Latter-Day Sweethearts

In going aboard the "Baltic" that exceptionally fine October morning, Miss Carstairs convinced herself that, of the people assembled to see her off, no one could reasonably discern in her movement the suggestion of a retreat. The commonplace of a sailing for the other side would not, indeed, have met with the recognition of any attendance at the pier among her set, save for her hint that she might remain abroad a year. There had been a small rally on the part of a few friends who had chanced to meet at a dinner overnight, to go down to the White Star docks and say good-by to Helen Carstairs. Helen sincerely wished they had not come, both because the ceremony proved a little flat, and because, when she had time to think them over, she was not so sure they were her friends.

But the main thing was that she had been able to withdraw, easily and naturally, from a doubly trying situation. She had not wanted to go abroad. All the novelty and sparkle had gone out of that business long ago. She knew foreign travel from A to Z, and she loathed tables d'hote, even more than the grim prospect of private meals with Miss Bleecker in sitting-rooms redolent of departed food, insufficiently atoned for by an encircling wilderness of gilding and red plush. The very thought of a concierge with brass buttons lifting his cap to her every time she crossed the hall, of hotel corridors decked with strange foot gear upon which unmade bedrooms yawned, of cabs and galleries and harpy dressmakers, of sights and fellow tourists, gave her a mental qualm. But it was better than staying at home this winter in the big house in Fifth Avenue where Mr. Carstairs had just brought a stepmother for her, in the person of "that Mrs. Coxe."

There was apparently no valid reason for Helen's shuddering antipathy to the lady, who had been the widow of a junior partner of her father, a man whom Mr. Carstairs had "made," like many another beginning in his employ.

Mr. Coxe had died two years before, of nervous overstrain, leaving this flamboyantly handsome, youngish woman to profit by his gains. Helen had always disliked having to ask the Coxes to dinner when her father's fiat compelled her to preside over the dull banquets of certain smartly-dressed women and weary, driven men, whom he assembled at intervals around his board. She could not say what she objected to in Mrs. Coxe; she thought it might be her giggle and her double chin. It had been always a relief when one of these "business" dinners was over, and she knew she would not have to do it soon again. When Mr. Carstairs dined in return with the Coxes, they had him at some fashionable restaurant, taking him afterward to the play. Mrs. Coxe had shown sense enough for that! During the interregnum of Mrs. Coxe's mourning following the demise of her exhausted lord, Mr. Carstairs had had the yacht meet Helen and himself at Gibraltar, and cruised all that winter in the Mediterranean.

That had been life abroad, Helen thought, with a throb of yearning! She was very fond of her father, rather a stony image to most people, and immensely proud of the way people looked up to his achievements in the Street, the resistless rush of his business combinations, his massive wealth, and his perfect imperturbability to newspaper cavil and attacks by enemies. She had loved to be at the head of his establishment, and to receive the clever and distinguished and notable people, foreign and domestic, who accepted Mr. Carstairs' invitation to meet one another, because they were clever and distinguished and notable, not because they wanted to talk all the evening what they had talked all day.

When they had come home from their cruise, Helen spent the summer in Newport, where her father rarely went. The yacht was his summer home, he was wont to say; and Helen did not suspect how often that season the noble "Sans Peur" had been anchored off the shores of a settlement in Long Island where Mrs. Coxe was enjoying the seclusion of a shingled villa with broad verandas set in a pocket handkerchief of lawn. Back and forth flew the owner's steam launch between the "Sans Peur" and the landing, and yet nobody told Helen. That autumn she had affairs of her own to absorb her time and give her a sobering view of humanity. For the first time in her life her father had vacated his throne as masculine ruler of her thoughts. She had passed into the grip of a strong, real passion for a man "nobody" knew.