impatient laugh. “Hasn’t Leila cured you of your delusions?”
She looked at him intently. “Then you don’t think Margaret Wynn meant to cut me?”
“I think your ideas are absurd.”
She paused for a perceptible moment without taking this up; then she said, at a tangent: “I’m sailing tomorrow early. I meant to write to you—there’s the letter I’d begun.”
Ide followed her gesture, and then turned his eyes back to her face. “You didn’t mean to see me, then, or even to let me know that you were going till you’d left?”
“I felt it would be easier to explain to you in a letter—”
“What in God’s name is there to explain?” She made no reply, and he pressed on: “It can’t be that you’re worried about Leila, for Charlotte Wynn told me she’d been there last week, and there was a big party arriving when she left: Fresbies and Gileses, and Mrs. Lorin Boulger—all the board of examiners! If Leila has passed that, she’s got her degree.”
Mrs. Lidcote had dropped down into a corner of the sofa where she had sat during their talk of the week before. “I was stupid,” she began abruptly. “I ought to have gone to Ridgefield with Susy. I didn’t see till afterward that I was expected to.”
“You were expected to?”
“Yes. Oh, it wasn’t Leila’s fault. She suffered—poor darling; she was distracted. But she’d asked her party before she knew I was arriving.”
“Oh, as to that—” Ide drew a deep breath of relief. “I can understand that it must have been a disappointment not to have you to herself just at first. But, after all, you were among old friends or their children: the Gileses and Fresbies—and little Charlotte Wynn.” He paused a moment before the last name, and scrutinized her hesitatingly. “Even if they came at the wrong time, you must have been glad to see them all at Leila’s.”
She gave him back his look with a faint smile. “I didn’t see them.”
“You didn’t see them?”
“No. That is, excepting little Charlotte Wynn. That child is exquisite. We had a talk before luncheon the day I arrived. But when her mother found out that I was staying in the house she telephoned her to leave immediately, and so I didn’t see her again.”
The colour rushed to Ide’s sallow face. “I don’t know where you get such ideas!”
She pursued, as if she had not heard him: “Oh, and I saw Mary Giles for a minute too. Susy Suffern brought her up to my room the last evening, after dinner, when all the others were at bridge. She meant it kindly—but it wasn’t much use.”
“But what were you doing in your room in the evening after dinner?”
“Why, you see, when I found out my mistake in coming,—how embarrassing it was for Leila, I mean—I simply told her I was very tired, and preferred to stay upstairs till the party was over.”
Ide, with a groan, struck his hand against the arm of his chair. “I wonder how much of all this you simply imagined!”
“I didn’t imagine the fact of Harriet Fresbie’s not even asking if she might see me when she knew I was in the house. Nor of Mary Giles’s getting Susy, at the eleventh hour, to smuggle her up to my room when the others wouldn’t know where she’d gone; nor poor Leila’s ghastly fear lest Mrs. Lorin Boulger, for whom the party was given, should guess I was in the house, and prevent her husband’s giving Wilbour the second secretaryship because she’d been obliged to spend a night under the same roof with his motherin-law!”
Ide continued to drum on his chair-arm with exasperated fingers. “You don’t know that any of the acts you describe are due to the causes you suppose.”
Mrs. Lidcote paused before replying, as if honestly trying to measure the weight of this argument. Then she said in a low tone: “I know that Leila was in an agony lest I should come down to dinner the first night. And it was for me she was afraid, not for herself. Leila is never afraid for herself.”
“But the conclusions you draw are simply preposterous. There are narrow-minded women everywhere, but the women who were at Leila’s knew perfectly well that their going there would give her a sort of social sanction, and if they were willing that she should have it, why on earth should they want to withhold it from you?”
“That’s what I told myself a week ago, in this very room, after my first talk with Susy Suffern.” She lifted a misty smile to his anxious eyes. “That’s why I listened to what you said to me the same evening, and why your arguments half convinced me, and made me think that what had been possible for Leila might not be impossible for me. If the new dispensation had come, why not for me as well as for the others? I can’t tell you the flight my imagination took!”
Franklin Ide rose from his seat and crossed the room to a chair near her sofa-corner. “All I cared about was that it seemed—for the moment—to be carrying you toward me,” he said.
“I cared about that, too. That’s why I meant to go away without seeing you.” They gave each other grave look for look. “Because, you see, I was mistaken,” she went on. “We were both mistaken. You say it’s preposterous that the women who didn’t object to accepting Leila’s hospitality should have objected to meeting me under her roof. And so it is; but I begin to understand why. It’s simply that society is much too busy to revise its own judgments. Probably no one in the house with me stopped to consider that my case and Leila’s were identical. They only remembered that I’d done something which, at the time I did it, was condemned by society. My case has been passed on and classified: I’m the woman who has been cut for nearly twenty years. The older people have half forgotten why, and the younger ones have never really known: it’s simply become a tradition to cut me. And traditions that have lost their meaning are the hardest of all to destroy.”
Ide sat motionless while she spoke. As she ended, he stood up with a short laugh and walked across the room to the window. Outside, the immense black prospect of New York, strung with its myriad lines of light, stretched away into the smoky edges of the night. He showed it to her with a gesture.
“What do you suppose such words as you’ve been using—‘society,’ ‘tradition,’ and the rest—mean to all the life out there?”
She came and stood by him in the window. “Less than nothing, of course. But you and I are not out there. We’re shut up in a little tight round of habit and association, just as we’re shut up in this room. Remember, I thought I’d got out of it once; but what really happened was that the other people went out, and left me in the same little room. The only difference was that I was there alone. Oh, I’ve made it habitable now, I’m used to it; but I’ve lost any illusions I may have had as to an angel’s opening the door.”
Ide again laughed impatiently. “Well, if the door won’t open, why not let another prisoner in? At least it would be less of a solitude—”
She turned from the dark window back into the vividly lighted room.
“It would be more of a prison. You forget that I know all about that. We’re all imprisoned, of course—all of us middling people, who don’t carry our freedom in our brains. But we’ve accommodated ourselves to our different cells, and if we’re moved suddenly into new ones we’re likely to find a stone wall where we thought there was
