WHO CARES?

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"Yep, the dirty dogs! Twelve weeks' rehearsals and eight nights'
playing! Me for the novelties at Gimbel's, if this goes on."

A phonograph in another room ground out an air from "Boheme."

They mounted again. "Here's me," said Miss Capper, waving her hand
to a man in a dirty dressing gown who was standing on the threshold
of the front apartment, probably to achieve air. The room behind him
was foggy with tobacco smoke which rose from four men playing cards.
He himself was conspicuously drunk and would have spoken if he had
been able. As it was, he nodded owlishly and waggled his fingers.

The girl threw open her door and turned up the light. "England, Home
and Beauty," she said. "Excuse me while I dress the ship."

Seizing a pair of corsets that sprawled loosely on the center table,
she rammed them under a not very pristine cushion on the sofa.

Martin burst out laughing. The Crystal Room wine was still in his
head. "Very nippy!" he said.

"Have to be nippy in this life, believe me. Give me a minute to
powder my nose and murmur a prayer of thanksgivin', and then I'll
set the festive board and show you how we used to scramble eggs in
Shaftesbury Avenue."

"Right," said Martin, getting out of his overcoat. How about it? Was
this one way of making the little old earth spin?

Susie Capper went into a bedroom even smaller than the sitting room,
turned up the light over her dressing table and took off her little
white hat. From where Martin stood, he could see in the looking-
glass the girl's golden bobbed hair, pretty oval face with too red
lips and round white neck. There, it was obvious, stood a little
person feminine from the curls around her ears to the hole in one of
her stockings, and as highly and gladly sexed as a purring cat.

"Buck up, Tootles," cried Martin. "Where do you keep the frying
pan?"

She turned and gave him another searching look, this time of marked
approval. "My word, what a kid you look in the light!" she said. "No
one would take you for a blooming road-hog. Well, who knows? You and
I may have been brought together like this to work out one of Fate's
little games. This may be the beginning of a side-street romance,
eh?"

And she chuckled at the word and turned her nose into a small snow-
capped hill.

IV

Pagliacci was to be followed as usual by "Cavalleria." It was the
swan song of the opera season.

In a part that he acted as well as he sang, Caruso had been
permitted finally to retire, wringing wet, to his dressing room.
With all the dignity of a man of genuine feeling and sensitiveness
he had taken call after call on the fall of the curtain and stood
bent almost double before the increasing breakers of applause. Once
more he had done his best in a role which demanded everything that
he had of voice and passion, comedy and tragedy. Once more, although
his soul was with his comrades in battle, he had played the fool and
broken his heart for the benefit of his good friends in front.

In her box on the first tier Mrs. Cooper Jekyll, in a dress
imaginatively designed to display a considerable quantity of her
figure, was surrounded by a party which attracted many glasses.
Alice Palgrave was there, pretty and scrupulously neat, even perhaps
a little prim, her pearls as big as marbles. Mrs. Alan Hosack made a
most effective picture with her black hair and white skin in a
geranium-colored frock--a Van Beers study to the life. Mrs. Noel
d'Oyly lent an air of opulence to the box, being one of those lovely
but all too ample women who, while compelling admiration, dispel
intimacy. Joan, a young daffodil, sat bolt upright among them, with
diamonds glistening in her hair like dew. Of the four men, Gilbert
Palgrave, standing where he could be seen, might have been an
illustration by Du Maurier of one of Ouida's impossible guardsmen.
He made the other three, all of the extraordinary ordinary type,
appear fifty per cent, more manly than they really were--the young
old Hosack with his groomlike face and immaculate clothes, the burly
Howard Cannon, who retained a walrus mustache in the face of
persistent chaff, and Noel d'Oyly, who when seen with his Junoesque
wife made the gravest naturalists laugh at the thought of the love
manners of the male and female spider.

Turning her chair round, Alice touched Joan's arm. "Will you do
something for me?" she asked.

Joan looked at her with a smile of disturbing frankness. "It all
depends whether it will upset any of my plans," she said.

"I wouldn't have asked you if I had thought that."

Joan laughed. "You've been studying my character, Alice."

"I did that at school, my dear." Mrs. Palgrave spoke lightly, but it
was plain to see that there was something on her mind. "Don't go out
to supper with Howard Cannon. Come back with me. I want to talk to
you. Will you?"

Joan had recently danced in Cannon's huge studio-apartment and been
oppressed by its Gulliveresque atmosphere, and she had just come
from the Fifth Avenue house of the Hosack family, where a
characteristically dignified dinner had got on her nerves. Gilbert,
she knew, was engaged to play roulette at the club, and none of her
other new men friends was available for dancing. She hadn't seen
anything of Martin for several days. She could easily oblige Alice
under the circumstances.

So she said: "Yes, of course I will--just to prove how very little
you really know about me."

"Thank you," said Alice. "I'll say that I have a headache and that
you're coming home with me. Don't be talked out of it."

A puzzled expression came into Joan's eyes, and she turned her
shoulder to Palgrave, who was giving her his most amorous glances.
"It doesn't matter," she said, "but I notice that you are all
beginning to treat me like a sort of moral weathercock. I wonder
why?" She gave no more thought to the matter which just for the most
fleeting moment had rather piqued her, but sat drinking in the music
of Mascagni's immortal opera entirely ignoring the fact that
Palgrave's face was within an inch of her shoulder and that Alan
Hosack, on her other side, was whispering heavy compliments.

Alice sat back and looked anxiously from the face of the girl who
had been her closest friend at school to that of the man to whom she
had given all her heart. In spite of the fact that she had been
married a year and had taken her place in the comparatively small
set which made up New York society, Mrs. Palgrave was an optimist.
As a fiction-fed girl she had expected, with a thrill of excitement,
that after marriage she would find herself in a whirlpool of
careless and extravagant people who made their own elastic code of
morals and played ducks and drakes with the Commandments. She had
accepted as a fact the novelist-playwright contention that society
was synonymous with flippancy, selfishness and unchastity, and that
the possession of money and leisure necessarily undermined all that
was excellent in human nature. Perhaps a little to her
disappointment, she had soon discovered how grotesque and ignorant
this play-and-book idea was. She had returned from her honeymoon in
November of the first year of the war and had been astonished to
find that nearly all the well-known women whose names, in the public
imagination, were associated with decadence and irresponsibility,
were as a matter of fact devoted to Red Cross work and allied war
charities; that the majority of the men who were popularly supposed
to be killing time with ingenious wickedness worked as hard as the
average downtown merchant, and that even the debutantes newly burst
upon the world had, for the most part, banded themselves together as
a junior war-relief society and were turning out weekly an immense
number of bandages for the wounded soldiers of France and England.
Young men of high and gallant spirit, who bore the old names of New
York, had disappeared without a line of publicity--to be heard of
later as members of the already famous Escadrille or as ambulance
workers on the Western front. Beautiful girls had slipped quietly
away from their usual haunts, touched by a deep and rare emotion, to
work in Allied hospitals three thousand miles and more away--if not
as full-blown nurses, then as scullery maids or motor drivers.

There were, of course, the Oldershaws and the Marie Littlejohns and
the Christine Hurleys and the rest. Alice had met and watched them
throwing themselves against any bright light like all silly moths.
And there were the girls like Joan, newly released from the exotic
atmosphere of those fashionable finishing schools which no sane
country should permit. But even these wild and unbroken colts and
fillies, she believed, had excuses. They were the natural results of
a complete lack of parental discipline and school training. They ran
amuck, advertised by the press and applauded by the hawks who
pounced upon their wallets. They were more to be pitied than
condemned, far more foolish and ridiculous than decadent. They were
not unique, either, or peculiar to their own country. Every nation
possessed its "smart set," its little group of men and women who
were ripe for the lunatic asylum, and even the war and its iron
tonic had failed to shock them into sanity. In her particularly sane
way of looking at things, Alice saw all this, was proud to know that
the majority of the people who formed American society were fine and
sound and generous, and kept as much as possible out of the way of
those others whose one object in life was to outrage the
conventions. It was only when people began to tell her of seeing her
husband and her friend about together night after night that she
found herself wondering, with jealousy in her heart, how long her
optimism would endure, because Gilbert had already shown her a foot
of clay, and Joan was deliberately flying wild.

It was, at any rate, all to the good that Joan kept her promise and
utterly refused to be turned by the pleadings and blandishments of
Cannon and Hosack. They drove together to Palgrave's elaborate
house, a faithful replica of one of the famous Paris mansions in the
Avenue Wagram and sat down to a little supper in Alice's boudoir.

They made a curious picture, these two children, one just over
twenty, the other under nineteen; and as they sat in that lofty room
hung with French tapestries and furnished with the spindle-legged
gilt chairs and tables of Louis XIV, they might have been playing,
with all the gravity and imitative genius of little girls in a
nursery, at being grown up.

While the servants moved discreetly about, Joan kept up a rattle of
impersonalities, laughing at Cannon's amazing mustache and
Gargantuan furniture, enthusing wildly over Caruso's once-in-a-
century voice, throwing satire at Mrs. Cooper Jekyll's confirmed
belief in her divine right to queen it, and saying things that made
Alice chuckle about the d'Oylys--that apparently ill-matched pair.
She drank a glass of champagne with the air of a connoisseur and
finally, having displayed an excellent appetite, mounted a cigarette
into a long thin mother-of-pearl holder, lighted it and sank with a
sigh into the room's one comfortable chair.

"Gilbert gave me a cigarette holder like that," said Alice.

"Yes? I think this comes from him," said Joan. "A thoughtful
person!"

That Joan was not quite sure from whom she received it annoyed Alice
far more than if she had boasted of it as one of Gilbert's numerous
gifts. She needed no screwing up now to say what she had rather
timidly brought this cool young slip of a thing there to discuss.

"Will you tell me about yourself and Gilbert?" she asked quietly.
There was no need for Joan to act complete composure. She felt it.
"What is there to tell, my dear?"

"I hope there isn't anything--I mean anything that matters. But
perhaps you don't know that people have begun to talk about you, and
I think you owe it to me to be perfectly frank."

Even then it didn't occur to Joan that there was anything serious in
the business. "I'll be as frank as the front page of The Times--'All
the news that's fit to print,'" she said. "What do you want to
know?"

Alice proved her courage. She drew up a chair, bent forward and came
straight to the point. "Be honest with me, Joan, even if you have to
hurt me. Gilbert is very handsome, and women throw themselves at
him. I did, I suppose; but having won him and being still in my
first year of marriage, I'm naturally jealous when he lets himself
be drawn off by them. The women who have tried to take Gilbert away
from me I didn't know, and they owed me no friendship. But you're
different, and I can't believe that you--"

Joan broke in with a peal of laughter. "Can't you? Why not? I
haven't got wings on my shoulders. Isn't everything fair in love and
war?"

Alice drew back. She had many times been called prim and old-
fashioned, especially at school, by Joan and others when men were
talked about, and the glittering life that lay beyond the walls.
Sophistication, to put it mildly, had been the order of the day in
that temporary home of the young idea. But this calm declaration of
disloyalty took her color away, and her breath. Here was honesty
with a vengeance!

"Joan!" she cried. "Joan!" And she put up her hand as though to ward
off an unbelievable thought.

In an instant Joan was on her feet with her arms around the
shoulders of the best friend she had, whose face had gone as white
as stone. "Oh, my dear," she said, "I'm sorry. Forgive me. I didn't
mean that in the least, not in the very least. It was only one of my
cheap flippancies, said just to amuse myself and shock you. Don't
you believe me?"

Tears came to Alice. She had had at least one utterly sleepless
night and several days of mental anguish. She was one of the women
who love too well. She confessed to these things, brokenly, and it
came as a kind of shock to Joan to find some one taking things
seriously and allowing herself to suffer.

"Why, Alice," she said, "Gilbert means nothing to me. He's a dear
old thing; he's awfully nice to look at; he sums things up in a way
that makes me laugh; and he dances like a streak. But as to flirting
with him or anything of that sort--why, my dear, he looks on me as a
little boob from the country, and in my eyes he's simply a man who
carries a latchkey to amusement and can give me a good time. That's
true. I swear it."

It was true, and Alice realized it, with immense relief. She dried
her eyes and held Joan away from her at arm's length and looked at
her young, frank, intrepid face with puzzled admiration. It didn't
go with her determined trifling. "I shall always believe what you
tell me, Joan," she said. "You've taken a bigger load than you
imagine off my heart--which is Gilbert's. And now sit down again and
be comfortable and let's do what we used to do at school at night
and talk about ourselves. We've both changed since those days,
haven't we?"

"Have we? I don't think I have." Joan took another cigarette and
went back to her chair. Her small round shoulders looked very white
against the black of a velvet cushion. If there was nothing boyish
or unfeminine about her, there was certainly an indefinable
appearance of being untouched, unawakened. She was the same girl who
had been found by Martin that afternoon clean-cut against the sky--
the determined individualist.

Alice sat in front of her on a low stool with her hands clasped
round a knee. "What a queer mixture you are of--of town and country,
Joany. You're like a piece of honeysuckle playing at being an
orchid."

"That's because I'm a kid," said Joan. "The horrible hour will come
when I shall be an orchid and try and palm myself off as
honeysuckle, never fear."

"Don't you think marriage has changed you a little?" asked Alice.
"It usually does. It changed me from an empty-headed little fool to
a woman with oh, such a tremendous desire to be worthy of it."

"Yes, but then you married for love."

"Didn't you, Joany?"

"I? Marry for love?" Joan waved her arm for joy at the idea.

Alice knew the story of the escape from old age. She also knew from
the way in which Martin looked at Joan why he had given her his name
and house. Here was her chance to get to the bottom of a constant
puzzle. "You may not have married for love," she said, "but of
course you're fond of Martin."

Joan considered the matter. It might be a good thing to go into it
now that there was an unexpected lull in the wild rush that she had
made to get into life. There had been something rather erratic about
Martin's comings and goings during the last week. She hadn't spoken
to him since the night at the Ritz.

"Yes, I am fond of him," she said. "That's the word. As fond as I
might be of a very nice, sound boy whom I'd known all my life."

"Is that all?"

Joan made a series of smoke rings and watched them curl into the
air. "Yes, that's all," she said.

Alice became even more interested and curious and puzzled. She held
very serious views about marriage. "And are you happy with him?"

"I don't know that I can be said to be happy with him," said Joan.
"I'm perfectly happy as things are."

"Tell me how they are." There was obviously something here that was
far from right.

Joan was amused at her friend's gravity. She had always been a
responsible little person with very definite and old-fashioned
views. "Well," she said, "it's a charming little story, really. I
was the maiden who had to be rescued from the ugly castle, and
Martin was the knight who performed the deed. And being a knight
with a tremendous sense of convention and a castle of his own full
of well-trained servants, it didn't seem to him that he could give
me the run of his house in the Paul and Virginia manner, which isn't
being done now; and so, like a little gentleman, he married me, or
as I suppose you would put it, went through the form of marriage.
It's all part of the adventure that we started one afternoon on the
edge of the woods. I call it the cool and common-sense romance of
two very modern and civilized people."

"I don't think there's any place in romance for such things as
coolness and common sense," said Alice warmly. "And as to there
being two very modern and civilized people in your adventure, as you
call it, that I doubt."

Joan's large brown eyes grew a little larger, and she looked at the
enthusiastic girl in front of her with more interest. "Do you?" she
asked. "Why?"

Alice got up. She was disturbed and worried. She had a great
affection for Joan, and that boy was indeed a knight. "I saw Martin
walking away from your house the night you dined with Gilbert at the
Brevoort--I was told about that!--and there was something in his
eyes that wasn't the least bit cool. Also I rode in the Park with
him one morning a week ago, and I thought he looked ill and haggard
and--if you must know--starved. No one would say that you aren't
modern and civilized,--and those are tame words,--but if Martin were
to come in now and make a clean breast of it, you'd be surprised to
find how little he is of either of those things, if I know anything
about him."

"Then, my dear," replied Joan, making a very special ring of smoke,
"you know more about him than I do."

Alice began to walk about. A form of marriage--that was the phrase
that stuck in her mind. And here was a girl who was without a
genuine friend in all that heartless town except herself, and a fine
boy who needed one, she began to see, very badly. She, at any rate,
and she thanked God for it, was properly married, and she owed it to
friendship to make a try to put things right with these two.

"Joan, I believe I do," she said. "I really believe I do, although
I've only had one real talk with him. You're terribly and awfully
young, I know. You had a bad year with your grandfather and
grandmother, and the reaction has made you wild and careless. But
you're not a girl who has been brought up behind a screen in a room
lighted with one candle. You know what marriage means. There isn't a
book you haven't read or a thing you haven't talked over. And if you
imagine that Martin is content to play Paul to your imitation
Virginia, you're wrong. Oh, Joan, you're dangerously wrong."

Settling into her chair and working her shoulders more comfortably
into the cushion, Joan crossed one leg over the other and lighted
another cigarette. "Go on," she said with a tantalizing smile. "I
love to hear you talk. It's far more interesting than listening to
Howard Cannon's dark prophecies about the day after to-morrow and
his gloomy rumblings about the writing on the wall. You stand for
the unemancipated married woman. Don't you?"

"Yes, I do," said Alice quickly, her eyes gleaming. "I consider that
a girl who lets a man marry her under false pretenses is a cheat."

"A strong word, my dear!"

"But not too strong."

"Wait a minute. Suppose she doesn't love him. What then?"

"Then she oughtn't to have married him."

"Yes, but it may have suited her to marry him."

"Then she should fulfill the bargain honestly and play the game
according to the rules. However modern and civilized people are,
they do that."

Joan shrugged her round white shoulders and flicked her cigarette
ash expertly into the china tray on the spindle-legged table at her
elbow. She was quite unmoved. Alice had always taken it upon herself
to lecture her about individualism--the enthusiastic little thing.
"Dear old girl," she said, "don't you remember that I always make my
own rules?"

"I know you do, but you can't tell me that Martin wants to go by
them--or that he'll be able to remain a knight long, while you're
going by one set and he's keen to go by another? Where will it end?"

"End? But why drag in the end when Martin and I are only at the
beginning?"

Alice sat down again and bent forward and caught up Joan's
unoccupied hand. "Listen, dear," she said with more than
characteristic earnestness. "Last night I went with the Merrills to
the Ziegfeld Follies, and I saw Martin there with a little white-
faced girl with red lips and the golden hair that comes out of a
bottle."

"Good old Martin!" said Joan. "The devil you did!"

"Doesn't that give you a jar?"

"Good heavens, no! If you'd peeked into the One-o'clock Club this
morning at half past two, you would have seen me with a white-faced
man with a red mustache and a kink in his hair that comes from a hot
iron. Martin and I are young and giddy, and we're on the round-
about, and we're hitting it up. Who cares?"

There was a little silence--and then Alice drew back, shaking her
pretty neat head. "It won't do, Joany," she said, "it won't do. I've
heard you say 'Who cares?' loads of times and never seen anybody
take you by the shoulders and shake you into caring. That's why you
go on saying it. But somebody always cares, Joany dear, and there's
not one thing that any of us can say or do that doesn't react on
some one else, either to hurt or bless. Martin Gray's your knight.
You said so. Don't you be the one to turn his gleaming armor into
common broadcloth--please, please don't."

Joan gave a little laugh and a little yawn and stretched herself
like a boy and got up. "Who'd have thought it? It's half-past
twelve, and we're both losing our much needed beauty sleep. I must
really tear myself away." She put her arm around Alice and kissed
her. "The same dear little wise, responsible Alice who would like to
put the earth into woolens with a mustard plaster on its chest. But
it takes all sorts to make up a world, you know, and it would be
rather drab without a few butterflies. Don't throw bricks at me
until I've fluttered a bit more, Ally. My colors won't last long,
and I know what old age means, better than most. If I were in love
as you are, my man's rules would be the ones I'd go by all the time;
but I'm not in love, and I don't want to be--yet; and I'm only a
kid, and I think I have the right to my fling. This marriage of mine
is just a part of the adventure that Martin and I plunged into as a
great joke, and he knows it and he's one of the best, and I'm
grateful to him, believe me. Good night. God bless you!"

She stood for a moment on the top step to taste the air that was
filled with the essence of youth. Across a sky as clear as crystal a
series of young clouds were chasing each other, putting out the
stars for a moment as they scurried playfully along. It was a joy to
be alive and fit and careless. Summer was lying in wait for spring,
and autumn would lay a withering hand upon summer, and winter with
its crooked limbs and lack-luster eyes was waiting its inevitable
turn.

"A short life and a merry one!" whispered Joan to the moon, throwing
it a kiss.

A footman, sullen for want of sleep, opened the door of the
limousine. Some one was sitting in the corner with his arms crossed
over his chest.

"Marty! Is that you?"

"It's all right," said Gilbert Palgrave. "I've been playing patience
for half an hour. I'm going to see you home."

V

"You are going home?"

"Yes," said Joan, "without the shadow of a doubt."

"Which means that I'd better tell the chauffeur to drive round to
the One-o'clock, eh?"

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