Youth and the Bright Medusa

ring lavender scarfs-wearing a most unseaworthy hat, her broad, vigorous face wreathed in smiles. She was too much an American not to believe in publicity. All advertising was good. If it

Sherry's, I had seen Jerome Brown come in with several younger

ry Cressida Garnet. Nobody believed it at first, but since she confir

convenient, it was Jerome Brown. But as an old friend of Cressida Gar

lf she still was, and with what undiminished zeal she went about even the most trifling things that pertained to her professi

olding a French bull-dog on the leash. This was "Horace," Cressida's only son. He, at any rate, had not the Garnet look. He was rich and ruddy, indolent and insolent, with soft oval cheeks and the blooming complexion of twenty-two. There was the beginning of a silky shadow on his upper lip. He seemed like a ripe fruit grown out of a rich soil; "oriental," his mother called his peculiar lusciousness. His aunt's restless and aggrieved glance kept flecking him from the side, b

. "Does Madame Cressida know we are to have the pleasure of your company for this voyage?" He spoke deliberate, grammatical English-he despised the American rendering of the language-but there was an indescribably foreign quality in his voice,-a something muted; and though he aspirated his "th's" with such conscientious thoroughness, there was always the thud of a "d" in them. Poppas stood before me in a short, tightly buttoned grey coat and cap, exactly the colour of his greyish skin and hair a

ressida had enga

quite well,-which is not at all, of course, what we might have expected, and only goes to show that our Madame Cressida is now, as always, a charming exception to rules." P

Cressida, and asked him whether he still suffered from facial neuralgia as much as he had done in fo

ico. It never relaxes. I think I have told you about my favourite city in the middle of Asia, la sainte Asie, where the rainfall is absolutely nil, and you are protected on every side by hundreds of metres of warm, dry sand. I was there when I was a child once, and it is still my intention to retire t

eing me, Cressida struggled under her fur-lined robes and got to her feet,-which was more than Horace or Miss Julia managed to do. Miss Julia, as I could have foretold, was not pleased. All the Garnets had an awkward manner with me. Whether it was that I reminded them of things they wished to forget, or whether they thought I esteemed Cres

ways turn up at critical moments in my life." She pressed my arm confidentially, and I felt that she

it's all that it shoul

later, and you'll see th

course,-all except Hor

for

chilly, and we sat down by an open hatchway which emitted warm air from somewhere below. At this close range I studied Cressida's face, and felt

t there is so little of my life I would be willing to live over again? So little that I can even think of without depression.

I've sometimes wondered whether the bleakness may not have been in me, too; for it has certainly followed me. There, that is no way to talk!"

oo," I said bluntly. "But perhaps that

't she? But it was Julia's turn. I can't come alone, and they've gro

roached us with a blue envelope. "

folded the paper small and tucked it between the buttons of her close-fitting gown, "Something he forgot to tell me. How long shall you be in London? Good; I want you to meet him. We shall probab

ard's hand; having found it again, he dropped back between Horace and Miss Julia, whom I think he disliked no more than he did the rest of the world. He liked Julia quite as well as he liked me, and he liked me quite as well as he liked any of the women to whom he would be fitfully agreeable upon the voyage. Once or twice, during each crossing, h

he deck, I was struck by their various degrees of in-expressiveness. Opaque brown eyes, almond-shaped and only half open; wolfish green eyes, close-set and always doing something, with a crooke

er in fortune or in person (though I think Miss Julia looked forward to the day when Cressida would "break" and could be mourned over),-but the fire at which she warmed herself, the little secret hope,-the illusion, ridiculous or sublime, which kept her going,-that they would have stamped out on the instant, with the whole Garnet pack behind them to make extinction s

e disappeared, there seemed to be every reason to hope that she might be off the scene for awhile. As Cressida said, if she had not brought Julia, she woul

been his

im than

d been h

uld have

g about with no visible means of locomotion, always running out of power and lying beached in some inconvenient spot until they received a check or a suggestion from Cressy. I was only too well acquainted with the strained, anxious expression that the sight of their handwriting brought to Cressida's face when she ran over her morning mail at breakfast. She usually put their letters by to read "when she was feeling up to it" and hastened to open others which

e Cressida. For twenty years she had been plunged in struggle; fighting for her life at first, then for a beginning, for growth, and at last for eminence and perfection; fighting in the dark, and afterward in the light,-which, with her bad preparation, and with her uninspired youth already behind her, took even more courage. During those twenty years the Garnets had been comfortable and indolent and vastly self-satisfied; and now they ex

king up from a bunch of those sloppily writ

essida unincumbered, as Horace was always in the cardroom and Mr. Poppas either nursed his neuralgia or went through the exercise of making himself interesting to some one of the young women on board.

im through a long illness and made the living besides. Her courage during the three years of her first marriage was fine enough to foreshadow her future to any discerning eye, and it had made me feel that she deserved any number of chances at marital happiness. There

n I used to meet him at the Whitings, while I was still singing at the Metropolitan, I always felt that he was different from the others; that if I were in

I knew, she had never been muc

ess relations in the end. I suppose it's because,-except for a sort of professional personality, which I've had to get, just as I've had to get so many oth

e them no good, and has robbed the

me grubby

and distracted so muc

off the family success, just as I might have carried off the family silver,-if there'd been any! They take the view that there were just so

ying, and I was touring the West with the Williams band, it was my feeling about my own people that made me go at all. Why I didn't drop myself into one of those muddy rivers, or turn on the gas in one of those dirty hotel rooms, I don't know to this day. At twenty-two you must hope for something

that I thought there were more likely to be limits to the rapac

can come again. You were the first person I told when I ran away with Charley, and for a long while you were the only one who

were all there. It's the greatest po

ers and accounts in the end-and a hurt. A hurt tha

known, she appealed to the acquisitive instinct in men; but this wa

is time bathed in moonlight, under an almost clear sky. Down there on the silvery floor, little hillocks were scattered about under quilts and shawls; family units, presumably,-male, female, and young. Here and there a black shawl sat alone, nodding. They crouched submissively under the moonlight as if it were a spell. In one of those hi

my Lady?" he expostulated, tossing his spark of a c

n you be so? If I were twenty-two,

h, I've not your energy, Mother dear. We make no secret of that.

ransparent in the argent light. Presently she turned away,-as if she had been alone and were leaving only the night sea behind her,-and walked slowly forward; a strong, solitary figure on the white deck, the smoke-like sc