The Lovely Lady

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"Somehow," Peter said as he fastened it with a pin underneath his lapel,
"seventeen years seems a shorter time to look back on than to look
forward to."

"Well, when we've put twenty-five years of work into it--and that's
nothing to what we'll get into the next seventeen." Lessing's tone keyed
admirably with the bright ample day outside, the rapid glint of the
river and the tips of the maple all a-tremble with the urgency of new
growth. The senior partner's eye roved from that to the restrained
richness of the office furniture from which the new was not yet worn,
and returned to the contemplation of the towering white cumuli beginning
to pile up beyond the farther bank of the river. "There's no end to what
a man can lift," he asserted confidently, "once he's got his feet under
him."

"We've carried a lot," Peter assented cheerfully, "and sometimes it was
rather steep going, but now it's carrying us. The question is"--and here
his voice fell off a shade and a slight gathering appeared between his
eyes--"the real question is, I suppose, what it is carrying us _to_."

"Where's the good of that?" Julian protested. "It's only a limitation to
set out for a particular place. The fun is in the going. You keep right
along with the procession until old age gets you. The thing is just to
keep it up as long as you can." He swung himself into a sitting posture
on the edge of the desk and noted that the slight pucker had not left
his partner's eyes. "What's the idea?" he wished affectionately to know.

"Oh, nothing much, but I sort of grew up with the idea of
Duty--something you had to do because there was nobody else to do it.
You had not only to do it but you had to like it, not because it was
likable, but because it was your duty. It was always right in front of
me: I couldn't see over or around it; I just had to do it."

"Well, you did it," Lessing corroborated. "Clarice says the way you've
taken care of Ellen----"

"And the way Ellen has taken care of me--but then Ellen was all the
woman I had." He caught himself up swiftly after that; it was seldom
even to his partner that anything escaped him in reference to the
interior life of dreams which had gone on in him, quite happily behind
his undistinguished exterior. "But somehow it hasn't seemed to come out
anywhere. I've done my duty ... and when I'm dead and Ellen's dead,
where is it? After all, what have I done?"

"Ah, look at Pleasanton," Julian reminded him; "do you call that
nothing?" They looked together toward the esplanade along the river,
beginning at this hour to be flecked with the white aprons of
nurse-maids and their charges. "We've given them clean water to drink
and clean streets, and a safe place for the children to play in. The
fight we had with the city council for _that_...!" He waved his arm
again toward the well-parked river front. "Ever since I sold your farm
for you and you began putting your money into the business, we've walked
right along with it. Even before you left Siegel Brothers and we used to
sit up nights with the map, planning where to put our money like a
checker-board, we saw things like this for the town, and now we've made
'em true. And you say we've done nothing!" The senior partner was
touched a little in his tenderest susceptibilities.

"Oh, well," Peter admitted with a shamed laugh, "I suppose man is an
incurable egotist. I was thinking of something more personal, something
_mine_, the way a book or a picture belongs to the man who makes it."

"The game isn't over yet," Lessing reminded him, with a glance at the
unfolding bud which Clarice had sent as a symbol of the opening year;
"you're only forty. And, anyway, the money's yours; you made it."
Something in the word recalled him to a thought that had been earlier
in his mind. "Clarice wanted me to ask you to-day if you had any idea
how much you are worth."

Peter's attention came back from the window with a start. "Does that
mean the Fresh Air Fund or the Association for the Protection of
Ownerless Pups?"

Julian grinned. "Ownerless bachelors rather. Clarice has an idea you are
well enough off to marry."

"If it were a proposition of my being married to Clarice I should
consider myself well enough off without anything else----" Peter dropped
the light, accustomed banter for a sober tone. "How well off does your
wife think I ought to be?"

"She's got it figured out that all you've spent on making Ellen
comfortable for life isn't a patch on what she and the boys cost me, so
it's high time you set about your natural destiny of making some woman
happy."

"Look here, Julian, _is_ it an object for a man to live for, making some
woman happy?"

"Well, it keeps you on the jump all right," Lessing assured him. "What
else is there? It's a way of making yourself happy when you come to
look at it; keeping her and the kids so that you leave the world better
off than you found it. It suits _me_." He was looking, indeed,
particularly well suited, in spite of a disposition to portliness and a
suspicion of thinning hair, with what the seventeen years just past had
brought him. A warm appreciation of what those things were touched his
regard for his companion with a sober affectionateness. "I reckon
Clarice is right: a wife and a couple of kids is the prescription for
your case. That's why she wanted me to remind you that you could afford
'em."

"And has she named the day?" Peter wished to know whimsically.

"Oh, I say, Weatheral----"

"My dear Julian, if I hadn't been able to see what Clarice has been up
to for the last six months, at least I could have depended on Ellen to
see it for me."

"She doesn't object, does she?"

"Oh, if you think the privilege of being aunt to your children has made
up to her for not being aunt to mine----"

"The privilege is on the other side. But anyway, I'm glad you got on to
it. I didn't want to be a spoil sport. I suppose women's instincts can
be trusted in these things, but I hated to see Clarice coming it over
you blind."

Peter wondered to himself a little, which of the charming ladies to whom
he had been introduced lately, Clarice had selected for him. He wasn't,
however, concerned about her coming it blind over anybody but the senior
partner who got down now from the desk, whistling softly and walking
with a wide step as a man will in June when affairs go well with him,
and he feels that if there are still some things which he desires he is
able to get them for himself.

"Don't forget you're coming to us on Saturday; and we dine together
to-night as usual."

"As usual." Always on the anniversary of their beginning business
together Weatheral and Lessing, who were still, in spite of seeing one
another daily for seventeen years, able to be interested in one another,
dined apart from their families, savouring pleasantly that essential
essence of maleness, the mutual power of work well accomplished. It was
the best tribute that Clarice and Ellen could pay to the occasion that
they understood that, much as their several lives had profited by the
partnership, they were still and naturally outside of it.

On this occasion, however, it was impossible for Peter to keep Mrs.
Lessing out of the background of his consciousness, because of the part
her suggestion of the morning played in new realization of himself as
the rich Mr. Weatheral of Pleasanton. He credited her with sufficient
knowledge of his character to have egged Julian on to the reminder as a
part of the game she had played with him for the past two or three
years, by which Peter was to be instated in a life more in keeping with
his opportunities.

It was a game Clarice played with life everywhere, coaxing it to yield
its choicest bloom to her. She had an instinct for choiceness like a
hummingbird, darting here and there for sweetness. Her flutterings were
never of uncertainty but such as kept her in the perfect airy poise. If
she wanted marriage for Peter it was because she could imagine nothing
better for anybody than a marriage like hers, and if she chose this
time for letting him know that she was thinking of it, it was because in
those terms she could bring closest to him his new-found possibilities.
If she could have reached Peter with the personal certainty of riches by
explaining to him how far his dollars would stretch end to end, or how
many acres of postage stamps he could buy with them, she might have
thought less of him on that account, but she would have helped him to
understanding even on those terms. You couldn't have made Clarice
Lessing believe that whatever their limitations, people weren't entitled
to help simply because they needed it.

It had come upon Peter by leaps and bounds during the last two or three
years, both the wealth and the necessity of putting it to himself in
terms of personal expression. During the first ten years of the
partnership, the only use for money the simple needs of Ellen and
himself had established was to put it back into the business; a use
which had become almost an obligation during the time when both children
and opportunity were coming to Julian faster than the cash to meet them.
It was due to the high ground that Clarice had made for them all out of
what she and the children stood for, that Peter's superior cash
contribution to the firm had become a privilege. They had had, he and
Ellen, their stringent occasions; it had been Clarice's part to see that
since they endured the pinch of poverty they should at least get
something human out of it. It came out for Peter pleasantly as he walked
home through the mild June evening, just how much they had had. Much,
much more than they would have been able to buy with the money they
might in strict equity have withdrawn from the business. Nothing, he had
long admitted, that he could have purchased for his sister would have
been so satisfying as what Clarice contributed, pressing the full cup of
her motherhood to Ellen's thirsty lips. They might have grown sleek, he
and Ellen, without exceeding a proper ratio of expenditure, and if in
the end they had been a little less rich, they would still have had
enough to go on being sleek and comfortable to the end. That he was
still fit, as Mrs. Lessing's transparent efforts to marry him to her
friends guaranteed him to be, he felt was owing greatly to the terms on
which Clarice had admitted him to the adventure of bringing up a family.
That a special fitness was required for admission to Mrs. Lessing's
circle he would have guessed even without the aid of print which
consistently described it as Our Best Society, for it was a Best
attested to by all the marks by which Clarice herself expressed the
essential fineness of things.

One couldn't have told, from anything that appeared on the surface of
the Lessing's social environment, that life did not proceed there as it
did between Clarice and the Weatherals, by means of its subtler
sympathies, and proceed, at least so far as the women were concerned, on
a still higher plane of grace and harmony. It moved about her table and
across the lawns of Lessing's handsome country place, with such
soundless ease and perfection as it had glided for Peter through the
House with the Shining Walls. Or at least so it had seemed on those
occasions during the last few years when he had found himself wondrously
inside it.

It had been accepted by Ellen on the mere certainty of Clarice's mother
having been one of the Thatcher Inwoods, that Clarice should enlarge
her social borders with Lessing's increasing means until they included
people among whom Ellen would have been miserably shy and out of tune.
But not Ellen herself guessed how much of Peter's admission to its
inaccessibility was owing to the returns from hardly snatched options
and long-nursed opportunities, coming in in checks of six figures.
Perhaps Clarice herself never knew. It was one of the things that went
with being a Thatcher Inwood, wherever an occasion presented a handle of
nobility, to seize by that and maintain it in the face of any contingent
smallness. Clarice wouldn't have introduced Peter to her friends if he
hadn't been fit, and it was part of the social creed of women like
Clarice Lessing, which takes almost the authority of religion, that he
wouldn't have been in a position to be introduced if he hadn't been fit.
So it had happened for the past two years that Peter had found himself
skirting the fringe of Best Society, and identifying it with the life he
had lived so long, sitting with his book open on his knees in their
little flat, with Ellen across the fire from him knitting white things
for Julian's children. But the idea that having come into this
neighbourhood of fine appreciations he was to take up his home and live
there, opened more slowly. It required more than one of Clarice's swift
hummingbird darts, more than the flutter of suggestion to brush its
petals awake for him.

It lay so deep under all the years, the power of loving. He knew almost
nothing about it except that he had had it once, and that marriage
without it would be unthinkable, even such a marriage as Mrs. Lessing
had let him see was now possible to him. She had called with all her
delicate friendly skill, on something which only now under that summons
he began to miss. It was like a lost word in every sentence in which the
ordinary hopes of men are to be read, and he felt that until he found it
again all the help Mrs. Lessing could afford him would not enable him to
think of marriage as a thing desirable in itself. It was missing in him
still, when he came that night rather late to the apartment where only
the Japanese houseboy awaited him. One of the first things he had done
for Ellen with his increasing means, had been to buy back for her the
house at Bloombury with the garden and a bit of the orchard. She had
been there now since Decoration Day, retiring more and more into the
kindly village life as a point of vantage from which to mark with pride
the social distance that Peter travelled from her. It had been
understood from the beginning that she wasn't to go with him. The
tapping of her crutch was no more to be heard in the new gracious
existence than in the House where she had never followed him. Life for
Ellen was lived close at hand. There were hollyhocks and currant bushes
in her garden and Julian's children overran it.

It was not Ellen then that Peter missed as he sat alone in the house
that night with his back to the lowered light and his gaze seeking the
river and the flitting shapes of boats that went up and down on it,
freighted with young voices and laughter. He missed the Lovely Lady. He
knew now why he had not been able to think of marriage in the way
Clarice held it out to him, as a happy contingency of his now being as
rich as he had intended to be. It was because he had not thought of her
clearly for a long time.

There had been a period in the beginning of his life with Ellen, when
the lady of his dreams had been so near the surface of all his thinking
that she took on form and likeness from anything that was lovely and
young in his neighbourhood, but as things lovely and young drifted from
him with the years; and as the business took deeper and deeper hold on
his attention, she had become a mere floating figment, a live fluttering
spark in the very core of all his imaginings.

She had been beside him, a pleasant, indeterminate presence in the long
journey she travelled from the printed page to the accompanying click of
Ellen's needles. Sometimes at the opera she took on a gossamer tint from
the singer's face, and longer ago than he could afford operas, he had
understood that all the beauty of the world, bursting apple buds, the
great curve of the surf that set the beaches trembling, derived somehow
its pertinence from her. Now at the age of forty he had ceased to think
very much about the Lovely Lady.

It occurred to him that this might have something to do with his failure
to get a new relation to life out of his new wealth.

It had struck Peter rather forlornly during the past few years that
there was little use he could put money to, except to make more money.
He could see by turning his head to the room behind him how little there
was there of what he had fancied once riches would bring him. The lines
of the room were good, the amount of the annual rent assured that to
him, the furniture was good and the rugs expensive. Ellen believed that
money in rugs was a good investment, particularly if the colours were
strong and would stand fading. There were some choice things here and
there, a vase and pictures which Peter had chosen for himself, though he
was aware, as he took them in under the dull glow, that Ellen had
arranged them in strict reference to the size of the frames, and that
the whole effect failed of satisfaction. He thought his life might be
somewhat like that room, full of good things but lacking the touch that
should set them in fruitful order. It stole over him as persuasively as
the warm growing smell of the park below him that the something missed
might be the touch and presence of the Lovely Lady.

II

It was the late end of the afternoon when Peter stepped off the train at
the Lessing's station and into the trap that was waiting for him. He
learned from Lessing's man that the family had been kept by the tennis
match at Maplemont and he was to come on to the house at his leisure.
That being the case, Peter took the reins himself and made a long detour
through the dust-smelling country roads, so that it was quite six when
he reached the house, and everybody dressing for the early dinner.

He made so hasty a change himself in his fear of being late, that when
he came down to the living-room in a quarter of an hour there was no one
there to meet him. Absorbed particles of the bright day gave off in the
dusk and made it golden. There were honeysuckles on the pergola outside,
and in the room beyond a girl singing a quiet air, half-trilled and
half-forgotten. He heard the singer moving toward him through the vacant
house, of which the doors stood open to the evening coolness, and the
click of the electric button as she passed, and saw the rooms burst one
by one into the bloom of shaded lights. So she came, busy with the
hummed fragments of her songs, and turned the lamp full on Peter before
she was aware of him, but she was not half so much disconcerted.

"You must be Mr. Weatheral," she said. "Mrs. Lessing sent me to say she
expected you. I am Miss Goodward."

She gave him her hand for a gracious moment before she turned to what
had brought her so early down, the arrangement of two great bowls of
wild ferns and vines which a servant had just placed on either end of
the low mantlepiece.

"We brought them in from Archer's Glen on the way home," she told him
over her shoulder, her hands busy with deft, quick touches. She was all
in white, which took a pearly lustre from the lamps, and for the moment
she was as beautiful as Peter believed her. A tiny unfinished phrase of
the song floated half consciously from her lips as a bubble. "They look
better so, don't you think?" As she stood off to measure the effect, it
seemed to Peter that the Spirit of the House had received him; it was so
men dream of home-coming, without sensible displacement of a life going
on in it, lovely and secure, as a bark slips into some still pool to its
moorings. He yielded himself naturally to the impersonal intimacy of her
welcome and all the sordid ways of his life led up to her.

It was not all at once he saw it so. He kept watching her all that
evening as one watches a perfect thing, a bird or a dancer, sensing in
the slim turn of her ankle, the lithe throat, the delicate perfume that
she shook from her summer draperies, so many strokes of a master hand.
She was evidently on terms with the Lessings which permitted her
acceptance of him at the family valuation, but the perfection of her
method was such that it never quite sunk his identity as the junior
partner in his character of Uncle Peter.

This was a nuance, if Peter had but known it, which Eunice Goodward
could have no more missed than she could have eaten with her knife. She
had been trained to the finer social adjustments as to a cult: Clarice's
game of persuading life to present itself with a smiling countenance,
played all in the key of personal relations. It was as if Nature, having
tried her hand at a great many ordinary persons, each with one gift of
sympathy or graciousness, had culled and compacted the best of them into
Eunice Goodward; which was precisely the case except that Peter through
his unfamiliarity with the Best Society couldn't be expected to know
that the intelligence which had put together so much perfectness was no
less calculating than that which goes to the matching of a string of
pearls. All that he got from it was precisely all that he was meant to
receive--namely, the conviction that she couldn't have charmed him so
had she not been altogether charming.

And as yet he did not know what had happened to him. He thought, when he
awoke in the morning to a new realization of the satisfactoriness of
living, that the fresh air had done it, the breath of the nearby
untrimmed forest, the loose-leaved roses pressed against the pane
beginning to give off warm odours in the sun. Then he came out on the
terrace and saw Eunice Goodward, looking like a thin slip of the morning
herself, in a blue dress buttoned close to her figure with wide white
buttons and a tiny froth of white at the short sleeves and open throat.
Across her bosom it was caught with a blue stone set in dull silver,
which served also to hold in place a rose that matched the morning tint
of her skin. She was talking with the Lessings' chauffeur as Peter came
up with her and all her accents were of dismay. They were to have driven
over to Maplemont that afternoon, she explained to Peter, for the last
of the tennis sets, and now Gilmore had just told her that the car must
go to the shop for two or three days. She was so much more charming in
the way she forgave Gilmore for her evident disappointment that he,
being a young man and troubled by a sense of moral responsibility, was
quite overcome by it.

"But, nonsense"; Peter was certain "there is always something can be
done to cars." There was, Gilmore assured him, but it took time to do
it, and to-morrow would be Sunday. "If you'd only thought to come down
in the motor yourself, sir----" the chauffeur reproached him. The truth
was that Peter hadn't a car of his own and Gilmore knew it. There was an
electric runabout which had gone down to Bloombury with Ellen, and a
serviceable roadster which was part of the office equipment, but the
rich Mr. Weatheral had never taken the pains to own a private car. Now,
as he hastily drew out his watch, it occurred to him that Lessing's
chauffeur was a fellow of more perspicuity than he had given him credit
for. The two men communicated wordlessly across the cool width of the
terrace steps.

"At what hour," Peter wished to know, "would we have to leave here to
reach Maplemont in good time? Then if you can be ready to leave the
moment my car gets here...." He excused himself to go to the telephone;
half an hour later when he joined the family at breakfast he had
discovered some of the things that, besides making more money with it,
can be done with money.

The knowledge suited him like his own garment, as if it had been lying
ready for him to put on when the occasion required it, and now became
him admirably. He perceived it to be a proper male function to produce
easily and with precision whatever utterly charming young ladies might
reasonably require. He appreciated Miss Goodward's acceptance of it as
she came down from the house bewilderingly tied into soft veils for the
afternoon's drive, as a part of her hall-marked fineness. If she
couldn't help knowing, taking in the car's glittering newness from point
to point, that its magnificence had materialized out of her simple wish
for it, she at least didn't allow him to think it was any more than she
would have expected of him. So completely did he yield himself to this
new sense of the fitness of things that it came as a shock to have her,
as soon as they had joined themselves to the holiday-coloured crowd that
streamed and shifted under the bright boughs of Maplemont, reft from him
by friendly, compelling voices, and particularly by Burton Henderson,
who played singles and went about bareheaded and singularly
self-possessed. It was unthinkable to Peter that, in view of her
recently discovered importance in putting him at rights with himself,
that he hadn't arranged with her that they were to be more together. For
the moment it was almost a derogation of her charm that she shouldn't
herself have recognized by some overt act her extraordinary opportunity.
And then in a moment more he perceived that she had recognized it. He
had only to wait, as he saw, and he would find himself pleasantly beside
her, and at each renewal of the excluding companionship, he was more
subtly aware that it was accorded not to anything he was but to what she
had it in her power so beautifully to make of him.

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