r had noticed her come in. Mrs.
Wordling turned to greet them. She was looking her best, which was
sensational.

NINETEENTH CHAPTER

IN THE HOUSE OF GREY ONE

Bedient went one morning to the old Handel studio in East Fourteenth
Street. The Grey One had asked him to come. Bedient liked the Grey One.
He could laugh with Mrs. Wordling; Vina Nettleton awed him, though he
was full of praise for her; he admired Kate Wilkes and had a keen
relish for her mind. The latter had passed the crisis, had put on the
full armor of the world; she was sharp and vindictive and implacable to
the world; a woman who had won rather than lost her squareness, who
showed her strength and hid her tenderness. He had rejoiced in several
brushes with Kate Wilkes. There was a tang to them. A little sac of
fiery acid had formed in her brain. It came from fighting the world to
the last ditch, year after year. Her children played in the
quick-passing columns of the periodicals--ambidextrous, untamable,
shockingly rough in their games, these children, but shams slunk away
from their shrill laughter. In tearing down, _she_ prepared for the
Builder.

Bedient was not at all at his best with Kate Wilkes; indeed, none of
the things that had aroused Vina and Beth and David, like sudden
arraignments from their higher selves, came to his lips with this
indomitable veteran opposite; still he would go far for ten minutes
talk with her. She needed nothing that he could give; her copy had all
gone to the compositor, her last forms were locked; and yet, he caught
her story from queer angles on the stones, and it was a transcript from
New York in this, the latest year of our Lord....

Bedient's "poise and general decency" disturbed the arrant man-hater
she had become; she called him "fanatically idealistic," and was
inclined to regard him at first as one of those smooth and finished
Orientalists who have learned to use their intellects to a dangerous
degree. But each time she talked with him, it seemed less possible to
put a philosophical ticket upon him. "He's not Buddhist, Vedantist,
neo-Platonist," she declared, deeply puzzled. Somehow she did not
attract from him, as did Vina Nettleton, the rare pabulum which would
have proved him just a Christian. Finally, from fragments brought by
Vina, the Grey One, and David Cairns, she hit upon a name for him that
would do, even if intended a trifle ironically at first: _The Modern_.
She was easier after that; bec