Isolde had it, and Mary of Scotland; he could believe that there had once been women in the world who had that tragic and passionate magnificence. But he had lived for twenty-seven years without encountering it in actual life, and the girls he met seemed to him, all of them, a little insipid.
Mrs. Luff’s new protégée rather surprised him, although in his eyes Anabel Luff could do no wrong. She had been a friend of his mother’s, and ever since his schooldays he had felt for her an affection and respect he accorded to no one else. If she were so fond of this silent and almost sullen girl, then there must be something admirable in her which he had not yet discerned.
“Her father was Foxe Sackett, you know!” Mrs. Luff had told him, and seeing by his face that the name meant nothing to him: “The musician,” she had added. “A composer. …He was really famous, in musical circles. And Elsie plays marvelously, and she’s beautiful, don’t you think, Hugh?”
“Oh, very!” he had answered, politely.
He sighed now, thinking of Elsie. His chivalrous attitude toward woman was a burden to him; he could not help being deferential to them. He could not let Anabel Luff suspect how little interest he felt in her Elsie; he could not let her know how reluctant he was to go to dinner to-night with this artist fellow. Mrs. Luff enjoyed the society of artists, but Hugh didn’t. He admired them, of course; no doubt it was necessary for pictures to be painted, music and books to be written, and so on, but the people who did these things were trying. He did not know how to talk to them. What he understood and liked best were riding, hunting, polo, flying, sailing; he liked to be active physically. To-night, he would probably have to look at this fellow’s pictures, and say something. …
With another sigh, he rose and began to dress. Dressing was one of the many things he knew how to do well. He was extremely fastidious; his dinner-jacket was a marvel, his trousers were a work of art. Slender, fair-haired, boyish in appearance, he had none the less a sort of dignity about him; he was easy, friendly, polite, but no one took liberties with him.
Anabel was waiting in the hall for him. Her black evening dress did not fit very well; her sandy hair was untidy, as usual, but she was privileged to look like that; she was beyond criticism. Luff was with her, wooden and immaculate.
“We’ll have cocktails before we go,” he said. “Whitestone’s liquor is…Well, Anabel’s responsible for this.”
“Robert Whitestone’s quite charming,” said Mrs. Luff, firmly. “And very talented.”
“But he doesn’t do anything!” her husband objected. “I mean—after all—how d’you know he’s talented? Never has any pictures to show.”
“If you’d ever seen him at work,” said Mrs. Luff, “in an awful little sort of summer-house, full of spiders, and wearing a smock, and his hair ruffled…”
Her husband and young Acheson both smiled with inmeasurable indulgence. Anabel Luff was past fifty, there was gray in her hair, but she would always be able to evoke in men that tender amusement.
“You’ll see yourself—” she began, and stopped, looking toward the staircase. Elsie was coming down, in a long white evening frock, a rose-colored ribbon about her dark hair; her appearance was unusual, and as a rule Hugh Acheson disliked any sort of eccentricity. But this girl, he thought, was like some portrait in a gallery, fragile, immature, touchingly lovely.
“You won’t want a cocktail, dear…?” said Mrs. Luff.
“I do, please.”
“It’s not good for your complexion—”
“I need one!” Elsie said vehemently.
This seemed to Hugh in poor taste. A kid of her age had no business to “need” a drink.
“Neurotic,” he said to himself.
He did not know definitely what that word meant, but he did know what it connoted for him. It signified too much smoking, and too little fresh air, too much emotion, and too little exercise. He was sorry to see her swallow a cocktail almost at a gulp, and hold out her glass for another. For she was authentically young, not more than eighteen or nineteen, he decided, and her youth was exquisite.
She had been badly brought up, though, or else she was bad-tempered. As he sat beside her in the car, he made two or three attempts to talk to her as he talked to other girls, without getting anything better than the curtest possible retorts. So he let her alone.
The Whitestones’ house was worse than he had expected, shabbier and smaller; something queer in the atmosphere, too. Whitestone was silent and distrait; Mrs. Whitestone was too gay. Moreover, it made Hugh uncomfortable to be waited upon by his hostess; he found it embarrassing to sit at the table while she hurried back and forth. He wanted to help her, but she would not allow that, wouldn’t even let her husband help her.
“But you’ve hurt your hand, Mrs. Whitestone!” Hugh protested, observing a bandage about her fingers.
“It’s nothing,” she assured him, smiling. “Just a tiny burn.”
She could not suppress the other man, though, that Delancey whom Hugh had met earlier in the day. Delancey seemed very much at home here, jumping up from the table, going in and out of the kitchen, making good-humored and somewhat pointless jokes. He carried it off very well, but Hugh saw. …
It was perhaps because he so seldom read anything, because his thoughts were so largely occupied by sports and more or less impersonal matters, that Hugh Acheson had so great a power of observation. He observed, and he understood, only by the light of his own experiences. There were no other people’s ideas in his head. He was that rare creature, a truly independent human being. Moreover, his active and temperate life had sharpened his senses; he had almost the accuracy, the quickness of a savage, and he never thought of doubting his own conclusions. He simply didn’t make mistakes.
“Something wrong here…” he thought.
There was something wrong with Delancey, and with Elsie, and with Mrs. Whitestone, and something very wrong indeed with Robert Whitestone.
“That fellow’s in hell,” thought Hugh, soberly.
Mrs. Whitestone was talking with animation to the polite and unresponsive Luff; Mrs. Luff and Delancey were very cheerful together, and Elsie and Whitestone obviously had no desire and no intention of talking at all, so Hugh thought himself justified in keeping silent, and trying to understand this situation. His quiet gray eyes never seemed to watch; his boyish face never revealed that he was listening, but he saw, and he heard, and every nerve in his alert, hardy body was conveying impressions to him.
Somehow, it was Delancey who interested him most. Beneath that genial air was a strained uneasiness; he kept glancing from Whitestone to Mrs. Whitestone.
“Is he in love with Mrs. Whitestone?” thought Hugh.
He decided not. He had seen plenty of fellows in love, and they had not been like this.
“No,” he thought. “He’s afraid of something.”
Fear, he reflected, was the one emotion that could not be concealed. Hate, love, even pain could be disguised, but not fear, that first great primeval passion and driver of men. At the hangar, at sea in a storm, Hugh had seen men afraid; he knew what that side-long look, that overhearty laugh meant.
“Why?”
