What Will People Say? - The Original Classic Edition. Hughes Rupert

less they had on.

       A cynicism unusual to his warm and woman-worshiping soul crept into Forbes' mind. He went along philosophizing:

       "All these women are paid for by men. For everything that every one of these women wears some man has paid. Fathers, husbands, guardians, keepers, dead or alive, have earned the price of all this pomp.

       "The men who pay for these things are not here: they are in their offices or shops or at their tasks somewhere, building, producing;

       or in their graves resting from their labors, while the spendthrift sex gads abroad squandering and flaunting what it has wheedled.

       "What do the women give in return? They must pay something. What do they pay?"[Pg 11] CHAPTER III

       HE brooded like a sneering Satan for a time upon the meaning of the dress-parade, and then the glory of it overpowered him again. He felt that it would be a hideous world without its luxuries. It was well, he concluded, that men should dig for gold, dive for pearls, climb for aigrets, penetrate the snows for furs, breed worms for silk, build looms, and establish shops--all in order that the she half of the world should bedeck itself.

       The scarlet woman on the beast, the pink girl with the box of chocolates, the white matron, the widow in the most costly and becoming weeds--they were all more important to the world than any other of man's institutions, because they were pretty or beautiful or in some way charming--as useless, yet as lovely as music or flowers or poetry.

       He was soon so overcrowded with impressions that he could not arrange them in order. He could only respond to them. The individual traits of this woman or that, swaggering afoot or reclining in her car, smote him. Every one of them was a Lorelei singing to him from her fatal cliff, and his heart turned from the next to the next like a little rudderless boat.

       Each siren rescued him from the previous, but the incessant impacts upon his senses rendered him to a glow of wholesale enthusi-

       asm. He rejoiced to be once more in New York. He began to wish to know some of these women.

       It was apparent that many of them were ready enough to extend their hospitality. Numbers of them--beauti[Pg 12]ful ones, too, and lavishly adorned--had eyes like grappling-hooks. Their glances were invitations so pressingly urged that they inspired opposition. They expressed contempt in advance for a refusal. But men easily find strength to resist such invitations and such contempt.

       It was not in these tavern-like hearts that Forbes would seek shelter. He wanted to find some attractive, some decently difficult woman to make friends with, make love to. He was heart-free, and impatient for companionship.

       When a man is a soldier, an officer, and young, well-made and well-bred, it is improbable that he will remain long without opportu-

       nity of adventure.

       The woman of the bird-of-paradise feather was buried in Forbes' mind as deeply as if a balcony full of matinee girls had collapsed upon her. Forbes fell in love at first sight a hundred and fifty times on the Avenue. Had he met any one of that cohort again under favoring auspices he might have found in her arms the response he sought. It might have brought him tragic unrest, or the sort of home comfort that makes no history.

       Perhaps he did meet some of these potential sweethearts later; but if he did, he could not remember them and he did not heed them, for he was by then involved inextricably with the one he had hunted for and lost.

       When he found her he did not remember her any more than the others. She impressed him as a woman of extreme fragility, yet she was to test his strength to its utmost, his endurance, his courage, his readiness for hazard.

       He had won a name among brave men for caution in approaching danger, for bravery in the midst of it, and for agility in extricating himself from ambush and trap. This most delicate lady was to teach him to be reckless, foolhardy, maladroit. She would wear him

       5

       out in the pursuit of happiness and disgust him with his profession, with himself and her. Under her tutelage he would run through scenes of splendor and scale the heights of excitement. He would know beauty and pleasure and intrigue[Pg 13] and peril. He would know everything but repose, contentment, and peace. He would love her and hate her, abhor her and adore her, be her greatest

       friend and enemy, and she his.

       At his first meeting with her he pursued her without knowing who she was and without overtaking her. And she, not knowing she

       was pursued, unconsciously teased him by keeping just out of his reach and denying him the glimpse of her face.

       Perhaps it would have been better for both if they had never come nearer together than in that shadowy, that foreshadowing game

       of hide-and-seek in the full sun among the throngs.

       Perhaps it was better that they should meet and endure the furnace of emotions and superb experiences in gorgeous scenes.

       But, whether for better or worse, they did meet, and their souls engaged in that grapple of mutual help and harm that we call love.

       The world heard much of them, as always, and inevitably misunderstood and misjudged, ignoring what justified them, not seeing that their most flippant moments were their most important and that when they seemed most to sin they were clutching at their noblest crags of attainment.

       It is such fates as theirs that make the human soul cry aloud for a God to give it understanding, to give it another chance in a better world. The longing is so fierce that it sometimes becomes belief. But while we wait for that higher court it is the province of story-tellers to play at being juster judges than the popular juries are.

       Meanwhile Forbes was unsuspicious of the future, and unaware of nearly everything except heart-fag and foot-weariness.

       When he returned to his hotel he was a tourist who has done too much art-gallery. Fifth Avenue had been an ambulant Louvre of

       young mistresses, not of old masters.[Pg 14]

       He crept into a tub of water as hot as he could endure, and simmered there, smoking the ache out of him, and imagining himself

       as rich as Haroun al Raschid, instead of a poor subaltern in a hard-worked little army, with only his pay and a small sum that he had saved, mainly because he had been detailed to regions where there was almost nothing fit to buy.

       The price of his room at the hotel had staggered him, but he charged it off to a well-earned holiday and pretended that he was a millionaire. He rose from the steaming pool and turned an icy shower on himself with shuddering exhilaration. His blood leaped as at a bugle-call, a reveille to life.

       He heard the city shouting up to his windows, and he began to fling on his clothes. And then he realized that he knew nobody among those roaring millions. He cursed his luck and flung into his bathrobe. As he knotted the rope he felt that he might as well be a cowled and cloistered monk in a desert as his friendless self in this wilderness of luxury.

       Happiness was bound to elude him as easily as that woman of the white query-plume eluded him when he in his tencent bus pursued her in her five-thousand-dollar landaulet. All he had of her was the back of her hat and the number of her car--N. Y. 41508. Or was it N. Y. 85140, or--what the devil was the number?

       He had not brought away even that![Pg 15]

       CHAPTER IV

       NOTHING can be lonelier than a room in even a best hotel when one is lonesome and when one's window looks out upon crowds. Forbes had pitched his tent at the Knickerbocker, and his view was of Longacre Square.

       The Times Building stood aloft, a huddled giraffe of a building. A fierce wind spiraled round it and played havoc with dignity. It was an ill-mannered bumpkin wind from out of town with a rural sense of humor. Women pressed forward into the gale, bending double and struggling with their tormented hats and writhing skirts. Some of the men seemed to find them an attractive spectacle till they felt their own hats caught up and kited to the level of the fourth and fifth windows.

       A flock of newsboys, as brisk as sparrows, drove a hustling trade in recovering hats for men who were ashamed of bare heads as of

       a nakedness. The