Nona felt an inward tremor; was she going to hear Lita’s name? She turned her glance on Heuston with a certain hostility.
“Oh, Stan’s hints — .”
“You see what Nona thinks of my views on cities and men,” Heuston shrugged. He had remained on his feet, as though about to take leave; but once again the girl felt his eager eyes beseeching her.
“Are you waiting to walk home with me? You needn’t. I’m going to stay for hours,” she said, smiling across him at Wyant as she settled down into one of the chintz armchairs.
“Aren’t you a little hard on him?” Wyant suggested, when the door had closed on their visitor. “It’s not exactly a crime to want to walk home with you.”
Nona made an impatient gesture. “Stan bores me.”
“Ah, well, I suppose he’s not enough of a novelty. Or not up-to~date enough; YOUR dates. Some of his ideas seem to me pretty subversive; but I suppose in your set and Lita’s a young man who doesn’t jazz all day and drink all night — or vice versa — is a back number.”
The girl did not take this up, and after a moment Wyant continued, in his half-mocking half-querulous voice: “Or is it that he isn’t ‘psychic’ enough? That’s the latest, isn’t it? When you’re not high-kicking you’re all high-thinking; and that reminds me of Stan’s news — ”
“Yes?” Nona brought it out between parched lips. Her gaze turned from Wyant to the coals smouldering in the grate. She did not want to face any one just then.
“Well, it seems there’s going to be a gigantic muck-raking — one of the worst we’ve had yet. Into this Mahatma business; you know, the nigger chap your mother’s always talking about. There’s a hint of it in the last number of the ‘Looker-on’; here . . . where is it? Never mind, though. What it says isn’t a patch on the real facts, Stan tells me. It seems the goings-on in that School of Oriental Thought — what does he call the place: Dawnside? — have reached such a point that the Grant Lindons, whose girl has been making a ‘retreat’ there, or whatever they call it, are out to have a thorough probing. They say the police don’t want to move because so many people we know are mixed up in it; but Lindon’s back is up, and he swears he won’t rest till he gets the case before the Grand Jury. . .”
As Wyant talked, the weight lifted from Nona’s breast. Much she cared for the Mahatma, or for the Grant Lindons! Stuffy old~fashioned people — she didn’t wonder Bee Lindon had broken away from such parents — though she was a silly fool, no doubt. Besides, the Mahatma certainly had reduced Mrs. Manford’s hips — and made her less nervous too: for Mrs. Manford sometimes WAS nervous, in spite of her breathless pursuit of repose. Not, of course, in the same querulous uncontrolled way as poor Arthur Wyant, who had never been taught poise, or mental uplift, or being in tune with the Infinite; but rather as one agitated by the incessant effort to be calm. And in that respect the Mahatma’s rhythmic exercises had without doubt been helpful. No; Nona didn’t care a fig for scandals about the School of Oriental Thought. And the relief of finding that the subject she had dreaded to hear broached had probably never even come to Wyant’s ears, gave her a reaction of light-heartedness.
There were moments when Nona felt oppressed by responsibilities and anxieties not of her age, apprehensions that she could not shake off and yet had not enough experience of life to know how to meet. One or two of her girl friends — in the brief intervals between whirls and thrills — had confessed to the same vague disquietude. It was as if, in the beaming determination of the middle-aged, one and all of them, to ignore sorrow and evil, “think them away” as superannuated bogies, survivals of some obsolete European superstition unworthy of enlightened Americans, to whom plumbing and dentistry had given higher standards, and bi-focal glasses a clearer view of the universe — as if the demons the elder generation ignored, baulked of their natural prey, had cast their hungry shadow over the young. After all, somebody in every family had to remember now and then that such things as wickedness, suffering and death had not yet been banished from the earth; and with all those bright-complexioned white-haired mothers mailed in massage and optimism, and behaving as if they had never heard of anything but the Good and the Beautiful, perhaps their children had to serve as vicarious sacrifices. There were hours when Nona Manford, bewildered little Iphigenia, uneasily argued in this way: others when youth and inexperience reasserted themselves, and the load slipped from her, and she wondered why she didn’t always believe, like her elders, that one had only to be brisk, benevolent and fond to prevail against the powers of darkness.
She felt this relief now; but a vague restlessness remained with her, and to ease it, and prove to herself that she was not nervous, she mentioned to Wyant that she had just been lunching with Jim and Lita.
Wyant brightened, as he always did at his son’s name. “Poor old Jim! He dropped in yesterday, and I thought he looked overworked! I sometimes wonder if that father of yours hasn’t put more hustle into him than a Wyant can assimilate.” Wyant spoke good~humouredly; his first bitterness against the man who had supplanted him (a sentiment regarded by Pauline as barbarous and mediæval) had gradually been swallowed up in gratitude for Dexter Manford’s kindness to Jim. The oddly-assorted trio, Wyant, Pauline and her new husband, had been drawn into a kind of inarticulate understanding by their mutual tenderness for the progeny of the two marriages, and Manford loved Jim almost as much as Wyant loved Nona.
“Oh, well,” the girl said, “Jim always does everything with all his might. And now that he’s doing it for Lita and the baby, he’s got to keep on, whether he wants to or not.”
“I suppose so. But why do you say ‘whether’?” Wyant questioned with one of his disconcerting flashes. “Doesn’t he want to?”
Nona was vexed at her slip. “Of course. I only meant that he used to be rather changeable in his tastes, and that getting married has given him an object.”
“How very old-fashioned! You ARE old-fashioned, you know, my child; in spite of the jazz. I suppose that’s what I’ve done for YOU, in exchange for Manford’s modernizing Jim. Not much of an exchange, I’m afraid. But how long do you suppose Lita will care about being an object to Jim?”
“Why shouldn’t she care? She’d go on caring about the baby, even if . . . not that I mean. . .”
“Oh, I know. That’s a great baby. Queer, you know — I can see he’s going to have the Wyant nose and forehead. It’s about all we’ve left to give. But look here — haven’t you really heard anything more about the Mahatma? I thought that Lindon girl was a pal of yours. Now listen — ”
When Nona Manford emerged into the street she was not surprised to meet Stanley Heuston strolling toward her across Stuyvesant Square. Neither surprised, nor altogether sorry; do what she would, she could never quite repress the sense of ease and well-being that his nearness gave. And yet half the time they were together she always spent in being angry with him and wishing him away. If only the relation between them had been as simple as that between herself and Jim! And it might have been — ought to have been — seeing that Heuston was Jim’s cousin, and nearly twice her age; yes, and had been married before she left the schoolroom. Really, her exasperation was justified. Yet no one understood her as well as Stanley; not even Jim, who was so much dearer and more lovable. Life was a confusing business to Nona Manford.
“How absurd! I asked you not to wait. I suppose you think I’m not old enough to be out alone after dark.”
“That hadn’t occurred to me; and I’m not waiting to walk home with you,” Heuston rejoined with some asperity. “But I do want to say two words,” he added, his voice breaking into persuasion.
Nona stopped, her heels firmly set on the pavement. “The same old two?”
“No. Besides, there are three of those. You never COULD count.” He hesitated: “This time it’s only about Arthur — ”
“Why; what’s the matter?” The sense of apprehension woke in her