Beatrice sent for Gay before she decided to run down to New York to gather up some good-looking things to wear while West. More and more the novelty of the situation was appealing to her. She would ship her car out and take with her a maid, the Pom, and her aunt, besides three trunks of clothes. She also had learned of hot springs that were extremely reducing; and of a wonderful lawyer whom several of her friends recommended. It had grown very distressing to have a cave man prowl about the villa, the eternal disapproval of whatsoever she did, then her father’s presence got on her nerves. Considering everything she was glad to escape, and she welcomed the sympathy and peculiar publicity that would be hers. The rÔle of an injured woman is almost as attractive as that of a romantic parasite. All in all, she was just bound to have a good time.

To be sure she thought of Steve working for someone else, making one twentieth of his former income, marrying Mary and starting housekeeping in eight rooms and a pocket handkerchief of a lawn––and she envied them. This was only natural; it would be fun to be in Mary’s place for a fortnight or so, so she could tell about it afterward. And she thought of Mary and of all she had admitted in the tenseness of their conversation.

When she returned from New York Gay met her at 321 the train. He carried a single long-stemmed white rose, which, he lisped, stood for friendship. And Beatrice––three pounds heavier if the truth were told––quite languid and easily pleased, looked affectionately upon Gay, who was trying to smile his sweetest.

“Of course this is very hard”––feeling it the thing to say––“but inevitable.”

“I always knew it,” he supplemented, feeling that the gates of paradise were slowly opening for him. Within a year or so he would not even have the pretense at a business. “I understand only too well. May I say to my old friend, one whose opinions have swayed me far more than she has imagined, that I, too, have experienced a similar disillusionment which terminated more tragically?”

“Really?” Beatrice roused from her cushions. “Tell me, Gay, just when did you begin to regret having married Trudy?”

The barriers down, Gay began a rapid fire of incidents concerning Trudy’s gross nature and lack of comprehension, and the patience it had required to bear with her. He twirled her diamond ring on his finger. Beatrice spied it.

“Why, that setting is just a little different from any I have,” she said, almost crossly. “I never saw it before.”

She held out her hand, and the minor question of a dead wife and a discarded husband was put aside until further ennui should overtake them.

Aunt Belle opposed the divorce trip more vigorously than any one else concerned. It seemed to her naught but a wild panorama of rattlesnakes and Indians, with no opportunity for her daily massage. 322 Besides, she knew Beatrice’s moods, and as time went on, between Constantine’s ridicule and his daughter’s tempers, Aunt Belle was forced to work hard to maintain a look of joyous contentment.

But there was nothing else for her to do unless she wished to be taken to an old ladies’ home. Her brother had said he would be delighted to have her away, her pretenses and simpering nothings drove him to distraction; and he had at last secured a man attendant who knew how to dodge small articles skilfully for the compensation of a hundred dollars a month and all he could pilfer. Like Beatrice, Aunt Belle regretted that the actual divorce must lack a gorgeous setting; it was quite commonplace. But one cannot have everything, and Beatrice had as much as hinted that for her second wedding she would use the sunken gardens at the Villa Rosa and wear a cloth-of-gold gown without a veil but a smart aigrette of gilded feathers.

Beatrice shrank from saying good-bye to her father. It was more than her usual dislike of entering the sick room. She had come to realize that though her father caused her to be the sort of person she was, he himself had remained both real and simple, succeeding by force of this fact, and her contact with both Steve and Mary convinced her that she did not wish to know real, everyday persons––they had nothing in common with her and caused her to be restless and distressed. Gay was as wild a mental tonic as she desired.

However, she bent solicitously over him and murmured the usual things: “Take best care of yourself––miss you worlds––do be careful––will write every day.”

Constantine looked up at her, tears in the harsh eyes, which had lost their black sparkle. “I’m sorry,” he said, in childish fashion, as she waited for an equally conventional reply. “Your mother would have liked Steve.”

“Papa!”––shocked at his lack of fairness––“how horrid!”

“Maybe I was wrong––maybe if your mother had lived it would have been different. She would have liked Steve.”

Beatrice played her final weapon against Steve’s reputation in her father’s eyes.

“He is going to marry Miss Faithful. He has loved her for a long time. Now you see what I have endured.”

“Are you sure?”

“Oh, quite. He admitted it. So did she.” Beatrice knew that Mary’s declaration against ever marrying Steve would have as much effect as to attempt to keep the sun from shining if it so inclined. “I’ve no doubt they will be the model couple of a model village, for if ever there was a reformer it is Steve. He never should have been a rich man.”

“Not at thirty,” his father-in-law championed. “So––it’s the woman who worked for him that won.... I guess it’s the way of things, Bea.”

“You uphold him?” Her temper was rising.

Constantine shook his head, closing the dull eyes. “I’m out of it all,” he excused himself. “There’s a check for you on the table.”

Either pretended or real, he seemed to go to sleep without delay.

Some months later Gaylord, very suave in white 324 flannels, came in to tell Constantino that he was to meet Beatrice in Chicago, en route from the West, and that they were planning to announce their engagement shortly after their arrival in Hanover. At which Constantine managed to curse Gay in as horrid fashion as he knew how. But Gay was quite too happy and secure to mind the reception. Besides, there was nothing Constantine could do about it. It was a rather neat form of revenge since his daughter would bring into his family the son of one of the men he had ruthlessly ruined in his own ascent of the ladder.

Gay had done nothing but write letters to Beatrice, in which he copied all the smart sayings and quips of everyone else, purporting them as original, impoverishing himself for florists’ orders and gifts, and even taking a desperate run out to see Beatrice ensconced in state in a Western town with her tortured aunt and lady’s maid and a stout squaw to do the housekeeping. Gay knew that all this work would not count in vain. So when he proposed to Beatrice, having taken three days in which to write the love missive, he knew that he would be accepted, and therefore counted Constantine’s wrath as a passing annoyance.

Everything considered, Beatrice could do no better. She had inclined toward a minister as a second husband, she one time said, but her chances there were small since she was not a bona-fide widow. Gay would endure anything at her hands; he knew no pride, he had no purpose in existing save to have a good time, neither did he possess annoying theories about life. He was an adept at flattery, and he understood Beatrice’s sensitiveness about being 325 called stout. With a suitor at hand well trained for the part, why waste time looking further, she argued.

So the wedding in the sunken gardens with the cloth-of-gold-garbed bride was planned for the next season’s calendar and there would be all the pleasure of talking it over, the entertainments, the new clothes, and so on. His father-in-law was paralyzed and his aunt-in-law was senile. Gay was bound to be master of all he surveyed before long.

Perhaps during the breaking up of his establishment he might be unpleasantly reminded of a red-haired girl who had died unmourned and whose very ring Beatrice now wore––in exchange for one of hers which Gay wore. But he could take an extra cordial if that was the case and soon forget. After all, Trudy, like Steve, had been impossible; and Gay felt positive that impossible people would not count at judgment day.

Likewise Beatrice, who regarded the whole thing as a lark, thought sometimes of Steve, who, she understood, was superintendent of a large plant some two hundred miles removed from Hanover, and of the time when the slightest flicker of her eyes made him glad for all the day, or the suggestion of a pout brought him to the level of despair. Perhaps she thought, too, of the very few moments as his wife during which she had wished things might have been as he wanted. No, not really wished––but wondered how it would have been. And of Mary she thought a great deal––that was to be expected. No one wrote her about Mary, no one seemed to think it would be interesting. The dozen dear friends who deluged her with weekly items of local scandal never once told her of her wife-in-law, as Gay dubbed her. 326 Therefore she thought of her more than she did of any one else––even Gay.

She wondered if Mary was making simple hemstitched things for her trousseau; if she would shamelessly marry this divorced man, superintendent of a cement works; if she would go live in a brown-shingled house and belong to the town social centre and all the rest of the woman’s-column, bargain-day, sewing-society things. And Beatrice knew that Mary would. Moreover, that she would make a complete success of so doing. Whereas even now Beatrice merely regarded Gay as essential to complete her defeat.

When she reached home, in company with Gay, her aunt, the maid, and an armful of flowers, the attendant told them her father was dead. He had had a bad turn in the early morning––no pain––just drifted off. Well, the only intelligible things he had said were––should he repeat them now? Well, the two words he had said over and over again were “Steve––Hannah––Hannah––Steve.”

So the cloth-of-gold wedding with the sunken-garden setting was changed for a wedding at twilight in the conservatory, Beatrice dressed in shimmery mauve out of memory to dear papa!

“You have renounced your economic independence and you are now approaching the legal-vassal stage,” Steve warned Mary as they viewed the rooms of the new brown house. “Do you know what it all means?”

“No; probably that is why we women do so,” she retorted. “Luke says you are bully and everything is fino––and I set quite a store by Luke’s opinions.”

“You’ll have green-plush and golden-oak people call on you, I’m afraid, and a few who run to Sheraton and crystal goblets. There will be funny entertainments and dinner parties where the hostess fries the steak and then removes her apron to display her best silk gown.”

“I am prepared. And the maid will leave us before the month is over and I shall be her understudy. Well, I can. That is something.”

“I’m not going to ask permission to smoke––I’m going to sprawl in all the chairs and puff away at my leisure.”

“Do. I’ll try to remember it is good for moths.”

“Mary, are you satisfied?” he asked, wistfully.

“Of course. It never does to have it all perfect––to the last detail of the wallpaper designs. That never lasts.”

She went to lay her head on his shoulder for a brief second, almost boyishly darting away and running upstairs to see to some detail in which Steve was not concerned.

He went to the side doorway of the house to look out at the other houses and yards––pleasant, livable dwellings without romantic construction or extravagant details––the homes of the people who keep the world moving and mostly turning to the right.

He felt he had earned this brown house––and the woman who was upstairs examining the linen-closet capacity. He had neither stolen nor bargained for either. It was true there was a tinge of regret, like a calm stretch of road without the suggestion of a stirring breeze. One cannot chain youth, romance, and Irish-Basque ancestry together and let them go 328 breakneck speed without glorious and eternal memories of the feat.

Mary realized this––even though she might pretend ignorance of the fact. She had reckoned with it before she gave Steve her word. Perhaps it, too, had been a factor in stripping off the mask of commercial nun and showing him the Gorgeous-Girl propensities. Nothing would content him so much as to think of someone dependent upon him, make him shoulder responsibility, surround him in a halo of hero worship. Even if they both knew this to be a lovely rosy joke––aide-de-camp of romance, which even the most practical American woman will not forgo––Mary had been wise in telling him the truth. The only time women do at all well in fibbing is to each other. Besides, there is a vast difference between fibs and rosy jokes!

Steve had earned this, therefore it would be his for all time. And though he felt youth had gone from him––the optimistic swashbuckling youth which conquered all in his pathway––approaching middle age was good to have, and he rejoiced that this mad noonday was over. As he looked out at the simple grounds and thought of how sensible Mary was, and how sensible was the colour of their modest car, and a hundred similar facts––there crossed his mind a vision of the Gorgeous Girl like a frail, exotic jungle flower, clad in copper-coloured tulle with tiny rusty satin slippers and surrounded by a bodyguard of the season’s best dancers.

“Why, Stevuns,” he almost fancied her light, gay voice saying, “aren’t you funny!” Then the tiny rusty satin slippers tripped away to the latest of waltz tunes.

Well, that was at an end. Perhaps even to Mary, who had come downstairs, delighted at finding extra shelf room, Steve would never confide these fleeting visions that would cross his mind from time to time; also his banished boy heart. Mary would grow a trifle matronly of figure, become addicted to severe striped silks, perhaps insist on meatless days––and smokeless rooms, for all she said not just now. She would dominate a trifle and be on committees, raise a great hue and cry as to the right schools for the children. But she would always be his Mary Faithful, gray-eyed and incurably honest and loving him without pause and without thought of her own splendid self. Truly he was a fortunate man, for though there is an abundance of Gorgeous Girls these days there are seldom enough Mary Faithfuls to go round.

But he would never tell even his nearest and dearest of the visions. This would be Steve’s one secret.

And as Steve thought sometimes of the Gorgeous Girl in copper-coloured tulle and with a dancing bodyguard, or in white fur coats being halfway carried into her motor car, so would the Gorgeous Girl sometimes find Gay and his simpering servility quite beside her own thoughts. Once more she would see Steve, young and flushed with a lover’s dream!

The same germ of greatness in these Gorgeous Girls as in their fathers frequently causes them to produce good results in the lives of those they apparently harm. As in Steve’s case––he found his ultimate salvation not so much by Mary Faithful’s love and service as by realizing the Gorgeous Girl’s shallow tragedy. With iron wills concealed behind childish faces and misdirected energy searching for 330 novelty, so the Gorgeous Girls stand to-day a deluxe monument to the failure of their adoring, check-bestowing, shortsighted parents. They are neither salamanders nor vampires. Steve had not spoken truly. They are more chaste and generous of heart than the former, more aloof from sordid things than the latter. Wonderful, curious little creatures with frail, tempting physiques and virile endurance, playing whatever game is handy without remorse and without vicious intent just as long as it interests them––in the same careless fashion their fathers stoked an engine or became a baker’s assistant as long as it proved advantageous.

Moreover, they are so apart from the workaday world that it is impossible to refrain from thinking of them in unwise fashion––even after life has fallen into pleasant channels and the dearly beloved of all the world is by one’s side. So strong yet so weak, so tantalizing yet generous, they have the power to haunt at strange intervals and in strange fashion. So it was with Steve. He could not experience a storm of definite reproach at the thought of Beatrice––nor bitter hatred. Only a vague, lonesome urge, which soon dulled beside the sharp commands of common sense.

It was only Mary who was done with visions and could give herself unreservedly to the making of her home, the rearing of her family. But Mary had realized her vision––not relinquished it.

THE END

THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS
GARDEN CITY, N. Y.