Clarence Louis Cullen

“ I know that I should if I were he."
"Why, Laura?" asked Louise with such genuine wide-eyed innocence that Laura laughed outright.
"Why?" she repeated in Louise's tone. "Well, I haven't the least doubt that I should be a great deal more selfish about it than he will be. Just because a man has to be such a horridly legal, dry-as-dust creature as a guardian, is that any particular reason why he should become incapable of experiencing the entirely human misery called lonesomeness?"
Louise had no reply for that except a little gesture of deprecation that quite failed to convince. ”

“ Treharne. "Laura, I begin to fear, is growing garrulous. You must not permit her to put absurd ideas into your head, my dear. I must speak to her about it."
"Pray do not, mother," said Louise, earnestly. "She is one of the dearest women in the world, and everything that she tells me, I know, is not only perfectly true, but for my good. It is not anything said to me by Laura that makes me dislike the idea of receiving Mr. Jesse. It is simply that I don't like him. There is a boldness, an effrontery, a cynicism, about him that make me distrust him. I don't care for his type of man. That is all." ”

“ In the lives of most men and women there are days—usually unanticipated days—so encompassed, aureoled, by a memorable happiness that, ever afterward, in hours of retrospection, they mark the beginning or denote the closing of the eventful periods.
This was such a day for Blythe and Louise and Laura. They rambled through miles of field and forest, chattering and laughing like children a-berrying; the women's hair blowing free or tumbling down altogether, their skirts caught by brambles, their deadliest fears aroused by the inevitable ruminative cow. ”

“ He is a man—a real man. He knows and gauges the world. More and better than that, he knows himself. I should have difficulty in recalling the name of any man who knows his mind better than John Blythe does his."
"I know that, Laura," said Louise. "But his unselfishness is too fine a thing to be taken advantage of. He has made his way unaided. He has had a long fight. He will never cease to mount. Why should I hamper him?"
"Hamper him!" exclaimed Laura. "Child, how can the woman a man loves hamper him?"
"Your partiality causes you to generalize, dear," said Louise. ”

“ Louise might have reminded an imaginative traveler, had there been such in the car, of a freshly-blown, firm-petalled chrysanthemum. There are women in whom you first discern an utter, convincing wholesomeness; later you become aware of their beauty. Their wholesomeness, you think upon your first comprehensive glance, is like that of an early vernal breeze, of dew upon clean grass; then the contributing elements of their beauty emerge upon your consciousness as through a succession of lifted veils. Louise Treharne was of this type. ”

“ And I can't leave her as long as there is a chance to do that."
"But your own life, dear?" interposed Laura. "You must consider that, you know. You are a very young woman. There is no reason why you should be dragged down."
"I shall not be," replied Louise. "And, if my mother is to be dragged down, if she is to continue in this way, of what use would my life ever be to me? I never could be happy with her in such surroundings, could I? There is only one thing for me to do, dear; stay with her until she sees it all. I know that she will understand sooner or later. She can't help it. ”

“ Jesse sat at the table and gnawed angrily at his unlighted cigar for a long time after Judd had gone; it was characteristic of him that his compunction was all for himself. He had been found out and pilloried. That was what cut him. He never gave a thought to the young woman whose life he had destroyed.
Jesse had been instantly struck by the beauty of Louise Treharne. He surmised that it was through no complaisance on her part, but purely because she had been helpless in the matter, that she had found herself living with her ostracised mother in the house on the Drive. ”

“ Louise, however, was scarcely in a mood of mirth.
"I knocked, my dear, but you were too much absorbed," said Mrs. Treharne, offering her daughter her cheek. "You were in a veritable trance. Did you get enough sleep, child? Was Heloise in a scolding humor? She makes my life a misery to me with her tongue. What beautiful hair you have! And what a perfect skin! A powder puff would mar that wonderful pallor. Yet you are not too white. It becomes you, with your hair. Appreciate these things while you have them, dear; look at your mother, a hag, a witch, at thirty-nine! ”

“ They would say that he had married a girl whose mother had been openly maintained by a man—a man in the public eye—whose wife was living. They would go farther and say—which of course is the simple truth—that I had lived for a time under the roof maintained by that man. And, with such things to go upon, how could the world possibly reach any other conclusion—granting, as you must, the knack the world has for leaping at conclusions—than that John Blythe, a growing man, a man destined for distinction, had made a tremendous mistake in his marriage? ”

“ She paused and gazed about the room wearily. "If to be a prude," she resumed, "is to be conscious of the desire and the intention to be an honest woman, then, mother, I am a prude," her voice breaking a little. "And if one must be a prude to recoil from the hideous advances of a man like Langdon Jesse, then again I am a prude."
She had been unfairly placed on the defensive. She had not meant to wound. But, while her words cut her mother like the impact of thongs, they did not arouse within her a sense of the humiliation of her position. ”

“ Jesse caught sight of Mutsu at the same instant that Louise did.
"What the devil are you doing here?" Jesse demanded of the valet. "Get out and stay out till this evening, do you hear?"
Mutsu first lowered his head, then shook it with a most decided negative. His lips were pulled back from his teeth; mutiny shone all over him.
"What you do?" he demanded of Jesse, falling into a pidgin vernacular which he rarely used except when excited. "She no like to be crushed in embrace? She is of an innocence. She is of an honorable. I saw that at Savoy Hotel when first I see her. Why you no let go?" ”

“ What sort of a place is this as a home for Louise? I am speaking to you as an old friend. I am in a fiendish predicament. Of course you see that. And I can't see the first step of a way out of it. Can you?"
"For one thing," said Laura, mischievously and with eyes a-twinkle, "you might permanently disperse your zoo."
Mrs. Treharne laughed harshly.
"One must know somebody," she said, deftly applying the rouge rabbit's-foot. "One can't live in a cave. My own sort banished me. I am declassée. Shall I sit and twiddle my thumbs? At least the people of my 'zoo,' as you call it, are clever. ”

“ You've scarcely been out of my mind since first I met you at Judd's—I should say, at your mother's house. I've been stark raving about you—am yet; and that's the truth. Why can't we be bully good friends? Your little pretenses are all very engaging and that sort of thing, and do you credit, of course, but you see I have penetrated them. Well, then, why can't we hit it off? You don't know how good I'll be to you if you look at the thing in the sensible way. The first time I saw you I heard them hail you as Empress Louise. ”

“ But George Treharne, accustomed to the beauty of his surroundings, was giving little heed, as he paced unceasingly back and forth, to the sights and sounds of his marvelous investiture. His mind was upon the snowy Christmas Eves of the flown years. He had not heard from his daughter, nor even from Blythe, a punctilious correspondent in matters of business, since receiving Louise's announcement of her mother's death, in the early part of September. And he had been unable to make his contemplated visit to "the main land," as Americans living in Hawaii call the United States. ”

“ Laura admired Louise beyond words for her uncomplaining acceptance of her bitter bolus.
"I never saw such pluck," she told John Blythe time and again. "It is the pluck of a thoroughbred. I believe she thoroughly understands everything now, except that she is in Judd's debt for her education. Her loyalty to her mother is wonderful, beautiful; far greater than Antoinette really deserves. I don't remember ever meeting a girl or woman whom I admired so much as I do Louise Treharne." ”

“ My mother and I will have a dear, cosy, happy life together yet, Laura, never fear."
Laura pretended that some pictures on a mantel needed straightening in order to hide her suffused eyes.
"All the same, Louise," she said, resuming her seat after a little while, "Mr. Blythe is entitled to know these things that you have told me. And you should have the benefit of his advice. He not only is your guardian, but he is a man—a regular man—and your—oh, well, I do not need to say that he is your friend, do I?" smiling. ”

“ As they stood side by side in the juxtaposition of a caress—they were friends from girlhood—the contrast between the two women was sufficiently striking. Laura Stedham, a woman of thirty-five, had the slender yet well-rounded structural sinuosities of a girl of twenty who passes all her days in the open air—minus the indubitable blowsiness which some open-air young women can't help but reveal to the dissecting eye. Unusually tall, she had the gliding grace of movement which so many women of uncommon stature lack. ”

“ Laura gathered up her skirts and raced for her hat, Louise after her.
"Stay here all night!" gasped Laura. "You are making a glorious beginning as a guardian, aren't you!"
It was past ten o'clock when Louise, in Laura's car, which had been waiting at the ferry, reached the house on the Drive, Laura having been dropped at her apartment. The sheer happiness of the day still absorbed her. Up to the moment when the car pulled up at the curb she had been going over and over, since parting with Blythe and Laura, the incidents of the day that had made it such an oasis of happiness. ”

“ Half-awake and the brightness of the room filtering through her still-closed eyelids, she was obsessed for an instant with the fear that, over-sleeping, she was late for the exercises attending the beginning of a day at Miss Mayhew's school. She smiled at the thought, in spite of a brooding, indefinable trouble that had burdened her sleep, when, with wide eyes, she quickly sensed the lavishness of the room and saw the invincibly trig Heloise moving about.
"Mademoiselle is awake at last?" said Heloise in French, a trace of irritation in her tone. ”

“ Her mother, generally in a state of feverish unrest that marked her strained incertitude over a situation which, in a way, was more intolerable to her than to her daughter because she was guiltily conscious that she was the maker of it, usually dropped into Louise's room for an hour's chat during the forenoon. She was alternately affectionate, stilted, indifferent and petulant in her attitude toward her daughter. She did not seek, in her brooding self-communings, to thrust aside the keen consciousness that she was utterly and hopelessly in the wrong ”

“ Great heaven, am I not old enough as it is? I am Laura to you, dear; flatter me at least, by making me believe that you consider me young enough to be called by my christened name; the aged have so few compensations, you know," and Louise, not without initial difficulty, however—for Laura had always been a woman to her—called her Laura thenceforth and was pleased to imagine that the elder woman was her "big, grown-up" sister.
On the ride to the Riverside Drive house Louise, suddenly remembering, mentioned Blythe. ”

“ Business-bound men, going more slowly than usual, glancing occasionally at the sky of sapphire, and feeling on their cheeks gusty little zephyrs from the South, thought of fishing "where the wild stream sings." Belated shopgirls, sensing the morning's benign balm as they hurried through crowds, thought of hats and furbelows for the season that, they surmised, was almost upon them.
In the ferry-bound automobile, John Blythe was thinking about a letter hid in the pocket of his coat and wondering how the person whom the letter most concerned would regard its contents. ”

“ Louise had amused Laura one day by saying that she found Blythe's face "restful." She had not the least partiality for men of the generally-accepted straightout handsome type of features; she was, in truth, a little inclined to be contemptuous of an excessive facial pulchritude in men. But—again for a reason which she could scarcely have explained—she was glad that Blythe was perhaps two inches more than six feet in height, that he was as straight as a lance, and that he found it necessary to walk sidewise in order to get his shoulders through some of Laura's lesser doors. ”

“ The reason, then, why I do not intend to have any further contact with Langdon Jesse is that he is one of the most notorious libertines in New York; a man who regards women from a single angle—as his prey. Everybody seems to know that, mother, except you: and you don't know it, do you?" There was a pathos in the eagerness with which the girl asked the question; it spoke of a dim hope she yet had that perhaps, after all, her mother did not know about Langdon Jesse. Her mother's harsh, dodging reply quickly dashed that hope. ”

“ Judd, however, was an individual who owed a considerable part of his immense success as a man of affairs to his studied and carefully-elaborated habit of never doing the obvious.
He leaned back in the car and half-screened his turkey-like eyes with their small, veinous lids. Mrs. Treharne, surprised at his silence, went on hastily:
"I am wretchedly disturbed over it. I know that I have no fit home to offer her. I know that I have completely undermined her chance in life. But what can I do? She can't live alone. And she merely brings the difficulty to a head by coming now. ”

“ Mrs. Treharne gazed at her daughter with mouth agape. When she finally spoke her words were almost inarticulate.
"Your guardian?" she gasped. "John Blythe is to be your guardian? At whose direction? Upon whose application?"
"My father's, mother."
"But are you sure that you are not being tricked—that——"
"John Blythe is not the man to trick anybody, dear—everybody, of course, knows that," said Louise, very prompt to a defense in that quarter. "Moreover, I saw the letters from my father. One of them is to me. So there is no mistake about it." ”

“ Everything works out right in time. I venture to touch upon that which pains you, not because we are to have a mere legal relationship, but because I am hoping that you view me as a friend. Do you?"
"You must know that I do," said Louise, more moved than he could guess. The touch of his hand had strangely thrilled her. "If it were not for you and Laura—" She paused, turning her head.
"I know," said Blythe. "It is not a matter for volunteered advice. But perhaps you have thought of some way in which I—we—can help you; make the course smoother for you. Have you?"
"No," replied Louise, simply. ”

“ Jesse, gnawing on an unlighted cigar as was his wont when temporarily eclipsed or engaged in blocking out a campaign, listened in silence. When it becomes the unfailing habit of a man to enjoy the last laugh he learns to pay little heed to the too-previous chirrupings of those over whom he feels confident of eventually triumphing. So he permitted Judd to enjoy himself. ”