Now began a phase of Kendall Ware’s life which was to continue for a matter of six weeks, a period full of conflict between anomalies, of indecisions, of procrastinations. There stood out high moments of happiness, and there were dark descents into unlighted realms of self-distrust. He questioned everything, doubted everything, and most especially did he doubt his own ability to weigh events and to choose between the better and the worse. He almost doubted if he had the power of choice and felt a dour leaning toward predestination. Much of this was self-deception, and conscious self-deception. He was becoming increasingly aware of a day when he would have to make a choice and reach a decision, but he was afraid of that day. He knew the choice was his, and could belong to no other individual or force. He must choose. The event was in his keeping.

Three major questions presented themselves: First, what was he going to do about Andree? Second, what was he going to do about Maude Knox? And, third, which was interwoven with the first, what about the vestibule of the Presbyterian church?

Ken had not the least doubt that he loved Andree. That was the one sure fact in the whole confused mass. He loved Andree and Andree loved him. To many young men, perhaps to most, this alone would have answered all his questions. Perhaps the ordinary young man would have thought of nothing else, but, perceiving that Andree was essential to him, he would have taken her and made her his own in permanence with due forms of marriage. This would have been the natural step for youth to take—disregarding consequences and challenging the future. But Ken was not an ordinary young man. He was a young man who was afraid of the future, who had been brought up to know a lively fear of the opinion of the community among which he lived. “What will folks say?” was a question he had heard propounded from his earliest childhood, until the thing that “they” would say had assumed a place of importance in his affairs second to nothing. It had almost confused his perceptions of right and wrong, for, even as a small boy, it had been made to appear to him that his mother was not so much concerned with the righteousness of any given act as she was by the effect of that act upon her circle of neighbors. Undoubtedly this was a mistaken notion, but it had at least the color of truth.

He recalled vividly how a certain prominent member of his church had become an absconder and the coming of the news of it into his household. He remembered how his father had said: “Mother, we don’t know all the ins and outs of it. Maybe he’s more sinned against than sinning. We don’t know....” His mother had rejected that view harshly. “Whatever will people say about him? It’ll be terrible on his wife, and him so prominent in the church.” She had not said, “What will God say about him?” but, “What will people say?” His sin, so it had seemed to Ken’s young mind, had not been so much in absconding with money as it had been in creating adverse talk.... This attitude of mind had altered somewhat with years, but never had his fear of clacking tongues diminished. It stood for the supreme punishment of evil ... not hell, but gossip.

So his first and third questions stood together, and he dared not force himself to answer them. The second question could not be answered until he had satisfied the other two.... There came a fourth question, upon which, ultimately, must hang the answers to all, and that was, “Can a man marry a woman with whom he has had such a relation as I have had with Andree?” In other words, could he, by his own act, unfit Andree to become his own wife? This question did not present itself poignantly for some time, but it was beginning to formulate in the back of his mind. As yet he was considering only the expediency of matters; later he would find trouble with their moral and sociological aspects.

Matters further complicated themselves when Maude Knox informed him that she had been assigned permanently to an administrative position in Paris. He would be compelled to see her frequently. He would want to see her frequently. Somehow this seemed unfair to Andree, but he knew that Maude could not remain in the city without his seeing a great deal of her. Andree would discover this, and what would Andree do about it? With Maude Knox absent her importance receded, was held in abeyance; if she were here she would grow increasingly important—and what would come of it?

“You don’t seem overjoyed,” she said.

“I’m glad you’re going to be here,” he said, “but just the same, I wish you weren’t.”

“Why? You aren’t compelled to have anything to do with me if you don’t want to.”

“That’s it. I am compelled, and I don’t know whether I want to or not.”

“Well!...” She drew the word out to its full value. “I must say you’re frank.”

“Please don’t be offended. I don’t mean to be offensive, but things have gotten so rottenly complicated with me that I’m afraid of another complication.”

“And I’m a complication?”

He nodded. “You know it,” he said. “I think you know more about what a complication you are than I do.”

“You are thinking Andree will be jealous.”

“I’m thinking she may have cause to be jealous.”

“And you don’t want her to have?”

“That’s just it. I don’t know.... I don’t want anything ever to happen to make her unhappy. You and I have talked pretty frankly, haven’t we? Somehow you seem to understand things over here, though you are as American as I am—and you—well, you don’t make a fuss. But even at that, you don’t know how I feel about her.... Maybe I’m going to be in love with you, and maybe I’m in love with you already. I don’t know.... But I do know that I love her.”

“If you are by way of making love to me you’ve invented a new method.”

“I’m not making love to you. I guess I’m trying to reason things out aloud.”

“Using me as a wall to bounce your ball against.”

He smiled without mirth. “Something like that. I know I love Andree, but yet I can see myself in love with you.... I’ve asked you before if a man can be in love with two girls at the same time.”

“I don’t know. Not in the same way, anyhow.”

“It would be different. If I did love you I would be thinking about marriage all the time. It would mean marriage. I would want you for my wife.... But Andree—she doesn’t mean that. At least marriage doesn’t figure in it. I can’t explain exactly, but it’s as if there never had been such a thing in the world as marriage—only love.”

“I’m not sure but that is better. Even if I am American I don’t know but I’d rather have that kind.”

“Andree isn’t just an adventure, an incident. She’s more important than that—the most important thing that ever happened to me.... I can’t explain. I can feel it, but I can’t express what it is. It isn’t that I couldn’t marry her, nor that I wouldn’t be mighty lucky to have her for a wife.... It seems, somehow, that marriage doesn’t signify—isn’t necessary.”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re trying to get at.”

“I don’t, either. I’m trying to find out.... But I do know that I don’t want to hurt her or make her sorry she has loved me.”

“How about me?” she asked, suddenly.

“You?”

“How about hurting me?” she asked. “You’ve made a weird sort of love to me. You’ve balanced on the fence and told me you might fall in love with me. You’ve carried on a sort of rubber-elastic courtship—ready to snap back out of reach if I seemed likely to catch you.... Have you thought about me at all? Really, I’ve some right to be considered.”

She was right. Undoubtedly he had not been fair to her. He had thought only of himself and of his sentiments toward her, but scarcely at all of her sentiments toward him.

“Why,” he said, “I don’t believe I’ve thought of that side of it. It never occurred to me that you—that you might be in love with me.”

“Well, I’m not.” She spoke sharply.

“Do you mean you never could be?”

“There! Of all things!... You want me to tell you that if you make up your mind to condescend to love me I’ll be ready to drop into your hands. You want to have your cake and eat it. I’d say you were the most completely selfish person I’ve ever encountered.”

“Really I’m not. It isn’t selfishness.... It’s just that I am so confused by the whole situation that I don’t know what to do.... You don’t know how relieved and happy I would be if there was nobody but you, and we were going to be married. You are just the kind of wife—”

“That your neighbors would approve of,” she interrupted. “I know. What I don’t know is why I keep on talking to you like this. I ought to send you about your business and tell you never to come near me again ... but I’m not going to. You’ve told me in effect that you would be in love with me if it weren’t for somebody else, and that the only reason you are pleased to consider me as a candidate at all is because you are afraid your family and your neighbors would make a fuss if you took the other woman home. That’s the truth, and you know it is.”

“Well,” he said, ruefully, and not wisely, “so long as you don’t love me, what does it matter?”

“So long as I don’t love you it doesn’t matter in the least.”

“But—”

She shook her head. “We sha’n’t talk about my loving you. I’m not going to love you.”

“Do you mean that?”

“Decidedly.”

“You wouldn’t marry me?”

“Of course not.”

“Why?”

“Really, I think you’re out of your mind. Even if I loved you—which I don’t—do you think I’d sit and wait for you to reason out that you had better fall in love with me, and then grab you with wild eagerness—after you make up your mind to chuck another woman whom you have assured me that you do love?”

“But suppose I do love you? Would the fact of my—my affair with Andree prevent you from marrying me?”

“If you loved me and I loved you nothing in the world would stop me from marrying you.”

“Anyhow, I’ve got that question answered.”

“And much good may it do you.”

“Why?”

“Because the condition doesn’t exist. If it did exist I might answer differently. I might think then that I could never marry a man who had done such a thing.”

This conversation took place at noon in a little cafÉ on the rue St.-HonorÉ not distant from the Y. M. C. A. headquarters. Kendall had met Maude Knox as he was seeking a place to lunch, and they had gone together. Now he wished he might sit and argue the question until his status with her was definitely settled, if it could be definitely settled, but she refused to pursue the subject.

“No, that’s all we talk about that. You can pick out any subject you want to, but we are through talking about you and me.... And, besides, I’ve got to get back to work.”

“When shall we have dinner together?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re angry with me.”

“No, but I’m disgusted with myself because I’m not. If I had a spark of pride I’d never speak to you again.”

“Why?”

“Ken Ware, you are a miracle of denseness. Don’t you know that this whole conversation has been impossible—that it couldn’t have happened? I never imagined such cool effrontery! But I’m not offended, and I don’t know why.... I’ll dine with you some evening soon—but not to touch this subject again. Don’t ever mention it—never! I’ve got some rights to be thought about, and I’m going to think about them. There are just two things you may do: either propose to me out and out, so I can refuse you, or else treat me as a friend, and no trimmings. I mean it!”

“But I don’t want to do either.”

“You’ll have to.” She laughed, and slid deftly from behind the table. “Are you going to walk up the street with me?”

“Let me pay the check.”

He called a waiter and asked for l’addition and then walked to the corner of the rue d’Aguesseau with Maude. She did not permit him to linger.

“Good-by,” she said, turning abruptly away. “Drop me a note when you feel in a condescending mood.”

That evening when he got home he found Bert and Madeleine there ahead of him.

“Andree’s coming, too,” said Bert. “I met her this afternoon and told her there was going to be a party.... This is a farewell. See Madeleine’s tears?”

“Farewell?”

“Yes. I’m going away for a couple of weeks—some buildings to look after. I don’t mind, but Madeleine’s darn near heartbroken.”

“Oh yes,” said Madeleine, gaily. “My heart it break. I am so lonely.... You see, Monsieur Bert he is the on’y American officier in France. When he is gone, there is no other.”

“You don’t mean that,” said Ken.

“Of course she does,” Bert said, with a grin.

Ken shrugged his shoulders and went to his room to tidy up a bit for dinner. He heard them laugh, and Bert’s voice said, “He thinks we are very naughty.”

He did think so, but in spite of himself he liked Madeleine, indeed, felt a real friendship for her. She was not like Andree, but she possessed qualities which could not pass unnoticed. She was generous, kind, always concerned for Bert’s comfort and financial welfare. There was not a mercenary hair in her head, if there was not a serious hair. Even though there was nothing deep and enduring and lofty in her relations with Bert, there was nothing sordid. She was seeking her little moments of happiness, seeking them lightly, gaily, carelessly.... Ken excused his own conduct because it was concerned with a great love and a beautiful fidelity. There were no such matters between Bert and Madeleine, yet Ken could not find it in his heart to denounce her as bad. According to all his standards she was bad—a light creature. But, somehow, he did not see her as a light woman nor as wicked.

It would have been difficult to find any one more different from Andree.... Ken had become used to accepting Andree’s judgments in large measure, and Andree did not declare Madeleine mÉchante. She, too, liked the girl, accepted her as a friend and equal.... It was all a part of this strange world with its upsetting standards....

The bell interrupted his moral reflections and he hurried to the door with that thrill of anticipation which Andree’s arrival always caused.... There she stood, very straight and still and grave, just as he knew she would be. She raised her eyes to his exactly as he knew she would raise them, and smiled appealingly. He drew her inside, into his arms.

“I’ve been needing you, mignonne,” he said. “Everything goes wrong when you’re not with me.”

“I am here,” she said, brightly. “Behol’! all is now well. I shall let nothing trouble you.”

“Do you love me?”

“Yes.... And you?”

“You are very beautiful.”

“That is well.... No, I am not beautiful, but it is well you theenk it is so. I am happy.”

She regarded him solicitously. “You are ver’ tired. Have you work’ beaucoup? It is not that you have an illness?”

“No.... No. Everything is all right now that you are here. You are the only person who is right in the whole world.”

“Oh!... Oh!... I am ver’ wonderful! I do not know thees till I meet you. I theenk I am only a yo’ng girl, but behol’! I have ver’ suddenly become—how do you say?—The dictionnaire—queek. The dictionnaire!” Laughing gaily, she searched with ludicrous haste for the word and could not find it. “Oh, it is terrible! W’at I am I cannot say. I am something that ees not in the dictionnaire. To be a thing that is not in the dictionnaire is mos’ grand and Étonnant—astonishing. I shall to be ver’ vain.”

Her eyes were dancing with an impish light. She seemed very young, a child, endowed with some magical quality which reassured him, dispelled the heaviness which rested on him.

“Have Monsieur Bert and Mademoiselle Madeleine yet arrive’?”

“They’re in the salon.”

“Come. We shall see them—now.” Again that quaint gesture of poking downward at the floor with a slender finger. “Thees minute.”

The girls shook hands formally and lapsed into an amazing splutter of French. Ken looked from one to the other, from Andree, tiny, fragile, dark, elfin, to Madeleine, tall, slender, fair of hair, always laughing. Madeleine seemed nothing but embodied laughter; Andree seemed to him now as she always seemed to him, a mystery, incomprehensible—a being come to him out of a land of wonders.

“Bert is going away,” he said.

“For how long?”

“Three weeks.”

“Oh, it ees a lifetime. Mademoiselle will be ver’ sad.”

“She says not,” Ken said.

“It is not possible. She will be mos’ sad.”

“Not Madeleine,” said Bert. “She’s going to find another American officer to keep her happy while I’m gone.”

“But she could not—non, non! You do not theenk!”

Madeleine laughed gaily.

“What would you do if I went away for three weeks?” Ken asked.

“You do not go!... It ees not true.” Her eyes grew big and her lips parted as she waited for his answer.

“No, I’m not going any place.... But if I should go, what would you do?”

“I should be ver’ solitaire. Ver’ often I should weep. And I should work ver’ hard at all times—to make the days go more fast.”

“Would you find another American officer to help you pass the time?”

“You know,” she said, simply.

“Oh, lÀ lÀ!” exclaimed Madeleine. “Regard these children. It ees the great love. Toujours fidÈle. It ees mos’ beautiful.”

“It is ever’thing,” said Andree. “You, mademoiselle, love a ver’ little. So you are happy a ver’ little. N’est-ce pas? I love ver’ much, so I am happy ver’ much. It is clear. You theenk you are mos’ happy, but you do not know. It is not until you love, mademoiselle, until you love weeth all the love there is that you have the great happiness.”

“It may be so.... But also the great sadness. Is it not so? Regard me. I love thees Monsieur Bert a leetle. He makes to go away, so I am sad a leetle. Yes? But, then, I love him so ver’, ver’ much and he makes to go away. And then?...” She shrugged her shoulders. “Behol’—then I am in despair. I theenk my way is more better. Not the great joy, but also not the great sadness.”

“Non!... Non!... It ees not so. There is the great sadness, it is true. Certainement! But even that, mademoiselle, is sweet. Bicause one remembers the great love and the great joy. The so great happiness has been. It will nevair die. No. For so long as one lives the happiness will remain.... The grief—one must expect grief.... It is a part of the worl’.”

“Vous Êtes un poÈte, mademoiselle.... You write the poetry. Therefore you are different. The poet makes of sadness a great thing, a wonderful thing.... But I—I, mademoiselle, am cashier in a shop. I do not have the so beautiful thoughts. No, I am jus’ a girl that loves to be happy always. I cannot think the wonderful thoughts like the poet—non. To me it seems that ver’ many leetle happinesses without a sorrow are more better than one great, wonderful happiness of the poet—but also with the terrible grief that makes to kill.... So I love a little and laugh all the days and am ver’ content.”

“Would you not wish to love—to have forever one man and to love him weeth the great love?”

“Ah, that is another matter. Always to have one lover, one husband! It is different. Then I would love—yes. I would love as much as any one.... But it is not possible. Do I not know? Where do I get the husband? Pouf! There is no husband for me, and as for lovers—thees American lovers—they come, and it is a little while when they go. So I do not love. I make believe to love, and so I am happy.... But why, mademoiselle, give to one of them the great love when one knows well it is but for a day? It is to throw away the love, is it not?”

Andree was silent; all were silent. Madeleine had thrust the situation before Kendall and Andree baldly. Ken drew Andree to him, but she did not respond; she was cold, frightened.

“But for a day ...” she said.

“Monsieur Bert and I we do not deceive ourselves. We tell each other that thees is not for always.... It is play—so there is no cloud between us.... But you—oh, you are ver’ wrong, mademoiselle. In your heart you know.... You love Monsieur Ken and he loves you—it is true. But—ask him the question, mademoiselle—does he stay forever? Or, when the day comes on which he mus’ depart, will he take you weeth him to thees America?... Ask him, mademoiselle, and if he tell you you shall be weeth him always, then I am wrong.” She looked at Ken. He was conscious that Andree was looking at him appealingly, and that even Bert was demanding something of him with his eyes.

He might have lied. He might have assured Andree that she should never leave him, but with her eyes upon him he could not lie.... He did not know. This was the thing that was making him miserable—the question of whether he should take Andree to America with him.... He did not know. Therefore he answered, lamely:

“I love you, mignonne.”

“It ees not an answer,” said Madeleine, inexorably.

“I can’t answer.... I can’t see the future.... I don’t know. All I know, Andree, is that I do love you. Why can’t we be satisfied with that until we have to decide?... The war will be long. I shall be here for years, perhaps.... Oh, my dear, I cannot think of a life without you—but I do not know....”

He was conscious that he was proving inadequate to the situation, that he was not measuring up to what Andree had a right to expect of him, and he was afraid of what she might do or say. Madeleine shrugged her shoulders expressively. He looked at Andree apprehensively, saw her eyes flash with anger, her little figure grow tense, her lips compress. It was the first time he had ever seen her angry.... He had offended her. She was in a rage with him, and rightly in a rage.... She stepped close to him and clasped his arm with both hands, turning her face toward Madeleine and Bert.

“See!” she exclaimed, and her black eyes flashed, “you have make him unhappy weeth your questions.... I shall not have questions asked of him.... Non! He shall not be troubled. It is not the affair of any one but himself and me.... I will not permit it.... What is it to you? It is for us alone. If it is nÉcessaire that he leave me one day—that is for him to say. Is it that I have ask or demand anything? Non, non, non!... He is ver’ good, and I love him—jus’ like he love’ me.... I know that and I am satisfy.... You shall not make him to be unhappy weeth questions....”

She faced them, tense, breathing rapidly. Her hands clutched his arm and pressed it to her breast....

“Andree ...” he said, hoarsely. “Andree ...”

She smiled up at him, her face softening, her eyes becoming big and tender. “Ever’thing is well,” she said.

Bert drew a long breath. “By Jupiter!” he said, and there was admiration in his eyes. “I’ll tell you what, Andree, if you’ll have me, if you can put up with a roughneck like me, I’ll take you for keeps ... and to hell with the consequences.”

Madeleine laughed and shook her head. “You see how fidÈle thees Monsieur Bert is.... LÀ lÀ! But you shall not have heem, mademoiselle, until I am through weeth him.... See, there is the head of Arlette.... Let us have the dinner and be gay!”