The Red Book Magazine/Volume 36/Number 3/The Woman Who Hated Politics

by Alice Duer Miller

THE WOMAN WHO
HATED POLITICS

By ALICE DUER MILLER

“PEREGRIN is bringing five politicians home to dinner,” said Mrs. Peregrin, as if announcing a great disaster.

Her companion, a gentle, neat young man who never attempted a more aggressive rôle than companionability, replied, as if it were a complete and adequate answer: “Oh, well!”

“And we shall have to dine at a quarter past seven.”

At this a slight shade crossed Treat’s face: dinner an hour earlier than usual was hardly dinner at all.

“I never know how to behave to people like that,” Mrs. Peregrin went on, as if this were entirely the people’s fault. “If I’m civil, I'm patronizing: and if I’m natural, I’m rude.”

“They’re pretty much like everyone else, I suppose.”

“Oh, no,” said Mrs. Peregrin. “They always say: ‘You have a lovely home, ma’am.’ Most people don’t say that, Treatsie.”

“No, most people know better. You’d better ask some other women to come and help you out.”

Mrs. Peregrin looked at him with scorn. “Where could I find any women who would be willing to help—except the horrors, and they of course can’t. Besides, everyone's away—the clever cats! The Hudson in August!”

“Laura Stanton is here with her mother-in-law.”

Mrs. Peregrin’s eye lightened and clouded again. “Laura’s rather a goose,” she said. “I mean that politicians are seldom fashionable, and Laura insists so on fashion. You know she comes from the Middle West.”

“Oh, I don’t think she takes social life quite so seriously as she used to,” answered Treat. “I have an impression it would be quite safe nowadays to ask her to meet some one less important than a queen.”

“She’s lovely to look at, and the politicians would like that.” Mrs. Peregrin was considering the question from all angles. “But then, she’s in such deep mourning. Justin Stanton has only been dead three months. Still, my party doesn’t promise to be very gay.”

“Gayer than dining with those old women at the Stantons. Poor, poor Laura!”

“Oh, I never can bring myself to pity a widow,” returned Mrs. Peregrin, and continued to the footman who had answered her ring: “Telephone to Mrs. Stanton’s house and ask if Mrs. Justin Stanton, Jr., will dine here tonight. Say there will be no one but ourselves and Mr. Treat.”

Then, as the man left the room, she added, in answer to Treat’s lifted eyebrow: “Don’t be silly, Treatsie; I could not send a message through a servant that there would be nothing human here except ourselves.”

“Politicians are human, goodness knows!”

“So Peregrin always contends.”

Presently the footman came back to say that Mrs. Justin Stanton. Jr., was out.

“Out!” said Mrs. Peregrin, casting the word straight in his teeth, as if it were his fault. The footman did not seem to care at all, but began calmly to take away the tea things, so that Mrs. Peregrin turned and attacked Treat: “Now will you tell me what Laura can be doing at this hour?”

“Oh, I can never guess what you women do all day long,” answered Treat. “What do you do yourself?”

“Oh, I do common things like gardening and playing with the children,” said Mrs. Peregrin, “but Laura wouldn’t do anything but chic things—things, I mean, that she used to read in fashion papers were chic—like being massaged and perfuming her hair.”

But Mrs. Justin Stanton, Jr., was not doing either. She was driving along the Hudson, wondering—wondering that is, when her mind was not a total blank, how it was that this myth of a society, gay and fashionable, wicked and amusing, had ever gained such a hold over her youthful imagination.

She could even fancy that her present deplorable situation—a duty visit to two old ladies—might be described in the papers of her native town as a “week-end.” “Mrs. Justin Stanton, Jr., is spending the week-end with Mrs. Stanton, Sr., at her country place on the Hudson.” Would they add that she had once been a resident of Wixville? No, the editor of the Sentinel would probably be too kind-hearted to rake up the old scandal. He’d leave it at that, knowing that everyone would remember; and girls, such girls as she herself had been, might read the paragraph, and something indefinable would be suggested to them of flirtation and gambling, trailing tea-gowns, wit and happiness.

Tri-trot, the old horses’ feet sounded on the macadam. Laura leaned forward and said in the lovely low voice which she had acquired three years ago: “I think we’ll turn back now, Peters.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Peters, touching his hat respectfully. “We’ll go on for a bit yet.”

Of course the Stantons had recognized the modern necessity for automobiles, and several cars of solid, expensive makes were standing in the garage at that moment, but they also recognized the necessity of being loyal to Peters, who had driven the family for fifty years and would never be anything but a coachman. They kept the victoria and the horses for his sake, and every now and then, on a fine afternoon, some member of the family was expected to drive with him. Laura, in a moment of hopelessness, had actually volunteered to go this afternoon, thinking that she would like to be alone; but after an hour of it she found she did not like it at all.

The Hudson, as every New Yorker knows, is a magnificent stream, making the Rhine look like an artificial lake and the Thames like a meadow brook. But anyone who has lived upon the Hudson knows that its broad waters can reflect the late afternoon sun with a steady dazzling heat that makes the observer wish that its banks were narrower and its bosom less splendid.

Laura, in her deep mourning, felt the rays of the sinking sun, and lowered her parasol so as to shut out the view of the Catskills, darkening slowly in preparation for the sunset.

Trit-trot! Peters reached a broad place in the road, and turned—it was where he had always intended to turn.

Yes, Laura could imagine how her story was told in Wixville—told and retold every time her name appeared in the papers.

“Why, she was Jim Robinson’s wife,—the man who was mayor,—and she was down at the hotel singing in a Red Cross concert back in 1914, when this man from the East, Stanton—well, I don’t know just how they fixed it, but she got her divorce and married him.”

 

SIX years ago—the autumn that Jim was running for mayor—every evening was given up to politics, meetings or conferences at the house. There had even been politics in her singing at the concert—at least, Jim had wanted her to do it. She remembered very well how she had come downstairs dressed for the entertainment, and had found two politicians with Jim. They rose as she entered, yet not so quickly but what she saw that they had had their feet on her best sofa, that sofa for which she paid seventy-five dollars of Jim’s slim funds, and which she had had covered in a velvet impractically delicate. She hated them all fiercely—hated their shirt-sleeves and their cigars and the faint smell of beer in the room she had made beautiful with such infinite thought.

She did not want their help in electing her husband mayor, because she did not want him to be mayor. She wanted him to drop politics, to stick to law and make enough money to move away from Wixville to surroundings where she would be more appreciated.

When she had first fallen in love with Jim,—and as a girl she had been very much in love with him,—she had thought him capable of anything. A strong, clever, capable man, she had imagined him making a fortune quickly and carrying her away to Chicago or New York. But at the end of three years he had got no further than running for mayor of Wixville with no absolute certainty of success.

To be mayor of Wixville seemed to Laura a pretty sordid job. She could not bear to see Jim working for it so eagerly. She might have tolerated it if his fellow-citizens had forced it on his acceptance, but she thought the struggle contemptible. Besides, it made him neglect her.

She was a very beautiful woman. The year before, when Tart had come campaigning through the State, a young reporter from a New York paper had told some one at a political dinner, who had told her, that in his opinion Mrs. Jim Robinson was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, “bar none.”

“Bar none,” she used to repeat to herself, thinking of all those he must have seen—at charity balls and the Metropolitan Opera House. He must have seen all the famous beauties whose pictures she had studied and whose clothes she had copied. Yet he thought her the most beautiful woman he had seen!

 

THIS evening of the concert she knew she was looking well—in a long black-and-white dress with a rhinestone band in her hair. She stood, a stern presence in the sitting-room door way, looking at the three men: old Reilly, the proprietor of the hotel where she was going, a white-haired, red-faced old man, very dominating in local politics; at the supervisor, round-headed and polite, whose sleek black hair, parted in the center, kept falling forward in two trembling hoops; at her husband, who was writing with his head cocked on one side to keep the smoke of his cigar out of his eyes. How she had agonized over his appearance! She admired tall men with a forward droop to their shoulders and a hollow behind their waistcoats, but she recognized that Jim, strongly built and not much taller than she was, had possibilities if he would take the trouble to bring them out. He had a smooth, clear skin and bright, piercing blue eyes, so bright people often thought they were twinkling with laughter when they were simply flashing with the most serious intelligence. He could look very well when he tried; but now, with his brown hair mussed, and his left eye screwed up to keep the smoke out of it, with his coat off and garters around his shirtsleeves, his appearance shocked something in her which she thought idealistic and which he thought silly.

“We could do with three more bottles of beer, dearie.”

She did not answer at all. She just turned on her heel and walked out of the house. The hotel was across the street.

She hated politics—not only because they were ugly and vulgar, and she loved the elegancies of life, but because they had the power of invading and dominating; they were more powerful even in her own house than she was.

She had just finished her first song and was waiting for the applause to subside, when, looking through the doorway of the ballroom, she saw a man who was crossing the lobby pause and look in her direction. He had just bitten off the end of a cigar, but what he saw through the wide doorway made him saunter toward the sound of the clapping. He came and leaned against the jamb of the door: He was tall and young, and there was a hollow behind his waistcoat. His clothes were made of a soft gray stuff which, she discovered later—not very much later—smelled deliciously of peat or heather or some odor not hitherto familiar to her nostrils.

She had been going to sing something by Debussy, but as she looked at this new auditor, so elegant and well turned out, she began to distrust her French accent, and she substituted Shubert’s serenade. She was not a vain woman, but she knew before this song was over that the stranger in the doorway was interested in her.

He managed the introduction beautifully. A cruder man might have scraped acquaintance with her directly. He scraped acquaintance with the most imposing white-haired woman in the room. When Laura stepped down from the platform, these two were waiting for her. The stranger was Mr. Stanton, from New York.

The Sentinel had a column about him the next day. His sister had lately married an English marquis, and it was in the interests of his brother-in-law that he was in Wixville, looking up a site for a British airplane factory.

Newport, New York, a colonial family, a sister a marchioness—it had all sounded romantic, like a dream and a fairy-tale and a love-affair combined. To be snatched up out of ugly little Wixville,-which had only come into existence thirty years ago, and plunged into the fashionable New York! To be taken away from the round of trolley franchises and sewer contracts, which seemed to make up her husband’s political activities, snatched up like Helen by a blond stranger into a realm of refinement and jewels and parties and French clothes.

 

ALL the elements had materialized—except the marquis and his wife, who were busy fighting the war in their own country. The jewels and the clothes and the parties had all been produced by her new husband; and yet somehow the effect was not what, in Wixville, she had fancied that it would be.

Her new husband was not a brilliant man, but she did not mind that; she herself was not of the intellectual type. The trouble with Justin was that like so many people with a tremendous sense of their own importance and no great ability, his egotism expressed itself in negations—in the things he wouldn’t do, the people he wouldn’t know, the parties he would not go to.

Many a poor girl has been disappointed at finding her husband's family less aristocratic than she supposed. Laura’s ill luck was that they were more so. The Stantons were too exclusive, too deeply rooted in tradition. They belonged to a group—small, in the North, at least—whose ancestors had come to this country not as farmers or religious enthusiasts, but as adventurous gentlemen, and had attempted, chiefly along the Hudson Valley, to establish a duplicate of English country life. Their tradition of wealth and aristocracy was as solidly grounded as that of English county families. But a republic was no place for them, and most of them have ceased to exist—have lost their money and their prestige and been overwhelmed by the plutocrats of the ’eighties.

Justin’s mother controlled his social standards and allowed no friendship with those who did not come up in birth and breeding, manners and elegance to the standards of those golden years when her husband had been a foreign ambassador. The result was that her choice was limited. Laura well remembered the first dinner party her mother-in-law had given her—the footmen and the flowers, the golden urns of flowers and the golden bowls of fruit, everything beautiful and perfect except the guests. She had sat between a bald, elderly man who knew an immense amount about international banking, and a pale cousin of the Stantons who was interested in the purification of city politics. Laura found that the purification of politics was not a bit more interesting than their corruption in Wixville.

Before the winter was over, however, she began to see that there were people who amused themselves and others, who were leading a life more nearly like what, in Wixville, she had pictured New York life. But her mother-in-law ignored them—though, oddly enough, they did not seem to want to be ignored. Laura used to think they would never maneuver for an invitation to Mrs. Stanton’s parties if they had only known how dull the parties were.

Eventually, perhaps, she would have arranged her own life her own way; but America’s entrance into the war came, and then her husband’s sudden death from influenza; and now, here she was, a lovely, dissatisfied widow at twenty-eight, rolling slowly through a little country town on her way home to dinner with three old ladies.

As she was passing the town hall, a poster caught her eye. Her heart changed its beat, although she had not read the printed words. She turned, craning her neck over the hood of the victoria, trying to see what it was that had caught her subconscious attention. She could read nothing but, “Monster Mass Meeting.” Oh, only politics! Well, dull as her life now was, she was at least spared that. What had attracted her attention had probably been some resemblance to the flaring posters in Wixville long ago.

It was extraordinary how seldom the memory of her first husband ever crossed her mind. Cut off as she was from all her early associations, she was never of course under the necessity of speaking his name. Indeed, she had gradually formed the habit of never mentioning anything that had happened to her before 1914. Her new friends talked long and easily to her without ever hearing a reference to her life before she had been Mrs. Justin Stanton. But she had accomplished a more difficult feat than this—a feat which might almost be called superhuman, if so many human beings did not accomplish it: she had succeeded in casting out of her consciousness all her past life except the last six years; it was gone—she couldn’t have remembered it now if she had wanted to, and of course she did not want to.

Clumpety-clump, clump! The horses stopped under the porte-cochère which her father-in-law had added in 1880 to the old stone house of his forefathers. A young footman came running down the steps to help her out. She crossed the square hall, paved in black and white marble, where tall vases were standing holding the celebrated Stanton chrysanthemums which always took first prize in the Dutchess County show. The house was very still. She knew that the old ladies were sitting on the piazza at this hour, watching the sunset. She had no intention of joining them, but the footman was giving her a message: Mrs. Peregrin had telephoned to know if she would dine there that evening at seven-fifteen—no one but themselves and Mr. Treat.

 

LAURA despised Treat and rather feared Mrs. Peregrin, who made fun of everyone, including herself; but a great desire to go—to go anywhere—came over her. When first married, she would have answered the footman with some expression of human interest, but now she just nodded her head, and turned toward the piazza.

Honeysuckle and one of the oldest wistaria vines in the country made a bower of one corner of it, and here there were tables and chairs. The Stantons did not approve of the modern manner of lounging in public, but Aunt Arabella’s age demanded a relaxation of this rule, and a magnificent couch had been arranged for her. On this, in all the glory of her high lace cap, she was now reclining, vigorous and black-eyed for all her eighty years. Near her sat Mrs. Stanton, erect but at ease, her hands as white as the pearls she wore on them, clasped in her lap, her eyes fixed on the crimson and gold sky, the black mountains and the streak of river still unaccountably blue. Mrs. Stanton had been a beauty, too, when she entered the family—as great a beauty as Laura; and she had brought a little money and no ugly scandal with her. Her unmarried sister, Aunt Beatrice Stevens, was there too, slim as a mosquito, and very dressy in half-mourning for her nephew.

Laura looked at them and felt that she knew just what they had been talking about since she went out—what it was that Lord Beaconsfield had really said to the Ambassador, when it was that Justin’s grandfather had bought the new field on the highroad, how many of the Peregrins’ remote ancestors were actually queer enough to be shut up. The Peregrins—fortunately for Laura’s plans—were respected equals.

As she stepped out on the piazza, Mrs. Stanton said kindly:

“Did you have a pleasant drive, my dear?”

The question angered Laura. How in heaven’s name could a young and beautiful woman enjoy driving in the heat alone behind two lazy old horses. She expressed her irritation by answering as if she were speaking to an importunate child:

“It’s rather hot, you know.”

Mrs. Stanton, senior, always gentle and kind and unruffled, knew how to put underbred young people in the wrong: “It’s a shame to victimize you,” she said, with a faint accent on the pronoun. “Peters likes to feel he is driving a member of the family now and then, but there is no reason why you should go.”

Laura noted the implication that she was hardly a member of the family. “The Peregrins want me to dine tonight,” she said. She told herself that she was going anyhow, whatever her family thought, but she helped them to think right by suppressing the existence of Treat as she added: “No one but themselves, of course. Do you see any reason why I should not go?”

Aunt Arabella’s eyes flashed about generally, but Mrs. Stanton said in her levelest tone: “Not if you want to.”

Of course, a widow of scarcely three months ought not to want to—Laura caught that intimation, but she did not care. She was already thinking about what she would wear. The presentation of her own great beauty was one of her few amusements. She moved quickly away before anything could be said to make it difficult to go. She hated to think of them sitting there in what should have been a bower of love, criticising every natural impulse of her youth.

When she had gone, they glanced at each other and shook their heads. They were not ill-natured women, but they themselves had all made sacrifices for the code they subscribed to; and besides, they had loved Justin deeply.

Laura, having made herself as lovely as a pure white crêpe could make her—it was from her mother-in-law that she had learned that pure white was considered as deep mourning as black—was not deeply chagrined at finding the Peregrin's drawing-room full of men. She was, however, surprised, and catching this look, Mrs. Peregrin came guiltily forward and met her at the door.

“Yes, Laura, dear,” she murmured, “I did deceive you about our being alone; but I needed your help, and they’re only some political friends of my husband’s.”

Laura allowed her beautiful eyes to stray toward the compact group. Now that she knew they were politicians, she told herself that she had recognized their species as soon as she saw them. “I’m not much good at this sort of thing,” she said. “I hate politics.”

“They wont hate you,” answered Mrs. Peregrin. And then the group opened, allowing Laura to see that the central figure to whose words they had all been listening was Jim Robinson. The other men were laughing, and Jim’s eyes were still twinkling over some shrewd truth he had just uttered, when he saw his former wife standing in the doorway. His face changed; it grew black and watchful, as she had so often seen it in old times when some political deal took an unaccountable turn.

As for herself, she stood quite still, and like a drowning person, relived all her life in a few seconds. The memories of her early days overwhelmed her so that she was hardly aware where she was. Those memories cast out? Not much! She had merely locked them up, and now they had broken the lock and rushed out upon her, stronger and more vital than anything that had happened to her since then.

The men were being introduced to her. Jim just nodded and moved away. She realized that he was suspicious of some sort of a plot; and indeed, it would be hard to explain that her intimate friends—and she was almost intimate with the Peregrins—had no recollection whatever that her name had been Robinson before; by becoming a Stanton, she had risen into their ken. She thought she would like to explain this to Jim; and yet if she were asked to lay her hand on his arm—an arm whose contours her fingers so well remembered—and go in to dinner with him, she would rather leave the house.

Fortunately they went in to the dining-room in a group, still talking. There were ten of them, and the chances of her sitting next to Jim were slight. She would be reserved, she thought, for one of the older, more important men. And yet, when she sat down and found herself between her host and a State chairman, she was conscious of bitter disappointment.

He, she saw to her surprise, was sitting on Mrs. Peregrin’s right—the most distinguished of the company. She stared at him for several seconds, and then hastily attempted a banality with her host about the weather. He did not hear her. He was leaning across the table to address Jim.

“What are you going to say this evening, Congressman?”

“Congressman!” cried Laura, her voice ringing out louder than she meant it to, and sounding, even in her own ears, strange.

She saw Jim turn to his hostess and heard him ask: “Is that lady interested in politics?” She couldn’t hear her hostess’ answer, but she knew what it would be—a detailed account of her, which would at least put Jim’s mind at rest about any design to throw them together. She saw Jim’s head slightly cocked as he listened, and once she saw him quickly suppress a smile—occasioned perhaps by a reference to a former unfortunate marriage.

For the first few minutes she herself had been afraid that some one in the room would recall the connection between them, but as time went on, she became reckless, and turning to Peregrin, she asked in a voice hardly lowered enough for civility: “Tell me—who is Mr. Robinson?”

“Why, Robinson is rather a remarkable fellow.” He leaned across her and included the State chairman. “Wouldn’t you say Robinson was remarkable?”

The State chairman nodded portentously. It was his business to be portentous about rising members of his party.

Peregrin went on: “He comes from one of those God-forsaken little towns in the Middle West—was mayor—the usual thing—gutter politics.”

“Pretty crooked, isn’t he?” asked Treat, who saw all politics in these terms.

“A great man for short-cuts,” replied Peregrin suavely. “But not out for himself—no. Sincerely eager to get things done, and of course a party man—a party man, I’m glad to say. A splendid record in Congress. We think he’ll go far.”

The Chairman nodded again, like Jove.

Laura decided to take a long chance.

“He’ll go far, I suppose,” she said languidly. “If he isn’t married to some impossible wife.”

“I don’t think he is married,” answered Peregrin. “No, he can’t be, for he was quite attentive to little Sally Grosvenor in Washington last winter.”

“Sally Grosvenor!” cried Laura, and a deep color rushed over her face.

Treat thought he interpreted her thought as he murmured, so the Chairman couldn’t hear and feel too much an outsider: “Pretty rough diamond for Sally, isn’t he?”

“Well, I don’t know,” said Peregrin. “Robinson’s a good deal of a man. A woman might do worse than marry a fellow like Robinson.” He turned benevolently to Laura. “Are you a good enough American to agree with me, Mrs. Stanton, that a woman might do worse than marry Jim Robinson?”

Laura’s reply was: “I can’t bear Sally Grosvenor.”

The State chairman leaned over and said very discreetly: “As a matter of fact, Robinson’s been married—and divorced. That’s where he was smart—got rid of her before he got really into public life.”

“Impossible, was she?” asked Peregrin sympathetically.

“Good deal of a goose, the people out there say,” answered the other. “He never got anywhere until he shook her.”

“Indeed!” said Laura. She was more surprised than angry. The idea was so entirely new to her—that she was a burr. She had thought of herself as a meteor that had flashed through his life, illuminating it for all too brief an instant. What did Jim himself think? He was talking now, and all the people at his end of the table were listening, or trying to interject an intelligent question which would make a favorable impression. It seemed to her that he was an utterly different man, a determined, powerful personality; emanations of that power seemed to reach her in waves and to sweep away the person she had imagined herself to be.

 

THE men next to her were exchanging anecdotes of political wives but she didn’t listen. Her whole being was taken up with the question: Had Jim really “shaken” her? She had often wondered at the ease with which she had got free, but she had in some vague way attributed it to her own cleverness. Yet even at the time it had seemed to her strange that a man as tenacious, jealous and revengeful as Jim had made so surprisingly weak a fight for so priceless a possession as herself. Was that the explanation—that he was glad to be rid of her?

Her silence becoming somewhat heavy, Peregrin felt the need of breaking it: “Are you coming on to the meeting with us, Mrs. Stanton? Does that sort of thing bore you too much? The chairman, you know, is a great orator, and Robinson makes a capital straight talk, I’m told.”

“I’d like to go,” said Laura, achieving each word with a conscious effort like a drunken man. Her inner turmoil was extreme. She felt as if she should never leave Jim until she had an answer to her question. Had he shaken her? Her mind kept going back, for the first time in all these years, to their early days—his courtship of her, their marriage. Oh, he had certainly loved her, jealously, passionately enough, then.

The brilliantly lighted town-hall, he on the platform sitting well forward with his hand inverted on his knee,—how well she knew that gesture!—she below in the front row of the audience next to Mrs. Peregrin: the situation did not promise an immediate answer to her question.

There were two speakers before Jim—an incoherent gentleman who said repeatedly that he believed in the Constitution of the United States, which, it appeared, the opposite party was, as usual, attempting to destroy. Then the State chairman, whose quietness at dinner had cloaked the orator—all triple adjectives and a rising shout at the end of each period. Then Jim, just as simply himself as in the little sitting-room at Wixville, not an extra adjective, his hands not in his pocket because that would not have been absolutely natural to him—and his voice low, carrying, everyday, and speaking to each person in the audience individually.

Laura, listening with every nerve in her body, almost screamed as he made a slip in grammar. He was talking about “practical politics.”

“I think politics aren’t half practical enough—not practical enough to run a business concern like the United States. Why, when I first come to Washington—”

Nobody cared. Nobody noticed, but Laura.

He began to tell a story of legislative incompetence that somehow became in his hands a thrilling narrative.

It was while he was talking that Laura realized that he really hadn’t changed—oh, he had broadened and matured, but he hadn’t changed essentially. The change was in her. She had been a blind, immature, self-centered, trivial girl. She had lived with this man for three years and had deliberately preferred a polite nonentity like Justin. Poor Justin, she could hardly recall his face.

She began to fancy eagerly the words with which her interview with Jim would begin, and then suddenly she saw that there wasn’t going to be any interview; there would be no further chance for them to speak. The accident of their meeting was over. The thought was like fire in her veins; she actually trembled with baffled fury and irritation. To be there, just a drop in the ocean of his audience, not able to get a word or a look from him—a man “whose wife you had been!” She couldn’t sit still in her place, but began moving her shoulders with nervous twists.

Mrs Peregrin, still a little guilty at having let her lovely friend in for a party she couldn’t appreciate, murmured in her ear, that they could go when this speech was over, if she would only be patient.

Laura frowned and shook her head; she could have killed her.

Then it was all over; everyone was crowding about Robinson, congratulating him, and being introduced to him, while she waited, a little apart—waited, she said to herself, like a footman. His manner, which in old times had seemed to her stolid and uncivil, now seemed dignified and self-respecting.

Then she saw him say good night to Mrs. Peregrin and move to the door, and he was gone. He was in danger, it seemed, of missing his train.

Well, she would go to Washington, to Wixville—she would see him; she couldn’t go on suffering like this. She had not supposed that people did suffer like this without physical pain.

When she had driven away, Mrs. Peregrin turned to Treat, who had just shut the door of the Stanton motor.

“Laura’s spoilt—she’s too sulky. It wasn’t so bad after all.”

“It was very good,” said Treat.

“Well, she was furious—wouldn’t say good night, and her eyes were like angry pools of ink. But mercy, I should think anything was better than an evening with old lady Stanton.”

 

THE lady so disrespectfully referred to was sitting up in bed reading Horace Walpole's letters. Hearing the motor door slam, and then the light footsteps of her daughter-in-law in the upper corridor, she called to her. She had to call twice.

She had reached an age when the focus of her eyes changed slowly, and she had only a general impression of the younger woman’s appearance as she came into the room.

“You're rather later than you expected, aren't you, my dear? What was it? Bridge?”

“No, they took me to a political meeting in the town.”

“In my father’s time, gentlemen went into politics,” said Mrs. Stanton. “He was elected to the Assembly from this district, and I remember very well the house in Albany—”

Laura could not walk out of the room in the midst of a sentence; nor could she stand still and listen. She walked to the window and pushed aside the curtains. The full moon was flooding down on the smooth old lawn, and Jim was standing there!

Ears more acute than Mrs. Stanton’s would have known that Laura stopped breathing for a few seconds. Then she turned and left the room like an arrow.

“Good night, my dear,” Mrs. Stanton called after her. There appeared to be no answer.

Opening the long French window with some difficulty, Laura stepped out on the piazza.

The lawn was empty. Picking up the long tail of her white dress she started to run across its dewy surface when a figure rose at her elbow—rose from Aunt Arabella’s sacred couch.

“That was a nice trick your friends played on me this evening.” she heard Jim’s voice saying. “Some men would have been so much upset they couldn’t have said a word.”

“It almost killed me,” said Laura. “How was I to know you were in this part of the world?”

“Only that there’s a poster on every fence.”

“Posters. I never read them.”

“I might have known you wouldn’t.”

“You can't suppose I should have come to dinner if I had known you were to be there?”

“Well. I don’t know. I thought you might feel some curiosity. I know I did.”

“You did not show it. You hardly looked in my direction. All the time you were speaking, your eye glanced over me as if I were an utter stranger—it was as if I were not there.”

“Oh, I knew you were there.”

“You did not show it.”

“I formed the habit young of not showing all I feel, Laura.”

“So 1 heard this evening. I heard many things about you this evening, Jim.”

“I picked up a few myself about you. I hear you were married before—to some impossible man from the West.”

 

THERE was a faint, dry humor in his voice, but Laura was far beyond the stage of emotion where even the keenest sense of humor can function.

“They told me you had only begun to succeed since you had been intelligent enough to get rid of—‘shake,’ was their word—a silly wife.”

“And you didn’t like that?”

“Is it true, Jim?”

“True that I’ve been getting ahead in the last five years? Certainly.”

She began to foam and churn inwardly like a torrent damned. “No, no, is it true that you deliberately shook me?”

“You ought to know the answer to that—a clever girl like you.”

“I must know,” she said. “It would be too contemptible if you had let me go on believing I had injured you, ruined your life, when all the time—”

“I never said anything about my life being ruined.”

“When all the time you were glad to get rid of me—would have broken with me, if I hadn't broken with you!”

“Hold on,” said Jim. “I did not say that. You were my wife. I would have stuck to you.”

“Just as a duty?”

“Well, for heaven’s sake, as what else? A pleasure? You were a great companion, weren’t you, doing the exiled queen all day long about the house—”

“I don’t see how you knew what I did all day long; you never saw me.”

“You never had a decent word or an atom of interest in what I was doing—insulting my friends and the men I needed most with your airs—was it any wonder that when this young sprig came along, who had everything you seemed to want, that I did not exactly put up a fight for the privilege of keeping you?”

“You couldn’t have done it.”

“Yes, I could. I could take you now.”

“If what?”

“I did not say ‘if.’”

“Your tone did.”

“No ‘if’ at all. I could take you now, and I would, if you were not so crazy about all the things you have in this new life of yours.”

“Oh, Jim, I hate my life.”

There was the second’s pause—hardly more than a second, though it seemed interminable to Laura, who knew exactly what she meant—while Jim took in the full meaning of her words. Then she felt herself caught in his arms.

“Hell, Laura,” he murmured amorously, “I never in all my life liked any woman but you.”

“I never loved anyone but you, Jim—and not you till tonight.”

Our savage ancestors, we are told, believed that each morning the sun that rose upon the world was a new one. Some hours later Laura, seeing a pale light spreading across the lawn from the other side of the house, knew that the world had changed for her, since she had watched a dull red orb sink behind the Catskills.

She rose, her hands going up to the magnificent knob of her dark hair.

“I’m afraid you’ve missed your train,” she said, and a certain note of triumph was not wholly absent.

“There are others. Suppose you come along on the next one.”

He was, as Peregrin had said, a great man for short-cuts.

He looked up at Laura in the dawn-light, and she looked down at him. It was very quiet, except for the birds, who were beginning as usual to excite themselves about the prospect of another summer morning.

“Will you wait while I change my dress and get some things?”

He nodded, and opening a little leather case, he lighted a cigarette.