CIRCUMSTANCES seemed to applaud almost immediately the step that Sylvia had taken. There was no long delay caused by looking for work in New York, which might have destroyed romance by its interposition of fretful hopes and disappointments. A variety company was going to leave in November for a tour in eastern Canada. At least two months would be spent in the French provinces, and Sylvia’s bilingual accomplishment was exactly what the manager wanted.

“I’m getting on,” she laughed. “I began by singing French songs with an English accent; I advanced from that to acting English words with a French accent; now I’m going to be employed in doing both. But what does it matter? The great thing is that we should be together.”

That was where Arthur made the difference to her life; he was securing her against the loneliness that at twenty-eight was beginning once more to haunt her imagination. What did art matter? It had never been anything but a refuge.

Arthur himself was engaged to sing, and though he had not such a good voice as Claude Raglan, he sang with much better taste and was really musical. Sylvia was annoyed to find herself making comparisons between Claude and Arthur. It happened at the moment that Arthur was fussing about his number on the program, and she could not help being reminded of Claude’s attitude toward his own artistic importance. She consoled herself by thinking that it should always be one of her aims to prevent the likeness growing any closer; then she laughed at herself for this resolve, which savored of developing Arthur, that process she had always so much condemned.

They opened at Toronto, and after playing a week Arthur caught a chill and was out of the program for a fortnight; this gave Sylvia a fresh opportunity of looking after him; and Toronto in wet, raw weather was so dreary that, to come back to the invalid after the performance, notwithstanding the ineffable discomfort of the hotel, was to come back home. During this time Sylvia gave Arthur a history of the years that had gone by since they parted, and it puzzled her that he should be so jealous of the past. She wondered why she could not feel the same jealousy about his past, and she found herself trying to regret that red-haired girl and many others on account of the obvious pleasure such regrets afforded Arthur. She used to wonder, too, why she always left out certain incidents and obscured certain aspects of her own past, whether, for instance, she did not tell him about Michael Fane on her own account or because she was afraid that Arthur would perceive a superficial resemblance between himself and Claude and a very real one between herself and Lily, or because she would have resented from Arthur the least expression, not so much of contempt as even of mild surprise, at Michael’s behavior. Another subject she could never discuss with Arthur was her mother’s love for her father, notwithstanding that his own mother’s elopement with a groom must have prevented the least criticism on his side. Here again she wondered if her reserve was due to loyalty or to a vague sense of temperamental repetition that was condemning her to stand in the same relation to Arthur as her mother to her father. She positively had to run away from the idea that Arthur had his prototype; she was shutting him up in a box and scarcely even looking at him, which was as good as losing him altogether, really. Even when she did look at him she handled him with such exaggerated carefulness, for fear of his getting broken, that all the pleasure of possession was lost. Perhaps she should have had an equal anxiety to preserve intact anybody else with whom she might have thrown in her lot; but when she thought over this attitude it was dismaying enough and seemed to imply an incapacity on her part to enjoy fully anything in life.

“I’ve grown out of being destructive; at least I think I have. I wonder if the normal process from Jacobinism to the intense conservatism of age is due to wisdom, jealousy, or fear.

“Arthur, what are your politics?” she asked, aloud.

He looked up from the game of patience he was playing, a game in which he was apt to attribute the pettiest personal motives to the court-cards whenever he failed to get out.

“Politics?” he echoed, vaguely. “I don’t think I ever had any. I suppose I’m a Conservative. Oh yes, certainly I’m a Conservative. That infernal knave of hearts is covered now!” he added, in an aggrieved voice.

“Well, I didn’t cover it,” said Sylvia.

“No, dear, of course you didn’t. But it really is a most extraordinary thing that I always get done by the knaves.”

“You share your misfortune with the rest of humanity, if that’s any consolation.”

The conversation was interrupted by the entrance of Orlone. He was a huge Neapolitan with the countenance of a gigantic and swarthy Punch, who had been trying to get back to Naples for twenty years, but had been prevented at first by his passion for gambling and afterward by an unwilling wife and a numerous family. Orlone made even Toronto cheerful, and before he had come two paces into a room Sylvia always began to laugh. He never said anything deliberately funny except on the stage, but laughter emanated from him infectiously, as yawning might. Though he had spent twenty years in America, he still spoke the most imperfect English; and when he and Sylvia had done laughing at each other they used to laugh all over again, she at his English, he at her Italian. When they had finished laughing at that Orlone used to swear marvelously for Sylvia’s benefit whenever she should again visit Sirene; and she would teach him equally tremendous oaths in case he should ever come to London. When they had finished laughing at this, Orlone would look over Arthur’s shoulder and, after making the most ridiculous gestures of caution, would finally burst out into an absolute roar of laughter right in Arthur’s ear.

“Pazienza,” Sylvia would say, pointing to the outspread cards.

“Brava signora! Come parla bene!”

And of course this was obviously so absurd a statement that it would set them off laughing again.

“You are a pair of lunatics,” Arthur would protest; he would have liked to be annoyed at his game’s being interrupted, but he was powerless to repulse Orlone’s good humor.

When they returned to New York in the spring and Sylvia looked back at the tour, she divined how much of her pleasure in it had been owed to Orlone’s all-pervading mirth. He had really provided the robust and full-blooded contrast to Arthur that had been necessary. It was not exactly that without him their existence together would have been insipid—oh no, there was nothing insipid about Arthur, but one appreciated his delicacy after that rude and massive personality. When they had traveled over leagues of snow-covered country, Orlone had always lightened the journey with gay Neapolitan songs, and sometimes with tender ones like “Torno di Surriento.” It was then that, gazing out over the white waste, she had been able to take Arthur’s hand and sigh to be sitting with him on some Sirenian cliff, to smell again the rosemary and crumble with her fingers the sunburnt earth. But this capacity of Orlone’s for conjuring up the long Parthenopean shore was nothing more than might have been achieved by any terra-cotta Silenus in a provincial museum. After Silenus, what nymph would not turn to Hylas somewhat gratefully? It had been the greatest fun in the world to drive in tinkling sledges through Montreal, with Orlone to tease the driver until he was as sore as the head of the bear that in his fur coat he resembled; it had been fun to laugh with Orlone in Quebec and Ottawa and everywhere else; but after so much laughter it had always been particularly delightful to be alone again with Arthur, and to feel that he too was particularly enjoying being alone with her.

“I really do think we get on well together,” she said to him.

“Of course we do.”

And was there in the way he agreed with her just the least suggestion that he should have been surprised if she had not enjoyed his company, an almost imperceptible hint of complacency, or was it condescension?

“I really must get out of this habit of poking my nose into other people’s motives,” Sylvia told herself. “I’m like a horrid little boy with a new penknife. Arthur could fairly say to me that I forced myself upon him. I did really. I went steaming into the Auburn Hotel like a salvage-tug. There’s the infernal side of obligations—I can’t really quite free myself from the notion that Arthur ought to be grateful to me. He’s in a false position through no fault of his own, and he’s behaving beautifully. It’s my own cheap cynicism that’s to blame. I wish I could discover some mental bitter aloes that would cure me of biting my mind, as I cured myself of biting my nails.”

Sylvia was very glad that Arthur succeeded in getting an engagement that spring to act, and that she did not; she was really anxious to let him feel that she should be dependent on him for a while. The result would have been entirely satisfactory but for one flaw—the increase in Arthur’s sense of his own artistic importance. Sylvia would not have minded this so much if he had possessed enough of it to make him oblivious of the world’s opinion, but it was always more of a vanity than a pride, chiefly concerned with the personal impression he made. It gave him much more real pleasure to be recognized by two shop-girls on their afternoon out than to be praised by a leading critic. Sylvia would have liked him to be equally contemptuous of either form of flattery, but that he should revel in both, and actually esteem more valuable the recognition accorded him by a shop-girl’s backward glance and a nudge from her companion seemed to be lamentable.

“I don’t see why you should despise me for being pleased,” Arthur said. “I’m only pleased because it’s a proof that I’m getting known.”

“But they’d pay the same compliment to a man with a wen on his nose.”

“No doubt, but also to any famous man,” Arthur added.

Sylvia could have screamed with irritation at his lack of any sense of proportion. Why could he not be like Jack Airdale, who had never suffered from any illusion that what he was doing, so far as art was concerned, was not essentially insignificant? Yet, after all, was she not being unreasonable in paying so much attention to a childish piece of vanity that was inseparable from the true histrionic temperament?

“I’m sorry, Arthur. I think I’m being unfair to you. I only criticize you because I want you to be always the best of you. I see your point of view, but I was irritated by the giggles.”

“I wasn’t paying the least attention to the girls.”

“Oh, I wasn’t jealous,” she said, quickly. “Oh no, darling Arthur, even with the great affection that I have for you, I shall never be able to be jealous of your making eyes at shop-girls.”

When Arthur’s engagement seemed likely to come to an end in the summer, they discussed plans and decided to take a holiday in the country, somewhere in Maine or Vermont. Arthur, as usual, set the scene beforehand, but as he set it quite in accord with Sylvia’s taste she did not mind. Indeed, their holiday in Vermont on the borders of Lake Champlain was as near as she ever got to being perfectly happy with Arthur—happy, that is, to the point of feeling like a chill the prospect of separation. Sylvia was inclined to say that all Arthur’s faults were due to the theater, and that when one had him like this in simple surroundings the best side of him was uppermost and visible, like a spun coin that shows a simple head when it falls.

Sylvia found that she had brought with her by chance the manuscript of the poems given to her by the outcast Englishman in Paris, and Arthur was very anxious that she should come back to her idea of rendering these. He had already composed a certain number of unimportant songs in his career, but now the Muses smiled upon him (or perhaps it might be truer to speak of her own smiles, Sylvia thought) with such favor that he set a dozen poems to the very accompaniment they wanted, the kind of music, moreover, that suited Sylvia’s voice.

“We must get these done in New York,” he said; but that week a letter came from Olive Airdale, and Sylvia had a sudden longing for England. She did not think she would make an effort to do anything in America. The truth was that she had supplemented the Englishman’s poems with an idea of her own to give impressions gathered from her own life. It was strange how abruptly the longing to express herself had arrived, but it had arrived, with a force and fierceness that were undeniable. It had come, too, with that authentic fever of secrecy that she divined a woman must feel in the first moment of knowing that she has conceived. She could not have imparted her sense of creation to any one else; such an intimacy of revelation was too shocking to be contemplated. Somehow she was sure that this strange shamefulness was right and that she was entitled to hug within herself the conception that would soon enough be turned to the travail of birth.

“By, Jove! Sylvia, this holiday has done you good!” Arthur exclaimed.

She kissed him because, ignorant though he was of the true reason, she owed him thanks for her looks.

“Sylvia, if we go back to England, do let’s be married first.”

“Why?”

“Why, because it’s not fair on me.”

“On you?”

“Yes, on me. People will always blame me, of course.”

“What has it got to do with anybody else except me?”

“My mother—”

“My dear Arthur,” Sylvia interrupted, sharply, “if your mother ran away with a groom, she’ll be the first person to sympathize with my point of view.”

“I suppose you’re trying to be cruel,” said Arthur.

“And succeeding, to judge by your dolorous mouth. No, my dear, let the suggestion of marriage come from me. I sha’n’t be hurt if you refuse.”

“Well, are we to pretend we’re married?” Arthur asked, hopelessly.

“Certainly not, if by that you mean that I’m to put ‘Mrs. Arthur Madden’ on a visiting-card. Don’t look so frightened. I’m not proposing to march into drawing-rooms with a big drum to proclaim my emancipation from the social decencies. Don’t worry me, Arthur. It’s all much too complicated to explain, but I’ll tell you one thing, I’m not going to marry you merely to remove the world’s censure of your conduct, and as long as you feel about marrying me as you might feel about letting me carry a heavy bag, I’ll never marry you.”

“I don’t feel a bit like that about it,” he protested. “If I could leave you, I’d leave you now. But the very thought of losing you makes my heart stop beating. It’s like suddenly coming to the edge of a precipice. I know perfectly well that you despise me at heart. You think I’m a wretched actor with no feelings off the stage. You think I don’t know my own mind, if you even admit that I’ve got a mind at all. But I’m thirty-one. I’m not a boy. I’ve had a good many women in love with me. Now don’t begin to laugh. I’m determined to say what I ought to have said long ago, and should have said if I hadn’t been afraid the whole time of losing you. If I lose you now it can’t be helped. I’d sooner lose you than go on being treated like a child. What I want to say is that, though I know you think it wasn’t worth while being loved by the women who’ve loved me, I do think it was. I’m not in the least ashamed of them. Most of them, at any rate, were beautiful, though I admit that all of them put together wouldn’t have made up for missing you. You’re a thousand times cleverer than I. You’ve got much more personality. You’ve every right to consider you’ve thrown yourself away on me. But the fact remains that you’ve done it. We’ve been together now a year. That proves that there is something in me. I’m prouder of this year with you than of all the rest of my life. You’ve developed me in the most extraordinary way.”

“I have?” Sylvia burst in.

“Of course you have. But I’m not going to be treated like a mantis.”

“Like a what?”

“A mantis. You can read about it in that French book on insects. The female eats the male. Well, I’m damned well not going to be eaten. I’m not going back to England with you unless you marry me.”

“Well, I’m not going to marry you,” Sylvia declared.

“Very well, then I shall try to get an engagement on tour and we’ll separate.”

“So much the better,” she said. “I’ve got a good deal to occupy myself at present.”

“Of course you can have the music I wrote for those poems,” said Arthur.

“Damn your music,” she replied.

Sylvia was so much obsessed with the conviction of having at last found a medium for expressing herself in art that, though she was vaguely aware of having a higher regard for Arthur at this moment than she had ever had, she could only behold him as a troublesome visitor that was preventing her from sitting down to work.

Arthur went off on tour. Sylvia took an apartment in New York far away up-town and settled down to test her inspiration. In six months she lived her whole life over again, and of every personality that had touched her own and left its mark she made a separate presentation. Her great anxiety was to give to each sketch the air of an improvisation, and in the course of it to make her people reveal their permanent characters rather than their transient emotions. It was really based on the art of the impersonator who comes on with a cocked hat, sticks out his neck, puts his hands behind his back, and his legs apart, leans over to the audience, and whispers Napoleon. Sylvia thought she could extend the pleasures of recognition beyond the mere mimicry of externals to a finer mimicry of essentials. She wanted an audience to clap not because she could bark sufficiently like a real dog to avoid being mistaken for a kangaroo, but because she could be sufficiently Mrs. Gainsborough not to be recognized as Mrs. Beardmore—yet without relying upon their respective sizes in corsets to mark the difference. She did not intend to use even make-up; the entertainment was always to be an improvisation. It was also to be undramatic; that is to say, it was not to obtain its effect by working to a climax, so that, however well hidden the mechanism might have been during the course of the presentation, the machinery would reveal itself at the end. Sylvia wanted to make each member of the audience feel that he had dreamed her improvisation, or rather she hoped that he would gain from it that elusive sensation of having lived it before, and that the effect upon each person listening to her should be ultimately incommunicable, like a dream. She was sure now that she could achieve this effect with the poems, not, as she had originally supposed, through their objective truthfulness, but through their subjective truth. That outcast Englishman should be one of her improvisations, and of course the original idea of letting the poems be accompanied by music would be ruinous; one might as well illustrate them with a magic lantern. As to her own inventions, she must avoid giving them a set form, because, whatever actors might urge to the contrary, a play could never really be performed twice by the same caste. She would have a scene painted like those futurist Italian pictures; they were trying to do with color what she was trying to do with acting; they were striving to escape from the representation of mere externals, and often succeeding almost too well, she added, with a smile. She would get hold of Ronald Walker in London, who doubtless by now would be too prosperous to serve her purpose himself, but who would probably know of some newly fledged painter anxious to flap his wings.

At the end of six months Sylvia had evolved enough improvisations to make a start. She went to bed tired out with the last night’s work, and woke up in the morning with a sense of blankness at the realization of there being nothing to do that day. All the time she had been working she had been content to be alone; she had even looked forward to amusing herself in New York when her work was finished. Now the happy moment had come and she could feel nothing but this empty boredom. She wondered what Arthur was doing, and she reproached herself for the way in which she had discarded him. She had been so thrilled by the notion that she was necessary to somebody; it had seemed to her the consummation of so many heedless years. Yet no sooner had she successfully imposed herself upon Arthur than she was eager to think of nothing but herself without caring a bit about his point of view. Now that she could do nothing more with her work until the test of public performance was applied to it, she was bored; in fact, she missed Arthur. The truth was that half the pleasure of being necessary to somebody else had been that he should be necessary to her. But marriage with Arthur? Marriage with a curly-headed actor? Marriage with anybody? No, that must wait, at any rate until she had given the fruit of these six months to the world. She could not be hampered by belonging to anybody before that.

“I do think I’m justified in taking myself a little seriously for a while,” said Sylvia, “and in shutting my eyes to my own absurdity. Self-mockery is dangerous beyond a certain point. I really will give this idea of mine a fair chance. If I’m a failure, Arthur will love me all the more through vanity, and if I’m a success—I suppose really he’ll be vain of that, too.”

Sylvia telegraphed to Arthur, and heard that he expected to be back in New York at the end of the month. He was in Buffalo this week. Nothing could keep her a moment longer in New York alone, and she went up to join him. She had a sudden fear when she arrived that she might find him occupied with a girl; in fact, really, when she came to think of the manner in which she had left him, it was most improbable that she should not. She nearly turned round and went back to New York; but her real anxiety to see Arthur and talk to him about her work made her decide to take the risk of what might be the deepest humiliation of her life. It was strange how much she wanted to talk about what she had done; the desire to do so now was as overmastering an emotion as had been in the first moment of conception the urgency of silence.

Sylvia was spared the shock of finding Arthur wrapped up in some one else.

“Sylvia, how wonderful! What a relief to see you again!” he exclaimed. “I’ve been longing for you to see me in the part I’m playing now. It’s certainly the most successful thing I’ve done. I’m so glad you kept me from wasting myself any longer on that concert work. I really believe I’ve made a big hit at last.”

Sylvia was almost as much taken aback to find Arthur radiant with the prospect of success as she would have been to find him head over ears in love. She derived very little satisfaction from the way in which he attributed his success to her; she was not at all in the mood for being a godmother, now that she had a baby of her own.

“I’m so glad, old son. That’s splendid. Now I want to talk about the work I’ve been doing all these six months.”

Forthwith she plunged into the details of the scheme, to which Arthur listened attentively enough, though he only became really enthusiastic when she could introduce analogies with his own successful performance.

“You will go in front to-night?” he begged. “I’m awfully keen to hear what you think of my show. Half my pleasure in the hit has been spoiled by your not having seen it. Besides, I think you’ll be interested in noticing that once or twice I try to get the same effect as you’re trying for in these impersonations.”

“Damn your eyes, Arthur, they’re not impersonations; they’re improvisations.”

“Did I say impersonations? I’m sorry,” said Arthur, looking rather frightened.

“Yes, you’d better placate me,” she threatened. “Or I’ll spend my whole time looking at Niagara and never go near your show.”

However, Sylvia did go to see the play that night and found that Arthur really was excellent in his part, which was that of the usual young man in musical comedy who wanders about in a well-cut flannel suit, followed by six young women with parasols ready to smother him with affection, melody, and lace. But how, even in the intoxication of success, he had managed to establish a single analogy with what she proposed to do was beyond comprehension.

Arthur came out of the stage door, wreathed in questions.

“You were in such a hurry to get out,” said Sylvia, “that you didn’t take off your make-up properly. You’ll get arrested if you walk about like that. I hear the sumptuary laws in Buffalo are very strict.”

“No, don’t rag. Did you like the hydrangea song? Do you remember the one I mean?”

He hummed the tune.

“I warn you, Arthur, there’s recently been a moral up-lift in Buffalo. You will be sewn up in a barrel and flung into Niagara if you don’t take care. No, seriously. I think your show was capital. Which brings me to the point. We sail for Europe at the end of April.”

“Oh, but do you think it’s wise for me to leave America now that I’ve really got my foot in?”

“Do you still want to marry me?”

“More than ever,” he assured her.

“Very well, then. Your only chance of marrying me is to leave New York without a murmur. I’ve thought it all out. As soon as I get back I shall spend my last shilling on fitting out my show. When I’ve produced it and when I’ve found out that I’ve not been making a fool of myself for the last six months, perhaps I’ll marry you. Until then—as friends we met, as anything more than friends we part. Got me, Steve?”

“But, Sylvia—”

“But me no buts, or you’ll get my goat. Understand my meaning, Mr. Stevenson?”

“Yes, only—”

“The discussion’s closed.”

“Are we engaged?”

“I don’t know. We’ll have to see our agents about that.”

“Oh, don’t rag. Marriage is not a joke. You are a most extraordinary girl.”

“Thanks for the discount. I shall be thirty in three months, don’t forget. Talking of the advantages of rouge, you might get rid of some of yours before supper, if you don’t mind.”

“Are we engaged?” Arthur repeated, firmly.

“No, the engagement ring and the marriage-bells will be pealed simultaneously. You’re as free as Boccaccio, old son.”

“You’re in one of those moods when it’s impossible to argue with you.”

“So much the better. We shall enjoy our supper all the more. I’m so excited at the idea of going back to England. After all, I shall have been away nearly three years. I shall find godchildren who can talk. Think of that. Arthur, don’t you want to go back?”

“Yes, if I can get a shop. I think it’s madness for me to leave New York, but I daren’t let you go alone.”

The anticipation of being in England again and of putting to the test her achievement could not charm away all Sylvia’s regret at leaving America, most of all New York. She owed to New York this new stability that she discovered in her life. She owed to some action of New York upon herself the delight of inspiration, the sweet purgatory of effort, the hope of a successful end to her dreams. It was the only city of which she had ever taken a formal farewell, such as she took from the top of the Metropolitan Tower upon a lucid morning in April. The city lay beneath, with no magic of smoke to lend a meretricious romance to its checkered severity; a city encircled with silver waters and pavilioned by huge skies, expressing modern humanity, as the great monuments of ancient architecture express the mighty dead.

“We too can create our Parthenons,” thought Sylvia, as she sank to earth in the florid elevator.

They crossed the Atlantic on one of the smaller Cunard liners. The voyage was uneventful. Nearly all the passengers in turn told Sylvia why they were not traveling by one of the large ships, but nobody suggested as a reason that the smaller ships were cheaper.

When they reached England Arthur went to stay with his mother at Dulwich. Sylvia went to the Airdales; she wanted to set her scheme in motion, but she promised to come and stay at Dulwich later on.

“At last you’ve come back,” Olive said, on the verge of tears. “I’ve missed you dreadfully.”

“Great Scott! Look at Sylvius and Rose!” Sylvia exclaimed. “They’re like two pigs made of pink sugar. Pity we never thought of it at the time, or they could have been christened Scarlet and Crimson.”

“Darlings, isn’t godmamma horrid to you?” said Olive.

“Here! Here! What are you teaching them to call me?”

“Dat’s godmamma,” said Sylvius, in a thick voice.

“Dat’s godmamma,” Rose echoed.

“Not on your life, cullies,” their godmother announced, “unless you want a thick ear each.”

“Give me one,” said Sylvius, stolidly.

“Give me one,” Rose echoed.

“How can you tease the poor darlings so?” Olive exclaimed.

“Sylvius will have one,” he announced, in the same thick monotone.

“Rose will have one,” echoed his sister.

Sylvia handed her godson a large painted ball.

“Here’s your thick ear, Pork.”

Sylvius laughed fatly; the ball and the new name both pleased him.

“And here’s yours,” she said, offering another to Rose, who waited to see what her brother did with his and then proceeded to do the same with the same fat laugh. Suddenly, however, her lips puckered.

“What is it, darling?” her mother asked, anxiously.

“Rose wants to be said Pork.”

“You didn’t call her Pork,” Olive translated, reproachfully, to Sylvia.

“Give me back the ball,” said Sylvia. “Now then, here’s your thick ear, Porka.”

Rose laughed ecstatically. After two ornaments had been broken Jack came in, and the children retired with their nurse.

Sylvia found that family life had not spoiled Jack’s interest in that career of hers; indeed, he was so much excited by her news that he suggested omitting for once the ceremony of seeing the twins being given their bath in order not to lose any of the short time available before he should have to go down to the theater. Sylvia, however, would not hear of any change in the domestic order, and reminded Jack that she was proposing to quarter herself on them for some time.

“I know, it’s terrific,” he said.

The excitement of the bath was always considerable, but this evening, with Sylvia’s assistance, it became acute. Sylvius hit his nurse in the eye with the soap, and Rose, wrought up to a fever of emulation, managed to hurl the sponge into the grate.

Jack was enthusiastic about Sylvia’s scheme. She was not quite sure that he understood exactly at what she was aiming, but he wished her so well that in any case his criticism would have had slight value; he gave instead his devoted attention, and that seemed a pledge of success. Success! Success! it sounded like a cataract in her ears, drowning every other sound. She wondered if the passion of her life was to be success. On no thoughts urged so irresistibly had she ever sailed to sleep, nor had she ever wakened in such a buoyancy, greeting the day as a swimmer greets the sea.

“Now what about the backing?” Jack asked.

“Backing? I’ll back myself. You’ll be my manager. I’ve enough to hire the Pierian Hall for a day and a night. I’ve enough to pay for one scene. Which reminds me I must get hold of Ronald Walker. You’ll sing, Jack, two songs? Oh, and there’s Arthur Madden. He’ll sing, too.”

“Who’s he?” Olive asked.

“Oh, didn’t I tell you about him?” said Sylvia, almost too nonchalantly, she feared. “He’s rather good. Quite good, really. I’ll tell you about him sometime. By the way, I’ve talked so much about myself and my plans that I’ve never asked about other people. How’s the countess?”

Olive looked grave. “We don’t ever see them, but everybody says that Clarehaven is going the pace tremendously.”

“Have they retreated to Devonshire?”

“Oh no! Didn’t you hear? I thought I’d told you in one of my letters. He had to sell the family place. Do you remember a man called Leopold Hausberg?”

“Do I not?” Sylvia exclaimed. “He took a flat once for a chimpanzee instead of Lily.”

“Well, he’s become Lionel Houston this year, and he’s talked about with Dorothy a good deal. Of course he’s very rich, but I do hope there’s nothing in what people say. Poor Dorothy!”

“She’ll survive even the divorce court,” Sylvia said. “I wish I knew what had become of Lily. She might have danced in my show. I suppose it’s too late now, though. Poor Lily! I say, we’re getting very compassionate, you and I, Olive. Are you and Jack going to have any more kids?”

“Sylvia darling,” Olive exclaimed, with a blush.

Sylvia had intended to stay a week or two with the Airdales, and, after having set in motion the preliminaries of her undertaking, to go down to Dulwich and visit Mrs. Madden, but she thought she would get hold of Ronnie Walker first, and with this object went to the CafÉ Royal, where she should be certain of finding either him or a friend who would know where he was.

Sylvia had scarcely time to look round her in the swirl of gilt and smoke and chatter before Ronald Walker himself, wearing now a long pale beard, greeted her.

“My dear Ronald, what’s the matter? Are you tired of women? You look more like a grate than a great man,” Sylvia exclaimed. “Cut it off and give it to your landlady to stuff her fireplace this summer.”

“What shall we drink?” he asked, imperturbably.

“I’ve been absinthe for so long that really—”

“It’s a vermouth point,” added Ronald.

“Ronnie, you devil, I can’t go on, it’s too whisky. Well, of course after that we ought both to drink port and brandy. Don’t you find it difficult to clean your beard?”

“I’m not a messy feeder,” said Ronnie.

“You don’t paint with it, then?”

“Only Cubist pictures.”

Sylvia launched out into an account of her work, and demanded his help for the painting of the scene.

“I want the back-cloth to be a city, not to represent a city, mark you, but to be a city.”

She told him about New York as beheld from the Metropolitan Tower, and exacted from the chosen painter the ability to make the audience think that.

“I’m too old-fashioned for you, my dear,” said Ronald.

“Oh, you, my dear man, of course. If I asked you for a city, you’d give me a view from a Pierrot’s window of a Harlequin who’d stolen the first five numbers of the Yellow Book from a Pantaloon who kept a second-hand bookshop in a street-scene by Steinlen, and whose daughter, Columbine, having died of grief at being deserted by the New English Art Club, had been turned into a book-plate. No, I want some fierce young genius of to-day.”

Over their drinks they discussed possible candidates; finally Ronald said he would invite a certain number of the most representative and least representational modern painters to his studio, from whom Sylvia might make her choice. Accordingly, two or three days later Sylvia visited Ronald in Grosvenor Road. For the moment, when she entered, she thought that he had been playing a practical joke upon her, for it seemed impossible that these extraordinary people could be real. The northerly light of the studio, severe and virginal, was less kind than the feverish exhalation of the CafÉ Royal.

“They are real?” she whispered to her host.

“Oh yes, they’re quite real, and in deadly earnest. Each of them represents a school and each of them thinks I’ve been converted to his point of view. I’ll introduce Morphew.”

He beckoned to a tall young man in black, who looked like a rolled-up umbrella with a jade handle.

“Morphew, this is Miss Scarlett. She’s nearly as advanced as you are. Sylvia, this is Morphew, the Azurist.”

Walker maliciously withdrew when he had made the introduction.

“Ought I to know what an Azurist is?” Sylvia asked. She felt that it was an unhappy opening for the conversation, but she did not want to hurt his religious feelings if Azurism was a religion, and if it was a trade she might be excused for not knowing what it was, such a rare trade must it be.

Mr. Morphew smiled in a superior way. “I think most people have heard about me by now.”

“Ah, but I’ve been abroad.”

“Several of my affirmations have been translated and published in France, Germany, Russia, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Hungary, and Holland,” said Mr. Morphew, in a tone that seemed to imply that if Sylvia had not grasped who he was by now she never would, in which case it was scarcely worth his while to go on talking to her.

“Oh dear! What a pity!” she exclaimed. “I was in Montenegro all last year, so I must have missed them. I don’t think you’re known in Montenegro yet. It’s such a small country, I should have been sure to hear about anything like that.

“Like what?” thought Sylvia, turning up her mind’s eyes to heaven.

Mr. Morphew was evidently not sure what sort of language was spoken in Montenegro, and thought it wiser to instruct Sylvia than to expose his own ignorance.

“What color is that?” he suddenly demanded, pointing to the orange coverlet of a settee.

“Orange,” said Sylvia. “Perhaps it’s inclining to some shade of brown.”

“Orange! Brown!” Mr. Morphew scoffed. “It’s blue.”

“Oh, but it’s not!” she contradicted. “There’s nothing blue about it.”

“Blue,” repeated Mr. Morphew. “All is blue. The Azurists deny that there is anything but blue. Blue,” he continued in a rapt voice. “Blue! I was a Blanchist at first; but when we quarreled most of the Blanchists followed me. I shall publish the nineteenth affirmation of the Azurists next week. If you give me your address I’ll send you a copy. We’re going to give the Ovists hell in a new magazine that we’re bringing out. We find that affirmations are not enough.”

“Will it be an ordinary magazine?” Sylvia asked. “Will you have stories, for instance?”

“We don’t admit that stories exist. Life-rays exist. There will be life-rays in our magazine.”

“I suppose they’ll be pretty blue,” said Sylvia.

“All life-rays are blue.”

“I suppose you don’t mind wet weather?” she suggested. “Because it must be rather difficult to know when it’s going to clear up.”

“There are degrees of blue,” Mr. Morphew explained.

“I see. Life isn’t just one vast, reckless blue. Well, thank you very much for being so patient with my old-fashioned optical ideas. I do hope you’ll go to America and tell them that their leaves turn blue in autumn. Anyway, you’ll feel quite at home crossing the ocean, though some people won’t even admit that’s blue.”

Sylvia left the Azurist and rejoined Ronald.

“Well,” he laughed. “You look quite frightened.”

“My dear, I’ve just done a bolt from the blue. You are a beast to rag my enthusiasms. Isn’t there anybody here whose serious view of himself I can indorse?”

“Well, there’s Pattison, the Ovist. He maintains that everything resolves itself into ovals.”

“I think I should almost prefer Azurism,” said Sylvia. “What about the Blanchists?”

“Oh, you wouldn’t like them! They maintain that there’s no such thing as color; their pictures depend on the angle at which they’re hung.”

“But if there’s no such thing as color, how can they paint?”

“They don’t. Their canvases are blank. Then there are the Combinationists. They don’t repudiate color, but they repudiate paint. The most famous Combinationist picture exhibited so far consisted of half a match-box, a piece of orange-peel, and some sealing-wax, all stuck upon a slip of sugar-paper. The other Combinationists wanted to commit suicide because they despaired of surpassing it. Roger Cadbury wrote a superb introduction, pointing out that it must be either liked or disliked, but that it was impossible to do both or neither. It was that picture which inspired Hezekiah Penny to write what is considered one of his finest poems. You know it, perhaps?

That caused almost as great sensation as the picture, because some of his fellow-poets maintained that he had no right to speak for anybody but himself.”

“Who is Hezekiah Penny?” Sylvia asked.

“Hezekiah Penny is a provincial poet who began by writing ProvenÇal verse.”

“But this is madness,” Sylvia exclaimed, looking round her at the studio, where the representatives of modernity eyed one another with surprise and distaste like unusual fish in the tank of an aquarium. “Behind all this rubbish surely something truly progressive exists. You’ve deliberately invited all the charlatans and impostors to meet me. I tell you, Ronnie, I saw lots of pictures in New York that were eccentric, but they were striving to rediscover life in painting. You’re prejudiced because you belong to the decade before all this, and you’ve taken a delight in showing me all the extravagant side of it. You should emulate Tithonus.”

“Who was he?”

“Now don’t pretend you can’t follow a simple allusion. The gentleman who fell in love with Aurora.”

“Didn’t he get rather tired of living forever?”

“Oh, well, that was because he grew a beard like you. Don’t nail my allusions to the counter; they’re not lies.”

“I’ll take pity on you,” said Ronnie. “There is quite a clever youth whom I intended for you from the beginning. He’s coming in later, when the rest have gone.”

When she and Ronnie were alone again and before Lucian Hope, the young painter, arrived, Sylvia, looking through one of his sketch-books, came across a series of studies of a girl in the practice-dress of dancing; he told her it was Jenny Pearl.

“Maurice Avery’s Jenny,” she murmured. “What happened to her?”

“Didn’t you hear about it? She was killed by her husband. It was a horrible business. Maurice went down to see her where she lived in the country, and this brute shot her. It was last summer. The papers were full of it.”

“And what happened to Maurice?”

“Oh, he nearly went off his head. He’s wandering about in Morocco probably.”

“Where I met him,” said Sylvia.

“But didn’t he tell you?”

“Oh, it was before. More than three years ago. We talked about her.”

Sylvia shuddered. One of her improvisations had been Maurice Avery; she must burn it.

Lucian Hope arrived before Sylvia could ask any more questions about the horrible event; she was glad to escape from the curiosity that would have turned it into a tale of the police-court. The new-comer was not more than twenty-two, perhaps less—too young, at any rate, to have escaped from the unconventionality of artistic attire that stifles all personality. But he had squirrel’s eyes, and was not really like an undertaker. He was shy, too, so shy that Sylvia wondered how he could tolerate being stared at in the street on account of his odd appearance. She would have liked to ask him what pleasure he derived from such mimicry of a sterile and professional distinction, but she feared to hurt his young vanity; moreover, she was disarmed by those squirrel’s eyes, so sharp and bright even in the falling dusk. The three of them talked restlessly for a while, and Sylvia, seeing that Ronald was preparing to broach the subject for which they were met, anticipated him with a call for attention, and began one of her improvisations. It was of Concetta lost in a greater city than Granada. By the silence that followed she knew that her companions had cared for it, and she changed to Mrs. Gainsborough. Then she finished up with three of the poems.

“Could you paint me a scene for that?” she asked, quickly, to avoid any comment.

“Oh, rather!” replied the young man, very eagerly; though it was nearly dark now, she could see his eyes flashing real assurance.

They all three dined together that evening, and Lucian Hope, ever since Sylvia had let him know that she stood beside him to conquer the world, lost his early shyness and talked volubly of what she wanted and what he wanted to do. Ronald Walker presided in the background of the ardent conversation, and as they came out of the restaurant he took Sylvia’s arm for a moment.

“All right?”

“Quite all right, thanks.”

“So’s your show going to be. Not so entirely modern as you gave me to suppose. But that’s not a great fault.”

Sylvia and Lucian Hope spent a good deal of time together, so much was there to talk about in connection with the great enterprise. She brought him to the Airdales’ that he might meet Jack, who was supposed to have charge of the financial arrangements. The sight of the long-haired young man made Sylvius cry, and, as a matter of course, Rose, also, which embarrassed Lucian Hope a good deal, especially when he had to listen to an explanation of himself by Olive for the children’s consolation.

“He’s a gollywog,” Sylvius howled.

“He’s a gollywog,” Rose echoed.

“He’s tum to gobble us,” Sylvius bellowed.

“To gobble us, to gobble us,” Rose wailed.

“He’s not a gollywog, darlings,” their mother declared. “He makes pretty pictures, oh, such pretty pictures of—”

“He is a gollywog,” choked Sylvius, in an ecstasy of rage and fear.

“A gollywog, a gollywog,” Rose insisted.

Their mother changed her tactics. “But he’s a kind gollywog. Oh, such a kind gollywog, the kindest, nicest gollywog that was ever thought of.”

“He is—ent,” both children proclaimed. “He’s bad!”

“Don’t you think I’d better go?” asked the painter. “I think it must be my hair that’s upsetting them.”

He started toward the door, but, unfortunately, he was on the wrong side of the children, who, seeing him make a move in their direction, set up such an appalling yell that the poor young man drew back in despair. In the middle of this the maid entered, announcing Mr. Arthur Madden, who followed close upon her heels. Sylvius and Rose were by this time obsessed with the idea of an invasion by an army of gollywogs, and Arthur’s pleasant face took on for them the dreaded lineaments of the foe. Both children clung shrieking to their mother’s skirts. Sylvia and Jack were leaning back, incapable through laughter. Arthur and Lucian Hope surveyed miserably the scene they had created. At last the nurse arrived to rescue the twins, and they were carried away without being persuaded to change their minds about the inhuman nature of the two visitors.

Arthur apologized for worrying Sylvia, but his mother was so anxious to know when she was coming down to Dulwich, and as he had been up in town seeing about an engagement, he had not been able to resist coming to visit her.

Sylvia felt penitent for having abandoned Arthur so completely since they had arrived in England, and she told him she would go back with him that very afternoon.

“Oh, but Miss Scarlett,” protested Lucian, “don’t you remember? We arranged to explore Limehouse to-morrow.”

Arthur looked at the painter very much as if he were indeed the gollywog for which he had just been taken.

“I don’t want to interfere with previous arrangements,” he said, with such a pathetic haughtiness that Sylvia had not the heart to wound his dignity, and told Lucian Hope that the expedition to Limehouse must be postponed. The young painter looked disconsolate and Arthur blossomed from his fading. However, Lucian had the satisfaction of saying, in a mysterious voice, to Sylvia before he went:

“Well, then, while you’re away I’ll get on with it.”

It was not until they were half-way to Dulwich in the train that Arthur asked Sylvia what he was going to get on with.

“My scene,” she said.

“What scene?”

“Arthur, don’t be stupid. The set for my show.”

“You’re not going to let a youth like that paint a set for you? You’re mad. What experience has he had?”

“None. That’s exactly why I chose him. I’m providing the experience.”

“Have you known him long?” Arthur demanded. “You can’t have known him very long. He must have been at school when you left England.”

“Don’t be jealous,” said Sylvia.

“Jealous? Of him? Huh!”

Mrs. Madden had changed more than Sylvia expected. Arthur had seemed so little altered that she was surprised to see his mother with white hair, for she could scarcely be fifty-five yet. The drawing-room of the little house in Dulwich recalled vividly the drawing-room of the house in Hampstead; nor had Mrs. Madden bought herself a new piano with the fifty pounds that was cabled back to her from Sulphurville. It suddenly occurred to Sylvia that this was the first time she had seen her since she ran away with Arthur, fifteen years ago, and she felt that she ought to apologize for that behavior now; but, after all, Mrs. Madden had run away herself once upon a time with her father’s groom and could scarcely have been greatly astonished at Arthur’s elopement.

“You have forgiven me for carrying him off from Hampstead?” she asked, with a smile.

Mrs. Madden laughed gently. “Yes, I was frightened at the time. But in the end it did Arthur good, I think. It’s been such a pleasure to me to hear how successful he’s been lately.” She looked at Sylvia with an expression of marked sympathy.

After supper Mrs. Madden came up to Sylvia’s room and, taking her hand, said, in her soft voice, “Arthur has told me all about you two.”

Sylvia flushed and pulled her hand away. “He’s no business to tell you anything about me,” she said, hotly.

“You mustn’t be angry, Sylvia. He made it quite clear that you hadn’t quite made up your mind yet. Poor boy,” she added, with a sigh.

Sylvia, when she understood that Arthur had not said anything about their past, had a strong desire to tell Mrs. Madden that she had lived with him for a year. She resented the way she had said “poor boy.” She checked the impulse and assured her that if Arthur had spoken of their marriage he had had no right to do so. It really was most improbable that she should marry him; oh, but most improbable.

“You always spoke very severely about love when you were a little girl. Do you remember? You must forgive a mother, but I must tell you that I believe Arthur’s happiness depends upon your marrying him. He talks of nothing else and makes such plans for the future.”

“He makes too many plans,” Sylvia said, severely.

“Ah, there soon comes a time when one ceases to make plans,” Mrs. Madden sighed. “One is reduced to expedients. But now that you’re a woman, and I can easily believe that you’re the clever woman Arthur says you are, for you gave every sign of it when you were young—now that you’re a woman, I do hope you’ll be a merciful woman. It’s such a temptation—you must forgive my plain speaking—it’s such a temptation to keep a man like Arthur hanging on. You must have noticed how young he is still—to all intents and purposes quite a boy; and believe me he has the same romantic adoration for you and your wonderfulness as he had when he was seventeen. Don’t, I beg of you, treat such devotion too lightly.”

Sylvia could not keep silent under this unjustified imputation of heartlessness, and broke out:

“I’m sure you’ll admit that Arthur has given quite a wrong idea of me when I tell you that we lived together for a year; and you must remember that I’ve been married already and know what it means. Arthur has no right to complain of me.”

“Oh, Sylvia, I’m sorry!” Mrs. Madden almost whispered. “Oh dear! how could Arthur do such a thing?”

“Because I made him, of course. Now you must forgive me if I say something that hurts your feelings, but I must say it. When you ran away with your husband, you must have made him do it. You must have done.”

“Good gracious me!” Mrs. Madden exclaimed. “I suppose I did. I never looked at it in that light before. You’ve made me feel quite ashamed of my behavior. Quite embarrassed. And I suppose everybody has always blamed me entirely; but because my husband was one of my father’s servants I always used to be defending him. I never thought of defending myself.”

Sylvia was sorry for stirring up in Mrs. Madden’s placid mind old storms. It was painful to see this faded gentlewoman in the little suburban bedroom, blushing nervously at the unlady-like behavior of long ago. Presently Mrs. Madden pulled herself up and said, with a certain decision:

“Yes, but I did marry him.”

“Yes, but you hadn’t been married already. You hadn’t knocked round half the globe for twenty-eight years. It’s no good my pretending to be shocked at myself. I don’t care a bit what anybody thinks about me, and, anyway, it’s done now.”

“Surely you’d be happier if you married Arthur after—after that,” Mrs. Madden suggested.

“But I’m not in the least unhappy. I can’t say whether I shall marry Arthur until I’ve given my performance. I can’t say what effect either success or failure will have on me. My whole mind is concentrated in the Pierian Hall next October.”

“I’m afraid I cant understand this modern way of looking at things.”

“But there’s nothing modern about my point of view, Mrs. Madden. There’s nothing modern about the egotism of an artist. Arthur is as free as I am. He has his own career to think about. He does think about it a great deal. He’s radically much more interested in that than in marrying me. The main point is that he’s free at present. From the moment I promise to marry him and he accepts that promise he won’t be free. Nor shall I. It wouldn’t be fair on either of us to make that promise now, because I must know what October is going to bring forth.”

“Well, I call it very modern. When I was young we looked at marriage as the most important event in a girl’s life.”

“But you didn’t, dear Mrs. Madden. You, or rather your contemporaries, regarded marriage as a path to freedom—social freedom, that is. Your case was exceptional. You fell passionately in love with a man beneath you, as the world counts it. You married him, and what was the result? You were cut off by your relations as utterly as if you had become the concubine of a Hottentot.”

“Oh, Sylvia dear, what an uncomfortable comparison!”

“Marriage to your contemporaries was a social observance. I’m not religious, but I regard marriage as so sacred that, because I’ve been divorced and because, so far as I know, my husband is still alive, I have something like religious qualms about marrying again. It takes a cynic to be an idealist; the sentimentalist gets left at the first fence. It’s just because I’m fond of Arthur in a perfectly normal way when I’m not immersed in my ambition that I even contemplate the notion of marrying him. I’ve got a perfectly normal wish to have children and a funny little house of my own. So far as I know at present, I should like Arthur to be the father of my children. But it’s got to be an equal business. Personally I think that the Turks are wiser about women than we are; I think the majority of women are only fit for the harem and I’m not sure that the majority wouldn’t be much happier under such conditions. The incurable vanity of man, however, has removed us from our seclusion to admire his antics, and it’s too late to start shutting us up in a box now. Woman never thought of equality with man until he put the notion into her head.”

“I think perhaps supper may be ready,” Mrs. Madden said. “It all sounds very convincing as you speak, but I can’t help feeling that you’d be happier if you wouldn’t take everything to pieces to look at the works. Things hardly ever go so well again afterward. Oh dear, I wish you hadn’t lived together first.”

“It breaks the ice of the wedding-cake, doesn’t it?” said Sylvia.

“And I wish you wouldn’t make such bitter remarks. You don’t really mean what you say. I’m sure supper must be ready.”

“Oh, but I do,” Sylvia insisted, as they passed out into the narrow little passage and down the narrow stairs into the little dining-room. Nevertheless, in Sylvia’s mind there was a kindliness toward this little house, almost a tenderness, and far away at the back of her imagination was the vision of herself established in just such another little house.

“But even the Albert Memorial would look all right from the wrong end of a telescope,” she said to herself.

One thing was brought home very vividly during her stay in Dulwich, which was the difference between what she had deceived herself into thinking was that first maternal affection she had felt for Arthur and the true maternal love of his mother. Whenever she had helped Arthur in any way, she had always been aware of enjoying the sensation of her indispensableness; it had been an emotion altogether different from this natural selfishness of the mother; it was really one that had always reflected a kind of self-conscious credit upon herself. Here in Dulwich, with this aspect of her affection for Arthur completely overshadowed, Sylvia was able to ask herself more directly if she loved him in the immemorial way of love; and though she could not arrive at a finally positive conclusion, she was strengthened in her resolve not to let him go. Arthur himself was more in love with her than he had ever been, and she thought that perhaps this was due to that sudden and disquieting withdrawal of herself; in the midst of possession he had been dispossessed, and until he could pierce her secret reasons he would inevitably remain deeply in love, even to the point of being jealous of a boy like Lucian Hope. Sylvia understood Arthur’s having refused an engagement to tour as juvenile lead in a successful musical piece and his unwillingness to leave her alone in town; he was rewarded, too, for his action, because shortly afterward he obtained a good engagement in London to take the place of a singer who had retired from the cast of the Frivolity Theater. At that rate he would soon find himself at the Vanity Theater itself.

In June Sylvia went back to the Airdales’, and soon afterward took rooms near them in West Kensington. It was impossible to continue indefinitely to pretend that Arthur and herself were mere theatrical acquaintances, and one day Olive asked Sylvia if she intended to marry him.

“What do you advise?” Sylvia asked. “There’s a triumph, dearest Olive. Have I ever asked your advice before?”

“I like him; Jack likes him, too, and says that he ought to get on fast now; but I don’t know. Well, he’s not the sort of man I expected you to marry.”

“You’ve had an ideal for me all the time,” Sylvia exclaimed. “And you’ve never told me.”

“Oh no, I’ve never had anybody definite in my mind, but I think I should be able to say at once if the man you had chosen was the right one. Don’t ask me to describe him, because I couldn’t do it. You used to tease me about marrying a curly-headed actor, but Arthur Madden seems to me much more of a curly-headed actor than Jack is.”

“In fact, you thoroughly disapprove of poor Arthur?” Sylvia pressed.

“Oh dear, no! Oh, not at all! Please don’t think that. I’m only anxious that you shouldn’t throw yourself away.”

“Remnants always go cheap,” said Sylvia. “However, don’t worry. I’ll be quite sure of myself before I marry anybody again.”

The summer passed away quickly in a complexity of arrangements for the opening performance at the Pierian Hall. Sylvia stayed three or four times at Dulwich and grew very fond of Mrs. Madden, who never referred again to the subject of marriage. She also went up to Warwickshire with Olive and the children, much to the pleasure of Mr. Fanshawe, who was now writing a supplementary volume called More Warwickshire Worthies. In London she scarcely met any old friends; indeed, she went out of her way to avoid people like the Clarehavens, because they would not have been interested in what she was doing. By this time Sylvia had reached the point of considering everybody either for the interest and belief he evinced in her success or by the use he could be to her in securing it. The first rapturous egoism of Arthur’s own success in London had worn off with time, and he was able to devote himself entirely to running about for Sylvia, which gradually made her regard him more and more as a fixture. As for Lucian Hope, he thought of nothing but the great occasion, and would have fought anybody who had ventured to cast a breath of doubt upon the triumph at hand. The set that he had painted was exactly what Sylvia required, and though both Arthur and Jack thought it would distract the audience’s attention by puzzling them, they neither of them on Sylvia’s account criticized it at all harshly.

At last in mid-October the very morning of the day arrived, so long anticipated with every kind of discussion that its superficial resemblance to other mornings seemed heartless and unnatural. It was absurd that a milkman’s note should be the same as yesterday, that servants should shake mats on front-door steps as usual, and that the maid who knocked at Sylvia’s door should not break down beneath the weightiness of her summons. Nor, when Sylvia looked out of the window, were Jack and Arthur and Ronald and Lucian pacing with agitated steps the pavement below, an absence of enthusiasm, at any rate on the part of Arthur and Lucian, that hurt her feelings, until she thought for a moment how foolishly unreasonable she was being.

As soon as Sylvia was dressed she went round to the Airdales’; everybody she met on the way inspired her with a longing to confide in him the portentousness of the day, and she found herself speculating whether several business men, who were hurrying to catch the nine-o’clock train, had possibly an intention of visiting the Pierian Hall that afternoon. She was extremely annoyed to find, when she reached the Airdales’ house, that neither Jack nor Olive was up.

“Do they know the time?” she demanded of the maid, in a scandalized voice. “Their clock must have stopped.”

“Oh no, miss, I don’t think so. Breakfast is at ten, as usual. There’s Mr. Airdale’s dressing-room bell going now, miss. That ’ll be for his shaving-water. Shall I say you’re waiting to see him?”

What a ridiculous time to begin shaving, Sylvia thought.

“Yes, please,” she added, aloud. “Or no, don’t bother him; I’ll come back at ten o’clock.”

Sylvia saw more of the streets of West Kensington in that hour than she had ever seen of them before, and decided that the neighborhood was impossible. Nothing so intolerably monotonous as these rows of stupid and meaningless houses had ever been designed. One after another of them blinked at her in the autumnal sunshine with a fatuous complacency that made her long to ring all the bells in the street. Presently she found herself by the play-fields of St. James’s School, where the last boys were hurrying across the grass like belated ants. She looked at the golden clock in the school-buildings—half past nine. In five hours and a half she would be waiting for the curtain to go up; in seven hours and a half the audience would be wondering if it should have tea in Bond Street or cross Piccadilly and walk down St. James’s Street to Rumpelmayer’s. This problem of the audience began to worry Sylvia. She examined the alternatives with a really anxious gravity. If it went to Rumpelmayer’s it would have to walk back to the Dover Street Tube, which would mean recrossing Piccadilly; on the other hand, it would be on the right side for the omnibuses. On the other hand, it would find Rumpelmayer’s full, because other audiences would have arrived before it, invading the tea-shop from Pall Mall. Sylvia grew angry at the thought of these other audiences robbing her audience of its tea—her audience, some members of which would have read in the paper this morning:

and would actually have paid, some of them, as much as seven shillings and sixpence to see Sylvia Scarlett. Seven hours and a half: seven shillings and sixpence: 7½ plus 7½ made fifteen. When she was fifteen she had met Arthur. Sylvia’s mind rambled among the omens of numbers, and left her audience still undecided between Bond Street and Rumpelmayer’s, left it upon the steps of the Pierian Hall, the sport of passing traffic, hungry, thirsty, homesick. In seven and a half hours she would know the answer to that breathless question asked a year ago in Vermont. To think that the exact spot on which she had stood when she asked was existing at this moment in Vermont! In seven and a half hours, no, in seven hours and twenty-five minutes; the hands were moving on. It was really terrible how little people regarded the flight of time; the very world might come to an end in seven hours and twenty-five minutes.

“Have you seen Sylvia Scarlett yet?”

“No, we intended to go yesterday, but there were no seats left. They say she’s wonderful.”

“Oh, my dear, she’s perfectly amazing! Of course it’s something quite new. You really must go.”

“Who is she like?”

“Oh, she’s not like anybody else. I’m told she’s half French.”

“Oh, really! How interesting.”

“Good morning! Have you used Pear’s soap?”

“V-vi-vin-vino-vinol-vinoli-vinolia.”

Sylvia pealed the Airdales’ bell, and found Jack in the queer mixed costume which a person wears on the morning of an afternoon that will be celebrated by his best tail-coat.

“My dear girl, you really mustn’t get so excited,” he protested, when he saw Sylvia’s manner.

“Oh, Jack, do you think I shall be a success?”

“Of course you will. Now, do, for goodness’ sake, drink a cup of coffee or something.”

Sylvia found that she was hungry enough to eat even an egg, which created a domestic crisis, because Sylvius and Rose quarreled over which of them was to have the top. Finally it was adjusted by awarding the top to Sylvius, but by allowing Rose to turn the empty egg upside down for the exquisite pleasure of watching Sylvia tap it with ostentatious greed, only to find that there was nothing inside, after all, an operation that Sylvius watched with critical jealousy and Rose saluted with ecstatic joy. Sylvia’s disappointment was so beautifully violent that Sylvius regretted the material choice he had made, and wanted Sylvia to eat another egg, of which Rose might eat the top and he offer the empty shell; but it was too late, and Sylvius learned that often the shadow is better than the substance.

It had been decided in the end that Jack should confine himself to the cares of general management, and Arthur was left without a rival. Sylvia had insisted that he should only sing old English folk-songs, a decision which he had challenged at first on the ground that he required the advertisement of more modern songs, and that Sylvia’s choice was not going to help him.

“You’re not singing to help yourself,” she had told him. “You’re singing to help me.”

In addition to Arthur there was a girl whom Lucian Hope had discovered, a delicate creature with red hair, whose chief claim to employment was that she was starving, though incidentally she had a very sweet and pure soprano voice. Finally there was an Irish pianist whose technique and good humor were alike unassailable.

Before the curtain went up, Sylvia could think of nothing but the improvisations that she ought to have invented instead of the ones that she had. It was a strain upon her common sense to prevent her from canceling the whole performance and returning its money to the audience. The more she contemplated what she was going to do the more she viewed the undertaking as a fraud upon the public. There had never been any chicane like the chicane she was presently going to commit. What was that noise? Who had given the signal to O’Hea? What in hell’s name did he think he was doing at the piano? The sound of the music was like water running into one’s bath while one was lying in bed—nothing could stop it from overflowing presently. Nothing could stop the curtain from rising. At what a pace he was playing that Debussy! He was showing off, the fool! A ridiculous joke came into her mind that she kept on repeating while the music flowed: “Many a minim makes a maxim. Many a minim makes a maxim.” How cold it was in the dressing-room, and the music was getting quicker and quicker. There was a knock at the door. It was Arthur. How nice he looked with that red carnation in his buttonhole.

“How nice you look, Arthur, in that buttonhole.”

The flower became tremendously important; it seemed to Sylvia that, if she could go on flattering the flower, O’Hea would somehow be kept at the piano.

“Well, don’t pull it to pieces,” said Arthur, ruthfully. But it was too late; the petals were scattered on the floor like drops of blood.

“Oh, I’m sorry! Come along back to my dressing-room. I’ll give you another flower.”

“No, no; there isn’t time now. Wait till you come off after your first set.”

Now it was seeming the most urgent thing in the world to find another flower for Arthur’s buttonhole. At all cost the rise of that curtain must be delayed. But Arthur had brought her on the stage and the notes were racing toward the death of the piece. It was absurd of O’Hea to have chosen Debussy; the atmosphere required a ballade of Chopin, or, better still, Schumann’s Noveletten. He could have played all the Noveletten. Oh dear, what a pity she had not thought of making that suggestion. The piano would have been scarcely half-way through by now.

Suddenly there was silence. Then there followed the languid applause of an afternoon audience for an unimportant part of the program.

“He’s stopped,” Sylvia exclaimed, in horror. “What has happened?”

She turned to Arthur in despair, but he had hurried off the stage. Lucian Hope’s painted city seemed to press forward and stifle her; she moved down-stage to escape it. The curtain went up and she recoiled as from a chasm at her feet. Why on earth was O’Hea sitting in that idiotic attitude, as if he were going to listen to a sermon, looking down like that, with his right arm supporting his left elbow and his left hand propping up his chin? How hot the footlights were! She hoped nothing had happened, and looked round in alarm; but the fireman was standing quite calmly in the wings. Just as Sylvia was deciding that her voice could not possibly escape from her throat, which had closed upon it like a pair of pincers, the voice tore itself free and went traveling out toward that darkness in front, that nebulous darkness scattered with hands and faces and programs. Like Concetta in a great city, Sylvia was lost in that darkness; she was Concetta. It seemed to her that the applause at the end was not so much approval of Concetta as a welcome to Mrs. Gainsborough; when isolated laughs and volleys of laughter came out of the darkness and were followed sometimes by the darkness itself laughing everywhere, so that O’Hea looked up very personally and winked at her, then Sylvia fell in love with her audience. The laughter increased, and suddenly she recognized at the end of each volley that Sylvius and Rose were supplementing its echoes with rapturous echoes of their own. She could not see them, but their gurgles in the darkness were like a song of nightingales to Sylvia. She ceased to be Mrs. Gainsborough, and began to say three or four of the poems. Then the curtain fell, and came up again, and fell, and came up again, and fell, and came up again.

Jack was standing beside her and saying:

“Splendid, splendid, splendid, splendid!”

“Delighted, delighted, delighted, delighted!”

“Very good audience! Splendid audience! Delighted audience! Success! Success! Success!”

Really, how wonderfully O’Hea was playing, Sylvia thought, and how good that Debussy was!

The rest of the performance was as much of a success as the beginning. Perhaps the audience liked best Mrs. Gowndry and the woman who smuggled lace from Belgium into France. Sylvius and Rose laughed so much at the audience’s laughter at Mrs. Gowndry that Sylvius announced in the ensuing lull that he wanted to go somewhere, a desire which was naturally indorsed by Rose. The audience was much amused, because it supposed that Sylvius’s wish was a tribute to the profession of Mrs. Gowndry’s husband, and whatever faint doubts existed about the propriety of alluding in the Pierian Hall to a lavatory-attendant were dispersed.

Sylvia forgot altogether about the audience’s tea when the curtain fell finally. It was difficult to think about anything with so many smiling people pressing round her on the stage. Several old friends came and reminded her of their existence, but there was no one who had quite such a radiant smile as Arthur Lonsdale.

“Lonnie! How nice of you to come!”

“I say, topping, I mean. What? I say, that’s a most extraordinary back-cloth you’ve got. What on earth is it supposed to be? It reminds me of what you feel like when you’re driving a car through a strange town after meeting a man you haven’t seen for some time and who’s just found out a good brand of fizz at the hotel where he’s staying. I was afraid you’d get bitten in the back before you’d finished. I say, Mrs. Gowndry was devilish good. Some of the other lads and lasses were a bit beyond me.”

“And how’s business?”

“Oh, very good. We’ve just put the neatest little ninety h. p. torpedo-body two-seater on the market. I’ll tootle you down to Brighton in it one Sunday morning. Upon my word, you’ll scarcely have time to wrap yourself up before you’ll have to unwrap yourself to shake hands with dear old Harry Burnly coming out to welcome you from the Britannia.”

“Not married yet, Lonnie?”

“No, not yet. Braced myself up to do it the other day, dived in, and was seized with cramp at the deep end. She offered to be a sister to me and I sank like a stone. My mother’s making rather a nuisance of herself about it. She keeps producing girls out of her muff like a conjurer, whenever she comes to see me. And what girls! Heather mixture most of them, like Guggenheim’s Twelfth of August. I shall come to it at last, I suppose. Mr. Arthur Lonsdale and his bride leaving St. Margaret’s, Westminster, under an arch of spanners formed by grateful chauffeurs whom the brilliant and handsome young bride-groom has recommended to many titled readers of this paper. Well, so long, Sylvia; there’s a delirious crowd of admirers waiting for you. Send me a line where you’re living and we’ll have a little dinner somewhere—”

Sylvia’s success was not quite so huge as in the first intoxication of her friends’ enthusiasm she had begun to fancy. However, it was unmistakably a success, and she was able to give two recitals a week through the autumn, with certainly the prospect of a good music-hall engagement for the following spring, if she cared to accept it. Most of the critics discovered that she was not as good as Yvette Guilbert. In view of Yvette Guilbert’s genius, of which they were much more firmly convinced now than they would have been when Yvette Guilbert first appeared, this struck them as a fairly safe comparison; moreover, it gave their readers an impression that they understood French, which enhanced the literary value of their criticism. To strengthen this belief most of them were inclined to think that the French poems were the best part of Miss Sylvia Scarlett’s performance. One or two of the latter definitely recalled some of Yvette Guilbert’s early work, no doubt by the number of words they had not understood, because somebody had crackled a program or had shuffled his feet or had coughed. As for the English character studies, or, as some of them carried away by reminiscences of Yvette Guilbert into oblivion of their own language preferred to call them, Études, they had a certain distinction, and in many cases betrayed signs of an almost meticulous observation, though at the same time, like everybody else doing anything at the present moment except in France, they did not have as much distinction or meticulousness as the work of forerunners in England or contemporaries abroad. Still, that was not to say that the work of Miss Sylvia Scarlett was not highly promising and of the greatest possible interest. The timbre of her voice was specially worthy of notice and justified the italics in which it was printed. Finally, two critics, who were probably sitting next to each other, found a misprint in the program, no doubt in searching for a translation of the poems.

If Sylvia fancied a lack of appreciation in the critics, all her friends were positive that they were wonderful notices for a beginner.

“Why, I think that’s a splendid notice in the Telegraph,” said Olive. “I found it almost at once. Why, one often has to read right through the paper before one can find the notice.”

“Do you mean to tell me that the most self-inebriated egotist on earth ever read right through the Daily Telegraph? I don’t believe it. He’d have been drowned like Narcissus.”

Arthur pressed for a decision about their marriage, now that Sylvia knew what she had so long wanted to know; but she was wrapped up in ideas for improving her performance and forbade Arthur to mention the subject until she raised it herself; for the present she was on with a new love twice a week. Indeed, they were fascinating to Sylvia, these audiences each with a definite personality of its own. She remembered how she had scoffed in old days at the slavish flattery of them by her fellow-actors and actresses; equally in the old days she had scoffed at love. She wished that she could feel toward Arthur as she felt now toward her audiences, which were as absorbing as children with their little clevernesses and precocities. The difference between what she was doing now and what she had done formerly when she sang French songs with an English accent was the difference between the realism of an old knotted towel that is a baby and an expensive doll that may be a baby but never ceases to be a doll. Formerly she had been a mechanical thing and had never given herself because she had possessed neither art nor truth, but merely craft and accuracy. She had thought that the personality was degraded by depending on the favor of an audience. All that old self-consciousness and false shame were gone. She and her audience communed through art as spirits may commune after death. In the absorption of studying the audience as a separate entity, Sylvia forgot that it was made up of men and women. When she knew that any friends of hers were in front, they always remained entirely separate in her mind from the audience. Gradually, however, as the autumn advanced, several people from long ago re-entered her life and she began to lose that feeling of seclusion from the world and to realize the gradual setting up of barriers to her complete liberty of action. The first of these visitants was Miss Ashley, who in her peacock-blue gown looked much as she had looked when Sylvia last saw her.

“I could not resist coming round to tell you how greatly I enjoyed your performance,” she said. “I’ve been so sorry that you never came to see me all these years.”

Sylvia felt embarrassed, because she dreaded presently an allusion to her marriage with Philip, but Miss Ashley was too wise.

“How’s Hornton House!” asked Sylvia, rather timidly. It was like inquiring after the near relation of an old friend who might have died.

“Just the same. Miss Primer is still with me. Miss Hossack now has a school of her own. Miss Pinck became very ill with gouty rheumatism and had to retire. I won’t ask you about yourself; you told me so much from the stage. Now that we’ve been able to meet again, won’t you come and visit your old school sometime?”

Sylvia hesitated.

“Please,” Miss Ashley insisted. “I’m not inviting you out of politeness. It would really give me pleasure. I have never ceased to think about you all these years. Well, I won’t keep you, for I’m sure you must be tired. Do come. Tell me, Sylvia. I should so like to bring the girls one afternoon. What would be a good afternoon to come?”

“You mean, when will there be nothing in the program that—”

“We poor schoolmistresses,” said Miss Ashley, with a whimsical look of deprecation.

“Come on Saturday fortnight, and afterward I’ll go back with you all to Hornton House. I’d love that.”

So it was arranged.

On Wednesday of the following week it happened that there was a particularly appreciative audience, and Sylvia became so much enamoured of the laughter that she excelled herself. It was an afternoon of perfect accord, and she traced the source of it to a group somewhere in the middle of the stalls, too far back for her to recognize its composition. After the performance a pack of visiting-cards was brought to the door of her dressing-room. She read: “Mrs. Ian Campbell, Mrs. Ralph Dennison.” Who on earth were they? “Mr. Leonard Worsley”—

Sylvia flung open the door, and there they all were, Mr. and Mrs. Worsley, Gladys and Enid, two good-looking men in the background, two children in the foreground.

“Gladys! Enid!”

“Sylvia!”

“Oh, Sylvia, you were priceless! Oh, we enjoyed ourselves no end! You don’t know my husband. Ian, come and bow nicely to the pretty lady,” cried Gladys.

“Sylvia, it was simply ripping. We laughed and laughed. Ralph, come and be introduced, and this is Stumpy, my boy,” Enid cried, simultaneously.

“Fancy, he’s a grandfather,” the daughters exclaimed, dragging Mr. Worsley forward. He looked younger than ever.

“Hercules is at Oxford, or of course he’d have come, too. This is Proodles,” said Gladys, pointing to the little girl.

“Sylvia, why did you desert us like that?” Mrs. Worsley reproachfully asked. “When are you coming down to stay with us at Arbor End? Of course the children are married....” She broke off with half a sigh.

“Oh, but we can all squash in,” Gladys shouted.

“Oh, rather,” Enid agreed. “The kids can sleep in the coal-scuttles. We sha’n’t notice any difference.”

“Dears, it’s so wonderful to see you,” Sylvia gasped. “But do tell me who you all are over again. I’m so muddled.”

“I’m Mrs. Ian Campbell,” Gladys explained. “And this is Ian. And this is Proodles, and at home there’s Groggles, who’s too small for anything except pantomimes. And that’s Mrs. Ralph Dennison, and that’s Ralph, and that’s Stumpy, and at home Enid’s got a girlie called Barbara. Mother hates being a grandmother four times over, so she’s called Aunt Victoria, and of course father’s still one of the children. We’ve both been married seven years.”

Nothing had so much brought home to Sylvia the flight of time as this meeting with Gladys and Enid, who when she last saw them were only sixteen. It was incredible. And they had not forgotten her; in what seemed now a century they had not forgotten her! Sylvia told them about Miss Ashley’s visit and suggested that they should come and join the party of girls from Hornton House. It would be fun, would it not? Miss Primer was still at the school.

Gladys and Enid were delighted with the plan, and on the day fixed about twenty girls invaded Sylvia’s dressing-room, shepherded by Miss Primer, who was still melting with tears for Rodrigo’s death in the scene. Miss Ashley had brought the carriage to drive Sylvia back, but she insisted upon going in a motor-’bus with the others and was well rewarded by Miss Primer’s ecstasies of apprehension. Sylvia wandered with Gladys and Enid down well-remembered corridors, in and out of bedrooms and class-rooms; she listened to resolutions to send Prudence and Barbara to Hornton House in a few years. For Sylvia it was almost too poignant, the thought of these families growing up all round her, while she, after so many years, was still really as much alone as she had always been. The company of all these girls with their slim black legs, their pigtails and fluffy hair tied back with big bows, the absurdly exaggerated speech and the enlaced loves of girlhood—the accumulation of it all was scarcely to be borne.

When Sylvia visited Arbor End and talked once again to Mrs. Worsley, sitting at the foot of her bed, about the wonderful lives of that so closely self-contained family, the desolation of the future came visibly nearer; it seemed imperative at whatever cost to drive it back.

Shortly before Christmas a card was brought round to Sylvia—“Mrs. Prescott-Merivale, Hardingham Hall, Hunts.”

“Who is it?” she asked her maid.

“It’s a lady, miss.”

“Well of course I didn’t suppose a cassowary had sent up his card. What’s she like?”

The maid strove to think of some phrase that would describe the visitor, but she fell back hopelessly upon her original statement.

“She’s a lady, miss.” Then, with a sudden radiancy lighting her eyes, she added, “And there’s a little boy with her.”

“My entertainment seems to be turning into a children’s treat,” Sylvia muttered to herself. “Sic itur ad astra.”

“I beg your pardon, miss, did you say to show her in?”

Sylvia nodded.

Presently a tall young woman in the late twenties, with large and brilliant gray eyes, rose-flushed and deep in furs, came in, accompanied by an extraordinarily handsome boy of seven or eight.

“How awfully good of you to let me waste a few minutes of your time,” she said, and as she spoke, Sylvia had a fleeting illusion that it was herself who was speaking, a sensation infinitely rapid, but yet sufficiently clear to make her ask herself the meaning of it, and to find in the stranger’s hair the exact replica of her own. The swift illusion and the equally swift comparison were fled before she had finished inviting her visitor to sit down.

“I must explain who I am. I’ve heard about you, oh, of course, publicly, but also from my brother.”

“Your brother?” repeated Sylvia.

“Yes, Michael Fane.”

“He’s not with you?”

“No. I wish he had been. Alas! he’s gone off to look for a friend who, by the way, I expect you know also. Maurice Avery? All sorts of horrid rumors about what had happened to him in Morocco were being brought back to us, so Michael went off last spring, and has been with him ever since.”

“But I thought he was a monk,” Sylvia said.

Mrs. Merivale laughed with what seemed rather like relief. “No, he’s neither priest nor monk, thank goodness, though the prospect still hangs over us.”

“After all these years?” Sylvia asked, in astonishment.

“Oh, my dear Miss Scarlett, don’t forget the narrow way is also long. But I didn’t come to talk to you about Michael. I simply most shamelessly availed myself of his having met you a long time ago to give myself an excuse for talking to you about your performance. Of course it’s absolutely great. How lucky you are!”

“Lucky?” Sylvia could not help glancing at the handsome boy beside her.

“He’s rather a lamb, isn’t he?” Mrs. Merivale agreed. “But you started all sorts of old, forgotten, hidden-away, burned-out fancies of mine this afternoon, and—you see, I intended to be a professional pianist once, but I got married instead. Much better, really, because, unless—Oh, I don’t know. Yes, I am jealous of you. You’ve picked me up and put me down again where I was once. Now the conversation’s backed into me, and I really do want to talk about you. Your performance is the kind about which one wonders why nobody ever did it before. That’s the greatest compliment one can pay an artist, I think. All great art is the great expression of a great commonplace; that’s why it always looks so easy. I do hope you’re having the practical success you deserve.”

“Yes, I think I shall be all right,” Sylvia said. “Only, I expect that after the New-Year I shall have to cut my show considerably and take a music-hall engagement. I’m not making a fortune at the Pierian.”

“How horrid for you! How I should love to play with you! Oh dear! It’s heartrending to say it, but it’s much too late. Well, I mustn’t keep you. You’ve given me such tremendous pleasure and just as much pain with it as makes the pleasure all the sharper.... I’ll write and tell Michael about you.”

“I expect he’s forgotten my name by now,” Sylvia said.

“Oh no, he never forgets anybody, even in the throes of theological speculation. Good-by. I see that this is your last performance for the present. I shall come and hear you again when you reopen. How odious about music-halls. You ought to have called yourself Silvia Scarletti, told your press agent that you were the direct descendant of the composer, vowed that when you came to England six months ago you could speak nothing but Polish, and you could have filled the Pierian night and day for a year. We’re queer people, we English. I think, you know, it’s a kind of shyness, the way we treat native artists. You get the same thing in families. It’s not really that the prophet has no honor, etc.; it really is, I believe, a fear of boasting, which would be such bad form, wouldn’t it? Of course we’ve ruined ourselves as a nation by our good manners and our sense of humor. Why, we’ve even insisted that what native artists we do support shall be gentlemen first and artists second. In what other country could an actor be knighted for his trousers or an author for his wife’s dowry? Good-by. I do wish you great, great success.”

“Anyway, I can’t be knighted,” Sylvia laughed.

“Oh, don’t be too sure. A nation that has managed to turn its artists into gentlemen will soon insist on turning its women into gentlemen, too, or at any rate on securing their good manners in some way.”

“Women will never really have good manners,” Sylvia said.

“No, thank God. There you’re right. Well, good-by. It’s been so jolly to talk to you, and again I’ve loved every moment of this afternoon. Charles,” she added to the handsome boy, “after bragging about your country’s good manners, let’s see you make a decent bow.”

He inclined his head with a grave courtesy, opened the door for his mother, and followed her out.

The visit of Michael’s sister, notwithstanding that she had envied Sylvia’s luck, left her with very little opinion of it herself. What was her success, after all? A temporary elation dependent upon good health and the public taste, financially uncertain, emotionally wearing, radically unsatisfying and insecure, for, however good her performance was, it was always mummery, really, as near as mummery could get to creative work, perhaps, but mortal like its maker.

“Sad to think this is the last performance here,” said her maid.

Sylvia agreed with her. It was a relief to find a peg on which to hang the unreasonable depression that was weighing her down. She passed out of her dressing-room. As the stage door swung to behind her a figure stepped into the lamplight of the narrow court; it was Jimmy Monkley. The spruceness had left him; all the color, too, had gone from his face, which was now sickly white—an evil face with its sandy mustache streaked with gray and its lusterless green eyes. Sylvia was afraid that from the way she started back from him he would think that she scorned him for having been in prison, and with an effort she tried to be cordial.

“You’ve done damned well for yourself,” he said, paying no attention to what she was saying. She found this meeting overwhelmingly repulsive and moved toward her taxi. It was seeming to her that Monkley had the power to snatch her away and plunge her back into that life of theirs. She would really rather have met Philip than him.

“Damned well for yourself,” he repeated.

“I’m sorry I can’t stay. I’m in a hurry. I’m in a hurry.”

She reached the taxi and slammed the door in his face.

This unexpected meeting convinced Sylvia of the necessity of attaching herself finally to a life that would make the resurrection of a Monkley nothing more influential than a nightmare. She knew that she was giving way to purely nervous fears in being thus affected by what, had she stopped to think, was the natural result of her name’s becoming known. But the liability to nervous fears was in itself an argument that something was wrong. When had she ever been a prey to such hysteria before? When had she allowed herself to be haunted by a face, as now she was being haunted by Monkley’s face? Suppose he had seated himself behind the taxi and that when she reached the Airdales’ house he should once more be standing on the pavement in the lamplight?

In Brompton Road Sylvia told the driver to stop. She wanted to do some Christmas shopping. After an hour or more spent among toys she came out with a porter loaded with packages, and looked round her quickly; but of course he was not upon the pavement. How absurd she had been! In any case, what could Monkley do? She would forget all about him. To-morrow was Christmas Eve. There was going to be such a jolly party at the Airdales’. The taxi hummed toward West Kensington. Sylvia leaned back, huddled up with her thoughts, until they reached Lillie Road. She had passed Mrs. Meares’s house so many times without giving it a second look. Now she found herself peering out into the thickening fog in case Monkley should be standing upon the door-step. She was glad when she reached the Airdales’ house, warm and bright, festooned with holly and mistletoe. There were pleasant little household noises everywhere, comfortable little noises, and a rosy glow from the silken shades of the lamps; the carpet was so quiet and the parlor-maid in a clean cap and apron so efficient, so quick to get in all the parcels and shut out the foggy night.

Olive was already in the drawing-room, and because this was to be a specially unceremonious evening in preparation for the party to-morrow, Olive was in a pink tea-gown that blended with the prettiness of her cozy house and made her more essentially a part of it all. How bleak was her own background in comparison with this, Sylvia thought. Jack was dining out most unwillingly and had left a great many pleas to be forgiven by Sylvia on the first night of her Christmas visit. After dinner they sat in the drawing-room, and Sylvia told Olive about her meeting with Monkley. She said nothing about Michael Fane’s sister; that meeting did not seem to have any bearing upon the subject she wanted to discuss.

“Can you understand,” Sylvia asked, “being almost frightened into marriage?”

“Yes, I think so,” Olive replied, as judicially as the comfort of her surroundings would allow. It was impossible to preserve a critical attitude in this room; in such a suave and genial atmosphere one accepted anything.

“Well, do you still object to my marrying Arthur?” Sylvia demanded.

“But, my dear, I never objected to your marrying him. I may have suggested, when I first saw him, that he seemed rather too much the type of the ordinary actor for you, but that was only because you yourself had always scoffed at actors so haughtily. Since I’ve known him I’ve grown to like him. Please don’t think I ever objected to your marrying him. I never felt more sure about anybody’s knowing her own mind than I do about you.”

“Well, I am going to marry him,” Sylvia said.

“Darling Sylvia, why do you say it so defiantly? Everybody will be delighted. Jack was talking only the other day about his perpetual dread that you’d never give yourself a chance of establishing your position finally, because you were so restless.”

Sylvia contemplated an admission to Olive of having lived with Arthur for a year in America, but in this room the fact had an ugly look and seemed to belong rather to that evil face of the past that had confronted her with such ill omen this evening, rather than to anything so homely as marriage.

“Arthur may not be anything more than an actor,” she went on. “But in my profession what else do I want? He has loved me for a long time; I’m very fond of him. It’s essential that I should have a background so that I shall never be shaken out of my self-possession by anything like this evening’s encounter. I’ve lived a life of feverish energy, and it’s only since the improvisations that I can begin to believe it wasn’t all wasted. I made a great mistake when I was seventeen, and when I was nineteen I tried to repair it with a still greater mistake. Then came Lily; she was a mistake. Oh, when I look back at it all, it’s nothing but mistake after mistake. I long for such funny ordinary little pleasures. Olive darling, I’ve tried, I’ve tried to think I can do without love, without children, without family, without friends. I can’t.”

The tears were running swiftly, and all the time more swiftly, down Sylvia’s cheeks while she was speaking. Olive jumped up from her soft and quilted chair and knelt beside her friend.

“My darling Sylvia, you have friends, you have, indeed you have.”

“I know,” Sylvia went on. “It’s ungrateful of me. Why, if it hadn’t been for you and Jack I should have gone mad. But just because you’re so happy together, and because you have Sylvius and Rose, and because I flit about on the outskirts of it all like a timid, friendly, solitary ghost, I must have some one to love me. I’ve really treated Arthur very badly. I’ve kept him waiting now for a year. I wasn’t brave enough to let him go, and I wasn’t brave enough to marry him. I’ve never been undecided in my life. It must be that the gipsy in me has gone forever, I think. This success of mine has been leading all the time to settling down properly. Most of the people who came back to me out of the past were the nice people, like my old mistress and the grown-up twins, and I want to be like them. Oh, Olive, I’m so tired of being different, of people thinking that I’m hard and brutal and cynical. I’m not. Indeed I’m not. I couldn’t have felt that truly appalling horror of Monkley this evening if I were really bad.”

“Sylvia dear, you’re working yourself up needlessly. How can you say that you’re bad? How can you say such things about yourself? You’re not religious, perhaps.”

“Listen, Olive, if I marry Arthur I swear I’ll make it a success. You know that I have a strong will. I’m not going to criticize him. I’m simply determined to make him and myself happy. It’s very easy to love him, really. He’s like a boy—very weak, you know—but with all sorts of charming qualities, and his mother would be so glad if it were all settled. Olive, I meant to tell you a whole heap of things about myself, about what I’ve done, but I won’t. I’m going to forget it all and be happy. I’m glad it’s Christmas-time. I’ve bought such ripping things for the kids. When I was buying them to-night there came into my head almost my first adventure when I was a very little girl and thought I’d found a ten-franc piece which was really the money I’d been given for the marketing. I had just such an orgy of buying to-night. Did you know that a giraffe could make a noise? Well, it can, or at any rate the giraffe I bought for Sylvius can. You twist its neck and it protests like a bronchial calf.”

The party on Christmas Eve was a great success. Lucian Hope burnt a hole in the table-cloth with what was called a drawing-room firework. Jack split his coat trying to hide inside his bureau. Arthur, sitting on a bottle with his legs crossed, lit a candle, twice running. The little red-haired singer found the ring in the pudding. Sylvia found the sixpence. Nobody found the button, so it must have been swallowed. It was a splendid party. Sylvius and Rose did not begin to cry steadily until after ten o’clock.

When the guests were getting ready to leave, about two o’clock on Christmas morning, and while Lucian Hope was telling everybody in turn that somebody must have swallowed the button inadvertently, to prove that he was quite able to pronounce “inadvertently,” Sylvia took Arthur down the front-door steps and walked with him a little way along the foggy street.

“Arthur, I’ll marry you when you like,” she said, laying a hand upon his arm.

“Sylvia, what a wonderful Christmas present!”

“To us both,” she whispered.

Then on an impulse she dragged him back to the house and proclaimed their engagement, which meant the opening of new bottles of champagne and the drinking of so many healths that it was three o’clock before the party broke up. Nor was there any likelihood of anybody’s being able to say “inadvertently” by the time he had reached the corner of the street.

Arthur had begged Sylvia to come down to Dulwich on Christmas day, and Mrs. Madden rejoiced over the decision they had reached at last. There were one or two things to be considered, the most important of which was the question of money. Sylvia had spent the last penny of what was left of Morera’s money in launching herself, and she owed nearly two hundred pounds besides. Arthur had saved nothing. Both of them, however, had been offered good engagements for the spring, Arthur to tour as lead in one of the Vanity productions, which might mean an engagement at the Vanity itself in the autumn; Sylvia to play a twenty minutes’ turn at all the music-halls of a big circuit. It seemed unsatisfactory to marry and immediately afterward to separate, and they decided each to take the work that had been offered, to save all the money possible, and to aim at both playing in London next autumn, but in any case to be married in early June when the tours would end. They should then have a couple of months to themselves. Mrs. Madden wanted them to be married at once; but the other way seemed more prudent, and Sylvia, having once made up her mind, was determined to be practical and not to run the risk of spoiling by financial worries the beginning of their real life together. Her marriage in its orderliness and forethought and simplicity of intention was to compensate for everything that had gone before. Mrs. Madden thought they were both of them being too deliberate, but then she had run away once with her father’s groom and must have had a fundamentally impulsive, even a reckless temperament.

The engagement was announced with an eye to the most advantageous publicity that is the privilege of being servants of the public. One was able to read everywhere of a theatrical romance or more coldly of a forthcoming theatrical marriage; nearly all the illustrated weeklies had two little oval photographs underneath which ran the legend:

In one particularly intimate paper was a short interview headed:

and so on, with what was described as a portrait of Miss Sylvia Scarlet inset, but which without the avowal would probably have been taken for the thumbprint of a paperboy.

“This is all terribly vulgar,” Sylvia bewailed, but Jack, Arthur, and Olive were all firm in the need for thorough advertisement, and she acquiesced woefully. In January she and Arthur parted for their respective tours. Jack, before she went away, begged Sylvia for the fiftieth time to take back the money she had settled on her godchildren. He argued with her until she got angry.

“Jack, if you mention that again I’ll never come to your house any more. One of the most exquisite joys in all my life was when I was able to do that, and when you and Olive were sweet enough to let me, for you really were sweet and simple in those days and not purse-proud bourgeois, as you are now. Please, Jack!” She had tears in her eyes. “Don’t be unkind.”

“But supposing you have children of your own?” he urged.

“Jack, don’t go on. It really upsets me. I cannot bear the idea of that money’s belonging to anybody but the twins.”

“Did you tell Arthur?”

“It’s nothing to do with Arthur. It’s only to do with me. It was my present. It was made before Arthur came on the scene.”

With great unwillingness Jack obeyed her command not to say anything more on the subject.

Sylvia earned a good enough salary to pay off nearly all her debts by May, when her tour brought her to the suburban music-halls and she was able to amuse herself by house-hunting for herself and Arthur. All her friends, and not the least old ones like Gladys and Enid, took a profound interest in her approaching marriage. Wedding-presents even began to arrive. The most remarkable omen of the gods’ pleasure was a communication she received in mid-May from Miss Dashwood’s solicitors to say that Miss Dashwood had died and had left to Sylvia in her will the freehold of Mulberry Cottage with all it contained. Olive was enraptured with her good fortune, and wanted to telegraph to Arthur, who was in Leeds that week; but Sylvia said she would rather write:

The next morning arrived a letter from Leeds, which had crossed hers:

“That funny little red-haired girl!” Sylvia gasped. Then like a surging wave the affront to her pride overwhelmed her. With an effort she looked at her other letters. One was from Michael Fane’s sister:

“Never,” Sylvia cried, tearing the letter into small pieces. “Ah no! That, never, never!”

She left her rooms, and went to Mulberry Cottage. The caretaker fluttered round her to show her sense of Sylvia’s importance as her new mistress. Was there nothing that she could do? Was there nothing that she could get?

Sylvia sat on the seat under the mulberry-tree in the still morning sunlight of May. It was impossible to think, impossible to plan, impossible, impossible. The ideas in her brain went slowly round and round. Nothing would stop them. Round and round they went, getting every moment more mixed up with one another. But gradually from the confusion one idea emerged, sharp, strong, insistent—she must leave England. The moment this idea had stated itself, Sylvia could think of nothing but the swiftness and secrecy of her departure. She felt that if one person should ever fling a glance of sympathy or condolence or pity or even of mild affection, she should kill herself to set free her outraged soul. She made no plans for the future. She had no reproaches for Arthur. She had nothing but the urgency of flight as from the Furies themselves. Quickly she went back to her rooms and packed. All her big luggage she took to Mulberry Cottage and placed with the caretaker. She sent a sum of money to the solicitors and asked them to pay the woman until she came back.

At the last moment, in searching through her trunks, she found the yellow shawl that was wrapped round her few treasures of ancestry. She was going to leave it behind, but on second thought she packed it in the only trunk she took with her. She was going back perhaps to the life of which these treasures were the only solid pledge.

“This time, yes, I’m off with the raggle-taggle gipsies in deadly earnest. Charing Cross,” she told the taxi-driver.

THE END

image of the book's back cover

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