In 1910 Harriet Price, Ames’s mother and widow of John Price, who had been head of the Price Tractor and Motor Company, built a new house. In 1912 she died, and the mansion, together with many other good things, among them a controlling interest in the tractor company, passed to Ames, the only child. The house, which was an immense square building of yellow stone in the Italian Renaissance style, occupied, with its grounds, an entire block in the best section of the fashionable boulevard. Stacey had always rather liked the exterior, though it was not Parkins and May but a Chicago firm of architects who had built the house. It was severe, commanding, less inharmonious in Vernon than most anachronisms, and the four great chimneys were really fine. Never having cared for the Prices, Stacey had seen the interior but once—at a large house-warming affair given in the winter of 1910, to which he had gone out of curiosity. It had struck him then as Chicago decorators’ stuff (which it was), proper, faultlessly in period, quite without character. He remembered perfectly the dreariness of his impression.
So now, when he entered the vast hall, his first glimpse of it made him aware of change.
“Mr. Carroll, sir?” asked the English butler. “Will you go upstairs, please? Mrs. Price is expecting you there, sir.”
“Yes,” said Stacey, “half a minute.” He walked quickly across the hall and stood for a moment at the entrance to the great drawing-room on the left. As he looked in he smiled, half appreciatively, half ironically. Change? Well, rather! To begin with, Marian—it was Marian, of course—had swept away pretty much everything that had been in that room when Stacey had first seen it. But, even supposing the discarded furniture and pictures to have been sold, he hardly thought the present relative bareness had saved Ames money. That long table, the Florentine chest, and the copy of a relief in marble with touches of blue and gold (Desiderio da Settignano?)—if it was a copy—h’m! He turned back. “All right,” he said to the butler. “I’ll go up.”
As he mounted the broad stone stairway, the man following, his glance rested on a tapestry—a Medici tapestry, if he knew anything about it. “Whew!” he thought. But his eyes were just a little hard now. Marian would take and take—and give nothing. All the same, what did she get from it? Again he felt suddenly unreasoningly sorry for her.
The butler conducted Stacey to the south end of the upper hall, tapped perfunctorily at a door, opened it, and Stacey went in.
The room he entered was a small sitting-room—Marian’s own, most certainly—English in feeling, crowded with a great many things. Or, rather, no, on second thought Stacey knew it well:—it was like what pleasant English people did sometimes to their smallest, best loved room in a Tuscan villa. The French windows were wide open, but the heavy wooden shutters were closed to shut out the heat, so that only a soft summer air entered, with perfumes from the garden outside. There was a kind of radiant greenish twilight in the room.
No one was there, though a flame burned beneath a silver kettle, two fragile cups stood ready, and a tea-wagon with bread and butter and cake was drawn up near the table. After perhaps a minute Marian entered through another door.
She was wearing a simple dress of a pearl gray color, short, as the fashion was, and with a silver cord about the waist. She looked as Greek as any one or anything modern could look, and Stacey drew in his breath sharply with admiration of her beauty. Nevertheless, as he shook hands with her and replied to her apparently natural greeting, he was wary. All this delightful readiness for his visit, the coziness, the shining tea things, Marian herself. . . . “?‘I mistrust the Greeks and the gifts they bring,’?” he said to himself suddenly, and smiled, finding the quotation apt, Marian looking as she did. But he kept it to himself.
Marian sat down at the table, but remained for a moment gracefully idle, smiling at him, before beginning to make the tea.
“You see all my preparations, Stacey,” she said lightly. “You see what an event it is when you come. Aren’t you flattered?”
“You know I am,” he returned, almost disarmed now by her remark. And this was true. For Stacey was genuinely anxious to be friends with Marian. After all, at bottom he was a simple person. That is, he was complex only on his receptive side. He could perceive, quite without effort, the subtlest, most tangled, personal relationships all about him, whether or not he was himself involved in them; he had always been able to do this. But the real Stacey Carroll in the centre of this rich shimmering web remained simple. The impulses on which he acted were simple, almost boyish sometimes.
Marian and Stacey were both silent while she measured out the tea and poured the hot water. Gazing at her so closely, he noted that she was very thin. Her fine pointed face was almost sharp, and her bare arms, lifted prettily to the silver urn, were too slender. Stacey was sorry. But, considering himself questioningly, he recognized that this half-pity for Marian, together with an artist’s admiration of her loveliness, was all that he felt for her now. Absolutely all. No touch of love remained. And Stacey was immensely relieved.
“It has to brew seven minutes,” said Marian, glancing at her tiny turquoise-incrusted wrist-watch, then leaning back in a corner of her chair and resting her long slim hands on one arm of it.
“Most people treat tea-making so clumsily,” Stacey remarked. “You make it an art, just as you do with all the other daily things. They acquire distinction. That’s nice.”
“Thanks,” she said idly, “but it’s only that it tastes better if it’s made right, you know.”
“And isn’t that something? Marian,” he added, noting that her fingers were quite bare, “don’t you wear your rings any more?”
She glanced down at her hands. “No,” she said, “I don’t like them. And they slip off.”
“You mustn’t let yourself get so thin,” he returned solicitously.
She gave him a quick hard smile. “Of course not. I must keep myself a handsome objet d’art, mustn’t I? I remember all about the Parthenon, Stacey.”
“No, no!” he answered, discouraged, getting a glimpse of her antagonism, “I didn’t mean that! I only meant that you must stay well. What a rotter you must think me, to take my remark like that! As far as that goes, you’re more beautiful at present than I’ve ever seen you,” he added simply.
But he saw her bite her lip after her pettish outburst, and he felt lost—baffled. To save him, he could not make out what she was after; whether she regretted her spiteful little attack because it was not in line with a carefully prepared program or because she merely wanted to be friendly and hadn’t meant to grow petulant. His mind played restlessly over the whole situation and could make nothing of it.
“Yes, that was rather nasty of me, I admit,” said Marian after a moment.
It was some little time before she could again conquer his wariness, but she did so at last. There is a smooth disarming intimacy about the tea-hour. The ceremony of tea itself is so fine; it is elegant, aloof and gracious; it ministers to taste yet not to appetite; people are not there to chew and be nourished. And then the hour itself is lovable—the sun’s rays growing level, dust in the air turned golden, a hush perceptible even through the city’s noise. Stacey surrendered to the atmosphere of intimacy. He drank the fragrant China tea and talked without restraint of a number of things. Perhaps, he thought, he and Marian might still be friends. He had treated her abominably and was sorry for it now that he understood her better, though she, he admitted, understood him better than he her.
They could be silent, too. Pauses were not awkward.
“You gather so much fineness together, Marian,” he remarked once. “All that you touch becomes fine, turns to gold.” He ceased abruptly. That was the wrong allusion, he thought, annoyed at his clumsiness.
But she did not seem to mind it. “You’re really quite kindly toward me, aren’t you, Stacey?” she replied, with perhaps just a hint of irony in her voice, but smiling pleasantly.
“Why shouldn’t I be?”
“No reason at all, of course,” she said prettily, making him a mocking little bow. “Have some more tea.”
He held out his cup, watched her fill it, then set it down again, all mechanically. “People get in states of mind—for no particular reason,” he said vaguely, feeling apologetic yet not wanting to go into the matter—as much on her account as on his.
“Yes, and then into others. Tell me:—do you feel kindly toward everybody now?”
“Oh, I shouldn’t go so far as to claim that!” he replied uncomfortably. It went against his whole nature to talk about himself to Marian, yet he felt he owed her some sort of confession. So he went on haltingly. “I used to get awfully worked up about a lot of things—about people being greedy, for instance. I don’t mean any one person—everybody, whole human race. But then,” he concluded diffidently, “it struck me that they weren’t hateful on account of it, but only pathetic, since their greed never brought them happiness—never!”
Marian’s face was half turned away from him and she was resting her chin in her cupped hand—an old familiar pose—so that he could not see her expression. But all at once she dropped her hand, lay back in her chair, and laughed musically, startling him.
“Oh, Stacey, you’re so funny!” she exclaimed. “I’ve told you that before. But I think,” she added, not laughing now, smiling at him deliberately, “that I liked you better in your fierce, world-defying, Byronic stage, when you were so dramatic, than now in this Christ-like phase.”
He winced sharply. She had really hurt him there. He despised people who went sweetly through the world doing good to others; which was what she meant. Stacey flushed hotly. But he caught a fleeting gleam of triumph in Marian’s eyes, and at this his anger and most of his shame left him, and............