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  Mabel drew a very unpleasant picture of that parentage. Her description of the father a successful lawyer and judge, and an excessively brutal and at the same time small-minded man who exercised great ingenuity in making himself unpleasant was not alluring, nor that of the mother who was very religious and spent most of her time mourning that it was not Helen that had been taken instead of the others a girl and boy whom she remembered as sweet gentle children.

  One day when Helen was a young girl she heard her mother say to the father “Isn’t it sad that Helen should have been the one to be left.”

  Mabel described their attempts to break Helen’s spirit and their anger at their lack of success. “And now” Mabel went on “they object to everything that she does, to her friends and to everything she is interested in. Mrs. T. always sides with her husband. Of course they are proud of her good looks, her cleverness and social success but she won’t get married and she doesn’t care to please the people her mother wants her to belong to. They don’t dare to say anything to her now because she is so much better able to say things that hurt than they are.”

  “I suppose there is very little doubt that Helen can be uncommonly nasty when she wants to be,” laughed Adele, “and if she isn’t sensitive to other people’s pain, a talent for being successful in bitter repartee might become a habit that would make her a most uncomfortable daughter. I believe I might condole with the elders if they were to confide their sorrows to me. By the way doesn’t Helen address them the way children commonly do their parents, she always speaks of them as Mr and Mrs. T.”

  “Oh yes” Mabel explained, “they observe the usual forms.”

  “It’s a queer game,” Adele commented, “coming as I do from a community where all no matter how much they may quarrel and disagree have strong family affection and great respect for the ties of blood, I find it difficult to realise.”

  “Yes there you come in with your middle-class ideals again” retorted Mabel.

  She then lauded Helen’s courage and daring. “Whenever there is any difficulty with the horses or anything dangerous to be done they always call in Helen. Her father is also very small-minded in money matters. He gives her so little and whenever anything happens to the carriage if she is out in it, he makes her pay and she has to get the money as best she can. Her courage never fails and that is what makes her father so bitter, that she never gives any sign of yielding and if she decides to do a thing she is perfectly reckless, nothing stops her.”

  “That sounds very awful” mocked Adele “not being myself of an heroic breed, I don’t somehow realise that type much outside of story-books. That sort of person in real life doesn’t seem very real, but I guess it’s alright. Helen has courage I don’t doubt that.”

  Mabel then described Helen’s remarkable endurance of pain. She fell from a haystack one day and broke her arm. After she got home, her father was so angry that he wouldn’t for some time have it attended to and she faced him boldly to the end. “She never winces or complains no matter how much she is hurt,” Mabel concluded. “Yes I can believe that” Adele answered thoughtfully.

  Throughout the whole of Mabel’s talk of Helen, there was an implication of ownership that Adele found singularly irritating. She supposed that Mabel had a right to it but in that thought she found little comfort.

  As the winter advanced, Adele took frequent trips to New York. She always spent some of her time with Helen. For some undefined reason a convention of secrecy governed their relations. They seemed in this way to emphasise their intention of working the thing out completely between them. To Adele’s consciousness the necessity of this secrecy was only apparent when they were together. She felt no obligation to conceal this relation from her friends.

  They arranged their meetings in the museums or in the park and sometimes they varied it by lunching together and taking interminable walks in the long straight streets. Adele was always staying with relatives and friends and although there was no reason why Helen should not have come to see her there, something seemed somehow to serve as one. As for Helen’s house it seemed tacitly agreed between them that they should not complicate the situation by any relations with Helen’s family and so they continued their homeless wanderings.

  Adele spent much of their time together in announcing with great interest the result of her endless meditations. She would criticise and examine herself and her ideas with tireless interest. “Helen,” she said one day, “I always had an impression that you talked a great deal but apparently you are a most silent being. What is it? Do I talk so hopelessly much that you get discouraged with it as a habit?”

  “No,” answered Helen, “although I admit one might look upon you in the light of a warning, but really I am very silent when I know people well. I only talk when I am with superficial acquaintances.” Adele laughed. “I am tempted to say for the sake of picturesque effect, that in that respect I am your complete opposite, but honesty compels me to admit in myself an admirable consistency. I don’t know that the quantity is much affected by any conditions in which I find myself, but really Helen why don’t you talk more to me?”

  “Because you know well enough that you are not interested in my ideas, in fact that they bore you. It’s always been very evident. You know” Helen continued affectionately, “that you haven’t much talent for concealing your feelings and impressions.” Adele smiled, “Yes you are certainly right about most of your talk, it does bore me,” she admitted. “But that is because it’s about stuff that you are not really interested in. You don’t really care about general ideas and art values and musical development and surgical operations and Heaven knows what all and naturally your talk about those things doesn’t interest me. No talking is interesting that one hasn’t hammered out oneself. I know I always bore myself unutterably when I talk the thoughts that I hammered out some time ago and that are no longer meaningful to me, for quoting even oneself lacks a flavor of reality, but you, you always make me feel that at no period did you ever have the thoughts that you converse with. Surely one has to hit you awfully hard to shake your realler things to the surface.”

  These meetings soon became impossible. It was getting cold and unpleasant and it obviously wouldn’t do to continue in that fashion and yet neither of them undertook to break the convention of silence which they had so completely adopted concerning the conditions of their relation.

  One day after they had been lunching together they both felt strongly that restaurants had ceased to be amusing. They didn’t want to stay there any longer but outside there was an unpleasant wet snow-storm, it was dark and gloomy and the streets were slushy. Helen had a sudden inspiration. “Let us go and see Jane Fairfield,” she said, “you don’t know her of course but that makes no difference. She is queer and will interest you and you are queer and will interest her. Oh! I don’t want to listen to your protests, you are queer and interesting even if you don’t know it and you like queer and interesting people even if you think you don’t and you are not a bit bashful in spite of your convictions to the contrary, so come along.” Adele laughed and agreed.

  They wandered up to the very top of an interminable New York apartment house. It was one of the variety made up apparently of an endless number of unfinished boxes of all sizes piled up in a great oblong leaving an elevator shaft in the centre. There is a strange effect of bare wood and uncovered nails about these houses and no amount of upholstery really seems to cover their hollow nakedness.

  Jane Fairfield was not at home but the elevator boy trustingly let them in to wait. They looked out of the windows at the city all gloomy and wet and white stretching down to the river, and they watched the long tracks of the elevated making such wonderful perspective that it never really seemed to disappear, it just infinitely met.

  Finally they sat down on the couch to give their hostess just another quarter of an hour in which to return, and then for the first time in Adele’s experience something happened in which she had no definite consciousness of beginnings. She found herself at the end of a passionate embrace.

  Some weeks after when Adele came again to New York they agreed to meet at Helen’s house. It had been arranged quite as a matter of course as if no objection to such a proceeding had ever been entertained. Adele laughed to herself as she thought of it. “Why we didn’t before and why we do now are to me equally mysterious” she said shrugging her shoulders. “Great is Allah, Mohammed is no Shodah! though I dimly suspect that sometimes he is.”

  When the time came for keeping her engagement Adele for some time delayed going and remained lying on her friend’s couch begging to be detained. She realised that her certain hold on her own frank joyousness and happy serenity was weakened. She almost longed to back out, she did so dread emotional complexities. “Oh for peace and a quiet life!” she groaned as she rang Helen’s door-bell.

  In Helen’s room she found a note explaining that being worried as it was so much past the hour of appointment, she had gone to the Museum as Adele had perhaps misunderstood the arrangement. If she came in she was to wait. “It was very bad of me to fool around so long” Adele said to herself gravely and then sat down very peacefully to read.

  “I am awfully sorry” Adele greeted Helen as she came into the room somewhat intensely, “it never occurred to me that you would be bothered, it was just dilatoriness on my part,” and then they sat down. After a while Helen came and sat on the arm of Adele’s chair. She took her head between tense arms and sent deep into her eyes a long straight look of concentrated question. “Haven’t you anything to say to me?” she asked at last. “Why no, nothing in particular,” Adele answered slowly. She met Helen’s glance for a moment, returned it with simple friendliness and then withdrew from it.

  “You are very chivalrous,” Helen
said with sad self-defiance. “You realise that there ought to be shame somewhere between us and as I have none, you generously undertake it all.”

  “No I am not chivalrous” Adele answered, “but I realise my deficiencies. I know that I always take an everlasting time to arrive anywhere really and that the rapidity of my superficial observation keeps it from being realised. It is certainly all my fault. I am so very deceptive. I arouse false expectations. You see,” she continued meeting her again with pleasant friendliness, “you haven’t yet learned that I am at once impetuous and slow-minded.”

  Time passed and they renewed their habit of desultory meetings at public places, but these were not the same as before. There was between them now a consciousness of strain, a sense of new adjustments, of uncertain standards and of changing values.

  Helen was patient but occasionally moved to trenchant criticism, Adele was irritable and discursive but always ended with a frank almost bald apology for her inadequacy.

  In the course of time they again arranged to meet in Helen’s room. It was a wet rainy, sleety day and Adele felt chilly and unresponsive. Throwing off her hat and coat, she sat down after a cursory greeting and looked meditatively into the fire. “How completely we exemplify entirely different types” she began at last without looking at her companion. “You are a blooming Anglo-Saxon. You know what you want and you go and get it without spending your days and nights changing backwards and forwards from yes to no. If you want to stick a knife into a man you just naturally go and stick straight and hard. You would probably kill him but it would soon be over while I, I would have so many compunctions and considerations that I would cut up all his surface anatomy and make it a long drawn agony but unless he should bleed to death quite by accident, I wouldn’t do him any serious injury. No you are the very brave man, passionate but not emotional, capable of great sacrifice but not tender-hearted.

  “And then you really want things badly enough to go out and get them and that seems to me very strange. I want things too but only in order to understand them and I never go and get them. I am a hopeless coward, I hate to risk hurting myself or anybody else. All I want to do is to meditate endlessly and think and talk. I know you object because you believe it necessary to feel something to think about and you contend that I don’t give myself time to find it. I recognise the justice of that criticism and I am doing my best these days to let it come.”

  She relapsed into silence and sat there smiling ironically into the fire. The silence grew longer and her smile turned into a look almost of disgust. Finally she wearily drew breath, shook her head and got up. “Ah! don’t go,” came from Helen in quick appeal. Adele answered the words. “No I am not going. I just want to look at these books.” She wandered about a little. Finally she stopped by Helen’s side and stood looking down at her with a gentle irony that wavered on the edge of scorn.

  “Do you know” she began in her usual tone of dispassionate inquiry “you are a wonderful example of double personality. The you that I used to know and didn’t like, and the occasional you that when I do catch a glimpse of it seems to me so very wonderful, haven’t any possible connection with each other. It isn’t as if my conception of you had gradually changed because it hasn’t. I realise always one whole you consisting of a laugh so hard that it rattles, a voice that suggests a certain brutal coarseness and a point of view that is aggressively unsympathetic, and all that is one whole you and it alternates with another you that possesses a purity and intensity of feeling that leaves me quite awestruck and a gentleness of voice and manner and an infinitely tender patience that entirely overmasters me. Now the question is which is really you because these two don’t seem to have any connections. Perhaps when I really know something about you, the whole will come together but at present it is always either the one or the other and I haven’t the least idea which is reallest. You certainly are one too many for me.” She shrugged her shoulders, threw out her hands helplessly and sat down again before the fire. She roused at last and became conscious that Helen was trembling bitterly. All hesitations were swept away by Adele’s instant passionate sympathy for a creature obviously in pain and she took her into her arms with pure maternal tenderness. Helen gave way utterly. “I tried to be adequate to your experiments” she said at last “but you had no mercy. You were not content until you had dissected out every nerve in my body and left it quite exposed and it was too much, too much. You should give your subjects occasional respite even in the ardor of research.” She said it without bitterness. “Good God” cried Adele utterly dumbfounded “did you think that I was deliberately making you suffer in order to study results? Heavens and earth what do you take me for! Do you suppose that I for a moment realised that you were in pain. No! no! it is only my cursed habit of being concerned only with my own thoughts, and then you know I never for a moment believed that you really cared about me, that is one of the things that with all my conceit I never can believe. Helen how could you have had any use for me if you thought me capable of such wanton cruelty?”

  “I didn’t know,” she answered “I was willing that you should do what you liked if it interested you and I would stand it as well as I could.”

  “Oh! Oh!” groaned Adele yearning over her with remorseful sympathy “surely dear you believe that I had no idea of your pain and that my brutality was due to ignorance and not intention.”

  “Yes! yes! I know” whispered Helen, nestling to her. After a while she went on, “You know dear you mean so very much to me for with all your inveterate egotism you are the only person with whom I have ever come into close contact, whom I could continue to respect.”

  “Faith” said Adele ruefully “I confess I can’t see why. After all even at my best I am only tolerably decent. There are plenty of others, your experience has been unfortunate that’s all, and then you know you have always shut yourself off by that fatal illusion of yours that you could stand completely alone.” And then she chanted with tender mockery, “And the very strong man Kwasind and he was a very strong man” she went on “even if being an unconquerable solitary wasn’t entirely a success.”

  2

  All through the winter Helen at intervals spent a few days with Mabel Neathe in Baltimore. Adele was always more or less with them on these occasions. On the surface they preserved the same relations as had existed on the steamer. The only evidence that Mabel gave of a realisation of a difference was in never if she could avoid it leaving them alone together.

  It was tacitly understood between them that on these rare occasions they should give each other no sign. As the time drew near when Adele was once more to leave for Europe this time for an extended absence, the tension of this self-imposed inhibition became unendurable and they as tacitly ceased to respect it.

  Some weeks before her intended departure Adele was one afternoon as usual taking tea with Mabel. “You have never met Mr and Mrs. T. have you?” Mabel asked quite out of the air. They had never definitely avoided talking of Helen but they had not spoken of her unnecessarily. “No” Adele answered, “I haven’t wanted to. I don’t like perfunctory civilities and I know that I belong to the number of Helen’s friends of whom they do not approve.”

  “You would not be burdened by their civility, they never take the trouble to be as amiable as that.”

  “Are your experiences so very unpleasant when you are stopping there? I shouldn’t think that you would care to do it often.”

  “Sometimes I feel as if it couldn’t be endured but if I didn’t, Helen would leave them and I think she would regret that and so I don’t want her to do it. I have only to say the word and she would leave them at once and sometimes I think she will do it anyway. If she once makes up her mind she won’t reconsider it. Of course I wouldn’t say such things to any one but you, you know.”