The Two Glass Doors

Wherein the Past and Future Become Transparent to a Perplexed Young Lady

ELINOR WYLIE

PERDITA, hastening precariously upon French heels along the ice-paven labyrinth of Washington Square, met her own image walking in the Garden of the Luxembourg. It may be recalled that Zoroaster, the Magi of Shelley's dream, sustained somewhat the same experience; the rencontre in Zoroaster's case was presumably an alarming one.

Perdita was the gentlest of ladies. The statement is simple and conservative; its implications are negligible. Diaphanous as she undoubtedly seemed, delicate as she undoubtedly was, her form and texture were spun from that excellent feminine hardness and suppleness which can be stretched into a spider-web or condensed into a single lethal drop of steel. She met her image with a level and inimical glance from cool gray eyes; her mouth was a contemptuous painted flower, her heart was adamant. The image was three years younger than Perdita and a shell-colored shade prettier; its clothes were mercifully out of date, or how could her courage have so gallantly borne the contrast between their Parisian crispness and her present raiment, over whose perfection a romantic shabbiness lay lightly as a bloom over black grapes?

Perdita's glance slid from the face of her image; her large eyes ceased to be cold transparent rain-drops; beneath their clarity a violet warmth began to glow. Her gray-gloved hand clenched itself a little; the hands of the image were encased in white gloves of an insolent freshness, and around its left hand the bare brown fingers of Hughie Graham's right hand were fitted like a leather gauntlet. Perdita looked appealingly up into Hughie's kind brown eyes; his gaze seemed cruelly absorbed by the shining fair hair under the image's cornflower hat. His total indifference smote her like a blow over the heart. Hughie had forgotten her; Plughie, whose tiresome faithfulness had been his chiefest fault; Hughie, whose feelings were invariably hurt by her exquisitely modulated change of manner after they had crossed to the Right Bank of the Seine; Hughie, who had once wept because, after clinging to his arm in the Cour du Dragon, she had cast it from her in the Place de la Concorde; Hughie, who had been so fantastically jealous of Pat Mortimer.

ANOTHER image, exorcising by its extreme brightness the first pair of ghosts, sprang up in Perdita's path; as she walked through Washington Square, a pale Parisian sunset filtered through layers of sweet-smelling dust, haloed this lady's little head against the vista of the Champs Elysees. Dust of the wooden paving-blocks, dust of the chestnut pollen, dust of rice-powder and orris, spangled the atmosphere; as Perdita passed the arch in Washington Square she saw the Arc de Triomphe very far away upon a golden sky.

The new image of herself lifted round innocent eyes to Pat Mortimer's smiling countenance; its uncovered hair was like a helmet, crested with small curls and faintly gilt. It sat bold upright in an open cab; it looked excited and beautiful and young. Its white skin shed a brilliance through a thin purplish cloak; its dress of sleek lemon-yellow satin appeared lighted from within. Pat Mortimer smiled like a well-fed cat who has no intention whatever of eating a canary. His uniform was a miracle of smartness; he had a broad brow, a short straight nose and a cloven chin; he was firmly and obstinately handsome. His brown eyes were full of gold specks like sealing-wax; they danced and glittered, and made—as she remembered Hughie's eyes—the clear dark color of those eyes seem gloomy and bitter as hemlock, when you thought of it, which was not often, because Pat was so amusing.

Perdita stopped to let them pass her; her hands almost pleaded with them to remember her presence, but they chattered on without a moment's pause.

"Curlilocks, curlilocks, wilt thou be mine?" said Pat, "and sit on a cushion of rose, chezFoyot, and feast upon strawberries drowned in Cliquot?"

"But no," said the image, "I must have the cream, in a little brown pot. "

They laughed uproariously, and Perdita hated them with an exquisite intensity.

She stood swaying gracefully in the wind at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Washington Square; she was shivering with cold, and it enraged her to see them drive off through an April twilight warm as new milk. Pat Mortimer who had so adored her, who had followed her about for three months in Paris begging her to marry him and his mother's pearls, who had nearly been court-martialed for sending motor-loads of lilac and mimosa to her apartment—Pat Mortimer had cut her dead, and that intolerable girl at his side had tinkled with approving laughter.

THE green dragon bus swept on without her; she leapt into a taxi's pumpkin chariot. "Delmonico's" breathed Perdita on a sigh of relief.

Perdita sat with her impractical feet poised upon the heated brass rail in the floor of the taxicab; her shoulders were supported by reasonably clean leather; she was comfortable. She regarded herself with approval in a mirror the size of a silver dollar; she loved her pale face, her eyes like gray pansies freaked with jet, her little lips minutely painted scarlet. She twirled a tendril of yellow hair against the ivory of either cheek; she powdered her small nose with enormous gravity. Certainly, if four years had purloined the faintest hint of freshness and buoyancy from her beauty, they had no less added a vague loveliness, thinner than the tulle veil of cigarette smoke even now encircling her shining turban.

She reached Delmonico's fifteen minutes early for her appointment with George; the taxicab could wriggle in and out of whirlpools of traffic fatal to green buses. George would be punctual to the very second; his estimate of the value of time would never allow him to be upon the spot too soon. His estimate of the value of Perdita made a moment's tardiness unthinkable.

Perdita was glad to have this hushed oasis of leisure in which to consider images, mirages, and kindred delusions. She arranged herself languidly in a velvet chair which afforded a fine view of the revolving glass door through which George must infallibly enter. With calm and obdurate deliberation, she detached her inward gaze from the past and turned it towards the future, that future whose portal was not transpicuous like the past, but frosted with uncertainty as the glass door of Delmonico's was even now frosted with cold blue mist.

Perdita stared into the future, and discerned the looming form of George, so soon to be at her side, through this nebulous portal. He was doubtless approaching her on foot, for he esteemed highly the fresh pink glaze upon his cheekbones, for whose preservation a certain amount of physical exercise was absolutely indispensable; his square shoulders and short-coupled muscles could ill permit the accretion of adipose tissue. Fortunately he was tall; that extra inch above six feet made all the difference. A deep breath, and the thickness of the torso rode triumphantly over the swelling chest, the budding alderman turned gladiator. Into how disarming a smile the pink glaze could crack only Perdita, the adored, might have told. She smiled, appraising it in silence.

THUS considered, George appeared curiously and subtly fascinating. Perdita asked herself, with relentless honesty, how this marvel had come to pass. She, of course, was a proverb in porcelain, a poem in pure white Sevres. She was musical, Episcopalian, and elegant; she was fastidious and poor. George, in his wholesome way, was clean and correct and totally unromantic. His family were rich, and precisely as fashionable as it is possible for staunch Presbyterians to be.

George was really rather good-looking; not so good-looking as Plughie or Pat, because he bore a slight resemblance to a very perfectly poached egg, but quite good enough, in a smooth yellow-haired manner, to win that small crabapple prize, Perdita's appreciation of masculine beauty. His clothes were dependable and inoffensive. Pat's clothes had always come from Savile Row a little too recently, and Hughie's so long ago that the coats and trousers had become inextricably mixed; they never matched each other, and you suspected them of having originally helonged to the wild younger brother who was taller than Hughie or the stupid elder brother who was very much shorter.

Continued on page 102

Continued from page 67

George's boots shone resplendent and his nails did not; he had a nice voice, Possessing, as he did, two blue-eyed parents, it was like the poor boy's unfailing filial respect to have painstakingly inherited his father's large robin's-egg stare and his mother's invisible eyebrows, Once upon a time, a whole legendary age before the war, George had been in New Haven; then he had been in Washington; then he had been in Paris. Now he was in a broker's office, but naturally, if he succeeded in marrying Perdita, he would enter diplomacy. In that event, his qualifications would be manifest, even to the Secretary of State.

Perdita thought, vaguely and with some distaste, of chocolate and French pastry as opposed to Orange Pekoe and crumpets. Then she thought, more definitely, of George's square white house at Rye as compared to Hughie's moated grange in Northumberland. But there was no denying the facts in the case; Hughie was dead, and his blond elder brother was barely five foot seven. His younger brother was paid to live in Penang. So much for that. Pat Mortimer had just bought a chateau near Tours, built of stone that was golden and crumbly like honeycomb in the sun. Only Pat had never forgiven her; indeed he had gone to the peevish extreme of marrying Millicent, and Millicent was the end of Pat.

THE door of the past was dark; it was more and more a diminishing glass, behind which the small figures shrank and wavered to the size of marionettes; their gestures were stiff with tragedy. The door of the future was clearer than the most expensive plate glass; it had suddenly grown bright with rainbow colors. It magnified the approaching shape of George into that of a beneficent giant; the three salmon-pink roses in the giant's hand were larger than cabbages; their stems were slim young trees. Perdita felt no bigger than a tortoise-shell kitten; as George drew nearer she felt no bigger than a yellow butterfly. But she leaped to her feet as George came out of the blue mist; the revolving door of Delmonico's stood still,

"George," she cried impulsively, "I am so glad to see you!" They were the kindest words she had ever given him. They looked at each other happily; in the palm of his hand her fingers seemed small as a kitten's claws and soft as a butterfly's wings.