Chapter 5

NARCISSE AND ALOIS

When Amy thought of her surroundings again, she was within a few blocks of home. "I won't lunch alone," she said. "I can't, with this on my mind." Through the tube she bade the coachman turn back to the Siersdorf offices.

A few minutes, and her little victoria was at the curb before a brownstone house that would have passed for a residence had there not been, to the right of the doorway, a small bronze sign bearing the words, "A. and N. Siersdorf, Builders." Two women were together on the sidewalk at the foot of the stoop. One, Amy noted, had a curiously long face, a curiously narrow figure; but she noted nothing further, as there was nothing in her toilet to arrest the feminine eye, ever on the rove for opportunities to learn something, or to criticise something, in the appearance of other women. The other was Narcisse Siersdorf�a strong figure, somewhat below the medium height, like Amy herself; a certain remote Teutonic suggestion in the oval features, fair, fine skin and abundant fair hair; a quick, positive manner, the dress of a highly prosperous working woman, businesslike yet feminine and attractive in its details. The short blue skirt, for example, escaped the ground evenly, hung well and fitted well across the hips; the blue jacket was cut for freedom of movement without sacrificing grace of line; and her white gloves were fresh. As Amy descended, she heard Narcisse say to the other woman, "Now, please don't treat me as a 'foreign devil.' If I hadn't happened on you in the street, I'd never have seen you."

"Really, I've intended to stop in, every time I passed," said the other, moving away as she saw Amy approaching. "Good-by. I'll send you a note as soon as I get back�about a week."

"One of the girls from out West," Narcisse explained. "We went to school together for a while. She's as shy as a hermit thrush, but worth pursuing."

"You're to lunch with me," said Amy.

Narcisse shook her head. "No�and you're not lunching with me, to-day. My brother's come, and we've got to talk business."

Amy frowned, remembering that those tactics were of no avail with Narcisse. "Please! I want to meet your brother�I really ought to meet him. And I'll promise not to speak."

"He's a man; so he'd be unable to talk freely, with a woman there," replied Narcisse. "You two would be posing and trying to make an impression on each other."

"Please!"

They were in the doorway, Narcisse blocking the passage to the offices. "Good-by," she said. "You mustn't push in between the poor and their bread and butter."

Amy was turning away. Her expression�forlorn, hurt, and movingly genuine�was too much for Narcisse's firmness. "You're not especially gay to-day," said she, relentingly.

Amy, quick as a child to detect the yielding note, brought her flitting mind back to Armstrong and her troubles. "My faith in a person I was very fond of has been�shaken." There was a break in her voice, and her bright shallow eyes were misty.

"Come in," said Narcisse, not wholly deceived, but too soft-hearted not to give Amy the benefit of the doubt, just as she gave to whining beggars, though she knew they were "working" her. Anyhow, was not Amy to be pitied on general principles, and dealt gently with, as a victim of the blight of wealth?

Amy never entered those offices without a new sensation of pleasure. The voluntary environment of a human being is a projection, a reflection, of his inner self, is the plain, undeceiving index to his real life�for, is not the life within, the drama of thought, the real life, and the drama of action but the imperfect, distorted shadowgraph? The barest room can be most significant of the personality of its tenant; his failure to make any impression on his surroundings is conclusive. The most crowded or the gaudiest room may tell the same story as the barest. The Siersdorfs conducted their business in five rooms, each a different expression of the simplicity and sincerity which characterized them and their work. There was the same notable absence of the useless, of the merely ornamental, the same making of every detail contributory both to use and to beauty. One wearies of rooms that are in any way ostentatious; proclamation of simplicity is as tedious as proclamation of pretentiousness. Those rooms seemed to diffuse serenity; they were like the friends of whom one never tires because they always have something new and interesting to offer. Especially did there seem to be something miraculous about Narcisse's own private office. It had few articles in it, and they unobtrusive; yet, to sit in that room and look about was to have as many differing impressions as one would get in watching a beam of white light upon a plain of virgin snow.

"How do you do it!" Amy exclaimed, as she seated herself. She almost always made the same remark in the same circumstances. "But then," she went on, "you are a miracle. Now, there's the dress you've got on�it's a jacket, a blouse, a belt and a skirt. But what have you done to it? How do you induce your dressmaker to put together such things for you?"

"You have to tell a dressmaker what to do," replied Narcisse, "and then you have to tell her how to do it. If she knew what to make and how, she'd not stop at dressmaking long. As I get only a few things, I can take pains with them. But you get so many that you have to accept what somebody else has thought out, and just as they've thought it out."

"And the result is, I look a frump," said Amy, half believing it for the moment.

"You look the woman who has too many clothes to have any that really belong to her," replied Narcisse, greatly to Amy's secret irritation. "There's the curse of wealth�too many clothes, to be well dressed; too many servants, to be well served; too many and too big houses, to be well housed; too much food, to be well fed." Then to the office boy for whom she had rung, "Please ask my brother if he's ready."

Soon Siersdorf appeared�about five years younger than his sister, who seemed a scant thirty; in his dress and way of wearing the hair and beard a suggestion of Europe, of Paris, and of the artist�a mere suggestion, just a touch of individuality�but not a trace of pose, and no eccentricity. He was of the medium height, very blond, with more sympathy than strength in his features, but no defined weakness either. A boy-man of fine instincts and tastes, you would have said; indolent, yet capable of being spurred to toil; taking his color from his surroundings, yet retaining his own fiber. He was just back from a year abroad, where he had been studying country houses with especial reference to harmony between house and garden�for, the Siersdorfs had a theory that a place should be designed in its entirety and that the builder should be the designer. They called themselves builders rather than architects, because they thought that the separation of the two inseparable departments was a ruinous piece of artistic snobbishness�what is every kind of snobbishness in its essence but the divorce of brain and hand? "No self-respecting man," Siersdorf often said, "can look on his trade as anything but a profession, or on his profession as anything but a trade."

During lunch Amy all but forgot her father's depressing hints against Armstrong in listening as the brother and sister talked; and, as she listened, she envied. They were so interested, and so interesting. Their life revealed her own as drearily flat and wearily empty. They knew so much, knew it so thoroughly. "How could anyone else fail to get tired of me when I get so horribly tired of myself?" she thought, at the low ebb of depression about herself�an unusual mood, for habitually she took it for granted that she must be one of the most envied and most enviable persons in the world.

Narcisse suddenly said to her brother, "Whom do you think I met to-day? Neva Carlin." At that name Amy, startled, became alert. "She's got a studio down at the end of the block," Narcisse went on, "and is taking lessons from Boris Raphael. That shows she has real talent, unless�" She paused with a smile.

"Probably," said Alois. "Boris is always in love with some woman."

"In love with love," corrected Narcisse. "Men who are always in love care little about the particular woman who happens to be the medium of the moment."

"I thought she was well off," said Alois; and then he looked slightly confused, as if he was trying not to show that he had made a slip.

Narcisse seemed unconscious, though she replied with, "There are people in the world who work when they don't have to. And a few of them are women."

"But I thought she was married, too. It seems to me I heard it somewhere."

"I didn't ask questions," said Narcisse. "I never do, when I meet anyone I haven't seen in a long time. It's highly unsafe."

With studied carelessness Amy now said: "I'd like to know her. She's the woman you were talking with at the door just now, isn't she?"

"Yes," said Narcisse.

"She looked�unusual," continued Amy. "I wish you'd take me to see her."

"I'll be very glad to take you," Narcisse offered, on impulse. "Perhaps she's really got talent and isn't simply looking for a husband. Usually, when a woman shows signs of industry it means she's looking for a husband, whatever it may seem to mean. But, if Neva's in earnest about her work and has talent, you might put her in the way of an order or so."

"I'll go, any day," said Amy. "Please don't forget."

She departed as soon as lunch was over, and the brother and sister set out for their offices�not for their work; it they never left. "Pretty, isn't she?" said Alois. "And extremely intelligent."

"She is intelligent in a scrappy sort of way," replied his sister. "But she neither said nor did anything in your presence to-day to indicate it."

"Well, then�she's pretty enough to make a mere man think she's intelligent."

"I saw you were beginning to fall in love with her," said the sister.

"I? Ridiculous!"

"Oh, I know you better than you know yourself in some ways. You've been bent on marriage for several years now."

"I want children," said he, after a pause.

"That's it�children. But, instead of looking for a mother for children, you've got eyes only for the sort of women that either refuse to have children, or, if they have them, abandon them to nurses. Let the Amy Fosdick sort alone, Alois. A cane for a lounger; a staff for a traveler."

"You're prejudiced."

"I'm a woman, and I know women. And I have interest enough in you to tell you the exact truth about them."

"No woman ever knows the side of another woman that she shows only to the man she cares for."

"A very unimportant side. Its gilt hardly lasts through the wedding ceremony. If you are going to make the career you've got the talent for, you don't want an Amy Fosdick. You'd be better off without any wife, for that matter. You ought to have married when you were poor, if you were going to do it. You're too prosperous now. If you marry a poor woman, you'll spoil her; if you marry a rich woman, she'll spoil you."

"You're too harsh with your own sex, Narcisse," said Alois. "If I didn't know you so well, I'd think you were really hard. Who'd ever imagine, just hearing you talk, that you are so tender-hearted you have to be protected from your own sentimentality? The real truth is you don't want me to marry."

"To marry foolishly�no. Tell me, 'Lois, what could you gain by marrying�say, Amy Fosdick? In what way could she possibly help you? She couldn't make a home for you�she doesn't know the first thing about housekeeping. The prosperous people nowadays think their daughters are learning housekeeping when they're learning to ruin servants by ordering them about. You say I'm harsh with my sex, but, as a matter of fact, I'm only just."

"Just!" Alois laughed. "That's the harshest word the human tongue utters."

"I've small patience with women, I will admit. They amount to little, and they're sinking to less. Girls used to dream of the man they'd marry. Now it's not the man at all, but the establishment. Their romance is of furniture and carriages and servants and clothes. A man, any man, to support them in luxury."

"I've noticed that," admitted Alois.

"It's bad enough to look on marriage as a career," continued Narcisse. "But, pass that over. What do the women do to fit themselves for it? A man learns his business�usually in a half-hearted sort of way, but still he tries to learn a little something about it. A woman affects to despise hers�and does shirk it. She knows nothing about cooking, nothing about buying, nothing about values or quantities or economy or health or babies or� She rarely knows how to put on the clothes she gets; you'll admit that most women show plainly they haven't a notion what clothes they ought to wear. Women don't even know enough to get together respectably clever traps to catch the men with. The men fall in; they aren't drawn in."

"Yet," said Alois, ironic and irritated, "the world staggers on."

"Staggers," retorted Narcisse. "And the prosperous classes�we're talking about them�don't even stagger on. They stop and slide back�what can be expected of the husbands of such wives, the sons and daughters of such mothers?"

Narcisse was so intensely in earnest that her brother laughed outright. "There, there, Cissy," said he, "don't be alarmed�I'm not even engaged yet."

Narcisse made no reply. She knew the weak side of her brother's character, knew its melancholy possibilities of development; and she had guessed what was passing in his mind as he and Amy were trying each to please the other.

"You yourself would be the better�the happier, certainly�for falling in love," pursued Alois.

"Indeed I should," she assented with sincerity. "But the man who comes for me�or whom I set my snares for�must have something more than a pretty face or a few sex-tricks that ought not to fool a girl just out of the nursery."

No arrow penetrates a man's self-esteem more deeply than an insinuation that he is easy game for women. But Alois was no match for his sister at that kind of warfare. He hid his irritation, and said good-humoredly, "When you fall in love, my dear, it'll be just like the rest of us�with your heart, not with your head."

Narcisse looked at him shrewdly, yet lovingly, too. "I'm not afraid of your marrying because you've fallen in love. What I'm agitated about is lest you'll fall in love because you want to marry."

Alois had an uncomfortable look that was confession.