I

New York was shining and shimmering in the first summer heat. Jane stood at her window in the Plaza Hotel, looking out over the feathery green treetops of Central Park at the long grey line of skyscrapers that reared their incredible towers against the serene background of the blue June sky. A black river of traffic streamed up and down Fifth Avenue. Here and there, like high lights on the water, Jane could catch the glint of a yellow taxi, the sheen of a green bus, the flash of sunlight from a moving windshield. New York looked cleaner and smarter and gayer than Chicago. It looked brand-new. Chicago, Jane thought, had a curious quality of antiquity. Like London. Looking down Adams Street, for instance, toward the smoke-stained portico of the Art Institute, with the old grey lions on guard. It was probably merely a question of the soot-smirched façades. New York, however, could boast a blue sky and a bright sun, just like the country. But it was much hotter than Lakewood. In spite of their unholy errand, Jane was glad that she and Stephen were going to sail in the morning.

The room behind her was crowded with luggage, neatly ticketed for the steamer. Stephen was seated in a plush armchair, perusing the columns of the New York Times. Jenny had met them at the Century, two hours before, looking very chic and New-Yorky, Jane had thought, in a new grey covert-cloth suit and a little black skull cap, pulled smartly back from her round forehead. She had come up with them to the Plaza and had perched on top of a trunk, swinging her heels and talking of her kennels in Bedford Hills. She had bought forty dogs and found a good man to take charge of them, but the repairs on the farmhouse had been rather delayed. She and Barbara could not move out until the first of July. It was just as well, Jenny had said, for now Jane and Stephen could see their penthouse on East Seventy-Ninth Street. They were to dine there that evening with Steve, who was coming from Boston on a late afternoon train to wave his parents off from the dock the next morning.

Jenny had talked for two hours, Jane was just realizing, and had run off for a luncheon engagement, without mentioning Cicily’s name. Without referring to the unholy errand. No one would have gleaned, from Jenny’s cheerful conversation, that her parents were not bound on a casual summer spree, a sightseeing tour, a lighthearted holiday. No one could have gathered that they had embarked on a monstrous pilgrimage to the divorce courts of France, that in three short weeks they would see one marriage of Cicily’s outrageously dissolved and another outrageously consecrated.

They would not have embarked on it, Jane thought with a sigh, if it had not been for the grandchildren. Albert was already in Paris. Muriel and Ed Brown, completing their circuit of the globe, were to meet him there for the wedding. Stephen would have washed his hands of the whole affair, would have left his daughter to the tender ministrations of Flora and Muriel, would have let her be given away at the altar by even Ed Brown, if it had not been so pathetically obvious that no one but Molly, the nurse, was going to look after the twins and Robin Redbreast.

Cicily was going to Russia for her honeymoon. To Russia and across Siberia and over the Gobi Desert to Peking, where Albert’s new job awaited him in the legation. The twins and Robin Redbreast were to summer at Gull Rocks. At Gull Rocks and Lakewood, where Cicily was to join them in October and “see all the family,” she had cheerily written, before carrying her children off to begin life in Peking. Cicily had thought the impeccable Molly, who had been, after all, nine years with the twins, was quite capable of taking the children from Paris to Gull Rocks. Muriel had agreed with her, while regretting that she and Ed Brown were to summer in England. But Jane had been outraged at the suggestion. “She just thinks of the physical care,” she had said to Stephen. “She doesn’t consider what it will do to those babies to see her marry again.” And she had offered to make the monstrous pilgrimage alone.

Stephen, of course, had scouted that suggestion. “I guess it’s a leading from the Lord,” he had said heavily. “I guess we both belong there.”

But this pleasant June morning, as Jane stood looking out over the feathery green treetops of Central Park, she had a guilty feeling that she was going to enjoy the pilgrimage, in spite of its monstrosity. Enjoy it more than Stephen would, at any rate. No woman was quite proof against the excitement of a trip to Paris. Jane had not seen Paris for twenty-three years. She had not seen New York for five. Every mother wanted to be with her daughter on her wedding day⁠—on all her wedding days, thought Jane, with a little rueful smile. And⁠—she would see André again.

She would certainly see André⁠—unless by ill luck he were out of Paris. Flora would arrange it. André himself would arrange it. She and André would meet⁠—it would be almost like meeting on the other side of the Jordan⁠—after thirty-four years of separation. They would meet and talk about life and she would feel again that old sense of intimacy, of identity, almost, with the boy that⁠—After all, there had never been anyone quite like André. They had seen life eye to eye. They had experienced together that first tremulous intimacy of passion. Not with Stephen, not with Jimmy, had she ever felt just that unity of interest and emotion. With Stephen there had been questioning⁠—did she love him, should she marry him? With Jimmy there had been conflict⁠—she should not love him, she should not marry him. With André it had all been as simple as the Garden of Eden. First love, Jane supposed, was always like that.

“Well, I’ve got to go,” said Stephen. He was lunching on Wall Street with Bill Belmont.

“Take a taxi, dear,” said Jane. “It’s very warm. Don’t experiment with the subway.”

“Don’t worry,” said Stephen. “My subway days are over, they were over when I turned sixty. Take a taxi, yourself.”

“I will,” said Jane. She was lunching with Agnes. It was funny how young she felt, just because she was going to see Agnes again. She glanced in the mirror before leaving the room. A sedate, grey-haired, much more than middle-aged lady glanced back at her. A lady discreetly attired in a black-and-white foulard dress and sensible kid walking-shoes and a black straw hat, perched just a little too high for fashion on a head with too much hair! But Jane only laughed. She laughed out loud alone in her hotel bedroom. Agnes would look like that, too. But it was only a joke. She and Agnes would know that the sedate, grey-haired, much more than middle-aged ladies were incredible changelings. When she and Agnes were together they were sitting on a Bryn Mawr window-seat. When she and Agnes were together they defied time and eternity. They laughed at the joke.

II

Agnes lived on Beekman Place in an old brownstone front house that she had bought twelve years ago. She had spent the proceeds of her third play upon it, figuring that it would be as good an investment as any other for little Agnes. It was very tall and narrow, with two rooms on each floor, and it had a garden, about as big as a postage stamp, overlooking the East River. There was not much in the garden but a privet hedge and a flagged path and one small poplar tree that was shining and shivering, that bright June day, in frail, pale bloom.

Agnes’s writing-room overlooked the garden. It had walnut panelling and book-lined walls and a large eighteenth-century table desk, with a typewriter on it, in a corner near the fireplace. Agnes and Jane spent most of the afternoon on the window-seat, looking out at the view. Jane liked the view. The grey-green river, glittering under smoke and sun, eddied swiftly past the parapet at the foot of the garden. City tugs and excursion boats plied up and down the stream, the grey towers of the Queensborough Bridge were etched against the enamelled sky, and the grass on Blackwell’s Island was the brilliant emerald green of city parks in June. Kept grass, thought Jane, that grows behind iron palings, man-made like the skyscrapers, but very tranquil and pleasant to look upon in the wilderness of brick and stone that was New York.

They talked of Cicily and her coming marriage. They talked of Jenny and her Seventy-Ninth Street penthouse. They talked of Steve and his house on Beacon Hill. They talked of Agnes’s work and of Agnes’s daughter.

Agnes turned out a play a year now. She had written twelve and had disposed of all of them, and only three had failed. One, to be sure, had had only a succès d’estime. It had been fun to work on it, but Agnes was never going to write a play like that again. Agnes was never going to finish her novel or write any more short stories, unless her luck failed her on Broadway. Agnes had banked two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in the course of the last fourteen years and bought the house on Beekman Place and educated little Agnes.

Little Agnes was a Bryn Mawr junior. She had been prepared at the Brearley School and had gone in with a lot of nice girls whom she knew very well and was majoring in biology and physics. Little Agnes wanted to be a doctor, and was planning to enter the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia, just as soon as she graduated. She was off on a house party now in the Berkshire Hills.

Marion Park had been kind to little Agnes and thought the child had ability. Though Agnes had often been back to the college and had seen Marion standing in Miss Thomas’s rostrum in a black silk Ph. D. gown with blue stripes on its flowing sleeves and a little black mortar board on her still brown hair, it seemed just as strange to her as it did to Jane to think that Marion Park was now President of Bryn Mawr. Agnes’s plump, authoritative person was a familiar figure on Broadway. Her grey head was crowned with authentic dramatic laurels. Jane was a grandmother three times over. Yet it seemed incredible to both of them that a contemporary of theirs could be a college president. Incredible to think that Marion, with whom they had so often sat upon a Bryn Mawr window-seat, could have become a privileged person like Miss Thomas⁠—Miss Thomas, who had always seemed to them not quite of this world of every day.

“Does little Agnes feel that way about Marion?” asked Jane.

“The rising generation,” said Agnes with a smile, “doesn’t feel that way about anyone on God’s green earth.”

“Do you remember what Papa said about her,” said Jane, “that first night in Pembroke, when he sat next to her at supper? ‘I bet that girl will amount to something some day.’ ”

“Your father was always right about people,” said Agnes.

That, of course, made Jane think instantly of Jimmy. Had her father been right about Jimmy or had he been blinded by parental fears? Jane knew more now about parental fears than she had in the days when Jimmy had aroused them in the breast of her father. She knew they were very blinding.

“What’s the matter, Jane?” asked Agnes. “You look so sober.”

“I was thinking of Jimmy,” said Jane quietly. “I was thinking of how proud he would have been of you, Agnes, and of how he would have loved all this.” Her glance wandered over the cheerful, luxurious room, then came to rest on the restless river rolling past the window.

“Yes. He would have loved it,” said Agnes gently. “For a time. Jimmy loved success and comfort. But if he never worked for them, Jane, it was only because he loved other things more. He wasn’t like me. I’m a moneymaker, pure and simple. But Jimmy was a gypsy. Jimmy loved success for the fun of it and comfort for the ease of it, but they would soon have bored him. Jimmy could never have sat on this window-seat and looked at all those boats without wanting to charter a tug for Shanghai or Singapore. Jimmy would never have locked up his money in banks or sunk it in bricks and mortar. He wouldn’t have been any happier, really, on Beekman Place than he was on Charlton Street. Jimmy’s happiness was always just around the corner.”

Jane listened in silence. She had been around the corner, of course. Was that why she had represented happiness to Jimmy? If so, how lucky, how very, very lucky, that she had never let him discover that her street was no different from any other thoroughfare!

Agnes was very wise. Agnes was wonderful. Agnes knew everything⁠—except one thing. In all the years of their common experience, thought Jane, nothing bound her to Agnes as closely as the secret that Agnes would never share. She rose to leave her a little sadly.

“I hate to think of what’s before you, Jane,” said Agnes. “But remember one thing⁠—there can’t be understanding between two generations. I’m convinced of that. Love, Jane, and sympathy, but never understanding. We must take our children’s ideas on faith. We can never make them our own. Remember that and save yourself unhappiness.”

III

Jane tried to remember it that very evening, as she sat by Stephen’s side on a black-and-silver divan in the shrimp-pink drawing-room of Jenny’s East Seventy-Ninth Street penthouse. The penthouse was small and very, very modern. Jane could not understand its scheme of decoration. From the Euclid designs of the geometric silver furniture to the tank of living goldfish set in the marble walls of Jenny’s black bathroom, it all looked very queer to Jane. It looked queerer than queer to Stephen. His face had been a study when he had seen the goldfish. Young Steve had thought nothing of it.

“I don’t like this arty stuff,” he had said with brotherly candour. “I’d change this entire roomful of modern truck for one genuine Duncan Phyfe table!”

Jenny had laughed at him and so had Barbara and so had the young interior decorator who had designed the room. Rather to Jane’s surprise, Jenny and Barbara had invited three of their friends to meet Jane and Stephen⁠—three young men, who, at the first glance, seemed almost as queer to Jane as the tiny modern penthouse.

One was the interior decorator, of course, a clever-looking young Jew in London evening clothes. He painted, Barbara had murmured, and had done some tremendous things, and condescended to run his shop on Madison Avenue, only because one must live. One must, thought Jane, and presumably in London evening clothes. Looking at a canvas of his that hung over the silver fireplace, Jane was not surprised that he found it practical to sell chintzes on the side. It looked like a broken kaleidoscope of green and pink and yellow glass. Jane wondered if it were a sunset or a woman, then realized that her ideas of painting were outdated. It was obviously a reaction, or, at the most concrete, a passion or a mood. Jane knew she was benighted about modern art. But honest, at least. She admitted frankly that she could not speak its language.

The second friend was a volatile young Englishman, the musical comedy star who had just finished playing the lead in Laugh, Lady, Laugh, a show that had been “packing them in,” so Jenny had informed Jane, for the last eighteen months on Broadway. Jane thought his crisp blond hair just a ripple too curly and the strength of his clear-cut jaw line a trifle weak. Nothing made a man look weaker, Jane reflected with a twinkle, than a strong chin. He was very nice and friendly, however. His name was Eric Arthur and he had a penchant for Russian wolf hounds. He had two with him on tour, with which he walked in Central Park every day at noon. They had formed his first bond with Jenny. She had met him at a party at Pierre’s and they had talked of the wolf hounds immediately.

The third friend looked more to Jane like someone whom you would conceivably ask to dinner in Lakewood. That was her first impression and she immediately despised herself for it. A thought like that was distinctly unworthy. It was just like her mother and Isabel. Jane was determined to like Jenny’s friends. This third young man was only a little anaemic-looking. He came from Hartford, Connecticut, and he had gone to Yale University and he was the youthful curator of prints at the Metropolitan. He had struck up an argument with Steve immediately on the question of the eternal merit of Currier and Ives.

All three of them, at any rate, seemed to be on the most intimate terms with Jenny and with Barbara. The curator of prints was their amateur bootlegger, the interior decorator was furnishing the farmhouse at Bedford Hills, the musical comedy star was full of wise thoughts on English kennels where they could buy a few better bitches. He was sailing for Liverpool next week and would take the matter up for them.

Jane learned all this before they had finished with the cocktails. They did not finish with the cocktails for some time. Champagne was served with the perfect little dinner, and chartreuse afterward, and, later in the evening, a highball for the men.

By nine o’clock the curator of prints and the musical comedy star were both a little flushed and loquacious. By ten they were distinctly hilarious. The young Jew did not drink, and Steve, Jane was thankful to note, was behaving himself, though he rated his sister’s taste in liquor much higher than her taste in decoration. By eleven all the young people were shouting the lyrics from Laugh, Lady, Laugh, around the grand piano, while Eric Arthur pounded out the melody on the keys. Stephen looked fearfully tired. Jane knew she ought to take him back to the Plaza, but she did not like to leave the girls alone at a party that was going just like this. Ridiculous, of course. Jenny and Barbara were left alone at all their other parties. They looked completely in command of themselves and the situation. Too young and too pretty, however, to⁠—

They did look ridiculously young. And rather as if preposterously masquerading in this little modern penthouse of their own. Barbara wore a black lace smoking-jacket over a gown of trailing black chiffon. Her curly red hair was cropped close, like a prizefighter’s, on her aristocratic little head. She wore her cigarette⁠—that was the verb that came to Jane’s mind⁠—in a long green jade holder. She was standing at Eric Arthur’s shoulder, highball in hand, her arm thrust casually through the curator’s elbow, singing the jazz melodies with mock emotion. Jenny was hanging over the end of the grand piano, singing, too. She was, Jane thought, rather amazingly dressed in black velvet pajamas, with a long loose coat of cherry-coloured silk. Her shiny pale hair was brushed straight off her forehead and cut short like a boy’s at the white nape of her neck. Two long paste earrings glittered at her ears. Between them her plain, distinguished little face looked out at Jane with exactly the same expression as her poor Aunt Silly’s. But Jenny had been born in the right period. There was a premium set now on distinguished plainness. Jenny’s lank figure in its bizarre costume, Jenny’s homely face with the hair strained off her high forehead, was the essence of smartness. She looked like a cover design for Vanity Fair.

It was the period, of course, Jane reflected soberly. It was not the children. Young people had always sung cheerily around grand pianos. It was prohibition and the emancipation of women and the new freedom of the sexes. There was no real harm in it. But was this just Jenny’s idea of “living smartly in New York”? It was not Jane’s. It was not Stephen’s. It was not Bill Belmont’s. In his brownstone residence on East Sixty-First Street, Bill Belmont, Jane knew, was as mystified as she and Stephen were at the charms of the penthouse.

Eric Arthur had run through the score of Laugh, Lady, Laugh, but his nimble fingers were still rattling over the keys. A shout of applause burst from his little audience.

“Sing it, Eric!” they cried.

“It’s the new song hit from Sunny Side Up!” Jenny tossed in explanation to her parents. Eric Arthur’s tender young tenor dominated the uproar. He was singing appassionata, uplifted by highballs.

“Turn on the heat! Start in to strut!
Wiggle and wobble and warm up the hut!
Oh! Oh! It’s thirty below!
Turn on the heat, fifty degrees!
Get hot for papa, or papa will freeze!
Oh! Oh! Start melting the snow!
If you are good, my little radiator⁠—”

This was not living smartly in New York, thought Jane firmly. Young people had always sung cheerily around grand pianos. But not⁠—not drunk. Not⁠—not songs like that. She rose to leave the party.

“Jenny,” she whispered, “you ought to send them home.”

Jenny’s eyes met hers with a little indulgent twinkle.

“I mean it, Jenny,” said Jane.

“All right,” said Jenny calmly. “I will.” She moved to Barbara’s side and whispered in her ear. Barbara laughed a little, then glanced at Jane and Stephen. Jenny clapped her hands, then clapped them again, more vehemently, until the clamour about the piano ceased.

“You’ve got to go home, boys,” she said in the sudden silence. “It’s twelve o’clock and Mother’s a blue-ribbon girl. She thinks we’ve all had enough!”

The blunt statement was met with a burst of good-humoured laughter. Eric rose from the piano bench and drained the last of his highball. They were no drunker, Jane reflected, than she had seen many young men at perfectly respectable parties at home. The young Jewish decorator said good night to her very politely. He was really a nice boy, thought Jane. He got the two inebriates out of the room much quicker than Jane would have thought possible. Jane heard Barbara make a date with the curator of prints for luncheon next day. She wondered if he would remember it. When they had finally taken themselves off, Jenny turned to her parents.

“You didn’t like them, did you, Mumsy?” she said. “But you know Eric’s funny when he’s tight.”

“They say, Mr. Carver,” said Barbara conversationally to Stephen, “that the tighter he is, the funnier he is in the show. He keeps putting in lines⁠—I don’t suppose he knows what he’s saying⁠—but they always bring down the house⁠—”

“It’s a gift!” laughed Jenny. She was placing Jane’s evening wrap around Jane’s shoulders. “I’ll meet you at the dock,” she said. She kissed Jane tenderly and threw her arms around Stephen. She looked absurd and adorable, Jane thought, as she smiled up into his weary face⁠—like some fragile, fantastic clown, in those loose black velvet trousers and that cherry-coloured sack. Barbara was rallying Steve at the door. No one, Jane thought suddenly, had yet mentioned Cicily’s name.

“I wish I were going with you,” smiled Jenny. “But we’re going to have a fearfully busy month at the kennels.”

“I wish I were going with them,” said Steve, “but I’m just getting into my stride at the bank.”

“You’ll have a lovely time,” said Barbara.

“Won’t they?” smiled Jenny.

“You bet they will!” said Steve.

It was a conspiracy, Jane decided, as she plunged earthward in the elevator. It was a friendly conspiracy of silence, to keep two foolish old people from worrying over something they could not control⁠—something that was none of their business, really. Steve chatted pleasantly all the way back to the Plaza in the taxi about modern decoration versus Duncan Phyfe tables. Jane did not listen. They did not know what they had lost in life, these kindly, capable, clever young people who did not believe in worry. Stephen looked terribly tired in the bright, white light of the Plaza lobby. She should have taken him away from that party at ten o’clock. They did not know that they had lost anything, she thought, as she plunged skyward in the Plaza elevator. But Stephen knew. And she knew. Though it was difficult to define it.

IV

Paris, thought Jane⁠—the city of joy! She glanced across the railway carriage at Stephen’s face. It looked rather grim. Stephen was rested, however. The six days at sea had been good for him. Stephen was a sailor and, in spite of parental anxieties, he had responded immediately to the tang of the briny breeze and the roll of the deep-sea swell. While still in the Ambrose Channel, he had seemed perceptibly more cheerful. He had landed at Cherbourg that morning, looking tanned and healthy and braced for his ordeal. The grimness had returned to his face rather slowly, as he had sat silently all day, staring out through the window of the railway carriage at the pleasant midsummer French landscape.

The train was pulling slowly into the Gare Saint-Lazare. A group of porters were assailing the door of the carriage. The air rang with their staccato utterance. Jane caught a whiff of garlic and was suddenly exalted with a feeling of adventure. It was a real breath from a foreign land. The train had stopped. The porters stormed the luggage rack. Jane and Stephen descended to the platform.

“Je veux un taxi,” said Jane.

The porters responded with a flood of eloquence. Jane and Stephen following their blue smocked figures through the crowd. Steamer acquaintances waved and smiled. Jane caught other whiffs of garlic. She could not subdue that sense of adventure. Ten days in Paris! She was smiling a little excitedly, when she first caught sight of Cicily⁠—Cicily standing with the three children and Molly at the gate of the train.

“Look at Robin Redbreast!” she cried gaily to Stephen. “Isn’t he huge?”

It was then that she saw Albert. She suffered a quick sense of shock. Why hadn’t she expected to see him? Of course he would be there. Nevertheless, his presence seemed vaguely indecent in that little family gathering. The pleasant, snub-nosed, twinkle-eyed ghost of Jack loomed at his side. He lifted Robin Redbreast to his shoulder. They were all laughing and waving. Cicily looked radiant. The twins dashed into Jane’s arms.

“Mumsy!” cried Cicily. She kissed Jane warmly. Then turned to greet her father. Albert thrust Robin Redbreast into Jane’s embrace. Over the child’s yellow head, surprisingly, he kissed her.

“Aunt Jane,” he was saying affectionately, “it was great of you to come!”

Cicily’s arm was thrust through Stephen’s. She was talking excitedly as she led him through the crowded concourse.

“I reserved your rooms at the Chatham. Why do you go there? Aunt Muriel’s at the Ritz. I wish I had room for you in my flat, but it’s perfectly tiny. Molly hates it. Just one bathroom and we froze all winter. But it’s sweet now. You can sit on the balcony and see the Arc de Triomphe.”

Albert was hailing two taxis.

“I suppose you want to go straight to the hotel, sir, and rest,” he was saying. “Did you have a smooth passage? We’re going to have a gay week.”

“Cousin Flora’s simply wild to see you, Mumsy,” interrupted Cicily. “She’s been awfully nice to me. She knows the smartest people⁠—real frogs, you know⁠—and she asked me to all her parties. I’ve simply loved it. I don’t want to go to Peking at all. I’d like to live here all my life⁠—if it weren’t so far from Lakewood.”

Stephen was succumbing, with a faintly constrained smile, to Cicily’s gay garrulity. She broke off suddenly to squeeze his elbow and kiss his cheek. Albert took up the burden of her song.

“We’re all dining tonight at L’Escargot. Do you like snails, Aunt Jane? We’re going to pick up Mother and my esteemed stepfather at the Ritz⁠—my esteemed stepfather is really all right, you know. He’s a good sort. We’ll all get a drink at the Ritz bar. The Ritz bar’s quite a sight, sir⁠—”

“Let’s send the children home with Molly,” said Cicily gaily, “and go up to the Chatham with Mumsy and Dad. I’ve got so much to say to you, darlings, that I don’t know where to begin. We’re going to be married in Cousin Flora’s apartment. Just the families, you know. I know you’ll like my dress, Mumsy. I won’t let Albert see it⁠—”

This was another conspiracy, thought Jane, as she climbed into the waiting taxi. A conspiracy, this time, not of silence, but of chatter. A friendly conspiracy to keep two foolish old people from worrying over something that they could not control. A conspiracy to prove that this was a very usual situation, a very gay situation, a very happy situation⁠—a situation that called for frivolity and celebration. A party, in fact. A purely social occasion.

But did not Cicily, Jane wondered, as their taxi dodged and tooted through chaotic traffic of the old grey streets, did not Cicily, beneath the gay garrulity of her light and laughing chatter, feel at all disturbed by her equivocal position as Albert’s fiancée and Jack’s wife? Jane, herself, felt profoundly disturbed by it. Belle’s divorce had been granted in Reno the end of March. Albert had been⁠—could you call him a bachelor?⁠—for three months. Yet Jane could not really consider the engagement as a fait accompli until next Wednesday morning, when Cicily’s decree would be made final and Cicily, herself, would be⁠—hateful word⁠—free. She would be married three days later in Flora’s apartment. But not until Wednesday noon, Jane told herself, firmly, would she recognize the engagement. If she did not recognize it, however, what was Albert’s status in the crowded little taxi? It was terribly complicated. It was terribly sordid. Glancing from Cicily’s bright, smiling countenance to Stephen’s grim, constrained one, Jane could not agree with Albert’s initial statement. They would not have a gay week.

V

Jane and Flora were sitting side by side on the Empire sofa of Jane’s little green sitting-room in the Chatham Hotel. The sitting-room was rather small and rather over-upholstered. It was extremely Empire and extremely green. The green carpet, the green curtains, the green wallpaper, and the green furniture were all emblazoned with Napoleonic emblems. Gold crowns and laurel wreaths and bees met the eye at every turn. Jane thought it looked rather sweet and stuffy and French, but “I can’t think in this room for the buzzing” had been Stephen’s laconic comment, when Cicily and Albert had finally left them alone in it, yesterday afternoon.

It was ten o’clock in the morning and Flora had just come in. She had brought a big box of roses and she was terribly glad to see Jane. Stephen was downstairs in the dining-room eating what he termed “a Christian breakfast.” Jane’s tray of coffee and rolls and honey was still on the sitting-room table.

“Jane,” said Flora, “you’re incredibly the same.”

“Am I?” said Jane a little wistfully. She had not seen Flora for nine years. Flora, she thought, looked subtly subdued and sophisticated. Silver-haired and slender in her grey French frock she no longer suggested anything as bright and gay and concrete as a Dresden-china shepherdess. Frail and faded, well-dressed and weary, there was something just a little shadowy about Flora. She looked like a Sargent portrait of herself, Jane decided. There was nothing shadowy, however, in her enthusiasm over this reunion.

“Of course I don’t mean you look the same, Jane,” she continued honestly. “But you look as if you were the same! And that’s even nicer.”

“We’re all the same,” said Jane stoutly. “That’s one of the things you learn by growing old. Nobody ever changes.”

“Children do,” smiled Flora. “I was surprised at Cicily. She was a pretty child, but she’s grown up into much more than that. You must be very proud of her.”

Jane’s eyes met Flora’s for a moment in silence.

“Well, Flora,” said Jane slowly, “I can’t say that I am.”

Flora took Jane’s hand and squeezed it before she spoke.

“Jane,” she said gently, “the war changed everything. Even over here, it’s all quite different. People don’t act as they used to do⁠—they don’t think as they used to do. Cicily’s a sweet child. It was a pleasure to have her here in Paris. She has lived so discreetly and charmingly in that little flat up near the Étoile⁠—everyone likes her⁠—her children are adorable and Albert’s a delightful young man. I think they’ll be very happy.”

“They don’t deserve to be very happy,” said Jane.

“But you want them to be,” said Flora brightly. Flora seemed almost a member of the friendly conspiracy. “And speaking of happiness,” she went on gaily, “isn’t Muriel funny with Ed Brown? She’s a perfect wife.”

“He’s a perfect husband,” smiled Jane.

“Well, Jane!” laughed Flora, “I think that statement’s a trifle exaggerated. He’s really awful⁠—pretty awful, I mean. He’s been in Paris three weeks and he hasn’t talked of anything but prohibition. With disfavour, my dear⁠—don’t misunderstand me!⁠—with distinct disfavour! But he makes Muriel sublimely happy!” She paused to twinkle, brightly, for a moment at Jane’s noncommittal countenance. “Jane,” she said, “you’re no gossip. You never were. You’re holding out on me. I wish Isabel were here.”

“Well, I don’t,” said Jane, with emphasis.

Flora stopped in confusion. “No, I suppose you don’t,” she said. “It⁠—it must have been terrible, Jane. All in the family, I mean.”

“It was terrible,” said Jane.

“Muriel’s very happy about it. She loves Cicily.”

“Muriel,” said Jane deliberately, “has no moral sense. She never had. She’s always been frivolous about falling in love. About anyone’s falling in love⁠—”

“Jane,” said Flora suddenly, “André Duroy’s not in Paris.”

The simple statement fell in a little pool of silence.

“Oh,” said Jane, after a moment. “Well, I thought perhaps he wouldn’t be.” She tried to make her voice sound very casual. “People aren’t in cities much, you know, in the month of July. I thought he’d be off with his wife in the country.”

“He’s not with his wife,” said Flora meaningly. “His wife’s at Cowes. She has a lot of English friends, you know.” Flora’s voice had lost nothing of its meaning.

“Yes, I know,” said Jane hastily. Letters were one thing, she thought, and talk was another. Jane did not want to sit gossiping with Flora about André’s wife. It seemed vaguely indecent. But it did not take two to make a gossip.

“She has their boy with her. She’s very discreet. He’s a nice child. Thirteen years old and he looks just like André. André’s in the French Alps, I think. He has a studio up there somewhere. I sent him a letter.”

“You sent him a letter?” said Jane.

“Yes. To say you were coming. I asked him to the wedding.”

“Oh⁠—he won’t come down for it,” said Jane defensively.

She was conscious of wishing, rather wildly, that Flora had not written. He would not come, of course. And yet⁠—and yet⁠—Jane felt curiously hurt, in advance, to know he was not coming. It would have been much nicer if André had never known that she was in Paris. If André had not had forced on him that faintly ungracious gesture of declining to cross France to see the girl who⁠—Ridiculously, Jane was thinking of that letter he had written her when he had received the Prix de Rome. Of how she had read it in her little room on Pine Street, at the window that overlooked the willow tree. If André had not written that letter, she might not have married Stephen. What nonsense! Of course she would have married Stephen. On what other basis than that of marriage with Stephen were the last thirty years imaginable?

“I think he will,” said Flora. “He quite fell for Cicily⁠—”

Just then Stephen entered the room. Flora greeted him with enthusiasm. They sat down together on the Empire sofa and began to talk about Chicago. Jane did not listen. She was thinking of how very odd it was to think that Cicily knew André. That Cicily might know him quite well. That she might know him, absurdly, much better than Jane herself did. Cicily was only five years younger than Cyprienne. Jane was seventeen years older. Oh, well⁠—of course he would not cross France to come to the wedding.

VI

Jane and Stephen and Cicily and Albert were strolling down the Rue Vaugirard on their way to the Luxembourg Museum. They had just lunched at Foyot’s on a perfect sole and fraises à la créme. Five of Jane’s ten days in Paris had passed. They had passed very quickly, she had just been thinking, and mainly in the consumption of food and drink. Cocktails at the Ritz bar, snails at L’Escargot, blinis at the Russian Maisonnette, cointreau at the Café de la Rotonde, fish food at Prunier’s, absinthe at the Dome, Muriel’s magnificent little dinner at Le Pré Catelan, Flora’s smart one in her apartment, champagne and sparkling Burgundy and Rhine wine in brown, long-necked bottles⁠—curious memories to blend with the sense of perplexity and despair that the sight of Cicily and Albert and the three grandchildren had engendered.

The three grandchildren had been very endearing and Cicily and Albert had devoted themselves to the entertainment of the older generation. Between their engagements at restaurants they had crowded in two trips to the Louvre and one to Notre Dame, a visit to the Cluny Museum, a drive through the midsummer Bois, a motor ride to Versailles, a jaunt by boat down the Seine to Saint-Cloud, a wild evening on Montmartre and a mild one at the Comédie-Française. That night they were taking the twins to the Cirque Madrano, to watch the Fratellinis. The Fratellinis, Albert had explained to Jane, were the funniest clowns in the world. At the moment, between lunch at Foyot’s and tea with Flora, they had just time to take in the Luxembourg Gallery. There was not much in it, Cicily had said.

The friendly conspiracy of chatter, Jane thought as they crossed the sun-washed court, had never faltered. The illusion of the “party” had been consistently sustained. The two foolish old people, she reflected, as they climbed the grey stone steps of the museum, had not been left alone for an hour to think or to worry. The children had been kind and capable and very, very clever. There had been no emotional moments, no awkward discussions, no embarrassing contretemps. They were carrying it all off beautifully. They would carry it all off beautifully until the end.

Nevertheless, Jane had felt during the last five days that she would have been glad of an hour in which to think or not think, worry or not worry, as she chose. An hour, perhaps, in which to look at Paris, without the tinkling accompaniment of the friendly conspiracy of chatter.

They entered the main gallery.

“We’ve got to hurry,” said Cicily.

Jane thought how much she wished that she were entering the main gallery alone. It looked just as she remembered it. The walls were hung with the same fine Gobelin tapestries. The familiar bronze and marble figures stood on their pedestals. Jane had not seen them for twenty years, but she remembered them well. Stephen and Albert were conscientiously buying catalogues. Cicily had paused before a case of Sèvres china. A rough-hewn Rodin arrested Jane’s attention. But Jane had not come to the Luxembourg to look at the Rodins. Jane had come to the Luxembourg for quite another purpose. She moved away from Cicily and strolled casually to the corner where André’s Eve awaited her. Jane stared up at her. She stood smiling provocatively over her yet untasted apple⁠—an Eve still innocent, yet subtly provocative. Jane gazed in silence at her rounded cheeks, at the fresh virginal curves of her parted lips. Could it be possible, Jane was thinking, that she had ever looked like that? That she had ever smiled like that? Could it be possible that she had ever been anything so fresh and young and fair and inexperienced? Stephen and Cicily turned up at her elbow. Jane was conscious of a quick fear that Cicily would recognize that smile, that Stephen would comment on it. But Stephen was glancing up at the Eve with a look of complete indifference. Jane suddenly realized that Stephen had quite forgotten that it was a Duroy. But Cicily had opened her catalogue.

“It’s awfully vieux jeu, isn’t it?” she was saying calmly. “He’s nice, though. I met him at Cousin Flora’s.”

Albert slipped his arm through Jane’s. “There are some good paintings,” he was saying, “but most of them have been moved to the Louvre.”

Jane passed at his side from the entrance hall to the farther galleries. She wandered, blindly, past a succession of canvases. Cicily’s light prattle fell unheeded on her ears. An hour later, when they stood once more in the entrance hall, Jane could not remember one single painting that she had seen in the Luxembourg.

“Come look at the gardens,” Albert was saying. “They’re really charming.”

“You go without me,” said Jane. “I’m a little tired.”

“It won’t take a minute,” said Albert brightly.

“I’ll wait here,” said Jane.

Stephen and Cicily and Albert moved toward the door. From the grey light of the entrance hall, Jane watched them descend the stone steps in the dazzling sunlight of the Paris afternoon. She walked slowly back to the Eve. “There is something of you in all my nymphs and Eves and saints and Madonnas,” she was thinking. “Something you brought into my life. Romance, I guess. Nothing more tangible.”

She had been young once, thought Jane, as she stood staring up at the Eve. She had been fresh and fair and inexperienced. She had smiled like that. Twenty-three years ago, Stephen himself had recognized that smile. Absurd, ridiculous, however, that fleeting fear that Cicily would recognize it now!

Jane wondered vaguely what Eve had looked like after thirty years with Adam. After Cain and Abel had disappointed her. Why had no one ever thought of doing Eve at the age of fifty-one? Cicily’s light voice broke in upon her revery. Jane turned with a start.

“I wonder who she is, Mumsy?” said Cicily.

“Who⁠—she is?” faltered Jane.

“Yes,” said Cicily brightly. “They say that all those rather saccharine ladies of his are someone, Mumsy. They’re a record of his sentimental journey. His wife’s the Venus in the Metropolitan. He did it the year he was married. I think”⁠—Cicily’s blue eyes gleamed experimentally⁠—“I think it would be rather nice to be loved by an artist who would recreate you and preserve you forever in words or paint or marble. Though I suppose you’d grow up and beyond his idea of you and then you’d want to throw a brick at what he’d done. It must give lots of André Duroy’s old girls a pain to look at what he once thought they were. You’d wonder, you know, if you ever had been anything so silly. And you’d fear you had. One’s always silly, Mumsy, when one’s in love. Which is quite as it should be. But the silliness should be ephemeral. It shouldn’t be perpetuated in words or paint or marble, any more than it is in life. Don’t you think so, Mumsy?”

Jane’s eyes were still on the Eve. “I don’t know,” she said. “There’s Keats⁠—and the ‘Grecian Urn’⁠—‘Forever wilt thou love and she be fair.’ ”

“It doesn’t sound so good,” said Cicily, “if you read it ‘Forever wilt thou love and she be silly’!” She tucked her arm under Jane’s elbow. “Come on, Mumsy, Albert and Dad are waiting.”

VII

“I think,” said Stephen, “I’ll try to take a nap.”

“Why don’t you, dear?” said Jane.

Jane herself was far from feeling sleepy. She had been sitting in silence for the last half-hour on the Empire sofa in the little green sitting room, watching Stephen turn over the pages of the Paris Herald and the London Times. She rose, now, and followed him into their bedroom. It was rather a relief, she was thinking, to have something definite to do, even if that something was only pulling down three window-shades and raising one window and tucking a light steamer rug over Stephen’s recumbent form. Stephen was looking very grim and tired. They had had a hard day, though nothing much had happened in it. At eleven in the morning Cicily had telephoned. She had telephoned to announce that her lawyer had just called her up from the courtroom to inform her that her decree had been made final. There had been no complications and the last requirement had been complied with. That was all there had been to the formal proceedings that Jane and Stephen had tragically prepared themselves to witness. Two months ago two foreign lawyers had spoken in an alien tongue. Cicily had murmured a few French words of acquiescence. A judge had entered an interlocutory judgment. Today that judgment had been entered on the records of the Bureau of Vital Statistics. And a marriage had been dissolved.

Cicily had planned to have a little lunch with Albert. She had arranged for Jane and Stephen, however, to join Muriel and Ed Brown at the Ritz. That luncheon with Muriel, Jane reflected, had been rather like the first meal after a family funeral. Though, of course, you did not usually have to take the first meal after a family funeral in a public restaurant and you did not usually have to talk through it about prohibition with Ed Brown. Jane and Stephen had returned very early in the afternoon to their rooms at the Chatham.

Jane closed the bedroom door and reentered the green sitting-room. She sat down on the Empire sofa. From behind the heavy green curtains of the long French windows the sharp, staccato uproar of the traffic on the rue Daunou rang in her ears. The shrill, toy-like toots of the French taxis punctuated the sound. Cities had voices, thought Jane. Chicago rumbled and New York hummed and Paris tooted. Jane glanced at the London Times and the Paris Herald. She felt curiously empty-handed, but she did not seem to want to read the papers. Reading the papers, Jane reflected, was the eternal resource of men. It offered no distraction to women. She had at last her hour alone in Paris and she did not know what to do with it. She wondered what Cicily and Albert were doing. She thought of the Bureau of Vital Statistics. The Catholics were right. Metaphysically speaking, there was no such thing as divorce. Marriage was a mystical union of body and spirit. It was a state of being. It could not be dissolved by legal procedure. The past could not be denied. The present was its consequence. The future⁠—but as far as the future went, though Cicily seemed to Jane as much Jack’s wife as she had ever been, she was going to marry Albert Lancaster in Flora’s apartment in three days’ time. After that, Jane reflected hopelessly, she would be two men’s wife! It was frightfully complicated, metaphysically speaking.

Just then Jane heard a knock on the door.

“Entrez!” she cried, with a curious sense of relief. But it was only a bellboy. He had a letter on a little silver tray. “Merci,” said Jane and fumbled for a franc. The letter was from Isabel.

Jane opened it before the bellboy had left the room. Isabel’s letters were always good reading. This one contained a surprise, and Jane felt, as she read it, exactly as if Isabel were sitting beside her on the little Empire sofa. Her sister’s very accents clung to the sixteen closely written pages.

“Dearest Jane,

“I haven’t written, but I’ve been awfully busy. I’ve been thinking of you, of course, and of Stephen, too. I sometimes feel that all this has been harder on Robin and Stephen than on you and me. In a way, I think, fathers care more than mothers what happens to daughters.

“I care most about Jack. But, Jane, I’m beginning to feel much happier about him. He loved his work at Tech, and as soon as he left there this June, he took a summer job with the telephone company down near Mexico City. I’ve just had his first letter. He’s stringing wires and building bridges, just as Cicily said he would. He misses the children fearfully, of course, but he could not have taken them to Mexico, in any case. Nevertheless, they are the insuperable problem.

“At any rate, work is the thing for Jack to tie to, just now. It can’t betray him, as a woman might. It’s so much safer to love things than people.

“This brings me to Belle’s news. It’s what I’ve been so busy over these last two weeks. It’s still a great secret, but I know it will make you and Stephen happier to know it. She’s engaged to Billy Winter. She’s not going to announce it, but just marry him quietly here in the apartment some afternoon and slip off to Murray Bay for her honeymoon. Robin and I are going to keep the babies while she’s gone. Billy’s rented a Palmer House on Ritchie Court for the winter.

“Belle has no misgivings about anything and almost no regrets. And to hear Billy talk, you’d think everyone was divorced and remarried. Of course, in a way, I hate it and so does Robin. But we like Billy and he’s sweet with Belle’s children. She’s so glad, now, they’re all girls. She’s going to give them Billy’s name. She’s really in love again, I think, and if she’s happy, perhaps it will all work out for the best. But I can’t get used to this modern idea that you can scrap the past and wipe the slate clean and begin life over again.

“I haven’t told Mamma anything about it and shan’t, until after the wedding. She keeps right on saying she doesn’t want to see Cicily or Albert ever again. But she’ll get over that, of course.

“Her blood pressure has been flaring up and she’s had some dizzy spells that have worried me. She fusses a lot about the house, and Minnie quarrels with all the other servants. She just made Mamma dismiss an excellent waitress I got her⁠—such a nice girl who didn’t want her Sundays out⁠—because she thought the pantry cupboards weren’t very clean.

“Of course they aren’t as clean as they were when Minnie used to keep them. But the neighbourhood’s so dirty now. That factory on Erie Street always burns soft coal. I don’t blame the waitress⁠—and, anyway, Jane, you know what I mean, what difference does it make? The main thing is to keep Mamma tranquil, and she’d never know about the pantry cupboards if Minnie didn’t tell her.

“She ought to move, of course, into some nice apartment that would be easy to live in, but she won’t hear of it. They’re going to pull down the house across the yard and put up a skyscraper. It will take away all the south sun and the blank north wall will be hideous to look at. I hate to think what Minnie will say when the wreckers begin. The plaster dust will sift in all the windows and the noise will be frightful. After that steel riveting, I suppose, all summer and fall.

“If you were here, I’d really advise trying to move them at once, but I honestly don’t feel up to all the argument alone. And, after all, perhaps it wouldn’t be worth while. Mamma’s seventy-seven and she’d never really feel at home anywhere else. She doesn’t do anything any more. She never goes out. Just walks around that empty house, rummaging in bureau drawers and boxes, going over her possessions and trying to throw things away. You know Mamma always kept everything, and the closets are all full of perfectly worthless objects. She doesn’t accomplish a thing, of course, and it tires her fearfully. But she won’t stay quiet.

“She’s always very sweet with me when I drop in, and I think she’s quite happy. But Minnie says she talks a lot about how she wants to leave things. She mentions that to me, sometimes, and I just hate to hear her. It’s queer⁠—you’d think it would make her feel so sad, but she seems rather to enjoy it. I think it makes her feel important again⁠—you know, something to be reckoned with. Perhaps at seventy-seven that’s the only way you can feel important⁠—by disposing of your property. That would account for lots of startling wills, wouldn’t it, Jane?

“She told me last week that you were to have the seed-pearl set and I was to have the amethyst necklace. It really made me cry. She says she wants that opal pin that she always said was Cicily’s to go to Belle, now, along with the cameos. But she’ll change her mind about that, of course, when she hears of Billy Winter.

“Minnie reads the paper to her every night in the library. They’re always sitting there together when Robin and I drop in. Reading the paper or talking over old times. In a way it seems awful⁠—Mamma talking like that with Minnie⁠—But Minnie’s really the only one, now, who remembers the things that Mamma likes to talk about. She always stands up very nicely when Robin and I are there, but I know when we’ve gone she just settles down in Papa’s armchair, and she doesn’t wear her apron any longer. I think I ought to try to make her, but Robin says to let her alone.

“I wouldn’t write Mamma much about the wedding if I were you. Not even about the children. It would only upset her. Her great-grandchildren don’t seem to mean much to her any more. They’re just things that make the general situation worse. I dread telling her about Belle. She keeps saying she’s glad that Papa was spared all this. And Mrs. Lester. She always speaks as if they had died just last week. And, after all, it’s nine years now.

“Of course, Jane, I think we really feel just as badly about it as Mamma does. But we have to carry it off. Old people are just like children. They have no mercy on you. I get so sick of trying to defend the situation to Mamma and Minnie, when I think, in my heart, there’s no defence for it.

“Well⁠—when Jack’s a full-fledged engineer and Belle and Billy have settled down in Ritchie Court and Cicily and Albert are living in Peking, I suppose we’ll all shake down in some dreadful modern way and accept the situation and not even feel awkward about it. Cicily’s children are still my grandchildren and Belle’s children are Muriel’s grandchildren as well as mine. We’re all held together by the hands of babies, which, I suppose, are the strongest links in the world. Nevertheless, Cicily and Albert won’t live in Peking forever, and I just can’t bear to think of the Christmas dinners and Thanksgiving luncheons that are ahead of us! It all seems so terribly confused and sordid.

“But I’m fifty-six, old dear, and you’re fifty-one and Stephen’s turned sixty and Robin’s sixty-three. The children will all have to live with the messes they’ve made a great deal longer than we will. So I suppose it’s none of our business⁠—how they work out their own salvation. I wish I could really think so.

Jane read the letter through three times and then sat staring at it in silence. She was thinking of Cicily. Of Cicily, sitting at her side on the sofa of her little French drawing-room in Lakewood and saying courageously, “In two years’ time we’ll all be a great deal happier. A great deal happier than we’ve been for years.” It was, however, “a dreadful modern way” to find your happiness. Jane had no sympathy with it. She did not even feel sure that Belle’s engagement made matters any better. It made them worse, perhaps. More trivial, more meaningless, more like the monkey house. She would not tell Cicily, she reflected firmly, about Belle’s engagement. She would not give her that satisfaction.

VIII

Three days later, when Jane entered Flora’s drawing-room with Stephen, she had no particular sense that she was going to witness the consecration of a marriage. The civil rites of France that they had all subscribed to that morning had made Cicily, she conceded, Albert’s lawful wife. This blessing of the Church seemed but an irrelevant afterthought. Cicily had set her heart on it, however. It was part of the party. It all went to prove that this was a very usual situation, a very gay situation, a very happy situation. It was the consummation of the friendly conspiracy of chatter.

Flora’s beautiful formal room was swept and garnished for the ceremony. It was always a little bare. The polished floor was sparsely adorned with three small rugs. The furniture was clustered in little social groups of chairs and sofas and small convenient tables. A Renoir hung over the fireplace⁠—it was the only picture in the room⁠—the portrait of a plump dark lady in a red velvet gown with a shirred bustle and a fair-haired child in a white muslin frock with a blue sash. The room was filled with vases of white lilies and curtained against the crude glare of the July sunshine. The perfume of the flowers, the subdued light, the faint gleam, here and there, of glass and gilt and parquet, the tranquillity of the Victorian lady over the fireplace, all subtly contributed to the sense of space and serenity that was the room’s distinguishing characteristic. The windows were open, their silken hangings moving a little in the gentle July breeze. The uproar of the Paris traffic was hushed in Flora’s neighbourhood. The tiny, rippling plash of some fountain in an outer court could be distinctly heard above the voices of Flora’s guests.

Flora’s guests were very few in number. Jane’s eyes found Cicily at once. She was at Albert’s side, smiling up into the face of a rather more than middle-aged gentleman, who was standing, when Jane entered the drawing-room, with his back to the door. Her gown was charming⁠—a daffodil yellow chiffon. A great straw shade hat hid her golden hair. She was carrying a sheaf of yellow calla lilies. The three children were being restrained by Molly in a distant corner of the room. Robin Redbreast was scuffling on the shiny floor. To judge by their rosy, excited faces they had no sense of the solemnity of the occasion. Flora, in a frock of pale grey taffeta, was talking to Ed Brown on the hearth beneath the Renoir. Ed Brown looked very cheerful. He had a gardenia in the buttonhole of his cutaway. Muriel, in a striking new costume of black-and-white satin, was chatting very pleasantly with the Church of England clergyman. He was a very callow young clergyman, and he did not look entirely at his ease with Muriel. She was doing her best for him, however. She had turned the full battery of her deeply shaded, bright blue eyes upon his embarrassed countenance. Her carmined lips were smiling.

“Here you are, Jane!” cried Flora.

Cicily waved her yellow lilies. The more than middle-aged gentleman at whom she had been smiling turned as she did so. Across the slippery expanse of polished floor, Jane stared at him, astounded. She suffered a distinct sense of shock. She was back, instantly, in Chicago in the early nineties. She was back in the Duroys’ little crowded living-room in the Saint James Apartments. She had two thin pigtails and a sense of social inadequacy and she was staring at Mr. Duroy! He had come! It was André! But how exactly like his father! The greying beard, the beribboned eyeglasses, the shred of scarlet silk run through the buttonhole! The wise, sophisticated gleam in the shrewd brown eyes!

The eyes were not sufficiently sophisticated, however, to veil their expression of complete astonishment. André stared at Jane. She saw the glint of amazement fade quickly from his face. A broad smile of pleasure supplanted it. It had struck her like lightning, however. She knew what it meant. She was fifty-one years old. Then André was holding both her hands in his own.

“Jane!” he was crying. “It is really you!” Looking up at the bearded face, meeting the wise, sophisticated gleam behind the beribboned eyeglasses, Jane was desperately trying to realize that it was really André.

“And this is Stephen,” she said confusedly.

The men shook hands. Cicily kissed her prettily over the yellow lilies. Albert tore his eyes from his bride to smile happily, reassuringly at Jane. The clergyman slipped away to get into his vestments. Cicily was taking command of the situation.

“I’ll stand here near the windows,” she was saying gaily. “I want the children near me, Molly! And you, too, Mumsy!”

André was staring at Jane. She still felt he must be Mr. Duroy. Cicily slipped her arm around her waist.

“Have you heard from Aunt Isabel?” she asked. “Albert had a cable from Belle this noon. She was married yesterday to Billy Winter.” Her blue eyes, meeting Jane’s, were twinkling with tranquil amusement. “She wouldn’t let me get ahead of her! But isn’t it nice?”

The clergyman had returned. His vested figure looked strangely out of place in Flora’s drawing-room.

“Come, Dad!” cried Cicily. “You know your place by this time!”

The little company had gathered in an informal semicircle. Stephen looked very grim as he took his stand by Cicily. Ed Brown was beaming, in step-paternal solicitude, at the ardent young face of Albert. Robin Redbreast was clinging to Molly’s hand. Jane moved to put her arms around the twins. Little John Ward smiled happily up at her. André was covertly watching her, all the time, from his stand between Flora and Muriel. The Church of England clergyman opened his prayer book.

“Dearly beloved brethren,” he said, “we are met together in the sight of God and this company to join together this man and this woman⁠—”

Jane turned her eyes from the flushed and radiant face of her recalcitrant daughter. She would not look at it. She could not look at it. This was worse than any wedding. This was worse than all the weddings. The measured tones of the clergyman’s voice recalled with frightful vividness the ceremony in her little Lakewood garden. Was she the only wedding guest, Jane wondered dumbly, that saw so plainly the pleasant, snub-nosed, twinkle-eyed ghost of Jack, standing at Cicily’s side?

IX

“I didn’t think you’d come,” said Jane.

“Of course I came,” said André.

They were sitting side by side in a taxi that was rolling down the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. Half an hour before Jane had seen Cicily depart for her honeymoon with Albert Lancaster. The parting with the children had been painfully emotional. Cicily herself had been very much moved. Little Jane had wept, and John had clung to his mother, and Robin Redbreast had tried to run after her as she paused on Albert’s arm, in the doorway of Flora’s apartment, to toss one last tremulous kiss to Jane.

“Well⁠—that’s over!” Stephen had said, when she had vanished. Personally Jane felt that it had just begun. The summer stretched before her with the children to watch over⁠—the autumn with its inevitable parting⁠—the years ahead with their adjustments and compromises. Then André had spoken.

“Are you really going tomorrow?” he had asked.

Jane had nodded.

“Then won’t you come back with me, now, to my studio? I want to talk to you.”

“Oh, go, Jane!” Flora had cried. “André’s studio is awfully interesting.”

“I think,” Jane had said rather slowly, “I’d better go back to the Chatham with Stephen. The children are dining with us, so Molly can pack.”

“Won’t Stephen come, too?” said André, a little hesitantly.

“No,” said Stephen abruptly. “I⁠—I think I’d like to be with the kids. But why don’t you go, Jane?”

And André had picked up his hat. That was how Jane had come to be with him in the taxi. She was still trying to realize that he was really himself. It was a great waste of André, she reflected, to have to meet him after thirty-four years at Cicily’s wedding. Her thoughts were with the grandchildren. It was hard to concentrate on André, after all she had just been through. Perhaps at fifty-one, however, it would always be hard to concentrate on any man. At fifty-one, you were perpetually torn by conflicting preoccupations. Meeting André’s gaze with a smile, Jane observed, a trifle whimsically, that he, at least, had achieved concentration. His wise, sophisticated brown eyes were bent earnestly upon her.

“You didn’t really think I wouldn’t come, did you?” said André.

“I didn’t know,” said Jane. Then added honestly, “I didn’t want to hope too much that you would.”

“Why not?” smiled André.

“For fear of being disappointed,” said Jane promptly. “I like to keep my illusions.”

“Am I one of your illusions, Jane?” asked André, with a twinkle.

“You always have been,” said Jane soberly.

André laughed at that. “The same honest Jane!” he said, as the taxi drew up at the curbing.

As André paid the cabman, Jane stood on the sidewalk and wondered where she was. She stared up at the grey stone façade of the building before her. She had not noticed where the taxi was going. It had crossed the Seine. That was all she knew. She felt a pleasing little sense of adventure as she followed André through some iron gates, across the corner of a crumbling courtyard, and in a tall carved doorway that opened on the court. A curved stone stairway stretched before her, leading up into comparative darkness. Jane’s sense of adventure deepened.

“It’s three flights up,” said André, “and there is no lift.”

Jane tried not to catch her breath too audibly as she plodded up the stairs, her hand on the iron rail. Her sense of adventure had faded a little. How ignominious, she was thinking, how fifty-one, to have to puff and pant on a staircase at André’s side! On the third landing he unlocked a door.

“Come in,” he said.

Jane found herself in a large light whitewashed room, the walls of which were hung with charcoal sketches and lined with bronze and plaster and marble figures. A frame platform occupied the centre of the floor. On it were placed a high stool, a box of sculptor’s tools, and a tall ambiguous form that was draped in a white cloth. A grand piano stood in one corner. Near it were clustered a divan, two comfortable armchairs, and a tea-table. Above them a great square window looked out over the rounded tops of an avenue of horse-chestnuts, down a curving vista of narrow grey street to the Gothic portico of a little hunchbacked church. One of the tourist-free, nameless old churches, Jane thought, that you always meant to visit in Paris and never did!

“Well, how do you like it?” asked André.

“I love it,” said Jane.

She sat down in an armchair and smiled up at André. She was beginning to feel that this bearded gentleman was really the boy that she had loved. The grandchildren seemed very far away. She felt a tremulous little sense of intimacy at the thought that this was André’s very own studio and that they were alone in it together.

“I do all my work here,” said André.

Jane gazed about her. The place looked very businesslike.

The armchairs were worn and the divan was covered with a frayed Indian rug and a heterogeneous collection of cushions that had seen better days. The tea-set was a little dusty. Jane felt, absurdly, that she would like to wash that tea-set for André!

“Would you like some tea?” he asked.

Jane shook her head.

“I can get it,” said André. “I live here, you know, a great deal of the time. I’ve a bedroom and a kitchen on the court.”

“I thought,” said Jane, “you had a house in Paris.”

“I have,” said André, “but my wife’s not often in it. I live there, usually, when she’s in town.”

His words made Jane think instantly of the older Duroys. Of Mr. Duroy, looking just like André, riding that tandem bicycle with his wife!

“André,” she said, “where is your mother?”

“She lives in England,” said André soberly. “Father died twenty years ago in Prague. Mother went back to my grandfather’s house in Bath.”

“The one you told me about,” smiled Jane, “in the Royal Crescent?”

“The same,” said André, answering her smile. “Mother’s seventy-three, you know. She’s very active. She breezes in here every few months and washes up those teacups!” He broke off abruptly. “Are you interested in sculpture?”

“I’m interested in yours,” said Jane.

Her eyes were wandering over the bronze and plaster and marble figures. They were charming, Jane thought. It was absurd of Cicily to call that Eve vieux jeu! It was absurd of Cicily to say⁠—Jane rose suddenly from her chair. Her gaze on the bronze and plaster and marble figures had grown a little more intent. She walked the length of the room in silence. André’s nymphs and Eves and saints and Madonnas drooped on every pedestal. Soft limbs and clinging draperies met the eye at every turn. The charcoal sketches on the walls vaguely revealed the grace of feminine curves. There was a certain harem-like quality to André’s studio! Would she have noticed it, Jane wondered, if it had not been for Cicily’s cynical words in the Luxembourg Gallery? Why⁠—it was an absolutely Adamless Eden! Except for André, of course.

“I must show you what I’m doing now,” he said suddenly. He turned toward the frame platform. “It’s a war memorial,” he explained, as he removed the cloth from the ambiguous form. “Isn’t she charming?”

She was charming. She was just that. Jane stared in silence at the unfinished figure⁠—a lovely girlish angel, sheathing a broken sword over a young dead warrior. Angels should be sexless, thought Jane quickly. Over young dead warriors their wings should droop in pity, not in love.

“Isn’t she charming?” repeated André. “My angel?”

Who was she? Jane could not help thinking. It was one of those thoughts that you despised yourself for, of course.

“Yes,” she said doubtfully. “Yes, but⁠—”

“But what?” smiled André.

“Not awfully⁠—angelic.” Jane wondered, as she spoke, just why she felt that she must make her criticism articulate. It was part of the old fourteen-year-old feeling of intimacy, perhaps. The feeling that she always owed André the truth. He was smiling again a trifle ironically.

“A little earthy, you think, my angel?”

Jane nodded soberly.

“Perhaps you’re right,” said André cheerfully. “Some of my angels have been a little earthy, you know.”

Jane looked at André. She still had that funny feeling that she owed him the truth.

“That’s too bad,” she said.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said André. “I’ve liked them earthy.”

Jane could not quite respond to his comical smile.

“Wasn’t that⁠—rather foolish of you?” she said slowly. She was beginning to feel a terrible prig! André was looking at her with a very amused twinkle in his shrewd brown eyes.

“Qui vit sans folie n’est pas si sage qu’il croít,” he said. “La Rochefoucauld said that, Jane. He was a very wise old boy.”

Jane’s glance had dropped before André’s twinkle.

“Yes,” she said slowly, “but⁠—”

“But what?” said André again.

Jane’s eyes were on his hands. She had felt a little shock of recognition when she looked at them. Hands did not change as faces did, she thought. André’s were still the strong sculptor’s hands of his boyhood. Prig or no prig, Jane felt an inexplicable impulse to give André good advice.

“André,” she said solemnly, “you ought to snap out of all this. Leave Paris. Go out to the provinces and forget the earthy angels. You’ve still got twenty years ahead of you.” André was smiling at her very amusedly, but Jane was not abashed. “You ought to come back to the corn belt, André. I know that seems ridiculous, but it’s true. Come back to the corn belt and do a bronze of Lincoln. Spend a winter in Springfield, Illinois, and get to know the rail-splitter. It would do you good.”

He shook his head. “It’s not in my line,” he said. “I tried a bronze of Foch last year. I had a good commission, but I couldn’t get interested.”

“You would get interested,” urged Jane, “if you really worked at it. You get interested in anything you actually experience.”

Again André’s smile was very much amused. But rather tender.

“It’s thirty-four years since I last saw you, Jane,” he said. “What have you experienced?”

He had dismissed the subject. He spoke as if to a child. Jane suddenly felt very young and virginal, but just a little irritated.

“I’ve experienced Stephen,” she said briefly.

“That all, Jane?” asked André. Under his ironic eye Jane felt far from confidential. She succumbed to an impulse to dismiss a subject herself.

“Of course,” she said.

“I wonder,” said André gallantly. But the gallantry was not very convincing. He did not seem incredulous. Jane was not surprised. She knew, of course, that she did not look any longer like the kind of woman who had ever experienced anything very much.

“But if it’s true,” continued André lightly, “don’t let it trouble you. L’amour fait passer le temps, le temps fait passer l’amour. It all comes to the same thing in the end, Jane, whatever we experience.”

Jane stared at him, appalled. He was pulling the cloth back over his earthy angel. He seemed quite unconscious of the significance of his utterance. Of the significance of the lesson that he had learned from life. Jane did not feel young and virginal and irritated any longer. She felt fifty-one years old and quite stripped of illusion. But very sorry for André.

“I must go,” she said. “I must go back to Stephen.” The grandchildren seemed much nearer than they had twenty minutes before. André smiled pleasantly at her as she preceded him out of the studio.

“I loved seeing your angel,” said Jane politely.

They descended the stairs together in silence. They crossed the crumbling courtyard and went out through the iron gates. André whistled for a taxi. Jane could not think of anything more to say to him. She was thinking of the faith that she had kept with the lover of her girlhood. “L’amour fait passer le temps, le temps fait passer l’amour.” Jane wished very sincerely that André had stayed in the French Alps. She wished that she had never come to his studio. The taxi rolled up to the curb. André handed her into it.

“Goodbye,” said Jane.

“Au revoir,” said André. He did look exactly like his father⁠—in spite of the earthy angels! “It’s been great to see you, Jane!”

“Goodbye,” said Jane again. She smiled and nodded gaily. The taxi rolled off down the curving vista of the narrow grey street. It tooted its horn and turned abruptly at the Gothic portico of the little hunchbacked church. The quai, the Seine, the Isle Saint-Louis and the towers of Notre Dame swung quickly into view. The day was fading into a sunset haze. But Jane was not thinking of the view. She was thinking of how things turned out. Of the inevitable disillusion of life.

“It all comes to the same thing in the end, Jane, whatever we experience.” But that was not true. That was a very fallacious philosophy! For, obviously, you did not come to the same thing in the end, yourself. You were, eventually, the product of your experience.

Jane’s mind returned to the problems of her children. If she had had Cicily’s courage of conviction, she reflected with a dawning twinkle, she might have married André and remarried Stephen and run away with Jimmy. Her life might have been the more interesting for those forbidden experiments. But she would not have been the same Jane at fifty-one. Not that Jane thought so much of the Jane she was. Or did she? Did you not always, Jane asked herself honestly, think a little too tenderly of the kind of person that you had turned out to be?

Cicily had been right about one thing. You had to choose in life. And perhaps you never gave up anything except what some secret self-knowledge whispered that you did not really care to possess. But no, thought Jane! She had made her sacrifices in agony of spirit. She had made them in simplicity and sincerity and because of that curious inner scruple that Matthew Arnold had defined⁠—that “enduring power, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness.” But to what end?

For Cicily had been right about another thing. You did not know⁠—you could not ever tell⁠—just where the path you had not taken would have led you. Cicily and Albert, on their way to Russia, were very happy. Belle and Billy were happy in Murray Bay. Jack, stringing his telephone wires and building his bridges down near Mexico City, was well on the road, perhaps, to a more enduring happiness than he had ever known before. The six children, Jane was prepared to admit, would probably fare quite as well at the hands of five affectionate parents as they had at the hands of four. Jane could not conscientiously claim that the world was any the worse for Cicily’s bad behaviour.

To what end, then, did you struggle to live with dignity and decency and decorum? To play the game with the cards that were dealt you? Was it only to cultivate in your own character that intangible quality that Jane, for want of a better word, had defined as grace? Was it only to feel self-respectful on your deathbed? That seemed a barren reward.

“I have lived and accomplished the task that Destiny gave me, and now I shall pass beneath the earth no common shade.” Dido had said that. Across the years Dido had said that to Jane and Agnes on the Johnsons’ little front porch “west of Clark Street.” Jane could remember thinking it was “nice and proud,” Dido’s niceness and her pride had illumined the difficult hexameters of Virgil’s Aeneid. They had burned with a brighter light than the flames of her funeral pyre.

The reward, however, still seemed a trifle barren. To pass beneath the earth no common shade. That romantic prospect was not as inviting to Jane at fifty-one as it had been at sixteen. A place in the hierarchy of heaven seemed rather unimportant. Jane felt a little weary, facing an immortality that would prove in the end only one more social adventure. She would prefer oblivion.

But André had not been right about experience. If André had married Jane and settled down in Lakewood, he would not have been the bearded cynic he was at fifty-three. Wives had a lot to do with it. It was Cyprienne⁠—and the earthy angels, of course⁠—Jane thought indulgently, who had made André what he was today. “L’amour fait passer le temps, le temps fait passer l’amour!” What words to hear from the lips of the man whose romantic memory you had been tenderly cherishing for thirty-four years! From the lips of the boy who had walked so bravely, so proudly out of your youth down Victorian Pine Street! Jane was thinking again of the inevitable disillusion of life. Was it inevitable, she wondered? If Jimmy had lived, would he be as dead as André?

X

But Stephen had lived and he was still very much alive. That consoling thought struck Jane the moment that she entered the little green sitting-room in the Chatham Hotel, and she felt distinctly cheered by it. Stephen was sitting between the twins on the Empire sofa, with Robin Redbreast on his knees. He looked cheerfully up at Jane over the book he was reading. Jane recognized it at once. It was the familiar copy of the King Arthur Stories, from their library at home. Stephen must have taken it from the shelf, Jane thought swiftly, and packed it in his trunk for the grandchildren without saying anything to her about it. Stephen was a darling! Husbands had a lot to do with it, too, of course. Stephen had had a lot to do with the sort of Jane Jane found herself at fifty-one. Facing Stephen and the grandchildren she felt a little ashamed of her recent preoccupation with André and with Jimmy.

“Go on,” she said. “Don’t stop reading.” She sank into a chair. The children wriggled their approval.

Stephen’s eyes returned to the book. “We’re just finishing,” he said.

Jane knew the story well. It was the first adventure of Sir Percival in the Forest of Arroy. The boyish Sir Percival⁠—Jane’s favourite knight. She had heard Stephen read it innumerable times to Cicily, Jenny, and Steve. Years ago now, of course, though it seemed only yesterday. When she closed her eyes, Jane lost all sense of time. She lost all sense of the grandchildren. When Jane closed her eyes, she was no longer in Paris. But she was not in the Forest of Arroy. She was back once more in the Lakewood living-room, and Stephen was sitting in his armchair with the children around him, and Cicily’s hair was long and crinkly, and Jenny’s round forehead was topped with her Alice in Wonderland comb, and Steve was wearing his first sailor suit.

How odd it was, thought Jane, that children grew up so unexpectedly. On looking back down the years, you could not see just what you had done⁠—just what you had let them do that⁠—And once they had escaped you, what was there to say to them? But Stephen was finishing the story of Sir Percival.

“ ‘And as it was with Sir Percival in that first adventure, so may you meet with a like success when you ride forth upon your first undertakings after you have entered into the glory of your knighthood, with your life lying before you and a whole world whereinto you may freely enter to do your devoirs to the glory of God and your own honour.’ ”

There it was in a nutshell. That was all there was for parents to say to children. You could bring them up according to your lights, but in the end you could only watch them ride forth and wish them well. And parents should remember, Jane admitted with a sigh, that the whole world should be freely entered, and that the idea of devoirs was apt to differ in successive generations.

Stephen closed the book. Robin Redbreast wriggled off his knee. Little John Ward’s eyes were shining. His sister’s face, however, looked a trifle wistful. Perhaps she had not been listening so very attentively.

“I wonder,” she said slowly, “I wonder where Mother is now.”

Stephen’s eyes met Jane’s. “I was thinking,” he said, “we might all go out to the theatre this evening.”

“All of us?” cried little Jane. Her eyes were shining now like John Ward’s.

“All of us,” said Stephen solemnly.

“Not Robin Redbreast?” said John Ward.

“Yes, Robin Redbreast,” said Stephen.

The twins began jumping up and down in ecstasy. Robin Redbreast’s four-year-old countenance was stupefied with delight. It was fun to please children. You could please them so easily. Nevertheless, Jane looked inquiringly at Stephen.

“There’s a company reviving the Gilbert and Sullivan operas at the Comédie des Champs-Élysées,” said Stephen. “I found it in the Paris Herald. Tonight they’re playing The Mikado.”

The twins’ jumps had accelerated into a spirited game of tag. They were chasing Robin Redbreast around the Empire sofa. Stephen, King Arthur stories in hand, had risen to his feet. He was looking indulgently at his grandchildren and humming a little tune. He did not know the words, of course.

Stephen never knew the words of anything! But Jane knew them. She walked over to Stephen and put her arm through his.

Robin Redbreast had collided with the centre table. He promptly fell down, and little Jane fell over him and John Ward triumphantly tagged her on an uplifted ankle. Stephen was still looking indulgently at his grandchildren and he was still humming his tune. The grimness, Jane realized suddenly, had quite faded from his face. Jane’s eyes returned to the twins and Robin Redbreast. The unspoken words of Stephen’s tune were ringing in her ears:

“Everything is a source of fun,
Nobody’s safe, for we care for none,
Life is a joke that’s just begun⁠—”

When you looked at a child, Jane reflected solemnly, you could never believe that it would grow up to disappoint you.