"American letters!" exclaimed Laura, turning the packet over eagerly. "Some rainy afternoon—which means, probably, this afternoon, even if the sun is shining smokily now—I am going to write a brief but enthusiastic essay, 'for private distribution,' on how good American stamps look on American letters addressed to Americans who are not in America—long may she wave!" and she sorted over the just-brought letters with fluttering fingers.

"What a lot of America in one sentence!" said Louise, her own eyes alight at the bulgy little packet of letters from overseas. "I wish," she added a little wistfully, "America were as near as your patriotism is genuine."

"Don't I!" heartily agreed Laura. "Could anything be better calculated to inspire patriotism in the American bosom than an occasional inspection of Europe—and particularly an occasional residence in London? All Americans possessed of the steamship fare should be forced by law to visit Europe—particularly London—at least once. Then there would be no further trouble in getting soldiers for our army. All of the tourists by mandate would become so patriotic that they would enlist just as soon as they got back to the United States!"

Then they fell upon their United-States-stamped mail as if the envelopes had contained anxiously awaited reprieves or dispensations, and for the next quarter of an hour the only sounds in the room were the crackling of paper and the absorbed, subdued ejaculations to which women give utterance in perusing letters.

The murk-modified morning sunshine of early June in London filtered wanly through the windows of their rooms at the Savoy. Very close to the consciousness of both women was the keen recollection of glorious Junes in the United States, with over-arching skies of sapphire, unstained for days at a stretch even by the fleeciest of golden clouds. Louise was confessedly lonesome. Laura, who had her London almost at her fingers' ends, was lonesome, too, but not confessedly so. It would be too much to ask a seasoned Londoner from New York to admit such a departure from the elemental rule of cosmopolitanism. Laura, in London or anywhere else in Europe, was lonesome in the abstract, so to speak. Her method of giving expression to her feeling was to comment—when no Europeans were of her audience, of course—upon the superior comforts and joys of life in the United States, which, to her, meant New York almost exclusively.

Louise shared the almost inevitable feeling of genuine lonesomeness and unanalyzable oppression which overcomes, to the point of an afflictive nostalgia, most Americans of whatever degree who find themselves for the first time in European capitals. They had spent their first fortnight in London; and Louise had only been saved from complete dejection during that period by the gayety—somewhat studied and reserved, but still gayety—of Laura's troops of friends, English and American, in the city that, for the socially unacclimated American, is the dullest and most hopeless in all Europe. Paris, whence they had gone from London for a month's stay, had been made endurable to Louise by her close fellowship with Laura in the older woman's incessant battlings with the milliners and makers of dresses. Victory had never failed eventually to perch upon Laura's banners at the termination of these conflicts; but the intervening travail had given her young companion more than enough to think about and thus to ward off an ever-recurring depression. She did not call it "homesickness," even to herself; for by this time she had become, if not used, at least reconciled to the thought that she had no real home.

One of the least true maxims of all of those having perennial currency is that which declares that "All good Americans go to Paris when they die." Most Americans, if the truth could be tabulated, are poignantly disappointed with Paris. It is a city where American men of a certain type feel that they have almost a Heaven-bestowed license to "throw off responsibility." But "the morning after" knows neither latitude nor longitude, and it is just as dismal and conducive to remorse and good resolutions in Paris as it is in any other quarter of the irresponsible world. It takes an American man about a week to become thoroughly disillusioned as to Paris. The American woman, who, like women the world over, must preserve her sense of responsibility at all times, even in the French capital, discovers her disappointment with and her weariness of the over-lauded Paris in considerably less time than a week. Louise found it unutterably tiresome, artificial, insincere, absurdly over-praised. Now they had been back in London for three weeks, and she was beginning to wonder when Laura would give the "pack-up signal" for the return to New York. Whenever she circuitously led up to such a suggestion, however, Laura told her how ridiculous it would be to return to New York in June, at the height of the London season; besides, there were thousands upon thousands of people in London whom Laura wanted Louise to meet; and Louise (Laura would go on) must fight to overcome her Londonphobia, because, after all, London probably would be on the map as a sort of meeting place for peripatetic folk for quite a long time to come; whereupon, with fine feminine inconsistency, Laura would round upon London for its primitiveness in the supplying of ordinary comforts, for its incurable smudginess, for the mediÆval complaisance of its populace, and for a hundred other matters that made it a mere "widely-spraddled" hamlet in comparison with her beloved New York.

Additionally, there had been an utter absence of the querulous note, and an unwonted tone of positive sadness, in her mother's letters that gravely disquieted Louise. Her mother's self-revelations on paper hitherto had been characterized by a sort of acidulous recklessness; her letters to Louise while the girl was at school had been long-drawn out epistolary complaints, the pages running over with the acridness of a woman at variance not only with her world but with herself. But the half dozen and odd letters which Louise had received from her mother since leaving New York had been of an entirely different character. Their tone denoted, not the indifference which proceeds from the callousness of surrender, but the long-deferred awakening of a maternal instinct and a maternal conscience. They were filled with reproaches, not for others, but for herself. In them, too, Louise perceived a vein of hopelessness, as of one who has been aroused all too late to the evils and dangers of a self-wrought environment, a self-created peril, which sorely disturbed her daughter.

Louise's parting with her mother had been tender enough on both sides. The girl had said, simply enough, that she was going away for a while in the hope that there would be an adjustment, a righting, of all things awry with her mother before her return. She felt her helplessness, she added, even to make herself a helpful instrument toward such an adjustment by remaining near her mother; but she hoped and believed that before she came back—And Louise had been able to progress no further. Nor was there any need. Her mother, troubled even beyond the relief of tears by her daughter's words, had taken Louise in her arms and cuddled her as if she had been again a child; and her last words had been, "Everything will be changed, dear—the slate will be cleansed, and we shall start hand in hand again—before you get back. Depend upon that. It is odd, I suppose, that I am beginning to remember my duty to you as a mother before I have made a start toward seeing my duty to myself as a woman. But the two awakenings go together, Louise, I find—as you shall see when you return." Louise had been quick to detect the implied promise in her mother's words; and her main reason for not being insistent with Laura upon an earlier return was that she wanted to give her mother plenty of time to redeem the tacit pledge bound up in her parting words.

Her letters from Blythe had been perfervid variations—the effort at restraint being almost humorously visible between the lines—upon the one theme, the leit motif of which was: "We are to be married: when?" The fact itself, it will be observed, was masterfully taken for granted; the time only remained to be mutually agreed upon, so it appeared to Blythe.

It was from such a letter as this that Louise now looked up and gazed pensively at the reddish rays of smothered London sunshine flickering, with the movement of the curtains, upon the rug. Laura herself, just having finished a far more informative letter from Blythe, caught the pensive expression and not unnaturally associated it with the still open letter on Louise's lap.

"Of course the man is impatient, dear," she said to Louise, weaving without effort into the subject matter of the girl's reflections. "But you must not mind that. Being impatient—at such an interesting juncture of their poor, benighted lives, I mean—is good for them. Really, it is the best thing that can possibly happen to them. It chastens them, teaches them the benignities, the joys of—er—abnegation and renunciation and things. By the way, Louise," veering about with diverting instability, "when do you really and privately mean to get rid of the man by marrying him?"

Louise, not without an effort, shook herself out of her reverie, folded her letter from Blythe with an odd sort of deliberation, and looked frankly enough at Laura.

"It is not certain, dear," she replied, with no irresolution of tone, "that I shall ever marry him."

Laura regarded the girl with a gaze of perfectly unaffected stupefaction.

"I wonder," she said, as if to herself, "if the acoustics of these London rooms can be so atrocious, or if I am really becoming so old that my hearing already is affected? Say that again, child. It isn't possible that I could have heard you correctly."

Louise was unable to repress a slight smile at the extraordinary bewilderment which was visible on Laura's face, but her tone was distinct enough when she repeated:

"It is far from a certainty that I shall marry him at all, Laura."

Laura rose from her deep chair, gathered her "getting-up gown" hastily about her, crossed over to where Louise was sitting, placed an arm about the girl's shoulder, and gazed wonderingly into her eyes.

"It is impossible," she said, "that you two are quarrelling across the wide Atlantic? I shall cable John Blythe this very hour! It is his fault! It must be his fault!" and she rushed to her escritoire and pretended to fumble for her cable blanks.

"Of course I know you haven't the least idea of doing any such a thing," said Louise, earnestness showing through her composure. "Won't you please stop your aimless ransacking and come over and talk with me?"

"But," said Laura, seating herself by Louise, "I am afraid I am too anxious to scold somebody—either you, here and now, or John Blythe, by a few stinging words sent under the sea, or—or anybody I can lay my tongue or pen to! Really, I am baffled by what you say, Louise. Of course the man has asked you time and again, since we've been over here, to marry him?"

"He scarcely writes about anything else," replied Louise, smothering a smile over Laura's intense but uninformed earnestness.

"And don't I know," pursued Laura, with a mystified rapidity of utterance, "that he made his incoherent, almost unintelligible declaration to you on the very day before we sailed—didn't I see him as he left, treading on air, and hear him emit the entranced gibberish that customarily mounts to a man's lips at such a time? And you received his declaration as if you had been timing its arrival, and you told me two minutes after he had gone that you loved him. Then what in the wide world is the—" Laura threw up her hands with a baffled gesture that was almost comic. "I confess myself completely daunted, dear. Won't you tell me what it is all about?"

Louise regarded Laura with steady, reflective eyes.

"You know how I appreciate your fine, generous impulsiveness, dear," she said to the older woman. "But you must have thought, haven't you, that it would not be fair for me to marry John Blythe?"

Another film of mystification appeared on Laura's widened eyes.

"Fair?" she almost whispered in her amazement. "How do you mean—'fair'? Fair to whom—to yourself or to John?"

"To him," said Louise. "Of course it would not be fair to him. I cannot see how there could be two views as to that."

Laura, arms folded, rose and lithely crossed the room several times, knitting her brow. Then she sat down again beside Louise.

"I think I know what you mean, child," she said. "But of course you are wrong. Utterly, hopelessly, pitiably wrong. He isn't that sort of a man. You should know that, dear."

"I don't underestimate him—far from that," said Louise. "It is just because he isn't that sort of a man, as you say, that I shrink from the thought of being unfair with him—of permitting him to do himself an injustice."

"But," said Laura, "he is not a cubbish, haphazard lad. He is a man—a real man. He knows and gauges the world. More and better than that, he knows himself. I should have difficulty in recalling the name of any man who knows his mind better than John Blythe does his."

"I know that, Laura," said Louise. "But his unselfishness is too fine a thing to be taken advantage of. He has made his way unaided. He has had a long fight. He will never cease to mount. Why should I hamper him?"

"Hamper him!" exclaimed Laura. "Child, how can the woman a man loves hamper him?"

"Your partiality causes you to generalize, dear," said Louise. "My case—our case, if you will—is entirely different." She took a turn up and down the room and then confronted Laura calmly. "Don't you know what the world—his world—would say if he married me?"

Laura shrugged impatiently.

"The 'They Sayers'!" she exclaimed. "The 'They Sayers' say this, they say that, they say the other thing. And what does their 'They-Saying' amount to?"

"It would amount to nothing at all in his estimation—I am only too sure of that," replied Louise. "But a man who is making his way in the world must even take heed of the 'They-Sayers,' as you call them. He cannot ignore them. His unselfish impulse would be, not only to ignore them, but to flaunt them; and all on my account. It would, I think, be simply contemptible for me to permit him to do that."

Laura studied for a moment, then shook her head despairingly.

"My dear," she said, "you are the first girl I ever knew deliberately to erect barriers between herself and the happiness that rightfully belongs to her. What, in Heaven's name, has your mother's departure from—from rule to do with you? How has it, how could it, ever involve you, or come between you and the man—the big-minded man—who loves you and whom you love? Tell me that."

"It could not come between us," replied Louise. "But the world—the very 'They-Sayers' you mention—could and would use it as a thong to punish him. And that is the one thing I could not have. I am the daughter of my mother. I am not very experienced, but I know how the world views these things. The world does not draw lines of demarcation where women are concerned. Its ostracism is a very long and heavy whip. Its condemnation does not take the least heed of mitigations. I can speak plainly to you, dear—you are of course the only living person to whom I would say these things. But, if I were to permit John Blythe to marry me, can you not hear the gruelling comment—comment that, while it might not actually reach my husband's ears, he could not fail to be conscious of? They would say that he had married a girl whose mother had been openly maintained by a man—a man in the public eye—whose wife was living. They would go farther and say—which of course is the simple truth—that I had lived for a time under the roof maintained by that man. And, with such things to go upon, how could the world possibly reach any other conclusion—granting, as you must, the knack the world has for leaping at conclusions—than that John Blythe, a growing man, a man destined for distinction, had made a tremendous mistake in his marriage? Of course you understand. I have been wanting to say these things to you for a long time, but I could not summon the courage. I wanted to say them to John on the day before we sailed; but I could not."

Her voice broke, and she gazed out of the window to hide the tears that stood in her eyes. Laura, so strongly moved that she deliberately forced herself to think of inconsequentialities to keep back her tears, wrapped her arms about the girl.

"My dear," she said, "I am not, I fear, as religious, as reverent a woman as I should be. But I do not believe that God will keep a woman like you and a man like John Blythe apart. That would be a deviation from His all-discerning rule in which I simply could not believe. I don't admit that you are right. I don't say now that you are wholly wrong. But, through the very nobility of the view you take, a way shall be found. Never doubt that, child. I know that in some ways—many ways—the world is awry enough. But I know, too, that there is not enough injustice in all the world to keep you from the arms of the man who loves you and is beloved by you."

There were two topics in John Blythe's letter to Laura that gave her more than a day's material for reflection. One of them concerned Louise's mother.

"Mrs. Treharne summoned me a few days ago, and in the evening I went to the house on the Drive," Blythe wrote. "There seemed to be nothing in particular as to which she wished to see me—except that she was good enough to intimate that she had noticed my 'interest' in Louise. (Interest!'—when that very evening I'd been cursing the slow progress of the art of aviation, which made it impossible for me to fly to London out of hand—out of wing, I mean.) Really, Laura, I think the depressed little woman merely wanted to have a talk with somebody about Louise, which was why she sent for me. She looks in shocking health. If I read aright, I think she is at least at the beginning of some sort of a decline. Better not tell Louise this—just yet. There are reasons why I think it would be better for Louise to remain abroad with you for a while longer. One of the reasons is this: I gather that Mrs. Treharne is pretty nigh through with Judd. She as much as told me so. I was touched by her lack of reserve in speaking to me of this matter. Louise was right. Her mother, as Louise prophesied to you, is undergoing the miseries of an awakening—a singularly bitter awakening in her case, I fear. I felt and feel intensely sorry for her—she was never wrong at heart, but was caught in the eddy of circumstance.

"She hinted, not vaguely, but quite directly, that she was upon the verge of a complete change in her environment—and the intertwined remarks denoted that her keenly-felt humiliation in the eyes of her daughter was at the bottom of the contemplated change, whatever it is to be. I am very confident that it is to be a withdrawal from the protection, if one could call it that, of Judd. It is too bad, isn't it, that this did not come just a few months earlier? But (here's a bromidiom for you!) better late than never! Think what distress such a withdrawal would have spared Louise if it had happened before the child quit school!

"But enough of if-it-had-beens. The point is that Louise, I feel very sure, has accomplished a wonderful regeneration—the regeneration of her own mother! Could there be anything more unheard-of, more marvelous, than that? But it is merely of a piece with the influence which Louise has upon everybody. You know that badly-batted-around modern word, 'uplift'? It applies actually, I think, to but one human being in the world: Louise. I mean that everybody who comes even slightly under her influence experiences that sense of 'uplift.' I know that I do! And even you, my dear Laura, even you ..."

("Of course the dear headlong creature is right," thought Laura when she read this, "but isn't it hard to picture the self-contained, occasionally even austere John Blythe raving so! But they're all alike. I suppose that even Alexander, CÆsar, and Charlemagne privately raved the same way over their sweethearts!")

"So you will see," Blythe went on in his letter, "why it is better that Louise should remain on the other side with you until matters work themselves out here—until, in essence, her mother completely clears her skirts of the wretched Judd entanglement; and that, I think, is something very imminent. It will be a joy for Louise to be freely and unrestrainedly alone with her mother when she comes back. You understand, of course. So stay over there for another month at least, won't you, Petrarch's Laura and the Laura of all of us?...

"A few forenoons ago I came perilously close to getting a bit of needed exercise by throwing a man bodily out of my office—and this will seem the more startling to you when you remember my almost lamb-like non-aggressiveness. I think, though, I should have gone the length of throwing him out of the window had I not mentally visualized, in an unaccustomed access of caution, the large, rampageous red headlines in the afternoon newspapers: 'Struggling Young (?) Lawyer Hurls Famous Financier From Fifth Story Window,' etc., etc.

"The man was Langdon Jesse, whom of course you know. (Sometimes I wish you did not know so many sinister persons, but perhaps you can't help it.) Probably you are aware that I don't like the Jesse individual. I don't believe I am a victim of a prejudice as to him, either. He is a waxy, doughy person who makes the pursuit of women a hobby as decenter men make hobbies of golf, billiards, cigars and so on. I do not lean to the condemnatory tone where men are concerned, but this man's record is too besmudged and his personality too repulsive even for my amiable, non-Pharisaical (I hope) taste. I have known him in a general sort of a way for a number of years, but have always been at some pains to make it clear to him that I preferred the sight of his back.

"He lounged in upon me the other forenoon, very oily and desirous of exhibiting to me his somewhat rhino-like brand of savoir-faire, and he told me that, inasmuch as he was leaving for Europe directly, he thought he would ask me if I, as the guardian of Miss Treharne, would be willing that he should extend the tourist's usual civilities and courtesies to that young lady. Can you imagine a more imbecile question? Naturally, I was astonished to find that he had even met Louise, and you may hold yourself in readiness to be very severely spoken to when you return because you did not inform me of it. Seriously, I am inordinately sorry that Louise ever did meet him. Of course I gave the fellow what the reporters call 'very short shrift.' I can't remember ever having been more annoyed. The impudence of this loathly Eden MusÉe Lothario, knowing (as he certainly must have known) that I was perfectly familiar with his record and character, coming to me on such a mission! He was upon the pin-point of hinting that a note of recommendation from me, submitting him to the fair opinion of you and Louise, might enable him to offer the two of you certain somewhat prized civilities not easily obtainable—when I, without the least attempt at hinting, indicated the general direction of my door and gave him a view of my back.

"I haven't the least notion as to what the fellow's actual purpose was, but if, as he claims, he really has met Louise, I am perturbed to think that presently he will be in the same hemisphere with her. (I would include you in my perturbation, only I know how thoroughly well able you are to crunch such objects with a mere word, if not, indeed, a simple lifting of the eyebrows.) Of course he will not now have the temerity to call upon you in London. But if he does exhibit such hardihood, and in any way attempts to annoy you or Louise with his 'prized civilities,' you will let me know at once, of course—by cable, if you think it necessary. I don't know why I have permitted and am permitting myself to be disturbed by this individual's inexplicable little machinations (his whole life, in business and in private, is one huge machination), but I have been and I am. Write me just how he contrived to meet Louise, won't you?"

Laura, in reading this, felt considerable compunction over the fact that she had not told Blythe of Louise's unavoidable meetings with Langdon Jesse and of the attentions which he had attempted to force upon her. She had not done so because she had frankly feared the possible consequences of Blythe's quick-blazing anger. While she would have been willing enough to commit Jesse to the corporeal handling of a physically adept man like John Blythe, she had no means of knowing in advance whether the story of such a chastisement, if it took place, would become public; and as Louise had come under her own protection very soon after her final encounter with Jesse, Laura had felt that, as the Jesse incubus probably had been disposed of for good and all, it would be better not to disquiet Blythe by telling him anything about it. She knew that Louise had not mentioned Jesse to Blythe out of a feeling of plain shame that she had been put in the way of meeting a man of his stamp. But Laura, after re-reading that part of Blythe's letter referring to Jesse, found herself vaguely uneasy at the thought that even then he was on his way to London. She determined not to say anything about it to Louise. She also determined that London was going to remain large enough for Louise and herself and ten thousand Langdon Jesses; which, interpreted, means that she had not the remotest idea of bolting for it because of Jesse's impending arrival. Laura also concluded to obey Blythe's injunction to say nothing to Louise as to her mother's changing affairs. She longed to tell the girl of Blythe's forecasting of the approaching dissolution of the relationship between her mother and Judd; but she had learned the time-biding lesson, and she disliked to arouse hopes within Louise's mind that might not, after all, have fruition. Moreover, she had frequently had occasion to test Blythe's judgment, and she had always found it sound.

"But I wish John Blythe would take a vacation of a fortnight or so and run over here," she caught herself meditating. "He would fit into the situation beautifully at the present moment and in some moments that I seem to feel approaching. But there never was a man yet who could recognize the psychological moment even when it paraded before his eyes—much less grasp it by intuition."