CHAPTER IV

ALICE CROXON

I

ON Christmas day I received two letters.

One was from Vernon. After giving me the local gossip he said, "You remember what I told you about Alice, that day when we talked together on the way to the Lost Lode Mine? Well, it seems her father's affairs have taken a sudden turn, and he is quite rich again. I think it's steel or leather he's making money in, he's a great speculator, you know, and the war has given him a great opportunity. At all events he's on his feet again, and richer than ever by what I can make out. He's living at the Waldorf in fine style, and he has written to Alice, telling her to come back to New York at once. Of course she doesn't know the real truth about his previous troubles, and I've never given her a hint of them; so she takes it as a natural thing that her father wants her back in New York, and promises her all kinds of gaiety. Personally, I'm sorry. Alice has fitted herself into our simple modes of life in a wonderful way, and is, I am sure, much happier here than she ever was before. She's lost her discontent; she's become natural, if you understand what I mean. And we've grown

very fond of her, and shall feel parting with her very much. However, she's going back to New York, and no doubt you will see her. You won't be offended, I'm sure, if I wish you luck with her."

The other was a brief note from Alice-the first I had ever had from her.

"Dear Gareth," she wrote. "It is I who should be called Gareth, for I've stuck to the business of dishwashing a good deal longer than you. However, the episode is closed for me too. I've put away my homespun and am contemplating the delights of being clothed in purple and fine linen. What a comfort it will be to wear silk stockings again, and not be ashamed of one's feet! Whether I shall ever be happier than I've been here I don't know; but I'm sure I shall dearly love riding in a limousine. I've no doubt you were equally glad to return to civilisation again, though I don't suppose you will admit it. That'll be something to quarrel about when we meet, won't it? And that reminds me of what I most want to say, but almost forgot, that I do really expect to be in New York early in the New Year, at the Waldorf. We might arrange for our amicable quarrel some day, if you still are at all interested in your obedient Lynette."

I read this letter with an amused sense of its charming casuistry. It was the typical casuistry of woman, who arrives at her end by indirection. What she meant was obvious enough; she wished to see me.

But she could not bring herself to say so in p words, and so she played with the idea of Gareth and Lynette, leaving me to draw my own conclusions.

These conclusions were not altogether happy. So far as Alice's letter was concerned, I was happy enough; but there was Vernon's letter to consider. I did not at all like the idea of Theodore Croxon as a rehabilitated millionaire. I liked still less the idea of Alice as a millionaire's daughter. I had seen her as a natural creature, fresh and vivid with sincerest life; and didn't like to think of her wearing silk stockings and riding in a limousine. Our charming idyll of Gareth and Lynette was exactly suited to a camp in the mountains, but I couldn't conceive it being played out with the Waldorf for a stage. I became suddenly conscious of a resentment against wealth, especially wealth gained in Theodore Croxon's way. Why couldn't fate have left Alice poor? She had been happy among poor folk like the Vernons-it was very doubtful if she would be happy, or certainly as happy, in the glitter of New York. That Power, whom the ancients pictured as the Supreme Ironist, had stuck a clumsy finger into my affairs, and had played me a a scurvy trick.

For, of course, my ultimate thought, which I didn't care to examine, was that this new wealth put a barrier between myself and Alice. We had met in Eden; when we met again it would be in Babel. Our idyll that seemed quite natural in Nature's garden would have quite another aspect among the lofty towers of Babel. Love spoke with a true accent in Eden; would

it be intelligible in Babel? But there I stopped, with a hearty wish that Theodore Croxon had remained smashed, or, better still, that he had never existed. Parents are great inconveniences. They are worse than inconveniences. They are positive nuisances when they interfere with love's purple dream, and build barriers of gold round desirable and lovely daughters. What a pity it is that women don't grow like flowers, with no troublesome obligations of ancestry to assert rights in them!

The first letter one receives from a woman he loves, or thinks he loves, is an event. I found myself going over every phrase of Alice's letter, again and again, trying to find meanings in it which lay beneath the surface. Was she merely ironical in her anticipation of luxury? Was she equally ironical in her assumption of the name Lynette? I suppose every man examines such a letter in a spirit of wonder and unfruitful search. He weighs each word which, in all probability, the writer never weighed at all. He tries even to find an indication of character in the handwriting. Alice's hand-writing was, if I may use the term, unsentimental. It was large, free, firm, and spread itself spaciously over the page. It didn't suggest romance, as the fine sloped writing of our mother does. There was nothing tender, evasive, provocative about it; just plain daylight writing, a lookthe-world-in-the-eyes sort of writing. There was only one thing about the letter that gave it the faintest aroma of a love-letter; that was the resumption of

our Gareth and Lynette fiction, which was an invocation to happy memories.

Nevertheless it stirred me deeply, and I became aware how much I had thought of Alice since the day I parted from her at Fruitvale. She had been in all my thoughts as a light, a music, a hope, a goal of effort. I had never even thought of comparing her with other women. She stood apart from them. Not that she was greater or better; in Mary Lorimer, for example, I could recognise a gravity and heroic strength of nature, very unusual in women. I asked, as many men have asked before me, what was the special quality that makes one woman, not conspicuously better or fairer than other women, the sole mistress of one's heart, the only woman at whose touch the heart melts? And I could find no better answer to the riddle than they. It's not something to be rationalised; it's magic, it's charm, it's evasive as a perfume, it's not a quality at all, but a delicate essence of personality, unperceived by others, not meant for others, recognisable only by the lover. In those long happy days at Fruitvale I had recognised this peculiar appeal of Alice's personality. Not continuously indeed, not very clearly. It had often evaded me. It had the volatility of a perfume-it came in sudden wafts, in swift penetrating gusts of sweetness. But I had felt it, and though in colder hours of reflection I had accused myself of folly in yielding to it, yet I knew that I could never forget it.

As I read her letter all these indistinct undefined sensations took a sharper edge. It was borne in upon