CHAPTER LVI

Persis sat in grim communion with her image for hours. She faintly heard

her husband's tapping on her door, and calling through it at intervals

in thicker and thicker speech. But it was like a far-off rumor from a

street. She was in session with herself.

She took her boudoir cap from her hair, and sat in the cascade of it

peering through as from a cavern, and smoking always. She was smoking

much too much, but she felt a companionship in tobacco. As she held the

cap in her hand she thought of Forbes; and the remembrance was so joyous

that she vowed to brave the world to get back to him.

But she pondered what the world would say of her, how it had dealt with

the others that had openly defied it, and she was afraid. Then she vowed

that she would take her love secretly and cleverly. She would hunt for

Forbes till she met him and regained him.

Then she pictured how he would look at her when he understood. She

imagined him starting back from her as from something abhorrent. She

threw a cigarette-stub at her face in the mirror and gasped: "Pagh!" She

could endure anything better than such cheapening of herself in Forbes'

eyes. And after a while she began to think of her self-respect. She had

only herself. She must keep that self precious.

Worn out at last with her silent war, she bent her head on her crossed

hands and fell asleep among the fripperies of her dressing-table. These

temptations in the wilderness come to people in various places. This

tired butterfly fought with evil and won the duel in a boudoir in a

fashionable hotel in Paris.

Hours later she woke in broad daylight and crept to bed with tingling

arms and aching forehead. She did not wake again till noon. Nichette had

tiptoed about her like a sentinel and had kept Willie at a distance. He

discharged her a dozen times, but she simply shrugged and sniffed and

answered him in French too rapid for him to follow or reply to.

When at last Persis sat up with her coffee and crescents on her knees,

Nichette read to her the news in the French columns of the Paris

_Herald_. She learned that Ambassador-elect Tait and his entourage had

gone to Evian-les-Bains.

Willie came in with new plans for Persis' diversion. He suggested a

visit to Switzerland and Lake Geneva. She would have liked to go to the

mountains. There was something heroic in them. But Evian was closely

adjacent to Switzerland. She nobly suggested Norway and Sweden. The

thought of fjords and midnight suns and things was also heroic.

In the meanwhile she must make haste to dress for the _Prix des Drags_,

and she took some interest in the choice of a gown sufficiently striking

to insure success in the fierce rivalry of that great costume race.

Everybody said that the world had not seen such undressing in public

since the Grecian revival at the time of the Directoire. Persis was not

the least astounding figure there. She felt that, after a deed of such

sacrifice as she had achieved in forswearing love, she had earned an

extra license in her draperies. Willie raised a tempest about her gown,

but she felt that she had done enough for him. She was suffering that

morning-after sullenness which follows unusual indulgences in virtue as

well as other excesses.

Life once more was a tango. She shifted from costume to costume like a

dressmaker's model. She went the rounds of _thes dansants_, and

musicales, and embassies, town houses, hotels, and chateaux,

watering-places, and mountains, lakes, and seas. But she kept away from

Switzerland till she read that Ambassador Tait was at his desk in Paris;

and then she avoided Paris and went to Trouville.

And so the days totaled into weeks, and the weeks became a month, two,

three, six. She fled from boredom to boredom. She skimmed the cream of

life and whipped it, and it turned sour. Though her abiding-places were

all oases and her tents were of silk, she led only a Bedouin existence.

After all, she and Willie were but tramps--velvet-clad hoboes. Variety

became monotony, luxury an oppression, contentment a will-o'-the-wisp.

She went to America and found that loveless contentment was not among

the Yankee inventions. She went back to Europe, and it was not among the

Parisian devices. There was everything for sale on the Rue de la Paix

except peace. She had not come to Paris purposely to find Harvey Forbes,

but she had sickened of being good, and she had grown nauseated with

denying her heart. If fate willed that their communion should be renewed

she would no longer tamper with destiny.

She wondered if time had cured Forbes' love. She wondered if he cared

for some one else--Mildred Tait, for instance, or some Parisian witch.

At the mere thought her heart beat like the wings of a wounded bird, and

she knew that she loved him and always would love him.

Half a year of Willie's tempers and whinings, his indigestions and

colds, and his diminishing patience with her whims, his growing habit of

complaining of her extravagances, his quarrels with their servants, with

every waiter, every messenger-boy, and hotel-keeper, had worn out even

her courtesy. They quarreled shamelessly in private, and with less and

less caution in public.

And now she was beginning to feel that she earned all she got, and was

paying usury on her money, and being badly treated in the bargain. She

was arriving at that sick frame of mind that makes cashiers and

statesmen and married people unfaithful to their trusts.

This was her humor when she met Forbes again. She had tried in various

ways to gain invitations to affairs of the Embassy. But Tait wasted no

diplomacy on cutting out the Enslees. He was the more brutal about this

since he felt that he was guarding his daughter's welfare.

Mildred had made herself dear to the more earnest elements of Paris. She

had grown somewhat less of a joke to the more frivolous. The

entertainments at the Embassy were not quite so Puritanical now, and her

costumes had amazingly improved since her father had put her under the

direct control of a tyrannical dressmaker of world-wide fame.

Whether she were growing to be merely a habit with Forbes or not, they

were more and more together. They fought bitterly on the question of

war, which she considered an unmitigated horror and he believed to be

the loftiest form of tragedy. But the whetting of mind on mind was

producing sparks, and Tait hoped that some day one of them would set

their two hearts on fire.

He was preparing for that day by making Forbes less poor. His post kept

him from taking advantage of the financial secrets he stumbled on. But

when he put Mildred in the hands of a dressmaker he gave the financial

destinies of Forbes to a retired capitalist, who juggled Forbes' five

hundred dollars into a thousand in a pair of weeks; and that thousand

into three. Then he encouraged Forbes to borrow, indorsed his notes and

speculated with the proceeds pyramidally. He was enjoying it as a form

of chess. At the end of half a year Forbes was talking as much of the

Bourse and Argentines as he was of projectiles and trajectories.

Having assured Forbes of enough money in bank to give him a salubrious

self-confidence, Tait dropped hints of a certain clause in his will and

sat back to watch the result. He was counting on receiving as his

Christmas gift the news that Forbes and Mildred were to be married, and

he was polishing up a joke about giving them inside rates on the

consular fees for that complicated ceremony.

And then the Enslees came to Paris in an unusual snow-storm, and winter

set in about the old man's overworked, undermined heart. He did his best

to keep Persis and Forbes apart; but when were the old ever vigilant

enough to thwart the young?