Heart-Unbroken

I

THE train creaked slowly out of the Gare de Lyon. Julian stood in the passageway outside his compartment, his forehead pressed against the glass, until only the haze of the station remained. Against that haze he could still see the slight figure of Elissa, surging and ebbing in his memory, long after Paris itself was a blue, smoky smudge in the distance. That visual memory was like the hum of a motor that persists after the plane has vanished beyond the eye, now softer, now stronger on the changing wind. But sounds vanish in time, or are lost in the amalgam of other sounds, or become so used to being heard that they are silent. This was different. The picture of Elissa was ever renewed in his mind, growing in definition and poignancy with every momentary effacement.

Now he could see the pale blue dress he had not noted at the station, the tan hat, the bag he had given her. She had not cried, nor had she smiled bravely. She had just stood, young and straight and broken, and looked at him. And a curious thing had happened. It seemed not to touch him then, and he noted it almost with the impersonal concern of a student in behaviorism, for he had never seen it before. But now it remained in his consciousness with an insistence that blurred out the station, the crowds, even the pale figure of Elissa herself. No, she had not cried, but all the while tears had been rolling down her immobile face from dry eyes. All during that endless minute while he had stood on the platform step, waiting, hoping for the straining tug of departure to end this useless, this pointless agony, he had watched that strange phenomenon. No, she had not cried. . . .

He wandered down the corridor and found his compartment. Thank heavens, it was unoccupied. The inevitable French lawyer, French soldier, French business man, with his wife and a baby or two, had apparently found other places to strew their baggage, open their bundles, feed their babies, and close the windows. And, greatest blessing of all, there was no American tourist. For this he would ever be grateful.

As he stretched out in his seat, he realized that he was still holding a square package Elissa had given him. He did not even remember taking it from her, but it had been in her hands when she met him at the station and now it was here with him. He picked at the knot carefully, laboriously, although he could easily have slipped the string over the side. For some reason this seemed important to him. Perhaps it was an unconscious slowing-down process to meliorate the long passage of the hours until he would be in Rome; or an effort to keep his fingers mechanically occupied while the figure of Elissa was rhythmically fading and deepening in his memory, the tears always falling from her dry, pale eyes. He took off the paper and opened the box. There was a note on top. And underneath, in neatly arranged order, — he had to smile, — were all the things a mother would pack for her boy’s first journey away from home: aspirin, bicarbonate, laxatives, foot powder, — his feet had been sore from walking around so much in Paris, — even a little briquet, for he was always without matches.

He opened the note. He almost knew the words she would use: ‘. . . no matter what, I shall always be waiting. For you? Maybe not — only waiting. . . . I shall try honestly not to miss you too much. . . . Our beautiful month . . . I would have gone with you, but I felt you needed to be alone. . . . I shall not be really unhappy while I am still living on fresh memories, but — oh, darling! . . .’He put the note in his pocket and rewrapped the package.

II

Yes, it had been a beautiful month, for him as for her. True, he had not done as much work as he had intended, but that could be as readily blamed on Paris as on his seeing her so constantly. He had done a few small sketches of the lesser-known corners, and he had written a piece for an American magazine, with drawings, but other than that, nothing. Well, Paris was n’t the place where he could work. It was too shrill, too volatile, too — or maybe it was Elissa. He could n’t know exactly. But it had been beautiful — and he had n’t done any of the serious things he had come from America to do.

And now Italy, with six months of roaming and painting and studying, was lying ahead for him to explore. He was free and unencumbered for the first time in his life. Free and unencumbered? He laughed at himself for the thought. He had left things behind him in America, things that he had thought were precious and dear and intimately a part of what he was and always must be. Yet here he was, thinking of himself as being free. Free for six months or seven, free to be alone, free from financial worry for the moment, free — until the time would come for him to return. It was a long chain that he had, but the stake was fixed fast in a distant ground. Free!

He was glad he had told Elissa about Freda so soon after their meeting. It helped his conscience a lot, and his conscience was needing a lot of help those days. But at least she knew the situation. He had not deceived her for a moment. And he had not tried to make her fall in love with him. It had just happened. Their meeting on the boat, the lazy, sunny voyage, the sudden impact upon them both of ancient and unusual beauty, the weeks of spring in Paris, that strange, false feel of freedom — all these had formed the background of an inevitable love affair. For he had fallen in love with her, too. At least . . .

Again he skimmed through the letter she had written him. It was so like her. It epitomized so completely the things that awakened his response to her. Response — that was it. That was what he had for her. There was no strength of resistance in him against the tender flow of her devotion, her utter abnegation of all that was not part of him. Nor had he tried to resist it. It had caught him piercingly and sweetly, her need and her courage. For he had told her that this thing could be only of the moment for him. His roots were otherwhere. Their lives, but for this incredibly lovely interlude, were separate. And this she had accepted, and this was her bravery.

He wondered if Freda would understand. How he would love to tell her when he returned. He had referred passingly to Elissa in his early letters as the p. g. o. b. — the prettiest girl on board — and she still remained, for Freda, one among the many people he had met. He repressed an intense impulse to write her fully into his letters. That impulse also was conscience, he supposed. A kind of self-extenuation through confession. But that would have to wait. It was too late now to do that by letter. Perhaps it was too late ever to do it. Perhaps Freda could never understand.

Even as he said it, he knew that this last was true. Through the five years of their married life, she had given him sympathy and encouragement in his work. She had not been impatient of the tedious journey toward success in his career. She had been willing to forgo the material pleasures of the moment, in view of the longer objective. In a word, she had been a brick. But to all things that challenged the conventional morality of her code she was deaf and blind and dumb. She did not even go so far as to consider them menaces to happiness. They were menaces to decency.

Why should he tell her? Just for the selfish fulfillment of his desire for absolution? To give her moments of pain that would poison subtly but cumulatively their entire future together? It was n’t as if he were going to do things about Elissa that Freda would have to know. He was n’t making a new choice. He was n’t giving Freda up — ever.

Yes, that was another thing. Why was n’t he? He did care deeply for Elissa, whether this was induced by her tenderness or her loveliness or Paris in the spring. No, he was using her courage, her unfaltering willingness to take the punishment and give him the freedom of the road. He was utilizing this chivalry of hers so that he might have the easiest path, exactly as he was using Freda’s timidity before new ideas for the purpose of saving himself the pain of hurting her. That was it. He was the Opportunist Magnificent. Elissa’s heroism and Freda’s cowardice — he turned them both to his ends.

‘I wonder if I’m really as bad as all that,’ he said to himself as he took out a pad and started a letter to Elissa.

III

In ‘the grandeur that was Rome’ he forgot himself completely. Days of precious research in the Vatican Library, hour after hour in the Museo delle Terme, the churches, the campagna, Tivoli — all went to his head like wine, but left him crystal-clear and excited. He was doing water color now. Something in the fluency of the medium seemed to meet him in his desire to get it all down, quickly, vividly, in the hot glow of his impression. His notebooks were filled with stuff he thought he would use some day but knew that he would n’t. That’s why he had to capture it fast. This thing called inspiration, which was really only the desire to tell somebody all about it, to communicate somehow the high level of his emotion, was a dangerous thing to put off. It could be so easily dissipated. You could cool down, or you could talk it away, or your physical energy could give out. In any case there would be no painting left — nothing but technique and memory.

Often he longed for Elissa, but not sentimentally. Yes, one night in the Colosseum he needed her, cruelly, desperately, romantically. This was a moonlit beauty that reached back into antiquity and gathered about itself the chiaroscuro of slow-moving time and historic memories. Such shadows were not made to fall on men who were alone. And he had painted himself out that day. The surplus energy of his emotion could not be canalized into the fluent expression that was most natural to him, nor could he switch it into those fields that other men less fastidious than he — and maybe a lot saner, he added grimly — would have chosen without knowing they were making a choice. And yet there was nothing of loyalty to Elissa in this abstinence. Essentially it was not doing the thing he did n’t want to do. The emotion engendered by the Colosseum was not something to be spent in cheap substitutions.

Through the days of his work, he did not really miss her. He needed someone to talk to, and yet, somehow, he was glad there was no one. He had talked lots in Paris, but in Italy he was painting — and painting as he had never painted before.

But this desire for words, light words, frivolous words, unfinished words, was a real need. He took it out in letters a good deal, writing her all the amusing things that happened around him. They were gay letters, filled with external incident, the progress of his work, the color of the Pincio at sundown. How he had overheard one tourist saying that Switzerland was really a very big country if they’d only flatten it out. How he had shocked a little group of art commentators by calling the Della Robbias a ‘family of distinguished mediocrities.’ And through all that he wrote ran the omnipresent beauty of Rome and the prodigiousness of its treasures.

He had heard from her only once, the day after his arrival. It was a brave little heart-unbroken letter, and again he could follow those curious tears that moved down her face from nowhere. But that had been a week ago — he looked down at his desk pad — no, two weeks. How the time had slipped by! Two weeks! Could that be possible? Was anything wrong? He felt like a beast not to have thought of this before, not to have realized. . . .

He dashed off a note, full of concern and tenderness. She must write at once. How could she expect him to do his work if he was n’t to know what was happening to her? ‘Let me know that you are well,’ — and he hated himself for adding this, but he had to, — ‘and not too unhappy.’

His mind was caught by a deep uneasiness for her now, and the days that followed, with no word or sign, no answer to his notes that became more and more urgent as his feeling of selfishness gave way to a genuine sense of panic, were contaminated by his everpresent anxiety. He found himself confining his work to the locale of the Spanish Steps, for that was near the American Express, where he would ask for mail two and three times a day, even though he knew Elissa had his permanent hotel address while he would be in Rome. He was working in oil now. It fitted more the tempo of his mood. Gone was that necessity for catching things on the high wing of his emotion. He could wait for the creative impulse without losing what had gone before, and the greater laboriousness of this kind of painting gave him something of peace through keeping him mechanically occupied. But the work was commonplace. He knew it. There was nothing he could do.

Yes, there was something he could do. He could go back to Paris. He could find out for himself what was wrong. He owed it to her. He owed her more than that. And he owed it to himself.

What did that mean, he wondered. One of those things that slip through the lips — to owe it to one’s self. He would go to Paris to clear his mind of this anxiety about her and then he would be able to work again, and that was that.

Now that his mind was set, he felt a lot better. He scribbled off a telegram at the Express: ‘Desperately worried. Starting for Paris to-morrow unless return wire by morning.’

He was so sure by now that he would not hear from her that already in his mind he was making preparations for departure. He hated the idea of leaving, of being forced to stop work for something he was unable to evaluate. If she had only written. If he only knew what had kept her silent for so long. He did not resent going back if she needed him. He would stay with her gladly if she were ill.

The wire came early next morning: ‘Sorry you worried. Inexplicably happy. Letter follows.’

He turned it over in his hands. He reread it. He studied carefully, and without object, all the cabalistic marks and signs and abbreviations that take up most of the space on a foreign telegram. ‘Inexplicably happy.’

Julian went to his table and drew out his writing pad. He carefully unscrewed the cap of his fountain pen and made sure that the ink flowed readily. Then he pushed aside the books and magazines and, sitting down, wrote a long, tender, beautiful letter, to his wife.

IV

Julian was doing a water color of the cloisters of St. Paul Beyond the Walls. He was working on a wave of cold rage now, rage against Elissa, rage for having let himself be deflected from the thing he had been waiting so long to do — painting in Italy. The letter had not followed yet, although it was a week since the telegram, and it was strange that he was almost without curiosity as to what she would have to say. He wondered how the Freudians would get around that, the psychologists who laid everything to the ego and its frustrations. If it had been merely the fear of having been ousted from his position of emotional dominance over Elissa, then surely he would be worse off now, catching from the glibness of her ‘inexplicably happy’ the full sense of his diminished importance to her. No, he hated himself for the tenderness that had reached out to her in what might have been her pain — the tenderness that had as its answer, ‘Sorry you worried.’

Well, rage was a good motive power, too. Maybe that was still another name for inspiration. Perhaps any excitement, anything that forced you into a gesture, would work. Here he was, under those languorous arches, with their shadows quieting like cool hands the exuberant mosaic of the arcade, turning the excitement of his hate into the depiction of unearthly peacefulness. He had recently seen the advertisement of a mechanical ice box, and he had to smile at the niceness of the analogy. It too utilized heat to produce cold, just as he was transmuting venom into serenity. And the water color, drawn with the exquisite sureness of his hand and eye, might have been done by some old monk who knew nothing of the world or of Elissa — who knew only of God.

Then came the letter. She wrote in a curiously elliptical style that flattered him in its assumption of his understanding and annoyed him with its spasmodic tangencies. Yes, the first three days had been rather terrible . . . Paris had become merely the place where Julian was not . . . the very beauty of the parks and streets had become unbearable. . . . . . And then somehow . . . Did he know Byron, the American composer? She had bumped into him recently — had been seeing quite a bit of him, in fact. . . . Loads of bridge, too. . . . The work at the Conservatory was a dull bore. She almost wished the session were over. . . . Oh, but they were stuffy — still thought no music had been written since Beethoven. . . . Byron was fascinating . . . interpreting surréalisme through the quarter-tone scale. . . . The night before last, a vernissage. . . . She had met Manari and Darvas and . . . they were doing things. You’d hear from them some day. . . . Poor Julian, sunk in the Christ-bitten Italian renaissance! . . . He’d have to snap out of it soon. . . . She was n’t getting much sleep . . . felt fine . . . was absolutely cock-eyed last night. . . . Byron had put Julian’s telegram to music. . . .

Yes, Julian knew Byron. He knew Byron and Darvas and Craig and Manari and the rest — knew them for what they were, a crowd of cheap sensationalists, riding the hobby of iconoclasm, with no voice of their own but to howl down standards. Fine. Howl down standards if you like, but after that say something, sing something, paint something. Or maybe they called that pathetic stuff of theirs painting. Maybe Byron really thought that ‘advanced’ music of his was an advance in music. No, they did n’t even think so themselves. They were debauchers without taste or scruple — and to Elissa they were ‘fascinating.’

And with that he locked up the compartment of his heart labeled ‘Elissa.’

V

The heat was beginning to descend on Italy. He would have to get down to Naples before the height of it, and then be up north, through the hill towns and the Lakes, where he could work without discomfort all during the midsummer. These days in Rome would have to be used to their full.

Elissa’s infrequent letters were all about the same, differing only in the recital of what had occupied her during the few days previous. He had written her no word. He read her lines with perfunctory attention, and forgot them as he was reading. One letter he held in his pocket for two days, without even remembering he had received it. Now as he fished through his pockets for a stray Macedonia and found only crumbled tobacco and torn tissue, he came upon it. She had not heard from him for weeks. . . . What was wrong? Was he well? . . . Please write . . . please . . .

It was in Sorrento that he got her telegram, forwarded on from his hotel in Rome, for she had no idea where he was by now. Her letters had been becoming more and more urgent. She was really frightened. She knew she had lost him, but also there was the fear that he was unable to write, that something had happened. He would have liked to be moved by it. It was impossible. He had no answer to her suffering, a suffering he understood so well from having gone through it himself. It did not touch him. She was merely a girl he had known in Paris, whose name happened to be Elissa.

But this telegram, he could not ignore that. She prayed him for a word, any word, just so she heard from him. He went to the hotel desk and scribbled it off on a blank. ‘You wish this sent by telegraph?’ the clerk said. Julian nodded and walked off. The clerk looked after him and shrugged. The telegram said: —

‘The Bay of Naples is a silver mirror under the moon.’

VI

November. The train seemed to crawl all the way from Chartres to Paris. It was cold and dark and drizzly, and had been so for weeks previous while Julian had slowly made his way up from the south of France. After the Lakes, he had gone to the French Riviera to rest up a bit, but he had struck Provence and the Château Country in the meanest time of the year. The light would fail at four in the afternoon, the days were wet and miserable, and he was tired, hopelessly tired.

He was sure Elissa would be at the station. He had sent her an occasional card, just to assure himself that he was not merely going through the motions of an unswerving indifference, and a wire saying when he would arrive. He had heard from her once or twice, artificial, unintimate glimpses of her life, and he knew that by this time her mother must have come over to see her. She was expected in October, and Elissa had chafed and fumed under the prospect of having her on her hands. ‘She docs n’t speak a word of French and she won’t like any of my friends,’ she had said, but Julian knew it was deeper than that. Elissa was doing the rounds of the salons and cafés and vernissages, and Julian had a great pity in his heart for Mrs. Mallin, who would have come all that way only to be a nuisance.

Elissa was not there. He looked through the station, into the telephone room, and waited around for a while in the event that she had been delayed. He had been so sure. Finally he gave it up and called a taxi.

At his hotel he found a note: ’Sorry I could n’t make it. Lots of people here. Come over.’ He crumpled the letter in his hand and went upstairs to unpack and bathe. He was tired. And for the first time in many months he felt utterly alone.

Two hours later he realized he was walking toward Elissa’s apartment.

Byron was sitting on a couch with his leg thrown over one end. Darvas and Craig and Bender were arguing over cocktails in a corner. Elissa’s mother was sitting apart, straight and ill at ease, with a fixed little smile on her lips. When Julian entered, Elissa left Manari and a dark, boyish-looking girl and walked unsteadily across the room toward him.

‘Hi,’ she said.

It was strange to note her face and compare it with the one he remembered, the one with those funny tears. It was hard now and drawn, with a hint of desperation. In some subtle way she looked like a French girl. Even her accent, he noticed later, was just slightly foreign. Her hair was different, the spots of rouge on her cheeks were higher up, her lips belied the design that was superimposed. She linked her arm through his and presented him around.

Byron looked up. ‘Oh, the man who discovered Italy,’ he said. Darvas snickered.

Julian took a chair next to Mrs. Mallin. She looked a good deal like Elissa, but she was rounder and somehow fresher. ‘She must have been beautiful as a girl,’ thought Julian. ‘Much more beautiful than Elissa.’

Her daughter put down an empty glass with one hand and raised a full one with the other. He watched Mrs. Mallin’s eyes follow her in silent protest. Elissa dragged him away for a moment.

‘Keep your eye on the mater,’ she said. ‘She came over here with a shotgun — but you were in Italy.’

‘There seem to be a number of other targets,’ said Julian, looking around. Elissa ignored it.

‘People saw us together and went back to America. She suspects the worst.’

‘And knows . . . ?’

‘The least,’ answered Elissa. ‘Except that you’re married.’ She left him for a fresh cocktail.

Julian again sat by her mother. ‘She really should n’t drink so much,’ Mrs. Mallin said.

‘No,’ said Julian. He walked over to Elissa. ‘You’ve had plenty. I don’t think I’d take any more,’ he remarked.

Her eyes blazed for a moment, but she put down her glass. ’I’ve gotten along fine for the last six months,’ she said.

‘I’m delighted to hear it,’ said Julian. He went back to his seat.

‘Thank you,’ said Mrs. Mallin.

VII

During the first few weeks of the time that remained before Julian’s boat would sail for New York he saw Mrs. Mallin frequently, Elissa hardly ever. He was full of compassion for the poor woman who was being left so alone by Elissa. One does n’t know what the word ‘aloneness’ means until one has been alone in Paris. The gayety of the city, the width of the boulevards, the eternal vistas, the forbidding intimacy of the cafés, all close in upon the heart and make its solitude an active, tangible thing. He knew, for he had never been more alone. And he recognized that it was not only out of his pity that he was devoting some time to Mrs. Mallin, but out of his own need for contact, a contact that was not wholly divorced from the theme of Elissa, who once, long ago, had been Paris in the Spring. The bleak incidence of winter was almost too perfect a setting for his fallen estate, too formal a contrast to the April he had known. There was something cheaply dramatic about it. Good playwrights avoided such pat fitness.

But wait. This thing was getting a bit mixed up. How much real pain was he suffering? And how much was it a simple matter of his nose having been put out of joint? The ego works in subtle ways. It’s a great little device for getting you to think noble, tragic thoughts about yourself when what you’re really trying to do is to save your face. Maybe those psychologists were n’t so wrong after all. He did n’t want to be any softer on himself than he was on the next one. He wondered. He did n’t know. This was nothing but a maze of speculation. But there was one fact that he could n’t escape if he wanted to; it was inescapable: that if he had stayed in Paris this could not have happened. He had gone away and relied on her bravery without being sure that she was brave. He had been too willing to accept her easy assumption of courage, because it had worked in with his design for living. He had left her to fight alone and she had not fought — she had succumbed.

Well, if this was true it changed the complexion of things. He could n’t have anything like this hanging over him for the rest of his life. In the beginning, his choice seemed free — the choice between Freda and Elissa. Not that he had ever seriously considered choosing between them; but at least there was nothing of duty in it. He was following the path of his inclination, and happily this coincided with what the world would have considered his first, his only obligation. But now there was a wrecked human being to account for. Something had to be straightened out, he knew not how.

He was having dinner with Mrs. Mallin that night in a little restaurant near the Bois. She had come somehow to rely on him in her struggle for Elissa’s spiritual and physical wellbeing. To Elissa he had become merely ‘a friend of Mother’s,’ and in that damning category he was automatically excluded from among the people who mattered to her. He had been discredited. As an artist he had been put into a class that Darvas and Byron and their group despised too much to laugh at, and she had accepted their standards as part of the movement called ‘modernism’ which left Julian, struggling and pathetic and a little ridiculous, among the ruins of a classic art which they cried down. With the loss of his prestige in the field that had once aroused her interest, the rest of him faded out into the general mediocrity that had been assigned to his taste and talent.

But this change in Mrs. Mallin toward him was almost funny. Gone was the hard suspicion with which she had first looked at him, the man against whom her daughter had to be safeguarded. She had never spoken a word about his relation with Elissa before Italy, nor had he; but to-night, somehow, it was all around them.

He came right out with it. ‘You knew, of course, that I was in love with Elissa,’ he said.

Mrs. Mallin seemed not to realize the swift cutting away of nonessentials. ‘I knew she was in love with you,’ she said. ‘She could n’t keep it out of her letters. Then I found out that you were n’t free, and I — I did n’t want Elissa to be hurt.’

‘Neither did I,’ said Julian. ‘Can you understand that?’

Mrs. Mallin looked down into her cup. ‘You did n’t do anything about it.’

‘No, I could n’t,’ said Julian. ‘It would have been swapping one tragedy for another. And besides, it did n’t seem like tragedy. It was just — a month in Paris. I thought she’d get over it.’

‘She did,’ said Mrs. Mallin.

‘I know,’ said Julian.

He lighted her cigarette and crunched his out. ‘It’s too late now, even if I were ready to — do things about it.’

‘I don’t think so,’ she said.

Julian looked up at her quickly. ‘Look here,’ he said. ‘We’re talking about old-fashioned things now. We ’re going to have to use old-fashioned words. What we’re trying to do is to “save” Elissa, is n’t it? And she can only be “saved through love,” and I’m the man she does n’t love.’

Mrs. Mallin’s cigarette was giving off infinitely rapid, tiny vibrations of blue smoke. She looked at him steadily. ‘You could get her to — again.’

‘Would you — would you want me to?’ Julian said.

Mrs. Mallin said, ‘Yes.’

‘And after that?’ asked Julian.

‘After that? . . . I don’t know,’ said Mrs. Mallin.

VIII

Julian never knew just how he set about doing this thing he had been called upon to do. In a specific sense, his tactic was wholly unplanned and spontaneous; in a general sense, it was highly organized and deliberate. No villain, whose motive was the betrayal of a woman, could have been more calculating in his approach toward her. Here was a strange irony: now that he was embarked upon a ‘good work,’ his method was that of Machiavelli, but in creating the situation that had turned into something so close to tragedy he had been completely without guile. He wondered how much of the world’s sorrow could be attributed to those who ‘just did n’t know,’ whose hearts were innocent and without wisdom.

One of his chief difficulties was the arranging of any time with Elissa. Her days and nights were extravagantly frittered away in a procession of selfconscious parties with her ’Post-Revolutionists,’ for that’s what they called themselves, and, while Julian could easily have gone along with the group, he knew instinctively that this would be futile. He had once read in Cabell the definition of a ‘two-ser’ — one who was only at his best with one other person — and he felt that for his purposes this was what he would have to be.

Then one evening she had been too tired to join them and he had sat with her in the apartment. Her fatigue had seemed to dwindle away under his unobtrusive solicitude. He had stayed and talked with her until very late, about Italy mostly, confining himself to those impressions that had to do with its natural beauty, so that the question of æsthetic standards would not be precipitated. There would be time for that later. Now he had to build from noncontentious ground. But when he tried to give her something of what had caught him that night in the Colosseum, she interrupted.

‘It must have been too divine,’ she said. ‘I know, because every honeymoon couple and sophomore and lovesick maiden I ever knew came back with the same story. And I’ve seen it on the loveliest picture postcards.’

‘It’s true,’ he said, ignoring the irony, ‘but there is some beauty so clear that the artist feels it no more strongly than the peasant. These things,’ he fumbled, ‘go beyond, outside of taste. Maybe they’re the things from which all taste, all standards, come into being.’ He smiled a little apologetically. ‘The mother, whose function it is to bear, and not be judged by, her children.’

He told her what he thought were his successes and his failures. How he had done a technically stunning water color of St. Paul Beyond the Walls, which was a complete fiasco because it might easily have been done by someone who had been dead for three hundred years. And here he skillfully used what might have been one of the tenets of PostRevolutionism and showed her that the only thing that was important was how the artist felt about the thing he was doing, and when what you had to say was three centuries old it was n’t worth the saying. He derogated, but without naming names, those who were filled with shouting and empty of craftsmanship. He tried to give her his methods of judgment, without ever implying that they should become her methods. He had to make the battle on the field of his æsthetic rationale, for it was from this ground that she had dismissed him and his values. The romantic approach would come later.

‘What a marvelous villain I would have made,’ thought Julian.

IX

Julian had said good-bye to Mrs. Mallin at the apartment. He had seen very little of her during the last few weeks. All his time had been spent with Elissa, except for an evening or two when he had taken her mother to dinner or the theatre. Elissa lent these occasions a gracious air of magnanimity, as though she were giving Julian over to her mother for the evening. It was a gesture of dependence and possession at the same time. It was a straw in the wind, a sign that he was perhaps unconsciously waiting for.

Mrs. Mallin, more lonely now than ever, watched the curious and gradual change that came over Elissa as Julian’s influence became more pronounced. The apartment had become more or less free from Post-Revolutionists. The hard tiredness of Elissa’s face had been replaced by something sound and happy and tender. But Mrs. Mallin was lonely, very lonely. The thing she had instinctively sought had come to pass. The bridge had been built, but it stretched to an unknown land. And neither she nor Julian knew whether the thing they had done was for the better or for the worse. For now the time had come for Julian to go away.

The Gare St.-Lazare. Not many Americans were left in Paris by this time of the year and the station was quite different from the way it would have looked in September, when the tourists were thronging the boat trains that emptied into the big ships at Havre.

The porter, standing near Elissa and Julian, motioned that it was time to go. She looked so young as she stood there, so straight, so broken. And those tears without source, magically appearing, tremulously falling . . .

Julian read her letter in the train. She had slipped it into his pocket. She knew now . . . this last month had cleared her eyes and her heart. . . . There would never be another . . . she was without hope and without pain. . . . Oh, dearest! . . .

X

Julian had been back three weeks when her first letter came. His eyes ran down the page avidly, fearfully. Yes, that first week had been a kind of agony. . . . Her bravery had been stupidity. She never knew a thing could hurt like that. . . . She still missed him, especially when she was with David Johns. They were so much alike. . . . She had met him while he was sketching some architectural detail at the Cluny. He was a prize man at the Beaux Arts, and positively brilliant. Architecture was fascinating. . . . She did not know what had become of Byron and that crowd. Most of her time was spent with David. . . . Her mother liked him, too — probably the first time they had ever agreed about anything. . . . They had decided to stay in Paris for the year. . . .

Julian put the letter back in his pocket. A faint smile lightened his lips. What had he accomplished? How long would this new infatuation last? One could n’t predict about Elissa, except that in her fickleness she was open to every influence and would always be. The certainty of this knowledge was something of a shock — and yet had n’t he known it before? Had n’t he used this very fact as a working basis in seeking his own exoneration — in extricating her from the debasing relationships she had formed after he first left her? And now? Well, it was a piece of luck about Johns. He knew of him, had heard he was brilliant, a solid student. Now let Johns hold her if he could. But that was none of Julian’s business. His responsibility was over. He turned to Freda.

‘Sometime you must remind me to tell you an awfully funny thing that happened in Paris.’