Read CHAPTER 30 of Quin, free online book, by Alice Hegan Rice, on ReadCentral.com.

Down in the open square, under the clear cool stars, they looked at each other and laughed.

“Lead me to a bus!” cried Quin.  “I want to ride on top of it where the wind can blow through my whiskers.  My head feels like a joss-house!”

“Oh, but you were funny!” cried Eleanor.  “I wish you could have seen your face when all those women swarmed around you.  I was afraid you were going to jump out of the window!  Did you ever feel anything so hot and stuffy as that room?  And weren’t they all silly and make-believe?”

Quin gave a mighty sigh of relief at being out of it.

“Is this the sort of thing you get let in for often?” he inquired, aghast.

“Oftener than I like.  You see, all those people are Papa Claude’s old friends, and he’s been having a lovely time showing me off as he showed you off to-night.”

“But you surely don’t like it?”

“Of course I don’t.  And they know it.  They are already calling me a prig, and poking fun at me for not smoking and for not liking to have my hands patted and my cheeks pinched.  Isn’t it funny, Quin?  At home I was always miserable because there were too many barriers; I wanted to tear them all down.  Here, where there aren’t any, I find myself building them up at every turn, and getting furious when people climb over them.”

“Bartlett versus Martel, eh?”

“I suppose so.  Heaven knows, I wish I were one thing or the other.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Quin.  “You are pretty nice just as you are.”  Then he added inconsequently:  “Who was that fat man you were talking to when I came up?”

“Mr. Pfingst.  He is Estelle Linton’s backer.”

“Backer?” queried Quin.  Then, when he saw Eleanor’s eyes drop, he added vaguely:  “Oh!  I see!”

For the next block, strange to say, he did not think so much about Eleanor as he did about Miss Isobel Bartlett.  The whole situation kept presenting itself through her austere eyes, and instinctively he put a protecting hand on Eleanor’s elbow.

When at last they were on top of the bus, with the big, noisy city apparently going in the opposite direction, they promptly forgot all about the studio party and plunged headlong into their own important affairs.

“Begin at the very beginning,” commanded Eleanor, settling herself for a good long ride; “I want you to tell me everything.”

The beginning and the end and all that lay between them could easily have been compassed in three words by Quin.  But there were things he had pledged himself to tell her before he even broached the subject that was shrieking for utterance.  With painstaking exactness he set forth the facts that led up to his dismissal, trying to be fair to Mr. Bangs as well as to himself, and, above all, to claim no credit for taking the stand he had.

But Eleanor would not see it thus.  With characteristic fervor she espoused his cause.  She declared he had been treated outrageously.  He ought to have taken the matter straight to her grandmother.  The very idea!  After all the work he had done at the factory, for him to be dismissed just because he wouldn’t do a thing that he considered dishonorable!  She hated Mr. Bangs she always had hated him; and the more she dwelt upon the fact, the more ardently she approved Quin’s course.

“It was perfectly splendid of you to refuse his offer!” she cried, and her eyes blazed with that particular ray of feminine partisanship that is most soothing to the injured masculine.  “And you won’t lose by it in the long run.  You’ll get another position right off.  Why don’t you try to get one here in New York?”

“Would you like me to?”

“I should say I should!  Then we could do all sorts of jolly things together.  Not studio parties or cabarets, but jolly outdoor things like we used to do at home.  Do stay, Quin; won’t you?”

She was looking up at him with such frank urgency and such entire sympathy that Quin lost his head completely.

“Miss Nell,” he blurted out, “if I stay and get a job and make good, will you marry me?”

Eleanor, who was used to much more subtle manoeuvers, was caught unaware by this sudden attack.  For a second she was thrown into confusion; then she rallied all her forces for the defense.

“Why, of course I won’t!” she said then added with more conviction:  “I am not going to marry anybody not for years and years.”

“But I’ll wait years and years,” persisted Quin eagerly.  “I wouldn’t marry any girl until I could take care of her.  But if you’ll just give me a tip that maybe some day perhaps ”

It was very difficult to go on addressing his remarks to an impassive classic profile so difficult, in fact, that he abandoned the effort and let his eyes say the rest for him.

Eleanor stirred uneasily.

“I wish you wouldn’t be foolish, Quin, and spoil all our fun.  I’ve told you I mean to go on the stage for good and all.  You know you wouldn’t want an actress for a wife.”

“I’d want you, whatever you were,” he said with such fervor that she rashly gave him her luminous eyes again in gratitude.

He made the most of the opportunity thus offered.

“Honest, now!” he boldly challenged her.  “You can’t deny that you love me just a little bit, can you?”

She stared straight ahead of her down the long dim avenue, making no response to his question.  The cherries that swung from her hat-brim stirred not a hair’s-breadth, but the commotion their stillness caused in Quin’s heart was nothing short of cyclonic.

“More than when you left Kentucky?” he persisted relentlessly.

This time a barely perceptible nod stirred the cherries.

“There!” he said triumphantly.  “I knew it!  Just keep right on the way you are going, and I won’t say a word!”

“But I haven’t given you any encouragement; you mustn’t think I have.”

“I know it.  But you haven’t turned me down.”

At this she smiled at him helplessly.

“You are not very easy to turn down, Quin.”

“No,” he admitted; “it can’t be done.”

At this moment the bus rounded a sharp corner without slowing up, and the passengers on top were lurched forward with such violence that at least one masculine arm took advantage of the occasion to clasp a swaying lady with unnecessary solicitude.  It may have been a second, and it may have been longer, that Quin sat with his arm about Eleanor and his hand clasping hers.  Time and space ceased to exist for him and blessed infinity set in.  And then

“Good gracious!” she cried, starting up.  “Where are we?  I’d forgotten all about our cross-street.”

As a matter of fact they were in Harlem.

All the way back Eleanor refused to be serious about anything.  The mischievous, contradictory, incalculable little devil that always lurked in her took full possession.  She teased Quin, and laughed at him, leading him on one minute and running to cover the next.

When they reached the apartment, she tripped up the five flights as lightly as a bird, and Quin, in his effort to keep up with her, overtaxed himself and paid the penalty.  Heart and lungs were behaving outrageously when he reached the top landing, and he had to steady himself by the banister.

“Oh, Quin, I ought to have remembered!” Eleanor cried, with what he considered divine compassion.  “I can’t bear to hear you cough like that!  It sounds as if it were tearing you to pieces.”

“It’s nothing!” said Quin, struggling to get his breath.  “I’ll be all right in a minute.  What’s the box by the door?”

Eleanor’s glance followed his.

“If that old walrus, Pfingst, has dared to send me flowers again!” she cried, pouncing on the card and holding it so they both could read it.

Penciled in small, even lines were the words: 

    Sorry to find the lady-bird flown.  Will call up in the morning.  H. P.

Even in the dimly lighted hall, Quin could see the flush that suffused Eleanor’s face.

“It’s Harold Phipps,” she said, trying to be casual.  “I I didn’t know he was in town.”

Quin followed her into the apartment, and stood dully by the table as she untied the box and lifted half a dozen exquisite white orchids from their bed of maidenhair ferns.  Then, trying very hard to keep his voice steady, he asked gently: 

“What does this mean, Miss Nell?  I thought you weren’t going to have anything more to do with that man.”

“Well, I haven’t.  That is, not not until he came on last month to see about the play.”

“What play?”

“‘Phantom Love.’”

“But why did you have to see him?”

“Because I am to be in the play.”

“Not in his play?”

“No more his than Papa Claude’s.”

Quin’s face darkened.

“I saw him for only a few minutes,” Eleanor went on, “and Papa Claude was with us.  I give you my word, Quin, I’ve never spoken to him alone, or answered one of his letters.”

“Then he has been writing to you?  What business has he got worrying you with letters and flowers when you have told him you are through with him?”

In spite of his effort to keep calm, there was a rising note of anger in his voice.

“He is not worrying me,” said Eleanor, evidently conscious of her weakness in admitting Harold at the window of friendship when she had banished him from the door of love.  “He understands perfectly that everything is over between us.  But it would be silly for us to refuse to speak to each other when we shall necessarily be thrown together a lot.”

“Thrown together?  How do you mean?”

“At rehearsals.”

“Do you mean he is to be here in New York?”

“Yes after next month.  He has given up his position in Chicago, so he can devote all the time to the play.  You see, he not only helped to write it, but he is financing it.”

“So he is the backer?” Quin was scarcely responsible for what he said, so suddenly had disaster trodden on the heels of ecstasy.

“He is Papa Claude’s partner and producer,” said Eleanor with dignity.  “If I don’t care anything for him, I don’t see what harm there is in seeing him.”

“Not liking whisky won’t keep it from going to your head,” said Quin stubbornly.

“That’s perfect nonsense; and besides, what can I do?  It’s his play as well as ours.  I can’t ask him to stay away from rehearsals.”

“No; but you can stay away yourself.  You don’t have to be in this play.  Something else will turn up.  You can afford to wait.”

“But that’s just the point I can’t!  And, besides, think how silly and childish it would be for me to refuse a wonderful chance for a professional debut that might not come again in years.”

“But don’t you see, Miss Nell, you are in honor bound not to go on with this?”

“Honor bound?  How do you mean?”

“Why, to Queen Vic.”

“I agreed to break my engagement with Harold Phipps and not to answer any of his letters.  I’ve kept my promise.”

“Yes; but I thought, and I made her think, that you agreed not to see him or have anything to do with him for six months.”

“Well, the time will be up in six weeks.”

“Lots can happen in six weeks.”

If Quin had been wise he would have taken another tack; but, in his earnest effort to make her see her duty to Madam, he failed to press his own more personal claims, and thus lost his one chance of reaching her.

Eleanor understood impulse, emotion, but she would not listen to reason.  The mere mention of Madam’s name stirred up a whirlwind that snuffed out any love-lights that might have been kindling.  She stood with her back to the table, twisting Harold Phipps’s card in her fingers, and she looked at Quin suspiciously.

“Did grandmother send you up here to see if I was keeping my word?”

“She did not.  She doesn’t know I am here.”

“Then it’s just you who don’t trust me?”

“Well, I don’t think you are playing quite fair,” admitted Quin bluntly, “either to Queen Vic or to me.”

“And I suppose you propose to go back and tell her so?”

“I propose nothing of the kind.  It’s up to you whether we both keep our word, or whether we both break it.  You know what I think, and you see the position I am in.”

“I can settle that,” said Eleanor with spirit.  “I can write home to-night and tell them what I intend to do.  That will exonerate you, if that is what you are after.”

“It isn’t what I am after, and you know it!  For God’s sake, Miss Nell, be fair!  You know you can’t go on with this thing without starting up the old trouble with Mr. Phipps.”

“But, I tell you, I can.  I can control the situation perfectly.  Why can’t you trust me, Quin?”

“I don’t trust him.  He’s got ways of compromising a girl that you don’t know anything about.  If he ever gets wind of your going to Chicago ”

“I wish you wouldn’t throw that up to me!” There was real anger in her voice, which up to now had shown signs of softening.  “Just because I happened to me a fool once, it doesn’t follow that I’ll be one again!  It won’t be pleasant for me, but I am not going to let his connection with ‘Phantom Love’ spoil my chance of a lifetime.”

“And he will be at all the rehearsals, I suppose, and up here in the apartment between-times.”  Quin’s jealousy ran through him like fire through dry stubble.  “You’ll probably be seeing him every day.”

“And what if I do?” demanded Eleanor.  “I have told you our relations are strictly professional.”

“That card looks like it,” said Quin bitterly.

Eleanor tossed the object referred to in the trash-basket and looked at him defiantly.  The very weakness of her position made her peculiarly sensitive to criticism, and the fact that her mentor was her one-time slave augmented her wrath.

“See here, Miss Nell.”  Quin came a step closer, and his voice was husky with emotion.  “I know how keen you are about the stage; but, take it from me, you are making a wrong start.  If you’ll just promise to wait until your time is up ”

“I won’t promise anything!  What’s the use?  Nobody believes me.  Even you are siding with grandmother and suspecting me of breaking my word.  I don’t intend to submit to it any longer!”

Queer, spasmodic movements were going on in Quin’s lungs, and he controlled his voice with difficulty.

“You mean you are going on seeing Mr. Phipps and letting him send you flowers and things?”

“I am not!” Eleanor cried furiously.  “But, if I should, it’s nobody’s business but my own!”

For an agonizing moment they faced each other angrily, both of them lost in the labyrinth of their own situation.  At the slightest plea for help on her part, Quin would have broken through his own difficulties and rushed to her rescue.  He would even have offered to plead her cause again at the family tribunal.  But she was like a wilful child who is determined to walk alone on a high and dangerous wall.  The very effort to protect her might prove disastrous.

“If that’s the case,” said Quin, with his jaw thrust out and his nostrils quivering, “what do you want me to do?”

“I don’t care what you do!” Eleanor flung back “just so you leave me alone.”

Without a word, he picked up his hat and strode out of the apartment and down the stairs.  At every landing he paused, hoping against hope that she might call him back.  Even at the door he paused, straining his ears for the faintest whisper from above.  But no sound broke the stillness, and with a gesture of despair he flung open the door and passed out into the darkness.