CHAPTER XIII

It was Alumnæ Day at the convent. Alumnæ Day meant a half holiday for the students, frosted cakes for “gouter” at four o’clock, the formal rooms and study halls and dormitories extra well cleaned and polished, the Chapel sweet with the fragrance of garden flowers sent by some graduate, the nuns a little more hurried than usual, though always composed, their immaculate ruffs whiter, if possible, than ever. Alumnæ Day brought with it a reception for the graduates who came to inspect the convent and to be present at the awarding of the gold medal for Composition and the silver one for French Verse, always given in October to members of the graduating class and worn proudly throughout the year. Benediction was especially beautiful with the extra candles on the altar and Mother Barante’s voice singing the “Tantum Ergo,” and many a graduate, mentally scarred from some of her contacts with life, often a little heart-sick at the failure of her ideals or broken by some sorrow, eased herself in memories of the peace of her schooldays. There was always a sale, too, of the handiwork of the girls and the money went to the support of the little charity school on the back of the convent grounds. Embroidered towels, pillow cases and such little luxuries were sold for ridiculously high sums and the graduates brought their friends to buy, too, and swell the fund for the charity school.

It was here that Cecily first met Fliss after the discussion with her husband and his rather disturbing lunch at the Lennox. By tacit consent Cecily and Dick had abandoned the plan for a “little dinner and the Orpheum” for the time being, both feeling a little fraid to reopen the discussion on points which might prove sensitive.

Madeline had brought Fliss. Madeline had attached herself to Fliss after Cecily’s comparative retirement and was quite one of the gayest people in that group which revolved around and with Mrs. Allenby. Agnes Hearding was there--tall, plainly dressed, a rather affected expression of continual high nobility on her face. Agatha Ward, too, and she had changed more than the others. Agatha had stopped writing verses, finding a more fruitful field in short stories, and she had been markedly successful for so young a person. Her first novel was on the press now. She bore the notoriety which surrounded her and all its attendant praise with considerable grace, a trifle conscious of making literary sentences perhaps, but not unpleasantly so.

The old, severely furnished convent made an austere background for the reception. Its proof that luxury was unnecessary to aristocracy was never more incontestable than on this day when the black robed nuns in the bare corridors and study rooms received the deference of beauty and wealth. No matter how powerful a graduate had become, no matter what she had excelled in, when she returned to the convent it was not to shed glory on her former surroundings, but to pay a tribute to the convent itself. So they all felt.

The groups gathered in the parlors and on the long wooden porch which overlooked the orchard. Cecily and her old group drew together again, extremely interested in each other as they always were.

“I haven’t seen you since we graduated, Cecily,” said Agnes. “I visited in Carrington once or twice, but you were always incapacitated. But I always try to make a point of coming for Alumnæ Day.”

“I come to the convent rather often, but I haven’t been to an Alumnæ Day before, since the first year.”

“That’s what it is to be a devoted mother. How are the children, Cecily?” asked Agatha.

“All very well; all very cunning.”

“Darling things,” said Madeline.

“But doesn’t it seem funny to think of Cecily with three children?” persisted Agnes.

“It’s very interesting,” said Agatha. “I think I’ll have to use you in a book, Cecily.”

“Type of the domesticated woman?”

“Dear, no--nothing so trite. No one deals with types any more, anyhow. It’s the vogue to be terrifically ‘inner.’ I’ll have to study you.”

“Don’t waste your time. Study Agnes.”

“I wouldn’t be interesting to modern fiction,” said Agnes, with some superiority. “I am a conservative, you know, and holding true to the things we learned in this dear old place.”

“What do you think the rest of us are doing, I wonder? It isn’t exactly immoral to write books or have babies, is it?”

“Or to be stupid?” put in Madeline. “Not to have any babies or any books--only a husband?”

“What I meant,” said Agnes, “is that simple religious ideals have gone out of fashion.”

“No, they’re coming in again.” Conscious that she was baiting Agnes a little, Agatha kept it up. “You’ll soon be fashionable, Agnes.”

“It’s possible that I may, after all, decide to enter the convent.”

That remark of Agnes did make a little ripple of excitement.

“Do you remember?” asked Cecily, looking about her, “the night we all sat in the parlor and discussed things? The night after the graduates’ retreat. Whether we should marry or not? Isn’t it funny that we are all doing just about what we thought we would do? Agatha writing, Madeline married and Agnes--I remember you said that if you really loved some one, Agnes, you’d marry. Now to enter----”

Agnes looked a little embarrassed and angry. “If I loved some one; but it is hard to find in these days a worthy person.”

They all knew then that Agnes must have been disappointed and no one pursued the subject.

“I remember that Cecily refused to commit herself,” said Agatha. “She didn’t know what she wanted to do.”

Cecily agreed a little dreamily, her eyes wandering off through the window.

“No, I didn’t know much about anything. As for knowing what I wanted to do I wonder if it isn’t all pretty much decided in advance for us; I wonder if we have much choice.”

“Here’s Mother Fénelon. Mother, Cecily has become a fatalist and Agnes is going to enter the convent.”

Mother Fénelon smiled. “Agnes going to enter?” she questioned. “Oh, no, dear Agnes hasn’t a vocation. She mustn’t joke about such things. And why is Cecily a fatalist?”

“She says we haven’t much choice in what happens to us.”

The nun turned and looked at Cecily. Under the beauty of Cecily’s face a kind of weariness showed for a moment, as she looked back into the eyes that reflected the peace of the cloister.

“Cecily was joking, too. You girls mustn’t talk this way. You’ll corrupt yourselves and each other.”

Fliss joined the circle.

“Having a reunion?” she said, as Madeline introduced her. “I’ve been wandering around, wishing I’d been educated here instead of in a noisy co-educational High School. Maybe sometimes I could talk to my husband if I had been brought up here. Where have you been keeping yourself, Cecily? I told Dick the other day that it was ages since I’d seen you.”

“He said he’d had lunch with you.”

“I hope he didn’t pretend he paid for my lunch.”

“No,” laughed Cecily. She always had a liking for Fliss when she saw her that her reason protested against. Every one liked to see Fliss around, especially with the new confidence which had replaced the impudence she had had before her marriage. “But he came home and told me that I didn’t go out enough and that he’d had lunch with you. I felt very domestic and badly dressed.”

“And I told Matthew that I had had lunch with Dick and he said, ‘It would do me good to see Cecily once in a while,’ and I felt pert and overdressed and ignorant.”

“There’s your story, Agatha,” said Madeline. “Each of them intriguing the other’s husband. Mismated.”

“Hush,” said Mother Fénelon. “Madeline, even if you are married, I’ll give you a penance if you talk like that.”

“Give me the penance,” begged Fliss, laughingly. “I started it and I’ve never had a penance. I never have had any one to expurgate my conversation.”

“Will you have your tea now?” asked the nun.

They followed her, Fliss and Cecily together. The curious attraction, which was not always friendly, that they felt for each other--had always felt since that day when Cecily met Fliss--and which had been cemented at the birth of Dorothea, was rather stronger than ever, in spite of the way they had drifted into different camps. It was as if each of them possessed something the other lacked or desired.

“It is a beautiful place,” said Fliss. “I’m glad to see it, though it makes me feel, as I say, raw and ignorant.”

“It shouldn’t. It should just make you feel peaceful. That’s what it tries to do.”

“That’s what it would do to me if I were its kind of person. It would make you feel peaceful. Isn’t it funny? You don’t really belong to it religiously and yet you fit in here much better than Madeline. You’re like the place. Matthew would explain that all in high sounding terms. I can’t explain it, but I do feel it.”

Cecily appreciated the half thought-out compliment. “The convent means a great deal to girls who were brought up here.”

“Did you have to study hard?”

“Not too hard. Have you seen where we studied?”

She took Fliss through the study halls, through the garden, down to the refectory and the winter playroom.

“It’s so different,” was Fliss’s comment. “Of course I liked the old High, and I had a corking time there. And I suppose it was pretty dull here with no boys, but it did make--ladies of you all.”

“Perhaps it didn’t make us very wise.”

“No, I know a lot more than you do about ways to get what I want. I think I know more about handling men than you do. But then you seem to get them without handling.”

That struck Cecily as a bit coarse and Fliss knew it. So she acknowledged it.

“That sounds rather coarse, doesn’t it? But most things outside of this enclosure are a bit coarse, I think.”

“They needn’t be,” said Cecily.

“I wonder. I wonder if most people aren’t a little too coarse grained to like a place like this.”

They were talking of the convent, but Cecily felt an implied criticism of herself.

“Most people prefer High Schools, you think.”

“Most people are the High School type now--talk a lot and pretty freely. Wasn’t it funny to see how shocked the nun got at Madeline? And Madeline wasn’t saying a circumstance to most of what you hear. Most people are a little broad and most women pretty used to having men around, knowing a lot of them easily and being friendly and a bit flirtatious.”

Was she warning her, thought Cecily? Her pride rose against such a warning.

“Yet there are men who don’t like that sort of women,” she answered, a faint edge of hauteur in her voice.

Then to make up for that remark she asked Fliss if she couldn’t come home for dinner.

“We’ve a temporary supply of servants and plenty of dinner. Can’t you telephone Matthew?”

“We’ll stop for him,” said Fliss, “if you can drive home with me. Are you in your own car?”

“No, mother dropped me here; my own car’s laid up.”

That was glorious for Fliss. This time it was her car that took Cecily home. It was a Fliss-like car--lean and low and yellow-brown. They piled into it and went down town, people turning to watch them, Fliss skimming through the streets, letting other drivers save her life and get out of her way because she was a pretty woman in a handsome car.

Matthew seemed delighted. Cecily was struck by the fact that he looked younger, laughed more easily, was not quite so inclined to heaviness in conversation. They dropped Madeline at her house and went on to surprise Dick and please him too.

Cecily had telephoned Ellen, who had a ready half-familiar smile for Fliss. Fliss returned it a bit quizzically. She even dared, while Cecily was busy with the baby, to slip out into the pantry where Ellen was working.

“How’s your ma?” asked Ellen promptly.

“Fine. I dropped in on her last week just after I’d made her buy some new window curtains and found her tying them all up with loops of blue ribbon. She and dad are attending movie serials.”

“Is everything all right with you at your house?”

“Slick. I wish you’d come and live with me, now, Ellen. I’d make you my housekeeper and after a bit I’d like to tell Cecily you’re a cousin of mine. This seems so queer.”

“Better not. No, I won’t leave Mrs. Harrison. Help’s hard to get. She counts on me, and I love the babies.”

“Good old Ellen.”

“Not a bit. I like it here. It’s very homey.”

“Don’t you think my house would be homey?”

Ellen looked at her dubiously and let that pass.

“Well, if you prefer the highly charged domesticity of this place to me and my Matthew, it’s up to you.”

Dick came out, seeking cocktails.

“I’m getting a drink and flirting with Ellen,” said Fliss.

“You’re probably trying to get Ellen away from us,” laughed Dick, “but I warn you that she won’t go. It’s been tried.”

It was only natural that Ellen should take an interest in the table conversation. She answered the bell herself, for the housemaid had cut her hand a few days before and, deliberately or otherwise, was retaining her clumsy bandages. It was obvious even to a listener so utterly untrained as Ellen that the old free give-and-take of the quartet was gone. They laughed just as much, gossiped as interestedly and haggled over their bits of philosophy as eagerly. Yet one could see that in these bits of philosophy, especially when they touched or seemed to touch upon habits of living, Cecily seemed to make an appeal to Matthew and Fliss to Dick. Ellen was very thoughtful as she washed her dishes, which the housemaid dried superciliously.

“Isn’t that Mrs. Allenby the prettiest thing you ever saw?” asked the housemaid.

“Not as pretty as Mrs. Harrison,” said Ellen, “but she’s very nice looking.”

“Well, Mrs. Harrison has looks all right--style, too, in a way, by which I mean she has nice things and expensive things--but to my way of thinking,” expounded Jenny, “she’s not in it with Mrs. Allenby for real class. Now, Mrs. Allenby knows how to dress. She’s an awful swell too. My goodness, you see her name everywhere. She’s the very center of that Country Club set.” Jenny had waited on table at the Country Club during the summer months and made fine distinctions.

“The men,” she went on, not at all disturbed by Ellen’s silence, “just flock around her. She livens things up so. Why, just think of the way she livened up that dining-room to-night. She knows how to put some pep into things. Everybody’s crazy about her. I wonder she can put up with a stupid little home dinner like this.”

Ellen chuckled at the marvelous reversals of standards.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, with a fairly good imitation of sarcasm, “maybe she wasn’t used to much before she married.”

Jenny cocked an elbow. “Used to much? That girl’s been a _débutante_, you can just be sure of that. She’s got a real aristocratic manner. You don’t appreciate standards like that, being from the country yourself, but to a town girl there’s no mistaking.”

“Don’t bang those cups.”

“Good Heavens, any one would think they were yours,” said Jenny. “I wouldn’t spend my life worrying about other people’s cups--or bothering about their kids either. You’re a fool, Ellen, and you’ll never get anywhere. Of course I don’t know what Mrs. Harrison pays you (this lack of confidence was a rankling thing), but if it’s a cent less than sixty-five you’re stung!”

“No!” said Ellen, who was banking seventy-five dollars a month.

“Yes, ma’am!” said Jenny, and banged another cup.

The Victrola started in the living-room, playing dance music. Jenny jazzed a bit.

“Lord, why don’t they play it when they’re alone?”