CHAPTER IV
By mid-January Louise had completed her inventory of the situation. Shefaced her position without flinching and with no visible sign of thedistress the gradually unfolding picture caused her, save a certainsilent preoccupation from which Laura vainly sought to rouse her bytaking her on incessant rounds of the theatres, whisking her off onshort up-State and Long Island motor tours, and providing other means ofdistraction and excitement. Laura's heart ached for Louise. Her owngirlhood had been clouded by trouble. Orphaned at sixteen, an heiresswith no disinterested advisors save those who were the legal guardiansof her person and estate, she had yielded shortly after leaving schoolto a girlish infatuation and entered upon a surreptitious marriage witha man who, with his child-wife's large wealth at his disposal, hadsurrendered to one dissipation after another until, eventually becominga drug fiend, he had, in his treatment of her, developed into such anutterly savage and irresponsible brute that she was compelled to divorcehim, after which he had been put under permanent restraint. It had takenLaura long years to recover her natural equipoise after her bitterdisillusionment. Louise's trouble, Laura could not help apprehending,was even more grievous than her own had been, intensified as she knew itmust be by the girl's carefully-screened feeling of humiliation.
Laura admired Louise beyond words for her uncomplaining acceptance ofher bitter bolus.
"I never saw such pluck," she told John Blythe time and again. "It isthe pluck of a thoroughbred. I believe she thoroughly understandseverything now, except that she is in Judd's debt for her education. Herloyalty to her mother is wonderful, beautiful; far greater thanAntoinette really deserves. I don't remember ever meeting a girl orwoman whom I admired so much as I do Louise Treharne."
Laura could not fail to note how Blythe's clear grey eyes would glistenwhen thus she praised the girl.
"Louise is like her father," he would say in reply to Laura'senthusiasm. "You know what a fine, game man George Treharne was and is.I'll never forget how generous he was in his treatment of me--and hetried to prevent me from knowing it, too--when, as a cub lawyer, I wasfirst starting out on my own hook; and there wasn't the least reason inlife why he should have been so decent to me, either. You remember howhe never whimpered when Antoinette dragged his--Oh, well, no use inreferring to that. But, when I first met the grown-up Louise on thetrain--after I accidentally discovered her identity, I mean--I couldn'thelp but observe how her resemblance to her father--"
"To whom," Laura watched him with twinkling eyes, "your sense ofresponsibility is so great that--er--that--"
Whereupon Blythe would flush hotly and proceed to shrivel Laura withwhatever in the way of polite invective occurred to him in hisconfusion.
The thought of leaving her mother for the sake of extricating herselffrom a difficult and taxing situation never entered Louise's mind. Hermother, she felt, needed her. It was not, she considered, a problem forher interposition; she shrank from the thought of even mentioning it.She knew that it was an utterly impossible situation; she had a profoundbelief that it was not, from its very nature, destined to last; but shepreferred that her mother should take the initiative in casting off theevil. She clearly saw how, from day to day, her mother was becomingincreasingly conscious of the grave trouble she was heaping upon herdaughter's young shoulders; she perceived how her mother, not inherentlyvicious, simply was in the bondage of an ingrained, luxury-lovingselfishness, and that, having been cast out of the social realm in whichshe formerly had moved, she was now possessed by a sort of despairwhich, more than anything else, prevented her from making the attempt toextricate herself from the slough.
Louise, then, schooled herself to wait. It was a sort of waiting thatdrew heavily upon her natural store of equanimity. But she could see noother course, and hopefulness is the tandem mate of youth.
"I have lived long enough," Laura said to her one afternoon, when theywere driving, during this trying period when Louise was testing heradaptability to the utmost, "to have discovered that nothing mattersvery much except one's own peace of mind. If one have that, the rest isall a mirage. I don't mean the peace of mind that proceeds from apriggish sense of superiority to human weaknesses. That, I am pleased tosay, is a sort of mental peace that I haven't yet experienced, and Ihope I never shall. But when one's hands are just decently clean, andone at least has tried to shake off the shackles forged by one's ownlittle meannesses, a sort of satisfying mental quiet ensues that isworth, I think, more than anything else one finds in life."
"But one's worry for others?" quietly suggested Louise, putting it inthe form of a question.
Laura pressed the girl's hands between her own.
"All of us, dear, must know the meaning of solicitude--often painfulsolicitude--for others at some period of our lives," she said, tenderly."I know what you mean. You are carrying yourself nobly through adifficult ordeal. Let that consciousness suffice. You will have theright to feel proud, in the coming time, to remember that you stood thetest--as we are proud of you now."
"'We?'" said Louise, puzzling.
"We," repeated Laura, steadfastly. "I think you scarcely understand,dear, how profoundly interested--yes, and chivalrously interested,too--John Blythe is in your--your problem."
Louise felt the blood rushing to her face.
"Does Mr. Blythe know?" she asked, her cheeks tingling.
"How could he avoid knowing, dear?" rejoined Laura, gently. "He is yourfather's lawyer. He is an occasional visitor at your--" she hesitated;"--visitor on Riverside Drive," she resumed. "And so of course heknows--everything. You may be glad of that, dear. There is no man in theworld whose friendship I value more highly than that of John Blythe. Ithink he would like to have you feel--I know, in fact, that hewould--that he is interested in your--your concerns; that, indeed, in away, he is standing guard for you."
Louise studied for a little while.
"I should have understood, of course, that he knew," she said,hesitatingly. "But it did not occur to me. I am afraid that I shouldhave been a little reluctant to meet him on those two or three occasionsat your home if I had known that he--" She paused.
"Why, dear child, should you have such a feeling when a man of innatenobility, who knew you when you were a little girl----"
"It is wrong, I know," put in Louise, hastily. "But I find it so hard toregard him as--as just a lawyer, you know, Laura. He is not like alawyer at all--at least I have not found him so. He is----"
Laura pointed a teasing finger at her, which caused the color toreappear on Louise's face.
"Don't try to tell me what he is, Louise," said Laura, smiling. "Don'tyou suppose I know? But you don't know how intensely glad I am to hearthat you can't regard Mr. Blythe as--as 'just a lawyer.' I shall tellhim that you are going about criticizing his professional ability."
"Don't do that--please!" said Louise in such an obvious panic that Laurapinched her cheek reassuringly.
The meetings with Blythe to which Louise referred were casual ones inLaura's apartment. Blythe was in the habit of dropping in occasionallyfor coffee--he abominated tea--and a chat at Laura's tea hour in thelate afternoon; and Laura duly noted, not without slyly chaffing himover it, that he had made this an almost daily habit since his discoverythat he stood a pretty fair gambling chance of finding Louise therealmost any afternoon. Once, when Laura and Louise came in from a drivewhich had been prolonged rather later than usual, they entered thelibrary quietly, to find Blythe, looking decidedly glum, browsing amongthe books without the least seeming of being interested in any of them,for his hands were thrust deep into his pockets and they caught himyawning most deplorably. But at sight of the two women--one woman, Laurasaid, accusingly, to him after Louise had gone home in Laura's car--hehad brightened so suddenly and visibly that Laura had to profess thather rippling laugh was occasioned by something she had seen during herdrive.
On these occasions Laura had found it imperatively necessary to leavethem together in order to confer with her servants. Louise and Blythehad talke
d easily on detached, somewhat light matters, finding anagreeable mutual plane without effort. Louise, remembering his somewhatsober preoccupation on the train, had been surprised and pleased--thoughshe could not have told why--to note his possession of a rather unusualsocial charm. She was pleased, too, that, except in the matter of aremarkable physique, he was not to be rated as a handsome man. Hisfeatures were too rugged for that. Strength, keenness and kindlinessshone from his masterful countenance; but he was anything but handsomejudged from the magazine-cover standard. Louise had amused Laura one dayby saying that she found Blythe's face "restful." She had not the leastpartiality for men of the generally-accepted straightout handsome typeof features; she was, in truth, a little inclined to be contemptuous ofan excessive facial pulchritude in men. But--again for a reason whichshe could scarcely have explained--she was glad that Blythe was perhapstwo inches more than six feet in height, that he was as straight as alance, and that he found it necessary to walk sidewise in order to gethis shoulders through some of Laura's lesser doors.
On her last meeting with Blythe Louise had asked him, with a certainhesitancy which he noticed, if he had written to her father.
"Yes," Blythe had replied, simply, "and I sent him your love." He hadnot offered to become more communicative; and Louise, concluding thathis reticence on the subject might be based on a considerateness for herwhich it might be unfair for her to seek to fathom, did not mention thematter to him again. She had an oddly resolute confidence in him,considering how short the time had been since he had come into her life;and she felt that, if he now exhibited a taciturnity which puzzled her,it would be explained in due time.
Louise Treharne belonged to that rare (and therefore radiant) type ofwomen who know how to wait.
* * * * *
Louise's life at the house on the Drive quickly resolved itself into adaily programme tinctured with a monotony that could not but wear uponthe spirits of a young woman of a naturally cheerful and gregarioustemperament.
Her mother, generally in a state of feverish unrest that marked herstrained incertitude over a situation which, in a way, was moreintolerable to her than to her daughter because she was guiltilyconscious that she was the maker of it, usually dropped into Louise'sroom for an hour's chat during the forenoon. She was alternatelyaffectionate, stilted, indifferent and petulant in her attitude towardher daughter. She did not seek, in her brooding self-communings, tothrust aside the keen consciousness that she was utterly and hopelesslyin the wrong; but this consciousness did not serve to allay herirritation, even if it was directed against herself. Like most women,she hated to be in the wrong; and she particularly loathed the thoughtof confessing herself in the wrong. She was less immoral than unmoral;her descent had been due to a sort of warped view as to forbiddenrelationships, nourished by an inborn and intense dislike for thesovereignty of convention--"the tyranny of the smug," she habituallycalled it--and based essentially upon her love of luxurious andextravagant living. But a consciousness of these facts only made herself-contempt the more keen. She measured and despised her sordidness.She was not, she fell into the habit of reflecting after her daughter'sreturn, the victim of anybody but herself; her days of ardor had slippedaway; she well knew that she had not even the excuse of a fondness forthe man who had made her a social pariah. If she had ever experiencedany such a fondness that fact might have mitigated, at least in her ownself-view, the rawness of her course. But she cared nothing for Judd,which made her case abominable, and she knew it.
Yet her weakened will, her character rendered flaccid by years ofcareless self-indulgence, made it acutely difficult for her tocontemplate the thought of abandoning her way of living, even for thesake of her daughter. Her prettiness was now purely a matter ofmeretricious building up; she would soon be forty; she fumed inwardly atthe thought of middle age, which now, for her, was only around thecorner, so to speak; she had been cast off by her own kind; and theterminal idea of her self-communings always was that, since there was nohope for her in any event, no matter what she might do, she might aswell finish the scroll. She pushed aside Louise's involvement in thedifficulty as something that would--that would have to--adjust itself. Away out for Louise must present itself sooner or later; but the way outfor her daughter must be one that would not demand too great asacrifice--if any sacrifice at all--on her own part. Perhaps a goodmarriage could be contrived for Louise; that would be the easiest andmost natural solution; and she would cast about in her mind foreligibles on whose sensitive social concepts perhaps her own method oflife would not grate. Her dreary meditations usually terminated withfutilities of this sort.
Louise, fighting back the oppressiveness that had clutched her eversince her return from school, was cheerful and sunny when her mother waswith her. She made no allusion of any sort to the conditions of herenvironment. Her mother, noticing this, was grateful for it, and she wasconscious of a genuine and growing admiration for the mingled dignityand delicacy of her daughter's behavior. On one of her forenoon visitsto Louise's dressing room the mother herself, swept by a feeling ofremorse in the contemplation of the girl's fragrant, pure-eyed beauty,could not refrain from touching impulsively upon the nub of her ownunrest.
"My dear," she said to Louise, passing a white and still prettilyrounded arm around her daughter, "do you hate your little mother?"
Louise fought back the tears that suffused her eyes.
"Why do you ask such a thing, dear?" she asked in a voice the hoarsenessof which she strove to disguise.
Her mother did not reply to the question, but went on, turning her headaway:
"Because there are circumstances, conditions that you can't have failedto notice here that maybe--" She struggled for words. "It has never beenin my heart to do anything except what was right and fair by you, child,but one drifts, drifts, always drifts----"
She could not proceed.
Louise wrapped her arms about her mother. Neither spoke for a space.
"Nothing can ever change me, dear," said Louise then in her quiet tone."It is not for me to judge or condemn. I can--wait. We shall not speakof it again, shall we, mother?"
Her mother, haggard and with pain-drawn features, smoothed Louise's facewith her hand for a little while and went away without another word. Thegirl's eyes were swollen when Laura came for her in her car an hourlater. But Laura did not ask her why.
Louise went nowhere with her mother. Mrs. Treharne made it plain fromthe beginning that this was her intention. Louise, for her part,required no reason. She understood. Nor did Louise seek to re-establishthe friendships she had formed with girls at Miss Mayhew's school, manyof whom now were living in New York or visiting their homes there duringthe holiday vacation.
One afternoon, at an opera matinee, Louise, strolling out the entr'actein the foyer with Laura, came face to face with Bella Peyton, a girl whohad been graduated from the finishing school with the class ahead ofLouise's. Miss Peyton was with her mother, a stony-eyed,granite-featured dowager who had often met Louise on her frequent visitsat the school; for her daughter and Louise had been school inseparables.
Bella rushed up cordially to Louise and kissed her enthusiastically.
"You darling!" she exclaimed in the abandonment of her delight at comingupon the chum of her school days so unexpectedly. "When did you reachtown? And why didn't you come to see me the very instant you returned?"
Mrs. Peyton, who, at sight of Louise, had purposely lagged in the rear,and whose adamantine countenance reflected intensifying degrees offrozenness with each word that her daughter was saying to Louise, drewher adipose person into a posture of icy rigidity, and croaked:
"Bella!"
Mrs. Peyton had not so much as nodded to Louise.
"Why, mamma," Bella broke out, "don't you remember Louise Treharne, mysworn and subscribed and vowed and vummed chum at Miss Mayhew's?"
"Bella!"
This time it was not merely an adjuration, it was a command.
Bella, perceiving t
hen that something was wrong, flushed. But she wasloyal to her friend.
"You are coming to see me immediately, dear?" she said, hurriedlyshaking hands with Louise in order to obey her mother's command.
"Bella! Come to me at once!" Mrs. Peyton croaked with cutting,unconscionable rudeness, seizing her daughter by the arm andincontinently marching her off.
Louise, crimsoning, took the stab without a word.
"The tabby!" broke out Laura, her eyes flashing with indignation."Gracious heaven, is it any wonder that men privately sneer at the waywomen treat each other? Don't you mind the shocking old cat, Louise;she'll tear herself to pieces with her own claws some day;" and Laurawas unusually tender and kind in her treatment of Louise for theremainder of the afternoon. But, after that encounter, Louise learned toavoid meeting her school friends when, as occasionally happened, she sawthem before they caught sight of her. She felt that they all "knew" or"would know," and she did not elect to take chances on additional snubs.
Her first formal meeting with Judd had been a trial. It had been anaccidental encounter, happening about a week after Louise's return fromschool, and at a time when Mrs. Treharne was in more than one mind as towhether she would permit Louise to meet Judd at all. Mrs. Treharne andJudd were stepping out of the huge yellow car at the close of their lateafternoon ride just at the moment when Louise, alone, was returning inLaura's car. Their meeting on the pavement was inevitable. For a momentLouise hoped that her mother would permit her to lag behind on pretenseof returning to Laura's car to find some imaginary forgotten article;but Mrs. Treharne, suddenly deciding that the meeting had best be overwith, since no way of avoiding it, sooner or later, had suggesteditself, called to her; and Louise, very beautiful with her cold-ruddiedcheeks nimbussed by her breeze-blown hair of bronze, walked erect towhere her mother stood with the bulky, red-eyed Judd, who regardedLouise with a stare of disconcerting admiration.
"My dear Louise," said Mrs. Treharne, obviously quelling a certaintremulousness in her tone, "permit me to present Mr. Judd; Mr. Judd, mydaughter Louise."
Judd, his mouth still unpleasantly agape, started the preliminarygesture toward extending his hand. But he made no further progress withthe hand, for he was quick to notice that Louise, at that very instant,was inserting her loose right hand in her muff. Louise bowed and thenreturned to Laura's car in quest of the imaginary article; she desiredto give Judd time to resume his place in his car before she joined hermother on the steps.
"Demmed handsome, that daughter of yours," Judd commented on Louise toMrs. Treharne when he saw her the next afternoon, "but--er--uppish,what?"
"I can dispense with your generalities on that subject," Mrs. Treharnehad replied.
After that Louise had met Judd casually in the wide, fire-litdown-stairs hall on two or three occasions, and once at the only one ofher mother's extraordinary Sunday night receptions--the "salon" which atonce provoked and amused Laura--which she attended; but she hadexchanged no word with him. She was not lacking in diplomacy, but therewere some stultifications that she found to be wholly beyond her; andshe was conscious of a certain previously unexperienced difficulty withher neck when she even inclined her head to Judd.
* * * * *
"Would you care to meet some of my Sunday night people, Louise?" hermother had asked her. "I dare say Laura has told you they are freaks.Perhaps some of them are. But there are clever ones among them, and onemust take the gifted with the mediocre. It would not harm you to meet afew of them. They are not wicked. They only think they are; some ofthem, that is. Their wickedness is an amiable abstraction. Shall you bedown?"
It was on a Sunday morning, in Louise's apartments, that Mrs. Treharnemade the suggestion. Louise was conscious of the need of a laugh, evenif it were a politely smothered one; and Laura had comically depictedher mother's "salon" to her. She told her mother that she had beenwaiting for that invitation, which caused Mrs. Treharne to glancesharply at her to ascertain if Louise already had adopted Laura's pointof view as to the Sunday evening gatherings.
"Do you entertain your people yourself, mother, or is there a--" Louisestumbled on the word "host."
But her mother was quick to catch her meaning.
"I should not ask you down, else, my dear--you should credit me thatfar," she had replied, a tinge of reproach in her tone. And so, an houror so after dinner on Sunday night, Louise, willowy yet full-blossomedand splendid in a simple princesse dress of white broadcloth, a gardenianestling in an embrasure of her velvety auburn hair, and a tiny-linkedchain of gold, with aquamarine pendants--a gift from Laura--around herfirm white neck, went, for the first time since she had been in thehouse, to the already crowded main floor.
Louise, in her inexperience, could not know that the gathering reallywas little less than an apotheosis of the _declasee_; she merely foundsome of the people agreeable, others of them unconsciously naive intheir ebullient enthusiasm over their imaginary achievements oraccomplishments, still others frankly laughable for their induratedhabit of self laudation.
It was in the main, so far as its social side went, an assemblage ofpersons, men and women, who, thrust outside the genuine socialbreastworks for various and more or less highly-tinctured lapses, thusforegathered in response to an instinct of gregariousness--an instinctaround which the "birds of a feather" aphorism no doubt was framed.Having no choice in the matter, these persons were willing to accept theshadow for the reality. It might almost be said that on every uptownsquare of New York there is at least one common meeting point forsimilar assemblages of social exiles. Nearly all of the figurantes inMrs. Treharne's Sunday evening affairs were _divorcees_ of more or lessnote; the "cases" of some of whom had been blazoned in huge red blocktype in the yellow newspapers, and "illustrated," in default of genuineportraits, with blurred "cuts" of no less benevolent or redoubtablefemales than the late Mrs. Pinkham or Carrie Nation. The men in thecompany who had not already rocketed through the divorce court werewilling, it appeared from their frank method of expressing themselves,to make that by no means perilous passage; though there was a sprinklingof younger men, still factors in a social world from which there are novoluntary expatriates, who attended Mrs. Treharne's Sunday eveningaffairs in a spirit of larkishness and glad of the chance to forsake,for a little while, regions more austere and still under the dominationof at least a tacit repression.
For the rest, there were poetasters who fidgetted until they were calledupon, out of pure sympathy, to read their own verse--some of the latterobviously "lifted;" temperamental musicians, male and female, whopreferred to sway at or with their instruments with the rooms darkenedwhile they performed; manufacturers and proselytizers ofpersonally-conducted and generally quite unintelligible cults, physical,moral or ethical, all of the cults extending a maximum of "freedom ofaction" to the individual; devisers of impromptu or extemporaneousreligions or near-religions, none of which boasted so inconvenient arestriction as a Decalogue; fashionable or striving-to-be-fashionablepalmists and chiromancers, "swamis," "yogis;" burnoosed, sullen,white-robed exploiters, from the Near or Far East, of women who mistooktheir advanced symptoms of neuresthenia for a hankering for the occult;and the other unclassified, sycophantic factors of a "Bohemianism" whoseseams were perfectly visible to the naked eye and whose sawdust was onlyheld in place with the all-together co-operation of the whole artificialassemblage.
Louise's entrance upon the scene created a stir which caused her to feeldistinctly uncomfortable. She longed for Laura; but Laura had "swornoff" attending Mrs. Treharne's Sunday evening parties; not from anyselfish motives of caution--for Laura was in keen demand in the socialcircle in which she had been born and reared; but simply because she hadat length ceased to extract amusement from the self-idolizing vagariesof Mrs. Treharne's crew; more briefly still, because they bored her toextinction.
When the word was buzzed around among the slowly-moving, chatteringassemblage to whom the entire lower floor of the house, including theconservatory, had been
thrown open--that "the tall girl with the air andthe hair" was Mrs. Treharne's daughter--the more privileged onesadverted to their hostess as Tony--there was a sudden cluttering of thepassageways leading to the room in which Louise was standing with hermother. In their keenness to catch a glimpse of the "just-bloomeddaughter of Tony" many of them even forsook the long andgenerously-provided buffet, than which no greater sign of a consuminginterest or curiosity could be given; for not a few of the raffishguests appeared to be so patently in need of nourishment--andstimulant--that they spent the major portion of the evening at thebuffet.
A woman whose vision seemed to be slightly filmed from her inordinatedevotion to the punch lifted her glass, after studying Louise in a sortof open-mouthed daze for a moment or so, and sang out, in a tone thatshe apparently had some difficulty in controlling:
"To Tony's daughter--the Empress Louise!"
The men and women in her neighborhood grabbed for glasses to fill fromthe punchbowls and took up the refrain:
"The Empress Louise!"
Louise felt the blood swirling to her head, but she braced herself tostand the volleying of eyes. Her mother was intensely annoyed and madenot the least effort to conceal her annoyance. When the incident hadbeen merged in a diversion afforded by a recitation of a Portuguesemadrigal in another room by a man with unkempt hair and untidyfingernails, Mrs. Treharne glided away from Louise's side for a momentand found the woman who had proposed the toast. She was still absorbedlybusy at the buffet.
"You are to leave at once, Ethel," she said in a low but determined toneto the toast-proposer, a woman whose divorce story in the newspapers hadbeen remarkable for the detailed account of liquid refreshments she hadconsumed up and down the world, at foreign hotels and on board yachts,for a number of years at a stretch. "I shall never forgive you if youmake another scene here."
"All right, Tony," the woman replied, with a vacuous smile. "Not angryat me, are you, for wishing luck to your little girl--your big girl, Imean; she _is_ an empress, you know, and--"
Mrs. Treharne guided her to the cloak room and stayed by her side untilshe bade her goodnight at the door.
Louise, in the meantime, had been approached by a man whose eyes, shehad noticed with a certain vague disquietude, had been following herabout since her entrance upon the scene.
He was a handsome man of the florid type, with a sweeping blondemustache and oddly-restless light brown eyes in which Louise, catchinghim devouring her with his gaze at frequent intervals, nervously thoughtthat she detected certain felinely-topaz glints. He was tall and atrifle over-heavy; but there was a certain slow-moving, easy air ofadventitious distinction about him which might have been in part lent bythe immaculateness of his evening clothes and his facile way ofdisposing of his hands without requiring any article to give thememployment; an art in which even practiced courtiers and carpet knightsoccasionally are deficient. Louise did not like his face; she observed,when she saw, not without a certain vague trepidation, that he wasapproaching her, that his over-red and over-full lips, from which thesweeping mustache was brushed away, were curved in a sort of habitualsneer which by no stretch of charity could be called a smile; thoughthat, no doubt, was the desired intent of it.
He bowed low, keeping his eyes upraised on Louise's face, when hereached her side, and said:
"Miss Treharne?"
Louise, used to more formal methods of meeting new men, inclined herhead.
"You will condone, I hope, Miss Treharne, my seeming breach of formalityin presuming to address you without a presentation," he said, even hisintensified smile failing to efface the sneering curve from his toovisible lips. "But your mother is generous enough to permit her guestsat times--on such occasions as these, for example--to forego formality.I have been ineffectually trying to reach her for an hour in order to--"
"In order to ask me to do that which you have already done," said Mrs.Treharne, with quite unusual affability, coming up at that moment andcatching his final words. "Louise, dear, permit me--Mr. Langdon Jesse.Don't expect her to know, Mr. Jesse, that you are a cotton king. I doubtif her routine at school permitted her to read the newspapers, even ifthey interested her; which I sincerely hope they did not and will not."
Louise had not often seen her mother in so gracious a humor toward anyman; but this fact did not in any sense serve to quell the instinctivedislike which she immediately felt for Jesse, the "cotton king" of hermother's somewhat too purposely-significant introduction. She noticedthat his hands were small and obtrusively white; that there was a wavein his burnished blonde hair; that his large clear-cut features were ofa chiselled regularity; and her natural aversion to the merely handsomeman promptly asserted itself. The sneer of his mouth, and his fixed wayof gazing squarely into her eyes as if his own eyes were forming aquestion, disquieted her. She replied in purposed monosyllables to hisrather trivial yet studied questions about her school life. She knewperfectly well that he was in no wise interested in her school life, butthat he merely was seeking what he considered might be the most engagingmethod of capturing her attention. Five minutes after his meeting withher she devised an excuse and went to her apartments. She threw herwindows wide and let the wintry air bulge the curtains when she reachedher sleeping room; perhaps it was her subconsciousness that told herthat she needed some such a bath of purifying air to obliterate whatintangible traces there might remain of her brief contact with LangdonJesse. That night she dreamt persistently of a leopard with large,blazing eyes of topaz; and an hour after she awoke a large basket ofsuperb orchids, with Langdon Jesse's card attached, was brought to her.Laura was with her at the time.
"From Langdon Jesse?" said Laura, knitting her brow. "Did you meet himlast night, Louise?"
"Yes. I disliked him intensely."
"If I were you, dear," suggested Laura, "I should send these orchids toa hospital. They can of course have no sinister effect upon those whohave not met their donor. But I should be afraid to have you keep anyflowers sent you by Langdon Jesse. They might poison the air. The baldimpudence of him in sending you flowers at all!"
A footman was carrying the orchids to a nearby hospital five minuteslater.
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