The Flaw

“You know, I never should have believed a game could be so exciting.” Celia swung her racket above the dandelions that shone along the walk. Her small, fine face and slender throat, unflushed, suggested an inner glow, swift blood through transparent veins.

Her companion, striding beside her, looked down for a deliberate moment before he answered, “Glad I bullied you into trying it, then?”

“If you think I can learn soon, soon to play well!”

“Of course you’ll learn. You’ve got speed—and you’re cool. But isn’t it fun?”

“I dislike being an amateur. It’s so bungling. I like to do the things I can do perfectly.” Her voice curved about the last word, and her gray eyes, lifted an instant, had a defiant passion in their glance.

“I’m afraid perfectly would limit me to—nothing. I like trying things I can’t do. Some bungling, I guess, but adventures, too.”

“Oh, but you do things well. Think of everything you’ve persuaded me to try these last two weeks!”

“Just a happy amateur, Miss Duryea.”

“I am limited. I meant only that I don’t like to bungle. My father has given me that ideal—” Her words might have sounded priggish, cold, but in her tone, in her quick upward glance, lay entreaty.

They turned at the corner, Celia walking ahead over soft grass. Ralph Monroe followed, his blue eyes and straight, firm lips settling into gravity as he watched her, the swing of her pongee dress about slim ankles, the coil of brown hair at the base of her neck.

“After all,” he said, “whatever you do becomes beautifully done—by your doing it. I suppose I’m rushing into another thing I don’t know how to do—” he went on earnestly. “But if I bungle this, I’m done for! I’ve persuaded you to see me a little—to like me a little! Have I? You know I’m on earth?”

Celia walked on, a hint of flight in her step.

“That night Mrs. Duryea brought me to dinner—why, I might have thought I wasn’t there, from all the attention you gave me!”

“I didn’t know you—”

“Know me! You weren’t aware I existed! Drifting off after dinner—I knew then I had to make you aware of me! You had to come out of that beautiful indifferent shell before you could hear what I had to say to you!”

There was color in Celia’s cheeks at last. And, turning toward the house, the two walked through streaks of pale, late sunlight stretched over the grass, and casting a tracery of the old elms across the face of the square white house.

“I don’t want to startle you, Celia Duryea. Sometimes I’m afraid you may vanish overnight. There’s some enchantment on you! But I can’t be patient! I can’t wait! Celia!”

They reached the steps of the porch. Celia faced him, close enough to know the fast rhythm of his breathing. She cowered under the intensity of his bending over her. Within her something new and young pushed up through darkness and cold, heavy soil, up to strange light.

“Tennis again? Well, well!” The voice behind them broke the moment. “Good evening, Mr. Monroe.” Mrs. Duryea extended a brisk hand. “Well, Celia? I’m glad I caught you. Stay to dinner. I need to be amused.” She sent him a darting, humorous glance out of eyes gray like Celia’s, set in a firm, sensible face. She moved up the steps with jerks of her compact body, pulling the pins from her jaunty hat. At the door she turned, her fingers brushing back wisps of brown hair.

“You are staying, aren’t you?”

“I certainly am, if I may.” Ralph was after her in time to hold the door open. With a touch on his arm, Mrs. Duryea went into the dark hall.

“If you don’t mind?” he asked Celia, who came toward him.

“I’d like you to stay—” began Celia, her eyes meeting his. Her face had a luminous expectancy. At the sound of her mother’s voice within, her glance leaped past him:

“Oh, Philip! Back to-day! We didn’t expect you until to-morrow.”

A man’s voice, thin, answering, “I judged I was premature.”

Celia’s face quivered. She looked at Ralph, almost with horror. Then she went swiftly into the hall, her low, “Father!” winging back to Ralph.

Her mother had started up the stairs; she stood, one hand tapping on the polished rail, her mouth a little pursed. Between the heavy curtains of the library door stood Mr. Duryea, slight, immaculate, his pointed gray beard and black-ribboned eye-glasses concealing his expression. He limped forward to meet Celia.

“When did you come?” She had his hand in both of hers, and bent for his ritualistic kiss.

“This afternoon.” He held her off at arm’s-length. The light glanced across his glasses and small blue eyes with a metallic luster. “I wished you to go over some notes with me.”

“I’m sorry.” Celia released his hand. “You said to-morrow—”

“What have you been doing? I never saw you look so—blowsy!”

Celia moved away, her mouth and eyelids contracted.

“Nonsense, Philip.” Mrs. Duryea spoke in a brisk undertone. “You mean you never saw her looking as though she had had so much fun! Mr. Monroe!” She raised her voice. “Won’t you come in? This is my husband. Philip, this is Ralph Monroe, who dropped into town just as you left.”

Celia held her breath for an instant as Ralph extended his hand with a decided, “I am glad to meet you, Mr. Duryea.” But her father was prompt with his hand.

“How do you do, Mr.—what was it? Monroe? A newcomer in our little town, eh?” He seemed to shrink, to turn more gray, under the tanned bulk of the young man.

“I’m only temporary.”

“Settling up the affairs of his uncle—Walter Monroe, you know. Will you excuse us a few minutes?” Mrs. Duryea went on up the stairs.

“Tell father about some of your bridge-making—” Celia’s fleet glance at Ralph was interrupted half-way by her consciousness of her father’s stare. “I’m sure he’d be interested.” She followed her mother, her nostrils dilating at her father’s formal, “Won’t you come into the library?”

The door of her mother’s room was open. Celia, her eyes averted quickly from the loud cheerfulness of cretonne and bright rugs, slipped past to her own room. Closing herself within her familiar gray walls, she stared across the room at her reflection in the long mirror between the windows. “Blowsy!” she whispered, defiantly. Ralph had not thought that, bending over her outside in the pale sunlight. She shivered. The subtle colors and outlines of the room flowed about her, an accustomed flood into which she let herself down, submerged. It was her father who had said that! He had come home, to find her not there. And she—she saw vividly how he had seen it—she had come in like any common thing, with her young man, warm, blown—Hastily her fingers stripped off her dress, pulled out hairpins. She would show him his Celia again!

A sharp rap at the door, her mother’s voice, “Celia!” She turned from her dressing-table, her bare, slim arms up-arching to the coil of bright hair she had just caught in place.

“Oh, changing your dress?” Her mother looked in, her face rosy above her stiff collar. “Will you be down soon? I’ve got to go back to the store—Saturday, you know.”

“Yes. At once.”

“Well.” She waited. “Celia—”

The girl’s arms dropped, stiffened. She moved to the closet, returned, shaking out folds of dull-green silk, over which her eyes just touched her mother’s for an instant of hostile rejection. Mrs. Duryea closed the door. Celia heard her quick descent of the stairs.

Presently Celia went down, softly. From the rear of the house came her mother’s voice in an undertone of domestic comment. Silence in the library. Celia paused. Her mother appeared at the end of the hall.

“Supper’s ready,” she said. “Just tell them, will you?”

From the library her father’s voice, “You have only a few days more, then, to suffer the dullness of our town?”

“Oh, I haven’t found it dull! On the contrary—thanks to Mrs. Duryea and your daughter.”

“Ah yes. You met Mrs. Duryea in her—shop, I suppose?”

There was a pause after that. Had Ralph felt the sneer beneath the query?

“My father had asked me to look her up. And I remembered her, too, from the time when I visited my uncle, years ago.”

Celia pushed the curtains apart. Her father, sunk in his armchair, was gazing under lowered lids at his hands, fingertips touching delicately. Ralph, sprawling in a chair beyond the table, looked up and sprang to his feet with a sudden lifting of the perplexed frown with which he was studying the father. Celia, eluding his glance, waited for her father to see her. He rose slowly, appraising her. The soft green draperies sheathed her slender body; her throat and face against the dark curtains, above the dull green of her dress, had a tender, pale fragility. But her father made her no sign of recognition. Celia felt suddenly cold to her fingertips; his eyes held her accusingly, pouring through her a bitter draught of guilt, of treachery. All that in a brief moment. Then Ralph was speaking:

“Won’t you have this chair, Miss Duryea? I was just telling your father that I had known Mrs. Duryea really for years!”

His warm, direct glance of admiration pulled her up.

“I’m to bring you out to dinner at once.” She smiled faintly.

“Take Mr. Monroe out. I’ll come.”

Ralph followed Celia down the hall. At the door he was at her shoulder with a swift whisper, “You beautiful, lovely Celia!”

Then they were in the bright, square dining-room, with Mrs. Duryea pointing to his place, and Mr. Duryea limping slowly toward the table.

When Celia thought of that dinner, later, it was in terms of a polished dark surface, with wheels and wheels, doilies, plates, cups, revolving slowly, and at the edges, hands. The long fingers of her father, serving, with motions deliberate and delicate; the smooth, plump hands of her mother, in quick gestures; the hands across the table, supple, large, deft; the black, fat hands of Kate, breaking in at the edge of the surface. Things were said, of course. Her mother chattered; Ralph talked; her father spoke at times, his words like a needle.

The needle plunged at her in a silence toward the end of the revolutions.

“You seem weary, Celia. What have you done with yourself while I’ve been gone?”

“I hope tennis hasn’t tired you, Miss Duryea.”

“No, indeed. I’m not tired.” Celia drew back in her chair, meeting the glance of the two men. She found herself suddenly rigid, the apex where two forces clashed and hung, immobile, opposed, unyielding.

Her mother pushed back her chair. “I must get back to work. You lazy people can sit on the veranda.”

“I’ll walk along with you if I may, Mrs. Duryea,” Ralph said.

Mrs. Duryea hung fire, looking at Celia. Then she said, calmly, “Must you go so soon?”

“Baxter, my lawyer, wants me to see a man about the sale of that land.”

He waited at the door for Mrs. Duryea. Mr. Duryea, with a casual “Good night,” had gone into the library. Celia, her hands interlaced, stood just outside the curtains.

“I suppose we can’t play tennis on Sunday in this town?”

“No. Shocking!” Celia’s head was bent, as though she listened to the slight shuffle of her father’s lame foot behind the curtains.

“How about a ride, then?” Ralph spoke eagerly. “I’ll come around with that very shiny buggy—”

Celia shook her head. “Not to-morrow, I’m afraid. Father has brought some work he wishes me to go over—and school opens Monday again.”

“But you won’t need all day—”

Mrs. Duryea came down the stairs.

“I don’t know—how much of it—” Celia held out her hand imploringly. “Good night, Mr. Monroe.”

He touched her hand, his face twisted into the frown of perplexity she had seen there earlier. Silently he pushed open the door for Mrs. Duryea, and followed her down the steps. When his square shoulders had disappeared, Celia, with a gesture of open, loose hands, went between the curtains, into the study, into the steady inspection of her father. He sat again in his low chair, his fingers playing against the arms.

“Don’t tell me I heard that—young man—offering you a buggy ride!”

“Yesterday,” said Celia, “we drove along the river road.”

“In a ‘buggy’?” His pointed beard, lifted eyebrows, and smiling mouth were all satiric angles.

“The peach-trees are just showing pink.” She dropped into the chair beside her. Her words acted as the note to set vibrating all that afternoon—golden-brown river swift between green-gold willows, the orchard pricking its faint glow against a spring sky, smooth breeze, silence. Then her father’s words, another note, contending, so that again she felt herself the rigid, immobile point of conflict.

“You have been generous of your days.”

“You don’t like him?”

“Celia dear! Am I supposed to take him on to that extent! I come home, eager to see you. You aren’t here. After hours you come—and I look out to see a stranger ogling you!”

Celia winced. He had seen that moment in front of the house.

“And then your mother rushes in, shovels this stranger into my study”—those tapering fingers of his pushed through the dark soil of her heart, in sure quest of that new quickening—“and leaves him here”—Mr. Duryea stretched back in his chair, puffing his cheeks, pushing open his coat, thrusting his thumbs into his belt—“boring me with tales of his prowess”—he deepened his voice and roughed his intonations—“and his long acquaintance with my family.”

Celia’s face grew warm—the burlesque had a cruel dexterity.

“He is a worthy young man, no doubt.” Her father shifted forward, his hands about one knee. “Just the qualities that would attract your mother.” For another moment his eyes held her with their hard luster, as though he gave a final twist to whatever young live thing he had found. “Discrimination, Celia!” Then, with a sigh, he rose.

“Now let me show you—” His voice softened. As he limped around the table he laid his cold fingers for an instant on Celia’s hands. “Did I write after I saw MacLaren? No. He wishes to use some of your sketches in the second part of the manual. Several of the details of Greek ornament, one or two of your little winter sketches.” He came back to the table with his bag. “He thinks the book will be a success.”

Celia lay back in her chair, a long tremor running over her body under the soft insistence of her father’s voice.

“This is for your share—” He held out a small white box. As Celia looked up, mutely, he opened it and extended his hand. In the palm lay a small, irregular bit of jade, a pendant on a thin gold chain. “Like the under curve of a wave, frozen, isn’t it!” He fastened it around her throat.

Celia’s eyes filled with tears. “It’s beautiful—”

“It becomes you.” He came back to his chair. “I have some cuts for the manual to show you, and all the proof to go over. We’ll do them to-morrow.”

They sat in silence, Celia with a finger touching the bit of jade. She stirred.

“I think I shall go up-stairs.” She stood in front of her father, meeting his sudden sharp peering with a smile. “To be quite fresh to-morrow. Good night.”

“It’s good to have you again,” he sent after her, with a friendly wave of his hand. “Sleep well.”

After she had undressed she stood for a time in the dark window, her kimono caught together in one hand doubled over her heart, the curtain blowing rhythmically against her cheek. The soft, misty sky with its few stars hung near the earth. Slowly past her swung the hours of the weeks just over. Hours out of doors, in sunshine, with spring winds; once a shower, through which they had run home, laughing. In them all, this man, sunshine on his fair, heavy hair, his white teeth flashing at her, his strong, sure hands—Her hand clutched at the folds. Hours making her blowsy! Making her forget—ah, everything she had built toward, all her life. Deliberately she rehearsed the mocking imitation her father had given. Her mother would like such a man—robust, sturdy, commonplace. She trampled down the soil her father had probed. Surely whatever had stirred there was dead.

But hours later, when Mrs. Duryea came, Celia lay still awake, her eyes held by the dark space of window with its shadow of motion. She did not move as her mother came up the stairs, her tired step loud in the silent house.

The next afternoon Celia straightened her shoulders from long bending over the desk, and gently, so that the sound should not wake her father, asleep on the couch, piled together the proof-sheets. She read again the title-page, “Modern Methods of Instruction in Drawing: A Manual for Teachers,” and slipped that into place on top of the pile. At a shifting of the light across the papers she looked up. Her mother had parted the curtains. Celia shook her head quickly, with a gesture toward the couch. Mrs. Duryea held the curtain back, imperatively, and Celia followed her, reluctantly, into the hall.

“What is it?” she asked, coolly. “Don’t wake him. He’s very tired.”

“Come out here, then.” Mrs. Duryea went out to the dining-room, stripping off her huge white garden-gloves, dropping them with her trowel on a chair before she spoke.

“Celia, Ralph wants to see you. He’s in the garden.”

“I told him I should be busy all day.” Celia wheeled, to escape to the library, but Mrs. Duryea caught her arm.

“He asked me to tell you that he must leave town to-morrow. You can’t be absurd and rude, after all—”

“Is it so rude, not to wish to see him?”

Mrs. Duryea withdrew her hand.

“It hasn’t taken your father long, has it!” Dull red mottled her cheeks.

Celia flung up her head, her mouth hard, but before she spoke her mother, with a small laugh, had darted between her and the door.

“There, I didn’t mean to say a thing. But Ralph is waiting out there, below the grape-arbor. It will do no harm for you to be civil. If you don’t”—her breath was quick—“I’ll just walk him right into the library!”

Celia stared at her mother, curious amazement shooting through her anger. She crossed the room slowly, to the outer door.

A graveled path led down a terrace to the garden behind the house, fenced off by a long trellis hung with tangled grapevines, still bare. Ralph rose from the bench under an old apple-tree in the corner, and watched her slow coming.

“I saw your mother out here, planting seeds.” He was gravely apologetic. “You had said you would be busy, but I ventured to run in. I had a telegram—some difficulty about a contract. Won’t you sit down?”

Celia seated herself, erect and still.

“You see, I couldn’t go without seeing you—” He dropped beside her, twirling his hat between his knees. “You know that, don’t you!”

“It wasn’t necessary.” Celia’s eyelids were heavy.

“Yes, it was!” He flung the hat aside. “But don’t look so far off. Has some one put a spell on you overnight, to turn you back to stone?” He swung around on the bench, bracing himself with one hand near her shoulder. “You can’t scare me now! Not after yesterday—and the day before—”

About them lay the faint odor of warmed earth. Celia felt the sun on her hands, along her arms—or was it only the warm, bantering tone which hung a little in the quiet garden? She lifted her eyes. Ralph’s face between her and the clear sky, the line of lean cheek and chin tautly defined.

“Celia, Celia!” Was it her name, that tender, silver word? Celia flinched away from the hand so near her shoulder. The steady, clear eyes waited, while that silver “Celia” dropped, dropped, down to a hidden door, behind which, cold, bound, she could not move. Yesterday, at the sound, she had pushed open that door!

“Celia!” Ralph bent close to her. “You know what I want! You! I want you to go with me when I go, to-morrow! Now I’ve found you, I can’t let you go for a day! You might escape. Perhaps I’m too fast—but, Celia, I love you. There isn’t time enough for half the things we can do together. Dear—” His hand closed over hers. “You’ll come, Celia? That’s what you meant, last night, there at the steps!”

Her hand, under his fingers, was a traitor to her! Her heart had slipped into it, a mad, riotous thing. In her ears hummed a thin wire, her father’s voice, “Ogling you!”

“It will take a lifetime to tell you how lovely you are, Celia—and, oh, the fun we’ll have! I’ve told your mother, and she wished me luck!”

Celia’s hand tore away from his.

“You’ve discussed—this—with her!”

“Just now, when I had to see you.” His forehead wrinkled a little. Pushing back his coat, he caught his thumb in his belt.

The bright clashing within Celia stopped, with an abrupt, terrible silence. She saw her father, his pointed brows derisive. “Just the qualities that would attract your mother—” What had so narrowly betrayed her! She rose.

“I’m sorry you have misunderstood—my enjoyment of tennis—or driving.” Her voice was brittle. “Perhaps your discussions with my mother misled you.”

Ralph was on his feet. His clear, steady gaze had changed, like a mirror splintered by a blow.

“Did I misunderstand you yesterday? What has happened to you since?”

“Nothing has happened, Mr. Monroe. But I must go in now—”

“I won’t let you go!” He confronted her squarely. “That would be crazy! What has happened? Celia, you can’t go back. I love you! Is it”—he hesitated—“something your father said? He didn’t take to me—”

“Did my mother tell you to say that?” No longer was Celia the rigidity of two forces clashed and held by their violence. They had slipped from that immobile grapple into tearing destruction, and out of the pain she struck at him. “My father take to you! Oh, let me go!”

Ralph’s hands lifted to make a barrier.

“I don’t wonder at his hating any one who might want you,” he said, slowly. “But that couldn’t make you hate me, could it?”

“I don’t hate you.” Celia’s face had a tense pallor. “It’s only—I lapse so dreadfully—from what he thinks I am—all the fineness—he wants in me—” She tried to push past Ralph.

But his arms went out, had her, held her. She shut her eyes against his face, close, demanding.

“Celia, you’re all beauty—I love you. Do you hear? And you love me—” Then his lips were on hers. Something rushed through her, a swift fire, a strong, sweet shouting. But she struggled away and ran past him, blindly, down the path to the house.

At the door of the dining-room she halted, her arms out to the door-jamb to steady herself. Across the room, rounding the table with his swift, syncopated walk, his face like a gargoyle’s in its sneer, came her father.

In front of her he stopped, his shoulders crooked, his face keeping its sneer. Celia felt her whole being crawl, like a green and sluggish tide. Finally he spoke.

“So. While I sleep you slink out to philander in the kitchen garden—like a drab! May I ask you to choose some decent privacy if you must kiss young men?” He thrust his face close to hers, the sneer twitching like a mask of cambric. “Thought you could hoodwink me! What—what haven’t I done for you? And you scramble into the first arms open to you—”

To Celia her blood seemed to clot in her ears, in her eyes, so that she would not hear his words, could not see that cambric mask. Faintly she heard another voice, her mother’s.

“Are my garden things here, my gloves?” She bustled in. “Oh yes. Here they are.” She drew them on.

Mr. Duryea spun around, one hand, the fingers curled, flung toward her.

“You—you—This is your scheme!”

“Philip, you have already said more than enough to be sorry for.” She walked toward him, swinging her trowel. “You’d better count ten—or, better, about five hundred!”

Her father crouched a little. Before he spoke again Celia fled, through the hall, up the stairs, his words snarling and yelping at her heels.

She pushed her door shut. From the room below, rising like a vapor, came the ominous cadence of emotion, formless, wordless. Then silence. A humming blackness floated toward her, out of the corners of the room. Steadily fighting it off, she walked across to the couch. She sat down and presently the humming darkness flowed back into the corners.

Something had crashed. She was too tired to stoop for the pieces, to see what had gone. Queer she felt so numb. Cold, too.

Her father had said those things—ugly, unjust, horrible! Perhaps—her face showed a brief flare of horror over its gray numbness—had she deserved those things? But for once that wire failed to work. Something had smashed through the delicate mechanism of self-reproach. With a twist of her body she lay face downward on the couch, her hands pressed over her ears as if to shut out the words she had heard.

Dusk filled the room.

A rap at the door shuddered through her body. She did not move when the door opened, nor when her mother’s light step stopped beside the couch.

“I thought you might like some tea,” she said, casually. Celia did not move. “Come, Celia.”

“Please go away.”

The cup clinked on the table. Mrs. Duryea put one arm under Celia’s body and pulled her firmly up against her shoulder.

“Celia, I want to talk to you. Oh, I know you don’t want me to. And you must drink this first. You’re frozen.”

The cup was at her lips. Easier to drink than to struggle—the liquid was a hot auger boring into her frigidity.

“Now come into my room. I’ve made a fire there. I won’t make you stay—” She pulled Celia to her feet. “You know I wouldn’t bother you unless I had to—” Her voice trembled.

Celia allowed herself to be led to the door of her mother’s room. There the light and gay color rose like a wall, and she turned in flight. But her mother closed the door quickly and pushed a chair near the small fireplace.

“You sit there.” She snapped off the lights except for the little pink-shaded desk-lamp behind her, and dragged a wicker rocker to the other side of the hearth. Before she sat down she poked a few sticks under the blazing log.

Celia watched the fire. Complete emptiness possessed her.

“You see,” began her mother, abruptly, as though continuing a conversation, “I have a sort of feeling that I ought to do penance—though I know that’s nonsense. But it looks as if you had been tied up as an offering in my stead. So now I’m willing, eager, to say anything or do anything that will cut you loose. If he hasn’t done it himself.”

Celia’s hands shut together in her lap.

“I have tried before, when I wanted to send you to college somewhere away from here. That scared him. He saw you getting free. Well, you didn’t go.”

Out of Celia’s lethargy rose a thin ghost, a phantom of her life-habit, the justification of her father.

“He wasn’t well. He needed an assistant.”

“Yes. And that way he kept you from going off to college. And he kept even your work for himself. I had hoped there at least you might get away. The job of drawing-teacher in the schools isn’t, one would say, heavy enough to take two person’s time.”

Her tone was so tranquil, so undisturbed, that Celia listened; the things said became a piling up of tiny weights, scarcely felt at first.

“What I want to do, though, is to go back—much farther. You see, at the beginning he had me, just as he has you now. I was teaching here, in a primary room, when he came. I was quite young, inexperienced, and his polish, his coldness, his whole way was fascinating. But he couldn’t let me alone. He didn’t love me. I found that out soon enough after we were married. He hasn’t ever loved anybody but himself. No, not even you, Celia. He thinks he has made you, that’s all. That’s why he was so mad this afternoon. He tried to make me over. I was—well, older than you—when he started.” Mrs. Duryea smiled. “A good deal like one of these rubber balls children have, soft, all right. But he’d think he’d made a dent, and when he took his thumb away, out I’d bob. Then he was irritated. Frightfully. He didn’t like my friends. Nor my way of doing things. Finally I thought that one day he’d simply cut me into shreds, boil me down, whatever you do to finish off a rubber ball! So I bounced out of his hand. Nothing else to do. I couldn’t leave him—he had to have some one looking out for him, and then there was you. The trouble was, I was so busy bouncing back into work, away from him—that it was quite a while before I saw he had his hands on you. And then—” Celia felt her eyes touch her, wistfully, for an instant. “I didn’t know how he had done it, but you didn’t like me. I wonder whether you remember when you were quite a little girl, you decided—I suppose most children have such ideas—that you had some mystery about your birth. A foundling, or noble birth, or something. But you wanted to be his child. So you asked him—if I could be your real mother. Do you remember?”

Celia did remember.

“He told you your real mother had died. You almost believe it to this day!”

“But he wasn’t lying!” The ghost came again, driving her into words. “He meant it figuratively. He thought I understood. He always treated me as his equal. He meant you had changed.”

MR. DURYEA SPUN AROUND. “YOU—YOU—THIS IS YOUR SCHEME!”

“He knew exactly how you took it. He told me of it, with triumph! Think of it, Celia! And I—You wouldn’t listen to me. I was outside your charmed circle. How old were you before you knew how he meant it? Old enough to believe him figuratively. So nothing changed. And he made fun of me because I kept a shop! What is there ridiculous about running a book-store? A good one, too. It made me free of him and so he had to cry it down. But Celia”—she gulped—“has he ever told you—how much money from that shop he uses?”

Celia stared at her. The pressure of accumulating weights had pain for her now.

“I shouldn’t tell you, perhaps—but it’s all the rest of your life I’m trying to give you. I have thought what I could do—especially lately. For a long time I was just hurt because you turned against me. I didn’t see his scheme—I suppose I hadn’t patience enough. Not that he had a scheme at first. But there you were, soft, pliable stuff. He could make you what I wouldn’t be, slave, admirer, wonderer at him. Oh, he must have seen it clearly to do it so well!”

“You have always been jealous of me!” Celia struck out in a gesture prompted by that ghost of defense.

“Oh—jealous! He’s made you think that. If I could make you see—He wanted to be a super-person. His lameness—his lack of success—he meant to paint, you know—He had to have shelter, a place where he was that super-person. He couldn’t have a shadow of a rival in it. What has he done to all the friends you might have had?”

“They couldn’t stand comparison with him. He’s not touched them!”

“What happened to Laura Welles? Nice, jolly girl. You didn’t know I heard your father, the night he met her here for the third time! A little twist of a knife, straight into the friendship that had started! And that boy, last winter! And now—Ralph!”

Mary Duryea sighed. Between her eyebrows a triangle of tiny drops of moisture glistened. But her face, except for that triangle of suffering, kept its whimsical tolerance of mouth and eyes.

“I told Ralph to hurry up,” she said, suddenly. “I hoped he’d sweep you off before Philip came back. He did, too, almost! You were a different person! What could your father say about him? He’s the finest, truest boy I ever knew. And Philip knows it! That is exactly why he forgot himself and raged at you. He was afraid. He hasn’t done that for a long time—” She paused, reminiscently. “He used to talk to me that way occasionally. He’s very sorry for it by now.”

“Oh, don’t! don’t!” Celia flung herself around in her chair, hiding her face against her arm. The numbness, the lethargy, was stripped away; she came back, as from an anesthetic, into a white glare of anguish. Through her, tangled in the knot of devotion, had always run a thread of justice, too firm to break now. These things were true. He, her father, had himself attested to them.

Her mother’s hand touched her shoulder, a friendly, human pat.

“There, Celia. That’s all. I just wanted to say those things before you sent Ralph away.”

Celia lifted her face; color and life drained out of it, leaving it piteous, blank.

“There’s nothing left of me,” she said, slowly. “I’ve tried just to be—what I thought he would like—because I thought it was beautiful and fine and perfect—and it’s gone.” Her hands dropped into her lap, palms upward.

Mary Duryea picked up the cold hands and held them, warmly.

“Nonsense, Celia!” Her eyes had a flare of loveliness. “You see, you’ve taken what was good in him—and there’s much of it. He’s given you his best.” She flushed. “I guess—I have been jealous of that. It’s only that I won’t have him giving you more of his worst.”

She bent to stir the fire; the sudden leap of flame sprayed her hair into soft light, touched with gold whimsical planes on forehead, cheek, and outstretched, steady hand.

Celia saw the lights shivered into prismatic edges through her own incredulous tears.

“And now”—Mrs. Duryea pushed back her rocker—“now I’m going to draw a warm bath for you—and you’re going straight to sleep. To-morrow’s time enough. I don’t know whether you care enough for Ralph to take him or not. Marrying lasts quite a while.” She smiled. “But you will know.”

Celia lay back in her chair, a curious listlessness on body and mind. Her mother had drawn the knife out of her wound and showed it to her, clean, no slightest rust of bitterness, strange warrant of healing. She gave herself up to warmth and light and the little bustle of her mother’s coming and going.

“Here are your things.” Her mother spread them on the chair beside her. “Everything’s ready.” She closed the door softly behind her.

Celia undressed slowly. The warmth of the fire flowed about her.

Presently, in her own room, unstartled, she saw her mother move out of the shadows near the window.

“Jump into bed and I’ll open your windows.”

She stood beside the bed, indistinct, just the lines of her bent head and shoulder showing, ineffably tender, valiant.

“Good night, Celia.” Her hand reached out, touched Celia’s arm. “Go right to sleep.”

After a moment she had gone. Through the window came the spring wind, earthy, sweet.

All night Celia moved through tranquil pools of sleep, coming sometimes almost into troubled consciousness, and then dropping again into tranquillity.

When she woke the room was full of sunshine. Then, as though her waking let down the bars behind which the night had herded them, they rushed upon her fanged and clawed, cruel thoughts, images. She cowered. But under her eyelids flashed a quick picture of her mother, undaunted, standing in the shadow by her bed. She pushed herself erect. Whatever happened, she could at least face things. If she pretended not to be afraid—they might slink off.

She dressed, lingering a little with each motion. The ordinary demands of a day had lost their important meanings. The house was still. They had gone, her father and her mother. The day was strange, secret. At its core, hidden, something which was hers, if she could work through to it, without fear.

She stopped at the door of her mother’s room. The sunlight, in plashes on its chintzes and white woodwork, quivered over her like a poignant, ironic tune, not to be endured. Then something—a small bedroom slipper with its pink bow, perhaps—loosened the ache in her throat. She had been scornful! She had thought she wanted her life to be beautiful, fine; and all the time that clear, bright, simple room, and the woman living in it, had stirred derision in her, or pity!

Through warm, humble tears she looked down the stairs, toward the drawn curtains of the study. Behind them she almost heard her father drag his twisted foot, in shadows—

If she had come to hate him, she would still be bound to him! That thought came drifting up from the dark curtains and passed. She was sorry for him! Tears were on her cheeks now. “He’s given you his best, always!” Her mother had said that!

Through her tears she saw the front door pushed open and warm light rush into the house. Ralph stood below her, peering about the hall.

“Celia!” he called, softly. Then he saw her.

For a moment she hung there above him.

“Shall I come after you?” he cried.

“No,” she said, and her voice dropped clear, wondering. “No. I’m coming—Ralph.”