Thurley’s summer was spent unwisely. She excused this by apparently sound reasons. First, she was tired from the season’s work and the unusual social demands which it seemed wisest to endure. Secondly, her jealous curiosity was roused at Bliss Hobart’s mysterious departure without explanation of where he was going or how long he would remain away, an almost brusque leave-taking which consisted of a brief cup of tea at Thurley’s apartment, telling her some critical things about her voice and answering lightly when she questioned him as to his whereabouts,

“I go to my castle in Spain, really, nothing but a simple little hermitage in the Maine woods. I assure you it would be of no interest. Now I must be off, for it is like uprooting an oak every time I go away. I like to leave things as shipshape as possible before I begin to play.”

“Are you never lonesome?” she persisted.

“I’ve all the inhabitants of the forest,” he answered. “Good-by. I understand you’ve accepted for the yachting party, the one Lissa is giving.” His face expressed displeasure.

Thurley nodded; she had intended to escape it until this identical moment when his bland, impersonal manner was fuel for her folly.

“You’ll get good ideas as to what to avoid. I have always contended that to build a virtuous wall around one’s self was questionable,—better be able to view all that is happening, good and bad, and make one’s deductions accordingly. Lissa reminds me of the basilisk serpent who could ‘look one to death.’ Have a care, Thurley; you’ve no more youth and energy to spare than most of us.” And he left her.

The third reason, and this, too, was an annoying secret, was that Thurley wanted to see the Boston Valley hills and Birge’s Corners. She wanted to go home! Yet not as Thurley Precore, prima donna, but just as Thurley, as unknown but as loved as when she had raced through the village with Dan in pursuit or climbed chestnut trees to the discredit of her manners, helping make daisy chains for the primary class to carry into church on Children’s Day or working her bit of a garden with wholehearted interest and disregard of her appearance.

The notion was absurd and impossible, and, as a powerful destroyer of whim, Thurley accepted the invitation to Lissa’s yachting party and cruised along the coast of Newfoundland in a yacht which had been lent to Lissa by one of her devoted pupils.

The yachting party was not a pleasant affair all told. But it was interesting and exciting. Lissa herself was the discordant note, with the faculty of stirring every one up about something and then losing interest in it and being provoked if the others did not play sheep and do likewise. She had a subtle fashion of reminding every one that, after all, she was the hostess and if they wished they could all get off the yacht at any time they liked and walk home from Newfoundland!

Lissa played with Mark in cat-and-mouse fashion, flirted desperately with Caleb to arouse Ernestine’s jealousy, and Caleb, who regarded her as stunning copy, resolved to transplant her bodily in her most daring combination of orange satin with black velvet streamers into his next best seller. There were ways of gaining revenge, he informed Ernestine, who stayed by herself on the upper deck, dressing in uninteresting smock affairs and talking over prosy matters with Collin Hedley and Polly, while Thurley and Mark romped about to brave Lissa’s displeasure as they made pseudo-love in audacious fashion.

After four weeks of this vapid sport, every one had succeeded in getting on every one else’s nerves and the party disbanded, its members each vowing that, although so and so was a dear, they would never go away with them again, and Thurley flew on to the mountains to visit Miss Clergy and find an enforced peace in the sanitarium routine.

War broke out in Europe with its astonishing effects and complications and when the fall came to rescue Thurley from feeling as aged as the gentleman from Calcutta who had chronic neuralgia and had occupied the veranda chair next to Miss Clergy’s, New York began to hum with winter plans and she returned to Hortense and the apartment with positive delight and eagerness.

Ennui in the young is more deadly than in the middle-aged, since it is an unnatural happening. The press agent who wrote attractive squibs about Miss Precore yachting and in the mountains little dreamed that Thurley started her season with as much zest as the squirrel in the squirrel cage who, from his endless pursuit of nothing, seems to be the proof extraordinary to the world that it is possible for one person to make a quarrel!

Ernestine Christian had romped over to Devonshire to meet a congenial friend who would wheel through the country and thus repay her for the yachting trip, but she was caught in the war clouds and reached home with difficulty.

Caleb met her as was customary, although all she said by way of a welcome was,

“I’ve had a fright of a time. Europe is seething like a witches’ caldron. I’m out of my own cigarettes and special kind of hair nets and my fingers feel like sticks. Dalrymple, the best coach I’ve ever had, has rushed to Canada to go into training!”

“You look fagged,” Caleb admitted as he drove her home. “Well, as nearly as I can make out every one has a grouch on. Thurley is beginning to have bad mannerisms; Bliss must take her in hand. Lissa has ruined her with nonsensical notions and Mark dawdles about only to waste her time. You haven’t asked as to myself,” he reminded her childishly.

“I brought you a hand-illumined thing,” she answered.

“Oh, certainly—always remember the servants when returning home. It pays! By Jove, that’s a nice hullo for a chap, to say nothing of having stood for your glooms in Newfoundland—”

“You were listening behind tall vases to get our conversation,” she reproached. “I dare say you’ve a hundred pages’ getaway on a worst-seller.”

Caleb was silent and then, instead of impetuous defense, he said in a dreary tone, “Don’t believe I’ll bother you again, Ernestine. It just ‘riles’ you and discourages me.”

“Oh, do drop in for dominoes; no one else ever lets me win so often,” she returned, a bundle of nerves and womanish imaginings, prepared to enter her apartment and find fault and be adorably generous all in one.

Caleb was right concerning Thurley’s mannerisms. Her first adverse criticism proved a mental stab at which she recoiled with agonizing and amusing self-excuses.

“Miss Precore has adopted an unpleasant habit of swaying her body when her voice ascends the scale. Hitherto one of the greatest delights of this young artist was the splendid simplicity which charmed every one who heard and saw her. Not for an instant did she forget the great essentials of musical art—to conceal art itself. She was as unconscious of the audience or the opera company as if she were, in truth, the composer’s mental vision when actually writing the title part! It is to be hoped that this habit and the air of self-consciousness may be done away with before either becomes fixed. To lose such an example of artistic triumph as Thurley Precore has demonstrated to us would be irreparable.”

No one mentioned the criticism to Thurley—there was no need to do so. Two days after it was printed and her manager told her she must go on a concert tour in February, Thurley dressed herself deliberately in a gown as gleamingly white and glitteringly silver as a path of moonlight; it fairly clothed her in romance. She tied green tulle about her hair and, taking a cloak of emerald green velours, she drove to Bliss Hobart’s apartment, having had Hortense first ’phone to ask if he would be at home.

During the drive she planned what she should say with the artifice of a world coquette. Thurley had fallen prey to Lissa’s spell, yet she had, being denied the simple ties of acknowledged relationships, found scant solace in the bizarre theories of a small but powerful portion of the world. She had told herself with the recklessness of youth that she was different from others, therefore she had the right to live in different fashion, to love in different fashion if she chose ... she would not stay a convent sort of celebrity with every one adoring and applauding and copying her in every way imaginable yet no one becoming happily related to her. She regarded Ernestine as a remote, though precious, older sister who had made a bad error in becoming so aloof; she wanted Collin to marry Polly Harris in the good old-fashioned way, since Polly had no more chance of writing successful opera than the fire escape of her attic of turning into a marble stairway. She was undecided as to Caleb’s destiny. Lissa was interesting, even with her jealousies and vanities, her greed for all material things—Thurley suddenly realized that Lissa was interesting because she never corrected one, she never proved the wrong of this or the right of that—and who, not excepting rosy youth, does not incline to him who never reproves but merely condones? Mark did not really interest Thurley, since she had ceased trying to deny the truth to herself—that she loved Bliss Hobart in such tense fashion that she thought of him as her inspiration in whatsoever she did! The only solace she had when Hobart busied himself with new pupils, going here and there to decide this or that question, or when society women flocked about to try their best to fascinate, was that he treated the entire world with the same indifference and kindly patronage and, if Thurley still hoped through magical power to waken in him romantic love, she had sense enough to keep her secret well hidden—from herself most of the time—in order that she might do her work and stay within his jurisdiction.

She found Hobart and Caleb Patmore playing chess, a favorite recreation of the former’s.

“I’m quite a gamester,” Caleb said, with visible relief as she appeared. “Ernestine lapses into childhood via dominoes and Collin actually stops painting to drag me into casino—casino, Thurley! Why do you not stroke my brow or show some symptom of humanity? Polly Harris yearns for cribbage; you know Polly still hints of that ancestry of hers where she had school marms for aunts and judges for uncles and her cousins all went to military academies. Why this odd devil takes to chess for his pleasure—I understand it not. Help, ho, Thurley, take my place—will you?”

Thurley hesitated. It was not to her liking nor her intention to have any one present at her visit, but she dallied the question gracefully, submitting a list of songs for the concert tour and pretending grave anxiety as to the recovery of one of the songbirds recently in a motor accident.

As she rose to go, inventing a dinner engagement, Hobart accompanied her into the reception hall, leaving Caleb straddled on the fire-settle wondering—who knows what?

“What did you really want?” Hobart asked, as she paused before the door. “Don’t tell me you’re going to do Red Cross work and wear a uniform—”

“It’s the criticism,” she said simply. “It hurt—you might have warned me when you saw my faults.”

“I warned you not to waste summers,” he reminded. “I said all I could. You are no longer my pupil and I have other things which take my time.”

“What shall I do?” she demanded petulantly. “I will not be a mere shooting-star person as so many would like to see me—”

“Well, well, let us see.” He placed his hands on her shoulders in the benevolent, paternal fashion she so admired. But she spoiled it by trying to flirt with him as she looked up.

He dropped his hands as if he read the meaning of the coquettish gaze. “Suppose you find a hobby, Thurley; put all your airs and mannerisms into it. It often works for the best good—what shall it be? Collecting butterflies or canes, opening Indian mounds—trying to write a play—discovering the fourth dimension—eh?”

Tears were in her eyes. And the big ache of her heart was changed into a sob which rose in her throat with a penitent murmur.

“You are cruel,” she said in a fierce little rage.

“You funny, lovely, little fool!” he laughed, but in soul-healing fashion. “Just be the old Thurley and we’ll love you as we did at first!” After which he opened the door and went down to her cab, telling her how becoming was the costume she wore as Elsa and promising to send her a book of golf anecdotes which he considered excellent. She drove off feeling somewhat as Hortense Quinby had expressed it—a mere onlooker at something she craved but could never attain. She wanted to rout Caleb from the fire-settle and sit there herself until Bliss Hobart should return, to say to him with the assurance with which loved wives are blessed,

“Darling, how stupid of any one to come in to-night—please bolt the door and finish the story we started. I’ll snuggle down on this cushion and lean against your knee. I like to watch the fire as you read to see the characters slip about the coals.... I’m very silly, Bliss, but there’s no need for me to reform, God made you wise enough for us both!” ...