"Farvie thinks," said Lydia recklessly, "that you haven't written to him."

"How could I?" asked Esther, in a quick reb.u.t.tal which actually had a convincing sound, "when he didn't write to me?"

"But he was in prison."

"He hasn't had everything to bear," said Esther, rising and putting some figurines right on the mantel where they seemed to be right enough before. "Do you know any woman whose life has been ruined as mine has?

Have you ever met one? Now have you?"

"Farvie's life is ruined," said Lydia incisively. "Jeff's life is ruined, too. I don't know whether it's any worse for a woman than for a man."

"Jeffrey," said Esther, "is taking the consequences of his own act."

"You don't mean to tell me you think he was to blame?" Lydia said, in a low tone charged with her own complexity of sentiment. She was horror-stricken chiefly. Esther saw that, and looked at her in a large amaze.

"You don't mean to tell me you think he wasn't?" she countered.

"Why, of course he wasn't!" Lydia's cheeks were flaming. She was impatiently conscious of this heat and her excited breath. But she had entered the fray, and there was no returning.

"Then who was guilty?" Esther asked it almost triumphantly, as if the point of proving herself right were more to her than the innocence of Jeff.

"That's for us to find out," said Lydia. She looked like the apostle of a holy war.

"But if you could find out, why haven't you done it before? Why have you waited all these years?"

"Partly because we weren't grown up, Anne and I. And even when we were, when we'd begun to think about it, we were giving dancing lessons, to help out. You know Farvie put almost every cent he had into paying the creditors, and then it was only a drop in the bucket. And besides Jeff pleaded guilty, and he kept writing Farvie to let it all stand as it was, and somehow, we were so sorry for Jeff we couldn't help feeling he'd got to have his way. Even if he wanted to sacrifice himself he ought to be allowed to, because he couldn't have his way about anything else. At least, that was what Anne and I felt. We've talked it over a lot. We've hardly talked of anything else. And we think Farvie feels so, too."

"You speak as if it were a sum of money he'd stolen out of a drawer,"

said Esther. Her cheeks were red, like exquisite roses. "It wasn't a sum of money. I read it all over in the paper the other day. He had stockholders' money, and he plunged, it said, just before the panic. He invested other people's money in the wrong things, and then, it said, he tried to realise."

"I can't help it," said Lydia doggedly. "He wasn't guilty."

"Why should he have said he was guilty?" Esther put this to her with her unchanged air of triumphant cruelty.

"He might, to save somebody else."

Esther was staring now and Lydia stared back, caught by the almost terrified surprise in Esther's face. Did she know about Jim Reardon? But Esther broke the silence, not in confession, if she did know: with violence rather.

"You never will prove any such thing. Never in the world. The money was in Jeff's hands. He hadn't even a partner."

"He had friends," said Lydia. But now she felt she had implied more than was discreet, and she put a sign up mentally not to go that way.

Whatever Esther said, she would keep her own eyes on the sign.

IV

Still she returned to the a.s.sault. Her next question even made her raise her brows a little, it seemed so crude and horrible; she could have laughed outright at herself for having the nerve to put it. She couldn't imagine what the colonel would have thought of her. Anne, she knew, would have crumpled up into silken disaster like a flower under too sharp a wind.

"Aren't you going to ask Jeff here to live with you?"

Esther was looking at her in a fiery amaze Lydia knew she well deserved.

"Who is this child," Esther seemed to be saying, "rising up out of nowhere and pursuing me into my most intimate retreats?" She answered in a careful hedging way that was not less pretty than her unconsidered speech:

"Jeffrey and I haven't been in communication for years."

Then Lydia lost her temper and put herself in the wrong.

"Why," said she, "you said that before. Besides, it's no answer anyway.

You could have written to him, and as soon as you heard he was going to be pardoned, you could have made your plans. Don't you mean to ask him here?"

Esther made what sounded like an irrelevant answer, but it meant apparently something even solemn to her.

"My grandmother," said she, "is an old lady. She's bedridden. She's upstairs, and I keep the house very quiet on her account."

Lydia had a hot desire to speak out what she really felt: to say, "Your grandmother's being bedridden has no more to do with it than the cat."

Lydia was p.r.o.ne to seek the cat for exquisite comparison. Persons, with her, could no more sing--or dance--than the cat. She found the cat, in the way of metaphor, a mysteriously useful animal. But the very embroidery of Esther's mode of speech forbade her invoking that eccentric aid. Lydia was not eager to quarrel. She would have been horrified if circ.u.mstance had ever provoked her into a rash word to her father, and with Anne she was a dove of peace. But Esther by a word, it seemed, by a look, had the power of waking her to unholy revolt. She thought it was because Esther was so manifestly not playing fair. Why couldn't she say she wouldn't have Jeff in the house, instead of sitting here and talking like a nurse in a sanitarium, about bedridden grandmothers?

"It isn't because we don't want him to come to us," said Lydia.

"Farvie's been living for it all these years, and Anne and I don't talk of anything else."

"Isn't that interesting!" said Esther, though not as if she put a question. "And you're no relation at all." She made it, for the moment, seem rather a breach of taste to talk of nothing else but a man to whom Lydia wasn't a sister, and Lydia's face burned in answer. A wave of childish misery came over her. She wished she had not come. She wished she knew how to get away. And while she took in Esther's harmony of dress, her own little odds and ends of finery grew painfully cheap to her. But the telephone bell rang in the next room, and Esther rose and excused herself. While she was gone, Lydia sat there with her little hands gripped tightly. Now she wished she knew how to get out of the house another way, before Esther should come back. If it were not for the credit of the family, she would find the other way. Meantime Esther's voice, very liquid now that she was not talking to a sister woman, flowed in to her and filled her with a new distrust and hatred.

"Please come," said Esther. "I depend upon it. Do you mean you weren't ever coming any more?"

When she appeared again, Lydia was quivering with a childish anger. She had risen, and stood with her hands clasped before her. So she was in the habit of standing before her dancing cla.s.s until the music should begin and lead her through the measures. She was delightful so and, from long training, entirely self-possessed.

"Good-bye," said she.

"Don't go," said Esther, in a conventional prettiness, but no such beguilement as she had wafted through the telephone. "It's been so pleasant meeting you."

Again Lydia had her unG.o.dly impulse to contradict, to say: "No, it hasn't either. You know it hasn't." But she turned away and, head a little bent, walked out of the house, saying again, "Good-bye."

When she got out into the dusk, she went slowly, to cool down and think it over. It wouldn't do for the colonel and Anne to see her on the swell of such excitement, especially as she had only defeat to bring them. She had meant to go home in a triumphant carelessness and say: "Oh, yes, I saw her. I just walked right in. That's what you ought to have done, Farvie. But we had it out, and I think she's ready to do the decent thing by Jeff." No such act of virtuous triumph: she had simply been a silly girl, and Anne would find it out. Near the corner she met the man she had seen on her way in coming, and he looked at her again with that solicitous air of being ready to take off his hat. She went on with a consciousness of perhaps having achieved an indiscretion in coming out bareheaded, and the man proceeded to Esther's door. He was expected.

Esther herself let him in.

Reardon had not planned to go to see her at that hour. He had meant to spend it at the club, feet up, trotting over the path of custom, knowing to a dot what men he would find there and what each would say. Old Dan Wheeler would talk about the advisability of eating sufficient vegetables to keep your stomach well distended. Young Wheeler would refer owlishly to the Maries and Jennies of an opera troupe recently in Addington, and Ollie Hastings, the oldest bore, would tell long stories, and wheeze. But Reardon was no sooner in his seat, with his gla.s.s beside him, than he realised he was disturbed, in some unexpected way. It might have been the pretty girl he met going into Esther's; it might have been the thought of Esther herself, the unheard call from her. So he left his gla.s.s untasted and telephoned her: "You all right?" To which Esther replied in a doubtful purr. "Want me to come up?" he asked, as he thought, against his will. And he swallowed a third of his firewater at a gulp and went to find her. He knew what he should find,--an Esther who bade him remember, by all the pliancy of her attractive body and every tone of her voice, how irreconcilably hard it was that she should have a husband pardoned out of prison, a husband of whom she was afraid.

Lydia found Anne waiting at the gate.

"Why, where've you been?" asked Anne, with all the air of a prim mother.

"Walking," said Lydia meekly.

"You'd better have come with us," said Anne. "It was very nice. Farvie told me things."

"Yes," said Lydia, "I wish I had."