Not alone from John Blythe had Langdon Jesse suffered a rebuff in his attempt to gather ammunition, in the form of intimate and more or less mandatory credentials, for his European campaign, in which Louise Treharne figured as the alluring citadel of his sinister ambition. First he had tried Louise's mother with that purpose in view; and in that quarter he had been treated to one of the surprises of his by no means uneventful life.

Jesse's method of reasoning, in approaching Mrs. Treharne on such a mission, was in no wise subtle; it was, on the contrary, as plain and pointed as a fence-paling. It all started from the outright premise that Jesse "wanted" Louise Treharne and thoroughly meant to "have" her—for Jesse had the merit (negative enough in his case) of never attempting to deceive himself as to his eventual purposes where women were concerned. Louise, of course, had plainly given him to understand that she despised him. That, however, was, in Jesse's view, a negligible detail. It would make his final conquest all the more satisfying. Many women who had begun by disliking him and frankly questioning his motives had ended by yielding to him; whereupon, after basking in the joys of triumph, he had taken a revengeful pleasure in casting them into what, in his self-communings, he brutally termed his "discard."

It would be the same, Jesse thoroughly believed, in Louise's case. She now represented to him a difficulty to be surmounted, a transaction to be successfully carried through. The weakness in the armor of men of the Jesse type is that they have little or no imagination. They foresee merely results; and their handling of the means to an end often is singularly clumsy and unadept. In regarding all women, of whatever class, as mere palterers with virtue and self-respect, Jesse considered that he was justified by his experience with women; but he made the egregious mistake of supposing that his own experience with women established a criterion, a formula, from which there could be no departure.

A week or so before he contemplated going abroad, mainly for the purpose of continuing his besiegement of Louise, Jesse dropped in at the house on the Drive one evening. He was glad to find Mrs. Treharne alone. He was not unmindful of his boast to Judd that he would victoriously overcome what, in his B[oe]otian imagining, he really deemed Louise's "prejudice" against him; and he preferred to lay his course without any Judd finger on his chart.

Mrs. Treharne, now thin and frail-looking, no longer from banting, but from the conflict with conscience that been consuming her ever since her daughter's departure, received him coldly enough. Not the least of her self-scornings since Louise had gone away had centered upon her complaisance in tacitly permitting her daughter to be pursued by a man of the Langdon Jesse type.

"I am leaving for England," Jesse found early occasion to announce.

Mrs. Treharne, very languid and tired-looking, did not find the announcement sufficiently important to call for comment.

"Louise, I believe, is in London?" pursued Jesse, sensing, without perturbation, the chill Mrs. Treharne was purposely diffusing.

Mrs. Treharne gave him a level, penetrating glance.

"Miss Treharne, I think, would not be interested in knowing that you possessed information as to her movements," she replied, with studied indifference.

Jesse smiled and stooped to stroke a dozing spaniel.

"What have I done, Tony?" he asked after a pause, looking up with a dental smile.

"You have presumed to employ Miss Treharne's first name, after having met her, I believe, not more than three times. Don't do it again," replied Mrs. Treharne in a tone that, while quiet enough, had a ring in it that was utterly new to Jesse. Jesse, seeming by his manner to take the rebuke in a chastened spirit, occupied himself again with the spaniel's silky coat.

"I seem," he said, finally breaking the oppressive silence, "to have found you in a somewhat Arctic humor. Still, that should not be allowed to congeal an old friendship. It cannot be that you, too, are beginning to misunderstand me, as Miss Treharne has from the beginning?"

"Miss Treharne should not have been allowed to meet you at all," returned Mrs. Treharne. "I leave you to imagine how bitterly I condemn myself now for not having at least screened her from that."

"You say 'now,'" said Jesse. "Why, particularly 'now?'"

"That," replied Mrs. Treharne, "is my affair."

The time, of course, had arrived for Jesse to make the best of a poor departure. The man, however, was of a surprising obtuseness as to such details.

"And yet I came this evening," he said, adopting a tonal tremolo which was intended to convey the idea that he was sorely put upon, "to offer, through you, any poor courtesies that I might have at my command to make Miss Treharne's stay in England agreeable."

Mrs. Treharne shrugged impatiently.

"Spare yourself these posturings, if you please," she said. "Miss Treharne has made it plain enough that she detests you. Are you waiting to have me tell you that I applaud her judgment?"

An ugly sneer flickered across Jesse's features. At length the barbs were hitting home. But he effaced the sneer and twisted it into a forced smile.

"What I can't understand is why you received me at all this evening, if this is your feeling—your newly-formed feeling—toward me," he said, quelling the hoarseness that proceeded from his repressed anger.

"I confess to having entertained a certain curiosity, perhaps a certain uneasiness, as to your purpose in calling at all," promptly replied Mrs. Treharne. "It is the first time you have been here since my daughter's departure. I have been sorting over certain of my mistakes since she went away. I have been considering them, too, from a different angle than any you could possibly understand. Not the least of these mistakes, as I have told you, was in permitting my daughter to exchange as much as two words with you. Happily, it is not too late to rectify that mistake, at least. She is well protected. I need not tell you that if you should have the temerity to attempt to call upon her in London she would instruct the flunkeys to cease carrying her your card. I think there is no more to be said?" Mrs. Treharne rose and assumed the attitude of dismissal.

This time Jesse, also rising, did not essay to erase the sneer from his wrath-flushed features.

"What is all this—a scene from some damned imbecile play?" he demanded, completely throwing off the mask. "Are you trying to regale me with a rehearsal of the flighty mother turned virtuous? Don't do that. That isn't the sort of thing you could reasonably expect me to stand for from Fred Judd's kept wo——"

"Say that if you dare!" exclaimed Mrs. Treharne, stepping close to him and transfixing him with blazing eyes.

Jesse, out of sheer timidity, broke off at the exact point where she had interrupted him. As she stepped to the wall to ring, he put on his hat with studied deliberation and patted it to make it more secure on his head. Thus, with his hat on, he spoke to her.

"I suppose your solicitude for the—er—the what-you-may-call-it of your auburn-haired daughter is natural enough, probably being based upon something that you, and you alone, know," he said, sidling, however, toward the door as he spoke. "But it is wasted solicitude, let me tell you that. She has lived here with you, hasn't she? Well, that fact will about settle her, you know. There's no downing that. And after awhile she'll give up. She won't be able to stand the stigma. None of them can stand it. It would take a superwoman to endure, without herself surrendering, the ignominy of having lived under this roof. Don't forget that."

Then the butler, answering the ring, appeared at the door. Mrs. Treharne raised a limp arm and pointed to Jesse.

"This man," she said to the butler, "is not to be admitted to the house again as long as I am in it."

The butler inclined his head with butler-like gravity, detoured to get behind Jesse, and Jesse, patting the top of his hat again to emphasize, in the menial's presence, the insult of wearing it, stalked down the hall.

The broken, faded woman tottered to her sleeping room and fell upon a couch in an agony of tears.

It was on the day following this scene that Jesse, inconceivably persistent in the pursuit of such a purpose as he had in mind, and now roused by obstacles to the point where he swore to himself that he would "win out," made the call at Blythe's office which the latter purposely glossed over in describing it in his letter to Laura.

Jesse's purpose in seeking out Blythe was two-fold. In the first place, he wanted to measure the man who, he knew, had been appointed Louise's guardian. He only recalled Blythe in a general sort of a way, and he wanted to "size him up" from this new angle. He was aware that Blythe was not only the guardian but an admirer of Louise, and he wanted to ascertain, from the contact of an interview, whether Blythe's admiration was of a piece with his own; the manifestation of a mere predatory design, that is to say; for men of the Jesse type are ever prone to drag the motives of other men to a level with their own. Secondly, if he found, as he hoped to find, that Blythe was a mere supple and sycophantic young lawyer, eager to succeed, and therefore capable of being impressed by a call from a man looming large in the financial world, Jesse prefigured that probably Blythe, by means of credentials that would have the weight of a guardian's advice, might very easily aid him in his "little affair" (so he thought of it) with Louise when he reached London. Jesse was not in the least fearful of the consequences, so far as his standing with Louise was concerned, of his unmasking in the presence of her mother. He was under the impression that Louise had left the house on the Drive at odds with her mother and that no correspondence existed between them. So that he felt sure that Louise would not hear from her mother of his brutality toward her.

It took Jesse something less than thirty seconds, when he called upon Blythe, to discover that that young lawyer was neither sycophantic nor supple, and that, so far from being impressed by a visit from Jesse in his capacity of financial magnate, Blythe was coldly but distinctly hostile toward him. The interview had terminated with startling abruptness. After having mentioned Louise's name once, and been forbidden to repeat the offense, Jesse had involuntarily let slip her name again. Blythe, seated in his desk-chair with his hands on his knees, viewed Jesse calmly, but with eyes that showed cold glints of steel.

"Are you going to get out now, or are you waiting for me to throw you out?" Blythe inquired of him in much the same tone that he would have employed in asking for a match.

Jesse, it appeared, was not waiting to be thrown out. He went at once. But when he reached the street level and got into his waiting car, he was in almost as pretty a state of passion as any sepulchral-voiced stage villain. And he was quite as resolved to win the baffling battle, even under the lash of unintermittent scorn, as he had been from the hour of his first meeting with Louise Treharne.

An hour after Jesse had gone, leaving the stunned, shattered woman weltering in his litter of cowardly words, Judd walked into Antoinette Treharne's apartments. He found her dishevelled and still weeping convulsively. He sat down and regarded her with the bewildered helplessness of the male when the woman's tears are streaming. She scarcely saw him, but lay, huddled and shaking, a mere wraith of the woman whom he had beckoned to this present disaster and despair but a few years before.

Judd, a gross, fleshly man not without human traits, felt sorry for her as he sat watching her. Also, he felt sorry for himself. It was not agreeable that a woman—this woman—should be weeping and moaning and shaking her shoulders in her grief in such a manner. It was disturbing. It destroyed the poise of things. It created a sort of sympathy which was bad for the digestion of the sympathizer. But Judd felt sorry for her. He really did. He had been watching, with a sort of mystified concern, how her health had been going to pieces lately. He wondered why that was. Surely, she had everything that she wanted? Well, then. Anyhow, Judd was sorry. He was extremely fond of Tony. She had touched a certain responsive chord in him, and he knew that his chords were pretty well insulated; and here she was weeping and staining her face with tears, her hair all mussed, and all that—Judd was decidedly disturbed, and sorry as well.

"I say, Tony, what is it?" he asked her, after keeping vigil for fifteen minutes without emitting a word.

There was no reply. She did not even look up at him. Gradually, though, her weeping ceased. Judd walked up and down the room, smoking an enormously long, black cigar, occasionally stopping in his heavy stride to look at her. Presently she sat up, blinking in the light, her face still swollen with her tears. A certain prettiness still remained to her; but it was the pathetic prettiness of the exotic the petals of which are dropping, dropping.

"Is it anything that I can help, Tony?" asked Judd in a tone that was not lacking in kindliness, as he stopped and stood before her. She shook her head wearily.

"No," she answered him in a quiet, tear-hoarsened tone. "It is nothing that you can help. It is all my own fault."

Judd flicked the long ash of his cigar to the rug and studied her with a puckered but not scowling brow.

"I don't want to stir up or start anything anew," he said, not unkindly, "but may I ask what it is that is your fault?"

She crushed her wet handkerchief between her palms and looked up at him with vague eyes.

"Oh, everything," she replied, with a shrug of utter weariness. "Few women could be found in all the world tonight, I believe, who have made such an utter mess of their lives as I have of mine. But I am not so unfair, thank God, as to blame it upon anybody but myself. It is a compensation, at any rate, to be able to see things in their true light."

"You are ill, aren't you?" Judd asked her, with a solicitude that was obviously genuine.

"I don't know—I think so," she replied. "I am very tired—I know that. Tired of myself, of everything."

"You need a change," suggested Judd. "You ought to go away somewhere. But I don't want you to go alone. I am pretty busy, but I'll chuck everything to go with you if you want me to, Tony."

She looked at him with a sort of weary curiosity.

"It is just as I have said," she murmured after having made this inspection of him. "It has never been your fault. You have, in your way, been kind to me. You still are. You care for me in your way. But it is a bad way, Fred. I know that now. It is too late, of course. Nevertheless, I am going to make what amendment I can. I must try to preserve at least a shred of womanhood. I am sure you are not going to take it angrily or bitterly. But we have reached the parting of the ways, my friend. You have been fair enough, from your point of view, through the whole wretched business. It has been my fault, my weakness, from the beginning."

Judd plumped into a deep chair near her and, pondering, blew great smoke-rings at the portieres.

"The thing is," he said, presently, "that you've lost your nerve. And, having lost it, why, you've gone into the camp of the folks you call the Smugs. Am I right?"

"You are utterly wrong," she replied, spiritlessly. "I have little toleration for—well, death-bed repentances. That is too old and too unconvincing a story. A woman does as she likes, flouts the world, snaps her finger at usage, until she becomes middle aged or near it; then she begins to fumble her beads, takes on the face of austerity, and condemns, right and left, the lapses of the younger generation of defiant women. I haven't the least use for that sort of thing. It is simply that I have arrived at the knowledge that a woman is an idiot not to conform and to stay conformed. It is mere madness for a woman to suppose that she can fight so unequal a battle against the world's opinion as I have foolishly tried to fight. It makes no difference as to a man. He can do as he pleases. I suppose it was the inequality of that law that goaded me into it all in the first place. But I've lost. I see now that there never was the possibility of any other outcome."

"You get a bit beyond me, you know," said Judd, not argumentatively, but as one seeking enlightenment. "I am willing to grant that men have the best of it, and all that sort of thing. But women know the rules of the game. Then why can't they play the game without moaning and kicking to the umpire?"

"There isn't any umpire except conscience," she answered him. "There isn't any arbitration for a woman. She is what the steel-sheathed law of the ages says she is to be, or she is not. I have not been, and I have lost. That is all. I am not so futile as to complain of the game. I despise myself for having been so opaque as to suppose that I could defy the rules, win, and not be disqualified—as I have been, of course, ever since I tried it."

"It's queer," said Judd, reflectively, after a pause, "how these man-made laws sooner or later anchor all you women, after you've made your flights. The whole thing, you know, is an idiotic system. They try to regulate us by rote and rule, by bell, book and candle. But, after all, they only think they're regulating us that way, don't they? I wonder how many of us really follow their rules? Mighty few that I know of. Openly, we subscribe to all of the iron-bound tenets, privately we laugh at them and do the best we know to rip them apart. It's all a matter of being found out; of being caught with the goods. A woman, of course, has to watch out for more danger signals than a man. But they're pretty clever little watchers, believe me."

"Well, you can't blame them for that," said Mrs. Treharne. "Most of them, at any rate, have the common sense not to attempt to brazen matters out, as I have."

"I see what you mean," said Judd, cogitatively. "Your idea is that it is a woman's business to get all that she can out of life, and that the only way for her to get the most out of life is to pretend to agree to the rules as they've been made for her, and then, if she feels disposed to kick over the traces, why, to keep under cover about it. You're right in that view, of course. But, after all, what difference does it make? Sooner or later, no matter how we play the string, they toss us into a box and plant us. When it comes to that, I can't see why you should permit what you call your conscience to make a wreck of you in this way. What have you done? Why, you've been my companion. Will you be good enough to tell me how that companionship could possibly have been made any better than it has been if, at its outset, a man in a surplice or a mouthing justice had mumbled a few so-called binding words over us? Faugh! You can't believe such crass humbug. The so-called 'consecration of matrimony' is a good enough phrase and a good enough scheme to keep groundlings up to the mark. Don't you suppose we'd have fought and barked at each other just the same if we'd been married according to the frazzled old rule? At that, I'd have married you years ago, just to straighten you out, if there had been the least chance of my prevailing upon my wife, who made life a hell for me with her whinings, to get a divorce from me. But, now that the thing has ambled along to this stage, what's the use of talking about quitting?"

She listened to him composedly. But his words fell thumpingly enough upon her ears. He had never gone to the pains before of giving her so complete an elucidation of his doctrine.

"There is as little use in our debating the world's social and ethical system," she said. "I am not thinking of myself. There is no reason why I shouldn't acknowledge to you that I don't much care how our relationship affects myself. But——"

"Yes, I know what it's all about," put in Judd. "It's your daughter. Well, I'll have to grant that you've got a big end of the argument there. I've got daughters of my own, and I know how I'd snort around if I thought there was a chance on earth for any of my daughters to inherit my doctrine, my view of the world, the flesh and the devil. That's the finest little inconsistency I possess. I might as well stick in the observation here, while we're all confessing our sins, that I've felt a good deal more like a blackguard than has been comfortable to my self-esteem ever since the night I rounded on your daughter. That, I think, was about the meanest and commonest act of my life. A pretty fine sort of a girl, your daughter."

"I didn't think you had it in you to admit that, and I'm glad that you have admitted it," replied Mrs. Treharne. "Of course your surmise is exactly right. It is on my daughter's account that I have brought myself up with a round turn. It is pretty late in the day for me to do that, I know; but one must do the best one can. We can talk as we please about our opinions of morals and ethics and the world's harsh rules; but all of our talk vanishes into murky vapor when we begin to consider our children. The most contemptible act of my life, since you have so unexpectedly acknowledged yours, was in permitting my daughter to come here. You know that as well as I do—now."

Judd lit another cigar and smoked in silence for a time.

"The thing that gets me around the throat in connection with all this," he said, presently, "is that it seems all to simmer down to the fact that you are thinking of quitting me."

"Don't be absurd, Fred," said Mrs. Treharne. "That consideration doesn't disturb you a whit. You know very well that you will be glad to be rid of me."

"That," said Judd, leaning toward her, his small eyes curiously alight, "is not true, and you know it."

"But," she said, perhaps, with the unconquerable desire of the woman for affection and admiration, curious to hear his reply, "I have lost my looks; I am a mere relic of what I was when I came to you; I am not far from forty. You know these things."

"Yes, I know them," said Judd, and there was genuine feeling in the man's tone. "But I know, too, that I care a damned sight more for you than I ever did for any other woman in all my life. I know that, if you really mean to go through with this plan of quitting me, it's going to knock me sky-high. I can't figure myself being without you. You have grown into my scheme of living. I don't profess to much when it comes to morals and all that sort of thing; but I've got a heart built upon some kind of a pattern, I suppose; I must have, and you ought to know it, for you've possessed it for years. And, that being the case—and it is the case—our relationship isn't so bad as you might have been supposing it to be. Don't you imagine that I am so infernally dried up as to what is called the affections. I know that my life won't be worth much to me after you go out of it."

Mrs. Treharne, astonished and perhaps a little pleased at the earnestness of the man's self-revelation, nevertheless shook her head wearily.

"Yet you know very well, at this moment, that I must leave you," she said broodingly.

"Well, I'm going to be fair with you," said Judd, the latent manhood, that had been buried under the callousness of years, showing in him. "I'm leaving that part of it up to you. I wouldn't do that, either, if I didn't care for you as I do. But you've got your end of it, and a big end. You're entitled to do what you are prompted to do in consideration of your daughter. I'm not hound enough to try to block you in that. I'll go further and say that you're right about it. If I were in your place I'd do the same thing. The devil of it is that I care for you all the more when I see you moved to give your daughter the fair deal she's entitled to. I hate to have you go. I don't know what I'll do with myself without you. But you've hit me right where I live in this business—the progeny end of it. The young ones have got to be thought of. And there is, I suppose, no way whereby you could remain openly under my protection and at the same time be doing the right thing by your daughter. Of course, if you cared to be more private about it, why——"

"No, no—don't even suggest that," put in Mrs. Treharne. "That would be a pitiable evasion. You know that."

"Well, probably it would, but I'm putting all angles of the thing up to you," said Judd, perhaps more in earnest that he had ever been in his life before. "One thing, though, you must leave to me. It's only the fair thing that I should continue to take care of you, no matter where you go."

"Not even that, Fred," replied Mrs. Treharne, determinedly. "That, too, would be a dodging of the issue. I have a few thousands put by. They came from you, of course, but before I had made up my mind to—to live otherwise. I shall manage. Let me have my own way this final once, won't you?" and she smiled wanly.

Judd rose and picked up his hat and coat.

"Don't take any leaps in the dark, Tony, that's all," he said. "Think the thing all over. Don't give yourself the worst of it. You know that I won't give you the worst of it. I never have, have I? Maybe you'll change your mind about it all. I'll be back tomorrow night and see. Goodnight."

There were tears standing in the eyes of the huge-girthed man as he went heavily out of the room, and his shoulders were hunched forward as if he had suddenly passed from elderliness to old age.

Mrs. Treharne, for almost an hour after Judd had gone, sat, chin in palm, gazing into vacancy. Then she rose, heavily enough for a woman so fragile as she now had become, gazed for a moment in the glass at her haggard features, and shook her head, smiling bitterly.

"'Facilis descensus,' and the rest of it," she murmured. "That, I suppose, is the truest of the maxims; it stands the wear of time better than any of the rest of them. Well, I have the mournful satisfaction of knowing that I have sufficient intelligence, at any rate, not to blame anybody but myself."

Then she rang for her maid.

"Pack in the morning, Heloise," she said when the maid appeared. "Begin early. Get one of the housemaids to help you. Pack everything—all of your own things, too. We shall be leaving before noon."

"Everything, madame?" inquired Heloise, her eyes widening, "Winter costumes—everything?"

"Everything," repeated Mrs. Treharne. "I am not to return here."

Heloise nodded with a sage acquiescence, and began to take down her mistress's hair.

"Where do we go tomorrow, madame?" Heloise asked when she had finished her task and Mrs. Treharne was in readiness for retiring.

"I haven't the least idea, Heloise," replied Mrs. Treharne, gesturing her unconcern. "I shall decide between now and morning. To the mountains, I suppose—the Adirondacks, probably. I am not very well—New York stifles me. The mountains, I think it shall be, Heloise."

"Madame feels badly?" inquired Heloise, solicitously. "One has noticed that madame is distraite, grows thin, looks unlike herself."

"Sometimes I wish I were anybody but myself, Heloise," said Mrs. Treharne, enigmatically enough, considering her audience. "Goodnight."

After the maid had gone Mrs. Treharne went to her desk and wrote to Louise, telling her that she was leaving the house on the Drive, not to return. It was a long, self-reproachful letter, threaded with the wistful but not outrightly expressed hope that the step she was taking would atone, if only in a slight degree, for the "wretched sin," as she called it, of having permitted her daughter to set foot within the Riverside Drive establishment. She did not mention Langdon Jesse's name. She felt a singular uneasiness over the thought that Jesse's approaching visit to London in some way involved the weaving of a net about her daughter; but she dismissed that thought, as often as it recurred, when she considered Louise's poise and her protection by Laura Stedham, an experienced woman of the world. Moreover, Mrs. Treharne would have found it difficult, unless there were some grave actual peril, to mention Jesse's name in a letter to her daughter; for it brought the blood to her face to remember how unconcernedly she had permitted Louise to meet the man—how she had even chided her daughter for not having accepted Jesse's attentions in a more pliant, not to say grateful, spirit.

"I am leaving with Heloise tomorrow, dear, but I have not decided where to go," she concluded. "I shall write or cable you an address before long. I am entirely well, though I believe I need rest and change. Have out your good time—I know that you are in good hands with Laura, to whom my love. I am looking forward to our new, happy life when you return to me."

Then she penned a little note to be left behind for Judd.

"Don't think me unkind for going without seeing you again," she wrote. "We have gone over it all, and we are both of the same opinion as to the need for the step I am taking. I cannot quite tell you how you have advanced in my opinion for some of the things you said tonight. You have been very fair, and I am correspondingly grateful. I will not be so banal as to suggest that, if there be any chance for a reconciliation, or at least a decent armistice, between you and your wife, it might be at least a solution of a sort, considering your children; I only wish that I could suggest that outright without incurring the suspicion that, having made a belated repentance myself, I am seeking to reform the world. One thing, however, I shall say outright: If I had it all to do over again, I should conform. There is no other way for a woman. We seek to ridicule the promptings of conscience by calling conscience an abnormality, a thing installed in us to whip us into line with age-old system. But it won't do. It is, after all, the true voice. I wish I had never closed my ears to its urgings.

"Time heals all. You will find yourself thinking less and less often of me as the days drift by. That is as it should be. I am sorry for the hurt—I did not know until you spoke as you did tonight that it would be a hurt—I am inflicting upon you in thus effacing myself, at such short notice, from your life. But Time heals. Goodbye, and all best wishes."

Before noon, on the following day, Mrs. Treharne and Heloise left the house on the Drive, leaving no word behind as to whither they were bound.