“You don’t know how I’ve missed you,” Steve told Mary upon her return. “Don’t I look it?” he added, wistfully.

Mary had appeared at the office late one September afternoon rather than appear the following morning as a model of exact punctuality. She had had to force herself to remain away until her leave of absence expired. It was Luke who rejoiced in the freedom of the woods and the green growing things in which his sister had tried to take consolation, telling herself they would revive her common sense and banish absurd notions concerning Steve O’Valley. It was Luke who rejoiced at catching the largest trout of the season, who never wearied of hayrack rides and corn roasts and bonfires with circles of ghostlike figures enduring the smoke and the damp and the rapid-fire gossiping and giggling. Luke had returned with a healthy coat of tan and a large correspondence list, pledging himself to revisit the spot every season.

But Mary felt defeated in the very purpose of her holiday. The atmosphere of weary school-teachers trying to appear as golden-haired flappers foot-loose for a romance; the white shoes always drying outside tents or along window sills; the college professors eternally talking about their one three-months’ tour of Europe; the mosquitoes; the professional invalid, the inevitable divorcee; the woman with literary ambitions and a typewriter set in action on 184 the greenest, most secluded spot for miles about; the constant snapshotting of everything from an angleworm to a group of arm-entwined bathers about to play splash-me; the cheap talk and aping of such Gorgeous Girls as Beatrice Constantine––all this on one side, and a great and eternal loneliness for Steve on the other.

It was small wonder that defeat was the result. And yet in her heart of hearts Mary was glad that it was so. There is something splendid and breathless in trying to shut away a forbidden rapture, and being unable to do so; in telling oneself one will never try repression again but will shamelessly acknowledge the forbidden rapture and register a desire to thrill to it whenever possible.

Besides the irritations of the summer camp Mary had been forced to leave Hanover remembering Steve as ill, worried over business; of Beatrice’s hinting that she would usurp her place. There had been so many womanly trifles she would have done for Steve had she been in Beatrice’s position––a linen cover for the water glass; a soft shade on the window instead of the glaring white-and-gold-striped affair; exile for that ubiquitous spaniel; home cooking, with old-fashioned milk toast and real coffee of a forefather’s day.

Strange how such homey trifles persist in the mind of a commercial nun through two months of supposed enjoyment and liberty. In the same way incongruous associations of ideas spring into the brain with no apparent reason at all causing fossilized professors to write essays-under-glass that elucidate matters not in the slightest.

So Mary returned to the office two days ahead of 185 time, her heart thumping so loudly that she thought Miss Lunk would surely detect the sound. She deliberately dressed herself in a demure new suit and a becoming black-winged hat which made her seem as if delightfully arrayed for afternoon tea. And it was with a charming timidity that she tiptoed into the office.

Before Steve had asked her opinion she had given one swift look about the two offices, and she was glad that they looked as they did. It would have been disappointing to have found them spick and span and quite self-sufficient, without a hint that Mary Faithful was missed or irreplaceable.

Evidences of Beatrice’s brief sojourn in the business world still remained––an elaborate easy-chair with rose pillows, a thermos bottle and cut-glass tumbler, a curlicue French mirror slightly awry and, on her desk, a gay-bordered silk handkerchief, a silver-mesh bag, and a great amount of cluttered notations; all of which proved that the understudy secretary had not yet mastered the law of efficiency.

It seemed amusing to Mary. She thought: “How stupid! How can she––when the wicker basket is the one logical place for–––”

Then she spied Steve’s desk, bearing a suggestion of the same disorder about it. When she spoke his name and he started up, holding out both hands, she saw a queer, bright look in his eyes, as if he, too, were trying to convince himself that everything was all right.

“So you really missed me?”

“Missed you! Heaven alone can record the unselfish struggle I endured to let you play. I give you my word.”

He wheeled up a chair for her, just as he used to 186 wheel up a chair for Beatrice, and sitting opposite him Mary heard an almost womanish enumeration of petty troubles and disturbances, a pathetic threat as to the avalanche of work which would await her in the morning.

“And now I will be polite enough to ask if you had a good time?”

“Very! And Mrs. O’Valley?”

It was so horrid to have to pretend when each knew the other was pretending; and as they pretended to the world in general, what a relief and blessed lightening of tension it would have been to have said merely an honest: “We don’t care about Mrs. Gorgeous Girl or any one else. We are quite content with each other. True, this is still platonic friendship––with one of us––but all tropical twilight is of short duration. It won’t be platonic much longer. So let’s talk about ourselves all we like!”

But being thoroughbred young persons they felt it was not the thing even to think frankly.

“She is well,” Steve said, briefly.

“She came down here, she wrote me, when she wanted to find out about something or other. I’ve forgotten just what.”

Steve smiled. “Yes, for nearly a week Mrs. O’Valley managed to create a furore among her own set. Before she came here she ordered an entire new outfit of clothes––business togs. There were queer hats and shirt waists and things.” He laughed at the remembrance. “Then she had to practise getting up early; that took a lot of time. Meanwhile, Miss Sartwell did your work just as we planned. It was found necessary to postpone her business career still further because of an out-of-door pageant 187 that required her services as a nymph. She caught cold at rehearsal and enjoyed a week of indoors.

“Then Gay turned up with a whole flock of new decorators for the d–––for the villa thing, and I was left without aid from the ennuied for another ten days. Jill Briggs had a wedding anniversary and relied on Beatrice’s aid. Of course she could not refuse, and Trudy, who, by the way, has come on very rapidly, persuaded Beatrice to take a booth at a charity kettledrum.

“So after several weeks my wife appeared on my business horizon and hung that mirror up and had those other things moved in and then she discovered that the impudent girls were all copying her coats and hats and stuff and even used her sort of perfume, and she decided that her duty lay not in making me a competent secretary but in reforming these extravagant young persons so that she could wear a model gown in comfort and not see it copied within a month. It was quite an experience for her; she was here about five days. Miss Sartwell just moved her desk out there and we managed nicely. Beatrice also had a private teacher for typewriting and so on, but she gave it all up because she felt the confinement and long hours made her head ache and she gained weight. She fled in haste. Sorry she had to do so, but under the circumstances it was better to jeopardize my business career than her own figure!”

“Aren’t you a little unfair?” Mary said, seriously.

“Am I? I never thought so. Wait––I must finish the tale. For a whole week after being my business partner she tried what she called holiness as a cosmetic, and became high-church and quite trying. At the end of that time she felt a veritable dynamo of 188 nerves and scandal and proceeded to become a liberated and advanced woman. You’ll soon enough see what I mean. She doesn’t run to short-haired ladies with theories so much as to hollow-eyed gentlemen embroidering cantos in the drawing room and trying to make the world safe for poetry. De-luxe adventuresses strike her as harmonious just now. You’ll hear about one Sezanne del Monte who is staying in town and living off of Bea and her set.”

“The woman who is divorced every season––and stars in musical comedy?”

“The same. Sezanne is now writing the intimate story of her life; sort of heart throbs instead of punctuation marks––lots of asterisks, you know, separating the paragraphs. Beatrice is going to finance the publication of it and Gay is going to be the sales manager. Yes, it’s funny, but a blamed nuisance when you come home and you find yourself wandering through a crowd of Sezanne del Montes and Gays and Trudys, all bent on playing parlour steeplechase, and you can’t find a plain chair to sit down or eat a plain meal or read a newspaper. It’s more than a blamed nuisance––it’s cause for a trial by jury,” he added, whimsically. “Now what’s wrong?”––watching Mary’s face.

“It isn’t cricket to tell all this.”

Somehow the old struggle began with renewed energy in Mary’s heart, the puritanical part saying: “Forget you ever thought twice of this man”; and the dreamer part urging: “You have earned the right to love him. She has not. Just be fair––merely fair. You have the right; don’t let your opportunity slip by.”

“Why can’t I tell you? I have no one else to whom I can tell things––and I’m so everlastingly tired. Goat tending and living off dried buffalo meat never fagged me like trying to dance with Trudy and living on truffles and champagne. First you are mentally bewildered and physically fagged, then you become defiant; then you realize that that is no use, you’ve brought this on your own self––it is quite the common fate of men like myself––and so you keep on with the steady grind; and by and by you find yourself longing to play in your own way with your own sort. The other sort have no use for you so long as you pay their bills; you are hardly missed, if the truth were told.

“Well, you must keep on with the grind. And you want your sort of playmates and fun, and it’s such decent, upright fun in comparison––oh, pshaw!” He stood up, kicking the edge of the rug with his foot in almost boyish, shamed fashion.

“Business isn’t quite so good,” he began anew in an impersonal, even voice. “Mr. Constantine thinks that the abnormal prosperity is on the wane for keeps––we must prepare for it––but Mr. Constantine has practically retired since you have been away. He’s not well. To-morrow morning, if you don’t mind, I’ll take you over there and we can straighten out some things for him. He is selling the greater share of stock to men from the West. And he’s saved out some pretty nice sugar plums to hand over to me. I haven’t been asked whether or not I want them.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I knew you would be, Miss Iconoclast.”

“Why do you accept them?”

“How can I refuse?”

“By saying you are not prepared to be a mental 190 wreck at forty––which you will be if you try such a gigantic scheme with so little preparation. I’ve an idea that when Mr. Constantine is known to have withdrawn from the business world there will be a change in many things. And when you are known to be alone in the fort––” She paused.

“Go on,” he demanded, irritably. “Can I never make you understand how much I want your advice, your opinions, your scoldings?”

“I think you will have new enemies with whom to deal––enemies you never thought existed. I don’t believe you can deal with them because you have always been so cotton-woolled, so to speak, by being Constantine’s special project–––”

“I’ve done what I’ve done myself,” he interrupted, “and I’m afraid of no one.”

“You think you have,” she corrected. “You have done what you have because Constantine was back of you––and now he is an old, tired man, and very soon he will think more of his days with Hannah than of the present. Which is perfectly safe for him to do. Because Mr. Constantine reckoned on his enemies he knew to a man who hated him and who was afraid of him, who admired him and who would be indifferent; and that is just as essential to success as to reckon on your friends. You never did that––you hadn’t the time––it was all so dazzling and sudden with the war helping things along at breakneck speed. You will find that if you have an Achilles’ heel it will be because you did not reckon on your enemies and are somewhat like a blindfolded man with money in your purse set down in a strange locality.... There. How does that sound for a welcome?”

Steve was pacing up and down the floor. “I’d like 191 enemies,” he said. “I’d like to see them try jumping at my throat. I’d make them cry quits. You don’t frighten me; you stimulate me.”

“That was my intention”––picking up her purse.

“Don’t go––or let me come to supper,” he begged.

She shook her head. Someone came in just then to whom she spoke of the pleasure it was to be back at the office; the word spread that Miss Faithful was back and girls came in groups to smile and say some pretty thing, and the men nodded with a pleased expression. Watching the procedure Steve realized that Mary was as dominant a personality in his office as he was himself, and instead of feeling a vague disapproval of the fact he was genuinely elated that it was so.

After the last of the visitors had gone and the clock pointed to five he said: “Of course I’m going to be dragged some place this evening, so I wouldn’t have much time––but may I come to supper? I’m going out of town next week. There, isn’t that a good reason to come to-night?”

“Suppose the world knew this––our little business world?”

“Hang the world!”

“You never did. You flattered it, and were delighted when the world patted you on the head and said, ‘Nice Stevens, come in and bring your bags of gold––the living’s fine.’”

“Are you starting in to tell me that people would misunderstand my motives? Sezanne del Monte has chapters along those lines. And Beatrice has quite a fad of slumming and taking a notebook along to write down new slang phrases or oaths or bits of heart-broken philosophy spilled in a drunken moment.... 192 I’ve grown careless to everything presumably orderly and conventional. I’m ready to walk the plank for my indifference if need be––but I do want to come home with you for supper!”

Mary did not answer for a moment. Then she said, in a quick breathless tone, as if she did not want to hear her own words: “I wonder if it would do any good to try explaining––really explaining and not fibbing or pretending–––”

“It has always done me good when you have explained––and I can’t imagine you telling cheap untruths.”

“Then I will try it.” The gray eyes grew stormy. “For if we are to continue as employer and secretary––and you must have such a person and I must earn my living––it would be much easier if you really understood and it was all settled. You’ve talked about early hardships, misunderstood childhood, goat tending, and what not; and the world gives you credit for your achievements. Then surely you must understand the woman’s end of the game––the American woman’s part in business, for it’s not easy to be errand girl or to fill endless underpaid clerical positions. It’s not easy to pile out every morning at such and such an hour and stand at a desk and work as if you had neither heart nor eye for the other things in life until gradually the woman part of yourself is changed and it is often too late to enjoy anything but desk drudgery––and a bonus!

“Now the man in the business game forgoes nothing; he has the world’s applause if he succeeds and the kisses of the woman he loves for his recreation, and all is complete and as it should be. But we commercial women of to-day do a man’s work and 193 earn a man’s wage. We do stay starved women, even if that fact doesn’t appear on the surface. We cannot have the things of romance as well as our livelihood. And by the very nature of the average business woman’s life she is often in love with someone in her office––from propinquity if for no other reason. She must. Don’t you see? They’re practically the only men she really comes to know or who come to know her, and she just can’t stab her heart into sudden death.

“So she wears her prettiest frock for this man––a wooden-faced bookkeeper perhaps; or a preoccupied president––and she dreams of him and is jealous of him and very likely gossips about him. And the years pass and she stays just as shut away and misunderstood and starved. And sometimes a woman, originally the most honest in the world, under these circumstances will deliberately steal another woman’s husband if she has the chance. Yes, she will––she does.”

“What do you mean, Mary?” He was almost unconscious of using the name.

“That I am no different from the others. I came here with the same starved heart and woman’s hopes, and I put into your career the devotion and service and very prayers that I should have put into a home and a family––your joys were my joys, your problems mine. It has not been my clever brain that has made me worth so much to you. That is what the superficial public says, but I know better. It’s been the love––yes, the love for you that has made me indispensable! The unreturned and unsuspected and I presume wicked love I felt for you. And now I’ve told you––broken precedent and told the truth. 194 And as you don’t love me you’ll feel very uncomfortable with me about. And you won’t want to play off pal; you’ll fight shy of me except for everyday work. So it has been the only square thing to do––humiliate myself into telling.

“I love you, I always have, and I always will––but I’m no home-wrecking, emotional being and I expect that you will resume our old relationships and I shall go on serving you and knowing my recompense will be a handsome farewell gift and a pension.

“Oh, the business woman’s life isn’t all beer and skittles. We’re expected to lie about our hearts, yet be as reliable as an adding machine about our columns of figures; to be shut away from the social world, thrown with men more hours a day than their wives see them and yet remain immovable, aloof, disinterested! Just good fellows, you know. Isn’t it hideous to think I’ve really told the truth?”

At this identical moment their platonic friendship, alias tropical twilight, ended, and Mary’s evening star of romance rose to stay. But such being the case Steve was the last person in the world to try to convince her that it was so.

All he said was: “I never appreciated you before. Please don’t feel that telling me this will make any difference save that I’ll stay aloof––as you suggest. I can forget it, somewhat, if that will make you feel any better about it. It is all quite true and equally hopeless––true things usually are––and if you like I’ll send you home in the car, because you must be a trifle tired.”

“Thank you,” she remembered answering as she told Steve’s chauffeur where to drive.

“You look as tired as before we went away,” Luke 195 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 cocktails 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 196 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 manuscript as solace until he should arrive.

“I wanted to ask you if Mary Faithful has returned,” she said, throwing down the manuscript 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 hit 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 title? 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 198 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 assistant 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 manuscript 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.