«I’ll never marry,» he came to say; «I’ve seen too much of it, and I know a happy marriage is a very rare thing. Besides, I’m too old.»
But he did believe in marriage. Like all men who spring from a happy and successful marriage, he believed in it passionately—nothing he had seen would change his belief, his cynicism dissolved upon it like air. But he did really believe he was too old. At twenty-eight he began to accept with equanimity the prospect of marrying without romantic love; he resolutely chose a New York girl of his own class, pretty, intelligent, congenial, above reproach—and set about falling in love with her. The things he had said to Paula with sincerity, to other girls with grace, he could no longer say at all without smiling, or with the force necessary to convince.
«When I’m forty,» he told his friends, «I’ll be ripe. I’ll fall for some chorus girl like the rest.»
Nevertheless, he persisted in his attempt. His mother wanted to see him married, and he could now well afford it—he had a seat on the Stock Exchange, and his earned income came to twenty-five thousand a year. The idea was agreeable: when his friends—he spent most of his time with the set he and Dolly had evolved—closed themselves in behind domestic doors at night, he no longer rejoiced in his freedom. He even wondered if he should have married Dolly. Not even Paula had loved him more, and he was learning the rarity, in a single life, of encountering true emotion.
Just as this mood began to creep over him a disquieting story reached his ear. His aunt Edna, a woman just this side of forty, was carrying on an open intrigue with a dissolute, hard-drinking young man named Cary Sloane. Every one knew of it except Anson’s Uncle Robert, who for fifteen years had talked long in clubs and taken his wife for granted.
Anson heard the story again and again with increasing annoyance. Something of his old feeling for his uncle came back to him, a feeling that was more than personal, a reversion toward that family solidarity on which he had based his pride. His intuition singled out the essential point of the affair, which was that his uncle shouldn’t be hurt. It was his first experiment in unsolicited meddling, but with his knowledge of Edna’s character he felt that he could handle the matter better than a district judge or his uncle.
His uncle was in Hot Springs. Anson traced down the sources of the scandal so that there should be no possibility of mistake and then he called Edna and asked her to lunch with him at the Plaza next day. Something in his tone must have frightened her, for she was reluctant, but he insisted, putting off the date until she had no excuse for refusing.
She met him at the appointed time in the Plaza lobby, a lovely, faded, gray-eyed blonde in a coat of Russian sable. Five great rings, cold with diamonds and emeralds, sparkled on her slender hands. It occurred to Anson that it was his father’s intelligence and not his uncle’s that had earned the fur and the stones, the rich brilliance that buoyed up her passing beauty.
Though Edna scented his hostility, she was unprepared for the directness of his approach.
«Edna, I’m astonished at the way you’ve been acting,» he said in a strong, frank voice. «At first I couldn’t believe it.»
«Believe what?» she demanded sharply.
«You needn’t pretend with me, Edna. I’m talking about Cary Sloane. Aside from any other consideration, I didn’t think you could treat Uncle Robert——»
«Now look here, Anson—» she began angrily, but his peremptory voice broke through hers:
«—and your children in such a way. You’ve been married eighteen years, and you’re old enough to know better.»
«You can’t talk to me like that! You——»
«Yes, I can. Uncle Robert has always been my best friend.» He was tremendously moved. He felt a real distress about his uncle, about his three young cousins.
Edna stood up, leaving her crab-flake cocktail untasted.
«This is the silliest thing——»
«Very well, if you won’t listen to me I’ll go to Uncle Robert and tell him the whole story—he’s bound to hear it sooner or later. And afterward I’ll go to old Moses Sloane.»
Edna faltered back into her chair.
«Don’t talk so loud,» she begged him. Her eyes blurred with tears. «You have no idea how your voice carries. You might have chosen a less public place to make all these crazy accusations.»
He didn’t answer.
«Oh, you never liked me, I know,» she went on. «You’re just taking advantage of some silly gossip to try and break up the only interesting friendship I’ve ever had. What did I ever do to make you hate me so?»
Still Anson waited. There would be the appeal to his chivalry, then to his pity, finally to his superior sophistication—when he had shouldered his way through all these there would be admissions, and he could come to grips with her. By being silent, by being impervious, by returning constantly to his main weapon, which was his own true emotion, he bullied her into frantic despair as the luncheon hour slipped away. At two o’clock she took out a mirror and a handkerchief, shined away the marks of her tears and powdered the slight hollows where they had lain. She had agreed to meet him at her own house at five.
When he arrived she was stretched on a chaise-longue which was covered with cretonne for the summer, and the tears he had called up at luncheon seemed still to be standing in her eyes. Then he was aware of Cary Sloane’s dark anxious presence upon the cold hearth.
«What’s this idea of yours?» broke out Sloane immediately. «I understand you invited Edna to lunch and then threatened her on the basis of some cheap scandal.»
Anson sat down.
«I have no reason to think it’s only scandal.»
«I hear you’re going to take it to Robert Hunter, and to my father.»
Anson nodded.
«Either you break it off—or I will,» he said.
«What God damned business is it of yours, Hunter?»
«Don’t lose your temper, Cary,» said Edna nervously. «It’s only a question of showing him how absurd——»
«For one thing, it’s my name that’s being handed around,» interrupted Anson. «That’s all that concerns you, Cary.»
«Edna isn’t a member of your family.»
«She most certainly is!» His anger mounted. «Why—she owes this house and the rings on her fingers to my father’s brains. When Uncle Robert married her she didn’t have a penny.»
They all looked at the rings as if they had a significant bearing on the situation. Edna made a gesture to take them from her hand.
«I guess they’re not the only rings in the world,» said Sloane.
«Oh, this is absurd,» cried Edna. «Anson, will you listen to me? I’ve found out how the silly story started. It was a maid I discharged who went right to the Chilicheffs—all these Russians pump things out of their servants and then put a false meaning on them.» She brought down her fist angrily on the table: «And after Tom lent them the limousine for a whole month when we were South last winter——»
«Do you see?» demanded Sloane eagerly. «This maid got hold of the wrong end of the thing. She knew that Edna and I were friends, and she carried it to the Chilicheffs. In Russia they assume that if a man and a woman——»
He enlarged the theme to a disquisition upon social relations in the Caucasus.
«If that’s the case it better be explained to Uncle Robert,» said Anson dryly, «so that when the rumors do reach him he’ll know they’re not true.»
Adopting the method he had followed with Edna at luncheon he let them explain it all away. He knew that they were guilty and that presently they would cross the line from explanation into justification and convict themselves more definitely than he could ever do. By seven they had taken the desperate step of telling him the truth—Robert Hunter’s neglect, Edna’s empty life, the casual dalliance that had flamed up into passion—but like so many true stories it had the misfortune of being old, and its enfeebled body beat helplessly against the armor of Anson’s will. The threat to go to Sloane’s father sealed their helplessness, for the latter, a retired cotton broker out of Alabama, was a notorious fundamentalist who controlled his son by a rigid allowance and the promise that at his next vagary the allowance would stop forever.
They dined at a small French restaurant, and the discussion continued—at one time Sloane resorted to physical threats, a little later they were both imploring him to give them time. But Anson was obdurate. He saw that Edna was breaking up, and that her spirit must not be refreshed by any renewal of their passion.
At two o’clock in a small night-club on 53d Street, Edna’s nerves suddenly collapsed, and she cried to go home. Sloane had been drinking heavily all evening, and he was faintly maudlin, leaning on the table and weeping a little with his face in his hands. Quickly Anson gave them his terms. Sloane was to leave town for six months, and he must be gone within forty-eight hours. When he returned there was to be no resumption of the affair, but at the end of a year Edna might, if she wished, tell Robert Hunter that she wanted a divorce and go about it in the usual way.
He paused, gaining confidence from their faces for his final word.
«Or there’s another thing you can do,» he
