"Very well, Dodo! I take you at your word. I don't know what it will be. What you ask from me is as great, probably a greater sacrifice than you would make. But I may do as you wish! To-morrow, in any case, I will come!"
He did not attempt to kiss her in the shadow of the vestibule, nor did she think of it. It was very serious, this parting. She felt the weight of the impending decision as she went slowly to her room, and she found herself halting, from time to time, in the dark ascent, a little frightened, a little strange, asking herself if it were possible, after all, if the incredible were to come, if he really was to put her to the test.
Sassoon came to see her the first thing in the morning, just as she was completing her toilet. For, though over the city was the heavy somnolence of Sunday, she could not sleep; in fact, she had scarcely closed her eyes all night. It was daylight, and yet it was unreal. She was asking herself, incredulously, if the moment of decision had come,—the hour she had contemplated, it seemed, all her life,—when Josephus brought his card. It gave her quite a shock, this return of the persistent hunter, whom she had left, groveling and stunned, at the foot of a disordered table. What did it mean? She glanced at the card again. Across it was written in minuscule letters:
"Please see me, just for a moment!"
She hesitated, tempted by the sudden and the inexplicable. Was it possible that he credited her with acting a part, that his passion could crowd out all sense of shame? And, finally, what could he say, after last night?
"I'll be down in a few minutes!" she said, with a nod. Then she recalled Josephus hastily, giving explicit orders that, if Nebbins came, he was to be told that she had gone on a visit, that she would not be back until the next noon; under no circumstances was he to be admitted. She glanced uneasily into the room where Snyder, curled up in a ball on the bed, was sleeping the heavy sleep of those who consume the night six days of the week. What would she say to Snyder, and how avoid her questioning glances, this day of days?
When, at length, she entered the stuffy parlor, she beheld Sassoon in the raw, no longer languid and heavy of eye, but uncontrollably aroused, pacing the floor in feverish impatience. The look he gave her was so like that of a maddened animal that she halted, afraid; and the fear that ran through her bones was not only of the present, but a sudden terrified comprehension of the past—of what she had risked and escaped. She remained standing, with the table interposed as a barrier between them.
"Sit down—please!" he said, looking at her eagerly, in his voice a note of hoarse avidity that gave it a strange hurried quality.
"What have you to say to me?" she said, without moving.
"Miss Baxter," he said abruptly, "make your own conditions!"
"What! You are not ashamed?"
"Make your own conditions! I will agree to anything!"
"There are no conditions!"
"Wait!" He drew from his pocket a document, his fingers trembling so he could hardly unbutton his coat, crumpled it in his emotion and resumed:
"First, I have arranged everything! You will marry—not a trainer or a secretary, but a gentleman, Captain Markett-Blount, an English gentleman whom I have bought. No—listen to me! Understand everything! I am not putting you into the demi-monde; I'm giving you a chance at everything. You will have a social position. You will go wherever I want you to go. You can remain married, or you can divorce, when you want. You will have a husband who will do as I wish! I give him fifty thousand for his name. I will give him the same to free you. You will marry the hour you say—to-night. You will dine at my house; you will visit me on the same footing as Mrs. Sassoon's friends. In a week you will join a party on my yacht, and go with us to cruise into the Mediterranean, to Egypt, anywhere! No one will say a word—no one will dare! You will be in exactly the same position as a hundred women in society—any one who would come at a whistle from me! As for you—"
"As for me?" she repeated, fascinated despite herself.
"I will give you now, simply on your word, anything you ask. Name any sum. More, I will do what I have never done. Here, look! Here is a contract in black and white. Have it examined by your own lawyer. Write down whatever sum you want. Make it for one year or ten—I'll sign it! You can hold it over me; you can blackmail me, if you wish! And that is nothing to what I'll give you—jewels, houses—"
"But you are mad!" she cried, horrified at the craving in his voice and the wildness in his eyes.
"Yes, mad, Dodo. You are right—completely mad! But profit by it! You can place yourself anywhere; you can have anything from me! I myself will tell you how to torture me, to rob me—"
"Never!"
"Yes, yes! You will! You can't refuse such things!" he cried. "You're not a fool! Ah, I will have you!"
Suddenly, as she shuddered and closed her hands over her eyes with loathing, he glided around the table and caught her in his arms.
"Sassoon! Here! You are crazy!" she cried, struggling frantically.
"What do I care!"
"Let me go! I'll scream!"
"What do I care!" His arms inclosed her with the strength of steel, gripped her to him, struggling to bring her face to his, crying incoherent brutal words that left her sick with loathing, a cold hard pain penetrating into her breast, frightened, helpless, trying to beat away the acquiring lips with savage fingers. At the moment when, despairing, she was about to cry aloud, mercifully there came a ring at the front door. He paused, trembling and breathless; and the next she had torn herself away from him and escaped up-stairs, shaken in every muscle, sick with horror and enraged loathing. Snyder up, stared in amazement at her disordered figure. The soiling embrace seemed to cling to her arms, to her neck, to the very clothes she had on. She tore them from her with disgust, with sickening.
"Lord! Dodo, what's happened?" cried Snyder, starting up.
"Sassoon! Beast!" she gasped, choking with rage. She flung her dress in a corner, and plunged her arms and head into the wash-basin, scrubbing them with a towel as if they could not be cleansed—as if nothing could ever cleanse them again.
Then suddenly she fell into a fit of hysterical weeping. Snyder, frightened, camped at her side, pressing her to her breast, calling her childish names, implored her to be calm. When at last, from sheer fatigue, she had grown quiet, she refused all questions, unwilling to talk; all at once solemn, determined, as controlled and impassive as a moment before she had been disorganized and frantic. Snyder, amazed, watched her as if she were a statue.
"You're all right now?"
"All right!"
"You can't tell me? Nothing?"
"Nothing!"
At the end of a moment she turned thoughtfully. "Come to lunch, just in Lexington Avenue?"
"Sure, petty!"
"I have no money."
"Shut up! I have lots!"
"Good! Now, don't talk to me, Snyder! I don't want to talk!"
The woman nodded, uneasy and suspicious, moving about her way, but never losing sight of the girl.
Dodo went to the trunk, took out Lindaberry's letters, and returned to the window. Outside it was raining by fits and starts, in swerving sheets, wind-driven, with the restlessness of March. Handfuls of drops flung against the panes with sudden rattling crescendo. She opened the last letter and read it without emotion, in a dull, listless, painless, concentration. It began, "Dodo, my good angel," and it announced the thing she had feared—his imminent return.
"He will get over it!" she said, staring down the avenue, where the rain-drops rebounded from the asphalt like myriads of shimmering insects, swarming hungrily. "He will get over it, and he will live his own life, and he will end by being grateful to me!"
She remained silent a long while, wondering, thinking of Massingale, of Blainey, watching the leaden clouds breaking and rolling above, feeling the spray that lashed the window, cooling her cheeks, fascinated by the rain-drops that swarmed, like myriad white insects, dancing below. There was so much to do—and she was unable to do anything.
At twelve she rose quietly, telephoned to Blainey for an afternoon appointment, signaled Snyder and led the way to luncheon.
She went to the theater by the subway on account of a famished pocketbook, and the depressing sensation of damp ankles and muddied skirts, which came to her as she clung to her umbrella and leaned against the wind, reinforced her determination to come to actualities.
"Hello! This is a surprise!" he said, when at last she had come, with dripping umbrella, into his office. "Must have got my dates mixed!"
"No! It's I who am tired of waiting!" she said abruptly.
She shed her rain-coat, shaking her skirts and glancing at her muddy shoes in delicate disgust. Then she advanced in a businesslike manner to the seat which Blainey, contrary to his customary bluff indifference, was presenting to her with extreme deference.
"Blainey, I've come to the end of my rope!" she said, folding her arms over her breast. "I'm through with playing and cutting up. I'm going to make up my mind to something serious now! I've got to talk to some one about it; that's why I've come to you!"
"Good eye!" he said, nodding and reaching for a cigar. "I, too, have got something to thrash out. Well, kid, what's annoyin' you?"
"Things have been getting mixed up, Blainey," she told him seriously. "I guess I'm not as clever as I thought!" She stopped, thinking of the legion that had fallen away: of Peavey, who had gone; of Massingale, who was still a mystery; and of Nebbins, a present menace. "Either that, or I'm getting tired of fooling!"
He nodded wisely, waiting for her to continue. She noted the rough sympathetic cut of visage,—the mouth, which had changed its grimness for a tolerant humor, the eyes, which were fixed on her with keen perception, softened by a homely adoration,—and she felt that she could talk to him as to no one else. He would understand everything, the good and the bad in her. He was nearer to her, to her kind, to an understanding of her longings and her temptations, than those other men who had never known the struggle of a self-made life.
"Blainey, it's awfully hard to decide," she said, leaning forward and clutching her knee. "I'm in a fix; I don't know what I'll do!"
"Well, first," he asked, with an encouraging nod, "how's the heart?"
She sat silent a moment, her hands locked, staring at the floor.
"I wish I knew!" she said slowly.
"Marriage?"
"No!"
"Sure of the man?" he said abruptly.
"That's it; I'm not sure of him!"
"And yourself?"
She tried conscientiously to see herself.
"Even of that—I don't know."
"Pretty hard hit, eh?"
She nodded.
"Go slow! Be sure!"
"I'm going to, Blainey!"
"What else? Marriage?"
She made a gesture of irritation.
"No; that's not for me!"
"You're wrong, kid," he said energetically. "You don't know the game!"
"What! You advise me to marry?" she exclaimed, in astonishment.
"You? Every time!" he said, straightening up. "However, we'll discuss that later!" He looked at her shrewdly and said abruptly: "How about Sassoon?"
A fantastic idea came into her head—to try to what extent his advice could be disinterested.
"Sassoon's the point," she said quietly. "What do you think he offered me this very morning?"
She detailed the terms, the proffered marriage and the contract, while Blainey, craning forward, listened with intense curiosity. When she had finished, he rose abruptly, eased the grip of his collar and moved heavily to the window. Then he made her repeat all that she had said, word for word.
"You're giving me a straight story?"
"Honest to God!"
He gave vent to a long whistle, drumming on the desk.
"Well, kid," he said at last, with an effort, "that's a pretty big proposition!" He shook his head solemnly. "I don't see how you can turn it down!"
"Well, Blainey, that's just what I've done!" she said evenly.
"Think it over! Better think it over carefully!" he advised anxiously. "Ten years from now you may get a different squint at life, and regret it!"
She laughed. She had an idea that what they were discussing was curiously immoral; but, strange as it was, she had a feeling that he was quite unselfish, and was grateful to him for it. In fact she felt nearer to him than ever before.
"No, no, Blainey," she said quickly. "Not for me! I'm not thirty-two—I'm twenty-two; and, thank heaven, I can be a little fool!"
He resumed his seat, unconvinced, half inclined to argue. All at once he looked up, with a snap in his gray eyes, at the girl who was watching him, amused.
"Speaking of marriage, why don't you marry me?"
She rose to her feet in amazement.
"Surprised?" he asked, grinning.
"Bowled over!"
"Rather expected another proposition?" he said bluntly.
"Yes, I did! Good heavens! Blainey, why do you want to marry me?"
"For about six hundred and fifty-two reasons!" he said solemnly. "First, because I'm fond of you. Second, because I'm lonely, kid! Third, because I'd like to work for you, make something big out of you, give you a career that would be a career. The rest don't count! You see, kid, I believe in you, and the contract I'm offering you," he added, with a sudden chuckling return to playfulness, "is the only contract I know that's worth a damn between manager and star. Of course, you've got to work!"
"Blainey, how much talent have I?" she asked passionately. "No compliments! Give me the truth! It may mean a lot!"
"I don't know!"
"And yet—"
"Talent be damned!" he said royally, as he said a dozen times a day. "Art be damned! It ain't talent, it's personality that counts—personality and advertising. Personality, kid, is the reason we build the stage three feet above the orchestra, to keep the bald heads from coming over. Do you think I'm in this God-forsaken business thirty-four years, and don't know the tricks? You'll be talking art to me next!"
"And I have personality?" she said doubtfully.
He smiled hugely.
"Would you be sitting here if you hadn't?"
"And you want to marry me, after all you know about me?" she asked solemnly. It was the one thing she did not like. Why was it impossible for her to go her way, free and irresponsible, as men went? Why was it that all sought this absolute control over her liberty? And yet, she was genuinely touched that Blainey, believing what he must, should have made the offer.
He shrugged his shoulders.
"My old dad ran a milk-wagon over in Brooklyn," he said. "I've pulled myself up by my boot-straps, and pretty much of everything has stuck to them on the way. I know what life is, kid. I stopped judging long ago! Leave that to a bunch of snobs in Fifth Avenue churches. Whatever you've done, you'd look like a white spot against me!"
"Blainey, I'll tell you something!" she said suddenly. "You've got me wrong! I'm as straight as they make 'em!"
"Don't lie, kid! It ain't necessary."
"Look at me! It's God's truth!" she exclaimed vehemently.
"Honest?" he said, opening his eyes.
"Honest!"
"Well, I'll be damned!"
"Blainey, you're an awfully good sort!" she said genuinely.
"Damned few would agree with you!" he said grimly.
"You've always been with me! Why?"
"'Cause I'm a sentimental nature!" he said, grinning. "Well, kid, how about it?"
"Well, Blainey, it may be yes! I shouldn't be surprised!"
He started up eagerly, with a look that somehow spoiled it all. She retreated instinctively, and perceiving it, he was clever enough to retain his seat, saying:
"When will you know?"
"To-night!"
"Telephone me here or at the hotel. Now, one thing more. This marriage means freedom to each—no spying and no interfering! It's a sentimental business contract for life. Savvy?"
She nodded.
"That's the best way!"
"You're free—I'm free!"
She nodded again, giving him her hand.
"Now I must go," she said hastily, with a glance at the clock. She went to the door, while he watched her without a word. Suddenly she turned. "If I decide, I want it over to-night! Do you understand?"
He nodded seriously. She smiled and went lightly out.
When she reached her room again she received a shock. Snyder informed her that Lindaberry had called twice, once while they were at luncheon, and again at three. Dodo was in a panic at the news, expected though it was. Josephus had informed her of Nebbins' insistent queries. All that she had planned dramatically, which now she wished to avoid, was rising up to confound her. She turned breathlessly on Snyder.
"You saw Mr. Lindaberry?"
"Yes!"
"He was here? Long?"
"About an hour!"
"Then you talked to him?" she persisted, suddenly suspicious.
"So-so," said Snyder evasively.
"What did you talk about? What did you say? What did you tell him about me? You didn't discuss—did he leave a message?"
"No, he left no message!" said Snyder obstinately.
"When is he coming back? You know!"
"No, I don't know!"
"Snyder!"
"I don't know!" she repeated, shrugging her shoulders and escaping into the other room, leaving Dodo in a torment of suspense, half inclined to flight.
She could explain whatever she intended doing to Blainey, to Massingale even, but not to Lindaberry. The thing was unthinkable. And she was afraid of his coming, for she was afraid to destroy the illusion, fragile and beautiful, which she had built of herself in his soul. To undeceive him, to let him see her as she believed she really was, brought her pain that she could not endure. And at that moment, as the town clock was methodically beating out the hour of five, she stopped abruptly, suddenly recalled to Massingale by the sound of his step on the stairs, torn between hope and fear, but inwardly steeling herself against the shock of disillusionment which she was certain awaited her with the opening of the door.
When a man has taken a step across those limits which society imposes on his conduct, he immediately begins, with a certain anxiety, to seek for the visible results in those events, ordinary or extraordinary, which affect his prosperity. From the time of Massingale's meeting with Dodo, everything had succeeded with him. He had had a period of unusual success in the stock market. Property which he had accepted in lieu of a debt had unexpectedly proved necessary to the approaches of a new bridge and had returned him ten times its value. His kennel had swept everything before it in the Dog Show, and in the daily sessions at the card table his run of luck had continued with extraordinary persistence. Finally, the newspapers, lately, had given him columns of publicity. Certain criticisms which he had passed on the haphazard conduct of justice had been taken up and had set in movement great machines of investigation, which threatened an overturn at the coming municipal elections. As a consequence, he had received proffers of advancement, and a political career seemed within his reach.
Whatever vague rumblings of conscience may have stirred within him, they were, in a measure, stilled by these evidences of the good favor in which he stood with Providence since Dodo's introduction into his life. He was resolved to see in her the explanation of all that was favorable, and he repeated, in daily self-justification, that if she brought him this good luck, there could be no great harm, else a moral Heaven certainly would not continue to shower him with blessings. He did not express the feeling in so many words, but it existed, half avowed, as often, when tendered a match, he would say to himself:
"If it remains lighted until it reaches me, it is a favorable sign!"
The first disagreeable shock had come in the form of a message from Harrigan Blood saying that he would oppose any attempt to raise Massingale to the Court of General Sessions. The message was delivered by a mutual friend with intimations that, on account of certain sides of his personal life, it would be better not to lay himself open to the attack of a vindictive antagonist. The truth was that Harrigan Blood, since the day when Dodo had been so unfortunately inspired as to bring them together, had conceived the idea that the luncheon had been arranged with the express purpose of making him ridiculous, and that Massingale had been a party to the plot. From the first he had felt the humiliation of the rôle he had been forced to play with Dodo. The quarrel with Sassoon had been costly; his sense of pride had been cruelly tried; on top of which the thought that she had paraded him for the delectation of a favored rival was unbearable to his sensitive vain nature. He took his revenge thus, from a need of feeling that at the end the ridicule would not rest on his side. Massingale knew the man too well to have any doubts as to his yielding. If the political campaign were to be entered, he saw now that it would mean a distressing facing of every indignity. It was the threat, perhaps, more than the deprivation, that annoyed him; for at the bottom he had now come to a full realization of the utter disorganization which the pursuit of Dodo must inevitably bring him.
The morality of a man of the world after forty is largely a question of what is, and what is not, done. Massingale, without being aware of it, possessed this code to an unusual degree. Petty political grafting was something of which he would have been simply incapable, from a pride of caste. There were certain vices that were associated with a lower order of human beings. Courage, in such surroundings, was as requisite to a gentleman as recklessness before the consequences of a five-foot leap in the hunting-field. So, with Doré, his moral code of good manners (which might be expressed as eligibility to club membership) could not permit what, to the eyes of the world, must appear as a deliberate seduction. Despite the depths of infatuation into which he had plunged, the genuine outcry of his whole nature, the intense and ceaseless longing with which he was consumed, he never for a moment contemplated anything but the permissible: divorce and remarriage.
This decisive step he had contemplated now for more than two months, approaching and retreating. At times he had been on the point of breaking in tempestuously on his wife and delivering an ultimatum, and the next day he had thanked heaven for the accident that had prevented a crisis. He was afraid of Dodo. Never for a moment had he placed the slightest faith in her romantic dramatization of a lawless elopement. Beyond that, a future in which she should join him as his wife was illegible to his eyes. He was too profoundly sensible of the utter change she had effected in his life not to fear where he might follow. He found that she consumed his day; that only the moments spent with her were vital. His old associations bored him.
His club friends of his age seemed hopelessly and incomprehendingly old. In their presence he felt unaccountably young, eager for youth. The evenings when Dodo punished him by departing with mysterious others were intolerably long and heavy. And then he suffered! He came to know all the torments of jealousy, hatred and submission violently reacting.
A little thing had perhaps more influence on his decision at this moment than anything else—the ring which Lindaberry had given Dodo, and of which she would furnish no explanation. This ring haunted him, terrified him. He was a keen enough observer to perceive instinctively its threat—that back of it was a deep import, not a mere passing entanglement of a week. Something else there was in her life, of major importance, he felt, strong enough to threaten him. Finally, on the night he had taken Dodo in his car after her meeting with Nebbins, this feeling of jealousy and alarm had become so intensified that he had suddenly flung the future to the winds, and determined to be rid of the pain, the frenzy and the miserable longing which his resistance brought him in daily torture.
When he returned to his home, he learned from the footman at the door that Mrs. Massingale had entered half an hour before. He went directly to her rooms, giving himself no time for hesitation or reflection.
"Who is it?" cried a startled voice at his knock.
"It's I; may I come in?"
"But I'm not dressed! Is it serious?"
"Yes! Put on a dressing-gown!"
A moment later he entered. His wife, a frail, neurasthenic, thinly pretty woman of forty, was standing with a peignoir hastily clutched about her, a towel in hand, hastily rubbing off the cream with which her maid had been industriously massaging her face. On the dressing-table was a heap of hair in disordered braids. The mellow shades on the electric candles flung frightened shadows on the sharp oval face and the penciled eyebrows, that took flight above the nervous eyes, now white with an exaggerated alarm.
"Send"—he did not even know the name of his wife's maid—"send her away!"
"Lucille, laissez-moi; je vous sonnerai plus tard!" Mrs. Massingale said directly, her eyes on her husband's face. She went to the door, closing it and came swiftly back.
"Harold, what is it?" she cried breathlessly. "Are we ruined?"
"No!" he said, with a touch of irony in his voice. "No; it is not money matters!"
She had seen the specter of bankruptcy before her eyes at his incomprehensible entrance. She shuddered and regained her self-control with a sigh, closing her wrapper more tightly over the disarray at her breast, as if suddenly aware of impropriety in the presence of this man who had entered her rooms after years.
"Sit down!" he said, straddling a chair and resting his arms on the back. "Clara, I am very—I am exceedingly unhappy!"
At the sound of his voice, more than from the authority in his manner, her alarm flashed up anew. She seated herself hesitatingly, scenting instinctively the approach of some formless danger. For a second she had a grotesque thought, caused by the sudden irruption on her cherished privacy, that he was going to ask her to surrender her own apartment and return to his.
"Well, well! What is it?" she asked, finally prepared to resist such brutality.
"Clara, I want my liberty!"
She relaxed a little. His liberty? She had never for a moment opposed that!
"This life I am leading is a ghastly mockery! I want it to end! I want to be able to lead my own life. I want a divorce!"
She rose in her seat, stretched out her hand and stammered:
"I have come to tell you that I am resolved to divorce!"
"Divorce!"
All at once she fell back, limp and swooning, her head fallen forward on her breast. He rose, searched among the bottles, found smelling-salts, and methodically, not quite convinced, held them to her nostrils. Then, when she started, he placed the bottle on her lap and resumed his seat.
Her first emotion, on returning from the dizziness which had not been altogether assumed, was one of profound astonishment. After almost twenty years of married life, when she felt the completest security, when her life had run smoothest along the roads she herself had directed, all at once everything was threatened, without her being able to perceive at what point she had committed an error.
"You said—divorce?" she said weakly, staring at him.
"Yes! I have come to ask you to make no opposition, if I make whatever provision you desire for yourself."
Before the detail of his manner she could no longer cherish any doubt. She became suddenly the woman of astuteness and cunning that she really was, gathering every energy to ward off the blow.
"You are not serious! It is impossible that you can be serious!" she began. She rose quickly, and gliding to the door, assured herself that Lucille was not eavesdropping.
"I never was more serious in my life!"
"Then let me say right here—and I will never change," she said, returning defiantly,—"I am Mrs. Massingale. That is my name; that is my position in the world. I will never surrender it. I will never, never consent to a divorce, on any grounds whatsoever!"
"Let us discuss!" he said quietly, resolved to push the matter no further than the statement of intention, and, above all, to preserve his self-respect.
"Discuss? There is nothing to discuss!" she cried, with rising anger. "What have you to reproach me with? I have been a faithful wife all my married life. I have never made you ridiculous; I have never dishonored your name! Of how many women can you say the same in our world? I have run your house for you, and I have let you go your way, lead your life, do as you pleased, without complaint! And now, I am the one to be sacrificed? Never! You may have your idea of marriage. I have mine! I regard it as a holy sacrament that nothing can divide but death!"
"Clara, I warn you," he said quietly, "that the matter is too serious for scenes. I am fully resolved!"
"So am I!"
"May I ask you what our marriage has been?" he said, growing angry in spite of himself. "Yes, I believe in all you say, when marriage is a marriage! But when it is simply a convenient legal phrase to yoke together two human beings who have not the slightest interest in common in the world—"
"My dear Clara," he said icily, "let me say a few plain words to you! We have lived twenty years together as you have wished it and as I have agreed. This house might be a hotel, and we passing guests, for all the marriage there has been to it! Let's go back! You married me for money and position!"
"Harold! I—"
"Don't lie!" he said, forced at last into the inevitable brutality of matrimonial discussion. "You never loved me! You loved what I had to give you! Come, you're not going to pretend, now, that there ever was a question of love in it? But then I thought so! You were very clever! More, you even made me believe—you, a young girl—that you loved me passionately, that you were capable of passion! You succeeded, as you intended, in carrying me off my feet!"
She looked at him, incapable of retort, overwhelmed with shame. She had never believed, in all these years, that he had comprehended this.
"Afterward I discovered the truth!" he continued. "I found I had united myself fatuously with a perfectly cold woman, to whom I was even repulsive!"
"Harold!"
"Physically speaking!" he added. "Who was cunningly intent on pushing me out of the way, and building up a hollow, conventionally brilliant, social life of her own. I ended by shrugging my shoulders and taking what I could out of the world in an amused, dilettante way. Every word I say is true! And now, when at forty-five I have the chance to live the life you denied me, you would stop me by any such mummery as the sacredness of this marriage! What? You would prevent me now when I come to you gently, quietly, and say to you: 'I love, I want to live, I want to be free from a bond that is nothing to you, to know what is real'—when I ask you to give me a chance to find in another what you scorn to give!"
"But you speak only of the physical!" she cried, aghast.
"No; I speak of the difference between the living and the dead!" he cried passionately. "I speak of a woman who, when she is in your arms, clings to you and cries out words of love, whose eyes shine with your coming, who listens for your step, who doesn't hide behind prudery, but adores you as a living, throbbing human being, who is not ashamed of her love, who is natural, whose lips have kisses and whose arms seize you to her, who has youth, fire, life!"
"But you are mad, infatuated! You don't know what you are saying!" she cried, recoiling in terror. "But then, you wish to marry again!"
"Again? No! I want a real marriage!" he cried.
There was a pause, during which he brought himself back to calm, and she rapidly ran over in her mind the possible woman in her own set who might have thus awakened him.
"Clara, do not let us lose our sense of dignity," he said solemnly. "I do not expect you to answer to-night."
"I will never consent!" she cried, flaring up.
"I don't expect your answer to-night," he repeated slowly. "I shall return here to-morrow afternoon at four. By that time you will have reflected; you will perceive the monstrous iniquity of keeping me from a happiness that is perfectly indifferent to you. Moreover, I will make any settlement on you that you indicate. You will probably realize by that time that nothing in your mode of living need be changed; this house shall be yours; all that is sacrificed is a little vanity, the public recognition of a loss that has never meant anything to you!"
"Wait!" she said, with a rapid calculation. "Do I know the woman? Is it one of my friends?"
"It is not! It is some one, a young girl, from an entirely different world," he replied, and went out.
She remained embattled, and yet with the hovering sense of defeat, striving to explain the catastrophe.
"Ah, if I had had a child this never could have happened!" she cried all at once, striking her forehead.
Despite his assurance, the next day, after a night of horror, she called up a dozen friends, seeking fruitlessly to learn of the woman. She consulted three of her most particular confidantes as to what course she should adopt. All three agreed on absolute resistance. The first said to her:
"My dear, treat him as a friend. Be sympathetic! Find out who she is. Point out to him that she is intriguing for his money. Act, not as an enemy, but as an adviser!"
The second added:
"Pretend to consider the proposition; then ask him for a year's delay, for his sake and for yours, to be sure that it is not a passing infatuation. In a year, especially if there is no opposition, great changes can take place!"
The third agreed with the others, with this addition:
"In a year he will either grow tired of her, or she will have become his mistress, and he may become thoroughly satisfied with the arrangement. Whatever you do, delay!"
At four o'clock, as the last adviser was hurrying out, Massingale entered. She was instantly struck with the intensity of the emotion that consumed him, which laid the telltale shadows of its fatigue in the hollows about his eyes and the stern drawn lines of his mouth.
"Before we go any further," she said carefully, "since I am to be sacrificed, may I at least ask you a few questions?"
"That is fair!" he said, deceived by her tone into a bounding hope that she would consent.
"Are you perfectly sure of this young girl, Harold?"
"Absolutely!"
"Who is she?"
He hesitated a moment.
"She is twenty-two; she is from the Middle West; she has been a little on the stage."
"And you are sure that she is disinterested?"
"Absolutely!"
"You are at the age when men are victims of such infatuations!" she said, looking down. "Perhaps I myself have been to blame! If you will wait a year, be sure, positively sure"—she stopped, blushed red, and said rapidly—"I will try to be to you, Harold, all that you want."
Even in the tensity of the moment, the incongruity of this unexpected solution struck him as so sublimely ludicrous that he laughed aloud. Also he perceived her maneuver, at once undeceived. She drew herself up, stung to the soul, prey to an anger that swept aside all caution.
"Well, no! I will never consent! You shall never have a divorce so long as I can stop it! Go, live with your mistress."
"She is not my mistress!" he said, white with anger.
"A girl on the stage! You are ridiculous! You will make yourself the laughing-stock of New York, my dear fellow, with your little girl! And you think she loves you? Fool! don't you know what her game is?"
"Don't judge all women by yourself, Clara Bayne!" he said between his teeth, giving her her girlhood name. But instantly, digging his nails in his hands, he said in a different tone: "I beg your pardon! I am very irritated, in a very nervous state. I don't want to lose control of myself! Clara, you are too generous, too honest a woman, deliberately to force her to be my mistress!"
"I force her?" she cried furiously. "If she has taken the love of a married man, she is that already! Let her go on!"
"Do you mean this?" he said sternly.
"I certainly do!"
"You will not give the woman I love and respect the right to be my wife—to love me honestly before the world? Do you mean this?"
"I am your wife, and you shall never take that from me!"
"You have never been my wife!" he cried, beside himself. "You, a pure girl, deliberately set about to win me, as a cocote does! Wife? You have taken my money to pay for your pleasures and your luxuries, and you have not even been my mistress! You a moral woman!"
"How dare you?" she cried, unrecognizable in her rage.
"A last time. Will you permit me to get a divorce?"
"No!" She uttered it as a shriek, fallen back against the wall.
"Then, madam, I will force you to do it!" he exclaimed, slamming his fist on a little table with such violence that it sent a shower of books clattering to the floor.
He left her clinging to the wall, choking with rage, descended to his car, and gave Dodo's address. The interview had left him in just that state of frenzy he needed to do the thing he would have hesitated long to do in his day of calm. The life that he had claimed from his wife rose up doubly precious to him for the proclaiming. He would cut off his wife without a cent; he would force her to sue him for abandonment, if not from shame, from positive necessity. Anyhow, the die was cast! He had cut away from all the old life! He would go with Dodo to-night, racing into the new, as she had wished. After a few months, a year, abroad, traveling in hidden countries, when his wife had come to her senses and procured a divorce, he would marry Dodo. They would not come back to New York, but the world was wide. Marriage exalted everything. He would not be the first so to do. Abroad, in Paris, London, Rome, such romances were understood. He jumped out and ran hastily up the stairs, knocked, and came tempestuously into the room.
He saw her with hands clasped over her breast, standing tremulously sweet, swaying with fear of his coming. He held out his arms, caught her violently to him, buried his head in the cool regions of her neck, caressed by the fragrant youth of her hair, uttering but one word:
"Come!"
She heard it, rather frightened, alarmed, too, at the personal disorder that shook him like a leaf, alarmed at the man who had at last come to where she had wished him. She said to herself, incredulously, that she was happy—wildly, deliriously happy; and she remained quiet, passing her hands soothingly over his bent head, alert, as if listening for some sound in the air.
"You will come?" he said suddenly, holding her from him.
"Yes!" she said in a whisper.
"Now—to-night—far off—with me?"
"Yes! How has it happened?" she said breathlessly. "Why now? Why are you willing, all at once?"
"Because I no longer care for anything else but you!" he cried—"friends, career, reputation. Because I can't live without you, Dodo! Because nothing else in life is life but you! Because I've come to hate it all—the rest! Dodo, I love you! I can't be without you!"
"At last!" she said mechanically, staring at him.
She did not draw away, though his lips sought hers. She longed for that oblivion which had first come to her in his arms, that quieting of the senses that drew the day from before her eyes and closed her ears to all but the faintest, far-off murmurings. She did not resist, but eagerly awaited this masculine mastery that once had awakened all the slumbering passionate fires within her. She wanted to forget again, to be overwhelmed, balanced in his arms, a weak contented thing, leaping hungrily to his contact, delirious and on fire. But no such oblivion arrived. She felt herself poignantly awake, curiously, critically conscious of a hundred questions against her brain, wondering at him, at his frenzy—feeling none herself, nor knowing why.
All at once from the other room the voice of Snyder startled them, singing raucously: