The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck. A Comedy of Limitations

I

When the Reliance, the Constitution and the Columbia were holding trial races off Newport to decide which one of these yachts should defend the America's cup; when the tone of the Japanese press as to Russia's actions in Manchuria was beginning to grow ominous; when the Jews of America were drafting a petition to the Czar; and when it was rumored that the health of Pope Leo XIII was commencing to fail:—at this remote time, the Musgraves gave their first house-party.

And at this period Colonel Musgrave noted and admired the apparent unconcern with which John Charteris and Clarice Pendomer encountered at Matocton. And at this period Colonel Musgrave noted with approval the intimacy which was, obviously, flourishing between the little novelist and Patricia.

Also Colonel Musgrave had presently good reason to lament a contretemps, over which he was sulking when Mrs. Pendomer rustled to her seat at the breakfast-table, with a shortness of breath that was partly due to the stairs, and in part attributable to her youthful dress, which fitted a trifle too perfectly.

"Waffles?" said Mrs. Pendomer. "At my age and weight the first is an experiment and the fifth an amiable indiscretion of which I am invariably guilty. Sugar, please." She yawned, and reached a generously-proportioned arm toward the sugar-bowl. "Yes, that will do, Pilkins."

Colonel Musgrave—since the remainder of his house-party had already breakfasted—raised his fine eyes toward the chandelier, and sighed, as Pilkins demurely closed the dining-room door.

Leander Pilkins—butler for a long while now to the Musgraves of Matocton—would here, if space permitted, be the subject of an encomium. Leander Pilkins was in Lichfield considered to be, upon the whole, the handsomest man whom Lichfield had produced; for this quadroon's skin was like old ivory, and his profile would have done credit to an emperor. His terrapin is still spoken of in Lichfield as people in less favored localities speak of the Golden Age, and his mayonnaise (boasts Lichfield) would have compelled an Olympian to plead for a second helping. For the rest, his deportment in all functions of butlership is best described as super-Chesterfieldian; and, indeed, he was generally known to be a byblow of Captain Beverley Musgrave's, who in his day was Lichfield's arbiter as touched the social graces. And so, no more of Pilkins.

Mrs. Pendomer partook of chops. "Is this remorse," she queried, "or a convivially induced requirement for bromides? At this unearthly hour of the morning it is very often difficult to disentangle the two."

"It is neither," said Colonel Musgrave, and almost snappishly.

Followed an interval of silence. "Really," said Mrs. Pendomer, and as with sympathy, "one would think you had at last been confronted with one of your thirty-seven pasts—or is it thirty-eight, Rudolph?"

Colonel Musgrave frowned disapprovingly at her frivolity; he swallowed his coffee, and buttered a superfluous potato. "H'm!" said he; "then you know?"

"I know," sighed she, "that a sleeping past frequently suffers from insomnia."

"And in that case," said he, darkly, "it is not the only sufferer."

Mrs. Pendomer considered the attractions of a third waffle—a mellow blending of autumnal yellows, fringed with a crisp and irresistible brown, that, for the moment, put to flight all dreams and visions of slenderness.

"And Patricia?" she queried, with a mental hiatus.

Colonel Musgrave flushed.

"Patricia," he conceded, with mingled dignity and sadness, "is, after all, still in her twenties——"

"Yes," said Mrs. Pendomer, with a dryness which might mean anything or nothing; "she was only twenty-one when she married you."

"I mean," he explained, with obvious patience, "that at her age she—not unnaturally—takes an immature view of things. Her unspoiled purity," he added, meditatively, "and innocence and general unsophistication are, of course, adorable, but I can admit to thinking that for a journey through life they impress me as excess baggage."

"Patricia," said Mrs. Pendomer, soothingly, "has ideals. And ideals, like a hare-lip or a mission in life, should be pitied rather than condemned, when our friends possess them; especially," she continued, buttering her waffle, "as so many women have them sandwiched between their last attack of measles and their first imported complexion. No one of the three is lasting, Rudolph."

"H'm!" said he.

There was another silence. The colonel desperately felt that matters were not advancing.

"H'm!" said she, with something of interrogation in her voice.

"See here, Clarice, I have known you——"

"You have not!" cried she, very earnestly; "not by five years!"

"Well, say for some time. You are a sensible woman——"

"A man," Mrs. Pendomer lamented, parenthetically, "never suspects a woman of discretion, until she begins to lose her waist."

"—and I am sure that I can rely upon your womanly tact, and finer instincts,—and that sort of thing, you know—to help me out of a deuce of a mess."

Mrs. Pendomer ate on, in an exceedingly noncommittal fashion, as he paused, inquiringly.

"She has been reading some letters," said he, at length; "some letters that I wrote a long time ago."

"In the case of so young a girl," observed Mrs. Pendomer, with perfect comprehension, "I should have undoubtedly recommended a judicious supervision of her reading-matter."

"She was looking through an old escritoire," he explained; "Jack Charteris had suggested that some of my father's letters—during the War, you know—. might be of value—"

He paused, for Mrs. Pendomer appeared on the verge of a question.

But she only said, "So it was Mr. Charteris who suggested Patricia's searching the desk. Ah, yes! And then—?"

"And it was years ago—and just the usual sort of thing, though it may have seemed from the letters—Why, I hadn't given the girl a thought," he cried, in virtuous indignation, "until Patricia found the letters—and read them!"

"Naturally," she assented—"yes,—just as I read George's."

The smile with which she accompanied this remark, suggested that both Mr. Pendomer's correspondence and home life were at times of an interesting nature.

"I had destroyed the envelopes when she returned them," continued Colonel Musgrave, with morose confusion of persons. "Patricia doesn't even know who the girl was—her name, somehow, was not mentioned."

"'Woman of my heart'—'Dearest girl in all the world,'" quoted Mrs. Pendomer, reminiscently, "and suchlike tender phrases, scattered in with a pepper-cruet, after the rough copy was made in pencil, and dated just 'Wednesday,' or 'Thursday,' of course. Ah, you were always very careful, Rudolph," she sighed; "and now that makes it all the worse, because—as far as all the evidence goes—these letters may have been returned yesterday."

"Why—!" Colonel Musgrave pulled up short, hardly seeing his way clear through the indignant periods on which he had entered. "I declined," said he, somewhat lamely, "to discuss the matter with her, in her present excited and perfectly unreasonable condition."

Mrs. Pendomer's penciled eyebrows rose, and her lips—which were quite as red as there was any necessity for their being—twitched.

"Hysterics?" she asked.

"Worse!" groaned Colonel Musgrave; "patient resignation under unmerited affliction!"

He had picked up a teaspoon, and he carefully balanced it upon his forefinger.

"There were certain phrases in these letters which were, somehow, repeated in certain letters I wrote to Patricia the summer we were engaged, and—not to put too fine a point upon it—she doesn't like it."

Mrs. Pendomer smiled, as though she considered this not improbable; and he continued, with growing embarrassment and indignation:

"She says there must have been others"—Mrs. Pendomer's smile grew reminiscent—"any number of others; that she is only an incident in my life. Er—as you have mentioned, Patricia has certain notions—Northern idiocies about the awfulness of a young fellow's sowing his wild oats, which you and I know perfectly well he is going to do, anyhow, if he is worth his salt. But she doesn't know it, poor little girl. So she won't listen to reason, and she won't come downstairs—which," lamented Rudolph Musgrave, plaintively, "is particularly awkward in a house-party."

He drummed his fingers, for a moment, on the table.

"It is," he summed up, "a combination of Ibsen and hysterics, and of—er, rather declamatory observations concerning there being one law for the man and another for the woman, and Patricia's realization of the mistake we both made—and all that sort of nonsense, you know, exactly as if, I give you my word, she were one of those women who want to vote." The colonel, patently, considered that feminine outrageousness could go no farther. "And she is taking menthol and green tea and mustard plasters and I don't know what all, in bed, prior to—to——"

"Taking leave?" Mrs. Pendomer suggested.

"Er—that was mentioned, I believe," said Colonel Musgrave. "But of course she was only talking."

Mrs. Pendomer looked about her; and, without, the clean-shaven lawns and trim box-hedges were very beautiful in the morning sunlight; within, the same sunlight sparkled over the heavy breakfast service, and gleamed in the high walnut panels of the breakfast-room. She viewed the comfortable appointments about her a little wistfully, for Mrs. Pendomer's purse was not over-full.

"Of course," said she, as in meditation, "there was the money."

"Yes," said Rudolph Musgrave, slowly; "there was the money."

He sprang to his feet, and drew himself erect. Here was a moment he must give its full dramatic value.

"Oh, no, Clarice, my marriage may have been an eminently sensible one, but I love my wife. Oh, believe me, I love her very tenderly, poor little Patricia! I have weathered some forty-seven birthdays; and I have done much as other men do, and all that—there have been flirtations and suchlike, and—er—some women have been kinder to me than I deserved. But I love her; and there has not been a moment since she came into my life I haven't loved her, and been—" he waved his hands now impotently, almost theatrically—"sickened at the thought of the others."

Mrs. Pendomer's foot tapped the floor whilst he spoke. When he had made an ending, she inclined her head toward him.

"Thank you!" said Mrs. Pendomer.

Colonel Musgrave bit his lip; and he flushed.

"That," said he, hastily, "was different."

But the difference, whatever may have been its nature, was seemingly a matter of unimportance to Mrs. Pendomer, who was in meditation. She rested her ample chin on a much-bejeweled hand for a moment; and, when Mrs. Pendomer raised her face, her voice was free from affectation.

"You will probably never understand that this particular July day is a crucial point in your life. You will probably remember it, if you remember it at all, simply as that morning when Patricia found some girl-or-another's old letters, and behaved rather unreasonably about them. It was the merest trifle, you will think…. John Charteris understands women better than you do, Rudolph."

"I need not pretend at this late day to be as clever as Jack," the colonel said, in some bewilderment. "But why not more succinctly state that the Escurial is not a dromedary, although there are many flies in France? For what on earth has Jack to do with crucial points and July mornings?"

"Why, I suppose, I only made bold to introduce his name for the sake of an illustration, Rudolph. For the last person in the world to realize, precisely, why any woman did anything is invariably the woman who did it…. Yet there comes in every married woman's existence that time when she realizes, suddenly, that her husband has a past which might be taken as, in itself, a complete and rounded life—as a life which had run the gamut of all ordinary human passions, and had become familiar with all ordinary human passions a dishearteningly long while before she ever came into that life. A woman never realizes that of her lover, somehow. But to know that your husband, the father of your child, has lived for other women a life in which you had no part, and never can have part!—she realizes that, at one time or another, and—and it sickens her." Mrs. Pendomer smiled as she echoed his phrase, but her eyes were not mirthful.

"Ah, she hungers for those dead years, Rudolph, and, though you devote your whole remaining life to her, nothing can ever make up for them; and she always hates those shadowy women who have stolen them from her. A woman never, at heart, forgives the other women who have loved her husband, even though she cease to care for him herself. For she remembers—ah, you men forget so easily, Rudolph! God had not invented memory when he created Adam; it was kept for the woman."

Then ensued a pause, during which Rudolph Musgrave smiled down upon her, irresolutely; for he abhorred "a scene," as his vernacular phrased it, and to him Clarice's present manner bordered upon both the scenic and the incomprehensible.

"Ah!—you women!" he temporized.

There was a glance from eyes whose luster time and irregular living had conspired to dim.

"Ah!—you men!" Mrs. Pendomer retorted. "And there we have the tragedy of life in a nutshell!"

Silence lasted for a while. The colonel was finding this matutinal talk discomfortably opulent in pauses.

"Rudolph, and has it never occurred to you that in marrying Patricia you swindled her?"

And naturally his eyebrows lifted.

"Because a woman wants love."

"Well, well! and don't I love Patricia?"

"I dare say that you think you do. Only you have played at loving so long you are really unable to love anybody as a girl has every right to be loved in her twenties. Yes, Rudolph, you are being rather subtly punished for the good times you have had. And, after all, the saddest punishment is something that happens in us, not something which happens to us."

"I wish you wouldn't laugh, Clarice——"

"I wish I didn't have to. For I would get far more comfort out of crying, and I don't dare to, because of my complexion. It comes in a round pasteboard box nowadays, you know, Rudolph, with French mendacities all over the top—and my eyebrows come in a fat crayon, and the healthful glow of my lips comes in a little porcelain tub."

Mrs. Pendomer was playing with a teaspoon now, and a smile hovered about the aforementioned lips.

"And yet, do you remember, Rudolph," said she, "that evening at Assequin, when I wore a blue gown, and they were playing Fleurs d'Amour, and—you said—?"

"Yes"—there was an effective little catch in his voice—"you were a wonderful girl, Clarice—'my sunshine girl,' I used to call you. And blue was always your color; it went with your eyes so exactly. And those big sleeves they wore then—those tell-tale, crushable sleeves!—they suited your slender youthfulness so perfectly! Ah, I remember it as though it were yesterday!"

Mrs. Pendomer majestically rose to her feet.

"It was pink! And it was at the Whitebrier you said—what you said! And—and you don't deserve anything but what you are getting," she concluded, grimly.

"I—it was so long ago," Rudolph Musgrave apologized, with mingled discomfort and vagueness.

"Yes," she conceded, rather sadly; "it was so long—oh, very long ago! For we were young then, and we believed in things, and—and Jack Charteris had not taken a fancy to me—" She sighed and drummed her fingers on the table. "But women have always helped and shielded you, haven't they, Rudolph? And now I am going to help you too, for you have shown me the way. You don't deserve it in the least, but I'll do it."

II

Thus it shortly came about that Mrs. Pendomer mounted, in meditative mood, to Mrs. Musgrave's rooms; and that Mrs. Pendomer, recovering her breath, entered, without knocking, into a gloom where cologne and menthol and the odor of warm rubber contended for mastery. For Patricia had decided that she was very ill indeed, and was sobbing softly in bed.

Very calmly, Mrs. Pendomer opened a window, letting in a flood of fresh air and sunshine; very calmly, she drew a chair—a substantial arm-chair—to the bedside, and, very calmly, she began:

"My dear, Rudolph has told me of this ridiculous affair, and—oh, you equally ridiculous girl!"

She removed, with deft fingers, a damp and clinging bandage from about Patricia's head, and patted the back of Patricia's hand, placidly. Patricia was by this time sitting erect in bed, and her coppery hair was thick about her face, which was colorless; and, altogether, she was very rigid and very indignant and very pretty, and very, very young.

"How dare he tell you—or anybody else!" she cried.

"We are such old friends, remember," Mrs. Pendomer pleaded, and rearranged the pillows, soothingly, about her hostess; "and I want to talk to you quietly and sensibly."

Patricia sank back among the pillows, and inhaled the fresh air, which, in spite of herself, she found agreeable. "I—somehow, I don't feel very sensible," she murmured, half sulky and half shame-faced.

Mrs. Pendomer hesitated for a moment, and then plunged into the heart of things. "You are a woman, dear," she said, gently, "though heaven knows it must have been only yesterday you were playing about the nursery—and one of the facts we women must face, eventually, is that man is a polygamous animal. It is unfortunate, perhaps, but it is true. Civilization may veneer the fact, but nothing will ever override it, not even in these new horseless carriages. A man may give his wife the best that is in him—his love, his trust, his life's work—but it is only the best there is left. We give our hearts; men dole out theirs, as people feed bread to birds, with a crumb for everyone. His wife has the remnant. And the best we women can do is to remember we are credibly informed that half a loaf is preferable to no bread at all."

Her face sobered, and she added, pensively: "We might contrive a better universe, we sister women, but this is not permitted us. So we must take it as it is."

Patricia stirred, as talking died away. "I don't believe it," said she; and she added, with emphasis: "And, anyhow, I hate that nasty trollop!"

"Ah, but you do believe it." Mrs. Pendomer's voice was insistent. "You knew it years before you went into long frocks. That knowledge is, I suppose, a legacy from our mothers."

Patricia frowned, petulantly, and then burst into choking sobs. "Oh!" she cried, "it's damnable! Some other woman has had what I can never have. And I wanted it so!—that first love that means everything—the love he gave her when I was only a messy little girl, with pig-tails and too many hands and feet! Oh, that—that hell-cat! She's had everything!"

There was an interval, during which Mrs. Pendomer smiled crookedly, and Patricia continued to sob, although at lengthening intervals. Then, Mrs. Pendomer lifted the packet of letters lying on the bed, and cleared her throat.

"H'm!" said she; "so this is what caused all the trouble? You don't mind?"

And, considering silence as equivalent to acquiescence, she drew out a letter at hazard, and read aloud:

"'Just a line, woman of all the world, to tell you … but what have I to tell you, after all? Only the old, old message, so often told that it seems scarcely worth while to bother the postman about it. Just three words that innumerable dead lips have whispered, while life was yet good and old people were unreasonable and skies were blue—three words that our unborn children's children will whisper to one another when we too have gone to help the grasses in their growing or to nourish the victorious, swaying hosts of some field of daffodils. Just three words—that is my message to you, my lady…. Ah, it is weary waiting for a sight of your dear face through these long days that are so much alike and all so empty and colorless! My heart grows hungry as I think of your great, green eyes and of the mouth that is like a little wound. I want you so, O dearest girl in all the world! I want you…. Ah, time travels very slowly that brings you back to me, and, meanwhile, I can but dream of you and send you impotent scrawls that only vex me with their futility. For my desire of you—'

"The remainder," said Mrs. Pendomer, clearing her throat once more, "appears to consist of insanity and heretical sentiments, in about equal proportions, all written at the top of a boy's breaking voice. It isn't Colonel Musgrave's voice—quite—is it?"

During the reading, Patricia, leaning on one elbow, had regarded her companion with wide eyes and flushed cheeks. "Now, you see!" she cried indignantly; "he loved her! He was simply crazy about her."

"Why, yes." Mrs. Pendomer replaced the letter, carefully, almost caressingly, among its companions. "My dear, it was years ago. I think time has by this wreaked a vengeance far more bitter than you could ever plan on the woman who, after all, never thought to wrong you. For the bitterest of all bitter things to a woman—to some women, at least—is to grow old."

She sighed, and her well-manicured fingers fretted for a moment with the counterpane.

"Ah, who will write the tragedy of us women who were 'famous Southern beauties' once? We were queens of men while our youth lasted, and diarists still prattle charmingly concerning us. But nothing was expected of us save to be beautiful and to condescend to be made much of, and that is our tragedy. For very few things, my dear, are more pitiable than the middle-age of the pitiful butterfly woman, whose mind cannot—cannot, because of its very nature—reach to anything higher! Middle-age strips her of everything—the admiration, the flattery, the shallow merriment—all the little things that her little mind longs for—and other women take her place, in spite of her futile, pitiful efforts to remain young. And the world goes on as before, and there is a whispering in the moonlit garden, and young people steal off for wholly superfluous glasses of water, and the men give her duty dances, and she is old—ah, so old!—under the rouge and inane smiles and dainty fripperies that caricature her lost youth! No, my dear, you needn't envy this woman! Pity her, my dear!" pleaded Clarice Pendomer, and with a note of earnestness in her voice.

"Such a woman," said Patricia, with distinctness, "deserves no pity."

"Well," Mrs. Pendomer conceded, drily, "she doesn't get it. Probably, because she always grows fat, from sheer lack of will-power to resist sloth and gluttony—the only agreeable vices left her; and by no stretch of the imagination can a fat woman be converted into either a pleasing or heroic figure."

Mrs. Pendomer paused for a breathing-space, and smiled, though not very pleasantly.

"It is, doubtless," said she, "a sight for gods—and quite certainly for men—to laugh at, this silly woman striving to regain a vanished frugality of waist. Yes, I suppose it is amusing—but it is also pitiful. And it is more pitiful still if she has ever loved a man in the unreasoning way these shallow women sometimes do. Men age so slowly; the men a girl first knows are young long after she has reached middle-age—yes, they go on dancing cotillions and talking nonsense in the garden, long after she has taken to common-sense shoes. And the man is still young—and he cares for some other woman, who is young and has all that she has lost—and it seems so unfair!" said Mrs. Pendomer.

Patricia regarded her for a moment. The purple eyes were alert, their glance was hard. "You seem to know all about this woman," Patricia began, in a level voice. "I have heard, of course, what everyone in Lichfield whispers about you and Rudolph. I have even teased Rudolph about it, but until to-day I had believed it was a lie."

"It is often a mistake to indulge in uncommon opinions," said Mrs. Pendomer. "You get more fun and interest out of it, I don't deny, but the bill, my dear, is unconscionable."

"So! you confess it!"

"My dear, and who am I to stand aside like a coward and see you make a mountain of this boy-and-girl affair—an affair which Rudolph and I had practically forgotten—oh, years ago!—until to-day? Why—why, you can't be jealous of me!" Mrs. Pendomer concluded, half-mockingly.

Patricia regarded her with deliberation.

In the windy sunlight, Mrs. Pendomer was a well-preserved woman, but, unmistakably, preserved; moreover, there was a great deal of her, and her nose was in need of a judicious application of powder, of which there was a superfluity behind her ears. Was this the siren Patricia had dreaded? Patricia clearly perceived that, whatever had been her husband's relations with this woman, he had been manifestly entrapped into the imbroglio—a victim to Mrs. Pendomer's inordinate love of attention, which was, indeed, tolerably notorious; and Patricia's anger against Rudolph Musgrave gave way to a rather contemptuous pity and a half-maternal remorse for not having taken better care of him.

"No," answered Mrs. Pendomer, to her unspoken thought; "no woman could be seriously jealous of me. Yes, I dare say, I am passée and vain and frivolous and—harmless. But," she added, meditatively, "you hate me, just the same."

"My dear Mrs. Pendomer——" Patricia began, with cool courtesy; then hesitated. "Yes," she conceded; "I dare say, it is unreasonable—but I do hate you like the very old Nick."

"Why, then," spoke Mrs. Pendomer, with cheerfulness, "everything is as it should be." She rose and smiled. "I am sorry to say I must be leaving Matocton to-day; the Ullwethers are very pressing, and I really don't know how to get out of paying them a visit——"

"So sorry to lose you," cooed Patricia; "but, of course, you know best. I believe some very good people are visiting the Ullwethers nowadays?" She extended the letters, blandly. "May I restore your property?" she queried, with utmost gentleness.

"Thanks!" Clarice Pendomer took them, and kissed her hostess, not without tenderness, on the brow. "My dear, be kind to Rudolph. He—he is rather an attractive man, you know,—and other women are kind to him. We of Lichfield have always said that he and Jack Charteris were the most dangerous men that even Lichfield has ever produced——"

"Why, do people really find Mr. Charteris particularly attractive?" Patricia demanded, so quickly and so innocently that Mrs. Pendomer could not deny herself the glance of a charlatan who applauds his fellow's legerdemain.

And Patricia colored.

"Oh, well—! You know how Lichfield gossips," said Mrs. Pendomer.

III

Colonel Musgrave had smoked a preposterous number of unsatisfying cigarettes on the big front porch of Matocton whilst Mrs. Pendomer was absent on her mission; and on her return, flushed and triumphant, he rose in eloquent silence.

"I've done it, Rudolph," said Mrs. Pendomer.

"Done what?" he queried, blankly.

"Restored what my incomprehensible lawyers call the status quo; achieved peace with honor; carried off the spoils of war; and—in short—arranged everything," answered Mrs. Pendomer, and sank into a rustic chair, which creaked admonishingly. "And all," she added, bringing a fan into play, "without a single falsehood. I am not to blame if Patricia has jumped at the conclusion that these letters were written to me."

"My word!" said Rudolph Musgrave, "your methods of restoring domestic peace to a distracted household are, to say the least, original!" He seated himself, and lighted another cigarette.

"Oh, well, Patricia is not deaf, you know, and she has lived in Lichfield quite a while." Mrs. Pendomer said abruptly, "I have half a mind to tell you some of the things I know about Aline Van Orden."

"Please don't," said Colonel Musgrave, "for I would inevitably beard you on my own porch and smite you to the door-mat. And I am hardly young enough for such adventures."

"And poor Aline is dead! And the rest of us are middle-aged now, Rudolph, and we go in to dinner with the veterans who call us 'Madam,' and we are prominent in charitable enterprises…. But there was a time when we were not exactly hideous in appearance, and men did many mad things for our sakes, and we never lose the memory of that time. Pleasant memories are among the many privileges of women. Yes," added Mrs. Pendomer, meditatively, "we derive much the same pleasure from them a cripple does from rearranging the athletic medals he once won, or a starving man from thinking of the many excellent dinners he has eaten; but we can't and we wouldn't part with them, nevertheless."

Rudolph Musgrave, however, had not honored her with much attention, and was puzzling over the more or less incomprehensible situation; and, perceiving this, she ran on, after a little:

"Oh, it worked—it worked beautifully! You see, she would always have been very jealous of that other woman; but with me it is different. She has always known that scandalous story about you and me. And she has always known me as I am—a frivolous and—say, corpulent, for it is a more dignified word—and generally unattractive chaperon; and she can't think of me as ever having been anything else. Young people never really believe in their elders' youth, Rudolph; at heart, they think we came into the world with crow's-feet and pepper-and-salt hair, all complete. So, she is only sorry for you now—rather as a mother would be for a naughty child; as for me, she isn't jealous—but," sighed Mrs. Pendomer, "she isn't over-fond of me."

Colonel Musgrave rose to his feet. "It isn't fair," said he; "the letters were distinctly compromising. It isn't fair you should shoulder the blame for a woman who was nothing to you. It isn't fair you should be placed in such a false position."

"What matter?" pleaded Mrs. Pendomer. "The letters are mine to burn, if I choose. I have read one of them, by the way, and it is almost word for word a letter you wrote me a good twenty years ago. And you re-hashed it for Patricia's benefit too, it seems! You ought to get a mimeograph. Oh, very well! It doesn't matter now, for Patricia will say nothing—or not at least to you," she added.

"Still——" he began.

"Ah, Rudolph, if I want to do a foolish thing, why won't you let me? What else is a woman for? They are always doing foolish things. I have known a woman to throw a man over, because she had seen him without a collar; and I have known another actually to marry a man, because she happened to be in love with him. I have known a woman to go on wearing pink organdie after she has passed forty, and I have known a woman to go on caring for a man who, she knew, wasn't worth caring for, long after he had forgotten. We are not brave and sensible, like you men. So why not let me be foolish, if I want to be?"

"If," said Colonel Musgrave in some perplexity, "I understand one word of this farrago, I will be—qualified in various ways."

"But you don't have to understand," she pleaded.

"You mean—?" he asked.

"I mean that I was always fond of Aline, anyhow."

"Nonsense!" And he was conscious, with vexation, that he had undeniably flushed.

"I mean, then, I am a woman, and I understand. Everything is as near what it should be as is possible while Patricia is seeing so much of—we will call it the artistic temperament." Mrs. Pendomer shrugged. "But if I went on in that line you would believe I was jealous. And heaven knows I am not the least bit so—with the unavoidable qualification that, being a woman, I can't help rising superior to common-sense."

He said, "You mean Jack Charteris—? But what on earth has he to do with these letters?"

"I don't mean any proper names at all. I simply mean you are not to undo my work. It would only signify trouble and dissatisfaction and giving up all this"—she waved her hand lightly toward the lawns of Matocton,—"and it would mean our giving you up, for, you know, you haven't any money of your own, Rudolph. Ah, Rudolph, we can't give you up! We need you to lead our Lichfield germans, and to tell us naughty little stories, and keep us amused. So please be sensible, Rudolph."

"Permit me to point out I firmly believe that silence is the perfectest herald of joy," observed Colonel Musgrave. "Only I do not understand why you should have dragged John Charteris's name into this ludicrous affair——"

"You really do not understand——?"

But Colonel Musgrave's handsome face declared very plainly that he did not.

"Well," Mrs. Pendomer reflected, "I dare say it is best, upon the whole, you shouldn't. And now you must excuse me, for I am leaving for the Ullwethers' to-day, and I shan't ever be invited to Matocton again, and I must tell my maid to pack up. She is a little fool and it will break her heart to be leaving Pilkins. All human beings are tediously alike. But, allowing ample time for her to dispose of my best lingerie and of her unavoidable lamentations, I ought to make the six-forty-five. I have noticed that one usually does—somehow," said Mrs. Pendomer, and seemed to smack of allegories.

And yet it may have been because she knew—as who knew better?—something of that mischief's nature which was now afoot.

IV

The colonel burned the malefic letters that afternoon. Indeed, the episode set him to ransacking the desk in which Patricia had found them—a desk which, as you have heard, was heaped with the miscellaneous correspondence of the colonel's father dating back a half-century and more. Much curious matter the colonel discovered there, for "Wild Will" Musgrave's had been a full-blooded career. And over one packet of letters, in particular, the colonel sat for a long while with an unwontedly troubled face.