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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of New Faces, by Myra Kelly
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: New Faces
+
+Author: Myra Kelly
+
+Illustrator:   Charles F. Neagle
+
+
+Release Date: March 24, 2005 [EBook #15449]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NEW FACES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Ted Garvin, Melissa Er-Raqabi and the PG Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+NEW FACES
+
+BY
+
+MYRA KELLY
+
+AUTHOR OF "LITTLE CITIZENS" "WARDS OF LIBERTY" "THE ISLE OF DREAMS"
+"ROSNAH" "THE GOLDEN SEASON" "LITTLE ALIENS"
+
+[Illustration: Printers Mark]
+
+_Illustrations by_
+
+CHARLES F. NEAGLE
+
+
+G.W. DILLINGHAM COMPANY PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
+
+
+
+
+_Copyright, 1910, By_ G.W. DILLINGHAM COMPANY
+
+
+
+
+NEW FACES
+
+[Illustration: "THERE'S NO QUESTION ABOUT IT," HE RETORTED. "SHE KNOWS
+THAT I SHALL MARRY HER."]
+
+
+    "Oh give me new faces, new faces, new faces
+    I have seen those about me a fortnight or more.
+    Some people grow weary of names or of places
+    But faces to me are a much greater bore."
+
+    _Andrew Lang._
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+THE PLAY'S THE THING                17
+THERE'S DANGER IN NUMBERS           57
+MISERY LOVES COMPANY                83
+THE CHRISTMAS GUEST                115
+WHO IS SYLVIA?                     147
+THE SPIRIT OF CECELIA ANNE         187
+THEODORA, GIFT OF GOD              219
+GREAT OAKS FROM LITTLE ACORNS      263
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+"There's no question about it," he retorted. "She knows that I shall
+marry her."
+
+Burgess gained an interest and an occupation more absorbing than he had
+found for many years
+
+Uncle Richard's face, as he met John's eyes, was a study
+
+She swooped under the large center table, dragging Patty with her
+
+The changeless smile and the drooping plumes made three complete
+revolutions, and nestled confidingly upon the shoulder of the law
+
+Celia Anne shut her eyes tightly and fired the rifle into the air
+
+
+
+
+NEW FACES
+
+
+
+
+"THE PLAY'S THE THING"
+
+
+A business meeting of the Lady Hyacinths Shirt-Waist Club was in
+progress. The roll had been called. The twenty members were all present
+and the Secretary had read the minutes of the last meeting. These
+formalities had consumed only a few moments and the club was ready to
+fall upon its shirt waists. The sewing-machines were oiled and
+uncovered, the cutting-table was cleared, every Hyacinth had her box of
+sewing paraphernalia in her lap; and Miss Masters who had been half
+cajoled and half forced into the management of this branch of the St.
+Martha's Settlement Mission was congratulating herself upon the ease and
+expedition with which her charges were learning to transact their
+affairs, when the President drew a pencil from her pompadour and rapped
+professionally on the table. In her daytime capacity of saleslady in a
+Grand Street shoe store she would have called "cash," but as President
+of the Lady Hyacinths her speech was:
+
+"If none of you goils ain't got no more business to lay before the
+meetin' a movement to adjoin is in order."
+
+"I move we adjoin an git to woik," said Mamie Kidansky promptly. Only
+three buttonholes and the whalebones which would keep the collar well up
+behind the ears lay between her and the triumphant rearing of her shirt
+waist. Hence her zeal.
+
+Susie Meyer was preparing to second the motion. As secretary she
+disapproved of much discussion. She was always threatening to resign her
+portfolio vowing, with some show of reason, "I never would 'a' joined
+your old Hyacinths Shirt-Waists if I'd a' known I was goin' to have to
+write down all the foolish talk you goils felt like givin' up."
+
+It seemed therefore that the business meeting was closed, when a voice
+from the opposite side of the table broke in with:
+
+"Say, Rosie, why can't us goils give a play?"
+
+"Ah Jennie, you make me tired," protested the Secretary.
+
+"An' you're out of order anyway," was the President's dictum.
+
+"Where?" cried Jennie wildly, clutching her pompadour with one hand and
+the back of her belt with the other, "where, what's the matter with me?"
+
+"Go 'way back an' sit down," was the Secretary's advice, "Rosie meant
+you're out of parliamentry order. We got a motion on the table an' it's
+too late for you to butt in on it. This meetin' is goin' to adjoin."
+
+But Jennie was the spokesman of a newly-born party and her supporters
+were not going to allow her to be silenced. Even those Lady Hyacinths
+who had not been admitted to earlier consultations took kindly to the
+suggestion when they heard it.
+
+"I don't care whether she's out of order or not," one ambitious Hyacinth
+declared, "I think it would be just too lovely for anything to have a
+play. They have 'em all the time over to Rivington Street an' down to
+the Educational Alliance."
+
+"Rebecca Einstein," said the Secretary darkly, "if you're goin' to fire
+off your face about plays an' the Educational Alliances you can keep
+your own minnits, that's all! Do ye think I'm goin' to write down your
+foolishness? Well, I ain't."
+
+Again the President plied her gavel. "Goils," she remonstrated, "this
+ain't no way to act. Say, Miss Masters," she went on, "I guess the whole
+lot of us is out of order now. What would you do about it if you was me?"
+
+"I should suggest," Miss Masters answered, "that the motion to adjourn
+be carried and that the whole club go into committee on the question
+raised by Miss Meyer."
+
+"I move that we take our woik into committee with us," cried Miss
+Kidansky, not to be deflected from her buttonholes. And from such humble
+beginnings the production of Hamlet by the Lady Hyacinths sprang.
+
+Hamlet was not their first choice. It was not even their tenth and to
+the end it was not the unanimous choice. During the preliminary stages
+of the dramatic fever Miss Masters preserved that strict neutrality
+which marks the successful Settlement worker. She would help--oh, surely
+she would help--the Hyacinths, but she would not lead them. She had
+never questioned their taste in the shape and color of their shirt
+waists. Some horrid garments had resulted but to her they represented
+"self expression," and as such gave her more pleasure than any servile
+following of her advice could have done. She soon discovered that the
+latitude in the shirt waist field is far exceeded by that in the
+dramatic and she discovered too, that the Lady Hyacinths, though they
+seldom visited the theatre had strong digestions where plays were
+concerned.
+
+"East Lynne" was warmly advocated until some one discovered a
+grandmother who had seen it in her youth. Then:
+
+"Ah gee!" remarked the Lady Hyacinths, "we ain't no grave snatchers. We
+ain't goin' to dig up no dead ones. Say Miss Masters, ain't there no new
+plays we could give?"
+
+Miss Masters referred them to the public library, but not many plays are
+obtainable in book form, and the next two meetings were devoted to the
+plays of Ibsen, Bernard Shaw, Vaughan Moody. When Miss Masters descried
+this literature in the hands of the now openly mutinous Secretary she
+felt the time had come to interfere with the "self activity" of her
+charges. She promptly confiscated the second volume of "G.B.S." "For,"
+she explained "we don't want to do anything unpleasant and the writer of
+these plays himself describes them as that."
+
+"Guess we don't," the President agreed. "We got to live up to our name,
+ain't we? An' what could be pleasanter than a Hyacinth?"
+
+"Nothing, of course," agreed Miss Masters unsteadily.
+
+"There's one in this Ibsen book might do," Jennie suggested. "It's
+called 'A Dolls' House,' that's a real sweet name."
+
+"I am afraid it wouldn't do," said Miss Masters hastily.
+
+"What's the matter with it?" demanded Susie Meyer.
+
+"Well, in the first place, there are children in it--"
+
+"Cut it! 'Nough said," pronounced the President. "Them plays wid kids in
+'em is all out of style. We giv' 'East Lynne' the turn down an' there
+was only one kid in that. What else have you got in that Gibson book?
+Have you got the play with the Gibson goils in it? We could do that all
+right, all right. Ain't most of us got Gibson pleats in our shirt
+waists?"
+
+"I don't see nothin' about goils," the Secretary made answer, "but
+there's one here about ghosts. How would that do?"
+
+"Not at all," said Miss Masters firmly.
+
+"What's the matter with it?" asked one of the girls abandoning her
+sewing-machine and coming over to the table. "I seen posters of it last
+year. They are givin' it in Broadway. The costoomes would be real easy,
+just a sheet you know and your hair hanging down."
+
+"It's not about that kind of ghost," Miss Masters explained, "and I
+don't think it would do for us as there are very few people in the cast
+and one of them is a minister."
+
+"Cut it," said the President briefly, "we ain't goin' to have no hymn
+singin' in ours. We couldn't, you know," she explained to Miss Masters,
+"the most of us is Jewesses."
+
+"Katie McGuire ain't no Jewess," asserted the Secretary. "She could be
+the minister if that's all you've got against this Gibson play. I wish
+we _could_ give it. It's about the only up-to-date Broadway success we
+can find. The librarian says you can't never buy copies of Julia
+Marlowe's an' Ethel Barrymore's an' Maude Adams' plays. I guess they're
+just scared somebody like us will come along an' do 'em better than they
+do an' bust their market. Actresses," she went on, "is all jest et up
+with jealousy of one another. Is there anythin' except the minister the
+matter with 'Ghosts?'"
+
+"Everything else is the matter with it," said Miss Masters. "To begin
+with, I might as well tell you, it never was a Broadway success. It's a
+play that is read oftener than it's acted and last year, Jennie, when
+you saw the posters, it only ran for a week."
+
+"Cut it," said the President. "We ain't huntin' frosts."
+
+The brows of the Hyacinths grew furrowed and their eyes haggard in the
+search. Everyone could tell them of plays but no one knew where they
+could be found in printed form and whenever the librarian found
+something which might be suitable Miss Masters was sure to know of
+something to its disadvantage.
+
+And then the real stage, the legitimate Broadway stage intervened.
+Albert Marsden produced Hamlet and the Lady Hyacinths determined to
+follow suit.
+
+"It's kind of old," the President admitted, "but there must be some
+style left to it. They're playin' it on Broadway right now. An' we'll
+give it on East Broadway just as soon as we can git ready. Me and Mamie
+went round to the library last night an' got it out. It's got a dandy
+lot of parts in it: more than this club will ever need. An' it's got
+lots of murders an' scraps, an' court ladies an' soldiers an' kings.
+It's our play all right!"
+
+The sea of troubles into which the Lady Hyacinths plunged with so much
+enthusiasm swallowed them so completely that Miss Masters could only
+stand on its shore, looking across to Denmark and wringing her hands
+over the awful things that were happening in that unhappy land.
+Fortunately she had a friend to whom she could appeal for succour for
+the lost but still valiant Hyacinths. He was the sort of person to whom
+appeals came as naturally as honors come to some men and, since he had
+nothing to do and ample time and money with which to do it, he was
+generally helpful and resourceful. That he had once loved Miss Masters
+has nothing to do with this story. She was now engaged to be married to
+a poorer and busier man, but it was to Jack Burgess that she appealed.
+
+"Of course I know," said he when he had responded to her message and she
+had anchored him with a tea-cup and disarmed him with a smile, "of
+course I know what you want to say to me. Every girl who has refused me
+has said it sooner or later. You are saying it later--much later--than
+they generally do, but it always comes. 'You have found a wife for me.'"
+
+"I have done much better than that," she answered, "I have found work
+for you." And she sketched the distress of the Hyacinths in Denmark and
+urged him to go to their assistance.
+
+"But, my dear Margaret," he remonstrated, "What can I do? You have
+always known that 'something is rotten in the state of Denmark,' and
+yet you have let these poor innocents stir it up. I have often thought
+that poor Shakespeare added that line after the first performance. I
+intend to write that hint to Furniss one of these days."
+
+"You will write it," said Margaret Masters, "with more conviction after
+you have seen _my_ Denmark."
+
+"Very well," said he, "I'll visit Elsinore to-night, but I insist upon a
+return ticket."
+
+"You will be begging for a season ticket," she laughed. "They have
+reduced me to such a condition that I don't know whether they are
+amusing me or breaking my heart. Tell me, come, which is it? Did you
+ever hear blank verse recited with tense and reverent earnestness and a
+Bowery accent?"
+
+"I never did," said he.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Shakespeare was right," whispered Burgess to Miss Masters. "There is
+something rotten in Denmark. I've located it. It's the Prince." They
+were sitting together in a corner of the kindergarten room of the
+settlement: a large and spacious room all decked and bright with the
+paper and cardboard masterpieces of the babies who played and learned
+there in the mornings. Casts and pictures and green growing things added
+to its charm and the Lady Hyacinths so trim and neat and earnest did not
+detract from it.
+
+The sewing-machines and the cutting-table had been cast into corners and
+well in the glare of the electric light the President was exclaiming in
+a voice which would have disgraced an early phonograph, "Oh that this
+too too solid flesh would melt."
+
+It was not a dress rehearsal but the too solid Prince wore his hair low
+on his neck and a golden fillet bound his brows. Silent, he was noble.
+His walk as he came in at the end of a procession of court ladies and
+gentlemen was magnificent--slow, dejected, imperious, aloof. But
+Wittenberg had a great deal to answer for, if he had contracted his
+accent there.
+
+Gertrude, Queen of Denmark, was a Hyacinth who worked daily at hooks and
+buttonholes for an East Broadway tailor. On this night she wore none of
+her regalia save her crown and the King had done nothing at all to
+differentiate himself from Susie Lacov who officiated as waitress in a
+Jewish lunchroom.
+
+The Hyacinths had wisely decided to edit Hamlet. In this they followed
+an almost universal principle and their method was also time-honored.
+All the scenes in which unimportant members of the club or cast "came
+out strong," were eliminated. So far the Hyacinths were orthodox, but
+Rosie Rosenbaum, Prince, President and Censor, went a step further.
+
+"Git busy. Mix her up, why don't you!" she commanded later from the
+wings. The other players were laboriously wading through persiflage and
+conversation. "You folks ain't _done_ nothin' the last ten minutes only
+stand there and gas. Is that actin'? Maybe it's wrote in the book. What
+I want to know is--is it actin'?" Burgess sat suddenly erect and his
+eyes glowed. Miss Masters half rose to assume authority but he
+restrained her.
+
+"You shut up and leave me be," Polonius cried. "Ain't I got a right to
+say good-bye to my son?"
+
+"You can say good-bye all right," Rosie reminded her, "without puttin'
+up that game of talk. Give him a 'I'll be a sister to you' on the cheek
+an' git through sometime before to-morrow. Cut it, I tell you."
+
+This "off with his head" attitude on the President's part delighted
+Burgess. But the caste enjoyed it less and when the ghost was docked of
+a whole scene it grew rebellious.
+
+"If you give me any more of your lip," said the princely stage manager,
+"I'll trow you out altogether. There's lots of people wouldn't believe
+in ghosts anyway. Me grandfather seen this play in Chermany and he told
+me they didn't use the ghost at all. Nothin' but a green light with a
+voice comin' out of it."
+
+"Well, I could be the voice, couldn't I?" the ghost argued; and it was
+at this point that Miss Masters took charge of the meeting and
+introduced Mr. Burgess.
+
+"Who has offered," she went on in spite of his energetic pantomime of
+disclaimer, "to help us with our play."
+
+"That's real sweet of you, Mr. Burgess," said the President graciously.
+
+"Not at all--not at all," he answered. "It will be a pleasure, I assure
+you."
+
+"You'll excuse me, I'm sure," the Secretary broke in, "if we go right on
+with our woik while you're here. We're makin' our own costoomes, as
+much as we can. That was one reason us young ladies chose Hamlet. It's a
+play what everyone wears skoits in. It's easier for us and it ain't so
+embarrassing, and I guess our folks will like it better. You _have_ to
+think of your folks sometimes. Even if they are old-fashioned. Miss
+Masters got us pictures of Mr. Marsden's production an' every last one
+of the characters has skoits on. Hamlet's ain't no longer than a bathin'
+suit, but anyway it's there. I don't think it's real refined, myself,
+for young ladies to wear gents' suits on the stage."
+
+"And of course," a gentle-eyed little girl looked up from her sewing to
+remark,--"of course this club ain't formed just for makin' shirt waists.
+We've got a culture-an'-refinement clause in the club constitution, so
+we wouldn't want to do nothin' that wasn't real refined."
+
+[Illustration: BURGESS GAINED AN INTEREST AND AN OCCUPATION MORE
+ABSORBING THAN HE HAD FOUND FOR MANY YEARS.]
+
+"I understand," said Burgess more at a loss than a conversation had
+ever found him, "And what may I ask, is your part of the play?"
+
+"Mamie Conners is too nervous," the lady President explained "to come
+right out and act. She's 'A flourish of trumpets within an' a voice
+without an' a lady of the court an' a soldier an' a choir boy at the
+funeral.'"
+
+"Ah, Miss Conners," Burgess assured this timid but versatile Hyacinth,
+"that's only stage fright, all great actresses suffer from it at one
+time or another."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+During the weeks that followed, order gradually gained sway in Denmark
+and Burgess gained an interest and an occupation more absorbing than he
+had found for many years.
+
+"My dear Margaret," he was wont to assure Miss Masters, when she
+remonstrated with him upon his generosity, "Why shouldn't I order
+supper to be sent in for them? and why shouldn't I ask them up to the
+house for rehearsals? There's the big music room going to waste and
+those lazy beggars of servants with nothing to do, and you saw yourself
+how it brightened up poor old Aunt Priscilla. She likes it--they like
+it--I like it--you ought to like it. And you certainly can't object to
+my having taken them _en masse_ to see Marsden in the play. By George!
+I'll drag him to theirs. We'll show him an Ophelia! that Mary Conners is
+a little genius."
+
+"She is wonderful," agreed Miss Masters. "The grace of her! The dignity!
+What she herself would call the culture-an'-refinement!"
+
+"All my discovery. That tyrant of a Rosie Rosenbaum had cast her as a
+quick change, general utility woman. And in the day-time you tell me
+she's a miserable little shop-girl in a Grand Street rookery!"
+
+"That is what she used to be. But I went to the shop a day or two ago
+to ask her to come up to my house to rehearse with the new Hamlet. I
+watched her for a few moments before she noticed me. She was Ophelia to
+the life. She conversed in blank verse. She walked about with that
+little queenly air you have taught her. She was delicious, adorable. At
+first she said that she could not rehearse that night, but I told her
+you wished it and she came like a lamb. I often wonder if I did a wise
+thing in introducing them to you. Your sort of culture-an'-refinement'
+may rather upset them when the play is over and we all settle back to
+the humdrum."
+
+"You did a great kindness to me," said he, "and the best stroke of
+missionary work you'll do in a dog's age. I'm going to work."
+
+"You are not," she laughed.
+
+"I am. Shamed into it by the Lady Hyacinths."
+
+"Then perhaps the balance will be maintained. If you turn them against
+labor they will have turned you toward it."
+
+But Miss Masters' fears were groundless: the Lady Hyacinths though
+dedicated to a flower of spring were old and wise in social
+distinctions. The story of King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid would have
+drawn only a contemptuous "cut it out" from the lady President. Every
+Hyacinth of them knew her exact place in nature's garden--all except
+Mary Conners--now Ophelia--and she knew herself to be a foundling with
+no place at all. The lonely woman who had adopted her was now dead and
+Mary was quite alone in her little two-room tenement, free to dream and
+play Ophelia to her heart's content and to an imaginary Hamlet who was
+always Burgess. To her he was indeed, "The expectancy and rose of the
+fair state." "The glass of fashion and the mould of form." He was "her
+honoured lord"--"her most dear lord." But in Monroe Street she never
+deceived him. Never handed his letters over to interfering relatives.
+She could quite easily go mad and tuneful when she knew that each
+rehearsal--each lesson taught by him and so quickly learned by
+her--brought the days when she would never see him so close that she
+could almost feel their emptiness.
+
+It was well that she played to an idealized Hamlet for the real Hamlets
+came and went bewilderingly. One of Burgess's first triumphs of tact had
+been to pry the part away from the lady President and give it to the
+sturdy Secretary. There followed two other claimants to the throne in
+quick succession and then the lot fell to Rebecca Einstein and stayed
+there. Each change in the principal role necessitated readjustment
+throughout the cast and at every change the lady President was persuaded
+not to over exert herself.
+
+And still Burgess in the seclusion of the homeward bound hansom railed
+and swore.
+
+"I tell you, Margaret, that girl will ruin us. All the rest are funny.
+Overwhelmingly, incredibly funny! And pathetic! Could anything be more
+pathetic! But that awful President strikes a wrong note: Vulgarity. Take
+her out of it and we'll have a thing the like of which New York had
+never seen, for Ophelia is a genius or I miss my guess and all the rest
+are darlings."
+
+"But we can't throw out the President of the club. She must have a part.
+You have moved her down from Hamlet to Laertes--to the King--"
+
+"I did," groaned Burgess. "Will you ever forget her rendering of the
+line, "Now I could do it, Pat," and then her storming up to me to know
+"Who Pat was anyway?""
+
+"I do," laughed Margaret, "and then how you moved her on to Guildenstern
+and now you have got her down to Bernardo with all her part cut out and
+nothing except that opening line, "Who's there?" and the other: "'Tis
+now struck twelve; get thee to bed, Francisco.""
+
+"Yes, and she ruins them. I've drilled her and drilled her till my
+throat is sore and still she says it straight through her nose just as
+though she were delivering an order of 'ham and' at her hash battery.
+Just the same truculent 'Don't you dare to answer back' attitude. She's
+impossible. She must be removed."
+
+Meanwhile the Lady Hyacinths scattering to their different homes
+discussed their mentor. Ophelia and Horatio and Hamlet were going
+through Clinton Street together. Ophelia was still at Elsinore but
+Horatio was approaching common ground again.
+
+"I suppose he's Miss Masters' steady," said he to Hamlet. "He wouldn't
+come down here every other night just to help us goils out."
+
+But Ophelia was better informed. She knew Miss Masters to be engaged to
+quite another person.
+
+"Then I know," cried Horatio triumphantly. "He's stuck on Rosie
+Rosenbaum. It's her brings him."
+
+Ophelia said nothing, and Horatio having experienced an inspiration, set
+about strengthening it with proof.
+
+"It's Rosie sure enough. Ain't he learned her about every part in the
+play? Don't he keep takin' her off in corners an' goin' 'Who's there,
+'Tis now struck twelve' for about an hour every night? I wouldn't have
+nothin' to do with a feller that kept company that way, but I s'pose
+it's the style on Fifth Avenue. You know how I tell you, Ham, in the
+play that there's lots of things goin' on what you ain't on to. Well
+it's so. None of you was on to Rosie an' his nibs. You didn't ever guess
+it did you 'Pheleir?"
+
+"No," admitted Ophelia. "No, I never did."
+
+"Well it's so. You watch 'em. The style in wives is changin'. Actresses
+is goin' out an' the 'poor but honest workin' goil' is comin' in. One of
+our salesladies has a book about it. "The Bowery Bride" its name is. All
+about a shop goil what married a rich fellow and used to come back to
+the store and take her old friends carriage ridin'. If Rosie Rosenbaum
+tries it on me, I'll break her face. If she comes round me," cried the
+Prince's fellow student: "with carriages and a benevolent smile, I'll
+claw the smile off of her if I have to take the skin with it!"
+
+When Horatio and Hamlet left her, she wandered disconsolate, down to the
+river. But no willow grows aslant that brook, no flowers were there with
+which to weave fantastic garlands.
+
+"I've gone crazy all right," said poor Ophelia as she watched the lights
+of the great bridge, "but I don't drown myself until Scene VII. And I'm
+goin' up to his house to-morrow night to learn to act crazy. I guess I
+don't need much learning."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The performance of Hamlet by the Lady Hyacinths is still remembered by
+those who saw it as the most bewildering entertainment of their
+theatrical experience. The play had been cut down to its absolute
+essentials and the players, though drilled and coached in their lines
+and business, had been left quite free in the matters of interpretation
+and accent. The result was so unique that the daily press fell upon it
+with whoops of joy and published portraits of and interviews with the
+leading characters. People who had thought that only ferries and docks
+lay south of Twenty-third Street penetrated to the heart of the great
+East Side and went home again full of an altruism which lasted three
+days. And on the last night of the "run" of three nights, Jack Burgess
+brought Albert Marsden to witness it. Other spectators had always
+emerged dumb or inarticulate from the ordeal but the great actor was not
+one of them. He was blusterous and garrulous and, to Burgess' amazement,
+not at all amused.
+
+"Who is that girl who played Ophelia? Is she an East Side working girl
+or one of the mission people?"
+
+"She's a shop-girl," answered Burgess. "There's no good in your asking
+me to introduce you to her for I won't. That's been one of our rules
+from the beginning. We don't want the children to be upset and
+patronized."
+
+"Who taught her to act?"
+
+"Well, I coached them all as you know, but she never seemed to require
+any special teaching. Pretty good, isn't she?"
+
+"Pretty good! She is a genius--a wonder. This is all rot about my not
+meeting her. I am going to meet her and train her. I suppose you have
+noticed that she is a beauty too."
+
+"But she's only a child," Burgess urged. "She's only eighteen. She
+couldn't stand the life and the work and she couldn't stand the people.
+You have no idea what high ideals these girls have, and Mary
+Conners--that's the girl's name--seems to be exceptional even amongst
+them."
+
+"Too good for us, eh?" asked the actor.
+
+"Entirely too good," answered Burgess steadily.
+
+"And do you feel justified in deciding her future for her! In condemning
+her to an obscure life in the slums instead of a successful career on
+the stage?"
+
+"I do not," answered Burgess, "she must decide that for herself. I'll
+ask her and let you know."
+
+To this end he sought Miss Masters. "I want you," said he, "to ask Mary
+Conners to tea with you to-morrow afternoon. It will be Sunday so she
+can manage. And then I want you to leave us alone. I have something very
+serious to say to her."
+
+Margaret looked at him and laughed. "Then you were right," said she,
+"and I was wrong; I had found a wife for you."
+
+"For absolute inane, insensate romanticism," said he, "I recommend you
+to the recently engaged. You used to have some sense. You were clever
+enough to refuse me and now you go and forever ruin my opinion of you by
+making a remark like that."
+
+"It is not romanticism at all," she maintained. "It is the best of
+common sense. You will never be satisfied with anyone you haven't
+trained and formed to suit your own ideals. And you will never find such
+a 'quick study' as Mary."
+
+It was the earliest peep of spring and Burgess stopped on his way to
+Miss Masters' house and bought a sheaf of white hyacinths and pale
+maiden hair for the little Lady Hyacinth who was waiting for him.
+
+As soon as he was alone with her he managed to distract her attention
+from her flowers and to make her listen to Marsden's message. He set the
+case before her plainly. Without exaggeration and without extenuation.
+
+"And we don't expect you," he ended, "to make up your mind at once. You
+must consult your relatives and friends."
+
+"I have no relatives," she answered.
+
+"Your friends then."
+
+"I don't think I have many. Some of the girls in the club perhaps. The
+old book-keeper in the store where I work, perhaps Miss Masters."
+
+"And you have me," he interrupted. But she smiled at him and shook her
+head. "You were real kind about the play," said she, "but the play's all
+over now. I guess you'd better tell your friend that I'll take the
+position. I have been getting pretty tired of work in the store and I'd
+like to try this if he don't mind."
+
+"Oh, but you mustn't go into it like that," Burgess protested, "just for
+the want of something better. Acting is an art--a great art--you must be
+glad and proud."
+
+"I'll try it," she said without enthusiasm. "If you feel that way about
+it I'll try it. It can't be worse than the store. The store is just
+horrible. Oh! Mr. Burgess you can't think what it is to be Ophelia in
+the evening with princes loving you and then to be a cashier in the
+day-time that any fresh customer thinks he can get gay with. Maybe if I
+was an actress I could be Ophelia oftener. I'd do anything, Mr. Burgess,
+to get away from the store."
+
+Burgess did not answer immediately. Her earnestness had rather overcome
+her and he waited silently while she walked to the window, surreptitiously
+pressed her handkerchief against her eyes and conquered
+the sobs that threatened to choke her. Burgess watched her. The trimness
+of her figure, the absolute neatness and propriety of her dress, the
+poise and restraint of her manner. Then she turned and he rose to meet her.
+
+"Mary," said he, "you never in all the time I've known you have failed
+to do what I asked you. Will you do something for me now?"
+
+"Yes, sir," she answered simply.
+
+"Then sit down in that chair and take this watch of mine in your hand
+and don't say one single, solitary, lonely word for five minutes. No
+matter what happens: no matter what anyone says or does. Will you
+promise?"
+
+"Yes, sir," she answered again.
+
+"Well then," he began, "I know another man who wants you--this stage
+idea is not the only way out of the store. Remember you're not to
+speak--this other man wants to marry you."
+
+A scarlet flush sprang to Mary's face and slowly ebbed away again leaving
+her deadly pale. She kept her word in letter but hardly in spirit for
+she looked at him through tear-filled eyes, and shook her head.
+
+"Of course you can't be expected to take to the idea just at first,"
+said he, as if she had spoken, "but I want you to think it over. The man
+is a well-off, gentlemanly sort of chap. Miles too old for you of
+course--for you're not twenty and he's nearly forty--but I think he
+would make you happy. I know he'd try with all the strength that's in him."
+
+Blank incredulity was on Mary's face. She glanced at the watch and up at
+him and again she shook her head.
+
+"This man," Burgess went on, "is a friend of Miss Masters and it was
+through her that he first heard of the Lady Hyacinths. He was an idler
+then. A shiftless, worthless loafer, but the Lady Hyacinths made a man
+of him and he's gone out and got a job."
+
+Comprehension overwhelming, overmastering, flashed into Mary's eyes. But
+her promise held her silent and in her chair. Again it was as though she
+had spoken.
+
+"Yes, I see you understand--you probably think of me as an old man past
+the time of love and yet I love you."
+
+    "Doubt thou the stars are fire;
+    Doubt that the sun doth move;
+    Doubt truth to be a liar;
+    But never doubt I love."
+
+"That's all I have to offer you, sweetheart. Just love and my life," and
+he in turn went to the window and looked out into the gathering dusk.
+
+Mary sat absolutely still. She knew now that she was dreaming. Just so
+the dream had always run and when the five minutes were past, she rose
+and went to him: a true Ophelia, her arms all full of hyacinths.
+
+"My honored Lord," said she. He turned, and the dream held.
+
+
+
+
+THERE'S DANGER IN NUMBERS
+
+
+The Pennsylvania Limited was approaching Jersey City and the afternoon
+was approaching three o'clock when Mr. John Blake turned to Mrs. John
+Blake, nee Marjorie Underwood, a bride of about three hours, and
+precipitated the first discussion of their hitherto happy married life.
+
+"Your Uncle Richard Underwood," said he--the earlier discussions in the
+wedded state are usually founded upon relations--"is as stupid as he is
+kind. It was very good of him to arrange that I should meet old
+Nicholson. Any young fellow in the country would give his eyes for the
+chance. But to make an appointment for a fellow at four o'clock in the
+afternoon of his wedding day is a thing of which no one, except your
+Uncle Richard, would be capable. He might have known that I couldn't go."
+
+"But you must go," urged the bride, "it's the chance of a lifetime.
+Besides which," she added with a pretty little air of practicality, "we
+can't afford to throw away an opportunity like this. We may never get
+another one, and if you don't go how are you to explain it to Uncle
+Richard when we dine there to-morrow night?--you know we promised to,
+when he was last at West Hills."
+
+"But what," suggested her husband--"what if, in grasping at the shadow,
+I lose the reality? I'd rather lose twenty opportunities than my only
+wife, and what's to become of you while I go down to Broad Street? Do
+you propose to sit in the station?"
+
+"I propose nothing of the kind," she laughed. "I shall go straight to
+the Ruissillard and wait for you. Dick and Gladys may be there already."
+
+Although Mr. John Blake received this suggestion with elaborate
+disfavor and disclaimer it was clear to the pretty eyes of Mrs. John
+Blake that he hailed it with delight, and she was full of theories upon
+marital co-operation and of eagerness to put them into practice. None of
+her husband's objections could daunt her, and before he had adjusted
+himself to the situation he had packed his wife into a hansom, given the
+cabman careful instructions and a careless tip, and was standing on the
+step admonishing his bride:
+
+"Be sure to tell them that we must have out-side rooms. Have the baggage
+sent up, but don't touch it. If you open a trunk or lift a tray before I
+arrive I shall instantly send you home to your mother as incorrigible."
+
+"Very well," she agreed; "I'll be good."
+
+"And then, if Gladys is there--it's only an off-chance that they come
+before to-morrow--get her to sit with you. But don't go wandering about
+the hotel by yourself. And, above all, don't go out."
+
+"Goosie," said she, "of course I shan't go out. Where should I go?"
+
+"And you're sure, sure, sure that you don't mind?" he asked for the
+dozenth time.
+
+"Goosie," said she again, "I am quite, quite sure of it. Now go or you
+will surely miss your appointment and disappoint your uncle."
+
+After two or three more questions of his and assurances of hers the cab
+was allowed to swing out into the current. John had given the driver
+careful navigation orders, and Marjorie leaned back contentedly enough
+and watched the busy people, all hot and haggard, as New York's people
+sometimes are in the first warm days of May. Her collection of
+illustrated post-cards had prepared her to identify many of the places
+she passed, but once or twice she felt, a little ruefully the difference
+between this, her actual first glimpse of New York and the same first
+glimpse as she and John had planned it before the benign, but hardly
+felicitous, interference of Uncle Richard. This feeling of loneliness
+was strongly in the ascendent when the cab stopped under an ornate
+portico and two large male creatures, in powdered wigs and white silk
+stockings, emerged before her astonished eyes. Open flew her little
+door, down jumped the cabman, out rushed other menials and laid hands
+upon her baggage. Horses fretted, pedestrians risked their lives, motors
+snorted and newsboys clamored as an enormous police-appearing person
+assisted her to alight. He had such an air of having been expecting and
+longing for her arrival that she wondered innocently whether John had
+telephoned about her. This thought persisted with her until she and her
+following of baggage-laden pages drew up before the desk, but it fell
+from her with a crash when she encountered the aloof, impersonal,
+world-weary regard of the presiding clerk. In all Marjorie's happy life
+she had never met anything but welcome. The belle of a fast-growing town
+is rather a sheltered person, and not even the most confiding of
+ingenues could detect a spark of greeting in the lackadaisical regard of
+this highly-manicured young man.
+
+Marjorie began her story, began to recite her lesson: "Outside rooms,
+not lower than the fourth nor higher than the eighth floor; the Fifth
+Avenue side if possible--and was Mrs. Robert Blake in?"
+
+The lackadaisical young man consulted the register with a disparaging eye.
+
+"Not staying here," Marjorie understood him to remark.
+
+"Oh, it doesn't matter--but about the rooms?"
+
+"Front!" drawled the young man, and several blue-clad bellboys ceased
+from lolling on a bench and approached the desk.
+
+"Register here," commanded the clerk, twirling the big book on its
+turn-table toward Marjorie so suddenly that she jumped, and laying his
+pink-tinted finger on its first blank line.
+
+"No, thank you," she stammered, "I was not to register until my
+husband--" and her heart cried out within her for that she was saying
+these new, dear words for the first time to so unresponsive a
+stranger--"told me not to register until he should come and see that the
+rooms were satisfactory. He will be here presently."
+
+"We have no unsatisfactory rooms," was the answer, followed by: "Front
+625 and 6," and fresh pages and bellboys fell upon the yellow baggage,
+and Marjorie, in a hot confusion of counting her property and wondering
+how to resent the young man's impertinence, turned to follow them.
+
+"One moment, madam," the clerk murmured; "name and address, please." The
+pages were escaping with the bags, and Mrs. Blake hardly turned as she
+answered, according to the habit of her lifetime:
+
+"Underwood, West Hills, N.J.," and flew to the elevator, which had
+already swallowed her baggage and the boys. Up to suite Number 625 and 6
+she was conducted by her blue-clad attendants, who opened the windows,
+pushed the furniture about--then waited; who fetched ice water, drew
+down shades--and waited; who closed the windows, drew up the shades,
+shifted the baggage from sofa to armchair, unbuckled the straps of a
+suitcase, indicated the telephone--and waited; who put the bags on the
+bed, opened the windows, pushed the furniture back against the wall--and
+waited. Marjorie viewed all these manoeuvres with amused but
+unsophisticated eyes. She smiled serenely at the smiling bellboys--while
+they waited. She thanked them prettily for their assistance--and they
+waited. She dismissed them still prettily, and it is to be regretted
+that, in the privacy of the hall, they swore.
+
+She then took possession of her little domain. The clerk, however
+unbearably, had spoken the truth, and the rooms were charming. There
+could be no question, she decided, of going farther. She spread her
+pretty wedding silver on the dressing-table, she hung her negligee with
+her hat and coat in the closet. She went down on her knees and
+investigated the slide which was to lead shoes to the bootblack; she
+tested, with her bridal glove-stretcher, the electrical device in the
+bathroom for the heating of curling irons. She studied all the pictures,
+drew out all the drawers, examined the furniture and bric-a-brac, and
+then she looked at her watch. Only half an hour was gone.
+
+She went to the window and watched the hats of the passing multitude,
+noting how short and fore-shortened all the figures seemed and how
+queerly the horses passed along beneath her, without visible legs to
+move them. Still an hour before John could be expected.
+
+And then their trunks, hers large and his small, made their thumping
+entrance. The porter crossed to the window and raised the shade, crossed
+to her trunk and undid its straps, dried his moistened brow--and waited.
+Marjorie thanked him and smiled. He smiled and waited, drying his brow
+industriously the while. No village black-smith ever had so damp a brow
+as he. She sympathized with him in the matter of the heat; he
+agreed--and waited. He undid the straps of John's trunk; he moved her
+trunk into greater proximity to the window and the light; he carried
+John's trunk into the sitting-room; he performed innumerable feats of
+prowess before her. But she only smiled and commended in an unfinancial
+way. Finally he laid violent hands upon his truck and retreated into the
+hall, swearing, as became his age, more luridly than the bellboys.
+
+Once more Marjorie looked out into the street for a while and began to
+plan the exact form of greeting with which she should meet John. It
+already seemed an eternity since she had parted with him. She drew the
+pretty evening dress which she had chosen for this and most important
+evening from its tissue-paper nest in the upper tray of her trunk. Its
+daintiness comforted and cheered her, as a friend's face might have
+done, and under its impetus she found calm enough to rearrange her hair,
+and, with many a shy recoil and shy caress, to lay out John's evening
+things for him, as she had often laid out her father's. How surprised,
+she smiled, he would be. How delighted, when he came, to find everything
+so comfy and domestic. Surely it was time for him to come. Presently it
+was late, and yet he did not come. She evolved another form of greeting:
+he did not deserve comfort and domesticity when he did not set more
+store on them than on a stupid interview in a stuffy office. He should
+see that an appointment with old Nicholson could not be allowed to
+interfere with their home life; that, simply because they were married
+now, he could not neglect her with impunity.
+
+She practised the detached, casual sort of smile with which she would
+greet him, and the patient, uninterested silence with which she would
+listen to his apologies. Then, realizing that these histrionics would be
+somewhat marred by a pink negligee, she struggled into her dinner dress.
+
+It was then seven o'clock and time to practise some more vehement reception
+for the laggard. It went well--very well. Any man would have been
+annihilated by it, but there was still no man when half-past seven came.
+
+Quite suddenly she fell into a panic. John was dead! She had heard and
+read of the perils of New York. She had seen a hundred potential
+accidents on her drive from the ferry. Trolley, anarchist, elevated
+railroad, collapsed buildings, frightened horses, runaway automobiles.
+Her dear John! Her mangled husband! Passing out of the world, even while
+she, his widowed bride, was dressing in hideous colors, and thinking so
+falsely of him!
+
+He must be brought to her. Some one should go and say something to
+somebody! Telephone Uncle Richard! She flew to the directory, which had
+interested her so little when the polite bellboy of the itching palm had
+pointed it out to her, and presently she had startled a respectable old
+stockbroker, so thoroughly and so hastily that he burst into his wife's
+presence with the news that John Blake had met with a frightful accident
+and was being carried to the hotel in the automobile of some rich
+gentleman from Paterson, New Jersey.
+
+"Hurry down there at once," commanded Aunt Richard, who was as staid
+and practical as the wife of a stockbroker ought to be, "and bring the
+two poor lambs here in your car. Take the big one. They'll want plenty
+of room to lay him flat. I'll have the nurse and the doctor here and a
+room ready. Get there if possible before he does, so as not to move him
+about too often."
+
+Meanwhile Mrs. John Blake, bride now of nearly eight hours, lay in a
+stricken heap upon the bed, bedewing with hot tears the shirt she had so
+dutifully laid ready for Mr. John Blake, and which now he was never more
+to wear. And Mr. John Blake, in a hurricane of fear, exasperation and
+bewilderment, a taxicab, and the swift-falling darkness, fared from
+hotel to hotel and demanded speech with Mrs. John Blake, a young lady in
+blue with several handbags and some heavy luggage, who had arrived at
+some hotel early that afternoon.
+
+His interview with old Nicholson had been short and satisfactory, and
+at about five-thirty o'clock he was at the Ruissillard inquiring for Mrs.
+J. Blake's number and floor with a confidence he was soon to lose. There
+was no such person. No such name. Then could the clerk tell him whether,
+and why, she had gone elsewhere. A slim and tall young lady in blue.
+
+The clerk really couldn't say. He had been on duty for only half an
+hour. There was no person of the name of Blake in the hotel. Sometimes
+guests who failed to find just the accommodation they wanted went over
+to the Blinheim, just across the avenue. So the bridegroom set out upon
+his quest and the clerk, less world-weary than his predecessor, turned
+back to the telephone-girl.
+
+Presently there approached the desk a brisk, business-like person who
+asked a few business-like questions and then registered in a bold and
+flowing hand, "Mr. and Mrs. Robert Blake, Boston."
+
+"My husband," she announced, "will be here presently."
+
+"He was here ten minutes ago," said the clerk, and added particulars.
+
+"Oh, that's all right," replied the slightly-puzzled but quite unexcited
+lady; "he'll be back." And then, accompanied by bags and suitcases, she
+vanished aloft.
+
+"Missed connections, somehow," commented the clerk to the stenographer,
+and gave himself to the contemplation of "Past Performances" in the
+_Evening Telegram_, and to ordinary routine of a hotel office for an
+hour or so, when, to prove the wisdom of the lady's calm, the excited
+Mr. John Blake returned.
+
+"There must be some mistake," he began darkly, "I've been to every
+hotel--"
+
+"Lady came ten minutes after you left," said the genial clerk. "Front,
+show the gentleman to 450." And, presently, John was explaining his
+dilemma to Gladys, the pretty wife of his cousin Bob. "She is somewhere
+in this hotel," he fumed, "and I'll find her if I have to search it room
+by room."
+
+The office was hardly quiet after the appearance and disappearance of
+Mr. John Blake, when the clerk and the telephone-girl were again
+interrupted by an excited gentleman. His white whiskers framed an
+anxious, kindly face, his white waistcoat bound a true and tender heart.
+
+"Has Mr. Blake arrived?" he demanded with some haste.
+
+"Just a minute ago," the clerk replied, and was surprised at the
+disappointment his answer caused.
+
+"I must see him," cried the old gentleman. "You needn't announce me.
+I'll go right up. I'm his wife's uncle, and she telephoned me to come."
+
+"Front!" called the clerk. "This gentleman to 450."
+
+At the door of 450 he dismissed his guide with suitable _largesse_, and
+softly entered the room. It was brightly illuminated, and Uncle Richard
+was able clearly to contemplate his nephew of eight hours in animated
+converse with a handsome woman in evening dress.
+
+"I think, sir," said the woman, "that there is some mistake."
+
+"I agree with you, madam," said Uncle Richard, "and I'm sorry for it."
+
+"But you are exactly the man to help us," cried the nephew; "we are in
+an awful state."
+
+"I agree with you, sir," repeated Uncle Richard.
+
+"You _must_ know how to help us," urged the nephew. "I've lost
+Marjorie."
+
+"So I should have inferred. But she had already thrown herself away."
+
+"She's _lost_!" stormed the bridegroom. "Don't you understand? Lost,
+lost, lost!"
+
+"I rather think he misunderstands," the handsome woman interrupted.
+"You've not told him, John, who I am."
+
+"You are mistaken," replied Uncle Richard with a horrible suavity; "I
+understand enough. That poor child telephoned to me not twenty minutes
+ago that her husband was injured, perhaps mortally, and implored my
+help. I left my dinner to come to his assistance and I find
+him--here--and thus."
+
+"Twenty minutes ago?" yelled John, leaping upon his new relative and
+quite disregarding that gentleman's last words. "Where was she? Did she
+tell you where to look for her?"
+
+"So, sir," stormed Uncle Richard, "the poor, deluded child has left you
+and turned to her faithful old uncle! Allow me to say that you're a
+blackguard, sir, and to wish you good-bye."
+
+"If you dare to move," stormed John Blake, "until you tell me where my
+wife is, I'll strangle you. Now listen to me. This is Mrs. Bob Blake,
+wife of my cousin Robert. She's an old friend of Marjorie's. We had a
+half engagement to meet here this week. Bob is due any minute, but
+Marjorie is lost. There is only one record of a Blake in to-day's
+register and that's this room and this lady--when Marjorie left me at
+the ferry she was coming here, straight. I've been to all the possible
+hotels. She is nowhere. You say she telephoned to you. From where?"
+
+"She didn't say," answered Uncle Richard, shame-facedly, and added still
+more dejectedly, "I didn't ask. She said in a letter her aunt received
+this morning that she was coming here. So I inferred that she was here."
+
+"Then she is here," cried Gladys. "It's some stupid mistake in the
+office."
+
+"I'll go down to that chap," John threatened, "and if he doesn't
+instantly produce Marjorie I'll shoot him."
+
+[Illustration: UNCLE RICHARD'S FACE, AS HE MET JOHN'S EYES, WAS A STUDY.]
+
+"You'll do nothing of the sort," his uncle contradicted, "the child
+appealed to me and I am the one to rescue her. I shall interview the
+manager. I know him. You may come with me if you like."
+
+Down at the desk they accosted the still-courteous clerk. Uncle Richard
+produced his card, and, before he could ask for the manager the clerk
+flicked a memorandum out of one pigeon-hole, a key out of another, and
+twirled the register on its turn-table almost into the midst of the
+white waistcoat.
+
+"The lady has been expecting you for hours, Mr. Underwood," said he.
+"Looked for you quite early in the afternoon, so the maid says. Register
+here, please. Quite hysterical, she is, they tell me, and the maid was
+asking for the doctor--Front! 625!"
+
+Uncle Richard's face, as he met John's eyes, was a study. The
+telephone-girl disentangled the receiver from her pompadour so that she
+might hear without hindrance the speech which was bursting through the
+swelling buttons of the white waistcoat and making the white whiskers
+quiver.
+
+"I know nothing whatever about _any_ lady in _any_ of your rooms," he
+roared, greatly to the delight of the bellboys. "I know nothing about
+your Underwood woman, with her doctors and her hysterics. I want to see
+the manager."
+
+"If," said the telephone maiden, adjusting her skirt at the hips and
+shaking her figure into greater conformity with the ideal she had set
+before it--"If this gentleman is 2525 Gram., then the lady in 625 rang
+him up at seven-thirty and held the wire seven minutes talkin' to him
+and cryin' to beat Sousa's band. All about her uncle she was talkin'. I
+guess it was him, all right, all right. His voice sounds sort of
+familiar to me when he talks mad."
+
+But John had neither eyes nor ears for Uncle Richard's wrath. He
+snatched the key and the paper upon which the supercilious clerk had
+inscribed, at Marjorie's embarrassed dictation, "Mrs. Underwood, West
+Hills, N.J. (husband to arrive later), 625 and 6," and, since love is
+keen, he jumped to the right conclusion and the open elevator without
+further delay.
+
+An hour or so later the attention of the clerk and the telephone-girl
+was again drawn to the complicated Blakes. A party of four sauntered out
+of the dining-room and approached the desk.
+
+"I'll register now, I think," said John. And when he had finished he
+turned to the star-eyed girl behind him.
+
+"Look carefully at this, Marjorie," he admonished. "Mr. and Mrs. John
+Blake. _You_ are Mrs. John Blake. Do you think you can remember that?"
+
+"Don't laugh at me," she pleaded, "Gladys says it was a most natural
+mistake, and so does Bob. Don't you, Gladys and Bob?"
+
+"An almost inevitable mistake," they chorused mendaciously, "but," added
+Bob, "a rather disastrous mistake for your uncle to explain to his wife,
+the doctor and the nurse. He'll be able for it, though; I never saw so
+game an old chap."
+
+"And I'll never do it again," she promised. People never do when they've
+been married a long, long time, and I feel as though I had been married
+thousands and thousands of years."
+
+"Poor, tired little girl," said John, "you have had a rather indifferent
+time of it. Say good-night to Dick and Gladys. Come, my dear."
+
+
+
+
+MISERY LOVES COMPANY.
+
+
+"But, Win," remonstrated the bride-elect, "I really don't think we
+_could_. Wouldn't it look awfully strange? I don't think I ever heard of
+its being done."
+
+"Neither did I," he agreed. "And yet I want you to do it. Look at it
+from my point of view. I persuade John Mead to stop wandering around the
+world and to take an apartment with me here in New York. Then I meet
+you. The inevitable happens and in less than a year John is to be left
+desolate. You know how eccentric he is, and how hard it will be for him
+to get on with any other companion--"
+
+"I know," said Patty, "that he never will find any one--but you--to put
+up with his eccentricities."
+
+"And then, as if abandoning him were not bad enough, I go and maim the
+poor beggar: blind him temporarily--permanently, if he is not taken care
+of--and disfigure him beyond all description. Honestly, Patty, you never
+saw anything like him."
+
+"I know," said she, "I know. A pair of black eyes."
+
+"Black!" he cried, "why, they're all the colors of the rainbow and two
+more beside, as the story-book says. All the way from his hair to his
+mustache he is one lurid sunset. I don't want to minimize this thing. It
+has only one redeeming feature: he will be a complete disguise. No
+amount of rice or ribbon could counteract his sinister companionship. No
+bridal suspicions could live in the light of it. Doesn't that thought
+help?".
+
+The conversation wandered into personalities and back again, as a
+conversation may three days before a wedding, but Patty was not entirely
+won over to Hawley's view of his responsibility for having with
+unprecedented dexterity and precision planted a smashing "right" on the
+bridge of his friend's nose in the course of an amicable "bout."
+
+"And the oculist chap says," Winthrop urged, "that he simply must not be
+allowed to use his eyes. I'm the only one who takes any interest in him
+or has any control over him, and to abandon him now would be an awful
+responsibility. Can't you see that, dear? If we stay at home to take
+care of him he will understand why we're doing it, and he'd vanish. Do
+let me put him into a motor mask and attach him to the procession."
+
+"Well, of course, Win," Patty answered, "of course we must have him if
+you feel so strongly about it. It's a pity," she ended mischievously,
+"that he dislikes me so much."
+
+"That's because you dislike him. But just wait till you know one
+another."
+
+"I will," she answered with a spirit which promised well for the future.
+"I'll wait."
+
+And Winthrop was so touched and gratified by her complaisance that he
+had no alternative, save to duplicate it, when the following evening
+brought him this communication:
+
+"Kate Perry and I were playing golf this morning. And, oh! Win, it seems
+just too dreadful! I banged her between the eyes with my driver. I can't
+think how I ever did it. She's not fit to be seen. Awful! worse than Mr.
+Mead can possibly be. She can't stay here and she can't go home to
+Washington.
+
+"So, now, if you will consent, we shall be four instead of three. Let me
+take poor Kate. She can wear a thick veil and sit in behind with Mr.
+Mead, in his goggles, and leave the front seats for us. They'll be
+company for one another."
+
+Winthrop questioned this final sentence. A supercilious, spoiled
+beauty--a beauty now doubly spoiled and presumedly bad tempered--was
+hardly an ideal companion for the misanthropic Mead.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The wedding took place in the morning and the beginning of the honeymoon
+was prosaic enough. Winthrop and Patty sat in the front seat of the
+throbbing touring car, while hysterical bridesmaids and vengeful
+groomsmen showered the requisite quantities of rice, confetti and old
+slippers upon them.
+
+It was at the New York side of the ferry that a shrouded female joined
+them, and it was at the Hoboken side of the river that a be-goggled
+young man was added unto her. The bride rushed through the formula of
+introduction: a readjustment of dress-suit cases and miniature trunks
+was effected, and the disguise which the bridegroom had predicted was
+complete. The most romantic onlooker would not have suspected them of
+concealing a honeymoon about them.
+
+It was nearly six o'clock when at last they reached their destination,
+the little town of Rapidan, in New Jersey, and stopped before the
+Empress Hotel. Hawley had visited Rapidan once before, as a member of
+his college glee club, and he had recalled it instantly when Mead's
+disfigurement made sequestration imperative.
+
+The motor sobbed itself to a standstill: several children and dogs
+gathered to inspect it, and then finding more interest and novelty in
+Mead's mask turned their attention to him.
+
+The Empress had evidently been dethroned for some years, and the
+hospitality she afforded her guests was of an impoverished sort. Hawley,
+approaching the desk to make enquiries, was met by a clerk incredibly
+arrayed, and the intelligence that the whole house was theirs to choose,
+except for two small rooms on the third floor occupied by two gentlemen
+who "traveled" respectively in sarsaparilla and molasses.
+
+Hawley returned to his friends and repeated this information.
+
+"How perfectly sweet of them," cried the irresponsible bride. "Oh! Win,
+we must stay here and see them. Isn't it the dearest sleepy hollow of a
+place?"
+
+Attended by the impressed and impressive clerk, they made an inspection
+of the house. Mr. and Mrs. Hawley settled upon a suite just over the
+main entrance. Mead was established across the hall. But Kate found a
+wonderful panorama which could only be seen from the rooms on the third
+floor, and there, down a dreary length of oil-clothed hall, she bestowed
+herself and her belongings.
+
+"For I must," she explained to Patty, "I simply _must_ get out of this
+veil and breathe, and I shouldn't dare to do it within reach of that
+horribly supercilious friend of Winthrop's. I'm going to plead headache
+or something, and have my dinner sent up here."
+
+Mead, meanwhile, was unfolding similar plans to Hawley. "I should have
+joined you," said he, "if your wife's friend had been a little less
+self-sufficient and unsympathetic. Of course, I don't require any
+sympathy; but I don't want ridicule either. So, while she is of the
+party I'll have my meals in my room. I can't act the 'Man in the Iron
+Mask' forever. You just leave the ladies together after dinner and come
+up here for a pipe with me."
+
+And when Mr. and Mrs. Hawley next encountered one another and reported
+the wishes of their friends, he suggested and she rapturously agreed,
+that they should dine in their horse-hair-covered sitting-room.
+
+"I have a reason, dear," she told him, "for not wishing to go to the
+dining-room for our first meal together. I'll explain later."
+
+"Your wishing it is enough," he answered before the conversation sank to
+banalities.
+
+And when these several intentions were made clear to the conscientious
+clerk, he sent for the police force of the town--it consisted of a mild,
+little old man in a uniform and helmet which might have belonged to some
+mountainous member of the Broadway Squad in its prime--and implored him
+to spend the evening in the hall.
+
+"They're beginning to act up funny already," the clerk imparted. "This
+eatin' all over the house don't seem just right to me. What do they
+think the dining-room's for anyway? Sam was up with the bag belonging to
+the single fellow, and he says he's got the worst looking pair of black
+eyes he ever saw. Here, Sam, you come and tell Jimmie what he looks
+like."
+
+Sam, a middle-aged combination of porter, bellboy, furnace-man, office
+assistant and emergency barkeeper was but newly launched upon his
+description of Mead's face, when the chambermaid, who was also the
+waitress and housekeeper, broke in upon them with the intelligence that
+never in all her born days _or_ nights had she seen anything like the
+face of the young lady on the third floor.
+
+"What's the matter with her," said the clerk suspiciously, with a look
+which warned Jimmie to be at once a Bingham and a Sherlock Holmes.
+
+"Why, Horace," she answered tragically, "that girl has two of the most
+awful black eyes. The whites of them is red and then comes purple and
+green and yellow. I guess they was meant to be blue."
+
+This chromatic scale was too much for Jimmie. He reeled where he sat and
+then, the postman opportunely arriving, sent word to Mrs. Jimmie that
+duty would keep him from her all the night.
+
+"Tell her," he huskily charged his messenger, "that there is suspicious
+circumstances going on in this house."
+
+"You bet there is," the clerk agreed. "It looks like a case of attempted
+murder to me."
+
+"Divorce, more likely," was Jimmie's professional opinion, but he had
+scant time to enlarge upon it before the waitress, outraged to the point
+of tears, broke out of her domain. She brought with her an atmosphere of
+long-dead beefsteak, chops and onions, and she shrilled for an answer to
+her question.
+
+"What's the matter with 'em anyway? Ain't the dining-room good enough
+for 'em to eat in? It done all right for Judge Campbell's funeral this
+afternoon, and I found a real sweet wreath on that there whatnot in the
+corner. The candles wasn't all burnt up neither, an' I set out four of
+'em on the four corners. It looks elegant, an' them tube-roses smells
+grand. An' when I told that young lady what's got the use of her eyes
+how glad I was they happened in when we was so well fixed for
+decorations, she looked awful funny. Most like she was cross-eyed."
+
+"They all seem to have eye-trouble," Jimmie commented. "Do you suppose
+they're running away from one of these here blind asylums."
+
+"Lunatic asylum, most likely," the cheerful clerk contributed.
+
+When the other two guests ceased from traveling in molasses and
+sarsaparilla and returned to their quiet hostelry, all these surmises
+had hardened into certainties, and were imparted to them with a new maze
+of suspicion, more dense, more deadly, and more strictly in accordance
+with the principles laid down in "Dandy Dick, the Boy Detective."
+
+Madeline, the waitress, reported further particulars as she ministered
+to the creature-comforts of the traveling gentlemen dining alone among
+the funeral-baked meats. So interested and excited did these gentlemen
+become that they determined to interview, or at least to see, their
+mysterious fellow guests.
+
+When their elaborate supper had reached its apotheosis of stewed prunes
+and blue-boiled rice, Hawley and Mead had gone out for a meditative and
+tobacco-shrouded stroll. They passed through the hall and inspiration
+awoke in Jimmie.
+
+"By gum," said he, "I know them now. I suspicioned them from the first
+by what Horace told me. But now I've got them sure. You mind that time I
+was down to New York and was showed over Police Headquarters, by
+professional etiquette?"
+
+"Sure," they all agreed. It was indeed a reminiscence, the details of
+which had been playing havoc with Rapidan's nerves for the past fifteen
+years. They felt that they could not bear it now.
+
+"Well," continued Jimmie, gathering his auditors close about him by the
+husky whisper he now adopted, "I see them two fellers then. Mebbe 'twas
+in the Rogue's Gallery and mebbe it was in the cells. I ain't worked it
+down that fine yet, but I'll think and pray on it and let you know when
+I get light."
+
+When the staff and the commercial guests of the Empress Hotel were
+waiting to see illumination burst through the blue-shrouded protector,
+the bridal party was veering momentarily further from the normal. For
+the deserted bride, alone in the desolate best sitting-room, laid her
+head upon her arms and laughed and laughed. She had made one cautious
+descent to the ground floor in search of diversion, and meeting Jimmie,
+she found it. After a conversation strictly categorical upon his side
+and widely misleading upon hers, she had gone up stairs again and halted
+in the upper hall just long enough to hear Jimmie's triumphant:
+
+"Well, we know _her_ name anyway."
+
+"What is it?" hissed Horace, while the porter relieved himself of a quid
+of tobacco so that nothing should interfere with his hearing and
+attention.
+
+"Huh!" ejaculated Jimmie, "you bin a hotel clerk two years and sold
+seegars all that time (when you could) and you don't know Ruby
+Mandeville when she stands before you."
+
+A box of the "Flor de" that gifted songstress, was soon produced and
+pried open, and the effulgent charms of its godmother compared with the
+less effulgent, but no less charming figure which had just trailed away.
+
+"It's her, sure as you're born," cried the gentleman who traveled in
+molasses, absent-mindedly abstracting three cigars and conveying them
+surreptitiously to his coat pocket.
+
+"She's fallen off some in flesh," commented Horace, as with careful
+presence of mind he drew out his daybook and entered a charge for those
+three cigars.
+
+"But she don't fool me," said Jimmie, "she can put flesh on or she can
+take it off--"
+
+"My, how you talk!" shrilled the chambermaid-bellboy, "you'd think you
+was talkin' about clothes."
+
+"It ain't no different to them," Jimmie maintained. "That's one of the
+things us detekitives has got to watch out for."
+
+"What do you s'pose she's doing here?" asked the porter.
+
+"Gettin' married again most likely. That's about all she does nowadays."
+
+Patty was still chuckling and choking over these remarks, when the door
+of the sitting-room opened cautiously and Kate Perry, swathed in her
+motor veil, looked in.
+
+"Are we alone?" she demanded with proper melodramatic accent.
+
+"We are," the bride answered, "Winthrop and Mr. Mead have gone out for a
+smoke."
+
+"Then I want you to tell me if I'm fading at all. I've been looking at
+it upstairs, in a little two-by-three mirror, and taken that way, by
+inches, it looks awful. Tell me what you think?" She removed the veil
+and presented her damaged face for her friend's inspection. There was
+not much improvement to report, but the always optimistic Patty did what
+she could with it.
+
+[Illustration: SHE SWOOPED UNDER THE LARGE CENTER TABLE, DRAGGING PATTY
+WITH HER.]
+
+"The left cheek," she pronounced, "is really better, less swollen,
+less--Oh! Kate, here they come."
+
+Miss Perry began to readjust her charitable gray chiffon veil. It was
+one of those which are built around a circular aperture, and as the
+steps in the hall came ever closer she, in one last frantic effort
+succeeded in framing the most lurid of her eyes in this opening. Casting
+one last look into the mirror, she swooped under the large center-table,
+dragging Patty with her, and disposing their various frills and ribbons
+under the long-hanging tablecover.
+
+"If they don't find either of us," she whispered, "they'll go away to
+look for us."
+
+She had no time to say more, and Patty had no time to say anything
+before the door opened and presented to their limited range of vision,
+two utterly strange pairs of shoes and the hems of alien trousers.
+
+"I hope you will excuse me, Miss," began the molasses gentleman, so full
+of his entrance speech that he said the first part of it before he
+noticed that the room was empty. And then turned to rend his fellow
+adventurer, who was laughing at him.
+
+"Didn't Horace tell us," he stormed, "that she was here, and wasn't you
+going to say how you had saw her in the original 'Black Crook?'"
+
+"I seen her all right," said his more grammatical friend, with heavy
+emphasis.
+
+"Do you see her now?" demanded the irate molasses traveler.
+
+"I do not, but I'll set here 'til she comes."
+
+They both sat. Not indeed until the arrival of Ruby Mandeville, but
+until Hawley and Mead made their appearance, and made it, too, very
+plain that they had not expected and did not enjoy the society of the
+travelers.
+
+"Where are the ladies?" asked Hawley.
+
+"Search us," responded the travelers.
+
+"They must have gone to their rooms," said the bridegroom. "If these
+gentlemen don't object to our waiting here," he went on with a fine and
+wasted sarcasm.
+
+"Set right down," said the genial sarsaparilla man, and to further
+promote good feeling he tendered his remaining "Ruby Mandeville" cigar.
+
+"Your friend," said he affably, "does he always wear them goggles?"
+
+"Always," answered Hawley. "Eats in them, sleeps in them."
+
+"Born in them," supplemented Mead savagely.
+
+They sat and waited for yet a few moments, and though Mead did not add
+geniality to the conversation, he certainly contributed interest to it.
+For his views on honeymoon etiquette being strong within him, and an
+audience made to his hand, he went on to amplify some of the theories
+with which he had been trying to undermine Winthrop's loyalty.
+
+"I am persuaded that most of the disappointments of married life are due
+to the impossible standards set up at the beginning. Look at it this
+way. You know the fuss most wives make about the hours a husband keeps.
+Well! suppose Mr. Hawley comes out in the car with me to-night. I know
+some fellows who have a summer studio near here. We'll run over and make
+a night of it."
+
+"Say," the molasses gentleman broke in, "be you married, mister?"
+
+"No!" said Mead.
+
+"Sounds like it," said the molasses gentleman. "Marriage will sort of
+straighten you out on these here subjects."
+
+"Oh, leave 'em be," admonished the sarsaparilla man. "If I had 'a met up
+with him thirty years ago, mebbee I wouldn't be in the traveling line
+now. He's got a fine idee."
+
+Hawley, meanwhile, was wrestling with his manners and the "Ruby
+Mandeville," until the lady, as was her custom, triumphed.
+
+He hurriedly and incompletely extinguished the cigar, and attracted by
+the same opportunity for concealment which had appealed to Kate and
+Patty, he lifted a corner of the heavy-fringed tablecover and sent Ruby
+to join the other ladies.
+
+Now, a lighted cigar applied suddenly to the ear of an excited and
+half-hysterical conspirator, will generally produce results. In this
+case it produced a scream, the bride, and after an interval, the
+shrouded confidential friend.
+
+"See where amazement on your mother sits," the ghost remarks in Hamlet,
+but amazement never sat so hard on the wicked Gertrude of Denmark as it
+did upon the four men who saw the tablecloth give up its ghosts.
+
+At first there was silence. One of those throbbing, abominable silences
+whose every second makes a situation worse and explanation more
+impossible.
+
+The "Black Crook" speech of welcome and appreciation died in the heart
+of the molasses traveler. It did not somehow seem the safest answer to
+Hawley's threatening--
+
+"I think you gentlemen had better explain how you happen to be in my
+private sitting-room. Perhaps we had better step out into the hall."
+
+They did, and the echoes of their conversation brought Jimmie, that
+trusty sleuth, upon the scene. With him he brought Horace as witness.
+Also, he carried his dark lantern. He directed its glare fitfully at the
+two strangers until Mead, catching a beam in his eye, turned and drove
+Jimmie and his cohorts from the scene. They retreated in exceedingly
+bad order to the bar, and then Jimmie announced in sepulchral whispers
+that he had further identification to impart. He required much liquid
+refreshment to nerve him to speech, and his audience required to be
+similarly strengthened to hear.
+
+"I've got 'em," he began, "I know 'em now. Horace, this is the biggest
+thing you'll ever be anywhere near." And, as his hearers drew close
+about him, he whispered "counterfeiters. The hull kit and bilin' of 'em."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Meanwhile, Kate and Patty wrestled afresh with the automobile veil, and
+had succeeded in getting it tied in a limp string around the
+bridesmaid's neck, leaving all her head and face uncovered. And when the
+groom and the groomsman returned she, with a muffled gurgle, dived back
+into the seclusion of the tablecover.
+
+"We've got rid of those bounders," Hawley announced, and--
+
+"Hello!" cried Mead, "Miss Perry gone already?"
+
+"She was very tired," said Patty veraciously, but evasively.
+
+"Awfully jolly girl, isn't she Mead?" said Hawley, with the
+expansiveness of the newly-wed. "Handsome, too?"
+
+"Perhaps she is, but so long as she dresses like a veiled prophet it is
+hard to tell."
+
+"If you two can get on without me," said Patty, disregarding a muffled
+protest from under the table, "I'll go up and fetch," she made these
+comforting words very clear, "my green motor veil."
+
+Instantly, when he closed the door after her, Mead turned to Hawley.
+
+"There's something wrong with this confounded mask," said he. "This
+strap-thing that goes round my head must be too tight. I've been mad
+with it the last half hour. How do I look?" he asked genially as he took
+it off, and proceeded to tamper with the buckles and elastic. "Howling
+Jupiter!" he cried a moment later, "I've busted it."
+
+As the two friends stood and stared at one another aghast, they heard
+the click of Patty's returning heels, and Mead, abandoning dignity,
+courage--everything except the broken mask--dived into Miss Perry's
+maiden bower.
+
+Mrs. Hawley watched this procedure with wide and fascinated eyes. No
+ripple shook the walls of the bower. No sound proceeded from it as the
+moments flew. Then Patty fell away into helpless laughter and wept tears
+of shocked and sudden mirth into the now useless motor veil.
+
+"Patty!" remonstrated her husband, but she laughed helplessly on. "At
+least come out into the hall and laugh there," he urged, "the poor chap
+will hear you." And when he had followed her and listened to her shaken
+whisper, he broke into such a shout as forced the indignant and
+outraged Kate into a shudder of protest and disgust.
+
+Instantly Mead threw an arm past the table's single central support and
+grasped a handful of silk chiffon and two fingers.
+
+He, being of an acquisitive turn, retained the fingers. She being of a
+dictatorial turn, rebuked him.
+
+"Finding is keeping," he shamelessly remarked. "Even in infancy I was
+taught that."
+
+Now, a certain pomp of scene and circumstance is necessary to the sort
+of dignified snubbing with which Miss Perry was accustomed to treat
+possible admirers. Also, a serene consciousness of superlative good
+looks. But Kate Perry disfigured, cramped into a ridiculous hiding
+place, and suffering untold miseries of headache and throbbing eyes, was
+a very different creature.
+
+And Mead, flippant, hard, and misanthropic in the state of nature,
+softened wonderfully as he sat in the gloom of the tablecover, in
+silent possession of those two slim fingers.
+
+His words grew gentle, his manner kind, and her answers were calculated
+to petrify her long-suffering family if they could have overheard them.
+
+"Mr. Mead," she said at last, "will you be so very kind as to stay here
+quietly under the table while I scramble out and go up to my room?"
+
+No tongue of angel could have made a more welcome suggestion. Mead
+uttered feeble and polite proffers of escort, and silently called down
+blessings upon the head he had never seen. He had just allowed himself
+to be dissuaded from knight errantry, when the door opened and Jimmie
+flashed his dark lantern about the brightly lighted room. He then beckoned
+mysteriously to the still vigilant Horace, who lurked in the hall.
+
+"Have you found them?" whispered that youth.
+
+"Not a trace of them," answered Jimmie triumphantly. "They ain't gone
+out. They ain't in their rooms, and I'm studyin' how I can round 'em up.
+They're the most suspicious characters I ever see, Horace, and this
+night's work may cost us our lives."
+
+This disposition of his existence did not seem to cheer Horace.
+
+"Counterfeiters," Jimmie went on, "is the desperatest kind of criminals
+there is. Still we got to git 'em. I'll look round this room just so as
+nothing won't escape us, and then we'll go up to the next floor. It's
+good we got two of them located in the bridal suite."
+
+Jimmie, with his prying dark lantern and his prodding nightstick, soon
+reached the space under the table, and the counterfeiters secreted there.
+
+"I got 'em," he cried delightedly. "Hi, you. Come out of there and show
+yourselves."
+
+They came. There was nothing else to do.
+
+"Moses's holy aunt," cried Jimmie, falling back upon Horace, who
+promptly fell back upon the sofa.
+
+"Here, you," said Mead. "You get out of this, both of you. Don't you
+know this is a private sitting-room?"
+
+"No settin'-room," said Jimmie, recovering somewhat, "is private to them
+as sets under tables blackening one another's eyes."
+
+"You ridiculous idiot," snorted Mead. "Do you dare to think that I hurt
+this lady?"
+
+"Lady? Ain't she your wife?"
+
+"She is _not_," snapped Kate.
+
+"Then why did you hit her?" demanded Jimmie. "If she ain't your wife
+what did you want to hit her for? An' anyway, she'd ought to be. That's
+all I got to say."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The same idea occurred to Mr. and Mrs. Hawley, crouched guiltily against
+their door to hear their victims pass, for their amazed ears caught
+these words--the first were Kate's:
+
+"You must let me give you some of my lotion."
+
+And then came Mead's:
+
+"I shall be _most_ grateful. It must be hot stuff. You know you're
+hardly disfigured at all."
+
+"The saints forgive him," Patty gurgled.
+
+Later on in the darkness, Jimmie's idea visited Mead and was received
+with some cordiality. And at some time later still, it must have been
+presented to Miss Perry, for the misanthropic Mead--no longer
+misanthropic--now boasts a massive and handsome wife whom he calls his
+Little Kitty. But the idea was originally Jimmie's.
+
+
+
+
+THE CHRISTMAS GUEST
+
+
+On the day before Christmas eve John Sedyard closed his desk, dismissed
+his two clerks and his stenographer two hours earlier than usual, and
+set out in quest of adventure and a present for his sister Edith. John
+Sedyard had a habit of succeeding in all he set forth to do but the
+complete and surprising success which attended him in this quest was a
+notch above even his high average.
+
+Earlier in the month, his stenographer had secured the annual pledges of
+his affection for all the relatives, friends and dependants to whom he
+was in the habit of giving presents: all except his mother, his
+unmarried sister, Edith, who still lived at home, and his fiancee, Mary
+Van Plank. The gifts for these three, he had decided, must be of his
+own choice and purchase. He had provided for his mother and for Mary
+earlier in the week. Neither excitement nor adventure had attended upon
+the purchase of their gifts. Something for the house or the table was
+always the trick for elderly ladies who presided over large
+establishments and gave their whole souls to the managing of them. He
+bought for his mother a set of colonial silver candlesticks. For Mary,
+he bought a comb of gold--all gold, like her own lovely hair. The dark
+tortoise shell of the one she wore always seemed an incongruous note in
+her fair crown. But Edith was as yet unpresented, and it was on her
+account that Mr. Sedyard deserted his office and delighted his
+subordinates at three o'clock in the afternoon.
+
+Edith was much more difficult than the other two had been. She was
+strong-minded, much given to churchwork and committees. Neither the
+home, as represented by the candlesticks, nor self-adornment as
+typified by the golden comb could be expected to appeal to her
+communistic, altruistic nature. And Sedyard, having experienced two
+inspirations, could think of nothing but combs and candlesticks. So he
+threw himself into the current, which swept along Broadway, trusting
+that some accident would suggest a suitable offering. Meanwhile, he
+revelled in the crowd, good-humored, holiday-making, holly-decked, which
+carried him uptown, past Wanamaker's and Grace Church, swirled him
+across old "dead man's curve," and down the Fourteenth Street side of
+Union Square. Here the shops were smaller, not so overwhelming, and here
+he was stopped by seeing a red auction flag. Looking in over the heads
+of the assembled crowd, he saw that the auctioneer was holding up a
+feather-crowned hat and addressing his audience after the manner of his
+kind:
+
+"Buy a hat for your wife. A waste-paper basket by night and a hat by
+day. Genuine ostrich feathers growing on it. Becoming to all styles of
+feminine beauty. What am I bid on this sure tickler of the feminine
+palate? Three dollars? Why, ladies and gents, the dooty on it alone was
+twelve. It's a Paris hat, ladies. Your sister, your mother, your maiden
+aunt--"
+
+Sedyard hearkened, but absently, to the fellow's words, but his problem
+was solved. He would buy Edith something to look pretty in. She was a
+pretty girl and in danger of forgetting it. And she had been decent,
+John reflected, awfully decent about Mary. He knew that the _entente
+cordiale_ which existed between Mary and his mother was largely due to
+Edith, and he knew, too, that Edith, an authority on modern-housing and
+model-living, surely but silently disapproved of Mary's living alone in
+a three-roomed studio and devoting her days to painting, when there was
+so much rescue work to be done in the world.
+
+"I get my uplift," Mary would explain when Edith urged these things upon
+her, "from the elevator. Living on the eighth floor, dear, I cannot but
+help seeing the world from a very different angle."
+
+Yes, John reflected as he chuckled in retrospect over such
+conversations, Edith had certainly been awfully decent.
+
+During these meditations several articles of feminine apparel had come
+and gone under the hammer. The crowd had decreased somewhat and his
+position now commanded a clear view of the auctioneer's platform, and he
+realized that the fierce light of the arc lamps beat down upon as
+charming a costume as he had seen for many a day. All of corn-flower
+blue it was, a chiffon gown, a big chiffon muff and a plumed hat. Oh! if
+he had been allowed to do such shopping for Mary! how quickly he would
+have entered into the lists of bidders! Mary's eyes were just that
+heavenly shade of blue, but Mary's pride was as great as her poverty,
+and the time when he could shower his now useless wealth upon her was
+not yet. And then his loyal memory told him that Edith was blue-eyed
+like all the Sedyards and he knew that his sister's Christmas gifts
+stood before him. He failed, however, to discern in the bland presence
+of the lay figure, upon which they were disposed to such advantage, the
+companion of one of the most varied adventures in his long career.
+
+The chiffon finery was rather too much for the Fourteenth Street
+audience. The bidding languished. The auctioneer's pleadings fell upon
+deaf ears. In vain his assistant, a deft-fingered man with a beard,
+twirled the waxen-faced figure to show the "semi-princesse back" and the
+"near-Empire front." Corn-blue chiffon and panne velvet are not much
+worn in Fourteenth Street. The auctioneer grew desperate. "Twenty-five
+dollars," he repeated with such scorn that the timid woman who had made
+the bid wished herself at home and in bed. "_Twenty-five_ dollars!"
+
+"Throw in the girl, why don't you?" suggested a facetious youth, chiefly
+remarkable for a nose, a necktie and a diamond ring. "She's a peach all
+right, all right. She's got a smile that won't come off."
+
+"All right, I'll throw her in," cried the desperate auctioneer. "What am
+I bid for this here afternoon costume complete with lady."
+
+"Twenty-seven fifty," said a woman whom three years of banting would
+still have left too fat to get into it.
+
+"Twenty-eight," whispered the first bidder.
+
+"Thirty," said John Sedyard.
+
+There was some other desultory bidding but in a few moments Sedyard
+found himself minus fifty-four dollars and plus a chiffon gown and
+muff, a hat all drooping plumes and a graceful female form,
+golden-haired, bewitching, with a smile sweetly blended of surprise,
+incipient idiocy and allure.
+
+"She's a queen all right, all right," the sophisticated youth cheered
+him. "Git onto them lovely wax-like hands. Say, you know honest, on the
+level, she's worth the whole price of admission."
+
+John, still chaperoned by this sagacious and helpful youth, made his way
+to the clerk's desk and proceeded to give his name and address and
+request that his purchases should be delivered in the morning.
+
+"Deliver nothin'," said the clerk pleasantly. "Do you suppose we'd 'a
+let you have the goods at that price if we could 'a stored 'em
+overnight? Our lease is up," he continued consulting his Ingersoll
+watch, "in just fifteen minutes. In a quarter of an hour we hand over
+the keys and what's left of the fixtures to the landlord. He's let the
+store for to-morrow to a Christmas-tree ornaments merchant."
+
+"Then I suppose I'll have to get an expressman. Where is the nearest, do
+you know?"
+
+"Expressman!" exclaimed the sharp youth. "Well, I guess the nearest
+would be about Three Hundred and Fifty-second Street and _then_ he'd
+have a load and a jag. No, sir, it's the faithful cab for yours. There's
+a row of cabs just on the edge of the square. I could go over and get
+you a hansom."
+
+"Thank you," said John, "I wish you would." But a glance at his
+languishing companion made him add, "I guess you had better make it a
+four-wheeler. Hansom-riding would be pretty cold for a lady without a
+coat."
+
+"All right," said the sharp youth. "You bring her out on the sidewalk
+and I'll get the hurry-up wagon. Say!" he halted to suggest, "you know
+what you'll look like, don't you?--riding around with that smile. When
+the lights flush you, you'll look just like a bridal party from
+Hoboken."
+
+Leaving this word of comfort behind him, he proceeded to imperil his
+life among trolley cars and traffic, while John engaged the lady and
+urged her to motion.
+
+He discovered that, supported at the waistline, she could be wheeled
+very nicely. He forced the muff over her upraised right hand, so that it
+somewhat concealed her face, and through an aisle respectfully cleared
+by the onlookers he led her to the open air. There he propped her
+against the show-window and turned in search of the cab and his new
+friend. In doing so he came face to face with an old one.
+
+"Why, hello John!" said Frederick Trevor, a man who had an office in his
+building and an interest in his sister. "Who would have thought of
+meeting you here?"
+
+"Or you," retorted John. "But since you are here, you can help me in a
+little difficulty."
+
+"Not now, old chap," said Frederick, "I'm in a bit of a hurry. See you
+about it to-morrow. Well, so long. Don't let me keep you from your
+friend."
+
+"Friend!" stormed John and then following the directions of Trevor's
+eyes, he descried a blue-clad, golden-haired young lady lolling against
+the window, trying with a giant chiffon muff to smother a fit of
+hilarious laughter. One arched and smiling eye showed above the muff and
+the whole figure was instinct with Bacchanalian mirth. "Why that's," he
+began to explain, but young Trevor had vanished into the crowd.
+
+Presently the cab with the smart youth inside drew up to the curb and
+Sedyard, with a new self-consciousness, put his arm around the blue
+figure and trundled her across the sidewalk. The cabman threw his rug
+across his horse's quarters and lumbered down to assist at the
+embarkation of so fair a passenger. The smart youth held the door
+encouragingly open and John proceeded, with much more strength than he
+had expected to use, to heave the passenger aboard.
+
+Even these preliminaries had attracted the nucleus of a crowd and the
+smart youth grew restive.
+
+"Aw, say Maudie," he urged when the lady stuck rigid catty-cornerwise
+across the cab with her blue feathers pressed against the roof in one
+corner, and her bird-cage skirt arrangement protruding beyond the
+door-sill. "Aw, say Maudie, set down, why don't you, and take your
+Trilbys in. This gent is going to take you carriage riding."
+
+"What's the matter with her anyway," demanded the cabman. "Don't she
+know how to set in a carriage?"
+
+"No, she doesn't, she's only a wax figure," said John, "but I bought
+her and now I'm determined to take her home. She'd better go up on the
+box with you."
+
+"What! her?" demanded the outraged Jehu. "Say, what do you take me for
+anyway? Do you suppose I ain't got no friends just 'cause I drive a cab?
+Why! I wouldn't drive up Broadway with them goo-goo eyes settin' beside
+me, not for nothing you could offer, I wouldn't."
+
+By this time the crowd had reached very respectable proportions although
+there was nothing to see except the end of a blue gown hanging out of
+the cab's open door. The sharp youth, the cabman and John took turns in
+trying to adjust the lady to her environment. The rigidity and fragility
+of her arms and head made this very difficult, and presently there
+rolled upon the scene a policeman, large, Irish and chivalrous. It took
+Patrolman McDonogh but a second, but one glance at the tableaux and one
+whisper from the crowd to understand that a kidnapping atrocity was in
+progress.
+
+With wrath in his eye, he shouldered aside Sedyard and the cabman,
+grabbed the smart youth, whose turn at persuasion was then on, and threw
+him into the face of the crowd.
+
+"Oh! but you're the villyans," he admonished them, and then addressed
+the captive maid in reassuring tones.
+
+"You're all right, Miss, now. You're no longer defenceless in this
+wicked city. The arrum of the law is around you," he cried, encircling
+her waist with that substantial member. "You're safe at last, come here
+to me out of that."
+
+"Oh! noble, noble man," cried an emotional woman in the crowd. "If all
+officers were like you!"
+
+Heartened by these words the noble, noble man exerted the arm of the
+law and plucked the maiden out of the cab amid great excitement and
+applause. But above the general murmur the shrill voice of the sharp
+youth rent the air:
+
+"Fathead," he cried, "you've broke her neck. Can't you see how her
+head's goin' round and round?"
+
+[Illustration: THE CHANGELESS SMILE AND THE DROOPING PLUMES MADE THREE
+COMPLETE REVOLUTIONS AND NESTLED CONFIDINGLY UPON THE SHOULDER OF THE
+LAW. Page 129.]
+
+At this the emotional woman dropped to the sidewalk. "Lady fainted here,
+officer," cried a gentleman. But the noble, noble officer had no time
+for faints, and the lady was obliged to revive with only the assistance
+of the cold stones and curiosity.
+
+For the shrill voice had spoken truth. Something had given away in
+Maudie's mysterious anatomy; the fair head, the changeless smile and the
+drooping plumes made three complete revolutions and nestled confidingly
+upon the shoulder of the Law.
+
+"Here, none o' that," yelled Patrolman McDonogh quite reversing his
+earlier diagnosis of the situation. "None of your flim-flams, if you
+please. You go quiet and paceable with this gentleman. A little ride in
+the air is what you need."
+
+"That's right, officer," Sedyard interrupted. "That's how to talk to
+her. I can't do a thing with her."
+
+"Brute!" cried the emotional woman now happily restored. "It's officers
+like him that disgraces the force."
+
+Patrolman McDonogh turned to identify this blasphemer and Maudie's head,
+deprived of its support, made another revolution and then dropped coyly
+to her left shoulder. She looked so unspeakable in that attitude that
+the cabman felt called upon to offer a little professional advice:
+
+"She needs a checkrein," he declared, "an' she needs it bad," a remark
+which so incensed Patrolman McDonogh that Sedyard decided to explain:
+
+"Just disperse those people, will you," said he, "I want to talk to you."
+
+The sharp youth relieved the officer of law of his fair burden and
+posed her in a natural attitude of waiting beside the cab. McDonogh
+cleared the sidewalk and hearkened to Sedyard's tale.
+
+"So you see," said John in conclusion, "what I'm up against. I really
+didn't want the dummy when I bought it and you can bet I'm tired of it
+now. What I wanted was the clothes, and I guess the thing for me to do
+is just to take them in the cab and leave the figure here."
+
+"What!" thundered McDonogh. "You're going to leave a dummy without her
+clothes here on my beat? Not if I see ye first, ye ain't, and if ye try
+it on I'll run ye in."
+
+"Say! I'll tell you what you want," piped up the still buoyant, smart
+youth. "You need one of them open taxicabs.
+
+"He needs a hearse," corrected the disgruntled cabman. "Somethin' she
+can lay down in comfortable an' take in the sights through the windows."
+
+"Now, he needs a taxi. He can leave her stand in the back all right,
+but I guess," he warned John, "you'll have to sit in with her and hold
+her head on."
+
+And thus it was that Maudie left the scene. She left, too, the smart
+youth, the cabman and the noble, noble officer. And as the taxi bumped
+over the trolley tracks she, despite all Sedyard's efforts, turned her
+head and smiled out at them straight over her near-princesse back.
+
+"Gee!" said the smart youth, "ain't she the friendliest bunch of
+calico."
+
+"This case," said the noble Patrolman McDonogh with unpunctual
+inspiration, "had ought to be looked into by rights."
+
+"Chauffeur," said John Sedyard to the shadowy form before him, "just
+pick out the darkest streets, will you?"
+
+"Yes, sir," answered the chauffeur looking up into the bland smile and
+the outstretched hand above him. "I'll make it if I can but if we get
+stopped, don't blame me."
+
+A year later, or so it seemed to John Sedyard, the taxicab, panting with
+indignation at the insults and interferences to which it had been
+subjected, turned into Sedyard's eminently respectable block and drew up
+before his eminently handsome house.
+
+He paid and propitiated the chauffeur, took his lovely burden in his
+arms and staggered up the steps with the half regretful feeling of one
+who steps out of the country of adventure back to prosaic things. He
+found his latchkey, opened his door and drew Maudie into the hall. And
+on the landing half-way up the stairs stood his sister Edith, evidently
+the bearer of some pleasant tidings.
+
+Maudie's smile flashed up at her from John's shoulder. Edith stared,
+stiffened, and retraced her steps. John wheeled the figure into the
+reception-room and thus addressed it:
+
+"Listen to me, you dumbhead. You may think this adventure is over.
+Well, so did I, but I tell you now it's only just beginning. If you are
+not mighty careful you will be wrecking a home. So keep your mouth
+shut," he charged her, "and do nothing till you hear from me!"
+
+Maudie smiled archly, coyly, confidentially, and he went upstairs.
+
+In the sitting-room, he found gathered together his mother, his sister
+and Dick Van Plank, Mary's young brother and a student at Columbia. John
+was supported through Edith's first remark and the look with which she
+accompanied it by the memory of her goodness to Mary and by the
+anticipation of the fun which Maudie might be made to provide.
+
+"I wish to say, John," she began, before any one else had time to speak,
+"that I've said _nothing_ to mother or Dick, and I think it would be
+better if you didn't. I can attend to the case if you leave it to me."
+
+"Like you," said John shortly. "Who told you she is a 'case.' Mother,"
+he went on addressing that gentle knitter by the fire, "I want you to
+come downstairs."
+
+"She shall do nothing of the kind!" cried Edith, and as Mrs. Sedyard
+looked interrogatively from one to another of her children, her daughter
+swept on. "John must be crazy, I saw him come in with a--a person--who
+never ought to be in a house like this."
+
+"I'd like to know why not?" stormed John. "You don't know a thing about
+her. _I_ don't know much for that matter, but when I came across her
+down on Union Square, just turned out of a shop where she had been
+working, mother, I made up my mind that I would bring her right straight
+home, and that Edith would be decent to her. You can see that Edith does
+not intend to be."
+
+"But my dear boy," faltered Mrs. Sedyard, "was not that a very reckless
+thing to do? I know of an institution where you could send her."
+
+"Oh! yes, yes," said John. "And I suppose I might have handed her over
+to a policeman," he added, thinking of his attempt in this direction,
+"but I didn't. The sight of her so gentle and uncomplaining in that
+awful situation at this time of general rejoicing was too much for me."
+
+He felt this to be so fine a flight and its effect upon Dick was so
+remarkable, that he went on in a voice, as his mother always remembered,
+"that positively trembled at times."
+
+"How was I, a man strong and well-dowered, to pass heartlessly by like
+the Good Samaritan--"
+
+"There's something wrong with that," Dick interposed.
+
+But John was not to be deflected. "What, mother, would you have thought
+of your son if he left that beautiful figure--for she is beautiful--"
+
+"You don't say," said Dick.
+
+"To be buffeted by the waves of 'dead man's curve?'"
+
+"Oh, how awful!" murmured the old lady. "How _perfectly_ dreadful."
+
+It was at this point that Dick Van Plank unostentatiously left the room.
+
+"But I didn't do it, mother," cried John, thumping his chest and anxious
+to make his full effect before the return of an enlightened and possibly
+enlightening Dick. "No, I thought of this big house, with only us three
+in it, and I said 'I'll bring her home.' Edith will love her. Edith will
+give her friendship, advice, guidance. She will even give her something
+to wear instead of the unsuitable things she has on. And what do I
+find?" He paused and looked around dramatically and warningly as Dick,
+with a beautified grin, returned. "Does Edith open her heart to her?
+No. Does Edith open her arms to her? No. All that Edith opens to her is
+the door which leads--who can tell where, whither?"
+
+"I can tell," said Dick, "it leads right straight to my little diggings.
+If Edith throws her out, I'll take her in."
+
+"Oh, noble, noble man," ejaculated John remembering the emotional woman,
+"but ah! that must not be. I took her hand in mine--by the way, did I
+tell you, she has beautiful little hands, not at all what I should have
+expected."
+
+"You did not," said Dick. "And now that'll be about all from you. You're
+just about through."
+
+"My opinion is," said Edith darkly, "that you are both either crazy or
+worse."
+
+"Go down and see her for yourself," urged Dick, "so quiet, so
+reserved--hush! hark! she's coming up. Now be nice to her whatever you
+feel! I'll be taking her away in a minute or two."
+
+But it was Mary Van Plank who came in. Mary, all blooming and glowing
+from the cold.
+
+"Who's that in the reception-room?" she asked when the greetings were
+over and she was warming her slender hands before the fire. "She's the
+prettiest dear. She was standing at the window and she smiled so sweetly
+at me as I came up the steps."
+
+John looked at Dick.
+
+"Yes," admitted that unabashed delinquent, "I left her at the window
+when I came up."
+
+"Alas! poor child," sighed John, looking out into the night. "She'll be
+there soon."
+
+"What is she going out for at this time?" Mary demanded. "I quite
+thought that she, too, had come to dinner. Who is she, Mrs. Sedyard?"
+
+Upon her mother's helpless silence, Edith broke in with the story as
+she felt she knew it. Union Square, the discharged shopgirl, John's
+quixotic conduct. And John watched Mary with a lover's eye. He had not
+intended that she should be involved. A moment of her displeasure, even
+upon mistaken grounds, was no part of his idea of a joke.
+
+But there was no displeasure in Mary's lovely face.
+
+"Why, of course, he brought her home," she echoed Edith's indignant
+peroration. "What else could he do?"
+
+"Well, for one thing he could have taken her to the Margaret Louise
+Home, that branch of the Y.W.C.A., on Sixteenth Street, only a few
+blocks from where he found her."
+
+"Oh! Edith," Mary remonstrated. "The Maggie Lou! And you know they would
+not admit her. Who would take a friendless girl to any sort of an
+institution at this season? John couldn't have done it! I think he's an
+old dear to bring her right straight home. Let's go down and talk to
+her. She must be wondering why we all leave her so long alone."
+
+"No, you don't," said Dick. "Edith didn't tell you the whole story. The
+girl," and he drew himself up to a dignity based on John's, "is under
+_my_ protection."
+
+"Your protection!" repeated his amazed sister.
+
+"Precisely. _My_ protection. Edith declines to receive this helpless
+child. Therefore, I have offered her the shelter of my roof."
+
+"His roof," explained Mary to Mrs. Sedyard, "is the floor of the hall
+bedroom above his. It measures about nine by six. So the thing to do,
+since of course, Dick is only talking nonsense, is to let me take the
+girl around to the studio until John and I can plan an uninstitutional
+future for her."
+
+"You may do just as you please," said Edith coldly. "I have given my
+opinion as to what should be done with her. It has been considered, by
+persons more experienced than you, the opinion of an expert. Girls of
+her history and standards are not desirable inmates for well-ordered
+homes. I shall have nothing to do with her."
+
+"How about it, Mary?" asked her brother. "Are you willing to risk her in
+the high-art atmosphere of the studio?"
+
+"I'm glad to," Mary answered. "It's not often that one gets a chance of
+being a little useful, and doesn't the Christmas Carol say, 'Good will
+to men.' I'm going down to see her now."
+
+"You're a darling," cried John. "True blue right through. Now, we'll all
+go down and arrange the transfer. But, first, I want to give Edith one
+more chance. Do you finally and unreservedly--"
+
+"I do," said Edith promptly.
+
+"And you, Mary, are you sure of yourself? Suppose that, when you see
+her, you change your mind?"
+
+"I've given my word,", she answered. "I promise to take her."
+
+"That's all I want," said John.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"How could you, John? How could you?" sobbed Edith. "How could you tell
+us--?"
+
+"I told you nothing but the absolute truth. I meant her to be your
+Christmas present, but you have resigned her 'with all her works and all
+her pomps' to Mary."
+
+"Ah! but if I refuse to take her from Edith?" Mary suggested.
+
+"Then I get her," answered Dick blithely, "and she'd be safer with me. I
+know what you two girls are thinking of. You are going to borrow her
+clothes and make a Cinderella of her. They are what you care about. But
+I love her for herself, her useless hands, her golden hair, her lovely
+smile--well, no, I guess we'll cut out the smile," he corrected when
+Maudie, agitated by the appraising hands of the two girls, swung her
+head completely round and beamed impartially upon the whole assembly.
+"It don't look just sincere to me."
+
+But there was no insincerity about Maudie. She was just as
+sweet-tempered as she looked. Uncomplainingly, she allowed herself to be
+despoiled of her finery and wrapped in a sheet while Mary wriggled
+ecstatically in the heavenly blue dress, pinned the plumed hat on her
+own bright head and threw the muff into a corner of the darkened
+drawing-room when she found that it interfered with the free expression
+of her gratitude to John.
+
+And some months later when the trousseau was in progress, the once
+despised Christmas guest, now a member in good-standing of Mary's
+household, did tireless service, smilingly, in the sewing-room.
+
+
+
+
+"WHO IS SYLVIA?"
+
+
+"Lemon, I think," said Miss Knowles, in defiance of the knowledge, born
+of many afternoons, that he preferred cream. She took a keen and
+mischievous pleasure in annoying this hot-tempered young man, and she
+generally succeeded. But to-day he was not to be diverted from the
+purpose which, at the very moment of his entrance, she had divined.
+
+"Nothing, thank you," he answered. "I'll not have any tea. I came in
+only for a moment to tell you that I'm going to be married."
+
+"Again?" she asked calmly, as though he had predicted a slight fall of
+snow. But her calm did not communicate itself to him.
+
+"Again?" he repeated hotly. "What do you mean by 'again?'"
+
+"Now, Jimmie," she remonstrated, as she settled herself more
+comfortably among her pillows and centered all her apparent attention
+upon a fragile cup and a small but troublesome sandwich, "don't be
+savage. I only mean that you always tell me so when you find an
+opportunity. That you even manufacture opportunities--some of them out
+of most unlikely material. A chance meeting in a cross-town car; an
+especially _forte_ place in an opera; the moment when a bishop is saying
+grace or a host telling his favorite story. And yet you expect me to be
+surprised to hear it now! Here in my own deserted drawing-room with the
+fire lighted and the lamps turned low. You forget that one is allowed to
+remember."
+
+"You allow yourself to forget when you choose and to remember when you
+wish: You are--"
+
+"And to whom are you going to be married? To the same girl? Do you
+know, I think she is not worthy of you?"
+
+"She is not," he acquiesced, and she, for a passing moment, seemed
+disconcerted. "Yet she is," he continued, cheered by this slight
+triumph, "the most persistent, industrious and deserving of all the
+young persons who, attracted by my great position and vast wealth, are
+pressing themselves or being pressed by designing relatives upon my
+notice."
+
+His hostess laughed softly.
+
+"Make allowances for them," she pleaded. "You know very few men can
+rival your advantages. The sixth son of a retired yet respectable stock
+broker, and an income of four thousand a year derived from a small but
+increasing--shall we say increasing--?"
+
+"Diminishing; incredible as it may seem, diminishing."
+
+"From a small but diminishing law practice. And with these you must
+mention your greatest charm."
+
+"Which is?"
+
+"Your humility, your modesty, your lack of self-assertiveness. Do you
+think she recognizes that? It is so difficult to fully appreciate your
+humility."
+
+Jimmie grinned. "She's up to it," said he. "She knows all about it.
+She's as clever, as keen, as clear-sighted."
+
+"Is she, perhaps, pleasing to the eye?" asked Miss Knowles idly. "Clever
+women are often so--well, so--"
+
+Jimmie gazed at her across the little tea-table. He filled his eyes with
+her. And, since his heart was in his eyes, he filled that, too. After a
+moment he made solemn answer:
+
+"She is the most beautiful woman God ever made."
+
+"Ah, now," said Miss Knowles, returning her cup to its fellows and
+turning her face, and her mind, more entirely to him, "now we grow
+interesting. Describe her to me."
+
+"Again?" Jimmie plagiarized.
+
+"Yes, again. Tell me, what is she like?"
+
+"She is like," he began so deliberately that his hostess, leaning
+forward, hung upon his words, "she is exactly like--nothing." The
+hostess sat back. "There was never anything in the least like her. To
+begin with, she is fair and young and slim. She is tall enough, and
+small enough and her eyes are gray and black and blue."
+
+"She sounds disreputable, your paragon."
+
+"And her eyes," he insisted, "are gray in the sunlight, blue in the
+lamplight, and black by the light of the moon."
+
+"And in the firelight?"
+
+He rose to kick the logs into a greater brightness; and when he had
+studied her glowing face until it glowed even more brightly, he
+answered:
+
+"In the firelight they are--wonderful. She has--did I tell you?--the
+whitest and smallest of teeth."
+
+"They're so much worn this year," she laughed, and wondered the while
+what evil instinct tempted her to play this dangerous game; why she
+could not refrain from peering into the deeper places of his nature to
+see if her image were still there and still supreme? Why should she,
+almost involuntarily, work to create and foster an emotion upon which
+she set no store, which indeed, only amused her in its milder
+manifestations and frightened her when it grew intense? He showed
+symptoms of unwelcome seriousness now, but she would have none of it.
+
+"Go on," she urged. "Unless you give her a few more features she will be
+like little Red Riding Hood's grandmother."
+
+"And she has," he proceeded obediently, "eyebrows and eyelashes--"
+
+"One might have guessed them."
+
+"--beyond the common, long and dark and soft. The rest of her face is
+the only possible setting for her eyes. It is perfection."
+
+"And is she gentle, womanly, tender? Is she, I so often wonder, good
+enough to you?"
+
+"She treats me hundreds of times better than I deserve."
+
+"Doesn't she rather swindle you? Doesn't she let you squander your
+time?"--she glanced at the clock--"your substance?"--she bent to lay her
+cheek against the violets at her breast--"your affection upon her--?"
+
+"And how could she be kinder? And when I marry her--"
+
+"And _if_," Miss Knowles amended.
+
+"There's no question about it," he retorted. "She knows that I shall
+marry her." Miss Knowles looked unconvinced. "She knows that she will
+marry me." Miss Knowles looked rebellious. "She knows that I shall never
+marry anyone else." Miss Knowles took that apparently for granted.
+
+"Dear boy!" said she.
+
+"That I have waited seven years for her."
+
+"Poor boy!" said she.
+
+"That I shall wait seven more for her."
+
+"Silly boy!" said she.
+
+"And so I stopped this afternoon to tell her that I'm coming home to
+marry her in two or three months."
+
+"Coming home?" she questioned with not much interest. "Where are you
+going?"
+
+"To Japan on a little business trip. One of the big houses wants to get
+some papers and testimony and that sort of thing out of a man who is
+living in a backwoods village there for his health--and his liberty.
+None of their own men can afford time to go. And I got the chance, a
+very good one for me--but I tire you."
+
+"No; oh, no," said Miss Knowles politely. "You are very interesting."
+
+"Then you shouldn't fidget and yawn. You lay yourself open to
+misinterpretation. To continue: a very great chance for me. The firm is
+a big firm, the case is a big case, and it will be a great thing for me
+to be heard of in connection with it."
+
+"Some nasty scandal, of course."
+
+"Not exactly. It is the Drewitt case. I wonder if you heard anything
+about it."
+
+"For three months after the thing happened," she assured him with a
+flattering accession of interest, "I heard nothing about anything else.
+Poor, dear father knew him, to his cost, you know. I heard that there
+was to be a new investigation and another attempt at a settlement. And
+now you're going to interview the man! And you're going to Japan! Oh,
+the colossal luck of some people! You will write to me--won't you?--as
+soon as you see him, and tell me all about him. How he looks, what he
+says, how he justifies himself. O Jimmie, dear Jimmie, you will surely
+write to me?"
+
+"Naturally," said Jimmie, and his thin, young face looked happier than
+it had at any other time since the beginning of this conversation;
+happier than it had in many preceding conversations with this very
+unsatisfying but charming interlocutor. "I always do. Sometimes when
+your mood has been particularly, well, unreceptive, I have thought of
+going away so that I might write to you. Perhaps I could write more
+convincingly than I can talk." A cheering condition of things for a
+lawyer, he reflected.
+
+"But this is a different and much more particular thing," she insisted
+with a cruelty of which her interest made her unconscious. "I have a
+sort of a right to know on account of poor, dear father. I shall make a
+list of questions and you will answer them fully, won't you? Then I
+shall be the only woman in New York to know the true inwardness of the
+Drewitt affair. When do you start?"
+
+"To-morrow morning. I shall be away for perhaps three months, and then,"
+doggedly, "then I'm coming home to be married. I came in to tell you."
+
+"And if I don't quite believe you?"
+
+"I shall postpone the ceremony. Shall we say indefinitely, some time in
+the summer?"
+
+"Not even then. Never, I think. That troublesome girl is beginning--she
+feels that she ought to tell you--"
+
+"That there is another 'another'?"
+
+"Yes, I fear so."
+
+"Who will be in town for the next three months?"
+
+"Again, I fear so."
+
+"Then that's all right," said the optimistic Jimmie. "There never was a
+man--save one, oh, lady mine--who could, for three months, avoid boring
+you. When he holds forth upon every subject under the sun and stars you
+will think longingly of me and of the endless variety of my one topic,
+'I'm going to marry you.'"
+
+"But if he should make it his?"
+
+"I defy him to do it. There is no guise in which he could clothe the
+idea which would not remind you instantly of me. If he should be
+poetical: well, so was I when we were twenty-one. If he should give you
+gifts of great price: well, so did I in those Halcyon days when I had an
+allowance from my Governor and toiled not. If his is an outdoor wooing,
+you will inevitably remember that I taught you to ride, to skate, to
+drive, and to play golf. If he should attack you musically, you will be
+surprised at the number of operas we've heard together and of duets
+we've sung together. And so, in the words of my friend, fellow-sufferer,
+and name-sake, Mr. Yellowplush, 'You'll still remember Jeames.'"
+
+"That's nonsense!" cried Miss Knowles. "I've tried to be fond of you--I
+_am_ fond of you and accustomed to you. The fatal point is that I am
+accustomed to you. You say you never bore me. Well, you don't. And that
+other men do. Well, you're right. But people don't marry people simply
+because they don't bore each other."
+
+"Your meaning is clearer than your words and much more correct. This
+really essential consideration is, alas, frequently not considered."
+
+"People should marry," said Miss Knowles with a sort of consecrated
+earnestness--the most deadly of all the practiced phases of her
+coquetry--"for love. Now, I'm not in love with you. If I were, the very
+idea of your going away would make me miserable. And do I seem
+miserable? Am I lovelorn? Look at me carefully and tell the truth."
+
+Jimmie obeyed, and the contemplation of his hostess seemed to depress him.
+
+"No," he agreed gloomily, "you seem to bear up. No one, looking at your
+face, could guess that your heart was in--was in--" Jimmie halted,
+vainly searching for the poetical word. Miss Knowles supplied it.
+
+"In torn and bleeding fragments," she supplemented. "No, Jimmie, I'm
+sorry. You've laid siege to it in every known way, and yet there's not a
+feather out of it."
+
+"There are two ways," Jimmie pondered audibly, "in which I have not
+wooed you. One is _a la_ cave dweller. I might knock you on the head
+with a knobby club and drag you to my lair. But since my lair is some
+blocks away, and since those blocks are studded with the interested
+public and the uninterested police, the cave dweller's method will not
+serve. There remains one other. I stand before you, so; I take your
+hand, so; I may even have to kiss it, so. And I say: 'Dear one, I want
+you. Every hour of my life I want you. I want you to take care of, to
+work for, to be proud of. I want you to let me teach you what life
+means. I want you for my dearest friend, for my everlasting sweetheart,
+for my wife.' And when I've said it, I kiss your hand, so; gently, once
+again, and wait for your answer."
+
+"Dear boy," said she with an unsteady little laugh, for--as always--she
+shrank from his earnestness after she had deliberately roused it, "I
+wish you wouldn't talk like that. You make me feel so shallow-pated and
+so small. I don't want to talk about life and knowledge and love. And I
+don't want any husband at all. What makes you so tragic this afternoon?
+You're spoiling our last hour together. Come, be reasonable. Tell me
+what you think of Drewitt. Why do you suppose he did it? Did his wife
+and daughter know?"
+
+"You're quite sure about the other thing?"
+
+"Unalterably sure. And, Jimmie, dear old Jimmie, there are two things I
+want you to do for me. The first is, to abandon forever and forever this
+'one topic' of which, you are so proud. Will you?"
+
+"I will not," said Jimmie.
+
+"And the second is: to fall in love with a girl on the boat. There is
+always a girl on a boat. Will you?"
+
+"I will," said Jimmie promptly. "It would be just what you deserve."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Miss Knowles bore the absence of her most persistent and accustomed
+suitor with a fortitude not predicted by that self-confident young man.
+She danced and drove, lunched and dined, rode and flirted with
+undiminished zest, bringing, each day, new energy and determination to
+the task of enjoying herself.
+
+The enjoyment of her neighbors seemed less important. She preferred that
+her part in the cotillion should be observed by a frieze of unculled
+wall-flowers. A drive was always pleasanter if it were preceded by a
+skirmish with her mother in which Miss Knowles should come off
+victorious with the victoria, while Mrs. Knowles accepted the _coup de
+grace_ and the coupe. A flirtation--if her languid, seeming innocent
+monopoly of a man's time and thoughts could be called by so gross a
+name--was more satisfying if it implied the breaking of vows and hearts
+and the mad jealousy of some less gifted sister; if it had, like a
+Russian folk song, a sob and a wail running through it.
+
+Jimmie had never approved of these amusements and had never hesitated to
+express his opinion of them in terms which were intelligible even to her
+vanity. From the days when they had played together in the park she had
+dreaded his honesty and feared his judgments. "You're such a poacher,
+Sylvia," he told her once, "such an inveterate, diabolical Fly-by-Night,
+Will-o'-the-Wisp poacher. I sometimes think you'd condescend to take a
+shot at me if you didn't know that I'm fair game. But you like to kill
+two birds with one stone; smash two hearts with one smile."
+
+During the weeks immediately following the departure of her mentor she
+devoted herself whole-heartedly to her favorite form of sport. Besides
+her unscrupulousness she was armed with her grandfather's name, the
+riches of her dead father, her own beauty, and a mind capable of much
+better things. And, since Jimmie's presence would have seriously
+interfered with the pleasures of the chase, she was rather glad than
+otherwise that he was not there to see--and comment.
+
+Her mother bore his absence with a like stoicism. That astute matron had
+long and silently deprecated the regularity with which her Louis Quinze
+had groaned beneath one hundred and eighty pounds of ineligibility, the
+frequency with which a tall troup horse of spectacular gait and
+snortings could be descried beside her daughter's English hunter in the
+park, the strange chain of coincidence by which at theater, house party,
+dinner, or even church, Jimmie smiling and unabashed, would find his
+way to her daughter's side and monopolize her daughter's attention.
+
+In the excitement of the first stages of one of her expeditions into
+another's territory, Jimmie's first letter arrived. It was mailed at
+Honolulu, and consisted obediently of the cryptic statement: "There is
+no girl on the boat. She is a widow, but lots of fun." And it changed
+the character of the invasion from a harmless survey of the land to a
+determined attack upon its fortresses. And so Gilbert Stevenson,
+millionaire dock owner, veteran of many seasons and more campaigns,
+found himself engaged to Miss Sylvia Knowles just when, after a long and
+careful courtship, he had decided to bestow his hand and name upon the
+daughter of the retired senior partner of his firm: "that dear little
+girl of old Marvin's," as he described the lady of his choice, "his only
+child and a good child, too." He bore his surprise and honors with a
+courteous pomposity. Miss Knowles bore the situation with restraint and
+decorum. But that "dear little girl of old Marvin's" could not bring
+herself to bear it at all and wept away her modest claims to prettiness
+and spirit in one desolate month.
+
+Like many a humbler poacher, Sylvia Knowles found an embarrassment in
+disposing of her victims after she had bagged them, and Mr. Gilbert
+Stevenson was peculiarly difficult in this regard. She did not want to
+keep him. In fact, the engagement upon which she was enduring
+congratulations had been as surprising to her as to her fiance. And the
+methodical manifestations of his regard contrasted wearyingly with the
+erratic events in another friendship in which nothing was to be counted
+upon except the unaccountable. So that when vanquished suitors withdrew
+discomfited and returned to renew an earlier allegiance or to swear a
+new one; when "that good child of old Marvin's" had withdrawn her
+pitiful little face and her disappointment into the remote fastness of
+settlement work; when her mother resigned all claims upon the victoria
+and loudly affirmed her preference for the brougham, then things in
+general--and Mr. Stevenson in particular--began to bore Miss Knowles,
+and she began to look forward, with an emotion which would have
+surprised her betrothed, to foreign mails and letters. She considerately
+spared Mr. Stevenson this disquieting intelligence, having found him in
+matters of honor and rectitude as archaic and as fastidious as Jimmie
+himself. "Has a nasty suspicious mind," she reflected, "and a nasty
+jealous disposition. I wonder if he will expect me to give up all my
+friends when I marry him."
+
+Yet even Mr. Stevenson could have found no cause for jealousy in the
+matter of the letters. He might have objected to their being written at
+all, but beyond that they were innocuous. For all the personality they
+contained they might have been transcripts of Jimmie's reports to his
+firm. He clung doggedly to his prescribed topics, and he could not have
+devised a surer method of arousing the curiosity and the interest of
+this spoiled young person. She spent hours, which should have been
+devoted to the contemplation of approaching bliss, in reading between
+the prosaic lines, in searching for sentiment in a catalogue of railway
+stations, for tenderness in description of eccentric _tables d'hote_.
+Finding no trace of his old gallantry in all the closely written pages,
+she attributed its absence to obedience and accepted it as the higher
+tribute to her power. She was forced to judge her lover's longing by the
+quantity rather than by the ardor of his words, and to detect the
+yearning of a true lover's heart through such effectual disguise as:
+
+"Drewitt is a fine old chap; as placid and as bright as this country
+and a great deal more so than anyone you'll see in the windows of the
+Union League Club. He received me so cordially that I felt awkward about
+introducing the object of my visit, but when I had admired everything in
+sight from the mountains in the distance to the rug I was sitting on, I
+finally faced the situation and did it.
+
+"'Dear me,' said he, 'are those directors still troubling themselves
+about their transaction with me?' I admitted apologetically that they
+were; that their books refused to close over the gap left by the
+vanishing of $50,000, and that he was earnestly requested to return to
+New York and to lend his acknowledged business acumen, etc., etc. He
+never turned a hair. Said they--and I--were very kind. Nothing could
+give him greater pleasure. But the ladies preferred Japan. Therefore he,
+etc., etc., etc. But he would be delighted to explain the matter fully
+to me; to supply me with all the figures and information I desired. (And
+that, of course, is as much as I am expected to bring back.) But he
+would have to postpone his return until--and you should have seen the
+whimsical, quizzical old eye of his--until the nations would agree upon
+new extradition treaties. Then, of course, etc., etc., etc. Meanwhile,
+as there was no immediate urgency about the matter, as he hoped that I
+would stay with them for as long a time as I cared to arrange, he would
+suggest that we should join Mrs. Drewitt in the garden. She would
+welcome news of our American friends. 'I need not ask you,' he added as
+we went out through the wall-like people in a dream or a fairy tale, to
+be discreet and casual in your conversation with the ladies. My daughter
+is away this week visiting an old friend of hers who is married to a
+missionary in a neighboring village. She knows the reason for our being
+here. My wife does not. It need not be discussed with either of them.'
+I should think not!
+
+"And there in the garden was Mrs. Drewitt, a fat little old lady in a
+flaming kimono and spectacles. She wears her hair as your Aunt Matilda
+does, stuck to her forehead in scrolls. 'Water curls,' I think, is the
+technical term. She was holding the head of a dejected marigold while a
+native propped it up with a stick. It seemed she remembered my mother,
+and we spent a delightful tea-time in a garden which was a part of the
+same dream as the phantom wall. Then the old gentleman led me off by
+myself and wanted to hear all about Broadway. Whether Oscar was still at
+the Waldorf. Whether Fields and Weber made 'a good thing of it' apart.
+Then the old lady led me off by myself and wanted to know who was now
+the pastor of the Brick Church, and what was Maude Adam's latest play,
+and whether skirts were worn long or short in the street.
+
+"'You see this dress,' she said, 'is not really made for a woman of my
+age. In fact, in this country all the bright and pretty colors are worn
+by the waitresses. Geishas they call them. But Mr. Drewitt always liked
+bright colors, and red is very becoming to me.' She was such a wistful,
+pathetic, and incongruous little figure that I said something about
+hoping that she would soon be in New York again. 'But,' she said, 'Mr.
+Drewitt cannot leave his work here. Didn't you know that he is stationed
+here to report the changes of the weather to Washington? It is very
+important, and we can't go home until he is recalled. And, besides,'"
+she went on with a half sob in her voice and a look in her eyes that
+made her seem as young as her own daughter, 'and, besides, I would much
+rather be here. In New York my husband was too busy. He had so many
+calls upon his time, so many people to meet, and so many places to go,
+that sometimes I hardly felt as though he belonged to me. But now for
+days and weeks at a time we are together. And he has no business
+worries. And his salary,' she brightened up to tell me, 'is almost as
+good here as it used to be in the Trust Company for _much_ harder work.'
+She's a sweet old thing--must have been quite a beauty once--and I wish
+you could see old Drewitt's manner with her--so courteous and
+affectionate--and hers with him--so adoring and confiding. It's
+wonderful!
+
+"It will take some time to get all the information I want from the old
+man. He has the papers and he is quite willing to explain everything,
+but we spend the larger part of every day in entertaining the old lady
+and keeping her happy and unsuspicious."
+
+A series of such letters covering several placid weeks reduced Miss
+Knowles to a condition of moodiness and abstraction which all the
+resources at her command failed to dissipate. In vain were the
+practical blandishments of Mr. Stevenson; in vain her mother's shopping
+triumphs; in vain were dinners given in her honor and receptions at
+which she reigned supreme. None of her other experiments had resulted in
+an engagement--an immunity which she now humbly attributed to the
+watchful Jimmie--and she was dismayed at the determined and
+matter-of-fact way in which she was called upon to fulfil her promise.
+"If only Jimmie were at home!" she realized, "he would save me." This
+was when the happy day was yet a great way off. "If only Jimmie would
+come home," she wailed as the weeks grew to months, and even the comfort
+of his letters failed her. For two months there had been no news of him,
+and Fate--and Mr. Stevenson--were very near when, at last, she heard
+from him again. He sent a telegram nearly as brief as his first letter.
+
+"I am coming home," it announced, "I am coming home, and I'm going to
+be married."
+
+And the simple little words, waited for so long, remembered so clearly,
+and coming, at last, so late, did what all Jimmie's more eloquent
+pleadings had failed to do.
+
+Sylvia Knowles, a creature made of vanities, realized that she loved
+better than all her other vanities her place in this one man's regard.
+No contemplation of Mr. Stevenson's estate on the Hudson, his shooting
+lodge on a Scottish moor, his English abbey, and his Italian villa could
+nerve her for the first meeting with Jimmie, could fortify her against
+his first laughing repetition:
+
+"_You_ married to Gilbert Stevenson," or his later scornful, "You
+_married_ to Gilbert Stevenson."
+
+So she dismissed Mr. Stevenson with as little feeling as she had annexed
+him, and sought comfort in the knowledge that her mother was furious,
+her own fortune ample, and that marrying for love was a graceful,
+becoming pose and an unusual thing to do.
+
+Her rejected suitor bore his disappointment as correctly as he had borne
+his joy. He stormed the special center of philanthropy in which old
+Marvin's little girl had buried herself, and she was most incorrectly
+but refreshingly glad to see him. She destroyed forever his poise and
+his pride in it when she sat upon his unaccustomed knee, rested her
+tired head upon his immaculate shirt front, and wept for very happiness.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"And I remember," said Miss Knowles, "that you always take cream."
+
+"Nothing, thank you," Jimmie corrected. "Just plain unadulterated tea. I
+learned to like it in Japan. But don't bother about it. I haven't long
+to stay. I came in to tell you--"
+
+"That you're going to be married."
+
+"How did you guess?"
+
+"You didn't leave me to guess. Your telegram."
+
+"Ah, yes!" quoth Jimmie. "I sent a lot of them before I sailed. But in
+my letters--"
+
+"You mentioned absolutely nothing but that stupid old Drewitt affair.
+Never a word of the places you saw, the people you met, or even the
+people you missed. Nothing of the customs, the girls, the clothes.
+Nothing but that shuffling old Drewitt and his stuffy old wife. Nothing
+about yourself."
+
+"Orders are orders," quoth Jimmie, "and those were yours to me. I
+remember exactly how it came about. We had been talking personalities. I
+have an idea that I made rather a fool of myself, and that you told me
+so. Then you, wisely conjecturing that I might write as foolishly as I
+had talked, made out a list of subjects for my letters. My name, I noted
+with some care, was not upon that list."
+
+"Jimmie," said Miss Knowles, "I was cruel and heartless that day. I've
+thought about it often."
+
+"You've thought!" cried the genial Jimmie. "How had you time to think?
+Where were all those 'anothers'?"
+
+"There were none," lied Miss Knowles soulfully with a disdainful
+backward glance toward Mr. Stevenson. "For a time I thought there was
+one. But whenever I thought of that last talk of ours--you remember it,
+don't you?"
+
+"Of course. I told you I was going to be married as soon as I came home.
+Well, and so I am."
+
+"So you are. But I used to think that if you hesitated to tell me; if
+you felt that I might still be hard about it and unsympathetic; if you
+decided to confide no more in me--"
+
+"But you would be sure to know. Even if I had not telegraphed I never
+could have kept it a secret from you."
+
+"Not easily. I should have been, as you observe, sure to know. Do you
+remember how I always refused to believe you? It was not until you were
+in that horrid Japan, where all the women are supposed to be
+beautiful--"
+
+"Yes," Jimmie acquiesced. "It was when I was in Japan."
+
+"It was then that it began to seem possible that you would be married
+when you came home. It was then that I began to realize that I didn't
+deserve to be told of your plans. For I had been a fool, Jimmie. You had
+been a fool, too, but not in the way you think. And so, if you will sit
+where I sat that horrid day, we will begin that conversation all over
+again and end it differently. The first speech was yours. Do you
+remember it?"
+
+"But I'm going to be married," said Jimmie.
+
+"Good boy. He knows his lesson. And now I say, 'To the most beautiful
+woman in the world?'"
+
+"To the most beautiful woman God ever made. The dearest, the most
+clever, the most simple."
+
+"Simple," repeated Miss Knowles with some natural surprise. "Did you say
+simple?"
+
+"Simple and jolly and unaffected. As true and as bright as the stars.
+And I'm going to marry her--"
+
+"Now this," Miss Knowles interjected, "is where the difference comes.
+You are to sit quite still and listen to me because a thing like
+this--however long and carefully one had thought it out--is difficult in
+the saying. So, I stand here before you where I can look at you; for
+four months are long; and where you may, when I have quite finished,
+kiss my hand again; for again four months are long. And I begin thus:
+Jimmie, you are going to be married--"
+
+"I told you first," cried Jimmie.
+
+"But I knew it first," she countered, "to a woman who has learned to
+love you during the past three months, but who could not do it more
+utterly, more perfectly, if she had practiced through all the years that
+you and I have been friends."
+
+"So she says," Jimmie interrupted with sudden heat. "So she says. God
+bless her!"
+
+"And, ah, _how_ she is fond of you. 'Fond' is a darling of a word. It
+keeps just enough of its old 'foolish' meaning to be human. Proud of
+you, glad of you, fond of you--I think that this is, perhaps, the time
+for you to kiss my hand."
+
+"You're a darling," he said as he obeyed. "But what I can't
+understand--"
+
+"It's not your turn. You may talk after I finish if I leave anything for
+you to say. See, I go on: You are going to marry--"
+
+"The most beautiful woman in the world."
+
+"That reminds me. What is she like? I've not heard her described for ages."
+
+"Because there was no one in New York who could do justice to her."
+
+"You are the knightliest of knights. Go on. Describe her."
+
+"Well, she is neither very tall nor very small. But the grace of her,
+the young, surpassing grace of her, makes you know as soon as your eyes
+have rested on her that her height, whatever it chances to be, is the
+perfect height for a woman. And then there is the noble heart of her.
+What other daughter would have buried herself, as she has done, in a
+little mountain village--"
+
+Miss Knowles looked quickly about the luxurious room, then out upon the
+busy avenue, then back at him, suspecting raillery. But he was staring
+straight through her; straight into the land of visions. His eyes never
+wavered when she moved slowly out of their range and sat, huddled and
+white-faced, in the corner of a big chair.
+
+"And all," Jimmie went on, "so bravely, so cheerily, that it makes
+one's throat ache to see. And one's heart hot to see. Then there is the
+beauty of her. Her hair is dark, her eyes are dark, but her skin is the
+fairest in the world."
+
+Miss Knowles pushed back a loose lace cuff and studied the arm it had
+hidden. _La reine est morte_, she whispered, _morte, morte, morte_.
+
+"But what puzzles me,", said the genial Jimmie, "is your knowing about
+it all. I never wrote you a word of it, and as for Sylvia--by the way,
+did you know that her name, like yours, is Sylvia?"
+
+"Yes," said Miss Knowles, "I had even guessed that her name would be
+Sylvia."
+
+"You're a wonderful woman," Jimmie protested. "The most wonderful woman
+in the world."
+
+"Except?"
+
+"Except, of course, Sylvia Drewitt."
+
+"Ah, yes," said Miss Knowles. "Yes, of course."
+
+
+
+
+THE SPIRIT OF CECELIA ANNE
+
+
+"And all the rest and residue of my estate," read the lawyer, his
+voice growing more impressive as he reached this most impressive clause,
+"I give and bequeath to my beloved granddaughter and godchild Cecelia
+Anne Hawtry for her own use and benefit forever."
+
+The black-clothed relations whose faces had been turned toward the front
+of the long drawing-room now swung round toward the back where a
+fair-haired little girl, her hands spread guardian-wise round the new
+black hat on her knees, lay asleep in her father's arms. For old Mrs.
+Hawtry's "beloved granddaughter Cecelia Anne" was not yet too big to
+find solace in sleep when she was tired and uninterested, being indeed
+but nine years old and exceedingly small of stature and babyish of
+habit. So she slept on and missed hearing all the provisions which were
+meant to protect her in the enjoyment of her estate but which were
+equally calculated to drive her guardian distracted.
+
+"I leave nothing to my beloved son, James Hawtry," the document
+continued, "because I consider that he has quite enough already. And I
+leave nothing to his son, James Hawtry, Junior, the twin-brother of
+Cecelia Anne Hawtry, because, though he and I have met but seldom, I
+have formed the opinion that he is capable of winning his way in the
+world without any aid from me."
+
+James Hawtry, Junior, sitting beside the heiress, failed to derive much
+satisfaction from this clause. If things were being given away, he was
+not quite certain as to what "rest and residue" might mean, but if
+things of any kind were being doled out he would fain have enjoyed them
+with the rest.
+
+Presently the lawyer read the final codicil and gathered his papers
+together, then addressed the blank and disappointed assemblage with: "As
+you have seen that all the minor bequests are articles of a household
+nature--portraits, tableware and the like, 'portable property' as my
+immortal colleague, Mr. Wemmick, would have said--I should suggest the
+present to be an admirable time for their removal by the fortunate
+legatees who may not again be in this neighbourhood. And now I have but
+to congratulate the young lady who has succeeded to this property, a
+really handsome property I may say, though the amount is not stated nor
+even yet fully ascertained. If Miss Cecelia Anne Hawtry is present, I
+should like to pay my respects to her and to wish her all happiness in
+her new inheritance. I have never had the pleasure of meeting the
+principal legatee. May I ask her to come forward and accept my
+congratulations."
+
+"Take her, Jimmie," commanded Mr. Hawtry, setting Cecelia down upon her
+thin little black legs, while he tried to smooth her into presentable
+shape in anticipation of the anxious cross-examination he was sure to
+undergo when he returned with the children to his New York home and wife.
+
+"She looked as fit as paint," he afterward assured that anxious
+questioner. "I stood the bow out on her hair and pushed her dress down
+just as I've seen you do hundreds of times. Jimmie helped, too, and I
+declare to you, you'd have been as proud of those two kids as I was when
+that boy led his little sister through the hostile camp. Funny, he felt
+the hostility instantly, though of course, he didn't understand it. But
+she--well, you know what a confiding little thing she is, and having
+been asleep made her eyes look even more babyish than they always
+do--walked beside him, smiling her soft little smile and looking about
+three inches high in her little black dress."
+
+"If I had been there," interrupted Mrs. Hawtry warmly, "I should have
+murdered your sister Elizabeth before I allowed her to put that baby
+into mourning. The black bow I packed for her hair would have been quite
+enough."
+
+"Well, she had it on. I saw it bobbing up the room while tenth and
+fifteenth cousins seven or eight times removed, stared at it and at her.
+But the person most surprised was old Debrett when Jimmie introduced them."
+
+"'This is her,' remarked your son with more truth than polish, and I'm,
+well, antecedently condemned, if that dry-as-dust old lawyer didn't
+stoop and kiss her as he wished her joy."
+
+"Ah, I'm glad he's as nice as that," said Mrs. Hawtry, "since he is to
+be your co-trustee. However," she added a little wistfully, "I don't
+like the idea of anybody dictating to us about the baby. It makes her
+seem somehow not quite so much our very own. And we could have taken
+care of her quite well without your mother's money and advice."
+
+"Why, my dear," laughed her husband, "that's a novel attitude to adopt
+toward a legacy. The baby is ours as much as she ever was. The advice is
+as good as any I ever read. And the money will leave us all the more to
+devote to Jimmie. There's the making of a good business man in Jimmie."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was part of what Mrs. Hawtry for a long time considered the
+interference of Cecelia Anne's grandmother that the child should have a
+monthly allowance, small while she was small and growing with her
+growth. She was to be allowed to spend it without supervision and to
+keep an account of it. At the end of each year the trustees were to
+examine these accounts and to judge from them the trend of their ward's
+inclinations. They would be then in a position to curb or foster her
+leanings as their judgment should dictate.
+
+Now, Cecelia Anne, restored to her friends from a wonderland sort of
+dream, called going--West--with--papa--on--the--train--and--living--
+with--Aunt--Elizabeth, was too full of narration and too excited by the
+envious regard of untraveled playmates to trouble overmuch about that
+scene in the long drawing-room which she had never clearly understood.
+The first monthly payment of her allowance failed to connect itself in
+her mind with the journey. Her predominant emotion on the subject of
+legacies was one of ardent gratitude to Jimmie. He had given her a
+quarter out of the change they had received at the toyshop where they
+had purchased the most beautiful sloop-yacht they had ever seen or
+dreamed of. A quarter for her very own; Jimmie's generosity and
+condescension extended even further than this. He also allowed her, the
+day being warm, to carry the yacht for a considerable part of their
+homeward journey, and, when the treasure was exhibited upon the topmost
+of their own front steps, he allowed her twice to pull the sails up and
+down. When he went to Central Park to sail the _Jennie H_, that being as
+near the feminine form of Jimmie Hawtry as their learning carried them,
+James, Junior, frequently allowed his sister to accompany him and his
+envious fellows. Then it was her proud privilege to watch the _Jennie
+H's_ wavering course and to rush around the margin of the lake ready to
+"stand by" to receive her beloved bowsprit wherever she should dock.
+Then all proudly would she set the rudder straight again and turn the
+_Jennie H_ back to the landing-stage where Jimmie, surrounded by his
+cohorts, all calm and cool in his magnificence, awaited this first
+evidence of "the trend of Cecelia Anne's inclinations."
+
+Not quite a year elapsed before Mr. Hawtry's genial co-trustee visited
+his little ward. The reading of the will had taken place in November,
+and on the last week of the following June, Mr. Debrett, chancing to be
+in New York, decided to cultivate the acquaintance of Cecelia Anne. Mrs.
+Hawtry and the twins were by this time settled in their country home in
+Westchester, and Debrett, driving up from the station in the evening
+with Mr. Hawtry, found it difficult to accept the freckled, barelegged,
+blue-jumpered form which he saw in the garden, polishing the spokes of a
+bicycle, as the ward who had lived all these months in his memory: a
+fragile little figure in funeral black. Never had he seen so altered a
+child, he assured Mrs. Hawtry with many congratulations. She seemed
+taller, heavier, more self-assured. But the smile with which she put a
+greasy little hand into his extended hand was misty and babyish still.
+
+Presently, while the two men rested with long chairs and long glasses
+and Mrs. Hawtry ministered to them, Jimmie appeared on the scene and
+after exchanging proper greetings turned to inspect Cecelia Anne and her
+work. "I think you've got it bright enough," he said with kindly
+condescension. "You can go and get dressed for dinner now. And to-morrow
+morning if I'm not using the wheel maybe I'll let you use it awhile."
+
+"Oh, fank you!" said Cecelia Anne who had never quite outgrown her
+babyhood's lisp, "and can I have the saddle lowered so's I can reach the
+pedals?"
+
+"Oh, I s'pose so," said Jimmie grudgingly. "Sometimes you act just like
+a girl. You give 'em something and they always want, more. Now you run
+on and open the stable door. I'm goin' to try if I can ride right into
+the harness-room without getting off. Don't catch your foot in the door
+and don't get too near Dolly's hind legs."
+
+When the children had vanished around the corner of the house, Mrs.
+Hawtry turned to Mr. Debrett.
+
+"There's the explanation of Cecelia Anne's ruggedness," said she. "She
+and Jimmie are inseparable. He has taught her all kinds of boys'
+accomplishments. And she's as happy as a bird if she's only allowed to
+trot around after him. It doesn't seem to make her in the least ungentle
+or hoydenish and I feel that she's safer with him than with the gossipy
+little girls down at the hotel."
+
+"Not a doubt of it," Debrett heartily endorsed. "She couldn't have a
+better adviser. Her grandmother, a very clever lady by the way, had a
+high opinion of your son's practical mind. A useful antidote, I should
+say, to his sister's extreme gentleness."
+
+He found further confirmation of old Mrs. Hawtry's acumen when Mr.
+Hawtry proposed that they should look over Cecelia Anne's disbursement
+account, kept by herself, as the will had specified.
+
+Cecelia Anne was delighted with the idea. Jimmie had wandered out to see
+about the sports that were going to be held on the Fourth of July, and
+so the burden of explanation fell upon the little heiress. She drew her
+account book from its drawer in her father's desk, settled herself
+comfortably in the hollow of his arm and proceeded to disclose the
+"trend of her inclinations" as is evidenced by her shopping list:
+
+"One sloop yat _Jennie H_ swoped for hockey skates when it got cold.
+
+One air riffle.
+
+Three Tickets.
+
+One riding skirt.
+
+Two Tickets.
+
+Six white rats two died.
+
+Four Tickets.
+
+Leather Stocking Tales. Three Books.
+
+Three Tickets.
+
+Four Boxing Gloves.
+
+Eight Tickets.
+
+One bull tarrier dog and collar he fought Len Fogerty's dog bit him all
+up and father sent him away."
+
+"I remember him," said Mr. Hawtry, "a well-bred beast but a holy terror,
+go on dear."
+
+"One Byccle.
+
+Three Tickets.
+
+Stanley's Darkest Africa two books but not very new.
+
+One printing press.
+
+Two Tickets.
+
+Treasure Island. One Book."
+
+"And that's all the big things," finished Cecelia Anne in evident
+relief. "Jimmie wrote down the prices, wouldn't you like to see them?"
+
+And she crossed to Mr. Debrett and laid the open book on his knee.
+
+Mr. Debrett, as Cecelia Anne teetered up and down on her heels and toes
+before him, read the list again, counted up the total expenditure and
+admitted that his ward had got remarkably good value for her money.
+
+"But what are all these 'tickets,' my dear?" he asked her.
+
+"Eden Musee," answered Cecelia Anne. And the very thought of it drew her
+to her mother's knee. "Jimmie and the boys used to take me there
+Saturday afternoons in the winter to try to get my nerve up. They say,"
+she admitted dolefully, "that I haven't got much. So they used to take
+me to the Chamber of Horrors so's I'd get accustomed to life. That's
+what Jimmie thought I needed. They used to like it, and I expect I'd
+have liked it, too, if I could have kept my eyes open, but I never
+could. I couldn't even _get_ them open when the boys stood me right
+close to that gentleman having death throes on the ground after he'd
+been hung on a tree. You can hear him breathing!"
+
+"I know him well," said Mr. Debrett. "He is rather awful I must admit.
+And now we'll talk about the books. Don't you care at all about 'Little
+Men' and 'Little Women' or the 'Elsie Books?'"
+
+"Jimmie says," Cecelia Anne made reply, "that 'Darkest Africa' is better
+for me. It tells me just where to hit an elephant to give him the death
+throes. He says the 'Elsie Books' wouldn't be any help to us even with a
+buffalo. We're going to buy 'The Wild Huntress, or Love in the
+Wilderness' next month. Jimmie thinks that's sure to get my nerve
+up--being about a girl, you see--"
+
+"And 'Treasure Island' now;" said her guardian, "did you enjoy that? It
+came rather late in my life, but I remember thinking it a great book."
+
+"It's great for nerve. Jimmie often reads me parts of it after I go to
+bed at night. There's a poem in it--he taught me that by heart--and if
+I think to say it the last thing before I go to sleep he says I'll get
+so's _nothing_ can scare me."
+
+"Recite it for Mr. Debrett," urged Mrs. Hawtry. And Cecelia Anne
+obediently began, with a jerk of a curtsey and a shake of her delicate
+embroideries and blue sash.
+
+    "Fifteen men on the dead man's chest
+    Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!
+    Drink and the devil had done for the rest
+    Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"
+
+Mr. Debrett's astonishment at this lullaby held him silent for some
+seconds.
+
+"You see, sir," Cecelia Anne explained, "if you _can_ go to sleep
+thinking about that it shows your nerve. I can't. Not yet. But it never
+makes me cry any more and Jimmie says that's something."
+
+"I should say it was!" he congratulated her. "It's wonderful. And now in
+the matter of dolls," he went on referring to the list, "no rag babies,
+eh?"
+
+"Oh, but she has beautiful dolls, Mr. Debrett," interposed her mother.
+"She'll show them to you to-morrow morning, won't you honey-child? But
+she did not buy them. They were given to her at Christmas and other
+times. But really, since we came out here for the summer they've been
+rather neglected. Their mother has been so busy."
+
+"And Jimmie made me a house for them!" Cecelia Anne broke in. "And
+furniture! And a front yard stuck right on to the piazza! But I don't
+know, mother, whether I'd have time to show them to Mr. Debrett in the
+morning. I'm pretty busy now. It's getting so near the race. And I pace
+Jimmie _every_ morning."
+
+"Ah! that reminds me," said her father, "Jimmie told me to send you to
+bed at eight o'clock--one of the rules of 'training', you know--so say
+good night to us all and put your little book back in the drawer.
+You've kept it very nicely. I am sure Mr. Debrett agrees with me."
+
+When the elders were alone, Mrs. Hawtry crossed over into the light and
+addressed her guest.
+
+"I can't have you thinking badly of Jimmie," she began, "or of us, for
+allowing him to practically spend the baby's income. Every one of the
+things on that list mark a stage in Cecelia Anne's progress away from
+priggishness and toward health. I don't know just how much she realizes
+her own power of veto in these purchases but I am sure she would never
+exercise it against Jimmie. She's absolutely wrapped up in him and he's
+wonderfully good and patient with her. Of course, you know, they're
+twins although no one ever guesses it. They've shared everything from
+the very first."
+
+"In this combination," laughed Debrett, "the boy is 'father to the
+girl' and the girl is 'mother to the boy.'"
+
+"Precisely so," Mr. Hawtry replied, "and the mother part comes out
+strong in this race and training affair. An old chap down at the
+hotel--one of those old white-whiskered 'Foxey Grandpas' that no summer
+resort should be without--has arranged a great race for his friends, the
+children, on Fourth of July morning. The prize is to be the privilege of
+setting off the fireworks in the evening."
+
+"They'll run themselves to death," commented Debrett, who knew his young
+America, "and is Jimmie to be one of the contestants?"
+
+"He is," replied Hawtry, "it's a 'free for all' event and even Cecelia
+Anne _may_ start if Jimmie allows it. She's not thinking much about that
+though. You see, Jimmie has gone into training and she's his trainer. I
+went out with them last Saturday morning to see how they manage. They
+marched me down to an untenanted little farm, back from the road. Jimmie
+carried the 'riffle' referred to in Cecelia Anne's text and a handful of
+blank cartridges. Cecelia Anne carried Jimmie's sweater, a bath towel, a
+large sponge, a small tin bucket and a long green bottle. I carried
+nothing. I was observing, not interfering."
+
+"Oh, that dear baby!" broke in Mrs. Hawtry, "such a heavy load!"
+
+"She's thriving under it, my dear." Well, presently we arrived at our
+destination, and I saw that those kids had worn a little path, not very
+deep of course, all round what used to be rather a spacious 'door yard.'
+The winning-post was the pump. By its side Cecelia Anne disposed her
+burden like a theatrical 'dresser' getting things ready for his
+principal. She hung her tin pail on the pump's snout and pumped it full
+of water, laid it beside the bath towel, threw the sponge into it,
+gave a final testing jerk to her tight little braids and divested
+herself of her jumpers and the dress she wore under them. Then she
+resumed the jumpers, took the rifle and crossed the 'track.' Jimmie,
+meanwhile, had stripped to trousers and the upper part of his
+bathing-suit, had donned his running shoes, set his feet in holes kicked
+in the ground for that purpose and bent forward, his back professionally
+hunched and in his hands the essential pieces of cork. Cecelia Anne
+gabbled the words of starting, shut her eyes tightly, fired the rifle
+into the air, threw it on the ground and set off after the swiftly
+moving Jimmie. Early in his first lap she was up to him. As they passed
+the pump, she was ahead. In the succeeding laps she kept a comfortable
+distance in the lead, until the end of the third when she sprinted for
+'home,' grabbed the towel and, as Jimmie came bounding up, wrapped him
+in it, rubbed him down, fanned him with it, moistened his brow with
+vinegar from the long bottle, tied the sweater around his neck by its
+red sleeves and held the dripping sponge to his lips. Then she found
+time for me.
+
+[Illustration: CELIA ANNE SHUT HER EYES TIGHTLY AND FIRED THE RIFLE INTO
+THE AIR.]
+
+"Oh, father," she cried, "did you _ever_ see _any_body who could run as
+fast as Jimmie? Don't you just know he'll win that race?"
+
+"There's but one chance against it," said I. "And really, Mr. Debrett,
+that boy can run. He's a little bit heavy maybe, but he holds himself
+well together and keeps up a pretty good pace. I timed him and measured
+up the distance roughly afterward. It was pretty good going for a little
+chap. Cecelia Anne is so much smaller that we often forget what a little
+fellow he is after all. But that baby--whew--I wish you'd seen her fly.
+It wasn't running. She just blew over the ground and arrived at the pump
+as cool as a cucumber although Jimmie was puffing like an automobile of
+the vintage of 1890."
+
+"You see," said Jimmie to me as he lay magnificently on the grass
+waiting to grow cool while Cecelia still fanned him with the towel, "you
+see it don't hurt her to pace me round the track."
+
+"Apparently not," said I, and although he's my own boy and I know him
+pretty well, I couldn't for the life of me decide whether he, as well as
+Cecelia Anne, had really failed to grasp the fact that she beats him to
+a standstill every morning. I suppose we'll know on the Fourth. If she
+runs, then he does not know. But if he refuses to let her run; it will
+be because he does know."
+
+"I'm not so sure of that," said Mrs. Hawtry.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Cecelia Anne _was_ allowed to run. First, in a girl's race among the
+giggling, amateurish, self-conscious girls whom she outdistanced by a
+lap or two and, later, in the race for all winners, where she had to
+compete with Charlie Anderson, the beau of the hotel, Len Fogarty, the
+milkman's son, and her own incomparable Jimmie.
+
+The master of ceremonies gave the signal and the event of the day was
+on. First to collapse was Charlie Anderson. Jimmie was then in the lead
+with Len Fogarty a close second, and Cecelia Anne beside him. So they
+went for a lap. Then Jimmie, missing perhaps the blue little figure of
+his pacemaker, wavered a little, only a little, but enough to allow Len
+Fogarty to forge past him. Len Fogarty! The blatant, hated Len Fogarty,
+always shouting defiance from his father's milk-wagon! Then forward
+sprang Cecelia Anne. Not for all the riches of the earth would she have
+beaten Jimmie, but not for all the glory of heaven would she allow any
+one else to beat him. And so by an easy spectacular ten seconds, she
+outran Len Fogarty.
+
+Then wild was the enthusiasm of the audience and black was the brow of
+Len Fogarty. A chorus of: "Let a girl lick you," "Call yourself a
+runner," "Come up to the house an' race me baby brother," has not a
+soothing effect when added to the disappointment of being forever shut
+off from the business end of rockets and Roman candles. These things
+Cecelia Anne knew and so accepted, sadly and resignedly, the glare with
+which Len turned away from her little attempts at explanations.
+
+But she was not prepared, nothing in her short life could ever have
+prepared her, to find the same expression on Jimmie's face when she
+broke through a shower of congratulations and followed him up the road;
+to expect praise and to meet _such_ a rebuff would have been sufficient
+to make even stiffer laurels than Cecelia Anne's trail in the dust.
+
+"Why Jimmie," she whimpered contrary to his most stringent rule. "Why
+Jimmie what's the matter?"
+
+"You're a sneak," said Jimmie darkly and vouchsafed no more. There was
+indeed no more to say. It was the last word of opprobrium.
+
+They pattered on in silence for a short but dusty distance, Cecelia Anne
+struggling with the temptation to lie down and die; Jimmie upborne by
+furious temper.
+
+"Who taught you how to run?" he at last broke out. "Wasn't it me? Didn't
+I give you lessons every morning in the old lot? And then didn't you go
+and beat me when Len Fogarty, Charlie Anderson, Billy Van Derwater, and
+all the other fellows were there?"
+
+Cecelia Anne returned his angry gaze with her blue and loyal eyes.
+
+"I didn't beat you 't all," she answered. "I didn't beat anybody but Len
+Fogarty."
+
+Her mentor studied her for a while and then a grin overspread his once
+more placid features.
+
+"I guess it'll be all right," he condescended. "Maybe you didn't mean it
+the way it looked. But say, Cecelia Anne, if you're afraid of
+fire-crackers what are you going to do about the rockets and the Roman
+candles? You know sparks fly out of them like rain. And if the smell of
+old cartridge shells makes you sick, I don't know just how you'll get
+along to-night."
+
+The victor stopped short under the weight of this overwhelming spoil.
+
+"I forgot all about it," she whispered. "Oh, Jimmie, I guess I ought to
+have let Len Fogarty win that race. He could set off rockets and Roman
+candles and Catherine wheels. I guess it'll kill me when the sparks and
+the smoke come out. Maybe I'd better go and see Mr. Anstell and ask to
+be excused."
+
+"Aw, I wouldn't do that," Jimmie advised her, "you don't want everyone
+to know about your nerve. You just tell him your dress is too light and
+that you want me to attend to the fireworks for you."
+
+In the transports of gratitude to which this knightly offer reduced her,
+Cecelia Anne fared on by Jimmie's side until they reached the house and
+their enquiring parents. Mrs. Hawtry was on the steps as they came up
+and she gathered Cecelia Anne into her arms. For a moment no one spoke.
+Then Jimmie made his declaration.
+
+"Cecelia Anne beat Len Fogarty all to nothing. You ought to have been
+there to see her."
+
+"Was there any one else in the race?" queried Mr. Hawtry in what his son
+considered most questionable taste.
+
+"Oh, yes," he was constrained to answer. "Charlie Anderson was in it.
+She beat him, too. And I _started_ with them but I thought it would do
+those boys more good to be licked by a little girl than to have me 'tend
+to them myself." And Jimmie proceeded leisurely into the house.
+
+"But I don't have to set off the fireworks," Cecelia Anne explained
+happily. "Jimmie says I don't have to if I don't want to. He's going to
+do it for me."
+
+"Kind brother," ejaculated Mr. Hawtry. And across the bright gold braids
+of her little Atalanta, Mrs. Hawtry looked at her husband.
+
+"_Did_ he know?" she questioned, "or did he not? You thought we could be
+sure if he let her start."
+
+"Well," was Mr. Hawtry's cryptic utterance, "he knows now."
+
+
+
+
+THEODORA, GIFT OF GOD
+
+
+"And then," cried Mary breathlessly, "what did they do then?"
+
+"And then," her father obediently continued, "the two doughty knights
+smote lustily with their swords. And each smote the other on the helmet
+and clove him to the middle. It was a fair battle and sightly."
+
+But Mary's interest was unabated. "And then," she urged, "what did they
+do then?"
+
+"Not much, I think. Even a knight of the Table Round stops fighting for
+a while when that happens to him."
+
+"Didn't they do anything 'tall?" the audience insisted. "You aren't
+leaving it out, are you? Didn't they bleed nor nothing?"
+
+"Oh, yes, they bled."
+
+"Then tell me that part."
+
+"Well, they bled. They never stinteth bleeding for three days and three
+nights until they were pale as the very earth for bleeding. And they
+made a great dole."
+
+"And then, when they couldn't bleed any more nor make any more dole,
+what did they do?"
+
+"They died."
+
+"And then--"
+
+"That's the end of the story," said the narrator definitely.
+
+"Then tell me another," she pleaded, "and don't let them die so soon."
+
+"There wouldn't be time for another long one," he pointed out as he
+encouraged his horse into an ambling trot. "We are nearly there now."
+
+"After supper will you tell me one?"
+
+"Yes," he promised.
+
+"One about Lancelot and Elaine?"
+
+"Yes," he repeated. "Anything you choose."
+
+"I choose Lancelot," she declared.
+
+"A great many ladies did," commented her father as the horse sedately
+stopped before the office of the Arcady _Herald-Journal_, of which he
+was day and night editor, sporting editor, proprietor, society editor,
+chief of the advertising department, and occasionally type-setter and
+printer and printer's devil.
+
+Mary held the horse, which stood in need of no such restraint, while
+this composite of newspaper secured his mail, and then they jogged off
+through the spring sunshine, side by side, in the ramshackle old buggy
+on a leisurely canvass of outlying districts in search of news or
+advertisements, or suggestions for the forthcoming issue.
+
+In the wide-set, round, opened eyes of his small daughter, Herbert
+Buckley was the most wonderful person in the world. No stories were so
+enthralling as his. No songs so tuneful, no invention so fertile, no
+temper so sweet, no companionship so precious. And her nine happy years
+of life had shown her no better way of spending summer days or winter
+evenings than in journeying, led by his hand and guided by his voice,
+through the pleasant ways of Camelot and the shining times of chivalry.
+
+Upon a morning later in this ninth summer of her life Mary was perched
+high up in an apple tree enjoying the day, the green apples, and
+herself. The day was a glorious one in mid July, the apples were of a
+wondrous greenness and hardness, and Mary, for the first time in many
+weeks, was free to enjoy her own society. A month ago a grandmother and
+a maiden aunt had descended out of the land which had until then given
+forth only letters, birthday presents, and Christmas cards. And they had
+proved to be not at all the idyllic creatures which these manifestations
+had seemed to prophesy, but a pair of very interfering old ladies with a
+manner of over-ruling Mary's gentle mother, brow-beating her genial
+father and cloistering herself.
+
+This morning had contributed another female assuming airs of instant
+intimacy. She had gone up to the last remaining spare chamber, donned a
+costume all of crackling white linen, and had introduced herself,
+entirely uninvited, into the dim privacy of Mary's mother's room, whence
+Mary had been sternly banished.
+
+"Another aunt!" was the outcast's instant inference, as in a moment of
+accountable preoccupation on the part of the elders she had escaped to
+her own happy and familiar country--the world of out-of-doors--where
+female relatives seldom intruded, and where the lovely things of life
+were waiting.
+
+When she had consumed all the green apples her constitution would
+accept, and they seemed pitifully few to her more robust mind, she
+descended from the source of her refreshment and set out upon a
+comprehensive tour of her domain. She liked living upon the road to
+Camelot. It made life interesting to be within measurable distance of
+the knights and ladies who lived and played and loved in the
+many-towered city of which one could gain so clear a view from the
+topmost branches of the hickory tree in the upper pasture. She liked to
+crouch in the elder bushes where a lane, winding and green-arched,
+crossed a corner of the cornfield, and to wait, through the long, still
+summer mornings for Lancelot or Galahad or Tristram or some other of her
+friends to come pricking his way through the sunshine. She could hear
+the clinking of his golden armor, the whinnying of his steed, the soft
+brushing of the branches as they parted before his helmet or his spear;
+the rustling of the daisies against his great white charger's feet. And
+then there was the river "where the aspens dusk and quiver," and where
+barges laden with sweet ladies passed and left ripples of foam on the
+water and ripples of light laughter in the air as, brilliant and fair
+bedight, they went winding down to Camelot.
+
+This morning she revisited all these hallowed spots. She thrilled on the
+very verge of the river and quivered amid the waving corn. She scaled
+the sentinel hickory and turned her eyes upon the Southern city. It was
+nearly a week since she had been allowed to wander so far afield, and
+Camelot seemed more than ever wonderful as it lay in the shimmering
+distance gleaming and glistening beyond the hills. Trails of smoke waved
+above all the towers, showing where Sir Beaumanis still served his
+kitchen apprenticeship for his knighthood and his place at the Table
+Round. Thousands of windows flashed back the light.
+
+"I could get there," pondered Mary, "if God would send me that goat and
+wagon. I guess there's quite a demand for goats and wagons. I could
+dress my goat all up in skirts like the ladies dressed their palfreys,
+an' I'd wear my hair loose on my shoulders--it's real goldy when it's
+loose--an' my best hat. I guess Queen Guinevere would be real glad to
+see me. Oh, dear," she fretted as these visions came thronging back to
+her, "I wish Heaven would hurry up."
+
+Between the pasture and the distant city she could distinguish the roofs
+of another of the havens of her dear desire--the house where the old
+ladies lived. Four old ladies there were, in the sweet autumn of their
+lives, and Mary's admiration of them was as passionate as were all her
+psychic states. She never could be quite sure as to which of the four
+she most adored. There was the gentle Miss Ann, who taught her to recite
+verses of piercing and wilting sensibility; the brisk Miss Jane, who
+explained and demonstrated the construction of many an old-time cake or
+pastry; the silent Miss Agnes, who silently accepted assistance in her
+never-ending process of skeletonizing leaves and arranging them in prim
+designs upon cardboard, and the garrulous Miss Sabina, who, with a
+crochet needle, a hair-pin, a spool with four pins driven into it,
+knitting needles and other shining implements, could fashion, and teach
+Mary to fashion, weavings and spinnings which might shame the most
+accomplished spider. Aided by her and by the re-enforced spool above
+mentioned, Mary had already achieved five dirty inches of red woollen
+reins for the expected goat. But the house was distant just three
+fields, a barb-wire fence, a low stone wall, and a cross bull, and Mary
+knew that her unaccustomed leisure could not be expected to endure long
+enough for so perilous a pilgrimage.
+
+Her dissatisfied gaze wandered back to her quiet home surrounded by its
+neatly laid out meadows, cornfield, orchard, barns, and garden. And a
+shadow fell upon her wistful little face.
+
+"That old aunt," she grumbled, "she makes me awful tired. She's always
+pokin' round an' callin' me."
+
+Such, indeed, seemed the present habit and intent of the prim lady who
+was approaching, alternately clanging a dinner-bell and calling in a
+tone of resolute sweetness:
+
+"Mary, O Mary, dear."
+
+Mary parted the branches of her tree and watched, but made no sound.
+
+"Mary," repeated the oncoming relative, "Mary, I want to tell you
+something," and added as she spied her niece's abandoned sunbonnet on
+the grass, "I know you're here and I shall wait until you come to me."
+
+"I _ain't_ coming," announced the Dryad, and thereby disclosed her
+position, both actual and mental. "I suppose it's something I've done
+and I don't want to hear it, so there!" Then, her temper having been
+worn thin by much admonishing, she anticipated: "I _ain't_ sorry I've
+been bad. I _ain't_ ashamed to behave so when my mamma is sick in bed.
+And I don't care if you _do_ tell my papa when he comes home to-night."
+
+The intruding relative, discerning her, stopped and smiled. And the
+smile was as a banderilla to her niece's goaded spirit.
+
+"Jiminy!" gasped that young person, "she's got a smile just like a
+teacher."
+
+"Mary, dear," the intruder gushed, "God has sent you something."
+
+The hickory flashed forth black and white and red. Mary stood upon the
+ground.
+
+"Where are they?" she demanded.
+
+"They?" repeated the lady. "There is only one."
+
+"Why, I prayed for two. Which did he send?"
+
+"Which do you think?" parried the lady. "Which do you hope it is?"
+
+Even Mary's scorn was unprepared for this weak-mindedness. "The goat, of
+course," she responded curtly. "Is it the goat?"
+
+"Goat!" gasped the scandalized aunt. "Goat! Why, God has sent you a baby
+sister, dear."
+
+"A sister! a baby!" gasped Mary in her turn. "I don't _need_ no sister.
+I prayed for a goat just as plain as plain. 'Dear God,' I says, 'please
+bless everybody, and make me a good girl, an' send me a goat an' wagon.'
+And they went an' changed it to a baby sister! Why, I never s'posed they
+made mistakes like that."
+
+Crestfallen and puzzled she allowed herself to be led back to the
+darkened house where her grandmother met her with the heavenly
+substitute wrapped in flannel. And as she held it against the square and
+unresponsive bosom of her apron she realized how the "Bible gentleman"
+must have felt when he asked for bread and was given a stone.
+
+During the weeks that followed, the weight of the stone grew heavier
+and heavier while the hunger for bread grew daily more acute. Not even
+the departure of interfering relatives could bring freedom, for the
+baby's stumpy arms bound Mary to the house as inexorably as bolts and
+bars could have done. She passed weary hours in a hushed room watching
+the baby, when outside the sun was shining, the birds calling, the
+apples waxing greener and larger, and the shining knights and ladies
+winding down to Camelot. She sat upon the porch, still beside the baby,
+while the river rippled, the wheatfields wimpled, and the cows came
+trailing down from the pasture, down from the upland pasture where the
+sentinel hickory stood and watched until the sun went down, and, one by
+one, the lights came out in distant Camelot. She listened for the light
+laughter of the ladies, the jingling of the golden armor, the swishing
+of the branches and of the waves. Listened all in vain, for Theodora,
+that gift of God, had powerful lungs and a passion for exercising them
+so that minor sounds were overwhelmed and only yells remained.
+
+But the deprivation against which she most passionately rebelled was
+that of her father's society. Before the advent of Theodora she had been
+his constant companion. They were perfectly happy together, for the poet
+who at nineteen had burned to challenge the princes of the past and to
+mold the destinies of the future was, at twenty-nine, very nearly
+content to busy himself about the occurrences of the present and to edit
+a weekly paper in the town which had known and honored his father, and
+was proud of, if puzzled by, their well-informed debonair son. Even
+himself he sometimes puzzled. He knew that this was not to be his life's
+work, this chronicling of the very smallest beer, this gossip and
+friendliness and good cheer. But it served to fill his leisure and his
+modest exchequer until such time as he could finish his great tragedy
+and take his destined place among the writers of his time. Meanwhile, he
+told himself, with somewhat rueful humor, there was always an editor
+ready to think well of his minor poems and an audience ready to marvel
+at them, "which is more, my dear," he pointed out to his admiring wife,
+"than Burns could have said for himself--or Coleridge."
+
+And when his confidence and his hopes flickered, as the strongest of
+hopes and confidence sometimes will, when his tragedy seemed far from
+completion, his paper paltry, and his life narrow, he could always look
+into his daughter's eyes and there find faith in himself and strength
+and sunny patience.
+
+Formerly these fountains of perpetual youth had been beside him all the
+long days through. From village to village, from store to farm, they
+had jogged, side by side, in a lazy old buggy; he smoking long, silent
+pipes, perhaps, or entertaining his companion with tales and poems of
+the days of chivalry when men were brave and women fair and all the
+world was young. And, Mary, inthralled, enrapt, adoring her father, and
+seeing every picture conjured up by his sonorous rhythm or quaint
+phrase, was much more familiar with the deeds and gossip of King
+Arthur's court than with events of her own day and country.
+
+So that while Mary, tied to the baby, yearned for the wide spaces of her
+freedom, Mr. Buckley, lonely in a dusty buggy, jogging over the familiar
+roads, thought longingly of a little figure in an irresponsible
+sunbonnet, and found it difficult to bear patiently with matronly
+neighbors, who congratulated him upon this arrangement, and assured him
+that his little play-fellow would now quickly outgrow her old-fashioned
+ways and become as other children, "which she would never have, Mr.
+Buckley, as long as you let her tag around with you and filled her head
+with impossible nonsense."
+
+It was not a desire for any such alteration which made him acquiesce in
+the separation. It was a very grave concern for his wife's health, and a
+very sharp realization that, until he could devise some means of
+increasing his income, he could not afford to engage a more experienced
+nurse for the new arrival. He had no ideas of the suffering entailed
+upon his elder daughter. He was deceived, as was every one else, by the
+gentle uncomplainingness with which she waited upon Theodora, for whose
+existence she regarded herself as entirely to blame. Had she not,
+without consulting her parents, applied to high heaven for an increase
+in live stock, and was not the answer to this application, however
+inexact, manifestly her responsibility.
+
+"They're awful good to me," she pondered. "They ain't scolded me a
+mite, an' I just know how they must feel about it. Mamma ain't had her
+health ever since that baby come, an' papa looks worried most to death.
+If they'd 'a' sent that goat an' wagon I could 'a' took mamma riding.
+Ain't prayers terrible when they go wrong!" And in gratitude for their
+forbearance she, erstwhile the companion, or at least the audience, of
+fealty knight and ladies, bowed her small head to the swathed and
+shapeless feet of heaven's error and became waiting woman to a flannel
+bundle.
+
+Only her dreams remained to her. She could still look forward to the
+glorious time of "when I'm big." She could still unbind her dun-colored
+hair and shake it in the sun. She could still quiver with anticipation
+as she surveyed her brilliant future. A beautiful prince was coming to
+woo her. He would ride to the door and kneel upon the front porch while
+all his shining retinue filled the front yard and overflowed into the
+road. Then she would appear and, since these things were to happen in
+the days of her maturity, perhaps when she was twelve years old, she
+would be radiantly beautiful, and her hair would be all goldy gold and
+curly, and it would trail upon the ground a yard or two behind her as
+she walked. And the prince would be transfixed. And when he was all
+through being that--Mary often wondered what it was--he would arise and
+sing "Nicolette, the Bright of Brow," or some other disguised
+personality, while all his shining retinue would unsling hautboys and
+lyres and--and--mouth organs and play ravishing music.
+
+And when she rode away to be the prince's bride and to rule his fair
+lands, her father and her mother should ride with her, all in the
+sunshine of the days "when I'm big"--the wonderful days "when I'm big."
+
+Meanwhile, being but little, she served the flannel bundle even as Sir
+Beaumanis had served a yet lowlier apprenticeship. But she still stormed
+high heaven to rectify its mistake.
+
+"And please, dear God, if you are all out of goats and wagons, send
+rabbits. But anyway come and take away this baby. My mamma ain't well
+enough to take care of it an' I can't spare the time. We don't need
+babies, but we do need that goat and wagon."
+
+And the powers above, with a mismanagement which struck their petitioner
+dumb, sent a wagon--only a wagon--and it was a gocart for the baby, and
+Mary was to be the goat.
+
+With this millstone tied about her neck she was allowed to look upon the
+scenes of her early freedom, and no inquisitor could have devised a more
+anguishing torture than that to which Mary's suffering and unsuspecting
+mother daily consigned her suffering and uncomplaining daughter.
+
+"Walk slowly up and down the paths, dear, and don't leave your sister
+for a moment. Isn't it nice that you have somebody to play with now?"
+
+"Yes, ma'am," said Mary. "But she ain't what I'd call playful."
+
+"You used to be so much alone," Mrs. Buckley continued. Mary breathed
+sharply, and her mother kissed her sympathetically. "But now you always
+have your sister with you. Isn't it fine, dearie?"
+
+"Yes, ma'am," repeated the victim, and bent her little energies to the
+treadmill task of wheeling the gocart to the orchard gate, where all
+wonders began, and then, with an effort as exhausting to the will as to
+the body, turning her back upon the lane, the river, and the sentinel
+tree, to trundle her Juggernaut between serried rows of cabbages and
+carrots.
+
+Then slowly she began to hate, with a deep, abiding hatred, the flannel
+bundle. She loathed the very smell of flannel before Theodora was six
+short weeks old, and the sight of the diminutive laundry, which hung
+upon the line between the cherry trees, almost drove her to arson.
+
+The shy, quick-darting creature--half child and half humming bird--was
+forced to drag that monstrous perambulator on all her expeditions. After
+a month's confinement to the garden, where knights and ladies never
+penetrate, she managed to bump her responsibility out into the orchard.
+But the glory was all in the treetops, and Mary soon grew restless under
+her mother's explicit directions. "Up and down the walks" meant
+imprisonment, despair. Theodora should have tried to make her role of
+Albatross as acceptable as it might be made to the long-suffering
+mariner about whose neck she hung, but she showed a callousness and a
+heartless selfishness which nothing could excuse. Mary would sometimes
+plead with all gentleness and courtesy for a few short moments' freedom.
+
+"Theodora," she would begin, "Theodora, listen to me a minute," and the
+gift of God would make aimless pugilistic passes at her interlocutor.
+
+"O Theodora, I'm awful tired of stayin' down here on the ground.
+Wouldn't you just as lieves play you was a mad bull an' I was a lady in
+a red dress?"
+
+Theodora, after some space spent in apparent contemplation, would wave a
+cheerful acquiescence.
+
+"An' then I'll be scared of you, an' I'll run away an' climb as high as
+anything in the hickory tree up there on the hill. Let's play it right
+now, Theodora. There's something I want to see up there."
+
+Taking her sister's bland smile for ratification and agreement, Mary
+would set about her personification, shed her apron lest its damaged
+appearance convict her in older eyes, and speed toward her goal. But
+the mad bull's shrieks of protest and repudiation would startle every
+bit of chivalry for miles and miles around.
+
+Several experiences of this nature taught Mary, that, in dealing with
+infants of changeable and rudimentary mind, honesty was an impossible
+policy and candor a very boomerang, which returned and smote one with
+savage force. So she stooped to guile and detested the flannel all the
+more deeply because of the state to which it was debasing an upright
+conscience and a high sense of honor.
+
+At first her lapses from the right were all negative. She neglected the
+gift of God. She would abandon it, always in a safe and shady spot and
+always with its covers smoothly tucked in, its wabbly parasol adjusted
+at the proper angle, and always with a large piece of wood tied to the
+perambulator's handle by a labyrinth of elastic strings. These Mary had
+drawn from abandoned garters, sling shots, and other mysterious sources,
+and they allowed the wood to jerk unsteadily up and down, and to soothe
+the unsuspecting Theodora with a spasmodic rhythm very like the
+ministrations of her preoccupied nurse.
+
+Meanwhile the nurse would be far afield upon her own concerns, and
+Theodora was never one of them. The river, the lane, the tall hickory
+knew her again and again. Camelot shone out across the miles of hill and
+tree and valley. But the river was silent and the lane empty, and
+Camelot seemed very far as autumn cleared the air. Perhaps this was
+because knights and ladies manifest themselves only to the pure of
+heart. Perhaps because Mary was always either consciously or
+subconsciously listening for the recalling shrieks of the abandoned and
+disprized gift of God.
+
+"Stop it, I tell you," she admonished her purple-faced and convulsive
+charge one afternoon when all the world was gold. "Stop it, or mamma
+will be coming after us, and making us stay on the back porch." But
+Theodora, in the boastfulness of her new lungs, yelled uninterruptedly
+on. Then did Mary try cajolery. She removed her sister from the
+perambulator and staggered back in a sitting posture with suddenness and
+force. The jar gave Theodora pause, and Mary crammed the silence full of
+promise. "If you'll stop yellin' now I'll see that my prince husband
+lets you be a goose-girl on the hills behind our palace. Its awful nice
+being a goose-girl," she hastened to add lest the prospect fail to
+charm. "If I didn't have to marry that prince an' be a queen I guess I'd
+been a goose-girl myself. Yes, sir, it's lovely work on the hills behind
+a palace with all the knights ridin' by an' sayin', 'Fair maid, did'st
+see a boar pass by this way?' You don't have to be afraid--you'd never
+have to see one. In all the books the goose-girls didn't never see no
+boars, and the knights gave 'em a piece of gold an' smiled on 'em, and
+the sunshine shined on 'em, an' they had a lovely time."
+
+Having stumbled into the road to peace of conscience, Mary trod it
+bravely and joyously. Theodora's future rank increased with the decrease
+of her present comfort, but her posts, though lofty and remunerative,
+were never such as would bring her into intimate contact with the person
+of the queen.
+
+She was betrothed to the son of a noble, and very distant, house after
+an afternoon when the perambulator, ill-trained to cross-country work,
+balked at the first stone wall on the way to the old ladies' house. It
+was then dragged backward for a judicious distance and faced at the
+obstacle at a mad gallop. Umbrella down, handle up, wheels madly
+whirring, it was forced to the jump.
+
+Again it refused, reared high into the air, stood for an instant upon
+its hind wheels and then fell supinely on its side, shedding its
+blankets, its pillows, and Theodora upon the cold, hard stones.
+
+After that her rise was rapid, and the distance separating her from her
+sister's elaborate court more perilous and more beset with seas and
+boars and mountains and robbers. She was allowed to wed her high-born
+betrothed when she had been forgotten for three hours while Mary learned
+a heart-rending poem commencing, "Oh, hath she then failed in her troth,
+the beautiful maid I adore?" until even Miss Susan could only weep in
+intense enjoyment and could suggest; no improvement in the recitation.
+
+On another occasion Mary was obliged to borrow the perambulator for the
+conveyance of leaves and branches with which to build a bower withal;
+and Theodora, having been established in unfortunate proximity to an
+ant hill, was thoroughly explored by its inhabitants ere her
+ministering sister realized that her cries and agitation were anything
+more than her usual attitude of protest against whatever chanced to be
+going on. By the time the bower was finished and the perambulator ready
+for its customary occupant that young person was in a position to claim
+heavy damages.
+
+"Don't you care," said Mary cheerfully, as she relieved Theodora from
+the excessive animation. "I can make it up to you when I'm big. My
+prince husband--I guess he'd better be a king by that time--will go over
+to your country an' kill your husband's father an' his grandfather an'
+all the kings an' princes until there's nobody only your husband to be
+king. Then you'll be a queen you see, an' live in a palace. So now hush
+up." And one future majesty was rocked upside down by another until the
+royal face of the younger queen was purple and her voice was still.
+
+Mary found it more difficult to quiet her new and painful agnosticism,
+and in her efforts to reconcile dogma with manifestation she evolved a
+series of theological and economical questions which surprised her
+father and made her mother's head reel. She further manifested a
+courteous attention when the minister came to call, and she engaged him
+in spiritual converse until he writhed again. For a space her
+investigations led her no whither, and then, without warning, the man of
+peace solved her dilemma and shed light upon her path.
+
+A neighbor ripe in years and good works had died. The funeral was over
+and the man of God had stopped to rest in the pleasant shade of Mrs.
+Buckley's trees and in the pleasant sound of Mrs. Buckley's voice. Mary,
+the gocart, and Theodora completed the group, and the minister spoke.
+
+"A good man," he repeated, "Ah, Mrs. Buckley, he will be sadly missed!
+But the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be--"
+
+"When?" demanded Mary breathlessly. "When does he take away?"
+
+"In His own good time."
+
+"When's that?"
+
+"'Tis not for sinful man to say. He sends His message to the man in the
+pride of his youth or to the babe in its cradle. He reaches forth His
+hand and takes away."
+
+"But when--" Mary was beginning when her mother, familiar with the
+Socratic nature of her daughter's conversation and its exhaustive effect
+upon the interlocutor, interposed a remark which guided the current of
+talk out of heavenly channels and back to the material plain.
+
+But Mary had learned all that she cared to know. It was not necessary
+that she should suffer the exactions of the baby or subject her family
+to them. The Lord had given and would take away! The minister had said
+so, and the minister knew all about the Lord. And if the powers above
+were not ready to send for the baby, it would be easy enough to deposit
+it in the Lord's own house, which showed its white spire beyond the
+first turn in the road which led to Camelot. There the Lord would find
+it and take it away. This would be, she reflected, the quiet, dignified,
+lady-like thing to do. And the morrow, she decided, would be an
+admirable day on which to do it.
+
+Therefore, on the morrow she carefully decked Theodora in small finery,
+hung garlands of red and yellow maple leaves upon the perambulator,
+twined chains of winter-green berries about its handle, tied a bunch of
+gorgeous golden rod to its parasol, and trundled it by devious and
+obscure ways to the sacred precincts of God's house.
+
+"They look real well," she commented. "If I was sure about that goat I
+might keep the cart, but it really ain't the right kind for a goat. I
+guess I'd better take 'em back just like they are an' when the Lord sees
+how I got 'em all fancied up, he'll know I ain't a careless child, an'
+maybe I'd get that goat after all."
+
+So the disprized little gifts of God were bumped up the church steps,
+wheeled up the aisle, and bestowed in a prominent spot before the
+chancel rail. Some one was playing soft music at the unseen organ, but
+Mary accepted soft music as a phenomenon natural to churches, and failed
+to connect it with human agency. Sedately she set out Theodora's bows
+and ruffles to the best advantage. Carefully she rearranged the floral
+decorations of the perambulator, and set her elastic understudy in
+erratic motion. Complacently she surveyed the whole and walked out into
+the sunshine--free. And presently the minister, the intricacies of a new
+hymn reconciled to the disabilities of a lack of ear and a lack of
+training, came out into the body of the church, where the gifts of God,
+bland in smiles and enwreathed in verdure, were waiting to be taken
+away.
+
+"Mrs. Buckley's baby," was his first thought. "I wonder where that queer
+little Mary is," was his second. And his third, it came when he was
+tired of waiting for some solution of his second, was an embarrassed
+realization that he would be obliged to take his unexpected guest home
+to its mother. And the quiet town of Arcady rocked upon its foundations
+as he did it.
+
+"In the church," marveled Mrs. Buckley. "How careless of Mary!" she
+apologized, and "How good of you!" she smiled. "No, I'm not in the least
+worried. She always had a way of trotting off to her own diversions when
+she was not with her father. And lately she has been astonishingly
+patient about spending her time with baby. I have felt quite guilty,
+about it. But after to-day she will be free, as Mr. Buckley has found a
+nurse to relieve her. He was beginning to grow desperate about Mary and
+me--said we neither of us had a moment to waste on him--and yet could
+not find a nurse whom we felt we could afford. And yesterday a young
+woman walked into his office to put an advertisement in his paper for
+just such a position as we had to offer. She is a German, wants to learn
+English, and she will be here this afternoon."
+
+"Perhaps your little girl resented her coming," he suggested vaguely.
+"Perhaps that was the reason."
+
+"Mary resentful!" laughed Mrs. Buckley.
+
+"She doesn't, bless her gentle little heart, know the meaning of the
+word. Besides which we haven't told her about the girl, as we are rather
+looking forward to that first interview, and wondering how Mary will
+acquit herself in a conversational Waterloo. She can't, you know, make
+life miserable and information bitter to a German who speaks no
+English. 'Ja' or 'nein' alternately and interchangeably may baffle even
+her skill in questioning."
+
+Mary, meanwhile, was hurrying along the way to Camelot. She had not
+planned the expedition in advance. Rather, it was the inevitable
+reaction toward license which marks the success of any revolution. She
+had cast off the bonds of the baby carriage, her time and her life were
+her own, and the road stretched white and straight toward Camelot.
+
+It was afternoon and the sun was near its setting when at last she
+reached the towered city and found it in all ways delightful but in some
+surprising. She was prepared for the moat and for the drawbridge across
+it, but not for the exceeding dirtiness of its water and the dinginess
+of its barges. She had expected it to be wider and perhaps cleaner, and
+the castles struck her as being ill-adapted to resist siege and the
+shocks of war since nearly all their walls were windows. And through
+these windows she caught glimpses of the strangest interiors which ever
+palaces boasted. Miles and acres of bare wooden tables stood under the
+shade of straight iron trees. From the trees black ribbons depended. In
+the treetops there were wheels and shining iron bars, and all about the
+tables there were other iron bars and bolts and bands of greasy leather.
+
+"I don't see a round table anywhere," she reflected. "What do you s'pose
+they do with all those little square ones?" She sought the answer to
+this question through many a dirty pane and many a high-walled street.
+But the palaces and the streets were empty and the explorer discovered
+with a quick-sinking heart and confidence that she was alone and hungry
+and very far from home. She was treading close upon the verge of tears
+when her path debouched upon the central square of Camelot. And
+straightway she forgot her doubts and puzzlements, her hunger and her
+increasing weariness, for she had found "The Court." Across a fair green
+plaisance, all seemly beset with flower and shrub, the wide doors of a
+church stood open. Tall palaces were all about, and in every window, on
+every step, on the green benches which dotted the plaisance, on every
+possible elevation or post of observation, the good folk of Camelot
+stood or hung or even fought, to watch the procession of beauty and
+chivalry as it came foaming down the steps, broke into eddies, and
+disappeared among the thronging carriages. Mary found it quite easy to
+identify the illustrious personages in the procession when once she had
+realized that they would, of course, not be in armor on a summer's
+afternoon, and at what even, to her inexperienced eyes, was manifestly a
+wedding.
+
+First to emerge was a group of the younger knights, frock-coated,
+silk-hatted, pale gray of waistcoat and gloves, white and effulgent of
+_boutonniere_. Excitement, almost riot, resulted among the
+much-caparisoned horses, the much-favored coachmen, and the
+much-beribboned equipages of state. But the noise increased to clamor
+and eagerness to violence when an ethereal figure in floating tulle and
+clinging lace was led out into the afternoon light by a more resplendent
+edition of black-coated, gray-trousered knighthood.
+
+The next wave was all of pink chiffon and nodding plumes. The first
+wave, after trickling about the carriages and the coachmen, receded up
+the steps again to be lost and mingled in the third, and then both swept
+down to the carriages again and were absorbed. Then the steady tide of
+departing royalty set in. Then horses plunged, elderly knights fussed,
+court ladies commented upon the heat, the bride, the presents, or their
+neighbors. Then the bride's father mopped his brow and the bridegroom's
+mother wept a little. Then there was much shaking or waving of hands or
+of handkerchiefs. Then the bridal carriage began to move, the bride
+began to smile, and rice and flowers and confetti and good wishes and
+slippers filled the air. Then other carriages followed, then the good
+folk of Camelot followed, an aged man closed the wide church doors, and
+the square was left to the sparrows, pink sunshine, confetti, rice, and
+Mary.
+
+The little pilgrim's sunbonnet was hanging down her back, her hair was
+loose upon her shoulders, "an' real goldy" where it caught the sun, and
+her eyes were wide and deep with happiness and faith. She crossed the
+wide plaisance and stood upon the steps, she gathered up three white
+roses and a shred of lace, she sat down to rest upon the topmost step,
+she laid her cheek against the inhospitable doors, and, in the language
+of the stories she loved so well, "so fell she on sleep" with the tired
+flowers in her tired hands.
+
+And there Herbert Buckley found her. He had traveled far afield on that
+autumn afternoon; but it is not every day that the daughter of the owner
+of one-half the mills in a manufacturing town is married to the owner of
+the other half, and when such things do occur to the accompaniment of
+illustrious visitors, a half-holiday in all the mills, perfect weather,
+and unlimited hospitality, it behooves the progressive journalist and
+reporter for miles around to sing "haste to the wedding," and to draw
+largely upon his adjectives and his fountain pen. The editorial staff of
+the Arcady _Herald-Journal_ turned homeward, and was evolving phrases in
+which to describe that gala day when his eye caught the color of a
+familiar little sunbonnet, the outline of a familiar little figure. But
+such a drooping little sunbonnet! Such a relaxed little figure! Such a
+weary little face! And such a wildly impossible place in which to find a
+little daughter. Then he remembered having seen Miss Ann and Miss Agnes
+among the spectators and his wonder changed to indignation.
+
+It was nearly dark when Mary opened her eyes again and found herself
+sheltered in her father's arm and rocked by the old familiar motion of
+the buggy.
+
+"And then," she prompted sleepily as her old habit was, "what did they
+do then?"
+
+"They were married," his quiet voice replied.
+
+"And then?"
+
+"Oh, then they went away together and lived happily ever after."
+
+For some space there was silence and a star came out. Mary watched it
+drowsily and then drowsily began:
+
+"When I was to Camelot--"
+
+"Where?" demanded her father.
+
+"When I was to Camelot," she repeated, cuddling close to him as if to
+show that there were dearer places than that gorgeous city, "I saw a
+knight and a lady getting married. And lots of other knights were
+there--they didn't wear their fighting clothes--and lots of other
+ladies, pink ones. An' Arthur wore a stovepipe hat an' Guinevere wore a
+white dress, an' she had white feathers in her crown. An' Lancelot, he
+was there, all getting married. Daddy, dear," she broke off to question,
+"were you ever to Camelot?"
+
+"Oh, yes, I was there," he answered, "but it was a great many years
+ago."
+
+"Did you find roses?" she asked, exhibiting her wilted treasures.
+
+"I found your mother there, my dear."
+
+"And then, what did you do then?"
+
+"Well, then we were married and lived happily ever after."
+
+"And then--?"
+
+"There was you, and we lived happier ever after."
+
+And Mary fell on sleep again in the shelter of her father's arm while the
+stars came out and the glow of joyant Camelot lit all the southern sky.
+
+
+
+
+GREAT OAKS FROM LITTLE ACORNS
+
+
+
+Among the influences which, in America, promote harmony between alien
+races, the public school plays a most important part. The children, the
+teachers, the parents--whether of emigrant or native origin--the
+relatives and friends in distant countries, are all brought more or less
+under its amalgamating influences. In the schoolroom the child finds
+friends and playmates belonging to races widely different from his own;
+there Greek meets not only Greek, but Turk, American, Irish, German,
+French, English, Italian and Hungarian, and representatives of every
+other nation under the sun. The lion lying down with the lamb was
+nothing to it, because the lamb, though its feelings are not enlarged
+upon, must have been distinctly uncomfortable. But in the schoolroom
+Jew and Gentile work and play together; and black and white learn love
+and knowledge side by side.
+
+And long after more formal instruction has faded with the passing of the
+years a man of, perhaps, German origin will think kindly of the whole
+irresponsible Irish race when he remembers little Bridget O'Connor, who
+sat across the aisle in the old Cherry Street school, her quick temper
+and her swift remorse.
+
+Of course, all these nationalities are rarely encountered in one
+district, but a teacher often finds herself responsible for fifty
+children representing five or six of them. In the lower grades eight or
+ten may be so lately arrived as to speak no English. The teacher
+presiding over this polyglot community is often, herself, of foreign
+birth, yet they get on very well together, are very fond of one another,
+and very happy. The little foreigners, assisted by their more
+well-informed comrades, learn the language of the land, I regret to say
+that it is often tinctured with the language of the Bowery, in from six
+to twelve weeks, six weeks for the Jews, and twelve for the slower among
+the Germans' children. And again, it will be difficult to stir Otto
+Schmidt, at any stage of his career, into antagonism against the Jewish
+race, when he remembers the patience and loving kindness with which
+Maxie Fishandler labored with him and guided his first steps through the
+wilderness of the English tongue.
+
+These indirect but constant influences are undeniably the strongest, but
+at school the child is taught in history of the heroism and the strength
+of men and nations other than his own; he learns, with some degree of
+consternation, that Christopher Columbus was a "Dago," George Washington
+an officer in the English Army, and Christ, our Lord, a Jew. Geography,
+as it is now taught with copious illustrations and descriptions, shows
+undreamed-of beauties in countries hitherto despised. And gradually, as
+the pupils move on from class to class, they learn true democracy and
+man's brotherhood to man.
+
+But the work of the American public school does not stop with the
+children who come directly under its control. The board of education
+reaches, as no other organization does, the great mass of the
+population. All the other boards and departments established for the
+help and guidance of these people only succeed in badgering and
+frightening them. They are met, even at Ellis Island, by the board of
+health and they are subjected to all kinds of disagreeable and
+humiliating experiences culminating sometimes in quarantine and
+sometimes in deportation. Even after they have passed the barrier of the
+emigration office, the monster still pursues them. It disinfects their
+houses, it confiscates the rotten fish and vegetables which they
+hopefully display on their push-carts, it objects to their wrenching off
+and selling the plumbing appliances in their apartments, it interferes
+with them in twenty ways a day and hedges them round about with a
+hundred laws which they can only learn, as Parnell advised a follower to
+learn the rules of the House of Commons, by breaking them.
+
+Then comes the department of street cleaning, with its extraordinary
+ideas of the use of a thoroughfare. The new-comer is taught that the
+street is not the place for dead cats and cabbage stalks, and other
+trifles for which he has no further use. Neither may it be used, except
+with restrictions, as a bedroom or a nursery. The emigrant, puzzled but
+obliging, picks his progeny out of the gutter and lays it on the
+fire-escape. He then makes acquaintance of the fire department, and
+listens to its heated arguments. So perhaps he, still willing to please,
+reclaims the dead cat and the cabbage stalk, and proceeds to cremate
+them in the privacy of the back yard. Again the fire department, this
+time in snorting and horrible form, descends upon him. And all these
+manifestations of freedom are attended by the blue-coated police who
+interdict the few relaxations unprovided for by the other powers. These
+human monsters confiscate stilettos and razors; discourage
+pocket-picking, brick-throwing, the gathering of crowds and the general
+enjoyment of life. Their name is legion. Their appetite for figs, dates,
+oranges and bananas and graft is insatiable; they are omnipresent; they
+are argus-eyed; and their speech is always, "Keep movin' there. Keep
+movin'." And all these baneful influences may be summoned and set in
+action by another, but worse than all of them, known as the Gerry
+Society. This tyrant denies the parent's right in his own child, forbids
+him to allow a minor to work in sweatshop, store, or even on the stage,
+and enforces these commands, even to the extreme of removing the child
+altogether and putting it in an institution.
+
+In sharp contrast to all these ogres, the board of education shines
+benignant and bland. Here is power making itself manifest in the form of
+young ladies, kindly of eye and speech, who take a sweet and friendly
+interest in the children and all that concerns them. Woman meets woman
+and no policeman interferes. The little ones are cared for, instructed,
+kept out of mischief for five hours a day, taught the language and
+customs of the country in which they are to make their living or their
+fortunes; and generally, though the board of education does not insist
+upon it, they are cherished and watched over. Doctors attend them,
+nurses wait upon them, dentists torture them, oculists test them.
+
+Friendships frequently spring up between parent and teacher, and it
+often lies in the power of the latter to be of service by giving either
+advice or more substantial aid. At Mothers' meetings the cultivation of
+tolerance still goes on. There, women of widely different class and
+nationality, meet on the common ground of their children's welfare. Then
+there are roof gardens, recreation piers and parks, barges and
+excursions, all designed to help the poorer part of the city's
+population--without regard to creed or nationality--to bear and to help
+their children to bear the killing heat of summer. So Jew and Gentile,
+black and white, commingle; and gradually old hostilities are forgotten
+or corrected. The board of education provides night schools for adults
+and free lectures upon every conceivable interesting topic, including
+the history and geography and natural history of distant lands.
+Travelers always draw large audiences to their lectures.
+
+The children soon learn to read well enough to translate the American
+papers and there are always newspapers in the different vernaculars, so
+that the emigrant soon becomes interested not only in the news of his
+own country, but in the multitudinous topics which go to make up
+American life. He soon grasps at least the outlines of politics,
+national and international, and before he can speak English he will
+address an audience of his fellow countrymen on "Our Glorious American
+Institutions."
+
+It is not only the emigrant parent who profits by the work of the public
+school. The American parent also finds himself, or generally herself,
+brought into friendly contact with the foreign teachers and the foreign
+friends of her children. The New York public school system culminates in
+the Normal College, which trains women as teachers, and the College of
+the City of New York, which offers courses to young men in the
+profession of law, engineering, teaching, and, besides, a course in
+business training. The commencement at these institutions brings
+strangely contrasted parents together in a common interest and a common
+pride. The students seem much like one another, but the parents are so
+widely dissimilar as to make the similarity of their offspring an
+amazing fact for contemplation. Mothers with shawls over their heads and
+work-distorted hands sit beside mothers in Parisian costumes, and the
+silk-clad woman is generally clever enough to appreciate and to admire
+the spirit which strengthened her weary neighbor through all the years
+of self-denial, labor, poverty and often hunger, which were necessary to
+pay for the leisure and the education of son or daughter. The feeling of
+inferiority, of uselessness, which this realization entails may
+humiliate the idle woman but it is bound to do her good. It will
+certainly deprive her conversation of sweeping criticisms on lives and
+conditions unknown to her. It will also utterly do away with many of her
+prejudices against the foreigner and it will make the "Let them eat
+cake" attitude impossible.
+
+And so the child, the parent, the teacher and the home-staying relative
+are brought to feel their kinship with all the world through the agency
+of the public school, but the teacher learns the lesson most fully, most
+consciously. The value to the cause of peace and good-will in the
+community of an army of thousands of educated men and women holding
+views such as these cannot easily be over-estimated. The teachers, too,
+are often aliens and nearly always of a race different from their
+pupils, yet you will rarely meet a teacher who is not delighted with her
+charges.
+
+"Do come," they always say, "and see my little Italians, or Irish, or
+German, or picaninnies; they are the sweetest little things," or, if
+they be teachers of a higher grade, "They are the cleverest and the most
+charming children." They are all clever in their different ways, and
+they are all charming to those who know them, and the work of the public
+school is to make this charm and cleverness appreciated, so that race
+misunderstandings in the adult populations may grow fewer and fewer.
+
+The only dissatisfied teacher I ever encountered was a girl of old
+Knickerbocker blood, who was considered by her relatives to be too
+fragile and refined to teach any children except the darlings of the
+upper West side, where some of the rich are democratic enough to
+patronize the public school. From what we heard of her experiences,
+"patronize" is quite the proper word to use in this connection. A group
+of us, classmates, had been comparing notes and asked her from what
+country her charges came. "Oh, they are just kids," she answered
+dejectedly, "ordinary every-day kids, with Dutch cut hair, Russian
+blouses, belts at the knee line, sandals, and nurses to convey them to
+and from school. You never saw anything so tiresome."
+
+It grew finally so tiresome that she applied for a transfer, and took
+the Knickerbocker spirit down to the Jewish quarter, where it gladdened
+the young Jacobs, Rachaels, Isadors and Rebeccas entrusted to her care.
+Her place among the nursery pets was taken by a dark-eyed Russian girl,
+who found the uptown babies, the despised "just kids," as entertaining,
+as lovable, and as instructive as the Knickerbocker girl found the Jews.
+Well, and so they are all of them, lovable, entertaining and
+instructive, and the man or woman who goes among them with an open heart
+and eye will find much material for thought and humility, and one
+function of the public school is to promote this understanding and
+appreciation. It has done wonders in the past, and every year finds it
+better equipped for its work of amalgamation. The making of an American
+citizen is its stated function, but its graduates will be citizens not
+only of America. In sympathy, at least, they will be citizens of the
+world.
+
+
+FINIS
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of New Faces, by Myra Kelly
+
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