The Price She Paid Part 12

"Was I thinking aloud?" said Mildred, as she gave him her hand.

"You said something about 'getting a good deal.'" He inspected her with the freedom of an old friend and with the thoroughness of a connoisseur. Women who took pains with themselves and were satisfied with the results liked Stanley Baird's knowing and appreciative way of noting the best points in their toilets. "You're looking fine,"

declared he. "It must be a pleasure to them up in the Rue de la Paix to dress you. That's more than can be said for nine out of ten of the women who go there. Yes, you're looking fine--and in grand health, too. Why, you look younger than I ever saw you. Nothing like marriage to freshen a girl up. Well, I suppose waiting round for a husband who may or may not turn up does wear a woman down."

"It almost killed me," laughed Mildred. "And you were largely responsible."

"I?" said Baird. "You didn't want me. I was too old for you."

"No, I didn't want you," said Mildred. "But you spoiled me. I couldn't endure the boys of my own age."

Stanley was remembering that Mildred had married a man much older than he. With some notion of a careless sort of tact in mind he said, "I was betwixt and between--neither young enough nor old enough."

"You've married, too, since we met. By the way, thank you again for that charming remembrance. You always did have such good taste. But why didn't you come to the wedding--you and your wife?"

He laughed. "We were busy busting up," said he. "You hadn't heard?

It's been in the papers. She's gone back to her people. Oh, nothing disgraceful on either side. Simply that we bored each other to death.

She was crazy about horses and dogs, and that set. I think the stable's the place for horses--don't care to have 'em parading through the house all the time, every room, every meal, sleeping and waking.

And dogs--the infernal brutes always have fleas. Fleas only tickled her, but they bite me--raise welts and hills. There's your husband now, isn't it?"

Baird was looking up at the windows of the Continental, across the street. Mildred's glance slowly and carelessly followed his. At one window stood the little general, gazing abstractedly out over the gardens. At another window Mildred saw Harding; at a third, her maid; at a fourth, Harding's a.s.sistant, Drawl; at a fifth, three servants of the retinue. Except the general, all were looking at her.

"You've married a very extraordinary man," said Baird, in a correct tone of admiration. "One of the ablest and most interesting men we've got, _I_ think."

"So you are free again?" said Mildred, looking at him with a queer, cold smile.

"Yes, and no," replied Stanley. "I hope to be entirely free. It's her move next. I'm expecting it every day. But I'm thoroughly respectable. Won't you and the general dine with me?"

"Thanks, but I'm sailing for home to-morrow or next day."

"That's interesting," said Baird, with enthusiasm. "So am I. What s.h.i.+p do you go on?"

"I don't know yet. I'm to decide this afternoon, after lunch." She laughed. "I'm sitting here waiting for someone to ask me to lunch.

I've not had even coffee yet."

"Lunch with me!" cried Baird. "I'll go get the general--I know him slightly."

"I didn't say anything about the general," said Mildred.

Stanley smiled apologetically. "It wouldn't do for you to go about with me--not when my missus is looking for grounds for divorce."

"Why not?" said Mildred. "So's my husband."

"You busted up, too? Now, that's what _I_ call jolly." And he cast a puzzled glance up at the abstracted general. "I say, Mildred, this is no place for either of us, is it?"

"I'd rather be where there's food," confessed she.

"You think it's a joke, but I a.s.sure you-- Oh, you WERE joking--about YOUR bust-up?"

"No, indeed," she a.s.sured him. "I walked out a while ago, and I couldn't go back if I would--and I don't think I would if I could."

"That's foolish. Better go back," advised he. He was preparing hastily to decamp from so perilous a neighborhood. "One marriage is about like another, once you get through the surface. I'm sure you'll be better off than--back with your stepfather."

"I've no intention of going to his house," she declared. "Oh, there's your brother. I forgot."

"So had I forgotten him. I'll not go there, either. In fact, I've not thought where I'll go."

"You seem to have done mighty little thinking before you took a very serious step for a woman." He was uneasily eying the rigid, abstracted little figure a story up across the way.

"Those things aren't a question of thinking," said she absently. "I never thought in my life--don't think I could if I tried. But when the time came I--I walked out." She came back to herself, laughed. "I don't understand why I'm telling you all this, especially as you're mad with fright and wild to get away. Well, good-by, Stanley."

He lifted his hat. "Good-by. We'll meet when we can do so without my getting a scandal on you." He walked a few paces, turned, and came back. "By the way, I'm sailing on the Deutschland. I thought you'd like to know--so that you and I wouldn't by any chance cross on the same boat."

"Thanks," said she dryly.

"What's the matter?" asked he, arrested, despite his anxiety to be gone, by the sad, scornful look in her eyes.

"Nothing. Why?"

"You had such a--such a queer look."

"Really? Good-by."

In fact, she had thought--had hoped for the sake of her liking for him--that he had come back to make the glaringly omitted offer of help that should have come from any human being learning that a fellow being was in the precarious position in which she had told him she was. Not that she would have accepted any such offer. Still, she would have liked to have heard the kindly words. She sat watching his handsome, graceful figure, draped in the most artistically cut of long dark overcoats, until he disappeared in the crowd in the Rue de Castiglione.

Then, without a glance up at the interested, not to say excited windows of the general's splendid and spreading apartments, she strolled down the gardens toward the Place Concorde. In Paris the beautiful, on a bright and brisk day it is all but impossible to despair when one still has left youth and health. Mildred was not happy--far from it. The future, the immediate future, pressed its terrors upon her. But in mitigation there was, perhaps born of youth and inexperience, a giddy sense of relief. She had not realized how abhorrent the general was--married life with the general. She had been resigning herself to it, accepting it as the only thing possible, keeping it heavily draped with her vanities of wealth and luxury--until she discovered that the wealth and the luxury were in reality no more hers than they were her maid's. And now she was free!

That word free did not have its full meaning for her. She had never known what real freedom was; women of the comfortable cla.s.s--and men, too, for that matter--usually are born into the petty slavery of conventions at least, and know nothing else their whole lives through--never know the joy of the thought and the act of a free mind and a free heart. Still, she was released from a bondage that seemed slavish even to her, and the release gave her a sensation akin to the joy of freedom. A heavy hand that was crus.h.i.+ng her very soul had been lifted off--no, FLUNG off, and by herself. That thought, terrifying though it was, also gave her a certain new and exalting self-respect.

After all, she was not a worm. She must have somewhere in her the germs of something less contemptible than the essential character of so many of the eminently respectable women she knew. She could picture them in the situation in which she had found herself. What would they have done? Why, what every instinct of her education impelled her to do; what some latent love of freedom, some unsuspected courage of self-respect had forbidden her to do, had withheld her from doing.

Her thoughts and the gorgeous suns.h.i.+ne and her youth and health put her in a steadily less cheerless mood as by a roundabout way she sought the shop of the jeweler who sold the general the gold bag she had selected.

The proprietor himself was in the front part of the shop and received "Madame la Generale" with all the honors of her husband's wealth. She brought no experience and no natural trading talent to the enterprise she was about to undertake; so she went directly to the main point.

"This bag," said she, laying it upon the gla.s.s between them, "I bought it here a short time ago."

"I remember perfectly, madame. It is the handsomest, the most artistic, we have sold this year."

"I wish to sell it back to you," said she.

"You wish to get something else and include it as part payment, madame?"

"No, I wish to get the money for it."

"Ah, but that is difficult. We do not often make those arrangements.

Second-hand articles--"

"But the bag is quite new. Anyhow, it must have some value. Of course I'd not expect the full price."

The jeweler smiled. "The full price? Ah, madame, we should not think of offering it again as it is. We should--"