Margaret Piper Chalmers

“ The grin did not lessen the ugliness of his face, rather accentuated it.
"It's not so bad," he drawled. "Nothing but death and what's that? I don't suffer much—not now. It's cancer, keeps gnawing away like a rat in the wall. By and by it will get up to my heart and then it's good-by Jim. I shan't care. What's life good for that a chap should cling to it like a barnacle on a rock?"
"We do though," said Alan Massey.
"Oh, yes, we do. It's the way we're made. We are always clinging to something, good or bad. Life, love, home, drink, power, money! ”

“ The car sped away, leaving Phil standing bareheaded in the sunshine, staring after it. The mocking silver lilt of Carlotta Cressy's laughter drifted back to him. He shrugged, jammed on his hat and strode off in the direction of the trolley car.
Dick Carson might just as well have spared himself the pain of jealousy. Phil had already forgotten Tony, was remembering only Carlotta, who would never deliberately do a mite of harm to the moon, would merely want to play with it at her fancy and leave it at her whim for somebody else to replace, if anybody cared to take the pains. ”

“ It made Tony sick to think of what they would have seen if Dick had lost his self control as Alan had. She thought she had never liked Dick as she did that moment, never despised Alan Massey so utterly. Dick was a man. Alan was a spoiled child, a weakling, the slave of his passions. It was no thanks to him that her name was not already bandied about on people's lips, the name of a girl, about whom men came to fist blows like a Bowery movie scene. She was humiliated all over, enraged with Alan, enraged with herself for stooping to care for a man like that. ”

“ Will you marry me, Tony Holiday? You shall be loved as no woman was ever loved. You shall be my queen. I will be true to you forever and ever, your slave, your mate. Tony, Tony, say yes. You must!"
But Tony drew back from him, frightened, repulsed, shocked, by the storm of his passion which shook him as mighty trees are shaken by tempests. She shrank from the hungry fires in his eyes, from the abandon and fierceness of his wooing. It was an alien, disturbing, dreadful thing to her.
"Don't," she implored. "You mustn't love me like that, Alan. You must not."
"How can I help it, sweetheart? ”

“ For Carlotta in her own happiness life and love were synonymous terms. Something of what was in her mind she said to her friend.
"I don't know," confessed Tony. "It is too soon to tell. Just now Alan fills every nook and cranny of me. I can't think of any other man or imagine myself loving anybody else as I loved him. But I am a very much alive person. I don't believe I shall give myself to death forever. Alan himself wouldn't want it so. A part of me will always be his but there are other margins of me that Alan never touched and these maybe I shall give to some one else when the time comes." ”

“ He loved her jealously, was sick at the thought that some other man might be near her when he might not, might dance with her, covet her, kiss her. He hated all men because of her and particularly he hated with black hate the man whom he was wronging daily by his silence, his cousin, John Massey.
Beneath all this strange, sad welter of emotion deeper still in Alan Massey's heart lay the tragic conviction that he would never win Tony, that his own sins would somehow rise to strike at him like a snake out of the grass. ”

“ A little later came Carlotta and Dick, the latter well and strong again but thin and pale and rather sober. Tony loved him for grieving for Alan as she knew he did. He too had known and loved the dead man and understood him perhaps better than she had herself. For after all no man and woman can ever fully understand each other especially if they are in love. So many faint nuances of doubt and fear and pride and passion and jealousy are forever drifting between lovers obscuring clarity of vision. ”

“ The excitement of the music, the general air of exhilaration about the place and their own high-pitched mood made the occasion different from the other gaieties of the week, merrier, madder, a little more reckless.
Once, seeing a painted, over-dressed or rather under-dressed, girl in the arms of a pasty-faced, protruding-eyed roué, both obviously under the spell of too much liquid inspiration, Ted suffered a momentary revulsion and qualm of conscience. He shouldn't have brought Madeline here. It wasn't the sort of place to bring a girl, no matter how good the music was. ”

“ But I believe he was not sorry to let the dagger get him. He had given up everything else. It wasn't so hard for him to give up the one thing more—the thing he didn't want anyway—life. Life wasn't much to him after he gave you up, Tony. His love was the biggest thing about him. I love you myself but I am not ashamed to say that his love was a bigger thing than mine every way, finer, more magnificent, the love of a genius whereas mine is just the love of an every day man. It was love that saved him."
"Dick, do you believe that the real Alan is dust—nothing but dust down in a grave?" ”

“ Again Tony turned a cold shoulder upon her amazing dinner companion but she did not do it so easily or so calmly this time. She was not unused to the strange ways of men. Not for nothing had she spent so much of her life at army posts where love-making is as familiar as brass buttons. Sudden gusts of passion were no novelty to her, nor was it a new thing to hear that a man thought he loved her. But Alan Massey was different. She disliked him intensely, she resented the arrogance of his assumptions with all her might, but he interested her amazingly. ”

“ Ted kissed her, tears in his eyes.
"Be—a man, dear," the lips breathed softly. "Be—" and Granny was off again to a world of unconsciousness from which she had returned a moment to give her message to the grief stricken lad by her side.
To Ted in his overwrought condition the words were almost like a voice from heaven, a sacred command. To be a man meant to face the hardest thing he had ever had to face in his life. It meant marrying Madeline Taylor, not leaving her like a coward to pay by herself for something which he himself had helped to start. ”

“ Rash, loving, generous-hearted Tony. Where was she going? Ah well, she was no longer a child to be protected from the storm and stress of life. She was a woman grown, woman enough to love and to be loved greatly, to sacrifice and suffer if need be for love's mighty sake. She must go her way as Ted had gone his, as their father had gone his before them. He could only pray that she was right in her faith that for love of her Alan Massey had been born anew.
His own deep affection for Ned's children seemed at the moment a sadly powerless thing. ”

“ No matter how badly we feel for him I think it is up to us not to try to dilute his penitence and to leave a generous share of the blame where he puts it himself—on his own shoulders."
"I suppose you are right, Uncle Phil," sighed Larry. "You usually are. But it's like having a piece taken right out of me to have him go off like that. And the Canadians are the very devil of fighters. Always in the thick of things."
"That is where Ted would want to be, Larry. Let us not cross that bridge until we have to. As he says himself there are worse things than death anyway." ”

“ On the threshold Ruth turned, flung back her hair and looked back at him. There was a kind of fearless exaltation and pride on her lovely young face and in her shining eyes.
"I don't know whether you are right or wrong, Larry, or rather when you are right and when you are wrong. It is all mixed up. It seems as if it must be right to care or we wouldn't be doing it so hard, as if God couldn't let us love like this if he didn't mean we should be happy together, belong to each other. Why should He make love if He didn't want lovers to be happy?" ”

“ What if Carlotta would not marry Philip after all? What if it was too late already? What if his grandson turned out to be a second Herbert Lathrop, an unobjectionable, possibly even an objectionable ass. Perspiration beaded on the millionaire's brow. Why was that young idiot on the Hill waiting? What were young men made of nowadays? Didn't Philip Lambert know that you could lose a woman forever if you didn't jump lively? Hanged if he wouldn't call the boy this minute and tell him he just had to change his mind and go to Crest House that very morning without a moment's delay. ”

“ By the time they brought in the first gentians Rose had drifted off after her little son. Carlotta and her father were alone.
By this time Harrison Cressy had begun to show the authentic Midas touch. Only the little Carlotta stood between him and sheer, sordid money grubbing. And even she was an excuse for the getting of always more and more wealth. He told himself Carlotta should be a veritable princess, should go always clad in the finest, have of the best, be surrounded always by the most beautiful. She should know only joy and light and laughter. ”

“ The fineness and the folly of the thing were so inextricably confused that there was little use trying to separate the two even if he had cared to judge the lad which he did not, being content with the boy's own judgment of himself. Bad as the gambling business was and deeply as he regretted the expulsion from college the doctor could not help seeing that there was some extenuation for Ted's conduct, that he had in the main kept faith with himself, paid generously, far more than he owed, and traveling through the fiery furnace had somehow managed to come out unscathed, his soul intact. ”

“ But she lingered a moment beside her friend. "You and I, Tony darling, don't seem to have very much luck in love," she murmured. "I hope you will be happy with Alan, if you do marry him. But happiness isn't exactly necessary. There are other things—" She broke off and began again. "There are other things in a man's life besides love. Somebody said that to me once and I believe it is true. But there isn't so much besides that matters much to a woman. I wish there were. I hate love." And pressing a rare kiss on her friend's cheek Carlotta vanished for the night. ”

“ Let's dance."
They danced. In her lover's arms, their feet keeping time to the syncopated, stirring rhythms of the violins, their hearts beating to a mightier harmony of nature's own brewing, Tony Holiday was far from being a piece of statuary. She was all woman, a woman very much alive and very much in love.
Alan bent over her.
"Tony, belovedest. There are more things than art in the world," he said softly. "Don't you know it, feel it? There is life. And life is bigger than your work or mine. We're both artists, but we'll be bigger artists together. ”

“ A dozen times, while she was dressing for the dance later, Ruth felt like crying out to Tony in the next room that she could not go, that she dared not face strangers, that it was too hard. But she set her lips firmly and did nothing of the sort. Larry wanted her to do it. She wouldn't disappoint him if it killed her.
Oh dear! Why did she always have to do everything as a case, never just as a girl. She couldn't even be natural as a girl. She had to be maybe married. She hated the ring which seemed to her a symbol of bondage to a past that was dead and yet still clutched her with cold hands. ”

“ Tony adored roses but she almost hated these because it seemed to her Alan was bribing her forgiveness by playing upon her worship of their beauty and fragrance.
Still kneeling by the flowers she glanced at the clock. Ten-thirty! Dick was already miles away on his hateful journey, had gone sad and hopeless because she loved Alan Massey. Why did it have to be so? Why was love so perverse and unreasonable a thing? Alan was not worthy to touch Dick's hand, though in his arrogance he affected to despise the other. But it was Alan she loved, not Dick. ”

“ It was rather a sacred little gown to Tony, sacred to Alan and her own surrender to love. He called it her starlight dress and loved it especially because it brought out the springlike, virginal quality of her youth and loveliness as her other more sophisticated gowns did not. Tony wore it for Alan to-night, wanted him to think her lovely, to love her immensely. She wanted to taste all life's joy at once, have a perfect deluge of happiness. Youth must be served. ”

“ Tony was wearing an exquisite white chiffon and silver creation, with silver slippers and a silver fillet binding her dark hair. Alan had sent her some wonderful orchids tied with silver ribbon, and these she wore; but no jewelry whatever, not even a ring. There was something particularly radiant about her young loveliness that night. The young men hovered about her like honey bees about a rose and at every dance they cut in and cut in until her white and silver seemed to be drifting from one pair of arms to another. ”

“ For all the bulletin proclaimed Antoinette Holiday might have been for hours wrapt in innocent slumber instead of speeding away the wee' sma' hours in a public restaurant in the arms of a lover at whom Madame Grundy and her allies looked awry. Somebody had tampered with the thing to save Tony a reprimand or worse. But who? Jean? No, certainly not Jean. Jean's conscience was as inelastic as a yard stick. Whoever had committed the charitable act of mendacity it couldn't have been Jean. ”

“ Phil bent and kissed her again—not passionately this time, but with a kind of reverent solemnity as if he were performing a rite.
"Never mind, sweetheart. I don't blame you any more than you blame me. We've got to take life as we find it, not try to make it over into something different to please ourselves. If some day you meet the man who can make you happy in your way, I'll not grudge him the right. I'm not sure I shall even envy him. I've had my moment."
"But Phil, you aren't going to be awfully unhappy about me?" sighed Carlotta. ”

“ It isn't like caring for Larry and Ted. It's different. For after all he isn't my brother—never was—never will be. I'm a wretched flirt, Alan. You know it as well as I do. I've let Dick keep on loving me, knowing all the time I didn't mean to marry him. And I'm not a bit sure I am going to marry you either."
"Tony!"
"Well, anyway not for a long, long time. I want to go on the stage. I can't put all of myself into my work and give it to you at the same time. I don't want to get married. I don't dare to. I don't dare even let myself care too much. I want to be free."
"You want to be loved." ”