“No, I’m not criticizing Clare. Not exactly. But lately—well, lately I’ve sort of come to understand Petra a little better. I feel as if I have, anyway. I don’t think things are so frightfully easy for her at Green Doors. Not that Clare means to be unkind. Oh, hardly! But their temperaments don’t jibe, that’s all. Clare can’t take it in, that any one can be so simple as Petra is. That’s the trouble, I think. She thinks Petra’s simplicity is always covering some design. But Petra hasn’t any design. She’s just a healthy, nice, rather sweet girl. She seems sweet to me, anyway. Just these last few weeks I’ve grown fond of her. You don’t have to wonder where you are with her, ever. Why, I told Clare just last night that if I had a daughter I’d adore her to be a second Petra. She’d be so comfortable to live with.”

“Yes? And what did Clare reply, if anything?”

“That made me rather cross, Lewis. She said that I didn’t know Petra. She said she was ‘deep.’”

“Did she mean it as insult or compliment?”

“Dear Lewis! When one woman calls another deep!—It has looked to me lately—nights at the Country Club, when they were all there together, the Farwells and Dick and Neil (that simply grand McCloud person, you know)—that Clare was almost jealous of Petra. Harry’s got an idea that that’s why Neil doesn’t come to Green Doors any more. I shouldn’t be surprised if he’s seeing Petra secretly, somewhere else. I think Clare suspects it too. She’s almost insufferable, anyway, the way she questions Petra as to where she has been and what she has been doing. And she doesn’t mind who’s there, listening. It makes one very uncomfortable. It’s hateful for Petra.”

“Yes. One feels that,” Lewis agreed. “But it isn’t worth Petra’s bothering about, or yours, really. Clare is—incorrigible. All the same, she must have some nice qualities, I suppose, or she couldn’t plan gardens so astutely, and care about the books she does care about, and music and all. She does honestly care for those things. That’s not sham. One can’t sham that. Do you know what I think, Cynthia? I think that people like Clare are so awful simply because they are so close to being really fine. If Clare were just any silly woman, ‘out for the men,’ you’d laugh at her and find her, possibly, rather touchingly human. You might even like her. But it’s precisely because she isn’t a silly, superficial creature that the cruelty and ugliness in her seems such wretched cruelty, such wretched ugliness. She is an exquisite person—has exquisite perceptions, anyway. There’s only that one unpleasant spot, her vanity in the admiration she excites in every one around her. If she were only sensual or selfish (openly, healthily selfish, I mean)—if she had any mean qualities at all, like the rest of us—she’d be forgivable. But it is the under-bogging of all this highly emphasized spirituality with endless quicksands of vanity that gives a fellow the jitters—unless he’s sucked under, like Dick, and suffocated in it. It is obvious that Clare deliberately took Petra on as handicap to add to the zest of a game that was becoming almost too easy to be exciting any longer. But now that the handicap begins really to weigh—as it did last night—she’s lost her poise—and her pose. Last night Clare was openly vicious. One could sympathize—just possibly—with her wanting to vie with Petra for Dick’s attention. But when it is in enchanting and holding Petra’s own father she uses the girl as her foil, I must say I find it revolting. That’s vanity gone rotten. It’s better, though, she should show her hand. It won’t do Farwell any harm to see it. He had it coming to him. I didn’t mind seeing him squirm last night. It’s for Petra I mind.”

Cynthia almost agreed with Lewis. But she looked very sorry. After all, Clare Farwell had for several years made life richer and more significant for Cynthia. Cynthia was hungry for the good and the beautiful, as are we all when given leisure to discover ourselves. It was hard giving Clare up as an ideal. Cynthia took a brave hold on honesty and justice when she said, after a painful silence, “Probably you are right, Lewis, in all you say. But I owe Clare a lot. And I’m going to try to stay friends with her and to like her. I mayn’t go on idealizing her as I have. I can’t any more. I’ve seen too much, and last night, as you say, finished the revelation. Any one could see that she was vicious toward Petra. But I think her friendship for me is genuine. And I shall try to make mine for her genuine and understanding. I am sorry for her.—And now promise me, Lewis” (he was up, ready to be off. It was quarter to eight), “promise me at least to suggest that Petra stays home to-day. Couldn’t I take her place? I have nothing to do. I’d love it.”

“You’re a dear,” Lewis said. “I’ll let you know if I need you. As I said, I’m sure Petra’s all right by now. She’s a healthy creature. I wish I had your charity, Cynthia. I need it terribly.”

Green Doors had a hushed air. Lewis felt, from the manner of Elise who opened the door to him, that the curtain had not yet been rung up, as it were, and that it was a little unreasonable of him to expect to be let in on the stage while the hands were still busy shifting scenery from night to morning. But when he asked for Petra, Elise’s face cleared. Petra, since her job, had become a worker, one of the hands. Part of real life. If it was only Petra he wanted, well, Petra could be produced easily enough.

“She hasn’t come down to breakfast yet. She ought to have been down half an hour ago. The cook was just asking me, was she coming.”

“She had a headache last night. Perhaps she is not able to get up. Will you please go and see? Tell her that Doctor Pryne is calling and that it’s all right, he’ll go along without her, unless she’s better.”

Lewis walked back and forth over a space of twelve of the floor tiles in the great hall while he waited for Elise’s return. He counted them each time. They were beautiful tiles. Gray-green and glistening with a silken sheen. The maid seemed a long time away. But she came at last, presenting to his expectant and quickly questioning look a face of blank perplexity.

“Miss Farwell didn’t sleep in her room last night,” she said. “Her bed is opened, just as I left it, and her night things laid out. I can’t think—”

“Take me to her room. Let me see it.” Lewis had the woman by the elbow and was pushing her toward the staircase. It was as if he had taken in Harry’s words about Petra’s not going to bed but out the front door for the first time. Without a wrap! And Clare had said, “She’ll be in bed by now then. It’s really October.”—Something like that, anyway.

As Elise led the way up the stars, Lewis knew, absolutely, that he had lived through these very moments before. He knew also that the dÉnouement was to be a tragic one. He knew beyond this that he and nobody else in the whole world was responsible and to blame. There was nothing dreamlike in all this. It was as if he were more, not less, sensibly conscious than ordinarily.

Lewis had no hesitation whatever about entering the room which the maid whispered to him was Petra’s. It was a corner room: two windows on each side. He looked about on perfect order. Glazed chintz draperies thickly pleated, like cardboard, were drawn across the window-panes, pulled there by the maid who had opened Petra’s bed for the night, as a screen for her undressing. Petra would have pushed them wide and opened the windows if she had slept here, of course. The curtains being drawn, and the windows shut, was evidence that she had not. Lewis turned to the bed. A pleated spread to match the curtains had been carefully removed and laid across two chairs, stiff and unwrinkled. The sheets were turned down. Across the foot of the bed a white nightgown was laid out, and down on the floor a pair of high-heeled mules, gay with pompoms. The dressing table, in one corner, with its rows of silver and glass-topped jars and bottles, was in exquisite order. Everything in the room was orderly—untouched. Even in his condition of fearful presentiment of evil, Lewis looked for the picture he had given Petra yesterday for her birthday. Had she hung it here in her bedroom, as he had hoped she would? No, there was a painting by Georgia O’Keefe on one wall,—a picture Petra couldn’t possibly understand. Nothing else.

Strange to be looking hungrily here for signs of Petra’s personality when Petra herself was lost! Strange to care that there was nothing here in Petra’s own place, her room, to speak her real! Stranger yet that there was nothing, not a book, not a flower,—not a scrap of living interest anywhere! It might have been a stage bedroom. All the properties necessary for the idea that somebody did use it to sleep in—yes. But you must wait for the actress to come on, to know what she was like. A stage bedroom! And yet this was Petra’s retreat, her very own room, her place. Lewis almost shuddered at it. The Maid of the Alder—the hollow woman. It might have been her cave! It was so soulless.

The brilliant October sunlight turned the shut curtains into a glaring purplish pink. The image of a peacock spreading a mammoth spectroscopic tail was embossed on the oyster-colored rug. There were smaller peacocks on the backs of the chairs. Suddenly Lewis stopped looking for signs of Petra. When she came in here, herself, her personality, was shut away, outside the four walls of her bedroom. He felt that it must beat around the walls all night to get in. She slept in a place shut away from herself. This was madness! She wasn’t here. Hadn’t been here ever. Not really. Where was she?

Elise had followed him in. He turned to her and all she saw was an efficient, cool person who would make everything all right. She was beginning to get over her scare. Doctor Pryne was not scared.

“Has Miss Farwell any other room than this? A sitting room?”

“No, sir. There is the bath. I looked in there when I came up. She didn’t use her towels last night. I don’t think she came into the room at all after I fixed it, sir.”

“Miss Farwell wore a white dress last night. Whitish, anyway. See if that is in her closet, please.”

Elise hurried to the closet. In spite of the way Doctor Pryne’s demands came—like firecrackers crackling—Elise still trusted to his coolness. It kept her cool.