WORLD'S END

This again was supposed to be "art"; and again the gossips wouldn't believe it. It was too bad that there had to be truth in their worst suspicions. There are persons who believe in the ascetic life, and when their stories of renunciation are told, as in Browning's Ring and the Book, they make noble and inspiring literature. But Lanny Budd had been brought up under a different code, and his leading lady also had ideas of her own. On the stage she was acting a part of conventional "virtue," and pouring intense feeling into it; but when she and Lanny were alone, she embraced him with ardor, and did not trouble to fit these two codes to each other.

Lanny felt free and happy, so long as he was in Holborn; but when he started on the long drive back to the home of Esther Remson Budd, a chill would settle over his spirit, and when he put his car in the garage and stole softly up to his room, he felt like a burglar. His stepmother didn't wait up for him, but she knew the worst - and, alas, the worst was true. She never said a word to him about it, but as the days passed, their relationship grew more and more formal. Esther saw herself justified in everything she had feared when she had let this bad woman's son into her home; he had that woman's blood and would follow her ways; he belonged in France, not in New England - at any rate not in her home, making it a target for the arrows of scandal. From that time on Esther would count the days to the latter part of September, when Lanny would be going back to school.

The thing made for unhappiness between her and her husband also. Robbie didn't feel as she did; Robbie had met the girl, and thought she was the right sort for Lanny to have at this stage of his life. He couldn't say that to Esther, of course; he had to pretend that he didn't know what was going on - at the same time knowing that Esther didn't believe him.

III

This interlude with Gracyn was a strange experience for Lanny. She was a "daughter of the people," and his acquaintance with these had been limited to servants and his childhood playmates in France. She had hardly any tradition of culture; her mother had been a clerk who had married her employer late in his life and inherited his small business. Gracyn had gone through school as Lanny was doing, bored with most subjects and forgetting them overnight. She had lived through four years of world war and it had become known to her that America was helping England and France to fight Germany; but she hadn't got quite clear about Britain and England, she didn't know which side Austria was on, and if you had mentioned Bulgaria and Bougainvillaea, she couldn't have told which was which. She was all the time pulling "boners" like that, and never minded if you laughed. "Don't expect me to know about anything but acting," she would say.

When she was a child in school she had posed in some tableaux, representing "Columbia," and "Innocence," and so on, and it had set her imagination on fire; she had discovered a way of escape from the harassments of daily life, with a mother always in debt and very rarely a good substantial meal on the table. She found that she could lose herself in a world of imagination, full of beautiful, rich, and delightful people - "like you, Lanny," she said. She had driven her childhood friends to act in stories which she made up and in which she played the princess, the endangered and adored one. She haunted the local "opera house," to which traveling companies now and then came; she learned that sometimes they would use a child to walk across the stage in a crowd scene, or to be dressed up and petted by some actress playing the mother. Thus she had watched plays from the wings, absorbed in the story, and, no matter how humble her part, she had lived it.

She was passionate and intense in whatever she did; making love to her was like holding a live bird in your hand and feeling the throbbing of its heart. Her emotions came like waves rolling on the ocean, sweeping a boat along; but they passed quickly and were succeeded by another kind of waves. Lanny would become aware that she was no longer loving him, but was thinking about love to be enacted on the stage. It would be one of the principal things she had to do, of course; and while she did it she would start to talk about it from the technical point of view. She had studied the fine points of the actresses she had been able to see; also the favorites of the motion picture screen, and Lanny found it startling in the midst of a tкte-а-tкte to be told that Gloria Swanson heaved her bosom thus and so when she was manifesting passion, and the audiences seemed to like it, but Gracyn thought it was rather overdone, and what did Lanny think?