At the end of two weeks she returned to her penthouse apartment on the roof of a hotel over Central Park, and her articles on life in the slums appeared in the Banner. They were a merciless, brilliant account.
She heard baffled questions at a dinner party. "My dear, you didn't actually write those things?"
"Dominique, you didn't really live in that place?"
"Oh, yes," she answered. "The house you own on East Twelfth Street, Mrs. Palmer," she said, her hand circling lazily from under the cuff of an emerald bracelet too broad and heavy for her thin wrist, "has a sewer that gets clogged every other day and runs over, all through the courtyard. It looks blue and purple in the sun, like a rainbow."
"The block you control for the Claridge estate, Mr. Brooks, has the most attractive stalactites growing on all the ceilings," she said, her golden head leaning to her corsage of white gardenias with drops of water sparkling on the lusterless petals.
She was asked to speak at a meeting of social workers. It was an important meeting, with a militant, radical mood, led by some of the most prominent women in the field. Alvah Scarret was pleased and gave her his blessing. "Go to it, kid," he said, "lay it on thick. We want the social workers." She stood in the speaker's pulpit of an unaired hall and looked at a flat sheet of faces, faces lecherously eager with the sense of their own virtue. She spoke evenly, without inflection. She said, among many other things: "The family on the first floor rear do not bother to pay their rent, and the children cannot go to school for lack of clothes. The father has a charge account at a corner speak-easy. He is in good health and has a good job ... The couple on the second floor have just purchased a radio for sixty-nine dollars and ninety-five cents cash. In the fourth floor front, the father of the family has not done a whole day's work in his life, and does not intend to. There are nine children, supported by the local parish. There is a tenth one on its way ... " When she finished there were a few claps of angry applause. She raised her hand and said: "You don't have to applaud. I don't expect it." She asked politely: "Are there any questions?" There were no questions.
When she returned home she found Alvah Scarret waiting for her. He looked incongruous in the drawing room of her penthouse, his huge bulk perched on the edge of a delicate chair, a hunched gargoyle against the glowing spread of the city beyond a solid wall of glass. The city was like a mural designed to illuminate and complete the room: the fragile lines of spires on a black sky continued the fragile lines of the furniture; the lights glittering in distant windows threw reflections on the bare, lustrous floor; the cold precision of the angular structures outside answered the cold, inflexible grace of every object within. Alvah Scarret broke the harmony. He looked like a kindly country doctor and like a cardsharp. His heavy face bore the benevolent, paternal smile that had always been his passkey and his trademark. He had the knack of making the kindliness of his smile add to, not detract from his solemn appearance of dignity; his long, thin, hooked nose did detract from the kindliness, but it added to the dignity; his stomach, cantilevered over his legs, did detract from the dignity, but it added to the kindliness. He rose, beamed and held Dominique's hand. "Thought I'd drop in on my way home," he said. "I've got something to tell you. How did it go, kid?"
"As I expected it."
She tore her hat off and threw it down on the first chair in sight. Her hair slanted in a flat curve across her forehead and fell in a straight line to her shoulders; it looked smooth and tight, like a bathing cap of pale, polished metal. She walked to the window and stood looking out over the city. She asked without turning: "What did you want to tell me?"
Alvah Scarret watched her pleasurably. He had long since given up any attempts beyond holding her hand when not necessary or patting her shoulder; he had stopped thinking of the subject, but he had a dim, half-conscious feeling which he summed up to himself in the words: You never can tell.
"I've got good news for you, child," he said. "I've been working out a little scheme, just a bit of reorganization, and I've figured where I'll consolidate a few things together into a Women's Welfare Department. You know, the schools, the home economics, the care of babies, the juvenile delinquents and all the rest of it — all to be under one head. And I see no better woman for the job than my little girl."
"Do you mean me?" she asked, without turning.
"No one else but. Just as soon as Gail comes back, I'll get his okay."
She turned and looked at him, her arms crossed, her hands holding her elbows. She said:
"Thank you, Alvah. But I don't want it."
"What do you mean, you don't want it?"
"I mean that I don't want it."
"For heaven's sake, do you realize what an advance that would be?"
"Toward what?"
"Your career."
"I never said I was planning a career."
"But you don't want to be running a dinky back-page column forever!"
"Not forever. Until I get bored with it."
"But think of what you could do in the real game! Think of what Gail could do for you once you come to his attention!"
"I have no desire to come to his attention."
"But, Dominique, we need you. The women will be for you solid after tonight."
"I don't think so."
"Why, I've ordered two columns held for a yarn on the meeting and your speech."
She reached for the telephone and handed the receiver to him. She said:
"You'd better tell them to kill it."
"Why?"
She searched through a litter of papers on a desk, found some typewritten sheets and handed them to him. "Here's the speech I made tonight," she said.
He glanced through it. He said nothing, but clasped his forehead once. Then he seized the telephone and gave orders to run as brief an account of the meeting as possible, and not to mention the speaker by name.
"All right," said Dominique, when he dropped the receiver. "Am I fired?"
He shook his head dolefully. "Do you want to be?"
"Not necessarily."
"I'll squash the business," he muttered. "I'll keep it from Gail."
"If you wish. I don't really care one way or the other."
"Listen, Dominique — oh I know, I'm not to ask any questions — only why on earth are you always doing things like that?"
"For no reason on earth."
"Look, you know, I've heard about that swank dinner where you made certain remarks on this same subject. And then you go and say things like these at a radical meeting."
"They're true, though, both sides of it, aren't they?"
"Oh, sure, but couldn't you have reversed the occasions when you chose to express them?"
"There wouldn't have been any point in that."
"Was there any in what you've done?"
"No. None at all. But it amused me."
"I can't figure you out, Dominique. You've done it before. You go along so beautifully, you do brilliant work and just when you're about to make a real step forward — you spoil it by pulling something like this. Why?"
"Perhaps that is precisely why."
"Will you tell me — as a friend, because I like you and I'm interested in you — what are you really after?"
"I should think that's obvious. I'm after nothing at all."
He spread his hands open, shrugging helplessly.
She smiled gaily.
"What is there to look so mournful about? I like you, too, Alvah, and I'm interested in you. I even like to talk to you, which is better. Now sit still and relax and I'll get you a drink. You need a drink, Alvah."
She brought him a frosted glass with ice cubes ringing in the silence. "You're just a nice child, Dominique," he said.