“Have you broken with Mr. Braxmar?” asked her mother, curiously, nervously, hopefully, hopelessly.
“I haven’t seen him since,” replied Berenice, lying conservatively. “I don’t know whether I shall or not. I want to think.” She arose. “But don’t you mind, mother. Only I wish we had some other way of living besides being dependent on Mr. Cowperwood.”
She walked into her boudoir, and before her mirror began to dress for a dinner to which she had been invited. So it was Cowperwood’s money that had been sustaining them all during the last few years; and she had been so liberal with his means—so proud, vain, boastful, superior. And he had only fixed her with those inquiring, examining eyes. Why? But she did not need to ask herself why. She knew now. What a game he had been playing, and what a silly she had been not to see it. Did her mother in any way suspect? She doubted it. This queer, paradoxical, impossible world! The eyes of Cowperwood burned at her as she thought.
LIII
A Declaration of Love
For the first time in her life Berenice now pondered seriously what she could do. She thought of marriage, but decided that instead of sending for Braxmar or taking up some sickening chase of an individual even less satisfactory it might be advisable to announce in a simple social way to her friends that her mother had lost her money, and that she herself was now compelled to take up some form of employment—the teaching of dancing, perhaps, or the practice of it professionally. She suggested this calmly to her mother one day. Mrs. Carter, who had been long a parasite really, without any constructive monetary notions of real import, was terrified. To think that she and “Bevy,” her wonderful daughter, and by reaction her son, should come to anything so humdrum and prosaic as ordinary struggling life, and after all her dreams. She sighed and cried in secret, writing Cowperwood a cautious explanation and asking him to see her privately in New York when he returned.
“Don’t you think we had best go on a little while longer?” she suggested to Berenice. “It just wrings my heart to think that you, with your qualifications, should have to stoop to giving dancing-lessons. We had better do almost anything for a while yet. You can make a suitable marriage, and then everything will be all right for you. It doesn’t matter about me. I can live. But you—” Mrs. Carter’s strained eyes indicated the misery she felt. Berenice was moved by this affection for her, which she knew to be genuine; but what a fool her mother had been, what a weak reed, indeed, she was to lean upon! Cowperwood, when he conferred with Mrs. Carter, insisted that Berenice was quixotic, nervously awry, to wish to modify her state, to eschew society and invalidate her wondrous charm by any sort of professional life. By prearrangement with Mrs. Carter he hurried to Pocono at a time when he knew that Berenice was there alone. Ever since the Beales Chadsey incident she had been evading him.
When he arrived, as he did about one in the afternoon of a crisp January day, there was snow on the ground, and the surrounding landscape was bathed in a crystalline light that gave back to the eye endless facets of luster—jewel beams that cut space with a flash. The automobile had been introduced by now, and he rode in a touring-car of eighty horsepower that gave back from its dark-brown, varnished surface a lacquered light. In a great fur coat and cap of round, black lamb’s-wool he arrived at the door.
“Well, Bevy,” he exclaimed, pretending not to know of Mrs. Carter’s absence, “how are you? How’s your mother? Is she in?”
Berenice fixed him with her cool, steady-gazing eyes, as frank and incisive as they were daring, and smiled him an equivocal welcome. She wore a blue denim painter’s apron, and a palette of many colors glistened under her thumb. She was painting and thinking—thinking being her special occupation these days, and her thoughts had been of Braxmar, Cowperwood, Kilmer Duelma, a half-dozen others, as well as of the stage, dancing, painting. Her life was in a melting-pot, as it were, before her; again it was like a disarranged puzzle, the pieces of which might be fitted together into some interesting picture if she could but endure.
“Do come in,” she said. “It’s cold, isn’t it? Well, there’s a nice fire here for you. No, mother isn’t here. She went down to New York. I should think you might have found her at the apartment. Are you in New York for long?”
She was gay, cheerful, genial, but remote. Cowperwood felt the protective gap that lay between him and her. It had always been there. He felt that, even though she might understand and like him, yet there was something—convention, ambition, or some deficiency on his part—that was keeping her from him, keeping her eternally distant.
He looked about the room, at the picture she was attempting (a snow-scape, of a view down a slope), at the view itself which he contemplated from the window, at some dancing sketches she had recently executed and hung on the wall for the time being—lovely, short tunic motives. He looked at her in her interesting and becoming painter’s apron. “Well, Berenice,” he said, “always the artist first. It is your world. You will never escape it. These things are beautiful.” He waved an ungloved hand in the direction of a choric line. “It wasn’t your mother I
