The Gay Cockade
did not like robust and hearty things or robust and hearty people. He
wore a corset to keep his hips small, and stood up at teas and
receptions with an almost military carriage. Of course he had to sit
down at dinners, but he sat very straight. He, too, had family portraits
and family silver, and he lived scrupulously up to them. His fortunes,
unlike the Merrymans', had not declined. He had money enough and to
spare. He could have made Amy or Ethel very comfortable if he had
married either of them. But he had not wanted to marry. There had been a
time when he had liked to think of Amy as presiding over his table. She
would have fitted in perfectly with the old portraits and old silver and
the family diamonds. Then Ethel had come along. She had not fitted in
with the diamonds and portraits and silver, but she had stirred his
pulses.
"Anywhere else but in Georgetown," old Molly Winchell was saying, "those
girls would have been snapped up long ago. It's a poor matrimonial
market."
Murray was complacently aware that he was geographically the only
eligible man on the Merryman horizon. Unless Amy and Ethel could marry
with distinction they would not marry at all. It was not lack of
attraction which kept them single, but lack of suitors in their own set.
And now here was Anne, with Ethel's loveliness and Amy's look of race.
There was also that look of angelic detachment from the things of earth.
So Murray's eyes rested on Anne with great content as she came and sat
beside Molly Winchell.
Other eyes rested on her--Amy's with quick jealousy. "So now it's Anne,"
she said to herself as she perceived Murray's preoccupation. Five years
ago she had said, "Now it's Ethel," as she had seen him turn to the
fresher beauty. Before that she had dreamed of herself as loving and
beloved. It had been hard to shut her eyes to that vision.
Yet--better Anne than an outsider. Amy had a fierce sense of
proprietorship in Murray. If she gave him to Ethel, to Anne, he would be
still in a sense hers. With Anne or Ethel she would share his future,
partake of his present.
A third pair of eyes surveyed Anne with interest as she sat by Molly.
"Corking kid," said the owner of the eyes to himself.
His name was Maxwell Sears. He was not in the least like Murray Flint.
He was from the Middle West, he was red-blooded, and he cared nothing
for the past. He held it as a rather negligible honor that he had a
Declaration-signing ancestor. The important things to Maxwell were that
he was representing his district in Congress; that he was still young
enough to carry his college ideals into politics, and that he had just
invested a small portion of the fortune which his father had left him in
a model stock farm in Illinois.
For the rest, he was big, broad-shouldered, clean-minded. Now and then
he looked up at the stars, and what he saw there swayed him level with
the men about him. Because of the stars he called no man a fool, except
such as deemed himself wiser than the rest. Because he believed in the
people they believed in him. It was that which had elected him. It was
that which would elect him again.
"Corking kid," said Maxwell Sears, with his smiling eyes on Anne.
II
In the course of the evening Maxwell managed an introduction. He found
Anne quaint and charming. That she was reading Dickens amused him. He
had thought that no one read Dickens in these days. How did it happen?
She said that she had discovered him for herself--many years ago.
How many years?
Well, to be explicit, ten. She had been eleven when she had found a new
world in the fat little books. They had a lot of old books. She loved
them all. But Dickens more than any. Didn't he?
He did. "His heart beat with the heart of the common people. It was that
which made him great."
"Murray hates him."
"Who is Murray?"
Anne pondered. "Well, he's a family friend. We girls were brought up on
him."
"Brought up on him?"
"Yes. Anything Murray likes we are expected to like. If he doesn't like
things we don't."
"Oh."
"He's over there by Mrs. Winchell."
Maxwell looked and knew the type. "But you don't agree about Dickens?"
"No. And Amy says that Murray's wiser than I. But I'm not sure. Amy
thinks that all men are wiser than women."
Maxwell chuckled. Anne was refreshing. She was far from modern in her
modes of thought. She was--he hunted for the word and found
it--mid-Victorian in her attitude of mind.
He wondered what Winifred Reed would think of her. Winifred lived in
Chicago. She was athletic and intellectual. She wrote tabloid dramas,
drove her own car, dressed smartly, and took a great interest in
Maxwell's career. She wrote to him once a week, and he always answered
her letters. Now and then she failed to write, and he missed her letters
and told her so. It was altogether a pleasant friendship.
She hated the idea of Maxwell's farm. She thought it a backward step.
"Are you going to spend the precious years ahead of you in the company
of cows?"
"There'll be pigs too, Winifred; and chickens. And, of course, my
horses."
"You belong in a world of men. It's the secret of your success that men
like you."
"My cows like me--and there's great comfort after the stress of a
stormy session in the reposefulness of a pig."
"I wish you'd be serious."
"I am serious. Perhaps it's a throwback, Winifred. There is farmer blood
in my veins."
It was something deeper than that. It was his virile joy in
fundamentals. He loved his golden-eared Guernseys and his black
Berkshires and his White Wyandottes--not because of their choiceness but
because they were cows and pigs and chickens; and he kept a pair of
pussy cats, half a dozen dogs, and as many horses, because man
primitively had made friends of the dumb brutes upon whom the ease and
safety of his life depended.
There was, rather strangely, something about Anne which fitted in with
this atavistic idea. She was, more than Winifred, a hearthstone woman. A
man might carry her over his threshold and find her when he came home o'
nights. It was hard to visualize Winifred as waiting or watching or
welcoming. She was always going somewhere with an air of having
important things to do, and coming back with an air of having done them.
Maxwell felt that these important things were not connected in any way
with domestic matters. One did not, indeed, expect domesticity of
Winifred.
Thus Anne, drawing upon him by mysterious forces, drew him also by her
beauty and a certain wistfulness in her eyes. He had once had a dog,
Amber Witch, whose eyes had held always a wistful question. He had
tried to answer it. She had grown old on his hearth, yet always to the
end of her eyes had asked. He hoped now that in some celestial hunting
ground she had found an answer to that subtle need.
He told Anne about Amber Witch. "I have one of her puppies on my farm."
She was much interested. "I've never had a dog; or a cat."
He had, he said, a big pair of tabbies who slept in the hay and came up
to the dairy when the milk was strained. There were two blue porcelain
dishes for their sacred use. There was, he said, milk and to spare. He
grew eloquent as he told of the number of quarts daily. He bragged of
his butter. His cheeses had won prizes at county fairs. As for
chickens--they had fresh eggs and broilers without end. He had his own
hives, too, white-clover honey. And his housekeeper made hot biscuit. In
a month or two there'd be asparagus and strawberries. Say! Yes, he was
eloquent.
Anne was hungry. There had been a meagre dinner that evening. The other
girls had not seemed to care. But Anne had cared.
"I'm starved," she had said as she had surveyed the table. "Let's pawn
the spoons and have one square meal."
"Anne!"
"Oh, we're beggars on horseback"--bitterly--"and I hate it."
It was her moment of rebellion against the tyranny of tradition. Amy had
had such a moment years ago when her mother had taken her away from
school. Amy had a brilliant mind, and she had loved study, but her
mother had brought her to see that there was no money for college.
"You'd better have a year or two in society, Amy. And this craze for
higher education is rather middle-class."
Ethel's rebellion had come when she had wanted to marry a round-faced
chap who lived across the street. They had played together from
childhood. His people were pleasant folks but lacked social background.
So Ethel's romance had been nipped in the bud. The round-faced chap had
married another girl. And now Amy at thirty and Ethel at twenty-five
were crystallizing into something rather hard and brilliant, as Anne
would perhaps crystallize if something didn't happen.
The something which happened was Maxwell Sears. Anne listened to the
things he said about his farm and felt that they couldn't be true.
"It sounds like a fairy tale."
"It isn't. And it's all tremendously interesting."
He looked very much alive as he said it, and Anne felt the thrill of his
energy and enthusiasm. Murray was never enthusiastic; neither were Amy
and Ethel. They were all indeed a bit petrified.
Before he left her Maxwell asked Anne if he could call. He came promptly
two nights later and brought with him a bunch of violets and a box of
chocolates. Anne pinned the violets in the front of the gray frock that
gave her the look of a cloistered nun, and ate up the chocolates.
Amy was shocked. "Anne, you positively gobbled--"
"I didn't."
"Well, you ate a pound at least."
Anne protested. Maxwell had eaten a lot, and Ethel and Amy had eaten a
few, and Murray had come in.
"You remember, Amy, Murray came in."
"He didn't touch one, Anne. He never eats chocolates."
"He's afraid of getting fat."
"Anne!"
"He is. When he takes me out to lunch he thinks of himself, not of me.
The last time we had grapefruit and broiled mushrooms and lettuce; and I
wanted chops."
Maxwell had been glad to see Anne eat the chocolates. She had seemed as
happy as a child, and he had liked that. There was nothing childish
about Winifred. She had been always grown-up and competent and helpful.
He felt that he owed Winifred a great deal. They were not engaged, but
he rather hoped that some day they might marry. Of course that would
depend upon Winifred. She would probably make him give up the farm and
he would hate that. But a man might give up a farm for a woman like
Winifred and still have more than he deserved.
It will be seen that Maxwell was modest, especially where women were
concerned. The complacency of Murray Flint, weighing Amy against Ethel
and Ethel against Amy and Anne against both, would have seemed infamous
to Maxwell. He felt that it was only by the grace of God that any woman
gave herself to any man. He had a sense of honor which was founded on
decency rather than on convention. He had also a sense of high romance
which belonged more fittingly to the fifteenth than to the twentieth
century. He was not, however, aware of it. He looked upon himself as a
plain and practical chap who had a few things to work out politically
before he settled down to the serious business of farming. Of course if
he married Winifred he wouldn't settle down to the farm, but he would
settle down to something.
In the meantime here was Anne, reading Dickens, eating chocolates, and
leaning over the rail of the House Gallery to listen to his speeches.
It was rather wonderful to have her there. She wore a gray cape with a
chinchilla collar made out of Amy's old muff. A straight sailor hat of
rough straw came well down over her forehead and showed fluffs of
shining hair at the sides. Her little gray-gloved hands clasped the
violets he had given her. Above the violets her eyes were a deeper blue.
She came always alone. "Amy doesn't know," she had told him frankly;