His Second Wife Part 30

"Yes, love, I'm almost ready now. Are you sure the car is at the door?"

"It's been there nearly half an hour!"

"That's good. Just a minute more."

As he angrily lit a cigarette, she looked in the gla.s.s at him and smiled. "How he dreads it, poor dear," she was thinking, as he strode into the living-room, "meeting Sally and all his old friends." She frowned. "Heaven knows I dread it myself. What am I going to say to them all? And suppose they don't care for me in the least? . . .

Well, it will soon be over." Presently Joe popped in at the door:

"Look here! If you're not dressed enough--"

"I'm all ready now," was her placid reply. "Don't you think I look rather nice?"

"Oh, yes. You'll do."

"Thank you, dear. Aren't you going to kiss me!"

"No! Yes! . . . Now come on!"

She threw back her head and laughed at him.

"It's beginning so well," murmured Sally to Ethel, as they went in to dinner. "Steady, my child."

"Oh, I'm all right!" was the reply, and Ethel smiled excitedly. The chorus of exclamations that had greeted Joe and herself had been so warm and gay and real. There had been no time for awkwardness. In a moment after their entrance, the hubbub of talk and laughter had gone right on as though nothing had happened. At table it continued still, and she felt herself borne along on the tide. She looked at Joe, who was on Sally's right, and she thought he was doing exceedingly well. And as for these old friends of his, as she rapidly scanned their faces, they looked far from formidable. On her left side Sally's husband, a tall dark creature with nice eyes, was telling her about the men--two or three writers, an architect and a portrait painter rather well known, whose pictures she had read about. She had already learned from Sally what the women did with themselves. They worked, they went to women's clubs, they dined and did the social side. One of them spoke for suffrage, another was a sculptress, one sang, one had a baby. They did not look solemn in the least. Everything went so naturally.

"Well, here I am at last," she thought. She kept throwing quick little glances about. Was it all so much worth while, she wondered. Yes, they were very pleasant and nice. But she had expected--well, something more, a kind of a brilliancy in their eyes and the things they were saying. For here were Art and Music, Movements, Causes and Ideas, and goodness only knew what else! Here were the people who really saw something richer and deeper in life than the sort of existence Amy had led--great bright vistas leading off from the city as it was today to some dazzling promised land. She thought of the little history "prof."

They were so cosy about it here! She did not want them to be "highbrows"--Heaven forbid! But they took it all so easily!

She thought of the struggles she had been through in order to get where she was tonight, the ardent hopes and the despairs, and all the eager planning. And just for a moment there came to her some little realization of those other women still outside, in this city of so many worlds, each with her particular world, her bright and shining goal, her shrine, and pushing and scheming to get in. She recalled the fierce light in Amy's eyes and the tone of her voice: "I may be too late!" Amy had wanted only money, and people like that. But how hard she had wanted it! . . . These people took it so pleasantly; they seemed so snug in their little group. She wondered if she would become like that.

No, she decided, most certainly not! And suddenly she realized that this was only one more step in the life she was to lead in this town.

These people? For a time perhaps.

Then others--always others! That was how it was in New York.

Ethel gave a queer little laugh--which at once she pretended had been caused by something Sally's husband had said. And she listened to him attentively now. "There's so much time for everything! I'm only twenty-five!" she thought. She turned to the painter on her right, and was soon talking rapidly.

The moments seemed to fly away. Now they had left the men to smoke.

But soon the men had followed them, and every one was smoking, and Ethel was trying a cigarette. The talk ran on, about this and that. But over on her side of the room, Sally had led the conversation back to Joe's old student days, to the Beaux Arts and life in the Quarter. Ethel heard s.n.a.t.c.hes from time to time, and she kept throwing vigilant glances over at her husband's face. He seemed to be responding, with a hungriness that thrilled his wife. Again he would fall silent, with an anxious gleam in his eyes. "He's wondering if he's too old!" she thought, and she crossed the room and joined them.

Sally was cleverly drawing him out about some of those early plans of his. And though awkward at first, he was warming up. In the room the hubbub died away. "They're listening to Joe!" thought Ethel. Joe kept talking on and on. Every few moments some one would break in to ask him something, or to raise a little laugh. Ethel tingled with pride in him, and with hope for the success of her scheming.

Now the crucial time arrived. For one by one the guests had gone, till only she and Joe and Nourse remained with Sally and her husband. The moment for springing the great idea had come at last. Nourse was to do the talking. That had been arranged ahead, at a meeting of Nourse and the two wives. But all at once in a panic now, Ethel knew that Nourse would bungle it. Why had she entrusted so much to this man? Had he ever shown tact in his whole life? And why so soon? Oh, it had been rash! The evening had pa.s.sed so gorgeously. Why not have waited and had other evenings to pave the way and make it sure! She tried to signal to Nourse to stop him, but he could or would not hear! Now he was getting ready to speak.

"Well," he said, rising and turning on Ethel a curious smile, "I guess it's time I was going home."

She stared at him in blank relief. So he had some sense about things, after all.

"But look here, Bill," said her husband, "before you go, let's give these scheming women of ours to understand we don't want 'em to meddle in our affairs."

"Right," growled Nourse. And a moment later the three men confronted two astonished wives, and Bill was gravely announcing, "We've done this thing all by ourselves. The firm is 'Nourse, Lanier and Crothers.' And from this night on we propose to do business without any interference from wives. Understand!" He frowned menacingly. "We settled that this afternoon. And the next thing we decided was that Joe packs up this wife of his, whether she happens to like it or not, and takes her over to Paris. See? And if she tries to keep him from work by yanking him all around to the shops--"

While Nourse growled on in his surly way, Ethel slipped quietly into the hall--where presently Sally with one arm about her was proffering a handkerchief and murmuring.

"Use mine, dear."

CHAPTER XXVIII

On the night before they sailed for France, long after she had gone to bed Ethel came out in her wrapper into the warm dark living-room. There was something she had forgotten to do, and she wanted to get it off her mind. She switched on the light by the doorway, and looked about her smiling, but with a little shiver, too.

The ghost was gone--or nearly so. Already the room had been stripped bare. Only Ethel's desk was left, and a chair or two and the long, heavy table with a lamp at either end. Amy's picture was still on the table, but it lay now on its back and looked up at the ceiling as though it knew it must soon depart. Tomorrow the movers would finish their work. Soon somebody else's things would be here, and somebody else's life would pour in and fill the room and make it new. Somebody else.

What kind of a woman? Another Amy, or f.a.n.n.y Carr, or Sally Crothers or Mrs. Grewe? What a funny, complicated town. On her return a year from now, Ethel had already decided to take a small house near Washington Square. How long would that experiment last! Doubtless in the years ahead she would try other homes, one after the other. "Why do we move so in New York!" She thought of that plan of her husband's for the future city street, with long rows on either hand of huge apartment buildings with receding terraces, numberless hanging gardens looking into the street below. And she wondered whether the city would ever be anything like that? "In New York all things are possible." . . .

"However." Ethel went to her desk and rummaged for paper, pen and ink.

Then she took out of a cubby-hole a bulky letter and read it through.

It was the "round-robin" come again on its annual journey over the land.

It had been in a lonely mining camp, on a cattle ranch, in a mill town and in cities large and small. There were many kinds of handwriting here, and widely different stories of the growth, the swift unfolding, of the lives of a new generation of women. "Girls like me." She read it through.

Then she took up her pen and began to write swiftly:

"I have been here for over three years--but it was hard to write before, because everything was far from clear." She stopped and frowned. "How much shall I tell them?" An eagerness to be frank and tell all was mingled with that feeling of Anglo-Saxon reticence which had been bred in Ethel's soul back in the town in Ohio. "Besides, I haven't time,"

she thought.

"I feel," she wrote, "as though I were just out of danger--barely out.

In danger, I mean, of nervously dashing about after nothing until I got wrinkled and old at forty--nerves in shreds. I might have done that. I have met a nerve specialist lately--and the stories he has told me about women in this town!

"However! I want to make myself clear. Am I a high-brow? Not at all.

I want good clothes--I love to shop--and I propose to go on shopping.

If you do not, let me tell you, my dears, that the men in New York are like all the rest--and you would soon be leading a very lonely existence! And I don't want that, I want bushels of friends--and some of them men--decidedly! I want to dance and dine about--but I don't want to be religious about it! Nor frantic and get myself into a state!

"Well, but I did start out like that. When I came here to live--" She hesitated. "No, I'd better scratch that out."

"Thank Heaven I got married," she wrote, "and fell in love with my husband." Again she stopped with a quick frown. "And I had a baby. And I began to find something real." Another pause, a long one.

"I had quite a struggle after that. I was all hemmed in--" she stopped again--"by the city I found when I first arrived. But I huffed and I puffed and I hunted about--and at last I discovered our New York--the town we girls used to dream about at home in all those talks we had!

Oh, I don't mean I have found it yet--but I've felt it, though, and had one good look. I dined with some people. How silly that sounds. But never mind--the point is not me, but the fact that this city is really and truly crammed full of the things we girls used to get so excited about--Art, you know, and Music of course, and people who make these things their G.o.d. The town opens up if you look at it right--and you find Movements--Politics--you hear people talk--you see suffrage parades--I marched in one not long ago feeling like Joan of Arc! And you find men, too, who are doing things. Big schemes for skysc.r.a.pers and homes! I mean that our New York is here!"

Again there came a pause in the writing. Her eyes looked excited. She smiled and frowned. Now to finish it off!

"What I want of it all I am not yet sure--for me personally, I mean.

But there is my husband, to begin with, and his work that I can help grow--and his old friends. And they are not all. I keep hearing of new ones I must meet--and they are mixed in with all those things I have discovered in the town. A few of these people were born here--but most have come from all over the country. Sometimes I shut my eyes and ask--'Where are you now, all over the land, you others who are to come to New York and be friends of mine and of my children?'

"I want children--more than one. How many I am not quite sure. That's another point--you decide these things." She frowned and scratched this sentence out. "And children grow--and the idea of bringing them up makes me feel very young and humble, too. But in that we are all in the same boat--for the whole country, I suppose, is a good deal the same.

What a queer and puzzling, gorgeous age we are just beginning--all of us! I wonder what I shall make of it? What shall I be like ten years from now? How much shall I mean to my husband--and to other men and women? But most of all to women--for we are coming together so! I wonder what we shall make of it all? I wonder how much we women who march--march on and on to everything--are really going to mean in the world!

"Oh, how solemn! Good-night, my dears! A kiss to every one of you!"