Ainslee's magazine, Volume 16, No. 3, October, 1905

“You have so many engagements, I wonder whether I shall see you at all,” she hinted, as he handed her into the runabout.

He flushed slightly. “Well,” he said, genially, as he took the reins, “you know there are mighty few of ’em I wouldn’t break for you, Lil.”

As they spun down the spongy asphalt of the boulevard, between the palms and electric-light poles, she was asking herself why it was that good, unsuspecting fellows like Wallie were always pounced upon by such women. She felt it was horrid to meddle, but this creature was so astonishingly impossible, and yet so overwhelming, that Wallie could hardly be expected to rescue himself. But she was cautious.

“Did you meet Miss Remi here, Wallie?” she asked him.

“Yes, at something at the country club.”

“Does she go there?”

“Why, of course. All the nice people go there.” He looked at her in lazy surprise.

“Oh!” she said, with a falling inflection. It was discouraging to find him so unconscious. “Does she go much?”

“Everywhere. She’s awfully popular. How does she strike you?” He tried to be casual.

“She’s not like anyone else I’ve seen in Santa Barbara,” Lillian replied.

He fairly glowed. She had never seen Wallie so enthusiastic.

“You’re just right, Lil! There is no one like her. She makes every other girl look like a dough doll! It’s not only that she’s beautiful – she isn’t afraid of anything, she don’t care how she looks – she’s just crackling with life.”

“Do you admire her so awfully?” Lillian said, with such an amazed emphasis on the personal pronoun as brought him up short.

“Why – er – of course. Why not? Don’t you?” The color came up under his brown skin.

“Well,” she said, slowly, “of course I’ve only met her once; but really, Wallie, is she quite – fine?”

“Fine? What do you mean?”

She knew that he knew what she meant. The word was not a new one from her. It was her measure, her ruler by which she judged the world. He was not so unconscious, then, as he seemed.

“I mean what you’ve been so accustomed to in women, you dear, that you don’t know they can lack it,” she said, caressingly. “Is she nice? Is she a lady?”

Something threatening looked out of her brother’s eyes. “Well, I introduced her to you.”

“I know. You put me in rather a difficult position, Wallie.”

“See here, Lil” – he dragged out his words with slow emphasis – “I don’t know who you’ve been listening to, but you can take it from me that’s she as fine as silk and as good as gold.”

“Oh, as to her goodness, I haven’t a doubt, of course.” She seemed to set this aside as a trifle. “But as to fineness, now, Wallie, what do you think of a girl driving through town in her bathing suit, with a man, and jumping out of her coat and shoes on the beach before everyone, as she did? She did it to make a sensation; and do you think that fine, Wallie?”

He flushed, but laughed.

“Nonsense. It was a whim – a freak. She thought nothing at all of any effect on the beach. That’s the trouble; she thinks too little of the effect, and so – ”

“And so she wears no stockings – and so she’s called ‘the Wrecker,’” his sister added, with inconsequent effect.

His face was grave, even disturbed. “Oh, yes, I’ve heard that. But she’s so beautiful, so happy, you can’t wonder at the attraction; and you know there’s always gossip. And then she’s run wild. She has had no one to take care of her – ” he left the sentence hanging.

His sister inwardly shivered. When a man talked about “taking care” in that tone, she seemed to see the end.

They were winding up the wide, wandering Main Street, the rose-covered verandas of the Arlington on their left; on the right an old garden ran back to the white stucco fronts and red tiles of the De la Gera place.

“Wallie,” Lillian asked him, softly, “are you in love with that girl?”

“Me! Oh, what a question, Lil!” He laughed at her – his nice, lazy laugh she loved so much.

“Are you, Wallie?”

He put up his monocle to meet her lorgnon. “My dear girl, do I look pale and sunken?”

“You are dodging the question. But think” – she was light, almost playful, over it – “is she the sort of woman you would care to introduce as your – wife?”

Wallie looked a little startled, but he took her tone. “My dear Lil, I haven’t thought of her in quite that way.” He grew more serious. “I think she’s wonderful. I never saw anyone like her. You must know her better.”

“I don’t see how I can,” Lillian sighed.

“You mean you won’t see her?”

“I suppose I must, since you are going to bring her to call. But I won’t go about with her. I can’t. Couldn’t you see there on the beach – she isn’t our kind?”

“She looks nothing like you, certainly, Lillian,” he replied, coolly, “if you insist on judging people by appearances, but it’s hardly a ‘fine’ way to judge.”

“Now, Wallie – ” they had turned into the Crosby drive, between the rose of sharon and syringa bushes.

“Of course,” he went on, “you’re always waving that word around as if it were the only thing worth being, and every virtue hung on it. But what about honor, and generosity, and simplicity, and courage? Are they nothing compared to it?”

The runabout had stopped before the piazza steps, but Lillian sat still a moment, frowning faintly.

“When I said ‘fine,’” she answered, “I didn’t mean fine finish, cultivation, which is a surface thing, but I meant fine fiber, which goes deep and counts in every way with everything. One judges the big things by the small ones,” she said, as Wallie handed her out, “and remembering mother, and the way we were brought up to feel and understand, I think you will presently agree with me that Miss Remi is hardly – fine.”

She gave him a smile with the last word; and her look, the movement of her graceful head in the turn, the poise of her delicate body, the fall of her delicate dress, showed forth every shade of meaning which that word could contain.

The memory of her thus was with him all the afternoon. It buzzed like a bee in his brain that night through the dinner at the Crosbys’, though Lillian, ravishing in daintily blended shades of chiffon, referred by no suggestion to the talk of the afternoon. She and her word, he thought, mutually described one another. Lillian was fine, and fine meant Lillian.

Deep down or on the surface, he knew she was the real thing. And the inevitable, following question was, what was Blanche Remi? She was the real thing, too. He was sure of that. Lil was ’way off, he told himself, when she said the big things showed up in the little. He had been bothered all his life by the petty goodnesses of women, and now that he had found one who had the great goodness he was not going to be disturbed by Lil’s scruples. As for being “in love” with Blanche Remi – Lillian had put it to him as he had never put it to himself.

From the first night her marvelous eyes had flashed into his indolent notice, he had felt an inclination to exterminate every other man who talked to her. And there were so many. The supposition on the tongues of Santa Barbara that all these men made love to her he had not believed – could not have tolerated. Why he had not made love to her himself was not from lack of impulse, but something in the very greatness of the emotions and passions she roused in him, something in her fine, free ignorance of the trifles that make up the virtue of most women, had made any trifling with her impossible to him. But he felt himself brought down to facts. What was he finally intending toward this girl whom he never saw without wanting to kiss, to carry off? His wife?

Well, Lil was right. Blanche did lack the superficial polish. Strange he hadn’t noticed that before. But that was just the use of Lil. She could be a lot of help if she could only be made to like Blanche, and, of course, all that was necessary was that Lil should know her better. He would, he decided, take Blanche to call there to-morrow.

With a little telephoning this was arranged, and Wallie had it all made out just how beautifully he would direct that interview and carry it through. But the direction was reversed at the beginning by so small an incident as a woman’s hat. Not that the hat was, in itself, so slight an affair. Indeed, when Blanche came out to where he waited her, curbing the most impatient horse in Santa Barbara, the hat was the first thing he saw.

It was wide. It was hung about with lace – too much lace. It was covered with pink roses – too many roses. Walter did not quite know what to think of it, but he had a feeling that Lillian would.

As Blanche sprang into the cart with that vigorous, energetic lift of her body in which the muscles seemed always tense with action:

“Where’s that little white, flyaway thing you used to wear?” he ventured.

“Oh, I don’t know – this is a new one. Don’t you like it?”

“Isn’t it a little – large for driving?”

She flushed but smiled. “Not for calling. Now, Wallie, that’s the first time since you met me that you’ve noticed my clothes. I don’t believe you’ve known whether I’ve had any. Is it because you’ve been having ideals put under your nose? Is it” – she laughed, drawing on a pair of extremely long lavender gloves – “because you are afraid your sister won’t approve of my hat, any more than she approved of my legs?”

It was this astonishing freedom of speech, more than the hat, that made him uneasy of the approaching interview. Of course Blanche could say what she liked to him. He understood. But the very idea of her talking that way to Lillian made him shiver.

But Blanche did not talk “that way” to Lillian. There in the Crosby garden, where the magnolias dropped languid petals on the lawn, she was touchingly like a little girl on her good behavior. She tried, with her anxious sweetness, to make Wallie’s sister like her. But Lillian had seen the hat first, and got no further. It was to the hat she talked, and it seemed to Walter that his sister’s costume, so notably discreet, somehow set off all the daring of Blanche Remi’s gown, the telling blacks of which were touched in at the most unexpected intervals. Was Lillian, instead of helping, trying to put Blanche at her worst? He thrust that thought out of sight as disloyal. He sat, wretchedly uncomfortable, trying to remember whether he had ever seen Lillian wear long lavender gloves, hearing Lillian deftly turn and dispose of, unanswered, Blanche Remi’s suggestions for horseback excursions and “plunge parties.”

He expected, with every covert snub, that Blanche would suddenly, diabolically turn tables on her, as he had seen her do with other women. But Blanche, who had always had what she wanted, now, for perhaps the first time in her life, wanted a woman to like her. And it did not occur to her that she should fail in her desire. But what had been her strength was now her failure. Her compelling magnetism alarmed Lillian Gueste. She had been thoroughly convinced at first glance that the girl was “bad form.” But now she felt her force as something terrible and threatening to Wallie. The very sweetness of the smile Blanche gave her in going seemed too rich.

“But the protection,” Lillian reasoned, going over the interview afterward with herself, “is that Wallie is beginning to see.”

Wallie, bitterly irritated, saw, indeed, many trifles that he had failed to see before, perplexing as so many pricks. Things he had thought amusing in Blanche Remi – her red gloves, her white spats, her man’s hunting coat, the terrier she took to receptions – would they do for Mrs. Walter Carter? Suppose he should put it to Blanche that way, would she take it from him? he wondered. He felt he must put it to her some way now – the questions of Mrs. Walter Carter – for in the background, dimly threatening him, was that aggregation, each one a future possibility – the pasts he would not contemplate – and all villainously responsible for the name gossip had fastened upon her, “the Wrecker.” He knew that Santa Barbara accounted her a “dangerous” woman, but to him, even with her fatal fascination, she had always seemed a child. And now it came to him that it was not the help of a woman, but the protection of a man, Blanche Remi required most.

He felt he could not wait a day, a moment, to tell her; but somehow it was very difficult to find that moment; his time was so unostentatiously but so thoroughly permeated and broken with Lillian’s engagements for him. A week escaped in which, without having seen Blanche less, he had seen her under circumstances that admitted no opportunity.

Lillian had not, as she first threatened, ignored Blanche. She had invited her, if not to dine, at least to a beach tea, to a driving party; had talked with her at the country club; had kept her before Wallie, always at arm’s length, as if to give him ample opportunity for comparison.

Walter could find no flaw in his sister’s attitude of disinterested politeness, of pale cordiality toward Blanche Remi, but side lights on it now and then made him suspicious. He was bewildered – as bewildered as a man tangled in a veil. He felt that the first fine intimacy of his fellowship with Blanche was dulled. He was distressed with a sense of being on a more formal footing with her. At the same time others – men who had been very much in the background – seemed to come forward into her notice. He saw her at the country club dances magnetize the men too bored to dance into an interested circle round her. Dismayed, he saw her first with one, then with another, driving, swimming, sitting on the beach under one parasol in the association so intimate, so informal, that, before Lillian came, he had usurped to the exclusion of the many. Finally, out of the crowd, as the one oftenest with her, he saw Blair Hemming, the man of loose lips and good-natured eyes, to whom Blanche had bowed that morning on the beach.

Walter had thought him a decent enough fellow, but now he was suddenly vile. And Blanche? Her behavior was unreasonable and unfair. But perhaps he had let himself drift too much with Lillian’s plans. A little self-accusing, a little self-righteous, he rang up the Remis’s to make an appointment to ride horseback with Blanche that afternoon.

Her voice reached him, nasal, resonant, with a vibrant quality that touched the ear with a fascination deeper than sweetness. She had a luncheon engagement at the club.

He was annoyed that he had not known of this.

“How about to-morrow?”

“Very well,” came back; “but make it a foursome. Get your sister to come.”

“Of course, if you would rather,” he answered, a little stiffly. “What has happened?” he asked himself. He knew he had done nothing. Was Blanche changing? Had he only imagined her attitude toward him differed from her attitude toward half a dozen others? It had seemed different – but how could a man be sure?

Harassed, suspicious, he hesitated over making the proposal to Lillian until the next afternoon at the last moment. He rode over to the Crosbys’ and found his sister, fair and diaphanous in her mousseline gown, crumbling bread to the gold fish in the fountain. The look she gave his proposition, sweet as it was, made him uncomfortable. Any man would do to fill in the fourth place, he had stupidly said.

“Any man for Miss Remi?” she had asked him. And he had fired.

She heard him with a half smile, softly beating the ground with the dried palm leaf she prettily carried as a parasol.

Well, she told him, she did not care particularly for such an expedition. It was such a time since she had seen him alone! Wouldn’t it be much nicer to make it just a tête-à-tête dinner at Estrelda’s?

He replied, with irritation, that if she did not care to make one of the party, it would not prevent him from taking Miss Remi.

“Ah, a previous arrangement,” Lillian said, taking in his whip and his riding boots as if she had just noticed them. “Well, you must realize by this time just what sort of a person she is.”

“I am far from being sure, but I intend to find out this afternoon.”

She turned sharply. “You mean you are going to ask her to marry you?”

“Well, if I am?”

“After the way she’s been running about with this Hemming?”

“Lillian – look out,” he warned. His sister’s smile was tight and fine.

“Oh, well,” she said, with a little shrug, letting her hands drop in a gesture that seemed to make an end of the matter. At the moment her brother appeared to her no less than a monster. But she watched him down the drive with a revulsion of mood. She felt he was leaving her forever, her Wallie, her little brother! He was a year younger than she. She had let her sense of personal injury get in the way of his happiness – and he was going to that woman.

She stood, the palm leaf fallen from her hand. He must be stopped, interrupted somehow. He should not do a thing in a heat to regret forever. Calling his name, she hurried down the drive to the gate, but he had already turned out of the side street, and was beyond both sight and call. She fairly ran across the garden, over lawns and borders, her gown streaming, regardless of dust or wet. Had anyone seen her running, flushed and breathless, across the piazza and up the stairs, he would scarcely have recognized, in her abandon, Mrs. Cornelius Gueste.

She hurried into her habit, trying to remember whether Wallie had said they would go down through Monticito and come back by the beach, or whether it were just the other way about. Where could she hope to catch up with them? It would be a humiliating affair enough for her; but she was not in the least thinking of herself, but only of Wallie, and some way by which she could avert his catastrophe.

Walter had departed with the responsibility of what he was about to do heavily upon him. His sister’s look had not failed to affect him. He felt he was adventuring, risking, going to deal with unknown quantities.

He was to meet Blanche in town, where she had told him she had some shopping to do. Halfway down the wide, wandering Main Street he saw her mare fastened in front of the confectioner’s. Riding up, he could glimpse through the glass door Blanche, a tall habited figure, strolling here and there, sampling the sweets. He sat waiting, scowling in the glare of the afternoon sun on white awnings and sidewalks. He saw Hemming jump out of his cart a few doors down, in front of the saddler’s, with a broken bridle over, his arm.

“Hey, Carter!” He came and leaned on the flank of Walter’s horse, his hand on the back of the saddle.

“Beastly familiar,” Walter thought.

Hemming’s good-natured, sensual face was vivid with animal spirits. “Where were you last night?” he said. “You did miss it!”

“What?” drawled Walter.

“Mrs. Jack Castra’s dinner dance. Great!” Hemming’s eyes narrowed. He shook his head. “I got Blanche Remi a bid. You know she wanted one like the devil. Mrs. Jack is a terrible stickler, but we’re great pals, and she let me have it.”

“Miss Remi went?” Walter’s voice was very lazy.

“Did she go?” Hemming laughed. “I’ll tell you what it is,” he said, “the Wrecker’s a wonder! She’s such a wonder that most of the women say, ‘Hands off.’ But between you and me, she makes every other woman look like a Dutch doll.”

Walter had an impulse to strike Hemming. His own words had been flung back at him, but he failed to recognize them.

“Oh, I had a good time,” Hemming repeated, significantly, but unmalicious. “So long.” He sauntered into the saddler’s.

Walter watched the confectioner’s door opening. So Blanche was under an obligation – such an obligation – to Hemming! He had not thought Hemming such a bad lot, but now – Things Lillian had said crowded back to him. And Blanche’s attitude lately? The color thickened in his sallow cheeks.

Blanche came out of the door with a swing. She was eating a chocolate. As she stood under the rippling awning, pulling on her red gloves, he saw she was glowing with excitement. The weight of her splendid hair under her man’s hat, the play of color in her eyes, the slight backward fling of her figure as she poised – each detail proclaimed eloquently how fully she was a conscious, vital force, stupendous to reckon with.

“Where’s Mrs. Gueste?” was the first question she tossed at him, with a straight, studying look.

“Er – she had a headache – and – er, another engagement,” he added, lamely.

Blanche laughed. “One would have been enough,” she said; but the curve of her lip quivered. She stopped his reply with a second question.

“Who ran away as I came out?” she asked, settling in her saddle.

“Blair Hemming.” He looked at her sharply, but she showed no consciousness; only a smile, as though Hemming were something funny.

“Did you have an amusing time last night?” he asked her.

Some vague reminder of Lillian Gueste’s voice startled her. The color deepened in her cheeks. “Oh, lovely! Hemming” – she never gave a title to a name – “took me to the Castras’.”

“Did he get you the invitation?”

She looked at him in surprise.

“I didn’t ask him for it. He offered it.”

“But you took it?”

“Why not? Everyone does it.”

Walter looked at her uneasily. He knew well enough that everyone didn’t. He said stiffly: “I don’t like the idea of your being under obligations to a man like Hemming.”

She looked at him with a quick flush. It might have been anger or pleasure. But then her lashes lowered over her eyes to cover the secret.

“You don’t!” she said. “And how do you suppose Hemming likes my being under obligations to you?”

He was aghast. “What has he got to say about it?”

“What have you?” She let it fall gently.

“Good heavens!” he burst out. “Do you lump us? I thought that you and I were – were – ”

“Friends?” she filled in without a quaver. “We were. But you’ve changed, Wallie.”

“Since – ”

“Your sister came.”

“What nonsense – ” he began, eagerly.

“No” – her eyes were somber, smoldering – “she hates me!” Blanche emphasized the word with her whip on the mare’s flank. “She thinks I’m awful! Hasn’t she said that to you?”

“She has said nothing of the sort. She has nothing to do with it.”

“She has everything!” Blanche said, suddenly, passionately. She jerked the mare’s head fiercely.

They had turned out of the dazzling street into a softly sprinkled side way, where the pepper trees wept their tassels in the dust. Blanche kept her eyes on the bit of blue sky that seemed to close the end of the street like a jewel in a setting.

“Before she came you took me for just what I was. You believed in me, Walter. But ever since she said things, I feel – oh, I don’t know! As if you were a long way off, watching me, and wondering about everything I say and do.”

He broke in: “Because once or twice I criticised some trifle!”

“Oh,” she cried, “don’t think I wouldn’t take criticism from you! I’d take a lot. I’d even wear the sort of hats your sister does!”

“Oh, confound the sort of hats! You know that’s not it. It’s – I – love you, Blanche.”

He brought out the little isolated sentence breathlessly, with a jerk. His sallow face was flushed.

Blanche was very pale. The horses took five steps while there was silence. Then:

“It’s sweet of you to say that.” The girl’s voice was shaken. “But you know, Walter, as she does, I’m not her kind.”

“But I don’t want you to be!”

“Don’t you, Walter?” She looked at him earnestly. “And I’m not your kind, either. I mean, I’m not like the women you’ve known. She’s made me feel that – your sister. It’s one reason why I hate her. Oh, I do!” She nodded at him. “You may as well know that. She makes me see what I’ve missed – little things I thought didn’t matter. But now – ”

“But, child,” he interrupted, exasperated, manlike, with her self-depreciations, “those little things don’t count! It isn’t that. But if you loved me – ”

“If I loved you?” She turned large, astonished eyes on him.

“Well, you wouldn’t take things from Blair Hemming. I won’t stand it,” he broke out. “He was talking about you, Blanche.”

“What did he say?”

“That makes no difference. A woman can’t afford to be talked about in any way. She can’t know a man in such a way.”

“In what way?” The girl was breathless.

He seemed to see long perspectives of pasts: the crowds around her at the dances; the men at dinners, talking to her across the disapproval of the other women; the looks following her down the beach. “Well, you know what I mean,” he answered, sullenly.