It was after the Christmas holidays, which Joy had worked through with no let-up save Christmas day at home with her father, that Pa announced a change in schedule. “You are working too steadily,” he said. “You never do anything else; you will turn into a machine; then you will no longer be a girl, and the warmth and glory of your appeal will be gone. Like that! Moreover, it takes a fine shade of quality from your voice; I want you to use it as an instrument, of course, but I think too much of how hard you have worked, and how dull your skin and eyes are getting, when I hear you.”
“Do you really think I’m losing my quality?” Joy demanded.
He laughed. “There—do you see what you just said? That shows you are turning into a little tuning fork, my dear. A girl would have cried: ‘Are my skin and eyes really dull?’ or at least looked in the mirror in front of you.” Before her attitude of unrelaxed question, he grew serious. “No, your quality is not as yet impaired in the slightest; and you are soaring along so swiftly that I cannot believe you have been with me for so few months. But a good teacher can see a fault pending before it takes possession; and as I have so often remarked, I am a good teacher. You need a change.”
“Are you going to send me home for a rest?” she asked in swift antagonism.
“No. You are going to New York. Take some friends along with you if you wish; stay at the Belmont, where all the nice Bostonians stay when they deign to turn their faces westward; go to the opera; go shopping; in short, have not a rest, but a vacation.”
“New York!” she breathed. “Oh, Pa—do you really mean it?”
He nodded. “And I want you to sing for my baby.” He mentioned a name that was a household word for glory of song, a name that shone high and clear in the eminence where only the truly great stars remain, while others tremble for a day and then are gone.
“Sing—for—her!” Joy gasped. “Oh, Pa, I couldn’t—not yet!”
“Little Joy—you will find as you go on, that the greatest ones will always be the easiest and kindest before whom to sing. They know the real elements, and can distinguish lack of training from lack of endowment; and they know of how much value is encouragement, along the weary ladder of the artist. I shall write her a letter, and she will send you word at the Belmont when to come.”
As she thought it over, she could not remember when she had been so excited. Jerry shared her anticipation, and announced that she was going also; it was a good opportunity to select models for her next sale.
“We can get Félicie, too,” she said; “It’s about time she went over to see Greg again.”
Neither voiced the mutual thought, that two of them going to New York alone seemed incomplete. Félicie made a third—possibly a more harmonious third than the other who had silently dropped from their lives.
Félicie acceded to their plans, and Joy wrote her father for money for the trip. His answering check and letter came when the three girls were all in Jerry’s room, Jerry “toning up” several of Félicie’s costumes. Joy read the letter with half her attention on Félicie’s bewitchingness in a pale green velvet that shone dully like moonlight on an even lawn, throwing out her colouring and features in rich relief. Suddenly a name on the page caught her attention. She looked again and then read the paragraph over slowly:
“I hope while you are in New York that you will see your cousin Mrs. Eustace Drew, who was Mabel Lancaster. The Lancasters of whom you have heard me speak; they were your mother’s cousins once removed, and we have not kept up the relationship as she would have wished. I have written Mabel that you are coming, and she will undoubtedly call on you at the Belmont.”
She sat for a moment watching Jerry swirl the velvet on Félicie into marvelous lines. Mabel Lancaster—who had come into Charlette’s for her trousseau, with her brother, Phil Lancaster—of whom Jerry still thought with unquenchable flame. Her first impulse was to show Jerry the letter, share her surprise at this identification of New York cousins she had heard her father mention so many times. Then she held herself back. What if cousin Mabel would forget to call upon her—what if she wasn’t the same one, after all—Joy had forgotten the married name Jerry had given. So she tore the letter into tiny bits, and prepared for the trip with excitement that grew to boiling point as she savoured the amazing possibilities of the coincidence, if coincidence it was.
They took the midnight train, landing in New York in time for breakfast, which they ate at Childs’ opposite the Belmont.
“Although even this place is getting too expensive,” Jerry grumbled.
They giggled all through the meal from sheer light-headedness at being off together. The French waitress had brought them their griddle-cakes, smiled at them in delight, and said as they left: “You act like all young girls should—happy and gay.” This set them off with renewed impetus, and after installing their luggage at the Belmont and as Jerry said “spreading more around in the way of tips than we ate for our breakfast,” they spent the morning going through the Fifth Avenue shops, seeing all “the latest models” with an economical thoroughness that left enraged saleswomen behind them. In the afternoon Félicie curled up for a rest.
“I never sleep on sleepers, and if I don’t look my best, Greg will notice it and say it’s because I’ve been running myself ragged in Boston,” she explained, burrowing her head down under the covers, from which came forth the muffled request: “Please don’t open any windows; you know I can’t sleep where there’s too much air around; it distracts my attention.”
Jerry had made arrangements for tea with two Princeton men, and Joy had willingly consented to go with her. She was just in the mood for squeezing the orange of her good time in New York dry.
They met the Princetonites in the lobby—two well-tailored youths, with that sleek, parted-in-the-middle college expression. The taller of the two, one Steve Mitchell, combed Joy up and down in one competent sweep of the eyes, and annexed her, while the other, poetically called Harry Hanigan, followed Jerry, who had done no more than greet them airily, shove Joy at them just as airily, then make her way to the nearest door, which fronted on the line of taxis.
“This place always acts as if it were the Methodist quarterly conference,” Harry complained loudly. “Come on, Jerry; let’s put in a little pep.”
He stepped with Jerry inside the swinging door, and pushed it, starting off so fast they had to dart around with it in self-protection—or so it seemed. A gentleman around forty, of a comfortable figure, had happened to be entering the swinging doors on the other side, and he too was forced to dart around for self-protection. But whereas his expression was varied, Jerry and Harry seemed to be enjoying themselves. The pace of the revolving doors increased; it almost looked as if the gentleman of no longer comfortable proportions were running a marathon, while the two-in-one on the other side sped over more merrily.
“Why—they’re doing it on purpose!” Joy exclaimed.
Her companions looked about them at the crowd of grinning bellboys collecting, together with the scattering of guests who were pretending not to watch while keeping tabs on every round. “I should think Harry’d get sick of this; he’s done it in almost every hotel in New York,” he said restfully, and waited. The pace slackened; soon the two wedged themselves out of the pinwheel, and waited until, crimson-faced, the third party in the proceedings flew out and bore down upon them.
“Awfully sorry, sir,” said Harry earnestly. “I got packed in with this lady by mistake, and we were so confused we started whirling around—you can see how that would be—and then I lost my head and lost count——”
The intent to kill was by no means abated in the eye of the flaming one. With a hasty, “By George, Mary, we must catch the train; we’ve lost a lot of time with this gentleman here!” Harry seized Jerry and drifted through the revolving doors once more. No one went after them. Joy and Steve found them by a taxi outside, Harry leaning up against it in a Napoleonic attitude.
“Was that neat, or was it not?” he hailed them triumphantly. Steve helped the girls into the taxi, pushed Harry inside, and said to the man: “Drive to the Astor roof.”
“Where’s that?” the driver asked, turning a helpless expression upon him.
“Why,—you drive to the Hotel Astor, and then just keep on driving up to the roof.” Steve spoke sweetly, considerately, as one might to a child, then climbed in and banged the door.
“Just for that, he’ll go the long way around,” Harry complained, peering out at the meter as they started off.
“You have such cheap ideas, Harry!” said Dave. “Jerry knows us, of course; but I was going to make Miss Nelson think we were millionaires.”
“Never mind—we’ll make the waiters at the Astor think we’re millionaires. Not in the obvious way! But by the good old method of gas. What do you say—are you game, Jerry?”
“The waiters don’t listen the way they used to,” Jerry objected.
“Oh, you haven’t been around with us for some time! Look here; I—-I’ll be the Western magnate; I’ve got a whacking black cigar I’ve been keeping just for this. Jerry, you look as though you could have come from most anywhere; you’ll be my wife, and I probably picked you up in some mining camp while I was getting rich, or something. See? Act with that as a background. We’re the recent rich, that want anything that’s high-priced or has a fancy name. Get it?”
“And I,” Steve contributed, “will be a New York crest-rider—gay young rounder—look down on you of course, but keen to wangle the contract out of you through this social means.”
“Contract! Oh, yes, there’s got to be a contract!”
“Cer-tain-ly. A million dollar one. We’ve got to make this party as doggy as possible. And Miss Nelson here can be my fiancée—I’ve dragged her along to impress her with my importance—you’ll be typical New York yearling, Miss Nelson, bored with anybody but your own set, bored with business, furious at me for bringing you, try to get all the men at the other tables to look at you, then turn ’em down with a haughty stare—you know.”
Jerry stood up on the taxi, struggling with herself. “I am nothing if not artistic,” she said; “and if I’m to be a mining-camp-varnished-with-dollars-product, I shall look the part.”
“That’s one of your best points, Jerry,” approved Steve. “You do a thing up right.”
She sat down again, barely in time before they drew up at the Astor and poured forth. Joy caught her breath in an abortive laugh, as they solemnly filed through the luxurious lobby, Jerry leading as usual. In a few swift touches, Jerry had changed herself from the breezy mondaine upon whom everything naturally looked right and leads to the harmony of that elusive completeness that is style, to the woman who, with obvious’ means and as obvious a wish to look well, pathetically falls just short of the mark. Her skirt sagged, ever so little, but still condemning enough; the buttons on the coat of her duveteen suit were fitted loosely in the wrong buttonholes; her hat was tilted back ingenuously, revealing a wide expanse of forehead, and she had pinned her hair in here and there so that the remains of its bobbed audacity had the appearance of little ends that had messily strayed from their moorings. Her gloves were partly unbuttoned, and one flapped as she walked. Even her walk had changed—it was a businesslike stride, with “getting-there” written all over her hastening back.
“Not a girl in a hundred would show she could look like that,” said Steve, in critical approval, as he kept pace with Joy in behind. “No wonder Jerry’s an institution that never fails.”
As they reached the roof Harry pulled out his cigar, a huge black affair that he stuck in his mouth at an angle of forty-five degrees. With cunning eye he marked out the head waiter and bore down upon him, thumbs in his waist-coat pocket, twirling his fingers. “We want the best table in the place,” he said, speaking through the cigar, at which the waiter tried not to look. “No expense shall be spared!”
He swaggered as the waiter hastily led them to a corner table. Joy was about to sink down, conscious that forks were being suspended in midair all about them, when Jerry put in a word.
“I don’t like this table, Bill,” she said querulously. “I want to be out in the middle where I can see everything that goes on, I do.”
“Waiter, did you hear my wife? What my wife says goes! Nothing’s too good for her!” Harry turned fiercely upon the waiter, jerking his cigar up and down in time to his words. The head waiter, all apologies, conducted them to a more centrally located table, and beckoned to a lesser menial, who helped install them. Jerry gave a bereft wail.
“Where’s the flowers! We haven’t got no flowers! Look, Bill, at that table there they got flowers!”
Her fingers pointed firmly to an adjoining table, all eyes of which were already fixed upon them with that passionate interest that only Americans display in the affairs of others.
“Now, Rosie, didn’t I tell you not to point at things with your fingers?” Harry admonished in a penetrating lower tone.
“Well, a fork wasn’t handy; the man ain’t set the table yet,” Jerry responded.
“Let us order,” interposed Steve in a suave, glossing-it-over tone, as the waiter thrust the menu before them.
“Just rustle us the best tea on the premises, young feller,” said Harry to the waiter, with a wave of the hand. “With all the fixin’s; see?”
Jerry interposed once more. “Say, Bill, I want a merring glass. Does that come with the tea?”
“A meringue glacé,” said Steve smoothly to the by now distracted waiter.
“What kind does madame prefer?”
“Kind?” Jerry looked bewildered. “Is there different kinds? Can’t I just have a plain merring glass?”
“A vanilla one, perhaps,” said Steve with a reassuring smile directed first at her and then at the waiter. Then, as the waiter fluttered away, leaving several around pouring water and adjusting the table, and others poised near by with their ears cocked, Steve leaned across the table, and addressed Harry in a loud, confidential tone:
“Rather a pleasant idea of yours, Mr.—er—Billings, to combine business with afternoon tea.”
“Well, I hope your girl and my wife get to be real good friends,” said Harry cordially. “I can remember when a million-dollar contract would ’a’ looked pretty big to me.”
“It is practically certain, then, that we have underbid the—the Standard Oil Company on this?” Steve demanded.
“Lemme tell you, young man, underbiddin’ don’t always mean you get a million-dollar contract. Not by a jugful!”
“Bill, remember there is ladies present!” from Jerry.
“Rosie, we’re talkin’ in business terms now, an’ you can chew on that piece of bread the waiter handed you, till we get through. Now lemme tell you, young man, the fact is, the underbiddin’ don’t cut so much ice as my private an’ personal opinions. I get hunches, that’s what I do; an’ hunches is what made Bill Billings what he is to-day, if I do say it.”
Joy could only watch, all her energies concentrated on stifling the mirth that their antics were inspiring. The waiter brought their tea and Jerry’s “merring,” which Jerry devoured with the aid of a spoon, a knife and fork, using her roll also as a pusher now and then. Harry drank tea from his saucer and discoursed on the grudge he bore the Standard Oil; they were a bunch of cheap skates, and they would be a bunch of soreheads to-morrow when they learned that Mr. Mitchell had nailed this contract. “For it is yours, young man, for the asking; and yours is a firm I would trust a lot further than that.” The people of the next table had given up all pretense of eating or talking to each other, and the table back of Joy was also avidly silent. She could not see them, but she could feel the tense attention, and sense the vibrations of vision that centered on their table.
Tea being over, Harry grew more expansive. “You going to step round to the minister’s soon, you two?” he beamed benevolently. “Better not waste any time. I married Rosie when she was sixteen—Told her then to stick to me and she’d wear diamonds. I notice you stuck, old girl?”
“Now, Bill, you stop!” Jerry simpered. The head waiter was presenting the check. Several other waiters who had added to their sense of well-being were lined up in back of the head waiter. Steve started to take the bill, but Harry intervened.
“Pay my way’s my motto,” he said, whereat Steve lost his composure for the first time and gulped while Harry drew his rather thin wallet from his pocket and carefully counted out what looked like a small amount which he laid on the salver with the check. Steve recovered himself and filled in the awkward pause by saying:
“Yes, we intend to be married as soon as Miss Nelson can get her trousseau together. It’s already taken a year—as fast as she gathers a few little things together, why, they go out of style, and then she has to start all over again. It’s such a fearful ordeal for the poor darling!”
They rose to go, Joy conscious of an acute sag in the waiter’s expression as he took the salver and walked away with failing footsteps. And then she turned and saw the table whose listening silence she had been appreciating throughout that time. She stared in stupefaction. The Lamkins; the Alfred Lamkins from Foxhollow Corners; pillars of the church, two solid, well-buttressed souls, with four white-eyelashed, shiny-nosed, unmarried daughters. All staring at Joy in that awful delight experienced by small-town souls when they find their neighbours doing something out of the ordinary.
“Why—there’s Joy Nelson!” said Mrs. Lamkin, in obviously manufactured surprise.
“So it is!” chorused the four white-eyelashed things. “Hello, Joy!”
It was plain that they expected her to stop and speak to them, exchange the usual banal what-are-you-doing-in-the-big-city of the out-of-towner, and present her companions. It was just as plain that she intended doing nothing of the sort, and with a confused nod of acknowledgement, her head down, she almost ran past them to the elevator.
“Did you see that waiter wilt at my twenty-five cent tip, and all the others melt away?” Harry chortled as they went down.
“Who were those people, Joy?” Jerry demanded, pulling her hat down and her hair out.
“People from home.”
“Home-town stuff!” Steve cried. “You’re compromised forever now, Joy; you’ll have to marry me now!”
“That’s not as bad as this fall, in at the Knickerbocker,” said Harry reminiscently. “I had the waiter sure I was the Prince of Wales and Steve here an escaped nobleman from Russia, conferring together about starting royalty over here, when up blows Dick Lindley and another poor egg, calling us by name and requesting the loan of some cash to get back to Princeton!”
The blithe youths left them at the Belmont. “We’ve been lowbrow this afternoon; we’ll be highbrow to-night,” said Steve. “We’ve wangled Harry’s mother’s box at the opera.”
“Can Félicie Durant and Greg Stevens come along?” Jerry asked. “Félicie’s over with us, and I said we’d do something to-night with them.”
“Félicie Durant can come anywhere with me where I can look at her,” said Harry; “if she’ll keep her mouth shut. Still going around with Greg Stevens, is she?”
“Greg Stevens—” Steve repeated; “not Princeton?”
“Nope—Yale—managed most of the teams there, and all that sort of flutter. He’s all right, though. Don’t take more than an hour now, you two!”
They found Félicie still sleeping in a breathlessly stuffy room, as she had not even turned off the heat.
“Well, Joy, what do you think of our Princeton specialties?” Jerry asked, turning on the lights and pulling the covers from Félicie’s face.
“Lovely. I can’t tell which one is talking when I close my eyes. But of all places I’ve been to around Boston—why did I have to come to New York to run into some home-towners!”
“That is one thing about New York—you’re always running into people you know, in the wrong places. Wake up, Félicie! You’ve only got an hour to get dressed, and we’ve a box at the opera!”
Félicie, after a struggle with herself, arose with an injured expression. “I was awake all the time—you needn’t have spoken so loud. I haven’t slept hardly a wink. Just as I was falling asleep someone called Joy on the phone—Madame Somebody’s maid, or something, who said Joy was to come at four to-morrow, she would send her car.”
It was characteristic of Félicie that she had not even recognised the great name that brought Joy to a standstill and drew a whistle from Jerry.
“Perhaps we’ll hear her to-night,” said Jerry. “Don’t lose your nerve, Joy; you’ll sing circles around her some day. Go and run a tub and do some scales—they won’t be heard over the tub if you close the door.”
“I hope you’re not running a tub for me,” Félicie objected; “too many baths are bad for me, I’m funny that way.”
Strange anomaly—the Félicie who had everything about her as neat as a bee-hive, but slept in sealed rooms and disagreed with baths!
An hour later they admitted they were fit to sit in anyone’s box at the opera. Félicie was almost bewilderingly lovely in pale green velvet; Jerry was audacious and stunning in low-cut purple with cerise ostrich feathers; Joy wore a cloth-of-gold that Jerry had ripped from an old model of hers and put together in a few simple lines.
“With your hair,” said Jerry, looking her over in professional pride, “that get-up’s a knock out.”
Joy found herself wishing that Jim was going to see her, instead of the Princeton youths.
“Wait till we hit the diamond horseshoe!” Jerry was saying. “Although we’re probably higher up than that.”
“I wish I had some diamonds to wear,” Félicie sighed. “I do love diamonds so.”
“If you’d give in to Greg, you might have one,” Jerry suggested.
“One about the size of a pin-point! I couldn’t stand that. Men don’t half appreciate what it means to a girl to have a ring that she won’t have to be ashamed of. When I get one, I want a good one, as long as it’s a thing I’ll have to wear all my life.”
“Oh, so you’ve thought up another argument now for not getting married for four years,” said Jerry.
“Now you’re picking on me again!”
The ring of the telephone announcing that their escorts awaited them downstairs interrupted here, and they sailed down after a mere ten minutes for last rites of re-powdering, going over one’s hair, and general touching up.
Gregory Stevens was as dark as Félicie, scarcely more than an eager boy, and very much in love, as Joy saw and could have seen if she had not been told. They ate at the Belmont, and throughout dinner Félicie and Greg carried on a low-toned conversation, refusing to be drawn into the general chatter. They reached the opera late, and Joy lost herself in a heaven of sound oblivious to the whispering all about her. The first grand opera she had ever heard; small wonder that she could not come out of her trance between the acts, to enjoy the sensation of being a beautiful girl sitting in a box at the Opera. A little before the end Harry pulled her back to the world of Excitement-Eaters by whispering: “Come on, we don’t want to be caught in this mob; we’re going somewhere to dance.”
Surprised dumb that they could leave the greatest of music quivering in mid-air, she followed them as they streaked out and lost the time they had gained in debate of where to go. Steve voted for the “Bré Cat;” Jerry downed that with a sniff; “Princeton’s playground!” “Weisenrebber’s,” Harry’s suggestion, was voted down as “too rough;” Jerry declared she positively would not go to any of the hotels, she could get the same thing in Boston. Steve groaned, and said he supposed they’d have to fork out fifty dollars or so for a table at the Frolic; Félicie and Greg cried out in swift protest that they wanted to go somewhere quiet.
“I tell you what,” said Harry: “let’s slum uptown. There’s a place up around Columbia with good music—Fennelly’s, or something. Come on, we’re off!”
No one knowing enough about the place to object, they piled into a taxi and worked their way uptown, Félicie and Greg following alone in another. The first four were well established at the uptown dancing palace before Félicie and Greg joined them. Félicie’s colour was heightened almost to a dark purple flush; Greg was pale, his features standing out sharply. They sat down at the table without a word, and stared vaguely at the dancers.
“You two ought never to go to the opera,” said Harry sweetly. “It’s got you all—wrought—up.”
“Not the opera,” said Greg, each word sheared off almost before it came. “We’ve been discussing the modern girl.”
“I don’t want to talk about it any more,” Félicie’s pouting lips twitched out. “I’m so nervous now I could just scream!”
“We’ve ordered for you,” said Steve as the waiter brought up some soft drinks. “Do you think opera is as crazy as I do? Come on, Harry; let’s do our favourite scene from Madame Butterfly. Ladies and gentlemen, this is an actual transition from part of this famous opera.” He rose, pouring some gingerale into a glass, singing solemnly: “Will you have some more whiskey?”
“Thank you!” sang Harry in response, taking the glass and draining it. They sat down looking for appreciation; but Joy and Jerry were regarding the two who still sat without a flicker of attention to anything.
“Well, what is there about the modern girl that brings on this run-over attitude?” Harry inquired, ignoring Steve’s warning eyebrows.
“The modern girl,” said Greg, “is selfish to cruelty. I think that—carries the situation in a nutshell.”
“Is the modern girl any more selfish than the modern man?” said Joy quickly, anxious to alleviate the mauve tints of Félicie’s face. “I haven’t noticed it, if it’s so.”
“Oh, now we’re in for deep discussion!” Harry proclaimed joyously. “I do love deep discussions in frivolous places!”
“From my point of view, the man as he is to-day is the result of the modern girl,” said Greg, turning to Joy.
“If she is selfish, so selfish that she wishes to have everything, while giving nothing in return, so selfish that she looks upon the world as her debtor—she must mold the man’s attitude toward her. And men can no longer regard her with the chivalry and reverence in which men held women when women made the sacrifices that made the name of woman something to be worshipped.”
“But we’re sick of being worshipped!” cried Félicie, whose silence had been fading to lavender. “The viewpoint you have is the viewpoint of the last century and so on—men dividing women into two classes—” She stopped, and Jerry took up the sentence:
“Félicie wants to say—two classes—good and bad; good to be worshipped and do all the work and have a generally poky time; bad to be despised, but taken around and having the whirl their good little sisters missed.”
“And why boast that the old-fashioned distinction has disappeared?” Greg thrust forth. “Nowadays the line has vanished. Good and bad comport themselves alike. The ‘good’ girl—so-called—refuses to undertake any of the responsibilities that for centuries have made her sheltered and protected. She paints her face more recklessly than her sister on the street. She aims to out-demi the demi-mondaine in her dress. She does not disdain to use any weapon, no matter how blood-stained, to bring men to her feet; and then she leaves them there. The old-fashioned girl gave a man the mitten. This new girl never kills them off; she must have strings to her bow; she keeps them dangling around her as long as is humanly possible. And then she turns around and says: ‘Men aren’t as chivalrous as they used to be!’” He looked around at them, with almost a sneer. “No wonder things are happening nowadays that a few years ago you couldn’t have believed possible!”
Joy, clutching at her throat, was conscious that her nails were biting into the skin. She was back at her first Prom—last spring. She saw herself standing in front of a mirror gazing in fascination at her white shoulders, her blazing cheeks, her painted lips. Again she beard Jim Dalton telling her what he thought of her appearance. Had she been in some way responsible for what had happened? “You’re ripping me all to pieces.” . . . The words leaped up at her from the stagnant channels of that memory. She drew in her breath so sharply that it caught in her lungs.
“That’s a very fluent argument, Greg,” Harry was saying: “I’m surprised and pleased to see an Eli whose brains weren’t lost under the training table. All the same, I think you’re on the wrong tack. As Jerry says, the old-fashioned girl was poky. I couldn’t stand her alone for five minutes; she’d drive me to drink.”
“Maybe, but she wouldn’t drink with you,” grinned Steve.
“That’s just it, Harry!” said Joy. “An old-fashioned girl bores men nowadays. So what stimulus have we for being old-fashioned?”
“It’s one of those vicious circles,” said Greg. “But the girls are responsible in the first place—they can’t get away from it. They have fooled the men into thinking they’re more attractive this way.”
“Well, they are,” Harry persisted. “I wouldn’t go back to the Clinging-Vine Age for marbles. When I go to see a girl, I want to have a good time with her—and as far as I can see, if the gallants in other times ever did get to see a girl, all they did was sit and twiddle their thumbs.”
“You didn’t hear any complaints from anybody,” said Greg undaunted. “Nobody realized they were having what we could now term a dull time. I tell you things are getting too complicated. There are too many new inventions for having good times. We just dash from one new sensation to the next. When a man goes to see a girl nowadays, what do they do? Do they sit in the parlor and talk, do they go out into the kitchen and make fudge? They do not. They duck the family, and step into his or her father’s Rolls-Royce or Ford and ride seven or seventy miles to the nearest place that has the best dance music or they go to the movies, during which they laugh and talk and say: ‘Why did we come? We could have done this at home and not be bored by a rotten show;’ but they go next time just the same; or if they stay home for once, they gather a large bunch around them and turn on the home jazz variety. Is this true or isn’t it?”
“Well, I fail to see how you can slide all that off on the girl,” said Jerry. “What’s the use of all this moralizing stuff? You know you like a good time as well as the rest of us. To crab at people who are enjoying themselves is a sign of the aged.”
“Look at us to-night,” said Greg. “Here we are paying I-don’t-know-what per couvert to sit in an uninteresting place and watch the world’s most ordinary potpourri, the personnel of a public dance hall, canter around on a bum floor——”
“And listen to you crab. I admit it’s awful,” said Jerry, rising. “Come on, Harry. Greg probably won’t dance after his oration, but I intend to see if it is a bum floor.”
They slid away, and Greg looked at Félicie. The lines in his face quivered into softness until he looked like a hungry, wistful child. Félicie’s colour had died to a brilliant flash in either cheek; her loveliness was almost aching in its intensity. “I’m sorry, Félicie,” he said gently. “Shall we dance?”
Steve and Joy looked after them as they joined “the world’s most ordinary-looking potpourri.” “He seems like a fine fellow,” said Steve; “but what’s eating him, anyway? Won’t she marry him? He ought to be glad.”
“Well, he doesn’t seem to be,” said Joy rather shortly.
“All this haste to get married while you’re young is idiotic,” said Steve, with an air of settling the subject. “If he says the modern girl is selfish because she doesn’t want to let herself in for the cares and risks of marriage until she has an everlasting good time out of her youth, he’s talking rot. The modern girl’s got a sane argument, and it’s the same one I’d use for myself. Marriage clips your wings, whether you’re a man or a girl, and there’s no use getting into it before you’ve had enough of high-flying!”
Joy said nothing. It was the same argument she had used for herself. Marriage was not for her, until the wings of her power had grown so that she could soar with that impediment. But Félicie’s case was different. She was in love—supposedly. And Greg’s face——
“Come on and twirl a measure,” said Steve, “if you’re not above mingling with the Too-Much-Perfumed.”
“Too-Much-Perfumed?” she echoed as they went out on the floor.
“Yes—I always think of that in these places—don’t you get the scent on different couples as they whiff by us? I always think of the common herd as perfuming themselves heavily. So, instead of calling ’em the Great Unwashed, I call ’em the Too-Much-Perfumed.”
It was about two when they returned to the Belmont. The girls undressed quickly, saying little. No one brought up the subject of Greg’s harangue. Jerry said that she would sleep with Félicie, so that Joy could have the single room and sleep as late as possible into the day.
“I know you’ve got to have sleep back of your voice,” she said, “so go to it, old girl. I’ll make Félicie open one window.”
If only Jerry were not such an Excitement-Eater——
By four the next afternoon, Joy had nearly scared herself into a chill. Félicie had gone down to Princeton for a party, but Jerry had remained with her. First, her costume offered trouble. After three changes, she was almost ready to start, when there was a heartsick moment of losing her short gloves. Then a worse moment when she found a rip in them that Jerry repaired with lightning skill. Hesitation over her music which Pa had told her to take indiscriminately, since the great one would select what she pleased to hear. It seemed such a lot to take in one music roll. Finally Jerry bundled her off, going down with her to the door of the waiting car, a dark green Cadillac, such as anyone,—well most anyone—might have. She was driven to the door of a Park Avenue apartment house, where the chauffeur instructed her to go to the top floor. A little maid admitted her to a room beautifully appointed in grey, relieved by sharp touches of black and the inevitable grand piano. Music was piled on the piano in indeterminate heaps; some of it was even trickling off to the floor. Another sheet fell as Joy came into the room, and she went over to pick it up, restoring the others to place as she did so.
“Ah, so we have a neat little housewife’s soul, in a singer!”
A full, perfectly poised voice, each word as flawless as if it had been engraved on a cameo. Joy turned, crimson with embarrassment and excitement, and straightway forgot both. The queen of music had a most understanding smile. Moreover, she did not look like a diva. She was not even large, as singers went, and certainly not of terrifying aspect. She was dainty as a little wren, standing by the doorway in a grey teagown, her head tipped to one side, her eyes—the eyes that looked so awe-inspiring in her pictures—surrounded by a network of little smile-wrinkles.
“Well,” she said, and came to take Joy’s hands; “have you nothing at all to say to me—or must all be sung, as in op-era? Never mind—” and she drew Joy to a sofa—“I once remember when I was younger than you, and they sent me to sing for Patti. Oh, how I died! It was after a performance, and Patti was in no charm to hear me. She was weary of child-wonders. How well I remember that long time ago! She was in her room at the hotel; there was a wood fire; she always had one go ahead of her, turn off the steam, and have a fire built ready for her coming. I sat in a tremble; and what I had brought to sing—at sixteen? The waltz song from Romeo and Juliet! But no matter. She came in all wrapped around with cloaks and hoods and shawls. How poisonous is the night air to a singer, and all other things that lend joy and romance! Her table was spread with her supper. I was to sing while she ate. She sat down, giving me a look with those black eyes, while her maid unwound her from the shawls. I was so unhappy! She pointed to the piano. ‘I do not know why they want me to hear them sing,’ she said. ‘I know nothing, just what I like or do not like, and how it sounds to me—I will listen not for the things the critics discuss. But sing! And I will tell you what I think.’”
She looked at Joy, her eyes twinkling up again. “I was in a horror! I shook, how I shook! And the noble Adelina saw that I could not do anything, although the young man was waiting for me at the piano. She arose from her clear soup, did Adelina, and went to look at what I had brought. ‘Ah, it is the waltz!’ she said. ‘Have you heard Nellie Melba sing this, child?’
“Nellie Melba was then dazzling the world. I had heard and rejoiced, as had everyone. I could only nod. But Adelina went on. ‘In my time,’ she said, ‘Nellie Melba’s voice would have been termed a light-opera voice. You gasp? But listen how we were taught to run the descent of the chromatic in this waltz.’”
She closed her eyes, her features sinking into a repose of prayer. “Oh, those notes that came floating from that supreme woman! Golden, perfectly matched, each one a pearl on the perfect string! She stopped on the B flat, and laughed a little at my face. ‘Now I will show you,’ said she, ‘how Nellie Melba pours it forth!’ And that Adelina ran it up and down in just the way I had heard Melba sing it many times. I cannot tell you the difference. Still beautiful, but—it was as if she had taken the bottom away from everything, that second time!”
“What did she say when you sang?” Joy asked eagerly, as she came to a pause.
The little wren tossed her hands and shoulders, laughing lightly. “The story ends there! I have gotten you to speak! Come—let us see what you have brought. I hope a variety, for............