The Flirt E-Book

Booth Tarkington

• Herausgeber: anamsaleem
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Booth Tarkington has an amazingly deft touch with characterization, and the tense relationship between town flirt Cora Madison and her quieter sister Laura is so compelling that the story has been the basis for a number of filmed versions. As with Tarkington's later novel The Magnificent Ambersons, The Flirt is a thoroughly entertaining portrait of a dysfunctional but ultimately loving family.

Leseprobe

The Flirt

Booth Tarkington

.

CHAPTER ONE

Valentine Corliss walked up Corliss Street the hottest afternoon of that hot August, a year ago, wearing a suit of white serge which attracted a little attention from those observers who were able to observe anything except the heat. The coat was shaped delicately; it outlined the wearer, and, fitting him as women's clothes fit women, suggested an effeminacy not an attribute of the tall Corliss. The effeminacy belonged all to the tailor, an artist plying far from Corliss Street, for the coat would have encountered a hundred of its fellows at Trouville or Ostende this very day. Corliss Street is the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, the Park Lane, the Fifth Avenue, of Capitol City, that smoky illuminant of our great central levels, but although it esteems itself an established cosmopolitan thoroughfare, it is still provincial enough to be watchful; and even in its torrid languor took some note of the alien garment.

Mr. Corliss, treading for the first time in seventeen years the pavements of this namesake of his grandfather, mildly repaid its interest in himself. The street, once the most peaceful in the world, he thought, had changed. It was still long and straight, still shaded by trees so noble that they were be- trothed, here and there, high over the wide white roadway, the shimmering tunnels thus contrived shot with gold and blue; but its pristine complete restfulness was departed: gasoline had arrived, and a pedestrian, even this August day of heat, must glance two ways before crossing.

Architectural transformations, as vital, staggered the returned native. In his boyhood that posthumously libelled sovereign lady, Anne, had terribly prevailed among the dwellings on this highway; now, however, there was little left of the jig-saw's hare-brained ministrations; but the growing pains of the adolescent city had wrought some madness here. There had been a revolution which was a riot; and, plainly incited by a new outbreak of the colonies, the Goth, the Tudor, and the Tuscan had harried the upper reaches to a turmoil attaining its climax in a howl or two from the Spanish Moor.

Yet it was a pleasant street in spite of its improvements; in spite, too, of a long, gray smoke-plume crossing the summer sky and dropping an occasional atomy of coal upon Mr. Corliss's white coat. The green continuous masses of tree-foliage, lawn, and shrubbery were splendidly asserted; there was a faint wholesome odour from the fine block pavement of the roadway, white, save where the snailish water-wagon laid its long strips of steaming brown. Locusts, serenaders of the heat, invisible among the branches, rasped their interminable cadences, competing bitterly with the monotonous chattering of lawn-mowers propelled by glistening black men over the level swards beneath. And though porch and terrace were left to vacant wicker chairs and swinging-seats, and to flowers and plants in jars and green boxes, and the people sat unseen--and, it might be guessed, unclad for exhibition, in the dimmer recesses of their houses--nevertheless, a summery girl under an alluring parasol now and then prettily trod the sidewalks, and did not altogether suppress an ample consciousness of the white pedestrian's stal- wart grace; nor was his quick glance too distressingly modest to be aware of these faint but attractive perturbations.

A few of the oldest houses remained as he remembered them, and there were two or three relics of mansard and cupola days; but the herd of cast-iron deer that once guarded these lawns, standing sentinel to all true gentry: Whither were they fled? In his boyhood, one specimen betokened a family of position and affluence; two, one on each side of the front walk, spoke of a noble opulence; two and a fountain were overwhelming. He wondered in what obscure thickets that once proud herd now grazed; and then he smiled, as through a leafy opening of shrubbery he caught a glimpse of a last survivor, still loyally alert, the haughty head thrown back in everlasting challenge and one foreleg lifted, standing in a vast and shadowy backyard with a clothesline fastened to its antlers.

Mr. Corliss remembered that backyard very well: it was an old battlefield whereon he had conquered; and he wondered if "the Lindley boys" still lived there, and if Richard Lindley would hate him now as implacably as then.

A hundred yards farther on, he paused before a house more familiar to him than any other, and gave it a moment's whimsical attention, without emotion.

It was a shabby old brick structure, and it stood among the gayest, the most flamboyant dwellings of all Corliss Street like a bewildered tramp surrounded by carnival maskers. It held place full in the course of the fury for demolition and rebuilding, but remained unaltered--even unrepaired, one might have thought--since the early seventies, when it was built. There was a sagging cornice, and the nauseous brown which the walls had years ago been painted was sooted to a repellent dinge, so cracked and peeled that the haggard red bricks were exposed, like a beggar through the holes in his coat. It was one of those houses which are large without being commodious; its very tall, very narrow windows, with their attenuated, rusty inside shutters, boasting to the passerby of high ceilings but betraying the miserly floor spaces. At each side of the front door was a high and cramped bay-window, one of them insanely culminating in a little six-sided tower of slate, and both of them girdled above the basement windows by a narrow porch, which ran across the front of the house and gave access to the shallow vestibule. However, a pleasant circumstance modified the gloom of this edifice and assured it a remnant of reserve and dignity in its ill-considered old age: it stood back a fine hundred feet from the highway, and was shielded in part by a friendly group of maple trees and one glorious elm, hoary, robust, and majestic, a veteran of the days when this was forest ground.

Mr. Corliss concluded his momentary pause by walking up the broken cement path, which was hard beset by plantain-weed and the long grass of the ill-kept lawn. Ascending the steps, he was assailed by an odour as of vehement bananas, a diffusion from some painful little chairs standing in the long, high, dim, rather sorrowful hall disclosed beyond the open double doors. They were stiff little chairs of an inconsequent, mongrel pattern; armless, with perforated wooden seats; legs tortured by the lathe to a semblance of buttons strung on a rod; and they had that day received a streaky coat of a gilding preparation which exhaled the olfactory vehemence mentioned. Their present station was temporary, their purpose, as obviously, to dry; and they were doing some incidental gilding on their own account, leaving blots and splashes and sporadic little round footprints on the hardwood floor.

The old-fashioned brass bell-handle upon the caller's right drooped from its socket in a dead fag, but after comprehensive manipulation on the part of the young man, and equal complaint on its own, it was constrained to permit a dim tinkle remotely. Somewhere in the interior a woman's voice, not young, sang a repeated fragment of "Lead, Kindly Light," to the accompaniment of a flapping dust-cloth, sounds which ceased upon a second successful encounter with the bell. Ensued a silence, probably to be interpreted as a period of whispered consultation out of range; a younger voice called softly and urgently, "Laura!" and a dark-eyed, dark-haired girl of something over twenty made her appearance to Mr. Corliss.

At sight of her he instantly restored a thin gold card-case to the pocket whence he was in the act of removing it. She looked at him with only grave, impersonal inquiry; no appreciative invoice of him was to be detected in her quiet eyes, which may have surprised him, possibly the more because he was aware there was plenty of appreciation in his own kindling glance. She was very white and black, this lady. Tall, trim, clear, she looked cool in spite of the black winter skirt she wore, an effect helped somewhat, perhaps, by the crisp freshness of her white waist, with its masculine collar and slim black tie, and undoubtedly by the even and lustreless light ivory of her skin, against which the strong black eyebrows and undulated black hair were lined with attractive precision; but, most of all, that coolness was the emanation of her undisturbed and tranquil eyes. They were not phlegmatic: a continuing spark glowed far within them, not ardently, but steadily and inscrutably, like the fixed stars in winter.

Mr. Valentine Corliss, of Paris and Naples, removed his white-ribboned straw hat and bowed as no one had ever bowed in that doorway. This most vivid salutation--accomplished by adding something to a rather quick inclination of the body from the hips, with the back and neck held straight expressed deference without affecting or inviting cordiality. It was an elaborate little formality of a kind fancifully called "foreign," and evidently habitual to the performer.

It produced no outward effect upon the recipient. Such self-control is unusual.

"Is Mr. Madison at home? My name is Valentine Corliss."

"He is at home." She indicated an open doorway upon her right. "Will you wait in there?"

"Thank you," said Mr. Corliss, passing within. "I shall be----" He left the sentence unfinished, for he was already alone, and at liberty to reflect upon the extraordinary coolness of this cool young woman.

The room, with its closed blinds, was soothingly dark after the riotous sun without, a grateful obscurity which was one of two attractions discovered in it by Mr. Corliss while he waited. It was a depressing little chamber, disproportionately high, uncheered by seven chairs (each of a different family, but all belonging to the same knobby species, and all upholstered a repellent blue), a scratched "inlaid table," likewise knobby, and a dangerous looking small sofa--turbulent furniture, warmly harmonious, however, in a common challenge to the visitor to take comfort in any of it. A once-gilt gas chandelier hung from the distant ceiling, with three globes of frosted glass, but undeniable evidence that five were intended; and two of the three had been severely bitten. There was a hostile little coal-grate, making a mouth under a mantel of imitation black marble, behind an old blue-satin fire-screen upon which red cat-tails and an owl over a pond had been roughly embroidered in high relief, this owl motive being the inspiration of innumerable other owls reflected in innumerable other ponds in the formerly silver moonlight with which the walls were papered. Corliss thought he remembered that in his boyhood, when it was known as "the parlour" (though he guessed that the Madison family called it "the reception room," now) this was the place where his aunt received callers who, she justifiably hoped, would not linger. Altogether, it struck him that it might be a good test-room for an alienist: no incipient lunacy would remain incipient here.

There was one incongruity which surprised him--a wicker waste-paper basket, so nonsensically out of place in this arid cell, where not the wildest hare-brain could picture any one coming to read or write, that he bestowed upon it a particular, frowning attention, and so discovered the second attractive possession of the room. A fresh and lovely pink rose, just opening full from the bud, lay in the bottom of the basket.

There was a rustling somewhere in the house and a murmur, above which a boy's voice became audible in emphatic but undistinguishable complaint. A whispering followed, and a woman exclaimed protestingly, "Cora!" And then a startlingly pretty girl came carelessly into the room through the open door.

She was humming "Quand I' Amour Meurt" in a gay preoccupation, and evidently sought something upon the table in the centre of the room, for she continued her progress toward it several steps before realizing the presence of a visitor. She was a year or so younger than the girl who had admitted him, fairer and obviously more plastic, more expressive, more perishable, a great deal more insistently feminine; though it was to be seen that they were sisters. This one had eyes almost as dark as the other's, but these were not cool; they were sweet, unrestful, and seeking; brilliant with a vivacious hunger: and not Diana but huntresses more ardent have such eyes. Her hair was much lighter than her sister's; it was the colour of dry corn-silk in the sun; and she was the shorter by a head, rounder everywhere and not so slender; but no dumpling: she was exquisitely made. There was a softness about her: something of velvet, nothing of mush. She diffused with her entrance a radiance of gayety and of gentleness; sunlight ran with her. She seemed the incarnation of a caressing smile.

She was point-device. Her close, white skirt hung from a plainly embroidered white waist to a silken instep; and from the crown of her charming head to the tall heels of her graceful white suede slippers, heels of a sweeter curve than the waist of a violin, she was as modern and lovely as this dingy old house was belated and hideous.

Mr. Valentine Corliss spared the fraction of a second for another glance at the rose in the waste-basket.

The girl saw him before she reached the table, gave a little gasp of surprise, and halted with one hand carried prettily to her breast.

"Oh!" she said impulsively; "I BEG your pardon. I didn't know there was---- I was looking for a book I thought I----"

She stopped, whelmed with a breath-taking shyness, her eyes, after one quick but condensed encounter with those of Mr. Corliss, falling beneath exquisite lashes. Her voice was one to stir all men: it needs not many words for a supremely beautiful "speaking-voice" to be recognized for what it is; and this girl's was like herself, hauntingly lovely. The intelligent young man immediately realized that no one who heard it could ever forget it.

"I see," she faltered, turning to leave the room; "it isn't here--the book."

"There's something else of yours here," said Corliss.

"Is there?" She paused, hesitating at the door, looking at him over her shoulder uncertainly.

"You dropped this rose." He lifted the rose from the waste-basket and repeated the bow he had made at the front door. This time it was not altogether wasted.

"I?"

"Yes. You lost it. It belongs to you."

"Yes--it does. How curious!" she said slowly. "How curious it happened to be THERE!" She stepped to take it from him, her eyes upon his in charming astonishment. "And how odd that----" She stopped; then said quickly:

"How did you know it was MY rose?"

"Any one would know!"

Her expression of surprise was instantaneously merged in a flash of honest pleasure and admiration, such as only an artist may feel in the presence of a little masterpiece by a fellow-craftsman.

Happily, anticlimax was spared them by the arrival of the person for whom the visitor had asked at the door, and the young man retained the rose in his hand.

Mr. Madison, a shapeless hillock with a large, harassed, red face, evidently suffered from the heat: his gray hair was rumpled back from a damp forehead; the sleeves of his black alpaca coat were pulled up to the elbow above his uncuffed white shirtsleeves; and he carried in one mottled hand the ruins of a palm-leaf fan, in the other a balled wet handkerchief which released an aroma of camphor upon the banana-burdened air. He bore evidences of inadequate adjustment after a disturbed siesta, but, exercising a mechanical cordiality, preceded himself into the room by a genial half-cough and a hearty, "Well-well-well," as if wishing to indicate a spirit of polite, even excited, hospitality.

"I expected you might be turning up, after your letter," he said, shaking hands. "Well, well, well! I remember you as a boy. Wouldn't have known you, of course; but I expect you'll find the town about as much changed as you are."

With a father's blindness to all that is really vital, he concluded his greeting inconsequently: "Oh, this is my little girl Cora."

"Run along, little girl," said the fat father.

His little girl's radiant glance at the alert visitor imparted her thorough comprehension of all the old man's absurdities, which had reached their climax in her dismissal. Her parting look, falling from Corliss's face to the waste-basket at his feet, just touched the rose in his hand as she passed through the door.

CHAPTER TWO

Cora paused in the hall at a point about twenty feet from the door, a girlish stratagem frequently of surprising advantage to the practitioner; but the two men had begun to speak of the weather. Suffering a momentary disappointment, she went on, stepping silently, and passed through a door at the end of the hall into a large and barren looking dining-room, stiffly and skimpily furnished, but well-lighted, owing to the fact that one end of it had been transformed into a narrow "conservatory," a glass alcove now tenanted by two dried palms and a number of vacant jars and earthen crocks.

Here her sister sat by an open window, repairing masculine underwear; and a handsome, shabby, dirty boy of about thirteen sprawled on the floor of the "conservatory" unloosing upon its innocent, cracked, old black and white tiles a ghastly family of snakes, owls, and visaged crescent moons, in orange, green, and other loathsome chalks. As Cora entered from the hall, a woman of fifty came in at a door opposite, and, a dust-cloth retained under her left arm, an unsheathed weapon ready for emergency, leaned sociably against the door-casing and continued to polish a tablespoon with a bit of powdered chamois-skin. She was tall and slightly bent; and, like the flat, old, silver spoon in her hand, seemed to have been worn thin by use; yet it was plain that the three young people in the room "got their looks" from her. Her eyes, if tired, were tolerant and fond; and her voice held its youth and something of the music of Cora's.

"What is he like?" She addressed the daughter by the window.

"Why don't you ask Coralie?" suggested the sprawling artist, relaxing his hideous labour. He pronounced his sister's name with intense bitterness. He called it "Cora-LEE," with an implication far from subtle that his sister had at some time thus Gallicized herself, presumably for masculine favour; and he was pleased to receive tribute to his satire in a flash of dislike from her lovely eyes.

"I ask Laura because it was Laura who went to the door, "Mrs. Madison answered. "I do not ask Cora because Cora hasn't seen him. Do I satisfy you, Hedrick?"

"`Cora hasn't seen him!'" the boy hooted mockingly. "She hasn't? She was peeking out of the library shutters when he came up the front walk, and she wouldn't let me go to the door; she told Laura to go, but first she took the library waste-basket and laid one o' them roses----"

"THOSE roses," said Cora sharply. "He WILL hang around the neighbours' stables. I think you ought to do something about it, mother."

"THEM roses!" repeated Hedrick fiercely. "One o' them roses Dick Lindley sent her this morning. Laid it in the waste-basket and sneaked it into the reception room for an excuse to go galloping in and----"

"`Galloping'?" said Mrs. Madison gravely.

"It was a pretty bum excuse," continued the unaffected youth, "but you bet your life you'll never beat our Cora-LEE when there's a person in pants on the premises! It's sickening." He rose, and performed something like a toe-dance, a supposed imitation of his sister's mincing approach to the visitor. "Oh, dear, I am such a little sweety! Here I am all alone just reeking with Browning-and-Tennyson and thinking to myself about such lovely things, and walking around looking for my nice, pretty rose. Where can it be? Oh heavens, Mister, are YOU here? Oh my, I never, never thought that there was a MAN here! How you frighten me! See what a shy little thing I am? You DO SEE, DON'T you, old sweeticums? Ta, ta, here's papa. Remember me by that rose, 'cause it's just like me. Me and it's twins, you see, cutie-sugar!" The diabolical boy then concluded with a reversion to the severity of his own manner: "If she was MY daughter I'd whip her!"

His indignation was left in the air, for the three ladies had instinctively united against him, treacherously including his private feud in the sex-war of the ages: Cora jumped lightly upon the table and sat whistling and polishing the nails of one hand upon the palm of another; Laura continued to sew without looking up, and Mrs. Madison, conquering a tendency to laugh, preserved a serene countenance and said ruminatively:

"They were all rather queer, the Corlisses."

Hedrick stared incredulously, baffled; but men must expect these things, and this was no doubt a helpful item in his education.

"I wonder if he wants to sell the house, said Mrs. Madison.

"I wish he would. Anything that would make father get out of it!" Cora exclaimed. "I hope Mr. Corliss will burn it if he doesn't sell it."

"He might want to live here himself."

"He!" Cora emitted a derisive outcry.

Her mother gave her a quick, odd look, in which there was a real alarm. "What is he like, Cora?"

"Awfully foreign and distinguished!"

This brought Hedrick to confront her with a leap as of some wild animal under a lash. He landed close to her; his face awful.

"Princely, I should call him," said Cora, her enthusiasm undaunted. "Distinctly princely!"

"Princely," moaned Hedrick. "Pe-rin-sley!"

"Hedrick!" Mrs. Madison reproved him automatically. "In what way is he `foreign,' Cora?"

"Oh, every way." Cora let her glance rest dreamily upon the goaded boy. "He has a splendid head set upon a magnificent torso----"

"TORSO!" Hedrick whispered hoarsely.

"Tall, a glorious figure--like a young guardsman's." Madness was gathering in her brother's eyes; and observing it with quiet pleasure, she added: "One sees immediately he has the grand manner, the bel air."

Hedrick exploded. "`BEL AIR'!" he screamed, and began to jump up and down, tossing his arms frantically, and gasping with emotion. "Oh, bel air! Oh, blah! `Henry Esmond!' Been readin' `Henry Esmond!' Oh, you be-yoo-tiful Cora-Beatrix-a-LEE! Magganifisent torso! GullO-rious figgi-your! Bel air! Oh, slush! Oh, luv-a-ly slush!" He cast himself convulsively upon the floor, full length. "Luv-a-ly, LUV-a-ly slush!"

"He is thirty, I should say," continued Cora, thoughtfully. "Yes--about thirty. A strong, keen face, rather tanned. He's between fair and dark----"

Hedrick raised himself to the attitude of the "Dying Gaul." "And with `hair slightly silvered at the temples!' AIN'T his hair slightly silvered at the temples?" he cried imploringly. "Oh, sister, in pity's name let his hair be slightly silvered at the temples? Only three grains of corn, your Grace; my children are starving!"

He collapsed again, laid his face upon his extended arms, and writhed.

"He has rather wonderful eyes," said Cora. "They seem to look right through you."

"Slush, slush, luv-a-ly slush," came in muffled tones from the floor.

"And he wears his clothes so well--so differently! You feel at once that he's not a person, but a personage."

Hedrick sat up, his eyes closed, his features contorted as with agony, and chanted, impromptu:

"Slush, slush, luv-a-ly, slush!

Le'ss all go a-swimmin' in a dollar's worth o' mush.

Slush in the morning, slush at night,

If I don't get my slush I'm bound to get tight!"

"Hedrick!" said his mother.

"Altogether I should say that Mr. Valentine Corliss looks as if he lived up to his name," Cora went on tranquilly. "Valentine Corliss of Corliss Street--I think I rather like the sound of that name." She let her beautiful voice linger upon it, caressingly. "Valentine Corliss."

Hedrick opened his eyes, allowed his countenance to resume its ordinary proportions, and spoke another name slowly and with honeyed thoughtfulness:

"Ray Vilas."

This was the shot that told. Cora sprang down from the table with an exclamation.

Hedrick, subduing elation, added gently, in a mournful whisper:

"POOR old Dick Lindley!"

His efforts to sting his sister were completely successful at last: Cora was visibly agitated, and appealed hotly to her mother. "Am I to bear this kind of thing all my life? Aren't you EVER going to punish his insolence?"

"Hedrick, Hedrick!" said Mrs. Madison sadly.

Cora turned to the girl by the window with a pathetic gesture. "Laura----" she said, and hesitated.

Laura Madison looked up into her sister's troubled eyes.

"I feel so morbid," said Cora, flushing a little and glancing away. "I wish----" She stopped.

The silent Laura set aside her work, rose and went out of the room. Her cheeks, too, had reddened faintly, a circumstance sharply noted by the terrible boy. He sat where he was, asprawl, propped by his arms behind him, watching with acute concentration the injured departure of Cora, following her sister. At the door, Cora, without pausing, threw him a look over her shoulder: a full-eyed shot of frankest hatred.

A few moments later, magnificent chords sounded through the house. The piano was old, but tuned to the middle of the note, and the keys were swept by a master hand. The wires were not hammered; they were touched knowingly as by the player's own fingers, and so they sang--and from out among the chords there stole an errant melody. This was not "piano-playing" and not a pianist's triumphant nimbleness--it was music. Art is the language of a heart that knows how to speak, and a heart that knew how was speaking here. What it told was something immeasurably wistful, something that might have welled up in the breast of a young girl standing at twilight in an April orchard. It was the inexpressible made into sound, an improvisation by a master player.

"You hear what she's up to?" said Hedrick, turning his head at last. But his mother had departed.

He again extended himself flat upon the floor, face downward, this time as a necessary preliminary to rising after a manner of his own invention. Mysteriously he became higher in the middle, his body slowly forming first a round and then a pointed arch, with forehead, knees, and elbows touching the floor. A brilliantly executed manoeuvre closed his Gothic period, set him upright and upon his feet; then, without ostentation, he pro- ceeded to the kitchen, where he found his mother polishing a sugar-bowl.

He challenged her with a damnatory gesture in the direction of the music. "You hear what Cora's up to? "

Mrs. Madison's expression was disturbed; she gave her son a look almost of appeal, and said, gently:

"I believe there's nothing precisely criminal in her getting Laura to play for her. Laura's playing always soothes her when she feels out of sorts--and--you weren't very considerate of her, Hedrick. You upset her."

"Mentioning Ray Vilas, you mean?" he demanded.

"You weren't kind."

"She deserves it. Look at her! YOU know why she's got Laura at the piano now."

"It's--it's because you worried her," his mother faltered evasively. "Besides, it is very hot, and Cora isn't as strong as she looks. She said she felt morbid and----"

"Morbid? Blah!" interrupted the direct boy. "She's started after this Corliss man just like she did for Vilas. If I was Dick Lindley I wouldn't stand for Cora's----"

"Hedrick!" His mother checked his outburst pleadingly. "Cora has so much harder time than the other girls; they're all so much better off. They seem to get everything they want, just by asking: nice clothes and jewellery--and automobiles. That seems to make a great difference nowadays; they all seem to have automobiles. We're so dreadfully poor, and Cora has to struggle so for what good times she----"

"Her?" the boy jibed bitterly. "I don't see her doing any particular struggling." He waved his hand in a wide gesture. "She takes it ALL!"

"There, there!" the mother said, and, as if feeling the need of placating this harsh judge, continued gently: "Cora isn't strong, Hedrick, and she does have a hard time. Almost every one of the other girls in her set is at the seashore or somewhere having a gay summer. You don't realize, but it's mortifying to have to be the only one to stay at home, with everybody knowing it's because your father can't afford to send her. And this house is so hopeless," Mrs. Madison went on, extending her plea hopefully; "it's impossible to make it attractive, but Cora keeps trying and trying: she was all morning on her knees gilding those chairs for the music-room, poor child, and----"

"`Music-room'!" sneered the boy. "Gilt chairs! All show-off! That's all she ever thinks about. It's all there is to Cora, just show-off, so she'll get a string o' fellows chasin' after her. She's started for this Corliss just exactly the way she did for Ray Vilas!"

"Hedrick!"

"Just look at her!" he cried vehemently. "Don't you know she's tryin' to make this Corliss think it's HER playin' the piano right now?"

"Oh, no----"

"Didn't she do that with Ray Vilas?" he demanded quickly. "Wasn't that exactly what she did the first time he ever came here--got Laura to play and made him think it was HER? Didn't she?"

"Oh--just in fun." Mrs. Madison's tone lacked conviction; she turned, a little confusedly, from the glaring boy and fumbled among the silver on the kitchen table. "Besides--she told him afterward that it was Laura."

"He walked in on her one day when she was battin' away at the piano herself with her back to the door. Then she pretended it had been a joke, and he was so far gone by that time he didn't care. He's crazy, anyway," added the youth, casually. "Who is this Corliss?"

"He owns this house. His family were early settlers and used to be very prominent, but they're all dead except this one. His mother was a widow; she went abroad to live and took him with her when he was about your age, and I don't think he's ever been back since."

"Did he use to live in this house?"

"No; an aunt of his did. She left it to him when she died, two years ago. Your father was agent for her."

"You think this Corliss wants to sell it?"

"It's been for sale all the time he's owned it. That's why we moved here; it made the rent low."

"Is he rich?"

"They used to have money, but maybe it's all spent. It seemed to me he might want to raise money on the house, because I don't see any other reason that could bring him back here. He's already mortgaged it pretty heavily, your father told me. I don't----" Mrs. Madison paused abruptly, her eyes widening at a dismaying thought. "Oh, I do hope your father will know better than to ask him to stay to dinner!"

Hedrick's expression became cryptic. "Father won't ask him," he said. "But I'll bet you a thousand dollars he stays!"

The mother followed her son's thought and did not seek to elicit verbal explanation of the certainty which justified so large a venture. "Oh, I hope not," she said. "Sarah's threatening to leave, anyway; and she gets so cross if there's extra cooking on wash-days."

"Well, Sarah'll have to get cross," said the boy grimly; "and _I_'ll have to plug out and go for a quart of brick ice-cream and carry it home in all this heat; and Laura and you'll have to stand over the stove with Sarah; and father'll have to change his shirt; and we'll all have to toil and moil and sweat and suffer while Cora-lee sits out on the front porch and talks toodle-do-dums to her new duke. And then she'll have YOU go out and kid him along while----"

"HEDRICK!"

"Yes, you will!--while she gets herself all dressed and powdered up again. After that, she'll do her share of the work: she'll strain her poor back carryin' Dick Lindley's flowers down the back stairs and stickin' 'em in a vase over a hole in the tablecloth that Laura hasn't had time to sew up. You wait and see!"

The gloomy realism of this prophecy was not without effect upon the seer's mother. "Oh, no!" she exclaimed, protestingly. "We really can't manage it. I'm sure Cora won't want to ask him----"

"You'll see!"

"No; I'm sure she wouldn't think of it, but if she does I'll tell her we can't. We really can't, to-day."

Her son looked pityingly upon her. "She ought to be MY daughter," he said, the sinister implication all too plain;--"just about five minutes!"

With that, he effectively closed the interview and left her.

He returned to his abandoned art labours in the "conservatory," and meditatively perpetrated monstrosities upon the tiles for the next half-hour, at the end of which he concealed his box of chalks, with an anxiety possibly not unwarranted, beneath the sideboard; and made his way toward the front door, first glancing, unseen, into the kitchen where his mother still pursued the silver. He walked through the hall on tiptoe, taking care to step upon the much stained and worn strip of "Turkish" carpet, and not upon the more resonant wooden floor. The music had ceased long since.

The open doorway was like a brilliantly painted picture hung upon the darkness of the hall, though its human centre of interest was no startling bit of work, consisting of Mr. Madison pottering aimlessly about the sun-flooded, unkempt lawn, fanning himself, and now and then stooping to pull up one of the thousands of plantain-weeds that beset the grass. With him the little spy had no concern; but from a part of the porch out of sight from the hall came Cora's exquisite voice and the light and pleasant baritone of the visitor. Hedrick flattened himself in a corner just inside the door.

"I should break any engagement whatsoever if I had one," Mr. Corliss was saying with what the eavesdropper considered an offensively "foreign" accent and an equally unjustifiable gallantry; "but of course I haven't: I am so utterly a stranger here. Your mother is immensely hospitable to wish you to ask me, and I'll be only too glad to stay. Perhaps after dinner you'll be very, very kind and play again? Of course you know how remarkable such----"

"Oh, just improvising," Cora tossed off, carelessly, with a deprecatory ripple of laughter. "It's purely with the mood, you see. I can't make myself do things. No; I fancy I shall not play again today."

There was a moment's silence.

"Shan't I fasten that in your buttonhole for you," said Cora.

"You see how patiently I've been awaiting the offer!"

There was another little silence; and the listener was able to construct a picture (possibly in part from an active memory) of Cora's delicate hands uplifted to the gentleman's lapel and Cora's eyes for a moment likewise uplifted.

"Yes, one has moods," she said, dreamily. "I am ALL moods. I think you are too, Mr. Corliss. You LOOK moody. Aren't you?"

A horrible grin might have been seen to disfigure the shadow in the corner just within the doorway.

CHAPTER THREE

It was cooler outdoors, after dinner, in the dusk of that evening; nevertheless three members of the Madison family denied themselves the breeze, and, as by a tacitly recognized and habitual house-rule, so disposed themselves as to afford the most agreeable isolation for the younger daughter and the guest, who occupied wicker chairs upon the porch. The mother and father sat beneath a hot, gas droplight in the small "library"; Mrs. Madison with an evening newspaper, her husband with "King Solomon's Mines"; and Laura, after crisply declining an urgent request from Hedrick to play, had disappeared upstairs. The inimical lad alone was inspired for the ungrateful role of duenna.

He sat upon the topmost of the porch steps with the air of being permanently implanted; leaning forward, elbows on knees, cheeks on palms, in a treacherous affectation of profound reverie; and his back (all of him that was plainly visible in the hall light) tauntingly close to a delicate foot which would, God wot! willingly have launched him into the darkness beyond. It was his dreadful pleasure to understand wholly the itching of that shapely silk and satin foot.

The gas-light from the hall laid a broad orange path to the steps--Cora and her companion sat just beyond it, his whiteness gray, and she a pale ethereality in the shadow. She wore an evening gown that revealed a vague lilac through white, and shimmered upon her like a vapour. She was very quiet; and there was a wan sweetness about her, an exhalation of wistfulness. Cora, in the evening, was more like a rose than ever. She was fragrant in the dusk. The spell she cast was an Undine's: it was not to be thought so exquisite a thing as she could last. And who may know how she managed to say what she did in the silence and darkness? For it was said--without words, without touch, even without a look--as plainly as if she had spoken or written the message: "If I am a rose, I am one to be worn and borne away. Are you the man?"

With the fall of night, the street they faced had become still, save for an infrequent squawk of irritation on the part of one of the passing automobiles, gadding for the most part silently, like fireflies. But after a time a strolling trio of negroes came singing along the sidewalk.

"In the evening, by the moonlight, you could hear

those banjos ringing;

In the evening, by the moonlight, you could hear

those darkies singing.

How the ole folks would injoy it; they would sit

all night an' lis-sun,

As we sang I-I-N the evening BY-Y-Y the moonlight.'

"Ah, THAT takes me back!" exclaimed Corliss. "That's as it used to be. I might be a boy again."

"And I suppose this old house has many memories for you?" said Cora, softly.

"Not very many. My, old-maid aunt didn't like me overmuch, I believe; and I wasn't here often. My mother and I lived far down the street. A big apartment-house stands there now, I noticed as I was walking out here this afternoon--the `Verema,' it is called, absurdly enough!"

"Ray Vilas lives there," volunteered Hedrick, not altering his position.

"Vilas?" said the visitor politely, with a casual recollection that the name had been once or twice emphasized by the youth at dinner. "I don't remember Vilas among the old names here."

"It wasn't, I guess," said Hedrick. "Ray Vilas has only been here about two years. He came from Kentucky."

"A great friend of yours, I suppose."

"He ain't a boy," said Hedrick, and returned to silence without further explanation.

"How cool and kind the stars are to-night," said Cora, very gently.

She leaned forward from her chair, extending a white arm along the iron railing of the porch; bending toward Corliss, and speaking toward him and away from Hedrick in as low a voice as possible, probably entertaining a reasonable hope of not being overheard.

"I love things that are cool and kind," she said. I love things that are cool and strong. I love iron." She moved her arm caressingly upon the railing. "I love its cool, smooth touch. Any strong life must have iron in it. I like iron in men."

She leaned a very little closer to him.

"Have you iron in you, Mr. Corliss?" she asked.

At these words the frayed edge of Hedrick's broad white collar was lifted perceptibly from his coat, as if by a shudder passing over the back and shoulders beneath.

"If I have not," answered Corliss in a low voice, I will have--now!"

"Tell me about yourself," she said.

"Dear lady," he began--and it was an effective beginning, for a sigh of pleasure parted her lips as he spoke--"there is nothing interesting to tell. I have spent a very commonplace life."

"I think not. You shouldn't call any life commonplace that has escaped THIS!" The lovely voice was all the richer for the pain that shook it now. "This monotony, this unending desert of ashes, this death in life!"

"This town, you mean?"

"This prison, I mean! Everything. Tell me what lies outside of it. You can."