"The veritable curiosity of a j.a.panese woman getting her first foreign gown!"
"Thank you! That is another excuse."
"And it certainly looks very well," Jack declared.
"Do you think so?" Mary flushed slightly. She could not help being pleased. "After six years, could I drop back into the old chrysalis naturally, without awkwardness? Did I still know how to wear a fine gown?"--and the gift for it, as anyone could see, was born in her as surely as certain gifts were born in Jack. "But," she added, severely, "I have only two--just two! And the cost of them! It will take the whole orange crop!"
Just two, when she ought to have twenty! When he would have liked to put all the Paris models in the store in a wagon and, himself driving, deliver them at her door!
"Having succ.u.mbed to temptation, I enjoy it out of sheer respect to the orange crop," Mary said; "and yes, because I like beautiful gowns; wickedly, truly like them! And I like the Avenue, just as I like the desert."
And all that she liked he could give her! And all that he could give she had stubbornly refused!
The liveliness of her expression, the many shades of meaning that she could set capering with a glance, were now as the personal reflection of the day and the scene. Their gait was a sauntering one. They went as far as the Park and started back, as if all the time of the desert were theirs. They stopped to look into the windows of shops of every kind, from antiques to millinery. When he saw a hat which he declared, after deliberate, critical apprais.e.m.e.nt, would surely become her, she asked boldly if it were better than the one she wore.
"I mean an extra hat; that one more hat would have the good fortune of becoming you!"
"Almost a real contribution to the literature of compliments!" she answered, unruffled.
He thought, too, that she ought to have a certain necklace in a jeweler"s window.
"To wear over my riding-habit or when I am digging in the flower beds?"
she inquired.
When they pa.s.sed a display of luxuries for masculine adornment, she found a further retort in suggesting that he ought to have a certain giddy fancy waistcoat. He complimented her on her taste, bought the waistcoat and, going to the rear of the shop, returned wearing it with a momentarily appreciated show of jaunty swagger.
"Why be on the Avenue and not buy?" he queried, enthusing with a new idea.
Jim Galway should have a cowpuncher hat as a present. The style of band was a subject of discussion calling on their discriminative views of Jim"s personal tastes. This led to thoughts of others in Little Rivers who would appreciate gifts, and to the purchase of toys for the children, a positive revel. When they were through it was well past noon and they were in the region of the restaurants. The sun in majestic alt.i.tude swept the breadth of the Avenue.
"Shall we lunch--yes, and in the Best Swell Place?" he asked, as if it were a matter-of-course part of the programme, while inwardly he was stirred with the fear of her refusal. He felt that any minute she might leave him, with no alternative but another farewell. She hesitated a moment seriously, then accepted blithely and naturally.
"Yes, the Best Swell Place--let"s! Who isn"t ent.i.tled to the Best Swell Place occasionally?"
After an argument in comparison of famous names, they were convinced that they had really chosen the Best Swell Place by the fact of a vacant table at a window looking out over a box hedge. Jack told the waiter that the a.s.semblage was not an autocracy, but a parliament which, with a full quorum present, would enjoy in discursive appreciation selections from the broad range of a bill of fare.
A luncheon for two narrows a walk on the Avenue, where you are part of a crowd, into restricted intimacy. He was feeling the intoxication of her inscrutability, catching gleams of the wealth that lay beyond it, across the limited breadth of a table-cloth. He forgot about the unspoken conditions in a sally which was like putting his hand on top of the barrier for an impetuous leap across.
"I wrote you stacks of letters," he said, "and you never sent me one little line; not even "Yours received and contents noted!""
In a flash all intimacy vanished. She might have been at the other end of the dining-room in somebody else"s party nodding to him as to an acquaintance. Her answer was delayed about as long as it takes to lift an arrow from a quiver and notch it in a bowstring.
"A novel may be very interesting, but that does not mean that I write to the author!"
He imagined her going through the meal in polite silence or in measured commonplaces, turning the happy parliament into a frigid Gothic ceremony.
Why had he not kept in mind that sufficient to the hour is the pleasure of it? Famished for her companionship, a foolhardy impulse of temptation had risked its loss. The waiter set something before them and softly withdrew. Jack signaled the unspoken humility of being a disciplined soldier at attention on his side of the barrier and Mary signaled a trifle superior but good-natured acceptance of his apology and promise of better conduct.
They were back to the truce of nonsense, apostrophizing the cooking of the Best Swell Place, setting exclamations to their glimpses of people pa.s.sing in the street. For they had never wanted for words when talking across the barrier; there was paucity of conversation only when he threatened an invasion.
While a New Yorker meeting a former New Yorker on the desert might have little to tell not already chronicled in the press, a Little Riversite meeting a former Little Riversite in New York had a family budget of news. How high were Jack"s hedges? How were the Doge"s date-trees? How was this and that person coming on? Listening to all the details, Jack felt homesickness creeping over him, and he clung fondly to every one of the swiftly-pa.s.sing moments. By no reference and by no inference had she suggested that there was ever any likelihood of his meeting or hearing from her again. A thread of old relations had been spun only to be snapped. She was, indeed, as a visitation developed out of the sunshine of the Avenue, into which she would dissolve.
"I was to meet father at a bookstore at three," she said, finally, as she rose.
"Inevitably he would be there or in a gallery," said Jack.
"He has done the galleries. This is the day for buying books--still more books! I suppose he is spending the orange crop again. If you keep on spending the same orange crop, just where do you arrive in the maze of finance?"
"I should not like to say without consulting the head book-keeper or, at least, Peter Mortimer!"
They were coming out of the door of the Best Swell Place, now. A word and she would be going in one direction and he in another. How easily she might speak that word, with an electric and final glance of good-will!
"But I must say howdy do to the Doge!" he urged. "I should like to see him buying books. What a prodigal debauch of learning! I cannot miss that!"
"It is not far," she said, prolonging Paradise for him.
A few blocks below Forty-second Street they turned into a cross street which was the same that led to the Wingfield house; and halfway to Madison Avenue they entered a bookstore. The light from low windows spreading across the counters blended with the light from high windows at the back, and here, on a platform at the head of the stairs, before a big table sat the Doge, in the majesty of a great patron of literature, with a clerk standing by in deftly-urging attentiveness. Mary and Jack paused at the foot of the stairs watching him. Gently he was fingering an old octavo; fingering it as one would who was between the hyperionic desire of possession and a fear that a bank account owed its solvency to keeping the amounts of deposits somewhere in proportion to the amount of withdrawals.
"No, sir! No more, you tempter!" he declared. "No more, you unctuous amba.s.sador from the court of Gutenberg! Why, this one would take enough alfalfa at the present price a ton to bury your store under a hayc.o.c.k as high as the Roman Pantheon!"
The Doge rose and picked up his broad-brimmed hat, prepared to fly from danger. He would not expose himself a moment longer to the wiles of that clerk.
"I"ll wait for my daughter down there in the safe and economical environs of the popular novels fresh from the press!" he said.
Turning to descend the stairs he saw the waiting pair. He stopped stock still and threw up his hand in a gesture of astonishment. His glance hovered back and forth between Jack"s face and Mary"s, and then met Jack"s look with something of the same challenge and confidence of his farewell on the road out of Little Rivers, and in an outburst of genial raillery he began the conversation where he had left off with the final call of his personal good wishes and his salutations to certain landmarks of New York.
"Well, well, Sir Chaps! I saw Sorolla in his new style; very different from the academics of the young Sorolla. He has found his mission and let himself go. No wonder people flocked to his exhibitions on misty days!
The trouble with our artists is that they are afraid to let themselves go, afraid to be popular. They think technique is the thing, when it is only the tool. Why, confound it all! all the great masters were popular in their day--Venetian, Florentine, Flemish! Confound it, yes! And not one Velasquez"--evidently he was talking partly to get his bearings after his shock at seeing Jack--"no, not one Velasquez in the Metropolitan! I go home without seeing a Velasquez. They have the Catherine Lorillard Wolfe collection, thousands of square yards of it, and yes, cheer up!
Thank heaven, they have some great Americans, Inness and Martin and Homer and our exile Whistler, who annexed j.a.pan, and our Sargent, born in Florence. And I did see the Metropolitan tower. I take off my hat, my broad-brimmed hat, wishing that it were as big as a carter"s umbrella, to that tower. I hate to think it an accident of chaos like the Grand Canyon. I rather like to think of it as majestic promise."
The Doge had talked so fast that he was almost out of breath. He was ready to yield the floor to Jack.
"I kissed my hand to Diana for you!" said Jack. "And what do you think?
The lady in answer shook out her scarf and something white and small fluttered down. I picked it up. It was a note."
"Did you open that note?" asked the Doge in haughty suspicion.
"Naturally."
"Wasn"t it marked personal for me?"--this in fine simulation of indignation.
"Without address!"
"I am chagrined and surprised at Diana," said the Doge ruefully. "It"s the effect of city a.s.sociation. As a matter of course, she ought to have given it to Mercury, or at least to one of the Centaurs, considering all the horseshows that have been held under her skipping toes! Well, what did she say? Being a woman of action she was brief. What did she say?"
"It was in the nature of a general personal complaint. Her costume is in need of repair; it is flaking disgracefully. She said that if you had not forsaken your love of the plastic for love of the graphic arts you would long ago have stolen a little gold off the Eternal Painter"s palette, just to clothe her decently for the sake of her own self-respect--the town having set her so high that its sense of propriety was quite safe."
"I stand convicted of neglect," said the Doge, coming down to the floor of the store. "I will shoot her a bundle of gold leaf from the top of the pa.s.s on a ray of evening sunshine."
There, he gave Jack a pat on the shoulder; a hasty, playful, almost affectionate demonstration, and broke off with a shout of: