Lowell Farwell’s voice making the appointment over the telephone—it was three or four years ago now—still vibrated through Lewis’ memory, melodious, interesting. Lewis had never happened to catch sight of the novelist at that time, nor had he since, but he knew from numberless newspaper cuts what he looked like. And the voice perfectly fitted those leonine, distinguished heads.

“My wife has been ill for months and now a friend has persuaded her to see you. Her doctor agrees that it may be a wise move to get your opinion, Doctor Pryne. You are acquainted with him. Doctor MacKay, here in Cambridge. He has come to the end of his resources and is ready to give psychiatry a try.”

It was a wind-clear, blue-red-gold October afternoon, when Lewis made that call in Cambridge. The Farwells were living on the upper floor of an unpretentious double house on Fayerweather Street. Instead of the expected maid in cap and apron opening the door, there was a girl in a brown smock.—Strange to be remembering color, and shades of color, after so many months!—Her eyes were brown-gold, and as photographically as Lewis remembered those gay and sincere eyes, he remembered the curves of the smiling mouth.

The room into which she brought Lewis was a blank in memory. Perhaps, even at the time, it had been a blank to his consciousness. Except for the blue gentians. There was a clump of them growing out of dark earth near where he laid down his hat. He supposed the flowers must have been planted in some sort of dish, but his memory of the Farwells’ Cambridge living room was fringed blue gentians growing out of dark earth.

The girl’s voice was as smiling as her mouth. “Mrs. Farwell will see you in a minute, Doctor.”

“Are you Miss Farwell?” he asked, for he knew, from Cynthia, probably, who read the columns of literary gossip in the Sunday papers, that Lowell Farwell had a daughter.

The smile became laughter. Laughter which sounded like pure happiness, translating itself into sound. The rarest sort of laughter in the world. Not amusement. Not embarrassment. Mere self-unknown joy.

“No. I am Teresa Kerr. This is Petra.”

The novelist’s daughter was sitting on the sill of an open window, her background wall-less—a sea of blue October air and light. She was a schoolgirl then, in a navy blue jersey schoolgirl dress. Her attentive, innocent eyes, set wide in a grave young brow, were the precise color of the gentians. That repetition of color and the eyes’ innocent attentiveness stabbed Lewis like some too pure, too perfect note in music. It was the most beautiful child’s face—or any face—of his memory. No wonder he remembered that so vividly! The short, straight nose, the upper lip—short to the exquisite point of breath-taking beauty—the Botticelli mouth, the strong, white, round chin!—The child was hardly human, she was so lovely!—Her head against the window’s blue background was a sculptor’s dream. Fine, very alive brown curls molded rather than obscured its classic contours. The gawky schoolgirl body, in its clinging jersey, was sculpture, too, with its wide shoulders and long thighs....

Lewis had supposed, since, that the mood which took possession of him when Teresa Kerr had opened the door to the Farwells’ Cambridge apartment, and which had increased like daylight upon dawn during the brief minutes he spent with those girls waiting for Mrs. Farwell to be ready to see him, was merely a state of rapport with their youth and happiness. Their relationship with life and with each other had by some miracle extended itself to him and created what at the time, and in memory ever since, had seemed a golden age circumferenced by a passing moment.

When the circumference contracted upon its enclosed eternity (these were Lewis’ similes, far-fetched, of course, but for himself alone), it was by way of a trivial voice calling out from the next room. Then he left timelessness, passed through a door into a ceilinged, four-walled space, and took a chair facing an emotional, pretty woman who lay relaxed among cushions on a chaise-longue; and at once, quite as if he had never passed through the sound of Teresa’s laugh and the sight of Petra’s attentive, innocent gaze to reach this meeting, he gave his complete attention to Mrs. Farwell and her woes.

She had these violent headaches. Weeks on end she could not sleep and then for other weeks she slept too much, could do nothing else but sleep. Her nerves needed either a stimulant or a sedative, constantly. But Doctor MacKay did not approve of drugs, not in the quantities her case demanded. Doctor MacKay said, “Exercise!” But she had this nervous heart. He admitted the nervous heart and yet insisted on the exercise. Imagine! Besides, how could she exercise? Riding was out of the question. Couldn’t afford it. And golf bored her. Terribly! And what other exercise is there, besides golf and riding? They hadn’t even a car. If they had, she might at least get some fresh air each day. But perhaps Doctor Pryne knew for himself—she was looking at his ready-made tweed suit—that fame did not pay in dollars and cents. Her husband’s novels were only for the discriminating few. The better the review, she noticed, the smaller the royalties always.... And noises—cooped up in a cheap little apartment like this—noises were a sort of crucifixion!

A laugh, muffled by the closed door, but audible enough for demonstration, coincidentally bore her out. Or so she imagined. She winced, becomingly, but genuinely enough.

“If only Petra could go away to school! She is my husband’s daughter, you know. But we can’t even afford a camp for her. And big girls like that are so noisy, so all over you! If she were a boy, she wouldn’t be always at home. It would be easier then. If Doctor MacKay ever thinks I am strong enough to have a baby I do hope it will be a boy!”

Lewis listened to all of this and much more with attention. And not until Mrs. Farwell had worn herself out with the emotion which accompanied her eager, fluent explanations of her nervous condition, did he venture a few tentative suggestions. But it appeared that Doctor MacKay had made the very same suggestions dozens of times already,—and none of them were any good.

“Well then—?” But it was only a mental question, a mental shrug. Lewis was grave and interested up till the very last. Doctor MacKay, however, had not had the slightest excuse for calling in a psychiatrist. It was an old story, but as disheartening and ridiculous as if it were the first occasion on which Lewis had wasted his time like this.

As it happened, the laugh which had penetrated Mrs. Farwell’s closed door, with its crucifying effect on one of its hearers, was Lewis’ last touch with Teresa and Petra. When he came out of Mrs. Farwell’s bedroom into the living room, they were gone. In their stead, a new individual—younger than Mrs. Farwell, older than the girls—was lying in wait for him. She had usurped Petra’s place in the open blue window, but she quickly left it and came forward.

“I am Mrs. Tom Otis, Doctor Pryne. A friend of the Farwells. Mr. Farwell has commissioned me to see you in his place. He is at a critical point in the new novel, and if he leaves it, he’s lost. You know how that is, since you write yourself. He is working in my house,—has his study there. He wants you to tell me your ‘findings’ here—if that’s the word—and then, when he comes to earth again, I’m to report to him. Do you see?”

Mrs. Otis had spoken in a lowered voice in spite of Mrs. Farwell’s closed door, and now she found a chair for herself with the obviously gracious intention of permitting Lewis to do the same. She appeared so altogether ingenuous a person that Lewis was fain to divert his irritation over the stupidity of the situation to the absent Lowell Farwell. Meanwhile he tried to get away from this Mrs. Otis as promptly and tactfully as possible.

“That’s all right,” he said. “I’m glad Mr. Farwell didn’t interrupt his work. There’s no reason why he should. Doctor MacKay will get in touch with me to-morrow and he’ll give Mr. Farwell my ‘findings’ such as they are, I suppose.”

He was looking for his hat, but wondering about Petra and Teresa. Why had they had to go away? He had meant to ask them where they had found the gentians.

“Here it is,” Mrs. Otis moved aside, so that he saw the dish of gentians, and then his hat beside them. “But please don’t go right away. Mr. Farwell will think I have failed him if you go without telling me what you think about Marian. It was stupid of me, perhaps, not to have explained myself more fully before I asked you to tell me. You couldn’t understand, of course. You couldn’t know how very close I am to these people. Why, it was I who persuaded them to get you. I couldn’t bear the way things were going. Something had to be done. Doctor MacKay is so tiresomely conservative. Any wise, up-to-date doctor would have seen long ago that Marian Farwell ought to go right away—to a sanitarium—abroad—anywhere—but away. It isn’t fair to let neurotics inflict their nerves on people who are perfectly sane and healthy. And it’s all the worse when an extremely sensitive artist like Lowell Farwell is the victim! You think so too, don’t you?”

But Mrs. Otis had not waited for Lewis’ answer. She took his agreement for granted and hurried on. “Doctor Pryne, see here. I am so eager—and more important, perhaps—able to help. Did you think I was merely curious and officious? That would be too hateful of me, if it were true. But it isn’t. This affair is almost as much mine as it is Lowell’s—theirs, the Farwells’, I mean. I got Mr. Farwell to call you in, I am paying your fees, and I will send Marian abroad, anywhere, to-morrow, if you will only say the word. We—Society—owe to first-rate artists their chance for good working conditions. Well, you and I between us can manage things for this particular artist right now. He won’t let me give Marian the money for Europe as things are, just for my urging it. But if you say she must go— Don’t you see?”

Mrs. Otis had seemed to Lewis at the time a rather delightful person. A magnetic smile and an air of almost naÏve simplicity had robbed what she said, and implied, of too much stupidity. And she went on to speak of her wealth with simplicity. “What use is all this money,” she asked, eyes shining and wide, “if I can’t do some ordinary human good with it outside of organized charity, and without fuss? What I can’t spend myself—spend beautifully, I mean—certainly belongs to the next person who needs it. And Marian, poor darling, is really and truly my next person. It’s as simple as that.”

But Mrs. Farwell, to Lewis’ mind, was neither mentally nor physically ill. She was a “happiness hound,” nothing else in the world, and he could not honestly prescribe Europe or a sanitarium as a cure for a deeply rooted perversion in human character. Yet getting away without committing himself to coÖperation in Mrs. Otis’ naÏve philanthropic schemes was difficult, the more so since he could not, of course, tell her his “findings.” But Lewis managed it at last and Dick’s errand here just now seemed to indicate that she had not stayed permanently resentful, however she had felt at the time.

And then, before anything of his call at the Cambridge apartment had had time to fade from Lewis’ memory, the papers were full of the divorce of Lowell and Marian Farwell. A little while more and two marriages were front-page news, Lowell Farwell to Mrs. Clare Otis nÉe Fay, and Mrs. Marian Farwell, nÉe Dodge to—somebody or other. The name hardly mattered since it was merely her recent connection with the celebrated novelist which gave the happiness hound’s new marriage its ephemeral public interest. And now, less than three years after that so simple solution of their problems—and a wonder Mrs. Clare had not hit on it sooner and had ever bothered to try plotting with a psychiatrist!—she had Lewis again marked down as a fellow conspirator.

What did she want to buy from him this time, Lewis asked himself. Her stepdaughter’s affection, according to Dick. But that would be only part of it. With three years for perspective, Lewis was more than a little doubtful of “Clare’s” simplicity. But he could not guess what she might be wanting. It would be interesting to see, possibly. And in any case, there would be Petra. And Teresa Kerr. Who was Teresa Kerr, anyway, and where was she now, Lewis wondered. Well, Petra could tell him that. He would ask her on Saturday, the first thing.

To-day was only Wednesday. Three days, then, to go until he should see Petra. It seemed an unconscionably long time to wait. But why, then, had he let three years go past without inquiring from Cynthia, or the dozen other people who could certainly have told him, what had become of Petra since Farwell’s last marriage, and who was Teresa Kerr?

He turned sharply around, as if startled away from the window by astonishment at himself for this strangely belated impatience.