Love in a Cloud: A Comedy in Filigree

"The man who betrays a confidence is always foolish enough to suppose his confidence will be sacred. I think this is an outrageous breach of good faith on Mr. Cutliff's part."

Mrs. Croydon gave a hitch forward as if she were trying to bring her chair closer to that of Fairfield.

"As I was saying," she remarked, "we society women have really so little time to give to literature, and literature needs just our touch so much, that it has been especially gratifying to find one that could carry out my ideas so well."

The young man began to regard her with a new expression in his face. As a literary woman she should have recognized the look, the expression which tells of the author on the scent of material. Whether Fairfield ever tried his hand at painting Mrs. Croydon or not, that look would have made it plain to any well-trained fellow worker that her peculiarities tempted his literary sense. Any professional writer who listens with that gleam in his eyes is inevitably examining what is said, the manner of its saying, the person who is speaking, in the hope that here he has a subject for his pen; he is asking himself if the reality is too absurd to be credible; how much short of the extravagance of the original he must come to keep within the bounds of seeming probability. Fairfield was confronted with a subject which could not be handled frankly and truthfully. Nobody would believe the tone of the woman or her remarks to be anything but a foolish exaggeration; if she had had the genuine creative instinct, the power of analysis, the recognition of human peculiarities, Mrs. Croydon must have seen in his evident preoccupation the indication that he was deliberating how far toward the truth it would in fiction be possible to go.

"It is very kind of you," he murmured vaguely.

"Oh, don't mention it," responded she, more graciously than ever. "You are really one of us now, as I said; and I always feel strongly the ties of the literary guild."

"The guild owes you a great deal," Fairfield observed blandly.

Mrs. Croydon waved her hand engagingly in return for this compliment, incidentally with a waving of various adornments of her raiment which gave her the appearance in little of an army with banners.

"I didn't come just for compliments," she observed with much sweetness. "I am a business woman, and I know how to come to the point. My father left me to manage my own property, and so I've had a good deal of experience. When I see how women wander round a thing without being able to get at it, it makes me ashamed of them all. I don't wonder that men make fun of them."

"You are hard on your sex."

"Oh, no harder than they deserve. Why, in Chicago there are a lot of women that do business in one way or another, and I never could abide 'em. I never could get on with them, it was so hard to pin them down."

"I readily understand how annoying it must have been," Fairfield observed with entire gravity. "Did you say that you had business with me?"

"Yes," she answered. "I suppose that I might have written, but there are some things that are so much better arranged by word of mouth. Don't you think so?"

"Oh, there's no doubt of it."

"Besides," she went on, "I wanted to tell you how much I like your work, and it isn't easy to express those things on paper."

It would be interesting to know whether to Fairfield at that moment occurred the almost inevitable reflection that for Mrs. Croydon it was hard, if her manuscripts were the test, to express anything on paper.

"You are entirely right," he said politely. "It is easy enough to put facts into words, but when it comes to feelings such as you express, it is different, of course."

He confided to Jack Neligage later that he wondered if this were not too bold a flout, but Mrs. Croydon received it as graciously as possible.

"There is so complete a difference," she observed with an irrelevance rather startling, "between the mental atmosphere in Boston and that I was accustomed to in Chicago. Here there is a sort of – I don't know that I can express it exactly; it's part of an older civilization, I suppose; but I don't think it pays so well as what we have in Chicago."

"Pays so well?" he repeated. "I don't think I understand."

"It doesn't sell so well in a book," she explained. "I thought that it would be better business to write stories of the East for the West to buy; but I've about made up my mind that it'll be money in my pocket to write of the West for the eastern market."

Fairfield smiled under his big mustache, playing with a paper-knife.

"Pardon my mentioning it," he said, "but I thought you wrote for fame, and not for money."

"Oh, I don't write for money, I assure you; but I was brought up to be a business woman, and if I'm going to write books somebody ought to pay for them. Now I wanted to ask you what you will sell me your part in 'Love in a Cloud' for."

Whether this sudden introduction of her business or the nature of it when introduced were the more startling it might have been hard to determine. Certain it is that Fairfield started, and stared at his visitor as if he doubted his ears.

"My part of it?" he exclaimed. "Why, I wrote it."

"Yes," she returned easily, "but so many persons have supposed it to be mine, that it is extremely awkward to deny it; and you have become my collaborateur, of course, by writing on the other novels."

"I hadn't realized that," Dick returned with a smile.

"You've put so much of your style into my other books," she pursued, "that it's made people attribute 'Love in a Cloud' to me, and I think you are bound now not to go back on me. I don't know as you see it as I do, but it seems to me that since you took the liberty of changing so much in my other stories you ought to be willing to bear the consequences of it, especially as I'm willing to pay you well."

"But as long as you didn't write the book," Dick observed, "I should think you'd feel rather queer to have it said you did."

"I've thought of that," Mrs. Croydon said, nodding, with a flutter of silken tags, "but I reason that the ideas are so much my own, and the book is so exactly what I would have written if social duties hadn't prevented, that that ought not to count. The fact that so many folks think I wrote it shows that I might have written it."

"But after all you didn't write it," Fairfield objected. "That seems to make it awkward."

"Why, of course it would have been better if I had given you a sketch of it," Mrs. Croydon returned, apparently entirely unmoved; "but then of course you got so much of the spirit of 'Love in a Cloud' out of my other books – "

This was perhaps more than any author could be expected to endure, and least of all a young author in the discussion of his first novel.

"Why, how can you say that?" he demanded indignantly.

"Do you suppose," she questioned with a benign and patronizing smile, "that so many persons would have taken your book for mine in the first place if you hadn't imitated me or taken ideas from my other books?"

Dick sprang to his feet, and then sat down, controlling himself.

"Well," he said coldly, "it makes no difference. It is too late to do anything about it now. An edition of 'Love in a Cloud' with my name on the title-page comes out next Wednesday. If folks say too much about the resemblance to your books, I can confess, I suppose, my part in the others."

She turned upon him with a burst of surprise and indignation which set all her ribbon-ends waving in protest.

"That," she said, "is a professional secret. No man of honor would tell it."

She rose as she spoke, her face full of indignation.

"You have not treated me fairly," she said bitterly. "You must have seen that the book was attributed to me, and you knew the connection between 'Love in a Cloud' and my other books – "

"Other books!" exclaimed Dick.

Mrs. Croydon waved him into silence with a magnificent gesture, but beyond that took no notice of his words.

"You saw how everybody looked at me that day at Mrs. Harbinger's," she went on. "If you were going to give your name to the book why didn't you do it then?"

"I didn't think of you at all," was his answer. "I was too much amused in seeing that absurd Barnstable make a fool of himself with Count Shimbowski. Did you know that the Count actually challenged him?"

Wrath of celestial goddesses darkened the face of Mrs. Croydon as a white squall blackens the face of the sky. Her eyes glared with an expression as fierce if not as bright as the lightning.

"What do you say?" she screamed. "Challenge my husband?"

"Your husband!" ejaculated Dick, a staring statue of surprise.

"Yes, my husband," she repeated vehemently. "He didn't make a fool of himself that day! A man can't come to the defense of a woman but you men sneer at him. Do you mean that that beastly foreign ape dared to challenge him for that? I'd like to give him my opinion of him!"