The Younger Set

At first she humoured him, and rather enjoyed his fresh, eager sympathy; after a little his increasing ardour inclined her to laugh; but it was very splendid and chivalrous and genuine ardour, and the inclination to laugh died out, for emotion is contagious, and his earnestness not only flattered her legitimately but stirred the slackened tension of her heart-strings until, tightening again, they responded very faintly.

"I had no idea that you were lonely," he declared.

"Sometimes I am, a little, Gerald." She ought to have known better. Perhaps she did.

"Well," he began, "couldn't I come and—"

"No, Gerald."

"I mean just to see you sometimes and have another of these jolly talks—"

"Do you call this a jolly talk?"—with deep reproach.

"Why—not exactly; but I'm awfully interested, Mrs. Ruthven, and we understand each other so well—"

"I don't understand you", she was imprudent enough to say.

This was delightful! Certainly he must be a particularly sad and subtle dog if this clever but misunderstood young matron found him what in romance is known as an "enigma."

So he protested with smiling humility that he was quite transparent; she insisted on doubting him and contrived to look disturbed in her mind concerning the probable darkness of that past so dear to any young man who has had none.

As for Alixe, she also was mildly flattered—a trifle disdainfully perhaps, but still genuinely pleased at the honesty of this crude devotion. She was touched, too; and, besides, she trusted him; for he was clearly as transparent as the spring air. Also most women lugged a boy about with them; she had had several, but none as nice as Gerald. To tie him up and tack his license on was therefore natural to her; and if she hesitated to conclude his subjection in short order it was that, far in a corner of her restless soul, there hid an ever-latent fear of Selwyn; of his opinions concerning her fitness to act mentor to the boy of whom he was fond, and whose devotion to him was unquestioned.

Yet now, in spite of that—perhaps even partly because of it, she decided on the summary taming of Gerald; so she let her hand fall, by accident, close to his on the cushioned seat, to see what he'd do about it.

It took him some time to make up his mind; but when he did he held it so gingerly, so respectfully, that she was obliged to look out of the window. Clearly he was quite the safest and nicest of all the unfledged she had ever possessed.

"Please, don't," she said sadly.

And by that token she took him for her own.

She was very light-hearted that evening when she dropped him at the Stuyvesant Club and whizzed away to her own house, for he had promised not to play again on her premises, and she had promised to be nice to him and take him about when she was shy of an escort. She also repeated that he was truly an "enigma" and that she was beginning to be a little afraid of him, which was an economical way of making him very proud and happy. Being his first case of beauty in distress, and his first harmless love-affair with a married woman, he looked about him as he entered the club and felt truly that he had already outgrown the young and callow innocents who haunted it.

On her way home Alixe smilingly reviewed the episode until doubt of Selwyn's approval crept in again; and her amused smile had faded when she reached her home.

The house of Ruthven was a small but ultra-modern limestone affair, between Madison and Fifth; a pocket-edition of the larger mansions of their friends, but with less excuse for the overelaboration since the dimensions were only twenty by a hundred. As a matter of fact its narrow ornate facade presented not a single quiet space the eyes might rest on after a tiring attempt to follow and codify the arabesques, foliations, and intricate vermiculations of what some disrespectfully dubbed as "near-aissance."

However, into this limestone bonbon-box tripped Mrs. Ruthven, mounted the miniature stairs with a whirl of her scented skirts, peeped into the drawing-room, but continued mounting until she whipped into her own apartments, separated from those of her lord and master by a locked door.

That is, the door had been locked for a long, long time; but presently, to her intense surprise and annoyance, it slowly opened, and a little man appeared in slippered feet.

He was a little man, and plump, and at first glance his face appeared boyish and round and quite guiltless of hair or of any hope of it.

But, as he came into the electric light, the hardness of his features was apparent; he was no boy; a strange idea that he had never been assailed some people. His face was puffy and pallid and faint blue shadows hinted of closest shaving; and the line from the wing of the nostrils to the nerveless corners of his thin, hard mouth had been deeply bitten by the acid of unrest.

For the remainder he wore pale-rose pajamas under a silk-and-silver kimona, an obi pierced with a jewelled scarf-pin; and he was smoking a cigarette as thin as a straw.

"Well!" said his young wife in astonished displeasure, instinctively tucking her feet—from which her maid had just removed the shoes—under her own chamber-robe.

"Send her out a moment," he said, with a nod of his head toward the maid. His voice was agreeable and full—a trifle precise and overcultivated, perhaps.

When the maid retired, Alixe sat up on the lounge, drawing her skirts down over her small stockinged feet.

"What on earth is the matter?" she demanded.

"The matter is," he said, "that Gerald has just telephoned me from the Stuyvesant that he isn't coming."

"Well?"

"No, it isn't well. This is some of your meddling."

"What if it is?" she retorted; but her breath was coming quicker.

"I'll tell you; you can get up and ring him up and tell him you expect him to-night."

She shook her head, eyeing him all the while.

"I won't do it, Jack. What do you want him for? He can't play with the people who play here; he doesn't know the rudiments of play. He's only a boy; his money is so tied up that he has to borrow if he loses very much. There's no sport in playing with a boy like that—"

"So you've said before, I believe, but I'm better qualified to judge than you are. Are you going to call him up?"

"No, I am not."

He turned paler. "Get up and go to that telephone!"

"You little whippet," she said slowly, "I was once a soldier's wife—the only decent thing I ever have been. This bullying ends now—here, at this instant! If you've any dirty work to do, do it yourself. I've done my share and I've finished."

He was astonished; that was plain enough. But it was the sudden overwhelming access of fury that weakened him and made him turn, hand outstretched, blindly seeking for a chair. Rage, even real anger, were emotions he seldom had to reckon with, for he was a very tired and bored and burned-out gentleman, and vivid emotion was not good for his arteries, the doctors told him.

He found his chair, stood a moment with his back toward his wife, then very slowly let himself down into the chair and sat facing her. There was moisture on his soft, pallid skin, a nervous twitching of the under lip; he passed one heavily ringed hand across his closely shaven jaw, still staring at her.

"I want to tell you something," he said. "You've got to stop your interference with my affairs, and stop it now."

"I am not interested in your affairs," she said unsteadily, still shaken by her own revolt, still under the shock of her own arousing to a resistance that had been long, long overdue. "If you mean," she went on, "that the ruin of this boy is your affair, then I'll make it mine from this moment. I've told you that he shall not play; and he shall not. And while I'm about it I'll admit what you are preparing to accuse me of; I did make Sandon Craig promise to keep away; I did try to make that little fool Scott Innis promise, too; and when he wouldn't I informed his father. . . . And every time you try your dirty bucket-shop methods on boys like that, I'll do the same."

He swore at her quite calmly; she smiled, shrugged, and, imprisoning her knees in her clasped hands, leaned back and looked at him.

"What a ninny I have been," she said, "to be afraid of you so long!"

A gleam crossed his faded eyes, but he let her remark pass for the moment. Then, when he was quite sure that violent emotion had been exhausted within him:

"Do you want your bills paid?" he asked. "Because, if you do, Fane, Harmon & Co. are not going to pay them."

"We are living beyond our means?" she inquired disdainfully.

"Not if you will be good enough to mind your business, my friend. I've managed this establishment on our winnings for two years. It's a detail; but you might as well know it. My association with Fane, Harmon & Co. runs the Newport end of it, and nothing more."

"What did you marry me for?" she asked curiously.