The Restless Sex

"Dear, forgive me!" cried Stephanie, jumping from her perch and passing one arm around Helen's shoulders.

They went away together, the former waving a saucy adieu to Cleland behind her back, without turning. She did not return.

So he concluded to get himself into fresh flannels, the late afternoon having grown very warm and promising a close and humid evening.

But when he descended again from his room, he found nobody except the cat, who, sadly disfigured by coal-dust, advanced toward him with amiable intention.

"Very fine, old girl," he said, "but you need a bath, too." So he rang and sent for some butter, dabbed a little on the cat's nose; and in ten seconds she had begun a thorough and minute toilet, greatly to Cleland's edification.

"Keep it up," he said, much interested, watching the pink tongue travelling over the fur, and the velvet paw scrubbing away industriously. "Good old cat! Go to it! Take the whole course – massage, shampoo, manicure, whiskers ironed! By Jove, you're coming out brand new!"

The cat paused to blink at him, sniff for a moment some faint perfume of distant cooking, unnoticed by his less delicate nostrils, then she settled down to the business in hand. And when a cat does that she feels that she is entirely at home.

Not until a maid announced dinner did the two girls appear, both arrayed in that filmy and dainty flyaway apparel suitable only to youth and freshness.

"We had naps," remarked Stephanie shamelessly, and with a slightly malicious humour in her smile, for she knew that Cleland had expected her to return for the ten-minutes' gossip she had suggested.

He shrugged:

"You should see your cat! She's polished within an inch of her life – "

A loud mew by his chair announced the regenerated animal's advent.

Stephanie fed it with odd morsels from time to time, and cautioned the waitress to prepare a banquet for it after dinner.

It was still daylight when they strolled out into the garden. The tree-clad eastern ridge was all ruddy in the rays of a declining sun; the river dull silver save in pools where pearl and pink tints tinged the stiller water. Birds were very noisy, robins gallantly attacking a gay carol which they always found impossible to vary or bring to any convincing musical conclusion; song sparrows sweetly monotonous; an exquisite burst of melody from a rose-grosbeak high on a balsam-tip above the stream; the rushing twitter of chimney swifts sweeping by, mounting, fluttering, sheering through the sunset sky.

Helen, pausing by the sun-dial, read aloud what was chiselled there, black with encrusted lichens.

"Who wrote this?" she asked curiously.

"Some bandit of the back-woods, some wilderness fur trader or ruthless forest runner – with murder on his soul, perhaps. I don't remember now. But my father made a note of the story."

She read the straggling lines again, slowly:

"But for ye Sunne no one would heed Me —
A senseless Stone;
But for ye Sunne no one could rede Me
Save God alone.
I and my comrade Sunne, together,
Print here ye hours
In praise of Love and pleasant weather
And Youth and flowers."

"How odd and quaint," she mused, " – and what straggling, primitive, illiterate letters these are, chiselled here in this black basalt. Fancy that gaunt, grim, buck-skinned runner emerging from the wilderness into this solitary settlement, finding shelter and refreshment; and, in his brief hour of rest and idleness, labouring to leave his record on this old stone!"

"His was a poet's soul," said Cleland, " – but he probably took an Iroquois scalp when unobserved, and skinned living and dead impartially in his fur transactions."

"Some degenerate son of honest English stock, I suppose," nodded Helen. "Yet, he had the simplicity of the Cavalier verse-makers in his gracious heart… Well, for his sake – "

She laid a June rose on the weather-ravaged dial. "God rest him, anyway!" she added lightly. "There's a devil in every one of us."

"Not in you, darling," cooed Stephanie, enlacing her waist. "If there ever was, he's dead."

"I wonder." … She glanced deliberately at Cleland, then smiled:

"There was a bully romance I read in extreme youth, in which an old swashbuckler was always exclaiming: 'Courage! The devil is dead!' And since I have realized that I, also, harboured a devil, the memory of that cheery war-cry always puts me on my mettle to slay him… It's a good fight, Jim," she added, serenely. "But a really good fight is never finished, you know. And it's better to end the story with, 'so they lived to fight happily ever after,' than to announce that the problem is solved, the romance ended for eternity."

In the pink dusk she picked her way over the dewy grass toward the porch, saying carelessly that her ancient bones resented dampness.

Stephanie, resting against the sun-dial, inhaled the sweetness of the iris and spoke of it.

"The flowers are lilac-grey, like your eyes," he said. "The scent expresses you to me – faintly sweet – a young, fresh, delicate odour —you– in terms of perfume."

"Such a poet! … But you know one never should touch the petals of an iris… The indiscreet imprint remains."

"Have I left any imprint?"

"I should say you had! Do you suppose my mind isn't busy most of the time remembering your – imprints?"

"Is it?"

"Does it comfort you to know it? Nobody else ever pawed me."

"A nice way to put it!" he remarked.

She shrugged:

"I don't know how it was I first permitted it – came to endure it – " She lifted her grey eyes deliberately, " – invited it … because I came to expect it – wish for it – " She bit her lip and made a quick gesture with clenched hand. "Oh, Jim, I'm no good! Here I am married, and as nonchalantly unfaithful to my vows as you care to make me – "

She turned abruptly and walked across the lawn toward the willows that fringed the stream, moving leisurely, pensively, her hands linked behind her back. He rejoined her at the willows and they slowly entered the misty belt of trees together.

"If you knew," she said, "what a futile, irresolute, irresponsible creature I am, you wouldn't waste real love on me. There's nothing to me except feminine restlessness, mental and physical, and it urges, urges, urges me to wander frivolously in pursuit of God knows what —I don't! But always my mind is a traveller impatient to go a-gypsying, and my feet beat the devil's tattoo – "

She sprang from the pebbles to a flat river stone projecting from the shore and stood poised, looking out across the rushing water at the mist curling there along the crests of little hurrying waves. A firefly drifted through it; above, unseen, night-hawks called persistently. She turned her head toward him expectantly.

There was room enough on the rock and he stepped to her side.

"I'm like that water," she said, "making a futile noise in the world, dashing and rippling along without any plan of my own, any destination. When I'm honest with myself, I know that it isn't the intellectual desire for self-expression that keeps me restless; it's merely and solely the instinct to ripple and bubble and dance and flow out under the stars and sunsets and dawns – and go sparkling and swirling and glimmering purposelessly away out into the world at random… And that's all there is to Stephanie Quest! – if you really desire to know – you very romantic and foolish boy, who think yourself in love with her!"

She looked up and laughed at his sober face.

"Dear novelist," she said, "it's common realism, not romantic fiction, that has us in its clutches. We're caught by the commonplace. If life were only like one of your novels, with some definite beginning, an artistic plot full of action running toward a properly planned climax! – but it isn't! It begins in the middle and ends nowhere. And here's another trouble with real life; there aren't any villains. And that's fatal to me as your heroine, Jim, for I can't be one unless I'm furnished with a foil."

"Steve," he said, "if you are not everything that my mind and heart believe you to be, the time is past when it makes any difference to me what you are."

She laughed:

"Oh, Jim, is it really as serious as that? Can you stand for a mindless, purposeless girl of unmoral and nomadic proclivities who really hasn't a single gift – no self to express, no creative or interpretive talent – with nothing but an inordinate, unquiet curiosity to find out everything there is to find out – a mental gypsy, lazy, self-indulgent, pleasure-loving, irresponsible – "