"You really want a story?" Elinor's voice was reticently mocking. "A story for good little boys?"

"Oh, _yes!_" from Peter, his clasped hands stretched toward her in an att.i.tude of absurd supplication. "All in nice little words of one syllable or we won't understand."

"Well, once there were three little girls named Elsie, Lacie and Tillie and they lived in the bottom of a well."

[ILl.u.s.tRATION: "WELL, ONCE THERE WERE THREE LITTLE GIRLS"] "What _kind_ of a well?" Oliver had caught the cue at once.

"A treacle well--"

She went on with the Dormouse's Tale, but Ted, for once, hardly heard her--his mind was too busy with its odd, Egyptological dream.

The princess who looked like Elinor. Her slaves would come first--a fat bawling eunuch, all one black glisten like new patent-leather, striking with a silver rod to clear dogs and crocodiles and Israelites out of the way. Then the litter--and a flash between curtains blown aside for an instant--and Hook Nose gazing and gazing--all the fine fighting curses of David on the infidel, that he had muttered sourly under breath all day, blowing away from him like sand from the face of a sphinx.

Pomp sounding in bra.s.s and cries all around the litter like the boasting color of a trumpet--but in the litter not pomp but fineness pa.s.sing.

Fineness of youth untouched, from the clear contrast of white skin and crow-black hair to the hands that had the little stirrings of moon-moths against the green robe. Fineness of mind that will not admit the unescapable minor dirts of living, however much it may see them, a mind temperate with reticence and gentleness, seeing not life itself but its own delighted dream of it, a heart that had had few shocks as yet, and never the ones that the heart must be mailed or masked to withstand. The thing that pa.s.sed had been continually sheltered, exquisitely guarded from the stronger airs of life as priests might guard a lotus, and yet it was neither tenderly unhealthy nor sumptuously weak. A lotus--that was it--and Hook Nose stood looking at the lotus--and because it was innocent he filled his eyes with it. And then it pa.s.sed and its music went out of the mind.

"_Ted_!"

"What? What? Oh, yeah--sorry, Elinor, I wasn't paying proper attention."

"You mean you were asleep, you big cheese!" from Peter.

"I wasn't--just thinking," and seeing that this only brought raucous mirth from both Peter and Oliver, "Oh, shut up, you apes! Were you asking me something, El?"

It was rather a change to come back from Elinor in scarab robes being carried along in a litter to Elinor sitting beside him in a bathing suit. But hardly an unpleasant change.

"I've forgotten how it goes on--the Dormouse--after 'Well in.' Do you remember?"

"Nope. Look it up when we get back. And anyhow--" "What?"

"Game called for to-day. The Lirrups have started looking important--that means it's about ten minutes of, they always leave on the dot. Well--" and Peter rose, scattering sand. "We must obey our social calendar, my prominent young friends--just think how awful it would be if we were the last to go. Race you half-way to the float and back, Ted."

"You're on," and the next few minutes were splashingly athletic.

Going back to the bath-house, though, Ted laughed at himself rather whimsically. That extraordinary day-dream of the slave and the Elinor Princess! It helped sometimes, to make pictures of the very impossible--even of things as impossible as that. If Elinor had only been older before the war came along and changed so much.

He saw another little mental photograph, the kind of photograph, he mused, that sleekly shabby Frenchmen slip from under views of the Vendome Column and Napoleon's Tomb when they are trying to sell tourists picture post-cards outside the Cafe de la Paix. Judged by American standards the work would be called rather frank. It was all interior--the interior of a room in a Montmartre hotel--and there were two people in it to help out the composition--and the face of one seemed somehow to be rather deathly familiar--

That, and Elinor. Why, Hook Nose could "reform" all the rest of his life in accordance with the highest dictionary standards--and still he wouldn't be fit to look at his princess, even from inside a cage.

Also, if you happened to be of a certain a.n.a.lytic temperament you could see what was happening to yourself all the while quite plainly--oh, much too plainly!--and yet that seemed to make very little difference in its going on happening. There was Mrs. Severance, for instance. He had been seeing quite a good deal of Mrs. Severance lately.

"Oh, Ted!" from Peter next door. "Snap it up, old keed, or we'll all of us be late for lunch."

They had just sat down to lunch and Peter was complaining that the whipped cream on the soup made him feel as if he were eating cotton-batting, when a servant materialized noiselessly beside Oliver's chair.

"Telephone for you, Mr. Crowe. Western Union calling."

Oliver jumped up with suspicious alacrity. "Oh, love, love, love!"

crooned Peter. "Oh, love, love, love!" Oliver flushed. "Don't swipe all my b.u.t.ter, you simple cynic!" He knew what it was, of course.

"This is Oliver Crowe talking. Will you give me the telegram?"

Nancy and Oliver, finding Sunday mails of a dilatory unsatisfactoriness, had made a compact to use the wire on that day instead. And even now Oliver never listened to the mechanical buzz of Central's voice in his ear without a little pulse of the heart. It seemed to bring Nancy nearer than letters could, somehow. Nancy had an imperial contempt for boiling down attractive sentences to the necessary ten or twenty words. This time, though, the telegram was short.

"Mr. Oliver Crowe, care Peter Piper, Southampton," clicked Central dispa.s.sionately. "I hate St. Louis. I would give anything in the world if we could only see each other for twenty-four hours. Love. Signed, Nancy."

And Oliver, after hanging up the receiver, went back to the dining-room with worry barking and running around his mind like a spoiled puppy, wondering savagely why so many rocking-chair people took a _crepey_ pleasure in saying it was good for young people in love to have to wait.

XI

Tea for two at the Gondolier, that newest and quotation-marked "Quaintest" of Village tea rooms. The chief points in the Gondolier's "quaintness" seem to be that it is chopped up into as many little part.i.tions as a roulette wheel and that all food has to be carried up from a cellar that imparts even to orange marmalade a faint persuasive odor of somebody else's wash. Still, during the last eight months, the Gondolier has been a radical bookstore devoted to b.l.o.o.d.y red pamphlets, a batik shop full of strange limp garments ornamented with decorative squiggles, and a Roumanian Restaurant called "The Brodska" whose menu seemed to consist almost entirely of old fish and maraschino cherries.

The wispy little woman from Des Moines who conducts the Gondolier at present in a series of timid continual flutters at actually leading the life of the Bohemian untamed, and who gives all the young hungry-looking men extra slices of toast because any one of them might be Vachel Lindsay in disguise, will fail in another six weeks and then the Gondolier may turn into anything from a Free Verse Tavern to a Meeting Hall for the Friends of Slovak Freedom. But at present, the tea is much too good for the price in spite of its inescapable laundry tang, and there is a flat green bowl full of j.a.panese iris bulbs in the window--the second of which pleases Mrs. Severance and the first Ted.

Besides like most establishments on the verge of bankruptcy, it is such a quiet place to talk--the only other two people in it are a boy with startled hair and an orange smock and a cigaretty girl called Tommy, and she is far too busy telling him that that dream about wearing a necklace of flying-fish shows a dangerous inferiority complex even to comment caustically on strangers from uptown who _will_ intrude on the dear Village.

"Funny stuff--dreams," says Ted uneasily, catching at overheard phrases for a conversational jumping-off place. His mind, always a little on edge now with work and bad feeding, has been too busy since they came in comparing Rose Severance with Elinor Piper, and wondering why, when one is so like a golden-skinned August pear and the other a branch of winter blackberries against snow just fallen, it is not as good but somehow warmer to think of the first against your touch than the second, to leave him wholly at ease.

"Yes--funny stuff," Mrs. Severance's voice is musically quiet. "And then you tell them to people who pretend to know all about what they mean--and then--" She shrugs shoulders at the Freudian two across the shoulder-high part.i.tion.

"But you don't believe in all this psycho-a.n.a.lysis tosh, do you?"

She hesitates. "A little, yes. Like the old woman and ghosts. I may not believe in it but I'm afraid of it, rather."

She gives him a steady look--her eyes go deep. It is not so much the intensity of the look as its haltingness that makes warmth go over him.

"Shall we tell our dreams--the favorite ones, I mean? Play fair if we do, remember," she adds slowly.

"Not if you're really afraid."

"I? But it's just because I am afraid that I really should, you know.

Like going into a dark room when you don't want to."

"But they can't be as scary as _that_, surely." Ted's voice is a little false. Both are watching each other intently now--he with a puzzled sense of lazy enveloping firelight.

"Well, shall I begin? After all this _is_ tea in the Village."

"I should be very much interested indeed, Mrs. Severance," says Ted rather gravely. "Check!" "How official you sound--almost as if you had a lot of those funny little machines all the modern doctors use and were going to mail me off to your pet sanatorium at once because you'd asked me what green reminded me of and I said 'cheese' instead of 'trees.'

And anyhow, I never have any startling dreams--only silly ones--much too silly to tell--"

"Please go on." Ted's voice has really become quite clinical.