Horace one night as he was on his way from the station to his house. He was considering several prospects that had opened up, a four months’ vaudeville offer in five figures, a chance to go back to Princeton in charge of all gymnasium work. Odd! He had once intended to go back there in charge of all philosophic work, and now he had not even been stirred by the arrival in New York of Anton Laurier, his old idol.
The gravel crunched raucously under his heel. He saw the lights of his sitting-room gleaming and noticed a big car standing in the drive. Probably Mr. Jordan again, come to persuade Marcia to settle down to work.
She had heard the sound of his approach and her form was silhouetted against the lighted door as she came out to meet him.
“There’s some Frenchman here,” she whispered nervously. “I can’t pronounce his name, but he sounds awful deep. You’ll have to jaw with him.”
“What Frenchman?”
“You can’t prove it by me. He drove up an hour ago with Mr. Jordan, and said he wanted to meet Sandra Pepys, and all that sort of thing.”
Two men rose from chairs as they went inside.
“Hello, Tarbox,” said Jordan. “I’ve just been bringing together two celebrities. I’ve brought M’sieur Laurier out with me. M’sieur Laurier, let me present Mr. Tarbox, Mrs. Tarbox’s husband.”
“Not Anton Laurier!” exclaimed Horace.
“But, yes. I must come. I have to come. I have read the book of Madame, and I have been charmed”—he fumbled in his pocket—“ah, I have read of you too. In this newspaper which I read to-day it has your name.”
He finally produced a clipping from a magazine.
“Read it!” he said eagerly. “It has about you too.”
Horace’s eye skipped down the page.
“A distinct contribution to American dialect literature,” it said. “No attempt at literary tone; the book derives its very quality from this fact, as did ‘Huckleberry Finn.’”
Horace’s eyes caught a passage lower down; he became suddenly aghast—read on hurriedly:
“Marcia Tarbox’s connection with the stage is not only as a spectator but as the wife of a performer. She was married last year to Horace Tarbox, who every evening delights the children at the Hippodrome with his wondrous flying-ring performance. It is said that the young couple have dubbed themselves Head and Shoulders, referring doubtless to the fact that Mrs. Tarbox supplies the literary and mental qualities, while the supple and agile shoulders of her husband contribute their share to the family fortunes.
“Mrs. Tarbox seems to merit that much-abused title—‘prodigy.’ Only twenty——”
Horace stopped reading, and with a very odd expression in his eyes gazed intently at Anton Laurier.
“I want to advise you—” he began hoarsely.
“What?”
“About raps. Don’t answer them! Let them alone—have a padded door.”
— ◆ —
The Cut-Glass Bowl.
Scribner’s Magazine (May 1920)
There was a rough stone age and a smooth stone age and a bronze age, and many years afterward a cut-glass age. In the cut-glass age, when young ladies had persuaded young men with long, curly mustaches to marry them, they sat down several months afterward and wrote thank-you notes for all sorts of cut-glass presents—punch-bowls, finger-bowls, dinner-glasses, wine-glasses, ice-cream dishes, bonbon dishes, decanters, and vases—for, though cut glass was nothing new in the nineties, it was then especially busy reflecting the dazzling light of fashion from the Back Bay to the fastnesses of the Middle West.
After the wedding the punch-bowls were arranged on the sideboard with the big bowl in the centre; the glasses were set up in the china-closet; the candlesticks were put at both ends of things—and then the struggle for existence began. The bonbon dish lost its little handle and became a pin-tray upstairs; a promenading cat knocked the little bowl off the sideboard, and the hired girl chipped the middle-sized one with the sugar-dish; then the wine-glasses succumbed to leg fractures, and even the dinner-glasses disappeared one by one like the ten little niggers, the last one ending up, scarred and maimed, as a tooth-brush holder among other shabby genteels on the bathroom shelf. But by the time all this had happened the cut-glass age was over, anyway.
It was well past its first glory on the day the curious Mrs. Roger Fairboalt came to see the beautiful Mrs. Harold Piper.
“My dear,” said the curious Mrs. Roger Fairboalt, “I love your house. I think it’s quite artistic.”
“I’m so glad,” said the beautiful Mrs. Harold Piper, lights appearing in her young, dark eyes; “and you must come often. I’m almost always alone in the afternoon.”
Mrs. Fairboalt would have liked to remark that she didn’t believe this at all and couldn’t see how she’d be expected to—it was all over town that Mr. Freddy Gedney had been dropping in on Mrs. Piper five afternoons a week for the past six months. Mrs. Fairboalt was at that ripe age where she distrusted all beautiful women——
“I love the dining-room most,” she said, “all that marvellous china, and that huge cut-glass bowl.”
Mrs. Piper laughed, so prettily that Mrs. Fairboalt’s lingering reservations about the Freddy Gedney story quite vanished.
“Oh, that big bowl!” Mrs. Piper’s mouth forming the words was a vivid rose petal. “There’s a story about that bowl——”
“Oh——”
“You remember young Carleton Canby? Well, he was very attentive at one time, and the night I told him I was going to marry Harold, seven years ago, in ninety-two, he drew himself way up and said: ‘Evylyn, I’m going to give a present that’s as hard as you are and as beautiful and as empty and as easy to see through.’ He frightened me a little—his eyes were so black. I thought he was going to deed me a haunted house or something that would explode when you opened it. That bowl came, and of course it’s beautiful. Its diameter or circumference or something is two and a half feet—or perhaps it’s three and a half. Anyway, the sideboard is really too small for it; it sticks way out.”
“My dear, wasn’t that odd! And he left town about then, didn’t he?” Mrs. Fairboalt was scribbling italicized notes on her memory—“hard, beautiful, empty, and easy to see through.”
“Yes, he went West—or South—or somewhere,” answered Mrs. Piper, radiating that divine vagueness that helps to lift beauty out of time.
Mrs. Fairboalt drew on her gloves, approving the effect of largeness given by the open sweep from the spacious music-room through the library, disclosing a part of the dining-room beyond. It was really the nicest smaller house in town, and Mrs. Piper had talked of moving to a larger one on Devereaux Avenue. Harold Piper must be coining money.
As
