XVII + 

One raw autumn evening when Vance came in, tired and dispirited, from the office of the Free Speaker, his elder sister, Pearl, who was always prying and investigating, bounced out into the hall with: “Here’s a letter for you from a New York magazine.” + 

Vance followed her into the overheated room where the family were waiting for Mr. Weston to go in to supper. Mr. Weston was generally late nowadays: real estate was in a slack phase at Euphoria, and he was always off somewhere, trying to get hold of a good thing, to extend his activities, especially to get a finger into the pie at Swedenville, which had recently started an unforeseen boom of its own. + 

There seemed to be a great many people in the brightly lit room, with its large pink-mouthed gramophone on a table with a crochet lace cover, its gold-and-gray wallpaper hung with the “Mona Lisa” (Mae’s contribution), “The Light of the World” (Grandma’s), and the palm in a congested pink china pot on a stained oak milking stool. + 

On chilly evenings the radiator was the centre of the family life, and the seat nearest it was now always occupied by a very old man with a yellowish waxen face and a heavy shock of black hair streaked with gray, who sat with a helpless left arm stretched on the shawl that covered his knees, and said at intervals, in a slow thick voice: “Feels⁠ ⁠… good⁠ ⁠… here⁠ ⁠… after⁠ ⁠… Crampton.⁠ ⁠…” + 

Grandpa and Grandma Scrimser had moved into Mapledale Avenue after Grandpa’s first stroke. The house out at Crampton was too cold, and the Nordic help, always yearning for Euphoria or Swedenville, could not be persuaded to wait on a paralytic old man and his unwieldy wife. Lorin Weston had accepted the charge without a murmur: he was a great respecter of family ties. But the presence of the old couple had not made things easier at Mapledale Avenue. It was an ever-recurring misery to Mrs. Weston to have the precise routine of her household upset by Mrs. Scrimser’s disorderly ways; she did not mind nursing her father nearly as much as “picking up” after her mother. But the crowning grievance was the invasion of her house by Grandma’s followers⁠—all the “inspirational” faddists, the prophets, seers, and healers who, having long enjoyed the happy-go-lucky hospitality of the Scrimser table, now thronged to Mrs. Weston’s, ostensibly to pray with Grandma and over Grandpa, but always managing, as Mrs. Weston remarked, to drop in round about mealtimes. + 

Grandpa’s stroke had come within the year after Vance’s return to Euphoria. Vance had not seen much of Mr. Scrimser during the months preceding the latter’s illness. Going out to Crampton was something the young man still shrank from. Everything in Euphoria, when he returned there from New York, seemed so small and colourless that he strayed about in it like a ghost in limbo; but the first time he walked out to see his grandmother, the old nausea caught him as he passed the field path leading to the river; and when his grandfather mounted the steps of the porch where Vance and Mrs. Scrimser were sitting, stiff-jointed but jaunty as ever, his hat tilted back from his black curls, his collar rolled away from his sinewy throat, the boy felt himself harden to a stone.⁠ ⁠… And then, one evening at the Free Speaker, a voice at the telephone had summoned Vance to the Elkington⁠—and there in the glaring bar lolled the old man, like a marionette with its wires cut, propped on the sofa to which they had hurriedly raised him.⁠ ⁠… + 

The accident did not reawaken Vance’s love for his grandfather, but it effaced the hate. If this was what a few years brought us to, the sternness of the moral law seemed cruelly out of proportion to the brevity of life; he acknowledged the grinning truth of the old man’s philosophy. Hitherto Vance had never regretted having written, or sold for publication, the tale into which he had poured all his youthful indignation; but now, though he felt sure that no one at Euphoria had ever heard of The Hour, or would have connected his tale with any actual incident, yet he would have been glad to wipe those pages out of existence, and still more glad to blot from his memory the money they had brought him.⁠ ⁠… + 

“Well, I guess your father’s going to be later than ever tonight, and that Slovak girl says she won’t stay another week if she don’t ever know what time to dish up for meals,” Mrs. Weston murmured, looking up from her towel-hemming as her son entered. + 

“Well, Vance’s got a letter from a New York magazine,” Pearl exulted, disregarding her mother. + 

Mrs. Scrimser looked yearningly from the corner where she sat by her husband, the last number of Spirit Light on her knee. (“What your grandmother wastes, subscribing to all those come-to-Jesus papers, is something that passes me. She could hire a nurse with the money,” Mrs. Weston frequently lamented to her children.) + 

“Oh, Vanny, open it quick!” his grandmother besought. “I wonder if it’s from Spirit Light? I was just reading to Grandpa about a twenty-five dollar prize they’re offering for a five-hundred-word appreciation of Jesus Christ, to be sent in before the last of the month. What are we now?” + 

No one answered, and Vance went up to the lamp and opened his letter. Below the letterhead of The Hour a rush of words poured out at him. “Another story on the lines of ‘One Day’⁠ ⁠… Review in new hands⁠ ⁠… editor would like to have first call on anything you may turn out during the coming year⁠ ⁠… Liberal terms⁠ ⁠… first story if possible in time for January number⁠ ⁠… wants to know if any chance of your being in New York within few weeks to consider possibility of permanent connection with review⁠ ⁠…” + 

Another story on the lines of “One Day”⁠—that was what first struck him. He read the phrase over several times; then, involuntarily, he turned and glanced at the marionette with its wires cut that cowered in the armchair by the radiator. How strange it was, Vance mused⁠—that poor creature had first taught him the meaning of pain, and out of the terrible lesson the means of deliverance had come! + 

His future⁠ ⁠… here was his future secure. And the people at The Hour regretted having lost sight of him for so long⁠—and the review was in new hands! He glanced back at the letterhead, and saw: “Editor: Lewis Tarrant.” But surely that was the blond fellow who was always hanging about Miss Spear and going off in the motor with her? Correspondence between Paul’s Landing and Mapledale Avenue had ceased after a somewhat acrimonious exchange of letters at the time of Vance’s departure from the Tracys’; since then he had heard nothing of the household at Eaglewood. Two or three curt notes from the editorial office of The Hour, rejecting the tales and essays he had sent at Frenside’s suggestion, had been the last of his communications with New York; and for nearly two years now his horizon had been so shut in by Euphoria that he was beginning to feel as if he had never left there. + 

“Is it about the Spirit Light competition, Vanny?” Mrs. Scrimser asked; and Pearl ejaculated: “Father may be late, but I guess he’ll be here before Vance condescends to tell us!” + 

“Tell us what?” Vance’s father questioned, banging the front door shut, and dropping his outer garments in the inglenook before joining his family. + 

“His news from New York,” Pearl snapped. + 

Lorin Weston came in, casting his cautious tired eyes about the room. His son suddenly noticed how much older and thinner he looked; his dapper business suit hung on him. “Well, what’s your news, son?” + 

“I’ve got a job in New York,” Vance announced, hardly believing that the voice he heard was his own. + 

“Feels⁠ ⁠… good⁠ ⁠… here⁠ ⁠… after⁠ ⁠… Crampton.⁠ ⁠…” the marionette crooned from its corner. + 

On the train to New York Vance had the same sense of detachment as when he had gone thither three years before. Again it was as though, in leaving his home, he took his whole self with him, like a telephone receiver unhooked and carried on a long cord into another room. The years at Euphoria had taught him something, he supposed; he felt infinitely older, felt mature, “hardboiled” as the new phrase was: he smiled with pity at the defenceless infant he had been when he made his first assault on the metropolis. + 

But how had the process of maturing been effected? He had felt himself an alien from the moment of his return to Euphoria; there had been no retightening of loosened links, no happy boyish sense of homecoming. He could imagine that a fellow might feel that, getting back to one of those old Lorburn houses, so impregnated with memories, so thick with tangible tokens of the past; but his own recollections could only travel back through a succession of new houses, each one a little larger and with a better bathroom and a neater garage than the last, but all without any traces of accumulated living and dying: shells shed annually, almost, like a crab’s. He even felt, as he sat in the spick-and-span comfort of Mapledale Avenue, the incongruity of an old man’s presuming to die there. “Seems like there’s no past here but in the cemeteries,” he mused one day, looking pityingly at his grandfather.⁠ ⁠… + 

And now he was getting away from it again, getting back into an atmosphere which to him seemed charged with the dust of ages. When he had been in New York before he had hardly noticed the skyscrapers, which were merely higher than those he already knew; but on one of his last days before leaving he had gone down to Trinity Church, and slowly, wonderingly, had roamed about the graveyard, brooding over names and dates.⁠ ⁠… The idea that there had been people so near his own day who had lived and died under the same roof, and worshipped every Sunday in the same church as their forebears, appealed in an undefinable way to his craving for continuity. And when he entered the church, and read the epitaphs on the walls above the very seats where the men and women commemorated had sat, it was like feeling a heart beating through the grave wrappings of one of the mummies he had seen in the museum. The ocean and Old Trinity⁠—those were the two gifts New York had given him.⁠ ⁠… + 

And now he was going back full of hope to the place which seemed to have become his spiritual home. The long cold weight of discouragement had fallen from him at the first word of the summons from The Hour. This time he knew he could make good. Never in journalism: his experience on the Free Speaker had taught him that. If his father hadn’t owned stock in the newspaper Vance knew he could never have held down even his insignificant job there. But there was nothing to regret in all that. He was going to be a writer now: a novelist. A New York review had opened its doors to him; he had only to reread the editorial letter for his brain to hum with new projects and ambitions. “A big novel⁠—I’ll do a big novel yet,” he thought; but meanwhile he would give them all the short stories they wanted. Subjects were swarming about him, opening paragraphs writing themselves on the curtains of his sleeper. All night he lay awake in an ecstasy of invention, rocked by the rhythm of the train as if the great Atlantic rollers were sweeping him forward to his fate. + 

This mild November day was all jewelled with sunlight as Vance pushed his way out of the Grand Central. Grip in hand, he was starting for the rooming house where he had lodged before. He did not know where else to go; but no doubt at The Hour he would find someone to advise him. Meanwhile he would just drop his bags (they were bulging with manuscripts), and get a quick wash-up before presenting himself at the office. It was nearly ten o’clock, and he had wired announcing his visit for that day at eleven. + 

It was the day after Thanksgiving, and the huge station was humming with the arrivals and departures of weekend crowds. Outside, close to the curb, a row of long “rubberneck” cars was drawn up, and with an absent eye Vance watched a band of sightseers, mostly girls, scrambling into one of them. He thought he had never seen so many happy unconcerned faces: certainly the mere air of New York seemed to wake people up, make them sparkle like the light on this balmy day. Vance, always amused by thronged streets and pleasurable activities, lingered to watch; and as he stood there he saw a girl in a close-fitting blue hat spring into the car in front of him. Her movement was so light and dancing that no term less romantic could describe it. She was absorbed into a giggling group, and under the blue brim Vance caught only a glimpse of cropped straw-coloured hair and a face so translucent that the thin brown eyebrows looked dark as the velvet crescents on a butterfly. His sense of bouyant renewal seemed to find embodiment in this morning vision, and he forgot his bag, forgot The Hour, forgot even his healthy morning hunger. All he wanted was to know if there was a seat left in that car. A man in a long light ulster, a lettered band on his cap, stood near the driver’s seat, giving orders or instructions. Vance touched his arm. “See here⁠—” The man turned, and Vance was face to face with Bunty Hayes, the former reporter of the Paul’s Landing paper. + 

Bunty Hayes had not changed; he was the same trim tight-featured fellow with impudent eyes and a small mouth with a childlike smile; but he had thickened a little, and the black-and-gold lettering on his cap gave him an air of authority. + 

“Say⁠—why, if it ain’t Vance Weston!” he exclaimed. + 

If anything could have troubled Vance in his present mood, it would have been an encounter with Bunty Hayes. The name had only disastrous associations, and he had always thought the man contemptible. But the tide which was sweeping him forward could not be checked by anything as paltry as Bunty Hayes; and Vance, with no more than a moment’s hesitation, put his hand into the other’s, and made one of his abrupt plunges to the point. “Say⁠—you going for a ride in this car?” + 

“Going for a ride in her?” Bunty echoed with his easy laugh. “Looks like as if I was. Say, why I’m the barker for her, sonny. Thought I was still up at Paul’s Landing, did you, doing write-ups for that cemetery of a paper? No, sir, that was in the far away and long ago. I been showing New York for nearly two years now. Hop right in⁠—got a capacity load, but I guess the girls’ll make room for you. (I’m taking round Saint Elfrida’s select boarding school, from Peapack⁠—yes, sir; six front rows; bunch of lookers, ain’t they? Primarily an art trip; we take in the Lib’ry, the Metropolitan, the Cathedral and the Palisades.) See here, pile in, Vance; never mind about your grip. ’Gainst the rules, I know; but shove it under the seat while the chauffeur’s looking at her appendix. There⁠—in you go; this row. Say, there’s a girl at the other end that’ll give you a squeeze-in next to her; there, the one with the blue hat.” + 

The barker caught Vance under the elbow to launch him on his way; and then, as he moved forward, called after him stentorianly: “Say, Vance, I want you to meet my feeancee; yes, that’s her in the blue hat. Laura Lou, meet Mr. Weston.⁠ ⁠… Gee, Vance, but ain’t you Laura Lou’s cousin? Say, well, if I didn’t clean forget you and me’d got acquainted at the Tracys’.⁠ ⁠… Laura Lou, here’s your cousin Vance Weston, come all the way from Illinois to see you. Now then, ladies and gentlemen, all aboard, please!” + 

Vance found himself climbing past a row of exposed pink knees. A flutter of girlish exclamations greeted him, and he slipped into a crack between a stout Jewish-looking young woman in rimless glasses and the girl under the blue hat, whose flexible young body seemed to melt against his own as she made room for him. + 

“Laura Lou!” he exclaimed as the car swayed out into the street. He could hardly believe that this little face with the pale rosy mouth and the delicately traced eyebrows could be that of the sulky flapper of Paul’s Landing. Yet he remembered that one evening when she came in for supper, late and a little flushed, in a faded yellow muslin the colour of her hair, he had thought her almost pretty. Almost pretty⁠—crude fool that he’d been, craving only such coarse fare as Floss Delaney and ’Smeralda Cran! Time had refined his taste as it had his cousin’s features; and he looked at her with new eyes.⁠ ⁠… + 

“Vance!” she said, in her shy drawling voice, but without a trace of shyness in her own eyes, which rested on him with a sort of affectionate curiosity. + 

The eyes too were different; instead of being like blurred gray glasses they were luminous as spring water; and they met his with full awareness of the change. It seemed as if, without self-consciousness or fatuity, she knew herself lovely and was glad, as simply as a flower might be. The sight absorbed Vance’s senses; he hardly heard what she was saying, was conscious only of her nearness, burning and radiant, yet so frail, immaterial almost, that she might vanish at a rash word or motion. + 

“Why, Vance, isn’t it funny? I didn’t know you were in New York,” she said; and he thought: “I used to think her cheekbones too high; and now the little shadow under them is what makes her look like those marble heads of Greek priestesses with the smile under their lids.⁠ ⁠…” (He had seen photographs of them in some book on ancient art, in the Euphoria college library.) + 

“It’s three years since I was here; you’re grown-up now, aren’t you?” he said; and she conceded: “Why, I s’pose I am,” with a laugh that made her mouth break open on her teeth like a pink pod on pearly seeds. + 

“Three years⁠—” he echoed; and suddenly he remembered her bending over him as he lay in the hammock, on his first evening at the Tracy’s, and snatching from his buttonhole the spray of lilac he had found on his pillow that morning. “Why, it was you that put the lilac on my pillow before I was awake!” he exclaimed, the words breaking from him before he knew it. He was looking at her intently and she did not avert her gaze; but a light like a rosy reflection stole from her throat to her temples. “Of course it was,” he triumphed. “Why, you’re like a tropical shell with the sun shining through it,” he cried; and she answered: “Oh, Vance, you always did say such killing things. I’ll die laughing if you don’t quit.⁠ ⁠…” It was only when she drew away her soft bare hand that he realized he had held it clutched ever since he had pushed his way to her.⁠ ⁠… + 

“This vacant lot on your right,” Bunty Hayes was bellowing as the car rolled up Fifth Avenue, “was formerly the site of Selfridge B. Merry’s five-million-dollar marble mansion, lately sold to the Amalgamated Searchlight Company, who are about to erect on it a twenty-five-million-dollar skyscraper of fifty stories, with roof gymnasium, cabaret terrace, New Thought church and airplane landing.⁠ ⁠… The artistic Gothic church on your left is the Reformed Methodist.⁠ ⁠…” + 

Vance caught back Laura Lou’s hand and pressed it in both of his. “For God’s sake⁠ ⁠… that’s all a joke about your being engaged to him, isn’t it?” + 

She cast down her lashes, which were of the same velvet texture as her eyebrows, but a darker brown, the colour of brown pansy petals. Her hand still lay confidingly in Vance’s. “Why, I guess he kinder thinks I am.⁠ ⁠…” she said. + 

“Oh, let him!” cried Vance derisively. He took a quick glance at the Jewish girl in rimless glasses, saw that she had turned away to pass a box of Fuller’s marshmallows down the line, and flinging his arm about Laura Lou, kissed her fervently. + 

She paled a little and shrank back, but so submissively, with such an air of leaving herself on his lips even though she withdrew her own, that he thought exultantly: “She knows she belongs to me,” and had there been room in his breast for any feeling but rapture it would have been pity for the tight-faced young man bellowing through his megaphone: “We are now approaching the only remaining private residence on Fifth Avenue, belonging to one of the old original society leaders known throughout the world as the Four Hundred.” + 