XVI

But that winter there was more in the house than Deborah’s big family. Though at times Roger felt it surging in with its crude, immense vitality, there were other times when it was not so, and the lives of his other two daughters attracted his attention, for both were back again in town.

Laura and her husband had returned from abroad in October, and in a small but expensive apartment in a huge new building facing on Park Avenue they had gaily started the career of their own little family, or “ménage,” as Laura called it. This word had stuck in Roger’s mind, for he had a suspicion that a “ménage” was no place for babies. Grimly, when he went there first to be shown the new home by its mistress, he looked about him for a room which might be made a nursery. But no such room was in evidence. “We decided to have no guest room,” he heard Laura say to Deborah. And glancing at his daughter then, sleek and smiling and demure, in her tea-gown fresh from Paris, Roger darkly told himself that a child would be an unwelcome guest. The whole place was as compact and sparkling as a jewel box. The bed chamber was luxurious, with a gorgeous bath adjoining and a dressing-room for Harold.

“And look at this love of a closet!” said Laura to Deborah eagerly. “Isn’t it simply enormous?” As Deborah looked, her father did, too, and his eye was met by an array of shimmering apparel which made him draw back almost with a start.

They found Harold in the pantry. Their Jap, it appeared, was a marvellous cook and did the catering as well, so that Laura rarely troubled herself to order so much as a single meal. But her husband had for many years been famous for his cocktails, and although the Jap did everything else Hal had kept this in his own hands.

“I thought this much of the housekeeping ought to remain in the family,” he said.

Roger did not like this joke. But later, when he had imbibed the delicious concoction Harold had made, and had eaten the dinner created by that Japanese artist of theirs, his irritation subsided.

“They barely know we’re here,” he thought. “They’re both in love up to their ears.”

Despite their genial attempts to be hospitable and friendly, time and again he saw their glances meet in an intimate gleaming manner which made him rather uncomfortable. But where was the harm, he asked himself. They were married all right, weren’t they? Still somehow⁠—somehow⁠—no, by George, he didn’t like it, he didn’t approve! The whole affair was decidedly mixing. Roger went away vaguely uneasy, and he felt that Deborah was even more disturbed than himself.

“Those two,” she remarked to her father, “are so fearfully wrapt up in each other it makes me afraid. Oh, it’s all right, I suppose, and I wouldn’t for worlds try to interfere. But I can’t help feeling somehow that no two people with such an abundance of youth and money and happiness have the right to be so amazingly⁠—selfish!”

“They ought to have children,” Roger said.

“But look at Edith,” his daughter rejoined. “She hasn’t a single interest that I can find outside her home. It seems to have swallowed her, body and soul.” A frowning look of perplexity swept over Deborah’s mobile face, and with a whimsical sigh she exclaimed, “Oh, this queer business of families!”

In December there came a little crash. Late one evening Laura came bursting in upon them in a perfect tantrum, every nerve in her lithe body tense, her full lips visibly quivering, her voice unsteady, and her big black eyes aflame with rage. She was jealous of her husband and “that nasty little cat!” Roger learned no more about it, for Deborah motioned him out of the room. He heard their two voices talk on and on, until Laura’s slowly quieted down. Soon afterwards she left the house, and Deborah came in to him.

“She’s gone home, eh?” asked Roger.

“Yes, she has, poor silly child⁠—she said at first she had come here to stay.”

“By George,” he said. “As bad as that?”

“Of course it isn’t as bad as that!” Deborah cried impatiently. “She just built and built on silly suspicions and let herself get all worked up! I don’t see what they’re coming to!” For a few moments nothing was said. “It’s so unnatural!” she exclaimed. “Men and women weren’t made to live like that!” Roger scowled into his paper.

“Better leave ’em alone,” he admonished her. “You can’t help⁠—they’re not your kind. Don’t you mix into this affair.”

But Deborah did. She remembered that her sister had once shown quite a talent for amateur theatricals; and to give Laura something to do, Deborah persuaded her to take a dramatic club in her school. And Laura, rather to Roger’s surprise, became an enthusiast down there. She worked like a slave at rehearsals, and upon the costumes she spent money with a lavish hand. Moreover, instead of being annoyed, as Edith was, at Deborah’s prominence in the press, Laura gloried in it, as though this “radical” sister of hers were a distinct social asset among her giddy friends uptown. For even Laura’s friends, her father learned with astonishment, had acquired quite an appetite for men and women with ideas⁠—the more “radical,” the better. But the way Laura used this word at times made Roger’s blood run cold. She was vivid in her approval of her sister’s whole idea, as a scheme of wholesale motherhood which would give “a perfectly glorious jolt” to the old-fashioned home with its overworked mothers who let their children absorb their days.

“As though having children and bringing them up,” she disdainfully declared, “were something every woman must do, whether she happens to like it or not, at the cost of any real growth of her own!”

And smilingly she hinted at impending radical changes in the whole relation of marriage, of which she was hearing in detail at a series of lectures to young wives, delivered on Thursday mornings in a hotel ballroom.

What the devil was getting into the town? Roger frowned his deep dislike. Here was Laura with her chicken’s mind blithely taking her sister’s thoughts and turning them topsy-turvy, to make for herself a view of life which fitted like a white kid glove her small and elegant “ménage.” And although her father had only inklings of it all, he had quite enough to make him irate at this uncanny interplay of influences in his family. Why couldn’t the girls leave each other alone?

Early in the winter, Edith, too, had entered in. It had taken Edith just one glance into the bride’s apartment to grasp Laura’s whole scheme of existence.

“Selfish, indulgent and abnormal,” was the way she described it. She and Bruce were dining with Roger that night. “I wash my hands of the whole affair,” continued Edith curtly. “So long as she doesn’t want my help, as she has plainly made me feel, I certainly shan’t stand in her way.”

“You’re absolutely right,” said her father.

“Stick to it,” said Bruce approvingly.

But Edith did not stick to it. In her case too, as the weeks wore on, those subtle family ties took hold and made her feel the least she could do was “to keep up appearances.” So she and Bruce dined with the bride and groom, and in turn had them to dinner. And these dinners, as Bruce confided to Roger, were occasions no man could forget.

“They come only about once a month,” he said in a tone of pathos, “but it seems as though barely a week had gone by when Edith says to me again, ‘We’re dining with Laura and Hal tonight.’ Well, and we dine. Young Sloane is not a bad sort of a chap⁠—works hard downtown and worships his wife. The way he lives⁠—well, it isn’t mine⁠—and mine isn’t his⁠—and we both let it go at that. But the women can’t, they haven’t it in ’em. Each sits with her way of life in her lap. You can’t see it over the tablecloth, but, my God, how you feel it! The worst of it is,” he ended, “that after one of these terrible meals each woman is more set than before in her own way of living. Not that I don’t like Edith’s way,” her husband added hastily.

Edith also disapproved of the fast increasing publicity which Deborah was getting.

“I may be very old-fashioned,” she remarked to her father, “but I can’t get used to this idea that a woman’s place is in headlines. And I think it’s rather hard on you⁠—the use she’s making of your house.”

One Friday night when she came to play chess, she found her father in the midst of a boisterous special meeting of his club of Italian boys. It had been postponed from the evening before. And though Roger, overcome with dismay at having forgotten Edith’s night, apologized profusely, the time-honored weekly game took place no more from that day on.

“Edith’s pretty sore,” said Bruce, who dropped in soon afterwards. “She says Deborah has made your house into an annex to her school.”

Roger smoked in silence. His whole family was about his ears.

“My boy,” he muttered earnestly, “you and I must stick together.”

“We sure must,” agreed his son-in-law. “And what’s more, if we’re to keep the peace, we’ve got to try to put some punch into Deborah’s so-called love affair. She ought to get married and settle down.”

“Yes,” said Roger, dubiously. “Only let’s keep it to ourselves.”

“No chance of that,” was the cheerful reply. “You can’t keep Edith out of it. It would only make trouble in my family.” Roger gave him a pitying look and said,

“Then, for the Lord’s sake, let her in!”

So they took Edith into their councils, and she gave them an indulgent smile.

“Suppose you leave this to me,” she commanded. “Don’t you think I’ve been using my eyes? There’s no earthly use in stepping in now, for Deborah has lost her head. She sees herself a great new woman with a career. But wait till the present flare-up subsides, till the newspapers all drop her and she is thoroughly tired out. Until then, remember, we keep our hands off.”

“Do you think you can?” asked Roger, with a little glimmer of hope.

“I?” she retorted. “Most certainly! I mean to leave her alone absolutely⁠—until she comes to me herself. When she does, we’ll know it’s time to begin.”

“I’m afraid Edith is hurt about something,” said Deborah to her father, about a month after this little talk. “She hasn’t been near us for over three weeks.”

“Let her be!” said Roger, in alarm. “I mean,” he hastily added, “why can’t you let Edith come when she likes? There’s nothing the matter. It’s simply her children⁠—they take up her time.”

“No,” said Deborah calmly, “it’s I. She as good as told me so last month. She thinks I’ve become a perfect fanatic⁠—without a spare moment or thought for my family.”

“Oh, my family!” Roger groaned. “I tell you, Deborah, you’re wrong! Edith’s children are probably sick in bed!”

“Then I’ll go and see,” she answered.

“Something has happened to Deborah,” Edith informed him blithely, over the telephone the next night.

“Has, eh,” grunted Roger.

“Yes, she was here to see me today. And something has happened⁠—she’s changing fast. I felt it in all kinds of ways. She was just as dear as she could be⁠—and lonely, as though she were feeling her age. I really think we can do something now.”

“All right, let’s do something,” Roger growled.

And Edith began to do something. Her hostility to her sister had completely disappeared. In its place was a friendly affection, an evident desire to please. She even drew Laura into the secret, and there was a gathering of the clan. There were consultations in Roger’s den. “Deborah is to get married.” The feeling of it crept through the house. Nothing was said to her, of course, but Deborah was made to feel that her two sisters had drawn close. And their influence upon her choice was more deep and subtle than she knew. For although Roger’s family had split so wide apart, between his three daughters there were still mysterious bonds reaching far back into nursery days. And Deborah in deciding whether to marry Allan Baird was affected more than she was aware by the married lives of her sisters. All she had seen in Laura’s ménage, all that she had ever observed in Edith’s growing family, kept rising from time to time in her thoughts, as she vaguely tried to picture herself a wife and the mother of children.

So the family, with those subtle bonds from the past, began to press steadily closer and closer around this one unmarried daughter, and help her to make up her mind.