Jewel Weed Part 29

"Surely you have met Mr. Preston. He is one of our best type of business men, and the candidate that the new reform element, in which your husband is playing an honorable part, is hoping to set up for mayor. It would be a notable thing for this community if we might have a man of his stamp represent our munic.i.p.ality."

"I have heard d.i.c.k speak of him," said Lena, "And is that the wonderful Hindu of whom I've heard? All the ladies are crazy about him, but I never happened to see him before."

"That is Ram Juna. He has been with me now for two months, and is to stay indefinitely. He is engaged on a work that will, I am convinced, add one more to the sacred books of the world. We need such men in this age of materialism, do we not? And I feel gratefully the beneficent effect of such a presence in my house."

So Mr. Early went on with ponderous sentences and a sharp look in his eye.

But Lena hardly heard him. She was absorbed in the soft lights and the flowers and the wonderful china, most of which, her host told her, had been made in his own works and was unique in the world. But strange as were all these things, her eyes kept coming back, as if fascinated, to the man-mountain in the silky white robe. The big ruby on his forehead seemed to wink and flash at her, and as often as she looked she met the sleepy eyes fixed on her face. Then she was irresistibly drawn to look again to see if he was still watching. For once, she forgot her big blue eyes and her bright little fluffs of hair and all the execution that they were meant to do on the masculine heart, because there was something different in the way this Oriental surveyed her. It was an unblinking and unemotional study.

Fortunately Mr. Early was content to talk and let her answer in brief.

Talking was not Lena's strong point. Mr. Early went on with his monologue, in plat.i.tudes about art, and Lena looked interested, or tried to, while she caught sc.r.a.ps of conversation from farther down the table.

Miss Elton was telling a story of her cooking-cla.s.s in a certain poor district. She had shown a flabby wife, noted even in that region for her lack of culinary skill, how to make a dish at once cheap, palatable and nutritious.

"And I said, 'Now Mrs. Koshek, if you'd give that to your husband some night when he comes home tired, don't you think it would be a pleasant surprise?' But all I could get out of her was, 'I'd ruther eat what I'd ruther; I'd ruther eat what I'd ruther.' And I'm afraid Mr. Koshek is still living on greasy sausages."

"That might teach you, Miss Elton," said Mr. Preston, "the futility of trying to improve women by reason. Now a man--"

"Oh, pooh, reason! reason!" exclaimed Mrs. Lenox, turning upon him, "I'm sorry for you poor men, you mistaken servants of boasted reason! Reason is the biggest fallacy on earth. It leads men by the straight path of logic to pure foolishness."

"And how is your woman's reason to account for that?" he asked tolerantly.

"Oh, I suppose your premises are never true. Or, if they are, another man's opposite premises are equally true. So there you are. Two contradictions are equally valid, but being a reasonable man you can't see more than one of them."

"And women can see both sides, of course."

"Truly. And flop from one to the other with lightning rapidity. We are too completely superior to reason to have any respect for or reliance on it. Do you think I try reason on my husband when he is in the wrong in his arguments with me! Not at all. I just say, 'I'm afraid you are not feeling well, dear.' And I put a mustard plaster on him. It's extraordinary how seldom he disagrees nowadays. Or when he's very obstinately set on an objectionable course, it's a good plan to say sweetly, 'I'll do just as you like, dear.' He invariably comes back with an emphatic, 'No--we'll do as _you_ like.'"

"I relinquish all claims to be called a reasonable being," said Mr.

Lenox with a wry face.

"When we, the unmarried, hear confessions of this kind," said Madeline, "it gives us an incongruous feeling to remember how happy you, the married, seem, after all."

"Getting along becomes a habit," retorted d.i.c.k. "Matrimony is like taking opium. It fixes itself on you. I suppose when the hero of Kipling's poem found out that she was only 'a rag and a bone and a hank of hair,' he kept on loving the rag, even while he felt like gnawing the bone and pulling the hair."

He knew he had said an ugly thing. It wasn't like him. He flushed as he saw Mrs. Lenox glance sharply at him.

"d.i.c.k, d.i.c.k, that is heresy," she exclaimed gaily. "We must pretend there aren't any vampires, and that we do not know what they are made of. If we tell the naked truth, how can we cry out with conviction that the old world is an harmonious and beautiful place?"

"That isn't your real philosophy," he said.

"No, it isn't," she said. "I sometimes wish it were. If one could have the temperament to shut one's eyes and say, 'I don't see it; therefore it isn't true,' what a very easy thing life would be."

"I don't know," answered d.i.c.k. "Going it blind with a dog and a string doesn't generally make it easier to walk."

"That's true," Madeline put in. "A little dog isn't a very good guide up the hilly road of righteousness. As for me, I prefer open-eyed obedience to blind obedience."

"I'll be bound you prefer obedience anyway," d.i.c.k said in an undertone, and he looked at her as though something in her hurt him. He turned abruptly to Mr. Preston.

"Preston," he said, "I wish we could hold a special election and put you into the executive chair before your time. Every kind of evil thing is taking advantage of our present lax administration. I believe the crooks of other cities are flying to us on the wings of the wind. One of the plain-clothes men told me to-day that the government detectives have traced a gang of counterfeiters to our beloved city, though they have not succeeded in spotting the rascals' whereabouts. It's rather humiliating to find St. Etienne picked out as a good hiding-place for any villany there is going."

"You needn't be so sure that a special election or any other kind would carry us in," laughed Mr. Preston. "I'm not so confident as you seem, Percival, that this community is overwhelmed with the consciousness of its rare opportunity."

And so the talk drifted on, as usual, to politics.

After dinner, in the drawing-room, Lena saw her husband in conversation with Ram Juna. The two crossed the room, and d.i.c.k introduced the new prophet.

"I fear my too constant inspection disturbed you. Myriad pardons for me," began the Swami in his mellifluous voice. "It is the tribute. When I feel deep interest I am p.r.o.ne to forget all but my study. See, I am the last of a family once powerful and wealthy; yet I hardly regret that heritage that I have lost. I look at you. You are the type of another fate. You are a bride, young, lovely, with the vigor and glory of this new race of America. I envy not, but I wonder. So I look too long."

Lena glanced discomfited at the retreating back of her husband and said, "I'm sure I didn't notice anything peculiar."

A curious gleam came into Ram Juna's sleepy eyes.

"Ah, then you, like me, love to examine the soul, your own or another's.

You have fellow feeling. So you forgive. May I sit here beside you?"

Lena drew aside her petticoats and the Swami shared her little sofa.

"You see that while you make study of others, I make study of you. I should wish to be your friend. I should in fact fear to have you count me an enemy."

Lena blinked at him in an uncomprehending way with her big eyes, and he smiled innocently in return.

"A woman who is an enemy is a danger. But men are tough-skinned and hard to kill. Is it not so? And even a woman enemy is often powerless to hurt. But when a woman hates a woman, then the case is different. A woman is easy to hurt. A little blow, even a breath on her reputation or to her pride, and the woman is wounded beyond repair. Is it not so?"

Still Lena stared blankly at him, but as he did not return her gaze, her eyes followed his to the other side of the room where Miss Elton bent over a table, with Mr. Early on one side of her and d.i.c.k Percival on the other.

"Oh!" she said with a little gasp. "Oh!" And Ram Juna looked back at her and smiled again.

"Therefore I was right to desire your friendship and not your enmity, was I not?" said he. "I, too, am a good friend and a bad enemy. See, Mr.

Early shows some wonderful j.a.panese paintings. Shall we join them in the inspection?"

And Lena went with wonder, and in her mind there began to form vague clumsy purposes which the Hindu would have despised if he had read them.

Nor did her conversation with her husband in the home-returning carriage tend to soften Lena's heart.

d.i.c.k was in an uncomfortable and irritable state of mind which was strange and disconcerting even to himself. Instead of giving her the big hug that was his habit when they found themselves safely alone, he said sharply,

"Lena, you use too much perfume about you. I wish you wouldn't."

"Do I?" asked Lena ominously. "Is there anything else?"

"Well, since you give me the chance to say it, dear," d.i.c.k's tone was now apologetic, "I'd a little rather you wore your dinner gowns higher.

I know many women do wear things like yours to-night, and your dressmaker has dictated to you; but I think the extremes are not well-bred. Just look at the best women. Look at Mrs. Lenox and Madeline--"

But here Lena gave so sharp a little cry of anger that d.i.c.k stopped dismayed.

"How dare you?" she screamed. "How dare you hold up a girl you know I hate as an example to me! If she's so perfect, why didn't you marry her?

I'm sure she wanted you badly enough."