Dangerous Days Part 21

"She has a girl she wants to get into the mill."

"Good gracious, she must be changed," said Natalie. And proceeded--she was ready to go out to dinner--to one of her long and critical surveys of herself in the cheval mirror. Recently those surveys had been rather getting on Clayton's nerves. She customarily talked, not to him, but to his reflection over her shoulder, when, indeed, she took her eyes from herself.

"I wonder," she said, fussing with a shoulder-strap, "who Audrey will marry if anything happens to Chris?"

She saw his face and raised her eyebrows.

"You needn't scowl like that. He's quite as likely as not never to come back, isn't he? And Audrey didn't care a pin for him."

"We're talking rather lightly of a very terrible thing, aren't we?"

"Oh, you're not," she retorted. "You think just the same things as I do, but you're not so open about them. That's all."

CHAPTER XI

Graham was engaged. He hardly knew himself how it had come about. His affair with Marion had been, up to the very moment of his blurted--out "I want you," as light-hearted as that of any of the a.s.sorted young couples who flirted and kissed behind the closed doors of that popular house.

The crowd which frequented the Hayden home was gay, tolerant and occasionally nasty. It made ardent love semi-promiscuously, it drank rather more than it should, and its desire for a good time often brought it rather close to the danger line. It did not actually step over, but it hovered gayly on the brink.

And Toots remained high-priestess of her little cult. The men liked her. The girls imitated her. And Graham, young as he was, seeing her popularity, was vastly gratified to find himself standing high in her favor.

Marion was playing for the stake of the Spencer money. In her intimate circle every one knew it but Graham.

"How's every little millionaire?" was Tommy Hale's usual greeting.

She knew only one way to handle men, and with the stake of the Spencer money she tried every lure of her experience on Graham. It was always Marion who on cold nights sat huddled against him in the back seat of the Hayden's rather shabby car, her warm ungloved hand in his. It was Marion who taught him to mix the newest of c.o.c.ktails, and who later praised his skill. It was Marion who insisted on his having a third, too, when the second had already set his ears drumming.

The effect on the boy of her steady propinquity, of her constant caressing touches, of the general letting-down of the bars of restraint, was to rouse in him impulses of which he was only vaguely conscious, and his proposal of marriage, when it finally came, was by nature of a confession. He had kissed her, not for the first time, but this time she had let him hold her, and he had rained kisses on her face.

"I want you," he had said, huskily.

And even afterward, when the thing was done, and she had said she would marry him, she had to ask him if he loved her.

"I--of course I do," he had said. And had drawn her back into his arms.

He wanted to marry her at once. It was the strongest urge of his life, and put into his pleading an almost pathetic earnestness. But she was firm enough now.

"I don't think your family will be crazy about this, you know."

"What do we care for the family? They're not marrying you, are they?"

"They will have to help to support me, won't they?"

And he had felt a trifle chilled.

It was not a part of Marion's program to enter the Spencer family unwelcomed. She had a furtive fear of Clayton Spencer, the fear of the indirect for the direct, of the designing woman for the essentially simple and open male. It was not on her cards to marry Graham and to try to live on his salary.

So for a few weeks the engagement was concealed even from Mrs.

Hayden, and Graham, who had received some stock from his father on his twenty-first birthday, secretly sold a few shares and bought the engagement ring. With that Marion breather easier. It was absolute evidence.

Her methods were the methods of her kind and her time. To allure a man by every wile she knew, and having won him to keep him uncertain and uneasy, was her perfectly simple creed. So she reduced love to its cheapest terms, pa.s.sion and jealousy, played on them both, and made Graham alternately happy and wretched.

Once he found Rodney Page there, lounging about with the manner of a habitue. It seemed to Graham that he was always stumbling over Rodney those days, either at home, with drawings and color sketches spread out before him, or at the Hayden house.

"What's he hanging around here for?" he demanded when Rodney, having bent over Marion's hand and kissed it, had gone away. "If he could see that bare spot on the top of his head he'd stop all that kow-towing."

"You're being rather vulgar, aren't you?" Marion had said. "He's a very old friend and a very dear one."

"Probably in love with you once, like all the rest?"

He had expected denial from her, but she had held her cigaret up in the air, and reflectively regarded its small gilt tip.

"I'm afraid he's rather unhappy. Poor Rod!"

"About me?"

"About me."

"Look here, Toots," he burst out. "I'm playing square with you. I never go anywhere but here. I--I'm perfectly straight with you. But every time here I find some of your old guard hanging round. It makes me wild."

"They've always come here, and as long as our engagement isn't known, I can't very well stop them."

"Then let me go to father."

"He'll turn you out, you know. I know men, dear old thing, and father is going to raise a merry little h.e.l.l about us. He's the sort who wants to choose his son's wife for him. He'd like to play Providence." She watched him, smiling, but with slightly narrowed eyes. "I rather think he has somebody in mind for you now."

"I don't believe it."

"Of course you don't. But he has."

"Who?"

"Delight. She's exactly the sort he thinks you'll need. He still thinks you are a little boy, Graham, so he picks out a nice little girl for you. Such a nice little girl."

The amused contempt in her voice made him angry--for Delight rather than himself. He was extremely grown-up and dignified the rest of the afternoon; he stood very tall and straight, and spoke in his deepest voice.

It became rather an obsession in him to prove his manhood, and added to that was the effect of Marion's constant, insidious appeal to the surging blood of his youth. And, day after day, he was shut in his office with Anna Klein.

He thought he was madly in love with Marion. He knew that he was not at all in love with Anna Klein. But she helped to relieve the office tedium.

He was often aware, sitting at his desk, with Anna before him, notebook in hand, that while he read his letters her eyes were on him. More than once he met them, and there was something in them that healed his wounded vanity. He was a man to her. He was indeed almost a G.o.d, but that he did not know. In his present frame of mind, he would have accepted even that, however.

Then, one day he kissed her. She was standing very close, and the impulse was quick and irresistible. She made no effort to leave his arms, and he kissed her again.

"Like me a little, do you?" he had asked, smiling into her eyes.