“I hear even Rosedale has been scared by the talk lately,” Mrs. Fisher rejoined; “but the sight of her last night sent him off his head. What do you think he said to me after her tableau? ‘My God, Mrs. Fisher, if I could get Paul Morpeth to paint her like that, the picture’d appreciate a hundred per cent in ten years.'”
“By Jove,–but isn’t she about somewhere?” exclaimed Van Alstyne, restoring his glass with an uneasy glance.
“No; she ran off while you were all mixing the punch down stairs. Where was she going, by the way? What’s on tonight? I hadn’t heard of anything.”
“Oh, not a party, I think,” said an inexperienced young Farish who had arrived late. “I put her in her cab as I was coming in, and she gave the driver the Trenors’ address.”
“The Trenors’?” exclaimed Mrs. Jack Stepney. “Why, the house is closed–Judy telephoned me from Bellomont this evening.”
“Did she? That’s queer. I’m sure I’m not mistaken. Well, come now, Trenor’s there, anyhow–I–oh, well–the fact is, I’ve no head for numbers,” he broke off, admonished by the nudge of an adjoining foot, and the smile that circled the room.
In its unpleasant light Selden had risen and was shaking hands with his hostess. The air of the place stifled him, and he wondered why he had stayed in it so long.
On the doorstep he stood still, remembering a phrase of Lily’s: “It seems to me you spend a good deal of time in the element you disapprove of.”
Well–what had brought him there but the quest of her? It was her element, not his. But he would lift her out of it, take her beyond! That beyond! on her letter was like a cry for rescue. He knew that Perseus’s task is not done when he has loosed Andromeda’s chains, for her limbs are numb with bondage, and she cannot rise and walk, but clings to him with dragging arms as he beats back to land with his burden. Well, he had strength for both–it was her weakness which had put the strength in him. It was not, alas, a clean rush of waves they had to win through, but a clogging morass of old associations and habits, and for the moment its vapours were in his throat. But he would see clearer, breathe freer in her presence: she was at once the dead weight at his breast and the spar which should float them to safety. He smiled at the whirl of metaphor with which he was trying to build up a defence against the influences of the last hour. It was pitiable that he, who knew the mixed motives on which social judgments depend, should still feel himself so swayed by them. How could he lift Lily to a freer vision of life, if his own view of her was to be coloured by any mind in which he saw her reflected?
The moral oppression had produced a physical craving for air, and he strode on, opening his lungs to the reverberating coldness of the night. At the corner of Fifth Avenue Van Alstyne hailed him with an offer of company.
“Walking? A good thing to blow the smoke out of one’s head. Now that women have taken to tobacco we live in a bath of nicotine. It would be a curious thing to study the effect of cigarettes on the relation of the sexes. Smoke is almost as great a solvent as divorce: both tend to obscure the moral issue.”
Nothing could have been less consonant with Selden’s mood than Van Alstyne’s after-dinner aphorisms, but as long as the latter confined himself to generalities his listener’s nerves were in control. Happily Van Alstyne prided himself on his summing up of social aspects, and with Selden for audience was eager to show the sureness of his touch. Mrs. Fisher lived in an East side street near the Park, and as the two men walked down Fifth Avenue the new architectural developments of that versatile thoroughfare invited Van Alstyne’s comment.
“That Greiner house, now–a typical rung in the social ladder! The man who built it came from a milieu where all the dishes are put on the table at once. His facade is a complete architectural meal; if he had omitted a style his friends might have thought the money had given out. Not a bad purchase for Rosedale, though: attracts attention, and awes the Western sight-seer. By and bye he’ll get out of that phase, and want something that the crowd will pass and the few pause before. Especially if he marries my clever cousin–-“