Part 10 (1/2)

”Miss Rhinelander,” he said firmly, ”I am taking this young lady as my partner,” and suiting the action to the word, he graciously extended his arm to Ella who took it with a pretty blush.

It was General Grant's turn to blush when the other guests, with a few exceptions, applauded his choice loudly, and made way enthusiastically as the handsome couple advanced to the brilliantly lighted dining room.

But although the hostess had provided the most costly of viands, I am afraid that the brave general did not fully appreciate them, for in his soul was the joy of a strong man who has found his mate and in his heart was the singing of the eternal song, ”I love her--I love her--I love her!”

It was only too apparent to the other guests what had happened and to their credit be it said that they heartily approved his choice, for Mrs. Rhinelander and her scheming daughter Geraldine had made countless enemies with their haughty manners, whereas the sweet simplicity of Ella Flowers had won her numerous friends. And all laughed merrily when General Grant, in his after dinner speech, said ”flowers” instead of ”flour” when speaking of provisioning the army--a slip which caused both the general and Miss Flowers to blush furiously, greatly to the delight of the good-natured guests. ”All the world loves a lover”--truer words were never penned.

After dinner, while the other men, according to the usages of best society, were filling the air of the dining room with the fumes of nicotine, the general, who did not use tobacco, excused himself--amid many sly winks from the other men--and wandered out into the conservatory.

There he found Ella.

”General,” she began.

”Miss Flowers,” said the strong man simply, ”Call me Ulysses.”

And there let us leave them.

CHAPTER EIGHT

CUSTER'S LAST STAND

In the Manner of Edith Wharton

It was already late afternoon and the gas street lamps of the Boul'

Mich' were being lighted for Paris, or at least for Paris in summer, by a somewhat frigid looking allumeur, when Philip Custer came to the end of his letter. He hesitated for an instant, wrote ”Your----,” then crossed that out and subst.i.tuted ”Sincerely.” No, decidedly the first ending, with its, as is, or, rather, as ordinarily is, the case in hymeneal epistles, somewhat possessive sense, would no longer suffice.

”Yours truly”--perhaps; ”sincerely”--better; but certainly not ”Your husband.” He was done, thank G.o.d, with presences.

Philip sipped his absinthe and gazed for an instant through the Cafe window; a solitary fiacre rattled by; he picked up the result of his afternoon's labor, wearily.

”Dear Mary,” he read, ”When I told you that my employers were sending me to Paris, I lied to you. It was, perhaps, the first direct lie that I ever told you; it was, I know now, the last. But a falsehood by word of mouth mattered really very little in comparison with the enormous lie that my life with you had become.”

Philip paused and smiled, somewhat bitterly, at that point in the letter. Mary, with her American woman's intuition, would undoubtedly surmise that he had run off with Mrs. Everett; there was a certain ironical humor in the fact that Mary's mistaken guess would be sadly indicative of her whole failure to understand what her husband was, to use a slang expression, ”driving at.”

”I hope that you will believe me when I say that I came to Paris to paint. In the past four years the desire to do that has grown steadily until it has mastered me. You do not understand. I found no one in America who did. I think my mother might have, had she lived; certainly it is utterly incomprehensible to father.”

Philip stopped. Ay, there was the rub--General Custer, and all that he stood for. Philip glimpsed momentarily those early boyhood days with his father, spent mainly in army posts; the boy's cavalry uniform, in which he had ridden old Bess about the camp, waving his miniature sabre; the day he had been thrown to the ground by a strange horse which he had disobediently mounted, just as his father arrived on the scene.

Philip had never forgotten his father's words that day. ”Don't crawl, son,--don't whine. It was your fault this time and you deserved what you got. Lots of times it won't be your fault, but you'll have to take your licking anyway. But remember this, son--take your medicine like a man--always.”

Philip groaned; he knew what the general would say when the news of his son's desertion of his wife and four year old boy reached him. He knew that he never could explain to his father the absolute torture of the last four years of enervating domesticity and business mediocrity--the torture of the Beauty within him crying for expression, half satisfied by the stolen evenings at the art school but constantly growing stronger in its all-consuming appeal. No, life to his father was a simple problem in army ethics--a problem in which duty was ”a”, one of the known factors; ”x,” the unknown, was either ”bravery” or ”cowardice” when brought in contact with ”a”. Having solved this problem, his father had closed the book; of the higher mathematics, and especially of those complex problems to which no living man knew the final answer, he had no conception. And yet----

Philip resumed his reading to avoid the old endless maze of subtleties.

”It is not that I did not--or do not--love you. It is, rather, that something within me is crying out--something which is stronger than I, and which I cannot resist. I have waited two years to be sure.

Yesterday, as soon as I reached here, I took my work to the man who is considered the finest art critic in Paris. He told me that there was a quality to my painting which he had seen in that of no living artist; he told me that in five years of hard work I should be able to produce work which Botticelli would be proud to have done. Do you understand that, Mary--Botticelli!

”But no, forgive me. My paean of joy comes strangely in a letter which should be of abject humility for what must seem to you, to father, and to all, a cowardly, selfish act of desertion--a whining failure to face life. Oh dear, dear Mary if you could but understand what a h.e.l.l I have been through--”