Chambers Robert William
The Common Law
"I usually go up with Rita," she said. "Rita is a dear. But do you know, I believe she is not a particularly happy girl."
"Why?"
"I don't know why…. After all, such a life—hers and mine—is only happy if you make it so…. And I don't believe she tries to make it so. Perhaps she doesn't care. She is very young—and very pretty—too young and pretty to be so indifferent—so tired."
She stood on the step behind and above him, looking down at his back and his well-set shoulders. They were inviting, those firm, broad, young shoulders of his; and she laid both hands on them.
"Shall I row you about in the flat-boat, Louis?"
"I'll do the paddling—"
"Not by any means. I like to row, if you please. I have cold cream and a pair of gloves, so that I shall acquire no blisters."
They walked together out to the road and along it, she holding to her skirts and his arm, until the star-lit pond came into view.
Afloat in the ancient, weedy craft he watched her slender strength mastering the clumsy oars—watched her, idly charmed with her beauty and the quaint, childish pleasure that she took in manoeuvring among the shoreward lily pads and stumps till clear water was reached and the little misty wavelets came slap! slap! against the bow.
"If you were Querida you'd sing in an exceedingly agreeable tenor," she observed.
"Not being Querida, and labouring further under the disadvantage of a barytone, I won't," he said.
"Please, Louis."
"Oh, very well—if you feel as romantic as that." And he began to sing:
"My wife's gone to the country, Hurrah! Hurrah!"
"Louis! Stop it! Do you know you are positively corrupt to do such a thing at such a time as this?"
"Well, it's all I know, Valerie—"
"I could cry!" she said, indignantly, and maintained a dangerous silence until they drifted into the still waters of the outlet where the starlight silvered the sedge-grass and feathery foliage formed a roof above.
Into the leafy tunnel they floated, oars shipped; she, cheek on hand, watching the fire-flies on the water; he, rid of his cigarette, motionless in the stern.
After they had drifted half a mile she seemed disinclined to resume the oars; so he crossed with her, swung the boat, and drove it foaming against the silent current.
On the return they said very little. She stood pensive, distraite, as he tied the boat, then—for the road was dark and uneven—took his arm and turned away beside him.
"I'm afraid I haven't been very amusing company," he ventured.
She tightened her arm in his—a momentary, gentle pressure:
"I'm merely too happy to talk," she said. "Does that answer satisfy you?"
Touched deeply, he took her hand which rested so lightly on his sleeve—a hand so soft and fine of texture—so cool and fresh and slender that the youth and fragrance of it drew his lips to it. Then he reversed it and kissed the palm.
"Why, Louis," she said, "I didn't think you could be so sentimental."
"Is that sentimental?"
"Isn't it?"
"It rather looks like it, doesn't it?"
"Rather."
"Did you mind?"
"No…. Only—you and I—it seems—superfluous. I don't think anything you do could make me like you more than I do."
"You sweet little thing!"
"No, only loyal, Kelly. I can never alter toward you."
"What's that? A vow!"
"Yes—of constancy and of friendship eternal."
"'Nomen amicitia est; nomen inane fides!—Friendship is only a name; constancy an empty title,'" he quoted.
"Do you believe that?"
"Constancy is an honest wish, but a dishonest promise," he said. "You know it lies with the gods, Valerie."
"So they say. But I know myself. And I know that, however I may ever care for anybody else, it can never be at your expense—at the cost of one atom of my regard for you. As I care for you now, so have I from the beginning; so will I to the end; care more for you, perhaps; but never less, Louis. And that I know."
More deeply moved than he perhaps cared to be, he walked on slowly in silence, measuring his step to hers. In the peace of the midnight world, in the peace of her presence, he was aware of a tranquillity, a rest that he had not known in weeks. Vaguely first, then uneasily, he remembered that he had not known it since her departure, and shook off the revelation with instinctive recoil—dismissed it, smiled at it to have done with it. For such things could not happen.
The woods were fragrant as they passed; a little rill, swelling from the thicket of tangled jewel-weed, welled up, bubbling in the starlight. She knelt down and drank from her cupped hands, and offered him the same sweet cup, holding it fragrantly to his lips.
And there, on their knees under the stars, he touched her full child-like lips with his; and, laughing, she let him kiss her again—but not a third time, swaying back from her knees to avoid him, then rising lithely to her feet.
"The poor nymph and the great god Kelly!" she said; "a new hero for the pantheon: a new dryad to weep over. Kelly, I believe your story of your golden cloud, now."
"Didn't you credit it before?"
"No."
"But now that I've kissed you, you do believe it?"
"Y-yes."
"Then to fix that belief more firmly—"
"Oh, no, you mustn't, Kelly—" she cried, her soft voice hinting of hidden laughter. "I'm quite sure that my belief is very firmly fixed. Hear me recite my creed. Credo! I believe that you are the great god Kelly, perfectly capable of travelling about wrapped in a golden cloud—"
"You are mocking at the gods!"
"No, I'm not. Who am I to affront Olympus?… Wh-what are you going to do, Kelly? Fly to the sacred mount with me?"
But she suffered his arm to remain around her waist as they moved slowly on through the darkness.
"How long are you going to stay? Tell me, Louis. I'm as tragically curious as Pandora and Psyche and Bluebeard's wife, melted into the one and eternal feminine."
"I'm going to-morrow."
"Oh-h," she said, softly.
He was silent. They walked on, she with her head bent a little.
"Didn't you want me to?" he asked at length.
"Not if you care to stay…. I never want what those I care for are indifferent about."
"I am not indifferent. I think I had better go."
"Is the reason important?"
"I don't know, Valerie—I don't really know."
He was thinking of this new and sweet familiarity—something suddenly born into being under the wide stars—something that had not been a moment since, and now was—something invoked by the vastness of earth and sky—something confirmed by the wind in the forest.
"I had better go," he said.
Her silence acquiesced; they turned into the ragged lawn, ascended the dew-wet steps; and then he released her waist.
The hallways were dark and deserted as they mounted the stairs side by side.
"This is my door," she said.
"Mine is on the next floor."
"Then—good night, Louis."
He took her hand in silence. After a moment she released it; laid both hands lightly on his shoulders, lifted her face and kissed him.
"Good night," she said. "You have made this a very happy day in my life.
Shall I see you in the morning?"
"I'm afraid not. I left word to have a horse ready at daylight. It is not far from that, now."
"Then I shall not see you again?"
"Not until you come to New York."
"Couldn't you come back for a day? Querida is coming. Sammy and Harry Annan are coming up over Sunday. Couldn't you?"
"Valerie, dear, I could"—he checked himself; thought for a while until the strain of his set teeth aroused him to consciousness of his own emotion.
Rather white he looked at her, searching for the best phrase—for it was already threatening to be a matter of phrases now—of forced smiles—and some breathing spot fit for the leisure of self-examination.
"I'm going back to paint," he said. "Those commissions have waited long enough."
He strove to visualise his studio, to summon up the calm routine of the old regime—as though the colourless placidity of the past could steady him.
"Will you need me?" she asked.
"Later—of course. Just now I've a lot of men's figures to deal with—that symbolical affair for the new court house."
"Then you don't need me?"
"No."
She thought a moment, slim fingers resting on the knob of her door, standing partly turned away from him. Then, opening her door, she stepped inside, hesitated, looked back:
"Good-bye, Louis, dear," she said, gently.
CHAPTER VI
Neville had begun to see less and less of Valerie West. When she first returned from the country in September she had come to the studio and had given him three or four mornings on the portrait which he had begun during the previous summer. But the painting of it involved him in difficulties entirely foreign to him—difficulties born of technical timidity of the increasing and inexplicable lack of self-confidence. And deeply worried, he laid it aside, A dull, unreasoning anxiety possessed him. Those who had given him commissions to execute were commencing to importune him for results. He had never before disappointed any client. Valerie could be of very little service to him in the big mural decorations which, almost in despair, he had abruptly started. Here and there, in the imposing compositions designed for the Court House, a female figure, or group of figures, was required, but, in the main, male figures filled the preliminary cartoons—great law-givers and law-defenders of all ages and all lands, in robes and gowns of silks; in armour, in skins, in velvet and ermine—men wearing doublet, jack-coat, pourpoint; men in turban and caftan, men covered with mail of all kinds—armour of leather, of fibre, of lacquer, of quilted silk, of linked steel, Milanaise, iron cuirass; the emblazoned panoply of the Mongol paladins; Timour Melek's greaves of virgin gold; men of all nations and of all ages who fashioned or executed human law, from Moses to Caesar, from Mohammed to Genghis Kahn and the Golden Emperor, from Charlemagne to Napoleon, and down through those who made and upheld the laws in the Western world, beginning with Hiawatha, creator of the Iroquois Confederacy—the Great League.
His studio was a confusion of silks, cut velvets, tapestries, embroideries, carpets of the East, lay figures glittering with replicas of priceless armour. Delicate fabrics trailed over chair and floor almost under foot; inlaid and gem-hilted weapons, illuminated missals, glass-cased papyri, gilded zones, filets, girdles, robes of fur, hoods, wallets, helmets, hats, lay piled up, everywhere in methodical disorder. And into and out of the studio passed male models of all statures, all ages, venerable, bearded men, men in their prime, men with the hard-hammered features and thick, sinewy necks of gladiators, men slender and pallid as dreaming scholars, youths that might have worn the gold-red elf-locks and the shoulder cloak of Venice, youth chiselled in a beauty as dark and fierce as David wore when the mailed giant went crashing earthward under the smooth round pebble from his sling.
Valerie's turn in this splendid panoply was soon over. Even had she been so inclined there was, of course, no place for her to visit now, no place to sit and watch him among all these men. After hours, once or twice, she came in to tea—to gossip a little with the old-time ease, and barter with him epigram for jest, nonsense for inconsequence. Yet, subtly—after she had gone home—she felt the effort. Either he or she had imperceptibly changed; she knew not which was guilty; but she knew.
Besides, she herself was now in universal demand—and in the furor of her popularity she had been, from the beginning, forced to choose among a very few with whom she personally felt herself at ease, and to whom she had become confidently accustomed. Also, from the beginning, she had not found it necessary to sit undraped for many—a sculptor or two—Burleson and Gary Graves—Sam Ogilvy with his eternal mermaidens, Querida—nobody else. The other engagements had been for costume or, at most, for head and shoulders. Illustrators now clamoured for her in modish garments of the moment—in dinner gown, ball gown, afternoon, carriage, motor, walking, tennis, golf, riding costumes; poster artists made her pretty features popular; photographs of her in every style of indoor and outdoor garb decorated advertisements in the backs of monthly magazines. She was seen turning on the water in model bathtubs, offering the admiring reader a box of bonbons, demurely displaying a brand of hosiery, recommending cold cream, baked beans, railroad routes, tooth powder, and real-estate on Long Island.
Her beauty, the innocent loveliness of her features, her dainty modest charm, the enchanting outline and mould of her figure were beginning to make her celebrated. Already people about town—at the play, in the park, on avenue and street, in hotels and restaurants, were beginning to recognise her, follow her with approving or hostile eyes, turn their heads to watch her.
Theatrical agents wrote her, making attractive offers for an engagement where showgirls were the ornamental caryatids which upheld the three tottering unities along Broadway. She also had chances to wear very wonderful model gowns for next season at the Countess of Severn's new dressmaking, drawing-rooms whither all snobdom crowded and shoved to get near the trade-marked coronet, and where bewildering young ladies strolled haughtily about all day long, displaying to agitated Gotham the most startling gowns in the extravagant metropolis.
She had other opportunities, too—such as meeting several varieties of fashionable men of various ages—gentlemen prominently identified with the arts and sciences—the art of killing time and the science of enjoying the assassination. And some of these assorted gentlemen maintained extensive stables and drove tandems, spikes, and fours; and some were celebrated for their yachts, or motors, or prima-donnas, or business acumen, or charitable extravagances…. Yes, truly, Valerie West was beginning to have many opportunities in this generously philanthropic world. And she was making a great deal of money—for her—but nothing like what she might very easily have made. And she knew it, young as she was. For it does not take very long to learn about such things when a girl is attempting to earn her living in this altruistic world.
"She'll spread her wings and go one of these days," observed Archie Allaire to Rita Tevis, who was posing as Psyche for one of his clever, thinly brushed, high-keyed studies very much after the manner and palette of Chaplin when they resembled neither Chartrain nor Zier, nor any other artist temporarily in vogue. For he was an adaptable man, facile, adroit, a master navigator in trimming sail to the fitful breeze of popular favour. And his work was in great demand.
"She'll be decorating the tonneau of some big touring car with crested panels—and there'll be a bunch of orchids in the crystal holder, and a Chow dog beside her, defying the traffic squad—"
"No, she won't!" snapped Rita. "She's as likely to do that as she is to dine with you again."
Allaire, caught off his guard, scowled with unfeigned annoyance. Repeated essays to ingratiate himself with Valerie had finally resulted in a dinner at the Astor, and in her firm, polite, but uncompromising declination of all future invitations from him, either to sit for him or beside him under any circumstances and any conditions whatever.
"So that's your opinion, is it, Rita?" he inquired, keeping his light-blue eyes and his thin wet brush busy on his canvas. "Well, sister, take it from muh, she thinks she's the big noise in the Great White Alley; but they're giving her the giggle behind her back."
"That giggle may be directed at you, Archie," observed Rita, scornfully; "you're usually behind her back, you know, hoisting the C.Q.D."
"Which is all right, too," he said, apparently undisturbed; "but when she goes to Atlantic City with Querida—"
"That is an utter falsehood," retorted Rita, calmly. "Whoever told you that she went there with Querida, lied."
"You think so?"
"I know so! She went alone."
"Then we'll let it go at that," said Allaire so unpleasantly that Rita took fiery offence.
"There is not a man living who has the right to look sideways at Valerie West! Everybody knows it—Neville, Querida, Sam, John Burleson—even you know it! If a man or two has touched her finger tips—her waist—her lips, perhaps—no man has obtained more than that of her—dared more than that! I have never heard that any man has ever even ventured to offend her ears, unless"—she added with malice, "that is the reason that she accepts no more invitations from you and your intimate friends."
Allaire managed to smile and continue to paint. But later he found use for his palette knife—which was unusual in a painter as clever as he and whose pride was in his technical skill with materials used and applied premier coup.
With October came the opening of many theatres; a premature gaiety animated the hotels and restaurants; winter fabrics, hats, furs, gowns, appeared in shops; the glittering windows along Fifth Avenue reflected more limousines and fewer touring bodies passing. Later top hats reappeared on street and in lobby; and when the Opera reopened, Long Island, Jersey, and Westchester were already beginning to pour in cityward, followed later by Newport, Lenox, and Bar Harbour. The police put on their new winter uniforms; furs were displayed in carriages, automobiles, and theatres; the beauty of the florist's windows became mellower, richer, and more splendid; the jewellery in the restaurants more gorgeous. Gotham was beginning to be its own again, jacked up by the Horse Show, the New Theatre, and the Opera; and by that energetic Advertising Trust Company with its branches, dependencies, and mergers, which is called Society, and which is a matter of eternal vigilance and desperate business instead of the relaxation of cultivated security in an accepted and acceptable order of things.
Among other minor incidents, almost local in character, the Academy and Society of American Artists opened its doors. And the exhibition averaged as well as it ever will, as badly as it ever had averaged. Allaire showed two portraits of fashionable women, done, this time, in the manner of Zorn, and quite as clever on the streaky surface. Sam Ogilvy proudly displayed another mermaid—Rita in_ the tub—and two babies from photographs and "chic"—very bad; but as usual it was very quickly marked sold.
Annan had a portrait of his sister Alice, poorly painted and even recognised by some of her more intimate friends. Clive Gail offered one of his marines—waves splashing and dashing all over the canvas so realistically that women instinctively stepped back and lifted their skirts, and men looked vaguely around for a waiter—at least Ogilvy said so. As for Neville, he had a single study to show—a full length—just the back and head and the soft contour of limbs melting into a luminously sombre background—a masterpiece in technical perfection, which was instantly purchased by a wise and Western millionaire, and which left the public staring but unmoved.
But it was José Querida who dominated the whole show, flooding everything with the splendour of his sunshine so that all else in the same room looked cold or tawdry or washed out. His canvas, with its superbly vigorous drawing, at once became the sensation of the exhibition. Sunday supplements reproduced it with a photograph of Querida looking amiably at a statuette of Venus which he held in his long, tapering fingers; magazines tried to print it in two colours, in three, in dozens, and made fireworks of it to Querida's inwardly suppressed agony, and their own satisfaction. Serious young men wrote "appreciations" about it; serious young women published instructive discourses concerning it in the daily papers. Somebody in the valuable columns of the Tribune inquired whether Querida's painting was meant to be symbolical; somebody in the Nation said yes; somebody in the Sun said no; somebody in something or other explained its psychological subtleties; somebody in something else screamed, "bosh!"
Meanwhile the discussion was a god-send to fashionable diners-out and to those cultivated leaders of society who prefer to talk through the Opera and philharmonic.
In what the educated daily press calls the "world of art" and the "realm of literature," Querida's picture was discussed intelligently and otherwise, but it was discussed—from the squalid table d'hôte, where unmanicured genius punctures the air with patois and punches holes in it with frenzied thumbs, to quiet, cultivated homes, where community of taste restricts the calling lists—from the noisy studio, where pianos and girls make evenings lively, to the austere bare boards or the velvet elegance of studios where authority and preciousness, and occasionally attainment, reside, and sometimes do not.
Cognatis maculis similis fera.
Neville was busy, but not too busy to go about in the evening among his own kind, and among other kinds, too. This unexpected resurgance within him of the social instinct, he made no attempt to account for to others or to himself. He had developed a mental and physical restlessness, which was not yet entirely nervous, but it had become sufficiently itching to stir him out of fatigue when the long day's work had ended—enough to drive him out of the studio—at first merely to roam about at hazard through the livelier sections of the city. But to the lonely, there is no lonelier place than a lively one; and the false brilliancy and gaiety drove him back upon himself and into his lair again, where for a while he remained meditating amid the sombre menace of looming canvases and the heavy futility of dull-gold hangings, and the mischievous malice of starlight splintering into a million incandescent rainbow rays through the sheet of glass above.
Out of this, after some days, he emerged, set in motion by his increasing restlessness. And it shoved him in the direction of his kind once more—and in the direction of other kinds.
He dined at his sister's in Seventy-ninth Street near Madison Avenue; he dined with the Grandcourts on Fifth Avenue; he decorated a few dances, embellished an opera box now and then, went to Lakewood and Tuxedo for week ends, rode for a few days at Hot Springs, frequented his clubs, frequented Stephanie, frequented Maxim's.
And all the while it seemed to him as though he were temporarily enduring something which required patience, which could not last forever, which must one day end in a great change, a complete transformation for himself, of himself, of the world around him and of his aim and hope and purpose in living. At moments, too, an odd sensation of expectancy came over him—the sense of waiting, of suppressed excitement. And he could not account for it.
Perhaps it concerned the finishing of his great mural frieze for the Court House—that is, the completion of the section begun in September. For, when it was done, and cleared out of his studio, and had been set in its place, framed by the rose and gold of marble and ormolu, a heavy reaction of relief set in, leaving him listless and indifferent at first, then idle, disinclined to begin the companion frieze; then again restless, discontented, tired, and lonely in that strange solitude which seemed to be growing wider and wider around him in rings of silence. Men praised and lauded the great frieze; and he strove to respond, to believe them—to believe in the work and in himself—strove to shake off the terrible discouragement invading him, lurking always near to reach out and touch him, slinking at his heels from street to street, from room to room, skulking always just beyond the shadows that his reading lamp cast.
Without envy, yet with profound sadness, he stood and faced the splendour of Querida's canvas. He had gone to Querida and taken him by both of his thin, olive-skinned hands, and had praised the work with a heart clean of anything unworthy. And Querida had laughed and displayed his handsome teeth, and returned compliment for compliment…. And Neville had seen, on his dresser, a photograph of Valerie, signed in her long, girlish, angular hand—"To José from Valerie"; and the date was of mid-winter.
Christmas came; he sent Valerie some furs and a note, and, before he went to Aiken to spend the holidays with his father and mother, he tried to get her on the telephone—tried half a dozen times. But she was either busy with business or with pleasure somewhere or other—and he never found her at home; so he went South without hearing from her.
After he arrived, it is true, he received from her a cigarette case and a very gay and frank Christmas greeting—happy and untroubled apparently, brimming with gossip, inconsequences, and nonsense. In it she thanked him for his letter and his gift, hoped he was happy with his parents, and expressed an almost conventional desire to see him on his return.
Then his parents came back to New York with him. Two days before New Year's Day they went to Spindrift House instead of sailing for Egypt, where for some years now they had been accustomed to spend the winters shivering at Shepherd's. And he and his sister and brother-in-law and Stephanie dined together that evening. But the plans they made to include him for a New Year's Eve home party remained uncertain as far as he was concerned. He was vague—could not promise—he himself knew not why. And they ceased to press him.
"You're growing thin and white," said Lily. "I believe you're getting painter's colic."
"House painters acquire that," he said, smiling. "I'm not a member of their union yet."
"Well, you must use as much white lead as they do on those enormous canvases of yours. Why don't you start on a trip around the world, Louis?"
He laughed.
Later, after he had taken his leave, the suggestion reoccurred to him. He took enough trouble to think about it the next morning; sent out his servant to amass a number of folders advertising world girdling tours of various attractions, read them while lunching, and sat and pondered. Why not? It might help. Because he certainly began to need help. He had gone quite stale. Querida was right; he ought to lie fallow. No ground could yield eternally without rest. Querida was clever enough to know that; and he had been stupid enough to ignore it—even disbelieve it, contemptuous of precept and proverb and wise saw, buoyed above apprehension by consciousness and faith in his own inexhaustible energy.
And, after all, something really seemed to have happened to him. He almost admitted it now for the first time—considered the proposition silently, wearily, without any definite idea of analysing it, without even the desire to solve it.
Somehow, at some time, he had lost pleasure in his powers, faith in his capacity, desire for the future. What had satisfied him yesterday, to-day became contemptible. Farther than ever, farther than the farthest, stars receded the phantoms of the great Masters. What they believed and endured and wrought and achieved seemed now not only hopelessly beyond any comprehension or attainment of his, but even beyond hope of humble discipleship.
And always, horribly, like an obsession, was creeping over him in these days the conviction of some similarity between his work and the thin, clear, clever brush-work of Allaire—with all its mastery of ways and means, all its triumph over technical difficulties, all its tricks and subtle appeals, and its falsity, and its glamour.
Reflection, retrospection sickened him. It was snowing and growing late when he wrote to a steamship agent making inquiries and asking for plans of staterooms.
Then he had tea, alone there in the early winter dusk, with the firelight playing over Gladys who sat in the full heat of the blaze, licking her only kitten, embracing its neck with one maternal paw.
He dressed about six, intending to dine somewhere alone that New Year's Eve. The somewhere, as usual, ended at the Syrinx Club—or rather at the snowy portal—for there he collided with Samuel Strathclyde Ogilvy and Henry Knickerbocker Annan, and was seized and compelled to perform with them on the snowy sidewalk, a kind of round dance resembling a pow-wow, which utterly scandalised the perfectly respectable club porter, and immensely interested the chauffeurs of a row of taxicabs in waiting.
"Come! Let up! This isn't the most dignified performance I ever assisted at," he protested.
"Who said it was dignified?" demanded Ogilvy. "We're not hunting for dignity. Harry and I came here in a hurry to find an undignified substitute for John Burleson. You're the man!"
"Certainly," said Annan, "you're the sort of cheerful ass we need in our business. Come on! Some of these taxis belong to us—"
"Where do you want me to go, you crazy—"
"Now be nice, Louis," he said, soothingly; "play pretty and don't kick and scream. Burleson was going with us to see the old year out at the Cafe Gigolette, but he's got laryngitis or some similar species of pip—"
"I don't want to go—"
"You've got to, dear friend. We've engaged a table for six—"
"Six!"
"Sure, dearie. In the college of experience coeducation is a necessary evil. Step lively, son!"
"Who is going?"
"One dream, one vision, one hallucination—" he wafted three kisses from his gloved finger tips in the general direction of Broadway—"and you, and Samuel, and I. Me lord, the taxi waits!"
"Now, Harry, I'm not feeling particularly cheerful—"
"But you will, dear friend; you will soon be feeling the Fifty-seven Varieties of cheerfulness. All kinds of society will be at the Gigolette—good, bad, fashionable, semi-fashionable—all imbued with the intellectual and commendable curiosity to see somebody 'start something.' And," he added, modestly, "Sam and I are going to see what can be accomplished—"
"No; I won't go—"
But they fell upon him and fairly slid him into a taxi, beckoning two other similar vehicles to follow in procession.
"Now, dearie," simpered Sam, "don't you feel better?"
Neville laughed and smoothed out the nap of his top hat.
They made three stops at three imposing looking apartment hotels between Sixth Avenue and Broadway—The Daisy, The Gwendolyn, The Sans Souci—where negro porters and hallboys were gorgeously conspicuous and the clerk at the desk seemed to be unusually popular with the guests. And after every stop there ensued a shifting of passengers in the taxicabs, until Neville found himself occupying the rear taxi in the procession accompanied by a lively young lady in pink silk and swansdown—a piquant face and pretty figure, white and smooth and inclined to a plumpness so far successfully contended with by her corset maker.
