The Lovely Lady

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So perfectly did she strike the key with him, when, in the intervals of
the afternoon's entertainment they found themselves sitting or walking
together, that he could not have imagined her to have been out of it,
not even in a rather long session after tea with Burton Henderson among
the rhododendrons, in which it was apparent from the young man's manner
that she hadn't at least been in tune with him. It occurred just as they
were leaving and served in the flutter of delay it occasioned to fix
the attention of all their party on Eunice coming out of the shrubbery
with young Henderson in her wake, batting aimlessly at the grass-tops
with the racquet which he still carried. There was an air of sulkiness
about him which caused Mrs. Lessing enigmatically to say that Eunice was
altogether too good to that young man. To which Lessing's "Well, if she
is, he doesn't seem to appreciate," served also to confirm Peter in the
role which the effect she produced on himself had created for him. He at
least appreciated the way in which she had made him feel himself the
Distributer of Benefits, to a degree which made it almost obligatory of
her to go on with it.

Successfully as Miss Goodward had kept for Peter during the day his new
relation to his wealth on the one hand and society on the other, she
seemed that evening quite to have abandoned him. While the family was
having coffee on the terrace after dinner, she slipped away from them to
reappear lower down among the rose trees, her white dress gathering all
that was left of the lingering glow. The junior partner, feeling himself
never so much junior, though he knew it was but a scant year or two,
sat on through Lessing's inconsequential comment on business and the
day's adventures, hearing not a word; now and then his chair creaked
with the intensity of his preoccupation. It grew dusk and the lamps
blossomed in the house behind them; presently Clarice slipped away to
the children and the evening damp fell over the rose garden. Peter could
endure it no longer. He believed as he rose suddenly with a stretching
movement that he meant merely to relieve the tension of sitting by
pacing up and down; it was unaccountable therefore that he should find
himself at the edge of the terrace. He wondered why on earth Clarice
couldn't have helped him a little, and then as if in response to his
deep instinctive demand upon her, he heard her call softly to her
husband from the door of the house. At the scrape of Julian's chair on
the terrace tiling, Peter cast away his cigar and hurried into the dusk
of the garden.

He found her at last by the herbacious border, keeping touch with the
flight of a sphinx-head moth along the tall white rockets of phlox.
Peter whipped out his handkerchief and dropped it deftly over the
fluttering wings. In a moment he had stilled them in his hand. Miss
Goodward cried out to him:

"You've spoiled his happy evening!"

"He's not hurt...." Peter laid the moth gently on a feathery flower
head, and the tiny whispering whirr began again. "I thought you wanted
him."

"I did--but not to catch him," Miss Goodward explained. "I wanted just
to want him."

"Ah, I'm afraid I'm one of those people with whom to want a thing is to
go after it," Peter justified himself.

"So one gathers from what one hears." She brushed him as lightly with
the compliment as with the wings of a moth. "I wasn't really wanting him
so much as I was wanting to _be_ him for a while. Just to pass from one
lovely hour to another and nothing to pay! But we humans have always to
pay something."

"Or some one pays for us."

"Well, isn't that worse ... taking it out of somebody else?"

"I'm not so sure; some people enjoy paying. It's not a bad feeling, I
assure you: being able to pay. Haven't you found that out yet?"

"Not in Trethgarten Square." Mrs. Lessing had managed to let him know
during the day that her guest had been reared within the sacred pale of
those first families in whom the choice stock of humanness is refined by
being maintained at precisely the same level for at least three
generations.

"In Trethgarten Square," Peter reminded her, "we are told that you
settle your account just by _being_; that you manage somehow to become
something so superior and delectable that the rest of us are willing to
pay for the privilege of having you about." He would have liked to add
that recently, no later in fact than the evening before, he had come to
think that this was so, but as she hesitated in her walk beside him, he
saw that she was concerned in putting the case to herself quite as much
as to him.

"It's not that exactly; more perhaps that our whole thought about life
is to live it so that there won't be anything to pay. We have to manage
to add things up like a column of figures with nothing to carry.
Perhaps that's why we get so little out of it."

"Don't you?"--he was genuinely surprised, "get anything out of it, I
mean."

"Oh, but I'm a selfish beast, I suppose! I want more--more!" They swung
as she spoke into a broad beam of yellow light raying out from the
library window, and he saw by it that with the word she flung out her
arms with a lovely upward motion that lifted his mood to the crest of
audacity.

"If you keep on looking like that," Peter assured her, "you'll get it."
He was struck dumb immediately after with apprehension. It sounded
daring, like a thing said in a book; but she took it as it came lightly
off the tip of his impulse, laughing. "Yes ... the great difficulty is
choosing which of so many things one really wants." They walked on then
in silence, the air darkling after the sudden shaft of illumination, the
light folds of her scarf brushing his sleeve. Peter was considering how
he might say, without precipitation, how suddenly she had limited and
defined all the things that he wanted by expressing them so perfectly
in herself, when she interrupted him.

"There's our moth again," she pointed; "he settles it by taking all of
them. It's a possibility denied to us."

"Even he," Peter insisted, "has to reckon with such incidents as my
dropping on him just now. I might have wanted him for a collection."

"Oh, if he takes us into account it must be as men used to think of the
gods walking." Suddenly the familiar beds and hedges widened for Peter;
they stretched warm and tender to the borders of youth and the unmatched
Wonder.... It was so they had talked when they walked together in the
Garden which was about the House....

For some time after Miss Goodward left him Peter remained walking up and
down, thinking of many things and unable to think of them clearly
because of a pleasant blur of excitement in his brain. As he came
finally back to the house he heard the Lessings talking from behind one
of the open windows.

"My word, that car was never out of the shop before," Julian was saying.
"He's a _goner!_"

"And that lovely, dusty, brown colour that goes so well with her hair!
Who would have thought Peter would be so noticing."

"It couldn't have cost him a cent under seven thousand." Julian was
certain, "and carrying it off with me the way he did--bought the six
cylinder after all, he had.... I'll bet old Peter don't know a cylinder
from a stomach pump."

Clarice was evidently going on with her own line of thought. "It will be
the best thing that ever happened to Eunice if she can only be got to
see it."

"Well, if she don't her mother will see it for her." Lessing's voice
died into a subdued chuckle as Peter passed under it on the dew-damp
lawn, but there was no revelation in it for the junior partner. He had
already found out what was the matter with him and what he meant to do
about it.

III

Whatever the process of becoming engaged to Eunice Goodward lacked of
dramatic interest, it made up to Peter by being such a tremendous
adventure for him to become engaged to anybody.

He had gone through life much as his unfriended youth had strayed
through the city streets, aching for the walled-up splendour--all the
world's chivalries, tendernesses, passions--known to him only by
glimmers and reflections on the plain glass of duty. Now at a word the
glass dissolved and he was free to wander through the rooms crammed with
imperishable poets' wares. He walked there not only as one who has the
price to buy, but himself made one of the splendid things of earth by
this same word which her mere being pronounced to him.

He paid himself for years of denials and repressions by the discovery of
being able to love in such a key. For he meant quite simply to marry
Eunice Goodward if she would have him, and it was no vanity which gave
him hope, but a tribute to her fineness as being able to see herself so
absolutely the one thing his life waited for. He knew himself, modestly,
no prize for her except as he was added to by inestimable passion.
Whatever she saw in him as a man, for her not to recognize the immortal
worth of what he was able to become under her hand, was to subtract
something from her perfections. In her acceptance would lie the Queen's
touch, redeeming him from all commonness.

He made his first venture within a week after their first meeting, in a
call on Miss Goodward and her mother in Trethgarten Square, where he
found their red brick, vine-masked front distinguishable among half a
hundred others by being kept open as late as the middle of June. To
their being marooned thus in a desert of boarded-up doors and shuttered
windows, due, as Eunice had frankly and charmingly let him know, to
their being poor among their kind, he doubtless owed it that no other
callers came to disturb the languid afternoon. Seen against her proper
background of things precious but worn, and in the style of a preceding
generation, the girl showed even lovelier than before, with the rich,
perfumed quality of a flower held in a chipped porcelain vase, a flower
moreover secure in its own perfectness, waiting only to be worn,
disdaining alike to offer or resist. Her very quietness--she left him,
in fact, almost wholly to her mother--had the air of condoning his
state, of understanding what he was there for and of finding it somehow
an accentuation of the interest they let him see that he had for them.
He found them, mother and daughter, more alike, in spite of their
natural and evident difference of years, more of a degree than he was
accustomed to find mother and daughters in the few houses where the
business of growing rich had admitted him, as though they had been
carved out of the same material, by the same distinguished artist, at
different times in his career.

It contributed to the effect of his having found, not by accident, but
by seeking, a frame of life kept waiting for him, kept warm and
conscious. Presently Eunice poured tea for them, and the intimacy of her
remembering as she did, how he took it, had its part in the freedom
which he presently found for offering hospitality on his own account,
not at his home, as he explained to them, his sister being away, but say
a dinner at Briar Crest to which they might motor out pleasantly
Saturday afternoon, returning by moonlight. He offered Briar Crest
tentatively on the strength of the Lessings having once given a dinner
there, and was relieved to find that he had made no mistake.

"A great many of your friends go there," Mrs. Goodward allowed; "the Van
Stitarts, Eunice, you remember."

"The Gherberdings are there now, mamma; I'm sure we shall enjoy it."

Having crossed thus at one fortunate stroke the frontiers of social
observance, to which Clarice had but edged her way in the right of being
a Thatcher Inwood, Peter ventured on Friday to suggest by telephone that
since dinner must be late, the ladies should meet him at what he had
taken pains to ascertain was the correct one of huge uptown hotels, for
tea before starting. It was Mrs. Goodward who answered him and she whom
he met in the white, marble tessellated tea-room, explaining that Eunice
had had some shopping to do--they were really leaving on Saturday--and
Mr. Weatheral was to order tea without waiting. They had time, however,
for the tea to be drunk and for Mrs. Goodward to become anxious in a
gentle, ladylike way, before it occurred to Peter to suggest that Miss
Goodward might be lurking anywhere in the potted palm and marble
pillared labyrinth, waiting for _them_, suffering equal anxieties, and
dreadful to think of in their present replete condition, languishing for
tea. His proposal to go and look for her was accepted with just the
shade of deprecation which admitted him to an amused tolerance of the
girl's delinquencies, as if somehow Eunice wouldn't have dared to be
late with him had she not had reason more than ordinary for counting on
his indulgence.

"You'll find," Mrs. Goodward let him know, "that we require a deal of
looking after, Eunice and I."

"Ah, I only hope you'll find that I'm equal to it." Peter had answered
her with so little indirection that it drew from the older woman a
quick, mute flush of sympathy. For a moment the homeliness of his lean
countenance was relieved with so redeeming a touch of what all women
most wish for in all men that she met it with an equal simplicity. "For
myself I am sure of it," but lifted next moment to a lighter key, with
a smile very like her daughter's dragged a little awry by the use of
years, "as for Eunice, you'll first have to lay hands on her."

With this permission he rose and made the circuit of the semi-divided
rooms, coming out at last into the dim rotunda, forested with clustered
porphyry columns, and there at last he caught sight of her. She had but
just stepped into its shaded coolness out of the hot, bright day, and
hung for a moment, in the act of furling her parasol, in which he was
about to hail her, until he discovered by his stepping into range from
behind one of the green pillars, that she was also in the act of saying
good-bye to Burton Henderson. There was a certain finality in the way
she held out her hand to him which checked Peter in the hospitable
impulse to include the younger man in the afternoon's diversion. He
stepped back the moment he saw that she was having trouble with her
escort, defending herself by her manner from something accusing in his.
Not to seem to spy upon her, Weatheral made his way back though the
coatroom without disclosing himself. From the door of it he timed his
return so as to meet her face to face as she came up with Mrs. Goodward
and was rewarded for it by the gayety of her greeting and the
unaffectedness of her attack of the fresh relay of toasted muffins and
tea.

"Absolutely famished," she told them, "and the shops are _so_
fascinating! You'd forgive me, Mr. Weatheral, if you could see the heaps
and heaps of lovely things simply begging to be bought; it seemed
positively unkind to come away and leave any of them." As she said
nothing whatever about the young man, it seemed unlikely that she could
have him much on her mind. She had a new way, very charming to Peter, of
surrendering the afternoon into his hands; let him ask nothing of her
she seemed to say, but to enjoy herself. She built out of their being
there before her, a very delightful supposition of her mother and Mr.
Weatheral, between them having made a little space for her to be gay in
and simple and lovely after her own kind. If she took any account of
them it was such as a dancer might who, practising a few steps for the
mere joy and pride of it, finds herself unexpectedly surrounded by an
interested and smiling audience.

If, however, with the memory of that afternoon upon him, Peter had gone
down to Fairport in the latter part of July with the expectation of
resuming the part of impresario to her charm, he suffered a sharp
disappointment. He found the Goodwards, not in the expensive caravansary
in which he installed himself, but in a smaller tributary house set back
from the main hotel though not quite disconnected with it; for quiet,
Mrs. Goodward told him, though he guessed quite as much from economy.

"It's wonderful, really, what they do with so little," Clarice, with her
fine discriminations in the obligations of friendship, had generously
let him know. "Eunice hasn't anything, positively not _any_thing in
comparison with what people of her class usually have. And with her
taste, you know, there must be things she's just aching for, that
somehow you can't give her." You couldn't, indeed. Though Peter made
excuses enough for giving her the use of his car, and giving it to her
shorn even of the implication of his society, there were few occasions
when he could do even so much as that. He couldn't even give her his
appreciations.

For at Fairport the Goodwards were quite in the heart of all that Peter
himself failed to understand that he couldn't possibly be. It was not
that he wasn't to the extent at least of sundry invitations given and
accepted, "in" as much of the Best Society as Fairport afforded. Mrs.
Goodward saw to that, and there were two or three whom he had met at the
Lessings' as well as men to whom the figure of his income was the cachet
of eligibility. It wasn't indeed that he wasn't liked, and that quite at
his proper worth, but that he couldn't somehow manage it so that the
Best Society cared in the least whether he liked it. He could see, in a
way, where Clarice had been at work for him; but the poison that was
dropped in his cup was the certainty that the way for him had to be
"worked." The discovery that he couldn't just find his way to Eunice
Goodward's side by the same qualities that had placed him beside the
males of her circle in point of property and power, that he couldn't
without admission to that circle, properly court her, hemmed him in
bewilderingly.

Her method of eluding him, if there were method in it, left him feeling
not so much avoided as prevented by the moves of a game he hadn't meant
to play. So greatly it irked his natural simplicity to be banded about
by the social observances of the place, that it might have led him to
irrecoverable mistakes had it not been for the hand held out to him by
Mrs. Goodward.

He perceived on closer acquaintance, that this lady's fine serenity of
manner was due largely to her never admitting to her mind the upsetting
possibility. She thought her world into acceptable shape and held it
there by the simple process of ignoring the eccentricities of its axis.

Peter would have admired, if his unsophistication had allowed him, the
facility with which she made it revolve now about their mutual pursuit
of Eunice through the rattle and cheapness of what was known as "the
Burton Henderson set." As it was against just such social inconsequence
that Peter felt himself strong to defend her, he fell easily into the
key of crediting the girl's sudden, bewildering flight to it as a mere
midsummer madness.

"It's the way with girls, I fancy," Mrs. Goodward had said to him,
strolling up and down the hotel veranda where through the wide French
windows they had glimpses of Eunice whirling away on the ice polished
floor of the ballroom within; "they cling the more to gayety as they see
the graver things of life bearing down upon them."

"You think she sees that?"

"Ah, there's much a mother sees, Mr. Weatheral----"

"You would, of course," he accepted.

"It's a woman's part, seeing; there's an instinct in us not to see too
soon." She gave him the benefit of her sweet weighted smile.

Peter lived greatly on these things. He was so sure of himself, of the
reality and strength of his passion; he had a feeling of its being quite
enough for them to go on, an inexhaustible, fairy capital out of which
almost anything that Eunice Goodward desired might be drawn. It was
fortunate that he found his passion so self-sufficing, for there was
little enough that Eunice afforded it by way of sustenance. For a week
he no more than kept in sight of her in the inevitable summer round; he
did not dance and the game of cards he could play was gauged to what
Ellen could manage in an occasional quiet evening at the Lessings'.

"I suppose," Eunice had said to him on an occasion when he had known
enough to decline an invitation for an afternoon's play to which Burton
Henderson was carrying her away, "that the stakes we play for aren't any
temptation to _you_."

"I think that they're out of proportion to the trouble you have to be at
to win them."

"Oh, if you don't care for the game----"

"I don't." And then casting about for a phrase that explained him more
happily, "Put it that I like to cut out my job and go to it." She gave
him a quick, condoning flash of laughter; the phrase was Lessing's and
out of her recognition of it he drew, loverlike, that assurance of
common understanding so dear to lovers. "Put it," he ventured further,
"that I don't like to see myself balked of the prize by the way the
cards are dealt."

"Ah, but that's what makes it a game. I'd no idea you were such
a--revolutionist."

"Evolutionist," he corrected, happy in having touched the subtler note
behind their persiflage. "I've all science on my side for the most
direct method." After all, why should he let even the Best Society deal
the cards for him? Should not a man sweep the boards of whatever kept
him from his natural mate?

That was on Tuesday, and the Thursday following he had asked the
Goodwards to motor over to Lighthouse Reef with him. He did not know
quite what he meant to bring about on this occasion; he had so much the
feeling of its being an occasion, the invitation had been so pointedly
given and accepted, it was with difficulty he adjusted himself to the
discovery on arriving at their hotel with the car, that Eunice had gone
to play tennis instead.

"The time is so short," Mrs. Goodward apologized; "she felt she must
make the most of it." She had to leave it there, not being able to make
a game of tennis in the hot sun seem more of a diversion than the steady
pacing of the luxurious car along the road which laced the forest to
the singing beaches. She had to let her sidewise smile do what it could
toward making the girl's bald evasion of her engagement seem the mere
flutter and hesitancy of besieged femininity. For the moment she was as
much "outside" so far as her daughter was concerned as Peter was of the
select bright circle in which she moved.

The way opened before them, beautiful in late bloom and heavy fern,
above which the sea wind kept a perpetual movement of aliveness.

"Eunice _will_ miss it," Mrs. Goodward rallied; "such a perfect
afternoon!" She gave him the oblique smile again, weighted this time
with the knowledge of all that Peter hadn't been able or hadn't tried to
keep from her. "It isn't easy, is it," she went on addressing her speech
to whatever, at the mention of her daughter's name, hung in the air
between them, "to stand by and see other people's great moments hover
over them. One would like so to lend a hand. And one is sure of nothing
so much as that if they are really to _be_ big, one mustn't."

"If you feel that," Peter snatched at encouragement, "that it is really
the big thing for her--what I'm sure you can't help knowing what I
mean--what I hope."

"What _I_ feel----? After all, it's _her_ feeling, my dear Mr.
Weatheral, that we have to take into account. It wouldn't be fair for me
to attempt to answer to you for that!"

"And of course if I can't _make_ her feel...." He did not trust himself
to a conclusion.

They found, however, when the road issued on the coast opposite the
great bursting bulks of spray, that Eunice's desertion and the
extenuation of it to which they had lent themselves, had put them out of
the mood for the high wind and warring surf of the Reef. Accordingly
they turned aside at Peter's suggestion to have tea at a little country
inn farther back in the hills, where the pound of the sea was reduced to
a soft, organ-booming bass to which the shrill note of the needles
countered in perfect tune. The tea garden, the favourite port of call
for afternoon drives from the resorts hereabouts, lay back of the
hostelry in a narrow, ferny glen from which springs issued. As Peter led
the way up its rocky stair, they could hear the light laughter of a
party just rising from one of the round rustic tables. The group
descending poured past them a summer-coloured runnel down the little
glen, and left them face to face with Eunice, who had lingered, her
dress caught on a point of the rustic chair.

"Mamma--you!" She looked trapped, accused, though sheer astonishment
held the others dumb. "We finished the game----" she began and stopped
short; after all, her manner seemed to say, why shouldn't she have tea
there with her friends? She made as if to sweep past after them but Mrs.
Goodward never moved from the narrow path. She was more embarrassed,
Peter saw, than her daughter, and as plainly at bay.

"Now that we are here----" she began in her turn.

"Now that you have followed me here," the girl rang out, "what is it
that you have to say to me?" She was white and a bright flame spot
showed on either cheek.

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