greenery dingles and blue glades.”
“Beautiful title!” Tommy mused; “ ‘The Blue Glades of Glengowrie’—I’ll do that next.”
“And that reminds me,” Kate said, she was always being inscrutably reminded, “our infant here, our Pearl Jane, has never been to a masquerade! A real one, I mean. She doesn’t count the Ivy Club Sociables in her Main Street home. Will you have one for her, Tommy? We’ll all help.”
“Better yet, I’ll paint one for her,” Locke said; “then she can see how one really looks.”
“No, she can’t,” Post declared. “You see, in your pictures, so much more is meant than meets the eye—and Pearl Jane wants her eyes met.”
“All right, then,” and Locke thought a minute. “Not a very big one, you said, didn’t you? And, no one asked but our own crowd, you insisted on, didn’t you? And you stipulated it would be small and early—am I not right? And if I am not mistaken, you said there’s no hurry about it.”
But he was set right on all these points, and the masquerade party for Pearl Jane was arranged in exactly the fashion Kate Vallon and Henry Post deemed fitting and proper.
However, their ideas were much in line with Locke’s own, and so they made it only a few hours later and a few people larger than he consented to.
Pearl Jane was in ecstasies, and when the night came, and she was togged out in her Dutch Peasant costume, her already bobbed fair hair flying from under her stiff lace cap, she couldn’t wait for the hour and ran round to Tommy’s early.
She found him, garbed in a monk’s robe and cowl, standing before an easel, gazing at one of his own pictures.
“Do you really like it, Pearl Jane?” he said, almost wistfully, as she came up and stood at his side in silence.
“Yes, I do. They can guy you all they like—there’s something in your work—something of Manet—I mean Monet——”
“Eeny, meeny, miney, mo!” he laughed, and turned to look at her. “Why, bless my soul, madam, you’ve suddenly grown up!”
“No, that’s ’cause this frock is longer than I usually wear. Do you like it?”
“Do blue and yellow make green? Yes, I like it. You’re a picture!”
“What’s the title?” asked another voice, and Kate and Post appeared.
“I think it might be called ‘The Puritan’s Carouse,’ Locke said, wresting his glance from the pretty Dutch girl. “Hello, Kate, you’re quite all right as a Contadina—Henry, not quite so good as a Spanish Don.”
“Ah, I’m not a Spanish Don—your mistake. I’m a Portuguese Man o’ War.”
“You look more like an Oscar Wilde.”
“Take that back! Call me anything but like that overrated, underbred gyastyockus!”
“I thought he was a great poet,” Pearl Jane said, wonderingly. “I never read any of his——”
“Don’t!” Post said, “I forbid it. There’s enough for you, yet unread. Pearl Jane, dear, without touching that Purple Jellyfish!”
“Some of his poems are fine,” Kate began, but Locke interrupted her:
“Only one—‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ is a great poem, but nothing else of his is worthy of consideration.”
Kate Vallon began to quote:
And all men kill the thing they love,
By all let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word.
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword.
“Oh, I hate it!” Pearl Jane shuddered. “If it’s like that, I don’t want to read it!”
“No, you don’t,” Locke agreed; “besides, he’s out of date now. You stick to your John Masefield and Carl Sandburg.”
“I don’t know them very well,” the girl acknowledged, “they’re rather hard, I think.”
Now Pearl Jane Cutler was by no means a child or an ignoramus. But she had been simply brought up in a small town, and though fairly well grounded in the rudiments of Life and Literature, she had still quite a bit to learn, and was swallowing it in chunks—anaconda like. She was twenty-two, and carried a little more flesh on her young bones than the average all-city girl did. Kate Vallon, half a dozen years older, was keeping an eye on her, and she thought maybe, perhaps, possibly, after a thousand years of study. Pearl Jane might learn to paint something noisier than clay pots and onions.
Chinese Charley appeared in the doorway.
“They arrive,” he said, a little laconically.
“Show them up,” Tommy ordered, as succinctly, and then the quartette hurried on their masks and the revel began.
Locke was a little surprised at the stream of people that flowed in. He was not inhospitable, and there was room enough, but he thought Post might have told him what he was up to. He said as much to Henry Post, who responded:
“I didn’t do it, Tommy, honest, I didn’t. But several whom I did invite, just casually said they might bring friends. I couldn’t say them nay—now could I?”
“Rather not,” said Locke, and turned to greet some new-comers.
But, in his mask, and his concealing robe and cowl, almost no one knew him, and so he had no duties as host. This suited him well enough, and he sauntered about, looking at the hackneyed costumes, recognizing some figure here and there, or mistakenly thinking he did.
The studio looked festive to-night, for Kate and Henry had insisted on a few decorations and had chosen Chinese lanterns and artificial cherry blossoms. These delighted the soul of Charley, Locke’s house-boy, and he gazed up at them, now and then, beatifically picturesque.
He was devoted to Locke, though so quiet of manner and scant of speech that there were no protestations, but he showed his affection in immaculate housekeeping and meticulous obedience to orders.
The place was not large; only the second floor entire, and a room or two on the first floor. Supper would be served downstairs, so the big studio and one or two smaller rooms could be used for dancing. This left a small room for a smoking den, and Locke’s own bedroom for a ladies’ dressing room.
A small orchestra arrived and soon proved that it could make jazz music out of all proportion to its size.
Locke asked a Carmen to dance with him, thinking he knew her, but found he was again mistaken.
“Strange how merely a mask can disguise one so thoroughly,” he said; “I’d think the face only a
