Lewis continued to see a blue gentian etched on air, all the while Clare told him about Petra. But he heard her, well enough, in spite of the vision he was contemplating, and outwardly he was attentive.

“Lowell was frightfully young when he married Petra’s mother. And the attraction between them—it’s almost inevitable in early marriages like that, I suppose—was merely physical. So, when he waked up to that, it wasn’t nearly enough, not for a person like Lowell Farwell, anyway. But the only reason one need even remember that early tragedy is the way it still affects Petra. Her father got the idea, almost from the day she was born, that she was her mother over again. She was physically like her, in the first place. They say that Ann was a great beauty. Lowell says she was even more beautiful than Petra. But it wasn’t the physical resemblance that repelled Lowell most and still hurts. It was her mind and temperament. He got the idea that Petra had a commonplace mind, ordinary. Like her mother. And now, nineteen years after, she is still for him an echo—a reverberation—of an old disappointment. It seems cruel, I know. But he can’t help himself, and one can understand, don’t you think?

“I understand, anyway. And it is appalling to think that if Petra’s mother hadn’t happened to die, Lowell might still be bound to her. She was puritanical or fundamentalist or something. Whatever the particular cult was, it was stupid and narrow and forbade divorce. She thought herself religious! Imagine calling such cruelty religion! But Providence had mercy, if she didn’t. She didn’t believe in birth control any more than she did in divorce, and she died when the second child was born, when Petra was only one year old. That, if anything, gives you the picture of how impossible Petra’s mother made things for her young, penniless, genius-husband—having another child right away. But the new baby was premature and fortunately lived only a little while.

“Lowell was through with marriage, he thought then, for all time. His religious wife had seared his faith in the sweetness of it as a human relation. But though seared, his faith was not actually destroyed. It has never been destroyed. Lowell Farwell has been bigger than the things life has done to him. Six or seven years later he saw Elsa Larsen in ‘Romeo and Juliet’ at Munich. Elsa Larsen’s acting was beautiful enough to break your heart. When she stuck to Shakespeare, anyway. She was really a great actress, even if this country never woke up to her. Did you ever see her? I saw her first in Munich, when I was a young girl. I spent the year I was twelve abroad with my mother. We went to the National Theater dozens of times to see Elsa Larsen in her Shakespeare roles. I never dreamed then that I should marry her husband one day! I may even have seen him, without knowing or remembering, in the theater. They were married inside of a week after they met. It was a perfectly wild marriage, of course. The result of utter loneliness on his part, mad infatuation on hers.

“Larsen killed herself. Yes, I know it isn’t known. And it is shocking. But she did it. She ran the car into those park gates on purpose. She meant to kill Lowell at the same time. He was begging her to get a divorce from him or let him get it, and she simply lost her head and drove straight into the gates. She saw that they were closed in plenty of time to have swerved. Lowell is certain of it.

“But what I want you to see and think about, Doctor, is Petra, of course. They put her in boarding school and she stayed there vacations and all, the few years till the so-called accident. But when poor Marian made Lowell think he had compromised her—yes, every one except Lowell himself, it seems, pretty well understood that little drama Marian staged at the Tillotsons’ house party—well, when Marian became Petra’s second stepmother, there wasn’t enough money to keep the child on at boarding school. Larsen spent all she earned and left nothing. They lived huddled up in that dreary little apartment in Cambridge with only one servant to do the work. How Marian hated it! She never lifted her hand for Petra or gave her a thought, except to resent her being there at all, one could see. But the thing Marian has really to blame herself for, to my mind, is the way she left the child to the sole companionship of whatever general-housework girl happened to be in possession of the place at the time. I myself was so appalled at seeing what Petra’s life was like when I met them, that even if I hadn’t fallen head over heels in love with Lowell I should have married him, almost, to rescue his daughter. All that was maternal in me was roused and fighting. That day I met you there—remember?—my heart was broken for Petra....

“So now you can see why I can’t blame Petra for any seeming disloyalty she may have displayed this afternoon in the talk you had with her. She has never known what it was to be loved before. How should she be counted on to return it, or even to be loyal to it? It is asking too much—even after three years, I think. But you see why I am grateful for your interest in her, and why I am ready, almost without questioning it, to act on any advice you care to give—now that you know the child’s miserable history.”

As she had been talking, Clare’s eyes had now and then been starry with tears, and on the final words one or two actually fell. She wiped them away, quite simply, with a handkerchief. She had no need to consider her make-up, as she never wore any.

Lewis withdrew his thought from a blue gentian, etched on air. He untied himself somehow and struggled up from his low place at Clare’s side. He asked if he might smoke. Clare had not remembered to offer him a cigarette because she herself did not smoke any more than she used make-up; but at once she was all charming apologies for her neglect and motioned him toward the supply near at hand. But Lewis, apologetic himself, preferred his own variety. He got out his case, lit a Lucky, took a deep inhalation,—and laughed.

Clare did not understand the laugh, considering all she had been saying to him—and her tears. But she waited. She had done what she could to make herself clear to him and it was his turn now. He must have some reaction other than that ambiguous laugh to all that she had said—and looked—during the past minutes.

He was pacing back and forth before the long divan, his hands deep in the already sagging pockets of his tweed jacket. They did not dress for dinner at the Allens, and Lewis was in Meadowbrook without his dress clothes. But when after a few seconds of this rather surprising behavior, the man whirled and stood before her, looking down at her, his face, at last, was beginning to mirror something—she was almost certain—of what she was. Clare thought she saw her generosity reflected in Doctor Pryne’s face as in a mirror. And on account of that true reflection of herself, she forgave him all the bewilderment and uncertainty he had for just a little while caused her. It was rather wonderful having his cold, sleepy eyes no longer cold and sleepy but aware of her. She had known all along of course that Doctor Lewis Pryne was a person of rare power and magnetism, but until this instant she had missed the biting tang of actually feeling it. To her own surprise her heart beat fast. Madly!

“Are you serious?” he was asking. “Do you really want advice from me? For I know what I would do in your place and I would do it like a shot. Shall I say?”

She looked back up at him. Was this hypnotism? She felt excitedly supine—submissive—open to this man’s will....

Her eyes, grave—and she herself knew how lovely!—promised him she was ready to do whatever he said.

“Very well.”—But how dry his voice sounded! And already he had stopped looking at her!—“First of all, I should cut off that absurd allowance. Two thousand a year, Petra said it was, and just for clothes! And then I should encourage her to take the job waiting for her in my office. It’s a good job. It can begin on Monday morning at nine o’clock. And I wouldn’t fuss any more about trying to create sympathy between father and daughter. It is too late. The time is past. Petra has had, I suppose, a pretty bad deal from the beginning, but from now on she ought to be her own environment maker. You can’t possibly go on doing it for her. Have you ever heard the phrase: ‘Environment is hidden identity’? I believe that that is perfectly true of any personality, given half a chance. It’s time Petra had her chance. Marriage and a home where she herself is the protecting force—that’s the ultimate answer. But as a stop-gap right now, a job. That’s what I think.”

Clare had sent for Petra and they were waiting. Lewis wandered over to the massive, built-in library table. It was shaped like a scimitar. The last words in biography, essays, poetry and fiction of two continents seemed to be here under his hand, most of the volumes still in their bizarre paper jackets. In the midst of the bright jumble stood two large heavy silver frames holding photographs. One was Clare, the other Petra. Petra was in evening dress and her posture and expression must have been dictated by the photographer. The eyes in particular were self-conscious and static in their inexpressive trance. The mouth alone was sentient, not even the stare of the photographer and the camera together having succeeded in betraying it into insincerity. Clare’s photographed face, on the other hand, was vibrant, with just the hint of a candid smile dawning in eyes and lips. She was not in evening dress but had been taken in a simple blouse with a soft turnover collar. Of the two photographs, hers was much the more interesting and alluring. And so Lowell Farwell must think every time he noticed the two faces in juxtaposition here on his table.

“Just one of Clare’s little touches,” Lewis told himself, wincing. But now he was to get Petra away, out of it. That was exhilarating. He took Petra’s photograph into his hands. He was studying it, and Clare from her corner of the divan was watching him curiously, when Petra finally came in. Clare beckoned Petra to the deserted place beside her while Lewis replaced the photograph to the exact spot on the desk from which he had taken it, and sat down on the arm of a chair facing the divan and the two living, breathing women contrasted there. He lighted a fresh cigarette but did not offer Petra one, remembering her afternoon’s embarrassment.

He began at once. “You know what you said this afternoon, Petra, about wanting to learn stenography and becoming ultimately somebody’s private secretary? Well, I have a job for you that will begin paying right away, and you can practise shorthand and typewriting in your spare moments. It’s in my office, assistant to my secretary. Miss Frazier is overworked. Has been for some time. It has been getting more and more on my conscience lately.” This was perfectly true. “But with another girl in the reception office to receive the patients, answer the telephone, and take the preliminary records, I’ll not worry. You can begin Monday morning.”

Lewis’ voice showed nothing of the elation he was feeling. His tone, in fact, was dry and his look constrained. But Petra, as well as he, had herself well in hand, it seemed. Reticence had leapt to her eyes with almost his first words—a sword on guard.

“Darling! What is the matter?” Clare demanded, but without much genuine surprise. She had never expected that Petra would be delighted by Doctor Pryne’s offer of this job. She knew her stepdaughter’s love of freedom and luxury too well, she thought. And when Petra learned that her allowance was to be cut as well as her days filled with work, Clare imagined she would not even consider Doctor Pryne’s astonishing proposition. Why, this very month Petra had borrowed ahead on her allowance, to pay for the frock she had worn this afternoon. She was always borrowing ahead. She spent more on her clothes than Clare spent on her own. Petra considered that her contribution to the world’s work was making and keeping herself beautiful, and if she had deceived Doctor Pryne this afternoon into thinking her serious-minded and idealistic, he was now to be undeceived, Clare told herself almost gleefully. Watching it happen was like watching a play, immensely entertaining. But while Clare watched, she spoke.

“There’s nothing to be frightened of,” she told Petra. “Don’t look like that. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to, darling. It is only a suggestion Doctor Pryne is making. Have a cigarette?” She picked one out of a box on a table at her hand, put it into Petra’s fingers, and finding an automatic lighter, held it for Petra.

Even in his bewilderment at the way Petra had received his offer, Lewis could appreciate what Clare was doing in insisting on that cigarette. Petra was a foil for herself. Physically and temperamentally, all Clare’s effects were heightened by her contrast with her stepdaughter. And Clare, the artist tireless in procuring her own effects, took advantage of even so trivial a difference as smoking and not smoking. She had not remembered to offer Lewis a cigarette, but she was practically forcing Petra to smoke. And Petra’s docile compliance was only one of the ways in which she was of use to her stepmother and earned that fantastic two thousand dollars....

But Petra’s fingers holding the cigarette were shaking. The trembling began at her elbow, resting on her knee, but it was most visible in the fingers. She said, in a voice that gave the lie to her shaking fingers, “It is very nice of you to offer me a job, Doctor Pryne. How much is the salary?”

Clare had made a mistake in insisting on the cigarette! She should have presented Petra with a spear, not an English Oval, as an emblem of the girl’s unyielding hardihood. The cigarette, moved to exquisite vibrations in her trembling fingers, merely robbed Petra’s overt hardness of its authenticity. Oh, yes, Clare would do better to play up the Diana in the girl, not a sophistication which did not exist.

“Eighteen dollars a week,” he said. “That is a small living wage, I know, but I am afraid it is all the job is really worth. And prices are down. Food, rooms, clothes, everything. They have tumbled. You ought to be able to manage on eighteen a week and get quite a lot of fun out of it, Petra.”

In saying this so lightly he remembered, of course, the millions of unemployed throughout the country, and his heart smote him at his careless words. But he did not waver in his purpose. Petra’s need of employment was different from theirs, it is true, but no less real. Her situation, as much as theirs, was desperate.... But what was she saying!

“I don’t have to worry about living on your eighteen a week, Doctor Pryne. I never could, you know. Just my dresses cost much more than that. Besides, Clare doesn’t charge me board!”

“Petra darling! There is nothing in this offer to make you angry! Doctor Pryne got the idea from you yourself, this afternoon, that you wanted to leave Green Doors and be independent. That is why he thought of this job. He thought you were unhappy because you weren’t independent and living a life of your own. Whatever did you say to make him think that?”

Petra hesitated. Any one looking at her that moment could actually see her deciding among a choice of answers to her stepmother. Lewis did look at her and see. But Clare could not wait for the fabrication, whatever it was to be. She went on: “But Doctor Pryne has convinced me of one thing, Petra. He has made me ashamed, not for you, for myself. Your two thousand dollars’ allowance is absurd. With people hungry right in Boston. When you spend it only for clothes! It ought to be one thousand, darling. And the other thousand you can give, yourself, any way you like to do it, to charity.”

Petra’s cigarette was burning itself away in an ashtray between herself and Clare. Its smoke ascended in thick violet ribbons. Lewis felt that she was thinking with lightning speed,—but unguessable thoughts. Clare was as much in the dark as himself as to Petra’s thoughts, he supposed; but he suspected that, unlike himself, she did not know her own ignorance. Against those ribbons of violet smoke Petra looked like a sibyl—enigmatical—young—divinely young.

“Do you mean that you are cutting my allowance in half? Now, like this,—without warning?” She spoke as if Lewis were not there, as if she and Clare were alone. Her voice was more astonished than it was angry.

“No. I wouldn’t do that, Petra. You know I wouldn’t. You can still have the second thousand for charity, to give any way you like. I will do the same myself. I had been thinking of it for myself as a matter of fact—even before my talk with Doctor Pryne about you to-night. I meant to go over my dress bills and, beginning next month, budget myself to half as much as I am accustomed to spend. Merely giving money outright, the way I have been doing, isn’t enough. It is actual sacrifice that counts.”

“But I don’t want either to give or to sacrifice,” Petra protested. “If the two thousand is mine, I shall spend it just as I have been spending it the last three years. Is it mine, or isn’t it mine, Clare? That is what I asked you.”

Clare’s glance just flickered in Lewis’ direction. But she did not want him to read the gratification in it and she put her hand to her cheek quickly, shading her eyes. She said, “Darling, unless you will look up some charity, get interested in it, and give the second thousand there, it can’t be yours any more. Not now—when I have been seeing things through Doctor Pryne’s clear vision. But surely—”

Lewis wanted to stop the woman, wanted to undo all that he himself had so crudely brought about. But he might as well have tried to push back an oncoming steam roller as turn Clare from her honorable participation in this dramatic scene that he himself, no other, had staged. He felt this and held his peace, knowing all the while that he had blundered irreparably and made things worse for Petra than they already had been, in some mysterious way that he was not yet in a position to understand.

Petra had interrupted Clare. Her anger had now risen to the level of her astonishment. “It’s absolutely unfair,” she cried, her young face and her young voice ablaze with wrath. “It is a salary you are cutting, Clare Otis-Farwell! Not a mere allowance. Does Doctor Pryne know that? And you do it casually, like this, at his mere suggestion. I earn every penny of it.”

“What in heaven’s name do you mean?” For that instant Clare forgot Lewis as audience. Her expression was simply dumbfounded, with for once nothing subtle about it. “You earn two thousand dollars a year! Why, you don’t even make your own bed!”

“But I do earn it, all the same. Every dollar of it. By being around all the while as evidence of your generosity and goodness! Everybody praises you for it! And you hope it will make my father keep on adoring you as he has never kept on adoring his other wives. I am a perpetual reminder to him of how you differ from all the others. You are maternal! Haven’t I let you play your part? Haven’t I played mine? What have I done to spoil the picture? Surely you’ve thought it worth a miserable two thousand!”

Clare was on her feet, every tinge of color whipped by Petra’s cruel, wild words from her unrouged face.

“Petra! Hush! Are you crazy?”

Petra, too, was up. And then Lewis noticed that he himself was standing! There was nothing he could say or do, however. He felt as if his own poisonous thoughts about Clare Farwell had been, through some fault of his own, broadcast through Petra’s sibyllic lips. All the blame for the whiplash words, for the cruel scorn of them and their hatred, was his. Not Petra’s. It was he, Lewis, who had thought them and now they were brashly vocal.

But now suddenly again Petra’s voice was her own, and the words were her own, no sibyl’s. “Oh, Clare!” she was faltering. “I am sorry. I am terribly sorry. I was crazy, yes.—” And then, looking at Lewis, in a different and utterly cold tone, she asked surprisingly, “How much does eighteen a week make it a year, Doctor Pryne? Eighteen times fifty-two, do you know?”

He told her, not showing his consternation. She said, “Well, that almost makes up the two thousand, then; if I live here at Green Doors and Clare pays me one thousand for part time. Am I to go on living here, Clare? Or isn’t that possible—after what I just said?”

Clare, who was not tall, looked tall at the moment. Consciousness of a chance to show magnanimity swayed her bodily as well as mentally, like a refreshing wind, where only a minute ago she had been stifling. “Of course you may go on living here. This is your home. Of course you haven’t meant a word you said. You were a little hysterical. It was Doctor Pryne’s idea, about your living in Boston,—not mine. He even suggested Teresa Kerr as a roommate! Imagine! But as long as you can tolerate me, Petra, no matter whether you can ever learn to trust me and love me or not, I want you at home. Call it half-time salary if you like. I shall certainly give you the one thousand.”

But at mention of Teresa’s name, Petra’s anger was back, lashing this time toward Lewis. But only for a flash. It was over, as lightning is over; and it had struck through her glance. She answered Clare, turning her back on Lewis, “That is wonderful of you. I don’t see how you can be so forgiving. I don’t deserve it. But I want to tell you, Clare, that ever since I have been with you here at Green Doors, I have never once spoken a disloyal word about you—until this afternoon, to Doctor Pryne. And I never will again—not as long as I live here, and ever after, I hope. Can you ever trust me again? Do you believe me, Clare?”

Lewis turned away. He walked toward one of the French windows opening onto the terrace. But Petra’s voice followed him, made him turn again. She was asking in a polite voice, “Is your offer still open, Doctor Pryne? Shall I come to work on Monday?”

He came back; looked at her for a confused, almost blank moment; then said shortly, “Of course. If you really want to.”

“Do you think I can learn? Will I really be any use to you? It isn’t just your conscience giving me that other thousand, since it’s through you I’ve lost it?”

“I am sure you will earn every cent of it. Miss Frazier needs an assistant badly. I told you that.”

“Shall I take this job, Clare? Do you advise it? Do you believe what Doctor Pryne says? For I won’t take his charity. Will I be worth eighteen a week to him?”

Lewis himself knew that Petra meant would having a job in Boston hurt the effect Clare desired to obtain of her relation to her stepdaughter. And did the part-time job she would now be holding at Green Doors—that is, evenings and holidays—make the one thousand dollars a guaranteed matter? But what was in Clare’s mind when she answered, Lewis was beyond guessing.

“I should try it, anyway, Petra. Of all people, you can trust Doctor Pryne’s sincerity. Working for him will be an interesting experience, at the very least, and at the most you will be having some responsible part in the world’s work and the joy that that inevitably brings. I think it is very wonderful of Doctor Pryne to take such an interest—and help us all. He is very generous—and understanding.”