Jean, Jean! Hurry a little, my dear,” called Daniel Willard from the foot of the stairs.
“But it’s early yet, uncle. Why, I believe you’ve actually put on your overcoat, and I haven’t even got into my gown and—”
“Sh—!” The tall figure below disappeared through the door of the living-room and the girl retreated in surprise from the balustrade.
But perhaps he was going farther after escorting her to Laura Brookman’s, she thought, and she had better not detain him unnecessarily—she held his stately disapproval in much too wholesome respect. The preliminaries to her toilet being accomplished, it took her but a few minutes to complete it with the donning of the simple white gown which had seen much pleasant service, and presently she was running downstairs, carrying her gloves and wrap, and pinning on her hat in her descent.
“Here I am,” she announced, coming into the flood of gaslight, still intent upon jabbing in a refractory hat-pin. “It’s ridiculously early, but I don’t mind with Lau—”
She stopped abruptly, her hands dropping from their task, at sight of the stranger standing tall and easy under the chandelier.
“Dr. May, Jean. My niece, Doctor.”
The girl acknowledged the introduction as he received it, with calm grace, reflecting the reserve in the glance from his hazel eyes, the distant smile upon his reticent lips, unprepared though she was for the meeting.
“Shall we not sit down?” she asked undecidedly, noticing that both gentlemen held their hats in their hands.
Her uncle quickly undeceived her. “No; if you are ready, we will go. We are going to drop you on the way. Dr. May has an hour to spare and is coming with me to the French Hospital51 to visit Bonnat,—you know poor old Bonnat, Jean?”
“Your dear, ladylike old man who wears his pride like a last year’s bonnet? Well?”
“My dear, you know you like him,” reproved Daniel. “But I have told the doctor he will find him a hard case.”
“An interesting one, from all accounts,” observed Philip, moving toward the door as if to hurry them. “Nothing arouses my egotism more than the hope of overcoming other people’s failures—or Bonnats.”
Daniel helped his niece with her wrap. “But,” hesitated the girl, distantly, “I really don’t care to inconvenience Dr. May. Mollie will walk to Laura’s with me.”
“It will be no inconvenience,” he assured her, in surprise, holding the portière aside. “Although my hurrying you off in this fashion robs your uncle of his usual concert.”
“Your father has been telling tales,” she returned, pleasantly formal, walking with him to the door.
“No—the walls.”
“I forgot I had a critic on the other side. Next time I shall play pianissimo.”
“Wouldn’t that be selfish?”
“But everybody is selfish.”
“In degrees.”
“And with exceptions. Witness somebody waiting out here on the steps for me. Ugh, how dark and cold it is!”
The bitter fog drove straight in their faces on the icy breath of the keen March wind as he closed the door behind them. They joined Daniel Willard waiting for them at the foot of the steps. Jean slipped her hand through her uncle’s arm, and they turned southward, down the hill. They walked briskly, their steps ringing sharp on the asphalt. The gas in the street lamps flared wildly, making grotesque shadows of the tall, hurrying figures with the fluttering drapery of the girl between.
“I like it,” she laughed, when Philip protested against the tug of war between hill and wind. “I’ve been raised on it. It’s like getting on in spite of things—and I’d think it lots of fun if it didn’t take uncle’s breath away.”
“Not at all,” repudiated Daniel, drawing himself up to a straighter perpendicular. “I have not been speaking because it is foolish to fill one’s lungs with the fog. Am I not right, Doctor?”
The latter met the girl’s merry eye with a twinkle of his own before assuring the old gentleman of the wisdom of his caution. “Although,” he added. “I’ve been told it is accountable for the famous complexions of the women of the city. So it compensates itself gallantly.”
“Yes, we’re all radiant,” said Jean, turning up her own creamy colorlessness for his inspection, “and all wild and woolly. Please take notice that, despite her fearlessness, a girl with only two blocks to walk at night is punctiliously provided with an escort. But, with due exaggeration admitted for art’s sake, surely only the blind would fail to remark our beautiful women.”
“Everything is in the eye of the observer,” laughed Philip, equivocally, glancing down at her. “Some people are beauty-blind, you know. And standards differ—and no one is the measure of all things. Remember the ass who preferred his thistle to gold.”52
“Happy ass,” murmured Jean.
“Most asses are happy,” he vouchsafed.
“Being stupid?” she suggested.
“Being satisfied,” he returned, shortly. Then suddenly remembering that he detested any display of self through word or tone, he drew rein, surprised at his slight lapse under the girl’s lovely eyes.
They stopped presently before an imposing house.
“Good night,” she said, putting up both hands to turn up her uncle’s coat-collar. “Don’t bother to come up the steps, dear.” She held out a frank hand to Dr. May. “I’m glad Uncle Joseph has you back,” she said, swiftly.
“Good night,” he returned, courteously, taking her hand and raising his hat.
The next minute she had run up the steps and rung the bell. As they waited while she stood just beneath the flickering lantern, holding her long gray wrap about her, her face showing fitfully in the wavering light, Philip’s critical eye paid reluctant homage to her personality. She disappeared abruptly as in a well of light, and the two men turned toward the Sacramento Street cars.
A delicious sense of warm luxury greeted her. She walked slowly through the stately hall and up the broad, familiar staircase, as directed, oblivious for once to the harmony of rugs and hangings and deep-toned walls. Pained over the vague yet indubitable reserve with which Philip May had met her, scorning herself for what she had expected merely on the score of her friendship with his father, glad of the thought that he was kind—spreading the glow of his going to poor old Bonnat into a sort of halo over his coldly intellectual aspect—“for kindness,” she argued, as though apologizing for his apostasy, “is as good a working creed as any in this hungry, workaday world”—lost in her chaotic abstractions, she reached her friend’s boudoir before she realized it.
A tall, handsome young woman, crowned with a mass of golden hair, absorbed in applying the last daub of powder to her nose, threw down her hand-glass at her approach and came gayly toward her.
“Oh,” she said, delightedly, “I’m so glad you’ve come early—now we can have a few words together before we go down. How do you look? What have you on?” She was hurriedly unfastening the girl’s wrap while she spoke.
“Just the old white thing,” replied Jean, in surprise. “You said no one would be here but Paul Stein, and that we three would have a good old talk together, your lord being due at his club.”
“Yes, I know. But I was afraid you had come in a shirt-waist, or something of that sort.”
“Suppose I had? Paul doesn’t count—but I felt like looking nice to-night, hence my festive appearance in this old rag.”
“The old rag was an inspiration, and you look lovely. Don’t stare at me as if I were daft. The fact is, Jean—would you have come to dine with us to-night if I had rung you up rather late?”
“I don’t know. Why?”
“Well, Charlie sent me word he was going to bring some one home to dinner, but as I wasn’t in—. Sit down there.” She pressed her into a chair.
“I believe you are positively excited over something,” murmured Jean, eying her with curiosity.
Laura laughed and seated herself near her. “To tell the truth,” she began, half jestingly, half judicially, the color sweeping over her rose-tinted cheeks—then she stopped. “Jean,” she essayed again, wholly earnest now, “do you think I care for you?”
“Laura,” repeated Jean, in exaggerated solemnity, “do you think I care for you? You are beginning to frighten me.”
“Because you frighten me. I don’t know how to begin—you are so different on some points from other girls. Well, then, Ted Hart is down in the billiard-room with Charlie.”
“Indeed! One of the gold-incrusted Harts?”
“Yes; the bachelor.”
“I thought he lived in the East, or abroad, or somewhere.”
“He does, but he is visiting his business interests on this coast and, incidentally, his brothers.”
“Well, what do you want me to do about it? Does he threaten your peace? Is that why you ran upstairs?”
“No; I was waiting for you. I wanted to ask you to be—amiable to him.”
“What a libel! Am I not always amiable?”
“No; and you know you’re not. If a man doesn’t just happen to come up to your demands you can freeze him into an icicle.”
“Thanks. It doesn’t sound pretty, but it isn’t true. I only treat a man according to his pretensions. But what is the matter with poor Mr. Hart?”
“There! You are going to be difficult to-night. I know it—I feel it.”
Jean laughed softly, amusedly. “You have no idea how hard and ordinary those violet eyes of yours look just now,” she said, slowly. “Just let that match burn out of them, Laura—and drop it.”
“There are millions in it, Jean.”
“That sounds like an echo of your husband.”
“Yes,” Laura agreed, with a slight laugh. “Charlie is rather blunt. Perhaps you prefer the more poetic. Then why not ‘take the cash and let the credit go’53—although—”
“Don’t get any deeper in the mire of figures, I beg of you. Think of calling a man Cash!”
“I was thinking more of the credit, Miss Independence.”
“And what is that, pray? My beggarly little bank-book?”
“No—the even smaller one, the invisible account we all hold against Fate, the banker of dreams, who loses all we have in mad speculation, and when we come clamoring for our own—behold closed doors.”
“Listen, Laura. Don’t I hear the children’s voices?” The quiet tone restored Laura Brook-man to a sudden consciousness of undue intensity. They were both pale, but the older woman laughed the emotion away.
“I was actually reading you a sermon, wasn’t I?” she said, rising with the girl. “Yes, the children are waiting to kiss you good night.”
Whatever the cause of her agitation, Mrs. Brookman was happiness incarnate when they left the nursery a few minutes later. When the two friends went downstairs together she was pleased to turn her little venture at matchmaking into a merry jest.
“They have gone into the library,” she said, as the sound of men’s voices reached them.
“Is that the voice of Cash?” whispered Jean. “Its sound is unfamiliar to me. I recognize Paul’s and—”
“Wait a minute—who is that? Why, it’s that Vic Davis. He must have come in with Paul.” Each favored the other with a little grimace of distaste.
They entered through the drawing-room. As Mr. Brookman caught sight of them from his position among the group before the blazing open fire-place, he lounged good-naturedly toward them. Good nature seemed the keynote to the man—it exuded, as it were, from every inch of his prosperous-looking, lazy figure and stout, florid face. He called his wife’s friend “Jeanie” in loud-voiced jocularity, and at any time would have gladly played at making love to her; but she called him “Mr. Brookman,” in pleasant friendliness, and he never got any further than a foolish killing glance or two.
Jean was introduced to the stranger, a quiet-mannered man, whose keen yet kindly eyes were the only good feature in a face marked with the wear and tear of opportunity enjoyed.
“The bonne bouche last,” said Paul Stein, a tall, slender man of thirty-five or thereabout, upon whose plain, thin, clever features the rough hand of life had left harsh manuscript.54 He put out an imperious hand to Jean. “Here’s a warm place—come and share it.”
“No, I see my favorite chair in that corner. But you can talk to me just as comfortably from a distance.”
“I am never distant with you if I can help it,” he said, pushing a hassock toward her, but pausing to shake hands with Mrs. Brookman before seating himself. “Vic been making his apologies for coming?” he asked, glancing good-humoredly at the vivid-faced, eagle-nosed young fellow behind her.
“She refuses to accept them,” the latter retorted, extending a deferential hand to Jean, “although I assured her I never would have ventured in if the wind hadn’t been so pressing.”
“Mr. Davis has not called upon me since the day I refused to give him my hand,” laughed Laura, sinking upon the couch and inviting the unexpected guest to the place beside her.
“What’s that?” exclaimed Brookman, in mock suspicion, from the depths of the great arm-chair, where he had gulfed himself into a shapeless heap. “Is there a skeleton in my closet?”
“I only asked for her palm,” soothed Davis, “thinking it might make good reading matter. But she was too superstitious to let me see it.”
“Superstitious! If I had been superstitious I would have begged you to read it at once. There isn’t a suspicion of superstition in me.”
“But,” drawled her husband, “she won’t make one of thirteen at table or—”
“That’s a good Christian superstition,” observed Paul, indulgently.55
“I know a man,” retorted Laura, glancing toward her husband, “who, every morning before going downtown to earn his children’s bread and butter, prays, ‘Lord, deliver me from the evil eye of a yellow dog.’”
“All Jews are superstitious,” quietly remarked Hart, from where he stood toasting himself before the blazing log.
“Every one is,” supplemented Paul, “and every one denies it. The Jews, if anything, are less so than any other race. We’re too material, you know, too practical—we’ve had the dream knocked out of us.”
“Why, there, Paul, you and my uncle are altogether at outs. He says, ‘While the Jew stands, his dream stands.’”
“Oh, when the Chevalier says that, Jean, he is arguing from the Messianic hypothesis.56 He’s romantic. We evolutionists have got over that—evolutions, like millenniums, being slow work.”
“Exactly. That is just what he says—we haven’t outgrown all our weaknesses yet. Although he doesn’t call dreaming a weakness.”
“Of course he doesn’t—for every Jewish weakness he has an excuse. He is loyal as he is learned.”
“Once a Jew always a Jew,” remarked Brookman, as though settling the question.
“That’s where you’re dead off, Brookman,” exclaimed young Davis, with a knowing laugh. “Do any of you happen to know Phil May—or, rather, Philip May, M. D., Ph. D.—and any other D in the alphabet you happen to think of?”
“Do you mean the English artist, or the young American physician, Dr. Philip May?” asked Hart, with interest.57
“The American. But surgeon suits him better, I understand.”
“Yes, I believe it does. He treated me last year at Baden Baden.58 A fine-looking man—wears a short, dark, pointed beard. But I didn’t take him for a Jew.”
“Ha, ha! that last hits him off capitally. He has made quite a record for himself in the cutting business since his return here.”
“I met Dr. May to-night,” Jean hastened to inform them. “He is the son of my uncle’s old friend, Mr. Joseph May. I had not heard of any wonderful operation of his in this town.”
Davis threw back his head in a paroxysm of laughter. “That’s one on you, Miss Willard,” he cried. “What! You haven’t heard of that already celebrated cutting affray of his on Kearney Street last Saturday night?”
“Cutting affray?”
“Let’s have it, Vic,” exclaimed Brookman, voicing the contagion of the young fellow’s evident excitement.
“It’s not a long story. You know Sam Weiss?”
“Yes.” The affirmation was unanimous—they all knew the song-and-dance amateur.
“Do you agree with me that he’s an all-round good fellow—give the coat off his back for a friend—and all the rest of the cardinal virtues?”
“Sure,” said Brookman, seriously. He was apt to indorse all Davis’s tastes and sentiments. The women were silent.
“Well, it seems he and Phil May were schoolmates once upon a time, and as intimate as May’s peculiar oysterdom and royal loneliness permitted. Sam has always taken great stock in May’s success—felt as though he had had a hand in it in some occult way, and was delighted over the thought that his old chum was coming to settle here. Well, last Saturday night, as you can imagine, he was tickled to death to come upon him at the corner of Market and Kearney streets.”
By some inexplicable attraction, the animated dark eyes had come to rest upon Jean Willard’s attentive face, and to her he addressed the story of the short encounter in his own terse, slangy expressiveness. “Gave him the glassy eye, you understand,” he concluded, with a shrug, “in the full electric light and gaze of two of Weiss’s friends.”
“Yes,” said Jean, quickly, before the disgusted expressions on the faces of the others could find vent in words. “But that remark about Moses—wasn’t it rather far-fetched?”
Davis looked at her pityingly. “Joseph May kept a clothing store in days of gold,” he explained, concisely. “But Weiss is only a case in point. Dr. May has been pleased to state his attitude in unmistakable terms of frost to several other Jews of former acquaintance—and—mark my words—he won’t have to wait till the long run to hear from them in return. I don’t happen to be honored with his acquaintance, but just as an expression of opinion, I’d like to—kick—kick—him—from—here—to—Jerusalem!” The clan spirit was up in arms. His loud, frank voice had sunk with the last words to a peculiar, slow quietude.
“Save him the trouble of rolling there on resurrection day, eh?”59 laughed Brookman, approvingly. “But what’s the matter with him? Strikes me we’re as good as the next ones. What’s wanting? Look at me. Look at my wife—look at my children. We’ve as good as the country affords. Who has a finer home—who’s better dressed, better fed, hey? My son will have all the education he’s fit for and my daughter all the accomplishments going—if she wants ’em. We help support the theaters and operas, and help liberally, by Jove! We travel, enjoy our money and ourselves—and let others enjoy our money as well. Where’s the kick?”
He basked broadly in the sun of his prosperity. A great, genial satisfaction shone from him as he spread his hands on the arms of his handsome chair. A bright spot of flame sprang to his wife’s cheek. Her eyes and lips smiled non-committally—she made no comment.
“Oh, you forgot,” laughed Paul, “that when Jeshurun waxes fat, he kicks.60 Dr. May is only a modern example. He has evidently weighed the pros and cons of the situation, and given himself over to the heavy-weight. Taking a Dreyfus on Devil’s Island as a basis for action—who can blame him?”61
“By God!” exclaimed Brookman, raising his fist to heaven. The exclamation had no bearing upon Philip May—it was but the suffocated protest against the crime of a nation over which the heart of every reading Jew was bursting with bitter indignation.
“Of course, I don’t know your Mr. Weiss,” interposed Mr. Hart, after an eloquent pause, “but I do know Dr. May, and I can readily imagine his not relishing being slapped on the shoulder by certain people—to say nothing, figuratively speaking, of a certain style of voice. But that doesn’t prove he has drawn the line at all Jews. He is far too sensible.”
“And one swallow does not make a summer,” suggested Laura, gently.
“I told you Weiss is only one of many,” reiterated Davis, hotly. “And, among other tales, I have heard that old man May told some fellow that it will be impossible for his son to join the Verein, or any other club, for that matter.”
“Nebbich,” murmured Brookman, with a sorrowful shake of the head.62
“Don’t you think,” began Jean, very quietly, “that we judge too quickly where our proverbial sensitiveness is concerned? If Philip May has seen fit to act as Mr. Davis says he has, how do we know what he has in view? How do we know what ambition or ambitions are leading him, and how old ties may hamper him? His social standards and tastes are not necessarily the same as ours. His accomplishments and wit may have traveled beyond a coon-song or an Orpheum joke—they may even fail to see the point in those diverting Jewish stories in Puck and other witty periodicals.63 Do we know all his life holds? May there not be a passage in his which might explain—excuse—not only a distaste, but a hatred of all Jews? Isn’t life full of unthought-of possibilities? Must we still continue not only to judge, but to condemn, everybody according to our own little lights?”
As she made her low-voiced plea for the development of individuality at any cost, Laura eyed her curiously.
“Come, come, Jean,” drawled Paul Stein, ironically, “how can you waste so much good interest on a fellow who has such a low opinion of his breeding that he has quit bowing to himself? My dear girl, we don’t need Philip May.”
“I was speaking in the abstract,” lied the girl, glibly. “But as to needing him, Paul—you spoke differently last week. Why, he was to be a sort of representative, an edition de luxe, the Jewish chef-d’oeuvre of San Francisco;64 you were so anxious to meet him—he was going to be such a stimulus!”
The attorney looked at her musingly. “Yes,” he said. “I had read one or two of his articles in medical reviews and was captivated by the virility of the man’s style, concluding that the style was the man. It seems I was mistaken. Unfortunately, I have not yet attained the Christian humility of turning the second cheek. I have this minute discovered that there is a rather strong party spirit in me, and I can’t, in all consciousness, try as I may, assume the brilliant, disinterested amusement of laughing stars high out of the heart of life. But Philip May is only a result of existing conditions, a sign of the times—set upon a height. He is not a type—he is only one of those inevitable, recurrent figures, dominant and bitter, pitting himself against fate in vain. The thing is, what does he want, will he get it, is the game worth the candle?65
“Oh, among ourselves we know that individually, feature for feature, we are all beautiful”—he grinned benignly upon them—“but outside, among others, en masse, our tout-ensemble!66—oh, my children!” He covered his face with his sinewy hand. A laugh of responsive understanding encouraged him further.
“And we can laugh, nevertheless,” he granted them, “because we know that, inwardly, we’re the right stuff, good backbone stuff, which it would be folly to eliminate from the civic anatomy. How’s that for fairness, Mr. Hart?”
“Not bad. Go ahead. Diagnose us.”
“Oh, talk, though cheap, is often extravagant,” laughed Paul. “But I like to splurge in that line once in a while, and can afford it—if you can afford the listening. Of course, we know the ignominies of the past against which we are still combating: that to-day we excuse ourselves on the score of being descendants, often to the exclusion of the more vital responsibility that to-day will be yesterday to-morrow, and that some day we will be ancestors. But we know, besides, the wheels within wheels—we know there are gradations. We don’t judge every rich Jew by the first flamboyant, gold-congested parvenu we happen to meet in his mansion on the heights, nor every poor Jew by the ignorant, sing-songing old clo’ man south of Market Street.67 We even admit that if, now and then, the one on the top were to exchange places with the one at the bottom it would be a good game of puss-in-the-corner.68 But think of cramming all Jewry—think of cramming one complex Jewish soul into an epigram! Why, we bulge over and out of every part of it. And yet, to some people, Judaism still means an old man who speaks gibberish, wears a beard and a praying-shawl, and whose golden rule is ‘Do others or others will do you.’”
“By Jove,” cried Davis, approvingly, “we’re not such an uninteresting lot, after all.”
“Oh, you’re the sort that likes to be sugared over and swallowed whole in audible contentment,” laughed Paul, sarcastically. “Few Jews can stand adverse criticism, and that’s what keeps so many of them from taking on the little outward graces that count for so much. But don’t imagine I think we’ve cornered the brain and virtue market of the world. We’re first-rate students because no power on earth can beat us in that intensity of purpose—born of the old-time restriction—of doing the best we can with our only unfilchable property—our brains; we are great financiers through enforced specialization; we are thrifty and industrious because we’ve had to fight for every right of possession inch by inch; we care for our poor as no other poor are cared for, because we were once one in misery, because we can’t climb effectually without pulling our weaker ones up with us, and because it was only on the condition that the Jewish poor would not become a burden on the community that the Jews were first granted settlement in the New World. I can laugh good-naturedly enough, Jean, over the wit of Puck’s stories when our shrewdness, or features, or mannerisms are the point of ridicule. I’m not like the cultured Irishman who sets his teeth at the sight of printed brogue—but when it comes to libeling our honesty and labeling the race with certain low-down propensities, I draw the line. We’ve had enough of tradition. Yet, you see, all our civic virtues lie rooted in some hard, grim, ugly fact, and I agree with Dr. May—the looking-back vision is not pretty—the harking-back accent is not musical. But though I too would cover it over, would say ‘hush’ to it, the very knowledge of the cause of its ugliness would make me say it in another tone than that of shame.” He paused with quivering nostril and compressed lip.
“I did not think you cared so much for your religion,” said Jean, a great wave of emotion thrilling her voice strangely.
“Neither did I.” He smiled wearily. “But it’s no longer a matter of religion—think of a man’s religious thoughts having anything to do with his success or non-success in this material age! No, it’s something more tragic—it’s a matter of race—and there is no way out of that except by the slow honeymoon route of intermarriage. Well? Queer how these forces lie silent in one, covered over by the day’s battle.”
“That’s no fairy-tale,” agreed Davis, in hearty seriousness. “For my part, being a Jew doesn’t bother me much the year round, except when New Year’s or Atonement Day comes along, and we have to close up shop.”
“But there’s one little cynicism of yours I wish you would qualify, Paul,” interposed Jean, earnestly, “and that is your remark about the virtue of the race. Surely you know there are no happier homes in the world than Jewish homes, and that fact usually bespeaks virtue.”
“There’s that sweet tooth again,” Paul returned, reproachfully. “Of course we’re a temperate lot—even at the lowest pitch we don’t drink, or beat our wives. But omitting the many love-matches—God bless ’em!—when you come to think of the many others, the mercenary and manufactured ones, in which the girls are supposed to love the men they’re told to love—surely you don’t still cherish that beautiful, primitive dream of universal peace, happiness and fidelity?”
“That sounds interesting,” said Hart, pulling up a chair finally, and seating himself in a leaning attitude of rapt attention.
“But the insinuation is not true,” combated Jean, flashing round upon him, overwhelming him in the sudden passion of her eyes. “Ninety-nine and a half Jewish marriages out of a hundred are happy and—and honorable.”
“Bravo! But how about that half case?” questioned Paul, quietly.
“Something keeps it from becoming a whole case” was the swift, fearless, pure-eyed response.
“Indeed? What?” murmured Paul, smiling gently.
“Ask Mr. and Mrs. Brookman,” cried Davis. “They should make pretty reliable witnesses.”
Brookman shook a reproving finger at him. “We belong to the God bless ’em crowd,” he said, comfortably.
Mrs. Brookman laughed lightly.
“However, Mr. Brookman,” broke in Jean, playfully, feeling a certain tension in the turn of subject, “tell us why a Jewess, even without the grand passion as a nucleus, always loves the man she marries.”
“Because her mamma tells her to,” laughed the great, good-natured fellow, with supreme satisfaction.
“And, Laura, how about the man? Why does a Jew always love his wife?”
“From an inherited, unconquerable sense of duty.” The caustic flippancy drew a laugh. Brookman gallantly returned her a military salute.
“Not bad, so far as they go,” remarked Stein, abruptly. “But, merely as a looker-on, might I say, supposing your conclusions to be true—she loves him, finally, because he is the father of her children, and he loves her because she is his—his property, I mean.”
The brutal words stilled the air.
“Jean, will you play for us?” Laura Brookman’s light voice broke the scarcely perceptible awkwardness.
The girl arose at once, Stein following her leisurely to the piano.
“You are hateful to-night,” she vouchsafed him in a low voice as she seated herself and he leaned against the instrument.
“You are inharmonious to-night,” he retorted. “I detected it as soon as you came in.”
She ceased to look at his provoking face. Her fingers ran over the keys.
“I can’t play,” she said after a minute, letting her hands fall into her lap.
“You can’t, but you will,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you always do—you always believe, even—in spite of things. Isn’t that your herculean motto? Then play.”
She began, her eyes upon his thin, plain face. Then she forgot him and played on.
“What is it?” he murmured, when her hands rested, carried away, despite his disturbed mood, by the exquisite grace and mystery of the music.
“A poem of Macdowell’s.69 Perhaps afterward, Laura,” she said, turning her head in answer. “Ask Mr. Davis to sing a coon-song for us, will you, Paul?”
“What! after your little flip at the coon-singing genus?”
“I didn’t.” The girl flushed distressfully. “I couldn’t—besides I like them—the songs—too much.”
“You could and you did. On impulse you can do anything, friend o’ mine. But don’t torture your sensitive conscience—you haven’t hurt him. He belongs to the breed that always thinks you’re pointing to the fellow behind. Ask him, and prove me.”
He came delightedly, flattered by the request, singing song after song to her swinging accompaniment with all the jubilant rhythm, the peculiar darky joy, which make the coon-song so unmistakably a song of color, not omitting several inimitable cake-walk steps, as though his feet must, perforce, respond to the charm.
He swung off finally, and Jean found Theodore Hart leaning on the piano in Paul Stein’s place. He spoke of music—he had heard much—tentatively watching her face. Jean questioned him carelessly, unaccountably annoyed over the fact that the man’s eyes and ears were frankly absorbed in her. She knew that Charlie Brookman and Vic Davis were holding a laughing chat in the corner, that Laura and Paul Stein were seated together on the couch, evidently talking fitfully, the former gazing before her, her elbow crushed in the pillow behind, the latter bent upon disentangling a piece of cord fantastically twisted about his fingers. Their attitudes disturbed her indefinably. The evident admiration of the man near her irritated her.
“You are a champion worth having,” he was saying. “Your views are broad—broader than most women’s.”
Broad! When she had been narrowing them to fit the case of one man! She stared at him coldly. Yes, Paul was right—she appeared and felt inharmonious.
She was glad, a little later, to find herself on the street alone with Stein, glad of his uncompromising silence. The wind had abated, the fog was dissipated, the air was crisp and bracing, the stars twinkled in cold brilliance. The two friends climbed the hills with long, quick strides, intimately still.