"Then, my dear," replied Joan, making a very special ring of smoke, "you know more about him than I do."
Alice began to walk about. A form of marriage--that was the phrase that stuck in her mind. And here was a girl who was without a genuine friend in all that heartless town except herself, and a fine boy who needed one, she began to see, very badly. She, at any rate, and she thanked God for it, was properly married, and she owed it to friendship to make a try to put things right with these two.
"Joan, I believe I do," she said. "I really believe I do, although I've only had one real talk with him. You're terribly and awfully young, I know. You had a bad year with your grandfather and grandmother, and the reaction has made you wild and careless. But you're not a girl who has been brought up behind a screen in a room lighted with one candle. You know what marriage means. There isn't a book you haven't read or a thing you haven't talked over. And if you imagine that Martin is content to play Paul to your imitation Virginia, you're wrong. Oh, Joan, you're dangerously wrong."
Settling into her chair and working her shoulders more comfortably into the cushion, Joan crossed one leg over the other and lighted another cigarette. "Go on," she said with a tantalizing smile. "I love to hear you talk. It's far more interesting than listening to Howard Cannon's dark prophecies about the day after to-morrow and his gloomy rumblings about the writing on the wall. You stand for the unemancipated married woman. Don't you?"
"Yes, I do," said Alice quickly, her eyes gleaming. "I consider that a girl who lets a man marry her under false pretenses is a cheat."
"A strong word, my dear!"
"But not too strong."
"Wait a minute. Suppose she doesn't love him. What then?"
"Then she oughtn't to have married him."
"Yes, but it may have suited her to marry him."
"Then she should fulfill the bargain honestly and play the game according to the rules. However modern and civilized people are, they do that."
Joan shrugged her round white shoulders and flicked her cigarette ash expertly into the china tray on the spindle-legged table at her elbow. She was quite unmoved. Alice had always taken it upon herself to lecture her about individualism--the enthusiastic little thing. "Dear old girl," she said, "don't you remember that I always make my own rules?"
"I know you do, but you can't tell me that Martin wants to go by them--or that he'll be able to remain a knight long, while you're going by one set and he's keen to go by another? Where will it end?"
"End? But why drag in the end when Martin and I are only at the beginning?"
Alice sat down again and bent forward and caught up Joan's unoccupied hand. "Listen, dear," she said with more than characteristic earnestness. "Last night I went with the Merrills to the Ziegfeld Follies, and I saw Martin there with a little white- faced girl with red lips and the golden hair that comes out of a bottle."
"Good old Martin!" said Joan. "The devil you did!"
"Doesn't that give you a jar?"
"Good heavens, no! If you'd peeked into the One-o'clock Club this morning at half past two, you would have seen me with a white-faced man with a red mustache and a kink in his hair that comes from a hot iron. Martin and I are young and giddy, and we're on the round- about, and we're hitting it up. Who cares?"
There was a little silence--and then Alice drew back, shaking her pretty neat head. "It won't do, Joany," she said, "it won't do. I've heard you say 'Who cares?' loads of times and never seen anybody take you by the shoulders and shake you into caring. That's why you go on saying it. But somebody always cares, Joany dear, and there's not one thing that any of us can say or do that doesn't react on some one else, either to hurt or bless. Martin Gray's your knight. You said so. Don't you be the one to turn his gleaming armor into common broadcloth--please, please don't."
Joan gave a little laugh and a little yawn and stretched herself like a boy and got up. "Who'd have thought it? It's half-past twelve, and we're both losing our much needed beauty sleep. I must really tear myself away." She put her arm around Alice and kissed her. "The same dear little wise, responsible Alice who would like to put the earth into woolens with a mustard plaster on its chest. But it takes all sorts to make up a world, you know, and it would be rather drab without a few butterflies. Don't throw bricks at me until I've fluttered a bit more, Ally. My colors won't last long, and I know what old age means, better than most. If I were in love as you are, my man's rules would be the ones I'd go by all the time; but I'm not in love, and I don't want to be--yet; and I'm only a kid, and I think I have the right to my fling. This marriage of mine is just a part of the adventure that Martin and I plunged into as a great joke, and he knows it and he's one of the best, and I'm grateful to him, believe me. Good night. God bless you!"
She stood for a moment on the top step to taste the air that was filled with the essence of youth. Across a sky as clear as crystal a series of young clouds were chasing each other, putting out the stars for a moment as they scurried playfully along. It was a joy to be alive and fit and careless. Summer was lying in wait for spring, and autumn would lay a withering hand upon summer, and winter with its crooked limbs and lack-luster eyes was waiting its inevitable turn.
"A short life and a merry one!" whispered Joan to the moon, throwing it a kiss.
A footman, sullen for want of sleep, opened the door of the limousine. Some one was sitting in the corner with his arms crossed over his chest.
"Marty! Is that you?"
"It's all right," said Gilbert Palgrave. "I've been playing patience for half an hour. I'm going to see you home."
V
"You are going home?"
"Yes," said Joan, "without the shadow of a doubt."
"Which means that I'd better tell the chauffeur to drive round to the One-o'clock, eh?"
"I'll drop you there if you like. I'm really truly going home."
"All right."
Joan began to sing as the car bowled up Fifth Avenue. Movement always made her sing, and the effect of things slipping behind her. But she stopped suddenly as an expression of Alice's flicked across her memory. "You'll catch Alice up, if you go straight back," she said.
"Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire! I wonder why it is the really good woman is never appreciated by a man until he's obliged to sit on the other side of the fireplace? I wish we were driving away out into the country. I have an unusual hankering to stand on the bank of a huge lake and watch the moonlight on the water."
Joan was singing again. The trees in the Park were bespattered with young leaves.
Palgrave controlled an ardent desire to touch with his lips that cool white shoulder from which the cloak had slipped. It was extraordinary how this mere girl inflamed him. Alice--Alice-Sit-by- the-Fire! She seemed oddly like some other man's wife, these days.
"Suppose I tell your man to drive out of the city beyond this rabble of bricks and mortar?"
But Joan went on singing. Spring was in her blood. How fast the car was moving, and those young clouds.
Palgrave helped her out with a hot hand.
She opened the door with her latch-key. "Thank you, Gilbert," she said. "Good night."
But Palgrave followed her in. "Don't you think I've earned the right to one cigarette?" He threw his coat into a chair in the hall and hung his hat on the longest point of an antler. It was a new thing for this much flattered man to ask for favors. This young thing's exultant youth made him feel old and rather humble.
"There are sandwiches in the dining room and various things to drink," said Joan, waving her hand toward it.
"No, no. Let's go up to the drawing-room--that is, unless you--"
But Joan was already on the stairs, with the chorus of her song. She didn't feel in the least like sleep with its escape from life. It was so good to be awake, to be vital, to be tingling with the current of electricity like a telegraph wire. She flung back the curtains, raised all the windows, opened her arms to the air, spilled her cloak on the floor, sat at the piano and ragged "The Spring Song."
"I am a kid," she said, speaking above the sound, and going on with her argument to Alice. "I am and I will be, I will be. And I'll play the fool and revel in it as long as I can--so there!"
Palgrave had picked up the cloak and was holding it unconsciously against his immaculate shirt. It was the sentimental act of a virtuoso in the art of pleasing women--who are so easily pleased. At the moment he had achieved forgetfulness of boudoir trickery and so retained almost all his usual assumption of dignity. Even Joan, with her quick eye for the ridiculous, failed to detect the bathos of his attitude, and merely thought that he was trying to be funny and not succeeding.
It so happened that over Palgrave's shoulder she could see the bold crayon drawing of Martin, brown and healthy and muscular, without an ounce of affectation, an unmistakable man with his nice irregular features and clean, merry eyes. There was strength and capability stamped all over him, and there was, as well, a pleasing sense of reliability which gained immediate confidence. With the sort of shock one gets on going into the fresh air from a steam-heated room, she realized the contrast between these two.
There is always something as unreal about handsome men as there is about Japanese gardens. Palgrave's hair was so scrupulously sleek and wiglike, his features so well-balanced and well-chosen, his wide-set eyes so large and long-lashed, and his fair, soft mustache so miraculously precise. His clothes, too, were a degree more than perfect. They were so right as to be a little freakish because they attracted as much attention as if they were badly cut. He was born for tea fights and winter resorts, to listen with a distrait half- smile to the gushing adulation of the oh-my-dear type of women.
He attracted Joan. She admired his assurance and polish and manners. With these three things even a man with a broken nose and a head bald as an egg can carry a beautiful woman to the altar. He was something new to her, too, and she found much to amuse her in his way of expressing himself. He observed, and sometimes crystallized his observations with a certain neatness. Also, and she made no bones about owning to it, his obvious attention flattered her. All the same, she was in the mood just then for Martin. He went better with the time of year, and there was something awfully companionable about his sudden laugh. She would have hailed his appearance at that moment with an outdoor cry.
It was bad luck for Palgrave, because he now knew definitely that in Joan he had found the girl who was to give him the great emotion.
She broke away from "The Spring Song" and swung into "D'ye Ken John Peel with His Coat So Gay?" It was Martin's favorite air. How often she had heard him shout it among the trees on his way to meet her out there on the edge of the woods where they had found each other. It was curious how her thoughts turned to Martin that night.
She left the piano in the middle of a bar. "One cigarette," she said, and held out a silver box.
Palgrave's hand closed tightly over her slim white arm. In his throat his heart was pumping. He spoke incoherently, like a man. "God," he said, "you--you take my breath away. You make my brain whirl. Why didn't you come out of your garden a year ago?"
He was acting, she thought, and she laughed. "My arm, I think," she said.
"No, mine. It's got to be mine. What's the good of beating about the bush?" He spoke with a queer hoarseness, and his hand shook.
She laughed again. He was trying his parlor tricks, as Hosack had called them one night at the Crystal Room, watching him greet a woman with both hands. What a joke to see what he would do if she pretended to be carried away. He might as well be made to pay for keeping her up. "Oh, Gilbert," she said, "what are you saying!" Her shyness and fright were admirable.
They added fuel to his fire. "What I've been waiting to say for years and never thought I should. I love you. You've just got me."
How often had he said those very words to other women! He did it surpassingly well. She continued to act. "Oh, Gilbert," she said in a low voice, "you mustn't. There's Alice." Two could play at his pet game.
"Yes, there is Alice. But what does that matter? I don't care, and you don't. Your motto is not to care. You're always saying so. I'm no more married to Alice than you are to Gray. They're accidents, both of them. I love you, I tell you." And he ran his hand up to her shoulder and bore down upon her. Where were his manners and polish and assurance? It was amazing to see the change in the man.
But she dodged away and took up a stand behind the piano and laughed at him. "You're an artist, Gilbert," she said. "It's all very well for you to practice on women of your own age, but I'm an unsophisticated girl. You might turn my head, you know."
Her sarcasm threw him up short. She was mocking. He was profoundly hurt. "But you've chosen me. You've picked me out. You've used me to take you to places night after night! Don't fool with me, Joan. I'm in dead earnest."
And she saw with astonishment that he was. His face was white, and he stood in a curious attitude of supplication, with his hands out. She was amazed, and for a moment thrilled. Gilbert Palgrave, the woman's man, in love with her. Think of it!
"But Gilbert," she said, "there's Alice. She's my friend." That seemed to matter more than the fact that she was his wife.
"That hasn't mattered to you all along. Why drag it in now? Night after night you've danced with me; I've been at your beck and call; you used me to rescue you from Gray that time. What are you? What are you made of? Unsophisticated! You!" He wasn't angry. He was fumbling at reasons in order to try and get at her point of view. "You know well enough that a man doesn't put himself out to that extent for nothing. What becomes of give and take? Do you conceive that you are going to sail through life taking everything and giving nothing?"
