"You look as tired as before we went away," Luke complained that same night when Mary sat at her desk adding up expenses and making out checks.
"Oh, no. This shade makes everyone look ghastly," she said.
"I"ll have to get a hump on and make my pile," he consoled. "I don"t want my sister being all tired out before she"s too old to have a good time."
"A good time?" Mary repeated. "Are you inoculated, too?"
"What"s wrong with a good time? I guess Steve O"Valley plays all he likes!"
"Yes, dear, I guess he does," Mary forced herself to answer.
When Steve returned home that evening he found one of those impromptu dinner parties on hand instead of a formal engagement. They had become quite the fad in Bea"s set. The idea was this--young matrons convened in the afternoon at one of their homes for c.o.c.ktails and confidences; very likely Sezanne del Monte would drop in to read her last chapter or Gay Vondeplosshe would arrive brandishing his cane and telling everyone how beautiful the Italian villa was to be; and by and by they would gather round the piano to sing the latest songs; then when the clock struck six there would be a wild flutter and a suggestion:
"Let"s phone cook to bring over our dinner. Then our husbands can come along or not just as they like. We"ll have a parlour picnic; and no one will bother about being dressed. And we"ll go to the nickel dance hall later."
This was followed by a procession of cooks arriving in state in various motor cars and carrying covered trays and vacuum bottles and departing in high spirits at the early close of their day"s work.
Then the procession of subdued husbands would follow, and conglomerate menus would be spread on a series of tea tables throughout the rooms, with Sezanne smoking her small amber-stemmed pipe and describing her sojourn in a Turkish harem while Gay picked minor chords on his ukulele. After a later diversion of nickel dance halls and slumming the young matrons would say good-bye, preparing to sleep until noon, quite convinced that any one would have called it a day.
Such a party greeted Steve, with Gay showing plans for Beatrice"s secret room with a sliding panel--clever idea, splendid when they would be playing hide and seek--and the cooks en route with the kettles and bottles of wine and the husbands meekly arriving in sulky silence.
A little before two in the morning Steve escorted Aunt Belle back to the Constantine house.
Beatrice had started to go to bed, but thinking of something she wished to ask Steve she stationed herself in his room, some candy near at hand and Sezanne"s ma.n.u.script as solace until he should arrive.
"I wanted to ask you if Mary Faithful has returned," she said, throwing down the ma.n.u.script as he came in. "Heavens, don"t look like a thundercloud! You used to complain about getting into evening dress for dinner; and now when they are as informal as a church supper you row even more. How was papa? Did you go in to see him? Does the house look terrible?"
"Of course I didn"t see your father at two in the morning; he was asleep. Your aunt fell into a bucket of plaster."
"Plaster! Why did the men leave it where she could fall into it? Did it hurt her dress?"
"No, just her bones." Steve laughed in spite of himself. "The dress hadn"t started to begin where the bones. .h.i.t the bucket."
Beatrice giggled. "Aunt Belle will try to look like a Kate Greenaway creation. And isn"t Jill stout? I"d eat stones before I"d get like her. Well, what about the Faithful woman?"
"Why such a t.i.tle? It was always Mary Faithful, and even Mary."
"I don"t know--but ever since I worked with you this summer I"ve realized what an easy time she has. She isn"t burdened with friends and social duties. It"s all so clearcut and straight-ahead sailing for her. I suppose she laughs at her day"s work."
"She has returned."
"Then we can go to the Berkshires. Sezanne knows an artist and some people from Chicago who are ripping company and they are going to visit her cousin at Great Barrington and we are all invited there----"
"Once and for all," Steve said, shortly, to his own surprise, "I am not in on this! Just count yourself a fair young widow for the time being. I cannot run my business, help close up your father"s affairs, be a social puppet, and go chasing off with bob-haired freaks to the Berkshires, and expect to survive. I"m going to work and keep on the job--it will be bad enough when I have to live in an Italian villa.
Who knows what new tortures that will bring? But for a few months I am certain of my whereabouts, so plan on going alone."
"So you won"t come with me! Oh, Steve, sometimes I can just see the whole mistake--you should never have made a fortune. Rather you should have been a nice foreman with a meek little wife in four-dollar hats and a large portion of offspring. You should have lived in a model bungalow with even a broom closet in the kitchen and leaded windows at one side. You would have been a socialist and headed labour-union picnics. But as my husband and my father"s a.s.sistant and all that--you are as impossible as that Faithful woman would be if she tried to be a lady!"
For a moment Steve hesitated. But the average day does not include losing ten thousand on the stock exchange from sheer folly, finding out that your blood pressure is too high, that your faithful secretary loves you and is truer blue than ever, and discovering at the same moment that you love her yet may not tell her so. Nor is a day so hectic usually concluded by finding an impromptu parlour picnic in full swing at home where rest was sought--finding, too, the full realization that you not only do not love your wife but you do not even approve of her.
So he said, quietly: "If you wish to make some radical change regarding your husband would you mind waiting until he has had a chance at a shower bath and some breakfast?"
For the first time in her life the Gorgeous Girl found herself gathering up Monster, the candy, and the novel ma.n.u.script in her lace-draped arms and standing outside her husband"s firmly closed door.
The shock was so great that she could not squeeze out a single tear.
CHAPTER XIV
Mary Faithful felt no regrets at having told the truth about her love for Steve O"Valley. The regrets were all on Steve"s side of the ledger. Contrary to customary procedure it was he who practised nonchalance and indifference, and the office force saw no whit of difference in the att.i.tude of the president toward his private secretary or vice versa.
Long ago the force had accepted the att.i.tude of these two persons as strictly businesslike and their conception of Mary Faithful was tinged with awe and a bit of envy at her success. To imagine her desperately in love with her employer, working for and with him each day, and finally in extreme desperation telling the truth as brutally as women sometimes tell it to women over clandestine cups of tea--was farthest from their comprehension.
Nor would they have thought it credible that Steve, married to his coveted fairy princess, should first become attached to Mary Faithful by friendship and then find that friendship replaced by a deep and never-to-be-changed love. It was an impossible situation, they would have said.
The morning following Beatrice"s parlour picnic and Mary"s hard-wrung confession Steve made it a point to be at his desk when Mary came in, despite the few hours" sleep and the fact that Beatrice had willfully chosen to take breakfast with him in sulky, tearful reproach. When Mary was taking off her hat and coat he came to the door of her office and made a formal little bow.
He found himself more in love with her than the night previous. There was something so pathetic and lonely about her, successful business woman that she was; the very fact of people"s not suspecting it, labelling her as self-sufficient and carefree, only emphasized this loneliness now that he looked at her with a lover"s eyes. He realized that whereas he had had to win a fortune to marry the Gorgeous Girl it would be as necessary to lose a fortune to marry Mary--if such a thing were possible; that she was a woman not easy to win, one who would find her happiness not in taking hastily acc.u.mulated wealth but in making a man by slow processes and honourable methods until he was fitted to obtain a fortune and then enjoy it with her.
"Good morning"--wondering if he looked confused--"I wanted to say that I am on the country-club committee to welcome English golfers, and I"ll be away this week off and on. And--and whenever you want me to I"ll try to keep under cover for a bit.... I think I do appreciate your telling me the truth last night more than anything else that has ever happened to me; there was something so stoically splendid about it--and I don"t want to abuse the confidence. Please don"t mind my just mentioning it, I"ll promise not to do so again; and we"ll go on as before. I was a cad to play about your fireplace--quite wrong--and you had to make me realize it. Do you know, I was half afraid you"d send in your resignation this morning? Women always do those things in books. Please say something and help a chap out."
Mary was at her desk opening mail with slow, steady fingers.
"I have my living and Luke"s living to make, and I could not resign unless you asked me to do so," she told him. "I wondered whether or not you would feel it the thing for me to do. It is a unique situation," she said in a slightly more animated tone--"not the situation, but my calm betrayal of it. Usually my sort go along in silence and take our bursts of truthful rebellion on our mothers"
shoulders or in sanitariums. I really feel a great deal better now that I have told you." Her gray eyes were quite fearless in their honesty as she glanced up. "I feel that I can settle down in an even routine and be of more service to everyone."
"We"ll be friends," he urged, impulsively. It seemed hard not to say foolish, loverish little things, try to make her believe in miracles, make wild and impossible rainbow plans, precluding any Gorgeous Girls and newly remodelled Italian villas.
"I wanted to add a postscript," she interrupted. "That"s only running true to form, isn"t it? Here it is: If you ever at any time, because you are emotional and in many ways untried, find yourself unhappy and at cross purposes, and try to lean on a sentimental crutch which inclines in my direction--I shall leave this office just as they do in novels. And I shall not come back, which they always do in novels.
This would deprive you of a good employee and myself of a good position and be foolish all round. You men are no different from us women; once a woman knows a man loves her she cannot quite hate him even if her heart is another"s. Instinctively she labels him as a rainy-day proposition and during some wild thunderstorm--well, idiotic things happen! Whereas if she never knew he cared she might go about finding a mild mission in life. A man is the same; and since I have trusted you with my secret, and that secret happens to concern yourself, the logical consequence is that you will never quite hate me because I care. In some moods you might even try telling yourself that you cared, too. Then I should not only leave your employ but I should stop caring."
She went on with the morning"s mail. Outside, the office force was stirring. Raps at the door and phone calls would soon begin.
"Would you really?" he asked, so soberly that Mary"s hands trembled and she blotted ink on her clean desk pad as she tried to make a memorandum.
"Really. I never can bring myself to believe in warmed-over magic."
"Then I shall never have any such moods."
He answered a phone call and there fell upon the office an atmosphere of strange peace which had been missing for many months.
During the winter the rift between Steve and Beatrice became noticeable even to the Gorgeous Girl"s friends, to Trudy"s infinite delight; and by the time spring came it was an accepted thing that Steve"s share in the scheme of things was to write checks and occupy as little s.p.a.ce as possible in the apartment, whereas Beatrice"s part in the scheme of things was to badger and nag at her husband eternally or be frigidly polite and civil, which was far harder to endure than her temper.
The Gorgeous Girl"s endeavours to become an advanced woman, an intellectual patroness and so on, were amusing and ineffectual. She soon found neither pleasure nor satisfaction in any of her near-lions.
Nor did she succeed in making them roar. Whether it was a parlour lecture on Did a Chinese Monk Visit America a Thousand Years before Columbus? or a Baby Party at which Beatrice and Gay dressed as twins and were wheeled about in a white pram by Trudy, dressed as a French _bonne_--the reaction was one of depression and defeat. Though Beatrice still had her name printed on the reports of charity committees she no longer took what was termed an active part. She shrugged her shoulders carelessly and gave the reason that it was all so hopeless--and no fun at all.
Inanimate things afforded the most satisfaction; at least she could buy an individual breakfast service costing a thousand dollars and have the item recorded in all the fashion journals, with her photograph, and she could have the most unique dinner favours and the smartest frocks, and they never disappointed her.