The Eddy - Clarence Louis Cullen

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with no unkind intent. It is something you yourself acknowledge. The same doors would be closed to your daughter if she came here. She could and would do so much better with me. Neither you nor she would be dependent. We are too old friends for that. And I know George Treharne. He would renew the allowance that you permitted Judd to thrust back at him through yourself and his lawyer. Leave this place, this sort of thing, once and forever. I want you to—for your own sake and your daughter's."

      Mrs. Treharne wept dismally, to the sad derangement of her elaborately-applied make-up. But she wept the tears of self-pity, than which there are none more pitiful. The reins of a great chance, for herself and her daughter, were in her hands. Perhaps it was the intensity of her perturbation that did not permit her to hold them. Very likely it was something else. But, at any rate, hold them she did not.

      "You are a dear, Laura," she said, fighting back her tears for the sake of her make-up. "It was what I might have expected of you. Of all the friends I used to have, you are the only one who never has gone back on me. But you must see how impossible it all is. I am in over my head. So what would be the use?"

      "You speak for yourself only, Antoinette," said Laura, a little coldly. "What of your daughter?"

      "Oh, if only she were a boy!" the wretched woman harped again.

      Laura Stedham removed her arm from her friend's shoulder and shrugged a bit impatiently.

      "That refrain again?" she said, the warmth departing from her tone. "I must be going before I become vexed with you, Tony. Your own position would be quite the same in any case—if you had a son instead of a daughter, I mean. For my part, I fail to perceive any choice between being shamed in the eyes of a son of in the eyes of a daughter. True, a son would not have to tolerate so humiliating a situation. A son could, and unquestionably would, clap on his hat the moment he became aware of the state of things here, and stamp out, leaving it all behind him. A son could and would shift for himself. But a girl—a girl just out of school—can't do that. She is helpless. She is at the mercy of the situation you have made for her. I fear you are completely losing your moorings, Tony. When is Louise arriving?"

      "Tonight," replied Mrs. Treharne, who had subsided into a sort of apathy of self-pity. "At nine something or other. I shall meet her at the station in the car."

      Laura turned a quizzical, slitted pair of eyes upon her friend, now busy again with her tear-smudged make-up.

      "Not in Judd's car, surely, Tony?" she said, in earnest expostulation. "Why do that? Why not let the girl in upon your—your tangled affairs a little more gradually? How could she help wondering at the extravagant, vulgar ornateness of Judd's car? For of course she knows perfectly well that your own finances are not equal to such a whale of a machine as that."

      "It will not take her long to find out everything," said Mrs. Treharne, a little sullenly. "She need not be uncommonly observant to do that. And you remember how embarrassingly observant she was even as a child."

      "Give her a chance to observe piecemeal, then," said Laura, laconically. "I shall be with you at the station. One of my poor accomplishments, you know, is the knack of ameliorating difficult situations. And I was always so fond of the child. I am stark curious to see how she has developed. She was a starchy Miss of fifteen when last I saw her. We'll fetch her home in a taxicab. That will be better. It is arranged, then?"

      "Everything that you suggest is as good as arranged,' Laura," replied Mrs. Treharne, with a wan smile. "Your gift of persuasion is irresistible—I wish I knew the secret of it. It is extremely good of you to want to meet the child. If I could only meet her with—with such clean hands as—well, as I should have!"

      "Never mind—there'll be a way out of it," said Laura, cheerily. "I am off."

      She grazed the adeptly-applied artificial bloom of the other woman's cheek with her lips.

      As they stood side by side in the juxtaposition of a caress—they were friends from girlhood—the contrast between the two women was sufficiently striking. Laura Stedham, a woman of thirty-five, had the slender yet well-rounded structural sinuosities of a girl of twenty who passes all her days in the open air—minus the indubitable blowsiness which some open-air young women can't help but reveal to the dissecting eye. Unusually tall, she had the gliding grace of movement which so many women of uncommon stature lack. Even in the cluttered dressing room of her friend she made nothing of the obstacles that barred her path, but, walking always with a sort of nervous swiftness, passed around them to her point of destination—a mantel, a table, a hanging picture—with a threading ease of locomotion that made it seem oddly doubtful if she were dependent upon the ground at all for a base. There are tall women who, if they do not collide with stationary objects when they undertake a tour of a room, at least arouse the fear that they will infallibly do so. Laura possessed an eye for the measurement of distances, and the litheness perfectly to follow her measurement. Her complexion was that of a woman to whom a long tramp, even in the city, in the mist or in the blinding rain, was not a task, but a delight. Her hair, all her own, yet worn in the final perverse mood of exaggeration of the coiffure "artist," was of an incredible burnished black, in unusual contrast with her full, kindling, Celtic-grey eyes. A certain irregularity in the outline of her features—especially of her nose, which, far from being aquiline, was too short by the merest fraction—lent a certain piquancy to her expression, even when her face was in repose. She had the habit, growing rare in a world of social avoidances and white lies, of looking the person addressing her straight in the eye. It was not an impaling, disquieting gaze, but one that fairly demanded truthfulness and candor; a gaze unconsciously calculated to cause the liar to stutter in the manufacture of his lie.

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      Mrs. Treharne, four years older than Laura, had the somewhat hollow-eyed plumpness of an indoor woman who wars fiercely but hopelessly and unequally upon ever-threatening embonpoint. Her triumphs over the enemy never were better than drawn battles; she was compelled to devote at least three hours a day to her determined, almost hysterical warfare upon the natural process of accretion, solely that she might not gain; long before she had abandoned hope of achieving the fragility of outline she pined for. The nostrums she employed in this incessant conflict had made her fragile, however, in at least one respect: her health; besides imparting a certain greenish-yellow tint to her skin which made her make-up box almost as necessary a part of her equipment as the hands wherewith she applied the mitigating tints. Five years before she had been a fresh-skinned, clear-eyed, naturally pretty woman of a somewhat inconsequential type; but the necessity—the hideous duty, as she deemed it—of banting without cessation or intermission had left her merely her regular features upon which artificially to create the illusion of a youthfulness she was far from feeling. With the final touch added for an appearance in a company, she still looked dainty, certainly of impeccable grooming. But she had learned to be uneasy under the scrutiny of eyes that she felt to be unfriendly, and she had become exceptionally partial to veils. Her hair, originally a light, unaggressive red, had been "done over" into a sort of vivid, brittle "Titian." There were occasional reddish gleams in her slightly furtive, small eyes of hazel. She had a child's foot, and she was inordinately proud of her tiny, waxy, too-white hands. In a company she smiled continuously in order to display her teeth, which were perfectly assembled and of an almost porcelain whiteness. Mrs. Treharne was called a pretty woman even by those who perhaps entertained unexpressed misgivings as to how she might look at her rising hour.

      After Laura had gone Mrs. Treharne tried, before her glass, the effect of a smile—somewhat frozen and quickly obliterated—upon her carefully studied and artfully executed make-up mask; then sighed drearily as she sank into a chair and began polishing her nails upon her palms.

      "Of course Laura is right, as usual—it wouldn't help matters particularly if Louise were a boy," she mused with puckered brows.

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