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"I have no right," he said, wincing.
"Indeed you have not!" she rejoined warmly, flushed and affronted. "I am glad that is perfectly clear to you."
"No right at all," he repeated – "except the personal privilege of recognising what is cleanest and sweetest and most admirable and most unspoiled in life; the right to care for it without knowing exactly why – the desire to be part of it – as have all men who are awakened out of trivial dreams when such a woman as you crosses their limited and foolish horizon."
She sat staring at him, struggling to comprehend what he was saying, perfectly unable to believe, nor even wishing to, yet painfully attentive to his every word.
"Mr. Quarren," she said, "I was hurt. I imagined presumption where there was none. But I am afraid you are romantic and impulsive to an amazing degree. Yet, both romance and impulse have a place and a reason, not undignified, in human intercourse." – She felt rather superior in turning this phrase, and looked on him a little more kindly —
"If the compliment which you have left me to infer is purely a romantic one, it is nevertheless unwarranted – and, forgive me, unacceptable. The trouble is – "
She paused to recover her wits and her breath; but he took the latter away again as he said:
"I am in love with you; that is the trouble, Mrs. Leeds. And I really have no business to say so until I amount to something."
"You have no business to say so anyway after one single evening's acquaintance!" she retorted hotly.
"Oh, that! If love were a matter of time and convention – like five o'clock tea! – but it isn't, you know. It isn't the brevity of our acquaintance that worries me; it's what I am – and what you are – and – and the long, long road I have to travel before I am worth your lightest consideration – I never was in love before. Forgive my crudeness. I'm only conscious of the – hopelessness of it all."
Breathless, confused, incredulous, she sat there staring at him – listening to and watching this tall, quiet, cool young fellow who was telling her such incomprehensible things in a manner that began to fascinate her. With an effort she collected herself, shook off the almost eerie interest that was already beginning to obsess her, and stood up, flushed but composed.
"Shall we not say any more about it?" she said quietly. "Because there is nothing more to say, Mr. Quarren – except – thank you for – for feeling so amiably toward me – for believing me more than I really am… And I would like to have your friendship still, if I may – "
"You have it."
"Even yet?"
"Why not?.. It's selfish of me to say it – but I wish you – could have saved me," he said almost carelessly.
"From what, Mr. Quarren? I really do not understand you."
"From being what I am – the sort of man you first divined me to be."
"What do you mean by 'saving' you?" she asked, coldly.
"I don't know! – giving me a glimmer of hope I suppose – something to strive for."
"One saves one's self," she said.
He turned an altered face toward her: and she looked at him intently.
"I guess you are right," he said with a short laugh. "If there is anything worth saving, one saves one's self."
"I think that is true," she said… "And – if my friendship – if you really care for it – "
He met her gaze:
"I honestly don't know. I've been carried off my feet by you, completely. A man, under such conditions, doesn't know anything – not even enough to hold his tongue – as you may have noticed. I am in love with you. As I am to-day, my love for you would do you no good – I don't know whether yours would do me any good – or your friendship, either. It ought to if I amounted to anything; but I don't – and I don't know."
"I wish you would not speak so bitterly – please – "
"All right. It wasn't bitterness; it was just whine. … I'll go, now. You will comprehend, after you think it over, that there is at least nothing of impertinence in my loving you – only a blind unreason – a deadly fear lest the other man in me, suddenly revealed, vanish before I could understand him. Because when I saw you, life's meaning broke out suddenly – like a star – and that's another stale simile. But one has to climb very far before one can touch even the nearest of the stars… So forgive my one lucid interval… I shall probably never have another… May I take you to your carriage?"
"Mrs. Lannis is calling for me."
"Then – I will take my leave – and the tatters of my reputation – any song can buy it, now – "
"Mr. Quarren!"
"Yes?"
"I don't want you to go – like this. I want you to go away knowing in your heart that you have been very – nice – agreeable – to a young girl who hasn't perhaps had as much experience as you think – "
"Thank God," he said, smiling.
"I want you to like me, always," she said. "Will you?"
"I promise," he replied so blithely that for a moment his light irony deceived her. Then something in his eyes left her silent, concerned, unresponsive – only her heart seemed to repeat persistently in childish reiteration, the endless question, Why? Why? Why? And she heard it but found no answer where love was not, and had never been.
"I – am sorry," she said in a low voice. "I – I try to understand you – but I don't seem to… I am so very sorry that you – care for me."
He took her gloved hand, and she let him.
"I guess I'm nothing but a harlequin after all," he said, "and they're legitimate objects for pity. Good-bye, Mrs. Leeds. You've been very patient and sweet with a blithering lunatic… I've committed only another harlequinade of a brand-new sort. But the fall from that balcony would have been less destructive."
She looked at him out of her gray eyes.
"One thing," she said, with a tremulous smile, "you may be certain that I am not going to forget you very easily."
"Another thing," he said, "I shall never forget you as long as I live; and – you have my violets, I see. Are they to follow the gardenia?"
"Only when their time comes," she said, trying to laugh.
So he wished her a happy trip and sojourn in the South, and went away into the city – downtown, by the way to drop into an office chair in an empty office and listen to the click of a typewriter in the outer room, and sit there hour after hour with his chin in his hand staring at nothing out of the clear blue eyes of a boy.
And she went away to her luncheon at the Province Club with Susanne Lannis who wished her to meet some of the governors – very grand ladies – upon whose good will depended Strelsa's election to the most aristocratic, comfortable, wisely managed, and thriftiest of all metropolitan clubs.
After luncheon she, with Mrs. Lannis and Chrysos Lacy – a pretty red-haired edition of her brother – went to see "Sumurun."
And after they had tea at the redoubtable Mrs. Sprowl's, where there were more footmen than guests, more magnificence than comfort, and more wickedness in the gossip than lemon in the tea or Irish in the more popular high-ball.
The old lady, fat, pink, enormous, looked about her out of her little glittering green eyes with a pleased conviction that everybody on earth was mortally afraid of her. And everybody, who happened to be anybody in New York, was exactly that – with a few eccentric exceptions like her nephew, Karl Westguard, and half a dozen heavily upholstered matrons whose social altitude left them nothing to be afraid of except lack of deference and death.
Mrs. Sprowl had a fat, wheezy, and misleading laugh; and it took time for Strelsa to understand that there was anything really venomous in the old lady; but the gossip there that afternoon, and the wheezy delight in driving a last nail into the coffin of some moribund reputation, made plain to her why her hostess was held in such respectful terror.
The talk finally swerved from Molly Wycherly's ball to the Irish Legation, and Mrs. Sprowl leaned toward Strelsa, and panted behind her fan:
"A perfect scandal, child. The suppers those young men give there! Orgies, I understand! No pretty actress in town is kept sighing long for invitations. Even" – she whispered the name of a lovely and respectable prima-donna with a perfectly good husband and progeny – and nodded so violently that it set her coughing.
"Oh," cried Strelsa, distressed, "surely you have been misinformed!"
"Not in the least," wheezed the old lady. "She is no better than the rest of 'em! And I sent for my nephew Karl, and I brought him up roundly. 'Karl!' said I, 'what the devil do you mean! Do you want that husband of hers dragging you all into court?' And, do you know, my dear, he appeared perfectly astounded – said it wasn't so – just as you said a moment ago. But I can put two and two together, yet; I'm not too old and witless to do that! And I warrant you I gave him a tongue trouncing which he won't forget. … Probably he retailed it to that O'Hara man, and to young Quarren, too. If he did it won't hurt 'em, either."
She was speaking now so generally that everybody heard her, and Cyrille Caldera said:
"Ricky is certainly innocuous, anyway."
"Oh, is he!" said Mrs. Sprowl with another wheezy laugh. "I fancy I know that boy. Did you say 'harmless,' Susanne? Well, you ought to know, of course – "
Cyrille Caldera blushed brightly although her affair with Quarren had been of the most innocent description.
"There's probably as much ground for indicting Ricky as there is for indicting me," she protested. "He's merely a nice, useful boy – "
"Rather vapid, don't you think?" observed a thin young woman in sables and an abundance of front teeth.
"Who expects anything serious from Ricky? He possesses good manners, and a sweet alacrity," said Chrysos Lacy, "and that's a rare combination."
"He's clever enough to be wicked, anyway," said Mrs. Sprowl. "Don't tell me that every one of his sentimental affairs have been perfectly harmless."
"Has he had many?" asked Strelsa before she meant to.
"Thousands, child. There was Betty Clyde – whose husband must have been an idiot – and Cynthia Challis – she married Prince Sarnoff, you remember – "
"The Sarnoffs are coming in February," observed Chrysos Lacy.
"I wonder if the Prince has had a tub since he left," said Mrs. Sprowl. "How on earth Cynthia can endure that dried up yellow Tartar – "
"Cynthia was in love with Ricky I think," said Susanne Lannis.
"Most girls are when they come out, but their mothers won't let 'em marry him. Poor Ricky."
"Poor Ricky," sighed Chrysos; "he is so nice, and nobody is likely to marry him."
"Why?" asked Strelsa.
"Because he's – why he's just Ricky. He has no money, you know. Didn't you know it?"
"No," said Strelsa.
"That's the trouble – partly. Then there's no social advantage for any girl in this set marrying him. He'll have to take a lame duck or go out of his circle for a wife. And that means good-bye Ricky – unless he marries a lame duck."
"Some unattractive person of uncertain age and a million," explained Mrs. Lannis as Strelsa turned to her, perplexed.
"Ricky," said the lady with abundant teeth, "is a lightweight."
"The lightness, I think, is in his heels," said Strelsa. "He's intelligent otherwise I fancy."
"Yes, but not intellectual."
"I think you are possibly mistaken."
The profusely dentate lady looked sharply at Strelsa; Susanne Lannis laughed.
"Are you his champion, Strelsa? I thought you had met him last night for the first time."
"Mrs. Leeds is probably going the way of all women when they first meet Dicky Quarren," observed Mrs. Sprowl with malicious satisfaction. "But you must hurry and get over it, child, before Sir Charles Mallison arrives." At which sally everybody laughed.
Strelsa's colour was high, but she merely smiled, not only at the coupling of her name with Quarren's but at the hint of the British officer's arrival.
Major Sir Charles Mallison had been over before, why, nobody knew, because he was one of the wealthiest bachelors in England. Now it was understood that he was coming again; and a great many well-meaning people saw that agreeable gentleman's fate in the new beauty, Strelsa Leeds; and did not hesitate to tell her so with the freedom of fashionable banter.
"Yes," sighed Chrysos Lacy, sentimentally, "when you see Sir Charles you'll forget Ricky."
"Doubtless," said Strelsa, still laughing. "But tell me, Mrs. Sprowl, why does everybody wish to marry me to somebody? I'm very happy."
"It's our feminine sense of fitness and proportion that protests. In the eternal balance of things material you ought to be as wealthy as you are pretty."
"I have enough – almost – "
"Ah! the 'almost' betrays the canker feeding on that damask cheek!" laughed Mrs. Lannis. "No, you must marry millions, Strelsa – you'll need them."
"You are mistaken. I have enough. I'd like to be happy for a while."
The naïve inference concerning the incompatibility of marriage and happiness made them laugh again, forgetting perhaps the tragic shadow of the past which had unconsciously evoked it.
After Strelsa and Mrs. Lannis had gone, a pair of old cats dropped in, one in ermine, the other in sea-otter; and the inevitable discussion of Strelsa Leeds began with a brutality and frankness paralleled only in kennel parlance.
To a criticism of the girl's slenderness of physique Mrs. Sprowl laughed loud and long.
"That's what's setting all the men crazy. The world's as full of curves as I am; plumpness to the verge of redundancy is supposed to be popular among men; a well-filled stocking behind the footlights sets the gaby agape. But your man of the world has other tastes."
"Jaded tastes," said somebody.
"Maybe they're jaded and vicious – but they're his. And maybe that girl has a body and limbs which are little more accented than a boy's. But it's the last shriek among people who know."
"Not such a late one, either," said somebody. "Who was the French sculptor who did the Merode?"
"Before that Lippo fixed the type," observed somebody else.
"Personally," remarked a third, "I don't fancy pipe-stems. Mrs. Leeds needs padding – to suit my notions."
"Wait a year," said Mrs. Sprowl, significantly. "The beauty of that girl will be scandalous when she fills out a little more… If she only had the wits to match what she is going to be! – But there's a streak of something silly in her – I suspect latent sentiment – which is likely to finish her if she doesn't look sharp. Fancy her taking up the cudgels for Ricky, now! – a boy whose wits would be of no earthly account except in doing what he is doing. And he's apparently persuaded that little minx that he's intellectual! I'll have to talk to Ricky."
"You'd better talk to your nephew, too," said somebody, laughing.
"Who? Karl!" exclaimed the old lady, her little green eyes mere sparks in the broad expanse of face. "Let me catch him mooning around that girl! Let me catch Ricky philandering in earnest! I've made up my mind about Strelsa Leeds, and" – she glared around her, fanning vigorously – "I think nobody is likely to interfere."
That evening, at the opera, Westguard came into her box, and she laid down the law of limits to him so decisively that, taken aback, astonished and chagrined, he found nothing to say for the moment.
