Read Ebook: Spellbinders by Banning Margaret Culkin

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Ebook has 2195 lines and 81830 words, and 44 pages

I AT THE BROWNLEYS' 11

II FREDA 30

IV CITY MICE 45

V A HUSBAND 64

VI MARGARET 76

X THE CLEAN WIND 116

XX BARBARA BREAKS LOOSE 243

SPELLBINDERS

AT THE BRONWLEYS'

Gage Flandon put his wife's fur cloak around her and stood back, watching her as she took a final glance into the long mirror in the hall.

"I'm quite excited," she said. "Margaret always excites me and I do want you to meet her. She really must come to stay with us, Gage."

"If you like. I'm not so keen."

"Afraid of strong-minded women?"

"It's not their strong minds I'm afraid of, Helen."

"Their alluring personalities?" She slipped an arm into his and led him to the door.

"Not even that. Their horrible consciousness--self-consciousness. Their nervousness. Their aggressiveness. Most of all, I hate the idea of their effect on you."

"You sound as if whole cohorts of strong-minded rapacious women were storming the city instead of one old college friend of mine come to bolster up the fortunes of your own political party."

Flandon helped her into the automobile.

"You know what I mean," he said briefly.

He stayed silent and Helen Flandon left him to it. But even in the darkness of the car he could feel her excitement and his own irritation at it bothered him. There was no reason, he told himself, to have conceived this prejudice against this friend of Helen's, this Margaret Duffield. Except that he had heard so much about her. Except that she was always being quoted to him, always writing clever letters to his wife, producing exactly that same nervous excitement which characterized her mood to-night. An unhealthy mood. He hated fake women, he told himself angrily, and was angry at himself for his prejudice.

"It's too bad to drag you out to meet her. But I couldn't go to the Brownleys', of all places, alone, could I?"

"Of course not. I don't mind coming. I want to see Brownley anyway. I don't mind meeting your friend, Helen. Probably I'll like her. But I don't like to see you excited and disturbed as she always makes you. Even in letters."

"Nonsense."

"No--quite true. You're not real. You begin by wondering whether you've kept up to the college standard of women again. You wonder if you've gone to seed and begin worrying about it. You get different. Even to me."

"How foolish, Gage."

Her voice was very sweet and she slipped along the seat of the car until she was pressed close beside him. He turned her face up to his.

"I don't care what the rest of the fool women do, Helen. But I do so love you when you're real--tangible--sweet."

"I'm always real, about five pounds too tangible and invariably sweet."

"You're utterly unreliable, anyway. You promised me you'd keep clear of this political stuff at least for a while. You quite agreed with me that you were not the kind of person for it. Then along comes this Duffield woman to stir up things and you forget everything you said to me and are off in Mrs. Brownley's train."

"I'm not in anybody's train, Gage." Mrs. Flandon straightened up. "And I don't intend to be in anybody's train. But it's a different thing to show decent interest in what other women are thinking and doing. Perhaps you don't want me to read the newspapers either."

"I merely want you to be consistent. I don't want you to be one of these--"

"Fake women," supplied his wife. "You repeat yourself badly, dear."

Entering the Brownley drawing-room a few minutes after his wife, Gage found no difficulty in picking out the object of his intended dislike. She was standing beside Helen and looked at him straightly at his entrance with a level glance such as used to be the prerogative of men alone. He had only a moment to appraise her as he crossed the room. Rather prettier--well, he had been warned of that, she had carried the famous Daisy Chain in college,--cleverly dressed, like his own wife, but a trifle more eccentric perhaps in what she was wearing. Not as attractive as Helen--few women were that and they usually paled a little beside her charm. A hard line about her mouth--no, he admitted that it wasn't hard--undeveloped perhaps. About Helen's age--she looked it with a certain fairness--about thirty-one or two.

She met him with the same directness with which she had regarded him, giving him her hand with a charming smile which seemed to be deliberately purged of coquetry and not quite friendly, he felt, though that, he quickly told himself, must be the reflection of his own mood.

"And how do you find Helen?" he asked her.

"Very beautiful--very dangerous, as usual."

"Dangerous?"

"Helen is always dangerous. She uses her power without directing it."

He had a sense of relief. That was what he had been feeling for. That was the trouble with Helen. But on that thought came quickly irritation at the personal comment, at the divination of the woman he disapproved of.

"It is sometimes a relief," he said, "to find some woman who is not deliberately directing her powers."

"You make my idea crystallize into an ugly thought, Mr. Flandon. It's hardly fair."

There she was, pulling him into heavy argument. He felt that he had been awkward and that it was entirely her fault. He took refuge in the commonplaces of gallantry.

"Ugly thoughts are impossible in some company. You're quite mistaken in my meaning."

She smiled, a half amused smile which did not so much reject his compliment as show him how impervious she was to such things. Deliberately she turned to Helen who had been enveloped by the ponderous conversation of the host. Mr. Brownley liked to talk to Helen and Helen was giving him that absorbed attention which she usually gave to any man. Gage and Margaret joined them, and as if she wondered at the brevity of their initial exchange, Helen gave them a swift glance.

"Well," she said, "have the feminist and the anti-feminist found peace in each other?"

"She refuses to be complimented," grinned Gage, rather sheepishly, immensely grateful to Helen for making a joke of that momentary antagonism.

"Have women given up their liking for compliments?" Mr. Brownley beamed upon them beneficently, quite conscious of his ability to remain gallant in his own drawing-room. "Not these women surely."

Gage flushed a little. It was almost what he himself had said. It had been his tone.

"We have been given so much more than compliments, Mr. Brownley," said Margaret Duffield, "that they seem a little tasteless after stronger food."

"Not tasteless to most of us. Perhaps to a few, like Margaret. But most of us, men and women, will like them as long as we have that passion for appearing to ourselves as we would like to be and not as we are."

Over recovered ease of manner, Gage smiled at Helen. She had taken that up neatly. She had penetration, not a doubt of it. Why did she try then to subordinate herself to these other women, people like this Duffield girl, these arrogant spinsters? He greeted his hostess, who came from the library, where a group of people were already settled about the card tables.

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