gray as a windy April sky, and so far from having been seared by
calcium lights, you might have fancied they had never looked on
anything less bucolic than growing fields and country fairs. She
wore her thick, brown hair short and parted at the side; and,
rather than hinting at freakishness, this seemed admirably in
keeping with her fresh, boyish countenance. She extended to
Imogen a large, well-shaped hand which it was a pleasure to
clasp.
"Ah! You are Miss Willard, and I see I need not introduce
myself. Flavia said you were kind enough to express a wish to
meet me, and I preferred to meet you alone. Do you mind if I
smoke?"
"Why, certainly not," said Imogen, somewhat disconcerted and
looking hurriedly about for matches.
"There, be calm, I'm always prepared," said Miss Broadwood,
checking Imogen's flurry with a soothing gesture, and producing
an oddly fashioned silver match-case from some mysterious recess
in her dinner gown. She sat down in a deep chair, crossed her
patent-leather Oxfords, and lit her cigarette. "This matchbox,"
she went on meditatively, "once belonged to a Prussian officer.
He shot himself in his bathtub, and I bought it at the sale of
his effects."
Imogen had not yet found any suitable reply to make to this
rather irrelevant confidence, when Miss Broadwood turned to her
cordially: "I'm awfully glad you've come, Miss Willard, though I've
not quite decided why you did it. I wanted very much to meet you.
Flavia gave me your thesis to read."
"Why, how funny!" ejaculated Imogen.
"On the contrary," remarked Miss Broadwood. "I thought it
decidedly lacked humor."
"I meant," stammered Imogen, beginning to feel very much
like Alice in Wonderland, "I meant that I thought it rather
strange Mrs. Hamilton should fancy you would be interested."
Miss Broadwood laughed heartily. "Now, don't let my
rudeness frighten you. Really, I found it very interesting, and
no end impressive. You see, most people in my profession are
good for absolutely nothing else, and, therefore, they have a
deep and abiding conviction that in some other line they might
have shone. Strange to say, scholarship is the object of our
envious and particular admiration. Anything in type impresses us
greatly; that's why so many of us marry authors or newspapermen
and lead miserable lives." Miss Broadwood saw that she had rather
disconcerted Imogen, and blithely tacked in another direction.
"You see," she went on, tossing aside her half-consumed
cigarette, "some years ago Flavia would not have deemed me worthy
to open the pages of your thesis--nor to be one of her house
party of the chosen, for that matter. I've Pinero to thank for
both pleasures. It all depends on the class of business I'm
playing whether I'm in favor or not. Flavia is my second cousin,
you know, so I can say whatever disagreeable things I choose with
perfect good grace. I'm quite desperate for someone to laugh
with, so I'm going to fasten myself upon you--for, of course, one
can't expect any of these gypsy-dago people to see anything
funny. I don't intend you shall lose the humor of the situation.
What do you think of Flavia's infirmary for the arts, anyway?"
"Well, it's rather too soon for me to have any opinion at
all," said Imogen, as she again turned to her dressing. "So far,
you are the only one of the artists I've met."
"One of them?" echoed Miss Broadwood. "One of the artists?
My offense may be rank, my dear, but I really don't deserve
that. Come, now, whatever badges of my tribe I may bear upon me,
just let me divest you of any notion that I take myself seriously."
Imogen turned from the mirror in blank astonishment and sat
down on the arm of a chair, facing her visitor. "I can't fathom
you at all, Miss Broadwood," she said frankly. "Why shouldn't
you take yourself seriously? What's the use of beating about the
bush? Surely you know that you are one of the few players on this
side of the water who have at all the spirit of natural or
ingenuous comedy?"
"Thank you, my dear. Now we are quite even about the thesis,
aren't we? Oh, did you mean it? Well, you are a clever
girl. But you see it doesn't do to permit oneself to look at it
in that light. If we do, we always go to pieces and waste our
substance astarring as the unhappy daughter of the Capulets. But
there, I hear Flavia coming to take you down; and just remember
I'm not one of them--the artists, I mean."
Flavia conducted Imogen and Miss Broadwood downstairs. As
they reached the lower hall they heard voices from the music
room, and dim figures were lurking in the shadows under the
gallery, but their hostess led straight to the smoking room. The
June evening was chilly, and a fire had been lighted in the
fireplace. Through the deepening dusk, the firelight flickered
upon the pipes and curious weapons on the wall and threw an
orange glow over the Turkish hangings. One side of the smoking
room was entirely of glass, separating it from the conservatory,
which was flooded with white light from the electric bulbs.
There was about the darkened room some suggestion of certain
chambers in the Arabian Nights, opening on a court of palms.
Perhaps it was partially this memory-evoking suggestion that
caused Imogen to start so violently when she saw dimly, in a blur
of shadow, the figure of a man, who sat smoking in a low, deep
chair before the fire. He was long, and thin, and brown. His
long, nerveless hands drooped from the arms of his chair. A
brown mustache shaded his mouth, and his eyes were sleepy and
apathetic. When Imogen entered he rose indolently and gave her
his hand, his manner barely courteous.
"I am glad you arrived promptly, Miss Willard," he said with
an indifferent drawl. "Flavia was afraid you might be late. You
had a pleasant ride up, I hope?"
"Oh, very, thank you, Mr. Hamilton," she replied, feeling
that he did not particularly care whether she replied at all.
Flavia explained that she had not yet had time to dress for
dinner, as she had been attending to Mr. Will Maidenwood, who had
become faint after hurting his finger in an obdurate window, and
immediately excused herself As she left, Hamilton turned to Miss
Broadwood with a rather spiritless smile.
"Well, Jimmy," he remarked, "I brought up a piano box full
of fireworks for the boys. How do you suppose we'll manage to
keep them until the Fourth?"
"We can't, unless we steel ourselves to deny there are any on the
premises," said Miss Broadwood, seating herself on a low stool by
Hamilton's chair and leaning back against the mantel. "Have you
seen Helen, and has she told you the tragedy of the tooth?"
"She met me at the station, with her tooth wrapped up in
tissue paper. I had tea with her an hour ago. Better sit down,
Miss Willard;" he rose and pushed a chair toward I
mogen, who was
standing peering into the conservatory. "We are scheduled to
dine at seven, but they seldom get around before eight."
By this time Imogen had made out that here the plural
pronoun, third person, always referred to the artists. As
Hamilton's manner did not spur one to cordial intercourse, and as
his attention seemed directed to Miss Broadwood, insofar as it
could be said to be directed to anyone, she sat down facing the
conservatory and watched him, unable to decide in how far he was
identical with the man who had first met Flavia Malcolm in her
mother's house, twelve years ago. Did he at all remember having
known her as a little girl, and why did his indifference hurt her
so, after all these years? Had some remnant of her childish
affection for him gone on living, somewhere down in the sealed
caves of her consciousness, and had she really expected to find
it possible to be fond of him again? Suddenly she saw a light in
the man's sleepy eyes, an unmistakable expression of
interest and pleasure that fairly startled her. She turned
quickly in the direction of his glance, and saw Flavia, just
entering, dressed for dinner and lit by the effulgence of her
most radiant manner. Most people considered Flavia handsome,
and there was no gainsaying that she carried her five-and-thirty
years splendidly. Her figure had never grown matronly, and her
face was of the sort that does not show wear. Its blond tints
were as fresh and enduring as enamel--and quite as hard. Its
usual expression was one of tense, often strained, animation,
which compressed her lips nervously. A perfect scream of
animation, Miss Broadwood had called it, created and maintained
by sheer, indomitable force of will. Flavia's appearance on any
scene whatever made a ripple, caused a certain agitation and
recognition, and, among impressionable people, a certain
uneasiness, For all her sparkling assurance of manner, Flavia
was certainly always ill at ease and, even more certainly,
anxious. She seemed not convinced of the established order of
material things, seemed always trying to conceal her feeling that
walls might crumble, chasms open, or the fabric of her life fly
to the winds in irretrievable entanglement. At least this was
the impression Imogen got from that note in Flavia which was so
manifestly false.
Hamilton's keen, quick, satisfied glance at his wife had
recalled to Imogen all her inventory of speculations about them.
She looked at him with compassionate surprise. As a child she
had never permitted herself to believe that Hamilton cared at all
for the woman who had taken him away from her; and since she had
begun to think about them again, it had never occurred to her
that anyone could become attached to Flavia in that deeply
personal and exclusive sense. It seemed quite as irrational as
trying to possess oneself of Broadway at noon.
When they went out to dinner Imogen realized the completeness of
Flavia's triumph. They were people of one name, mostly, like
kings; people whose names stirred the imagination like a romance or
a melody. With the notable exception of M. Roux, Imogen had seen
most of them before, either in concert halls or lecture rooms; but
they looked noticeably older and dimmer than she remembered them.
Opposite her sat Schemetzkin, the Russian pianist, a short,
corpulent man, with an apoplectic face and purplish skin, his
thick, iron-gray hair tossed back from his forehead. Next to the
German giantess sat the Italian tenor --the tiniest of men--pale,
with soft, light hair, much in disorder, very red lips, and
fingers yellowed by cigarettes. Frau Lichtenfeld shone in a gown
of emerald green, fitting so closely as to enhance her natural
floridness. However, to do the good lady justice, let her attire
be never so modest, it gave an effect of barbaric splendor. At
her left sat Herr Schotte, the Assyriologist, whose features were
effectually concealed by the convergence of his hair and beard,
and whose glasses were continually falling into his plate. This
gentleman had removed more tons of earth in the course of his
explorations than had any of his confreres, and his vigorous
attack upon his food seemed to suggest the strenuous nature of
his accustomed toil. His eyes were small and deeply set, and his
forehead bulged fiercely above his eves in a bony ridge. His
heavy brows completed the leonine suggestion of his face. Even
to Imogen, who knew something of his work and greatly respected
it, he was entirely too reminiscent of the Stone Age to be
altogether an agreeable dinner companion. He seemed, indeed, to
have absorbed something of the savagery of those early types of
life which he continually studied.
Frank Wellington, the young Kansas man who had been two
years out of Harvard and had published three historical novels,
sat next to Mr. Will Maidenwood, who was still pale from his
recent sufferings and carried his hand bandaged. They took
little part in the general conversation, but, like the lion and
the unicorn, were always at it, discussing, every time they met,
whether there were or were not passages in Mr. Wellington's works
which should be eliminated, out of consideration for the Young
Person. Wellington had fallen into the hands of a great American
syndicate which most effectually befriended struggling authors
whose struggles were in the right direction, and which had
guaranteed to make him famous before he was thirty. Feeling the
security of his position he stoutly defended those passages which
jarred upon the sensitive nerves of the young editor of
Woman. Maidenwood, in the smoothest of voices, urged the
necessity of the author's recognizing certain restrictions at the
outset, and Miss Broadwood, who joined the argument quite without
invitation or encouragement, seconded him with pointed and
malicious remarks which caused the young editor manifest
discomfort. Restzhoff, the chemist, demanded the attention of the
entire company for his exposition of his devices for manufacturing
ice cream from vegetable oils and for administering drugs in
bonbons.
Flavia, always noticeably restless at dinner, was somewhat
apathetic toward the advocate of peptonized chocolate and was
plainly concerned about the sudden departure of M. Roux, who had
announced that it would be necessary for him to leave tomorrow.
M. Emile Roux, who sat at Flavia's right, was a man in middle
life and quite bald, clearly without personal vanity, though his
publishers preferred to circulate only those of his portraits
taken in his ambrosial youth. Imogen was considerably shocked at
his unlikeness to the slender, black-stocked Rolla he had looked
at twenty. He had declined into the florid, settled heaviness of
indifference and approaching age. There was, however, a certain
look of durability and solidity about him; the look of a man who
has ear
ned the right to be fat and bald, and even silent at
dinner if he chooses.
Throughout the discussion between Wellington and Will
Maidenwood, though they invited his participation, he remained
silent, betraying no sign either of interest or contempt. Since
his arrival he had directed most of his conversation to Hamilton,
who had never read one of his twelve great novels. This
perplexed and troubled Flavia. On the night of his arrival Jules
Martel had enthusiastically declared, "There are schools and
schools, manners and manners; but Roux is Roux, and Paris sets
its watches by his clock." Flavia bad already repeated this
remark to Imogen. It haunted her, and each time she quoted it
she was impressed anew.
Flavia shifted the conversation uneasily, evidently exasperated
and excited by her repeated failures to draw the novelist out.
"Monsieur Roux," she began abruptly, with her most animated smile,
"I remember so well a statement I read some years ago in your 'Mes
Etudes des Femmes' to the effect that you had never met a really
intellectual woman. May I ask, without being impertinent, whether
that assertion still represents your experience?"
"I meant, madam," said the novelist conservatively, "intellectual
in a sense very special, as we say of men in whom the purely
intellectual functions seem almost independent."
"And you still think a woman so constituted a mythical
personage?" persisted Flavia, nodding her head encouragingly.
"Une Meduse, madam, who, if she were discovered, would
transmute us all into stone," said the novelist, bowing gravely.
"If she existed at all," he added deliberately, "it was my
business to find her, and she has cost me many a vain pilgrimage.
Like Rudel of Tripoli, I have crossed seas and penetrated deserts
to seek her out. I have, indeed, encountered women of learning
whose industry I have been compelled to respect; many who have
possessed beauty and charm and perplexing cleverness; a few with
remarkable information and a sort of fatal facility."
"And Mrs. Browning, George Eliot, and your own Mme. Dudevant?"
queried Flavia with that fervid enthusiasm with which she could, on
occasion, utter things simply incomprehensible for their
banality--at her feats of this sort Miss Broadwood was wont to sit
breathless with admiration.
"Madam, while the intellect was undeniably present in the
performances of those women, it was only the stick of the rocket.
Although this woman has eluded me I have studied her conditions
and perturbances as astronomers conjecture the orbits of planets
they have never seen. if she exists, she is probably neither an
artist nor a woman with a mission, but an obscure personage, with
imperative intellectual needs, who absorbs rather than produces."
Flavia, still nodding nervously, fixed a strained glance of
interrogation upon M. Roux. "Then you think she would be a woman
whose first necessity would be to know, whose instincts would be
satisfied only with the best, who could draw from others;
appreciative, merely?"
The novelist lifted his dull eyes to his interlocutress with
an untranslatable smile and a slight inclination of his
shoulders. "Exactly so; you are really remarkable, madam," he
added, in a tone of cold astonishment.
After dinner the guests took their coffee in the music room,
where Schemetzkin sat down at the piano to drum ragtime, and give
his celebrated imitation of the boardingschool girl's execution
of Chopin. He flatly refused to play anything more serious, and
would practice only in the morning, when he had the music room to
himself. Hamilton and M. Roux repaired to the smoking room to
discuss the necessity of extending the tax on manufactured
articles in France--one of those conversations which particularly
exasperated Flavia.
After Schemetzkin had grimaced and tortured the keyboard
with malicious vulgarities for half an hour, Signor Donati, to
put an end to his torture, consented to sing, and Flavia and