Moffatt.
Undine was glad to be relieved of her burden, for she was unused to the child’s weight, and disliked to feel that her skirt was dragging on the pavement. “Go to the gentleman, Pauly—he’ll carry you better than mother,” she said.
The little boy’s first movement was one of recoil from the ruddy sharp-eyed countenance that was so unlike his father’s delicate face; but he was an obedient child, and after a moment’s hesitation he wound his arms trustfully about the red gentleman’s neck.
“That’s a good fellow—sit tight and I’ll give you a ride,” Moffatt cried, hoisting the boy to his shoulder.
Paul was not used to being perched at such a height, and his nature was hospitable to new impressions. “Oh, I like it up here—you’re higher than father!” he exclaimed; and Moffatt hugged him with a laugh.
“It must feel mighty good to come uptown to a fellow like you in the evenings,” he said, addressing the child but looking at Undine, who also laughed a little.
“Oh, they’re a dreadful nuisance, you know; but Paul’s a very good boy.”
“I wonder if he knows what a friend I’ve been to him lately,” Moffatt went on, as they turned into Fifth Avenue.
Undine smiled: she was glad he should have given her an opening. “He shall be told as soon as he’s old enough to thank you. I’m so glad you came to Ralph about that business.”
“Oh I gave him a leg up, and I guess he’s given me one too. Queer the way things come round—he’s fairly put me in the way of a fresh start.”
Their eyes met in a silence which Undine was the first to break. “It’s been awfully nice of you to do what you’ve done—right along. And this last thing has made a lot of difference to us.”
“Well, I’m glad you feel that way. I never wanted to be anything but ‘nice,’ as you call it.” Moffatt paused a moment and then added: “If you’re less scared of me than your father is I’d be glad to call round and see you once in a while.”
The quick blood rushed to her cheeks. There was nothing challenging, demanding in his tone—she guessed at once that if he made the request it was simply for the pleasure of being with her, and she liked the magnanimity implied. Nevertheless she was not sorry to have to answer: “Of course I’ll always be glad to see you—only, as it happens, I’m just sailing for Europe.”
“For Europe?” The word brought Moffatt to a stand so abruptly that little Paul lurched on his shoulder.
“For Europe?” he repeated. “Why, I thought you said the other evening you expected to stay on in town till July. Didn’t you think of going to the Adirondacks?”
Flattered by his evident disappointment, she became high and careless in her triumph. “Oh, yes,—but that’s all changed. Ralph and the boy are going, but I sail on Saturday to join some friends in Paris—and later I may do some motoring in Switzerland an Italy.”
She laughed a little in the mere enjoyment of putting her plans into words and Moffatt laughed too, but with an edge of sarcasm.
“I see—I see: everything’s changed, as you say, and your husband can blow you off to the trip. Well, I hope you’ll have a first-class time.”
Their glances crossed again, and something in his cool scrutiny impelled Undine to say, with a burst of candour: “If I do, you know, I shall owe it all to you!”
“Well, I always told you I meant to act white by you,” he answered.
They walked on in silence, and presently he began again in his usual joking strain: “See what one of the Apex girls has been up to?”
Apex was too remote for her to understand the reference, and he went on: “Why, Millard Binch’s wife—Indiana Frusk that was. Didn’t you see in the papers that Indiana’d fixed it up with James J. Rolliver to marry her? They say it was easy enough squaring Millard Binch—you’d know it WOULD be—but it cost Roliver near a million to mislay Mrs. R. and the children. Well, Indiana’s pulled it off, anyhow; she always WAS a bright girl. But she never came up to you.”
“Oh—” she stammered with a laugh, astonished and agitated by his news. Indiana Frusk and Rolliver! It showed how easily the thing could be done. If only her father had listened to her! If a girl like Indiana Frusk could gain her end so easily, what might not Undine have accomplished? She knew Moffatt was right in saying that Indiana had never come up to her…She wondered how the marriage would strike Van Degen…
She signalled to a cab and they walked toward it without speaking. Undine was recalling with intensity that one of Indiana’s shoulders was higher than the other, and that people in Apex had thought her lucky to catch Millard Binch, the druggist’s clerk, when Undine herself had cast him off after a lingering engagement. And now Indiana Frusk was to be Mrs. James J. Rolliver!
Undine got into the cab and bent forward to take little Paul.
Moffatt lowered his charge with exaggerated care, and a “Steady there, steady,” that made the child laugh; then, stooping over, he put a kiss on Paul’s lips before handing him over to his mother.
XIX
“The Parisian Diamond Company—Anglo-American branch.”
Charles Bowen, seated, one rainy evening of the Paris season, in a corner of the great Nouveau Luxe restaurant, was lazily trying to resolve his impressions of the scene into the phrases of a letter to his old friend Mrs. Henley Fairford.
The long habit of unwritten communion with this lady—in no way conditioned by the short rare letters they actually exchanged—usually caused his notations, in absence, to fall into such terms when the subject was of a kind to strike an answering flash from her. And who but Mrs. Fairford would see, from his own precise angle, the fantastic improbability, the layers on layers of unsubstantialness, on which the seemingly solid scene before him rested?
The diningroom of the Nouveau Luxe was at its fullest, and, having contracted on the garden side through stress of weather, had even overflowed to the farther end of the long hall beyond; so that Bowen, from his corner, surveyed a seemingly endless perspective of plumed and jewelled heads, of shoulders bare or black-coated, encircling the close-packed tables. He had come half an hour before the time he had named to his expected guest, so that he might have the undisturbed amusement of watching the picture compose itself again before his eyes. During some forty years’ perpetual exercise of his perceptions he had never come across anything that gave them the special titillation produced by the sight of the dinner-hour at the Nouveau Luxe: the same sense of putting his hand on human nature’s passion for the factitious, its incorrigible habit of imitating the imitation.
As he sat watching the familiar faces swept toward him on the rising tide of arrival—for it was one of the joys of the scene that the type was always the same even when the individual was not—he hailed with renewed appreciation this costly expression of a social ideal. The diningroom at the Nouveau Luxe represented, on such a spring evening, what unbounded material power had devised for the delusion of its leisure: a phantom “society,” with all the rules, smirks, gestures of its model, but evoked out of promiscuity and incoherence while the other had been the product of continuity and choice. And the instinct which had driven a new class of world-compellers to bind themselves to slavish imitation of the superseded, and their prompt and reverent faith in the reality
