The Titan

governess, kick a table over, and, seizing the toppling lamp with demoniac skill, hurl it through a window. She, herself, had been tossed by him in one of these tantrums, when, in answer to the cries of terror of those about her, he had shouted: “Let her fall! It won’t hurt the little devil to break a few bones.” This was her keenest memory of her stepfather, and it rather softened her judgment of her mother, made her sympathetic with her when she was inclined to be critical. Of her own father she only knew that he had divorced her mother⁠—why, she could not say. She liked her mother on many counts, though she could not feel that she actually loved her⁠—Mrs. Carter was too fatuous at times, and at other times too restrained. This house at Pocono, or Forest Edge, as Mrs. Carter had named it, was conducted after a peculiar fashion. From June to October only it was open, Mrs. Carter, in the past, having returned to Louisville at that time, while Berenice and Rolfe went back to their respective schools. Rolfe was a cheerful, pleasant-mannered youth, well bred, genial, and courteous, but not very brilliant intellectually. Cowperwood’s judgment of him the first time he saw him was that under ordinary circumstances he would make a good confidential clerk, possibly in a bank. Berenice, on the other hand, the child of the first husband, was a creature of an exotic mind and an opalescent heart. After his first contact with her in the reception-room of the Brewster School Cowperwood was deeply conscious of the import of this budding character. He was by now so familiar with types and kinds of women that an exceptional type⁠—quite like an exceptional horse to a judge of horseflesh⁠—stood out in his mind with singular vividness. Quite as in some great racing-stable an ambitious horseman might imagine that he detected in some likely filly the signs and lineaments of the future winner of a Derby, so in Berenice Fleming, in the quiet precincts of the Brewster School, Cowperwood previsioned the central figure of a Newport lawn fête or a London drawing-room. Why? She had the air, the grace, the lineage, the blood⁠—that was why; and on that score she appealed to him intensely, quite as no other woman before had ever done.

It was on the lawn of Forest Edge that Cowperwood now saw Berenice. The latter had had the gardener set up a tall pole, to which was attached a tennis-ball by a cord, and she and Rolfe were hard at work on a game of tetherball. Cowperwood, after a telegram to Mrs. Carter, had been met at the station in Pocono by her and rapidly driven out to the house. The green hills pleased him, the up-winding, yellow road, the silver-gray cottage with the brown-shingle roof in the distance. It was three in the afternoon, and bright for a sinking sun.

“There they are now,” observed Mrs. Carter, cheerful and smiling, as they came out from under a low ledge that skirted the road a little way from the cottage. Berenice, executing a tripping, running step to one side, was striking the tethered ball with her racquet. “They are hard at it, as usual. Two such romps!”

She surveyed them with pleased motherly interest, which Cowperwood considered did her much credit. He was thinking that it would be too bad if her hopes for her children should not be realized. Yet possibly they might not be. Life was very grim. How strange, he thought, was this type of woman⁠—at once a sympathetic, affectionate mother and a panderer to the vices of men. How strange that she should have these children at all. Berenice had on a white skirt, white tennis-shoes, a pale-cream silk waist or blouse, which fitted her very loosely. Because of exercise her color was high⁠—quite pink⁠—and her dusty, reddish hair was blowy. Though they turned into the hedge gate and drove to the west entrance, which was at one side of the house, there was no cessation of the game, not even a glance from Berenice, so busy was she.

He was merely her mother’s friend to her. Cowperwood noted, with singular vividness of feeling, that the lines of her movements⁠—the fleeting, momentary positions she assumed⁠—were full of a wondrous natural charm. He wanted to say so to Mrs. Carter, but restrained himself.

“It’s a brisk game,” he commented, with a pleased glance. “You play, do you?”

“Oh, I did. I don’t much any more. Sometimes I try a set with Rolfe or Bevy; but they both beat me so badly.”

“Bevy? Who is Bevy?”

“Oh, that’s short of Berenice. It’s what Rolfe called her when he was a baby.”

“Bevy! I think that rather nice.”

“I always like it, too. Somehow it seems to suit her, and yet I don’t know why.”

Before dinner Berenice made her appearance, freshened by a bath and clad in a light summer dress that appeared to Cowperwood to be all flounces, and the more graceful in its lines for the problematic absence of a corset. Her face and hands, however⁠—a face thin, long, and sweetly hollow, and hands that were slim and sinewy⁠—gripped and held his fancy. He was reminded in the least degree of Stephanie; but this girl’s chin was firmer and more delicately, though more aggressively, rounded. Her eyes, too, were shrewder and less evasive, though subtle enough.

“So I meet you again,” he observed, with a somewhat aloof air, as she came out on the porch and sank listlessly into a wicker chair. “The last time I met you you were hard at work in New York.”

“Breaking the rules. No, I forget; that was my easiest work. Oh, Rolfe,” she called over her shoulder, indifferently, “I see your pocketknife out on the grass.”

Cowperwood, properly suppressed, waited a brief space. “Who won that exciting game?”

“I did, of course. I always win at tetherball.”

“Oh, do you?” commented Cowperwood.

“I mean with brother, of course. He plays so poorly.” She turned to the west⁠—the