Kathleen went slowly into her bedroom. She was gone a great while — perhaps ten actual minutes. When she came back, the rims of her eyes were red. She carried four large pasteboard boxes, tied together with twine. St. Peter sprang up, took the parcel, and began untying the string. He opened the first and pulled out a brown stole. “What is it, mink?”

  “No, it’s Hudson Bay sable.”

  “Very pretty.” He put the collar round her neck and drew back to look at it. But after a sharp struggle Kathleen broke down. She threw off the fur and buried her face in a fresh handkerchief.

  “I’m so sorry, Daddy, but it’s no use to-day. I don’t want any furs, really. She spoils everything for me.”

  “Oh, my dear, my dear, you hurt me terribly!” St. Peter put his hands tenderly on her soft hazel-coloured hair. “Face it squarely, Kitty; you must not, you cannot, be envious. It’s self-destruction.”

  “I can’t help it, Father. I am envious. I don’t think I would be if she let me alone, but she comes here with her magnificence and takes the life out of all our poor little things. Everybody knows she’s rich, why does she have to keep rubbing it in?”

  “But, Kitty dear, you wouldn’t have her go home and change her coat before coming to see you?”

  “Oh, it’s not that, Father, it’s everything! You know we were never jealous of each other at home. I was always proud of her good looks and good taste. It’s not her clothes, it’s a feeling she has inside her. When she comes toward me, I feel hate coming toward me, like a snake’s hate!”

  St. Peter wiped his moist forehead. He was suffering with her, as if she had been in physical anguish. “We can’t, dear, we can’t, in this world, let ourselves think of things — of comparisons — like that. We are all too susceptible to ugly suggestions. If Rosamond has a grievance, it’s because you’ve been untactful about Louie.”

  “Even if I have, why should she be so revengeful? Does she think nobody else calls him a Jew? Does she think it’s a secret? I don’t mind being called a Gentile.”

  “It’s all in the way it’s done, you know, Kitty. And you’ve shown that you were a little bored with all their new things, now haven’t you?”

  “I’ve shown that I don’t like the way she overdresses, I suppose. I would never have believed that Rosie could do anything in such bad taste. While she is here among her old friends, she ought to dress like the rest of us.”

  “But doesn’t she? It seems to me her things look about like yours.”

  “Oh, Father, you’re so simple! And Mother is very careful not to enlighten you. We go to the Guild to sew for the Mission fund, and Rosie comes in in a handmade French frock that cost more than all our dresses put together.”

  “But if hers are no prettier, what does it matter how much they cost?” He was watching Kathleen fearfully. Her pale skin had taken on a greenish tinge — there was no doubt about it. He had never happened to see that change occur in a face before, and he had never realized to what an ugly, painful transformation the common phrase “green with envy” referred.

  “Oh, foolish, they are prettier, though you may not see it. It’s not just the clothes” — she looked at him intently, and her eyes, in their reddened rims, expanded and cleared. “It’s everything. When we were at home, Rosamond was a kind of ideal to me. What she thought about anything decided it for me. But she’s entirely changed. She’s become Louie. Indeed, she’s worse than Louie. He and all this money have ruined her. Oh, Daddy, why didn’t you and Professor Crane get to work and stop all this before it began? You were to blame. You knew that Tom had left something that was worth a lot, both of you. Why didn’t you do something? You let it lie there in Crane’s laboratory for this — this Marsellus to come along and exploit, until he almost thinks it’s his own idea.”

  “Things might have turned out the same, anyway,” her father protested. “Whatever the process earned was Rosamond’s. I wasn’t in the mood to struggle with manufacturers, I know nothing of such things. And Crane needs every ounce of his strength for his own experiments. He doesn’t care anything but the extent of space.”

  “He’d better have taken a few days off and saved his friend’s reputation. Tom trusted him with everything. It’s too foolish; that poor man being cut to pieces by surgeons all the time, and picking up the little that’s left of himself and bothering about the limitations of space — much good they’ll do him!”

  St. Peter rose, took both of his daughter’s hands and stood laughing at her. “Come now! You have more brains than that, Kitty. It happens you do understand that whatever poor Crane can find out about space is more good to him than all the money the Marselluses will ever have. But are you implying that if Crane and I had developed Tom’s discovery, we might have kept Rosie and her money in the family, for ourselves?”

  Kathleen threw up her head. “Oh, I don’t want her money!”

  “Exactly; nor do I. And we mustn’t behave as if we did want it. If you permit yourself to be envious of Rosie, you’ll be very foolish, and very unhappy.”

  The Professor walked away across the snowy park with a tired step. He was heavy-hearted. For Kathleen he had a special kind of affection. Perhaps it was because he had had to take care of her for one whole summer when she was little. Just as Mrs. St. Peter was ready to start for Colorado with the children, the younger one developed whooping-cough and had to be left at home with her father. He had opportunity to observe all her ways. She was only six, but he found her a square-dealing, dependable little creature. They worked out a satisfactory plan of life together. She was to play in the garden all morning, and was not on any account to disturb him in his study. After lunch he would take her to the lake or the woods, or he would read to her at home. She took pride in keeping her part of the contract. One day when he came out of his study at noon, he found her sitting on the third floor stairs, just outside his door, with the arnica bottle in one hand and the fingers of the other puffed up like wee pink sausages. A bee had stung her in the garden, and she had waited half the morning for sympathy. She was very independent, and would tug at her leggings or overshoes a great while before she asked for help.

  When they were little girls, Kathleen adored her older sister and liked to wait on her, was always more excited about Rosie’s new dresses and winter coat than about her own. This attachment had lasted even after they were grown. St. Peter had never seen any change in it until Rosamond announced her engagement to Louie Marsellus. Then, all at once, Kathleen seemed to be done with her sister. Her father believed she couldn’t forgive Rosie’s forgetting Tom so quickly.

  It was dark when the Professor got back to the old house and sat down at his writing-table. He would have an hour on his notes, he told himself, in spite of families and fortunes. And he had it. But when he looked up from his writing as the Angelus was ringing, two faces at once rose in the shadows outside the yellow circle of his lamp: the handsome face of his older daughter, surrounded by violet-dappled fur, with a cruel upper lip and scornful half-closed eyes, as she had approached her car that afternoon before she saw him; and Kathleen, her square little chin set so fiercely, her white cheeks actually becoming green under her swollen eyes. He couldn’t believe it. He rose quickly and went to his one window, opened it wider, and stood looking at the dark clump of pine-trees that told where the Physics building stood. A sharp pain clutched his heart. Was it for this the light in Outland’s laboratory used to burn so far into the night!

  Chapter 8

  THE FOLLOWING WEEK St. Peter went to Chicago to give his lectures. He had engaged rooms for himself and Lillian at a quiet hotel near the university. The Marselluses went down by the same train, and they all alighted at the station together, in a raging snow-storm. The St. Peters were to have tea with Louie at the Blackstone, before going to their own quarters.

  Tea was served in Louie’s suite on the lake front, with a fine view of the falling snow from the windows. The Professor was in a genial mood; he was glad to be in a big city again, in a luxurious hotel, and especially pleased to be able to sit in comfort and watch the storm over the water.

  “How snug you are here, Louie! This is really very nice,” he said, turning back from the window when Rosamond called him.

  Louie came and put both hands on St. Peter’s shoulders, exclaiming delightedly: “And do you like these rooms, sir? Well, I’m glad, for they’re yours! Rosie and I are farther down the corridor. Not a word! It’s all arranged. You are our guests for this engagement. We won’t have our great scholar staying off in some grimy place on the South side. We want him where we can keep an eye on him.”

  Louie was so warm with his plan that the Professor could only express satisfaction. “And our luggage?”

  “It’s on the way. I cancelled your reservations and did everything in order. Now have your tea, but not too much. You dine early; you have an engagement for to-night. You and Dearest are going to the opera — Oh, not with us! We have other fish to fry. You are going off alone.”

  “Very well, Louie! And what are they giving to-night?”

  “Mignon. It will remind you of your student days in Paris.”

  “It will. I always had abonnement at the Opéra Comique, and Mignon came round frequently. It’s one of my favourites.”

  “I thought so!” Louie kissed both the ladies, to express his satisfaction. The Professor had forgotten his scruples about accepting lavish hospitalities. He was really very glad to have windows on the lake, and not to have to go away to another hotel. After the Marselluses went to their own apartment, he remarked to his wife, while he unpacked his bag, that it was much more convenient to be on the same floor with Louie and Rosamond.

  “Much better than cabbing across Chicago to meet them all the time, isn’t it?”

  At eight o’clock he and his wife were in their places in the Auditorium. The overture brought a smile to his lips and a gracious mood to his heart. The music seemed extraordinarily fresh and genuine still. It might grow old-fashioned, he told himself, but never old, surely, while there was any youth left in men. It was an expression of youth, — that, and no more; with the sweetness and foolishness, the lingering accent, the heavy stresses — the delicacy, too — belonging to that time. After the entrance of the hero, Lillian leaned toward him and whispered: “Am I over-credulous? He looks to me exactly like the pictures of Goethe in his youth.”

  “So he does to me. He is certainly as tall as Goethe. I didn’t know tenors were ever so tall. The Mignon seems young, too.”

  She was slender, at any rate, and very fragile beside the courtly Wilhelm. When she began her immortal song, one felt that she was right for the part, the pure lyric soprano that suits it best, and in her voice there was something fresh and delicate, like deep wood flowers. “Connais-tu — le pays” — it stirred one like the odours of early spring, recalled the time of sweet, impersonal emotions.

  When the curtain fell on the first act, St. Peter turned to his wife. “A fine cast, don’t you think? And the harps are very good. Except for the wood-winds, I should say it was as good as any performance I ever heard at the Comique.”

  “How it does make one think of Paris, and of so many half-forgotten things!” his wife murmured. It had been long since he had seen her face so relaxed and reflective and undetermined.

  Through the next act he often glanced at her. Curious, how a young mood could return and soften a face. More than once he saw a starry moisture shine in her eyes. If she only knew how much more lovely she was when she wasn’t doing her duty!

  “My dear,” he sighed when the lights were turned on and they both looked older, “it’s been a mistake, our having a family and writing histories and getting middle-aged. We should have been picturesquely shipwrecked together when we were young.”

  “How often I’ve thought that!” she replied with a faint, melancholy smile.

  “You? But you’re so occupied with the future, you adapt yourself so readily,” he murmured in astonishment.

  “One must go on living, Godfrey. But it wasn’t the children who came between us.” There was something lonely and forgiving in her voice, something that spoke of an old wound, healed and hardened and hopeless.

  “You, you too?” he breathed in amazement.

  He took up one of her gloves and began drawing it out through his fingers. She said nothing, but he saw her lip quiver, and she turned away and began looking at the house through the glasses. He likewise began to examine the audience. He wished he knew just how it seemed to her. He had been mistaken, he felt. The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one’s own. Presently the melting music of the tenor’s last aria brought their eyes together in a smile not altogether sad.

  That night, after he was in bed, among unaccustomed surroundings and a little wakeful, St. Peter still played with his idea of a picturesque shipwreck, and he cast about for the particular occasion he would have chosen for such a finale. Before he went to sleep he found the very day, but his wife was not in it. Indeed, nobody was in it but himself, and a weather-dried little sea captain from the Hautes-Pyrénées, half a dozen spry seamen, and a line of gleaming snow peaks, agonizingly high and sharp, along the southern coast of Spain.

  Louie arranged the birthday dinner in the public dining-room of the hotel, and three of the Professor’s colleagues dined with them on that occasion. Louie had gone out to the university to hear St. Peter lecture, had met some of the faculty, and immediately invited them to dinner. They accepted — when was a professor known to refuse a good dinner? Rosamond was presented with her emeralds, and, as St. Peter afterward observed to his wife, practically all the guests in the dining-room were participants in the happy event. Lillian was doubtless right when she told him that, all the same, his fellow professors went away from the Blackstone that night respecting Godfrey St. Peter more than they had ever done before, and if they had marriageable daughters, they were certainly envying him his luck.

  “That,” her husband replied, “is my chief objection to public magnificence; it seems to show everybody up in the worst possible light. I’m not finding fault with anyone but myself, understand. When I consented to occupy an apartment I couldn’t afford, I let myself in for whatever might follow.”

  They got back to Hamilton in bitter weather. The lake winds were scourging the town, and Scott had laryngitis and was writing prose poems about the pleasures of tending your own furnace when the thermometer is twenty below.

  “Godfrey,” said Mrs. St. Peter when he set off for his class-room on the morning after their return, “surely you’re not going to the old house this afternoon. It will be like a refrigerating-plant. There’s no way of heating your study except by that miserable little stove.”

  “There never was, my dear. I got along a good many years.”

  “It was very different when the house below was heated. That stove isn’t safe when you keep the window open. A gust of wind might blow it out at any moment, and if you were at work you’d never notice until you were half poisoned by gas. You’ll get a fine headache one of these days.”

  “I’ve got headaches that way before, and survived them,” he said stubbornly.

  “How can you be so perverse? You know things are different now, and you ought to take more care of your health.”

  “Why so? It’s not worth half so much as it was then.”

  His wife disregarded this. “And don’t you think it’s foolish extravagance to go on paying the rent of an entire house, in order to spend a few hours a day in one very uncomfortable room of it?”

  The Professor’s dark skin reddened, and the ends of his formidable eyebrows ascended toward his black hair. “It’s almost my only extravagance,” he muttered fiercely.

  “How irritable and unreasonable he is becoming!” his wife reflected, as she heard him putting on his overshoes in the hall.

  Chapter 9

  FOR CHRISTMAS DAY the weather turned mild again. There would be a family dinner in the evening, but St. Peter was going to have the whole day to himself, in the old house. He asked his wife to put him up some sandwiches, so that he needn’t come back for lunch. He kept a few bottles of sherry in his study, in the old chest under the forms. Fortunately he had brought back a great deal of it from his last trip to Spain. It wasn’t foresight — Prohibition was then unthinkable — but a lucky accident. He had gone with his innkeeper to an auction, and bought in a dozen dozens of a sherry that went very cheap. He came home by the City of Mexico and got the wine through without duty.

  As he was crossing the park with his sandwiches, he met Augusta coming back from Mass. “Are you still going to the old house, Professor?” she asked reproachfully, her face smiling at him between her stiff black fur collar and her stiff black hat.

  “Oh, yes Augusta, but it’s not the same. I miss you. There are never any new dresses on my ladies in the evening now. Won’t you come in sometime and deck them out, as a surprise for me? I like to see them looking smart.”

  Augusta laughed. “You are a funny man, Doctor St. Peter. If anyone else said the things you do to your classes, I’d be scandalized. But I always tell people you don’t mean half you say.”

  “And how do you know what I say to my classes, may I ask?”

  “Why, of course, they go out and talk about it when you say slighting things about the Church,” she said gravely.

  “But, really, Augusta, I don’t think I ever do.”

  “Well, they take it that way. They are not as smart as you, and you ought to be careful.”

  “It doesn’t matter. What they think to-day, they’ll forget to-morrow.” He was walking beside Augusta, with a slack, indifferent stride, very unlike the step he had when he was full of something. “That reminds me: I’ve been wanting to ask you a question. That passage in the service about the Mystical Rose, Lily of Zion, Tower of Ivory — is that the Magnificat?”