* A Distributed Proofreaders Canada eBook *

This eBook is made available at no cost and with very few restrictions. These restrictions apply only if (1) you make a change in the eBook (other than alteration for different display devices), or (2) you are making commercial use of the eBook. If either of these conditions applies, please contact a https://www.fadedpage.com administrator before proceeding. Thousands more FREE eBooks are available at https://www.fadedpage.com.

This work is in the Canadian public domain, but may be under copyright in some countries. If you live outside Canada, check your country's copyright laws. IF THE BOOK IS UNDER COPYRIGHT IN YOUR COUNTRY, DO NOT DOWNLOAD OR REDISTRIBUTE THIS FILE.

This eBook was produced by: Al Haines, John Routh & the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at https://www.pgdpcanada.net

This file was produced from images generously made available by HathiTrust Digital Library

One More Such Victory

From the entrance hall up one flight of stairs, the good wide stairs they built in old brownstones on Murray Hill, one arrived at the door, and to the second floor rear apartment entered. That was a big room, though not as big as before the house was remodelled because space had been taken from the inner wall for a bath and kitchenette. The bath was light because it had a window in the side wall of the house. The kitchenette was dark, but that didn’t matter. Susan Barr only used it to make Sunday breakfasts, or cocktails once in a while when she had guests.

The big room had a marble fireplace, kept through the remodelling, and three long windows with nice panelling on the frames, that matched the door panelling. The windows faced north on an open space, the yards of the houses on that block and the next, so the room was cooler and airier than most New York rooms in a heat wave.

No piece of furniture in the apartment was valuable, except possibly the ‘grandfather’s clock’ in the corner, which was not running. The chocolate-covered velvet love seat by the fireplace was inconspicuously shabby; a couple of chairs covered in blue flowered chintz that matched the window curtains were vaguely decorative. But the daybed against the wall opposite the fireplace looked more like a bed than a living room piece, and the desk between the windows was businesslike.

A bowl of rose peonies on the desk somewhat mitigated that effect, and prints of Degas’ dancers on the wall were graceful. The room did achieve a certain careless charm beyond the fact that it was clean and orderly.

When the hands of the small travelling clock on the desk pointed to six-twenty, Susan Barr came in with her usual air of being slightly in a hurry.

She went over to the desk and took out a pile of typed manuscript. Then, glancing at the clock, she telephoned.

“Hello, Jennifer, how soon are you coming over?”

An Alabama accent said: “ ’Bout twenty minutes, angel. Have you got the book all tied up with red ribbon?”

“No, I hear they don’t send them that way. I just wanted to know whether I had time to rewrite the last page. Oliver is in town and we are dining at half-past seven and I have to bathe.”

“How funny you are, Susan. Much more excited ’bout that old boy friend of yours than that you finally got your book finished.”

Jennifer did not like Oliver, who did not like Southern blondes. But her comment was true enough. Susan was much more excited about Oliver than about those neatly stacked pages. They only represented how she had spent the evenings of eight months when Oliver had been out of town.

She said, “Well you come along when you’re ready,” and said, “good-bye,” and sat still, staring down at the manuscript.

What she thought of it now it was done she did not know more specifically than that she had two ideas for the last three paragraphs; and whichever one she wrote she immediately preferred the other.

She knew both versions by heart. She knew the beginning of the book by heart and certain chapters in the middle. It was half-past six. She threw the current last page in the wastepaper basket, and wrote the other, typing slowly for the sake of accuracy, because she was not an expert typist.

Then she wrote “The End” and put the page with the rest.

Four hundred and seventy-eight pages. (No carbons.)

“Encounter,” by Susan Barr.

Probably no one would publish it, but, anyway, it was finished.

In school she had ‘meant to write.’

She wondered whether she ever would have written this or anything else but for Oliver Pryor, who would be here in forty-five minutes! She ceased to wonder about the book. She had not had time to make up her face since noon.

She bathed, she dressed, she made up her face.

Jennifer as always was late, but Susan was ready for her and more importantly for Oliver at five minutes past seven when the telephone rang.

“Hello— Hello, Oliver!”

“Old Mountain’s going to keep me later than I expected, but I’ll get there by eight.”

‘Old Mountain’ was his employer.

“Oh, all right. I’ll be ready.”

“ ’Bye, sweet.”

Oliver was always abrupt on the telephone.

Another bell rang. Susan pushed a button that opened the downstairs door, and opened her own.

Jennifer climbed the stairs slowly. “If I take a single rapid step, Susan, I’ll perspire all over my make-up. You have a new dress. Shall I sit and cool off a moment or will I interfere with you and your boy friend affectionately greeting each other?”

“Sit twenty minutes if you like. He’s going to be late.”

“I’m meeting Cousin Lansing in fifteen.” Jennifer stared at the pages. “You know, Susan, it’s kind of impressive. Here you are just a nice pretty girl with a good job like so many of us and now you’ve got a book written.”

Susan’s automatic response was, “You’re a prettier girl than I am.” Since they were different types, each secretly did admire the other’s looks without sense of rivalry. Jennifer was tall and fair; Susan was small and very slight. Susan had that wonderful smooth black hair that generally implies an Irish grandparent, wide-set gray eyes with thick black lashes, and a skin so white it was a startling contrast to her hair.

Very abruptly, Jennifer clutched her own charming round face. She gasped, “Oh, my wisdom tooth is driving me crazy.”

The wisdom tooth, which was to have curious brief importance in her life, bored Susan at the moment.

For weeks everyone of the so-called junior executives in the offices of Foresight Insurance had been urging Jennifer to have that tooth out. But though for all her soft Southern looks Jennifer was an extremely capable secretary to the vice president and a generally sensible girl, she was terrified of dentists, and let the tooth linger in an aura of oil of cloves.

Jennifer announced: “Now it’s gone again,” hopefully as if some vanishing of the pain might be permanent. “Susan honey, tell me how it feels to have a book going right this minute to a publisher, or at least to a publisher’s reader, so I can tell people a long time from now when you wear diamonds how you said the beginning was.”

“It doesn’t feel anything,” Susan said. “At least, I don’t dare let it. As long as I tell myself most manuscripts aren’t published, I shan’t be upset if this is not. And even if it got published, no one might read it. I would be so pleased if it should sell just a little, just enough so I could afford to give up my job and live three months while I tried to write one or two short stories. It is nice of you to take it to your cousin, Jennifer.”

‘Cousin Lansing’, a reader for the firm of Mead and Michaels, was the only person either of them knew who was in any way connected with book publishing.

“Oh, he’s mad to discover something to make him important with old Mr. Mead.”

“This won’t be it,” said Susan.

“You can’t tell. You’ve been funny about not letting your friends read it.”

“Well, I didn’t want to bore them.”

“Probably wouldn’t bore them,” Jennifer stated. She stood up. “Give me the book.”

“I have a big manila envelope,” Susan told her, and found it.

Jennifer went to the doorway and turned. She had on a wide navy blue hat with a white bow, and a navy blue crepe dress with white polka dots and a white frilled collar. The dress was street length. (For June 1935 street length was halfway between knee and ankle.)

She smiled that smile Southerners acquire with their first teeth.

“Honey, I do feel there ought to be something momentous to say.”

The moment only felt confused.

But always through years and years, Susan remembered with complete clarity Jennifer’s face under the blue hat, her yellow hair curling up at the ends, the pattern of the polka dots and the pleating of her frock. And the tone of her voice drawling: ‘There ought to be something momentous to say’, with the shape of the door panelling behind her.

Susan had no slightest premonition that she would remember at all.

Jennifer’s footsteps went down the stairs. Susan closed the door, and while she waited for Oliver, sat in the window seat, because a suggestion of breeze came in between the blue flowered chintz curtains.

Behind her the light was fading a little. Dusk would soon descend on Tuesday, July second, which was a very hot day in New York City.

A mood rare with Susan, a mood she never encouraged, overwhelmed her quite suddenly.

She wanted to stop and think: Of herself and Oliver, of the way they had come and the way they were going. Of her life as she had planned it when she was a schoolgirl. And as it turned out. And as it might be if her book were nothing and she went on another five years with Foresight Insurance Company, if she and Oliver did not marry after all.

She drew a long breath and she smiled. The mood left her suddenly as it came. Oliver would arrive very soon.

Only in retrospect do occasions become memorable.

Susan Barr, wearing her best informal dress, a chiffon on which roses and carnations wandered over a black background, a forty dollar frock described as an ‘adaptation’ of a French model, was then in her twenty-sixth year, a phenomenon to which America was already so long accustomed it had ceased to recognize it. Phenomenon of the young woman of marriageable age who has, in spite of bad times, a very good job, dresses well, dances well, looks charming and has no immediate prospects of matrimony to anyone who could support her and himself as well as she could support herself alone.

She turned the dials of the radio on the window seat, idly, and quickly turned them away from the station broadcasting news. If there were any people in 1935 who listened to radio news unless there were one of the two biggest prizefights of the year or one of three or four football games being broadcast, Susan didn’t know them! Oh, yes, there was one other exception. When Mr. Roosevelt gave one of his Fireside Chats, people frequently listened.

If one wanted to know the details of the fact that the British had just made a deal with that man Hitler in which he agreed to limit the German navy, one could just read the newspapers.

Hitler was quite mad, but rather boring, and not very important, anyway. The British and French would get rid of him in a year or two.

At the moment naturally they had no time to bother with Hitler since they were obligated to deal with the more important dictator Mussolini and his awful Ethiopian War. Everyone was sorry for the poor Ethiopians, though of course things like that war were farther than the moon from America, and European dictators were at least half as distant.

That evening was the end of an era in Susan Barr’s life. Five and six years later, she would remember it had been that. But of the many things that changed for her in the time between, the more important half were to change for all the pretty young girls hunting on radio dials for dance music as they waited for their ‘boyfriends’ and quickly turning off the broadcast of the dull and inconsequential and incredibly remote news from Europe.

‘Boyfriend,’ pronounced as one word, had just come up from unacceptable slang to be used by debutantes, divorcees, and business women alike. Its connotation depended on the accent with which it was uttered. It could mean fiancé, escort, admirer, lover, as one chose.

Susan Barr’s doorbell rang, and her boyfriend’s footsteps made hurrying sounds on the stairs.

Oliver Pryor usually described himself as a ‘stocking salesman.’ One was supposed to laugh. He meant that he was the most recent of James Mountain’s bright young men—so-called ‘assistant to the President.’

James Mountain owned great stocking mills in Pennsylvania, where Oliver had to spend two thirds of his time—an exile mitigated somewhat by the fact that the ‘Chief’—as Mountain really enjoyed being called, had an enormous estate only a few miles from his mills. The ‘bright young men’ who were liaison officers between their employer and a world full of difficult people were encouraged to come to swim, play tennis and dine, and amuse James Mountain’s granddaughter, Marjorie Phillips. At least in Mountain’s opinion they amused her.

She was not an unattractive orphaned girl, who managed however to appear depressed continuously. That was easy to comprehend, since she had been brought up to understand that she was to ‘look after her poor grandfather in his old age and not marry some whippersnapper.’

Susan and Oliver often laughed about Marjorie, carelessly, but not unkindly. They never meant to be unkind.

Oliver, kissing Susan delightedly as if they had been separated for months instead of the six days since his last hurried trip to New York, had no more thought of Marjorie in his mind at the moment than of the Ethiopian War. Susan was his ‘darling,’ his ‘sweet,’ his ‘baby,’ his ‘dearest,’ solemnly or gaily as the occasion warranted.

He said, “You have a new dress,” and held her at arm’s length to admire it. He said, “It’s lovely. You’re lovely. Let’s have a lovely evening. Where do you want to eat? Some day we really must get married or something, Angel.”

She could answer lightly enough. “Some day. Don’t hold me so close, Oliver darling. I have to breathe.”

But what she wanted was an instant in which to compose herself. For two years she had been in love with Oliver; for at least the last half of that time she had been conscious of increasing sensitiveness on the subject of marriage.

He lighted cigarettes for her and for himself, without saying anything.

Unhappily she thought, “And he knows that I mind.” She regarded him, as often in their first quarter hour together after separation, with a detachment that never lasted more than a moment or two. Yes, he was handsome. He looked like the blond young men who were forever stepping in and out of new cars in the advertisements. But a certain irregularity of feature made Oliver more human than most of those. He had the fine healthy skin of someone who went from football in college to tennis in summer and squash in winter, with plenty of golf for between seasons. His smile was that of a person having a very good time, and hoping everyone else present was the same. Surprisingly with that thick yellow hair and light tanned skin, he had brown eyes.

Susan considered his eyes beautiful, his hair beautiful, the way he walked beautiful. Also his smile, his hands and his neckties.

Her only complaint was with his situation: the situation of a man separated from his wife but not divorced, not likely to be divorced soon, nor by any evidence very anxious to be divorced.

He said in a deep, warm voice: “Susan, when you look at me like that sometimes I feel conceited and sometimes I feel frightened. Stop it, dearest. No man is worth it. And—what are you thinking about anyway?”

“Nothing in particular.”

By that he knew! He walked up and down the room for a moment, thinking rather confusedly that he did want to marry Susan eventually. But even if Rena his wife would consent to a divorce, marriage on a hundred and fifty dollars a week would not be the same as bachelor life at the same figure. And what was the hurry? He and Susan were young enough to wait. He was only just thirty.

He said aloud, “Susan, when I get a job that makes it possible for me to live in New York continuously—you would be bored to death in a little Pennsylvania town——”

What he did not add but what she knew by various implications was that Mr. Mountain did not approve of married young executives in the factory. They were not as available to make a fourth at bridge, or dine and spend an evening elaborating some project of his invention concerning improvement of the stocking business.

“Doesn’t matter, Oliver. Let’s go to dinner.”

But his face, with its charming boyishness, was suddenly unhappy. “Let’s face it,” he said and thought how he hated facing disagreeable things. “I have a wife whom I married at twenty-one, from whom I was separated six years ago, and have not seen in four. She doesn’t believe in divorce. Until you and I grew serious about each other, I didn’t care whether I ever had a divorce. But the situation is not fair to you.”

Perhaps it was not, but it was no good talking about it either. Susan thought, “It just makes him feel better to admit that it’s difficult for me sometimes.” Largely in connection with her mother, who had asked once or twice, “When are you and Oliver going to be married?”

No one in the East except Susan herself knew the circumstances.

She said, “Oliver darling, don’t let’s spoil an evening—or a weekend either. I wired mother that you were free and staying over the Fourth.”

Susan’s widowed mother lived in a house in the Berkshires, and (very fortunately since she loved entertaining an assortment of indigent relatives for weeks and months together) had an annuity.

Oliver told Susan automatically, “Your mother is wonderful.”

She was a sweet, little, bustling woman who interested herself in everything from gardening to town meetings, and wrote verse that she kept in a bureau drawer.

The subject being sufficiently changed, Susan and Oliver went to dinner in a garden restaurant. It was a favorite of theirs, a former speakeasy that had blossomed out with Repeal, to table cloths, wine cards, real petunias in window boxes, and an ivy-covered trellis under which the orchestra played Hungarian gypsy music.

They drank white wine and seltzer because nothing else tasted quite so cool in a heat wave. The music was very gay, and between much music and a little wine they began to feel as happy as they almost always were in each other’s company.

Oliver made his usual account of Mr. Mountain’s recent ideas exceedingly entertaining. He had asked for suggestions for a name for his new weave of stockings. Oliver had suggested “Cloudsheen,” and had been told by Mr. Mountain it was an idiotic name. After four days’ confusion at the factory, and at least twelve conferences, Mr. Mountain had announced, “ ‘Cloudsheen’ is a most magnificent name. Who thought of that? I forget.”

“So he gave me a bonus of a hundred dollars, Susan. Half is for you to buy yourself a birthday present.”

“But my birthday isn’t for nearly two months, Oliver.”

“The end of August will be the end of my vacation. I won’t have a dime, so take it while it’s there.”

There were several dangerous corners in that sentence. Oliver never saved a penny from what seemed to Susan a magnificent salary. For various departmental reasons, Susan was obliged to take her vacation from Foresight Insurance in September. So an idea she had had that Oliver spend part of his with her at her mother’s house was impossible. Also—Oliver had his heart set on making a trip to the Gaspé for some fishing, which meant that she would not see him throughout his entire holiday.

He handed her a fifty-dollar bill across the table. “Buy yourself something nice.”

“You buy me something, Oliver.”

“But Susan, we settled that, a year ago Christmas.”

He maintained he hated shopping, never knew what she would like and so insisted on giving her the money to buy Christmas and birthday presents. For sentimental reasons, she would have preferred he choose something.

She drew a long breath, took the fifty dollars, and thought, “We aren’t having one of our best evenings. It’s my fault, too.” Because in August she would have her twenty-sixth birthday, and she had expected to be married long before her twenty-sixth birthday!

She wanted to be married, have a pleasant medium-sized apartment or a very small house in the country, a baby who would resemble Oliver, and always be well groomed to meet her husband at the door when he came home from the office. The utter simplicity and conventionality of those ideas distressed Oliver, who wanted—something remarkable. Susan knew that. She had stopped phrasing what she would like to have, some time since.

Again she changed the subject. “My book’s finished. Jennifer took it to that cousin who is a publisher’s reader.” She uttered those two sentences as one saying, “I just finished knitting a blue sweater. It’s gone to be pressed.”

With no more excitement than if he had received the latter news, Oliver said, “That’s nice.”

Susan was not very conceited, else she would have been irritated many months ago by Oliver’s casualness in reference to her book. He behaved as if writing it was a way of filling her evenings. Some girls took Spanish lessons, some girls went to dancing school when they had no engagements. Susan worked on a book.

The parts he had read depressed him. She had taken the theme of the hundreds of girls from all over the country who had come to New York, to be stars on Broadway, or famous models or great dancers, and are glad in the end to hold down a fifteen dollar a week job in a place like Foresight Insurance Company. The story of their small struggles and minute joys simply was not romantic, in his opinion.

Susan continued, “If anyone ever published ‘Encounter’, I would give you half the profits for a Christmas present. In fact, that’s what I promise you for your Christmas present this year.”

He thought, “Poor baby. She does care about that book a little. I hope not enough to be seriously disappointed when it goes the rounds and comes back to her.” But he loved her face when she looked eager, quite pleased with the moment, altogether approving of himself. And he thought, “How clear her eyes are!” He put his hand over hers on the table. Her fingers tightened in his for an instant.

She said, “It won’t, Oliver, but just suppose it did make a thousand dollars.”

His voice was very tender. “I don’t believe first books usually make quite that much. Well—we’ll spend the profits together. Go for a skiing trip Christmas or something.” What he meant was, that he would like to save the money for them to go on a trip at Christmas time. But it was so difficult to save money! As for the profits of Susan’s book, he would have gambled them against a good necktie.

Then he said, half teasingly but with affection too: “Marvelous to realize that under that lovely black hair and behind those beautiful eyes is intelligence, in addition to the pretty package. Miss Susan Barr, about-to-be-a-novelist, would you like a Scotch and soda to finish off the evening?”

“No, thanks, darling. It’s too hot to drink whiskey.”

He had, however, two Scotch and sodas while she drank another glass of white wine and seltzer.

The tradition is that authors’ manuscripts lie about publishers’ offices weeks and months collecting dust and rejection slips somehow simultaneously. That often happens. Occasionally it happens the other way too.

At shortly after eight o’clock that evening, as Jennifer Reed and her cousin were just beginning dinner, Jennifer’s wisdom tooth abruptly ceased to be relatively quiescent or even endurable.

Lansing Morgan took Jennifer to a dentist who had evening office hours, and then took her home minus the wisdom tooth. He was left with most of the evening on his hands before he was due to meet Roland Mead, president of Mead and Michaels, publishers, at the Cunard Line docks. The young men in the firm took turns in assisting Roland in ‘seeing off’ visiting English authors at midnight sailings.

When Lansing had left the restaurant with Jennifer, he had put the manuscript of Susan’s novel under his arm automatically. The first thing that employees of Mead and Michaels learned was that manuscripts were to be saved in whatever emergency.

Dining then alone, Lansing began to read “Encounter” because he had nothing else to read. When he had finished about fifty pages, he said to the waiter: “Tell me when it is eleven o’clock,” and went on.

At eleven o’clock Lansing looked up from page two hundred forty (like all professional readers he was very fast), put the manuscript back into its envelope, himself and the envelope into a taxi, and said: “Cunard Line.”

All the way across town he repeated to himself: “I don’t know why it’s extraordinary. But it is. It is completely extraordinary. It is moving. It is alive. It is—extraordinary!”

In the year he had worked for Mead and Michaels he had not had a ‘find.’ But he knew what to do, since he thought he had one. The legend of the young reader who had telephoned Roland Mead at four in the morning, to report on “Effigy of Eloise,” and had his salary doubled for not wasting time, had its basis in fact.

The boat was hot. Roland Mead looked exhausted. The British author’s final comments (at least final verbal comments) on the climate of New York were acid. But Lansing ignored all that.

“I’ve got something for you, sir,” Morgan told Roland Mead. “Really something, though I have not decided why.”

Roland’s flushed old face brightened. “Why never matters,” he said. “Half the time no one knows. Give it to me.”

They finished ‘seeing off’ the visiting Englishman with dispatch.

Roland Mead had been told by his doctor not to read at night. But he decided he would just have a look at the thing.

“Encounter” by Susan Barr. He thought, “Never heard of her. Well, that doesn’t matter either.”

It was quarter-past one in the morning when he began to read. At just that hour, Susan and Oliver, walking home through the quiet city, were turning the corner of the street where Susan lived. Oliver’s hand rested on Susan’s shoulder lightly.

They were completely happy.

From its not quite fortunate beginning, their evening had flowered in its last hour to the mood they both cherished: mood of being sure they would have everything they wanted with each other just because they loved each other so.

Susan had stopped troubling about how and when Oliver would get a divorce, or whether he would be able to afford it since he never had money from week to week. Their restaurant check had managed to add itself up to eighteen dollars because Oliver had insisted the wine in the white wine and seltzer be good vintage wine.

She had forgotten too the doubt that was most painful when it came involuntarily and suddenly: whether even if that legendary wife, who was older than Oliver and therefore in Susan’s opinion practically middle-aged for a woman, divorced him, he would be as impatient to marry as Susan herself would be.

Had he not in the last forty minutes told Susan twice that if Mr. Mountain made him sales manager of the New York district, or if he got a job as good as that with some other firm, he would actually enjoy living in the country and commuting?

Poor Susan had instantly chosen chintzes for the living room in her mind. Not too big a pattern, because the living room would not, of course, be large—with a good deal of yellow in the flowers as yellow looked sunny even in wintertime.

Before they left the restaurant, Oliver had asked, “Do you realize that you are actually the only girl I have kissed in two years?” Susan wished his own voice had not held a note of surprise but the face itself had delighted her.

Hers was the kind of devotion which believes that every woman not occupied with a husband or fiancé must want Oliver at first sight, because they had never seen anyone so handsome, so charming, so generally—nice. As to the women otherwise involved, in Susan’s opinion they probably wished they had met Oliver first.

Oliver had not as much confidence in his own desirability as Susan had. He even had hours of suspecting himself of laziness and irresponsibility. Yet as he would have phrased it only among old friends at his college club: “A man who gets around a good deal in an odd job like mine has—well—a good many funny things happen.”

With Mr. Mountain he had made business trips to the Middle West, the Coast and to Florida just before the season. It was occasionally suggested that he accompany Mr. Mountain to Japan and China, learn something about the silk business at its source. However, it was well known in the firm that Mr. Mountain had never yet taken any of his assistants to the Orient, deciding always at the last moment that it cost too much. It was suspected sometimes that Mr. Mountain enjoyed having the knowledge of the silk business at its source exclusive to himself.

In the course of the trips he had taken, Oliver had met here and there women who had indicated that they liked him enough so that if he had pursued certain opportunities they might have more than liked him. And yet, practically since the advent of Susan at a cocktail party Oliver had not planned to attend, and certainly since first Susan and he became important to each other, he had not pursued the opportunities.

Odd how vividly her face came before him when she was absent, her clear eyes adoring! He would remember how smooth her white skin felt, how gentle her voice, how little she seemed!

Susan never pretended either that she was the least important or remarkable, but she believed he was. Nor was she exigent about wanting to marry him, though naturally all girls wanted to marry. Well—some day he would marry her, when he was a trifle richer and somewhat less restless.

Meanwhile he held her hand tucked under his arm and glanced sometimes at the evenness of her profile under her wide-brimmed hat. How he loved walking home with her through the sleeping city!

They turned from the bright avenue to the dimly lighted side street, silent now, listening to the echoing of their own footsteps as they had listened on so many other ordinary happy evenings, going home.

But never as quite the same Susan or quite the same Oliver were they to hear those echoes, see the soft pools of lamplight before the dark old houses, conscious each of the touch of the other’s arm, on any other evening of any other Summer night again.

At half-past six that morning, Roland Mead finished “Encounter.” He telephoned his secretary. “Get a woman named Susan Barr to my office at one o’clock today. Lansing Morgan knows where to find her. I’ll sleep until then. Send here for a script I want Clement to read this morning.”

It was some time before he slept. He thought of “Encounter” that he was going to make the novel of the Fall season. And of other books that he had made the novels of other seasons. When you found one that could be of that company, there was very little on earth as exciting. Perhaps at one end of the scale finding a great pearl held something of the same delight—and at the other end, stumbling on an unlooted Egyptian tomb. He did not know. He only knew about books.

The executive offices of Foresight Insurance Company wore a cheerfully languid air of pre-holiday that morning. Susan attended to some routine work and wondered only once or twice whether Jennifer’s cousin Lansing would read her book over the Fourth of July weekend. She supposed not. He probably had plans to go to the country and the shore. However, he would read it next week and send it back to her with a note that it was interesting perhaps but not quite—quite something or other. She must expect that!

Jennifer telephoned that her tooth was out and she herself in bed, “all swollen crooked in the cheek, Susan. I’ll have to spend the holiday swathed in veils like a mummy. I ask you, darling——”

She was by the sound of her voice too uncomfortable for Susan to bother her with questions about whether she had actually delivered the book.

Mr. Stephen Quintar, Director of Publicity, called her into his office and began to talk about a campaign to be organized immediately after the holiday to increase insurance against minor accidents.

It was several years since someone discovered that the pretty secretary Miss Barr had an odd gift for writing sales copy. She had done a great deal more of that than typing in the interval. A succession of stenographers sat in the corner of Susan’s little office attending to Mr. Quintar’s correspondence, while Susan wrote brief essays on the men who wished they had done this and that for their families before a series of catastrophes overwhelmed them.

The current stenographer rang the private office extension. “For you, Miss Barr.”

Susan said, “Sorry, Mr. Quintar. I shan’t talk a second,” hoping that the voice would be Oliver announcing he was free for lunch and where they should meet.

A calm voice asked, “Miss Susan Barr?”

“Yes, speaking.”

“I am calling for Mr. Roland Mead, Miss Barr. He would like you to be at this office at one o’clock to discuss publication of your book ‘Encounter.’ Could you arrange to come? The address is——”

Susan dropped the telephone.

The years of business training came to her rescue. She picked it up, said in a voice unrecognizable as her own, “I could arrange that.”

The voice said, “Splendid. We’ll see you then.”

In Mr. Quintar’s opinion his assistant had just received some startling news. Because he liked Miss Barr, who was both businesslike and intelligent, he was about to ask her what was the matter, but she asked stiffly, “Aside from the newspaper advertising, Mr. Quintar, are you interested in mail-order ideas?”

Well, he was not the sort of employer who pried into the private affairs of his employees. He told her how much mail-order advertising he thought might be profitable. He talked rather a long while.

So that Susan was ten minutes late arriving at the offices of Mead and Michaels.

The hardest thing she had done so far in her life was to seem to be attentive to Mr. Quintar in that discussion. She wanted to talk to Oliver! Oliver would be so pleased! But Oliver had not been at Mr. Mountain’s offices when she took thirty seconds to try to reach him. He might be anywhere in the city, lunching with an important client of the firm. He and she had arranged to meet at the Grand Central at nine o’clock to take their train for the Berkshires and her mother’s house.

Susan went uptown in a taxi, in a state of excitement verging on terror, and a gray crepe two-piece dress with a plain top and pleated skirt. The dress, which happened to be her best daytime dress, afforded her a trifle of reassurance. She had worn it in case Oliver had been free for luncheon and telephoned her.

She didn’t know what a publishing office looked like.

The firm of Mead and Michaels happened to be a four-story building in the East Fifties. There was a reception room rather like a library in a private house.

A girl wandered out and asked her name. The girl then said, “Come right along. Mr. Mead is waiting in his office.”

Mr. Mead’s office was even more like a library in a house.

A large old man stood up behind the desk. “Miss Barr? I’m Roland Mead.”

She must have said she was Miss Barr. She sat down on the edge of a green velvet chair. A slim man with dark eyes and hair came in. “Our sales manager, Mr. Something,” Mr. Mead said, and to the sales manager, “Have you read it?”

He said: “Two-thirds through. It’s the works.”

Then Lansing Morgan arrived. Susan only knew him slightly, but she was as glad to see him as if he were an intimate friend.

A tall woman forty years old, more or less, extremely smartly dressed, came in. “Our publicity manager, Miss Jackson,” Mr. Mead told her.

Another young man appeared. Susan was somehow beyond noticing what he looked like. He was carrying papers. “My secretary, Mr. Something Else,” Mr. Mead said. “He has your contracts ready.”

The day, the hour, the room and the people in it had gone beyond the horizon of the actual, the comprehensible. Susan made a great effort to pull them back from the fantastic, or at least to pull herself back.

She spoke slowly: “Mr. Mead, are you trying to say that you are publishing my book?”

“Oh, yes, Miss Barr. I am publishing your book. I am leading my Fall list with your book. Because we received the manuscript so late, it will require a great deal of work to get it out by September, the second week in September, I think . . .”

The slim dark man, who was Mr. Something, the sales manager, interrupted: “Wait a minute, Roland. She doesn’t get it. Postpone for five minutes the plans for the jacket, the printing, binding, distribution, the advance publicity, the party a week before publication. Give the girl a chance to draw her breath.”

He turned to her. His face, a thin, amused face, came sharply into focus, in that room where nothing was in focus. “Take your time, Miss Barr. Say it slowly to yourself. ‘I am an author. My novel “Encounter” is to be published in September by Mead and Michaels.’ ” His gray eyes were sparkling.

Everyone laughed, warmly enough.

“She’ll get used to the idea,” Roland Mead announced. “Let’s start over, Miss Barr. The contracts on the desk are the usual first book contracts. We agree to pay you ten percent royalties on the first four thousand copies . . .”

Mr. Something interrupted again: “You don’t know what that means, do you?”

Susan said, “No. And I don’t even remember your name.”

“My name is Clement Travis. Ten percent royalty on a book means that if it sells for two dollars and a half in a bookstore, you get twenty-five cents on every copy up to four thousand copies. On every copy beyond four thousand, you get fifteen percent. That’s thirty-seven and a half cents.”

“It’s different if your book is Book-of-the-Month,” Mr. Mead went on. “I could make your book Book-of-the-Month. . . . They’d choose it all right—but then I could not publish until Spring. I’m going to let this ride by itself . . .” He paused, meditating other books that had ridden by themselves and some that had not!

Susan thought she was expected to say something. She said, “I subscribe to the Book-of-the-Month Club.”

Everyone laughed again.

Mr. Mead looked at her from under thick white eyebrows. “Read your contract,” he told her, and handed it to her. She tried to read it, but she could not.

“Never mind,” Lansing Morgan said. “It’s all right, Susan. You had better just sign.”

She agreed with him. The secretary produced a fountain pen. Mr. Travis had moved to the door, spoken to someone outside and returned.

“Celebratory occasion,” he explained to Mr. Mead, who said, “Good idea. She looks healthy, fortunately, not the hysterical kind.” He addressed Susan again. The secretary was holding the contract steady for her to sign.

“I take twenty percent of the picture rights on a first novel, Miss Barr. I have to find an agent, pay the agent, and sell the book. On later novels, I take no picture rights.”

She didn’t comprehend a word.

“Is Susan Barr your legal name?” the secretary wanted to know.

“Oh yes.”

She wrote her name.

“Three copies,” the secretary said.

The woman who did publicity was speaking. “Not a bad name for a cover. Good and short.”

Susan wrote her name twice more.

The secretary blotted the signature. A man opened the door to the room; he was carrying a cocktail shaker and some glasses on a tray.

Clement Travis said, “We are all going to have a cocktail now, in honor of the book, Miss Barr. Also you need one.”

Susan looked about at their friendly, amused faces. They all looked like nice people, but as if they understood the point of a jest she didn’t understand.

Clement Travis was pouring cocktails.

She asked Mr. Mead, because she had to ask him: “You like my book? You think it is a good book?”

“It is a very good book,” he said. “For a first novel, it’s remarkable. Completely romantic, you know.”

She answered without thinking, because she was so surprised: “Someone—the only friend of mine who has read the book—did not think it was romantic at all.” Oliver! Oliver! She simply had to find him!

“Whoever told you that was wrong, Miss Barr. Your book has none of the trappings of romance, no banners flying . . . but all the essentials of the romance that’s living. Fighting, going on without any help but one’s own will——”

The publicity woman wrote something down.

Clement Travis handed Susan a cocktail. She drank it slowly. It didn’t taste like any cocktail she ever had before.

But it was only an ordinary Martini.

The publicity woman, Miss Jackson (Susan thought: “I must try to remember names in case I meet any of these people again,”) took charge briefly.

Mr. Mead started to explain that there are difficulties in rushing a book to press as fast as we mean to rush yours. You see, there are good and bad months to publish books. September is a good month. A book that starts well then and hits the best-seller lists will carry along past Christmas.

“The printing and binding and distributing are our worry. But we need you for various things. Normally, if we had received your manuscript six months before publication, we could plan slowly for advance publicity. Interviews in the papers, photographs, all the rest. Now we must hurry. This morning Clement and I decided to let our weekend go and plan the beginning of the campaign.

“This afternoon we’ll get up a biography of you and take a few photographs to go on with. Then tomorrow. . . .”

Mr. Mead said, “I want the special notice to send out to the trade by Monday after the Fourth.”

Susan snatched at reality feebly. “But this afternoon I have to work. I work—at Foresight Insurance Company.”

“What do you do there?” Miss Jackson wanted to know at once.

Why she felt desperate, Susan did not understand. But she did feel desperate.

“I have a silly title.” (Never . . . never until that moment had it seemed such a reasonable title.) “I am Personal Secretary to the Director of Publicity, who is the younger Mr. Stephen Quintar.” And an important person, or at least he has an important position and some people think he is important! That irrelevant reflection was oddly comforting.

“Call him up and resign,” Mr. Mead told her calmly.

Susan was too astonished to be angry. “Resign? Why I’ve worked there six years!”

“What do they pay you?”

“Fifty dollars a week.”

Roland Mead spoke more gently and what he said now became perfectly distinct—“Miss Barr, you have written a book called ‘Encounter.’ Anyone capable of writing such a book is capable of writing a great many other things. Have you ideas for other things, by the way?”

“Ever so many ideas. But I haven’t had time.”

“You have time now. All the time there is, except when Clement or Anne Jackson wants you through the next weeks. According to your contract, I pay you two hundred fifty dollars advance against royalties. Did you read that part?”

“No.”

Mr. Mead spoke to his secretary. “Change it to five hundred. We are going to need her around most of the next month.”

He turned to Susan again. “Unless I don’t know what I’m talking about, and I do know what I am talking about, I assure you . . . you will make fifty thousand dollars from ‘Encounter’ by Christmas time.”

Clement Travis’ voice was urgent. “Here’s another cocktail, Miss Barr. Never mind whether you drink cocktails before luncheon habitually or not. Drink this one.”

Fifty thousand dollars! Fifty thousand dollars! No one ever made fifty thousand dollars in six months. The President of the United States was not paid fifty thousand dollars in six months. Mother’s annuity was enormous. It was nearly six thousand dollars. Fifty thousand dollars was a fortune, an incomprehensible fortune.

Clement Travis rose. “Come along with me, Miss Barr.” He took her to a small room that, blessedly, looked like an office. “Sit down. Now you’re free at five for the weekend anyway, aren’t you?”

“Yes. For the weekend.” At nine she was meeting Oliver at Grand Central. That was only a little more than seven hours from now. She could get through seven hours.

“What do you have to do at Foresight Insurance this afternoon?”

“Nothing very special. Start planning a campaign for insurance against minor accidents. Mr. Quintar wanted my suggestions the first of the week.”

Clement Travis sighed. “Baby, you aren’t ever going to see that campaign through. The accident that has happened to you is not minor. However! Could you telephone Mr. Quintar and tell him an emergency has arisen, that you would like the afternoon off? Say you will bring him in your suggestions, and explain after the holiday?”

“Yes, I really could do that. I never did it before, but . . . Mr. Quintar is leaving early for Southampton, anyway.”

Mr. Travis picked up the telephone. “What’s the number?” She told him. He called it and handed her the telephone receiver.

Mr. Quintar said: “Certainly, take the afternoon. No bad news I hope.”

“Oh no. Very good news.”

“Have a pleasant holiday then, Miss Barr.”

“Thank you, Mr. Quintar.”

“That’s all, there is no more,” Mr. Travis assured her. “You will know it yourself by Monday. Let me clarify a few essentials before we return to the conference and order sandwiches sent in.

“What are you going to do this weekend, Miss Barr?”

“Go to my mother’s house in the Berkshires.”

“Oh no. You’re going to sit right here with Anne Jackson and myself.”

“But I’ve asked—someone.”

“Husband, boyfriend?”

“Boyfriend.”

“Fine. We don’t have to consider him in your publicity unless we choose.”

“You aren’t clarifying anything.”

“I’m just about to begin. Nine weeks is really no time in which to invent an author and a best seller. Roland is perfectly right that we have to be ready to shoot immediately after the holiday.”

She repeated his words, but as a question. “Invent an author and a best seller?”

“Yes. You have lived—how many years, twenty-four?”

She told him, “Almost twenty-six.”

He went right on: “You wrote ‘Encounter’. That’s all. We invent the rest. You’ll understand better as we go along.”

He stopped talking and regarded her in silence, his gray eyes without laughter in them for the first time in the hour since she had met him. That level glance was disturbing for some unknown reason, so that the silence grew uncomfortable.

Susan played with her white gloves and noticed that, though they had been very fresh at the time she left Foresight Insurance Company, they were wrinkled and damp.

Mr. Travis said without any expression in his tone that she could estimate: “You have been clutching those gloves ever since you came into the office, Miss Barr. You even held them in your left hand while you signed copies of contracts with your right. As if they gave you a contact with reality.”

He paused again, as if he were waiting for her to speak. She simply could not comprehend why her only clear emotion was fear—not of him—he looked amiable enough, and even kind. Fear—of the unknown!

After a long instant she asked, “Why am I afraid?” The four words sounded completely absurd.

But surprisingly Mr. Travis showed no tendency to laugh, even now. He stated: “Instinct. You don’t know enough to be bothered with the reasons at present.”

The clear, pleasant, somewhat positive voice of Anne Jackson floated down the corridor. “Coming back soon, Clement?”

He called to her, “In just a little while.” Then he told Susan, “I have the most extraordinary curiosity about people in general—how they react to certain circumstances. It’s none of my business of course to sit here wondering what sort of a person you will be in two years and five years. Forgive me.”

A trace of naturalness came to life in Susan. Probably because she had had a few minutes’ rest from people running in and out, talking as if she were something in a circus! Though Mr. Travis regarded her in just that fashion too, but more quietly at least.

She said what she felt. “It’s very extraordinary that you say words that make sentences with beginnings, middles and ends, but you might as well be talking in a foreign language.”

He did smile then, and she realized his smile was really charming. He said, “Time will provide the translation, Miss Barr.”

She risked further candor. “What is all the fuss about? I wrote a book. You people publish books. Well, then——”

“You won the gold ring on the merry-go-round. That’s all. You will make us a fortune and we shall make you a fortune somewhat smaller.”

“I can’t believe it, you know.”

“Time will cure that, too. Time will make you take it for granted. That is one of the many complications involved in winning the gold ring. Never mind, Miss Barr. You look like a young girl and you seem like a nice young girl. We must go back to the others. The only advice that I can give you is to do whatever Roland suggests or Anne Jackson suggests, or I suggest from now on. It will make life more restful for you.”

Then she thought he was just mocking her. She must have looked hurt because he said quickly: “No, for heaven’s sake. I was not being superior. As I told you before, I have a speculative nature, and among other things I was trying to decide whether I envied you or—oh well—the opposite. Never mind my speculative nature. I’m a good dancer too.”

She must know one more thing. “They weren’t serious about my giving up my job right away?” Dull, kind, middle-aged Mr. Quintar was seeming a solid rock in the surf.

“We’ll worry about that Monday, Miss Barr,” and he had become soothing as to a child. They went back along the corridor to the others.

The afternoon raced. Everyone ate sandwiches, and drank iced tea. Then they all vanished, except Anne Jackson. The effect of suddenness about the whole day made ‘vanished’ the word Susan’s mind picked out. She was growing more comfortable, because whatever happened had taken on an Alice-in-Wonderland quality, and nothing was more unreal than anything else.

She asked permission to make a telephone call, but again she did not succeed in reaching Oliver. Anne Jackson kept on asking questions, which Susan answered absently. Where had she gone to school? What relatives had she? Ah—her mother wrote poetry for pleasure? How had she, Susan, happened to want to write? Always wanted to write? Good enough. Lived a little first. Of course she wanted to write more than anything else?

In the midst of the dream which this day had become, Susan almost spoke aloud, “Of course not. I should rather marry Oliver than write seven books.” Instead she said uncertainly, “I’m not sure about that. It would be nice to marry and have a country house.”

The cool blue eyes of Miss Anne Jackson rested on her speculatively. Then she said, obviously more to herself than to Susan, “The marriage-is-worth-more-than-career-business has been done to death. That won’t do.” Then to Susan, “Well, you can buy your own country house if you are a good girl and keep working. More importantly, what will you write next? What did you mean when you told Roland you had ever so many ideas?”

That was easy. All the time she had been writing “Encounter” Susan had thought of half a dozen other situations in which the characters might have behaved one way or another, and other characters, impossible to crowd into “Encounter,” who would have been fun to write about, and other backgrounds for those characters.

She never had any difficulty with ideas.

Clement Travis came in occasionally suggesting questions, and once with no question, just to mention he had completed his reading of “Encounter.”

Susan hoped he would say what he thought of it, because he did look intelligent, but he made no comment at all. He only regarded her now as if he were puzzled, and something else. It could not possibly be respectful! Susan thought, “What a silly idea to have; why on earth should he be respectful?”

Just then someone called Anne Jackson away. Simultaneously Mr. Mead appeared with a medium-sized gray-haired man who looked athletic.

That man was saying, “For no one but you Roland would I take a train a single hour later. I’m showing Clarissa in five classes tomorrow and trucking her to Westchester tonight myself.”

Clement Travis laughed.

“Hello Mike.”

He turned to Susan. “This seems to be my day for being the Greek Chorus that interrupts to explain at intervals. Miss Barr, this is Michael Nash. Clarissa is a horse belonging to Michael Nash. Michael Nash lives to show hunters in Summer and hunt them in Autumn. Hunters, not racehorses. There is an enormous difference.”

Michael Nash said, “So you are the young lady who is to be congratulated.” He shook hands cordially, but his glance made her feel as if she were a racehorse or a hunter (she was not sure of the difference) concerning which he was uncertain.

She was getting used to the fact that these people, who seemed more charming, agreeable and amusing every hour, without exception, watched her as if they were appraising her.

“Does Mr. Nash write books about hunting?” she asked Clement to make conversation.

Mr. Mead’s laughter dominated all the other laughter. “Mike, that’s too good to keep,” he said. His secretary called him out of the room before he made any explanation.

Clement picked up the conversation. “Mr. Nash is a literary agent, my dear. He is in fact the literary agent. Roland is giving him your book to sell for pictures, and wanted him to meet you.” He interrupted himself to state: “We’re getting it typed tonight, Mike, six copies, double rates for night work at the typing service. Miss Barr didn’t know about carbons.”

Mr. Nash went on looking at her, but his question was to Clement. “Is she going to write other things?”

“Oh yes—you can see that in ‘Encounter’. I’ll get a copy to you in the country Sunday. We are driving up then to Roland’s to lunch. There will be a couple of editors and book critics.”

Mr. Nash said, “Lucky Roland only announces once in five years he has the sensation of the season. They sit up and listen.”

He spoke to Susan. “Do you know how lucky you are?”

“No.” Clement answered for her. “Roland promised fifty grand before Christmas, assuming you do right by the picture sale. Miss Barr has been having shock reactions ever since.”

“If I like your book, I shall talk to you Sunday at Roland’s luncheon, Miss Barr.” Mr. Nash sounded as one conferring a favor, simply and graciously. However, Susan did not know what the favor was supposed to be.

“We’ll get some photographs tomorrow,” Clement mentioned. “Start with a couple of feature stories next week. Then we’re off.”

Mr. Nash stood up, shook hands again, went to the door with Clement and stood talking to him. Susan heard Clarissa, the hunter, mentioned in practically the same breath as “Encounter.”

She decided when Mr. Travis came back she must tell him she had to go to the Berkshires for some part of the weekend, to be with her mother and Oliver.

Meanwhile, she stared at Mr. Travis and Mr. Nash, talking so easily. They looked sure of themselves, competent in a special sort of way.

She was looking at the two people who were to be most important in determining the course of years and years of her life. She was not sure yet whether she liked either of them.

Toward seven o’clock Anne Jackson was taking a bath in Susan’s tub, preparatory to dining with Susan and Clement and Roland, at Roland’s town apartment.

The weekend was settled, though just how and when Susan was never to remember. Someone (Susan meant it to be herself) was to find Oliver at the Grand Central, and bring him to Roland’s house to catch up on the day.

Friday and Saturday were to be spent with photographers and a feature writer for a syndicate who happened to be staying in town through the holiday.

Sunday included luncheon at Roland’s place in North Stamford.

Then Susan could go to the Berkshires if she liked for Sunday evening and Monday, “Unless something comes up.”

Anne had said easily, “Your young man is going to understand completely. He won’t mind changing his weekend plans, considering the circumstances.”

Susan was not sure. She had never changed around engagements with Oliver.

She sat in the window seat dressed in the same flowered chiffon she had worn the night before. A summer shower was cooling the air briefly.

Susan was beginning to believe Mead and Michaels were publishing “Encounter” in September, and to be breathless with excitement. She had telephoned her mother, and Jennifer, but had not been able to reach Oliver even yet.

However, she now began to be somewhat consoled by the fact that she would see him in only a little more than two hours.

Then, when he knew about the book, she would believe in it completely.

In the bathtub, slightly resigned to the loss of her own weekend by the discovery that she and Susan Barr had the same taste in soap and bathpowder, Anne Jackson considered the case of Susan detachedly, as if she were a restaurant that a good publicity expert planned to make fashionable.

Then recollection of a conversation between herself and Clement Travis impinged on Anne’s detachment, briefly—as she sat, relaxed for the first time that day, and thought, “I behave well. I even let the embryo star bathe and dress first.”

The embryo star had been talking long distance to her mother, while Anne and Clement talked. Anne had accused him cheerfully.

“You have taken a fancy to the wonder child, Clem. Now, now, even you, who have ten years less than I at this business, have seen them come and most usually go. Wait until she gets to the point she feels we ought to publish any tripe she knocks out between visits to Hollywood for five thousand cash in advance.”

Clement said, “You haven’t read ‘Encounter’ yet. I was actually impressed.”

Then he admitted: “I have taken a slight fancy to her. She is so utterly unaware of what she has done or what is going to be done to her thereby, good and bad. Also I haven’t seen a girl as naively in love as this one with the young stocking salesman, judging from the glow about her every time she was allowed to pronounce his name. It’s charming, Anne. Remember, you were once young and innocent.”

“Thank heaven I recovered from both illnesses long since.” Anne had as smoothly extracted from Susan the entire history of Oliver as she would have extracted from the restaurant proprietor the precise amount he meant to spend on publicity.

She said to Clement: “I was a little charmed. Even I faintly remember. We didn’t laugh in the right place, you know. The ‘stocking salesman’ was supposed to be comic because the boyfriend is obviously, by the tone of voice, utter magnificence. But I give you five to one he is not among those present come Christmastime.”

“No takers,” Clement answered promptly, “unless he’s the kind that marries for the gold in those hills.”

“Thank Providence he can’t marry her fast,” Anne told him. “He is married. In fact, that is going to be anything but a big help to me. Gossip columns by August.”

“She didn’t mention to me that he was married, Anne.”

“Of course not. She was very surprised to find herself telling me, Clem. If I do say so, I’m good.”

Susan’s eager young voice, which seemed to be saying “Wonderful” into the telephone frequently, came from two rooms away to their ears. Anne shrugged. “Well, she’ll have fifty grand for consolation if young love is dead with the Autumn leaves. Not a bad Christmas present. And where would you bet she would be a year from Christmas?”

Clement said: “She will have travelled a long, long road, if she keeps her head and works. Mike Nash is sound in maintaining that the trouble with young writers who arrive suddenly is that they stop working. If Mike decides to take her on as his client that will be a big help.”

Anne told him, “I like Mike’s idea about writers being a commodity.”

It was one of his better-known ideas. It went like this: Nowadays most writers are commodities like factory equipment. A writer who makes five thousand a year is a hundred thousand dollar factory earning five percent. A writer who makes fifty thousand is a million dollar factory.

Anne got out of the bathtub and dried herself thoughtfully. The girl in the next room might turn out a million dollar business and she might not. Meanwhile, Anne decided she would risk one simple suggestion. Anne was not quite as hard-boiled as she liked to be considered.

She had decided to discount what she called ‘the girl’s wide-eyed look.’ Because she would not keep that long! So she put on Susan’s bathrobe and went to talk to her. She began:

“I’m going to start calling you Susan. So somewhere in the course of dinner will Clem and Roland. We’ll all feel like childhood friends after a week of this. There is just one thing.” She paused.

The girl looked attentive.

“Your young man, Susan. He is no doubt delightful, and I am looking forward to meeting him. But very temporarily, if I were you, I should avoid making it apparent to all and sundry that he is your young man.”

“Why?”

“Because he is not having a book come out in September and you are. Afterward you and he can do just as you please. Naturally; but just now while Mead and Michaels are going to town, and planning that you meet all sorts of people, I should meet them by yourself. You would not like someone to discover that the young man is married, and land you both in a gossip column in a horrid sort of way, would you?”

“No.” Susan thought how much her mother would dislike that.

“Well then——”

Susan said, “I don’t know how I should feel. I never was in a gossip column.”

“You will be.” Anne was matter-of-fact about it. She went on forthwith toward her main objective.

“I’ll give you an example of what I mean. Don’t make Roland feel obliged to ask the young man to Sunday luncheon.”

“But what will Oliver do with his weekend?”

Anne thought, “Start practicing for what he’ll do with the rest of his life.”

But she spoke sweetly.

“Susan, no doubt he has dozens of friends, since he is so attractive. And he is bound to be utterly delighted with your luck, so he won’t care at all.”

All that sounded a little too simple, in Susan’s opinion. But Anne Jackson’s confidence was contagious. The trouble was—Susan didn’t want Oliver to spend his holiday with other people he knew. Susan wanted him badly to spend it with her.

No doubt Mr. Mountain had asked him for the holiday weekend as a matter of routine. According to all accounts, Mr. Mountain liked his place to be crowded with people always. Well—she couldn’t stop to think about Mr. Mountain. She must salvage what she could and begin with the first matter of importance.

“Anne, I want to meet Oliver at the station myself.” Her voice was more decisive than Anne had yet heard it.

“Well, why not, my dear? There is no reason you shouldn’t.”

Susan didn’t know ‘why not’ but she had a dreadful feeling something would be bound to prevent it.

She was completely right. At Roland’s town apartment, his guests were only half through dinner at twenty-five minutes to nine. Mr. Mead was old, distinguished and commanded deference. It seemed impossible to Susan to extricate herself from his dinner table. Aside from all that, there was not a single moment of silence in which she might remind Anne Jackson or Clement Travis that she had to meet Oliver.

Aside from herself, and those two, Roland Mead and Lansing Morgan, there was present a woman editor of a Sunday newspaper book section, who told extremely amusing stories about writers. Most of the stories fascinated Susan, or would have fascinated her if the hands on her watch were not moving inexorably. The faint malice in some of the others troubled her.

It was Clement who said right through animated conversation, “Someone has to collect Susan’s young man. Lansing, you said you had met him——”

“Very good idea,” Roland said. And Lansing departed.

Dessert was served before Susan recovered sufficiently from her disappointment to notice the conversation again. Roland was mentioning to the woman editor the sociological aspects of Susan’s book. Susan had not known it had any!

They were drinking coffee in the drawing room when Lansing and Oliver arrived.

Susan said, “I’m so glad to see you,” and knew with all those people about that it was going to be practically impossible to indicate how glad she was to see him. She had never been so glad to see anyone since she was born!

Lansing, it seemed, had told Oliver about the book. He smiled down at her. He said, “Congratulations, darling.” Then the woman editor came to talk to Susan. Oliver had no further chance to say anything at all personal.

The woman editor, who liked books triply as much as she liked people, was doing her best to be pleasant, because Roland Mead was a favorite person of hers, if she had any favorite people. She really made an effort to put Susan at ease, to ‘draw her out’ so that she would say something quotable for the ‘Personalities’ column.

She meant well by Susan, in intending to quote her. It would be pleasant to be part of what was so evidently going to be one of Roland’s ‘all out’ shows. Whatever the quality of the girl’s book, the editor thought cheerfully, he didn’t usually have such a pretty face and dainty figure to help him in his publicity campaign. The girl’s eyes were so young!

But clearly she was so overwhelmed by her good fortune that she couldn’t talk. Very agreeably the woman editor terminated their conversation, thinking, “She’ll have acquired a ‘line’ by September tenth, no doubt.”

September tenth was settled for publication date of the book. When that had been decided Susan didn’t know. Someone had informed her casually. She watched Oliver moving about, talking smoothly and not absorbing the conversation. He was so ‘good’ with people! She wished she were! She also wished he would smile across the room as he sometimes had at parties, to let her know that this was all very well, but he and she shared a special lovely secret. Instead, seated by Anne Jackson, all of thirty feet from Susan, he behaved as if he were having a pleasant time!

Roland Mead came and talked to Susan as soon as the woman editor left. She did like him but it was hard to say yes she would enjoy seeing the book of woodcuts of which he had been telling her.

She wanted to know everything Oliver thought about what had happened. Surely, soon they could leave. She and Oliver could sit up all night while she told him about the day, and heard everything he wanted to say.

She thought unhappily that she must not be selfish and keep him in town the whole weekend. She must suggest that he find something amusing to do. But what was left of this evening he would certainly want to spend with her!

He stood up, still talking to Anne Jackson. But, in a minute, Susan decided he would cross the room to her. He would ask, “May I take you home now, darling,” and say something casual to all the other people to the effect that she must be tired. She was quite suddenly wretchedly tired!

Oliver crossed the room to her. He apologized politely for interrupting Roland Mead. He said, “Susan, I really should have spent this holiday with Mr. Mountain. We had half a dozen things to go over. So I think I had better wire him that I’ll get to his house early tomorrow.” He glanced at his watch. “If I hurry, I can just catch the midnight to Philadelphia. Mr. Mead, will someone see that this child gets home?”

Clement spoke from where he sat within hearing distance. “I’ll take her home, Pryor.”

Oliver thanked him.

Susan was beyond speech or thought except one thought: “I wish I had never written a book called ‘Encounter’. I wish I had never written anything except my advertisements at Foresight Insurance.”

Then she heard herself say three words. “Oliver, don’t go.”

He looked at her with the strangest expression. He looked at her as if she were very far off, instead of within touch of his hand. He said easily, “Darling, I must. But I’ll see you early next week.”

Then he made his general ‘goodnights’ and left.

On the way to deposit Susan on her doorstep, Clement Travis was almost completely at a loss for conversation, which he realized was extraordinarily unlike him. He grew much too elaborate in his account of the various things they would do next day. It had already been arranged that Susan meet him and Anne at the offices of Mead and Michaels at ten o’clock. Clement told her that the photographer who would take something called ‘press pictures’ was entertaining. He told her that Anne was a very good sort. “You musn’t let her manner dismay you.”

And he thought he had never seen anyone look more forlorn than the pretty girl beside him.

As it happened, he had more of a clue to Oliver Pryor’s behavior than Susan had. Lansing Morgan told him that when he met Oliver at the station and tried to sum up the facts concerning Susan’s book in a paragraph, Oliver’s first reaction was: “I read it. It’s very dreary and solemn. Why on earth is Mead publishing it?”

In Clement’s opinion, men of Oliver’s type didn’t like to be wrong.

Susan slept for some hours the sleep of exhaustion. When she woke before dawn, the thought did occur to her, “Oliver never liked my book. But surely he doesn’t mind that others like it!” She couldn’t decide. After a while she slept again.

Once in 1941, Susan Barr happened to remind Clement Travis of his brief summary of what might happen to a life. She quoted: “You wrote ‘Encounter.’ That is all. We invent the rest.”

He asked: “Was I so sure even then how it would be?”

She nodded: “Yes, even on July third 1935 you were as sure as that.”

Clement remembered aloud: “Anne and I had to give up our Fourth of July weekend to start you on your way, Susan. You looked a baby, a charming bewildered baby, and you wore some sort of gray dress. Or was it green?”

For various reasons intervening time had made significant she did not say aloud: “I had to give up my weekend too. Oliver and I were going to meet at nine o’clock at the Grand Central to go to mother’s house,” though she remembered that most clearly. She said instead: “The dress I wore was gray.”

As whenever she thought of her life before she became Susan Barr, novelist, July second 1935 began with time’s passing to symbolize years of days like that day, so July third of that year symbolized months of happenings afterward.

She was not clear about a single date between July and December except that September tenth had been publication day for “Encounter.”

There were things she remembered, but the order blurred. She was never sure whom she met at that first Sunday luncheon at Roland Mead’s, because by September her luncheons there were practically weekly events, and he always had a dozen or more guests.

The date that the advance sale of “Encounter” reached a thousand copies, netting her two hundred fifty dollars, became confused with the date on which the advance sale had reached four thousand copies, netting her a thousand dollars. Both those dates were very close to the one when the advance sale reached ten thousand copies, from which she would receive a sum it took her some time to figure out, because above four thousand copies she received fifteen, not ten percent royalty.

Mr. Mead, whom she called Roland to his face but Mr. Mead still in her thoughts, told her she could draw what she liked against her royalties. So she drew a hundred dollars because she was being taken to so many places in the evenings she needed two or three Summer dinner dresses. For these, she dared going to a shop a little more expensive than any she had ever patronized.

One of the most astonished moments of her life occurred when the salesgirl, hearing her name, asked: “Didn’t I read about you in a column? Don’t you have a book coming out?”

Susan admitted it.

After that, the salesgirl showed her some other things.

Susan had never in her life owned a frock that cost more than forty dollars, nor bought more than one evening frock at once. On this occasion she bought two, one for eighty-five dollars, one for sixty-nine fifty.

Then on the way from the store she did something she had always wanted to do—something that symbolized utter wealth to her.

She bought twelve pairs of stockings at once!

When she realized that she had spent everything in her checking account, she asked rather timidly if she could have another hundred dollars. No one had the least objection.

Slightly to the annoyance of Roland Mead, she had insisted on giving Foresight Insurance Company two weeks’ notice. So she did write the campaign against minor accidents after all. She never remembered how those advertisements read, but she remembered the hot Friday afternoon when she was to leave those familiar offices.

The elderly bookkeeper in the department told her she was crazy to give up a good steady job with a future because someone was publishing a book of hers. Stephen Quintar (evidently with the same idea in the back of his mind) phrased it more tactfully. He said, “If you ever want to come back to Foresight, just let me know.” That kindly speech somewhat exasperated the girl who was taking her place, as Susan could see.

People who liked her congratulated her and told her to come back to see them sometimes. People who didn’t like her congratulated her but in a different tone.

She said she would come back to see them all often. She meant to do that, too.

When she left, when she rode down the elevator and walked through the marble lobby, she was only aware of one emotion. She was most intensely frightened. Suppose she never wrote anything else! Suppose “Encounter” was a failure in spite of everything!

Outside in the sunlight a car that recently had grown familiar was waiting. Susan said, “Clement, how nice of you to call for me.” Though in the last extraordinary weeks she had grown to depend on Clement as interpreter of the fantastic, and to like him very much, she was not on that Friday very pleased to see him.

Oliver, who had only come to New York once in a fortnight, was arriving for the entire weekend and she simply must not keep him waiting! The single evening she had spent with him since the acceptance of “Encounter” had been oddly uncomfortable. Oliver, for no sensible reason, had behaved as if he were tired of hearing of the firm of Mead and Michaels in general and of Clement Travis in particular.

Well, it was five o’clock. Oliver was not calling for her until half-past seven. There was really plenty of time.

Clement told her: “We’re meeting Roland and Anne at the Ritz bar.”

Susan was by now grown used to the fact that one had business engagements with agents, publishers, feature writers and editors (Michael Nash had already produced two of those) at any time or place from breakfast at the Biltmore to supper at the Stork Club. So she asked, “Who is going to be there besides?”

“Michael Nash—no one else.”

“But I saw him yesterday.”

“So he said.”

Already, Mr. Nash had secured for her two orders for short stories for which editors would pay three hundred dollars each. She had been able to give him two ideas, but had told him straight out that she simply couldn’t describe plots to editors. It made her much too self-conscious.

Michael had said, “Never mind,” and to her surprise he himself gave detailed outlines of the stories to the editors. Nothing was required of her but to sit and look sensible. (She was not at all sure she managed that.)

She decided en route to the Ritz that the editors had no doubt decided they didn’t want the stories and Michael thought the presence of Roland and Anne would comfort her.

Prohibition was in 1935 so short a time past that people still sat in the new bright hotel bars with a certain air of uncertainty as if subconsciously awaiting the arrival of police.

Only, it seemed to Susan the three who were waiting for her did not share that look of uncertainty. She thought: “They seem so sure of themselves. I never knew anyone before who seemed so sure.”

Roland’s handsome head was flung back in laughter. Michael Nash’s face, under his smooth gray hair, was more animated than usual except when he was talking about hunters. Anne Jackson’s cool blue eyes were bright.

It was Anne who said, “There they are.”

Michael announced: “Just ready for a champagne cocktail.”

Susan was still only a little way removed from the era when a champagne cocktail, that usually cost a dollar at least, was something one refrained from ordering out of consideration for the man who took one to dinner. But just lately she had tried to be matter-of-fact about the standards of these people.

She said calmly: “All right. A champagne cocktail.”

Everyone was oddly silent while they waited for their drinks. They all regarded Susan either directly or with sidelong glances they thought perhaps she did not notice. Since she was by now sure they had bad news for her, she grew more and more uncomfortable. Sight of the waiter approaching with his tray was a relief.

But no one picked up their drinks.

Roland Mead said, “Tell her now, Mike.”

Mike said, “I have a little present for you, Susan.” He took something out of his pocket that looked like a check and laid it face down on the table. Then he went on: “This is a celebration of the fact that you wrote a very good book, and that I am a very good agent.”

When he paused again Clement interrupted: “Susan’s frightened. I’ll interpret, as usual. Susan, Mike sold ‘Encounter’ to Hollywood.”

Mike handed her the check. There was a mistake in the figures evidently. Mike said, “Thirty-five thousand, of which twenty percent goes to Roland under your contract—of which twenty he had to give half to me. Your check comes out twenty-eight thousand even. Many happy returns of the day, Susan.”

She never remembered afterward if she said anything more than “Oh.”

Roland Mead advised mildly: “I wouldn’t spend it all on clothes in a week, Susan.”

How funny that was; no one could spend that amount of money on clothes in a lifetime!

The others went away in a little while. But Michael Nash said, “I want to talk to Susan. I’ll take a later train.”

She glanced at the little silver wrist watch that was a one-time Christmas present from Oliver. It was not quite six o’clock. She still had a half hour before she need go home to change for dinner with him.

“Put that check in your purse,” Michael suggested. She did so.

“What I have to say won’t take long, Susan.”

But, for an instant, he did not begin. It seemed to Susan that his expression, that was inconsistently hard yet kind, was as of one regarding a horse and wondering how he would run or jump.

In that she was extraordinarily percipient. It was just what he was thinking.

He began: “That check makes your little three hundred dollar magazine orders small, doesn’t it?”

“I had forgotten about them.”

“Don’t forget about them. They can build to something. You may make a fortune in picture money through the next decade, but to a person who wants to be a novelist, Hollywood must be only the frosting on the cake.”

He saw that she didn’t understand at all. “Susan, when you sell a finished story to pictures, you get paid for something you have already accomplished. When you write books or magazines, you are obliged continuously to do something new. So you grow as a writer.”

She said, “I understand.” But she understood better a long time afterward.

Mike changed the subject. “How are you and that boyfriend of yours getting on? The blond—is his name Pryor?”

“Yes. His name’s Pryor. I’m having dinner with him in an hour.”

“Are you going to marry him?”

“He has a wife.” She knew somehow that Anne Jackson had told him that already.

“Why doesn’t he get a divorce?”

Since she had never quite understood that herself, she couldn’t find an answer.

Mike said mildly: “Don’t resent the question. I think you are a nice girl, but you also are beginning to be very valuable property to me as an agent. If you are involved in some emotional situation that keeps you from working, you become property somewhat damaged.”

“I can’t get used to thinking of myself as a ‘property’ at all.”

“You will. I’ll offer another scrap of hard-boiled advice, since I’ve ten minutes before I have to leave for my train. Men writers and women opera singers can ‘live’ and do their work. Women writers can’t.”

“What do you mean by ‘live’?”

“The gamut from ecstasy to despair. You can get married to some nice quiet understanding guy. You can give up men. But you have to go in for a settled orderly life either way. An opera singer can scream out her delight or misery in high C melodically—and get paid for it. A writer has to keep perspective. If you have an order for a story about pleasant young people and you are so locked in misery that you can’t see straight, you’ll write some mournful humorless thing.”

“Well, I’m not wrapped in misery. Oliver and I have got on very well for a long time.”

“How long does it take him to make as much money as you have in your purse at the moment?”

“Years and years.” She risked saying what she felt. “Mike, sometimes you seem so nice, but sometimes you try to sound like—like someone perfectly horrid.”

He laughed a friendly laugh. “I’m neither very nice nor very horrid, Susan. I’m a business man and a realist. Also in the literary agent business, I’ve seen them come and I’ve seen them go through twenty years in which I’ve formed various conclusions. One of those is that there are only two kinds of men who get on with women writers in the big time. First, the charming weaklings who are perfectly willing to be the tail of someone’s kite. Second, men who make so much money or do such important work that the little darling’s writing is no more significant to them than if she did needlepoint embroidery. Is your Mr. Pryor either of those?”

“No.”

“Well, he could be one of the very rare exceptions. A man so understanding, so generous in mind and heart that he is incapable of resenting the fact his wife makes dollars to his dimes and at any party they ever attend receives ten times the attention. Is your Mr. Pryor like that?”

Susan would not have believed that with a check for twenty-eight thousand dollars in a purse anyone could be miserable. But she was so miserable it showed in her voice when she said, “I don’t know.”

Some compunction revealed itself in Mike’s tone: “Don’t bother about it at the moment. It was stupid of me to bring this up now. Come along. I’ll put you in a taxi. Have a nice time tonight and don’t worry about anything.”

She was dressed waiting for Oliver when she decided to telephone her mother about the check. Her mother was overwhelmed with delight. That made Susan feel better.

Yet, when he came in, when he put his arms ’round her and she felt suddenly warm, safe, without problems, she decided not to tell him about the money—at least not immediately.

They went for dinner to a chophouse of which they were both fond when in the mood for steak. It was in Chelsea, surrounded by a street of Victorian apartments. Inside, the Victorian atmosphere was even more noticeable. The waiters had the air of having been born there, full grown in white aprons, not very long after the Civil War. The clientele were largely middle-aged Irishmen and their comfortable plump wives. But the food was wonderful.

(In ‘West of the Moon’ by Susan Barr, published in 1939, there is an exact description of the place. The scene where the man tells the girl he never had the least desire to marry her is set there.)

Oliver talked amusingly of a dinner party Mr. Mountain’s granddaughter had given. Susan wondered a little unhappily why all that Pennsylvania life of his in which she used to be so interested seemed suddenly remote.

Then he told her that his vacation, postponed because of business, was definitely settled for the second and third weeks in September.

She protested without thinking: “But that means you won’t be here for the publication date of ‘Encounter’.”

Roland Mead was giving her a cocktail party two days after publication. She had been asked by a famous bookstore to autograph copies of “Encounter”, on the Saturday of publication week. Mike Nash was giving one of his famous luncheons in town for her on the Monday following. She had hoped most unreasonably that Oliver would be in New York most of the time so that he could hear about everything that happened as it happened. Even more, she had hoped that he would be present at the cocktail party, the luncheon and the autographing.

He said, “Darling, the appearance of the book isn’t the kind of accouchement where the anxious husband has to pace up and down the corridor. Your publisher and your agent are much more competent to see you through than I am.”

“Oliver, you don’t like any of them, do you?”

“I think they are interesting and intelligent people. They are, however, not in the least interested in me. They keep wondering whether I’m going to be a help or a hindrance in the career of Miss Susan Barr.”

“What makes you think that?”

“I’m not stupid, Susan.”

Twenty-eight thousand dollars in one’s purse gave one an odd feeling of recklessness. She said, “Well, that’s all nonsense. Maybe I won’t have a career. One book isn’t a career. Anyway I don’t want one much, not one-tenth as much as I want a life with you.”

The brown eyes under his thick yellow hair flickered oddly. “That, Susan, is the largest compliment I’m ever going to receive in my life. I thank you for it. Surprisingly enough, I believe you mean it.”

“Of course I mean it.” Would she have dared to go on if she had not had that check in the pretty, soft, black suede bag that with her black frock and hat were recent extravagances? She went on: “But we can’t have a life if we can’t ever be married. Isn’t there something to be done about that? I’m—I’m assuming that you still would like to marry me.”

He said, “I would very much like to marry you.”

As he said the words, he meant them. A hundred memories of little, gentle, unimportant Susan Barr caught at him. She had loved him simply, undemandingly, patiently. She had lived for the evenings they could spend together. In all his absences, she had never bothered to find amusement for herself. She had spent the time writing a book that people who knew better than she said would make her famous, and already the promise of fame had changed her a little! She could not help it. He did not blame her. But he wished that now, tonight—he could marry her before she changed unrecognizably.

He said aloud: “I wish we could be married, have a pleasant little house, somewhere in the Pennsylvania hills, have you meet me at the station every evening. . . .”

She interrupted, but with delight: “Oliver darling, those are all the things I’ve wanted. You used to seem to find them so dull—so ordinary.”

But didn’t she understand the chance of them was passing now? Mrs. Oliver Pryor would have been so delighted if her husband had a five hundred a year salary increase. They would have discussed whether they could change the old car for a new one.

He told her: “Yes, I’m inconsistent,” but he did not explain. He had thought all that pleasant American middle-class life was stupid. But he had wanted some day to do the remarkable thing that would set them apart from that life. He hadn’t wanted her to accomplish the change.

The husband of the famous Miss Barr—if it turned out that way! He would hate it!

Susan asked again gently: “Wouldn’t your wife give you a divorce under any circumstance?”

He told her the truth. “Undoubtedly she would—if I paid her the ten thousand dollars or so I’ve never saved for the privilege of being rid of her. She doesn’t believe in divorce—without some quid pro quo.”

Why on earth should Susan smile as if he had just told her wonderful news? She was taking something out of her purse. She handed it across the table. “Take half of this—I promised you half of the proceeds of ‘Encounter’ anyway. This is my share of the picture sale.”

He looked at the check. Under his tan he flushed bright crimson.

Susan said matter-of-factly: “With the other fourteen thousand dollars, we could buy quite a nice house.”

He could tell that she was not at ease as she pretended. But she went on steadily: “I’ve always felt about money, though I never had any before, that it should be spent on being happy.”

Oliver thought: “This is the strangest moment of my life. In some ways, it is the best moment. From another point of view, it is the worst.”

He let the equivalent of four years’ income for him lie on the table. He took Susan’s hand. Ill-assorted, confused things raced through his mind. . . . That she was offering him a small fortune lightly as he had given her a fifty dollar present! That she was being no more generous with her money than she had always been to him with herself, her whole life. That he had never for very long or very seriously troubled himself as to what return he was giving for the two years she had spent devoted to him, for the uncertain number of years ahead in which he had comfortably assumed she would continue that devotion.

She said rather surprisingly: “Give me back the check for a minute.”

He handed it to her. From her purse she took a fountain pen. She wrote something on the back of the check.

Oliver told her: “I hope you marked that ‘for deposit only.’ ”

“Just about. Here you are.”

She had written: “Pay to the order of Oliver Pryor.”

“You are completely crazy, Susan.”

“Not at all. Save half of it for our house, if you like.”

Then he was wretched! Because he knew that he was going to take that check, that he couldn’t resist taking it. He would spend it on getting rid of his wife—and on buying a house, if that was what Susan wanted. He would spend it as she directed. It was, after all, her money.

And nothing in the world would be as it had been between them again. Neither small things nor great things. Never now would he suggest dining extravagantly at a place that might amuse her, and feel that he was giving her a special ‘treat.’ Nor, in time to come would he be likely to make sacrifices to take out insurance for her security. It was probable she was much more competent to make herself secure than he would ever be. Twenty-eight thousand dollars was a sign post on the way!

He spoke after a moment that felt to him an endless time. “So we’ll be married, sweet, and live happily ever after.”

“You announce that in such an odd tone, darling. Is it because all men when faced with matrimony are really reluctant?”

Most intensely he wanted to say to her: “You are stupid.” Knowing the phrase was in a sense unjust, he wanted to state it nevertheless. She was stupid only in the simplicity of her love, in the directness of her approach to what she wanted. She was unlikely to keep that simplicity, that directness indefinitely.

“Have you finished your coffee, Susan? Shall we go home?”

In his arms that night, she said, “You never kissed me like this.”

He laughed. “You forget between times, dearest.” But he knew she spoke the truth. He was in fact kissing good-bye to something that had been young, uncomplicated, happy.

Sometime in the Fall of that year, Oliver’s wife went to Reno. Her divorce was to be final toward the first of December. Oliver, it seemed, was fantastically busy. He had had a promotion! Which was wonderful, of course. But for all her best efforts, Susan Barr could not behave as if it were as wonderful as if certain things had not happened to herself.

The few reviews of “Encounter” that were not what the trade called ‘raves’ were something it seemed the trade called ‘selling’ reviews anyway. Susan Barr was famous. Everyone was so nice to her!

(The first time she saw a bookstore window filled with copies of “Encounter” she wanted to cry. The second time she was only pleased—and sort of proud, in spite of herself.)

“Where are you going to live?” Michael Nash had asked. “You had better take a larger apartment. You can afford it.”

She took a charming duplex apartment on a quiet street off Park Avenue. She planned it would be large enough for herself and Oliver when they married.

On the only two occasions that he came to New York between late September and Thanksgiving, they had talked about being married at Christmas time. But Oliver said, “I want you to be very sure.”

That made her almost impatient with him. She had been sure—for years. She told him something to that effect. He said an odd thing. He said, “But those years were different.”

They had not been nearly as wonderful. All sorts of interesting people asked Susan to luncheon and to dinner nowadays. She had spoken twice on the radio and been told her low voice sounded splendid. She had completed two short stories, had an order for a serial. Roland Mead urged her to begin her second book. And—since she was going to be married and it could come under the general heading of trousseau she bought a mink coat; also a good deal of furniture for her new apartment.

Clement Travis was her escort to first nights, to parties, to suddenly arranged dinners at Twenty-one and semi-business luncheons all over town. She liked him so much. They were very good friends, long before November was December.

She told him once: “Since Oliver is out of town practically all the time, I don’t know how I would have managed without you.”

He laughed and laughed.

Very defensively, she said, “Well, it sounded less gracious than I meant it to sound. But you know I am saying ‘thank you.’ ”

Clement asked: “By the way, have you set any date for your wedding?”

“No.”

She had had that day a very strange, brief letter from Oliver. She had read it over so many times in an effort to interpret it that she knew it by heart:

Clement said, “The expression on your face is very unhappy. Why? Better tell me. Or don’t you know who I am yet?”

“You’re a nice idiot.”

“Not at all. I’m the person in your life who will be there ‘whence all but he have fled’ which is a misquotation derived from the boy and the burning deck.”

“Why is everyone else going to flee?”

“Oh, Mike Nash will stay around. He for money and me for love.”

Clement, seated on the window seat in her new living room, regarded the wide view of lighted skyscrapers.

“Did I tell you before that sometimes you’re like a male Cassandra, Clement?”

“No. I don’t think so. We progress in intimacy. Have I confessed that I’m the seventh son of a seventh son and can see around the corners!”

He sounded so serious that for a second or two she took him literally. “You’re an only child, Clement. I’ve met your mother. She told me so.”

Then they both laughed.

“Give me a drink, Susan, and I’ll go home.”

“You know where the Scotch is.”

She kept it in the beautiful antique sideboard of the dining room.

“Well, come along with me. I like your company.” He asked, regarding the sideboard, “How much did you spend on furnishing this apartment, Susan?”

“Around five thousand dollars.”

“Only a couple of weeks’ royalties on ‘Encounter’. Well, that’s all right.”

“Encounter” had, before November’s end, sold a hundred thousand copies. It seemed to be racing along heading best-seller lists at about the rate of ten thousand copies a week.

“Well, in a way it’s all right. But I still feel crazily dizzy.”

Clement stood slim and graceful in his dinner clothes (they had been to one of Roland’s dinners), mixing a small Scotch highball with a rather unusually serious expression on his face. “You have a right to spend at least half the first fifty thousand on yourself—on the setting for the jewel that is Miss Barr.”

“How disagreeable that last phrase is.”

“It truly was not intended to be. I mean that you are entitled to a charming apartment, a car, a maid, a little country house if you like— But the second fifty grand may be harder work to earn, and if you make that amount of money a minimum basic wage scale, you are going to be hard up a great deal of the time.”

“What nonsense! How on earth would I spend fifty thousand a year every year?”

“It’s not so hard.”

Above the sideboard was an old gilt mirror. Quite accidentally, Susan saw herself therein. The reflection of her velvet frock, that was a wonderful fuchsia color, seemed to glow in the mirror’s depth.

“It’s so lovely to have as many clothes as one wants, Clement.”

“What a child you are, Susan! No one could possibly grudge you this honeymoon.”

“It is a sort of honeymoon. What comes after?”

“I hope—that you are married to your work more closely than to whoever happens to be your husband.”

“That’s a strange wish, Clement.”

“It’s to my own disadvantage. Did I mention that I mean to be your second husband?”

“No, you didn’t.” She was very cross. “And stop not taking Oliver seriously. I’m going to be married to him until fifty years from now, until he or I dies. And I’m going to care for him much more than for being a famous novelist, if I turn out a really famous novelist, I mean—with half a dozen good books back of me. I want three children, two boys and a girl.”

Clement put his arm around her shoulder. “And you ran around Madison Avenue antique shops with Anne Jackson, choosing furniture not for the smart town apartment of a charming young writer, but for heirlooms for your grandchildren. Anne said it was obvious.”

She ignored that and went to the main point. “Why do you all so enjoy predicting disaster for me?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps we shouldn’t. I think I never will again. Let me just give a postscript of advice. Don’t insist on predicting your own happy ending. Just thank Heaven for it if it arrives on schedule. In the set, the world, we know and you begin to know, happy endings are so rare.”

“But why should they be?”

“Because consciously or subconsciously, practically all the citizens of this world are egotists.”

“Am I?”

“Not yet.” He bent and kissed her lightly. But the kiss startled her.

He said, “I’m going home, little Victorian.”

As to that, he was right. She was very slightly shocked, because she had never let anyone else kiss her even in the most casual fashion since she had known Oliver.

That night, half asleep, she thought with some bewilderment that she scarcely ever could tell whether Clement were serious or jesting. Second husband. What nonsense!

Oliver telephoned long distance to say that he was flying to California on three hours’ notice, but that he would be back by mid-December. She began to miss him acutely.

As the first novelty of being a celebrity wore off, Susan was discovering that being a celebrity was pretty boring.

She heard second hand that a woman who had so overwhelmed her with flattery as to “Encounter” that she had been almost too shy to speak, had described her as ‘high hat’.

A girl she had known fairly well at Foresight Insurance had given an account of the visit that Susan took time to make there. The account was: “She came swaggering in to show off her mink coat.”

Only Jennifer Reed was exactly as she had been. Susan looked forward enormously to the luncheons they managed to have nearly every week. Jennifer was nowadays as busy in the evenings as Susan.

Jennifer had met a Georgian with a drawl even slower and softer than her own, a remarkably good job ‘Nawth’—meaning with an advertising agency in Philadelphia, charming manners, and what Jennifer called ‘deadly serious intentions’. He was so devoted that he made the two-hour train journey nearly every evening to New York to see Jennifer.

Who said, “I can resist until Spring, maybe. Then we’ll live on the Main Line and acquire Pennsylvania Dutch accents.”

“There aren’t any Pennsylvania Dutch accents on the Main Line, Jennifer.”

From a weekend in Philadelphia to meet the Georgian’s mother, who was there for a visit, Jennifer came back on Sunday evening and telephoned Susan immediately.

Her whole manner of asking if Susan could lunch next day had the effect of urgency. Susan was sure Jennifer was going to tell her that she planned to marry very soon.

But Jennifer had no news about herself—and—for the first time in their friendship—had almost nothing to say about anything. She mentioned, however, in the course of luncheon that she had met James Mountain’s granddaughter at a party. “Her name is Marjorie Phillips,” she said.

“I know that. Oliver is always talking of her.”

Jennifer started to speak—stopped—and looked so uncomfortable, then Susan asked: “What on earth’s the matter?”

“Nothing. Nothing whatsoever.”

When Susan wanted to know what the Phillips girl was like, Jennifer said, “Pretty in a quiet way,” and then talked on suddenly about her fiancé’s mother as if to make up in five minutes for all her previous silence.

At the stage of life that he called middle-aged when he felt well, and elderly when he was overworked, Roland Mead’s principal pleasure aside from his business was in entertaining. He had at least a small dinner every week of his life. He showered his authors with cocktail parties and luncheons to an extent that irritated other publishers. Three or four times a year he gave what he called a ‘good sized’ party, of which the most traditional had become his annual Christmas party, held always ten days or a fortnight before that holiday.

There were always present at that event an opera singer a little past her bloom, who was reputed to have been the love of Roland’s life twenty years previously; a male picture-star who flew East for the event every year; an aged female author better known in the last decade for reading palms with a sort of bitter wit than for any writing she had done. Every year a very famous United States senator, a former governor, a Supreme Court justice represented politics; a king of jazz represented modernity; and some four hundred other people, themselves as they like to think of themselves.

The party usually began at eleven, reached its peak between three and four, dwindled toward sunrise and expired only after the breakfast Roland always served at seven o’clock.

Susan Barr had heard so much about this party that she looked forward to it eagerly. She was particularly delighted that Oliver, at last returned from the Coast, was coming to take her to dinner before the party. They would have several hours alone to catch up on the long weeks of their separation, and surely, as always before, sight of each other would sweep away the strain that absence had built before, if never quite as definitely as this time.

She sat in front of the dressing table that was the only non-antique piece of furniture in her bedroom and that she knew was incongruous but had bought, unable to resist its many mirrored surfaces.

The colored maid, Maybelle, whom Anne Jackson had acquired for her, was as gifted at arranging hair as making canapés for cocktails. The girl had never been farther south from Harlem than the Battery, but she cheerfully attempted plantation mannerisms gathered from her reading or the pictures.

Thus: “You shuah is beautiful in this flowered gold lamé, Miss Susan. I expect it’s maybe the most beautiful of all the dresses you has got.”

Then, in perfectly good New York English: “The moonstone necklace and bracelet are just right for it.”

And back to the deep South with: “You done look like just a little young lady in her ’teens.”

The contrast was a trifle bewildering until one got used to it. But Susan had got used to it. Not quite for the first time, it occurred to her that she had got used to a great many things in the hundred or so days since “Encounter” was published.

To have a maid bring a breakfast tray, run a bath for her, tiptoe around with iced tea when she was writing, lay out the clothes she was going to wear, return to the clothes closet pressed and brushed the clothes she had worn. She was used to taking taxis all day long every time she went anywhere. And to ninety-five dollars having become the average price of a dinner dress and eighty-five dollars of an afternoon dress.

Once in a while a kind of terror caught at her at how easy it was to get used to all these things.

For Christmas she had ordered a car for Oliver, a sports roadster of the make she had once seen him admire in a window. A little sense of humor remained with her; she told herself this would be her only two-car Christmas in life. The meaning of that was that she was also buying her mother a car, a sedate sedan, but much handsomer and smoother-running than the old car her mother was always making do one more year.

The moonstone jewelry she had seen in an antique shop window. It was her Christmas present for herself, a necklace and bracelet set in heavy dull gold.

She noticed that the moonstones were very effective with the dress, thought detachedly and without any special conceit: “I’m looking well lately,” and didn’t recognize that she looked any different than she used to look.

But she was already a very little different and more than expensive clothes added up to the change. By now, numbers of supposedly important people had treated her as if she were supposedly an important person, so—she had grown much more assured. That assurance changed her smile, her voice, her entire manner. It was so far a becoming change. She looked a much more distinctive pretty girl than she had been six months previously. But perhaps her face had lost a certain softness.

The telegram that said Oliver would call for her by half-past seven and go on to the party with her if she liked lay on her dressing table. Of course, Oliver didn’t realize it, but he would like this party too. She hadn’t told him how special it would be.

Dressed now, ready to slip on the gold-colored velvet wrap with its little ermine collar, she walked up and down her apartment living room where a real fire burned in the fireplace, and shone on the little tables and chair legs kept so carefully waxed by Maybelle. This was the prettiest room in which she had ever lived!

It was wonderful to have it and the handsome dining room, the curved staircase to the study, the two bedrooms and baths above. The second bedroom was to be a guest room. When she was so perfectly happy, delighted with her possessions, her success, the prospects of her evenings, why should she be reminded of unhappy things? Such as the fact that she had expected her mother to spend a great deal of time in that guest room, and she had not yet seen it! Her mother reading “Encounter” for the first time in a pre-publication copy had most intensely disliked it!

She had said, “My dear, I hoped you would write a charming young love story. This—this book is amoral.” And she had thought the publicity it received vulgar. She had written Susan a letter saying: “Darling, can’t you make your publishers keep your photograph out of the newspapers? After all, you aren’t a picture-star or a circus performer. It’s not dignified.”

Susan herself felt very mixed emotions about what Anne Jackson called her ‘personal publicity’. She always read the stories as if they dealt with someone else. One corner of her mind was delighted with them; another corner quite inconsistently felt uncomfortable.

Well—her mother had promised to visit the new apartment after Susan went to the country for Christmas. She would get used to having a famous daughter—Susan smiled, remembering another sentence in that letter: “I never wanted to have a conspicuous daughter.”

Very faintly she heard a buzzer sound. Maybelle announced: “Mr. Pryor,” and stood by the door ready to take his coat.

Susan walked to the door of the living room, as he arrived in the hall. They shook hands. When Maybelle left for the butler’s pantry and the mixing of cocktails, Susan decided Oliver would of course kiss her.

But for some reason he did not. He said, “You look very beautiful, Susan. So does this apartment. It wasn’t finished last time I was in New York.” He stood in front of the fireplace, staring down at her.

“You—you don’t seem very glad to see me, Oliver.” What a stupid thing to say!

He said, “I don’t know whether I am or not.”

Then Maybelle appeared with the cocktails.

Susan made conversation that she knew was completely inane. “I thought you would like Manhattans because the weather is cold.”

Maybelle passed canapés.

“Yes, Manhattans are the best cold-weather cocktails.”

Wasn’t Maybelle ever going to set down the plate of canapés and leave!

Susan said desperately: “This annual Christmas party that Roland gives is supposed to be wonderful.”

Maybelle arranged the cocktail tray and the plate of canapés on a sidetable.

“Oh,” said Oliver too casually, “I can’t take you to it. I dressed at the Pennsylvania because I knew that you’d be dressed, and oh well—just to dine with you.”

At last Maybelle went away.

“What is it, Oliver, what is it?”

“I’ll tell you in a little while. Where do you want to dine?”

“I don’t care. We . . .” She started to say: “We have been as close as married people for two years, for two and a half years now. Yet you are behaving like a stranger. It—it frightens me.” She suppressed all that, asked instead: “Why can’t you come to the party?”

“I’ll tell you that, too.”

He finished his cocktail. She had scarcely touched hers. He asked: “May I?” and filled his glass again. “The steak place or the restaurant that has the garden in Summer time?”

“That’s not so gay in Winter when there is no garden. But—let’s go there.” In retrospect it seemed that all the evenings they ever had dined there had been happy evenings.

“Do you want to see the rest of the apartment before we go, Oliver?”

“All right.”

She showed him the antique Chinese screen so beautifully painted in dim blue and gold that sky and trees and figures of the design had a dreamy quality. She showed him the old highboy that, used as a bedroom chest, was her special joy.

Oliver said at some point: “It’s a big apartment for a little girl.”

She protested: “But it’s for us.”

He did not answer.

The words her mind framed would sound like bad melodrama. She knew that. She did not utter them. “Don’t you love me any more?”

But how appalling if he did not!

He had been away from her a long time. He might have met someone—someone new. She remembered she had worried before when he was away on long business trips.

She picked up her wrap, her purse, her long white gloves. Maybelle waited in the downstairs hall to hold Oliver’s coat for him, to hand him his scarf and hat. When they went out into the street, snow was falling lightly, the first snow of Winter.

With absurd irrelevance she remembered last year—no, the year before—the first snow fell on a Sunday in the afternoon. She and Oliver put on old clothes and went for a long walk through the park with the flakes coming harder and harder against their faces. Of what they had talked, she did not remember at all, but that they went to tea disgracefully wet and dishevelled and had toasted English muffins swimming in butter.

The cab moved slowly along the streets that seemed so silent when snow fell. She asked, “Do you remember the walk we took in the snow in the park on Sunday a long time ago?”

“Yes. I remember.”

She reached for his hand, as always before he had reached for hers!

He held her hand tight then when her fingers touched his. He made the most extraordinary speech. “When I met you, you weren’t quite twenty-four years old. I’ll always think of you like that. You had one evening dress—sort of Nile green. Your hair wasn’t usually neat. You wore no lipstick at the office and too much in the evenings.”

Well, her hair hung in beautiful smooth curves on her shoulders. She had six evening dresses not counting Summer ones, and was very careful about how she put on lipstick. But—those things were supposed to be improvements, not subjects for reproach.

They were arrived.

The Hungarian musicians that looked romantic in the garden in Summertime now looked rather shabby and poor indoors where one had a closer view of them. But the restaurant itself had a vogue of sorts because of the excellence of the food. A good many people in evening dress were dining there.

Oliver was behaving as if the decision between chicken en casserole or noisette of lamb as a main course was momentous. She had never seen his manner so remote, his handsome face so strange. Something occurred to her. “Are you thinner, Oliver?”

“Perhaps. I’ve been working rather hard.”

Then she told herself she was being ridiculous, that she was exaggerating whatever was ‘different’ in his manner. Perhaps he was just tired. But ‘I don’t know whether I am glad to see you or not.’ That sentence of his had been a shock. It kept echoing in her mind.

She tasted a fruit cup; she played with her soup.

“Eat your dinner, Susan. Drink some wine.”

With the arrival of the noisette of lamb, a dish she would never eat voluntarily again, patience left her.

“Oliver, you simply have to tell me now—whatever it is.”

“No, not quite yet. I enjoy looking at you too much.”

“But I’ll be around for you to look at always.”

Who was it had said, “Don’t insist on your happy ending?”

She sipped her wine. It was extraordinary in that hot room that she should feel so cold.

Oliver asked, “Dessert, Susan?”

She said, “No, thank you. Coffee, please.”

He gave the order to the waiter. When coffee arrived he said, “And two brandies.” Then to Susan: “I was going to do this by letter. It seemed too cowardly. Now I’m here though it seems the other way would have been less painful. For us both.”

She was for the moment quite steady. “Come to the point, Oliver.”

“There are two points: One is—that I owe you a great deal of money I shan’t be able to pay for years.”

“What has that to do with anything?”

“A great deal—since I’m marrying Marjorie Phillips—you remember—my boss’s granddaughter? Our engagement is being announced at Christmas. I tried to persuade her to postpone that announcement a little while—for your sake.”

The room really went ’round and ’round. She had heard the expression before. It had been meaningless. Now it was a literal phrase. Yet she had only had to drink a sip of a cocktail and a half a glass of wine.

Years and years later when she saw a Dali painting of a clock, a sleeping man in a top hat, seaweed and a string of pearls, she was reminded of this moment.

A Hungarian with an accordion, her untouched brandy glass, a strange brightly painted blonde woman with a fur hat and a red blouse at the next table, her own evening purse of gold and Oliver’s face blurred as if he were drowned or she drowning were regarding him from far away, made an insane picture in her mind.

A voice she didn’t know was saying: “Why? What have I done? Why? What have I done?” several times hoarsely.

“Perhaps you haven’t done anything,” Oliver told her. So it was herself who had been asking. The room came sharply into focus again. She had to take a handkerchief out of her purse to wipe perspiration from her forehead.

Oliver spoke again. He said, “I’m sorry,” as if he had bumped into her on a street corner. She began to laugh. Then he said, “Don’t.” So she stopped.

He said as if to himself: “This is the worst moment of my life, really the worst.”

Her answer was automatic: “Then why did you have it?”

“Do you want to know, Susan, or doesn’t it matter?”

Out of blankness of despair, her answer to that came: “If you don’t love me anymore, nothing matters.”

How exaggerated the words sounded, like something stupid she had said before, something she could not remember. But stupid as they were, the words were true. He was going, nothing mattered—nothing, nothing.

“In a minute I’ll stop being dizzy, Oliver.” She didn’t want to fall off her chair onto the floor. If she didn’t stop being dizzy, that would happen. So she had to stop being dizzy.

He began to talk. Later that evening, she could not have told anyone a single sentence he had said; but weeks and months after, she discovered that she had memorized almost every word. (And, in 1940, she used three quarters of his speech in a scene in a story.)

He said, “You were one person. Now you are another. You were a little adoring girl who looked to me for all the answers. You would have expected me to look after you, to support you and our children. You would have been interested in every detail of my work, my career.”

(Afterwards she couldn’t be sure whether she said, ‘But I still am’ or just wanted to say that.)

He went on: “Now in six months you’ve made about as much money as I could possibly make in the better part of a decade. Maybe you’ll keep it up. I would detest it. I would detest the weeks I made a hundred and fifty dollars and you made a thousand. I detest that beautiful apartment you arranged for a life I’ll never live. Maybe we could have spent a thousand dollars on furniture, and maybe some of that we would have had to buy on installments— You probably have the most expensive dress in this room. I couldn’t keep you in clothes like that and I would loathe having you wear them bought by yourself.

“Also, I really do hate your agent, your publisher, his publicity woman, his assistant Mr. Travis—all the people who treat you as if you were a prize poodle and they were all sharing the prize money. I don’t care if you are likely to keep on making as much as the President of the United States or not; they do. They’re smart people too. They probably will arrange that you make it. It’s to their interest.

“But already they’ve made you less of a person in ratio to making you more of a celebrity. Miss Barr endorses What Not’s shoes. (I saw that ad.) Miss Barr at the opening of some damn play or other with Mr. Travis. I saw that picture. I hate it all.”

It must have been at just about that moment that she said, with bitterness sweeping her that she had never known: “So you’re marrying the boss’s granddaughter, who will inherit her money. Probably she wouldn’t be bright enough to make any.”

“Exactly. And you can’t say anything disagreeable as to that that I haven’t said to myself, many times. But this is true—though you may not believe it. . . . I’m not marrying her because her grandfather owns the business. I’m marrying her because she is a nice quiet girl who thinks I’m God. As you used to think I was God. No man is. But we all like to be treated as if we were. You haven’t had time since June. Yes, her grandfather will make me vice president. Yes, I’ll probably inherit the mills. But I’ll earn my living in them and Marjorie’s too, working as hard as James Mountain does now. I’ll protect Marjorie’s money. . . . Oh, I’m explaining very badly.”

Deep in her heart, pain was so sharp only the rising tide of her anger could soothe it. She could not know that the anger would pass in days and some remnant of the pain endure so many years to make her distrustful, to make her hard, finally. . .

Her purse and her gloves lay on the table. She picked them up. She stood up. Rage was a wonderful warm rushing tide drowning pain. “Don’t come to the door with me. I have money for my own cab. Sometime you might spare enough of Marjorie’s to pay me what I spent on your divorce. Good-bye.”

Would she remember forever that his face was haggard, that he looked as he would look when he was old—in the instant he stood aside for her to pass. She walked on with her head high.

She smiled at the doorman. Her face was so stiff with pain, the smile hurt. She got into a cab. The driver asked ungrammatically: “Where to, Miss?”

“Drive around the park.” In ten minutes she thought: “But he and I can’t part like this. We can’t.” She told the driver to go back to the restaurant. She wanted to tell Oliver—something—something decent, something kind. She prayed that he still would be there.

But he had been gone some minutes.

Then she hated him again. He should have known she would come back.

The driver asked: “Where to now, Miss?”

There had been a party to which she had wanted to go. She had nowhere else to go. She might as well go to the party. So she gave the driver Roland Mead’s address.

It did not occur to her until she was going upstairs in the elevator that she was very early. But perhaps she could sit in a room and rest and think. She asked herself furiously: “What is there to think about? He’s gone. He’ll never come back.” The most terrible desire caught at her to go right down in the elevator, get another cab, and hurry to the Pennsylvania station. She might get there before Oliver took a train. But perhaps it was better to telephone the Pennsylvania Hotel. He said he had taken a room there to change into evening clothes.

She told Roland’s butler: “I’ll make a telephone call before I go inside.” She telephoned from the little booth in the foyer. After a moment, the operator told her Mr. Oliver Pryor had just checked out.

When she opened the door of the telephone booth, Clement Travis was in the hall. “Hello, Susan. People won’t start arriving for a half hour or so, but I’m glad you’re early. What a lovely frock!”

He looked at her more closely and took her arm, led her into an empty room where people would leave their wraps later, and asked quietly: “What is it?”

She couldn’t even manage her voice now. It squeaked. Comically. “I just got jilted. Oliver is going to marry someone else. Oh, Clement, take me home. Take me home.”

“No,” he said. “I’ll bring you a drink instead. This is going to be a very nice party. You may as well enjoy it.”

“Enjoy it!”

“Yes.” His voice was cool. “This sort of thing, you see, is what you have.”

She told him an exact truth. “I only wrote ‘Encounter’ to make Oliver proud of me.”

“Well, it’s a very good first novel nevertheless.”

The butler brought a highball that evidently Clement had ordered.

“Now sit still and drink that slowly. I’ll be back in a moment,” he told her.

She swallowed an inch or two of the highball, looked up. Michael Nash was standing in the doorway. “Clement will be back in a little while,” he said. “Some people came to whom he had to talk for a moment. . . .”

“I don’t want to see anyone, Mike.”

“No. We arranged to put the wraps in another bedroom. You can sit here, contemplate the empty rack that would have held ermine and mink, make up some sort of symbolism that it is empty like your life and use that in a story sometime.” For all the flippant words, his voice was extraordinarily kind.

“Clement told me, of course. I had a broken heart once myself. That was when I took up hunting. You might do that, but it wastes a lot of time for a writer.”

She said to him, or to the room, or to herself: “I hurt—horribly.”

“That goes by too, Susan. If you keep your head, you can have a hundred thousand a year for consolation. There’s an enormous quantity of consolation in a hundred thousand a year.”

“No there wouldn’t be. What good is money if you lose—” she stopped. She didn’t know what she had been going to say. What she meant was what good was money or anything at all without Oliver.

“You’re mixing it up with the Bible thing about gaining the whole world and losing your own soul, Susan.”

Until the last half year, she had spent her life among people who, if they wasted conversation on you outside business hours, liked you. She was now horribly uncertain as to the motives behind people’s conversations. Also, she had been that evening too suddenly, too intimately acquainted with jealousy, regret and despair to keep any sense of proportion.

She asked: “Do you like me?”

Her agent told her: “Well enough. You are a pretty little thing. I suspect you of a kind of split personality—oh, not amounting to what the psychiatrists call schizophrenia.” Susan wasn’t sure what that was. Absentmindedly, though in the midst of grief and shock, she resolved to look up the word. That was the kind of mind she had. She couldn’t help it.

Michael Nash kept on talking. “I mean that although you are observant, ruthlessly observant—both ‘Encounter’ and your short stories demonstrate that—as soon as your own emotions are involved you lose all sense of proportion. Why with your creative capacity, your originality, you ever picked that healthy dull blond Oliver Pryor as an answer to life, no one would understand.”

She said: “Oh. Oh. Oh.” He grinned, not altogether pleasantly, his neat small gray head on one side like an owl’s. It occurred to her sharply that all these new people involved with the author of “Encounter,” all except Clement, were middle aged.

Her agent stated defensively: “Well, that’s how you ought to think of him. Blond. Dull. Tout cela est tout fini. This is the best prescription for a broken heart I know. Resolve to be miserable a month from Thursday. I mean it. For instance, I’ve made a luncheon date for you with the editor of Manhattan Magazine Tuesday. He wants a serial from you. You should bring your mink coat and your charming smile to luncheon, but not your broken heart. He couldn’t use that except in the second installment, briefly.”

She made the only protest she was ever going to make articulately. “But I am a girl, a young woman at least. What I wanted was the organ playing Mendelssohn, and Jennifer in turquoise blue as matron of honor, and four girls I used to know (two of them worked at Foresight) in rose color as bridesmaids.”

The cadences of the wedding march went through her head horribly too loud—like a siren screaming. She had never been drunk in her life. She felt utterly drunk on two inches of Scotch and soda, that bit of Manhattan and wine long before.

Michael Nash stared at her. “The first prize in the raffle; the easy answer; the obvious conclusion—in short, the blue ribbon. All right. So you don’t get it. Concentrate on the second prizes. I’m going out to the party to find the most amusing man I know: Larry Robbins. He never bored anyone. Your young love isn’t going to be around to bore you. He’ll bore another girl instead. Now re-makeup that ardent young face and I will produce Larry.”

She re-made her face because she was at heart a docile woman. She had been hearing about Larry Robbins from Roland, Anne Jackson, Clement and Mike himself. He was the former foreign correspondent who had recently written a book about mid-Africa called “The Darkness Lightens,” and previously had written a book about China called “The Giant Stirs.”

In fact, she had read his books before she wrote herself. She judged him to be old, sensible. Maybe to talk to him would be peaceful.

Beside Mike, in the doorway now, a wide-shouldered thin man with short-cropped light-brown hair, bright hazel eyes, a very cheerful expression.

The man said to Mike: “Good Lord, she’s too pretty to perpetrate a best seller. Hello, my child. I’m Larry Robbins.”

He came and sat in the chair opposite hers. Mike had gone away. She said, “How do you do?”

Larry Robbins said, “I do beautifully. It always surprises me. Roland went on the other day about the book you wrote. I didn’t mean to read it. Best-selling novels tire me out usually. But now that I see you . . .” He stopped that sentence and began another. “How does it feel? I had my first book so long ago I have forgotten almost. You know, don’t you, that you only have a first book once? I have had eleven.”

She thought: “All I’m conscious of is being bruised, bruised as if I had been beaten.”

The man was saying: “I only turn up in New York once in four or five years.”

“Oh, do you?” She couldn’t think of any other comment.

Quite suddenly he was telling her about Africa. Sometime later he was saying: “Naturally, there’s no more privacy between an author and his publisher, or his agent, than that possessed by the well-known goldfish. I know you are sitting here because someone walked out. Mike will talk about that as he would mention the fact that you had a wisdom tooth pulled, if you had had a wisdom tooth pulled.

“Ever since I saw that very shining black hair of yours and those very wide-set gray eyes, I’ve been about to propose—a sort of proposal. Strictly limited. Let me amuse you for a little while. I do no harm. At the point when I might fall in love, I’m always suddenly obsessed by the realization that I’ve never seen Patagonia—or Kazan, or some place or other.

“The timing, of course, is perfect. I just reached New York day before yesterday. The girl with whom I spent my leisure last time has married and had two children since.”

Susan expressed an idea with a certain feeling of reality about it: “Maybe I have gone crazy.”

“Oh, no,” Larry Robbins assured her. “You just found out something was a dead-end road. Well, so am I in a manner of speaking. But for instance, how would you like to have dinner and go to the theater tomorrow?”

She thought he would not conceivably understand this, of course. No Mendelssohn, no attendants in blue and rose. Just tomorrow and tomorrow and a few more tomorrows. But she could not live like that. She could not possibly live like that.

He had understood. “Oh, no, no Mendelssohn, I never married. I know I should be a wretched husband.”

Far away, someone began to sing something. It occurred to Susan she should know what it was.

Larry said, “Roland’s opera singer. You aren’t seeing much of this party. Well, let’s leave it and go have butter cakes at Childs’. Do people still do that or am I being just nostalgic about the nineteen-twenties?”

“People still do that.”

Over butter cakes at Childs’, they talked—as she remembered, about Russia. Neither he, who had been there four times, nor she, who had never seen the place, was very sure what they thought about it.

Also, Larry Robbins mentioned that he was forty-three years old. She had thought him no more than thirty-five, had been startled by his youthfulness as against her preconception of him.

They stayed at Childs’ a long time. Though now she felt calmer, drunk if at all only with fatigue, she dreaded going home, going into her apartment alone. Somehow she knew that at the minute she opened the door and went inside she would realize that, insofar as Oliver was concerned, and no one else would ever be as important as Oliver—she was going to be alone the rest of her life.

Larry said eventually: “I’ll take you home now and you’ll ask me in for a drink so that I can see your apartment. People know each other better when they have seen where the other lives. Tomorrow you can come to my place for a cocktail. It’s only a hotel suite.”

He said of her apartment: “This was arranged with the idea of permanence, wasn’t it? Well, of course permanence is relative.”

He sat down by the fireplace and entertained her with thoroughly amusing stories about Capetown. When he rose to go, it was almost five o’clock in the morning. She could scarcely hold her eyes open.

When she knew him much better, she understood that Larry had stayed so long deliberately for two mixed reasons; he had thought her attractive, and he was sorry for her.

She never denied that her husband had great natural kindliness.

Oh yes, she married him in February 1936.

He proposed because he liked her better than he had liked any of the other girls who had amused him in New York or Moscow or Paris or Yokohama. Also, actually, because he thought either himself or the Far East to which he proposed to take her forthwith would be extremely good for her. She grieved so (and tried so gallantly not to show it) over a man who from all the accounts he had heard was practically a total loss.

She accepted him (she tried to convince herself) because he looked so competent about life in general. He was so kind, and amusing. He was also an authority on African tribal customs, politics of the Far East and South American Indians. (She meant, in dwelling on those things, to tell herself that she admired him and respected him.) Love him she did not and told him so.

He said, “I don’t love you either the way they describe it in some of the books. But I think you will be a pleasanter companion than anyone I know.”

Sometimes between finishing her second book (“Highroad,” which puzzled the critics because the last half was so much more mature work than the first), shopping for her trousseau, dining and going to the theater and talking to Larry, she really knew why she was marrying him.

Because ‘Arrangements have been Completed for the marriage of Miss Marjorie Phillips and Mr. Oliver Pryor. The ceremony will take place on February fifteenth at the home of the bride’s grandfather, James Mountain.’ That was the way it read in the New York society column. There was also a list of bridesmaids and ushers, the statement of the year Marjorie Phillips made her debut and the year Oliver had graduated from college.

So she planned to be married February ninth with Jennifer as her only attendant. Michael Nash was to be best man for Larry, who had long been a client of his. She was to be married at her own apartment by a judge who was a friend of Larry’s.

The night before, her mother came down to sleep in the guest room for the first time. It would also be the last time in the near future. Anne Jackson had arranged the subletting of Susan’s apartment complete with Maybelle.

Mrs. Barr, a gentle unworldly woman, approved altogether of Susan’s marriage, for none of the reasons of other people who thought Susan ‘was doing all right for herself.’

Larry Robbins’ great potential earning capacity, his considerable fame, his rather worn good looks, did not interest her at all. She announced to her daughter: “For all that he is a little old for you, he is a strong man and a kind man,” and in the same breath: “You can wear my wedding dress and veil. I’ve always kept them for you.”

That weekend at her mother’s country house when Susan brought Larry to meet her had been the happiest of Susan’s engagement. She acquired a temporary sense of reality about the engagement while her mother talked on happily about her long-dead husband and Susan’s childhood, and the set of Minton which had been Susan’s great-grandmother’s which she was giving them for a wedding present.

Driving back from the country that Winter Sunday, Larry had volunteered: “We’ll have a house and live in it a quarter of a century—when we come back from one or two more trips. You’ll settle me down, Susan, and a good thing too.” He had never, he said, lived even in an apartment a whole year through.

Susan could not make the quarter of a century they might live anywhere real, nor many of their present plans. She was engaged to Larry Robbins, she was going to marry him February ninth. Michael Nash was endowing them with a set of flat silver for twelve. Clement and Anne stated that they would jointly present table glassware. All these things would be packed away until Mr. and Mrs. Robbins returned from the East.

She was not going to become Mrs. Robbins, however, wearing her mother’s wedding gown and veil. She had always planned to become in those garments Mrs. Oliver Pryor. For her wedding with Larry, she would wear a silver-gray afternoon frock, a hat to match, and a silver-fox jacket in consideration of the weather.

The costume was not too elaborate in which to depart for the Twentieth Century to Chicago en route West to the East.

She woke very early. The clear Winter dawn was violet and gold outside her window. She woke, knowing suddenly and absolutely that she had never expected this day to arrive; that she had been pretending she was going to marry Larry Robbins, because it kept her from remembering continuously that she was not going to marry Oliver.

Her trunk, already packed and closed, stood between her and the window. Her suitcase and her dressing case half-packed were on a luggage rack at the foot of the great mahogany four poster where she had hoped to wake a thousand mornings, maybe five thousand mornings, with Oliver’s yellow head on the pillow beside her.

She got up and went to the window to watch the dawn brighten, as he and she had watched it sometimes with his arm around her, both sleepy, happy, sure of each other.

Once over a cocktail she had asked Larry coolly: “What do you want to know about my great, my only love affair?”

“No more than I propose to tell you about any love affair of mine. I propose to tell you one thing. Whatever it was is ended, and it will never recur. Can you tell me the same? Can you tell me you will never see that man except by accident, never communicate with him, again in your life?”

She had answered, “Of course,” with a single mental reservation about communication. A week before this ninth of February, she had figured out what was half of her total earnings from “Encounter” to date, had written a check for that amount, and sent it to Oliver with her card and two words: “As promised.” When she had done that, she had almost as little money left as if she had never written the book. She hoped “Encounter” continued earning, so that she could pay her income tax.

Within twenty-four hours, she had an envelope in the mail in that familiar handwriting. When she opened it with trembling fingers, it contained her check, torn in four pieces, and a note:

So, she could pay her income tax fairly easily.

Beside the open window, she shivered a little on the cold dawn. Not any words of Oliver’s now but those words of Larry’s kept repeating themselves in her mind. “You will never see that man except by accident as long as you live.”

Never, never, never. They had shared beauty, hope, anticipation of the years to come. They had shared joy and not much sorrow. They had never believed they would be old. So once, picnicking in a country cemetery, seeing a tomb inscription, “Mr. and Mrs. Jonathan Stanton who lived in blessed matrimony fifty-four years and were separated in death only by two hours,” they had laughed tenderly and agreed they would arrange for that inscription sometime toward the year 1990 for themselves.

Never, never, never. She began to sob, strangling sobs that hurt her dreadfully. She had to call him. She had to hear his voice. She had to say, “But it is mad for you to marry someone else and me to marry someone else. We belong to each other forever. You and I.”

She went to the telephone beside her bed. She put her hand on the receiver. Strange—she had scarcely wept for him before. She wept hysterically now. When she was calmer, she would telephone him. In a minute, in five minutes.

After a long time, her sobs lessened. The first pale sunlight slid in through the window of a room where he had never stayed. If she did not stop crying soon, her mother, when she waked, would be distressed.

Never, never, never. “Arrangements for the marriage of Miss Marjorie Phillips and Mr. Oliver Pryor have been completed” long since.

Miss Susan Barr, novelist, was marrying a tall, broad-shouldered, brown-haired man who had an enormous zest for living, a warm deep voice, an air of competence and was otherwise practically a stranger.

Sobs tore at her again. But she choked them down. She rang for Maybelle who brought a breakfast tray, who said, “All brides get upset I expect, Miss Susan. But you had better let me give you a facial before your mother wakes up. You doan want her to see you all upset.”

So she had a facial and when her mother waked described to her various people she would meet at the wedding reception.

When at three she stood with orchids on her shoulder beside Larry, she felt nothing, nothing at all. All she ever remembered about her wedding reception was Michael Nash saying worriedly: “Well, you’ll get a lot of material. But don’t stay too long. It’s hard to build a writer in magazines if he or she aren’t around pretty often.”

And going down in the elevator beside Larry, the slight sound of the elevator’s machinery said: “Never, never, never. Never, never, never.”

In the drawing room on the Century, Larry said, “You look so surprised to be here. But my darling child, don’t you know how surprised I am to be here? I never expected to marry anyone.”

The train wheels in the tunnel were saying: “Never, never, never.”

Larry was saying: “You have beautiful black hair and gray eyes. In fact, you are a very beautiful bride. I don’t think I dwell on that enough.”

She tried very hard. “You have mentioned it once or twice.”

He took her hand in his big strong hand. “Let’s be nice to each other and have a fine interesting life together.”

“All right, Larry.”

One didn’t notice the train wheels so much after a while. They still said, “Never, never, never,” but more and more faintly as time passed.

Lawrence Robbins had been ‘in the money,’ as the phrase runs, the last dozen of the forty-three years he had lived. He never made in any six months what Susan made in the half year after the publication of “Encounter,” but year in year out he acquired from somewhere forty or fifty thousand dollars. (That magnificent voice of his, broadcasting from “Pigmyland,” “Llamaland,” or “Aztec Land,” was always worth a couple of thousand a week to a sponsor of tobacco or razor blades.)

Once upon a time he had been a very good newspaperman. Enough of that flair was left so that he always could drop in on a Japanese general or the current Bolshevist Commissar of Foreign Affairs and produce an interview one of the weekly magazines would pay for at something like seventy-five cents a word.

He had thousands and thousands of ‘friends’ ranging in stature from waiters in Paris night clubs to a member of the British cabinet. Also, in more than a decade of prosperity he had acquired what felt to him in the very rare moments when he was tired like thousands and thousands of dependents. Of these, the principal one was a widowed half-sister with four children. Heaven had provided that responsibility, to which no one but Larry Robbins would have added the Chinese boy and girl whom he had rescued from starvation and then decided to educate in America.

There also was his secretary, Paul Hanson, a former newspaperman who used to drink too much even for that lenient profession. Paul was really competent in research and had stopped drinking (due to stomach ulcers, not to Larry’s influence). He, however, suffered greatly from a sense of failure only slightly compensated for by the fact that Larry paid him a hundred dollars a week and travelling expenses.

Of his ‘friends,’ very many half across the world were perennially in situations where sums ranging from ten to five hundred dollars were so immediately essential they had to be cabled. Larry always cabled them!

The only explanation he ever made to Susan was: “I’m so lucky. Have to do something as a gesture of appreciation.”

There was a phrase habitual on Larry’s lips: “Old money all worn out, have to get new money.” He knew all sorts of ways of getting it—advances from magazines, his publisher, a whacking payment to bind the bargain on a radio contract—or a Chinese money lender. He didn’t care which way. One of them always worked ‘and always will,’ he told Susan lightly.

They were in Harbin then, where she was embarrassed to discover that he was the support of not one but two female White Russian refugees. She was not jealous; the younger of this pair was past forty. She dated from Larry’s first visit to Harbin in 1920.

Larry told her of the existence of these two people as soon as they arrived in the city. “My business manager sends them a couple of hundred a year,” he stated. “It comes out more in Chinese money,” and brought her to call on the ladies.

She had met Larry’s ‘business manager’ briefly at her wedding. He was a distinguished lawyer named James Rayburn. She remembered now his greeting to her. “I hope you are going to settle Larry down.” She understood better now what he meant.

It was in Harbin that for the first time since their marriage Larry left her for two days. He was going to the back country to interview a former Manchurian war lord.

On the eve of his departure, he had engaged for her a big stone house that resembled a palace in an advanced state of dilapidation, some Chinese or Manchurian servants (she couldn’t tell the difference) who apparently spoke no English, and an aged white Russian male to be a sort of interpreter. “Of course Dmitri smokes,” her husband mentioned lightly, “but he is reliable as White Russians go.”

She did not realize until some hours after Larry’s departure that he had meant Dmitri smoked opium. He was deep in a dream when she wanted him to escort her for a walk about the city that noonday.

It turned out that one of the house boys spoke English after all. At least, he said, “He all right five o’clock.”

Susan spent most of the interval walking up and down her room and thinking about her marriage. She had actually not had leisure heretofore in the three months since her wedding day.

The house without Larry’s cheerful rich voice seemed intensely quiet. She began to ache a little with homesickness. At least, with her husband, she had not felt—lonely.

That made her laugh. Larry was very absorbing. He was also kind, generous, amusing. He lived in the moment more than anyone she had ever known (or ever would know). He made love to her as if she were the only woman in the world. She had no doubt he had behaved like that to all the other women of whom he seldom talked. But they were implied by everything about him. Witness his careless speech: “It is nice being married. No passport trouble at borders.” And the elderly Russian had entertained her with an account of her trip across the Trans-Siberian with Larry in the early nineteen-twenties.

Susan supposed she should have been disturbed by that account, but she had only been amused, probably because she had no sense of being married to Larry at all. She felt as if she were just his 1936 travelling companion. Though occasionally he said things like: “We’ll get a country house when we go back to America. We’ll settle down.”

She knew by now his idea of settling down was to give a great cocktail party to the numberless ‘friends’ within a hundred miles, have some of them remain for a weekend and then one’s self depart for indefinite months and years.

Larry had said in Shanghai: “We’ll settle down here” and had done precisely that.

Well, what did it matter?

She was abruptly very restless and went to the courtyard to see if Dmitri had possibly waked early. But he continued to sleep on a carved stone bench that looked most uncomfortable. She went to her room again.

That was furnished with a couple of screens to represent the Orient and a brass bed to represent the U.S.A. She thought: “That line of Kipling’s should have run, ‘East and West never ought to meet’ ” and to her startled surprise flung herself on her bed and began to weep.

She wanted to be at home in New York in the bright May weather. It did not seem to her odd that when she said ‘at home’ she did not mean her beautiful new apartment adorned with expensive old furniture. She meant the one room apartment on Murray Hill where she had lived happy years, where she had felt very prosperous, well dressed and practically content when her salary reached fifty dollars a week.

She could see herself in that apartment with dreadful vividness, dressed, waiting on the window seat for the bell to ring—for Oliver to come running up the stairs. Oliver! Oliver!

There was a sentence in the “Forsyte Saga” that she had repeated to herself many times in the last months. The sentence of Fleur Forsyte’s: ‘I shall forget him, I suppose, if I fly fast and far enough.’

She had repeated that line every time she had wanted to think of Oliver. There was a kind of magic in it. It helped her to smile at her husband, to kiss him gaily, to look at new cities, new people, to laugh, pretend to be absorbed, excited, happy.

But the magic wouldn’t work today, perhaps because Larry wasn’t there to talk to; Oliver, five thousand miles away from her, married, gone from her life, was there. Instead she thought: “I’ve got to get home, I’ve got to get back to my life, to him. I’m lost here. This whole marriage is a masquerade. I can’t keep it up any more.”

Later that day, walking about the strange city with her strange escort, who was talking about the soy bean industry that made the city great, she was really interested in the streets and the people, because she was going to leave them, she was going home soon.

That night she slept badly. Someone cried out sharply in the noisy town. That waked her altogether. A kind of dread caught at her for the first time.

The next day Larry sent her a messenger with a letter that he would be much delayed, that she should not expect him for another four or five days. He told her to be careful where she went; and not to go out in the evening at all without Dmitri.

But she had no desire to go out in the evening. That dread was growing as the long hours passed.

She tried to write but threw away everything she wrote. She sent Dmitri for English books. He produced the ‘Tale of Two Cities’ and ‘Ivanhoe.’ She read them both through.

A cable came for Larry. She left it on his dresser. On the seventh day, she was resting when she heard commotion outside and then his voice. In a minute she heard his footsteps on the stone stairs and was horribly sharply reminded of Oliver’s footsteps light on carpeted stairs in a brownstone house.

“Well Susan darling, did you miss me? I missed you very like hell. I had to go farther into the back country than I thought.” He put his arms around her. He kissed her eagerly. Between kisses, he told her he had enough material for half a dozen articles as to what the Russians were up to in Outer Mongolia and the Japanese nearby.

In a minute he stopped kissing her. “What’s the matter, sweet?”

“Oh Larry, I want to go home.”

“So you did miss me.” He sounded pleased. She wondered why she was glad of his arm around her, since she didn’t love him, never would love him. She said, to get time to catch her breath: “A cable came for you. It’s over there.”

He read it with an expressionless face, then he brought it over to her. “I expect we ought to go home.” His business manager had cabled: “I can manage to stall the government for two years’ unpaid income taxes not five. Better turn up with some money.”

She gasped: “Larry, you don’t pay your income tax?”

He answered easily: “Oh I pay some of it—with what money I have around March fifteenth. I don’t owe so much. No more than these articles will pay for . . . How about going home the long way—Trans-Siberian to Moscow, Moscow to Paris and across the Atlantic, take two or three months over the trip? Rayburn can manage until then. He always has managed.”

She hadn’t been certain she was going to tell him. She had been hoping against hope that she was wrong, that there was nothing to tell him. “I want to go straight home, Larry, please. I’m pretty sure I’m going to have a baby.”

He said, “Why, Susan, that’s very sweet of you.” He put his arms ’round her again. She rested her head against his wide chest. He said, “So we are for the centuries after all. It surprises me, but I’m pleased—if you are. We’ll go right straight home. I’ll buy you a house and support you in luxury.”

She looked up at him. He actually did look delighted! She had never liked him so much as at that instant. Children! Her own voice saying long ago: “I want three, two boys and a girl.” But Oliver’s children.

Larry asked: “How do you feel about it? Very trapped?”

She answered honestly: “A little.” Then she remembered something. “What did you mean when you said you were surprised we were going to be for the centuries?”

“Well, when people have a child they are. Something of them goes on in the world . . .”

“Yes, but why are you surprised?”

“My dear, I married you because since you were just jilted at the moment of our meeting—I thought you shouldn’t be jilted again. Of course, I’m half jesting.

“There is also the fact that you aren’t quite the sort with whom one suggests travelling to China sans benefit of clergy. I meant to give you a very nice time, because I like you so much. But I thought in two or three years very probably you would leave me and marry more the sort—the sort . . .” he stumbled a little, “you know, the sort who buy country houses and live in them permanently; the kind who take out life insurance and college insurance and fire insurance and burglary insurance and old-age insurance. I mean I’ve looked after a lot of people first to last, but I am fundamentally shiftless. I don’t have the instincts of a good husband.”

It was the first time she had heard a note of worry in his voice. She tried to be light: “Well, you can insure yourself slightly instead of showering me with jade, mandarin robes and so on.”

For a moment his face looked grim. He laughed: “Not a bad idea.” He had no intention of telling her that he couldn’t pass an insurance examination. An attack of dengue fever had done something to his heart. It wasn’t serious, of course.

He asked his pretty wife: “How about you? Do you want to have this baby?”

“I don’t want not . . .” it was her turn to stumble. Some steadiness, some simplicity inherited from her mother and other quiet women who accepted life came to her rescue. “Yes, I’ve always wanted children.”

“Fine. There we are then.”

In the next days, she thought of her mother almost continuously. They had always been ‘fond’ of each other, though not very close in the years Susan had been in love with Oliver and even more remote since Susan wrote “Encounter.”

Otherwise she thought of going home. She regretted somewhat that they would arrive at the Golden Gate, not the Statue of Liberty. That, however, was minor. She wanted clean, uncomplicated American cities, American voices and American food—most particularly American food.

Once in the first stage of their journey to Shanghai, she thought: “But I’m not really going home to the life I used to have, the friends. I’m not going home to Oliver. This will be different.” But she put realization out of her mind.

How different it was to be she did not begin to estimate until, in Shanghai, the cable came that her mother was dead of pneumonia.

As people always do upon the death of someone loved imperfectly, Susan grieved for what she and her mother might have been to each other rather than what they were. She had been so sure that on her return they would have been close; that her mother would have been delighted with a grandchild; that her various slight bewilderments and disapprovals anent Susan would dwindle forthwith.

At Yokohama where they stopped to acquire that jewel of Larry’s life, his secretary Paul Hanson, there was a letter for Susan from Elizabeth Pennington, her mother’s sixty year old cousin who had been an almost perennial visitor with her. It gave details of her death and then said: “Marcus and I are staying on to keep things in order for you.”

Marcus was Marcus Jones, her mother’s uncle. Her mother had been supporting both those people in what she would call ‘a nice way’—that is, persuading them that she could not run her house without their assistance, practically since the beginning of the depression.

Susan supposed she would have to do something about them. Meanwhile she was slightly confused in discussing them or anything with her husband, in the presence of Paul Hanson.

He had turned out to be a fat little man, probably as a result of the milk-and-cream cure for stomach ulcers. Paul’s scant remaining hair was brown; two little sharp brown eyes gleamed out of a flushed cherubic countenance. He talked on all subjects at length. What he thought about anything, Susan could seldom tell.

But he treated Larry as if Larry were absolutely God. He started to treat Susan as if she were Mrs. God, but she felt somewhat too young to be comfortable in the role.

Up to the point of their meeting, she did not quite realize what he had been doing in Japan, or that he had been on salary all these months. The way he and Larry worked together became clear to her suddenly.

Paul Hanson had been doing two kinds of research in Yokohama. One was designed for the background of a series of political articles Larry would write; the other for one of their already famous radio programs, the travel series always announced as ‘for the young of all ages.’ This successor to “Pigmyland” and the others would be called, of course, “Cherry Blossom Land.”

Her husband’s secretary also called it, “Twenty-six weeks’ sure-fire income.” He explained: “I am the mole who digs up the dull facts. Your husband is the eagle who assorts them.” In spite of that mixed metaphor, Susan began to understand the extreme dependence of Larry on Paul.

En route home across the Pacific, Paul lunched with them but refused to dine with them. “After all, this is the end of a honeymoon,” he said. “I couldn’t think of intruding upon them.”

Sometimes when she and Larry walked about the deck after dinner (Larry’s only attention to her ‘condition’ was based on one of two sentences: “Shouldn’t you drink some milk?” or “Shouldn’t you go for a walk?”)—they heard a little scrabbling sound and that would be Paul coming up the deck behind them to make comments on the stars, or the moonlit sea, and then to depart.

Two nights before they reached San Francisco, Larry, with his arms around her, asked out of silence: “Was it a nice honeymoon? Are you glad you married me?”

She said, “Oh yes,” and meant it. What on earth else would she have done, since she couldn’t marry Oliver?

But after her husband slept, she decided that was over-simplification. She was grateful to Larry because he made demands on her attention, affection, her thoughts; he so filled many hours of her life that the time before he was in her life was comfortably unreal.

She couldn’t quite remember who it was who had said that, if one can’t love, it’s better to be loved than to be liked but it is better to be liked than nothing. She agreed with whoever it was, though, much more than with the Victorian school of thought that, if one loved one man, another man’s kisses were torture.

Sometimes when she sat in the dining salon opposite Larry, conscious of several trivialities simultaneously, that her frock was pretty, that many women looked at Larry admiringly and a few men looked at her admiringly, her heart ached abominably. But it was so useless to encourage that aching, or even to analyze it. It was much more sensible to listen to Larry’s plans for their future. His plans were always lavish; so might the future be. Who could tell?

There was a particularly inane woman on the ship, the sort who travelled eight months a year that she might bore her friends the other four with: “Guess whom I met on the Way from Yokohama! The Whatnots. Such dear simple people.” This woman had a copy of “Encounter” she got Susan to autograph.

What irritated Susan much more was the woman’s invariable way of introducing her: “Mrs. Lawrence Robbins, wife of the celebrated political journalist and radio commentator; also celebrated as a novelist in her own right.” She never left a word of that out. Susan dreaded meeting her on deck.

The Golden Gate looked exactly like a picture postcard of itself that Oliver had once sent her when he was on a trip to the Coast. She had not noticed that, sailing from it.

Reporters interviewed her husband, a few of them interviewed her. “Did you write a new novel in China, Mrs. Robbins, or do you prefer to be called Miss Barr?”

No, she had not written a new novel, she hadn’t written anything and a letter delivered at Quarantine from Mike Nash was very reproachful therefore. Well, as soon as she got settled, she would write.

Larry and Susan were making the trip to New York by plane. That was a last-minute idea of Larry’s, after his letter from Mike Nash; therefore Susan judged his letter presaged a crisis. Paul Hanson would follow by train with all their heavy luggage.

Susan was so glad to be rid of his presence that she thought herself unfair. Paul was enormously efficient. He had badgered Larry into keeping regular hours on the boat and completing three articles. But he acted as if he owned them both. His brisk manner, “Mrs. Robbins, if I can help you with your work, as soon as I finish with the boss’s, I should be very glad. He and I have discovered that my annoying presence keeps him tied to his typewriter. Ten to four o’clock. I could take you on; four to seven. We might knock out a short story or two on the crossing.”

Much to her surprise, he added: “I read everything of yours as soon as I knew you were marrying the Boss. Even the serial now running. You’re very competent, Mrs. Robbins, very competent.”

She had said rather unappreciatively that she was going to rest on the boat. Paul had actually protested: “But you have been resting!”

“I’m going to rest more, though,” she insisted. There was no logical reason she should rest more. But she felt disorganized, and would feel disorganized until she got to New York, she supposed.

On the plane, she told Larry about Paul’s suggestion.

“Yes, he told me himself he would take you on for an extra fifty a week. I said nothing because I’m resolved not to interfere with your work. I would resent your interference with mine, terribly.”

“Well, I have no wish to interfere with yours. Sometimes I feel I’m lacking in proper wifely instincts. You know,” she quoted: “ ‘A wife should take proper interest in her husband’s work’.”

He grinned. “Don’t worry. You would have if you had married the husband you expected.”

He so rarely mentioned Oliver, even by indirection, that she glanced at him quickly from between her thick eyelashes. But he was looking as cheerful, as untroubled as usual.

She went back to the original subject. “My only resentment of Paul is that he behaves as if he owns you.”

“Well, he does own me in a way.”

“I don’t know what you are talking about.”

He explained. “All these people that attach themselves to the chariot wheels of a celebrity own the celebrity. The indispensable secretary, the pathetic relatives . . . Paul earns his ownership. He makes me work. He would make you work too.”

“For an extra fifty dollars a week?”

“So what, Susan? If he helps you to earn an extra three or four hundred, it’s worth it, isn’t it?”

“I suppose so, Larry. I’m beginning to hate the word ‘celebrity’.”

“Don’t be so intolerant, my dear.”

“But the whole celebrity racket is vulgar.”

“So are eating and drinking and sleeping and making love vulgar.”

“I don’t see the connection.”

“It’s simple. People who are starved of success themselves are naturally interested in those who achieve it. They identify themselves in a sense. The common example is the woman, dull, bedraggled, poor, who identifies herself with the on-screen off-screen life of a picture-star. But it works for other types of celebrity. When someone likes a book of yours enough to sit down and write you, what does it mean?”

“I’ve never decided. But I admit I am pleased to get the letter.”

“The writer identifies himself either with the book, thinking ‘why I am like the girl in the story,’ or with you, thinking ‘I could write something like that if I got “round to it.” ’”

She considered that. It seemed reasonable in a way. Yet: “I like success and I like writing. But this being ‘the promising novelist, Miss Barr’ is very tiresome. I wish that could be all put in one corner of my life, and the rest go on as before. It would be less complicated. For instance, when I’m being interviewed I feel like an idiot.”

But Larry was not specially sympathetic. “If a time ever comes when they don’t interview you, you will feel like a failure—much more intensely.”

Something occurred to her. “Roland Mead can’t go through all the hoopla over ‘Highroad’ that he did over ‘Encounter.’ And the first week in September I won’t look nice in photographs.”

Her husband laughed and laughed. “That’s the first time in a week you have thought of having that baby, Susan.”

“What’s so funny about that? I don’t feel ill or anything.”

“It’s the most unflattering thing that ever happened to me, Susan. Think of the noble emotions that ought to absorb you, bearing the child of our great love.”

His voice was mocking, but she could not quite understand the expression on his face. She ventured: “It’s just—I’m still surprised by the idea. I will get used to it.”

“No doubt. If I weren’t sure that you would be happier when you have something of your own to love, I would certainly have insisted before now . . .” He did not finish.

“Something of my own to love?” When she repeated the question, she said sturdily: “But I have you already.”

He put his big hand over her little one. “Not only charming and brilliant, but also very polite. What a nice wife I have!”

She watched a section of Arizona (or was it Texas now) go by under the plane’s right wing before she thought of an answer to that. It was so startling if Larry regretted her lack of love for him!

She did not understand at all that recently he felt great tenderness for her. She made the most of what she had. She never admitted that it was not what she wanted. That seemed to him gallant. But whether in time she succeeded in forgetting that she had not what she wanted, he was not sure.

In the beginning, he had desired her, been amused by her and thought her sweet besides. Now, most illogically he wished that she desired him, because in an odd way he had fallen in love with her. And if he told her so, he was pretty sure she would be embarrassed!

Echoes of old emotions had disturbed him in recent weeks. He was beginning to feel toward Susan no differently than twenty years before he had felt for that English girl he had married at the beginning of his career. Twenty years before! Their child was born in ’17. He would have been a boy of nineteen, if he had lived. But he had died of measles when only two years old and his mother died of grief or reaction from strain of the war, soon after the boy.

He had never told Susan that either of these people had existed. In the nearly score of years since that young marriage ended, he had never spoken of them. He had been amused by many women, had taken none of them seriously, had taken nothing but his work seriously, and latterly, not even that. It was too easy to coast, to make money, spend money, move on from a city or a person when the city or the person grew boring.

Well, he would never move on from this girl now because of the child. And perhaps if he were patient and sensible, in time she would be glad of him, glad enough to steady him, to make him more responsible, to make him care again about his work and his failure.

He asked her very lightly: “Do you happen to have sense about money, my dear?”

“No. I don’t expect so. I haven’t accumulated debts, like you.”

“Well, you haven’t been successful so long a time.”

“Is that supposed to be amusing?”

“Yes.”

She laughed, dutifully.

At Washington, Susan had a telegram from Clement Travis:

She showed it to Larry, who implied a question after they were settled in the New York plane: “It always seemed to me that Clement was half in love with you.”

She told him what she had thought once or twice before. (All the time she had been away she had scarcely thought of Clement more than twice.)

“Maybe he was half in love with me. He said once that he planned to be my second husband. That was a jest. But Clement was waiting to see how I turned out eventually and you were content with the current model.”

“How do you feel about him?”

“I like him. That’s all. I only was in love once . . .” she added with only the slightest perceptible pause, “before you, I mean.”

The air of the eastern United States smelt good. It was wonderful to be coming home. The tenants had been got out of her apartment. She and Larry could go straight there. At the weekend she would go out to her mother’s house. That would be dreadful. She would realize then. But in spite of that dreadful loss and grief, and another vaguer sense of loss she wasn’t ever going to admit any more, she was glad to be coming home.

She volunteered to Larry: “I want to have a book a year and six or eight short stories. A baby every two years.”

“Indefinitely?”

“Oh no. Only until I have three. We can enlarge mother’s house. Poor sweet! It will be the only thing she left me, you know. Her annuity ended with her. I’ll have to support my great-uncle Marcus and my ancient cousin Elizabeth.”

Sudden tears came into her clear eyes, not, he knew, based on her lack of inheritance or the necessity to look after indigent relatives.

He held her hand tight. She said, “I will miss her. Nothing will be the same.” But in a little while she dried her tears. “No use weeping, is it?”

Larry told her: “None at all.”

(And for some reason she always remembered her question and his steady answer.)

Mike Nash said, “Sit down and write me some magazine stuff and for goodness’ sake, Susan, persuade Larry to save a dime or two once in a while.”

Roland Mead said, “When are you going to start your next book?”

Clement said, “You’re looking lovely, darling. Marriage agrees with you.”

The maid Maybelle said, “Your husband is certainly a handsome man, Miss Susan.”

Jennifer, happily married and living in Philadelphia, said, “I missed you so at the wedding, Susan.”

Cousin Elizabeth said, “It’s sweet of you, my dear, to let Marcus and me live on in the house. We’ll keep everything just the way your mother had it, and supervise the improvements,” which sounded somehow inconsistent. But Susan didn’t bother with that.

She had agreed to write a series of short stories fast, and quite suddenly between June and July she was realizing practically continuously that she was having a baby. She was uncomfortable, lazy and jittery about nothing.

Larry suggested she stay in the country, but she maintained she worked better in town. He himself was committed to town because of his radio contract.

The truth was that she had tried staying two days alone (except for Elizabeth and Marcus) in her mother’s house and had been wretched. Her mother’s gentle presence filled the familiar shabby rooms and Oliver’s not gentle, too vivid ghost, filled all out of doors!

There was the old swing on the great sugar maple where he had swung her through a lazy Summer afternoon. There was the little pool in the brook where they had swum, the walk through the woods where they had gathered wild strawberries, the level pasture (rented by a neighboring farmer for his Jerseys) where they had played a long Spring morning with a heifer calf whose breath smelt of vanilla and whose dancing hooves never seemed to touch the ground all four at once!

Larry (the day after he said triumphantly, “I placated the government”) asked: “Would you like to remodel your mother’s house for us, my darling; or would you like us to buy a place of our own in southern Connecticut?”

She answered immediately: “Let’s remodel mother’s place.” She meant: “Let’s remodel it out of recognition.”

Then the late Summer was full of architects, contractors, landscape gardeners and decorators. They would add a wing for the nursery. They would add another wing for a playroom downstairs and guest rooms upstairs. They would make a proper swimming pool where the brook widened.

“Larry you can’t pay for all this. It’s my house. I’ll pay for it.”

“Nonsense. I was going to buy you a house.”

“Well, what would I have done with two houses?”

“Certainly there is no reason you should supply me with an establishment, Susan.”

“There must be some sort of compromise we can work out.”

Oddly enough, he who never made plans for the future thought of one.

“Let me buy the barn and half the land. I’ll build over the barn for my sister and her children. They want to come East anyway. Or would it bore you to have them so near?”

“It isn’t near. The barn is a quarter mile from the house.” It was in fact originally the barn for another house which had burned to the ground long before Susan was born. Susan’s mother had always been going to sell that land and the barn when she got ’round to it. But she never got ’round to it.

“All right. I’ll pay you ten thousand for the barn and six acres.”

“Mother’s whole place isn’t worth ten thousand.”

“I won’t take it for less, Susan.”

“All right.” She would spend part of the ten thousand remodelling the old coachhouse, which was near the main house, for a cottage for Elizabeth and Marcus.

She said aloud: “We’re spending an enormous amount of money.”

“Plenty more where that came from.”

“I suppose so.” She really didn’t care. While she had every intention of saving the proceeds of “Highroad” next year, she was for some absurd reason anxious to dispose of the remaining proceeds of “Encounter.” That book had brought her no luck!

Looking at Larry as she thought that, she reproached herself. She ought to appreciate him more. Well, when the baby got born and the house got remodelled, she would.

Meanwhile everything was so hurried. Mike Nash said, “When’s the next story coming in?” Roland said, “I’m giving you a dinner the week ‘Highroad’ comes out.” Larry said, “Can you meet me at the studio, honey?” Paul Hanson said, “Don’t you think you can write a couple more pages before dinner?” The landscape gardener said, “This, you see, is planned as a June border, just irises and peonies, but if we choose the varieties carefully, we will get six weeks’ bloom.” Uncle Marcus said, “That man building the swimming pool is cheating you.” Cousin Elizabeth said, “It’s going to be a beautiful place, dear—but . . .”

And where in the excitement, the hurry, the pressure of the next thing waiting to be done when one finished this thing, was one’s heart? Where was the meaning of having a child, a husband, a life?

Well, when the baby was born she would know.

Meanwhile, Larry’s sister Rachel came East with the children. Susan liked her. She was a little pale moon shining beside the sun of her brother’s zest for things. The children were charming. They loved their house, they adored their uncle, they were prepared to adore Susan.

If she had time! “Highroad” came out with almost as much fanfare as “Encounter.”

Anne Jackson kept saying: “But you look all right, Susan. Stop being self-conscious.” She didn’t stop being self-conscious but she was docile. She went to Literary Guild teas and book luncheons. She even did some autographing, wrapped in a cape of kolinsky.

Her second book in a window just made her wonder what she was going to write for a third book. As yet, she had no idea. And Roland Mead expected the manuscript by March.

At tea one day with Clement, he asked: “What is the mystery about your next book, Susan?”

She told him the truth. “I haven’t thought about it yet. I haven’t had time. After the baby arrives, I’ll think.”

“Poor Susan.” Clement changed the subject, but he looked anxious.

She suggested that he walk a few blocks down the avenue with her. She was meeting Larry at ‘21.’

The Autumn air was stimulating. Wrapped in her fur cape, she felt she looked all right and Clement was a restful person. She slipped her arm into his. “I’ll think of something for the book. Stop worrying.”

“I’m not worrying about that. You’ll always have ideas.”

“About what, then?”

“You—where you are going in such a hurry.”

She answered softly: “Almost far and fast enough.”

To her dismay, he recognized the quotation. He repeated it in full. “ ‘I shall forget him, I suppose, if I fly fast and far enough’. Fleur Forsyte, when she couldn’t marry the man she wanted. I’m well read too, Susan.”

“I hadn’t thought of that.”

He insisted: “Well, has it worked? Have you forgotten him?”

“Sometimes.”

“If I had believed you were capable of forgetting him, I would have been very seriously in love with you, Susan.”

She told him: “Just as well, my sweet. Because I don’t want to be seriously in love again, ever. The three-ring circus in which Larry and I live is much less painful than being in love.” For some reason, there was never any need to pretend with him.

So she went on: “Practically every evening that no one’s giving a dinner with Larry as guest of honor and me the proud wife in attendance, someone gives a dinner with me as guest of honor and Larry, the proud husband, in attendance. Of course, I wish I had a twenty-four inch waist to enclose in my dinner frocks, but one can’t have everything all at the same time.”

“How much of it is real?”

She said aloud: “Masquerade! But a good masquerade. It may go on forty years.”

Her hand tightened on Clement’s arm suddenly. She swayed a very little. She straightened herself. Then he saw too that face, that walk, that she would recognize far off, no matter in what crowd, the longest day she lived.

They would have been bound to meet sometime. They had to meet sometime.

He, with whom living had not been masquerade, had his hat off. Under the light from some shop window, his bright hair shone. “Hello Susan. How are you? Hello Travis.”

“Very well, Oliver, and you?”

“En route to find a drink and dinner at the end of a hard day’s work. I’m going back to Pennsylvania this evening.” He hesitated. “Why don’t you two have a drink with me?”

She managed to say calmly: “I’m sorry. My husband is waiting at ‘21.’ ”

“Oh.”

“We’re rather late, I’m afraid. It was nice to see you, Oliver.”

“It was very nice to see you, Susan.”

She walked on. Were the words as much lies when he repeated them as when she said them? Nice to see him. It was horrible to see him, to be reminded of a hundred things—that were finished, that were all finished.

“Are you all right, Susan?”

“Yes, Clement.”

He left her at the iron gate of ‘21.’ For a horrible moment, she could not remember what she was doing there, standing in the early darkness alone.

The doorman asked: “How are you tonight, Mrs. Robbins? Mr. Robbins is in the bar waiting for you.”

Oh yes. She was a few minutes late.

Susan’s daughter was born the week before Christmas.

If as she suspected, Larry had wanted a son very badly, he never said so. He surrounded her with orchids, a gardenia tree, new books, a string of pearls, an ostrich bedjacket from France and dozens of other symbols of a devotion she began now really to believe he had for her.

For days and days after the baby was born, he greeted her by telephone and in person, with “Are you all right, Susan? Are you really all right?”

She did not quite know. She had had, they told her, ‘rather a bad time,’ to produce this small red wailing creature that was homely and yet—how touching!

“I hope she turns out as pretty as her mother,” Larry stated firmly.

It was hard to realize the little helpless thing would ‘turn out’ an adult. Susan was too tired to contemplate the possibility. She never knew anyone could be so tired.

The doctor told Larry: “She did too much working and running about before the child arrived. You had better insist she take a long rest. Have you a country place? In the Berkshires? Fine. Send her up there with the baby and a nurse for a couple of months. Then she can go South, if you like.”

Christmas and New Year’s in the hospital were dreary. She supposed she would be glad to leave, to go to the country. But when she was able to go, she was curiously reluctant. In the hospital, one had no problems of work, a house to run, a husband to amuse.

There was a great deal of snow and the house was rather inaccessible. Larry could not possibly risk missing broadcasts by attempting to commute. He came out weekends.

The Mondays to Fridays were long and would have been longer except for Rachel Linton, of whom Susan grew very fond. Rachel was a slim, quiet woman in her forties, who made no pretense and appeared to have no desire to seem younger. She admired her successful brother—and Susan now almost as much.

Rachel often said, wonderingly: “It must be such a source of happiness to be able to earn money.” Her only talents were for being restful, serene with her children, undemanding of attention from anyone. In fact, she was misplaced in her generation. She had been content to marry, have children, be patient through their attacks of croup, measles, chickenpox and temper, and live within her husband’s means.

Of the ten years since his death, she used to say, “But for Larry, I don’t know what I would have done. God was very good to provide him.” Sentences like that were so simple they embarrassed Susan. But after a while she understood that Rachel meant them. God had provided for her orphaned children most generously.

Without questioning (Susan was convinced Rachel’s philosophy of life amounted to “One’s men relatives know best”), she followed Larry’s ideas for the children’s upbringing.

The twin boys, Stephen and Lawrence, who were nearly fourteen, were to go to the excellent expensive preparatory school Larry had suggested, in the Autumn.

The thirteen-year-old girl, Mary, would in Larry’s opinion, be all right for a while with her mother, attending the very good high school in the town a dozen miles from the farm, which her brothers attended temporarily. Her ten-year-old sister went to the grammar school in the same town.

All four children were driven into town daily by the gardener. When they departed in the sedan Susan had given her mother, there was left for Susan and Rachel (who insisted on driving Susan here and there for ‘air and a change’) a sports roadster, which Susan had bought for someone else, for a fourteen months past Christmas and had not given to that someone else.

On the fourteenth of February, which Rachel celebrated by a Valentine party for the children at her house, Susan walked back to her larger establishment alone, through the early Winter dark. She had enjoyed the party more than she had expected. All those bright smiling faces, so innocent, so confident! If only life came out the way children took it for granted it would, the world would be a perfect place.

To her right, in the distance through a patch of bare woods, light shone in the remodelled stable, where no doubt Marcus and Elizabeth were already eating supper. To her left below the drive, the gardener’s cottage was also bright. When she turned the bend in the wood path, the main house was a blaze of golden windows in the dark. She saw by the presence of a familiar car that Paul Hanson had arrived from town, and she sighed.

He was managing to tear himself away from Larry’s affairs two or three days a week, besides which he appeared with Larry most weekends and, when he appeared, assumed that Susan was glad to see him because now she could get right down to work. For some reason she always did get right down to work, too, unable to stand Paul’s reproving expression if she did not.

He was in the enormous hall (that was achieved by breaking down two partitions and making the original hall, living room and dining room into one thereby).

Paul raised his head from playing with the three puppies Larry had bought since Autumn. They were a red chow, a black cocker and a fawn-colored Great Dane. As Larry purchased each, he uttered the same statement: “No sense having a country house without dogs.”

That was obviously true, but they were an odd assortment. The cocker lived a querulous life on the sidelines of the differences between the chow and the Dane. Though the Dane was already much bigger, the chow dominated him.

There were also at Rachel’s house the Sealyham and the Scottie which Larry had given to her children long ago. Also, the gardener possessed a dog who was his pride, an animal part sheep-dog and part house-dog, who usually wandered about the main house with the others. Marcus and Elizabeth kept Persian cats and a parrot.

Paul said, “The boss ordered another dog at the Westminster Show. Irish wolfhound puppy. It’s a surprise for you, but I thought I better mention it before it arrives so you can get a kennel built, if you don’t want to make a house dog of it.” He said in the same breath: “You’re looking very well. I telephoned Mike Nash I could get out tonight and he said he would like the outline of that serial by next Monday. Besides, you’ve those Shanghai stories. Maybe we can work after dinner?” That was too hopeful.

“Maybe. I’m going to see the baby now. Paul, eat dinner with me. Don’t go get a tray from the butler.”

That was his usual habit. His diet seemed still to be largely milk and cream. She rang and said, “Charles, Mr. Hanson will dine with me,” and mentioned hesitantly: “Mr. Robbins is sending out a new puppy. Irish wolfhound.”

The tall butler beamed with delight. He was animal crazy and a good thing too, she reflected.

She went upstairs through the long corridor to the nursery suite. A day nursery, a night nursery, a room for the nurse, a bath and a sort of kitchenette arrangement. The nurse, a middle-aged Englishwoman, was putting the baby to bed in the much lace trimmed bassinette that Larry had seen in a shop window.

“Let me hold her a minute, Nanny.”

All big eyes, that were probably going to be dark blue, scarcely any hair, which the nurse insisted was going to be dark like her mother’s, beautiful little hands.

“She has gained another two ounces,” the nurse mentioned. “That change in formula agreed with her.”

“That’s good.”

Nanny always spoke of the ‘formula’ disapprovingly. But it wasn’t Susan’s fault. They had considered it inadvisable for her to nurse the baby. For once, Nanny refrained from suggesting politely: “If you’ve been out of doors, madam, warm your hands before you touch the baby.”

Susan sat before the fireplace where a very little fire was burning to circulate the air, with the warm bundle in her arms and felt—odd, strangely like crying.

In her own childhood, she used to watch an open fire burning and invent pictures in the flames, castles where knights rescued sleeping beauties, forests where Robin Hood and his men wandered, oceans where mermaids played. For her, like so many children, the boundaries between this world and the worlds dreamed were vague.

That feeling recurred to her sometimes. Sharply now. The child in her arms was real. So was the house, now a large house around her.

In the kitchen the cook was busy with dinner. The chambermaid-waitress was arranging the nurse’s tray. The butler was probably mixing a cocktail for Susan herself, or surreptitiously feeding the puppies bits of canapés. Rachel, with the help of the little maid Larry had insisted she have, was straightening the house after the Valentine party. The children were doing homework. Marcus and Elizabeth were playing double solitaire. The gardener, who was mad about cows, was perhaps discussing with his wife the possibility of getting Mr. Robbins to buy that bred heifer whose beauties he had been urging upon Susan for a week. Oh yes, Paul Hanson would be dialing to get the station from which Larry was about to broadcast.

All that was reality.

But—the life one might have lived was as real almost as if one could reach it somewhere by the opening of a door, if one could find the door. That life would have contained nothing at all important but Oliver. Oliver’s kisses, Oliver’s gaiety, Oliver’s work. Even Oliver’s baby would have been only a sort of added attraction.

Susan said to herself: “Face it. Face what’s been the matter with you for months.”

She kissed the baby’s little hand lightly and handed her to Nanny. “Time for Miss Laura Robbins to retire.” The baby’s long eyelashes were dropping on her cheeks.

Susan had named her Laura, since it was the nearest feminine variant of Lawrence. She had wanted to please him for some obscure reason. He had in fact been very pleased.

Nanny mentioned: “You’re looking very well again, Mrs. Robbins.”

Yes, she had her looks back. She had noticed that lately, for what it was worth. So she went to her pretty bedroom where another fire burned, making shadows on the silver walls and the clear lemon-yellow paint.

Larry would telephone after his seven o’clock broadcast to ask how she was and the baby too. He always telephoned then. She took a bath, made up her face; she put on a bright green hostess gown.

And said again to herself: “Face it.”

Then she took from a locked drawer in a dressing table an envelope, took from the envelope a letter and a clipping.

At the beginning of December, Jennifer had written:

She had come to New York. She was Laura’s godmother. Neither she nor Susan had mentioned the letter or the clipping.

The clipping read:

Susan threw the letter and the clipping into the fire. One moderate-sized yellow flame ate them in an instant. If one could arrange that there so quickly could be devoured memory, regret, bitterness—it would be—convenient!

She went down to the living room for which she had chosen the flowered chintzes, the white paint, and the flower paintings. It was a beautiful room, but rather feminine.

That amused Larry who had provided for himself a library with a linoleum floor the puppies had already scratched, some enormously expensive old prints of dogs and horses, leather chairs and the books he had kept in storage the better part of twenty years.

Charles brought in Martinis for her and a glass of milk for Paul.

She said to Paul: “Mike Nash has to put off that serial. I want to have a book this year after all. I just decided.”

Paul said, “Fine. What’s the book going to be about?”

“The narrow border between dreams and reality.”

He asked in a doubtful voice: “Has it a good strong dramatic plot?”

She laughed rather unhappily: “Probably not.”

“Then write the serial and take the sure money.”

“Paul, why on earth do you care how much money Larry and I make as long as you get your salary—the hundred from him and the fifty from me?”

His round face crinkled. “Ah, if I can keep building you both up, in the end you’ll pay me three hundred a week.”

“There’s more than that to it, Paul.”

He hesitated.

The idea flicked across her mind that he was the most unique mixture of conceit and humility she had ever known. He would walk the puppies—in fact he would bathe them, if Charles were busy. When they were arranging the house, before the permanent servants arrived, he produced a couple of excellent meals for herself and Larry, between taking dictation for a lecture Larry was giving and typing a short story for her. But ‘building you both up’!

Yet it was true he did. She understood completely now that he was worth a hundred a week to Larry, and, to herself, an enormous amount.

By some much subtler method than nagging, by his very presence, he made one sit down at a typewriter and do today what one wanted to in a week. Also, when one was writing fast he always caught things. (“Miss Barr, on page fifty-eight you used the adjective silver-gilt. That’s such an unusual adjective, don’t you think you better not repeat it on page one hundred three? Miss Barr, I feel I should mention that three heroines in stories I read this month had honey-colored hair. Don’t you think yours had better have something else?”)

He said now: “If one can’t play the big time one’s self—and I never could, I never was more than the most ordinary sort of reporter—then the next best thing is to be attached to the big time. I used to think I’d like to be secretary to a financier, but two careers like yours and the boss’s are much more exciting. Crazy, too, of course. The way you spend money. . . .”

“Oh. I didn’t know you disapproved.” She couldn’t help being a trifle ironic.

“I don’t,” he was entirely serious. “If you or Larry decided life would be more interesting if you acquired a private zoo complete with tigers and lions, I shouldn’t care, provided you earned the extra money to pay for it. As long as you keep writing, the rest doesn’t matter.”

“You’ve worked it all out, haven’t you?”

“Yes, indeed. I’ve been around with Larry a long time.”

“Do you like us?”

He said, “I admire Larry Robbins more than anyone in the world.”

Suddenly she knew he meant it absolutely, and her heart warmed to him. So that, when she spoke, the amusement in her tone was very friendly. “You don’t say anything about me?”

Surprisingly, he paid her no compliment. He said what he believed. “No one can tell about you yet. You have written a couple of books and some magazine things. If you keep it up, I’ll admire you. But—your career is less than two years old.”

The truth of that last startled her. It was not yet eighteen months since “Encounter” had been published. It felt a decade.

He asked: “What are you thinking about, Mrs. Robbins? Sometimes you look as if your thoughts went right out of the room. I’ve wondered whether that was because you are a fiction writer.”

She teased him again: “If you ever do a book, at the end, on celebrities you have ‘built up,’ you want to have all the motives right, don’t you?”

He said, “Exactly,” and she understood he was serious, that sometime a quarter century from now he meant to write his memoirs of Larry—and herself, if she continued to be a ‘name.’

Then Paul stated: “You don’t eat enough, Mrs. Robbins. You can’t do a good day’s work without eating.”

Susan paid a little more attention to her food to please him.

He was part of what she and Larry had ‘acquired.’ More useful but less decorative than the puppies. Probably more permanent. He would call her “Miss Barr” when she was working and “Mrs. Robbins” when she was his hostess, all the rest of the time.

She thought: “Reality. I will face it. The husband, baby, house, secretary and servants that I have. I will make them do,” and she relaxed a little.

In that small fire she had flung more than a letter and a clipping. Some shadow of hope had been consumed there too.

She had everything in life she wanted, except one thing that she had wanted most. Put that away, lock it in a door of one’s mind one never opened. Hide the door behind a crowd of furniture, house, husband, children, career, people to dinner, people for weekends, work, responsibilities, a second cocktail if the first did not produce ‘lift’—much furniture, valuable or worthless—why estimate it as long as it filled the room of one’s life?

The weekend guests that arrived with Springtime said, “What a beautiful place you have, my dear. What a charming hostess you are. How many talents have you?” In effect they said those things, less blatantly.

Susan was aware most of them liked Larry better than herself. He had more genuine warmth. She knew that, but she couldn’t help it. Spring was an aching season.

Slender, beautiful, beautifully dressed, Miss Susan Barr, in her private life Mrs. Lawrence Robbins, filled her days.

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Have a breakfast tray, get up, put on a charming ‘young’ cotton frock, see the gardener, say good morning to his assistant. Be lady of the manor and arrange flowers for a bit. Give the cook orders for dinner. At ten go to work. Have a lunch tray. Keep on working until five. Have a massage (a very good woman came to the house), a swim with Rachel and her children, dress, dine, and so to bed.

Friday go to town, shop, lunch with Mike Nash, talk about the work just finished and the work to be done next week. Go to the beauty shop. Dine with Larry. Drive out to the country with one’s head on his shoulder.

Saturday get ready for guests who rode, painted, sang, acted—or were in politics or were in business. Sunday be amused by them—or, sometimes—bored by them.

For the moment, Susan had abandoned her book. She had too many magazine orders to take proper time for it. If she realized that Paul Hanson had been responsible for that conclusion, still what did it matter?

What did anything matter except to look nice, work well and be amused?

Well, one thing mattered. She had, with a sort of delayed intensity, fallen in love with her baby. It had been worth while to have that baby, most specially worth while.

So she said to Larry one evening when the lilacs filled the whole air with sweetness: “Let’s have another. I can manage the time. And you would like a boy.”

Her husband said, “Sometimes, my dearest, you behave as if you were in love with me.”

“Why shouldn’t I?”

“No, Susan. Don’t lie, darling.”

“All right. If I’m not in love with you, I’m grateful to you and I like you very well.”

She could manage another child. She could manage anything in the whole world, now, that she wanted. That was a kind of reward from Heaven for not having managed the only thing she had wanted very much, a sort of private bargain with God.

So—there would be another baby for her second wedding anniversary and, she hoped, a son. The nursery was large enough.

This Summer’s project was to greatly enlarge the barn Larry had built for the cows. He wanted a couple of horses for himself, Rachel’s boys and casual guests. Also, the gardener, now superintendent, had commanded proper chicken houses, a building far off for guinea hens, because they were noisy, and a heated coop for turkeys, which were delicate. Larry paid for all that.

Susan bought herself some beautifully designed modern jewelry with some of her money.

Also, she started a little trust fund for her daughter.

1937 was a year that went by very fast.

Susan’s son was born in early February 1938. She went back to the country three weeks later, with a sense of accomplishment, a nurse to look after her for a while and help Nanny with the new baby, and a consciousness that her work was in arrears and she should do something about it. But there was no hurry.

Life had a few small worries but there was no use considering them at the moment. Larry looked dreadfully tired lately, and there did seem to be a fine Winter crop of bills. The Irish wolfhound had slightly bitten a neighbor who was suing for a large sum. Well, their lawyer said the suit was just a holdup and not to bother with it.

Susan wrapped herself in silk negligées under a silk pouf and worried about nothing.

On a February Saturday, she came down to the living room to have tea with Rachel and wait for Larry and Paul to arrive. They were driving and would no doubt be much delayed by the snow, which had been beating against the window panes since noon.

The only noise in the house was the crackling of the fire and the dogs quarrelling amiably in the hall. The chow was indubitably ruler of the four of them now and would shortly appear for buttered toast, turning to snarl at the Dane if the Dane followed him.

“They’re badly disciplined dogs,” Susan told Rachel lazily, “but sweet, rather. You know O’Brien never bit that man unless the man teased him.”

“Of course not,” Rachel agreed warmly.

She gave Susan a letter from one of the twins to read. Even their mother seldom knew which one composed the weekly letter. They always both signed it and their handwritings were indistinguishable. It was a nice schoolboy letter, with an account of a hockey game at length and of a history examination very briefly.

They loved their school.

After they finished the letter, Susan and Rachel fell silent; Rachel went on knitting a cherry-colored sweater for her younger girl. She said once, “How quickly it grew dark today.” But within, it was warm and bright and peaceful.

Most people built fortresses of one sort or another against the storms of life. Susan, who had only built hers earlier and more elaborately, felt safe in it—safe, calm, strong. As long as she never stepped outside again into the stormy world where delight must be paid for with regret and hope with disappointment, she was secure.

Hum of the motor of a car being driven very fast, shriek of tires with chains on them being braked hard to a stop, came through the sound of the storm. There was something unusual in the swiftness of those sounds. The hall door banged.

Paul Hanson stood in the door of the living room, his round face gray with some emotion like—like terror.

“Where’s Larry?” His wife, his sister asked the question in one high, frightened tone.

Paul didn’t answer. He walked toward them slowly, tiredly. Snow dripped off his overcoat, his galoshes, onto the apple-green broadloom. Behind him, Charles, who had heard the door slam, said, “Your coat, Mr. Hanson.”

He handed it to the butler absently. Charles turned to leave. But a phenomenon made even that epitome of the convention pause and stand still, the dripping coat over his arm. Paul Hanson burst into dreadful sobs. Tears streamed down his cheeks.

Between the sobs he gasped: “Oh Mrs. Robbins, poor Mrs. Robbins. Larry—his heart—worse lately—he never wanted to bother you . . .” he could not go on.

Larry’s sister Rachel caught his arm. “Tell us!”

His sobs were dreadful. But the words he spoke were clear between them. “At the rehearsal of tonight’s show. He just said, ‘Paul.’ Then he said, ‘There isn’t time,’ and he died. He died then.”

Paul told them other things brokenly. “I came as fast as I could. Asked the studio to keep the news off the air until I could get here!”

Irrelevant things were all that came to Susan’s mind. Her husband was dead. She would never again hear his warm voice, teasing her, laughing at her. They had shared much laughter. All that she would realize in time. But at the moment all she could think of was: “I never knew how much Paul loved him. He must have loved him more than he is capable of loving anyone else. Poor Paul. Poor little man.”

The butler knew the correct thing under such circumstances. He had gone. He had already reappeared with a bottle of brandy and hastily chosen glasses. Afterward he told the cook: “I was so upset—first time I ever brought whiskey glasses for brandy in twenty-five years of service. But the poor little thing with those young children.”

“Poor little thing,” the cook repeated. “I don’t suppose she’ll be able to keep us on, do you?”

“Certainly,” said the butler. “Whenever she sits down with Hanson and his pitcher of milk and cream, she writes one of those best-sellers.”

Larry was buried in Arlington, with men from his World War regiment. Until Susan read that arrangement in his will, she had scarcely remembered the fact that Larry had been a soldier, volunteering in 1918.

It seemed Larry had only told her one lie about himself. When they met, he had said he was forty-three years old—perhaps wanting to seem closer to her youth. In fact, he had been five years older than that.

Susan stopped over in New York at her old apartment. She corrected the description in her mind. Not her really old apartment, but the duplex she had furnished just as “Encounter” was published. Larry had been using it for a New York office and place to sleep. He had been paying the rent.

Mike Nash, Roland Mead, Mr. Rayburn (Larry’s business manager, whom she had met only once or twice) had separately suggested that they wanted to see her. She had decided to have a joint meeting—and know the worst at once.

Paul Hanson, who had scarcely left her out of his sight in three days, came along automatically. Rachel went to lie down upstairs.

It occurred to Susan as somewhat odd that Rachel had no flicker of curiosity as to the problems resulting from Larry’s death. She just grieved for him, simply. Susan grieved too, but also—she worried.

She was always to remember that conference with a kind of bitter amusement. They tried to break the news so gently. In the end, she demanded facts in a hard voice none of them had ever heard her use: “Get to the point. How much are Larry’s debts?”

Across the room she saw Paul Hanson smile very faintly. There was more approval in that smile than she had ever got from him.

Well, including unpaid income taxes, Larry died owing a trifle more than forty thousand dollars. Mr. Rayburn explained: “There isn’t any hurry about the government. I mean—they’ll just take a lien on that property Larry bought from you. It is about his only asset. When it is sold, they will be content with what they get from the sale.”

“What’s going to become of Larry’s sister and the children?”

Roland Mead asked hopefully: “She can’t read proofs, can she? I could get her a job for twenty-five dollars a week—maybe thirty dollars.”

“That place is all I inherited from my mother,” Susan stated, not quite sure why she mentioned that.

“Of course,” Mike Nash tried to be optimistic, “you may possibly be able to keep the main house if you rent it.”

Susan said nothing.

Roland Mead mentioned, “Besides his other debts, there is the four thousand I advanced Larry against two books he meant to write—his autobiography and the African book. I’ll make what I can out of a collected edition and put the rest down to profit and loss, if you’ll do me a book for Fall publication, Susan.”

Mike said, “She’ll have to do too much magazine stuff to promise that, Roland.” He sounded cross.

In that instant, Susan understood something about these people she had never understood before. They had told her what a valuable property she was. She had laughed, thinking the comparison amusing.

It wasn’t amusing. It was exactly what they meant. Though they might be ‘fond’ of her, of Larry, of Mr. or Miss X among their clients, their main interest was in what they made out of any of those people. She accepted that as natural between one breath and the next, without anger, only with surprise that she had not understood before.

Publisher, agent or editor would gamble with a money-making client while the client produced. Roland Mead had made some tens of thousands of dollars from Larry’s work in the last dozen years. But—that was forgotten. He had gambled once too often with Larry, whose heart had stopped inconveniently. Roland would lose part of four thousand dollars thereby. That was all that counted now.

She asked Mike coolly: “Tell me the rest. What have you lent Larry against future work?”

But Mike surprised her. He was harder material than Roland. “I’ll tell you a year from now, when you are straightened out. You can pay me then, if you like—if I make you some picture money.”

Carrot before the donkey’s nose! “Work hard, little girl. I’ll make you a lot of money, if you work hard. And I will get your husband’s debt back from your gratitude.”

Susan said, “As it happens, I have about twenty-eight thousand dollars in the world and only a few debts.” (Only a few! But they would add up. She had gone on a clothes orgy last week, so glad to be thin after the baby and to look pretty again. She could add up five or six thousand dollars she had charged around New York. Christmas bills not paid yet, the fitted dressing case she had given the nurse who took care of her in the hospital.)

What was Paul trying to tell her with that stiff expression on his face?

She repeated: “I have some money, enough to pay off Larry’s publisher and his agent, I guess.”

Paul shook his head slightly.

Roland said, “Very good of you, Susan—but no necessity. I mean, I’ll take a book.” It was the first time in their association she had seen him embarrassed. She smiled not very merrily.

Mr. Rayburn suggested, “If we could make some payment to the government so the house wouldn’t go at a forced sale. . . . So we could wait and get a better offer.”

“I’m not sure I’ll sell it at all,” she announced with a calmness she was not feeling.

“But my dear young lady. . .”

Paul was smiling again.

She stood up. “I’m tired. I’m driving out to the country for dinner. I want to think about everything for a few days.”

There was a chorus of “certainlys.”

Rachel glimpsed something in Susan’s face, when Susan went upstairs to ask whether she was ready to start home.

She was very silent in the car. No one spoke at all until Paul turned from the front seat (he was driving them): “Listen Susan, pay those this and that's last! They have got to be nice to you. You are still a potential goldmine.”

Then Rachel suggested: “Susan dear—if there are going to be money worries, I could take the boys out of school.”

That was the first time Susan laughed since Larry’s death. But after she stopped laughing, she said, “Nonsense darling, we’ll manage.”

Late that evening, she and Paul finished adding up the total of bills. Larry, of course, poor sweet, had put a mortgage on his property—to buy Susan those pearls, as nearly as she could figure out by the dates.

She said to Paul evenly: “It can’t be done, can it? Six children, four adults. At present six servants, counting Rachel’s maid. I would have to make a hundred thousand a year to keep it going. And at that, I wouldn’t be out of debt for months.”

“O.K. Make a hundred thousand. I’ll work for you for seventy-five a week until you’ve made the first twenty-five. Then I’ll take a hundred.”

She asked: “If I dismiss the nurse, how am I going to take care of the children and work?”

“You can’t. Don’t dismiss anybody for a while. Make yourself pretend you can afford the whole show and maybe then you can.”

“That didn’t work out so well for Larry.”

He told her coolly: “It would have, if he hadn’t married. He always broke pretty nearly even before. Go to bed so you can get up early and work, Miss Barr.”

(He never called her Mrs. Robbins again.)

The next day she assembled the adults of her family: Marcus, Elizabeth and Rachel. She said, “I don’t want you to worry about anything. Things are going to go on just the same. I have plenty of money and I can always earn more.”

Larry’s phrase echoed in her mind: “Old money all worn out. Got to get new money.”

They all thanked her. They all looked enormously relieved. She repeated: “I can take care of you all.”

It was some time before she realized that promise was one that had to be kept three hundred and sixty-five days a year.

The hundred thousand a year goal, translated, amounted to this: If Susan Barr could gross a hundred thousand dollars after paying the government thirty to forty thousand, depending on allowable exemptions, paying her agent ten thousand and her secretary nearly five thousand—she could cope with her dependents on the rest. That is, after she paid forty thousand dollars of Larry’s debts, six or seven thousand of her own debts, paid the taxes on both Larry’s and her part of their country estate and assuming he had contracted no other debts.

At the time of Larry’s death, the monthly wages one or another of them were paid were like this: Superintendent (the ex-self-promoted gardener), $125, a cottage, electricity, milk, cream, butter, vegetables in season. His two assistants, $100 and $80 respectively. The butler, $100 and his keep; cook, $90 and hers; chambermaid-waitress, $80; baby’s nurse, $100; Rachel’s maid, $50. The superintendent’s wife, for doing the laundry, $65. Not counting Paul’s salary, the total monthly payroll amounted to seven hundred ninety dollars. The food bills and bills for feed for stock amounted to the stratosphere.

Of course, the cows produced milk; the chickens, eggs and meat—but the horses and the dogs produced nothing.

There was, however, a kind of mad logic in Paul’s idea of keeping the whole show going. Entirely mad, but logic of a sort. In his opinion, Susan’s only salvation was in producing short stories, novelettes, serials, complete-novels-in-one-issue.

If she dismissed the housemaid and tidied rooms herself, or the butler and made canapés and cocktails for the guests, she would have in time reduced her earning capacity by the hours she spent on these efforts. A hundred thousand a year was something like two hundred and seventy-five a day. Also (this he announced to her one day), she had better keep her mind on beautiful young girls and charmingly homely men who had problems but exciting ones, not dull worries about bills.

In his opinion, the reason readers were seldom interested in the financial difficulties of the people in stories was that so many readers had financial difficulties of their own and didn’t like being reminded of them. To be sure, people had romantic difficulties too, yet they liked to read about those. Paul’s explanation of that inconsistency was that romantic difficulties were only painful at the moment. People liked to look forward to them and back upon them.

Even he himself, a little fat man nearer sixty years old than he admitted by a decade, liked to remember a beautiful Paris dancer whom he had admired in 1905 or thereabouts. She looked like an angel, but was French and practical, naturally; therefore she married a prospering wine merchant before the last war. Still, when the apple blossoms were out and the countryside smelt so sweet, he thought of her sometimes in the little walks he took to see that the gardeners were getting vegetables planted, and the swimming pool scrubbed out.

He supervised these things for Susan Barr as matter-of-factly as he put his hand on a third carbon copy when she asked for it.

If from the heaven in which Larry Robbins had only taken remote interest, because of the fact that there were so many heavenly places yet to see on this planet (but he had liked the phrase ‘in my father’s house are many mansions’), he could regard his charming wife, his heart must have warmed to notice how greatly she missed him.

But always since the arrival of her first child she had warmed his heart, so that was no change. Very well he knew that she had only married him because the ship of her young love had sunk. However, what she had made of that marriage was wonderful. She had never grudged him kisses, attention, gaiety.

Of course, she had not understood how greatly he admired her for her courage in making the most of what she had, in never dwelling on what she did not have. She had made a bargain and kept her side of it by more than the letter of the implied understanding. So had he meant to keep his, give her a lavish, exciting existence; had hoped that in time he might make it so interesting it would no longer be a substitute for another sort of living.

But his heart which he had trusted to see him through a couple of decades had betrayed him. He who had always ‘wanted to keep up his end,’ had left the show to her.

For that, Susan never thought of blaming him in the long nights, when, too tired to sleep well, she dozed, waked, read, walked up and down her room, ached for his cheerful presence, dozed, waked, slept again.

She worked most evenings now, as well as all the days. She wrote good stories, medium stories, and stories her public thought were far from her best. She also produced in six weeks a book for Roland Mead. Beside her bed, she kept a notebook in case some idea for a new story came to her, and she kept also Bartlett’s “Familiar Quotations,” because that contained hundreds of good titles.

In the three months that quickly became four months since Larry’s death, she should have made about thirty-five thousand dollars to average the hundred a year. But she could not quite manage it. She made twenty-eight.

The plumber had not been paid for the new heating plant in the house where Rachel lived. (The whole property was Susan’s now. Larry’s will had read: “all of which I die possessed to my beloved wife.”) The plumber grew insistent. She paid him instead of the grocer. Then the grocer was disagreeable.

Rayburn urged her to settle the lawsuit about the Irish wolfhound’s bite. He said, “All those court expenses, my bill to defend the case and you know—juries. . . .” She didn’t know juries, but she followed his advice. The man had been suing for fifteen thousand dollars; she settled for three thousand plus Rayburn’s bill of a thousand.

But that year she did not send a check for the June quarter of her income tax. She didn’t have any money for it.

Susan was not in mourning for her husband; Larry had expressed a dislike for it. She was wearing her last year’s clothes. That is—until toward June’s end, when one hot day in New York she was tempted by a frock in her favorite store. Susan went in to purchase it and came out with a good Summer wardrobe.

“After all,” she thought, “I have to get a little something for myself once in a while.” And “I owe so much money two or three hundred more or less isn’t important.”

That night she dined with Clement Travis, feeling for the first time in ever so long, attractive, well dressed and young.

Clement volunteered: “You are prettier than ever, Susan, and—much more exciting looking than you used to be.”

He added, when she thanked him lightly: “But I’m beginning to disapprove of you thoroughly.”

“I’ve known you long enough now, Clement, so I should know when you are jesting. But I don’t.”

His thin face looked grave. “I’m not, at the moment. You know that book you flung at us is very bad.”

“It’s as good as I could make it in the time at my disposal.”

He ignored that. “Of course, one bad book doesn’t matter. But you’ll never do a good one in the spare time you have left from keeping that gaudy show in the Berkshires running.”

“I have to keep that show running.”

“Nonsense. If you want to provide for Larry’s dependents in a small simple way, go ahead. It’s very good of you. And you can persuade anyone who didn’t know you when—that you only run that place for your children and Rachel’s children and your great-uncle and your cousin. But I knew you when! Only for their sakes too do you wear that charming flowered frock that cost somewhere around a hundred dollars, I suppose!”

“Well, if you knew why else, tell me,” she added. “Not about the frock. I admit nice clothes are just a comfort.”

“I’ll tell you. There’s more to it with you than the fact that a great many writers elect themselves to the upper classes on the strength of their first book, or play, or picture. By that I mean they decide that life owes them, permanently, the car with chauffeur, the country house, the travel on first-rate ships or in drawing-rooms of extra-fast trains to fashionable resorts—just because they did something once that gave them the money to try these things.”

She said aloud, what suddenly occurred to her: “Clement, you are a Puritan. I never realized it until this moment.”

“That’s because you aren’t very percipient about people, except the composite people you invent. I began to say there’s more to your case than most. When Oliver Pryor walked out of your life, you decided you were going to get for yourself more than he could ever give you, more than he would get from his rich wife. I truly believe that you had two children just because he had one.”

She said, “Stop it. It isn’t either true or amusing.”

“Not even true, Susan?”

“Not a word of it.” (And if it were, she would never admit it even to herself. Never! To be sure, Laura’s layette cost five hundred dollars and she had thought, ‘That woman’s child can’t have any nicer lace dresses. . .’) She smiled a hard smile.

Clement thought, watching her: “Yes, she has grown more vivid, harder, more provocative.” Those clear gray eyes of hers were bright with anger, but he could not resist asking: “Of what precisely are you thinking, when you look like that?”

She had no intention of telling him! She said, “Just that Laura’s clothes are lasting very well for the little baby, Lawrence.”

“All right. Don’t tell me. But I have two reasons for spoiling a pleasant dinner with all this, Susan. First, you have a special, a rather delicate talent. It won’t endure the beating of writing fast, writing thoughtlessly, forever. And, second, I’m very fond of you.”

Her face softened a little. “I know that, Clement. Sometimes it seems to me you are the only person I know who doesn’t spend his time figuring what he can make out of me.”

“Well then, trust my advice, Susan. Dump that place in the country. Stop aiming at the hundred grand Mike Nash says you will come near. Make fifteen thousand a year with slow, careful work. Live on five, save five and spread five around among your dependents.”

“After a while maybe. When I get caught up.”

He sighed and wished he did not love her. But, in a way, he had loved her since she was a charming, frightened young girl in a time that seemed remote but was only about a thousand days ago. If only she would evaluate differently . . .

In the six months following Larry Robbins’ death, Susan grossed forty-four thousand dollars.

The executive instinct develops with practise. The Susan Barr who walked about her garden in September cutting dahlias was a person much more decisive and sure of herself than Susan Barr of the previous March.

She would never remind the six adults whom she fed, sheltered, clothed and gave money for amusement that she did those things because she was fundamentally a nice person. But quite unconsciously she ordered all those people about.

“Cousin Elizabeth, you must go to town and have that tooth fixed tomorrow.” But Cousin Elizabeth would have liked to have cherished her mild toothache off and on for a year.

“Rachel, of course the boys need new clothes. Charge them to me at Brooks’. All the nicest preparatory school boys buy their things there.” (But Rachel would have enjoyed shopping around town, saving if possible a trifle of Susan’s money, and having the pleasant feeling of being competent.)

“Uncle Marcus—the doctor says you musn’t smoke cigars, my dear. Paul, will you find Uncle Marcus that pipe and denicotinized tobacco I bought him?” But Uncle Marcus would have exchanged half the remaining ten years he might expect to live for a good cigar after dinner. Yet, when Susan was so generous and saw to it he had money for little purchases in the village, he didn’t think it right to cheat her. He gave up the cigars and assumed, in spite of himself, a sad expression.

On Susan’s weekly visits to town she purchased clothes for Rachel’s two daughters, always choosing charming suitable little frocks so much nicer than the clothes Rachel used to enjoy making.

Rachel, who found time hanging rather heavily on her hands, offered to help Susan “run” the place. But Susan suddenly discovered she liked running it. She liked running everything! Somewhat appalled by the discovery, she encouraged Rachel to independence, and Rachel made plans for the rearrangement of the garden that Susan was sure she would dislike!

One day, Susan took Mary, Rachel’s older daughter, to town. Because she had to go to a beauty shop herself, she suggested the child have her long brown-gold hair ‘styled.’ It was handsome hanging half way down her back, but really not very smart. The hair stylist cut it so short that Mary looked like a youngish skinned cat, and tears came into her mother’s eyes when she saw her. But Susan was so wonderful, looking after them all so beautifully, that of course Rachel said nothing.

‘Susan is so wonderful’ was a phrase that echoed frequently around the estate. All her relatives and connections by marriage said so. So did Paul Hanson. Even Mike Nash announced one day when a large check arrived: “You are pretty wonderful, Susan.”

So perhaps it was natural she began to believe it herself. She had paid a great many old bills. (If there were at least half as many new bills locked in a file for which Paul Hanson had the key, it was no use to dwell on that.)

Paul Hanson sorted the morning mail and never showed Susan disagreeable letters. He coped with them, writing everyone they would hear from him shortly, and relatively shortly the most pressing of the creditors did get a check.

He was sorting the mail one crisp late September morning, while Susan at her typewriter had already written six pages, when he interrupted her, as very rarely.

“You’ll want to see this.”

The name at the bottom of the short note was not quite unknown to him. Larry had mentioned it, among other people. He sighed, remembering how Larry used to tell him everything, quite rightly sure that he would never repeat any of it.

Miss Barr, whom he would never again call Mrs. Robbins lest it upset her, was a better substitute for his old boss than he thought she would be. But since she wasn’t a man, there was never much for her to tell him except about the clothes she bought, in which she did look lovely.

It would do her good, though, to begin now to have a little life of her own—more than dining occasionally with Clement Travis, who upset her talking about literature. Travis should be realistic enough to know that anything which sold was literature.

In the midst of these reflections, Paul had left the room so Miss Barr could read her letter in peace, and, walking up and down the terrace, he thought: “He’s married. They would just have a few dinners. Much better than if she met someone unattached who might marry her, and whom she would have to support.”

Paul believed in the lightning-never-strikes-twice theory. He did not assume that Miss Barr would again acquire a husband who could support himself. He glanced at his wrist watch. Better give her fifteen minutes.

She sat quite still. Strange that in spite of all the time and things that had intervened, that handwriting still had power to make her heart beat fast!

It used to be the Pennsylvania where he always stayed!

There is an old saying which goes: “He who marries money earns it.”

In Oliver’s case, that turned out to be strictly true. Marjorie Phillips Pryor had never had a chance to order anyone around before her marriage, and the law of compensation worked within her, buttressed by the fact she lived in a house the gift of her grandfather, and her husband’s generous salary was in a sense a gift of her grandfather too.

Old James Mountain aided and abetted her in the arrangement of all of Oliver’s waking hours. Since he would have to leave the mills to Marjorie and Oliver, having no one else to whom to leave those joys of his old age, he considered that he bought in advance all Oliver’s time.

If it were not necessary for the business, Oliver would not have had freedom in New York from Wednesday noon to Thursday afternoon, every week of his life. Because Oliver was obliged to entertain clients or so it was supposed, Marjorie did not accompany him. Besides, she was not fond of New York, where she was not as important a young matron as in Philadelphia or on the Main Line.

They would only meet and dine as old friends, people who used to be fond of each other. Therefore, it was not quite sensible of Susan to spend the morning shopping and the afternoon in a beauty shop.

She was to meet Oliver at the Ritz at seven o’clock. His telegram in answer to her note read:

Paul Hanson had driven her to the early morning train with this benison: “You’ll be buying clothes, I suppose. If I were you, I’d go to X’s, not Y’s. We don’t owe X’s nearly as much money.”

That day, everything had seemed extraordinarily amusing. Paul always said, ‘Our story,’ ‘our garden.’ He had done that with Larry too. But ‘We don’t owe X’s so much money’ seemed one of the most laughable sentences she had heard in a year.

Pleased to owe X’s so little, she bought the most expensive plain black frock they had in the shop and then a short silver-fox coat to wear with it. Silver foxes, as the salesgirl mentioned, had grown so reasonable. Whether she wore her pearls or her jade, she would be wearing something Larry had given her, so she compromised on the gold jewelry she had bought herself.

Her face, her figure that was thinner than it used to be before she worked so hard, pleased her in her last glance at herself before she left. And—she felt absurdly like a girl.

(She had taken a suite at the Plaza. Though she still had her apartment, it was sublet until December. Then she assumed she could sublet it again.)

In the cab driving down Fifth Avenue, she told herself three times: “You’re just going to see an old friend. There’s no reason to be excited.”

The ‘old friend’ held out his hand. He said, “Susan, I had almost forgotten how beautiful you are.”

If that wasn’t quite an old friend’s greeting, still it warmed a heart that had been cool a rather dreadfully long time. His dark eyes, so strange, so beautiful under his thick yellow hair, were shining. “I never was so glad to see anyone since I was born, Susan.”

“Neither was I, Oliver.”

That October, Mike Nash said to Paul, who was delivering an installment of a serial only a little late: “She’s getting a nice warmth into her stuff, lately. Is she happier?”

The invariably discreet Mr. Hanson said, “Miss Barr enjoys Autumn in the country. She says the air is like wine.”

“Yes, she said that twice in two different stories,” Mike mentioned. “I caught it, of course. Well, she does have to write hurriedly, but the stuff holds up pretty well.”

The country air was unimportant. So were the late chrysanthemums. So were all the people with whom she was surrounded. So, almost, were her own babies, though they were sweet little things.

One had to fill in the weeks with work to make the time pass between one Wednesday and the next. Life began every Wednesday at luncheon, and was temporarily suspended every Thursday after luncheon.

Yet through that golden October, Susan and Oliver only just touched each other’s hands sometimes. “We aren’t doing anyone any harm,” they assured each other on the rare occasions when they thought of other people.

It was on the first Wednesday of November (Susan, with a memory for anniversaries which she wished she had been spared, would always think of that) that Oliver put his arms around her and said: “I can’t bear it any more. Susan, I have never stopped loving you.”

That was in the sitting room of her suite at the Plaza. Oliver had brought her home after dinner.

She clung to him. She felt his kisses on her hair, on her eyelids. She lifted her head so that he could kiss her mouth. For those moments, the last three years had never been.

Oliver’s voice was hoarse. “Susan, let’s go away. Let’s find some little boat sailing to the West Indies, sail, and let the rest go—just have each other.”

She said, as one dreaming: “Yes. Just each other.”

He let her go. He was trembling. Though his own words surprised him, he meant them. From its far beginning until now, his feeling for Susan had been the most sincere emotion he had ever known.

So, though in the last weeks he had thought cynically: “Why not make the most of both worlds? What does it matter, as long as no one knows . . .” now, regarding Susan, small, dark-eyed, her eyes so soft, he knew that he would let the rest go.

There was a newspaper in the room. To steady himself as much as her, he opened it and turned to the ship-news page: “The St. Lucia sails Friday, Susan. It stops at St. Thomas, St. Kitts, Antigua and ever so many other places. They say those islands are lovely.”

“Yes, Oliver.”

She was swaying a little. He moved to her and put his arms ’round her again. This time, she withdrew from them. “So we are to have it all, all the years, Oliver?” There was a question in the tone.

“Yes, all of them. And to hell with all the people and things that interfere.”

He grew practical. He would go to Pennsylvania for his passport and some clothes. He would reserve tickets. He would meet her Friday. Suddenly he was aware that she was terribly tired. She was agreeing to all his plans, but she seemed scarcely to hear the details.

So he kissed her goodnight, tenderly and lightly as he used to kiss her.

Early next morning she went home with some of her own practical details worked out. Fortunately, she had more money in her account than usual, because she had not yet paid any of her November bills.

She would keep Nanny on and the cook, would say she was going on a short much-needed holiday, would send for the children eventually.

Meanwhile, she finished a short story. There would be time to pack in the morning. What to do about Paul Hanson, she could not decide. Would he accompany her and Oliver? If he didn’t, what kind of secretary would she get on a West Indian island?

Toward dusk, done with the story and wondering where she would be when she began the next one, she went upstairs to see the babies put to bed, as she did every day unless she were at her typewriter, halfway through a scene.

Laura was toddling up and down the room. The baby, Lawrence, already in his nightgown, crawled about the clean sheet Nanny had laid down for him.

He was a fat, solemn child, resembling his father to an absurd degree. He greeted his mother with a cooing noise and crawled toward her.

Nanny, beginning to undress Laura, said, “He always knows you, ma-am,” and then gasped with delight. The baby had seized the hem of his mother’s skirt and pulled himself to his feet for an instant before he tumbled over and burst into tears.

“He stood up straight,” Nanny sounded triumphant. “And him not nine months old, madam!”

Nanny picked him up. Laura, disliking the amount of attention he was receiving, crawled up in her mother’s lap: “Brother can’t,” she announced.

Nanny began one of her firm lectures. “The idea of being jealous of your dear baby brother.” She was tucking Larry into his crib meanwhile, a process during which his screams increased so that Nanny picked him up immediately, against all modern precepts.

“Did um want to be held till um was sleepy?” she inquired.

Laura rubbed her head against her mother’s cheek saying: “Um-mum-um-mum.” The baby quieted in his nurse’s arms and, between one moment and the next, shut his eyes.

“Come, Laura,” Nanny said. The child slipped off her mother’s lap.

Susan stood up rather quickly, terribly afraid she would weep. Then she did weep silently, tears streaming down her cheeks. Nanny came to her at once: “There, Mrs. Robbins. You must miss him dreadfully. But the children will be more and more comfort to you.”

“Yes, Nanny. Yes, Nanny.”

But she was weeping because she had found out that she wasn’t going to take a boat sailing this Friday or any Friday. The baby’s hands pulling at her, the tiny girl’s body so warm and trusting close against her, between one moment and the next she had known.

One lived but once. One had a right to live— But somehow—somehow not at the expense of the helpless. . . .

Nanny said to the cook that night: “Poor Mrs. Robbins was so upset tonight, she forgot to kiss the children goodnight.”

Susan telephoned Oliver in Philadelphia and told him: “I am staying here. Good-bye.”

She knew somehow that he would not forgive her.

That late Autumn, she began again to sleep very badly. The bills were mountainous. Her work was endless. And what was the use of it all?

After an unusually disagreeable letter from Y’s smart department store, she persuaded Mike Nash to get an advance for her from United States Weekly, a magazine for which she had not yet written.

Mike said, “But you owe three editors advances already.”

She said, “I like even numbers better.”

He got her the advance.

She placated Y’s for the time being.

Christmas expenses loomed on the horizon.

That night, skipping through the pages of Bartlett’s “Familiar Quotations,” she read:

She began to laugh. She laughed and laughed quite happily, without any hysteria. She laughed until she fell asleep with the lights on.

It was a very cynical person who stated that the reward of virtue is peace plus boredom. In Susan’s case that was not immediately true, though almost at once she attained peace.

That year Autumn lingered all through November. The scent of ripe apples, though the apples were long garnered, seemed to be somewhere in the sunshine, mingled in the fragrance of leaves burning with soft blue smoke. The sun itself held a warmth left over from September and no high wind blew, but only a little breeze singing in the bare branches of the trees. In the flower garden, rose and yellow and bronze late chrysanthemums blossomed and even a late rose or two opened its pale petals that were more elusively scented than the roses of June.

With Rachel, her daughters, or alone, Susan walked through the Autumn woods in the early dusk, the pack of dogs hunting rabbits they never caught, ahead of them and behind them. Susan waked early these days, had a good amount of work finished by mid-afternoon, and then enjoyed her country place as she never had enjoyed it since her own childhood, when with cheeks as bright as Rachel’s little girls she had hunted the horsechestnuts that fell by the stepping stones in the brook.

Though the main house, Rachel’s house, Elizabeth’s house, the new barns and pool and gardens were unrecognizably dissimilar to what they used to be, the paths through the woods were unchanged. Sometimes walking through them, the childish feeling of being young and carefree walked with Susan.

Thanksgiving, ‘with our own turkeys, potatoes, squash, mincemeat’ and so on (as Paul Hanson mentioned happily), was a wonderful day. Laura and the baby had new scarlet jackets and caps and leggings. The day was punctuated by their chatter on the lawn that was still quite green outside the sheltered terrace. To be exact, Laura chattered and baby Lawrence made noises no one except Nanny attempted to translate.

Before Christmas, the weather turned cold. There was skating for the boys when they came home from school, a wonderful tree, and many presents (on which Susan, who had scarcely been to New York, had spent much less money than usual).

At the end of Christmas dinner when Rachel’s four had gone ‘to walk it off,’ they said, and Susan’s babies were gone for their naps, the adults lingered around the dining room table. Charles brought in a bottle of champagne, slightly to Susan’s surprise.

But old Uncle Marcus said, “I ordered this, my dear. Elizabeth and Rachel agreed.” He stood up. “We wish to drink to the health of her who makes our whole lives as happy as most people’s holidays. For bringing comfort to the aged and helpless, Elizabeth and myself—the sense of security to a mother, Rachel here—and a happy childhood to her children and your babies, we wish you many many Merry Christmases, Susan, and may God bless you.”

He sat down amid applause. Embarrassed, confused, touched, Susan smiled at them uncertainly. Paul Hanson lifted his glass, said, “May next year be the best ever.”

She was content. This was good enough.

Rachel broke the tension. “Look at Marcus. I haven’t seen him so happy since Susan persuaded him to stop smoking.”

He drew long puffs of one of three cigars Susan had put in the toe of his Christmas stocking, feeling that after all once a year indulgence wouldn’t hurt him. She did not quite guess that she could have skipped the warm muffler, the bright neckties, the conservative gray pullover and he would have been just as delighted, because he ached so with desire for cigars.

Marcus said, “I am happy. Why shouldn’t I look it?”

Everyone laughed and dinner came to an end.

That afternoon, the baby stood unaided by anyone, staring at the street until his sister said, “Walk, you can! Walk, brother,” and gave him a slight push to aid him in that accomplishment. He fell right over, of course, and seemed inconsolable until Nanny popped a Christmas candy into his mouth, whereupon he beamed at them all and departed in her arms.

Yes, it was a good Christmas.

Perhaps it was on New Year’s Eve that boredom first slid into Susan’s mind.

Paul Hanson had gone to New York to celebrate with newspaper friends. Marcus and Elizabeth had said they would not stay up. But Rachel was letting her children see the New Year in, and Susan had invited them all to the main house to pop corn.

They sat in the living room, the boys ostentatious about the fact that staying up past eleven was no novelty to them; the girls, admitting it was remarkable.

Mary, who was taking music lessons, played Christmas carols badly. They all sang. Then one of the boys turned on the radio and the sound of a dance band came into the room, bringing New York New Year’s Eve with the saxophone’s singing.

“Dance with me, Aunt Susan,” one of the twins asked her.

But she wanted to dance in some café, wearing her best evening frock, waiting for the lights to be darkened at midnight, to feel someone’s kiss on her lips. . . .

For the first time since that day in November when she had telephoned him to say good-bye, her heart cried: “Oliver, Oliver!” She remembered wearing a blue velvet frock, an apple-green crepe frock, a cream-colored lace frock on the three New Year’s Eves they had spent together. And—a velvet wrap with a collar of rabbit that looked somewhat like ermine, all three years.

Then Larry had taken her out, the New Year’s just before they married. She had been a little unhappy, but laughed at his jests, smiled at his compliments and was even glad of his kiss at midnight. The year after she had just produced Laura. Larry sat with her in the hospital and had the nurse open champagne and give her a sip. Last year—even though the baby was going to be born within weeks, Larry had encouraged her to go to New York—had insisted she never looked more lovely, though she kept herself swathed in her kolinsky cape all evening and he had asked whether she wanted to dance.

When she sat down again, her eyes strayed to a new picture on the wall. Rachel, observing that, came and sat beside her, holding her hand. It wasn’t Rachel’s hand Susan wanted to hold, she thought ungratefully. Oliver’s—or Larry’s for that matter—the hand of an attractive man who would make her feel attractive, young, pretty.

“It’s seldom pictures painted from photographs are so alive,” Rachel said. The children grew a little silent. When their dead uncle Larry was mentioned, they never knew how to behave. And the swing music blared into the room.

A painter friend of Larry’s had sent them the portrait at Christmas. It was a beautiful piece of work. Larry Robbins smiled out of the picture with that faint twist to his mouth that was kind, even though it was ironic and his eyes looked speculative.

Susan rang for Charles. “Do you want brandy or champagne, Rachel?”

“Nothing for me, thank you.” Was there faint reproof in her tone? Susan wondered.

It was quite true that she celebrated the end of every day’s work with a couple of Martinis latterly, but she rarely drank after dinner, finding it hurt her work next morning. She thought: “Rachel, you are middle-aged, resigned, dull, dull, dull. I love you, but you frighten me by that resignation. This year I’ll be thirty. That’s frightening too. Don’t you see I must have—something?”

She said nothing of that. She said, “Oh, just a glass of wine for the New Year, Rachel.”

After New Year’s, the weather grew bad. Rachel had a serious attack of influenza. The little girls had wretched colds. The baby was sick for two or three days and lost weight he did not quickly gain. Charles and the cook gave notice, because they had been offered a job that would take them to Florida. The best offer the real-estate agent got for Susan’s New York apartment, vacant since the beginning of January, was for a four months’ tenancy beginning March first.

Susan was ambitious to do a book, a very serious novel on middle-class country life in America, its small disappointments, its trivial warming delights. But she owed three magazine stories she had to write before she could begin the book.

When the chambermaid-waitress gave notice, announcing she would not care to work with new people, Susan told Paul Hanson: “I’m bored, bored, bored!”

“I know. Why don’t you send the whole family away? Camp out here—the gardener’s wife will look after a couple of rooms, or work in the place in town when you like? Get new servants in the Spring and don’t worry about it until then.”

He rented from pictures a large sprawling cheap house in Bermuda. So at January’s end, Susan ‘saw off’ her children, Nanny, Rachel, her children, Marcus and Elizabeth, and, feeling at loose ends, went across town to a cocktail party at Roland Mead’s.

She seldom attended his parties nowadays. He had told her she would not grow as a novelist if she spent the bulk of her time on short things for magazines. Besides, a more recently discovered young man was writing books that outsold hers.

But everyone at the cocktail party seemed glad to see her—and she met an amusing dark young man named Gregory something, who asked her if she happened to be free for dinner.

Though she knew him only six weeks, Gregory Johnson was as significant in Susan’s life almost as Oliver had been. He completed a process that began when Oliver told Susan he was marrying someone else and that progressed when Susan realized that Roland Mead and Mike Nash were more interested in the money they made from her than they were in her. Gregory was the person who put the final hard polish on a young Susan who had been gentle, trusting, simple. (But Susan expressed it more contemptuously to herself “a thorough-going little fool, generally.”)

The odd part of it was that she never really liked Gregory. His good looks were startling, but on the common side. His compliments were blatant. He was possessed neither of Oliver’s graceful charm nor Larry’s intelligence and quiet consideration.

Gregory just danced beautifully. He sent Susan flowers. He said, “Of course, I want you—no woman as intelligent as you has a right to be so provocative,” and he settled fairly amiably for holding her hand in a taxicab, which made her feel simultaneously young and ridiculous.

He was someone to dress for, to have one’s hair done, to buy a few new clothes. But Susan laughed when Paul Hanson said, “All right for a night club. No good for matrimony, I should think.”

Susan was halfway through a six-part serial for “Woman’s Work,” that most sedately conservative of the women’s magazines. She was getting paid twenty-four thousand for the serial, two thousand upon the delivery of each installment and the balance at the end. The two thousand coming in almost every week made her feel prosperous. She really believed that in a few months, three or four months, she might get caught up with the government, department stores, the bill for fuel oil for the house, the bill for the dentist whom all Rachel’s children had visited during Christmas holidays, and for the doctor who had practically been in residence half of January.

She worked in town, or out of town, as the mood seized her, and went to openings, night clubs, smart dining places with Gregory.

He lived somewhere in Jersey. She scarcely remembered the name of the town, but it was a long way off. So that it was quite natural, when one night he drove her to the Berkshires to ask him to stay in the empty guest wing. Paul, somewhere about the house that was empty of servants now, was surely adequate chaperonage now. But she scarcely thought of that; she had been an independent woman for a very long time.

When three installments of the serial had been turned in, Paul Hanson startled her. “Susan, I’d like to take a week’s vacation. . . I’ll go to Bermuda and have a look at your family. You write the fourth and fifth installments. ‘Woman’s Work’ isn’t rushing you for them. I’ll come back Monday week and retype them.”

“Why of course, Paul, if you want a holiday.”

But it did seem odd that he was taking it when she was in the midst of a serial.

She never guessed his reason. That was one of the few mistakes Paul ever made about Susan. He considered he was chaperoning her so much as to be in the way. There he was, still typing, when the young man brought her home in New York at odd hours of the morning! There he was, seeming in residence, when they turned up in the Berkshires. After all, Susan was young—and Larry Robbins would have wanted her to have a good time. Paul had no doubt of it.

Aside from that, he considered Susan too intelligent to take the young man with dangerous seriousness. So he departed, hoping he had done the right thing.

Two or three evenings later, Susan went to the theater with Gregory—to a comedy about marriage that bored him. He had, as he mentioned casually once or twice to Susan, been married—not happily. (She assumed that he had been divorced many years.)

It had been snowing, when they went into the theater. When they left it, the storm approximated a blizzard. By the time they left the club where they went to dance, taxis were hard to find.

She asked Gregory to come in for a drink, when they reached her apartment. He glanced at his watch. “Might as well. I can’t get a train to my place in Jersey until six o’clock now.” It was then only about two o’clock.

Why Susan hesitated to ask him to stay in her perfectly adequate guest room, she could not tell. Stupid reasons! The colored maid (distant relative of Maybelle, who was long since married and had named her pickaninny daughter Susan Barr Washington), who came to get Susan breakfast and clean the apartment, would think it peculiar to serve breakfast for two.

Gregory was entirely manageable, but somehow, having him stay overnight in a six-room New York apartment was rather different than in a fifteen-room country house.

He stood by the window and announced that the storm was getting worse, if possible.

“You had better stay in the guest room here,” Susan told him.

“What an unenthusiastic invitation!”

“Sorry, I’m tired, Greg.”

“All right. I’ll stay—in the guest room.”

Rather unnecessarily she supposed, she locked her door.

At breakfast, Gregory said an odd thing. He said, “In a way, I’m sorry for you, Susan. Underneath all your manner of the great Miss Barr, you are a baby.”

She didn’t know what he meant, but it did not matter. She was anxious to get to work and was glad when he took his departure immediately after breakfast. It did just occur to her that they had not arranged their next meeting. Well, he would call her.

She wrote: “Installment Four, page 123” on a sheet of paper and forgot him. This serial was going quite well.

Her telephone rang at five o’clock. “Miss Barr?”

“Yes.”

“This is Jeremy Clissold. I am Mrs. Gregory Johnson’s lawyer.”

Even then she did not understand. But the voice made it very clear. “You are being named as co-respondent in Mrs. Johnson’s suit for divorce. The papers are drawn up and will be filed tomorrow. Once they are filed, they will be public property. Naturally, you might like to see me.”

There was a long pause in which Susan thought: “I won’t be blackmailed,” and then thought: “Named as co-respondent. ‘Woman’s Work’ wouldn’t have me in their magazine.”

Horribly clear before her mind came the ravaged face, the fat figure of a woman she had only met once—a woman whose stories she used to read when she was a young girl. That woman had been in a great scandal. No magazine would put her name on a cover for the next decade. Someone had given her a job as a proofreader—and maybe twenty-five dollars a week. She had grown old. Roland asked her to dinner once a year and thought he was very charitable. So Susan had met her.

The voice at the other end of the telephone said, “Miss Barr, I don’t intend to wait long for your answer.”

She said, “I’ll see you now,” and started to hang up the receiver.

But the voice insisted: “And alone, Miss Barr.”

“All right.”

But in the end she had to see Rayburn, of course, and Mike Nash and Roland Mead (to beg for whatever royalties she had accumulated ahead of the date they would normally be paid).

Rayburn said, “If women who make money would consult a lawyer before they embark on innocent love-affairs . . .”

Roland Mead said, “Of course it won’t hurt her books much. But it won’t help the kind of books she writes and anyway . . .”

Mike Nash said, “Anyway, she can’t support her dependents, her establishment, and herself on what she might make out of some book not yet written. She has to pay up. If they won’t come down from twenty-five thousand, she has to pay twenty-five thousand. I don’t know two magazines in America who would take her stuff, even at a cut rate, after she was co-respondent in the kind of suit they’ll make this deliberately.

“Rayburn, get them to take it on installments and hold the release in escrow until she’s paid up. I’ll give you the first five thousand, Susan. I have to or lose my best money-making client in the magazines. And next time you ask a man you think is divorced to stay in the guest room,” his voice was derisive, “in town or the country, you telephone me. I’ll appear to chaperon you.”

“Of course,” Rayburn spoke, “it’s a clear case of planned blackmail. We could defend it on that basis.”

“And have her in the papers every day the suit ran. No thanks,” said Mike. “I don’t want her in the papers for anything but contributing to a worthy cause. Pay up—in installments.”

So that’s what she did with her money in the first half of 1939.

Rayburn had to attend so many conferences in relation to the matter that he sent Susan a bill for twenty-five hundred, which was, of course, a minor detail.

There were rumors about Susan in connection with that case which wasn’t going to be filed now. But Susan went around town (when she was in town) with her head high and no one dare mention the rumors to her.

“Get yourself a lot of acquaintances and don’t bother with friends,” Mike Nash advised her casually. “Friends mostly want to borrow money from you anyway.” He was, that year, somewhat sorry for Susan, who was having to pay a small fortune for a trifle of carelessness. As to whether it was any more than carelessness, of course, he couldn’t tell.

But Susan would have been very surprised to know that he believed her guilty, not innocent, since, after all, she was very pretty, young and lonely—sometimes, and the man, they said, had been handsome.

So she went to literary teas, fashionably dressed and people inquired in an interested manner about her new book, which was to be published in the Fall. (She was writing that book nights, after finishing an eight or nine hour day writing things for magazines.) The serial in “Woman’s Work” was running by late Summer. Every time Susan saw a copy on the news stands she remembered how nearly it had come to not being published. Of course, “Woman’s Work” didn’t know that possibility.

She filled her house with weekend guests of whom practically her only requirement was that they talk well. She had, as her agent advised, at least a hundred acquaintances by Fall—that September when the war began.

Susan joined a committee of very social women who were working extremely hard to raise funds for refugees. She suspected that the only reason she had been asked to join this fashionably sponsored branch of a good cause was in the hope that she would make an enormous contribution.

She did, however, make a contribution that was considerably more than she could afford. (By now, her situation as to unpaid income taxes was really serious. It worried her so that with extreme reluctance she mortgaged the still unmortgaged part of her property for enough to pay the worst part of her overdue taxes. As Rayburn said, the amount she raised should placate the government for at least a year.)

Her book was published in late September. She was oddly excited as publication date approached. Very privately, she liked that book better than anything she had written heretofore. It was called “October.”

Published with no great fanfare, the reviews could be summarized by these two comments of two different (and very prominent) critics: “The book is a hasty and somewhat careless sketch of what might possibly have been a first rate novel.” And “It reads as if Miss Barr had composed it in bits and pieces in intervals of what is, of course, her much more important work, keeping her name on magazine covers.”

She was hurt—and experienced enough never to indicate it in the slightest, to say: “Oh—my book—the reviews were bad. I didn’t mean the critics to give it serious attention.” But that wasn’t true!

Mike Nash said, “I think I may sell it to Hollywood,” as if that would be sufficient consolation to any writer.

They both knew that the sale was not certain. Susan had never become a big ‘Hollywood name.’ The picture made from “Encounter” had been only moderately successful. Her second book sold to pictures at a slightly less price. Her third book hadn’t sold at all, but she had made one or two sales of magazine things.

The bad reviews of “October” had one effect on Susan. Never again, after a hard day’s work, would she try to write for love of writing in her evenings. She would enjoy her evenings! But though she was asked a great many places in New York in the ‘season’ and entertained herself all through the Summer, there were still three hundred and sixty-five evenings a year, some of which had to be spent alone.

However, a bath at the end of her writing day, dressing in a comfortable negligée and two or three cocktails relaxed her to enjoy a sparse dinner (she had gained a few pounds and having lost them by severe diet, was firmly resolved never to regain them).

After dinner, she read or played phonograph records, until she felt sleepy.

A hundred acquaintances—and one friend, Clement Travis! Clement probably still disapproved of her, but he didn’t mention it any more. He took her about a great deal in New York; he came often to the country where he seemed as much a member of the family as old Marcus.

Clement advised the twins solemnly about careers. Clem played with Laura and the baby. And Susan thought: “He is the only person whom I still know with whom I don’t have to pretend.”

Pretend—to be the highly successful Miss Barr, envied by many, rich obviously, always so perfectly dressed! Pretend even to Roland and Michael that her life was full, happy, serene! Pretend to Rachel and the children that she wanted no life except what their companionship and admiration gave her! Pretend she had no worries. Pretend it was not terrifying to be thirty, and thirty-one and going to be thirty-two, riding forever on the merry-go-round which never stopped.

Write, get checks, pay bills, run up new bills; write, get checks, pay bills, run up new bills. And—if she gave it all up or any part of it—clothes, cars, country house that were the outward testimony of her remarkable success, at what expense of pride!

Visiting for a weekend with her husband, Jennifer said, “Your country place is really much nicer than the Pryors’.” She visited Mr. and Mrs. Oliver Pryor quite often, it seemed. She and Marjorie moved in the same circle of the young-married. And Oliver and his wife had another son!

What was that to the popular, attractive Miss Susan Barr, who ‘went everywhere’? Nothing! Nothing except just enough to make her have one more cocktail before dinner than usual and be (she decided afterwards) rather patronizing as to her guests’ opinions of the war. As if she got her information from mysteriously better sources!

With Clement only could she be simple. It was restful to be simple, once in a while, to pretend the merry-go-round was not moving inexorably fast.

“You’re late with that story, Susan. Don’t get a reputation for being unreliable. You are done with that story, Susan, but the next one is overdue.” That was the music the merry-go-round played.

She hoped Clement was her friend forever, even when he was a very old bachelor and she an old widow. They had been friends a long, long time already. She wished she didn’t have the horrible feeling that nothing was forever except work, that Clement too would change.

But though sometimes she worried about that, she was not prepared for the change when it came.

Clement arrived for dinner one only moderately hot August evening in 1941. It was the night before Susan’s thirty-second birthday and he had come to see her in honor of the event. On the day itself she would have no time for him.

Inspired by Rachel who had a passion for what she called ‘little family celebrations,’ all her children and Susan’s own (helped by Nanny) would so fill the day with surprises, singing of ‘Happy Birthday to you,’ and a great supper at Rachel’s house (birthday cake by Rachel, something knitted by cousin Elizabeth, something whittled—that had become the elderly hobby of Uncle Marcus), that Susan scarcely had a moment of that day for herself.

Although her own taste for ‘little family celebrations’ was much more moderate than Rachel’s, she enjoyed a certain amount of the fuss—really they all behaved as if they were absolutely devoted to her—and she realized the others enjoyed every bit of it.

Clement had been early. It was only about six when he and Susan sat on the terrace for cocktails. They could hear the children’s voices as they played by the pool, and Nanny, the voice of law, announcing that in five minutes more they had to go to bed. (But the children would succeed in obtaining from her, whose bark was so much more than her non-existent bite, several extensions of time. They always did.)

The shrubbery newly planted in Larry’s time had grown thick and high about the pool. They could not see the children. But the voices were pleasant obbligato to the peaceful hour.

The long, nearly level rays of the sun fell on the garden, on the luxuriant colors in the zinnia borders. But the terrace was already shaded.

They sat silent. Susan wondered whether it would be a comfort to tell Clement of her latest worry—that the government was going to put a tax lien on the whole property unless she raised seventy-five hundred dollars immediately. She had no way of raising the money unless Mike closed the picture deal for her latest “Woman’s Work” serial. Hollywood was interested. Of course, the seventy-five hundred wasn’t all her tax bill. That was just the amount two years, or was it three years, overdue? Rayburn knew the details. Well, if the serial didn’t sell to pictures, Mike would get her enough advances to tide over.

Nanny appeared on the garden path between dark-haired Laura in a green play suit, and fair-haired Larry in a pink play suit. (Larry had turned out as blond as either of Oliver Pryor’s sons could possibly be. That was a matter of surprise to Susan, though Rachel explained: “Larry was as blond as an angel when he was a little boy.”)

The children ran to him whom they called “Uncle Clement.”

Susan told him: “They’ll make a nice sight of that linen jacket. They are all muddy.”

But he laughed and said he did not care.

When they were gone into the house, Susan poured Clement a second cocktail and resolved to think no more of her tax problem. It would spoil a pleasant evening.

Clement was unusually silent. Susan regarded the printed poppies on her long white dinner frock and wondered if he had been working hard and was specially tired.

“We’re dining alone,” she told him, because it seemed rather too long since either of them had spoken. “Paul has gone to town.”

“Fine, then I’ll tell you now.”

He rose and walked up and down the terrace once, observing the little fountain where very late Japanese irises were still in flower, as if he had ever seen fountain or iris before.

As slim in figure, as thin-faced as when she first saw him, there were perhaps a few more lines around his dark eyes.

She said, “You change less than anyone I know, Clement.”

He stood still, facing her. “Do you know how much you’ve changed?”

“I don’t dwell on it, Clement.”

“Oh, you are in the full bloom of your beauty, as the Victorians would have phrased it. I was talking about your character.”

“Dear, dear. I thought we had abandoned my character as a subject of conversation a long time ago.” She wished Clement wouldn’t pick this evening to worry her. She had enough worries! Then she remembered: “Was what you had to tell me connected with my character?”

“No. It’s this. I have met recently a very pleasant young girl. She is twenty-four. She doesn’t dance, sing, write or paint professionally. You don’t know her. I think—when I go back to town, I will set about convincing her that I would make her an excellent husband.”

Susan simply could not help the little exclamation that escaped her lips. “Oh, Clement!” Then she sat rigid. She would miss him. She hadn’t known how much she would miss him. But nothing lasted, except the merry-go-round. She had been fairly sure of that, a long time.

He asked her, “Do you care?”

“Of course—we won’t see as much of each other.”

“As yet, Susan, I have not begun to persuade this young girl. . .”

“What do you mean?”

“You know—or perhaps you don’t. Perhaps you haven’t bothered to think of the fact that I have been in love with you a long time, patient about hoping you would grow up, make sense, live reasonably. And—I have almost no respect for you any more. Handling money wisely is a chore, like doing a day’s work. You refuse to let it be a chore, or a duty. You fling money around on bringing up children beyond their means, beyond anything the future can offer them. You fling it away on assuaging your vanity. Miss Susan Barr, who can buy herself as expensive a fur coat as any woman with a rich husband wears! You toss money around entertaining writers poorer than you so lavishly they resent it; and society people richer than you so elaborately I’ve heard them say it’s too bad you behave in such a nouveau riche fashion. . .”

“Suppose you stop this, Clement, and we go in to dinner.”

The butler had come to the terrace door.

“Dinner can wait five minutes until I finish. More seriously than all the rest, you no longer write as well, as slowly, as carefully as you can. You just write fast as you can, to keep your gaudy establishment going. Oh, you have great talent. You can get by a lot of years yet. . .”

She was furious, but, illogically, she thought she was going to weep. “So you came to tell me all this in honor of my birthday.”

“Don’t be stupid. Underneath your wicked folly, your vanity, your laziness in surrounding yourself only with the people who’ll pay Miss Barr compliments, is the lovely person you used to be, lost, trapped in a mountain of nonsense. . .”

He stopped. But tears choked her throat so that she couldn’t find an answer.

“I am the only person you still know with whom you are very real, Susan. Therefore, though it sounds utter conceit, I think I’m practically your last chance on earth. Also, I do adore the you I glimpse so rarely nowadays. Susan, give it all up and marry me. I’ll never ask you again. I’ve waited in attendance on your career off and on a good many years. Seriously, if you refuse, I’m going on to make sense of my life, marry that girl, be happy with her, and, I suppose, love her very much in time.”

He paused. “But I don’t want Miss Susan Barr with this ostentatious country place that’s mortgaged and her showy expensive clothes that are usually not paid for. . . .”

She spoke then. Her mouth was so stiff with pain and anger, it was hard to frame the words: “Ostentatious and showy are not pretty adjectives, Clement.”

“And what you are making of your life isn’t pretty either, dear.”

He said more gently: “Let’s go in to dinner and talk about other things. You can tell me your answer later this evening.”

She stood up. But there was something she had to ask: “What would marriage to you be like?”

“Living without debts on my ten thousand a year income. I’ll support you and your children. You can let Rachel’s boys work their way through college, write one magazine thing a year to support the girls, Rachel, your cousin and your uncle. Five thousand a year should take care of them all amply. . . For the rest, I suggest you spend a couple of years writing a good book, if ever you are going to write one.”

“Thank you, Clement. You make it very clear.”

The butler held the terrace door open. They went into the dining room. Clement talked about Mead’s Fall list, about a party he had attended where there was a charming refugee singer. He talked about everything and nothing. Afterward, Susan remembered she had scarcely spoken through dinner.

As dessert was being served, she was called to the telephone.

Mike Nash said, “Well, Susan, I worked hard to get you a nice present. The picture deal was closed long-distance telephone five minutes ago. Seventy-five hundred. Give it all to the government and pay me my commission later.”

“What a darling you are, Mike.”

“No. Just a hard-boiled business man. You know that too.”

“Never mind. You are an angel and it’s the best birthday present I ever got.”

“Listen, if I get you a serial order from Metropolis, could you fit it in next month—no fooling?”

“I could try.”

She went back to the dining room. Clement stood up politely.

“It’s warm enough for coffee outside, don’t you think?”

“Yes, Susan.”

The full moon was rising over the garden and the fields beyond. The beauty of the night hurt somehow.

“Well, Susan?”

“Just a minute, Clement.”

To be done with the merry-go-round, the strain, the weariness, the endless effort! But to be done with the excitement too, the sense of importance. Miss Susan Barr, one of our most successful magazine writers—Miss Susan Barr, who has such a charming place in the Berkshires. The merry-go-round played that music too, though one seldom heard it under this: “Write. Get checks. Pay bills. Run up new bills.” To have time and leisure to write a book, as one wanted to write it! But—suppose it wasn’t good after all. Suppose it wasn’t first rate.

To be Mrs. Clement Travis. (He wasn’t the sort to introduce her as “Miss Susan Barr, my famous wife,” as a man she knew, slightly, introduced his wife.) Do what one was told. Be supported, moderately well. Never any more sauntering into a store and charge anything one liked. Be sensible!

She had promised Rachel’s daughters a smart boarding school. They were pretty children and with a good background, ought to marry well. She thought contemptuously, “The trouble with you is that you just love playing God, Miss Barr.”

To have peace but no adventure, risk, gamble any more!

Kaleidoscoped through her head—bills, the government placated, her children with their proper “Nanny,” garden, gardeners, dogs, cows, vegetables. . . Press a button (say two words, say, “Yes, Clement”) and all would vanish like Cinderella’s coach.

But she didn’t want them to vanish! She maintained them. They were hers!

“Clement, it’s no use. We wouldn’t be happy.”

He stood up quickly. He held out his hand. “So good-bye, Susan. I’m driving back to town.”

She held his hand a long moment. He asked: “So this is all, Susan?”

“That, of course, is up to you.”

“I’m sorry, darling. But this is all.”

He went into the house. She started to rise to follow him to say—something—she didn’t know what. But she was too tired to rise. And there was nothing to say. In a moment or two she heard the sound of his car driving off.

Then she did go into the house.

In the living room the butler had left Scotch, soda, ice and glasses.

Susan very seldom drank after dinner, but she mixed herself a strong highball. Then she drew the curtains to shut the moonlight out and, turning on the many lights, regarded the portrait of her husband.

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors occur.

A cover which is placed in the public domain was created for this ebook.

[The end of One More Such Victory by Ursula Parrott]