The Gorgeous Girl Part 20

"It's a good thing I gave you a check," said her father.

"Yes, because Gay can always find me something"--brightening. "And tell me, how is the salon fresco coming on?"

Her father held up his hands in protest. "Ask something easy. A mob of workmen and sleek gentlemen that tiptoe about like undertakers'

a.s.sistants--that's all I know. But not one of them touches my room!"

"All right, papa." She kissed him prettily. "And as I'm dead for sleep and aunty is snoring in her chair, suppose you wake her up and run along?"

Summoning Aunt Belle, who was approaching the Mrs. Skewton stage of wanting a continuous rose-curtain effect, Beatrice stood at the window with unusual affection to wave the last of her guests a good-bye.

She sat up until daylight, to her maid's dismay, still in her remodelled wedding gown. She was thinking chaotic, rebellious, ridiculous nothings, punctuated with uneven ragged thoughts about matching gloves to gowns or getting potted goose livers at the East-Side store Trudy had just recommended. The general trend of her reverie was the dissatisfaction not over this first year of married life but at the twenty-seven years as a Gorgeous Girl, the disappointment at not having some vital impelling thing to do, which should of course supply a good time as well as a desirable achievement. The inherited energy was demanding an outlet. She recalled the evening's entertainment--a paper chase with every room left littered and disordered, her lace flounce badly torn, her head thumping with pain, the latest dances, the inane music, the scandal whispered between numbers, the elaborate supper and favours, the elaborate farewells--and the elaborate lies about the charm of the hostess and the good time.

She began to envy Steve as well as Trudy, Steve in his hotel busy with Labour delegates, wrangling, demanding, threatening, winning or losing as the case might be. She, too, must do something. She had finished with another series of adventures--that of being a mad b.u.t.terfly. It was shelved with the months of a romantic, parasitical existence misnaming jealous monopoly as love, an existence which all at once seemed as long ago as another lifetime.

She would now be an advanced woman, intellectual, daring; she would allow her stunted abilities to have definite expression. Either she would find a new circle of friends or else swerve the course of the present circle into an atmosphere of Ibsen, Pater, advanced feminine thought, and so on--with Egyptology as a special side line. She would even become an advocate of parlour socialism, perhaps. She would encourage languid poets and sarcastic s.e.x novelists with matted hair and puff satin ties. She would seek out short-haired mannish women with theories and oodles of unpublished short stories, and feed them well, opening her house for their drawing-room talks. She would be a lion tamer! She was done with sighing and tears, belonging to the first stage of Glorious Girlism; and with pouting and flirting, which belonged to the second--she would now make them roar, herself included!

At noon the next day she sought Mary Faithful in her office, to everyone's surprise. To her own astonishment she discovered her husband busily engaged in conversation with some members of the Board of Trade, his travelling bag on a side table.

"I didn't bother to telephone you or wire--I got in at eight this morning and came right up here. I knew you'd not be up," he added, curtly. "Would you mind waiting in Miss Faithful's office until I'm at liberty?"

Beatrice was forced to consent graciously and pa.s.s into the other room, where Mary was giving dictation.

When Mary finished she offered Beatrice a magazine but the Gorgeous Girl declined it and began in petulant fas.h.i.+on:

"I've been thinking about you, Miss Faithful, and I do envy you. Do you know why? You have more of my husband than I have; that was what I came to tell you. For business is his very life and you are his business partner. I only have the tired remnant that occasionally wanders homeward."

Mary wondered what Beatrice would say if she knew of the supper talks she had had with the tired remnant, who flung discretion to the winds and clamoured for invitations as keenly as he had once begged for the Gorgeous Girl's kisses.

"Oh, no, that's not true. You see----" she began, but she simply could not finish the lie.

"I've decided that if business is more important to my husband than his wedding anniversary I shall be of importance to him in his business," she continued. "Be careful--you've a rival looming ahead."

Steve opened the door and nodded for his wife to come in. Mary was left with rather unsteady nerves and a pessimistic att.i.tude to round out her day. Beatrice's hint had had an unpleasant petty sound that she did not quite understand. She wished she had never allowed Steve to draw her out of her businesslike att.i.tude. However, when she learned that he had very unexpectedly called off work for the rest of the day to do his wife's bidding she told herself she was needlessly alarmed, though it was always a rash thing to try exchanging her heartache for a temporary joyful mirage!

The next evening, when Mary was in the throes of explaining this thing in guarded fas.h.i.+on to Steve and Steve was arguing angrily and begging for his welcome, Trudy Vondeplosshe happened in unexpectedly and very much rejoiced inwardly at finding this delightful little tete-a-tete in full progress.

Of course the couple gave business and the recent strike as an alarming necessity for a private conference, and then Steve scuttled away, leaving Mary to try to look unconscious and change the subject to Trudy's new hat. But ever mindful of Mary's confession Trudy was not to be swerved from the topic.

"I'm glad Beatrice was not with me," she said, sweetly, "for like all heartless flirts she is jealous--ashamed of Steve half of the time and mad about him the other half. I'd try to have the business all transacted at the office. You used to. And Beatrice says business isn't half as brisk as it was then."

The upshot of the matter resulted in Mary's applying for a two-months'

leave of absence. Spent in the Far North woods with Luke it would make common sense win over starved dreams.

"I think I've earned it," was all she said to Steve.

"A year ago I went away and you stayed. Of course you have earned it.

But I am going to miss you."

The day before she left--it was well into July before she could conscientiously see her way clear to go--she received a plaid steamer rug. There was no card attached to the gift, and when she was summoned to Steve's apartment to inform him about some matters, Steve having a slight attack of grippe, she was so formal to both Steve and Beatrice, who stayed in the room, making them very conscious of her apricot satin and cream-lace presence, that Beatrice remarked later:

"It's a fortunate thing that she isn't going to visit the North Pole; she'd be so chilly when she returned you'd have to wrap the entire office in a warming pad. I was thinking this morning that with the way she lives and manages she must have saved some money. Do you know if she has--and how much? I hope you won't pay her her salary while she is gone. It's no wonder she can afford nervous prostration if you do!"

"I didn't know she had it," Steve said, dully.

"Whatever it is, then, that makes her take all this time. The way employees act, walking roughshod in their rights! And now, deary, hurry and get well, for I've a wonderful surprise for you." She knelt beside the couch and patted his cheek. "I'm going to be your private secretary during her absence--yes, I am. As soon as I finish making the mannikins for the knitting bags at the kermis. Then I'm going to try to take her place--well, a tiny part of her place to start with, and work into the position gradually. Yes, I am. I'm determined to try it. I've worried and worried to decide what to do with myself."

Worry was Beatrice's sole form of prayer. Steve wondered if what Mary had recently said to him could be true, at least in his own case. She had said that defeat at thirty should be an incentive--only after fifty could it be counted a definite disaster.

CHAPTER XIII

"You don't know how I've missed you," Steve told Mary upon her return.

"Don't I look it?" he added, wistfully.

Mary had appeared at the office late one September afternoon rather than appear the following morning as a model of exact punctuality.

She had had to force herself to remain away until her leave of absence expired. It was Luke who rejoiced in the freedom of the woods and the green growing things in which his sister had tried to take consolation, telling herself they would revive her common sense and banish absurd notions concerning Steve O'Valley. It was Luke who rejoiced at catching the largest trout of the season, who never wearied of hayrack rides and corn roasts and bonfires with circles of ghostlike figures enduring the smoke and the damp and the rapid-fire gossiping and giggling. Luke had returned with a healthy coat of tan and a large correspondence list, pledging himself to revisit the spot every season.

But Mary felt defeated in the very purpose of her holiday. The atmosphere of weary school-teachers trying to appear as golden-haired flappers foot-loose for a romance; the white shoes always drying outside tents or along window sills; the college professors eternally talking about their one three-months' tour of Europe; the mosquitoes; the professional invalid, the inevitable divorcee; the woman with literary ambitions and a typewriter set in action on the greenest, most secluded spot for miles about; the constant snapshotting of everything from an angleworm to a group of arm-entwined bathers about to play splash-me; the cheap talk and aping of such Gorgeous Girls as Beatrice Constantine--all this on one side, and a great and eternal loneliness for Steve on the other.

It was small wonder that defeat was the result. And yet in her heart of hearts Mary was glad that it was so. There is something splendid and breathless in trying to shut away a forbidden rapture, and being unable to do so; in telling oneself one will never try repression again but will shamelessly acknowledge the forbidden rapture and register a desire to thrill to it whenever possible.

Besides the irritations of the summer camp Mary had been forced to leave Hanover remembering Steve as ill, worried over business; of Beatrice's hinting that she would usurp her place. There had been so many womanly trifles she would have done for Steve had she been in Beatrice's position--a linen cover for the water gla.s.s; a soft shade on the window instead of the glaring white-and-gold-striped affair; exile for that ubiquitous spaniel; home cooking, with old-fas.h.i.+oned milk toast and real coffee of a forefather's day.

Strange how such homey trifles persist in the mind of a commercial nun through two months of supposed enjoyment and liberty. In the same way incongruous a.s.sociations of ideas spring into the brain with no apparent reason at all causing fossilized professors to write essays-under-gla.s.s that elucidate matters not in the slightest.

So Mary returned to the office two days ahead of time, her heart thumping so loudly that she thought Miss Lunk would surely detect the sound. She deliberately dressed herself in a demure new suit and a becoming black-winged hat which made her seem as if delightfully arrayed for afternoon tea. And it was with a charming timidity that she tiptoed into the office.

Before Steve had asked her opinion she had given one swift look about the two offices, and she was glad that they looked as they did. It would have been disappointing to have found them spick and span and quite self-sufficient, without a hint that Mary Faithful was missed or irreplaceable.

Evidences of Beatrice's brief sojourn in the business world still remained--an elaborate easy-chair with rose pillows, a thermos bottle and cut-gla.s.s tumbler, a curlicue French mirror slightly awry and, on her desk, a gay-bordered silk handkerchief, a silver-mesh bag, and a great amount of cluttered notations; all of which proved that the understudy secretary had not yet mastered the law of efficiency.

It seemed amusing to Mary. She thought: "How stupid! How can she--when the wicker basket is the one logical place for----"

Then she spied Steve's desk, bearing a suggestion of the same disorder about it. When she spoke his name and he started up, holding out both hands, she saw a queer, bright look in his eyes, as if he, too, were trying to convince himself that everything was all right.

"So you really missed me?"

"Missed you! Heaven alone can record the unselfish struggle I endured to let you play. I give you my word."

He wheeled up a chair for her, just as he used to wheel up a chair for Beatrice, and sitting opposite him Mary heard an almost womanish enumeration of petty troubles and disturbances, a pathetic threat as to the avalanche of work which would await her in the morning.

"And now I will be polite enough to ask if you had a good time?"

"Very! And Mrs. O'Valley?"