"Why?"
"I want to be in town early."
"Why?"
"The early light is the best."
"I thought you'd stopped painting for a while."
"I have, practically. There's one thing I keep on with, in a desultory sort of way—"
"What is it?"
"Oh, nothing of importance—" he hesitated—"that Is, it may be important. I can't be sure, yet."
"Will you tell me what it is?"
"Why, yes. It's a portrait—a study—"
"Of whom, dear?"
"Oh, of nobody you know—"
"Is it a portrait of Valerie West?"
"Yes," he said, carelessly.
There was a silence; in the starlight his shadowy face was not clearly visible to his sister.
"Are you leaving just to continue that portrait?"
"Yes. I'm interested in it."
"Don't go," she said, in a low voice.
"Don't be silly," he returned shortly.
"Dear, I am not silly, but I suspect you are beginning to be. And over a model!"
"Lily, you little idiot," he laughed, exasperated; "what in the world is worrying you?"
"Your taking that girl to the St. Regis. It isn't like you."
"Good Lord! How many girls do you suppose I've taken to various places?"
"Not many," she said, smiling at him. "Your reputation for gallantries is not alarming."
Ho reddened. "You're perfectly right. That sort of thing never appealed to me."
"Then why does it appeal to you now?"
"It doesn't. Can't you understand that this girl is entirely different—"
"Yes, I understand. And that is what worries me."
"It needn't. It's precisely like taking any girl you know and like—"
"Then let me know her—if you mean to decorate-public places with her."
They looked at one another steadily.
"Louis," she said, "this pretty Valerie is not your sister's sort, or you wouldn't hesitate."
"I—hesitate—yes, certainly I do. It's absurd on the face of it. She's too fine a nature to be patronised—too inexperienced in the things of your world—too ignorant of petty conventions and formalities—too free and fearless and confident and independent to appeal to the world you live in."
"Isn't that a rather scornful indictment against my world, dear?"
"No. Your world is all right in its way. You and I were brought up in it. I got out of it. There are other worlds. The one I now inhabit is more interesting to me. It's purely a matter of personal taste, dear. Valerie West inhabits a world that suits her."
"Has she had any choice in the matter?"
"I—yes. She's had the sense and the courage to keep out of the various unsafe planets where electric light furnishes the principal illumination."
"But has she had a chance for choosing a better planet than the one you say she prefers? Your choice was free. Was hers?"
"Look here, Lily! Why on earth are you so significant about a girl you never saw—scarcely ever heard of—"
"Dear, I have not told you everything. I have heard of her—of her charm, her beauty, her apparent innocence—yes, her audacity, her popularity with men…. Such things are not unobserved and unreported between your new planet and mine. Harry Annan is frankly crazy about her, and his sister Alice is scared to death. Mr. Ogilvy, Mr. Burleson, Clive Gail, dozens of men I know are quite mad about her…. If it was she whom you used as model for the figures in the Byzantine decorations, she is divine—the loveliest creature to look at! And I don't care, Louis; I don't care a straw one way or the other except that I know you have never bothered with the more or less Innocently irregular gaieties which attract many men of your age and temperament. And so—when I hear that you are frequently seen—"
"Frequently?"
"Is that St. Regis affair the only one?"
"No, of course not. But, as for my being with her frequently—"
"Well?"
He was silent for a moment, then, looking up with a laugh:
"I like her immensely. Until this moment I didn't realise how much I do like her—how pleasant it is to be with a girl who is absolutely fearless, clever, witty, intelligent, and unspoiled."
"Are there no girls in your own set who conform to this standard?"
"Plenty. But their very environment and conventional traditions kill them—make them a nuisance."
"Louis!"
"That's more plain truth, which no woman likes. Will you tell me what girl in your world, who approaches the qualitative standard set by Valerie West, would go about by day or evening with any man except her brother? Valerie does. What girl would be fearless enough to ignore the cast-iron fetters of her caste? Valerie West is a law unto herself—a law as sweet and good and excellent and as inflexible as any law made by men to restrain women's liberty, arouse them to unhappy self-consciousness and infect them with suspicion. Every one of you are the terrified slaves of custom, and you know it. Most men like it. I don't. I'm no tea drinker, no cruncher of macaroons, no gabbler at receptions, no top-hatted haunter of weddings, no social graduate of the Ecole Turvydrop. And these places—if I want to find companionship in any girl of your world—must frequent. And I won't. And so there you are."
His sister came up to him and placed her arms around his neck.
"Such—a—wrong-headed—illogical—boy," she sighed, kissing him leisurely to punctuate her words. '"If you marry a girl you love you can have all the roaming and unrestrained companionship you want. Did that ever occur to you?"
"At that price," he said, laughing, "I'll do without it."
"Wrong head, handsome head! I'm in despair about you. Why in the world cannot artists conform to the recognised customs of a perfectly pleasant and respectable world? Don't answer me! You'll make me very unhappy…. Now go and talk to Stephanie. The child won't understand your going to-night, but make the best of it to her."
"Good Lord, Lily! I haven't a string tied to me. It doesn't matter to Stephanie what I do—why I go or remain. You're all wrong. Stephanie and I understand each other."
"I'll see that she understands you" said his sister, sorrowfully.
He laughed and kissed her again, impatient. But why he was impatient he himself did not know. Certainly it was not to find Stephanie, for whom he started to look—and, on the way, glanced at his watch, determined not to miss the train that would bring him into town in time to talk to Valerie West over the telephone.
Passing the lighted and open windows, he saw Querida and Alice absorbed in a tête-à-tête, ensconced in a corner of the big living room; saw Gordon playing with Heinz, the dog—named Heinz because of the celebrated "57 varieties" of dog in his pedigree—saw Miss Aulne at solitaire, exchanging lively civilities with Sandy Cameron at the piano between charming bits of a classic ballad which he was inclined to sing:
"I'd share my pottage
With you, dear, but
True love in a cottage
Is hell in a hut."
"Is that you, Stephanie?" he asked, as a dark figure, seated on the veranda, turned a shadowy head toward him.
"Yes. Isn't this starlight magnificent? I've been up to the nursery looking at the infant wonder—just wild to hug him; but he's asleep, and his nurse glared at me. So I thought I'd come and look at something else as unattainable—the stars, Louis," she added, laughing—"not you."
"Sure," he said, smiling, "I'm always obtainable. Unlike the infant upon whom you had designs," he added, "I'm neither asleep nor will any nurse glare at you if you care to steal a kiss from me."
"I've no inclination to transfer my instinctively maternal transports to you," she said, serenely, "though, maternal solicitude might not be amiss concerning you."
"Do you think I need moral supervision?"
"Not by me."
"By whom?"
"Ask me an easier one, Louis. And—I didn't say you needed it at all, did I?"
He sat beside her, silent, head lifted, examining the stars.
"I'm going back on the midnight," he remarked, casually.
"Oh, I'm sorry!" she exclaimed, with her winning frankness.
"I'm—there's something I have to attend to in town—"
"Work?"
"It has to do with my work—indirectly—"
She glanced sideways at him, and remained for a moment curiously observant.
"How is the work going, anyway?" she asked.
He hesitated. "I've apparently come up slap against a blank wall. It isn't easy to explain how I feel—but I've no confidence in myself—"
"You! No confidence? How absurd!"
"It's true," he said a little sullenly.
"You are having a spasm of progressive development," she said, calmly. "You take it as a child takes teething—with a squirm and a mental howl instead of a physical yell."
He laughed. "I suppose it's something of that sort. But there's more—a self-distrust amounting to self-disgust at moments…. Stephanie, I want to do something good—"
"You have—dozens of times."
"People say so. The world forgets what is really good—" he made a nervous gesture—"always before us poor twentieth-century men looms the goal guarded by the vast, austere, menacing phantoms of the Masters."
"Nobody ever won a race looking behind him," she Said, gaily; "let 'em menace and loom!"
He laughed in a half-hearted fashion, then his head fell again slowly, and he sat there brooding, silent.
"Louis, why are you always dissatisfied?"
"I always will be, I suppose." His discontented gaze grew more vague.
"Can you never learn to enjoy the moment?"
"It goes too quickly, and there are so many others which promise more, and will never fulfil their promise; I know it. We painters know it when we dare to think clearly. It is better not to think too clearly—better to go on and pretend to expect attainment…. Stephanie, sometimes I wish I were in an honest business—selling, buying—and could close up shop and go home to pleasant dreams."
"Can't you?"
"No. It's eternal obsession. A painter's work is never ended. It goes on with some after they are asleep; and then they go crazy," he added, and laughed and laid his hand lightly and unthinkingly over hers where it rested on the arm of her chair. And he remained unaware of her delicate response to the contact.
The stars were clear and liquid-bright, swarming in myriads in the June sky. A big meteor fell, leaving an incandescent arc which faded instantly.
"I wonder what time it is," Be said.
"You mustn't miss your train, must you?"
"No." … Suddenly it struck him that it would be one o'clock before he could get to the studio and call up Valerie. That would be too late. He couldn't awake her just for the pleasure of talking to her. Besides, he was sure to see her in the morning when she came to him for her portrait…. Yet—yet—he wanted to talk to her…. There seemed to be no particular reason for this desire.
"I think I'll just step to the telephone a moment." He rose, and her fingers dropped from his hand. "You don't mind, do you?"
"Not at all," she smiled. "The stars are very faithful friends. I'll be well guarded until you come back, Louis."
What she said, for some reason, made him slightly uncomfortable. He was thinking of her words as he called up "long distance" and waited. Presently Central called him with a brisk "Here's your party!" And very far away he heard her voice:
"I know it is you. Is it?"
"Who?"
"It is! I recognise your voice. But which is it—Kelly or Louis or Mr.
Neville?"
"All three," he replied, laughing.
"But which gentleman is in the ascendant? The god-like one? Or the conventional Mr. Neville? Or—the bad and very lovable and very human Louis?"
"Stop talking-nonsense, Valerie. What are you doing?"
"Conversing with an abrupt gentleman called Louis Neville. I was reading."
"All alone in your room?"
"Naturally. Two people couldn't get into it unless one of them also got into bed."
"You poor child! What are you reading?"
"Will you promise not to laugh?"
"Yes, I will."
"Then—I was reading the nineteenth psalm."
"It's a beauty, isn't it," he said.
"Oh, Louis, it is glorious!—I don't know what in it appeals most thrillingly to me—the wisdom or the beauty of the verse—but I love it."
"It is fine," he said. "… And are you there in your room all alone this beautiful starry night, reading the psalms of old King David?"
"Yes. What are you doing? Where are you?"
"At Ashuelyn, my sister's home."
"Oh! Well, it is perfectly sweet of you to think of me and to call me up—"
"I usually—I—well, naturally I think of you. I thought I'd just call you up to say good night. You see my train doesn't get in until one this morning; and of course I couldn't wake you—"
"Yes, you could. I am perfectly willing to have you wake me."
"But that would be the limit!"
"Is that your limit, Louis? If it is you will never disturb my peace of mind." He heard her laughing at the other end of the wire, delighted with her own audacity.
He said: "Shall I call you up at one o'clock when I get into town?"
"Try it. I may awake."
"Very well then. I'll make them ring till daylight."
"Oh, they won't have to do that! I always know, about five minutes before you call me, that you are going to."
"You uncanny little thing! You've said that before."
"It's true. I knew before you called me that you would. It's a vague feeling—a—I don't know…. And oh, Louis, it is hot in this room! Are you cool out there in the country?"
"Yes; and I hate to be when I think of you—"
"I'm glad you are. It's one comfort, anyway. John Burleson called me up and asked me to go to Manhattan Beach, but somehow it didn't appeal to me…. I've rather missed you."
"Have you?"
"Really."
"Well, I'll admit I've missed you."
"Really?"
Sure thing! I wish to heaven I were in town now. We would go somewhere."
"Oh, I wish so, too."
"Isn't it the limit!"
"It is, Kelly. Can't you be a real god for a moment and come floating into my room in a golden cloud?"
"Shall I try?"
"Please do."
"All right. I'll do my god-like best. And anyway I'll call you up at one. Good night."
"Good night."
He went back to the girl waiting for him in the starlight.
"Well," she said, smiling at his altered expression, "you certainly have recovered your spirits."
He laughed and took her unreluctant fingers and kissed them—a boyishly impulsive expression of the gay spirits which might have perplexed him or worried him to account for if he had tried to analyse them. But he didn't; he was merely conscious of a sudden inrush of high spirits—of a warm feeling for all the world—this star-set world, so still and sweet-scented.
"Stephanie, dear," he said, smiling, "you know perfectly well that I think—always have thought—that there was nobody like you. You know that, don't you?"
She laughed, but her pulses quickened a little.
"Well, then," he went on. "I take it for granted that our understanding is as delightfully thorough as it has always been—a warm, cordial intimacy which leaves us perfectly unembarrassed—perfectly free to express our affection for each other without fear of being misunderstood."
The girl lifted her blue eyes: "Of course."
"That's what I told Lily," he nodded, delighted. I told her that you and I understood each other—that it was silly of her to suspect anything sentimental in our comradeship; that whenever the real thing put in an appearance and came tagging down the pike after you, you'd sink the gaff into him—"
"The—what?"
"Rope him and paste your monogram all over him."
"I certainly will," she said, laughing. Eyes and lips and voice were steady; but the tumult in her brain confused her.
"That is exactly what I told Lily," he said. "She seems to think that if two people frankly enjoy each other's society they want to marry each other. All married women are that way. Like clever decoys they take genuine pleasure in bringing the passing string under the guns."
He laughed and kissed her pretty fingers again:
"Don't you listen to my sister. Freedom's a good thing; and people are selfish when happy; they don't set up a racket to attract others into their private paradise."
"Oh, Louis, that is really horrid of you. Don't you think Lily is happy?"
"Sure—in a way. You can't have a perfectly good husband and baby, and have the fun of being courted by other aspirants, too. Of course married women are happy; but they give up a lot. And sometimes it slightly irritates them to remember it when they see the unmarried innocently frisking as they once frisked. And it's their instinct to call out 'Come in! Matrimony's fine! You don't know what you are missing!'"
Stephanie laughed and lay back in her steamer chair, her hand abandoned to him. And when her mirth had passed a slight sense of fatigue left her silent, inert, staring at nothing.
When the time came to say adieu he kissed her as he sometimes did, with a smiling and impersonal tenderness—not conscious of the source of all this happy, demonstrative, half impatient animation which seemed to possess him in every fibre.
"Good-bye, you dear girl," he said, as the lights of the motor lit up the drive. "I've had a bully time, and I'll see you soon again."
"Come when you can, Louis. There is no man I would rather see."
"And no girl I would rather go to," he said, warmly, scarcely thinking what he was saying.
Their clasped hands relaxed, fell apart. He went in to take leave of Lily and Gordon and their guests, then emerged hastily and sprang into the car.
Overhead the June stars watched him as he sped through the fragrant darkness. But with him, time lagged; even the train crawled as he timed it to the ticking seconds of his opened watch.
In the city a taxi swallowed him and his haste; and it seemed as though he would never get to his studio and to the telephone; but at last he heard her voice—a demure, laughing little voice:
"I didn't think you'd be brute enough to do it!"
"But you said I might call you—"
"There are many things that a girl says from which she expects a man to infer, tactfully and mercifully, the contrary."
"Did I wake you, Valerie? I'm terribly sorry—"
"If you are sorry I'll retire to my pillow—"
"I'll ring you up again!"
"Oh, if you employ threats I think I'd better listen to you. What have you to say to me?"
"What were you doing when I rang you up?"
"I Wish I could say that I was asleep. But I can't. And if I tell the truth I've got to flatter you. So I refuse to answer."
"You were not waiting up for—"
"Kelly! I refuse to answer! Anyway you didn't keep your word to me."
"How do you mean?"
"You promised to appear in a golden cloud!"
"Something went wrong with the Olympian machinery," he explained, "and I was obliged to take the train…. What are you doing there, anyway?"
"Now?"
"Yes, now."
"Why, I'm sitting at the telephone in my night-dress talking to an exceedingly inquisitive gentleman—"
"I mean were you reading more psalms?"
"No. If you must know, I was reading 'Bocaccio'"
He could hear her laughing.
"I was meaning to ask you how you'd spent the day," he began. "Haven't you been out at all?"
"Oh, yes. I'm not under vows, Kelly."
"Where?"
"Now I wonder whether I'm expected to account for every minute when I'm not with you? I'm beginning to believe that it's a sort of monstrous vanity that incites you to such questions. And I'm going to inform you that I did not spend the day sitting by the window and thinking about you."
"What did you do?"
"I motored in the Park. I lunched at Woodmanston with a perfectly good young man. I enjoyed it."
"Who was the man?"
"Sam."
"Oh," said Neville, laughing.
"You make me perfectly furious by laughing," she exclaimed. "I wish I could tell you that I'd been to Niagara Falls with José Querida!"
"I wouldn't believe it, anyway."
"I wouldn't believe it myself, even if I had done it," she said, naïvely. There was a pause; then:
"I'm going to retire. Good night."
"Good night, Valerie."
"Louis!"
"What?"
"You say the golden-cloud machinery isn't working?"
"It seems to have slipped a cog."
"Oh! I thought you might have mended it and that—perhaps—I had better not leave my window open."
"That cloud is warranted to float through solid masonry."
"You alarm me, Kelly."
"I'm sorry, but the gods never announce their visits."
"I know it…. And I suppose I must sleep in a dinner gown. When one receives a god it's a full-dress affair, isn't it?"
He laughed, not mistaking her innocent audacity.
"Unexpected Olympians must take their chances," he said. "… Are you sleepy?"
"Fearfully."
"Then I won't keep you—"
"But I hope you won't be rude enough to dismiss me before I have a chance to give you your congé!"
"You blessed child. I could stay here all night listening to you—"
"Could you? That's a temptation."
"To you, Valerie?"
"Yes—a temptation to make a splendid exit. Every girl adores being regretted. So I'll hang up the receiver, I think…. Good night, Kelly, dear…. Good night, Louis. À demain!—non—pardon! à bien tôt!—parceque il est deux heures de matin! Et—vous m'avez rendu bien heureuse."