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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Gentle Julia, by Booth Tarkington
+
+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: Gentle Julia
+
+Author: Booth Tarkington
+
+Illustrator: C. Allan Gilbert and Worth Brehm
+
+Release Date: April 26, 2006 [EBook #18259]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GENTLE JULIA ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Gentle Julia]
+
+GENTLE JULIA
+
+BY
+BOOTH TARKINGTON
+
+AUTHOR OF PENROD, PENROD AND SAM,
+THE TURMOIL, ETC.
+
+ILLUSTRATED BY
+C. ALLAN GILBERT
+and
+WORTH BREHM
+
+GROSSET & DUNLAP
+PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
+
+Made in the United States of America
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
+DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
+ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY P. F. COLLIER AND SON COMPANY
+COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY THE PICTORIAL REVIEW COMPANY
+
+PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
+AT
+THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+TO M. L. K.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+GENTLE JULIA
+
+"Rising to the point of order, this one said that since the morgue
+was not yet established as the central monument and inspiration of
+our settlement, and true philosophy was as well expounded in the
+convivial manner as in the miserable, he claimed for himself, not
+the license, but the right, to sing a ballad, if he chose, upon even
+so solemn a matter as the misuse of the town pump by witches."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+GENTLE JULIA
+
+CHAPTER ONE
+
+
+Superciliousness is not safe after all, because a person who forms the
+habit of wearing it may some day find his lower lip grown permanently
+projected beyond the upper, so that he can't get it back, and must go
+through life looking like the King of Spain. This was once foretold as a
+probable culmination of Florence Atwater's still plastic profile, if
+Florence didn't change her way of thinking; and upon Florence's
+remarking dreamily that the King of Spain was an awf'ly han'some man,
+her mother retorted: "But not for a girl!" She meant, of course, that a
+girl who looked too much like the King of Spain would not be handsome,
+but her daughter decided to misunderstand her.
+
+"Why, mamma, he's my Very Ideal! I'd marry him to-morrow!"
+
+Mrs. Atwater paused in her darning, and let the stocking collapse
+flaccidly into the work-basket in her lap. "Not at barely thirteen,
+would you?" she said. "It seems to me you're just a shade too young to
+be marrying a man who's already got a wife and several children. Where
+did you pick up that 'I'd-marry-him-to-morrow,' Florence?"
+
+"Oh, I hear that everywhere!" returned the damsel, lightly. "Everybody
+says things like that. I heard Aunt Julia say it. I heard Kitty Silver
+say it."
+
+"About the King of Spain?" Mrs. Atwater inquired.
+
+"I don't know who they were saying it about," said Florence, "but they
+were saying it. I don't mean they were saying it together; I heard one
+say it one time and the other say it some other time. I think Kitty
+Silver was saying it about some coloured man. She proba'ly wouldn't want
+to marry any white man; at least I don't expect she would. She's _been_
+married to a couple of coloured men, anyhow; and she was married twice
+to one of 'em, and the other one died in between. Anyhow, that's what
+she told me. She weighed over two hunderd pounds the first time she was
+married, and she weighed over two hunderd-and-seventy the last time she
+was married to the first one over again, but she says she don't know
+how much she weighed when she was married to the one in between. She
+says she never got weighed all the time she was married to that one. Did
+Kitty Silver ever tell you that, mamma?"
+
+"Yes, often!" Mrs. Atwater replied. "I don't think it's very
+entertaining; and it's not what we were talking about. I was trying to
+tell you----"
+
+"I know," Florence interrupted. "You said I'd get my face so's my
+underlip wouldn't go back where it ought to, if I didn't quit turning up
+my nose at people I think are beneath contemp'. I guess the best thing
+would be to just feel that way without letting on by my face, and then
+there wouldn't be any danger."
+
+"No," said Mrs. Atwater. "That's not what I meant. You mustn't let your
+feelings get _their_ nose turned up, or their underlip out, either,
+because feelings can grow warped just as well as----"
+
+But her remarks had already caused her daughter to follow a trail of
+thought divergent from the main road along which the mother feebly
+struggled to progress. "Mamma," said Florence, "do you b'lieve it's true
+if a person swallows an apple-seed or a lemon-seed or a watermelon-seed,
+f'r instance, do you think they'd have a tree grow up inside of 'em?
+Henry Rooter said it would, yesterday."
+
+Mrs. Atwater looked a little anxious. "Did you swallow some sort of
+seed?" she asked.
+
+"It was only some grape-seeds, mamma; and you needn't think I got to
+take anything for it, because I've swallowed a million, I guess, in my
+time!"
+
+"In your time?" her mother repeated, seemingly mystified.
+
+"Yes, and so have you and papa," Florence went on. "I've seen you when
+you ate grapes. Henry said maybe not, about grapes, because I told him
+all what I've just been telling you, mamma, how I must have swallowed a
+million, in my time, and he said grape-seeds weren't big enough to get a
+good holt, but he said if I was to swallow an apple-seed a tree would
+start up, and in a year or two, maybe, it would grow up so't I couldn't
+get my mouth shut on account the branches."
+
+"Nonsense!"
+
+"Henry said another boy told _him_, but he said you could ask anybody
+and they'd tell you it was true. Henry said this boy that told him's
+uncle died of it when he was eleven years old, and this boy knew a grown
+woman that was pretty sick from it right now. I expect Henry wasn't
+telling such a falsehood about it, mamma, but proba'ly this boy did,
+because I didn't believe it for a minute! Henry Rooter says he never
+told a lie _yet_, in his whole life, mamma, and he wasn't going to begin
+now." She paused for a moment, then added: "I don't believe a word he
+says!"
+
+She continued to meditate disapprovingly upon Henry Rooter. "Old thing!"
+she murmured gloomily, for she had indeed known moments of apprehension
+concerning the grape-seeds. "Nothing but an old thing--what he is!" she
+repeated inaudibly.
+
+"Florence," said Mrs. Atwater, "don't you want to slip over to grandpa's
+and ask Aunt Julia if she has a very large darning needle? And don't
+forget not to look supercilious when you meet people on the way. Even
+your grandfather has been noticing it, and he was the one that spoke of
+it to me. Don't forget!"
+
+"Yes'm."
+
+Florence went out of the house somewhat moodily, but afternoon sunshine
+enlivened her; and, opening the picket gate, she stepped forth with a
+fair renewal of her chosen manner toward the public, though just at that
+moment no public was in sight. Miss Atwater's underlip resumed the
+position for which her mother had predicted that regal Spanish fixity,
+and her eyebrows and nose were all three perceptibly elevated. At the
+same time, her eyelids were half lowered, while the corners of her mouth
+somewhat deepened, as by a veiled mirth, so that this well-dressed child
+strolled down the shady sidewalk wearing an expression not merely of
+high-bred contempt but also of mysterious derision. It was an expression
+that should have put any pedestrian in his place, and it seems a pity
+that the long street before her appeared to be empty of human life. No
+one even so much as glanced from a window of any of the comfortable
+houses, set back at the end of their "front walks" and basking amid
+pleasant lawns; for, naturally, this was the "best residence street" in
+the town, since all the Atwaters and other relatives of Florence dwelt
+there. Happily, an old gentleman turned a corner before she had gone a
+hundred yards, and, as he turned in her direction, it became certain
+that they would meet. He was a stranger--that is to say, he was unknown
+to Florence--and he was well dressed; while his appearance of age
+(proba'ly at least forty or sixty or something) indicated that he might
+have sense enough to be interested in other interesting persons.
+
+An extraordinary change took place upon the surface of Florence Atwater:
+all superciliousness and derision of the world vanished; her eyes opened
+wide, and into them came a look at once far-away and intently fixed.
+Also, a frown of concentration appeared upon her brow, and her lips
+moved silently, but with rapidity, as if she repeated to herself
+something of almost tragic import. Florence had recently read a
+newspaper account of the earlier struggles of a now successful actress:
+As a girl, this determined genius went about the streets repeating the
+lines of various roles to herself--constantly rehearsing, in fact, upon
+the public thoroughfares, so carried away was she by her intended
+profession and so set upon becoming famous. This was what Florence was
+doing now, except that she rehearsed no rôle in particular, and the
+words formed by her lips were neither sequential nor consequential,
+being, in fact, the following: "Oh, the darkness ... never, never,
+never! ... you couldn't ... he wouldn't ... Ah, mother! ... Where the
+river swings so slowly ... Ah, _no_!" Nevertheless, she was doing all
+she could for the elderly stranger, and as they came closer,
+encountered, and passed on, she had the definite impression that he did
+indeed take her to be a struggling young actress who would some day be
+famous--and then he might see her on a night of triumph and recognize
+her as the girl he had passed on the street, that day, so long ago! But
+by this time, the episode was concluded; the footsteps of him for whom
+she was performing had become inaudible behind her, and she began to
+forget him; which was as well, since he went out of her life then, and
+the two never met again. The struggling young actress disappeared, and
+the previous superiority was resumed. It became elaborately emphasized
+as a boy of her own age emerged from the "side yard" of a house at the
+next corner and came into her view.
+
+The boy caught sight of Florence in plenty of time to observe this
+emphasis, which was all too obviously produced by her sensations at
+sight of himself; and, after staring at her for a moment, he allowed his
+own expression to become one of painful fatigue. Then he slowly swung
+about, as if to return into that side-yard obscurity whence he had come;
+making clear by this pantomime that he reciprocally found the sight of
+her insufferable. In truth, he did; for he was not only her neighbour
+but her first-cousin as well, and a short month older, though taller
+than she--tall beyond his years, taller than need be, in fact, and still
+in knickerbockers. However, his parents may not have been mistaken in
+the matter, for it was plain that he looked as well in knickerbockers as
+he could have looked in anything. He had no visible beauty, though it
+was possible to hope for him that by the time he reached manhood he
+would be more tightly put together than he seemed at present; and indeed
+he himself appeared to have some consciousness of insecurity in the
+fastenings of his members, for it was his habit (observable even now as
+he turned to avoid Miss Atwater) to haul at himself, to sag and hitch
+about inside his clothes, and to corkscrew his neck against the swathing
+of his collar. And yet there were times, as the most affectionate of his
+aunts had remarked, when, for a moment or so, he appeared to be almost
+knowing; and, seeing him walking before her, she had almost taken him
+for a young man; and sometimes he said something in a settled kind of
+way that was almost adult. This fondest aunt went on to add, however,
+that of course, the next minute after one of these fleeting spells, he
+was sure to be overtaken by his more accustomed moods, when his eye
+would again fix itself with fundamental aimlessness upon nothing. In
+brief, he was at the age when he spent most of his time changing his
+mind about things, or, rather, when his mind spent most of its time
+changing him about things; and this was what happened now.
+
+After turning his back on the hateful sight well known to him as his
+cousin Florence at her freshest, he turned again, came forth from his
+place of residence, and joining her upon the pavement, walked beside
+her, accompanying her without greeting or inquiry. His expression of
+fatigue, indicating her insufferableness, had not abated; neither had
+her air of being a duchess looking at bugs.
+
+"You _are_ a pretty one!" he said; but his intention was perceived to be
+far indeed from his words.
+
+"Oh, _am_ I, Mister Herbert Atwater?" Florence responded. "I'm _awf'ly_
+glad _you_ think so!"
+
+"I mean about what Henry Rooter said," her cousin explained. "Henry
+Rooter told me he made you believe you were goin' to have a grapevine
+climbin' up from inside of you because you ate some grapes with the
+seeds in 'em. He says you thought you'd haf to get a carpenter to build
+a little arbour so you could swallow it for the grapevine to grow on. He
+says----"
+
+Florence had become an angry pink. "That little Henry Rooter is the
+worst falsehooder in this town; and I never believed a word he said in
+his life! Anyway, what affairs is it of yours, I'd like you to please be
+so kind and obliging for to tell me, Mister Herbert Illingsworth
+Atwater, Exquire!"
+
+"What affairs?" Herbert echoed in plaintive satire. "What affairs is it
+of mine? That's just the trouble! It's _got_ to be my affairs because
+you're my first-cousin. My goodness _I_ didn't have anything to do with
+you being my cousin, did I?"
+
+"Well, _I_ didn't!"
+
+"That's neither here nor there," said Herbert. "What _I_ want to know
+is, how long you goin' to keep this up?"
+
+"Keep what up?"
+
+"I mean, how do you think I like havin' somebody like Henry Rooter
+comin' round me tellin' what they made a cousin of mine believe, and
+more than thirteen years old, goin' on fourteen ever since about a month
+ago!"
+
+Florence shouted: "Oh, for goodness' _sakes_!" then moderated the volume
+but not the intensity of her tone. "Kindly reply to _this_. Whoever
+asked you to come and take a walk with me to-day?"
+
+Herbert protested to heaven. "Why, I wouldn't take a walk with you if
+every policeman in this town tried to make me! I wouldn't take a walk
+with you if they brought a million horses and--"
+
+"I wouldn't take a walk with _you_," Florence interrupted, "if they
+brought a million million horses and cows and camels and--"
+
+"No, you wouldn't," Herbert said. "Not if _I_ could help it!"
+
+But by this time Florence had regained her derisive superciliousness.
+"There's a few things you _could_ help," she said; and the incautious
+Herbert challenged her with the inquiry she desired.
+
+"What could I help?"
+
+"I should think you could help bumpin' into me every second when I'm
+takin' a walk on my own affairs, and walk along on your own side of the
+sidewalk, anyway, and not be so awkward a person has to keep trippin'
+over you about every time I try to take a step!"
+
+Herbert withdrew temporarily to his own side of the pavement. "Who?" he
+demanded hotly. "_Who_ says I'm awkward?"
+
+"All the fam'ly," Miss Atwater returned, with a light but infuriating
+laugh. "You bump into 'em sideways and keep gettin' half in front of
+'em whenever they try to take a step, and then when it looks as if
+they'd pretty near fall over you--"
+
+"You look here!"
+
+"And besides all that," Florence went on, undisturbed, "why, you
+generally keep kind of snorting, or somep'n, and then making all those
+noises in your neck. You were doin' it at grandpa's last Sunday dinner
+because every time there wasn't anybody talking, why, everybody could
+hear you plain as everything, and you ought to've seen grandpa look at
+you! He looked as if you'd set him crazy if you didn't quit that
+chuttering and cluckling!"
+
+Herbert's expression partook of a furious astonishment. "I don't any
+such thing!" he burst out. "I guess I wouldn't talk much about last
+Sunday dinner, if I was _you_ neither. Who got caught eatin' off the ice
+cream freezer spoon out on the back porch, if you please? Yes, and I
+guess you better study a little grammar, while you're about it. There's
+no such words in the English language as 'cluckling' and 'chuttering.'"
+
+"I don't care what language they're in," the stubborn Florence insisted.
+"It's what you do, just the same: cluckling and chuttering!"
+
+Herbert's manners went to pieces. "Oh, dry up!" he bellowed.
+
+"That's a _nice_ way to talk! So gentlemanly----"
+
+"Well, you try be a lady, then!"
+
+"'Try!'" Florence echoed. "Well, after that, I'll just politely thank you
+to dry up, yourself, Mister Herbert Atwater!"
+
+At this Herbert became moody. "Oh, pfuff!" he said; and for some moments
+walked in silence. Then he asked: "Where you goin', Florence?"
+
+The damsel paused at a gate opening upon a broad lawn evenly divided by
+a brick walk that led to the white-painted wooden veranda of an ample
+and honest old brick house. "Righ' there to grandpa's, since you haf to
+know!" she said. "And thank you for your delightful comp'ny which I
+never asked for, if you care to hear the truth for once in your life!"
+
+Herbert meditated. "Well, I got nothin' else to do, as I know of," he
+said. "Let's go around to the back door so's to see if Kitty Silver's
+got anything."
+
+Then, not amiably, but at least inconsequently, they passed inside the
+gate together. Their brows were fairly unclouded; no special marks of
+conflict remained; for they had met and conversed in a manner customary
+rather than unusual.
+
+They followed a branch of the brick walk and passed round the south side
+of the house, where a small orchard of apple-trees showed generous
+promise. Hundreds of gay little round apples among the leaves glanced
+the high lights to and fro on their polished green cheeks as a breeze
+hopped through the yard, while the shade beneath trembled with
+coquettishly moving disks of sunshine like golden plates. A pattern of
+orange light and blue shadow was laid like a fanciful plaid over the
+lattice and the wide, slightly sagging steps of the elderly "back
+porch"; and here, taking her ease upon these steps, sat a middle-aged
+coloured woman of continental proportions. Beyond all contest, she was
+the largest coloured woman in that town, though her height was not
+unusual, and she had a rather small face. That is to say, as Florence
+had once explained to her, her face was small but the other parts of her
+head were terribly wide. Beside her was a circular brown basket, of a
+type suggesting arts-and-crafts; it was made with a cover, and there was
+a bow of brown silk upon the handle.
+
+"What you been up to to-day, Kitty Silver?" Herbert asked genially.
+"Any thing special?" For this was the sequel to his "so's we can see if
+Kitty Silver's got anything." But Mrs. Silver discouraged him.
+
+"No, I ain't," she replied. "I ain't, an' I ain't goin' to."
+
+"I thought you pretty near always made cookies on Tuesday," he said.
+
+"Well, I ain't _this_ Tuesday," said Kitty Silver. "I ain't, and I ain't
+goin' to. You might dess well g'on home ri' now. I ain't, an' I ain't
+goin' to."
+
+Docility was no element of Mrs. Silver's present mood, and Herbert's
+hopeful eyes became blank, as his gaze wandered from her head to the
+brown basket beside her. The basket did not interest him; the ribbon
+gave it a quality almost at once excluding it from his consciousness. On
+the contrary, the ribbon had drawn Florence's attention, and she stared
+at the basket eagerly.
+
+"What you got there, Kitty Silver?" she asked.
+
+"What I got where?"
+
+"In that basket."
+
+"Nemmine what I got 'n 'at basket," said Mrs. Silver crossly, but added
+inconsistently: "I dess _wish_ somebody ast me what I got 'n 'at basket!
+_I_ ain't no cat-washwoman fer _no_body!"
+
+"Cats!" Florence cried. "Are there cats in that basket, Kitty Silver?
+Let's look at 'em!"
+
+The lid of the basket, lifted by the eager, slim hand of Miss Atwater,
+rose to disclose two cats of an age slightly beyond kittenhood. They
+were of a breed unfamiliar to Florence, and she did not obey the impulse
+that usually makes a girl seize upon any young cat at sight and caress
+it. Instead, she looked at them with some perplexity, and after a moment
+inquired: "Are they really cats, Kitty Silver, do you b'lieve?"
+
+"Cats what she done tole _me_," the coloured woman replied. "You betta
+shet lid down, you don' wan' 'em run away, 'cause they ain't yoosta
+livin' 'n 'at basket yit; an' no matter whut kine o' cats they is or
+they isn't, _one_ thing true: they _wile_ cats!"
+
+"But what makes their hair so long?" Florence asked. "I never saw cats
+with hair a couple inches long like that."
+
+"Miss Julia say they Berjum cats."
+
+"What?"
+
+"I ain't tellin' no mo'n she tole me. You' aunt say they Berjum cats."
+
+"Persian," said Herbert. "That's nothing. I've seen plenty Persian cats.
+My goodness, I should think you'd seen a Persian cat at yow age.
+Thirteen goin' on fourteen!"
+
+"Well, I _have_ seen Persian cats plenty times, I guess," Florence said.
+"I thought Persian cats were white, and these are kind of gray."
+
+At this Kitty Silver permitted herself to utter an embittered laugh.
+"You wrong!" she said. "These cats, they white; yes'm!"
+
+"Why, they aren't either! They're gray as----"
+
+"No'm," said Mrs. Silver. "They plum spang white, else you' Aunt Julia
+gone out her mind; me or her, one. I say: 'Miss Julia, them gray cats.'
+'White,' she say. 'Them two cats is white cats,' she say. 'Them cats
+been crated,' she say. 'They been livin' in a crate on a dirty express
+train fer th'ee fo' days,' she say. 'Them cats gone got all smoke' up
+thataway,' she say. 'No'm, Miss Julia,' I say, 'No'm, Miss Julia, they
+ain't _no_ train,' I say, 'they ain't _no_ train kin take an' smoke two
+white cats up like these cats so's they hair is gray clean plum up to
+they hide.' You betta put the lid down, I tell you!"
+
+Florence complied, just in time to prevent one of the young cats from
+leaping out of the basket, but she did not fasten the cover. Instead,
+she knelt, and, allowing a space of half an inch to intervene between
+the basket and the rim of the cover, peered within at the occupants. "I
+believe the one to this side's a he," she said. "It's got greenisher
+eyes than the other one; that's the way you can always tell. I b'lieve
+this one's a he and the other one's a she."
+
+"I ain't stedyin' about no he an' she!"
+
+"What did Aunt Julia say?" Florence asked.
+
+"Whut you' Aunt Julia say when?"
+
+"When you told her these were gray cats and not white cats?"
+
+"She tole me take an' clean 'em," said Kitty Silver. "She say, she say
+she want 'em clean' up spick an' spang befo' Mista Sammerses git here to
+call an' see 'em." And she added morosely: "I ain't no cat-washwoman!"
+
+"She wants you to bathe 'em?" Florence inquired, but Kitty Silver did
+not reply immediately. She breathed audibly, with a strange effect upon
+vasty outward portions of her, and then gave an incomparably dulcet
+imitation of her own voice, as she interpreted her use of it during the
+recent interview.
+
+'Miss Julia, ma'am,' I say--'Miss Julia, ma'am, my bizniss cookin'
+vittles,' I say. 'Miss Julia, ma'am,' I tole her, 'Miss Julia, ma'am, I
+cook fer you' pa, an' cook fer you' fam'ly year in, year out, an' I hope
+an' pursue, whiles some might make complaint, I take whatever I find,
+an' I leave whatever I find. No'm, Miss Julia, ma'am,' I say--'no'm,
+Miss Julia, ma'am, I ain't no cat-washwoman!'"
+
+"What did Aunt Julia say then?"
+
+"She say, she say: 'Di'n I tell you take them cats downstairs an' clean
+'em?' she say. I ain't _no_body's cat-washwoman!"
+
+Florence was becoming more and more interested. "I should think that
+would be kind of fun," she said. "To be a cat-washwoman. _I_ wouldn't
+mind that at all: I'd kind of like it. I expect if you was a
+cat-washwoman, Kitty Silver, you'd be pretty near the only one was in
+the world. I wonder if they do have 'em any place, cat-washwomen."
+
+"I don' know if they got 'em some place," said Kitty Silver, "an' I
+don't know if they ain't got 'em no place; but I bet if they do got 'em
+any place, it's some place else from here!"
+
+Florence looked thoughtful. "Who was it you said is going to call this
+evening and see 'em?"
+
+"Mista Sammerses."
+
+"She means Newland Sanders," Herbert explained. "Aunt Julia says all her
+callers that ever came to this house in their lives, Kitty Silver never
+got the name right of a single one of 'em!"
+
+"Newland Sanders is the one with the little moustache," Florence said.
+"Is that the one you mean by 'Sammerses,' Kitty Silver?"
+
+"Mista Sammerses who you' Aunt Julia tole _me_," Mrs. Silver responded
+stubbornly. "He ain't got no moustache whut you kin look at--dess some
+blackish whut don' reach out mo'n halfway todes the bofe ends of his
+mouf."
+
+"Well," said Florence, "was Mr. Sanders the one gave her these Persian
+cats, Kitty Silver?"
+
+"I reckon." Mrs. Silver breathed audibly again, and her expression was
+strongly resentful. "When she go fer a walk 'long with any them callers
+she stop an' make a big fuss over any li'l ole dog or cat an' I don't
+know whut all, an' after they done buy her all the candy from all the
+candy sto's in the livin' worl', an' all the flowers from all the
+greenhouses they is, it's a wonder some of 'em ain't sen' her a mule fer
+a present, 'cause seem like to me they done sen' her mos' every kine of
+animal they is! Firs' come Airydale dog you' grampaw tuck an' give away
+to the milkman; 'n'en come two mo' pups; I don't know whut they is,
+'cause they bofe had dess sense enough to run away after you' grampaw
+try learn 'em how much he ain't like no pups; an' nex' come them two
+canaries hangin' in the dinin'-room now, an' nex'--di'n' I holler so's
+they could a-hear me all way down town? Di'n' I walk in my kitchen one
+mawnin' right slam in the face of ole warty allagatuh three foot long
+a-lookin' at me over the aidge o' my kitchen sink?"
+
+"It was Mr. Clairdyce gave her that," said Florence. "He'd been to
+Florida; but she didn't care for it very much, and she didn't make any
+fuss at all when grandpa got the florist to take it. Grandpa hates
+animals."
+
+"He don' hate 'em no wuss'n whut I do," said Kitty Silver. "An' he ain't
+got to ketch 'em lookin' at him outen of his kitchen sink--an' he ain't
+fixin' to be no cat-washwoman neither!"
+
+"_Are_ you fixing to?" Florence asked quickly. "You don't need to do it,
+Kitty Silver. I'd be willing to, and so'd Herbert. Wouldn't you,
+Herbert?"
+
+Herbert deliberated within himself, then brightened. "I'd just as soon,"
+he said. "I'd kind of like to see how a cat acts when it's getting
+bathed."
+
+"I think it would be spesh'ly inter'sting to wash Persian cats,"
+Florence added, with increasing enthusiasm. "I never washed a cat in my
+life."
+
+"Neither have I," said Herbert. "I always thought they did it
+themselves."
+
+Kitty Silver sniffed. "Ain't I says so to you' Aunt Julia? She done tole
+me, 'No,' she say. She say, she say Berjum cats ain't wash they self;
+they got to take an' git somebody else to wash 'em!"
+
+"If we're goin' to bathe 'em," said Florence, "we ought to know their
+names, so's we can tell 'em to hold still and everything. You can't do
+much with an animal unless you know their name. Did Aunt Julia tell you
+these cats' names, Kitty Silver?"
+
+"She say they name Feef an' Meemuh. Yes'm! Feef an' Meemuh! Whut kine o'
+name is Feef an' Meemuh fer cat name!"
+
+"Oh, those are lovely names!" Florence assured her, and, turning to
+Herbert, explained: "She means Fifi and Mimi."
+
+"Feef an' Meemuh," said Kitty Silver. "Them name don' suit me, an' them
+long-hair cats don' suit me neither." Here she lifted the cover of the
+basket a little, and gazed nervously within. "Look at there!" she said.
+"Look at the way they lookin' at me! Don't you look at _me_ thataway,
+you Feef an' Meemuh!" She clapped the lid down and fastened it. "Fixin'
+to jump out an' grab me, was you?"
+
+"I guess, maybe," said Florence, "maybe I better go ask Aunt Julia if I
+and Herbert can't wash 'em. I guess I better go _ask_ her anyhow." And
+she ran up the steps and skipped into the house by way of the kitchen. A
+moment later she appeared in the open doorway of a room upstairs.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER TWO
+
+
+It was a pretty room, lightly scented with the pink geraniums and blue
+lobelia and coral fuchsias that poised, urgent with colour, in the
+window-boxes at the open windows. Sunshine paused delicately just
+inside, where forms of pale-blue birds and lavender flowers curled up
+and down the cretonne curtains; and a tempered, respectful light fell
+upon a cushioned _chaise longue_; for there fluffily reclined, in
+garments of tender fabric and gentle colours, the prettiest
+twenty-year-old girl in that creditably supplied town.
+
+It must be said that no stranger would have taken Florence at first
+glance to be her niece, though everybody admitted that Florence's hair
+was pretty. ("I'll say _that_ for her," was the family way of putting
+it.). Florence did not care for her hair herself; it was dark and thick
+and long, like her Aunt Julia's; but Florence--even in the realistic
+presence of a mirror--preferred to think of herself as an ashen blonde,
+and also as about a foot taller than she was. Persistence kept this
+picture habitually in her mind, which, of course, helps to explain her
+feeling that she was justified in wearing that manner of
+superciliousness deplored by her mother. More middle-aged gentlemen than
+are suspected believe that they look like the waspen youths in the
+magazine advertisements of clothes; and this impression of theirs
+accounts (as with Florence) for much that is seemingly inexplicable in
+their behaviour.
+
+Florence's Aunt Julia was reading an exquisitely made little book, which
+bore her initials stamped in gold upon the cover; and it had evidently
+reached her by a recent delivery of the mail, for wrappings bearing
+cancelled stamps lay upon the floor beside the _chaise longue_. It was a
+special sort of book, since its interior was not printed, but all
+laboriously written with pen and ink--poems, in truth, containing more
+references to a lady named Julia than have appeared in any other poems
+since Herrick's. So warmly interested in the reading as to be rather
+pink, though not always with entire approval, this Julia nevertheless,
+at the sound of footsteps, closed the book and placed it beneath one of
+the cushions assisting the _chaise longue_ to make her position a
+comfortable one. Her greeting was not enthusiastic.
+
+"What do you want, Florence?"
+
+"I was going to ask you if Herbert and me--I mean: Was it Noble Dill
+gave you Fifi and Mimi, Aunt Julia?"
+
+"Noble Dill? No."
+
+"I wish it was," Florence said. "I'd like these cats better if they were
+from Noble Dill."
+
+"Why?" Julia inquired. "Why are you so partial to Mr. Noble Dill?"
+
+"I think he's _so_ much the most inter'sting looking of all that come to
+see you. Are you _sure_ it wasn't Noble Dill gave you these cats, Aunt
+Julia?"
+
+A look of weariness became plainly visible upon Miss Julia Atwater's
+charming face. "I do wish you'd hurry and grow up, Florence," she said.
+
+"I do, too! What for, Aunt Julia?"
+
+"So there'd be somebody else in the family of an eligible age. I really
+think it's an outrageous position to be in," Julia continued, with
+languid vehemence--"to be the only girl between thirteen and forty-one
+in a large connection of near relatives, including children, who all
+seem to think they haven't anything to think of but Who comes to see
+her, and Who came to see her yesterday, and Who was here the day before,
+and Who's coming to-morrow, and Who's she going to marry! You really
+ought to grow up and help me out, because I'm getting tired of it. No.
+It wasn't Noble Dill but Mr. Newland Sanders that sent me Fifi and
+Mimi--and I want you to keep away from 'em."
+
+"Why?" asked Florence.
+
+"Because they're very rare cats, and you aren't ordinarily a very
+careful sort of person, Florence, if you don't mind my saying so.
+Besides, if I let you go near them, the next thing Herbert would be over
+here mussing around, and he can't go near _anything_ without ruining it!
+It's just in him; he can't help it."
+
+Florence looked thoughtful for a brief moment; then she asked: "Did
+Newland Sanders send 'em with the names already to them?"
+
+"No," said Julia, emphasizing the patience of her tone somewhat. "I
+named them after they got here. Mr. Sanders hasn't seen them yet. He had
+them shipped to me. He's coming this evening. Anything more to-day,
+Florence?"
+
+"Well, I was thinking," said Florence. "What do you think grandpa'll
+think about these cats?"
+
+"I don't believe there'll be any more outrages," Julia returned, and her
+dark eyes showed a moment's animation. "I told him at breakfast that
+the Reign of Terror was ended, and he and everybody else had to keep
+away from Fifi and Mimi. Is that about all, Florence?"
+
+"You let Kitty Silver go near 'em, though. She says she's fixing to wash
+'em."
+
+Julia smiled faintly. "I thought she would! I had to go so far as to
+tell her that as long as I'm housekeeper in my father's house she'd do
+what I say or find some other place. She behaved outrageously and
+pretended to believe the natural colour of Fifi and Mimi is gray!"
+
+"I expect," said Florence, after pondering seriously for a little
+while--"I expect it would take quite some time to dry them."
+
+"No doubt. But I'd rather you didn't assist. I'd rather you weren't even
+around looking on, Florence."
+
+A shade fell upon her niece's face at this. "Why, Aunt Julia, I couldn't
+do any harm to Fifi and Mimi just _lookin'_ at 'em, could I?"
+
+Julia laughed. "That's the trouble; you never do 'just look' at anything
+you're interested in, and, if you don't mind my saying so, you've got
+rather a record, dear! Now, don't you care: you can find lots of other
+pleasant things to do at home--or over at Herbert's, or Aunt Fanny's.
+You run along now and----"
+
+"Well----" Florence said, moving as if to depart.
+
+"You might as well go out by the front door, child," Julia suggested,
+with a little watchful urgency. "You come over some day when Fifi and
+Mimi have got used to the place, and you can look at them all you want
+to."
+
+"Well, I just----"
+
+But as Florence seemed disposed still to linger, her aunt's manner
+became more severe, and she half rose from her reclining position.
+
+"No, I really mean it! Fifi and Mimi are royal-bred Persian cats with a
+wonderful pedigree, and I don't know how much trouble and expense it
+cost Mr. Sanders to get them for me. They're entirely different from
+ordinary cats; they're very fine and queer, and if anything happens to
+them, after all the trouble papa's made over other presents I've had,
+I'll go straight to a sanitarium! No, Florence, you keep away from the
+kitchen to-day, and I'd like to hear the front door as you go out."
+
+"Well," said Florence; "I do wish if these cats are as fine as all that,
+it was Noble Dill that gave 'em to you. I'd like these cats lots better
+if _he_ gave 'em to you, wouldn't you?"
+
+"No, I wouldn't."
+
+"Well----" Florence said again, and departed.
+
+Twenty is an unsuspicious age, except when it fears that its dignity or
+grace may be threatened from without; and it might have been a "bad
+sign" in revelation of Julia Atwater's character if she had failed to
+accept the muffled metallic clash of the front door's closing as a token
+that her niece had taken a complete departure for home. A supplemental
+confirmation came a moment later, fainter but no less conclusive: the
+distant slamming of the front gate; and it made a clear picture of an
+obedient Florence on her homeward way. Peace came upon Julia: she read
+in her book, while at times she dropped a languid, graceful arm, and,
+with the pretty hand at the slimmer end of it, groped in a dark shelter
+beneath her couch to make a selection, merely by her well-experienced
+sense of touch, from a frilled white box that lay in concealment there.
+Then, bringing forth a crystalline violet become scented sugar, or a bit
+of fruit translucent in hardened sirup, she would delicately set it on
+the way to that attractive dissolution hoped for it by the wistful
+donor--and all without removing her shadowy eyes from the little volume
+and its patient struggle for dignified rhymes with "Julia." Florence
+was no longer in her beautiful relative's thoughts.
+
+Florence was idly in the thoughts, however, of Mrs. Balche, the
+next-door neighbour to the south. Happening to glance from a bay-window,
+she negligently marked how the child walked to the front gate, opened
+it, paused for a moment's meditation, then hurled the gate to a vigorous
+closure, herself remaining within its protection. "Odd!" Mrs. Balche
+murmured.
+
+Having thus eloquently closed the gate, Florence slowly turned and moved
+toward the rear of the house, quickening her steps as she went, until at
+a run she disappeared from the scope of Mrs. Balche's gaze, cut off by
+the intervening foliage of Mr. Atwater's small orchard. Mrs. Balche felt
+no great interest; nevertheless, she paused at the sound of a boy's
+voice, half husky, half shrill, in an early stage of change. "What she
+say, Flor'nce? D'she say we could?" But there came a warning "_Hush
+up_!" from Florence, and then, in a lowered tone, the boy's voice said:
+"Look here; these are mighty funny-actin' cats. I think they're kind of
+crazy or somep'n. Kitty Silver's fixed a washtub full o' suds for us."
+
+Mrs. Balche was reminded of her own cat, and went to give it a little
+cream. Mrs. Balche was a retired widow, without children, and too timid
+to like dogs; but after a suitable interval, following the loss of her
+husband, she accepted from a friend the gift of a white kitten, and
+named it Violet. It may be said that Mrs. Balche, having few interests
+in life, and being of a sequestering nature, lived for Violet, and that
+so much devotion was not good for the latter's health. In his youth,
+after having shown sufficient spirit to lose an eye during a sporting
+absence of three nights and days, Violet was not again permitted enough
+freedom of action to repeat this disloyalty; though, now, in his
+advanced middle-age, he had been fed to such a state that he seldom
+cared to move, other than by a slow, sneering wavement of the tail when
+friendly words were addressed to him; and consequently, as he seemed
+beyond all capacity or desire to run away, or to run at all, Mrs. Balche
+allowed him complete liberty of action.
+
+She found him asleep upon her "back porch," and placed beside him a
+saucer of cream, the second since his luncheon. Then she watched him
+affectionately as he opened his eye, turned toward the saucer his noble
+Henry-the-Eighth head with its great furred jowls, and began the process
+of rising for more food, which was all that ever seemed even feebly to
+rouse his mind. When he had risen, there was little space between him
+anywhere and the floor.
+
+Violet took his cream without enthusiasm, pausing at times and turning
+his head away. In fact, he persisted only out of an incorrigible
+sensuality, and finally withdrew a pace or two, leaving creamy traces
+still upon the saucer. With a multitude of fond words his kind mistress
+drew his attention to these, whereupon, making a visible effort, he
+returned and disposed of them.
+
+"Dat's de 'itty darlin'," she said, stooping to stroke him. "Eat um all
+up nice clean. Dood for ole sweet sin!" She continued to stroke him, and
+Violet half closed his eye, but not with love or serenity, for he
+simultaneously gestured with his tail, meaning to say: "Oh, do take your
+hands off o' me!" Then he opened the eye and paid a little attention to
+sounds from the neighbouring yard. A high fence, shrubberies, and
+foliage concealed that yard from the view of Violet, but the sounds were
+eloquent to him, since they were those made by members of his own
+general species when threatening atrocities. The accent may have been
+foreign, but Violet caught perfectly the sense of what was being said,
+and instinctively he muttered reciprocal curses within himself.
+
+"What a matta, honey?" his companion inquired sympathetically. "Ess, bad
+people f'ighten poor Violet!"
+
+From beyond the fence came the murmurings of a boy and a girl in hushed
+but urgent conversation; and with these sounds there mingled watery
+agitations, splashings and the like, as well as those low vocalizings
+that Violet had recognized; but suddenly there were muffled explosions,
+like fireworks choked in feather beds; and the human voices grew
+uncontrollably somewhat louder, so that their import was
+distinguishable. "_Ow!_" "Hush up, can't you? You want to bring the
+whole town to--_ow!_" "Hush up yourself!" "Oh, _goodness_!" "Look out!
+Don't let her----" "Well, look what she's _doin'_ to me, can't you?"
+"For Heavenses' sakes, catch holt and----_Ow!_"
+
+Then came a husky voice, inevitably that of a horrified coloured person
+hastening from a distance: "Oh, my soul!" There was a scurrying, and the
+girl was heard in furious yet hoarsely guarded vehemence: "Bring the
+clo'es prop! Bring the clo'es prop! We can poke that one down from the
+garage, anyway. _Oh, my goodness, look at 'er go!_"
+
+Mrs. Balche shook her head. "Naughty children!" she said, as she picked
+up the saucer and went to the kitchen door, which she held open for
+Violet to enter. "Want to come with mamma?"
+
+But Violet had lost even the faint interest in life he had shown a few
+moments earlier. He settled himself to another stupor in the sun.
+
+"Well, well," Mrs. Balche said indulgently. "Afterwhile shall have some
+more nice keem."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Sunset was beginning to be hinted, two hours later, when, in another
+quarter of the town, a little girl of seven or eight, at play on the
+domestic side of an alley gate, became aware of an older girl regarding
+her fixedly over the top of the gate. The little girl felt embarrassed
+and paused in her gayeties, enfolding in her arms her pet and playmate.
+"Howdy' do," said the stranger, in a serious tone. "What'll you take for
+that cat?"
+
+The little girl made no reply, and the stranger, opening the gate, came
+into the yard. She looked weary, rather bedraggled, yet hurried: her air
+was predominantly one of anxiety. "I'll give you a quarter for that
+cat," she said. "I want an all-white cat, but this one's only got that
+one gray spot over its eye, and I don't believe there's an all-white
+cat left in town, leastways that anybody's willing to part with. I'll
+give you twenty-five cents for it. I haven't got it with me, but I'll
+promise to give it to you day after to-morrow."
+
+The little girl still made no reply, but continued to stare, her eyes
+widening, and the caller spoke with desperation.
+
+"See here," she said, "I _got_ to have a whitish cat! That'n isn't worth
+more'n a quarter, but I'll give you thirty-five cents for her, money
+down, day after to-morrow."
+
+At this, the frightened child set the cat upon the ground and fled into
+the house. Florence Atwater was left alone; that is to say, she was the
+only human being in the yard, or in sight. Nevertheless, a human voice
+spoke, not far behind her. It came through a knot-hole in the fence, and
+it was a voice almost of passion.
+
+"_You grab it!_"
+
+Florence stood in silence, motionless; there was a solemnity about her.
+The voice exhorted. "My goodness!" it said. "She didn't say she
+_wouldn't_ sell it, did she? You can bring her the money like you said
+you would, can't you? I got _mine_, didn't I, almost without any
+trouble at all! My Heavens! Ain't Kitty Silver pretty near crazy? Just
+think of the position we've put her into! I tell you, you _got_ to!"
+
+But now Florence moved. She moved slowly at first: then with more
+decision and rapidity.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That evening's dusk had deepened into blue night when the two cousins,
+each with a scant, uneasy dinner eaten, met by appointment in the alley
+behind their mutual grandfather's place of residence, and, having
+climbed the back fence, approached the kitchen. Suddenly Florence lifted
+her right hand, and took between thumb and forefinger a lock of hair
+upon the back of Herbert's head.
+
+"Well, for Heavenses' sakes!" he burst out, justifiably protesting.
+
+"Hush!" Florence warned him. "Kitty Silver's talkin' to somebody in
+there. It might be Aunt Julia! C'm'ere!"
+
+She led him to a position beneath an open window of the kitchen. Here
+they sat upon the ground, with their backs against the stone foundation
+of the house, and listened to voices and the clink of dishes being
+washed.
+
+"She's got another ole coloured darky woman in there with her," said
+Florence. "It's a woman belongs to her church and comes to see her 'most
+every evening. Listen; she's telling her about it. I bet we could get
+the real truth of it maybe better this way than if we went in and asked
+her right out. Anyway, it isn't eavesdropping if you listen when people
+are talkin' about you, yourself. It's only wrong when it isn't any of
+your own bus--"
+
+"For Heavenses' sakes hush _up_!" her cousin remonstrated. "Listen!"
+
+"'No'm, Miss Julia, ma'am,' I say"--thus came the voice of Mrs.
+Silver--"'no'm, Miss Julia, ma'am. Them the same two cats you han' me,
+Miss Julia, ma'am,' I say. 'Leas'wise,' I say, 'them the two same cats
+whut was in nat closed-up brown basket when I open it up an' take an'
+fix to wash 'em. Somebody might 'a' took an' change 'em 'fo' they got to
+_me_,' I say, 'Miss Julia, ma'am, but all the change happen to 'em sence
+they been in charge of _me_, that's the gray whut come off 'em whiles I
+washin' 'em an' dryin' 'em in corn meal and flannel. I dunno how much
+_washin'_ 'em change 'em, Miss Julia, ma'am,' I say, ''cause how much
+they change or ain't change, that's fer you to say and me not to jedge,'
+I say."
+
+"Lan' o' misery!" cried the visitor, chuckling delightedly. "I wonder
+how you done kep' you face, Miss Kitty. What Miss Julia say?"
+
+A loud, irresponsible outburst of mirth on the part of Mrs. Silver
+followed. When she could again control herself, she replied more
+definitely. "Miss Julia say, she say she ain't never hear no sech
+outragelous sto'y in her life! She _tuck_ on! Hallelujah! An' all time,
+Miz Johnson, I give you my word, I stannin' there holdin' nat basket,
+carryin' on up hill an' down dale how them the same two Berjum cats
+Mista Sammerses sen' her: an' trouble enough dess ten'in' to that
+basket, lemme say to you, Miz Johnson, as anybody kin tell you whutever
+tried to take care o' two cats whut ain't yoosta each other in the same
+basket. An' every blessed minute I stannin' there, can't I hear that ole
+Miz Blatch nex' do', out in her back yod an' her front yod, an' plum out
+in the street, hollerin': 'Kitty? Kitty? Kitty?' '_Yes!_' Miss Julia
+say, she say, 'Fine sto'y!' she say. 'Them two cats you claim my Berjum
+cats, they got short hair, an' they ain't the same age an' they ain't
+even nowheres near the same _size_,' she say. 'One of 'em's as fat as
+_bofe_ them Berjum cats,' she say: 'an' it's on'y got one eye,' she say.
+'Well, Miss Julia, ma'am,' I say--'_one_ thing; they come out white,
+all 'cept dess around that there skinnier one's eye,' I say: 'dess the
+same you tell me they goin' to,' I say. 'You right about _that_ much,
+ma'am!' I say."
+
+"Oh, me!" Mrs. Johnson moaned, worn with applausive laughter. "What she
+respon' then?"
+
+"I set that basket down," said Kitty Silver, "an' I start fer the do',
+whiles she unfasten the lid fer to take one mo' look at 'em, I reckon:
+but open window mighty close by, an' nat skinny white cat make one jump,
+an' after li'l while I lookin' out thishere window an' see that ole fat
+Miz Blatch's tom, waddlin' crost the yod todes home."
+
+"What she doin' now?" Mrs. Johnson inquired.
+
+"Who? Miss Julia? She settin' out on the front po'che talkin' to Mista
+Sammerses."
+
+"My name! How she goin' fix it with _him_, after all thishere
+dishcumaraddle?"
+
+"Who? Miss Julia? Leave her alone, honey! She take an' begin talk so
+fas' an' talk so sweet, no young man ain't goin' to ricklect he ever
+give her no cats, not till he's gone an' halfway home! But I ain't tole
+you the en' of it, Miz Johnson, an' the en' of it's the bes' part whut
+happen."
+
+"What's that, Miss Kitty?"
+
+"Look!" said Mrs. Silver. "Mista Atwater gone in yonder, after I come
+out, an' ast whut all them goin's-on about. Well suh, an' di'n' he come
+walkin' out in my kitchen an' slip me two bright spang new silbuh
+dolluhs right in my han'?"
+
+"My name!"
+
+"Yessuh!" said Mrs. Silver triumphantly. And in the darkness outside the
+window Florence drew a deep breath. "I'd of felt just awful about this,"
+she said, "if Noble Dill had given Aunt Julia those Persian cats."
+
+"Why?" Herbert inquired, puzzled by her way of looking at things. "I
+don't see why it would make it any worse _who_ gave 'em to her."
+
+"Well, it would," Florence said. "But anyway, I think we did rather
+wrong. Did you notice what Kitty Silver said about what grandpa did?"
+
+"Well?"
+
+"I think we ought to tell him our share of it," Florence returned
+thoughtfully. "I don't want to go to bed to-night with all this on my
+mind, and I'm going to find grandpa right now and confess every bit of
+it to him."
+
+Herbert hopefully decided to go with her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THREE
+
+
+Julia, like Herbert, had been a little puzzled by Florence's expression
+of a partiality for the young man, Noble Dill; it was not customary for
+anybody to confess a weakness for him. However, the aunt dismissed the
+subject from her mind, as other matters pressed sharply upon her
+attention; she had more worries than most people guessed.
+
+The responsibilities of a lady who is almost officially the prettiest
+person in a town persistently claiming sixty-five thousand inhabitants
+are often heavier than the world suspects, and there were moments when
+Julia found the position so trying that she would have preferred to
+resign. She was a warm-hearted, appreciative girl, naturally unable to
+close her eyes to sterling merit wherever it appeared: and it was not
+without warrant that she complained of her relatives. The whole family,
+including the children, she said, regaled themselves with her private
+affairs as a substitute for theatre-going. But one day, a week after the
+irretrievable disappearance of Fifi and Mimi, she went so far as to
+admit a note of unconscious confession into her protest that she was
+getting pretty tired of being mistaken for a three-ring circus! Such was
+her despairing expression, and the confession lies in her use of the
+word "three."
+
+The misleading moderation of "three" was pointed out to her by her
+niece, whose mind at once violently seized upon the word and divested it
+of context--a process both feminine and instinctive, for this child was
+already beginning to be feminine. "Three!" she said. "Why, Aunt Julia,
+you must be crazy! There's Newland Sanders and Noble Dill and that old
+widower, Ridgley, that grandpa hates so, and Mister Clairdyce and George
+Plum and the two new ones from out of town that Aunt Fanny Patterson
+said you had at church Sunday morning--Herbert said he didn't like one
+of 'em's looks much, Aunt Julia. And there's Parker Kent Usher and that
+funny-lookin' one with the little piece of whiskers under his underlip
+that Noble Dill got so mad at when they were calling, and Uncle Joe
+laughed about, and I don't know who all! Anyhow, there's an awful lot
+more than three, Aunt Julia."
+
+Julia looked down with little favour upon the talkative caller. Florence
+was seated upon the shady steps of the veranda, and Julia, dressed for a
+walk, occupied a wicker chair above her. "Julia, dressed for a
+walk"--how scant the words! It was a summer walk that Julia had dressed
+for: and she was all too dashingly a picture of coolness on a hot day: a
+brunette in murmurous white, though her little hat was a film of
+blackest blue, and thus also in belt and parasol she had almost matched
+the colour of her eyes. Probably no human-made fabric could have come
+nearer to matching them, though she had once met a great traveller--at
+least he went far enough in his search for comparisons--who told her
+that the Czarina of Russia had owned a deep sapphire of precisely the
+colour, but the Czarina's was the only sapphire yet discovered that had
+it. One of Newland Sanders's longest Poems-to-Julia was entitled "Black
+Sapphires."
+
+Julia's harmonies in black sapphire were uncalled for. If she really had
+been as kind as she was too often capable of looking, she would have
+fastened patches over both eyes--one patch would have been useless--and
+she would have worn flat shoes and patronized a dressmaker with genius
+enough to misrepresent her. But Julia was not great enough for such
+generosities: she should have been locked up till she passed sixty; her
+sufferings deserve no pity.
+
+And yet an attack of the mumps during the winter had brought Julia more
+sympathy than the epidemic of typhoid fever in the Old Ladies' Infirmary
+brought all of the nine old ladies who were under treatment there. Julia
+was confined to her room for almost a month, during which a florist's
+wagon seemed permanent before the house: and a confectioner's frequently
+stood beside the florist's. Young Florence, an immune who had known the
+mumps in infancy, became an almost constant attendant upon the patient,
+with the result that the niece contracted an illness briefer than the
+aunt's, but more than equalling it in poignancy, caused by the poor
+child's economic struggle against waste. Florence's convalescence took
+place in her own home without any inquiries whatever from the outer
+world, but Julia's was spent in great part at the telephone. Even a poem
+was repeated to her by the instrument:
+
+    How the world blooms anew
+    To think that you
+    Can speak again,
+    Can hear
+    The words of men
+    And the dear
+    Own voice of you.
+
+This was Newland Sanders. He was just out of college, a reviewer, a
+poet, and once, momentarily, an atheist. It was Newland who was present
+and said such a remarkable thing when Julia had the accident to her
+thumb-nail in closing the double doors between the living-room and the
+library, where her peculiar old father sat reading. "To see you suffer,"
+Newland said passionately as she nursed her injury:--"to see you in
+pain, that is the one thing in the universe which I feel beyond all my
+capacities. Do you know, when you are made to suffer pain, then I feel
+that there is no God!"
+
+This strong declaration struck Herbert as one of the most impressive
+things he had ever heard, though he could not account for its being said
+to any aunt of his. Herbert had just dropped in without the formality of
+ringing the bell, and had paused in the hall, outside the open door of
+the living-room. He considered the matter, after Newland had spoken, and
+concluded to return to his own place of residence without disturbing
+anybody at his grandfather's. At home he found his mother and father
+entertaining one of his uncles, one of his aunts, two of his
+great-uncles, one of his great-aunts, and one of his grown-up cousins,
+at cards: and he proved to be warranted in believing that they would all
+like to know what he had heard. Newland's statement became quite
+celebrated throughout the family: and Julia, who had perceived almost a
+sacred something in his original fervour, changed her mind after hearing
+the words musingly repeated, over and over, by her fat old Uncle Joe.
+
+Florence thought proper to remind her of this to-day, after Julia's
+protest containing the too moderately confessional word "three."
+
+"If you don't want to be such a circus," the niece continued, reasoning
+perfectly, "I don't see what you always keep leadin' all of 'em on all
+the time just the same for."
+
+"Who've you heard saying that, Florence?" her aunt demanded.
+
+"Aunt Fanny Patterson," Florence replied absently. "F'r instance, Aunt
+Julia, I don't see what you want to go walking with Newland Sanders for,
+when you said yourself you wished he was dead, or somep'n, after there
+got to be so muck talk in the family and everywhere about his sayin' all
+that about the Bible when you hurt your thumb. All the family----"
+
+Julia sighed profoundly. "I wish 'all the family' would try to think
+about themselves for just a little while! There's entirely too little
+self-centredness among my relatives to suit me!"
+
+"Why, it's only because you're related to me that _I_ pay the very
+_slightest_ attention to what goes on here," Florence protested. "It's
+my own grandfather's house, isn't it? Well, if you didn't live here, and
+if you wasn't my own grandfather's daughter, Aunt Julia, I wouldn't ever
+pay the _very_ slightest attention to you! Anyway, I don't _much_
+criticize all these people that keep calling on you--anyway not half as
+much as Herbert does. Herbert thinks he always hass to act so critical,
+now his voice is changing."
+
+"At your age," said Julia, "my mind was on my schoolbooks."
+
+"Why, Aunt Julia!" Florence exclaimed in frank surprise. "Grandpa says
+just the opposite from that. I've heard him say, time and time and time
+again, you always _were_ this way, ever since you were four years old."
+
+"What way?" asked her aunt.
+
+"Like you are now, Aunt Julia. Grandpa says by the time you were
+fourteen it got so bad he had to get a new front gate, the way they
+leaned on it. He says he hoped when you grew up he'd get a little peace
+in his own house, but he says it's worse, and never for one minute the
+livelong day can he----"
+
+"I know," Julia interrupted. "He talks like a Christian Martyr and
+behaves like Nero. I might warn you to keep away from him, by the way,
+Florence. He says that either you or Herbert was over here yesterday and
+used his spectacles to cut a magazine with, and broke them. I wouldn't
+be around here much if I were you until he's got over it."
+
+"It must have been Herbert broke 'em," said Florence promptly.
+
+"Papa thinks it was you. Kitty Silver told him it was."
+
+"Mean ole reptile!" said Florence, alluding to Mrs. Silver; then she
+added serenely, "Well, grandpa don't get home till five o'clock, and
+it's only about a quarter of two now. Aunt Julia, what are you waitin'
+around here for?"
+
+"I told you; I'm going walking."
+
+"I mean: Who with?"
+
+Miss Atwater permitted herself a light moan. "With Mr. Sanders and Mr.
+Ridgely, Florence."
+
+Florence's eyes grew large and eager. "Why, Aunt Julia, I thought those
+two didn't speak to each other any more!"
+
+"They don't," Julia assented in a lifeless voice. "It just happened that
+Mr. Sanders and Mr. Ridgley and Mr. Dill, all three, asked me to take a
+walk this afternoon at two o'clock."
+
+"But Noble Dill isn't going?"
+
+"No," said Julia. "I was fortunate enough to remember that I'd already
+promised someone else when he asked me. That's what I didn't remember
+when Mr. Ridgely asked me."
+
+"I'd have gone with Noble Dill," Florence said firmly. "Noble Dill is my
+Very Ideal! I'd marry him to-morrow."
+
+"It seems to me," her aunt remarked, "I heard your mother telling
+somebody the other day that you had said the same thing about the King
+of Spain."
+
+Florence laughed. "Oh, that was only a passing fancy," she said lightly.
+"Aunt Julia, what's Newland Sanders supposed to do?"
+
+"I think he hasn't entered any business or profession yet."
+
+"I bet he couldn't," her niece declared. "What's that old Ridgely
+supposed to be? Just a widower?"
+
+"Never mind!"
+
+"And that George Plum's supposed to do something or other around Uncle
+Joe's ole bank, isn't he?" Florence continued.
+
+"'Supposed'!" Julia protested. "What is all this 'supposed to be'? Where
+did you catch that horrible habit? You know the whole family worries
+over your superciliousness, Florence; but until now I've always thought
+it was just the way your face felt easiest. If it's going to break out
+in your talk, too, it's time you began to cure yourself of it."
+
+"Oh, it doesn't hurt anything!" Florence made careless response, and, as
+she saw the thin figure of young Mr. Sanders approaching in the
+distance, "Look!" she cried, pointing. "Why, he doesn't even _compare_
+to Noble Dill!"
+
+"Don't point at people!"
+
+"Well, he's nothing much to point at!" She lowered her finger. "It's no
+depredation to me, Aunt Julia, to give up pointing at Newland Sanders.
+Atch'ly, I wouldn't give Noble Dill's little finger for a hunderd and
+fifty Newland Sanderses!"
+
+Julia smiled faintly as she watched Mr. Sanders, who seemed not yet to
+be aware of her, because he thought it would be better to reach the gate
+and lift his hat just there. "What _has_ brought on all this tenderness
+in favour of Mr. Dill, Florence?"
+
+Her niece's eyes, concentrated in thought, then became dreamy. "I like
+him because he's so uncouth," she said. "I think he's the uncouthest of
+any person I ever saw."
+
+"'Uncouth'?"
+
+"Yes," said Florence. "Herbert said I was uncouth, and I looked it up in
+the ditchanary. It said, 'Rare, exquisite, elegant, unknown, obs,
+unfamiliar, strange,' and a whole lot else. I never did know a word that
+means so much, I guess. What's 'obs' mean, Aunt Julia?"
+
+"Hush!" said Julia, rising, for Mr. Sanders had made a little startled
+movement as he reached the gate and caught sight of her; and now, straw
+hat in hand, he was coming up the brick walk that led to the veranda.
+His eyes were fixed upon Julia with an intensity that seemed to affect
+his breathing; there was a hushedness about him. And Florence, in
+fascination, watched Julia's expression and posture take on those little
+changes that always seemed demanded of her by the approach of a young or
+youngish man, or a nicely dressed old one. By almost imperceptible
+processes the commonplace moment became dramatic at once.
+
+"You!" said Newland in a low voice.
+
+And Julia, with an implication as flattering as the gesture was
+graceful, did not wait till he was within reach, but suddenly extended
+her welcoming hand at arm's length. He sprang forward convulsively and
+grasped it, as if forever.
+
+"You see my little niece?" Julia said. "I think you know her."
+
+"Know her?" Mr. Sanders repeated; then roused his faculties and gave
+Florence a few fingers dangling coldly after their recent emotion.
+"Florence. Oh, yes, Florence."
+
+Florence had not risen, but remained seated upon the steps, her look and
+air committed to that mood of which so much complaint had been made.
+"How do you do," she said. "There's Mr. Ridgely."
+
+"Where?" Newland asked loudly.
+
+"Comin' in at the gate," said Florence. "He's goin' walkin' with you,
+too."
+
+In this crisis, Mr. Sanders's feeling was obviously one of startled
+anguish. He turned to Julia.
+
+"Why, this is terrible!" he said. "You told me----"
+
+"Sh!" she warned him; and whispered hastily, all in a breath:
+"_Couldn't-be-helped-explain-next-time-I-see-you._" Then she advanced a
+gracious step to meet the newcomer.
+
+But the superciliousness of Florence visibly increased with this advent:
+Mr. Ridgely was easily old enough to be her grandfather, yet she seemed
+to wish it evident that she would not have cared for him even in that
+capacity. He was, in truth, one of those widowers who feel younger than
+ever, and behave as they feel. Since his loss he had shown the greatest
+willingness to forego whatever advantages age and experience had given
+him over the descendants of his old friends and colleagues, and his
+cheerfulness as well as his susceptibility to all that was charming had
+begun to make him so famous in the town that some of his contemporaries
+seemed to know scarce another topic. And Julia had a kinder heart, as
+her father bitterly complained, than most girls.
+
+The widower came, holding out to her a votive cluster of violets, a
+pink rose among them, their stems wrapped in purple; and upon the lapel
+of his jovial flannel coat were other violets about a pink rosebud.
+
+"How pretty of you!" said Julia, taking the offering; and as she pinned
+it at her waist, she added rather nervously, "I believe you know Mr.
+Sanders; he is going with us."
+
+She was warranted in believing the gentlemen to be acquainted, because
+no longer ago than the previous week they both had stated, in her
+presence and simultaneously, that any further communication between them
+would be omitted for life. Julia realized, of course, that Mr. Ridgely
+must find the present meeting as trying as Newland did, and, to help him
+bear it, she contrived to make him hear the hurried whisper:
+"_Couldn't-be-helped-explain-some-day._"
+
+Then with a laugh not altogether assured, she took up her parasol.
+"Shall we be starting?" she inquired.
+
+"Here's Noble Dill," said Florence, "I guess he's goin' to try to go
+walkin' with you, too, Aunt Julia."
+
+Julia turned, for in fact the gate at that moment clicked behind the
+nervously advancing form of Noble Dill. He came with, a bravado that
+was merely pitiable and he tried to snap his Orduma cigarette away with
+thumb and forefinger in a careless fashion, only to see it publicly
+disappear through an open cellar window of the house.
+
+"I hope there's no excelsior down there," said Newland Sanders. "A good
+many houses have burned to the ground just that way."
+
+"It fell on the cement floor," Florence reported, peering into the
+window. "It'll go out pretty soon."
+
+"Then I suppose we might as well do the same thing," said Newland,
+addressing Julia first and Mr. Dill second. "Miss Atwater and I are just
+starting for a walk."
+
+Mr. Ridgely also addressed the new arrival. "Miss Atwater and I are just
+starting for a walk."
+
+"You see, Noble," said the kind-hearted Julia, "I did tell you I had
+another engagement."
+
+"I came by here," Mr. Dill began in a tone commingling timidity, love,
+and a fatal stubbornness; "I came by here--I mean I just happened to be
+passing--and I thought if it was a walking-_party_, well, why not go
+along? That's the way it struck me." He paused, coughing for courage and
+trying to look easily genial, but not succeeding; then he added, "Well,
+as I say, that's the way it struck me--as it were. I suppose we might as
+well be starting."
+
+"Yes, we might," Newland Sanders said quickly; and he placed himself at
+Julia's left, seizing upon her parasol and opening it with
+determination.
+
+Mr. Ridgely had kept himself closely at the lady's right. "You were
+mistaken, my boy," he said, falsely benevolent. "It isn't a
+party--though there's Miss Florence, Noble. Nobody's asked her to go
+walking to-day!"
+
+Now, Florence took this satire literally. She jumped up and said
+brightly: "I just as soon! Let's _do_ have a walking-party. I just as
+soon walk with Mr. Dill as anybody, and we can all keep together, kind
+of." With that, she stepped confidently to the side of her selected
+escort, who appeared to be at a loss how to avert her kindness.
+
+There was a moment of hesitation, during which a malevolent pleasure
+slightly disfigured the countenances of the two gentlemen with Julia;
+but when Florence pointed to a house across the street and remarked,
+"There's Great-Uncle Milford and Aunt C'nelia; they been lookin' out of
+their second guestroom window about half an hour," Julia uttered an
+exclamation.
+
+"Murder!" she said, and moved with decision toward the gate. "Let's go!"
+
+Thus the little procession started, Mr. Sanders and the sprightly
+widower at Beauty's side, with Florence and Mr. Dill so close behind
+that, before they had gone a block, Newland found it necessary to warn
+this rear rank that the heels of his new shoes were not part of the
+pavement. After that the rear rank, a little abashed, consented to fall
+back some paces. Julia's heightened colour, meanwhile, was little abated
+by some slight episodes attending the progress of the walking-party. Her
+Aunt Fanny Patterson, rocking upon a veranda, rose and evidently called
+to someone within the house, whereupon she was joined by her invalid
+sister, Aunt Harriet, with a trained nurse and two elderly domestics, a
+solemnly whispering audience. And in the front yard of "the Henry
+Atwater house," at the next corner, Herbert underwent a genuine
+bedazzlement, but he affected more. His violent gaze dwelt upon
+Florence, and he permitted his legs slowly to crumple under him, until,
+just as the party came nearest him, he lay prostrate upon his back in a
+swoon. Afterward he rose and for a time followed in a burlesque manner;
+then decided to return home.
+
+"Old heathen!" said Florence, glancing back over her shoulder as he
+disappeared from view.
+
+Mr. Dill was startled from a reverie inspired by the back of Julia's
+head. "'Heathen'?" he said, in plaintive inquiry.
+
+"I meant Herbert," Florence informed him. "Cousin Herbert Atwater. He
+was following us, walking Dutch."
+
+"'Cousin Herbert Atwater'?" said Noble dreamily. "'Dutch'?"
+
+"He won't any more," said Florence. "He always hass to show off, now his
+voice is changing." She spoke, and she also walked, with dignity--a
+rather dashing kind of dignity, which was what Herbert's eccentricity of
+gait intended to point out injuriously. In fact, never before had
+Florence been so impressed with herself; never before, indeed, had she
+been a member of a grown-up non-family party; never before had she gone
+walking with an actual adult young man for her escort; and she felt that
+she owed it to her position to appear in as brilliant an aspect as
+possible. She managed to give herself a rhythmical, switching motion,
+causing her kneelength skirt to swing from side to side--a pomp that
+brought her a great deal of satisfaction as she now and then caught the
+effect by twisting her neck enough to see down behind, over her
+shoulder.
+
+But her poise was temporarily threatened when the walking-party passed
+her own house. Her mother happened to be sitting near an open window
+upstairs, and, after gazing forth with warm interest at Julia and her
+two outwalkers, Mrs. Atwater's astonished eyes fell upon Florence taking
+care of the overflow. Florence bowed graciously.
+
+"Florence!" her mother called down from the window: whereupon both
+Florence and her Aunt Julia were instantly apprehensive, for Mrs. George
+Atwater's lack of tact was a legend in the family. "Florence! Where on
+earth are you going?"
+
+"Never mind!" Florence thought best to respond. "Never mind!"
+
+"You'd better come _in_," Mrs. Atwater called, her voice necessarily
+louder as the party moved onward.
+
+"Never mind!" Florence called back.
+
+Mrs. Atwater leaned out of the window. "Where are you going? Come back
+and get your _hat_. You'll get a _sunstroke_!"
+
+Florence was able to conceal her indignation, and merely waved a hand
+in airy dismissal as they passed from Mrs. Atwater's sight, leaving her
+still shouting.
+
+The daughter smiled negligently and shrugged her shoulders. "She'll get
+over it!" she said.
+
+"Who?"
+
+"My mother. She was the one makin' all that noise," said Florence.
+"Sometimes I do what she says: sometimes I don't. It's all accordings to
+the way I feel." She looked up in her companion's face, and her
+expression became politely fond as she thought how uncouth he was, for
+in Florence's eye Noble Dill was truly rare, exquisite, and unfamiliar;
+and she believed that he was obs, too, whatever that meant. She often
+thought about him, and no longer ago than yesterday she had told Kitty
+Silver that she couldn't see "how Aunt Julia could _look_ at anybody
+else!"
+
+Florence's selection of Noble Dill for the bright favourite of her
+dreams was one of her own mysteries. Noble was not beautiful, neither
+did he present to the ordinary eye of man anything especially rare,
+exquisite, unfamiliar, or even so distinguished as to be obsolete. He
+was about twenty-two, but not one of those book-read sportsmen of that
+age, confident in clothes and manner, easy travellers and debonair;
+that is to say, Noble was not of the worldly type twenty-two. True, he
+had graduated from the High-school before entering his father's Real
+Estate and Insurance office, but his geographical experiences (in
+particular) had been limited to three or four railway excursions, at
+special rates, to such points of interest as Mammoth Cave and Petoskey,
+Michigan. His other experiences were not more sparkling, and except for
+the emotions within him, he was in all the qualities of his mind as well
+as in his bodily contours and the apparel sheltering the latter, the
+most commonplace person in Florence's visible world. The inner areas of
+the first and second fingers of his left hand bore cigarette stains,
+seemingly indelible: the first and second fingers of his right hand were
+strongly ornamented in a like manner; tokens proving him ambidextrous to
+but a limited extent, however. Moreover, his garments and garnitures
+were not comparable to those of either Newland Sanders or that dapper
+antique, Mr. Ridgely. Noble's straw hat might have brightened under the
+treatment of lemon juice or other restorative; his scarf was folded to
+hide a spot that worked steadily toward a complete visibility, and some
+recent efforts upon his trousers with a tepid iron, in his bedchamber
+at home, counteracted but feebly that tendency of cloth to sculpture
+itself in hummocks upon repeated pressure of the human knee.
+
+All in all, nothing except the expression of Noble's face and the
+somewhat ill-chosen pansy in his buttonhole hinted of the remarkable.
+Yet even here was a thing for which he was not responsible himself; it
+was altogether the work of Julia. What her work was, in the case of
+Noble Dill, may be expressed in a word--a word used not only by the
+whole Atwater family connection, in completely expressing Noble's
+condition, but by Noble's own family connection as well. This complete
+word was "awful."
+
+Florence was the one exception on the Atwater side: she was far, far
+from thinking or speaking of Noble Dill in that way, although, until she
+looked up "uncouth" in Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, she had not
+found suitable means to describe him. And now, as she walked at his
+side, she found her sensations to be nothing short of thrilling. For it
+must be borne in mind that this was her first and wholly unexpected
+outburst into society; the experience was that of an obscure aerolite
+suddenly become a noble meteor. She longed to say or do something
+magnificent--something strange and exhilarating, in keeping with her new
+station in life.
+
+It was this longing, and by no means a confirmed unveracity, that
+prompted her to amplify her comments upon her own filial independence.
+"Oh, I guess I pretty near never do anything I don't want to," she said.
+"I kind of run the house to suit myself. I guess if the truth had to be
+told, I just about run the whole Atwater family, when it comes to that!"
+
+The statement was so noticeable that it succeeded in turning Noble's
+attention from the back of Julia's head. "You do?" he said. "Well, that
+seems queer," he added absently.
+
+"Oh, I don't know!" she laughed. In her increasing exaltation things
+appeared actually to be as she wished them to be; an atmosphere both
+queenly and adventurous seemed to invest her, and any remnants of human
+caution in her were assuaged by the circumstance that her Aunt Julia's
+attention was subject to the strong demands necessarily imposed upon
+anybody taking a walk between two gentlemen who do not "speak" to each
+other. "Oh, I don't know," said Florence. "The family's used to it by
+this time, I guess. The way I do things, they haf to be, I guess. When
+they don't like it I don't say much for a while, then I just----" She
+paused, waiting for her imagination to supply a sequel to the drama just
+sketched. "Well, I guess they kind of find out they better step around
+pretty lively," she concluded darkly. "They don't bother around _too_
+much!"
+
+"I suppose not," said Noble, his vacancy and credulity continuing to
+dovetail perfectly.
+
+"You bet not!" the exuberant Florence thought proper to suggest as a
+preferable expression. And then she had an inspiration to enliven his
+dreamy interest in her conversation. "Grandpa, he's the one I kind of
+run most of all of 'em. He's about fifty or sixty, and so he hasn't got
+too much sense. What I mean, he hasn't got too much sense _left_, you
+know. So I haf to sort of take holt every now and then." She lowered her
+voice a little, some faint whisper of discretion reaching her inward
+ear. "Aunt Julia can't do a thing with him. I guess that's maybe the
+reason she kind of depen's on me so much; or anyway somep'n like that.
+You know, f'r instance, I had to help talk grandpa into lettin' her send
+to New York for her things. Aunt Julia gets all her things in New York."
+
+Undeniably, Mr. Dill's interest flickered up. "_Things_?" he repeated
+inquiringly. "Her things?"
+
+"Yes. Everything she wears, you know."
+
+"Oh, yes."
+
+"What I was goin' to tell you," Florence continued, "you know grandpa
+just about hates everybody. Anyhow, he'd like to have some peace and
+quiet once in a while in his own house, he says, instead of all this
+moil and turmoil, and because the doctor said all the matter with her
+was she eats too much candy, and they keep sendin' more all the
+time--and there's somep'n the trouble with grandpa: it makes him sick to
+smell violets: he had it ever since he was a little boy, and he can't
+help it; and he hates animals, and they keep sendin' her Airedales and
+Persian kittens, and then there was that alligator came from Florida and
+upset Kitty Silver terribly--and so, you see, grandpa just hates the
+whole everlasting business."
+
+Mr. Dill nodded and spoke with conviction: "He's absolutely right;
+absolutely!"
+
+"Well, some ways he is," said Florence; and she added confidentially:
+"The trouble is, he seems to think you're about as bad as any of 'em."
+
+"What?"
+
+"_Well_!" Florence exclaimed, with upward gestures both of eye and of
+hand, to signify what she left untold of Mr. Atwater's orations upon
+his favourite subject: Noble Dill. "It's torrable!" she added.
+
+Noble breathed heavily, but a thought struggled in him and a brightening
+appeared upon him. "You mean----" he began. "Do you mean it's terrible
+for your Aunt Julia? Do you mean his injustice about me makes her feel
+terribly?"
+
+"No," said Florence. "No: I mean the way he goes on about everybody. But
+Aunt Julia's kind of used to it. And anyhow you needn't worry about him
+'long as I'm on your side. He won't do anything much to you if I say not
+to. Hardly anything at all." And then, with almost a tenderness, as she
+marked the visibly insufficient reassurance of her companion, she said
+handsomely: "He won't say a word. I'll tell him not to."
+
+Noble was dazed; no novelty, for he had been dazed almost continually
+during the past seven months, since a night when dancing with Julia,
+whom he had known all his life, he "noticed for the first time what she
+looked like." (This was his mother's description.) Somewhere, he vaguely
+recalled, he had read of the extraordinary influence possessed by
+certain angelic kinds of children; he knew, too, what favourite
+grandchildren can do with grandfathers. The effect upon him was
+altogether base; he immediately sought by flattery to increase and
+retain Florence's kindness. "I always _thought_ you seemed to know more
+than most girls of your age," he began.
+
+It was a great afternoon for Florence. From time to time she glanced
+over her shoulder at the switching skirt, and increased its radius of
+action, though this probably required more exercise, compared to the
+extent of ground covered, than any lady member of a walking-party had
+ever before taken, merely as a pedestrian. Meanwhile, she chattered on,
+but found time to listen to the pleasant things said to her by her
+companion; and though most of these were, in truth, rather vague, she
+was won to him more than he knew. Henceforth she was to be his champion
+indeed, sometimes with greater energy than he would need.
+
+... The two were left alone together by Julia's gate when the walk (as
+short as Julia dared to make it) was over.
+
+"Well," Florence said, "I've had quite a nice time. I hope you enjoyed
+yourself nicely, too, Mr. Dill." Then her eye rose to the overhanging
+branch of a shade-tree near them. "Would you like to see me chin
+myself?" she asked, stepping beneath the branch. "I bet I could
+skin-the-cat on that limb! Would you like to see me do it?"
+
+"I would _so_!" the flatterer enthused.
+
+She became thoughtful, remembering that she was now a lady who took
+walks with grown gentlemen. "I can, but I won't," she said. "I used to
+do lots of things like that. I used to whenever I felt like it. I could
+chin myself four times and Herbert only three. I was lots better than
+Herbert when I used to do all kinds of things like that."
+
+"Were you?"
+
+She laughed as in a musing retrospect of times gone by. "I guess I used
+to be a pretty queer kind of a girl in those days," she said. "Well--I
+s'pose we ought to say good-bye for the present, so to speak, Mr. Dill."
+
+"I'm afraid so."
+
+"Well----" She stood looking at him expectantly, but he said nothing
+more. "Well, good-bye for the present, Mr. Dill," she said again, and,
+turning, walked away with dignity. But a moment later she forgot all
+about her skirt and scampered.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER FOUR
+
+
+Mrs. Dill, Noble's mother, talked of organizing a Young Men's Mothers'
+Club against Julia, nevertheless she acknowledged that in one solitary
+way Noble was being improved by the experience. His two previous attacks
+of love (one at twelve, and the other at eighteen) had been incomparably
+lighter, and the changes in him, noted at home, merely a slight general
+irritability and a lack of domestic punctuality due to too much
+punctuality elsewhere. But, when his Julia Atwater trouble came, the
+very first symptom he manifested was a strange new effort to become
+beautiful; his mother even discovered that he sometimes worked with
+pumice stone upon the cigarette stains on his fingers.
+
+The most curious thing about his condition was that for a long time he
+took it for granted that his family did not know what was the matter
+with him; and this shows as nothing else could the meekness and tact of
+the Dills; for, excluding bad cooks and the dangerously insane, the
+persons most disturbing to the serenity of households are young lovers.
+But the world has had to accommodate itself to them because young lovers
+cannot possibly accommodate themselves to the world. For the young lover
+there is no general life of the species; for him the universe is a
+delicate blush under a single bonnet. He has but an irritated perception
+of every vital thing in nature except the vital thing under this bonnet;
+all else is trivial intrusion. But whatever does concern the centrifugal
+bonnet, whatever concerns it in the remotest--ah, _then_ he springs to
+life! So Noble Dill sat through a Sunday dinner at home, seemingly
+drugged to a torpor, while the family talk went on about him; but when
+his father, in the course of some remarks upon politics, happened to
+mention the name of the county-treasurer, Charles J. Patterson, Noble's
+startled attention to the conversation was so conspicuous as to be
+disconcerting. Mrs. Dill signalled with her head that comment should be
+omitted, and Mr. Dill became, for the moment, one factor in a fairly
+clear example of telepathic communication, for it is impossible to
+believe that his wife's almost imperceptible gesture was what caused
+him to remember that Charles J. Patterson was Julia Atwater's uncle.
+
+That name, Charles J. Patterson, coming thus upon Noble's ear, was like
+an unexpected shrine on the wayside where plods the fanatic pilgrim; and
+yet Mr. Patterson was the most casual of Julia's uncles-by-marriage: he
+neither had nor desired any effect upon her destiny. To Noble he seemed
+a being ineffably privileged and fateful, and something of the same
+quality invested the wooden gateposts in front of Julia's house;
+invested everything that had to do with her. What he felt about her
+father, that august old danger, himself, was not only the uncalled-for
+affection inevitable toward Julia's next of kin, but also a kind of
+horror due to the irresponsible and awful power possessed by a sacred
+girl's parent. Florence's offer of protection had not entirely reassured
+the young lover, and, in sum, Noble loved Mr. Atwater, but often, in his
+reveries, when he had rescued him from drowning or being burned to
+death, he preferred to picture the peculiar old man's injuries as
+ultimately fatal.
+
+For the other Atwaters his feeling held less of apprehension, more of
+tenderness; and whenever he saw one of them he became deferential and a
+little short of breath. Thus, on a sunny afternoon, having been home to
+lunch after his morning labour downtown, he paused in passing young
+Herbert's place of residence and timidly began a conversation with this
+glamoured nephew. It happened that during the course of the morning
+Herbert had chosen a life career for himself; he had decided to become a
+scientific specialist, an entomologist; and he was now on his knees
+studying the manners and customs of the bug inhabitants of the lawn
+before the house, employing for his purpose a large magnifying lens, or
+"reading glass." (His discovery of this implement in the attic,
+coincidentally with his reading a recent "Sunday Supplement" article on
+bugs, had led to his sudden choice of a vocation.)
+
+"Did somebody--ah, have any of the family lost anything, Herbert?" Noble
+asked in a gentle voice, speaking across the fence.
+
+Herbert did not look up, nor did he relax the scientific frown upon his
+brow. "No," he said. "They always _are_ losin' things, espesh'ly Aunt
+Julia, when she comes over here, or anywheres else; but I wouldn't waste
+_my_ time lookin' for any old earrings or such. I got more important
+things to do on my hands."
+
+"_Has_ your Aunt Julia lost an earring, Herbert?"
+
+"Her? Well, she nearly always _has_ lost somep'n or other, but that
+isn't bother'n' _me_ any. I got better things to do with my time."
+Herbert spoke without interrupting his occupation or relaxing his
+forehead. "Nacher'l history is a _little_ more important to the
+inhabitants of our universe than a lot o' worthless jew'lry, I guess,"
+he continued; and his pride in discovering that he could say things like
+this was so great that his frown gave way temporarily to a look of
+pleased surprise, then came back again to express an importance much
+increased. He rose, approached the fence, and condescended to lean upon
+it. "I don't guess there's one person in a thousand," he said, "that
+knows what they _ought_ to know about our inseck friends."
+
+"No," Mr. Dill agreed readily. "I guess that's so. I guess you're right
+about that, Herbert. When did your Aunt Julia lose the earring,
+Herbert?"
+
+"I d' know," said Herbert. "Now, you take my own father and mother: What
+do they know? Well, mighty little. They may have had to learn a little
+teeny bit about insecks when they were in school, but whatever little it
+was they went and forgot it proba'ly long before they were married.
+Well, that's no way. F'r instance, you take a pinchin' bug: What do you
+suppose my father and mother know about its position in the inseck
+world?"
+
+"Well----" said Noble uneasily. "Well----" He coughed, and hastened to
+add: "But as I was saying, if she lost her earring somewhere in your
+yard, or----"
+
+The scientific boy evidently did not follow this line of thought, for he
+interrupted: "Why, they wouldn't know a thing about it, and a pinchin'
+bug isn't one of the highest insecks at all. Ants are way up compared to
+most pinchin' bugs. Ants are way up anyway. Now, you take an ant----" He
+paused. "Well, everybody ought to know a lot more'n they do about ants.
+It takes time, and you got to study 'em the right way, and of course
+there's lots of people wouldn't know how to do it. I'm goin' to get a
+book I been readin' about. It's called 'The Ant.'"
+
+For a moment Noble was confused; he followed his young friend's
+discourse but hazily, and Herbert pronounced the word "ant" precisely as
+he pronounced the word "aunt." The result was that Noble began to say
+something rather dreamy concerning the book just mentioned, but,
+realizing that he was being misunderstood, he changed his murmur into a
+cough, and inquired:
+
+"When was she over here, Herbert?"
+
+"Who?"
+
+"Your Aunt Julia."
+
+"Yesterday evening," said Herbert. "Now, f'r instance, you take a common
+lightning-bug----"
+
+"Did she lose it, then?"
+
+"Lose what?"
+
+"Her earring."
+
+"I d' know," said Herbert. "You take the common lightning-bug or, as
+it's called in some countries, the firefly----"
+
+He continued, quoting and misquoting the entomological authority of the
+recent "Sunday Supplement"; but his friend on the other side of the
+fence was inattentive to the lecture. Noble's mind was occupied with a
+wonder; he had realized, though dimly, that here was he, trying to make
+starry Julia the subject of a conversation with a person who had the
+dear privilege of being closely related to her--and preferred to talk
+about bugs.
+
+Herbert talked at considerable length about lightning-bugs, but as his
+voice happened rather precociously to be already in a state of
+adolescent change, the sound was not soothing; yet Noble lingered.
+Nephews were queer, but this one was Julia's, and he finally mentioned
+her again, as incidental to lightning-bugs; whereupon the mere hearer of
+sounds became instantly a listener to words.
+
+"Well, and then I says," Herbert continued;--"I says: 'It's phosphorus,
+Aunt Julia.' I guess there's hardly anybody in the world doesn't know
+more than Aunt Julia, except about dresses and parasols and every other
+useless thing under the sun. She says: 'My! I always thought it was
+sulphur!' Said nobody ever _told_ her it wasn't sulphur! I asked her: I
+said: 'You mean to sit there and tell me you don't know the difference?'
+And she says: 'I don't care one way or the other,' she says. She said
+she just as soon a lightning-bug made his light with sulphur as with
+phosphorus; it didn't make any difference to her, she says, and they
+could go ahead and make their light any way they wanted, _she_ wouldn't
+interfere! I had a whole hatful of 'em, and she told me not to take 'em
+into their house, because grandpa hates insecks as much as he does
+animals and violets, and she said they never owned a microscope or a
+magnifying-glass in their lives, and wouldn't let me hunt for one. All
+in the world she knows is how to sit on the front porch and say: 'Oh
+you don't mean _that!_' to somebody like Newland Sanders or that ole
+widower!"
+
+"When?" Noble asked impulsively. "When did she say that?"
+
+"Oh, I d' know," said Herbert. "I expect she proba'ly says it to
+somebody or other about every evening there is."
+
+"She does?"
+
+"Florence says so," Herbert informed him carelessly. "Florence goes over
+to grandpa's after dark and sits on the ground up against the porch and
+listens."
+
+Noble first looked startled then uneasily reminiscent. "I don't believe
+Florence ought to do that," he said gravely.
+
+"_I_ wouldn't do it!" Herbert was emphatic.
+
+"That's right, Herbert. I'm glad you wouldn't."
+
+"No, sir," the manly boy declared. "You wouldn't never catch _me_ takin'
+my death o' cold sittin' on the damp grass in the night air just to
+listen to a lot o' tooty-tooty about 'I've named a star for you,' and
+all such. You wouldn't catch me----"
+
+Noble partly concealed a sudden anguish. "Who?" he interrupted. "Who did
+she say _that_ to?"
+
+"She didn't. They say it to her, and she says? 'Oh, you don't mean
+that!' and of course then they haf to go on and say some more. Florence
+says----" He checked himself. "Oh, I forgot! I promised Florence I
+wouldn't tell anything about all this."
+
+"It's safe," Noble assured him quickly. "I'm quite a friend of
+Florence's and it's absolutely safe with me. I won't speak of it to
+anybody, Herbert. Who was it told her he'd named a star for her?"
+
+"It was the way some ole poem began. Newland Sanders wrote it. Florence
+found it under Aunt Julia's sofa-cushions and read it all through, but
+_I_ wouldn't wade through all that tooty-tooty for a million dollars,
+and I told her to put it back before Aunt Julia noticed. Well, about
+every day he writes her a fresh one, and then in the evening he stays
+later than the rest, and reads 'em to her--and you ought to hear grandpa
+when _he_ gets to talkin' about it!"
+
+"He's perfectly right," said Noble. "Perfectly! What does he say when he
+talks about it, Herbert?"
+
+"Oh, he says all this and that; and then he kind of mutters around, and
+you can't tell just what all the words are exactly, so't he can deny it
+if any o' the family accuses him of swearing or anything." And Herbert
+added casually: "He was kind of goin' on like that about you, night
+before last."
+
+"About _me_! Why, what could he say about _me_?"
+
+"Oh, all this and that."
+
+"But what did he find to say?"
+
+"Well, he heard her tellin' you how you oughtn't to smoke so many
+cigarettes and all about how it was killin' you, and you sayin' you
+guessed it wouldn't matter if you _did_ die, and Aunt Julia sayin' 'Oh,
+you don't mean that,' and all this and such and so on, you know. He can
+hear anything on the porch pretty good from the lib'ary; and Florence
+told me about that, besides, because she was sittin' in the grass and
+all. She told Great-Uncle Joe and Aunt Hattie about it, too."
+
+"My heavens!" Noble gasped, as for the first time he realized to what
+trumpeting publicity that seemingly hushed and moonlit bower, sacred to
+Julia, had been given over. He gulped, flushed, repeated "My heavens!"
+and then was able to add, with a feeble suggestion of lightness: "I
+suppose your grandfather understood it was just a sort of joke, didn't
+he?"
+
+"No," said Herbert, and continued in a friendly way, for he was
+flattered by Noble's interest in his remarks, and began to feel a
+liking for him. "No. He said Aunt Julia only talked like that because
+she couldn't think of anything else to say, and it was wearin' him out.
+He said all the good it did was to make you smoke more to make her think
+how reckless you were; but the worst part of it was, he'd be the only
+one to suffer, because it blows all through the house and he's got to
+sit in it. He said he just could stand the smell of _some_ cigarettes,
+but if you burned any more o' yours on his porch he was goin' to ask
+your father to raise your salary for collectin' real-estate rents, so't
+you'd feel able to buy some real tobacco. He----"
+
+But the flushed listener felt that he had heard as much as he was called
+upon to bear; and he interrupted, in a voice almost out of control, to
+say that he must be "getting on downtown." His young friend, diverted
+from bugs, showed the greatest willingness to continue the narrative
+indefinitely, evidently being in possession of copious material; but
+Noble turned to depart. An afterthought detained him. "Where was it she
+lost her earring?"
+
+"Who?"
+
+"Your Aunt Julia."
+
+"Why, _I_ didn't say she lost any earring," Herbert returned. "I said
+she always _was_ losin' 'em: I didn't say she did."
+
+"Then you didn't mean----"
+
+"No," said Herbert, "_I_ haven't heard of her losin' anything at all,
+lately." Here he added: "Well, grandpa kept goin' on about you, and he
+told her----Well, so long!" And gazed after the departing Mr. Dill in
+some surprise at the abruptness of the latter's leave-taking. Then,
+wondering how the back of Noble's neck could have got itself so fiery
+sunburnt, Herbert returned to his researches in the grass.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The peaceful street, shady and fragrant with summer, was so quiet that
+the footfalls of the striding Noble were like an interruption of
+coughing in a silent church. As he seethed adown the warm sidewalk the
+soles of his shoes smote the pavement, for mentally he was walking not
+upon cement but upon Mr. Atwater.
+
+Unconsciously his pace presently became slower for a more concentrated
+brooding upon this slanderous old man who took advantage of his position
+to poison his daughter's mind against the only one of her suitors who
+cared in the highest way. And upon this there came an infinitesimal
+consolation in the midst of anguish, for he thought of what Herbert had
+told him about Mr. Newland Sanders's poems to Julia, and he had a strong
+conviction that one time or another Mr. Atwater must have spoken even
+more disparagingly of these poems and their author than he had of Orduma
+cigarettes and their smoker. Perhaps the old man was not altogether
+vile.
+
+This charitable moment passed. He recalled the little moonlit drama on
+the embowered veranda, when Julia, in her voice of plucked harp strings,
+told him that he smoked too much, and he had said it didn't matter;
+nobody would care much if he died--and Julia said gently that his mother
+would, and other people, too; he mustn't talk so recklessly. Out of this
+the old eavesdropper had viciously represented him to be a poser, not
+really reckless at all; had insulted his cigarettes and his salary.
+Well, Noble would show him! He had doubts about being able to show Mr.
+Atwater anything important connected with the cigarettes or the salary,
+but he _could_ prove how reckless he was. With that, a vision formed
+before him: he saw Julia and her father standing spellbound at a
+crossing while a smiling youth stood directly between the rails in the
+middle of the street and let a charging trolley-car destroy him--not
+instantly, for he would live long enough to whisper, as the stricken
+pair bent over him: "Now, Julia, which do you believe: your father, or
+me?" And then with a slight, dying sneer: "Well, Mr. Atwater, is _this_
+reckless enough to suit you?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Town squirrels flitted along their high paths in the shade-tree branches
+above the embittered young lover, and he noticed them not at all, which
+was but little less than he noticed the elderly human couple who
+observed him from a side-yard as he passed by. Mr. and Mrs. Burgess had
+been happily married for fifty-three years and four months. Mr. Burgess
+lay in a hammock between two maple trees, and was soothingly swung by
+means of a string connecting the hammock and the rocking-chair in which
+sat Mrs Burgess, acting as a mild motor for both the chair and the
+hammock. "That's Noble Dill walking along the sidewalk," Mrs. Burgess
+said, interpreting for her husband's failing eyes. "I bowed to him, but
+he hardly seemed to see us and just barely lifted his hat. He needn't be
+cross with _us_ because some other young man's probably taking Julia
+Atwater out driving!"
+
+"Yes, he need!" Mr. Burgess declared. "A boy in his condition needs to
+be cross with everything. Sometimes they get so cross they go and drink
+liquor. Don't you remember?"
+
+She laughed. "I remember once!" she assented, and laughed again.
+
+"Why, it's a terrible time of life," her husband went on. "Poets and
+suchlike always take on about young love as if it were a charming and
+romantic experience, but really it's just a series of mortifications.
+The young lover is always wanting to do something dashing and romantic
+and Sir Walter Raleigh-like, but in ordinary times about the wildest
+thing he can do, if he can afford it, is to learn to run a Ford. And he
+can't stand a word of criticism; he can't stand being made the least
+little bit of fun of; and yet all the while his state of mind lays him
+particularly open to all the things he can't stand. He can't stand
+anything, and he has to stand everything. Why, it's a _horrible_ time of
+life, mamma!"
+
+"Yes, it is," she assented placidly. "I'm glad we don't have to go
+through it again, Freddie; though you're only eighty-two, and with a
+girl like Julia Atwater around nobody ought to be sure."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER FIVE
+
+
+Although Noble had saluted the old couple so crossly, thus unconsciously
+making them, as he made the sidewalk, proxy for Mr. Atwater, so to
+speak, yet the sight of them penetrated his outer layers of
+preoccupation and had an effect upon him. In the midst of his suffering
+his imagination paused for a shudder: What miserable old gray shadows
+those two were! Thank Heaven he and Julia could never be like that! And
+in the haze that rose before his mind's eye he saw himself leading Julia
+through years of adventure in far parts of the world: there were
+glimpses of himself fighting grotesque figures on the edge of Himalayan
+precipices at dawn, while Julia knelt by the tent on the glacier and
+prayed for him. He saw head-waiters bowing him and Julia to tables in
+"strange, foreign cafés," and when they were seated, and he had ordered
+dishes that amazed her, he would say in a low voice: "Don't look now,
+but do you see that heavy-shouldered man with the insignia, sitting
+with that adventuress and those eight officers who are really his
+guards? Don't be alarmed, Julia, but I am here to _get_ that man!
+Perhaps you remember what your father once said of me? Now, when what I
+have to do here is done, perhaps you may wish to write home and mention
+a few things to that old man!" And then a boy's changing voice seemed to
+sound again close by: "He said he just could stand the smell of _some_
+cigarettes, but if you burned any more o' yours on his porch----" And
+Noble came back miserably to town again.
+
+From an upper window of a new stucco house two maidens of nineteen
+peered down at him. The shade of a striped awning protected the window
+from the strong sun and the maidens from the sight of man--the latter
+protection being especially fortunate, since they were preparing to take
+a conversational afternoon nap, were robed with little substance, and
+their heads appeared to be antlered; for they caught sight of Noble just
+as they were preparing to put silk-and-lace things they called "caps" on
+their heads.
+
+"Who's that?" the visiting one asked.
+
+"It's Noble Dill; he's kind of one of the crowd."
+
+"Is he nice?"
+
+"Oh, sort of. Kind of shambles around."
+
+"Looks like last year's straw hat to me," the visiting one giggled.
+
+"Oh, he tries to dress--lately, that is--but he never did know how."
+
+"Looks mad about something."
+
+"Yes. He's one of the ones in love with that Julia Atwater I told you
+about."
+
+"Has he got any chance with her?"
+
+"Noble Dill? Mercy!"
+
+"Is he much in love with her?"
+
+"'Much'? _Murder!_"
+
+The visiting one turned from the window and yawned. "Come on: let's lie
+down and talk about some of the nice ones!"
+
+The second house beyond this was--it was the house of Julia!
+
+And what a glamour of summer light lay upon it because it was the house
+of Julia! The texture of the sunshine came under a spell here; glowing
+flakes of amber were afloat; a powder of opals and rubies fell silently
+adrizzle through the trees. The very air changed, beating faintly with a
+fairy music, for breathing it was breathing sorcery: elfin symphonies
+went tinkling through it. The grass in the next yard to Julia's was
+just grass, but every blade of grass in her yard was cut of jewels.
+
+Julia's house was also the house of that person who through some
+ungovernable horseplay of destiny happened to be her father: and this
+gave the enchanted spot a background of lurking cyclone--no one could
+tell at what instant there might rise above the roseate pleasance a
+funnel-shaped cloud. With young Herbert's injurious narrative fresh in
+his mind, Noble quickened his steps; but as he reached the farther fence
+post, marking the southward limit of Mr. Atwater's property, he halted
+short, startled beautifully. Through the open front door, just passed, a
+voice had called his name; a voice of such arresting sweetness that his
+breath stopped, like his feet.
+
+"Oh, Noble!" it called again.
+
+He turned back, and any one who might have seen his face then would have
+known what was the matter with him, and must have been only the more
+sure of it because his mouth was open. The next instant the adequate
+reason for his disorder came lightly through the open door and down to
+the gate.
+
+Julia was kind, much too kind! She had heard that her Aunt Harriet and
+her Uncle Joe were frequently describing Mr. Atwater's most recent
+explosion to other members of the extensive Atwater family league; and
+though she had not discovered how Aunt Harriet and Uncle Joe had
+obtained their material, yet, in Julia's way of wording her thoughts, an
+account of the episode was "all over town," and she was almost certain
+that by this time Noble Dill had heard it. And so, lest he should
+suffer, the too-gentle creature seized the first opportunity to cheer
+him up. That was the most harmful thing about Julia; when anybody liked
+her--even Noble Dill--she couldn't bear to have him worried. She was the
+sympathetic princess who wouldn't have her puppy's tail chopped off all
+at once, but only a little at a time.
+
+"I just happened to see you going by," she said, and then, with an
+astounding perfection of seriousness, she added the question: "Did you
+_mind_ my calling to you and stopping you, Noble?"
+
+He leaned, drooping, upon the gatepost, seeming to yearn toward it; his
+expression was such that this gatepost need not have been surprised if
+Noble had knelt to it.
+
+"Why, no," he said hoarsely. "No, I don't have to be back at the office
+any particular time. No."
+
+"I just wanted to ask you----" She hesitated. "Well, it really doesn't
+amount to anything--it's nothing so important I couldn't have spoken to
+you about it some other time."
+
+"Well," said Noble, and then on the spur of the moment he continued
+darkly: "There might not be any other time."
+
+"How do you mean, Noble?"
+
+He smiled faintly. "I'm thinking of going away." This was true;
+nevertheless, it was the first time he had thought of it. "Going away,"
+he repeated in a murmur. "From this old town."
+
+A shadowy, sweet reproach came upon Julia's eyes. "You mean--for good,
+Noble?" she asked in a low voice, although no one knew better than she
+what trouble such performances often cost her, later. "Noble, you don't
+mean----"
+
+He made a vocal sound conveying recklessness, something resembling a
+reckless laugh. "I might go--any day! Just as it happens to strike me."
+
+"But where to, Noble?"
+
+"I don't----Well, maybe to China."
+
+"China!" she cried in amazement. "Why, Noble Dill!"
+
+"There's lots of openings in China," he said. "A white man can get a
+commission in the Chinese army any day."
+
+"And so," she said, "you mean you'd rather be an officer in the Chinese
+army than stay--here?" With that, she bit her lip and averted her face
+for an instant, then turned to him again, quite calm. Julia could not
+help doing these things; she was born that way, and no punishment
+changed her.
+
+"Julia----" the dazzled Noble began, but he stopped with this beginning,
+his voice seeming to have exhausted itself upon the name.
+
+"When do you think you'll start?" she asked.
+
+His voice returned. "I don't know _just_ when," he said; and he began to
+feel a little too much committed to this sudden plan of departure, and
+to wonder how it had come about. "I--I haven't set any day--exactly."
+
+"Have you talked it over with your mother yet, Noble?"
+
+"Not yet--exactly," he said, and was conscious of a distaste for China
+as something unpleasant and imminent. "I thought I'd wait till--till it
+was certain I _would_ go."
+
+"When will that be, Noble?" And in spite of herself, Julia spoke in the
+tone of one who controls herself to ask in calmness: "Is my name on the
+list for the guillotine?"
+
+"Well," he said, "it'll be as soon as I've made up my mind to go. I
+probably won't go before then; not till I've made up my mind to."
+
+"But you might do that any day, mightn't you?"
+
+Noble began to feel relieved; he seemed to have hit upon a way out.
+"Yes; and then I'd be gone," he said firmly. "But probably I wouldn't go
+at all unless I decided to." This seemed to save him from China, and he
+added recklessly: "I guess I wouldn't be missed much around this old
+town if I did go."
+
+"Yes, you would," Julia said quickly. "Your family'd miss you--and so
+would everybody."
+
+"Julia, _you_ wouldn't----"
+
+She laughed lightly. "Of course I should, and so would papa."
+
+Noble released the gatepost and appeared to slant backward. "What?"
+
+"Papa was talking about you this very morning at breakfast," she said;
+and she spoke the truth. "He said he _dreamed_ about you last night."
+
+"He did?"
+
+Julia nodded sunnily. "He dreamed that you and he were the very greatest
+friends!" This also was true, so far as it went; she only omitted to
+state that Mr. Atwater had gone on to classify his dream as a nightmare.
+"There!" she cried. "Why, of course he'd miss you--he'd miss you as much
+as he'd miss any friend of mine that comes here."
+
+Noble felt a sudden rush of tenderness toward Mr. Atwater; it is always
+possible to misjudge a man for a few hasty words. And Julia went on
+quickly:
+
+"I never saw anybody like you, Noble Dill!" she exclaimed. "I don't
+suppose there's anybody in the United States except you that would be
+capable of doing things like going off to be an officer in the Chinese
+army--all just any minute like this. I've always declared you were about
+the most reckless man I know!"
+
+Noble shook his head. "No," he said judicially. "I'm not reckless; it's
+just that I don't care what happens."
+
+Julia became grave. "Don't you?"
+
+"To me," he said hurriedly. "I mean I don't care what happens to myself.
+I mean that's more the way I am than just reckless."
+
+She was content to let his analysis stand, though she shook her head, as
+if knowing herself to be wiser than he about his recklessness. A
+cheerfulness came upon them; and the Chinese question seemed to have
+been settled by these indirect processes;--in fact, neither of them ever
+mentioned it again. "I mustn't keep you," she said, "especially when you
+ought to be getting on downtown to business, but----Oh!" She gave the
+little cry of a forgetful person reminded. "I almost forgot what I ran
+out to ask you!"
+
+"What was it, Julia?" Noble spoke huskily, in a low voice. "What is it
+you want me to do, Julia?"
+
+She gave a little fluttering laugh, half timid, half confiding. "You
+know how funny papa is about tobacco smoke?" (But she hurried on without
+waiting for an answer.) "Well, he is. He's the funniest old thing; he
+doesn't like _any_ kind very much except his own special cheroot things.
+He growls about every other kind, but the cigars Mr. _Ridgely_ smokes
+when he comes here, papa really _does_ make a fuss over! And, you see, I
+don't like to say 'No' when Mr. Ridgely asks if he can smoke, because it
+always makes men so uncomfortable if they can't when they're sitting on
+a veranda, so I wondered if I could just tactfully get him to buy
+something different from his cigars?--and I thought the best thing would
+be to suggest those cigarettes you always have, Noble. They're the ones
+papa makes the _least_ fuss about and seems to stand the best--next to
+his own, he seems to like them the most, I mean--but I'd forgotten the
+name of them. That's what I ran out to ask you."
+
+"Orduma," said Noble. "Orduma Egyptian Cigarettes."
+
+"Would you mind giving me one--just to show Mr. Ridgely?"
+
+Noble gave her an Orduma cigarette.
+
+"Oh, thank you!" she said gratefully. "I mustn't keep you another
+minute, because I know your father wouldn't know _what_ to do at the
+office without you! Thank you so much for this!" She turned and walked
+quickly halfway up the path, then paused, looking back over her
+shoulder. "I'll only show it to him, Noble," she said. "I won't give it
+to him!"
+
+She bit her lip as if she had said more than she should have; shook her
+head as in self-chiding; then laughed, and in a flash touched the tiny
+white cylinder to her lips, waved it to him;--then ran to the veranda
+and up the steps and into the house. She felt satisfied that she had set
+matters right, this kind Julia!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER SIX
+
+
+Before she thus set matters right with Noble he had been unhappy and his
+condition had been bad; now he was happy, but his condition was worse.
+In truth, he was much, much too happy; nothing rational remained in his
+mind. No elfin orchestra seemed to buzz in his ears as he went down the
+street, but a loud, triumphing brass band. His unathletic chest was
+inflated; he heaved up with joy; and a little child, playing on the next
+corner, turned and followed him for some distance, trying to imitate his
+proud, singular walk. Restored to too much pride, Noble became also much
+too humane; he thought of Mr. Atwater's dream, and felt almost a
+motherly need to cherish and protect him, to be indeed his friend. There
+was a warm spot in Noble's chest, produced in part by a yearning toward
+that splendid old man. Noble had a good home, sixty-six dollars in the
+bank and a dollar and forty cents in his pockets; he would have given
+all for a chance to show Mr. Atwater how well he understood him now, at
+last, and how deeply he appreciated his favour.
+
+Students of alcoholic intoxication have observed that in their cups
+commonplace people, and not geniuses, do the most unusual things. So
+with all other intoxications. Noble Dill was indeed no genius, and some
+friend should have kept an eye upon him to-day; he was not himself. All
+afternoon in a mood of tropic sunrise he collected rents, or with glad
+vagueness consented instantly to their postponement. "I've come about
+the rent again," he said beamingly to one delinquent tenant of his
+father's best client; and turned and walked away, humming a waltz-song,
+while the man was still coughing as a preliminary to argument.
+
+Late in the afternoon, as the entranced collector sat musing alone near
+a window in his father's office, his exalted mood was not affected by
+the falling of a preternatural darkness over the town, nor was he roused
+to action by any perception of the fact that the other clerks and the
+members of the firm had gone home an hour ago; that the clock showed him
+his own duty to lock up the office and not keep his mother "waiting
+dinner"; and that he would be caught in a most outrageous thunderstorm
+if he didn't hurry. No; he sat, smiling fondly, by the open window, and
+at times made a fragmentary gesture as of some heroic or benevolent
+impulse in rehearsal.
+
+Meanwhile, paunchy with wind and wetness, unmannerly clouds came smoking
+out of the blackened west. Rumbling, they drew on. Then from cloud to
+cloud dizzy amazements of white fire staggered, crackled and boomed on
+to the assault; the doors of the winds were opened; the tanks of deluge
+were unbottomed; and the storm took the town. So, presently, Noble
+noticed that it was raining and decided to go home.
+
+With an idea that he was fulfilling his customary duties, he locked the
+doors of the two inner rooms, dropped the keys gently into a
+wastebasket, and passing by an umbrella which stood in a corner, went
+out to the corridor, and thence stepped into the street of whooping
+rain.
+
+Here he became so practical as to turn up his collar; and, substantially
+aided by the wind at his back, he was not long in leaving the purlieus
+of commerce behind him for Julia's Street. Other people lived on this
+street--he did, himself, for that matter; and, in fact, it was the
+longest street in the town; moreover, it had an official name with
+which the word "Julia" was entirely unconnected; but for Noble Dill (and
+probably for Newland Sanders and for some others in age from nineteen to
+sixty) it was "Julia's Street" and no other.
+
+It was a tumultuous street as Noble splashed along the sidewalk.
+Incredibly elastic, the shade-trees were practising calisthenics, though
+now and then one outdid itself and lost a branch; thunder and lightning
+romped like loosed scandal; rain hissed upon the pavement and capered
+ankle-high. It was a storm that asked to be left to itself for a time,
+after giving fair warning that the request would be made; and Noble and
+the only other pedestrian in sight had themselves to blame for getting
+caught.
+
+This other pedestrian was some forty or fifty yards in advance of Noble
+and moved in the same direction at about the same gait. He wore an old
+overcoat, running with water; the brim of his straw hat sagged about his
+head, so that he appeared to be wearing a bucket; he was a sodden and
+pathetic figure. Noble himself was as sodden; his hands were wet in his
+very pockets; his elbows seemed to spout; yet he spared a generous pity
+for the desolate figure struggling on before him.
+
+All at once Noble's heart did something queer within his wet bosom. He
+recognized that figure, and he was not mistaken. Except the One figure,
+and those of his own father and mother and three sisters, this was the
+shape that Noble would most infallibly recognize anywhere in the world
+and under any conditions. In spite of the dusk and the riot of the
+storm, Noble knew that none other than Mr. Atwater splashed before him.
+
+He dismissed a project for seizing upon a fallen branch and running
+forward to walk beside Mr. Atwater and hold the branch over his
+venerated head. All the branches were too wet; and Noble feared that Mr.
+Atwater might think the picture odd and decline to be thus protected.
+Yet he felt that something ought to be done to shelter Julia's father
+and perhaps save him from pneumonia; surely there was some simple,
+helpful, dashing thing that ordinary people couldn't think of, but that
+Noble could. He would do it and not stay to be thanked. And then,
+to-morrow evening, not sooner, he would go to Julia and smile and say;
+"Your father didn't get too wet, I hope, after all?" And Julia: "Oh,
+Noble, he's talked of you all day long as his 'new Sir Walter
+Raleigh'!"
+
+Suddenly will-o'-the-wisp opportunity flickered before him, and in his
+high mood he paused not at all to consider it, but insanely chased it.
+He had just reached a crossing, and down the cross street, walking away
+from Noble, was the dim figure of a man carrying an umbrella. It was
+just perceptible that he was a fat man, struggling with seeming
+feebleness in the wind and making poor progress. Mr. Atwater, moving up
+Julia's Street, was out of sight from the cross street where struggled
+the fat man.
+
+Noble ran swiftly down the cross street, jerked the umbrella from the
+fat man's grasp; ran back, with hoarse sounds dying out behind him in
+the riotous dusk; turned the corner, sped after Mr. Atwater, overtook
+him, and thrust the umbrella upon him. Then, not pausing the shortest
+instant for thanks or even recognition, the impulsive boy sped onward,
+proud and joyous in the storm, leaving his beneficiary far behind him.
+
+In his young enthusiasm he had indeed done something for Mr. Atwater. In
+fact, Noble's kindness had done as much for Mr. Atwater as Julia's
+gentleness had done for Noble, but how much both Julia and Noble had
+done was not revealed in full until the next evening.
+
+That was a warm and moonshiny night of air unusually dry, and yet
+Florence sneezed frequently as she sat upon the "side porch" at the
+house of her Great-Aunt Carrie and her Great-Uncle Joseph. Florence had
+a cold in the head, though how it got to her head was a process involved
+in the mysterious ways of colds, since Florence's was easily to be
+connected with Herbert's remark that he wouldn't ever be caught takin'
+his death o' cold sittin' on the damp grass in the night air just to
+listen to a lot o' tooty-tooty. It appeared from Florence's narrative to
+those interested listeners, Aunt Carrie and Uncle Joseph, that she had
+been sitting on the grass in the night air when both air and grass were
+extraordinarily damp. In brief, she had been at her post soon after the
+storm cleared on the preceding evening, but she had heard no
+tooty-tooty; her overhearings were of sterner stuff.
+
+"Well, what did Julia say _then_?" Aunt Carrie asked eagerly.
+
+"She said she'd go up and lock herself in her room and stuff cushions
+over her ears if grandpa didn't quit makin' such a fuss."
+
+"And what did he say?"
+
+"He made more rumpus than ever," said Florence. "He went on and on, and
+told the whole thing over and over again; he seemed like he couldn't
+tell it enough, and every time he told it his voice got higher and
+higher till it was kind of squealy. He said he'd had his raincoat on and
+he didn't want an umberella anyhow, and hadn't ever carried one a single
+time in fourteen years! And he took on about Noble Dill and all this and
+that about how you _bet_ he knew who it was! He said he could tell Noble
+Dill in the dark any time by his cigarette smell, and, anyway, it wasn't
+too dark so's he couldn't see his skimpy little shoulders, and anyway he
+saw his face. And he said Noble didn't _hand_ him the umberella; he
+stuck it all down over him like he was somep'n on fire he wanted to put
+out; and before he could get out of it and throw it away this ole fat
+man that it belonged to and was chasin' Noble, he ran up to grandpa from
+behind and took hold of him, or somep'n, and they slipped, and got to
+fussin' against each other; and then after a while they got up and
+grandpa saw it was somebody he knew and told him for Heaven's sake why
+didn't he take his ole umberella and go on home; and so he did, because
+it was raining, and I guess he proba'ly had to give up; he couldn't
+out-talk grandpa."
+
+"No," said Uncle Joe. "He couldn't, whoever he was. But what happened
+about Noble Dill?"
+
+Florence paused to accumulate and explode a sneeze, then responded
+pleasantly: "He said he was goin' to kill him. He said he often and
+often wanted to, and now he _was_. That's the reason I guess Aunt Julia
+wrote that note this morning."
+
+"What note?" Aunt Carrie inquired. "You haven't told us of that."
+
+"I was over there before noon," said Florence, "and Aunt Julia gave me a
+quarter and said she'd write a note for me to take to Noble Dill's house
+when he came home for lunch, and give it to him. She kind of slipped it
+to me, because grandpa came in there, pokin' around, while she was just
+finishin' writin' it. She didn't put any envelope on it even, and she
+never said a single thing to _me_ about its bein' private or my not
+readin' it if I wanted to, or anything."
+
+"Of course you didn't," said Aunt Carrie. "You didn't, did you,
+Florence?"
+
+"Why, she didn't _say_ not to," Florence protested, surprised. "It
+wasn't even in an envelope."
+
+Mr. Joseph Atwater coughed. "I hardly think we ought to ask what the
+note said, even if Florence was--well, indiscreet enough to read it."
+
+"No," said his wife. "I hardly think so either. It didn't say anything
+important anyhow, probably."
+
+"It began, 'Dear Noble,'" said Florence promptly. "Dear Noble'; that's
+the way it began. It said how grandpa was just all upset to think he'd
+accepted an umberella from him when Noble didn't have another one for
+himself like that, and grandpa was so embarrassed to think he'd let
+Noble do so much for him, and everything, he just didn't know _what_ to
+do, and proba'ly it would be tactful if he wouldn't come to the house
+till grandpa got over being embarrassed and everything. She said not to
+come till she let him know."
+
+"Did you notice Noble when he read it?" asked Aunt Carrie.
+
+"Yessir! And would you believe it; he just looked _too_ happy!" Florence
+made answer, not wholly comprehending with what truth.
+
+"I'll bet," said Uncle Joseph;--"I'll bet a thousand dollars that if
+Julia told Noble Dill he was six feet tall, Noble would go and order his
+next suit of clothes to fit a six-foot man."
+
+And his wife complemented this with a generalization, simple, yet of a
+significance too little recognized. "They don't see a thing!" she said.
+"The young men that buzz around a girl's house don't see a _thing_ of
+what goes on there! Inside, I mean."
+
+Yet at that very moment a young man was seeing something inside a girl's
+house a little way down that same street. That same street was Julia's
+Street and the house was Julia's. Inside the house, in the library, sat
+Mr. Atwater, trying to read a work by Thomas Carlyle, while a rhythmic
+murmur came annoyingly from the veranda. The young man, watching him
+attentively, saw him lift his head and sniff the air with suspicion, but
+the watcher took this pantomime to be an expression of distaste for
+certain versifyings, and sharing that distaste, approved. Mr. Atwater
+sniffed again, threw down his book and strode out to the veranda. There
+sat dark-haired Julia in a silver dress, and near by, Newland Sanders
+read a long young poem from the manuscript.
+
+"Who is smoking out here?" Mr. Atwater inquired in a dead voice.
+
+"Nobody, sir," said Newland with eagerness. "_I_ don't smoke. I have
+never touched tobacco in any form in my life."
+
+Mr. Atwater sniffed once more, found purity; and returned to the
+library. But here the air seemed faintly impregnated with Orduma
+cigarettes. "Curious!" he said as he composed himself once more to
+read--and presently the odour seemed to wear away and vanish. Mr.
+Atwater was relieved; the last thing he could have wished was to be
+haunted by Noble Dill.
+
+Yet for that while he was. Too honourable to follow such an example as
+Florence's, Noble, of course, would not spy or eavesdrop near the
+veranda where Julia sat, but he thought there could be no harm in
+watching Mr. Atwater read. Looking at Mr. Atwater was at least the next
+thing to looking at Julia. And so, out in the night, Noble was seated
+upon the top of the side fence, looking through the library window at
+Mr. Atwater.
+
+After a while Noble lit another Orduma cigarette and puffed strongly to
+start it. The smoke was almost invisible in the moonlight, but the night
+breeze, stirring gently, wafted it toward the house, where the open
+window made an inward draft and carried it heartily about the library.
+
+Noble was surprised to see Mr. Atwater rise suddenly to his feet. He
+smote his brow, put out the light, and stamped upstairs to his own room.
+
+His purpose to retire was understood when the watcher saw a light in the
+bedroom window overhead. Noble thought of the good, peculiar old man
+now disrobing there, and he smiled to himself at a whimsical thought:
+What form would Mr. Atwater's embarrassment take, what would be his
+feeling, and what would he do, if he knew that Noble was there now,
+beneath his window and thinking of him?
+
+In the moonlight Noble sat upon the fence, and smoked Orduma cigarettes,
+and looked up with affection at the bright window of Mr. Atwater's
+bedchamber. Abruptly the light in that window went out.
+
+"Saying his prayers now," said Noble. "I wonder if----" But, not to be
+vain, he laughed at himself and left the thought unfinished.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER SEVEN
+
+
+A week later, on a hot July afternoon, Miss Florence Atwater, recovered
+from her cold, stood in the shady back yard of her place of residence
+and yawned more extensively than any one would have believed possible,
+judging by her face in repose. Three of her friends, congenial in age
+and sex, were out of town for the summer; two had been ascertained, by
+telephonic inquiries, to be taking commanded siestas; and neither the
+other one nor Florence had yet forgotten that yesterday, although they
+were too religious to commit themselves to a refusal to meet as sisters
+in the Great Beyond, they had taken the expurgated oath that by
+Everything they would never speak to each other again so long as they
+both should live.
+
+Florence was at the end of her resources. She had sought distraction in
+experimental cookery; but, having scorched a finger, and having been
+told by the cook that a person's own kitchen wasn't worth the price at
+eleven dollars a week if it had to git all smelled up with broiled
+rubber when the femometer stood at ninety-sevvum degrees in the shade,
+the experimenter abusedly turned her back on the morose woman and went
+out to the back yard for a little peace.
+
+After an interval of torpor, she decided to go and see what Herbert was
+doing--a move not short of desperation, on account of Herbert's new
+manner toward her. For a week Herbert had steadily pursued his
+scientific career, and he seemed to feel that in it he had attained a
+distinction beyond the reach of Florence. What made it ridiculous for
+her to hope was, of course, the fact that she was a girl, and Herbert
+had explained this to her in a cold, unpleasant way; for it is true that
+what is called "feminism" must be acquired by men, and is not a
+condition, or taste, natural to them. At thirteen it has not been
+acquired.
+
+She found him at home. He was importantly engaged in a room in the
+cellar, where were loosely stored all manner of incapacitated household
+devices; two broken clothes-wringers, a crippled and rusted
+sewing-machine, an ice-cream freezer in like condition, a cracked and
+discarded marble mantelpiece, chipped porcelain and chinaware of all
+sorts, rusted stove lids and flatirons, half a dozen dead mops and
+brooms. This was the laboratory, and here, in congenial solitude,
+Herbert conducted his investigations. That is to say, until Florence
+arrived he was undisturbed by human intrusion, but he was not alone--far
+from it! There was, in fact, almost too much life in the place.
+
+Where the light fell clearest from the cobwebby windows at the ground
+level overhead, he had placed a long deal table, once a helpmate in the
+kitchen, but now a colourless antique on three legs and two starch
+boxes. Upon the table were seven or eight glass jars, formerly used for
+preserves and pickles, and a dozen jelly glasses (with only streaks and
+bits of jelly in them now) and five or six small round pasteboard
+pill-boxes. The jars were covered, some with their own patent tops,
+others with shingles or bits of board, and one with a brick. The jelly
+glasses stood inverted, and were inhabited; so were the preserve jars
+and pickle jars; and so were the pill-boxes, which evidently contained
+star boarders, for they were pierced with "breathing holes," and one of
+them, standing upon its side like a little wheel, now and then moved in
+a faint, ghostly manner as if about to start rolling on its own
+account--whereupon Herbert glanced up and addressed it sternly, though
+somewhat inconsistently: "You shut up!"
+
+In the display of so much experimental paraphernalia, there may have
+been a hint that Herbert's was a scientific nature craving rather
+quantity than quality; his collection certainly possessed the virtue of
+multitudinousness, if that be a virtue; and the birds in the
+neighbourhood must have been undergoing a great deal of disappointment.
+In brief, as many bugs as Herbert now owned have seldom been seen in the
+custody of any private individual. And nearly all of them were alive,
+energetic and swearing, though several of the preserve jars had been
+imperfectly drained of their heavy syrups, and in one of them a great
+many spiders seemed to be having, of the whole collection, the poorest
+time; being pretty well mired down and yet still subject to
+disagreements among themselves. The habits of this group, under such
+unusual surroundings, formed the subject of Herbert's special study at
+the moment of Florence's arrival. He was seated at the table and
+frowning with science as he observed the unfortunates through that
+magnifying-glass, his discovery of which was responsible for their
+present condition and his own choice of a career.
+
+Florence paused in the doorway, but he gave no sign of recognition,
+unless his intensified preoccupation was a sign, and Florence,
+perceiving what line of conduct he meant to adopt, instinctively
+selected a reciprocal one for herself. "Herbert Atwater, you ought to be
+punished! I'm goin' to tell your father and mother."
+
+"You g'way," Herbert returned, unmoved; and, without condescending to
+give her a glance, he set down the magnifying-glass, and with a pencil
+wrote something profoundly entomological in a soiled memorandum book
+upon the table. "Run away, Flor'nce. Run away somewheres and play."
+
+Florence approached. "'Play'!" she echoed tartly. "I should think _you_
+wouldn't talk much about 'playin',' the way you're teasing those poor,
+poor little bugs!"
+
+"'Teasing'!" Herbert exclaimed: "That shows! That shows!"
+
+"Shows what?"
+
+"How much you know!" He became despondent about her. "See here,
+Florence; it does look to me as though at your age a person ought to
+know anyway enough not to disturb me when I'm expairamenting, and
+everything. I should think----"
+
+But she did not prove so meek as to await the conclusion of his
+remonstrance. "I never saw anything as wicked in my whole born days!
+What did any of those poor, poor little bugs ever do to _you_, I'd like
+to know, you got to go and confine 'em like this! And look how dirty
+your hands are!"
+
+This final charge, wandering so far from her previous specifications of
+his guilt, was purely automatic and conventional; Florence often
+interjected it during the course of any cousinly discussion, whatever
+the subject in dispute, and she had not even glanced at Herbert's hands
+to assure herself that the accusation was warranted. But, as usual, the
+facts supported her; and they also supported Herbert in his immediate
+mechanical retort: "So're yours!"
+
+"Not either!" But here Florence, after instinctively placing her hands
+behind her, brought forth the right one to point, and simultaneously
+uttered a loud cry: "Oh, _look_ at your hands!" For now she did look at
+Herbert's hands, and was amazed.
+
+"Well, what of it?"
+
+"They're all lumpy!" she cried, and, as her gaze rose to his cheek, her
+finger followed her eyes and pointed to strange appearances there. "Look
+at your _face_!"
+
+"Well, what of it?" he demanded, his tone not entirely free from
+braggadocio. "A girl can't make expairaments the way I do, because if
+one of these good ole bumblebees or hornets of mine was to give 'em a
+little sting, once in a while, while they was catchin' 'em and puttin'
+'em in a jar, all they'd know how to do'd be to holler and run home to
+their mamma. Nobody with any gumption minds a few little stings after
+you put mud on 'em."
+
+"I guess it serves you right," Florence said, "for persecutin' these
+poor, poor little bugs."
+
+Herbert became plaintive. "Look here, Florence; I do wish you'd go on
+back home where you belong."
+
+But Florence did not reply; instead she picked up the magnifying-glass,
+and, gazing through it at a pickle jar of mixed beetles, caterpillars,
+angleworms, and potato bugs, permitted herself to shudder. "Vile
+things!" she said.
+
+"They are not, either!" Herbert retorted hotly. "They're about the
+finest insecks that you or anybody else ever saw, and you ought to be
+ashamed----"
+
+"I ought?" his cousin cried. "Well, I should think you're the one ought
+to be ashamed, if anybody ought! Down here in the cellar playin' with
+all these vile bugs that ought to be given their liberty, or thrown
+down the sewer, or somep'n!" Again, as she peered through the lens, she
+shuddered. "Vile----"
+
+"Florence," he said sternly, "you lay down that magnifying-glass."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Because you don't know how to handle it. A magnifying-glass has got to
+be handled in just the right way, and you couldn't learn if you tried a
+thousand years. That's a mighty fine magnifying-glass, and I don't
+intend to have it ruined."
+
+"Why, just lookin' through it can't spoil it, can it?" she inquired,
+surprised.
+
+"You lay it down," said Herbert darkly. "Lookin' through it the wrong
+way isn't going to do it any _good_."
+
+"Why, how could just _lookin'_ through it----"
+
+"Lookin' through it the wrong way isn't goin' to _help_ it any, I tell
+you!" he insisted. "You're old enough to know that, and I'm not goin' to
+have my magnifying-glass spoiled and all my insecks wasted just because
+of a mere whin of yours!"
+
+"A what?"
+
+"A mere whin, I said!"
+
+"What's a whin?"
+
+"Never you mind," said Herbert ominously. "You'll proba'ly find out some
+day when you aren't expectin' to!"
+
+Undeniably, Florence was somewhat impressed: she replaced the
+magnifying-glass upon the table and picked up the notebook.
+
+"You lay that down, too," said Herbert instantly.
+
+"Oh, maybe it's somep'n you're _'shamed_ to----"
+
+"Go on and read it, then," he said, suddenly changing his mind, for he
+was confident that she would find matter here that might cause her to
+appreciate at least a little of her own inferiority.
+
+"'Nots'," Florence began. "'Nots'----"
+
+"Notes!" he corrected her fiercely.
+
+"'Notes'," she read. "'Notes on our inseck friends. The spidder----'"
+
+"_Spider!_"
+
+"'The spider spends his time mostly in cobwebs which he digilently spins
+between posts and catches flies to eat them. They are different coloured
+and sizes and have legs in pairs. Spiders also spin their webs in
+corners or in weeds or on a fence and sometimes in the grass. They are
+more able to get about quicker than catapillars or fishing worms, but
+cannot fly such as pinching bugs, lightning bugs, and birds because
+having no wings, nor jump as far as the grass hoper----'"
+
+"Grasshopper!" Herbert shouted.
+
+"I'm readin' it the way it's spelled," Florence explained. "Anyway, it
+don't make much sense."
+
+Herbert was at least enough of an author to be furious. "Lay it down!"
+he said bitterly. "And go on back home to your dolls."
+
+"Dolls certainly would be _cleaner_ than vile bugs," Florence retorted,
+tossing the book upon the table. "But in regards to that, I haven't had
+any," she went on, airily--"not for years and years and years and----"
+
+He interrupted her, his voice again plaintive. "See here, Florence, how
+do you expect me to get my _work_ done, with you everlastin'ly talkin'
+and goin' on around here like this? Can't you see I've got somep'n
+pretty important on my hands?"
+
+Florence became thoughtful. "I never did see as many bugs before, all
+together this way," she said. "What you goin' to do with 'em, Herbert?"
+
+"I'm makin' my expairaments."
+
+But her thoughtfulness increased. "It seems to me," she said
+slowly:--"Herbert, it seems to me there must be some awful inter'sting
+thing we could do with so many bugs all together like this."
+
+"'We'!" he cried. "My goodness, whose insecks do you think these insecks
+are?"
+
+"I just know there's somep'n," she went on, following her own line of
+thought, and indifferent to his outburst. "There's somep'n we could do
+with 'em that we'd never forget, if we could only think of it."
+
+In spite of himself, Herbert was interested. "Well, what?" he asked.
+"What could we do with 'em we'd never forget?"
+
+In her eyes there was a far-away light as of a seeress groping. "I don't
+just know exackly, but I know there's _somep'n_--if we could only think
+of it--if we could just----" And her voice became inaudible, as in
+dreamy concentration she seated herself upon the discarded ice-cream
+freezer, and rested her elbows upon her knees and her chin upon the
+palms of her hands.
+
+In silence then, she thought and thought. Herbert also was silent, for
+he, too, was trying to think, not knowing that already he had proved
+himself to be wax in her hands, and that he was destined further to show
+himself thus malleable. Like many and many another of his sex, he never
+for an instant suspected that he spent the greater part of his time
+carrying out ideas implanted within him by a lady-friend. Florence was
+ever the imaginative one of those two, a maiden of unexpected fancies
+and inexplicable conceptions, a mind of quicksilver and mist. There was
+within her the seedling of a creative artist, and as she sat there, on
+the ice-cream freezer in Herbert's cellar, with the slowly growing
+roseate glow of deep preoccupation upon her, she looked strangely sweet
+and good, and even almost pretty.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER EIGHT
+
+
+"Do you s'pose," she said, at last, in a musing voice: "Herbert, do you
+s'pose maybe there's some poor family's children somewheres that haven't
+got any playthings or anything and we could take all these----"
+
+But here Herbert proved unsympathetic. "I'm not goin' to give my insecks
+to any poor people's children," he said emphatically. "I don't care how
+poor they are!"
+
+"Well, I thought maybe just as a surprise----"
+
+"I won't do it. I had mighty hard work to catch this c'lection, and I'm
+not goin' to give it away to anybody, I don't care how surprised they'd
+be! Anyway, I'd never get any thanks for it; they wouldn't know how to
+handle 'em, and they'd get all stung up: and what'd be the use, anyhow?
+I don't see how _that's_ goin' to be somep'n so interesting we'd never
+forget it."
+
+"No," she said. "I guess it wouldn't. I just thought it would be kind of
+a bellnevolent thing to do."
+
+This word disturbed Herbert, but he did not feel altogether secure in
+his own impression that "benovvalent" was the proper rendition of what
+she meant, and so refrained from criticism. Their musing was resumed.
+
+"There's one thing I do wish," Florence said suddenly, after a time. "I
+wish we could find some way to use the c'lection that would be useful
+for Noble Dill."
+
+Now, at this, her cousin's face showed simple amazement. "What on earth
+you talkin' about?"
+
+"Noble Dill," she said dreamily. "He's the only one I like that comes to
+see Aunt Julia. Anyway, I like him the most."
+
+"I bet Aunt Julia don't!"
+
+"I don't care: he's the one _I_ wish she'd get married to."
+
+Herbert was astounded. "Noble Dill? Why, I heard mamma and Aunt Hattie
+and Uncle Joe talkin' about him yesterday."
+
+"What'd they say?"
+
+"Most of the time," said Herbert, "they just laughed. They said Noble
+Dill was the very last person in this town Aunt Julia'd ever dream o'
+marryin'. They said he wasn't anything: they said he wasn't handsome
+and he wasn't distingrished-looking----"
+
+"I think he is," Florence interposed. "I think he's _very_
+distingrished-looking."
+
+"Well, they said he wasn't, and they know more'n you do. Why, Noble Dill
+isn't hardly any taller'n I am myself, and he hasn't got any muscle
+partickyourly. Aunt Julia wouldn't look at him!"
+
+"She does, too! My goodness, how could he sit on the porch, right in
+front of her, for two or three hours at a time, without her lookin' at
+him?"
+
+"I don't care," Herbert insisted stubbornly. "_They_ said Aunt Julia
+wouldn't. They said she was the worst flirt had ever been in the whole
+family and Noble Dill had the worst case they ever saw, but she wouldn't
+ever look at him, and if she did she'd be crazy."
+
+"Well, anyway," said Florence, "I think he's the nicest of all that goes
+to see her, and I wish we could use this c'lection some way that would
+be nice for him."
+
+Herbert renewed his protest. "How many times I got to tell you I had a
+hard enough time catchin' this c'lection, day in and day out, from
+before daylight till after dark, and then fixin' 'em all up like this
+and everything! I don't prapose to waste 'em just to suit Noble Dill,
+and I'm not goin' to give 'em away either. If anybody wanted to buy 'em
+and offered a good fair price, money down, why, I----"
+
+"_That's_ it, Herbert!" his lady-cousin exclaimed with sudden
+excitement. "Let's sell 'em!" She jumped up, her eyes bright. "I bet we
+could get maybe five dollars for 'em. We can pour the ones that are in
+the jars that haven't got tops and the ones in the jelly glasses and
+pill-boxes--we can pour all those into the jars that have got tops, and
+put the tops on again, and that'd just about fill those jars--and then
+we could put 'em in a basket and take 'em out and sell 'em!"
+
+"Where could we sell 'em?" Herbert inquired, not convinced.
+
+"At the fish store!" she cried. "Everybody uses bugs and worms for bait
+when they go fishing, don't they? I bet the fish man'll buy all the
+worms we got, even if he wouldn't buy anything else. I bet he'll buy all
+the others, too! I bet he never saw as much good bait as this all at one
+time in his whole life! I bet he'll give us five dollars--maybe more!"
+
+Herbert was dazzled; the thought of this market was a
+revelation--nothing could have been more plausible. Considered as bait,
+the c'lection at once seemed to acquire a practical and financial value
+which it lacked, purely as a c'lection. And with that the amateur and
+scientist disappeared, giving way to the person of affairs. "'Give _us_
+five dollars'?" he said, in this capacity, and for deeper effect he used
+a rhetorical expression: "Who do you think is the owner of all this fish
+bait, may I ask you, pray?"
+
+"Yes, you _may_, pray!" was his cousin's instant and supercilious
+retort. "Pray where would you ever of got any five dollars from any fish
+man, if it hadn't been for me, pray? Pray, didn't I first sajest our
+doing somep'n with the bugs we'd never forget, and if the fish man gives
+us five dollars for 'em won't we remember it all our lives, pray? And,
+pray, what part did you think up of all this, pray? Not one single
+thing, and if you don't divide even with me, I'll run ahead and tell the
+fish man the whole c'lection has been in bottles that had old medicine
+and poison in 'em--and then where'll _you_ be, pray?"
+
+It is to be doubted that Florence possessed the cold-blooded capacities
+with which this impromptu in diplomacy seemed to invest her: probably
+she would never have gone so far. But the words sufficed; and Herbert
+was so perfectly intimidated that he was even unresentful. "Well, you
+can have your ole two dollars and a half, whether you got a right to it
+or not," he said. "But you got to carry the basket."
+
+"No," said Florence. "This has got to be done right, Herbert. We're
+partners now and everything's got to be divided just exackly even. I'll
+carry the basket half the way and you carry it the other half."
+
+"Well----" he grumbled, consenting.
+
+"That's the only right way," she said sunnily. "You carry it till we get
+to the fish man's, and I'll carry it all the way back."
+
+But even Herbert could perceive the inequality here. "It'll be empty
+then," he protested.
+
+"Fair's fair and wrong's wrong," she returned firmly. "I spoke first to
+carry it on the way home, and the one that speaks first gets it!"
+
+"Look here!"
+
+"Herbert, we got to get all these bugs fixed up and ready," she urged.
+"We don't want to waste the whole afternoon just talkin' about it, do
+we? Besides, Herbert, on the way home you'll have two dollars and a half
+in your pocket, or anyway as much as you have left, if you buy some
+soda and candy and things, and you'll feel so fine then you won't mind
+whether you're carrying the basket or not."
+
+The picture she now suggested to Herbert's mind was of himself carrying
+the basket both to the fish man and from the fish man: and he found
+himself anxious to protest, yet helpless in a maze of perplexity. "But
+wait a minute," he began. "You said----"
+
+"Let's don't waste another minute," she interrupted briskly. "I
+shouldn't wonder it was after four o'clock by this time, and we both
+need money. Hurry, Herbert!"
+
+"But didn't you say----" He paused to rub his head. "You said I'd feel
+so good I wouldn't mind if I--if----"
+
+"No. I said, 'Hurry'!"
+
+"Well----" And though he felt that a subtle injustice lurked somewhere,
+he was unable to think the matter out clearly into its composing
+elements, and gave up trying. Nevertheless, as he obeyed her, and began
+to "hurry," there remained with him an impression that by some foggy and
+underhand process he had been committed to acquiescence in an unfair
+division of labour.
+
+In this he was not mistaken. An hour later he and Florence were on their
+way home from the fish man's place of business, and Herbert, having
+carried the basket thither, was now carrying it thence. Moreover, his
+burden was precisely as heavy on this homeward leg of the course as it
+had been on that terminating at the fish store, for, covered by a
+discreet newspaper, the preserve and pickle jars still remained within
+the basket, their crowding and indignant contents intact. The fish man
+had explained in terms derisive, but plain, the difference between a
+fish man and a fisherman. He had maintained his definitions of the two
+economic functions in spite of persistent arguments on the part of the
+bait-dealers, and in the face of reductions that finally removed ninety
+per cent. of their asking price. He wouldn't give fifty cents, or ten
+cents, or one cent, he said: and he couldn't furnish the address of
+anybody else that would. His fish came by express, he declared, again
+and again: and the only people he knew that did any fishing were mainly
+coloured, and dug their own bait; and though these might possibly be
+willing to accept the angle worms as a gift, they would probably incline
+to resent a generosity including so many spiders, not to speak of the
+dangerous winged members of the c'lection. On account of these latter,
+he jocosely professed himself to be anxious lest the tops of some of the
+jars might work loose--and altogether he was the most disheartening man
+they had ever met.
+
+Anticlimax was never the stimulant of amiability, and, after an
+altercation on the pavement just outside of the store, during which the
+derisive fish man continually called to them to go on and take that
+there basket out of the neighbourhood, the cousins moved morbidly away,
+and walked for a time in silence.
+
+They brooded. Herbert was even more embittered with Florence than he was
+with the fish man, and Florence found life full of unexpectedness; it
+had been so clear to her that the fish man would say: "Why, certainly.
+Here's five dollars; two dollars and a half for each of you. Would you
+care to have the jars back?" The facts, so contrary, seemed to wear the
+aspect of deliberate malice, and she felt ill-used, especially as she
+had several physical grievances, due to her assistance in pouring part
+of the c'lection into the jars with tops. In spite of every precaution
+three or four of the liveliest items had made their escape, during this
+pouring, and had behaved resentfully. Florence bore one result on the
+back of her left hand, two others on the thumb and second finger of her
+right hand, and another, naturally the most conspicuous, on the point of
+her chin. These had all been painful, in spite of mud poultices, but,
+excited by the anticipation of a kindly smiling fish man, and occupied
+with plans for getting Herbert to spend part of his two dollars and a
+half for mutual refreshment, she had borne up cheerfully. Now,
+comprehending that she had suffered in vain, she suffered anew, and
+hated bugs, all fish men, and the world.
+
+It was Herbert who broke the silence and renewed the altercation. "How
+far you expeck me to go on luggin' this ole basket?" he demanded
+bitterly. "All the way home?"
+
+"I don't care how far," she informed him. "You can throw it away if you
+want to. It's certainly no propaty of mine, thank you!"
+
+"Look here, didn't you promise you'd carry it home?"
+
+"I said I _spoke_ to. I didn't say I _would_ carry it."
+
+"Well, I'd like to know the dif----"
+
+But Florence cut him off. "I'll tell you the difference, since you're so
+anxious to know the truth, Mister Herbert Atwater! The difference is
+just this: you had no biznuss to meddle with those vile ole bugs in the
+first place, and get me all stung up so't I shouldn't wonder I'd haf to
+have the doctor, time I get home, and if I do I'm goin' to tell mamma
+all about it and make her send the bill to your father. I want you to
+know I _hurt_!"
+
+"My goodness!" Herbert burst out. "Don't you s'pose _I_ hurt any? I
+guess you don't hurt any worse than----"
+
+She stopped him: "Listen!"
+
+From down the street there came a brazen clamouring for the right of
+way; it grew imperiously louder, and there were clatterings and
+whizzings of metallic bodies at speed, while little blurs and
+glistenings in the distance grew swiftly larger, taking shape as a fire
+engine and a hose-cart. Then, round the near-by corner, came perilously
+steering the long "hook-and-ladder wagon"; it made the turn and went by,
+with its firemen imperturbable on the running boards.
+
+"Fire!" Florence cried joyfully. "Let's go!" And, pausing no instant,
+she made off up the street, shouting at the top of her voice: "_Fire!
+Fire! Fire! Fire!_"
+
+Herbert followed. He was not so swift a runner as she, though this he
+never submitted to a test admitted to be fair and conclusive; and he
+found her demonstration of superiority particularly offensive now, as
+she called back over her shoulder: "Why don't you keep up with me? Can't
+you keep up?"
+
+"I'd _show_ you!" he panted. "If I didn't haf to lug this ole basket,
+I'd leave you a mile behind mighty quick."
+
+"Well, why'n't you drop it, then?"
+
+"You s'pose I'm goin' to throw my c'lection away after all the trouble I
+been _through_ with it?"
+
+She slackened her gait, dropping back beside him. "Well, then, if you
+think you could keep up with me if you didn't have it, why'n't you leave
+it somewhere, and come back and get it after the fire's over?"
+
+"No place to leave it."
+
+She laughed, and pointed. "Why'n't you leave it at grandpa's?"
+
+"Will you wait for me and start fair?"
+
+"Come on!" They obliqued across the street, still running forward, and
+at their grandfather's gate Herbert turned in and sped toward the house.
+
+"Take it around to the kitchen and give it to Kitty Silver," Florence
+called. "Tell Kitty Silver to take care of it for you."
+
+But Herbert was in no mind to follow her advice; a glance over his
+shoulder showed that Florence was taking another unfair advantage of
+him. "You wait!" he shouted. "You stand still till I get back there! You
+got half a mile start a'ready! You wait till we can start even!"
+
+But Florence was skipping lightly away and she caroled over her
+shoulder, waving her hand in mocking farewell as she began to run:
+
+    "Ole Mister Slowpoke can't catch me!
+    Ole Mister Slowpoke couldn't catch a flea!"
+
+"I'll show you!" he bellowed, and, not to lose more time, he dashed up
+the steps of the deserted veranda, thrust his basket deep underneath a
+wicker settee, and ran violently after his elusive cousin.
+
+She kept a tantalizing distance between them, but when they reached the
+fire it was such a grand one they forgot all their differences--and also
+all about the basket.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER NINE
+
+
+Noble Dill came from his father's house, after dinner that evening, a
+youth in blossom, like the shrubberies and garden beds in the dim yards
+up and down Julia's Street. All cooled and bathed and in new clothes of
+white, he took his thrilled walk through the deep summer twilight, on
+his way to that ineffable Front Porch where sat Julia, misty in the
+dusk. The girlish little new moon had perished naďvely out of the sky;
+the final pinkness of the west was gone; blue evening held the quiet
+world; and overhead, between the branches of the maple trees, were
+powdered all those bright pin points of light that were to twinkle on
+generations of young lovers after Noble Dill, each one, like Noble,
+walking the same fragrant path in summer twilights to see the Prettiest
+Girl of All.
+
+Now and then there came to the faintly throbbing ears of the pedestrian
+a murmur of voices from lawns where citizens sat cooling after the day's
+labour, or a tinkle of laughter from where maidens dull (not being
+Julia) sat on verandas vacant of beauty and glamour. For these poor
+things, Noble felt a wondering and disdainful pity; he pitied everything
+in the world that was not on the way to starry Julia.
+
+Eight nights had passed since he, himself, had seen her, but to-day she
+had replied (over the telephone) that Mr. Atwater seemed to have settled
+down again, and she believed it might be no breach of tact for Noble to
+call that evening--especially as she would be on the veranda, and he
+needn't ring the bell. Would she be alone--for once? It was improbable,
+yet it could be hoped.
+
+But as he came hoping up the street, another already sat beside Julia,
+sharing with her the wicker settee on the dim porch, and this was the
+horn-rimmed young poet. Newland had, as usual, a new poem with him; and
+as others had proved of late that they could sit on Julia's veranda as
+long as he could, he had seized the first opportunity to familiarize her
+with this latest work.
+
+The veranda was dark, and to go indoors to the light might have involved
+too close a juxtaposition to peculiar old Mr. Atwater who was in the
+library; but the resourceful Newland, foreseeing everything, had
+brought with him a small pocket flashlight to illumine his manuscript.
+"It's _vers libre_, of course," he said as he moved the flashlight over
+the sheets of scribbled paper. "I think I told you I was beginning to
+give all the old forms up. It's the one new movement, and I felt I ought
+to master it."
+
+"Of course," she said sympathetically, though with a little nervousness.
+"Be just a wee bit careful with the flashlight--about turning it toward
+the window, I mean--and read in your nice low voice. I always like
+poetry best when it's almost whispered. I think it sounds more musical
+that way, I mean."
+
+Newland obeyed. His voice was hushed and profoundly appreciative of the
+music in itself and in his poem, as he read:
+
+          "I--And Love!
+    Lush white lilies line the pool
+    Like laces limned on looking-glasses!
+    I tread the lilies underfoot,
+    Careless how they love me!
+      Still white maidens woo me,
+      Win me not!
+        But thou!
+        Thou art a cornflower
+    Sapphire-eyed!
+          I bend!
+        Cornflower, I ask a question.
+    O flower, speak----"
+
+Julia spoke. "I'm afraid," she said, while Newland's spirit filled with
+a bitterness extraordinary even in an interrupted poet;--"I'm afraid
+it's Mr. Dill coming up the walk. We'll have to postpone----" She rose
+and went to the steps to greet the approaching guest. "How nice of you
+to come!"
+
+Noble, remaining on the lowest step, clung to her hand in a fever. "Nice
+to come!" he said hoarsely. "It's eight days--eight days--eight days
+since----"
+
+"Mr. Sanders is here," she said. "It's so dark on this big veranda
+people can hardly see each other. Come up and sit with us. I don't have
+to introduce you two men to each other."
+
+She did not, indeed. They said "H'lo, Dill" and "H'lo Sanders" in a
+manner of such slighting superiority that only the utmost familiarity
+could have bred a contempt so magnificent. Then, when the three were
+seated, Mr. Sanders thought well to add: "How's rent collecting these
+days, Dill? Still hustling around among those darky shanties over in
+Bucktown?"
+
+In the dark Noble moved convulsively, but contrived to affect a light
+laugh, or a sound meant for one, as he replied, in a voice not entirely
+under control: "How's the ole poetry, Sanders?"
+
+"What?" Newland demanded sharply. "What did you say?"
+
+"I said: 'How's the ole poetry?' Do you read it to all your relations
+the way you used to?"
+
+"See here, Dill!"
+
+"Well, what you want, Sanders?"
+
+"You try to talk about things you understand," said Newland. "You better
+keep your mind on collecting four dollars a week from some poor coloured
+widow, and don't----"
+
+"I'd _rather_ keep my mind on that!" Noble was inspired to retort. "Your
+Aunt Georgina told my mother that ever since you began thinkin' you
+could write poetry the life your family led was just----"
+
+Newland interrupted. He knew the improper thing his Aunt Georgina had
+said, and he was again, and doubly, infuriated by the prospect of its
+repetition here. He began fiercely:
+
+"Dill, you see here----"
+
+"Your Aunt Georgina said----"
+
+Both voices had risen. Plainly it was time for someone to say:
+"Gentlemen! Gentlemen!" Julia glanced anxiously through the darkness of
+the room beyond the open window beside her, to where the light of the
+library lamp shone upon a door ajar; and she was the more nervous
+because Noble, to give the effect of coolness, had lit an Orduma
+cigarette.
+
+She laughed amiably, as if the two young gentlemen were as amiable as
+she. "I've thought of something," she said. "Let's take the settee and
+some chairs down on the lawn where we can sit and see the moon."
+
+"There isn't any," Noble remarked vacantly.
+
+"Let's go, anyhow," she said cheerily. "Come on."
+
+Her purpose was effected; the belligerents were diverted, and Noble
+lifted the light wicker settee. "I'll carry this," he said. "It's no
+trouble. Sanders can carry a chair--I guess he'd be equal to that much."
+He stumbled, dropped the settee, and lifted a basket, its contents
+covered with a newspaper. "Somebody must have----"
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"It's a basket," said Noble.
+
+"How curious!"
+
+Julia peered through the darkness. "I wonder who could have left that
+market basket out _here_. I suppose----" She paused. "Our cook does do
+more idiotic things than--I'll go ask her if it's ours."
+
+She stepped quickly into the house, leaving two concentrations of
+inimical silence behind her, but she returned almost immediately,
+followed by Kitty Silver.
+
+"It's no use to argue," Julia was saying as they came. "You did your
+marketing and simply and plainly left it out there because you were too
+shiftless to----"
+
+"No'm," Mrs. Silver protested in a high voice of defensive complaint.
+"No'm, Miss Julia, I ain' lef no baskit on _no_ front po'che! I got jus'
+th'ee markit baskits in the livin' worl' an' they ev'y las' one an' all
+sittin' right where I kin lay my han's on 'em behime my back do'. No'm,
+Miss Julia, I take my solemn oaf I ain' lef no----" But here she
+debouched upon the porch, and in spite of the darkness perceived herself
+to be in the presence of distinguished callers. "Pahdon me," she said
+loftily, her tone altering at once, "I beg leaf to insis' I better take
+thishere baskit back to my kitchen an' see whut-all's insiden of it."
+
+With an elegant gesture she received the basket from Noble Dill and took
+the handle over her ample forearm. "Hum!" she said. "Thishere ole basket
+kine o' heavy, too. I wunner whut-all she _is_ got in her!" And she
+groped within the basket, beneath the newspaper.
+
+Now, it was the breath of Kitty Silver's life to linger, when she could,
+in a high atmosphere; and she was a powerful gossip, exorbitantly
+interested in her young mistress's affairs and all callers. Therefore it
+was beyond her not to seize upon any excuse that might detain her for
+any time whatever in her present surroundings.
+
+"Pusserve jugs," she said. "Pusserve or pickle. Cain't tell which."
+
+"You can in the kitchen," Julia said, with pointed suggestion. "Of
+course you can't in the dark."
+
+But still Mrs. Silver snatched at the fleeting moment and did not go.
+"Tell by smellin' 'em," she murmured, seemingly to herself.
+
+With ease she unscrewed the top of one of the jars; then held the open
+jar to her nose. "Don't smell to me exackly like no pusserves," she
+said. "Nor yit like no pickles. Don't smell to me----" She hesitated,
+sniffed the jar again, and then inquired in a voice quickly grown
+anxious: "Whut _is_ all thishere in thishere jug? Seem like to _me_----"
+
+But here she interrupted herself to utter a muffled exclamation, not
+coherent. Instantly she added some words suitable to religious
+observances, but in a voice of passion. At the same time, with a fine
+gesture, she hurled the jar and the basket from her, and both came in
+contact with the wall, not far away, with a sound of breakage.
+
+"Why, what----" Julia began. "Kitty Silver, are you crazy?"
+
+But Kitty Silver was moving hurriedly toward the open front door, where
+appeared, at that moment, Mr. Atwater in his most irascible state of
+peculiarity.
+
+He began: "What was that heathenish----"
+
+Shouting, Mrs. Silver jostled by him, and, though she disappeared into
+the house, a trail of calamitous uproar marked her passage to the
+kitchen.
+
+"What thing has happened?" Mr. Atwater demanded. "Is she----?"
+
+His daughter interrupted him.
+
+"_Oh_!" was all she said, and sped by him like a bit of blown
+thistledown, into the house. He grasped at her as she passed him; then
+suddenly he made other gestures, and, like Kitty Silver, used Jacobean
+phrases. But now there were no auditors, for Noble Dill and Newland
+Sanders, after thoughtlessly following a mutual and natural impulse to
+step over and examine the fallen basket, had both gone out to the
+street, where they lingered a while, then decided to go home.
+
+... Later, that evening, Florence and Herbert remembered the c'lection;
+so they came for it, a mistake. Discovering the fragments upon the
+veranda, they made the much more important mistake of entering the house
+to demand an explanation, which they received immediately. It was
+delivered with so much vigour, indeed, that Florence was surprised and
+hurt. And yet, the most important of her dreamy wishes of the afternoon
+had been fulfilled: the c'lection had been useful to Noble Dill, for Mr.
+Atwater had smelled the smell of an Orduma cigarette and was just on the
+point of coming out to say some harsh things, when the c'lection
+interfered. And as Florence was really responsible for its having been
+in a position to interfere, so to say, she had actually in a manner
+protected her protégé and also shown some of that power of which she had
+boasted when she told him that sometimes she made members of her family
+"step around pretty lively."
+
+Another of her wishes appeared to be on the way to fulfilment, too. She
+had hoped that something memorable might be done with the c'lection, and
+the interview with her grandfather, her Aunt Julia, and Kitty Silver
+seemed to leave this beyond doubt.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER TEN
+
+
+Now August came, that florid lazy month when mid-summer dawdles along in
+trailing greeneries, and the day is like some jocund pagan, all flushed
+and asleep, with dripping beard rosy in a wine bowl of fat vine leaves.
+Yet, in this languorous time there may befall a brisker night, cool and
+lively as an intrusive boy--a night made for dancing. On such a night a
+hasty thought might put it as desirable that all the world should be
+twenty-two years old and in love, like Noble Dill.
+
+Upon the white bed in his room, as he dressed, lay the flat black
+silhouettes of his short evening coat and trousers, side by side, trim
+from new pressing; and whenever he looked at them Noble felt rich, tall,
+distinguished, and dramatic. It is a mistake, as most literary legends
+are mistakes, to assume that girls are the only people subject to
+before-the-party exhilaration. At such times a girl is often in the
+anxious yet determined mood of a runner before a foot race, or she may
+be merely hopeful; some are merry and some are grim, but arithmetical
+calculation of some sort, whether glorious or uneasy, is busy in their
+eyes as they pin and pat before their mirrors. To behold romance gone
+light-headed, turn to the humbler sort of man-creature under
+twenty-three. Alone in his room, he may enact for you scenes of flowery
+grace and most capricious gallantry, rehearsals as unconscious as the
+curtsies of field daisies in a breeze. He has neither doubt nor
+certainty of his charm; he has no arithmetic at all, and is often so
+free of calculation that he does not even pull down the shades at his
+windows.
+
+Unfortunately for the neighbours, and even for passers-by, since Noble's
+room had a window visible from the street, his prophetic mother had
+closed his shutters before he began to dress. Thus she deprived honest
+folk of what surely must have been to them the innocent pleasure of
+seeing a very young man in light but complete underwear, lifting from
+his head a Panama hat, new that day, in a series of courteous
+salutations. At times, during this same stage of his toilet, they might
+have had even more entertainment:--before putting on his socks Noble
+"one-stepped" for several minutes, still retaining upon his head the
+new hat. This was a hat of double value to him; not only was it pleasant
+to behold in his mirror, but it was engaged in solidifying for the
+evening the arrangement of his hair.
+
+It may be admitted that he was a little giddy, for the dance was
+Julia's. Mr. Atwater had been summoned to New York on a blessed business
+that would keep him a fortnight, and his daughter, alert to the first
+flash of opportunity, had almost instantly summoned musicians, florists,
+a caterer, and set plans before them. Coincidentally, Noble had chanced
+to see Mr. Atwater driving down Julia's Street that morning, a
+travelling bag beside him, and, immediately putting aside for the day
+all business cares, hurried to the traveller's house. Thus he
+forestalled, for the time being, that competition which helped to make
+caring for Julia so continuous a strain upon whatever organ is the seat
+of the anxieties. Kind Julia, busy as she was, agreed to dance the first
+dance with him, and the last--those being considered of such
+significance that he would be entitled to the perquisites of a special
+cavalier; for instance, a seat beside her during the serving of the
+customary light repast. In such high fortune, no wonder he was a little
+giddy as he dressed!
+
+The process of clothing himself was disconnected, being broken by
+various enacted fancies and interludes. Having approached the length of
+one sock toward the completion of his toilet, he absently dropped the
+other upon the floor, and danced again; his expression and attitude
+signifying that he clasped a revered partner. Releasing her from this
+respectful confinement, he offered the invisible lady a gracious arm and
+walked up and down the room with a stateliness tempered to rhythm, a
+cakewalk of strange refinement. Phrases seemed to be running in his
+head, impromptus symbolic of the touching and romantic, for he spoke
+them half aloud hi a wistful yet uplifted manner. "Oh, years!" he said.
+"Oh, years so fair; oh, night so rare!" Then he added, in a deeper
+voice:
+
+"For life is but a golden dream so sweetly."
+
+Other whimsies came forth from him as the dressing slowly continued,
+though one might easily be at fault in attempting to fathom what was his
+thought when, during the passage of his right foot through the
+corresponding leg of his trousers, he exclaimed commandingly:
+
+"Now, Jocko, for the stirrup cup!"
+
+Jack boots and a faithful squire, probably.
+
+During the long and dreamy session with his neck gear he went back to
+the softer _motif_:
+
+    "Oh, years so fair; oh, night so rare!
+    For life is but a golden dream so sweetly."
+
+Then, pausing abruptly to look at his coat, so smoothly folded upon the
+bed, he addressed it: "O noblest sample of the tailor's dext'rous art!"
+
+This was too much courtesy, for the coat was "ready-made," and looked
+nobler upon the bed than upon its owner. In fact, it was by no means a
+dext'rous sample; but evidently Noble believed in it with a high and
+satisfying faith; and he repeated his compliment to it as he put it on:
+
+"Come, noblest sample of the tailor's art; I'll don thee!"
+
+During these processes he had been repeatedly summoned to descend to the
+family dinner, and finally his mother came lamenting and called up from
+the front hall that "everything" was "all getting cold!"
+
+But by this time he was on his way, and though he went back to leave his
+hat in his room, unwilling to confide it to the hat-rack below, he
+presently made his appearance in the dining-room and took his seat at
+the table. This mere sitting, however, appeared to be his whole
+conception of dining; he seemed as unaware of his mother's urging food
+upon him as if he had been a Noble Dill of waxwork. Several tunes he
+lifted a fork and set it down without guiding it to its accustomed
+destination. Food was far from his thoughts or desires, and if he really
+perceived its presence at all, it appeared to him as something vaguely
+ignoble upon the horizon.
+
+But he was able to partake of coffee; drank two cups feverishly, his
+hand visibly unsteady; and when his mother pointed out this confirmation
+of many prophecies that cigarettes would ruin him, he asked if anybody
+had noticed whether or not it was cloudy outdoors. At that his father
+looked despondent, for the open windows of the dining-room revealed an
+evening of fragrant clarity.
+
+"I see, I see," Noble returned pettishly when the fine state of this
+closely adjacent weather was pointed out to him by his old-maid sister.
+"It wouldn't be raining, of course. Not on a night like this." He jumped
+up. "It's time for me to go."
+
+Mrs. Dill laughed. "It's only a little after seven. Julia won't be
+through her own dinner yet. You mustn't----"
+
+But with a tremulous smile, Noble shook his head and hurriedly left the
+room. He went upstairs for his hat, and while there pinned a geranium
+blossom upon his lapel, for it may be admitted that in boutonničres his
+taste was as yet unformed.
+
+Coming down again, he took a stick under his arm and was about to set
+forth when he noticed a little drift of talcum powder upon one of his
+patent leather shoes. After carefully removing this accretion and adding
+a brighter lustre to the shoe by means of friction against the back of
+his ankle, he decided to return to his room and brush the affected
+portion of his trousers. Here a new reverie arrested him; he stood with
+the brush in his hand for some time; then, not having used it, he
+dropped it gently upon the bed, lit an Orduma cigarette, descended, and
+went forth to the quiet street.
+
+As he walked along Julia's Street toward Julia's Party, there was
+something in his mien and look more dramatic than mere sprightliness;
+and when he came within sight of the ineffable house and saw its many
+lights shining before him, he breathed with profundity, half halting.
+Again he murmured:
+
+    "Oh, years so fair; oh, night so rare!
+    For life is but a golden dream so sweetly."
+
+At the gate he hesitated. Perhaps--perhaps he was a little early. It
+might be better to walk round the block.
+
+He executed this parade, and again hesitated at the gate. He could see
+into the brightly lighted hall, beyond the open double doors; and it
+contained nothing except its usual furniture. Once more he walked round
+the block. The hall was again in the same condition. Again he went on.
+
+When he had been thrice round the block after that, he discovered human
+beings in the hall; they were Florence, in a gala costume, and
+Florence's mother, evidently arrived to be assistants at the party, for,
+with the helpful advice of a coloured manservant, they were arranging
+some bunches of flowers on two hall tables. Their leisurely manner
+somewhat emphasized the air of earliness that hung about the place, and
+Noble thought it better to continue to walk round the block. The third
+time after that, when he completed his circuit, the musicians were just
+arriving, and their silhouettes, headed by that of the burdened bass
+fiddler, staggered against the light of the glowing doorway like a
+fantasia of giant beetles. Noble felt that it would be better to let
+them get settled, and therefore walked round the block again.
+
+Not far from the corner above Julia's, as he passed, a hoarse and
+unctuous voice, issuing out of an undistinguishable lawn, called his
+name: "Noble! Noble Dill!" And when Noble paused, Julia's Uncle Joseph
+came waddling forth from the dimness and rested his monstrous arms upon
+the top of the fence, where a street light revealed them as
+shirt-sleeved and equipped with a palm-leaf fan.
+
+"What _is_ the matter, Noble?" Mr. Atwater inquired earnestly.
+
+"Matter?" Noble repeated. "Matter?"
+
+"We're kind of upset," said Mr. Atwater. "My wife and I been just
+sittin' out here in our front yard, not doing any harm to anybody, and
+here it's nine times we've counted you passing the place--always going
+the same way!" He spoke as with complaint, a man with a grievance. "It's
+kind of ghostlike," he added. "We'd give a good deal to know what _you_
+make of it."
+
+Noble was nonplussed. "Why----" he said. "Why----"
+
+"How do you get _back_? That's the mystery!" said Mr. Atwater. "You're
+always walkin' down street and never up. You know my wife's never been
+too strong a woman, Noble, and all this isn't doing her any good.
+Besides, we sort of figured out that you ought really to be at Julia's
+dance this evening."
+
+"I am," said Noble nervously. "I mean that's where I'm going. I'm going
+there. I'm going there."
+
+"That's what's upsetting us so!" the fat man exclaimed. "You keep on
+going there! Just when we've decided you must _be_ there, at last, here
+you come, going there again. Well, don't let me detain you. But if you
+do decide to go in, some time, Noble, I'm afraid you aren't going to be
+able to do much dancing."
+
+Noble, who had begun to walk on, halted in sudden panic. Did this
+sinister fear of Mr. Atwater's mean that, as an uncle, he had heard
+Julia was suddenly ill?
+
+"Why won't I?" he asked quickly. "Is anything----"
+
+"Your poor feet!" said Mr. Atwater, withdrawing. "Good-night, Noble."
+
+The youth went on, somewhat disturbed; it seemed to him that this uncle,
+though Julia's, was either going queer in the head or had chosen a poor
+occasion to be facetious. Next time, probably, it would be better to
+walk round the block below this. But it was no longer advisable to walk
+round any block. When he came to the happy gateway, the tuning of
+instruments and a fanfare of voices sounded from within the house; girls
+in light wraps were fluttering through the hall with young men; it was
+"time for the party!" And Noble went in.
+
+Throughout the accomplishment of the entrance he made, his outside and
+his inside were directly contradictory. His inside was almost
+fluttering: there might have been a nest of nervous young birds in his
+chest; but as he went upstairs to the "gentlemen's dressing-room," to
+leave his hat and stick, this flopping and scrambling within him was
+never to be guessed from his outside. His outside was unsympathetic,
+even stately; he greeted his fellow guests with negligent hauteur, while
+his glance seemed to say: "Only peasantry here!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER ELEVEN
+
+
+The stairway was crowded as he descended; and as he looked down upon the
+heads and shoulders of the throng below, in Julia's hall, the thought
+came to him that since he had the first and last dances and supper
+engaged with Julia, the hostess, this was almost the next thing to being
+the host. It was a pleasing thought, and a slight graciousness now
+flavoured his salutations.
+
+At the foot of the stairs he became part of the file of young people who
+were moving into one of the large rooms where Julia stood to "receive."
+And then, between two heads before him, he caught a first glimpse of
+her;--and all the young birds fluttering in his chest burst into song;
+his heart fainted, his head ballooned, his feet seemed to dangle from
+him at the ends of two strings.
+
+There glowed sapphire-eyed Julia; never had she been prettier.
+
+The group closed, shutting out the vision, and he found himself able to
+dry his brow and get back his breath before moving forward in a cold
+and aristocratic attitude. Then he became incapable of any attitude--he
+was before her, and she greeted him. A buzzing of the universe confused
+him: he would have stood forever, but pressure from behind pushed him
+on; and so, enveloped in a scented cloud, he passed into a corner. He
+tried to remember what he had said to her, but could not; perhaps it
+would have discouraged him to know that all he had said was, "Well!"
+
+Now there rattled out a challenge of drums; loud music struck upon the
+air. Starting instantly to go to Julia, Noble's left leg first received
+the electric impulse and crossed his laggard right; but he was no pacer,
+and thus stumbled upon himself and plunged. Still convulsive, he came
+headlong before her, and was the only person near who remained unaware
+that his dispersal of an intervening group had the appearance of extreme
+unconventionality. Noble knew nothing except that this was his dance
+with Her.
+
+Then heaven played with him. She came close and touched him exquisitely.
+She placed a lovely hand upon his shoulder, her other lovely cool hand
+in one of his. The air filled with bursting stars.
+
+They danced.
+
+Noble was conscious of her within his clasping arm, but conscious of her
+as nothing human. The fluffy white bodice pressed by his hand seemed to
+be that of some angel doll; the charming shoulder that sometimes touched
+his was made of a divine mist. Only the pretty head, close to his, was
+actual; the black-sapphire eyes gave him a little blue-black glance, now
+and then, and seemed to laugh.
+
+In truth, they did, though Julia's lips remained demure. So far as Noble
+was able to comprehend what he was doing, he was floating rhythmically
+to a faint, far music; but he was almost unconscious, especially from
+the knees down. But to the eye of observers incapable of perceiving that
+Noble was floating, it appeared that he was out of step most of the
+time, and danced rather hoppingly. However, these mannerisms were no
+novelty with him, and it cannot be denied that girls at dances usually
+hurried impulsively away to speak to somebody when they saw him coming.
+One such creature even went so far as to whisper to Julia now, during a
+collision: "How'd you get caught?"
+
+Julia was loyal; she gave no sign of comprehension, but valiantly swung
+onward with Noble, bumped and bumping everywhere, in spite of the most
+extraordinary and graceful dexterity on her part.
+
+"That's one reason she's such a terrible belle," a damsel whispered to
+another.
+
+"What is?"
+
+"The way she'll be just as nice to anybody like Noble Dill as she is to
+anybody," said the first. "Look at her now: she won't laugh at him a
+bit, though everybody else is."
+
+"Well, I wouldn't laugh either," said the other. "Not in Julia's
+position. I'd be too busy being afraid."
+
+"What of?"
+
+"Of getting a sprained ankle!"
+
+It is well that telepathy remains, as a science, lethargic. Speculation
+sets before us the prospect of a Life Beyond in which every thought is
+communicated without the intervention of speech: a state wherein all
+neighbours and neighbourhoods would promptly be dispersed and few
+friendships long endure, one fears. If to Noble Dill's active
+consciousness had penetrated merely the things thought about him and his
+dancing, in this one short period of time before the music for that
+dance stopped, he might easily have been understood if he had hurried
+forth, obtained explosives, and blown up the place, himself indeed
+included. As matters providentially were in reality, when the music
+stopped he stood confounded: he thought the dance had just begun.
+
+His mouth remained open until the necessary gestures of articulation
+intermittently closed it as he said: "_Oh!_ That was _divine_!"
+
+Too-gentle Julia agreed.
+
+"You said I could have part of some in between the first and last," he
+reminded her. "Can I have the first part of the next?"
+
+She laughed. "I'm afraid not. The next is Mr. Clairdyce's and I really
+_promised_ him I wouldn't give _any_ of his away or let anybody cut in."
+
+"Well, then," said Noble, frowning a little, "would you be willing for
+me to cut in on the third?"
+
+"I'm afraid not. That's Newland Sanders', and I promised him the same
+thing."
+
+"Well, the one after that?"
+
+"No, that one's Mr. Clairdyce's, too."
+
+"It _is_?" Noble was greatly disturbed.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Two that quick with old Baldy Clairdyce!" he exclaimed, raising his
+voice, but unaware of the fervour with which he spoke. "Two with that
+old----"
+
+"_Sh_, Noble," she said, though she laughed. "He isn't really old; he's
+just middle-aged, and only the least bit bald, just enough to be
+distinguished-looking."
+
+"Well, you know what _I_ think of him!" he returned with a vehemence not
+moderated. "_I_ don't think he's distinguished-looking; I think he's
+simply and plainly a regular old----"
+
+"_Sh!_" Julia warned him again. "He's standing with some people just
+behind us," she added.
+
+"Well, then," said Noble, "can I cut in on the next one after that?"
+
+She consulted a surreptitious little card. "I'm afraid you'll have to
+wait till quite a little later on, Noble. That one is poor Mr.
+Ridgely's. I promised him I wouldn't----"
+
+"Then can I cut in on the next one after that?"
+
+"It's Mr. Clairdyce's," said Julia--and she blushed.
+
+"My goodness!" said Noble. "Oh, my goodness!"
+
+"_Sh!_ I'm afraid people----"
+
+"Let's go out on the porch," said Noble, whose manner had suddenly
+become desperate. "Let's go out and get some air where we can talk this
+thing over."
+
+"I'm afraid I'd better not just now," she returned, glancing over her
+shoulder. "You see, all the people aren't here yet."
+
+"You've got an aunt here," said Noble, "and a sister-in-law and a little
+niece: I saw 'em. They can----"
+
+"I'm afraid I'd better stay indoors just now," she said persuasively.
+"We can talk here just as well."
+
+"We can't!" he insisted feverishly. "We can't, Julia! I've got something
+to say, Julia. Julia, you gave me the first dance and the last dance,
+and of course sitting together at supper, or whatever there is, and you
+know as well as I do that means it's just the same as if you weren't
+giving this party but it was somewhere else and I took you to it, and
+it's always understood you _never_ dance more with anybody else than the
+one you went with, when you go with that person to a place, because
+that's the rights of it; and other towns it's just the same way; they do
+that way there, just the same as here; they do that way everywhere,
+because nobody else has got a right to cut in and dance more with you
+than the one you go with, when you goes to a place with that one. Julia,
+don't you see that's the regular way it is, and the only fair way it
+ought to be?"
+
+"What?"
+
+"Weren't you even _listening_?" he cried.
+
+"Yes, indeed, but----"
+
+"Julia," he said desperately, "let's go out on the porch. I want to
+explain just the way I feel. Let's go out on the porch, Julia. If we
+stay here, somebody's just bound to interrupt us any minute before I can
+explain the way I----"
+
+But the prophecy was fulfilled even before it was concluded. A group of
+loudly chattering girls and their escorts of the moment bore down upon
+Julia, and shattered the tęte-ŕ-tęte. Dislodged from Julia's side by a
+large and eager girl, whom he had hated ever since she was six years old
+and he five, Noble found himself staggering in a kind of suburb; for the
+large girl's disregard of him, as she shouldered in, was actually
+physical, and too powerful for him to resist. She wished to put her
+coarse arm round Julia's waist, it appeared, and the whole group burbled
+and clamoured: the party was _perfictly_ glorious; so was the waxed
+floor; so was Julia, my _dear_, so was the music, the weather, and the
+din they made!
+
+Noble felt that his rights were being outraged. Until the next dance
+began, every moment of her time was legally his--yet all he could even
+see of her was the top of her head. And the minutes were flying.
+
+He stood on tiptoe, thrust his head forward over the large girl's odious
+shoulder, and shouted: "Julia! Let's go out on the porch!"
+
+No one seemed to hear him.
+
+"Julia----"
+
+_Boom!_ Rackety-_Boom_! The drummer walloped his drums; a saxophone
+squawked, and fiddles squealed. Hereupon appeared a tall authoritative
+man, at least thirty-two years old, and all swelled up with himself, as
+interpreted by Noble and several other friends of Julia's--though this,
+according to quite a number of people (all feminine) was only another
+way of saying that he was a person of commanding presence. He wore a
+fully developed moustache, an easy smile, clothes offensively knowing;
+and his hair began to show that scarcity which Julia felt gave him
+distinction--a curious theory, but natural to her age. What really did
+give this Clairdyce some air of distinction, however, was the calmness
+with which he walked through the group that had dislodged Noble Dill,
+and the assurance with which he put his arm about Julia and swept her
+away in the dance.
+
+Noble was left alone in the middle of the floor, but not for long.
+Couples charged him, and he betook himself to the wall. The party, for
+him, was already ruined.
+
+Sometimes, as he stood against the wall, there would be swirled to him,
+out of all the comminglements of other scents, a faint, faint hint of
+heliotrope and then Julia would be borne masterfully by, her flying
+skirts just touching him. And sometimes, out of the medley of all other
+sounds, there would reach his ear a little laugh like a run of lightly
+plucked harp strings, and he would see her shining dark hair above her
+partner's shoulder as they swept again near him for an instant. And
+always, though she herself might be concealed from him, he could only
+too painfully mark where she danced: the overtopping head of the tall
+Clairdyce was never lost to view. The face on the front part of that
+disliked head wore continuously a confident smile, which had a bad
+effect on Noble. It seemed to him desecration that a man with so gross a
+smile should be allowed to dance with Julia. And that she should smile
+back at her partner, and with such terrible kindness--as Noble twice saw
+her smile--this was like a calamity happening to her white soul without
+her knowing it. If she should ever marry that man--well, it would be
+the old story: May and December! Noble shuddered, and the drums, the
+fiddles, the bass fiddle, and the saxophone seemed to have an evil
+sound.
+
+When the music stopped he caromed hastily through the room toward Julia,
+but she was in a thicket of her guests when he arrived, and for several
+moments Mr. Clairdyce's broad back kept intervening--almost
+intentionally, it seemed. When Noble tried to place himself in a
+position to attract Julia's attention, this back moved, too, and Noble's
+nose but pressed black cloth. And the noise everybody made was so
+baffling that, in order to be heard, Julia herself was shouting. Finally
+Noble contrived to squirm round the obtrusive back, and protruded his
+strained face among all the flushed and laughing ones.
+
+"Julia, I got to----" he began.
+
+But this was just at the climax of a story that three people were
+telling at the same time, Julia being one of them, and he received
+little attention.
+
+"Julia," he said hoarsely; "I got something I want to _tell_ you
+about----"
+
+He raised his voice: "Julia, come on! Let's go out on the _porch_!"
+
+Nobody even knew that he was there. Nevertheless, the tall and solid
+Clairdyce was conscious of him, but only, it proved, as one is conscious
+of something to rest upon. His elbow, a little elevated, was at the
+height of Noble's shoulder, and this heavy elbow, without its owner's
+direct or active cognizance, found for itself a comfortable support.
+Then, as the story reached its conclusion, this old Clairdyce joined the
+general mirth so heartily as to find himself quite overcome, and he
+allowed most of his weight to depend upon the supported elbow. Noble
+sank like feathers.
+
+"Here! What you doin'?" he said hotly. "I'll thank you to keep off o'
+me!"
+
+Old Baldy recovered his balance without being aware what had threatened
+it, while his elbow, apparently of its own volition, groped for its
+former pedestal. Noble evaded it, and pushed forward.
+
+"Julia," he said. "I _got_ to say some----"
+
+But the accursed music began again, and horn-rimmed Newland Sanders
+already had his arm about her waist. They disappeared into the ruck of
+dancers.
+
+"Well, by George!" said Noble. "By George, I'm goin' to _do_
+something!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER TWELVE
+
+
+He went outdoors and smoked Orduma cigarettes, one after the other.
+Dances and intermissions succeeded each other but Noble had "enough of
+_that_, for one while!" So he muttered.
+
+And remembering how Julia had told him that he was killing himself with
+cigarettes, "All right," he said now, as he bitterly lighted his fifth
+at the spark of the fourth;--"I hope I will!"
+
+"Lot o' difference it'd make!" he said, as he lighted the eighth of a
+series that must, all told, have contained nearly as much tobacco as a
+cigar. And, leaning back against the trunk of one of the big old walnut
+trees in the yard, he gazed toward the house, where the open window
+nearest him splashed with colour like a bright and crowded aquarium. "To
+_her_, anyway!" he added, with a slight remorse, remembering that his
+mother had frequently shown him evidences of affection.
+
+Yes, his mother would care, and his father and sisters would be upset,
+but Julia--when the friends of the family were asked to walk by for a
+last look, would she be one? What optimism remained to him presented a
+sketch of Julia, in black, borne from the room in the arms of girl
+friends who tried in vain to hush her; but he was unable to give this
+more hopeful fragment an air of great reality. Much more probably, when
+word came to her that he had smoked himself to death, she would be a
+bride, dancing at Niagara Falls with her bald old husband--and she would
+only laugh and pause to toss a faded rose out of the window, and then go
+right on dancing. But perhaps, some day, when tears had taught her the
+real meaning of life with such a man----
+
+"You--_wow_!"
+
+Noble jumped. From the darkness of the yard beside the house there came
+a grievous howl, distressful to the spinal marrow, a sound of animal
+pain. It was repeated even more passionately, and another voice was also
+heard, one both hoarsely bass and falsetto in the articulation of a
+single syllable. "_Ouch!_" There were sounds of violent scuffing, and
+the bass-falsetto voice cried: "What's that you _stuck_ me with?" and
+another: "Drag her! Drag her back by her feet!"
+
+These alarms came from the almost impenetrable shadows of the small
+orchard beside the house; and from the same quarter was heard the
+repeated contact of a heavy body, seemingly wooden or metallic, with the
+ground; but high over this there rose a shrieking: "Help! Help! Oh,
+_hay_-yulp!" This voice was girlish. "Hay-_yulp_!"
+
+Noble dashed into the orchard, and at once fell prostrate upon what
+seemed a log, but proved to be a large and solidly packed ice-cream
+freezer lying on its side.
+
+Dark forms scrambled over the fence and vanished, but as Noble got to
+his feet he was joined by a dim and smallish figure in white--though
+more light would have disclosed a pink sash girdling its middle. It was
+the figure of Miss Florence Atwater, seething with furious agitations.
+
+"Vile thieves!" she panted.
+
+"Who?" Noble asked, brushing at his knees, while Florence made some
+really necessary adjustments of her own attire. "Who were they?"
+
+"It was my own cousin, Herbert, and that nasty little Henry Rooter and
+their gang. Herbert thinks he hass to act perfectly horrable all the
+time, now his voice is changing!" said Florence, her emotion not abated.
+"Tried to steal this whole ice-cream freezer off the back porch and
+sneak it over the fence and eat it! I stuck a pretty long pin in Herbert
+and two more of 'em, every bit as far as it would go." And in the
+extremity of her indignation, she added: "The dirty robbers!"
+
+"Did they hurt you?"
+
+"You bet your life they didn't!" the child responded. "Tried to drag me
+back to the house! By the feet! I guess I gave 'em enough o' _that_!"
+
+Then, tugging the prostrate freezer into an upright position, she
+exclaimed darkly: "I expect I gave ole Mister Herbert and some of the
+others of 'em just a few kicks they won't be in such a hurry to forget!"
+And in spite of his own gloomy condition, Noble was able, upon thinking
+over matters, to spare some commiseration for Herbert and his friend,
+that nasty little Henry Rooter and their gang. They seemed to have been
+at a disadvantage.
+
+"I suppose I'd better carry the freezer back to the kitchen porch," he
+said. "Somebody may want it."
+
+"'Somebody'!" Florence exclaimed. "Why, there's only two of these big
+freezers, and if I hadn't happened to suspeck somep'n and be layin' for
+those vile thieves, half the party wouldn't get _any_!" And as an
+afterthought, when Noble had pantingly restored the heavy freezer to its
+place by the kitchen door, she said: "Or else they'd had to have such
+little saucers of it nobody would of been any way _like_ satisfied, and
+prob'ly all the fam'ly that's here assisting would of had to go without
+any at all. That'd 'a' been the worst of it!"
+
+She opened the kitchen door, and to those within explained loudly what
+dangers had been averted, directing that both freezers be placed indoors
+under guard; then she rejoined Noble, who was walking slowly back to the
+front yard.
+
+"I guess it's pretty lucky you happened to be hangin' around out here,"
+she said. "I guess that's about the luckiest thing ever happened to me.
+The way it looks to me, I guess you saved my life. If you hadn't chased
+'em away, I wouldn't been a bit surprised if that gang would killed me!"
+
+"Oh, no!" said Noble. "They wouldn't----"
+
+"You don't know 'em like I do," the romantic child assured him. "I know
+that gang pretty well, and I wouldn't been a bit surprised. I wouldn't
+been!"
+
+"But----"
+
+She tossed her head, signifying recklessness.
+
+"Guess 'twouldn't make much difference to anybody particular, whether
+they did or not," said this strange Florence.
+
+Noble regarded her with astonishment; they had reached the front yard,
+and paused under the trees where the darkness was mitigated by the light
+from the shining windows. "Why, you oughtn't to talk that way,
+Florence," he said. "Think of your mamma and papa and your--and your
+Aunt Julia."
+
+She tossed her head again. "Pooh! They'd all of 'em just say: 'Good
+ribbons to bad rubbish,' I guess!" However, she seemed far from
+despondent about this; in fact, she was naturally pleased with her
+position as a young girl saved from the power of ruffians by a rescuer
+who was her Very Ideal. "I bet if I died, they wouldn't even have a
+funeral," she said cheerfully. "They'd proba'ly just leave me lay."
+
+The curiosities of the human mind are found not in high adventure: they
+are everywhere in the commonplace. Never for a moment did it strike
+Noble Dill that Florence's turn to the morbid bore any resemblance to
+his recent visions of his own funeral. He failed to perceive that the
+two phenomena were produced out of the same laboratory jar and were
+probably largely chemical, at that.
+
+"Why, Florence!" he exclaimed. "That's a dreadful way to feel. I'm sure
+your--your Aunt Julia loves you."
+
+"Oh, well," Florence returned lightly;--"maybe she does. I don't care
+whether she does or not." And now she made a deduction, the profundity
+of which his condition made him unable to perceive. "It makes less
+difference to anybody whether their aunts love 'em or not than whether
+pretty near anybody else at all does."
+
+"But not your Aunt _Julia_" he urged. "Your Aunt _Julia_----"
+
+"I don't care whether she does than any other aunt I got," said
+Florence. "All of 'em's just aunts, and that's all there is to it."
+
+"But, Florence, your Aunt _Julia_----"
+
+"She's nothin' in the world but my _aunt_," Florence insisted, and her
+emphasis showed that she was trying hard to make him understand. "She's
+just the same as all of 'em. I don't get anything more from her than I
+do from any the rest of 'em."
+
+Her auditor was dumfounded, but not by Florence's morals. The
+cold-blooded calculation upon which her family affections seemed to be
+founded, this aboriginal straightforwardness of hers, passed over him.
+What shocked him was her appearing to see Julia as all of a piece with a
+general lot of ordinary aunts. Helplessly, he muttered again:
+
+"But your Aunt _Julia_----"
+
+"There she is now," said Florence, pointing to the window nearest them.
+"They've stopped dancing for a while so's that ole Mister Clairdyce can
+get a chance to sing somep'n. Mamma told me he was goin' to."
+
+Dashing chords sounded from a piano invisible to Noble and his
+companion; the windows exhibited groups of deferentially expectant young
+people; and then a powerful barytone began a love song. From the yard
+the singer could not be seen, but Julia could be: she stood in the
+demurest attitude; and no one needed to behold the vocalist to know that
+the scoundrel was looking pointedly and romantically at her.
+
+    "Dee-urra-face that holds soswee tasmile for me,
+    Wairyew nah tmine how darrrk the worrrl dwooed be!"
+
+To Noble, suffering at every pore, this was less a song than a
+bellowing; and in truth the confident Mr. Clairdyce did "let his voice
+out," for he was seldom more exhilarated than when he shook the ceiling.
+The volume of sound he released upon his climaxes was impressive, and
+the way he slid up to them had a great effect, not indoors alone, but
+upon Florence, enraptured out under the trees.
+
+"Oh, isn't it be-_you_-tiful!" she murmured.
+
+Her humid eyes were fixed upon Noble, who was unconscious of the honour.
+Florence was susceptible to anything purporting to be music, and this
+song moved her. Throughout its delivery from Mr. Clairdyce's unseen
+chest, her large eyes dwelt upon Noble, and it is not at all impossible
+that she was applying the tender words to him, just as the vehement
+Clairdyce was patently addressing them to Julia. On he sang, while
+Noble, staring glassily at the demure lady, made a picture of himself
+leaping unexpectedly through the window, striding to the noisy barytone,
+striking him down, and after stamping on him several times, explaining:
+"There! That's for your insolence to our hostess!" But he did not
+actually permit himself these solaces; he only clenched and unclenched
+his fingers several times, and continued to listen.
+
+    "Geev a-mee yewr ra-smile,
+      The luv va-ligh TIN yew rise,
+      Life cooed not hold a fairrerr paradise.
+    Geev a-mee the righ to luv va-yew all the wile,
+      My worrlda for AIV-vorr,
+    The sunshigh NUV vyewr-ra-smile!"
+
+The conclusion was thunderous, and as a great noise under such
+circumstances is an automatic stimulant of enthusiasm, the applause was
+thunderous too. Several girls were unable to subdue their outcries of
+"Charming!" and "_Won_-derf'l!"--not even after Mr. Clairdyce had begun
+to sing the same song as an encore.
+
+When this was concluded, a sigh, long and deep, was heard under the
+trees. It came from Florence. Her eyes, wanly gleaming, like young
+oysters in the faint light, were still fixed on Noble; and there can be
+little doubt that just now there was at least one person in the world,
+besides his mother, who saw him in a glamour as something rare, obs,
+exquisite, and elegant. "I think that was the most be-_you_-tiful thing
+I ever heard!" she said; and then, noting a stir within the house, she
+became practical. "They're starting refreshments," she said. "We better
+hurry in, Mr. Dill, so's to get good places. Thanks to me, there's
+plenty to go round."
+
+She moved toward the house, but, observing that he did not accompany
+her, paused and looked back. "Aren't you goin' to come in, Mr. Dill?"
+
+"I guess not. Don't tell any one I'm out here."
+
+"I won't. But aren't you goin' to come in for----"
+
+He shook his head. "No, I'm going to wait out here a while longer."
+
+"But," she said, "it's _refreshments_!"
+
+"I don't want any. I--I'm going to smoke some more, instead."
+
+She looked at him wistfully, then even more wistfully toward the house.
+Evidently she was of a divided mind: her feeling for Noble fought with
+her feeling for "refreshments." Such a struggle could not endure for
+long: a whiff of coffee conjured her nose, and a sound of clinking china
+witched her ear. "Well," she said, "I guess I ought to have some
+nourishment," and betook herself hurriedly into the house.
+
+Noble lit another Orduma. He would follow the line of conduct he had
+marked out for himself: he would not take his place by Julia for the
+supper interval--perhaps that breach of etiquette would "show" her. He
+could see her no longer--she had moved out of range--but he imagined
+her, asking everywhere: "Hasn't _any_ one seen Mr. Dill?" And he thought
+of her as biting her lip nervously, perhaps, and replying absently to
+sallies and quips--perhaps even having to run upstairs to her own room
+to dash something sparkling from her eyes, and, maybe, to look angrily
+in her glass for an instant and exclaim, "Fool!" For Julia was proud,
+and not used to be treated in this way.
+
+He felt the least bit soothed, and, lightly flicking the ash from his
+Orduma with his little finger, an act indicating some measure of
+restored composure, he strolled to the other side of the house and
+brought other fields of vision into view through other windows. Abruptly
+his stroll came to an end.
+
+There sat Julia, flushed and joyous, finishing her supper in company
+with old Baldy Clairdyce, Newland Sanders, George Plum, seven or eight
+other young gentlemen, and some inconsidered adhering girls--the
+horrible barytone sitting closest of all to Julia. Moreover, upon that
+very moment the orchestra, in the hall beyond, thought fit to pay the
+recent vocalist a sickening compliment, and began to play "The Sunshine
+of Your Smile."
+
+Thereupon, with Julia herself first taking up the air in a dulcet
+soprano, all of the party, including the people in the other rooms, sang
+the dreadful song in chorus, the beaming Clairdyce exerting such
+demoniac power as to be heard tremendously over all other voices. He had
+risen for this effort, and to Noble, below the window, everything in his
+mouth was visible.
+
+The lone listener had a bitter thought, though it was a longing, rather
+than a thought. For the first time in his life he wished that he had
+adopted the profession of dentistry.
+
+    "Geev a-mee the righ to luv va-yew ALL the wile,
+      My worrrlda for AIV-vorr,
+    The sunshigh NUV vyewr-ra-smile!"
+
+The musicians swung into dance music; old Baldy closed the exhibition
+with an operatic gesture (for which alone, if for nothing else, at least
+one watcher thought the showy gentleman deserved hanging), and this
+odious gesture concluded with a seizure of Julia's hand. She sprang up
+eagerly; he whirled her away, and the whole place fluctuated in the
+dance once more.
+
+"Well, now," said Noble, between his teeth--"now, I _am_ goin' to do
+something!"
+
+He turned his back upon that painful house, walked out to the front
+gate, opened it, passed through, and looked southward. Not quite two
+blocks away there shone the lights of a corner drug store, still open to
+custom though the hour was nearing midnight. He walked straight to the
+door of this place, which stood ajar, but paused before entering, and
+looked long and nervously at the middle-aged proprietor who was
+unconscious of his regard, and lounged in a chair, drowsily stroking a
+cat upon his lap. Noble walked in.
+
+"Good evening," said the proprietor, rising and brushing himself
+languidly. "Cat hairs," he said apologetically. "Sheddin', I reckon."
+Then, as he went behind the counter, he inquired: "How's the party goin'
+off?"
+
+"It's--it's----" Noble hesitated. "I stepped in to--to----"
+
+The druggist opened a glass case. "Aw right," he said, blinking, and
+tossed upon the counter a package of Orduma cigarettes. "Old Atwater'd
+have convulsions, I reckon," he remarked, "if he had to lay awake and
+listen to all that noise. Price ain't changed," he added, referring
+humorously to the purchase he mistakenly supposed Noble wished to make.
+"F'teen cents, same as yesterday and the day before."
+
+Noble placed the sum upon the counter. "I--I was thinking----" He
+gulped.
+
+"Huh?" said the druggist placidly, for he was too sleepy to perceive the
+strangeness of his customer's manner.
+
+Noble lighted an Orduma with an unsteady hand, leaned upon the counter,
+and inquired in a voice that he strove to make casual: "Is--is the soda
+fountain still running this late?"
+
+"Sure."
+
+"I didn't know," said Noble. "I suppose you have more calls for soda
+water than you do for--for--for real liquor?"
+
+The druggist laughed. "Funny thing: I reckon we don't have more'n half
+the calls for real liquor than what we used to before we went dry."
+
+Noble breathed deeply. "I s'pose you probably sell quite a good deal of
+it though, at that. By the glass, I mean--such as a glass of something
+kind of strong--like--like whiskey. That is, I sort of supposed so. I
+mean I thought I'd ask you about this."
+
+"No," said the druggist, yawning. "It never did pay well--not on this
+corner, anyhow. Once there used to be a little money in it, but not
+much." He roused himself somewhat. "Well, it's about twelve. Anything
+you wanted 'cept them Ordumas before I close up?"
+
+Noble gulped again. He had grown pale. "_I_ want----" he said abruptly,
+then his heart seemed to fail him. "I want a glass of----" Once more he
+stopped and swallowed. His shoulders drooped, and he walked across to
+the soda fountain. "Well," he said, "I'll take a chocolate sundae."
+
+The thought of going back to Julia's party was unendurable, yet a return
+was necessary on account of his new hat, the abandonment of which he did
+not for a moment consider. But about half way, as he walked slowly
+along, he noticed an old horse-block at the curbstone, and sat down
+there. He could hear the music at Julia's, sometimes loud and close at
+hand, sometimes seeming to be almost a mile away. "All right!" he said,
+so bitter had he grown. "Dance! Go on and _dance_!"
+
+... When finally he reëntered Julia's gate, he shuffled up the walk, his
+head drooping, and ascended the steps and crossed the veranda and the
+threshold of the front door in the same manner.
+
+Julia stood before him.
+
+"Noble _Dill_!" she exclaimed.
+
+As for Noble, his dry throat refused its office; he felt that he might
+never be able to speak to Julia again, even if he tried.
+
+"Where in the world have you been all evening?" she cried.
+
+"Why, Jew-Julia!" he quavered. "Did you notice that I was gone?"
+
+"Did I 'notice'!" she said. "You never came near me all evening after
+the first dance! Not even at supper!"
+
+"You wouldn't--you didn't----" he faltered. "You wouldn't do anything
+all evening except dance with that old Clairdyce and listen to him
+trying to sing."
+
+But Julia would let no one suffer if she could help it; and she could
+always help Noble. She made her eyes mysterious and used a voice of
+honey and roses. "You don't think I'd _rather_ have danced with him, do
+you, Noble?"
+
+Immediately sparks seemed to crackle about his head. He started.
+
+"What?" he said.
+
+The scent of heliotrope enveloped him; she laughed her silver
+harp-strings laugh, and lifted her arms toward the dazzled young man.
+"It's the last dance," she said. "Don't you want to dance it with me?"
+
+Then to the spectators it seemed that Noble Dill went hopping upon a
+waxed floor and upon Julia's little slippers; he was bumped and bumping
+everywhere; but in reality he floated in Elysian ether, immeasurably
+distant from earth, his hand just touching the bodice of an angelic
+doll.
+
+Then, on his way home, a little later, with his new hat on the back of
+his head, his stick swinging from his hand, and a semi-fragrant Orduma
+between his lips, his condition was precisely as sweet as the condition
+in which he had walked to the party.
+
+No echoes of "The Sunshine of Your Smile" cursed his memory--that
+lover's little memory fresh washed in heliotrope--and when his mother
+came to his door, after he got home, and asked him if he'd had "a nice
+time at the party," he said:
+
+"Just glorious!" and believed it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THIRTEEN
+
+
+It was a pretty morning, two weeks after Julia's Dance; and blue and
+lavender shadows, frayed with mid-summer sunshine, waggled gayly across
+the grass beneath the trees of the tiny orchard, but trembled with
+timidity as they hurried over the abnormal surfaces of Mrs. Silver as
+she sat upon the steps of the "back porch." Her right hand held in
+security one end of a leather leash; the other end of the leash was
+fastened to a new collar about the neck of an odd and fascinating dog.
+Seated upon the brick walk at her feet, he was regarding her with a
+gravity that seemed to discomfort her. She was unable to meet his gaze,
+and constantly averted her own whenever it furtively descended to his.
+In fact, her expression and manner were singular, denoting
+embarrassment, personal hatred, and a subtle bedazzlement. She could not
+look at him, yet could not keep herself from looking at him. There was
+something here that arose out of the depths of natural character; it was
+intrinsic in the two personalities, that is to say; and was in addition
+to the bitterness consequent upon a public experience, just past, which
+had been brought upon Mrs. Silver partly by the dog's appearance (in
+particular the style and colour of his hair) and partly by his
+unprecedented actions in her company upon the highway.
+
+She addressed him angrily, yet with a profound uneasiness.
+
+"Dog!" she said. "You ain't feelin' as skittish as whut you did, li'l
+while ago, is you? My glory! I dess would like to lay my han' to you'
+hide once, Mister! I take an' lam you this livin' minute if I right sho'
+you wouldn't take an' bite me."
+
+She jerked the leash vindictively, upon which the dog at once "sat up"
+on his haunches, put his forepaws together above his nose, in an
+attitude of prayer, and looked at her inscrutably from under the great
+bang of hair that fell like a black chrysanthemum over his forehead.
+Beneath this woolly lambrequin his eyes were visible as two garnet
+sparks of which the coloured woman was only too nervously aware. She
+gasped.
+
+"Look-a-here, dog, who's went an' ast you to take an' pray fer 'em?"
+
+He remained motionless and devout.
+
+"My goo'niss!" she said to him. "If you goin' keep on thisaway whut you
+_is_ been, I'm goin' to up an' go way from here, ri' now!" Then she said
+a remarkable thing. "Listen here, Mister! I ain' never los' no gran'
+child, an' I ain' goin' 'dop' no stranger fer one, neither!"
+
+The explanation rests upon the looks and manners of him whom she
+addressed. This dog was of a kind at the top of dog kingdoms. His size
+was neither insignificant nor great; probably his weight would have been
+between a fourth and a third of a St. Bernard's. He had the finest head
+for adroit thinking that is known among dogs; and he had an athletic
+body, the forepart muffled and lost in a mass of corded black fleece,
+but the rest of him sharply clipped from the chest aft; and his trim,
+slim legs were clipped, though tufts were left at his ankles, and at the
+tip of his short tail, with two upon his hips, like fanciful buttons of
+an imaginary jacket; for thus have such dogs been clipped to a fashion
+proper and comfortable for them ever since (and no doubt long before) an
+Imperial Roman sculptor so chiselled one in bas-relief. In brief, this
+dog, who caused Kitty Silver so much disquietude, as she sat upon the
+back steps at Mr. Atwater's, belonged to that species of which no
+Frenchman ever sees a specimen without smiling and murmuring:
+"_Caniche!_" He was that golden-hearted little clown of all the world, a
+French Poodle.
+
+To arrive at what underlay Mrs. Silver's declaration that she had never
+lost a grandchild and had no intention of adopting a stranger in the
+place of one, it should be first understood that in many respects she
+was a civilized person. The quality of savagery, barbarism, or
+civilization in a tribe may be tested by the relations it
+characteristically maintains with domestic animals; and tribes that eat
+dogs are often inferior to those inclined to ceremonial cannibalism.
+Likewise, the civilization, barbarism, or savagery of an individual may
+be estimated by the same test, which sometimes gives us evidence of
+sporadic reversions to mud. Such reversions are the stomach priests:
+whatever does not minister to their own bodily inwards is a "parasite."
+Dogs are "parasites"; they should not live, because to fat and eat them
+somehow appears uncongenial. "Kill Dogs and Feed Pigs," they write to
+the papers, and, with a Velasquez available, would burn it rather than
+go chilly. "Kill dogs, feed pigs, and let _me_ eat the pigs!" they cry,
+even under no great stress, these stern economists who have not noticed
+how wasteful the Creator is proved to be if He made themselves. They
+take the strictly intestinal view of life. It is not intelligent;
+parasite bacilli will get them in the end.
+
+Mrs. Silver was not of these. True, she sometimes professed herself
+averse to all "animals," but this meant nothing more than her
+unwillingness to have her work increased by their introduction into the
+Atwater household. No; the appearance of the dog had stirred something
+queer and fundamental within her. All coloured people look startled the
+first time they see a French Poodle, but there is a difference. Most
+coloured men do not really worry much about being coloured, but many
+coloured women do. In the expression of a coloured man, when he looks at
+a black and woolly French Poodle, there is something fonder and more
+indulgent than there is in the expression of a coloured woman when she
+looks at one. In fact, when some coloured women see a French Poodle they
+have the air of being insulted.
+
+Now, when Kitty Silver had first set eyes on this poodle, an hour
+earlier, she looked, and plainly was, dumfounded. Never in her life had
+she seen a creature so black, so incredibly black, or with hair so
+kinky, so incredibly kinky. Julia had not observed Mrs. Silver closely
+nor paused to wonder what thoughts were rousing in her mind, but bade
+her take the poodle forth for exercise outdoors and keep him strictly
+upon the leash. Without protest, though wearing a unique expression,
+Kitty obeyed; she walked round the block with this mystifying dog; and
+during the promenade had taken place the episode that so upset her
+nerves.
+
+She had given a little jerk to the leash, speaking sharply to the poodle
+in reproach for some lingering near a wonderful sidewalk smell,
+imperceptible to any one except himself. Instantly the creature rose and
+walked beside her on his hind legs. He continued to parade in this
+manner, rapidly, but nevertheless as if casually, without any apparent
+inconvenience; and Mrs. Silver, never having seen a dog do such a thing
+before, for more than a yard or so, and then only under the pressure of
+many inducements, was unfavourably impressed. In fact, she had
+definitely a symptom of M. Maeterlinck's awed feeling when he found
+himself left alone with the talking horses: "With _whom_ was she?"
+
+"Look-a-here, dog!" she said breathlessly. "Who you tryin' to skeer?
+_You_ ain't no person!"
+
+And then a blow fell. It came from an elderly but ever undignified woman
+of her own race, who paused, across the street, and stood teetering from
+side to side in joyful agitation, as she watched the approach of Mrs.
+Silver with her woolly little companion beside her. When this smaller
+silhouette in ink suddenly walked upright, the observer's mouth fell
+open, and there was reason to hope that it might remain so, in silence,
+especially as several other pedestrians had stopped to watch the
+poodle's uncalled-for exhibition. But all at once the elderly rowdy saw
+fit to become uproarious.
+
+"Hoopsee!" she shouted. "Oooh, _Gran'ma_!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And so, when the poodle "sat up," unbid, to pray, while Kitty Silver
+rested upon the back steps, on her return from the excursion, she
+fiercely informed him that she had never lost a grandchild and that she
+would not adopt a stranger in place of one; her implication being that
+he, a stranger, had been suggested for the position and considered
+himself eligible for it.
+
+He continued to pray, not relaxing a hair.
+
+"Listen to me, dog," said Kitty Silver. "Is you a dog, or isn't you a
+dog? Whut _is_ you, anyway?"
+
+But immediately she withdrew the question. "I ain't astin' you!" she
+exclaimed superstitiously. "If you isn't no dog, don't you take an' tell
+me whut you is: you take an' keep it to you'se'f, 'cause I don' want to
+listen to it!"
+
+For the garnet eyes beneath the great black chrysanthemum indeed seemed
+to hint that their owner was about to use human language in a human
+voice. Instead, however, he appeared to be content with his little
+exhibition, allowed his forepaws to return to the ground, and looked at
+her with his head wistfully tilted to one side. This reassured her and
+even somewhat won her. There stirred within her that curious sense of
+relationship evoked from the first by his suggestive appearance;
+fondness was being born, and an admiration that was in a way a form of
+Narcissism. She addressed him in a mollified voice:
+
+"Whut you want now? Don' tell me you' hungry, 'cause you awready done et
+two dog biskit an' big saucer milk. Whut you stick you' ole black face
+crossways at _me_ fer, honey?"
+
+But just then the dog rose to look pointedly toward the corner of the
+house. "Somebody's coming," he meant.
+
+"Who you spectin', li'l dog?" Mrs. Silver inquired.
+
+Florence and Herbert came round the house, Herbert trifling with a
+tennis ball and carrying a racket under his arm. Florence was peeling an
+orange.
+
+"For Heavenses' sakes!" Florence cried. "Kitty Silver, where on earth'd
+this dog come from?"
+
+"B'long you' Aunt Julia."
+
+"When'd she get him?"
+
+"Dess to-day."
+
+"Who gave him to her?"
+
+"She ain't sayin'."
+
+"You mean she won't tell?"
+
+"She ain't sayin'," Kitty Silver repeated. "I ast her. I say, I say:
+'Miss Julia, ma'am,' I say, 'Miss Julia, ma'am, who ever sen' you sech a
+unlandish-lookin' dog?' I say. All she say when I ast her: 'Nemmine!'
+she say, dess thataway. 'Nemmine!' she say. I reckon she ain't goin'
+tell nobody who give her this dog."
+
+"He's certainly a mighty queer-lookin' dog," said Herbert. "I've seen a
+few like that, but I can't remember where. What kind is he, Kitty
+Silver?"
+
+"Miss Julia tell me he a poogle dog."
+
+"A poodle," Florence corrected her, and then turned to Herbert in
+supercilious astonishment. "A French Poodle! My goodness! I should think
+you were old enough to know that much, anyway--goin' on fourteen years
+old!"
+
+"Well, I did know it," he declared. "I kind of knew it, anyhow; but I
+sort of forgot it for once. Do you know if he bites, Kitty Silver?"
+
+She was noncommittal. "He ain't bit nobody yit."
+
+"I don't believe he'll bite," said Florence. "I bet he likes me. He
+looks like he was taking a fancy to me, Kitty Silver. What's his name?"
+
+"Gammire."
+
+"What?"
+
+"Gammire."
+
+"What a funny name! Are you sure, Kitty Silver?"
+
+"Gammire whut you' Aunt Julia tole _me_," Mrs. Silver insisted. "You kin
+go on in the house an' ast her; she'll tell you the same."
+
+"Well, anyway, I'm not afraid of him," said Florence; and she stepped
+closer to the poodle, extending her hand to caress him. Then she shouted
+as the dog, at her gesture, rose to his hind legs, and, as far as the
+leash permitted, walked forward to meet her. She flung her arms about
+him rapturously.
+
+"Oh, the lovely thing!" she cried. "He walks on his hind legs! Why, he's
+crazy about me!"
+
+"Let him go," said Herbert. "I bet he don't like you any more than he
+does anybody else. Leave go of him, and I bet he shows he likes me
+better than he does you."
+
+But when Florence released him, Gammire caressed them both impartially.
+He leaped upon one, then upon the other, and then upon Kitty Silver with
+a cordiality that almost unseated her.
+
+"Let him off the leash," Florence cried. "He won't run away, 'cause the
+gates are shut. Let him loose and see what he'll do."
+
+Mrs. Silver snapped the catch of the leash, and Gammire departed in the
+likeness of a ragged black streak. With his large and eccentric ears
+flapping back in the wind and his afterpart hunched in, he ran round and
+round the little orchard like a dog gone wild. Altogether a comedian,
+when he heard children shrieking with laughter, he circled the more
+wildly; then all upon an unexpected instant came to a dead halt, facing
+his audience, his nose on the ground between his two forepaws, his
+hindquarters high and unstooping. And, seeing they laughed at this, too,
+he gave them enough of it, then came back to Kitty Silver and sat by
+her feet, a spiral of pink tongue hanging from a wide-open mouth roofed
+with black.
+
+Florence resumed the peeling of her orange.
+
+"Who do you _think_ gave Gammire to Aunt Julia?" she asked.
+
+"I ain't stedyin' about it."
+
+"Yes, but who do you _guess_?"
+
+"I ain't----"
+
+"Well, but if you had to be burned to death or guess somebody, who would
+you guess?"
+
+"I haf to git burn' up," said Kitty Silver. "Ev'y las' caller whut comes
+here _is_ give her some doggone animal awready. Mista Sammerses, he give
+her them two Berjum cats, an' ole Mister Ridgways whut los' his wife, he
+give you' Aunt Julia them two canaries that tuck an' hopped out the cage
+an' then out the window, las' week, one day, when you' grampaw was alone
+in the room with 'em; an' Mista George Plummers, he give her that
+Airydale dog you' grampaw tuck an' give to the milkman; an' Mista
+Ushers, he give her them two pups whut you' grampaw tuck an' skeer off
+the place soon as he laid eyes on 'em, an' thishere Mista Clairidge, he
+give her that ole live allagatuh from Florida whut I foun' lookin' at
+me over the aidge o' my kitchen sink--ugly ole thing!--an' you' grampaw
+tuck an' give it to the greenhouse man. Ain't none nem ge'lmun goin' try
+an' give her no _mo'_ animals, I bet! So how anybody goin' guess who
+sen' her thishere Gammire? Nobody lef' whut ain't awready sen' her one
+an' had the gift spile."
+
+"Yes, there is," said Florence.
+
+"Who?"
+
+"Noble Dill."
+
+"That there li'l young Mista Dills?" Kitty Silver cried. "Listen me!
+Thishere dog 'spensive dog."
+
+"I don't care; I bet Noble Dill gave him to her."
+
+Mrs. Silver hooted. "Go way! That there young li'l Mista Dills, he ain'
+nev' did show no class, no way nor no time. He be hunderd year ole b'fo'
+you see him in autamobile whut b'long to him. Look at a way some nem
+fine big rich men like Mista Clairidge an' Mista Ridgways take an' th'ow
+they money aroun'! New necktie ev'y time you see 'em; new straw hat
+right spang the firs' warm day. Ring do' bell. I say, I say: 'Walk right
+in, Mista Ridgways.' Slip me dollah bill dess like that! Mista Sammerses
+an' Mista Plummers, an' some nem others, they all show class. Look Mista
+Sammerses' spectickles made turtle back; fancy turtle, too. I ast Miss
+Julia; she tell me they fancy turtle. Gol' rim spectickles ain't in it;
+no ma'am! Mista Sammerses' spectickles--jes' them rims on his
+spectickles alone--I bet they cos' mo'n all whut thishere young li'l
+Mista Dills got on him from his toes up an' his skin out. I bet Mista
+Plummers th'ow mo' money aroun' dess fer gittin' his pants press' than
+whut Mista Dills afford to spen' to buy his'n in the firs' place! He
+lose his struggle, 'cause you' Aunt Julia, she out fer the big class.
+Thishere Gammire, he dog cos' money; he show class same you' Aunt Julia.
+Ain't neither one of 'em got to waste they time on nobody whut can't
+show no mo' class than thishere li'l young dish-cumbobbery Mista Dills!"
+
+"I don't care," Florence said stubbornly. "He could of saved up and
+saved up, and if he saved up long enough he could of got enough money to
+buy a dog like Gammire, because you can get money enough for anything if
+you're willing to save up long enough. Anyway, I bet he's the one gave
+him to her."
+
+Herbert joined Kitty Silver in laughter. "Florence is always talkin'
+about Noble Dill," he said. "She's sort of crazy, anyway, though."
+
+[Illustration: _"Herbert attempted to continue the drowning out. He
+bawled, 'She made it up! It's somep'n she made up herself! She----'"_]
+
+"It runs in the family," Florence retorted, automatically. "I caught it
+from my cousins. Anyhow, I don't think there's a single one of any that
+wants to marry Aunt Julia that's got the slightest co'parison to Noble
+Dill. I admire him because he's so uncouth."
+
+"He so who?" Kitty Silver inquired.
+
+"Uncouth."
+
+"Yes'm," said Mrs. Silver.
+
+"It's in the ditchanary," Florence explained. "It means rare, elegant,
+exquisite, obs, unknown, and a whole lot else."
+
+"It does not," Herbert interposed. "It means kind of countrified."
+
+"You go look in the ditchanary," his cousin said severely. "Then, maybe,
+you'll know what you're talkin' about just for once. Anyhow, I _do_ like
+Noble Dill, and I bet so does Aunt Julia."
+
+Kitty Silver shook her head. "He lose his struggle, honey! Miss Julia,
+she out fer the big class. She ain't stedyin' about him 'cept maybe dess
+to let him run her erran's. She treat 'em all mighty nice, 'cause the
+mo' come shovin' an' pushin' each other aroun', class or no class, why,
+the mo' harder that big class got to work to git her--an' the mo' she
+got after her the mo' keeps a-comin'. But thishere young li'l Mista
+Dills, I kine o' got strong notion he liable not come no mo' 'tall!" Her
+tone had become one of reminiscent amusement, which culminated in a
+burst of laughter. "Whee!" she concluded. "After las' night, I reckon
+thishere Mista Dills better keep away from the place--yes'm!"
+
+Florence looked thoughtful, and for the time said nothing. It was
+Herbert who asked: "Why'd Noble Dill better stay away from here?"
+
+"You' grampaw," Mrs. Silver said, shaking her head. "You' grampaw!"
+
+"What about grandpa?" said Herbert. "What'd he do last night?"
+
+"'Do'? Oh, me!" Then Mrs. Silver uttered sounds like the lowing of kine,
+whereby she meant to indicate her inability to describe Mr. Atwater's
+performance. "Well, ma'am," she said, in the low and husky voice of
+simulated exhaustion, "all I got to say: you' grampaw beat hisse'f! He
+beat hisse'f!"
+
+"How d'you mean? How could he----"
+
+"He beat hisse'f! He dess out-talk hisse'f! No, ma'am; I done hear him
+many an' many an' many's the time, but las' night he beat hisse'f."
+
+"What about?"
+
+"Nothin' in the wide worl' but dess thishere young li'l Noble Dills whut
+we talkin' about this livin' minute."
+
+"What started him?"
+
+"Whut _start_ him?" Mrs. Silver echoed with sudden loudness. "My
+goo'niss! He _b'en_ started ev' since the very firs' time he ev' lay
+eyes on him prancin' up the front walk to call on Miss Julia. You'
+grampaw don' like none nem callers, but he everlas'n'ly did up an' take
+a true spite on thishere li'l Dills!"
+
+"I mean," said Herbert, "what started him last night?"
+
+"Them cigareets," said Kitty Silver. "Them cigareets whut thishere Noble
+Dills smoke whiles he settin' out on the front po'che callin' on you'
+Aunt Julia. You' grampaw mighty funny man about smellin'! You know's
+well's I do he don't even like the smell o' violet. Well, ma'am, if he
+can't stan' _violet_, how in the name o' misery he goin' stan' the smell
+nem cigareets thishere Dills smoke? I can't hardly stan' 'em myse'f.
+When he light one on the front po'che, she sif' all through the house,
+an' come slidin' right the whole way out to my kitchen, an' _bim_! she
+take me in the nose! You' grampaw awready tole Miss Julia time an' time
+again if that li'l Dills light dess one mo' on his front po'che he goin'
+to walk out there an' do some harm! Co'se she nev' tuck an' pay no
+'tention, 'cause Miss Julia, she nev' pay no 'tention to nobody; an' she
+like caller have nice time--she ain' goin' tell 'em you' grampaw make
+such a fuss. 'Yes, 'deed, kine frien',' she say, she say, when they ast
+her: 'Miss Julia, ma'am,' they say, 'I like please strike a match fer to
+light my cigareet if you please, ma'am.' She say: 'Light as many as you
+please, kine frien',' she say, she say. She say: 'Smell o' cigareet dess
+deligh'ful li'l smell,' she say. 'Go 'head an' smoke all you kin stan','
+she say, ''cause I want you injoy you'se'f when you pay call on me,' she
+say. Well, so thishere young li'l Dills settin' there puffin' an'
+blowin' his ches' out and in, an' feelin' all nice 'cause it about the
+firs' time this livin' summer he catch you' Aunt Julia alone to hisse'f
+fer while--an' all time the house dess fillin' up, an' draf' blowin'
+straight at you' grampaw whur he settin' in his liberry. Ma'am, he sen'
+me out an' tell her come in, he got message mighty important fer to
+speak to her. So she tell thishere Dills wait a minute, an' walk in the
+liberry. Oh, ladies!"
+
+"What'd he say?" Herbert asked eagerly.
+
+"He di'n' say nothin'," Mrs. Silver replied eloquently. "He hollered."
+
+"What did he holler?"
+
+"He want know di'n' he never tell her thishere Dills can't smoke no mo'
+cigareets on his property, an' di'n' he tell her he was'n' goin' allow
+him on the place if he did? He say she got to go back on the po'che an'
+run thishere li'l Dills off home. He say he give her fair choice; she
+kin run him off, or else he go on out and chase him away hisse'f. He
+claim li'l Dills ain' got no biznuss roun' callin' nowhere 't all,
+'cause he on'y make about eighteen dollars a week an' ain't wuth it. He
+say----"
+
+She was confirmed in this report by an indignant interruption from
+Florence. "That's just what he did say, the old thing! I heard him,
+myself, and if you care to ask _me_, I'll be glad to inform you that I
+think grandpa's conduck was simply insulting!"
+
+"'Deed it were!" said Mrs. Silver. "An' dess whut he claim hisse'f he
+mean it fer! But you tell me, please, how you hear whut you' grampaw
+say? He mighty noisy, but you nev' could a-hear him plumb to whur you
+live."
+
+"I wasn't home," said Florence. "I was over here."
+
+"Then you mus' 'a' made you'se'f mighty skimpish, 'cause _I_ ain't seen
+you!"
+
+"Nobody saw me. I wasn't in the house," said Florence, "I was out in
+front."
+
+"Whurbouts 'out in front'?"
+
+"Well, I was sitting on the ground, up against the latticework of the
+front porch."
+
+"Whut fur?"
+
+"Well, it was dark," said Florence. "I just kind of wanted to see what
+might be going on."
+
+"An' you hear all whut you' grampaw take on about an' ev'ything?"
+
+"I should say so! You could of heard him _lots_ farther than where I
+was."
+
+"Lan' o' misery!" Kitty Silver cried. "If you done hear him whur you
+was, thishere li'l Dills mus' a-hear him _mighty_ plain?"
+
+"He did. How could he help it? He heard every word, and pretty soon he
+came down off the porch and stood a minute; then he went on out the
+gate, and I don't know whether he went home or not, because it was too
+dark to see. But he didn't come back."
+
+"Yo' right he didn'!" exclaimed Mrs. Silver. "I reckon he got fo'thought
+'nough fer that, anyhow! I bet he ain't nev' _goin'_ come back neither.
+You' grampaw say he goin' be fix fer him, if he do."
+
+"Yes, that was while he was standing there," said Florence ruefully. "He
+heard all that, too."
+
+"Miss Julia, she s'picion' he done hear somep'm 'nother, I guess," Kitty
+Silver went on. "She shet the liberry do' right almos' on you' grampaw's
+nose, whiles he still a-rampin', an' she slip out on the po'che, an'
+take look 'roun'; then go on up to her own room. I 'uz up there, while
+after that, turn' down her bed; an' she injoyin' herse'f readin' book.
+She feel kine o' put out, I reckon, but she ain't stedyin' about no
+young li'l Dills. She want 'em all to have nice time an' like her, but
+she goin' lose this one, an' she got plenty to spare. She show too much
+class fer to fret about no Dills."
+
+"I don't care," said Florence. "I think she ought to whether she does or
+not, because I bet he was feeling just awful. And I think grandpa
+behaved like an ole hoodlum."
+
+"That'll do," Herbert admonished her sternly. "You show some respect for
+your relations, if you please."
+
+But his loyalty to the Atwater family had a bad effect on Florence. "Oh,
+_will_ I?" she returned promptly. "Well, then, if you care to inquire
+_my_ opinion, I just politely think grandpa ought to be hanged."
+
+"See here----"
+
+But Florence and Kitty Silver interrupted him simultaneously.
+
+"Look at _that_!" Florence cried.
+
+"My name!" exclaimed Kitty Silver.
+
+It was the strange taste of Gammire that so excited them. Florence had
+peeled her orange and divided it rather fairly into three parts, but the
+vehemence she exerted in speaking of her grandfather had caused her to
+drop one of these upon the ground. Gammire promptly ate it, "sat up" and
+adjusted his paws in prayer for more.
+
+"Now you listen me!" said Kitty Silver. "I ain't see no dog eat orange
+in all my days, an' I ain't see nobody else whut see dog eat orange! No,
+ma'am, an' I ain't nev' hear o' nobody else whut ev' see nobody whut see
+dog eat orange!"
+
+Herbert decided to be less impressed. "Oh, I've heard of dogs that'd eat
+apples," he said. "Yes, and watermelon and nuts and things." As he
+spoke he played with the tennis ball upon his racket, and concluded by
+striking the ball high into the air. Its course was not true; and it
+descended far over toward the orchard, where Herbert ran to catch
+it--but he was not quick enough. At the moment the ball left the racket
+Gammire abandoned his prayers: his eyes, like a careful fielder's,
+calculating and estimating, followed the swerve of the ball in the
+breeze, and when it fell he was on the correct spot. He caught it.
+
+Herbert shouted. "He caught it on the _fly_! It must have been an
+accident. Here----" And he struck the ball into the air again. It went
+high--twice as high as the house--and again Gammire "judged" it;
+continuously shifting his position, his careful eyes never leaving the
+little white globe, until just before the last instant of its descent he
+was motionless beneath it. He caught it again, and Herbert whooped.
+
+Gammire brought the ball to him and invited him to proceed with the
+game. That there might be no mistaking his desire, Gammire "sat up" and
+prayed; nor did he find Herbert anything loth. Out of nine chances
+Gammire "muffed" the ball only twice, both times excusably, and
+Florence once more flung her arms about the willing performer.
+
+"_Who_ do you s'pose trained this wonderful, darling doggie?" she cried.
+
+Mrs. Silver shook her marvelling head. "He mus' 'a' _come_ thataway,"
+she said. "I bet nobody 't all ain' train him; he do whut he want to
+hisse'f. That Gammire don' ast nobody to train him."
+
+"Oh, goodness!" Florence said, with sudden despondency. "It's awful!"
+
+"Whut is?"
+
+"To think of as lovely a dog as this having to face grandpa!"
+
+"'Face' him!" Kitty Silver echoed forebodingly. "I reckon you' grampaw
+do mo'n dess 'face' him."
+
+"That's what I mean," Florence explained. "I expect he's just brute
+enough to drive him off."
+
+"Yes'm," said Mrs. Silver. "He git madder ev'y time somebody sen' her
+new pet. You' grampaw mighty nervous man, an' everlas'n'ly do hate
+animals."
+
+"He hasn't seen Gammire, has he?"
+
+"Don't look like it, do it?" said Kitty Silver. "Dog here yit."
+
+"Well, then I----" Florence paused, glancing at Herbert, for she had
+just been visited by a pleasant idea and had no wish to share it with
+him. "Is Aunt Julia in the house?"
+
+"She were, li'l while ago."
+
+"I want to see her about somep'n I ought to see her about," said
+Florence. "I'll be out in a minute."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER FOURTEEN
+
+
+She ran into the house, and found Julia seated at a slim-legged desk,
+writing a note.
+
+"Aunt Julia, it's about Gammire."
+
+"Gamin."
+
+"What?"
+
+"His name is Gamin."
+
+"Kitty Silver says his name's Gammire."
+
+"Yes," said Julia. "She would. His name is Gamin, though. He's a little
+Parisian rascal, and his name is Gamin."
+
+"Well, Aunt Julia, I'd rather call him Gammire. How much did he cost?"
+
+"I don't know; he was brought to me only this morning, and I haven't
+asked yet."
+
+"But I thought somebody gave him to you."
+
+"Yes; somebody did."
+
+"Well, I mean," said Florence, "how much did the person that gave him to
+you pay for him?"
+
+Julia sighed. "I just explained, I haven't had a chance to ask."
+
+Florence looked hurt. "I don't mean you _would_ ask 'em right out. I
+just meant: Wouldn't you be liable to kind of hint around an' give 'em a
+chance to tell you how much it was? You know perfeckly well it's the way
+most the fam'ly do when they give each other somep'n pretty expensive,
+Christmas or birthdays, and I thought proba'ly you'd----"
+
+"No. I shouldn't be surprised, Florence, if nobody _ever_ got to know
+how much Gamin cost."
+
+"Well----" Florence said, and decided to approach her purpose on a new
+tack. "Who was it trained him?"
+
+"I understand that the person who gave him to me has played with him at
+times during the few days he's been keeping him, but hasn't 'trained'
+him particularly. French Poodles almost learn their own tricks if you
+give them a chance. It's natural to them; they love to be little clowns
+if you let them."
+
+"But who was this person that gave him to you?"
+
+Julia laughed. "It's a secret, Florence--like Gamin's price."
+
+At this Florence looked piqued. "Well, I guess I got _some_ manners!"
+she exclaimed. "I know as well as you do, Aunt Julia, there's no
+etiquette in coming right square out and asking how much it was when
+somebody goes and makes you a present. I'm certainly enough of a lady to
+keep my mouth shut when it's more polite to! But I don't see what harm
+there is in telling who it is that gives anybody a present."
+
+"No harm at all," Julia murmured as she sealed the note she had written.
+Then she turned smilingly to face her niece. "Only I'm not going to."
+
+"Well, then, Aunt Julia"--and now Florence came to her point--"what I
+wanted to know is just simply the plain and simple question: Will you
+give this dog Gammire to me?"
+
+Julia leaned forward, laughing, and suddenly clapped her hands together,
+close to Florence's face. "No, I won't!" she cried. "There!"
+
+The niece frowned, lines of anxiety appearing upon her forehead. "Well,
+why won't you?"
+
+"I won't do it!"
+
+"But, Aunt Julia, I think you ought to!"
+
+"Why ought I to?"
+
+"Because----" said Florence. "Well, it's necessary."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Because you know as well as I do what's bound to happen to him!"
+
+"What is?"
+
+"Grandpa'll chase him off," said Florence. "He'll take after him the
+minute he lays eyes on him, and scare him to death--and then he'll get
+lost, and he won't be _anybody's_ dog! I should think you'd just as lief
+he'd be my dog as have him chased all over town till a street car hits
+him or somep'n."
+
+But Julia shook her head. "That hasn't happened yet."
+
+"It _did_ happen with every other one you ever had," Florence urged
+plaintively. "He chased 'em every last one off the place, and they never
+came back. You know perfectly well, Aunt Julia, grandpa's just bound to
+hate this dog, and you know just exactly how he'll act about him."
+
+"No, I don't," said Julia. "Not just _exactly_."
+
+"Well, anyway, you know he'll behave awful."
+
+"It's probable," the aunt admitted.
+
+"He always does," Florence continued. "He behaves awful about everything
+I ever heard about. He----"
+
+"I'll go pretty far with you, Florence," Julia interposed, "but we'd
+better leave him a loophole. You know he's a constant attendant at
+church and contributes liberally to many good causes."
+
+"Oh, you know what I mean! I mean he always acts horrable about
+anything pleasant. Of course I know he's a _good_ man, and everything; I
+just mean the way he behaves is perfeckly disgusting. So what's the use
+your not givin' me this dog? You won't have him yourself as soon as
+grandpa comes home to lunch in an hour or so."
+
+"Oh, yes, I will!"
+
+"Grandpa hasn't already seen him, has he?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Then what makes you say----"
+
+"He isn't coming home to lunch. He won't be home till five o'clock this
+afternoon."
+
+"Well, then, about six you won't have any dog, and poor little
+Gammire'll get run over by an automobile some time this very evening!"
+Florence's voice became anguished in the stress of her appeal. "Aunt
+Julia, _won't_ you give me this dog?"
+
+Julia shook her head.
+
+"Won't you, _please_?"
+
+"No, dear."
+
+"Aunt Julia, if it was Noble Dill gave you this dog----"
+
+"Florence!" her aunt exclaimed. "What in the world makes you imagine
+such absurd things? Poor Mr. Dill!"
+
+"Well, if it was, I think you ought to give Gammire to me because I
+_like_ Noble Dill, and I----"
+
+But here her aunt laughed again and looked at her with some curiosity.
+"You still do?" she asked. "What for?"
+
+"Well," said Florence, swallowing, "he may be rather smallish for a man,
+but he's very uncouth and distingrished-looking, and I think he doesn't
+get to enjoy himself much. Grandpa talks about him so torrably
+and--and----" Here, such was the unexpected depth of her feeling that
+she choked, whereupon her aunt, overcome with laughter, but nevertheless
+somewhat touched, sprang up and threw two pretty arms about her
+charmingly.
+
+"You _funny_ Florence!" she cried.
+
+"Then will you give me Gammire?" Florence asked instantly.
+
+"No. We'll bring him in the house now, and you can stay for lunch."
+
+Florence was imperfectly consoled, but she had a thought that brightened
+her a little.
+
+"Well, there'll be an awful time when grandpa comes home this
+afternoon--but it certainly will be inter'sting!"
+
+She proved a true prophet, at least to the extent that when Mr. Atwater
+opened his front gate that afternoon he was already in the presence of a
+deeply interested audience whose observation was unknown to him. Through
+the interstices of the lace curtains at an open window, the gaze of
+Julia and Florence was concentrated upon him in a manner that might have
+disquieted even so opinionated and peculiar a man as Mr. Atwater, had he
+been aware of it; and Herbert likewise watched him fixedly from an
+unseen outpost. Herbert had shown some recklessness, declaring loudly
+that he intended to lounge in full view; but when the well-known form of
+the ancestor was actually identified, coming up the street out of the
+distance, the descendant changed his mind. The good green earth ceased
+to seem secure; and Herbert climbed a tree. He surrounded himself with
+the deepest foliage; and beneath him some outlying foothills of Kitty
+Silver were visible, where she endeavoured to lurk in the concealment of
+a lilac bush.
+
+Gammire was the only person in view. He sat just in the middle of the
+top step of the veranda, and his air was that of an endowed and settled
+institution. What passing traffic there was interested him but vaguely,
+not affecting the world to which he belonged--that world being this
+house and yard, of which he felt himself now, beyond all question, the
+official dog.
+
+It had been a rather hard-working afternoon, for he had done everything
+suggested to him as well as a great many other things that he thought of
+himself. He had also made it clear that he had taken a fancy to
+everybody, but recognized Julia to be the head of the house and of his
+own universe; and though he was at the disposal of all her family and
+friends, he was at her disposal first. Whithersoever she went, there
+would he go also, unless she otherwise commanded. Just now she had
+withdrawn, closing the door, but he understood that she intended no
+permanent exclusion. Who was this newcomer at the gate?
+
+The newcomer came to a halt, staring intolerantly. Then he advanced,
+slamming the gate behind him. "Get out o' here!" he said. "You get off
+the place!"
+
+Gammire regarded him seriously, not moving, while Mr. Atwater cast an
+eye about the lawn, seeming to search for something, and his gaze, thus
+roving, was arrested by a slight movement of great areas behind a lilac
+bush. It appeared that the dome of some public building had covered
+itself with antique textiles and was endeavouring to hide there--a
+failure.
+
+"Kitty Silver!" he said. "What are you doing?"
+
+"Suh?"
+
+Debouching sidewise she came into fuller view, but retired a few steps.
+"Whut I doin' whur, Mista Atwater?"
+
+"How'd that dog get on my front steps?"
+
+Her face became noncommittal entirely. "Thishere dog? He just settin'
+there, suh."
+
+"How'd he get in the yard?"
+
+"Mus' somebody up an' brung him in."
+
+"Who did it?"
+
+"You mean: Who up an' brung him in, suh?"
+
+"I mean: Who does he belong to?"
+
+"Mus' be Miss Julia's. I reckon he is, so fur."
+
+"What! She knows I don't allow dogs on the place."
+
+"Yessuh."
+
+Mr. Atwater's expression became more outraged and determined. "You mean
+to say that somebody's trying to give her another dog after all I've
+been through with----"
+
+"It look that way, suh."
+
+"Who did it?"
+
+"Miss Julia ain't sayin'; an' me, I don' know who done it no mo'n the
+lilies of the valley whut toil not neither do they spins."
+
+In response, Mr. Atwater was guilty of exclamations lacking in courtesy;
+and turning again toward Gammire, he waved his arm. "Didn't you hear me
+tell you to get out of here?"
+
+Gammire observed the gesture, and at once "sat up," placing his forepaws
+over his nose in prayer, but Mr. Atwater was the more incensed.
+
+"Get out of here, you woolly black scoundrel!"
+
+Mrs. Silver uttered a cry of injury before she perceived that she had
+mistaken her employer's intention. Gammire also appeared to mistake it,
+for he came down upon the lawn, rose to his full height, on his "hind
+legs," and in that humanlike posture "walked" in a wide circle. He did
+this with an affectation of conscientiousness thoroughly hypocritical;
+for he really meant to be humorous.
+
+"My heavens!" Mr. Atwater cried, lamenting. "Somebody's given her one of
+those things at last! I don't like _any_ kind of dog, but if there's one
+dam thing on earth I _won't_ stand, it's a trick poodle!"
+
+And while the tactless Gammire went on, "walking" a circle round him,
+Mr. Atwater's eye furiously searched the borders of the path, the lawn,
+and otherwheres, for anything that might serve as missile. He had never
+kicked a dog, or struck one with his hand, in his life; he had a theory
+that it was always better to throw something. "Idiot poodle!" he said.
+
+But Gammire's tricks were not idiocy in the eyes of Mr. Atwater's
+daughter, as she watched them. They had brought to her mind the tricks
+of the Jongleur of Notre Dame, who had nothing to offer heaven itself,
+to mollify heaven's rulers, except his entertainment of juggling and
+nonsense; so that he sang his thin jocosities and played his poor tricks
+before the sacred figure of the Madonna; but when the pious would have
+struck him down for it, she miraculously came to life just long enough
+to smile on him and show that he was right to offer his absurd best. And
+thus, as Julia watched the little Jongleur upon the lawn, she saw this
+was what he was doing: offering all he knew, hoping that someone might
+laugh at him, and like him. And, not curiously, after all, if everything
+were known, she found herself thinking of another foolish creature, who
+had nothing in the world to offer anybody, except what came out of the
+wistfulness of a foolish, loving heart. Then, though her lips smiled
+faintly as she thought of Noble Dill, all at once a brightness trembled
+along the eyelids of the Prettiest Girl in Town, and glimmered over, a
+moment later, to shine upon her cheek.
+
+"You get out!" Mr. Atwater shouted, "D'ye hear me, you poodle?"
+
+He found the missile, a stone of fair diameter. He hurled it violently.
+
+"_There_, darn you!"
+
+The stone missed, and Gammire fled desperately after it.
+
+"You get over that fence!" Mr. Atwater cried. "You wait till I find
+another rock and I'll----"
+
+He began to search for another stone, but, before he could find one,
+Gammire returned with the first. He deposited it upon the ground at Mr.
+Atwater's feet.
+
+"There's your rock," he said.
+
+Mr. Atwater looked down at him fiercely, and through the black
+chrysanthemum two garnet sparks glinted waggishly.
+
+"Didn't you hear me tell you what I'd do if you didn't get out o' here,
+you darn poodle?"
+
+Gammire "sat up," placed his forepaws together over his nose and
+prayed. "There's your rock," he said. And he added, as clearly as if he
+used a spoken language, "Let's get on with the game!"
+
+Mr. Atwater turned to Kitty Silver. "Does he--does he know how to speak,
+or shake hands, or anything like that?" he asked.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next morning, as the peculiar old man sat at breakfast, he said to
+the lady across the table: "Look here. Who did give Gamin to us?"
+
+Julia bit her lip; she even cast down her eyes.
+
+"Well, who was it?"
+
+Her demureness still increased. "It was--Noble Dill."
+
+Mr. Atwater was silent; he looked down and caught a clownish garnet
+gleam out of a blackness neighbouring his knee. "Well, see here," he
+said. "Why can't you--why can't you----"
+
+"Why can't I what?"
+
+"Why can't you sit out in the yard the next time he calls here, instead
+of on the porch where it blows all through the house? It's just as
+pleasant to sit under the trees, isn't it?"
+
+"Pleasanter," said Julia.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER FIFTEEN
+
+
+By the end of October, with the dispersal of foliage that has served all
+summer long as a screen for whatever small privacy may exist between
+American neighbours, we begin to perceive the rise of our autumn high
+tides of gossip. At this season of the year, in our towns of moderate
+size and ambition, where apartment houses have not yet condensed and at
+the same time sequestered the population, one may look over back yard
+beyond back yard, both up and down the street; especially if one takes
+the trouble to sit for an hour or so daily, upon the top of a high fence
+at about the middle of a block.
+
+Of course an adult who followed such a course would be thought peculiar,
+no doubt he would be subject to inimical comment; but boys are
+considered so inexplicable that they have gathered for themselves many
+privileges denied their parents and elders, and a boy can do such a
+thing as this to his full content, without anybody's thinking about it
+at all. So it was that Herbert Illingsworth Atwater, Jr., sat for a
+considerable time upon such a fence, after school hours, every afternoon
+of the last week in October; and only one person particularly observed
+him or was stimulated to any mental activity by his procedure. Even at
+that, this person was affected only because she was Herbert's relative,
+of an age sympathetic to his and of a sex antipathetic.
+
+In spite of the fact that Herbert, thus seriously disporting himself on
+his father's back fence, attracted only an audience of one (and she
+hostile at a rather distant window) his behaviour might well have been
+thought piquant by anybody. After climbing to the top of the fence he
+would produce from interior pockets a small memorandum-book and a
+pencil. His expression was gravely alert, his manner more than
+businesslike; yet nobody could have failed to comprehend that he was
+enjoying himself, especially when his attitude became tenser, as it
+frequently did. Then he would rise, balancing himself at adroit ease,
+his feet one before the other on the inner rail, below the top of the
+boards, and with eyes dramatically shielded beneath a scoutish palm, he
+would gaze sternly in the direction of some object or movement that had
+attracted his attention and then, having satisfied himself of something
+or other, he would sit and decisively enter a note in his
+memorandum-book.
+
+He was not always alone; sometimes he was joined by a friend, male, and,
+though shorter than Herbert, about as old; and this companion was
+inspired, it seemed, by motives precisely similar to those from which
+sprang Herbert's own actions. Like Herbert he would sit upon the top of
+the high fence; like Herbert he would rise at intervals, for the better
+study of something this side the horizon; then, also like Herbert, he
+would sit again and write firmly in a little notebook. And seldom in the
+history of the world have any such sessions been invested by the
+participants with so intentional an appearance of importance.
+
+That was what most irritated their lone observer at the somewhat distant
+upstairs back window. The important importance of Herbert and his friend
+was so extreme as to be all too plainly visible across four intervening
+broad back yards; in fact, there was sometimes reason to suspect that
+the two performers were aware of their audience and even of her goaded
+condition; and that they deliberately increased the outrageousness of
+their importance on her account. And upon the Saturday of that week,
+when the notebook writers were upon the fence the greater part of the
+afternoon, Florence's fascinated indignation became vocal.
+
+"Vile Things!" she said.
+
+Her mother, sewing beside another window of the room, looked up
+inquiringly.
+
+"What are, Florence?"
+
+"Cousin Herbert and that nasty little Henry Rooter."
+
+"Are you watching them again?" her mother asked.
+
+"Yes, I am," said Florence; and added tartly, "Not because I care to,
+but merely to amuse myself at their expense."
+
+Mrs. Atwater murmured, "Couldn't you find some other way to amuse
+yourself, Florence?"
+
+"I don't call this amusement," the inconsistent girl responded, not
+without chagrin. "Think I'd spend all my days starin' at Herbert
+Illingsworth Atwater, Junior, and that nasty little Henry Rooter, and
+call it _amusement_?"
+
+"Then why do you do it?"
+
+"Why do I do _what_, mamma?" Florence inquired, as in despair of Mrs.
+Atwater's ever learning to put things clearly.
+
+"Why do you 'spend all your days' watching them? You don't seem able to
+keep away from the window, and it appears to make you irritable. I
+should think if they wouldn't let you play with them you'd be too
+proud----"
+
+"Oh, good heavens, mamma!"
+
+"Don't use such expressions, Florence, please."
+
+"Well," said Florence, "I got to use _some_ expression when you accuse
+me of wantin' to 'play' with those two vile things! My goodness mercy,
+mamma, I don't want to 'play' with 'em! I'm more than four years old, I
+guess; though you don't ever seem willing to give me credit for it. I
+don't haf to 'play' all the time, mamma: and anyway, Herbert and that
+nasty little Henry Rooter aren't playing, either."
+
+"Aren't they?" Mrs. Atwater inquired. "I thought the other day you said
+you wanted them to let you play with them at being a newspaper reporter
+or editor or something like that, and they were rude and told you to go
+away. Wasn't that it?"
+
+Florence sighed. "No, mamma, it cert'nly wasn't."
+
+"They weren't rude to you?"
+
+"Yes, they cert'nly were!"
+
+"Well, then----"
+
+"Mamma, _can't_ you understand?" Florence turned from the window to
+beseech Mrs. Atwater's concentration upon the matter. "It isn't
+'_playing_'! I didn't want to 'play' being a reporter; _they_ ain't
+'playing'----"
+
+"_Aren't_ playing, Florence."
+
+"Yes'm. They're not. Herbert's got a real printing-press; Uncle Joseph
+gave it to him. It's a _real_ one, mamma, can't you understand?"
+
+"I'll try," said Mrs. Atwater. "You mustn't get so excited about it,
+Florence."
+
+"I'm not!" Florence returned vehemently. "I guess it'd take more than
+those two vile things and their old printing-press to get _me_ excited!
+_I_ don't care what they do; it's far less than nothing to me! All _I_
+wish is they'd fall off the fence and break their vile ole necks!"
+
+With this manifestation of impersonal calmness, she turned again to the
+window; but her mother protested. "Do quit watching those foolish boys;
+you mustn't let them upset you so by their playing."
+
+Florence moaned. "They don't 'upset' me, mamma! They have no effects on
+me by the slightest degree! And I _told_ you, mamma, they're not
+'playing'."
+
+"Then what are they doing?"
+
+"Well, they're having a newspaper. They got the printing-press and an
+office in Herbert's stable, and everything. They got somebody to give
+'em some ole banisters and a railing from a house that was torn down
+somewheres, and then they got it stuck up in the stable loft, so it runs
+across with a kind of a gate in the middle of these banisters, and on
+one side is the printing-press and a desk from that nasty little Henry
+Rooter's mother's attic; and a table and some chairs, and a map on the
+wall; and that's their newspaper office. They go out and look for what's
+the news, and write it down in lead pencil; and then they go up to their
+office and write it in ink; and then they print it for their newspaper."
+
+"But what do they do on the fence?"
+
+"That's where they go to watch what the news is," Florence explained
+morosely. "They think they're so grand, sittin' up there, pokin' around!
+They go other places, too; and they ask people. That's all they said _I_
+could be!" Here the lady's bitterness became strongly intensified. "They
+said maybe I could be one o' the ones they asked if I knew anything,
+sometimes, if they happened to think of it! I just respectf'ly told 'em
+I'd decline to wipe my oldest shoes on 'em to save their lives!"
+
+Mrs. Atwater sighed. "You mustn't use such expressions, Florence."
+
+"I don't see why not," the daughter promptly objected. "They're a lot
+more refined than the expressions they used on me!"
+
+"Then I'm very glad you didn't play with them."
+
+But at this, Florence once more gave way to filial despair. "Mamma, you
+just _can't_ see through anything! I've said anyhow fifty times they
+ain't--aren't--playing! They're getting up a _real_ newspaper, and have
+people _buy_ it and everything. They been all over this part of town and
+got every aunt and uncle they have besides their own fathers and
+mothers, and some people in the neighbourhood, and Kitty Silver and two
+or three other coloured people besides. They're going to charge
+twenty-five cents a year, collect-in-advance because they want the money
+first; and even papa gave 'em a quarter last night; he told me so."
+
+"How often do they intend to publish their paper, Florence?" Mrs.
+Atwater inquired absently, having resumed her sewing.
+
+"Every week; and they're goin' to have the first one a week from
+to-day."
+
+"What do they call it?"
+
+"The North End Daily Oriole. It's the silliest name I ever heard for a
+newspaper; and I told 'em so. I told 'em what _I_ thought of it, I
+guess!"
+
+"Was that the reason?" Mrs. Atwater asked.
+
+"Was it what reason, mamma?"
+
+"Was it the reason they wouldn't let you be a reporter with them?"
+
+"Poot!" Florence exclaimed airily. "_I_ didn't want anything to do with
+their ole paper. But anyway I didn't make fun o' their callin' it 'The
+North End Daily Oriole' till after they said I couldn't be in it. _Then_
+I did, you bet!"
+
+"Florence, don't say----"
+
+"Mamma, I got to say somep'n! Well, I told 'em I wouldn't be in their
+ole paper if they begged me on their bented knees; and I said if they
+begged me a thousand years I wouldn't be in any paper with such a crazy
+name and I wouldn't tell 'em any news if I knew the President of the
+United States had the scarlet fever! I just politely informed 'em they
+could say what they liked, if they was dying _I_ declined so much as
+wipe the oldest shoes I got on 'em!"
+
+"But why _wouldn't_ they let you be on the paper?" her mother insisted.
+
+Upon this Florence became analytical. "Just so's they could act so
+important." And she added, as a consequence, "They ought to be
+arrested!"
+
+Mrs. Atwater murmured absently, but forbore to press her inquiry; and
+Florence was silent, in a brooding mood. The journalists upon the fence
+had disappeared from view, during her conversation with her mother; and
+presently she sighed, and quietly left the room. She went to her own
+apartment, where, at a small and rather battered little white desk,
+after a period of earnest reverie, she took up a pen, wet the point in
+purple ink, and without great effort or any critical delayings, produced
+a poem.
+
+It was in a sense an original poem, though like the greater number of
+all literary projections, it was so strongly inspirational that the
+source of its inspiration might easily become manifest to a cold-blooded
+reader. Nevertheless, to the poetess herself, as she explained later in
+good faith, the words just seemed to _come to_ her;--doubtless with
+either genius or some form of miracle implied; for sources of
+inspiration are seldom recognized by inspired writers themselves. She
+had not long ago been party to a musical Sunday afternoon at her
+Great-Uncle Joseph's house, where Mr. Clairdyce sang some of his songs
+again and again, and her poem may have begun to coagulate within her
+then.
+
+
+                     THE ORGANEST
+
+                  BY FLORENCE ATWATER
+
+    The organest was seated at his organ in a church,
+    In some beautiful woods of maple and birch,
+    He was very weary while he played upon the keys,
+    But he was a great organest and always played with ease,
+              When the soul is weary,
+              And the wind is dreary,
+    I would like to be an organest seated all day at the organ,
+    Whether my name might be Fairchild or Morgan,
+              I would play music like a vast amen,
+              The way it sounds in a church of men.
+
+Florence read her poem seven or eight times, the deepening pleasure of
+her expression being evidence that repetition failed to denature this
+work, but on the contrary, enhanced an appreciative surprise at its
+singular merit. Finally she folded the sheet of paper with a delicate
+carefulness unusual to her, and placed it in her skirt pocket; then she
+went downstairs and out into the back yard. Her next action was
+straightforward and anything but prudish; she climbed the high wooden
+fences, one after the other, until she came to a pause at the top of
+that whereon the two journalists had lately made themselves so odiously
+impressive.
+
+Before her, if she had but taken note of them, were a lesson in history
+and the markings of a profound transition in human evolution. Beside the
+old frame stable was a little brick garage, obviously put to the daily
+use intended by its designer. Quite as obviously the stable was
+obsolete; anybody would have known from its outside that there was no
+horse within it. There, visible, was the end of the pastoral age.
+
+All this was lost upon Florence. She sat upon the fence, her gaze
+unfavourably though wistfully fixed upon a sign of no special aesthetic
+merit above the stable door.
+
+        THE NORTH END DAILY ORIOLE
+        ATWATER & ROOTER OWNERS &
+    PROPREITORS SUBSCRIBE NOW 25 CENTS
+
+The inconsistency of the word "daily" did not trouble Florence;
+moreover, she had found no fault with "Oriole" until the Owners &
+Propreitors had explained to her in the plainest terms known to their
+vocabularies that she was excluded from the enterprise. Then, indeed,
+she had been reciprocally explicit in regard not only to them and
+certain personal characteristics of theirs, which she pointed out as
+fundamental, but in regard to any newspaper which should deliberately
+call itself an "Oriole." The partners remained superior in manner,
+though unable to conceal a natural resentment; they had adopted "Oriole"
+not out of a sentiment for the city of Baltimore, nor, indeed, on
+account of any ornithologic interest of theirs, but as a relic left over
+from an abandoned club or secret society, which they had previously
+contemplated forming, its members to be called "The Orioles" for no
+reason whatever. The two friends had talked of this plan at many
+meetings throughout the summer, and when Mr. Joseph Atwater made his
+great-nephew the unexpected present of a printing-press, and a newspaper
+consequently took the place of the club, Herbert and Henry still
+entertained an affection for their former scheme and decided to
+perpetuate the name. They were the more sensitive to attack upon it by
+an ignorant outsider and girl like Florence, and her chance of
+ingratiating herself with them, if that could be now her intention, was
+not a promising one.
+
+She descended from the fence with pronounced inelegance, and,
+approaching the old double doors of the "carriage-house," which were
+open, paused to listen. Sounds from above assured her that the editors
+were editing--or at least that they could be found at their place of
+business. Therefore, she ascended the cobwebby stairway, emerged from it
+into the former hay loft, and thus made her appearance in the
+printing-room of _The North End Daily Oriole_.
+
+Herbert, frowning with the burden of composition, sat at a table beyond
+the official railing, and his partner was engaged at the press,
+earnestly setting type. This latter person (whom Florence so seldom
+named otherwise than as "that nasty little Henry Rooter") was of a pure,
+smooth, fair-haired appearance, and strangely clean for his age and
+occupation. His profile was of a symmetry he had not yet himself begun
+to appreciate; his dress was scrupulous and modish; and though he was
+short, nothing outward about him confirmed the more sinister of
+Florence's two adjectives. Nevertheless, her poor opinion of him was
+plain in her expression as she made her present intrusion upon his
+working hours. He seemed to reciprocate.
+
+"Listen! Didn't I and Herbert tell you to keep out o' here?" he said.
+"Look at her, Herbert! She's back again!"
+
+"You get out o' here, Florence," said Herbert, abandoning his task with
+a look of pain. "How often we got to tell you we don't want you around
+here when we're in our office like this?"
+
+"For Heaven's sake!" Henry Rooter thought fit to add. "Can't you quit
+runnin' up and down our office stairs once in a while, long enough for
+us to get our newspaper work done? Can't you give us a little _peace_?"
+
+The pinkiness of Florence's altering complexion was justified; she had
+not been within a thousand miles of their old office for four days. With
+some heat she stated this to be the fact, adding, "And I only came then
+because I knew somebody ought to see that this stable isn't ruined. It's
+my own uncle and aunt's stable, I guess, isn't it? Answer me that, if
+you'll kindly please to do so!"
+
+"It's my father and mother's stable," Herbert asserted. "Haven't I got a
+right to say who's allowed in my own father and mother's stable?"
+
+"You have not," the prompt Florence replied. "It's my own uncle and
+aunt's stable, and I got as much right here as anybody."
+
+"You have not!" Henry Rooter protested hotly. "This isn't either your
+ole aunt and uncle's stable."
+
+"_It isn't_?"
+
+"No, it is not! This isn't anybody's stable. It's my and Herbert's
+Newspaper Building, and I guess you haven't got the face to stand there
+and claim you got a right to go in a Newspaper Building and say you got
+a right there when everybody tells you to stay outside of it, I guess!"
+
+"Oh, haven't I?"
+
+"No, you 'haven't--I'!" Mr. Rooter maintained bitterly. "You just walk
+down town and go in any Newspaper Buildings down there and tell 'em you
+got a right to stay there all day long when they tell you to get out o'
+there! Just try it! That's all I ask!"
+
+Florence uttered a cry of derision. "And pray, whoever told you I was
+bound to do everything you ask me to, Mister Henry Rooter?" And she
+concluded by reverting to that hostile impulse, so ancient, which, in
+despair of touching an antagonist effectively, reflects upon his
+ancestors. "If you got anything you want to ask, you go ask your
+grandmother!"
+
+"Here!" Herbert sprang to his feet. "You try and behave like a lady!"
+
+"Who'll make me?" she inquired.
+
+"You got to behave like a lady as long as you're in our Newspaper
+Building, anyway," Herbert said ominously. "If you expect to come up
+here after you been told five dozen times to keep out----"
+
+"For Heaven's sakes!" his partner interposed. "When we goin' to get our
+newspaper _work_ done? She's _your_ cousin; I should think you could get
+her out!"
+
+"Well, I'm goin' to, ain't I?" Herbert protested plaintively. "I expect
+to get her out, don't I?"
+
+"Oh, do you?" Miss Atwater inquired, with severe mockery. "Pray, how
+would you expect to accomplish it, pray?"
+
+Herbert looked desperate, but was unable to form a reply consistent with
+a few new rules of etiquette and gallantry that he had begun to observe
+during the past year or so. "Now, see here, Florence," he said. "You're
+old enough to know when people tell you to keep out of a place, why, it
+means they want you to stay away from there."
+
+Florence remained cold to this reasoning. "Oh, Poot!" she said.
+
+"Now, look here!" her cousin remonstrated, and went on with his
+argument. "We got our newspaper work to do, and you ought to have sense
+enough to know newspaper work like this newspaper work we got on _our_
+hands here isn't--well, it ain't any child's play."
+
+His partner appeared to approve of the expression, for he nodded
+severely and then used it himself. "No, you _bet_ it isn't any child's
+play!" he said.
+
+"No, sir," Herbert continued. "This newspaper work we got on our hands
+here isn't any child's play."
+
+"No, sir," Henry Rooter again agreed. "Newspaper work like this isn't
+any child's play at _all_!"
+
+"It isn't any child's play, Florence," said Herbert. "It ain't any
+child's play at all, Florence. If it was just child's play or something
+like that, why, it wouldn't matter so much your always pokin' up here,
+and----"
+
+"Well," his partner interrupted judicially;--"we wouldn't want her
+around, even if it _was_ child's play."
+
+"No, we wouldn't; that's so," Herbert agreed. "We wouldn't want you
+around, anyhow, Florence." Here his tone became more plaintive. "So, for
+mercy's sakes can't you go on home and give us a little rest? What you
+want, anyhow?"
+
+"Well, I guess it's about time you was askin' me that," she said, not
+unreasonably. "If you'd asked me that in the first place, instead of
+actin' like you'd never been taught anything, and was only fit to
+associate with hoodlums, perhaps my time is of _some_ value, myself!"
+
+Here the lack of rhetorical cohesion was largely counteracted by the
+strong expressiveness of her tone and manner, which made clear her
+position as a person of worth, dealing with the lowest of her inferiors.
+She went on, not pausing:
+
+"I thought being as I was related to you, and all the family and
+everybody else is goin' to haf to read your ole newspaper, anyway it'd
+be a good thing if what was printed in it wasn't _all_ a disgrace to the
+family, because the name of our family's got mixed up with this
+newspaper;--so here!"
+
+Thus speaking, she took the poem from her pocket and with dignity held
+it forth to her cousin.
+
+"What's that?" Herbert inquired, not moving a hand. He was but an
+amateur, yet already enough of an editor to be suspicious.
+
+"It's a poem," Florence said. "I don't know whether I exackly ought to
+have it in your ole newspaper or not, but on account of the family's
+sake I guess I better. Here, take it."
+
+Herbert at once withdrew a few steps, placing his hands behind him.
+"Listen here," he said;--"you think we got time to read a lot o' nothin'
+in your ole hand-writin' that nobody can read anyhow, and then go and
+toil and moil to print it on our printin'-press? I guess we got work
+enough printin' what we write for our newspaper our own selves! My
+goodness, Florence, I _told_ you this isn't any child's play!"
+
+For the moment, Florence appeared to be somewhat baffled. "Well," she
+said. "Well, you better put this poem in your ole newspaper if you want
+to have anyhow one thing in it that won't make everybody sick that reads
+it."
+
+"_I_ won't do it!" Herbert said decisively.
+
+"What you take us for?" his partner added.
+
+"All right, then," Florence responded. "I'll go and tell Uncle Joseph
+and he'll take this printing-press back."
+
+"He will not take it back. I already did tell him how you kept pokin'
+around, tryin' to _run_ everything, and how we just worried our lives
+out tryin' to keep you away. He said he bet it was a hard job; that's
+what Uncle Joseph said! So go on, tell him anything you want to. You
+don't get your ole poem in _our_ newspaper!"
+
+"Not if she lived to be two hunderd years old!" Henry Rooter added.
+Then he had an afterthought. "Not unless she pays for it."
+
+"How do you mean?" Herbert asked, puzzled by this codicil.
+
+Now Henry's brow had become corrugated with no little professional
+impressiveness. "You know what we were talkin' about this morning?" he
+said. "How the right way to run our newspaper, we ought to have some
+advertisements in it and everything? Well, we want money, don't we? We
+could put this poem in our newspaper like an advertisement;--that is, if
+Florence has got any money, we could."
+
+Herbert frowned. "If her ole poem isn't too long I guess we could. Here,
+let's see it, Florence." And, taking the sheet of paper in his hand, he
+studied the dimensions of the poem, without paining himself to read it.
+"Well, I guess, maybe we can do it," he said. "How much ought we to
+charge her?"
+
+This question sent Henry Rooter into a state of calculation, while
+Florence observed him with veiled anxiety; but after a time he looked
+up, his brow showing continued strain. "Do you keep a bank,
+Florence--for nickels and dimes and maybe quarters, you know?" he
+inquired.
+
+It was her cousin who impulsively replied for her. "No, she don't," he
+said.
+
+"Not since I was about seven years old!" And Florence added sharply,
+though with dignity: "Do you still make mud pies in your back yard,
+pray?"
+
+"Now, see here!" Henry objected. "Try and be a lady anyway for a few
+minutes, can't you? I got to figure out how much we got to charge you
+for your ole poem, don't I?"
+
+"Well, then," Florence returned, "you better ask _me_ somep'n about
+that, hadn't you?"
+
+"Well," said Henry Rooter, "have you got any money at home?"
+
+"No, I haven't."
+
+"Have you got any money with you?"
+
+"Yes, I have."
+
+"How much is it?"
+
+"I won't tell you."
+
+Henry frowned. "I guess we ought to make her pay about two dollars and a
+half," he said, turning to his partner.
+
+Herbert became deferential; it seemed to him that he had formed a
+business association with a genius, and for a moment he was dazzled;
+then he remembered Florence's financial capacities, always well known
+to him, and he looked depressed. Florence, herself, looked indignant.
+
+"Two dollars and a half!" she cried. "Why, I could buy this whole place
+for two dollars and a half, printing-press, railing, and all--yes, and
+you thrown in, Mister Henry Rooter!"
+
+"See here, Florence," Henry said earnestly. "Haven't you got two dollars
+and a half?"
+
+"Of course she hasn't!" his partner assured him. "She never had two
+dollars and a half in her life!"
+
+"Well, then," said Henry gloomily, "what we goin' to do about it? How
+much _you_ think we ought to charge her?"
+
+Herbert's expression became noncommittal. "Just let me think a minute,"
+he said, and with his hand to his brow he stepped behind the
+unsuspicious Florence.
+
+"I got to think," he murmured; then with the straightforwardness of his
+age, he suddenly seized his damsel cousin from the rear and held her in
+a tight but far from affectionate embrace, pinioning her arms. She
+shrieked, "Murder!" and "Let me go!" and "Help! Hay-yulp!"
+
+"Look in her pocket," Herbert shouted. "She keeps her money in her skirt
+pocket when she's got any. It's on the left side of her. Don't let her
+kick you! Look out!"
+
+"I got it!" said the dexterous Henry, retreating and exhibiting coins.
+"It's one dime and two nickels--twenty cents. Has she got any more
+pockets?"
+
+"No, I haven't!" Florence fiercely informed him, as Herbert released
+her. "And I guess you better hand that money back if you don't want to
+be arrested for stealing!"
+
+But Henry was unmoved. "Twenty cents," he said calculatingly. "Well, all
+right; it isn't much, but you can have your poem in our newspaper for
+twenty cents, Florence. If you don't want to pay that much, why, take
+your ole twenty cents and go on away."
+
+"Yes," said Herbert. "That's as cheap as we'll do it, Florence. Take it
+or leave it."
+
+"Take it or leave it," Henry Rooter agreed. "That's the way to talk to
+her; take it or leave it, Florence. If you don't take it you got to
+leave it."
+
+Florence was indignant, but she decided to take it. "All right," she
+said coldly. "I wouldn't pay another cent if I died for it."
+
+"Well, you haven't got another cent, so that's all right," Mr. Rooter
+remarked; and he honourably extended an open palm toward his partner.
+"Here, Herbert; you can have the dime, or the two nickels, whichever you
+rather. It makes no difference to me; I'd as soon have one as the
+other."
+
+Herbert took the two nickels, and turned to Florence. "See here,
+Florence," he said, in a tone of strong complaint. "This business is all
+done and paid for now. What you want to hang around here any _more_
+for?"
+
+"Yes, Florence," his partner faithfully seconded him, at once. "We
+haven't got any more time to waste around here to-day, and so what you
+want to stand around in the way and everything for? You ought to know
+yourself we don't want you."
+
+"I'm not in the way," said Florence hotly. "Whose way am I in?"
+
+"Well, anyhow, if you don't go," Herbert informed her, "we'll carry you
+downstairs and lock you out."
+
+"I'd just like to see you!" she returned, her eyes flashing. "Just you
+dare to lay a finger on me again!" And she added, "Anyway, if you did,
+those ole doors haven't got any lock on 'em: I'll come right back in and
+walk right straight up the stairs again!"
+
+Herbert advanced toward her. "Now you pay attention, to me," he said.
+"You've paid for your ole poem, and we got to have some peace around
+here. I'm goin' straight over to your mother and ask her to come and get
+you."
+
+Florence gave up. "What difference would _that_ make, Mister
+Taddletale?" she inquired mockingly. "_I_ wouldn't be here when she
+came, would I? I'll thank you to notice there's some value to my time,
+myself; and I'll just politely ask you to excuse me, pray!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER SIXTEEN
+
+
+With a proud air she crushingly departed, returning to her own home far
+from dissatisfied with what she had accomplished. Moreover, she began to
+expand with the realization of a new importance; and she was gratified
+with the effect upon her parents, at dinner that evening, when she
+informed them that she had written a poem, which was to be published in
+the prospective first number of _The North End Daily Oriole_.
+
+"Written a _poem_?" said her father. "Well, I declare! Why, that's
+remarkable, Florence!"
+
+"I'm glad the boys were nice about it," said her mother. "I should have
+feared they couldn't appreciate it, after being so cross to you about
+letting you have anything to do with the printing-press. They must have
+thought it was a very good poem."
+
+"Where is the poem, Florence?" Mr. Atwater asked. "Let's read it and see
+what our little girl can do when she really tries."
+
+Unfortunately Florence had not a copy, and when she informed her father
+of this fact, he professed himself greatly disappointed as well as eager
+for the first appearance of _The Oriole_, that he might felicitate
+himself upon the evidence of his daughter's heretofore unsuspected
+talent. Florence was herself anxious for the newspaper's début, and she
+made her anxiety so clear to Atwater & Rooter, Owners & Propreitors,
+every afternoon after school, during the following week, that by
+Thursday further argument and repartee on their part were felt to be
+indeed futile; and in order to have a little peace around there, they
+carried her downstairs. At least, they defined their action as
+"carrying," and, having deposited her in the yard, they were obliged to
+stand guard at the doors, which they closed and contrived to hold
+against her until her strength was worn out for that day.
+
+Florence consoled herself. During the week she dropped in on all the
+members of "the family"--her grandfather, uncles and aunts and cousins,
+her great-aunts and great-uncles--and in each instance, after no
+protracted formal preliminaries, lightly remarked that she wrote poetry
+now; her first to appear in the forthcoming _Oriole_. And when
+Great-Aunt Carrie said, "Why, Florence, you're wonderful! I couldn't
+write a poem to save my life. I never _could_ see how they do it,"
+Florence laughed, made a deprecatory little side motion with her head,
+and responded, "Why, Aunt Carrie, that's nothing! It just kind of comes
+to you."
+
+This also served as her explanation when some of her school friends
+expressed their admiration, after being told the news in confidence;
+though to one of the teachers she said, smiling ruefully, as in
+remembrance of midnight oil, "It _does_ take work, of course!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When opportunity offered, upon the street, she joined people she knew
+(or even rather distant acquaintances) to walk with them a little way
+and lead the conversation to the subject of poetry, including her own
+contribution to that art. Altogether, if Florence was not in a fair way
+to become a poetic celebrity it was not her own fault but entirely that
+of _The North End Daily Oriole_, which was to make its appearance on
+Saturday, but failed to do so on account of too much enthusiasm on the
+part of Atwater & Rooter in manipulating the printing-press. It broke,
+had to be repaired; and Florence, her nerves upset by the accident,
+demanded her money back. This was impossible, and the postponement
+proved to be but an episode; moreover, it gave her time to let more
+people know of the treat that was coming.
+
+Among these was Noble Dill. Until the Friday following her
+disappointment she had found no opportunity to acquaint her Very Ideal
+with the news; and but for an encounter partly due to chance, he might
+not have heard of it. A sentimental enrichment of colour in her cheeks
+was the result of her catching sight of him, as she was on the point of
+opening and entering her own front door, that afternoon, on her return
+from school. He was passing the house, walking somewhat dreamily.
+
+Florence stepped into the sheltering vestibule, peeping round it with
+earnest eyes to watch him as he went by; obviously he had taken no note
+of her. Satisfied of this, she waited until he was at a little distance,
+then ran lightly down to the gate, hurried after him and joined him.
+
+"Why, Mr. Dill!" she exclaimed, in her mother's most polished manner.
+"How supprising to see _you_! I presume as we both happen to be walking
+the same direction we might just's well keep together."
+
+"Surprising to see me?" Noble said vaguely. "I haven't been away
+anywhere in particular, Florence." Then, at a thought, he brightened.
+"I'm glad to see you, Florence. Do you know if any of your family or
+relatives have heard when your Aunt Julia is coming home?"
+
+"Aunt Julia? She's out of town," said Florence. "She's visiting
+different people she used to know when she was away at school."
+
+"Yes, I know," Mr. Dill returned. "But she's been gone six weeks."
+
+"Oh, I don't believe it's that long," Florence said casually; then with
+more earnestness: "Mr. Dill, I was goin' to ask you somep'n--it's kind
+of a funny question for _me_ to ask, but----"
+
+"Yes, she has," Noble interrupted, not aware that his remark was an
+interruption. "Oh, yes, she has!" he said. "It was six weeks
+day-before-yesterday afternoon. I saw your father downtown this morning,
+and he said he didn't know that any of the family had heard just when
+she was coming home. I thought maybe some of your relatives had a letter
+from her by this afternoon's mail, perhaps."
+
+"I guess not," said Florence. "Mr. Dill, there was a question I thought
+I'd ask you. It's kind of a funny question for _me_----"
+
+"Are you _sure_ nobody's heard from your Aunt Julia to-day?" Noble
+insisted.
+
+"I guess they haven't. Mr. Dill, I was goin' to ask you----"
+
+"It's strange," he murmured, "I don't see how people can enjoy visits
+that long. I should think they'd get anxious about what might happen at
+home."
+
+"Oh, grandpa's all right; he says he kind of likes to have the house
+nice and quiet to himself; and anyway Aunt Julia enjoys visiting,"
+Florence assured him. "Aunt Fanny saw a newspaper from one the places
+where Aunt Julia's visiting her school room-mate. It had her picture in
+it and called her 'the famous Northern Beauty'; it was down South
+somewhere. Well, Mr. Dill, I was just sayin' I believe I'd ask you----"
+
+But a sectional rancour seemed all at once to affect the young man. "Oh,
+yes. I heard about that," he said. "Your Aunt Fanny lent my mother the
+newspaper. Those people in _that_ part of the country--well----" He
+paused, remembering that it was only Florence he addressed; and he
+withheld from utterance his opinion that the Civil War ought to be
+fought all over again. "Your father said your grandfather hadn't heard
+from her for several days, and even then she hadn't said when she was
+coming home."
+
+"No, I expect she didn't," said Florence. "Mr. Dill, I was goin' to ask
+you somep'n--it's kind of a queer kind of question for _me_ to ask, I
+guess----" She paused. However, he did not interrupt her, seeming
+preoccupied with gloom; whereupon Florence permitted herself a
+deprecatory laugh, and continued, "It might be you'd answer yes, or it
+might be you'd answer no; but anyway I was goin' to ask you--it's kind
+of a funny question for _me_ to ask, I expect--but do you like poetry?"
+
+"What?"
+
+"Well, as things have turned out lately I guess it's kind of a funny
+question, Mr. Dill, but do you like poetry?"
+
+Noble's expression took on a coldness; for the word brought to his mind
+a thought of Newland Sanders. "Do I like poetry?" said Noble. "No, I
+don't."
+
+Florence was momentarily discouraged; but at her age people usually
+possess an invaluable faculty, which they lose later in life; and it is
+a pity that they do lose it. At thirteen--especially the earlier months
+of thirteen--they are still able to set aside and dismiss from their
+minds almost any facts, no matter how audibly those facts have asked for
+recognition. Children superbly allow themselves to become deaf, so to
+speak, to undesirable circumstances; most frequently, of course, to
+undesirable circumstances in the way of parental direction; so that
+fathers, mothers, nurses, or governesses, not comprehending that this
+mental deafness is for the time being entirely genuine, are liable to
+hoarseness both of throat and temper. Thirteen is an age when the fading
+of this gift or talent, one of the most beautiful of childhood, begins
+to impair its helpfulness under the mistaken stress of discipline; but
+Florence retained something of it. In a moment or two Noble Dill's
+disaffection toward poetry was altogether as if it did not exist.
+
+She coughed, inclined her head a little to one side, in her mother's
+manner of politeness to callers, and, repeating her deprecatory laugh,
+remarked: "Well, of course it's kind of a funny question for _me_ to
+ask, of course."
+
+"What is, Florence?" Noble inquired absently.
+
+"Well--what I was saying was that 'course it's sort of queer _me_ askin'
+if you liked poetry, of course, on account of my _writing_ poetry the
+way I do now."
+
+She looked up at him with a bright readiness to respond modestly to
+whatever exclamation his wonder should dictate; but Noble's attention
+had straggled again.
+
+"Has she written your mother lately?" he asked.
+
+Florence's expression denoted a mental condition slightly disturbed.
+"No," she said. "It's goin' to be printed in _The North End Daily
+Oriole_."
+
+"What?"
+
+"My poem. It's about a vast amen--anyhow, that's proba'ly the best thing
+in it, I guess--and they're goin' to have it out to-morrow, or else
+they'll have to settle with _me_; that's one thing certain! I'll bring
+one over to your house and leave it at the door for you, Mr. Dill."
+
+Noble had but a confused notion of what she thus generously promised.
+However, he said, "Thank you," and nodded vaguely.
+
+"Of course, I don't know as it's so awful good," Florence admitted
+insincerely. "The family all seem to think it's something pretty much;
+but I don't know if it is or not. _Really_, I don't!"
+
+"No," said Noble, still confused. "I suppose not."
+
+"I'm half way through another one I think myself'll be a good deal
+better. I'm not goin' as fast with it as I did with the other one, and I
+expect it'll be quite a ways ahead of this one." She again employed the
+deprecatory little laugh. "I don't know how I do it, myself. The family
+all think it's sort of funny I don't know how I do it, myself; but
+that's the way it is. They all say if they could do it they're sure
+they'd know how they did it; but I guess they're wrong. I presume if you
+can do it, why, it just _comes_ to you. Don't you presume that's the way
+it is, Mr. Dill?"
+
+"I--guess so." They had reached his gate, and he stopped. "You're sure
+none of your family have heard anything to-day?" he asked anxiously.
+
+"From Aunt Julia? I don't think they have."
+
+He sighed, and opened the gate. "Well, good evening, Florence."
+
+"Good evening." Her eyes followed him wistfully as he passed within the
+enclosure; then she turned and walked quickly toward her own home; but
+at the corner of the next fence she called back over her shoulder, "I'll
+leave it with your mother for you, if you're not home when I bring it."
+
+"What?" he shouted, from his front door.
+
+"I'll leave it with your _mother_."
+
+"Leave what?"
+
+"The _poem_!"
+
+"Oh!" said Noble. "Thanks!"
+
+But when his mother handed him a copy of the first issue of _The North
+End Daily Oriole_, the next day, when he came home to lunch, he read it
+without edification; there was nothing about Julia in it.
+
+                     THE NORTH END DAILY ORIOLE
+
+                Atwater & Rooter Owners & Propreitors
+
+                  SUBSCRIBE NOW 25 Cents Per Year
+
+    Subscriptions shloud be brought to the East etrance of Atwater
+    & Rooter Newspaper Building every afternoon 4.30 to 6.  25 cents.
+
+               =======================================
+
+                         NEWS OF THE CITY
+
+                            ----------
+
+    The Candidates for mayor at the election are Mr P. N. Gordon and
+    John T Milo. The contest is very great between these candidates.
+
+    Holcombs chickens get in MR. Joseph Atwater's yard a god deal
+    lately. He says chickens are out of place in a city of this size.
+
+    Minnie the cook of Mr. F. L. Smith's residisence goes downtown
+    every Thrusday afts about three her regular day for it.
+
+    A new ditch is being dug accross the MR. Henry D. Vance backyrad.
+    ;Tis about dug but nobody is working there now. Patty Fairchild
+    received the highest mark in declamation of the 7A at Sumner School
+    last Friday.
+
+    Balf's grorcey wagon ran over a cat of the Mr. Rayfort family. Geo.
+    the driver of the wagom stated he had not but was willing to take
+    it away and burg it somewheres Geo. stated regret and claimed
+    nothing but an accident which could not be helped and not his team
+    that did the damage.
+
+    MissColfield teacher of the 7A atSumner School was reproted on the
+    sink list. We hope she will soon be well.
+
+    There were several deaths in the city this week.
+
+    Mr. Fairchild father of Patty Fairchild was on the sick list
+    several days and did not go to his office but is out now.
+
+    Been Kriso the cHauffeur of the Mr. R. G. Atwater family washes
+    their car on Monday. In using the hose he turned water over the
+    fence accidently and hit Lonnie the washWOman in back of MRS.
+    Bruffs who called him some low names. Ben told her if he had have
+    been a man he wrould strike her but soon the distrubance was at an
+    end. There is a good deal more of other news which will be printed
+    in our next NO.
+
+                        Advertisements & Poems
+                          20 Cents Each Up.
+
+               JOSEPH K. ATWATER & CO.
+                 127 South Iowa St,
+                 Steam Pumps.
+
+                            THE Organstep
+                                 BY Florence Atwater
+
+    The Organstep was seated at his organ in a
+    In some beautifil words of vagle and brir
+      But he was a gReat organstep and always
+        When the soil is weary
+        And the mind is drearq
+      I would play music like a vast amen
+      The way it sounds in a church of new
+      Subscribe NOW 25 cents Adv & Poetry
+      20 cents up. Atwater & Rooter News
+      Paper Building 25 cents per YEAR
+
+Such was the first issue, complete, of _The North End Daily Oriole_.
+What had happened to the poem was due partly to Atwater & Rooter's
+natural lack of experience in a new and exacting trade; partly to their
+enviable unconsciousness of any necessity for proof-reading; and
+somewhat to their haste in getting through the final and least
+interesting stage of their undertaking; for of course so far as the
+printers were concerned, the poem was mere hack work anti-climax.
+
+And as they later declared, under fire, anybody that could make out more
+than three words in five of Florence's ole handwriting was welcome to do
+it. Besides, what did it matter if a little bit was left out at the end
+of one or two of the lines? They couldn't be expected to run the lines
+out over their margin, could they? And they never knew anything crazier
+than makin' all this fuss, because: Well, what if some of it wasn't
+printed just exactly right, who in the world was goin' to notice it, and
+what was the difference of just a few words different in that ole poem,
+anyhow?
+
+For by the time these explanations (so to call them) took place,
+Florence was indeed makin' a fuss. Her emotion, at first, had been
+happily stimulated at sight of "BY Florence Atwater." A singular
+tenderness had risen in her--a tremulous sense as of something almost
+sacred coming at last into its own; and she hurried to distribute,
+gratis, among relatives and friends, several copies of the _Oriole_,
+paying for them, too (though not without injurious argument), at the
+rate of two cents a copy. But upon returning to her own home, she became
+calm enough (for a moment or so) to look over the poem with attention to
+details. She returned hastily to the Newspaper Building, but would have
+been wiser to remain away, since all subscribers had received their
+copies by the time she got there; and under the circumstances little
+reparation was practicable.
+
+She ended her oration--or professed to end it--by declaring that she
+would never have another poem in their ole vile newspaper as long as she
+lived.
+
+"You're right about that!" Henry Rooter agreed heartily. "We wouldn't
+_let_ another one in it. Not for fifty dollars! Just look at all the
+trouble we took, moiling and toiling, to get your ole poem printed as
+nice as we could, so it wouldn't ruin our newspaper, and then you come
+over here and go on like this, and all this and that, why, I wouldn't go
+through it again for a _hunderd_ dollars! We're makin' good money
+anyhow, with our newspaper, Florence Atwater. You needn't think we
+depend on _you_ for our living!"
+
+"That's so," his partner declared. "We knew you wouldn't be satisfied,
+anyway, Florence. Didn't we, Henry?"
+
+"I should say we did!"
+
+"Yes, sir!" said Herbert. "Right when we were havin' the worst time
+tryin' to print it and make out some o' the words, I said right then we
+were just throwing away our time. I said, 'What's the use? That ole
+girl's bound to raise Cain anyhow, so what's the use wastin' a whole lot
+of our good time and brains like this, just to suit _her_? Whatever we
+do, she's certain to come over and insult us.' Isn't that what I said,
+Henry?"
+
+"Yes, it is; and I said then you were right, and you _are_ right!"
+
+"Cert'nly I am," said Herbert. "Didn't I tell you she'd be just the way
+some the family say she is? A good many of 'em say she'd find fault with
+the undertaker at her own funeral. That's just exactly what I said!"
+
+"Oh, you did?" Florence burlesqued a polite interest. "How _vir_ry
+considerate of you! Then, perhaps you'll try to be a gentleman enough
+for one simple moment to allow me to tell you my last remarks on this
+subject. I've said enough----"
+
+"Oh, _have_ you?" Herbert interrupted with violent sarcasm. "Oh, no! Say
+not so! Florence, say not so!"
+
+At this, Henry Rooter loudly shouted with applausive hilarity; whereupon
+Herbert, rather surprised at his own effectiveness, naturally repeated
+his waggery.
+
+"Say not so, Florence! Say not so! Say not so!"
+
+"I'll tell you one thing!" his lady cousin cried, thoroughly infuriated.
+"I wish to make just one last simple remark that I would care to soil
+myself with in _your_ respects, Mister Herbert Illingsworth Atwater and
+Mister Henry Rooter!"
+
+"Oh, say not so, Florence!" they both entreated. "Say not so! Say not
+so!"
+
+"I'll just simply state the simple truth," Florence announced. "In the
+first place, you're goin' to live to see the day when you'll come and
+beg me on your bented knees to have me put poems or anything I want to
+in your ole newspaper, but I'll just _laugh_ at you! '_Indeed_?' I'll
+say! 'So you come beggin' around _me_, do you? Ha, ha!' I'll say! 'I
+guess it's a little too late for that! Why, I wouldn't----'"
+
+"Oh, say not so, Florence! Say not so!"
+
+"'_Me_ to allow you to have one of my poems?' I'll say, 'Much less than
+_that_!' I'll say, 'because even if I was wearing the oldest shoes I got
+in the world I wouldn't take the trouble to----'"
+
+Her conclusion was drowned out. "Oh, _Florence_, say not so! Say not so,
+Florence! Say not so!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
+
+
+The hateful entreaty still murmured in her resentful ears, that night,
+as she fell asleep; and she passed into the beginnings of a dream with
+her lips slightly dimpling the surface of her pillow in belated
+repartee. And upon waking, though it was Sunday, her first words, half
+slumbrous in the silence of the morning, were, "Vile Things!" Her
+faculties became more alert during the preparation of a toilet that was
+to serve not only for breakfast, but with the addition of gloves, a hat,
+and a blue-velvet coat, for Church and Sunday-school as well; and she
+planned a hundred vengeances. That is to say, her mind did not occupy
+itself with plots possible to make real; but rather it dabbled among
+those fragmentary visions that love to overlap and displace one another
+upon the changeful retina of the mind's eye.
+
+In all of these pictures, wherein prevailingly she seemed to be some
+sort of deathly powerful Queen of Poetry, the postures assumed by the
+figures of Messrs. Atwater and Rooter (both in an extremity of rags)
+were miserably suppliant. So she soothed herself a little--but not long.
+Herbert, in the next pew, in church, and Henry in the next beyond that,
+were perfect compositions in smugness. They were cold, contented,
+aristocratic; and had an imperturbable understanding between themselves
+(even then perceptible to the sensitive Florence) that she was a
+nuisance now capably disposed of by their beautiful discovery of "Say
+not so!" Florence's feelings were unbecoming to the place and occasion.
+
+But at four o'clock, that afternoon, she was assuaged into a milder
+condition by the arrival, according to an agreement made in
+Sunday-school, of the popular Miss Patty Fairchild.
+
+Patty was thirteen and a half; an exquisite person with gold-dusted
+hair, eyes of singing blue, and an alluring air of sweet
+self-consciousness. Henry Rooter and Herbert Illingsworth Atwater, Jr.,
+out gathering news, saw her entering Florence's gate, and immediately
+forgot that they were reporters. They became silent, gradually moving
+toward the house of their newspaper's sole poetess.
+
+Florence and Patty occupied themselves indoors for half an hour; then
+went out in the yard to study a mole's tunnel that had interested
+Florence recently. They followed it across the lawn at the south side of
+the house, discussing the habits of moles and other matters of zoölogy;
+and finally lost the track near the fence, which was here the "side
+fence" and higher than their heads. Patty looked through a knot-hole to
+see if the tunnel was visible in the next yard, but, without reporting
+upon her observations, she turned, as if carelessly, and leaned back
+against the fence, covering the knot-hole.
+
+"Florence," she said, in a tone softer than she had been using
+heretofore;--"Florence, do you know what I think?"
+
+"No. Could you see any more tracks over there?"
+
+"Florence," said Patty;--"I was just going to tell you something, only
+maybe I better not."
+
+"Why not?" Florence inquired. "Go on and tell me."
+
+"No," said Patty gently. "You might think it was silly."
+
+"No, I won't."
+
+"Yes, you _might_."
+
+"I promise I won't."
+
+"Well, then--oh, Florence I'm _sure_ you'll think it's silly!"
+
+"I _promised_ I wouldn't."
+
+"Well--I don't think I better say it."
+
+"Go on," Florence urged. "Patty, you _got_ to."
+
+"Well, then, if I got to," said Patty. "What I was going to say,
+Florence: Don't you think your cousin Herbert and Henry Rooter have got
+the nicest eyes of any boy in town?"
+
+"_Who_?" Florence was astounded.
+
+"I do," Patty said in her charming voice. "I think Herbert and Henry've
+got the nicest eyes of any boy in town."
+
+"You do?" Florence cried incredulously.
+
+"Yes, I really do, Florence. I think Herbert Atwater and Henry Rooter
+have got the nicest eyes of any boy in town."
+
+"Well, I never heard anything like _this_ before!" Florence declared.
+
+"But _don't_ you think they've got the nicest eyes of any boy in town?"
+Patty insisted, appealingly.
+
+"I think," said Florence, "their eyes are just horrable!"
+
+"What?"
+
+"_Herbert's_ eyes," continued Florence, ardently, "are the very worst
+lookin' ole squinty eyes I ever saw, and that nasty little Henry
+_Rooter's_ eyes----"
+
+But Patty had suddenly become fidgety; she hurried away from the fence.
+"Come over here, Florence," she said. "Let's go over to the other side
+of the yard and talk."
+
+It was time for her to take some such action. Messrs. Atwater and
+Rooter, seated quietly together upon a box on the other side of the
+fence (though with their backs to the knot-hole), were beginning to show
+signs of inward disturbance. Already flushed with the unexpected
+ineffabilities overheard, their complexions had grown even pinker upon
+Florence's open-hearted expressions of opinion. Slowly they turned their
+heads to look at the fence, upon the other side of which stood the
+maligner of their eyes. Not that they cared what _that_ ole girl
+thought--but she oughtn't to be allowed to go around talking like this
+and perhaps prejudicing everybody that had a kind word to say for them.
+
+"Come on over here, Florence," called Patty huskily, from the other side
+of the yard. "Let's talk over here."
+
+Florence was puzzled, but consented. "What you want to talk over here
+for?" she asked as she came near her friend.
+
+"Oh, I don't know," said Patty. "Let's go out in the front yard."
+
+She led the way round the house, and a moment later uttered a cry of
+surprise as the firm of Atwater & Rooter, passing along the pavement,
+hesitated at the gate. Their celebrated eyes showed doubt for a moment,
+then a brazenness: Herbert and Henry decided to come in.
+
+"Isn't this the funniest thing?" cried Patty. "After what I just said
+awhile ago--_you_ know, Florence. Don't you dare to tell 'em!"
+
+"I cert'nly won't!" her hostess promised, and, turning inhospitably to
+the two callers, "What on earth you want around here?" she inquired.
+
+Herbert chivalrously took upon himself the duty of response. "Look here;
+this is my own aunt and uncle's yard, isn't it? I guess if I want to
+come in it I got a perfect right to."
+
+"I should say so," his partner said warmly.
+
+"Why, of course!" the cordial Patty agreed. "We can play some nice
+Sunday games, or something. Let's sit on the porch steps and think what
+to do."
+
+"_I_ just as soon," said Henry Rooter. "_I_ got nothin' p'ticular to
+do."
+
+"I haven't either," said Herbert.
+
+Thereupon, Patty sat between them on the steps.
+
+"This is _per-feckly_ grand!" she cried. "Come on, Florence, aren't you
+going to sit down with all the rest of us?"
+
+"Well, pray kindly excuse _me_!" said Miss Atwater; and she added that
+she would neither sit on the same steps with Herbert Atwater and Henry
+Rooter, nor, even if they entreated her with accompanying genuflections,
+would she have anything else whatever to do with them. She concluded
+with a reference to the oldest pair of shoes she might ever come to
+possess; and withdrew to the railing of the veranda at a point farthest
+from the steps; and, seated there, swinging one foot rhythmically, she
+sang hymns in a tone at once plaintive and inimical.
+
+It was not lost upon her, however, that her withdrawal had little effect
+upon her guests. They chattered gaily, and Patty devised, or remembered,
+harmless little games that could be played by a few people as well as by
+many; and the three participants were so congenial and noisy and made so
+merry, that before long Florence was unable to avoid the impression
+that whether she liked it or not she was giving quite a party.
+
+At times the noted eyes of Atwater & Rooter were gentled o'er with the
+soft cast of enchantment, especially when Patty felt called upon to
+reprove the two with little coquetries of slaps and pushes. Noted for
+her sprightliness, she was never sprightlier; her pretty laughter tooted
+continuously, and the gentlemen accompanied it with doting sounds so
+repulsive to Florence that without being actively conscious of what she
+did, she embodied the phrase, "perfeckly sickening," in the hymn she was
+crooning, and repeated it over and over to the air of "Rock of Ages."
+
+"Now I tell you what let's play," the versatile Patty proposed, after
+exhausting the pleasures of "Geography," "Ghosts" and other tests of
+intellect. "Let's play 'Truth.' We'll each take a piece o' paper and a
+pencil, and then each of us asks the other one some question, and we haf
+to write down the answer and sign your name and fold it up so nobody can
+see it except the one that asked the question, and we haf to keep it a
+secret and never tell as long as we live."
+
+"All right," said Henry Rooter. "I'll be the one to ask you a question,
+Patty."
+
+"No," Herbert said promptly. "I ought to be the one to ask Patty."
+
+"Why ought you?" Henry demanded. "Why ought you?"
+
+"Listen!" Patty cried, "_I_ know the way we'll do. I'll ask each of you
+a question--we haf to whisper it--and each one of you'll ask me one, and
+then we'll write it. That'll be simply grand!" She clapped her hands;
+then checked herself. "Oh, I guess we can't either. We haven't got any
+paper and pencils unless----" Here she seemed to recall her hostess.
+"Oh, Florrie, dear! Run in the house and get us some paper and pencils."
+
+Florence gave no sign other than to increase the volume of her voice as
+she sang: "Perf'ly sick'ning, clef' for me, let me _perf'_ly
+sick-kin-_ning_!"
+
+"We got plenty," said Herbert; whereupon he and Henry produced pencils
+and their professional note-books, and supplied their fair friend and
+themselves with material for "Truth." "Come on, Patty, whisper me
+whatever you want to."
+
+"No; I ought to have her whisper _me_, first," Henry Rooter objected.
+"I'll write the answer to _any_ question; I don't care what it's about."
+
+"Well, it's got to be the _truth_, you know," Patty warned them. "We
+all haf to write down just exackly the truth on our word of honour and
+sign our name. Promise?"
+
+They promised earnestly.
+
+"All right," said Patty. "Now I'll whisper Henry a question first, and
+then you can whisper yours to me first, Herbert."
+
+This seemed to fill all needs happily, and the whispering and writing
+began, and continued with a coziness little to the taste of the piously
+singing Florence. She altered all previous opinions of her friend Patty,
+and when the latter finally closed the session on the steps, and
+announced that she must go home, the hostess declined to accompany her
+into the house to help her find where she had left her hat and wrap.
+
+"I haven't the _least_ idea where I took 'em off!" Patty declared in the
+airiest manner. "If you won't come with me, Florrie, s'pose you just
+call in the front door and tell your mother to get 'em for me."
+
+"Oh, they're _somewhere_ in there," Florence said coldly, not ceasing to
+swing her foot, and not turning her head. "You can find 'em by yourself,
+I presume, or if you can't I'll have our maid throw 'em out in the yard
+or somep'n to-morrow."
+
+"Well, _thank_ you!" Miss Fairchild rejoined, as she entered the house.
+
+The two boys stood waiting, having in mind to go with Patty as far as
+her own gate. "That's a _pretty_ way to speak to company!" Herbert
+addressed his cousin with heavily marked severity. "Next time you do
+anything like that I'll march straight in the house and inform your
+mother of the fact."
+
+Florence still swung her foot and looked dreamily away. She sang, to the
+air of "Rock of Ages":
+
+"Henry Rooter, Herbert, too--they make me sick, they make me sick,
+that's what they do."
+
+However, they were only too well prepared with their annihilating
+response.
+
+"Oh, say not so! Florence, say not so! _Florence!_ Say not so!"
+
+They even sent this same odious refrain back to her from the street, as
+they departed with their lovely companion; and, so tenuous is feminine
+loyalty sometimes, under these stresses, Miss Fairchild mingled her
+sweet, tantalizing young soprano with their changing and cackling
+falsetto.
+
+"Say not so, Florence! Oh, say not so! Say not so!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
+
+
+They went satirically down the street, their chumminess with one another
+bountifully increased by their common derision of the outsider on the
+porch; and even at a distance they still contrived to make themselves
+intolerable; looking back over their shoulders, at intervals, with
+say-not-so expressions on their faces. Even when these faces were far
+enough away to be but yellowish oval planes, their say-not-so
+expressions were still bitingly eloquent.
+
+Now a northern breeze chilled the air, as the hateful three became
+indistinguishable in the haze of autumn dusk, whereupon Florence stopped
+swinging her foot, left the railing, and went morosely into the house.
+And here it was her fortune to make two discoveries vital to her present
+career; the first arising out of a conversation between her father and
+mother in the library, where a gossipy fire of soft coal encouraged this
+proper Sunday afternoon entertainment for man and wife.
+
+"Sit down and rest, Florence," said her mother. "I'm afraid you play too
+hard when Patty and the boys are here. Do sit down quietly and rest
+yourself a little while." And as Florence obeyed, Mrs. Atwater turned to
+her husband, resuming: "Well, that's what _I_ said. I told Aunt Carrie I
+thought the same way about it that _you_ did. Of course nobody _ever_
+knows what Julia's going to do next, and nobody needs to be surprised at
+anything she does do. Ever since she came home from school, about
+four-fifths of all the young men in town have been wild about her--and
+so's every old bachelor, for the matter of that!"
+
+"Yes," Mr. Atwater added. "And every old widower, too."
+
+His wife warmly accepted the amendment. "And every old widower, too,"
+she said, nodding. "Rather! And of course Julia's just done exactly as
+she pleased about everything, and naturally she's going to do as she
+pleases about _this_."
+
+"Well, of course it's her own affair, Mollie," Mr. Atwater said mildly.
+"She couldn't be expected to consult the whole Atwater family connection
+before she----"
+
+"Oh, no," she agreed. "I don't say she could. Still, it _is_ rather
+upsetting, coming so suddenly like this, when not one of the family has
+ever seen him--never even heard his very name before."
+
+[Illustration: _"'Well, men ... I don't want to see any loafin' around
+here, men. I expect I'll have a pretty good newspaper this week.'"_]
+
+"Well, that part of it isn't especially strange, Mollie. He was born and
+brought up in a town three hundred miles from here. I don't see just how
+we _could_ have heard his name unless he visited here or got into the
+papers in some way."
+
+Mrs. Atwater seemed unwilling to yield a mysterious point. She rocked
+decorously in her rocking-chair, shook her head, and after setting her
+lips rigidly, opened them to insist that she could never change her
+mind: Julia had acted very abruptly. "Why couldn't she have let her poor
+father know at least a _few_ days before she did?"
+
+Mr. Atwater sighed. "Why, she explains in her letter that she only knew
+it, herself, an hour before she wrote."
+
+"Her poor father!" his wife repeated commiseratingly.
+
+"Why, Mollie, I don't see how father's especially to be pitied."
+
+"Don't you?" said Mrs. Atwater. "That old man, to have to live in that
+big house all alone, except a few negro servants?"
+
+"Why, no! About half the houses in the neighbourhood, up and down the
+street, are fully occupied by close relatives of his: I doubt if he'll
+be really as lonely as he'd like to be. And he's often said he'd give a
+great deal if Julia had been a plain, unpopular girl. I'm strongly of
+the opinion, myself, that he'll be pleased about this. Of course it may
+upset him a little at first."
+
+"Yes; I think it will!" Mrs. Atwater shook her head forebodingly. "And
+he isn't the only one it's going to upset."
+
+"No, he isn't," her husband admitted seriously. "That's always been the
+trouble with Julia; she never could bear to seem disappointing; and so,
+of course, I suppose every one of 'em has a special idea that he's
+really about the top of the list with her."
+
+"Every last one of 'em is positive of it," said Mrs. Atwater. "That was
+Julia's way with 'em!"
+
+"Yes, Julia's always been much too kind-hearted for other people's
+good." Thus Mr. Atwater summed up Julia; and he was her brother.
+Additionally, since he was the older, he had known her since her birth.
+
+"If you ask _me_," said his wife, "I'll really be surprised if it all
+goes through without a suicide."
+
+"Oh, not quite suicide, perhaps," Mr. Atwater protested. "I'm glad it's
+a fairly dry town though."
+
+She failed to fathom his simple meaning. "Why?"
+
+"Well, some of 'em might feel _that_ desperate at least," he explained.
+"Prohibition's a safeguard for the disappointed in love."
+
+This phrase and a previous one stirred Florence, who had been sitting
+quietly, according to request, and "resting", but not resting her
+curiosity. "_Who's_ disappointed in love, papa?" she inquired with an
+explosive eagerness that slightly startled her preoccupied parents.
+"What _is_ all this about Aunt Julia, and grandpa goin' to live alone,
+and people committing suicide and prohibition and everything? What _is_
+all this, mamma?"
+
+"Nothing, Florence."
+
+"Nothing! That's what you always say about the very most inter'sting
+things that happen in the whole family! What _is_ all this, papa?"
+
+"It's nothing that would be interesting to little girls, Florence.
+Merely some family matters."
+
+"My goodness!" Florence exclaimed. "I'm not a 'little girl' any more,
+papa! You're _always_ forgetting my age! And if it's a family matter I
+belong to the family, I guess, about as much as anybody else, don't I?
+Grandpa himself isn't any _more_ one of the family than I am, I don't
+care _how_ old he is!"
+
+This was undeniable, and her father laughed. "It's really nothing you'd
+care about one way or the other," he said.
+
+"Well, I'd care about it if it's a secret," Florence insisted. "If it's
+a secret I'd want to know it, whatever it's about."
+
+"Oh, it isn't a secret, particularly, I suppose. At least, it's not to
+be made public for a time; it's only to be known in the family."
+
+"Well, didn't I just _prove_ I'm as much one o' the family as----"
+
+"Never mind," her father said soothingly. "I don't suppose there's any
+harm in your knowing it--if you won't go telling everybody. Your Aunt
+Julia has just written us that she's engaged."
+
+Mrs. Atwater uttered an exclamation, but she was too late to check him.
+
+"I'm afraid you oughtn't to have told Florence. She _isn't_ just the
+most discreet----"
+
+"Pshaw!" he laughed. "She certainly is 'one of the family', however, and
+Julia wrote that all of the family might be told. You'll not speak of it
+outside the family, will you, Florence?"
+
+But Florence was not yet able to speak of it, even inside the family; so
+surprising, sometimes, are parents' theories of what will not interest
+their children. She sat staring, her mouth open, and in the uncertain
+illumination of the room these symptoms of her emotional condition went
+unobserved.
+
+"I say, you won't speak of Julia's engagement outside the family, will
+you, Florence?"
+
+"Papa!" she gasped. "Did Aunt Julia write she was _engaged_?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"To get _married_?"
+
+"It would seem so."
+
+"To _who_?"
+
+"'To whom,' Florence," her mother suggested primly.
+
+"Mamma!" the daughter cried. "Who's Aunt Julia engaged to get married
+to? Noble Dill?"
+
+"Good gracious, _no_!" Mrs. Atwater exclaimed. "What an absurd idea!
+It's to a young man in the place she's visiting--a stranger to all of
+us. Julia only met him a few weeks ago." Here she forgot Florence, and
+turned again to her husband, wearing her former expression of
+experienced foreboding.
+
+"It's just as I said. It's exactly like Julia to do such a reckless
+thing!"
+
+"But as we don't know anything at all about the young man," he
+remonstrated, "how do you know it's reckless?"
+
+"How do you know he's young?" Mrs. Atwater retorted crisply. "All in the
+world she said about him was that he's a lawyer. He may be a widower,
+for all we know, or divorced, with seven or eight children."
+
+"Oh, no, Mollie!"
+
+"Why, he _might_!" she insisted. "For all we know, he may be a widower
+for the third or fourth _time_, or divorced, with any _number_ of
+children! If such a person proposed to Julia, you know yourself she'd
+hate to be disappointing!"
+
+Her husband laughed. "I don't think she'd go so far as to actually
+accept 'such a person' and write home to announce her engagement to the
+family. I suppose most of her swains here have been in the habit of
+proposing to her just as frequently as she was unable to prevent them
+from going that far; and while I don't think she's been as discouraging
+with them as she might have been, she's never really accepted any of
+'em. She's never been engaged before."
+
+"No," Mrs. Atwater admitted. "Not to this extent! She's never quite
+announced it to the family before, that is."
+
+"Yes; I'd hate to have Julia's job when she comes back!" Julia's brother
+admitted ruefully.
+
+"What job?"
+
+"Breaking it to her admirers."
+
+"Oh, _she_ isn't going to do that!"
+
+"She'll have to, now," he said. "She'll either have to write the news to
+'em, or else tell 'em, face to face, when she comes home."
+
+"She won't do either."
+
+"Why, how could she get out of it?"
+
+His wife smiled pityingly. "She hasn't set a time for coming home, has
+she? Don't you know enough of Julia's ways to see she'll never in the
+world stand up to the music? She writes that all the family can be told,
+because she knows the news will leak out, here and there, in confidence,
+little by little, so by the time she gets home they'll all have been
+through their first spasms, and after that she hopes they'll just send
+her some forgiving flowers and greet her with manly hand-clasps--and get
+ready to usher at the wedding!"
+
+"Well," said Mr. Atwater, "I'm afraid you're right. It does seem rather
+like Julia to stay away till the first of the worst is over. I'm really
+sorry for some of 'em. I suppose it _will_ get whispered about, and
+they'll hear it; and there are some of the poor things that might take
+it pretty hard."
+
+"'Take it pretty hard!'" his wife echoed loudly. "There's _one_ of 'em,
+at least, who'll just merely lose his reason!"
+
+"Which one?"
+
+"Noble Dill."
+
+At this, the slender form of Florence underwent a spasmodic seizure in
+her chair, but as the fit was short and also noiseless, it passed
+without being noticed.
+
+"Yes," said Mr. Atwater thoughtfully. "I suppose he will."
+
+"He certainly will!" Mrs. Atwater declared. "Noble's mother told me last
+week that he'd got so he was just as liable to drop a fountain-pen in
+his coffee as a lump of sugar; and when any one speaks to him he either
+doesn't know it, or else jumps. When he says anything, himself, she says
+they can scarcely ever make out what he's talking about. He was trying
+enough before Julia went away; but since she's been gone Mrs. Dill says
+he's like nothing in her experience. She says he doesn't inherit it;
+Mr. Dill wasn't anything like this about her."
+
+Mr. Atwater smiled faintly. "Mrs. Dill wasn't anything like Julia."
+
+"No," said his wife. "She was quite a sensible girl. I'd hate to be in
+her place now, though, when she tells Noble about _this_."
+
+"How can Mrs. Dill tell him, since she doesn't know it herself?"
+
+"Well--perhaps she ought to know it, so that she _could_ tell him.
+_Somebody_ ought to tell him, and it ought to be done with the greatest
+tact. It ought to be broken to him with the most delicate care and
+sympathy, or the consequences----"
+
+"Nobody could foretell the consequences," her husband interrupted:--"no
+matter how tactfully it's broken to Noble."
+
+"No," she said, "I suppose that's true. I think the poor thing's likely
+to lose his reason unless it _is_ done tactfully, though."
+
+"Do you think we really ought to tell Mrs. Dill, Mollie? I mean,
+seriously: Do you?"
+
+For some moments she considered his question, then replied, "No. It's
+possible we'd be following a Christian course in doing it; but still
+we're rather bound not to speak of it outside the family, and when it
+does get outside the family I think we'd better not be the ones
+responsible--especially since it might easily be traced to us. I think
+it's usually better to keep out of things when there's any doubt."
+
+"Yes," he said, meditating. "I never knew any harm to come of people's
+sticking to their own affairs."
+
+But as he and his wife became silent for a time, musing in the
+firelight, their daughter's special convictions were far from coinciding
+with theirs, although she, likewise, was silent--a singularity they
+should have observed. So far were they from a true comprehension of her,
+they were unaware that she had more than a casual, young-cousinly
+interest in Julia Atwater's engagement and in those possible
+consequences to Noble Dill just sketched with some intentional
+exaggeration. They did not even notice her expression when Mr. Atwater
+snapped on the light, in order to read; and she went quietly out of the
+library and up the stairs to her own room.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On the floor, near her bed, where Patty Fairchild had left her coat and
+hat, Florence made another discovery. Two small, folded slips of paper
+lay there, dropped by Miss Fairchild when she put on her coat in the
+darkening room. They were the replies to Patty's whispered questions in
+the game on the steps--the pledged Truth, written by Henry Rooter and
+Herbert Atwater on their sacred words and honours. The infatuated pair
+had either overestimated Patty's caution, or else each had thought she
+would so prize his little missive that she would treasure it in a tender
+safety, perhaps pinned upon her blouse (at the first opportunity) over
+her heart. It is positively safe to say that neither of the two
+veracities would ever have been set upon paper had Herbert and Henry any
+foreshadowing that Patty might be careless; and the partners would have
+been seized with the utmost horror could they have conceived the
+possibility of their trustful messages ever falling into the hands of
+the relentless creature who now, without an instant's honourable
+hesitation, unfolded and read them.
+
+"_Yes if I got to tell the truth I know I have got pretty eyes_,"
+Herbert had unfortunately written. "I _am glad you think so too Patty
+because your eyes are too Herbert Illingsworth Atwater, Jr._"
+
+And Mr. Henry Rooter had likewise ruined himself in a coincidental
+manner:
+
+"_Well Patty my eyes are pretty but suppose I would like to trade with
+yours because you have beautiful eyes also, sure as my name is Henry
+Rooter._"
+
+Florence stood close to the pink-shaded electric drop-light over her
+small white dressing-table, reading again and again these pathetically
+honest little confidences. Her eyelids were withdrawn to an
+unprecedented retirement, so remarkably she stared; while her mouth
+seemed to prepare itself for the attempted reception of a bulk beyond
+its capacity. And these plastic tokens, so immoderate as to be
+ordinarily the consequence of nothing short of horror, were overlaid by
+others, subtler and more gleaming, which wrought the true significance
+of the contortion--a joy that was dumfounding.
+
+Her thoughts were first of Fortune's kindness in selecting her for a
+favour so miraculously dovetailing into the precise need of her life;
+then she considered Henry and Herbert, each at this hour probably
+brushing his hair in preparation for the Sunday evening meal, and both
+touchingly unconscious of the calamity now befalling them; but what
+eventually engrossed her mind was a thought about Wallie Torbin.
+
+This Master Torbin, fourteen years of age, was in all the town the boy
+most dreaded by his fellow-boys, and also by girls, including many of
+both sexes who knew him only by sight--and hearing. He had no physical
+endowment or attainment worth mention; but boys who could "whip him with
+one hand" became sycophants in his presence; the terror he inspired was
+moral. He had a special over-development of a faculty exercised clumsily
+enough by most human beings, especially in their youth; in other words,
+he had a genius--not, however, a genius having to do with anything
+generally recognized as art or science. True, if he had been a violinist
+prodigy or mathematical prodigy, he would have had some respect from his
+fellows--about equal to that he might have received if he were gifted
+with some pleasant deformity, such as six toes on a foot--but he would
+never have enjoyed such deadly prestige as had actually come to be his.
+In brief, then, Wallie Torbin had a genius for mockery.
+
+Almost from his babyhood he had been a child of one purpose: to increase
+by burlesques the sufferings of unfortunate friends. If one of them
+wept, Wallie incessantly pursued him, yelping in horrid mimicry; if one
+were chastised he could not appear out-of-doors for days except to
+encounter Wallie and a complete rehearsal of the recent agony. "Quit,
+Papa! _Pah_-puh, quee-yet! I'll _never_ do it again, Pah-puh! Oh,
+_lemme_ alone, Pah-_puh_!"
+
+As he grew older, his insatiate curiosity enabled him to expose
+unnumbered weaknesses, indiscretions, and social misfortunes on the part
+of acquaintances and schoolmates; and to every exposure his noise and
+energy gave a hideous publicity: the more his victim sought privacy the
+more persistently he was followed by Wallie, vociferous and attended by
+hilarious spectators. But above all other things, what most stimulated
+the demoniac boy to prodigies of satire was a tender episode or any
+symptom connected with the dawn of love. Florence herself had suffered
+at intervals throughout her eleventh summer because Wallie discovered
+that Georgie Beck had sent her a valentine; and the humorist's many,
+many squealings of that valentine's affectionate quatrain finally left
+her unable to decide which she hated the more, Wallie or Georgie. That
+was the worst of Wallie: he never "let up"; and in Florence's circle
+there was no more sobering threat than, "I'll tell Wallie Torbin!" As
+for Henry Rooter and Herbert Illingsworth Atwater, Jr., they would as
+soon have had a Head-hunter on their trail as Wallie Torbin in the
+possession of anything that could incriminate them in an implication of
+love--or an acknowledgment (in their own handwriting!) of their own
+beauty.
+
+The fabric of civilized life is interwoven with blackmail: even some of
+the noblest people do favours for other people who are depended upon not
+to tell somebody something that the noblest people have done. Blackmail
+is born into us all, and our nurses teach us more blackmail by
+threatening to tell our parents if we won't do this and that--and our
+parents threaten to tell the doctor--and so we learn! Blackmail is part
+of the daily life of a child. Displeased, his first resort to get his
+way with other children is a threat to "tell," but by-and-by his
+experience discovers the mutual benefit of honour among blackmailers.
+Therefore, at eight it is no longer the ticket to threaten to tell the
+teacher; and, a little later, threatening to tell any adult at all is
+considered something of a breakdown in morals. Notoriously, the code is
+more liable to infraction by people of the physically weaker sex, for
+the very reason, of course, that their inferiority of muscle so
+frequently compels such a sin, if they are to have their way. But for
+Florence there was now no such temptation. Looking to the demolition of
+Atwater & Rooter, an exposure before adults of the results of "Truth"
+would have been an effect of the sickliest pallor compared to what might
+be accomplished by a careful use of the catastrophic Wallie Torbin.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On Sunday evening it was her privileged custom to go to the house of fat
+old Great-Uncle Joseph and remain until nine o'clock, in chatty
+companionship with Uncle Joseph and Aunt Carrie, his wife, and a few
+other relatives (including Herbert) who were in the habit of dropping in
+there, on Sunday evenings. In summer, lemonade and cake were frequently
+provided; in the autumn, one still found cake, and perhaps a pitcher of
+clear new cider: apples were a certainty.
+
+This evening was glorious: there were apples and cider and cake, with
+walnuts, perfectly cracked, and a large open-hearted box of candy; for
+Uncle Joseph and Aunt Carrie had foreseen the coming of several more
+Atwaters than usual, to talk over the new affairs of their beautiful
+relative, Julia. Seldom have any relative's new affairs been more
+thoroughly talked over than were Julia's that evening; though all the
+time by means of symbols, since it was thought wiser that Herbert and
+Florence should not yet be told of Julia's engagement; and Florence's
+parents were not present to confess their indiscretion. Julia was
+referred to as "the traveller"; other makeshifts were employed with the
+most knowing caution, and all the while Florence merely ate inscrutably.
+The more sincere Herbert was placid; the foods absorbing his attention.
+
+"Well, all I say is, the traveller better enjoy herself on her travels,"
+said Aunt Fanny, finally, as the subject appeared to be wearing toward
+exhaustion. "She certainly is in for it when the voyaging is over and
+she arrives in the port she sailed from, and has to show her papers. I
+agree with the rest of you: she'll have a great deal to answer for, and
+most of all about the shortest one. My own opinion is that the shortest
+one is going to burst like a balloon."
+
+"The shortest one," as the demure Florence had understood from the
+first, was none other than her Very Ideal. Now she looked up from the
+stool where she sat with her back against a pilaster of the mantelpiece.
+"Uncle Joseph," she said;--"I was just thinking. What is a person's
+reason?"
+
+The fat gentleman, rosy with firelight and cider, finished his fifth
+glass before responding. "Well, there _are_ persons I never could find
+any reason for at all. 'A person's reason'? What do you mean, 'a
+person's reason,' Florence?"
+
+"I mean: like when somebody says, 'They'll lose their reason,'" she
+explained. "Has everybody got a reason, and if they have, what is it,
+and how do they lose it, and what would they do then?"
+
+"Oh! I see!" he said. "You needn't worry. I suppose since you heard it
+you've been hunting all over yourself for your reason and looking to see
+if there was one hanging out of anybody else, somewhere. No; it's
+something you can't see, ordinarily, Florence. Losing your reason is
+just another way of saying, 'going crazy'!"
+
+"Oh!" she murmured, and appeared to be disturbed.
+
+At this, Herbert thought proper to offer a witticism for the pleasure of
+the company.
+
+"_You_ know, Florence," he said, "it only means acting like _you_ most
+always do." He applauded himself with a burst of changing laughter
+ranging from a bullfrog croak to a collapsing soprano; then he added:
+"Espeshually when you come around my and Henry's Newspaper Building! You
+cert'nly 'lose your reason' every time you come around _that_ ole
+place!"
+
+"Well, course I haf to act like the people that's already there,"
+Florence retorted, not sharply, but in a musing tone that should have
+warned him. It was not her wont to use a quiet voice for repartee.
+Thinking her humble, he laughed the more raucously.
+
+"Oh, Florence!" he besought her. "Say not so! Say not so!"
+
+"Children, children!" Uncle Joseph remonstrated.
+
+Herbert changed his tone; he became seriously plaintive. "Well, she does
+act that way, Uncle Joseph! When she comes around there you'd think we
+were runnin' a lunatic asylum, the way she takes on. She hollers and
+bellers and squalls and squawks. The least little teeny thing she don't
+like about the way we run our paper, she comes flappin' over there and
+goes to screechin' around you could hear her out at the Poor House
+Farm!"
+
+"Now, now, Herbert," his Aunt Fanny interposed. "Poor little Florence
+isn't saying anything impolite to you--not right now, at any rate. Why
+don't you be a little sweet to her just for once?"
+
+Her unfortunate expression revolted all the manliness in Herbert's
+bosom. "Be a little _sweet_ to her?" he echoed with poignant
+incredulity, and then in candour made plain how poorly Aunt Fanny
+inspired him. "I just exackly as soon be a little sweet to an
+alligator," he said.
+
+"Oh, oh!" said Aunt Carrie.
+
+"I would!" Herbert insisted. "Or a mosquito. I'd rather, to _either_ of
+'em, 'cause anyway they don't make so much noise. Why, you just ought to
+_hear_ her," he went on, growing more and more severe. "You ought to
+just come around our Newspaper Building any afternoon you please, after
+school, when Henry and I are tryin' to do our work in anyway _some_
+peace. Why, she just squawks and squalls and squ----"
+
+"It must be terrible," Uncle Joseph interrupted. "What do you do all
+that for, Florence, every afternoon?"
+
+"Just for exercise," she answered dreamily; and her placidity the more
+exasperated her journalist cousin.
+
+"She does it because she thinks _she_ ought to be runnin' our own
+newspaper, my and Henry's; that's why she does it! She thinks she knows
+more about how to run newspapers than anybody alive; but there's one
+thing she's goin' to find out; and that is, she don't get anything
+_more_ to do with my and Henry's newspaper. We wouldn't have another
+single one of her ole poems in it, no matter how much she offered to
+pay us! Uncle Joseph, I think you ought to _tell_ her she's got no
+business around my and Henry's Newspaper Building."
+
+"But, Herbert," Aunt Fanny suggested;--"you might let Florence have a
+little share in it of some sort. Then everything would be all right."
+
+"It would?" he said. "It _woo_-wud? Oh, my goodness, Aunt Fanny, I guess
+you'd like to see our newspaper just utterably ruined! Why, we wouldn't
+let that girl have any more to do with it than we would some horse!"
+
+"Oh, oh!" both Aunt Fanny and Aunt Carrie exclaimed, shocked.
+
+"We wouldn't," Herbert insisted. "A horse would know any amount more how
+to run a newspaper than she does. Soon as we got our printing-press, we
+said right then that we made up our minds Florence Atwater wasn't ever
+goin' to have a single thing to do with our newspaper. If you let her
+have anything to do with anything she wants to run the whole thing. But
+she might just as well learn to stay away from our Newspaper Building,
+because after we got her out yesterday we fixed a way so's she'll never
+get in _there_ again!"
+
+Florence looked at him demurely. "Are you sure, Herbert?" she inquired.
+
+"Just you try it!" he advised her, and he laughed tauntingly. "Just come
+around to-morrow and try it; that's all I ask!"
+
+"I cert'nly intend to," she responded with dignity. "I may have a slight
+supprise for you."
+
+"Oh, _Florence_, say not so! Say not so, Florence! Say not so!"
+
+At this, she looked full upon him, and already she had something in the
+nature of a surprise for him; for so powerful was the still balefulness
+of her glance that he was slightly startled. "I might say not so," she
+said. "I might, if I was speaking of what pretty eyes you say yourself
+you know you have, Herbert."
+
+It staggered him. "What--what do you mean?"
+
+"Oh, nothin'," she replied airily.
+
+Herbert began to be mistrustful of the solid earth: somewhere there was
+a fearful threat to his equipoise. "What you talkin' about?" he said
+with an effort to speak scornfully; but his sensitive voice almost
+failed him.
+
+"Oh, nothin'," said Florence. "Just about what pretty eyes you know you
+have, and Patty's being pretty, too, and so you're glad she thinks
+yours are pretty, the way _you_ do--and everything!"
+
+Herbert visibly gulped. He believed that Patty had betrayed him; had
+betrayed the sworn confidence of "Truth!"
+
+"That's all I was talkin' about," Florence added. "Just about how you
+knew you had such pretty eyes. Say not so, Herbert! Say not so!"
+
+"Look here!" he said. "When'd you see Patty again between this afternoon
+and when you came over here?"
+
+"What makes you think I saw her?"
+
+"Did you telephone her?"
+
+"What makes you think so?"
+
+Once more Herbert gulped. "Well, I guess you're ready to believe
+anything anybody tells you," he said, with palsied bravado. "You don't
+believe everything Patty Fairchild says, do you?"
+
+"Why, Herbert! Doesn't she always tell the _truth_?"
+
+"Her? Why, half the time," poor Herbert babbled, "you can't tell whether
+she's just makin' up what she says or not. If you've gone and believed
+everything that ole girl told you, you haven't got even what little
+sense I used to think you had!" So base we are under strain,
+sometimes--so base when our good name is threatened with the truth of
+us! "I wouldn't believe anything she said," he added, in a sickish
+voice, "if she told me fifty times and crossed her heart!"
+
+"Wouldn't you if she said you _wrote down_ how pretty you knew your eyes
+were, Herbert? Wouldn't you if it was on paper in your own handwriting?"
+
+"What's this about Herbert having 'pretty eyes'?" Uncle Joe inquired,
+again bringing general attention to the young cousins; and Herbert
+shuddered. This fat uncle had an unpleasant reputation as a joker.
+
+The nephew desperately fell back upon the hopeless device of attempting
+to drown out his opponent's voice as she began to reply. He became
+vociferous with scornful laughter, badly cracked. "Florence got mad!" he
+shouted, mingling the purported information with hoots and cacklings.
+"She got mad because I and Henry played some games with Patty and
+wouldn't let her play! She's tryin' to make up stories on us to get
+even. She made it up! It's all made up! She----"
+
+"No, no," Mr. Atwater interrupted. "Let Florence tell us. Florence,
+what was it about Herbert's knowing he had 'pretty eyes'?"
+
+Herbert attempted to continue the drowning out. He bawled. "She made it
+_up_! It's somep'n she made up her_self_! She----"
+
+"Herbert," said Uncle Joseph;--"if you don't keep quiet, I'll take back
+the printing-press."
+
+Herbert substituted a gulp for the continuation of his noise.
+
+"Now, Florence," said Uncle Joseph, "tell us what you were saying about
+how Herbert knows he has such 'pretty eyes'."
+
+Then it seemed to Herbert that a miracle befell. Florence looked up,
+smiling modestly. "Oh, it wasn't anything, Uncle Joseph," she said. "I
+was Just trying to tease Herbert any way I could think of."
+
+"Oh, was that all?" A hopeful light faded out of Uncle Joseph's large
+and inexpressive face. "I thought perhaps you'd detected him in some
+indiscretion."
+
+Florence laughed, "I was just teasin' him. It wasn't anything, Uncle
+Joseph."
+
+Hereupon, Herbert resumed a confused breathing. Dazed, he remained
+uneasy, profoundly so: and gratitude was no part of his emotion. He
+well understood that in conflicts such as these Florence was never
+susceptible to impulses of compassion; in fact, if there was warfare
+between them, experience had taught him to be wariest when she seemed
+kindest. He moved away from her, and went into another room where his
+condition was one of increasing mental discomfort, though he looked over
+the pictures in his great-uncle's copy of "Paradise Lost." These
+illustrations, by M. Gustave Doré, failed to aid in reassuring his
+troubled mind.
+
+When Florence left the house, he impulsively accompanied her,
+maintaining a nervous silence as they walked the short distance between
+Uncle Joseph's front gate and her own. There, however, he spoke.
+
+"Look here! You don't haf to go and believe everything that ole girl
+told you, do you?"
+
+"No," said Florence heartily. "I don't haf to."
+
+"Well, look here," he urged, helpless but to repeat. "You don't haf to
+believe whatever it was she went and told you, do you?"
+
+"What was it you think she told me, Herbert?"
+
+"All that guff--you know. Well, whatever it was you _said_ she told
+you."
+
+"I didn't," said Florence. "I didn't say she told me anything at all."
+
+"Well, she did, didn't she?"
+
+"Why, no," Florence replied, lightly. "She didn't say anything to _me_.
+Only I'm glad to have your _opinion_ of her, how she's such a
+story-teller and all--if I ever want to tell her, and everything!"
+
+But Herbert had greater alarms than this, and the greater obscured the
+lesser. "Look here," he said, "if she didn't tell you, how'd you know it
+then?"
+
+"How'd I know what?"
+
+"That--that big story about my ever writin' I knew I had"--he gulped
+again--"pretty eyes."
+
+"Oh, about _that_!" Florence said, and swung the gate shut between them.
+"Well, I guess it's too late to tell you to-night, Herbert; but maybe if
+you and that nasty little Henry Rooter do every single thing I tell you
+to, and do it just _exackly_ like I tell you from this time on, why
+maybe--I only say 'maybe'--well, maybe I'll tell you some day when I
+feel like it."
+
+She ran up the path and up the veranda steps, but paused before opening
+the front door, and called back to the waiting Herbert:
+
+"The only person I'd ever _think_ of tellin' about it before I tell you
+would be a boy I know." She coughed, and added as by an afterthought,
+"He'd just love to know all about it; I know he would. So, when I tell
+anybody about it I'll only tell just you and this other boy."
+
+"What other boy?" Herbert demanded.
+
+And her reply, thrilling through the darkness, left him demoralized with
+horror.
+
+"Wallie Torbin!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER NINETEEN
+
+
+The next afternoon, about four o'clock, Herbert stood gloomily at the
+main entrance of Atwater & Rooter's Newspaper Building awaiting his
+partner. The other entrances were not only nailed fast but massively
+barricaded; and this one (consisting of the ancient carriage-house
+doors, opening upon a driveway through the yard) had recently been made
+effective for exclusion. A long and heavy plank leaned against the wall,
+near by, ready to be set in hook-shaped iron supports fastened to the
+inner sides of the doors; and when the doors were closed, with this
+great plank in place, a person inside the building might seem entitled
+to count upon the enjoyment of privacy, except in case of earthquake,
+tornado, or fire. In fact, the size of the plank and the substantial
+quality of the iron fastenings could be looked upon, from a certain
+viewpoint, as a real compliment to the energy and persistence of
+Florence Atwater.
+
+Herbert had been in no complimentary frame of mind, however, when he
+devised the obstructions, nor was he now in such a frame of mind. He was
+pessimistic in regard to his future, and also embarrassed in
+anticipation of some explanations it would be necessary to make to his
+partner. He strongly hoped that Henry's regular after-school appearance
+at the Newspaper Building would precede Florence's, because these
+explanations required both deliberation and tact, and he was convinced
+that it would be almost impossible to make them at all if Florence got
+there first.
+
+He understood that he was unfortunately within her power; and he saw
+that it would be dangerous to place in operation for her exclusion from
+the Building this new mechanism contrived with such hopeful care, and at
+a cost of two dollars and twenty-five cents taken from the _Oriole's_
+treasury. What he wished Henry to believe was that for some good reason,
+which Herbert had not yet been able to invent, it would be better to
+show Florence a little politeness. He had a desperate hope that he might
+find some diplomatic way to prevail on Henry to be as subservient to
+Florence as she had seemed to demand, and he was determined to touch any
+extremity of unveracity, rather than permit the details of his answer
+in "Truth" to come to his partner's knowledge. Henry Rooter was not
+Wallie Torbin; but in possession of material such as this he could
+easily make himself intolerable.
+
+Therefore, it was in a flurried state of mind that Herbert waited; and
+when his friend appeared, over the fence, his perturbation was not
+decreased. He even failed to notice the unusual gravity of Henry's
+manner.
+
+"Hello, Henry! I thought I wouldn't start in working till you got here.
+I didn't want to haf to come all the way downstairs again to open the
+door and hi'st our good ole plank up again."
+
+"I see," said Henry, glancing nervously at their good ole plank. "Well,
+I guess Florence'll never get in _this_ good ole door--that is, she
+won't if we don't let her, or something."
+
+This final clause would have astonished Herbert if he had been less
+preoccupied with his troubles. "You bet she won't!" he said
+mechanically. "She couldn't ever get in here again--if the _family_
+didn't go intafering around and give me the dickens and everything,
+because they think--they _say_ they do, anyhow--they say they
+think--they think----"
+
+He paused, disguising a little choke as a cough of scorn for the
+family's thinking.
+
+"What did you say your family think?" Henry asked absently.
+
+"Well, they say we ought to let her have a share in our newspaper."
+Again he paused, afraid to continue lest his hypocrisy appear so
+bare-faced as to invite suspicion. "Well, maybe we _ought_," he said
+finally, his eyes guiltily upon his toe, which slowly scuffed the
+ground. "I don't say we ought, and I don't say we oughtn't."
+
+He expected at the least a sharp protest from his partner, who, on the
+contrary, surprised him. "Well, that's the way _I_ look at it," Henry
+said. "I don't say we ought and I don't say we oughtn't."
+
+And he, likewise, stared at the toe of a shoe that scuffed the ground.
+Herbert felt a little better; this particular subdivision of his
+difficulties seemed to be working out with unexpected ease.
+
+"I don't say we will and I don't say we won't," Henry added. "That's the
+way I look at it. My father and mother are always talkin' to me: how I
+got to be polite and everything, and I guess maybe it's time I began to
+pay some 'tention to what they say. You don't have your father and
+mother for always, you know, Herbert."
+
+Herbert's mood at once chimed with this unprecedented filial
+melancholy. "No, you don't, Henry. That's what I often think about,
+myself. No, sir, a fellow doesn't have his father and mother to advise
+him our whole life, and you ought to do a good deal what they say while
+they're still alive."
+
+"That's what I say," Henry agreed gloomily; and then, without any
+alteration of his tone, or of the dejected thoughtfulness of his
+attitude, he changed the subject in a way that painfully startled his
+companion. "Have you seen Wallie Torbin to-day, Herbert?"
+
+"What!"
+
+"Have you seen Wallie Torbin to-day?"
+
+Herbert swallowed. "Why, what makes--what makes you ask me that, Henry?"
+he said.
+
+"Oh, nothin'." Henry still kept his eyes upon his gloomily scuffing toe.
+"I just wondered, because I didn't happen to see him in school this
+afternoon when I happened to look in the door of the Eight-A when it was
+open. I didn't want to know on account of anything particular. I just
+happened to say that about him because I didn't have anything else to
+think about just then, so I just happened to think about him, the way you
+do when you haven't got anything much on your mind and might get to
+thinkin' about you can't tell what. That's all the way it was; I just
+happened to kind of wonder if he was around anywhere maybe."
+
+Henry's tone was obviously, even elaborately, sincere; and Herbert was
+reassured. "Well, I didn't see him," he responded. "Maybe he's sick."
+
+"No, he isn't," his friend said. "Florence said she saw him chasin' his
+dog down the street about noon."
+
+At this Herbert's uneasiness was uncomfortably renewed. "_Florence_ did?
+Where'd you see Florence?"
+
+Mr. Rooter swallowed. "A little while ago," he said, and again
+swallowed. "On the way home from school."
+
+"Look--look here!" Herbert was flurried to the point of panic.
+"Henry--did Florence--did she go and tell you--did she tell you----?"
+
+"_I_ didn't hardly notice what she was talkin' about," Henry said
+doggedly. "She didn't have anything to say that _I'd_ ever care two
+cents about. She came up behind me and walked along with me a ways, but
+I got too many things on my mind to hardly pay the least attention to
+anything _she_ ever talks about. She's a girl what I think about her
+the less people pay any 'tention to what she says the better off they
+are."
+
+"That's the way with me, Henry," his partner assured him earnestly. "I
+never pay any notice to what _she_ says. The way I figure it out about
+_her_, Henry, everybody'd be a good deal better off if nobody ever paid
+the least notice to anything she says. I never even notice what she
+says, myself."
+
+"I don't either," said Henry. "All _I_ think about is what my father and
+mother say, because I'm not goin' to have their advice all the rest o'
+my life, after they're dead. If they want me to be polite, why, I'll do
+it and that's all there is about it."
+
+"It's the same way with me, Henry. If she comes flappin' around here
+blattin' and blubbin' how she's goin' to have somep'n to do with our
+newspaper, why, the only reason _I'd_ ever let her would be because my
+_family_ say I ought to show more politeness to her than up to now. I
+wouldn't do it on any other account, Henry."
+
+"Neither would I. That's just the same way _I_ look at it, Herbert. If I
+ever begin to treat her any better, she's got my father and mother to
+thank, not me. That's the only reason _I'd_ be willing to say we better
+leave the plank down and let her in, if she comes around here like she's
+liable to."
+
+"Well," said Herbert. "_I'm_ willing. I don't want to get in trouble
+with the family."
+
+And they mounted the stairs to their editorial, reportorial, and
+printing rooms; and began to work in a manner not only preoccupied but
+apprehensive. At intervals they would give each other a furtive glance,
+and then seem to reflect upon their fathers' and mothers' wishes and the
+troublous state of the times. Florence did not keep them waiting long,
+however.
+
+She might have been easier to bear had her manner of arrival been less
+assured. She romped up the stairs, came skipping across the old floor,
+swinging her hat by a ribbon, flung open the gate in the sacred railing,
+and, flouncing into the principal chair, immodestly placed her feet on
+the table in front of that chair. Additionally, such was her lively
+humour, she affected to light and smoke the stub of a lead pencil.
+"Well, men," she said heartily, "I don't want to see any loafin' around
+here, men. I expect I'll have a pretty good newspaper this week; yes,
+sir, a pretty good newspaper, and I guess you men got to jump around a
+good deal to do everything I think of, or else maybe I guess I'll have
+to turn you off. I don't want to haf to do that, men."
+
+The blackmailed partners made no reply, on account of an inability that
+was perfect for the moment. They stared at her helplessly, though not
+kindly; for in their expressions the conflict between desire and policy
+was almost staringly vivid. And such was their preoccupation, each with
+the bitterness of his own case, that neither wondered at the other's
+strange complaisance.
+
+Florence made it clear to them that henceforth she was the editor of
+_The North End Daily Oriole_. (She said she had decided not to change
+the name.) She informed them that they were to be her printers; she did
+not care to get all inky and nasty herself, she said. She would,
+however, do all the writing for her newspaper, and had with her a new
+poem. Also, she would furnish all the news and it would be printed just
+as she wrote it, and printed _nicely_, too, or else----She left the
+sentence unfinished.
+
+Thus did this cool hand take possession of an established industry, and
+in much the same fashion did she continue to manage it. There were
+unsuppressible protests; there was covert anguish; there was even a
+strike--but it was a short one. When the printers remained away from
+their late Newspaper Building, on Wednesday afternoon, Florence had an
+interview with Herbert after dinner at his own door. He explained coldly
+that Henry and he had grown tired of the printing-press and had decided
+to put in all their spare time building a theatre in Henry's attic; but
+Florence gave him to understand that the theatre could not be; she
+preferred the _Oriole_.
+
+Henry and Herbert had both stopped "speaking" to Patty Fairchild, for
+each believed her treacherous to himself; but Florence now informed
+Herbert that far from depending on mere hearsay, she had in her own
+possession the confession of his knowledge that he had ocular beauty;
+that she had discovered the paper where Patty had lost it; and that it
+was now in a secure place, and in an envelope, upon the outside of which
+was already written, "For Wallie Torbin. Kindness of Florence A."
+
+Herbert surrendered.
+
+So did Henry Rooter, a little later that evening, after a telephoned
+conversation with the slave-driver.
+
+Therefore, the two miserable printers were back in their places the next
+afternoon. They told each other that the theatre they had planned wasn't
+so much after all; and anyhow your father and mother didn't last all
+your life, and it was better to do what they wanted, and be polite while
+they were alive.
+
+And on Saturday the new _Oriole_, now in every jot and item the inspired
+organ of feminism, made its undeniably sensational appearance.
+
+A copy, neatly folded, was placed in the hand of Noble Dill, as he set
+forth for his place of business, after lunching at home with his mother.
+Florence was the person who placed it there; she came hurriedly from
+somewhere in the neighbourhood, out of what yard or alley he did not
+notice, and slipped the little oblong sheet into his lax fingers.
+
+"There!" she said breathlessly. "There's a good deal about you in it
+this week, Mr. Dill, and I guess--I guess----"
+
+"What, Florence?"
+
+"I guess maybe you'll----" She looked up at him shyly; then, with no
+more to say, turned and ran back in the direction whence she had come.
+Noble walked on, not at once examining her little gift, but carrying it
+absently in fingers still lax at the end of a dangling arm. There was no
+life in him for anything. Julia was away.
+
+Away! And yet the dazzling creature looked at him from sky, from earth,
+from air; looked at him with the most poignant kindness, yet always
+shook her head! She had answered his first letter by a kind little note,
+his second by a kinder and littler one, and his third, fourth, fifth,
+and sixth by no note at all; but by the kindest message (through one of
+her aunts) that she was thinking about him a great deal. And even this
+was three weeks ago. Since then from Julia--nothing at all!
+
+But yesterday something a little stimulating had happened. On the
+street, downtown, he had come face to face, momentarily, with Julia's
+father; and for the first time in Noble's life Mr. Atwater nodded to him
+pleasantly. Noble went on his way, elated. Was there not something
+almost fatherly in this strange greeting?
+
+An event so singular might be interpreted in the happiest way: What had
+Julia written her father, to change him so toward Noble? And Noble was
+still dreamily interpreting as he walked down the street with _The North
+End Daily Oriole_ idle in an idle hand.
+
+He found a use for that hand presently, and, having sighed, lifted it to
+press it upon his brow, but did not complete the gesture. As his hand
+came within the scope of his gaze, levelled on the unfathomable
+distance, he observed that the fingers held a sheet of printed paper;
+and he remembered Florence. Instead of pressing his brow he unfolded the
+journal she had thrust upon him. As he began to read, his eye was
+lustreless, his gait slack and dreary; but soon his whole demeanour
+changed, it cannot be said for the better.
+
+           THE NORTH END DAILY ORIOLE
+
+    Atwater & Co., Owners & Propietors
+    Subscribe NOW 25 cents Per. Year. Sub-
+    scriptions should be brought to the East
+    Main Entrance of Atwater & Co., News-
+       paper  Building  every afternoon
+          430  to  VI  25 Cents
+
+                      POEMS
+
+           My Soul by Florence Atwater
+
+        When my heart is dreary
+        Then my soul is weary
+        As a bird with a broken wing
+    Who never again will sing
+    Like the sound of a vast amen
+    That comes from a church of men.
+
+        When my soul is dreary
+        It could never be cheery
+        But I think of myideal
+        And everything seems real
+        Like the sound of the bright church bells peal.
+
+    Poems by Florence Atwater will be in the paper each and every Sat.
+
+            Advertisements 45c. each Up
+
+              Joseph K. Atwater Co.
+              127 South Iowa St.
+                Steam Pumps
+
+            The News of the City
+
+    Miss Florence Atwater of tHis City received a mark of 94 in History
+    Examination at the concusion of the school Term last June.
+
+    Blue hair ribbons are in style again.
+
+    Miss Patty Fairchild of this City has not been doing as well in
+    Declamation lately as formerly.
+
+    MR. Noble Dill of this City is seldom seen on the streets of the
+    City without smoking a cigarette.
+
+    Miss Julia Atwater of this City is out of the City.
+
+    The MR. Rayfort family of this City have been presentde with the
+    present of a new Cat by Geo. the man employeD by Balf & CO. This
+    cat is perfectly baeutiful and still quit young.
+
+    Miss Julia Atwater of this City is visiting friends in the Soth.
+    The family have had many letters from her that are read by each and
+    all of the famild.
+
+    Mr. Noble Dill of this City is in business with his Father.
+
+    There was quite a wind storm Thursday doing damage to shade trees
+    in many parts of our beautiful City.
+
+    From Letters to the family Miss Julia Atwater of this City is
+    enjoying her visit in the south a greadeal.
+
+    Miss Patty Fairchild of the 7 A of this City, will probably not
+    pass in ARithmetiC--unless great improvement takes place before
+    Examination.
+
+    Miss Julia Atwater of this City wrote a letter to the family
+    stating while visiting in the SOuth she has made an engagement to
+    be married to MR. Crum of that City. The family do not know who
+    this MR. Crum is but It is said he is a widower though he has been
+    diVorced with a great many children.
+
+    The new ditch of the MR. Henry D. Vance, backyard of this City is
+    about through now as little remain to be done and it is thought the
+    beighborhood will son look better. Subscribe NOW 25c. Per Year Adv.
+    45c. up. Atwater & Co. Newspaper Building 25 Cents Per Years.
+
+It may be assumed that the last of the news items was wasted upon Noble
+Dill and that he never knew of the neighbourhood improvement believed to
+be imminent as a result of the final touches to the ditch of the Mr.
+Henry D. Vance backyard.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER TWENTY
+
+
+Throughout that afternoon adult members of the Atwater family connection
+made futile efforts to secure all the copies of the week's edition of
+_The North End Daily Oriole_. It could not be done.
+
+It was a trying time for "the family." Great Aunt Carrie said that she
+had the "worst afternoon of any of 'em," because young Newland Sanders
+came to her house at two and did not leave until five; all the time
+counting over, one by one, the hours he'd spent with Julia since she was
+seventeen and turned out, unfortunately, to be a Beauty. Newland had not
+restrained himself, Aunt Carrie said, and long before he left she wished
+Julia had never been born--and as for Herbert Illingsworth Atwater,
+Junior, the only thing to do with him was to send him to some strict
+Military School.
+
+Florence's father telephoned to her mother from downtown at three, and
+said that Mr. George Plum and the ardent vocalist, Clairdyce, had just
+left his office. They had not called in company, however, but
+coincidentally; and each had a copy of _The North End Daily Oriole_,
+already somewhat worn with folding and unfolding. Mr. Clairdyce's
+condition was one of desperate calm, Florence's father said, but Mr.
+Plum's agitation left him rather unpresentable for the street, though he
+had finally gone forth with his hair just as he had rumpled it, and with
+his hat in his hand. They wished the truth, they said: Was it true or
+was it not true? Mr. Atwater had told them that he feared Julia was
+indeed engaged, though he knew nothing of her fiancé's previous marriage
+or marriages, or of the number of his children. They had responded that
+they cared nothing about that. This man Crum's record was a matter of
+indifference to them, they said. All they wanted to know was whether
+Julia was engaged or not--and she was!
+
+"The odd thing to _me_," Mr. Atwater continued to his wife, "is where on
+earth Herbert could have got his story about this Crum's being a
+widower, and divorced, and with all those children. Do you know if
+Julia's written any of the family about these things and they haven't
+told the rest of us?"
+
+"No," said Mrs. Atwater. "I'm sure she hasn't. Every letter she's
+written to any of us has passed all through the family, and I know I've
+seen every one of 'em. She's never said anything about him at all,
+except that he was a lawyer. I'm sure _I_ can't imagine where Herbert
+got his awful information; I never thought he was the kind of boy to
+just make up such things out of whole cloth."
+
+Florence, sitting quietly in a chair near by, with a copy of "Sesame and
+Lilies" in her lap, listened to her mother's side of this conversation
+with an expression of impersonal interest; and if she could have
+realized how completely her parents had forgotten (naturally enough) the
+details of their first rambling discussion of Julia's engagement, she
+might really have felt as little alarm as she showed.
+
+"Well," said Mr. Atwater, "I'm glad _our_ branch of the family isn't
+responsible. That's a comfort, anyhow, especially as people are reading
+copies of Herbert's dreadful paper all up and down the town, my clerk
+says. He tells me that over at the Unity Trust Company, where young
+Murdock Hawes is cashier, they only got hold of one copy, but typewrote
+it and multigraphed it, and some of 'em have already learned it by heart
+to recite to poor young Hawes. He's the one who sent Julia the three
+fivepound boxes of chocolates from New York all at the same time, you
+remember."
+
+"Yes," Mrs. Atwater sighed. "Poor thing!"
+
+"Florence is out among the family, I suppose?" he inquired.
+
+"No; she's right here. She's just started to read Ruskin this afternoon.
+She says she's going to begin and read all of him straight through.
+That's very nice, don't you think?"
+
+He seemed to muse before replying.
+
+"I think that's very nice, at her age especially," Mrs. Atwater urged.
+"Don't you?"
+
+"Ye-es! Oh, yes! At least I suppose so. Ah--you don't think--of course
+she hasn't had anything at all to do with this?"
+
+"Well, I don't _see_ how she could. You know Aunt Fanny told us how
+Herbert declared before them all, only last Sunday night, that Florence
+should never have one thing to do with his printing-press, and said they
+wouldn't even let her come near it."
+
+"Yes, that's a fact. I'm glad Herbert made it so clear that she can't be
+implicated. I suppose the family are all pretty well down on Uncle
+Joseph?"
+
+"Uncle Joseph is being greatly blamed," said Mrs. Atwater primly. "He
+really ought to have known better than to put such an instrument as a
+printing-press into the hands of an irresponsible boy of that age. Of
+course it simply encouraged him to print all kinds of things. We none of
+us think Uncle Joseph ever dreamed that Herbert would publish, anything
+exactly like _this_, and of course Uncle Joseph says himself he never
+dreamed such a thing; he's said so time and time and time again, all
+afternoon. But of course he's greatly blamed."
+
+"I suppose there've been quite a good many of 'em over there blaming
+him?" her husband inquired.
+
+"Yes--until he telephoned to a garage and hired a car and went for a
+drive. He said he had plenty of money with him and didn't know when he'd
+be back."
+
+"Serves him right," said Mr. Atwater. "Does anybody know where Herbert
+is?"
+
+"Not yet!"
+
+"Well----" and he returned to a former theme. "I _am_ glad we aren't
+implicated. Florence is right there with you, you say?"
+
+"Yes," Mrs. Atwater replied. "She's right here, reading. You aren't
+worried about her, are you?" she added.
+
+"Oh, no; I'm sure it's all right. I only thought----"
+
+"Only thought what?"
+
+"Well, it _did_ strike me as curious," said Mr. Atwater; "especially
+after Aunt Fanny's telling us how Herbert declared Florence could never
+have a single thing to do with his paper again----"
+
+"Well, what?"
+
+"Well, here's her poem right at the top of it, and a _very_ friendly
+item about her history mark of last June. It doesn't seem like Herbert
+to be so complimentary to Florence, all of a sudden. Just struck me as
+rather curious; that's all."
+
+"Why, yes," said Mrs. Atwater, "it does seem a little odd, when you
+think of it."
+
+"Have you _asked_ Florence if she had anything to do with getting out
+this week's _Oriole_?"
+
+"Why, no; it never occurred to me, especially after what Aunt Fanny told
+us," said Mrs. Atwater. "I'll ask her now."
+
+But she was obliged to postpone putting the intended question. "Sesame
+and Lilies" lay sweetly upon the seat of the chair that Florence had
+occupied; but Florence herself had gone somewhere else.
+
+She had gone for a long, long ramble; and pedestrians who encountered
+her, and happened to notice her expression, were interested; and as they
+went on their way several of them interrupted the course of their
+meditations to say to themselves that she was the most thoughtful
+looking young girl they had ever seen. There was a touch of wistfulness
+about her, too; as of one whose benevolence must renounce all hope of
+comprehension and reward.
+
+Now, among those who observed her unusual expression was a gentleman of
+great dimensions disposed in a closed automobile that went labouring
+among mudholes in an unpaved outskirt of the town. He rapped upon the
+glass before him, to get the driver's attention, and a moment later the
+car drew up beside Florence, as she stood in a deep reverie at the
+intersection of two roads.
+
+Uncle Joseph opened the door and took his cigar from his mouth. "Get in,
+Florence," he said. "I'll take you for a ride." She started violently;
+whereupon he restored the cigar to his mouth, puffed upon it, breathing
+heavily the while as was his wont, and added, "I'm not going home. I'm
+out for a nice long ride. Get in."
+
+"I was takin' a walk," she said dubiously. "I haf to take a whole lot of
+exercise, and I ought to walk and walk and walk. I guess I ought to
+keep on walkin'."
+
+"Get in," he said. "I'm out riding. I don't know _when_ I'll get home!"
+
+Florence stepped in, Uncle Joseph closed the door, and the car slowly
+bumped onward.
+
+"You know where Herbert is?" Uncle Joseph inquired.
+
+"No," said Florence, in a gentle voice.
+
+"I do," he said. "Herbert and your friend Henry Rooter came to our house
+with one of the last copies of the _Oriole_ they were distributing to
+subscribers; and after I read it I kind of foresaw that the feller
+responsible for their owning a printing-press was going to be in some
+sort of family trouble or other. I had quite a talk with 'em and they
+hinted they hadn't had much to do with this number of the paper, except
+the mechanical end of it; but they wouldn't come out right full with
+what they meant. They seemed to have some good reason for protecting a
+third party, and said quite a good deal about their fathers and mothers
+being but mortal and so on; so Henry and Herbert thought they oughtn't
+to expose this third party--whoever she may happen to be. Well, I
+thought they better not stay too long, because I was compromised enough
+already, without being seen in their company; and I gave 'em something
+to help 'em out with at the movies. You can stay at movies an awful long
+time, and if you've got money enough to go to several of 'em, why,
+you're fixed for pretty near as long as you please. A body ought to be
+able to live a couple o' months at the movies for nine or ten dollars, I
+should think."
+
+He was silent for a time, then asked, "I don't suppose your papa and
+mamma will be worrying about you, will they, Florence?"
+
+"Oh, no!" she said quickly. "Not in the least! There was nothin' at all
+for me to do at our house this afternoon."
+
+"That's good," he said, "because before we go back I was thinking some
+of driving around by way of Texas."
+
+Florence looked at him trustfully and said nothing. It seemed to her
+that he suspected something; she was not sure; but his conversation was
+a little peculiar, though not in the least sinister. Indeed she was able
+to make out that he had more the air of an accomplice than of a
+prosecutor or a detective. Nevertheless, she was convinced that far, far
+the best course for her to pursue, during the next few days, would be
+one of steadfast reserve. And such a course was congenial to her mood,
+which was subdued, not to say apprehensive; though she was sure her
+recent conduct, if viewed sympathetically, would be found at least
+Christian. The trouble was that probably it would not be viewed
+sympathetically. No one would understand how carefully and tactfully she
+had prepared the items of the _Oriole_ to lead suavely up to the news of
+Aunt Julia's engagement and break it to Noble Dill in a manner that
+would save his reason.
+
+Therefore, on account of this probable lack of comprehension on the part
+of the family and public, it seemed to her that the only wise and good
+course to follow would be to claim nothing for herself, but to allow
+Herbert and Henry to remain undisturbed in full credit for publishing
+the _Oriole_. This involved a disappointment, it is true; nevertheless,
+she decided to bear it.
+
+She had looked forward to surprising "the family" delightfully. As they
+fluttered in exclamation about her, she had expected to say, "Oh, the
+_poem_ isn't so much, I guess--I wrote it quite a few days ago and I'm
+writing a couple new ones now--but I did take quite a lot o' time and
+trouble with the rest of the paper, because I had to write every single
+word of it, or else let Henry and Herbert try to, and 'course they'd
+just of ruined it. Oh, it isn't so much to talk about, I guess; it just
+sort of _comes_ to me to do things that way."
+
+Thirteen attempts to exercise a great philanthropy, and every grown
+person in sight, with the possible exception of Great-Uncle Joseph, goes
+into wholly unanticipated fits of horror. Cause and effect have no
+honest relation: Fate operates without justice or even rational
+sequence; life and the universe appear to be governed, not in order and
+with system, but by Chance, becoming sinister at any moment without
+reason.
+
+And while Florence, thus a pessimist, sat beside fat Uncle Joseph during
+their long, long drive, relatives of hers were indeed going into fits;
+at least, so Florence would have described their gestures and
+incoherences of comment. Moreover, after the movies, straight into such
+a fitful scene did the luckless Herbert walk when urged homeward by
+thoughts of food, at about six that evening. Henry Rooter had strongly
+advised him against entering the house.
+
+"You better not," he said earnestly. "_Honest_, you better not,
+Herbert!"
+
+"Well, we got apple dumplings for dinner," Herbert said, his tone
+showing the strain of mental uncertainty. "Eliza told me this morning we
+were goin' to have 'em. I kind of hate to go in, but I guess I better,
+Henry."
+
+"_You_ won't see any apple dumplings," Henry predicted.
+
+"Well, I believe I better try it, Henry."
+
+"You better come home with me. My father and mother'll be perfectly
+willing to have you."
+
+"I know that," said Herbert. "But I guess I better go in and try it,
+anyhow, Henry. I didn't have anything to do with what's in the _Oriole_.
+It's every last word ole Florence's doing. I haven't got any more right
+to be picked on for that than a child."
+
+"Yes," Henry admitted. "But if you go and tell 'em so, I bet she'd get
+even with you some way that would probably get _me_ in trouble, too,
+before we get through with the job. _I_ wouldn't tell 'em if I was you,
+Herbert!"
+
+"Well, I wasn't intending to," Herbert responded gloomily; and the
+thought of each, unknown to the other, was the same, consisting of a
+symbolic likeness of Wallie Torbin at his worst. "I _ought_ to tell on
+Florence; by rights I ought," said Herbert; "but I've decided I won't.
+There's no tellin' what she wouldn't do. Not that she could do anything
+to _me_, particyourly----"
+
+"Nor me, either," his friend interposed hurriedly. "I don't worry about
+anything like that! Still, if I was you I wouldn't tell. She's only a
+girl, we got to remember."
+
+"Yes," said Herbert. "That's the way _I_ look at it, Henry; and the way
+I look at it is just simply this: long as she _is_ a girl, why, simply
+let her go. You can't tell what she'd do, and so what's the use to go
+and tell on a girl?"
+
+"That's the way _I_ look at it," Henry agreed. "What's the use? If I was
+in your place, I'd act just the same way you do."
+
+"Well," said Herbert, "I guess I better go on in the house, Henry. It's
+a good while after dark."
+
+"You're makin' a big mistake!" Henry Rooter called after him. "_You_
+won't see any apple dumplings, I bet a hunderd dollars! You better come
+on home with me."
+
+Herbert no more than half opened his front door before he perceived that
+his friend's advice had been excellent. So clearly Herbert perceived
+this, that he impulsively decided not to open the door any farther, but
+on the contrary to close it and retire; and he would have done so, had
+his mother not reached forth and detained him. She was, in fact, just
+inside that door, standing in the hall with one of his great-aunts, one
+of his aunts, two aunts-by-marriage, and an elderly unmarried cousin,
+who were all just on the point of leaving. However, they changed their
+minds and decided to remain, now that Herbert was among them.
+
+The captive's father joined them, a few minutes later, but it had
+already become clear to Herbert that _The North End Daily Oriole_ was in
+one sense a thing of the past, though in another sense this former owner
+and proprietor was certain that he would never hear the last of it.
+However, on account of the life of blackmail and slavery now led by the
+members of the old régime, the _Oriole's_ extinction was far less
+painful to Herbert than his father supposed; and the latter wasted a
+great deal of severity, insisting that the printing-press should be
+returned that very night to Uncle Joseph. Herbert's heartiest
+retrospective wish was that the ole printing-press had been returned to
+Uncle Joseph long ago.
+
+"If you can find him to give it to!" Aunt Harriet suggested. "Nobody
+_knows_ where he goes when he gets the way he did this afternoon when we
+were discussing it with him! I only hope he'll be back to-night!"
+
+"He can't stay away forever," Aunt Fanny remarked. "That garage is
+charging him five dollars an hour for the automobile he's in, and surely
+even Joseph will decide there's a limit to wildness _some_ time!"
+
+"I don't care when he comes back," Herbert's father declared grimly.
+"Whenever he does he's got to take that printing-press back--and Herbert
+will be let out of the house long enough to carry it over. His mother or
+I will go with him."
+
+Herbert bore much more than this. He had seated himself on the third
+step of the stairway, and maintained as much dogged silence as he could.
+Once, however, they got a yelp of anguish out of him. It was when Cousin
+Virginia said: "Oh, Herbert, Herbert! How could you make up that
+terrible falsehood about Mr. Crum? And, _think_ of it; right on the same
+page with your cousin Florence's pure little poem!"
+
+Herbert uttered sounds incoherent but loud, and expressive of a supreme
+physical revulsion. The shocked audience readily understood that he
+liked neither Cousin Virginia's chiding nor Cousin Florence's pure
+little poem.
+
+"Shame!" said his father.
+
+Herbert controlled himself. It could be seen that his spirit was broken,
+when Aunt Fanny mourned, shaking her head at him, smiling ruefully:
+
+"Oh, if boys could only be girls!"
+
+Herbert just looked at her.
+
+"The worst thing," said his father;--"that is, if there's any part of it
+that's worse than another--the worst thing about it all is this rumour
+about Noble Dill."
+
+"What about that poor thing?" Aunt Harriet asked. "We haven't heard."
+
+"Why, I walked up from downtown with old man Dill," said Mr. Atwater,
+"and the Dill family are all very much worried. It seems that Noble
+started downtown after lunch, as usual, and pretty soon he came back to
+the house and he had a copy of this awful paper that little Florence had
+given him, and----"
+
+"_Who_ gave it to him?" Aunt Fanny asked. "_Who_?"
+
+"Little Florence."
+
+"Why, that's curious," Cousin Virginia murmured. "I must telephone and
+ask her mother about that."
+
+The brooding Herbert looked up, and there was a gleam in his dogged eye;
+but he said nothing.
+
+"Go on," Aunt Harriet urged. "What did Noble do?"
+
+"Why, his mother said he just went up to his room and changed his shoes
+and necktie----"
+
+"I thought so," Aunt Fanny whispered. "Crazy!"
+
+"And then," Mr. Atwater continued, "he left the house and she supposed
+he'd gone down to the office; but she was uneasy, and telephoned his
+father. Noble hadn't come. He didn't come all afternoon, and he didn't
+go back to the house; and they telephoned around to every place he
+_could_ go that they know of, and they couldn't find him or hear
+anything about him at all--not anywhere." Mr. Atwater coughed, and
+paused.
+
+"But what," Aunt Harriet cried;--"_what_ do they think's become of him?"
+
+"Old man Dill said they were all pretty anxious," said Mr. Atwater.
+"They're afraid Noble has--they're afraid he's disappeared."
+
+Aunt Fanny screamed.
+
+Then, in perfect accord, they all turned to look at Herbert, who rose
+and would have retired upstairs had he been permitted.
+
+As that perturbing evening wore on, word gradually reached the most
+outlying members of the Atwater family connection that Noble Dill was
+missing. Ordinarily, this bit of news would have caused them no severe
+anxiety. Noble's person and intellect were so
+commonplace--"insignificant" was the term usually preferred in his own
+circle--that he was considered to be as nearly negligible as it is
+charitable to consider a fellow-being. True, there was one thing that
+set him apart; he was found worthy of a superlative when he fell in love
+with Julia; and of course this distinction caused him to become better
+known and more talked about than he had been in his earlier youth.
+
+However, the eccentricities of a person in such an extremity of love are
+seldom valued except as comedy, and even then with no warmth of heart
+for the comedian, but rather with an incredulous disdain; so it is safe
+to say that under other circumstances, Noble might have been missing,
+indeed, and few of the Atwaters would have missed him. But as matters
+stood they worried a great deal about him, fearing that a rash act on
+his part might reflect notoriety upon themselves on account of their
+beautiful relative--and _The North End Daily Oriole_. And when nine
+o'clock came and Mrs. Dill reported to Herbert's father, over the
+telephone, that nothing had yet been heard of her son, the pressure of
+those who were blaming the _Oriole_ more than they blamed Julia became
+so wearing that Herbert decided he would rather spend the remaining days
+of his life running away from Wallie Torbin than put in any more of such
+a dog's evening as he _was_ putting in. Thus he defined it.
+
+He made a confession; that is to say, it was a proclamation. He
+proclaimed his innocence. He began history with a description of events
+distinctly subsequent to Sunday pastimes with Patty Fairchild, and
+explained how he and Henry had felt that their parents would not always
+be with them, and as their parents wished them to be polite, they had
+resolved to be polite to Florence. Proceeding, he related in detail her
+whole journalistic exploit.
+
+Of the matter in hand he told the perfect and absolute truth--and was
+immediately refuted, confuted, and demonstrated to be a false witness by
+Aunt Fanny, Aunt Carrie, and Cousin Virginia, who had all heard him
+vehemently declare, no longer ago than the preceding Sunday evening,
+that he and his partner had taken secure measures to prevent Florence
+from ever again setting foot within the Newspaper Building. In addition,
+he was quite showered with definitions; and these, though so various,
+all sought to phrase but the one subject: his conduct in seeking to drag
+Florence into the mire, when she was absent and could not defend
+herself. Poor Florence would answer later in the evening, he was told
+severely; and though her cause was thus championed against the slander,
+it is true that some of her defenders felt stirrings of curiosity in
+regard to Florence. In fact, there was getting to be something almost
+like a cloud upon her reputation. There were several things for her to
+explain;--among them, her taking it upon herself to see that Noble
+received a copy of the _Oriole_, and also her sudden departure from home
+and rather odd protraction of absence therefrom. It was not thought she
+was in good company. Uncle Joseph had telephoned from a suburb that they
+were dining at a farmhouse and would thence descend to the general
+region of the movies.
+
+"_Nobody_ knows what that man'll do, when he decides to!" Aunt Carrie
+said nervously. "Letting the poor child stay up so late! She ought to be
+in bed this minute, even if it is Saturday night! Or else she ought to
+be here to listen to her own bad little cousin trying to put his
+terrible responsibility on her shoulders."
+
+One item of this description of himself the badgered Herbert could not
+bear in silence, although he had just declared that since the truth was
+so ill-respected among his persecutors he would open his mouth no more
+until the day of his death. He passed over "bad," but furiously stated
+his height in feet, inches, and fractions of inches.
+
+Aunt Fanny shook her head in mourning. "That may be, Herbert," she said
+gently. "But you must try to realize it can't bring poor young Mr. Dill
+back to his family."
+
+Again Herbert just looked at her. He had no indifference more profound
+than that upon which her strained conception of the relation between
+cause and effect seemed to touch;--from his point of view, to be missing
+should be the lightest of calamities. It is true that he was concerned
+with the restoration of Noble Dill to the rest of the Dills so far as
+such an event might affect his own incomparable misfortunes, but not
+otherwise. He regarded Noble and Noble's disappearance merely as unfair
+damage to himself, and he continued to look at this sorrowing great-aunt
+of his until his thoughts made his strange gaze appear to her so
+hardened that she shook her head and looked away.
+
+"Poor young Mr. Dill!" she said. "If someone could only have been with
+him and kept talking to him until he got used to the idea a little!"
+
+Cousin Virginia nodded comprehendingly. "Yes, it might have tided him
+over," she said. "He wasn't handsome, nor impressive, of course, nor
+anything like that, but he always spoke so nicely to people on the
+street. I'm sure he never harmed even a kitten, poor soul!"
+
+"I'm sure he never did," Herbert's mother agreed gently. "Not even a
+kitten. I do wonder where he is now."
+
+But Aunt Fanny uttered a little cry of protest. "I'm afraid we may
+hear!" she said. "Any moment!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
+
+
+These sympathetic women had unanimously set their expectation in so
+romantically pessimistic a groove that the most tragic news of Noble
+would have surprised them little. But if the truth of his whereabouts
+could have been made known to them, as they sat thus together at what
+was developing virtually into his wake, with Herbert as a compulsory
+participant, they would have turned the session into a riot of
+amazement. Noble was in the very last place (they would have said, when
+calmer) where anybody in the world could have even madly dreamed of
+looking for him! They would have been right about it. No one could have
+expected to find Noble to-night inside the old, four-square brick house
+of H. I. Atwater, Senior, chief of the Atwaters and father of too gentle
+Julia. Moreover, Mr. Atwater himself was not at present in the house; he
+had closed and locked it the day before, giving the servants a week's
+vacation and telling them not to return till he sent for them; and he
+had then gone out of town to look over a hominy-mill he thought of
+buying. And yet, as the wake went on, there was a light in the house,
+and under that light sat Noble Dill.
+
+Returning home, after Florence had placed the shattering paper within
+his hand, Noble had changed his shoes and his tie. He was but a
+mechanism; he had no motive. The shoes he put on were no better than
+those he took off; the fresh tie was no lovelier than the one he had
+worn; nor had it even the lucidity to be a purple one, as the banner of
+grief. No; his action was, if so viewed, "crazy," as Aunt Fanny had
+called it. Agitation first took this form; that was all. Love and change
+of dress are so closely allied; and in happier days, when Noble had come
+home from work and would see Julia in the evening, he usually changed
+his clothes. No doubt there is some faint tracery here, probably too
+indistinct to repay contemplation.
+
+When he left the house he walked rapidly downtown, and toward the end of
+this one-mile journey he ran; but as he was then approaching the railway
+station, no one thought him eccentric. He was, however, for when he
+entered the station he went to a bench and sat looking upward for more
+than ten minutes before he rose, went to a ticket window and asked for
+a time-table.
+
+"What road?" the clerk inquired.
+
+"All points South," said Noble.
+
+He placed the time-table, still folded, in his pocket, rested an elbow
+on the brass apron of the window, and would have given himself up to
+reflections, though urged to move away. Several people, wishing to buy
+tickets, had formed a line behind him; they perceived that Noble had
+nothing more to say to the clerk, and the latter encouraged their
+protests, even going so far as to inquire: "For heaven's sakes, can't
+you let these folk buy their tickets?" And since Noble still did not
+move: "My gosh, haven't you got no _feet_?"
+
+"Feet? Oh, yes," said Noble gently. "I'm going away." And went back to
+his seat.
+
+Afterwhile, he sought to study his time-table. Ordinarily, his mind was
+one of those able to decipher and comprehend railway time-tables; he had
+few gifts, but this was one of them. It failed him now; so he wandered
+back to the ticket-window, and, after urgent coaching, eventually took
+his place at the end instead of at the head of the line that waited
+there. In his turn he came again to the window, and departed from it
+after a conversation with the clerk that left the latter in accord with
+Aunt Fanny Atwater's commiserating adjective, though the clerk's own
+pity was expressed in argot. "The poor nut!" he explained to his next
+client. "Wants to buy a ticket on a train that don't pull out until ten
+thirty-five to-night; and me fillin' it all out, stampin' it and
+everything, what for? Turned out all his pockets and couldn't come
+within eight dollars o' the price! Where you want to go?"
+
+Noble went back to his bench and sat there for a long time, though there
+was no time, long or short, for him. He was not yet consciously
+suffering; nor was he thinking at all. True, he had a dim, persistent
+impulse to action--or why should he be at the station?--but for the
+clearest expression of his condition it is necessary to borrow a
+culinary symbol; he was jelling. But the state of shock was slowly
+dispersing, while a perception of approaching anguish as slowly
+increased. He was beginning to swallow nothing at intervals and the
+intervals were growing shorter.
+
+Dusk was misting down, outdoors, when with dragging steps he came out of
+the station. He looked hazily up and down the street, where the
+corner-lamps and shop-windows now were lighted; and, after dreary
+hesitation, he went in search of a pawn-shop, and found one. The old man
+who operated it must have been a philanthropist, for Noble was so
+fortunate as to secure a loan of nine dollars upon his watch. Surprised
+at this, he returned to the station, and went back to the same old
+bench.
+
+It was fully occupied, and he stood for some time looking with vague
+reproach at the large family of coloured people who had taken it. He had
+a feeling that he lived there and that these coloured people were
+trespassers; but upon becoming aware that part of an orange was being
+rubbed over his left shoe by the youngest of the children, he groaned
+abruptly and found another bench.
+
+A little after six o'clock a clanging and commotion in the train-shed
+outside, attending the arrival of a "through express," stirred him from
+his torpor, and he walked heavily across the room to the same
+ticket-window he had twice blocked; but there was no queue attached to
+it now. He rested his elbow upon the apron and his chin upon his hand,
+while the clerk waited until he should state his wishes. This was a new
+clerk, who had just relieved the other.
+
+"Well! Well!" he said at last.
+
+"I'll take it now," Noble responded.
+
+"What'll you take now?"
+
+"That ticket."
+
+"What ticket?"
+
+"The same one I wanted before," Noble sighed.
+
+The clerk gave him a piercing look, glanced out of the window and saw
+that there were no other clients, then went to a desk at the farther end
+of his compartment, and took up some clerical work he had in hand.
+
+Noble leaned upon the apron of the window, waiting; and if he thought
+anything, he thought the man was serving him.
+
+The high, vaulted room became resonant with voices and the blurred
+echoes of mingling footsteps on the marble floor, as passengers from the
+express hurried anxiously to the street, or more gaily straggled
+through, shouting with friends who came to greet them; and among these
+moving groups there walked a youthful fine lady noticeably enlivening to
+the dullest eye. She was preceded by a brisk porter who carried two
+travelling-bags of a rich sort, as well as a sack of implements for the
+game of golf; and she was warm in dark furs, against which the vasty
+clump of violets she wore showed dewy gleamings of blue.
+
+At sight of Noble Dill, more than pensive at the ticket-window, she
+hesitated, then stopped and observed him. That she should observe
+anybody was in a way a coincidence, for, as it happened, she was herself
+the most observed person in all the place. She was veiled in two veils,
+but she had been seen in the train without these, and some of her
+fellow-travellers, though strangers to her, were walking near her in a
+hypocritical way, hoping still not to lose sight of her, even veiled.
+And although the shroudings permitted the most meagre information of her
+features, what they did reveal was harmfully piquant; moreover, there
+was a sweetness of figure, a disturbing grace; while nothing could
+disguise her air of wearing that many violets casually as a daily
+perquisite and matter of course.
+
+[Illustration: _"He stared at her. His elbow sagged away from the
+window; the whole person of Noble Dill seemed near collapse."_]
+
+So this observed lady stopped and observed Noble, who in return observed
+her not at all, being but semi-conscious. Looked upon thoughtfully, it
+is a coincidence that we breathe; certainly it is a mighty coincidence
+that we speak to one another and comprehend; for these are true marvels.
+But what petty interlacings of human action so pique our sense of
+the theatrical that we call them coincidences and are astonished! That
+Julia should arrive during Noble's long process of buying a ticket to go
+to her was stranger than that she stopped to look at him, though still
+not comparable in strangeness to the fact that either of them, or any
+living creature, stood upon the whirling earth;--yet when Noble Dill
+comprehended what was happening he was amazed.
+
+She spoke to him.
+
+"Noble!" she said.
+
+He stared at her. His elbow sagged away from the window; the whole
+person of Noble Dill seemed near collapse. He shook; he had no voice.
+
+"I just this minute got off the train," she said. "Are you going away
+somewhere?"
+
+"No," he whispered; then obtained command of a huskiness somewhat
+greater in volume. "I'm just standing here."
+
+"I told the porter to get me a taxicab," she said. "If you're going home
+for dinner I'll drop you at your house."
+
+"I--I'm--I----" His articulation encountered unsurmountable
+difficulties, but Julia had been with him through many such trials
+aforetime. She said briskly, "I'm awfully hungry and I want to get
+home. Come on--if you like?"
+
+He walked waveringly at her side through the station, and followed her
+into the dim interior of the cab, which became fragrant of violets--an
+emanation at once ineffable and poisonous.
+
+"I'm so glad I happened to run across you," she said, as they began to
+vibrate tremulously in unison with the fierce little engine that drew
+them. "I want to hear all the news. Nobody knows I'm home. I didn't
+write or telegraph to a soul; and I'll be a complete surprise to father
+and everybody--I don't know how pleasant a one! _You_ didn't seem so
+frightfully glad to see me, Noble!"
+
+"Am I?" he whispered. "I mean--I mean--I mean: Didn't I?"
+
+"No!" she laughed. "You looked--you looked shocked! It couldn't have
+been because I'm ill or anything, because I'm not; and if I were you
+couldn't have told it through these two veils. Possibly I'd better take
+your expression as a compliment." She paused, then asked hesitatingly,
+"Shall I?"
+
+This was the style for which the Atwaters held Julia responsible; but
+they were mistaken: she was never able to control it. Now she went
+cheerily on: "Perhaps not, as you don't answer. I shouldn't be so bold!
+Do you suppose anybody at all will be glad to see me?"
+
+"I--I----" He seemed to hope that words would come in their own good
+time.
+
+"Noble!" she cried. "Don't be so glum!" And she touched his arm with her
+muff, a fluffy contact causing within him a short convulsion, naturally
+invisible. "Noble, aren't you going to tell me what's all the news?"
+
+"There's--some," he managed to inform her. "Some--some news."
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"It's--it's----"
+
+"Never mind," she said soothingly. "Get your breath; I can wait. I hope
+nothing's wrong in your family, Noble."
+
+"No. Oh, no."
+
+"It isn't just my turning up unexpectedly that's upset you so, of
+course," she dared to say. "Naturally, I know better than to think such
+a thing as that."
+
+"Oh, Julia!" he said. "Oh, Julia!"
+
+"What is it, Noble?"
+
+"Noth-ing," he murmured, disjointing the word.
+
+"How odd you happened to be there at the station," she said, "just when
+my train came in! You're sure you weren't going away anywhere?"
+
+"No; oh, no."
+
+She was thoughtful, then laughed confidentially. "You're the only person
+in town that knows I'm home, Noble."
+
+"I'm glad," he said humbly.
+
+She laughed again. "I came all of a sudden--on an impulse. It's a little
+idiotic. I'll tell you all about it, Noble. You see, ten or twelve days
+ago I wrote the family a more or less indiscreet letter. That is, I told
+them something I wanted them to be discreet about, and, of course, when
+I got to thinking it over, I knew they wouldn't. You see, I wrote them
+something I wanted them to keep a secret, but the more I thought about
+it, the more I saw I'd better hurry back. Yesterday it got into my head
+that I'd better jump on the next train for home!"
+
+She paused, then added, "So I did! About ten or twelve days is as long
+as anybody has a right to expect the Atwater family connection to keep
+the deadliest kind of a secret, isn't it?" And as he did not respond,
+she explained, modestly, "Of course, it wasn't a very deadly secret; it
+was really about something of only the least importance."
+
+The jar of this understatement restored Noble's voice to a sudden and
+startling loudness. "'Only the least importance'!" he shouted. "With a
+man named Crum!"
+
+"What!" she cried
+
+"Crum!" Noble insisted. "That's exactly what it said his name was!"
+
+"_What_ said his name was?"
+
+"_The North End Daily Oriole!_"
+
+"What in heaven's name is that?"
+
+"It's the children's paper, Herbert's and Florence's: your own niece and
+nephew, Julia! You don't mean you deny it, do you, Julia?"
+
+She was in great confusion: "Do I deny what?"
+
+"That his name's Crum!" Noble said passionately. "That his name's Crum
+and that he's a widower and he's been divorced and's got nobody knows
+how many children!"
+
+Julia sought to collect herself. "I don't know what you're talking
+about," she said. "If you mean that I happened to meet a very charming
+man while I was away, and that his name happened to be Crum, I don't
+know why I should go to the trouble of denying it. But if Mr. Crum has
+had the experiences you say he has, it is certainly news to me! I think
+someone told me he was only twenty-six years old. He looked rather
+younger."
+
+"You 'think someone told' you!" Noble groaned. "Oh, Julia! And here it
+is, all down in black and white, in my pocket!"
+
+"I haven't the slightest idea what you're talking about." Julia's tone
+was cold, and she drew herself up haughtily, though the gesture was
+ineffective in the darkness of that quivering interior. The quivering
+stopped just then, however, as the taxicab came to a rather abrupt halt
+before her house.
+
+"Will you come in with me a moment, please?" Julia said as she got out.
+"There are some things I want to ask you--and I'm sure my father hasn't
+come home from downtown yet. There's no light in the front part of the
+house."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
+
+
+There was no light in any other part of the house, they discovered,
+after abandoning the front door bell for an excursion to the rear.
+"That's disheartening to a hungry person," Julia remarked: and then
+remembered that she had a key to the front door in her purse. She opened
+the door, and lighted the hall chandelier while Noble brought in her
+bags from the steps where the taxicab driver had left them.
+
+"There's nobody home at all," Julia said thoughtfully. "Not even Gamin."
+
+"No. Nobody," her sad companion agreed, shaking his head. "Nobody at
+all, Julia. Nobody at all." Rousing himself, he went back for the golf
+tools, and with a lingering gentleness set them in a corner. Then,
+dumbly, he turned to go.
+
+"Wait, please," said Julia. "I want to ask you a few things--especially
+about what you've got 'all down in black and white' in your pocket. Will
+you shut the front door, if you please, and go into the library and
+turn on the lights and wait there while I look over the house and see if
+I can find why it's all closed up like this?"
+
+Noble went into the library and found the control of the lights. She
+came hurrying in after him.
+
+"It's chilly. The furnace seems to be off," she said. "I'll----" But
+instead of declaring her intentions, she enacted them; taking a match
+from a little white porcelain trough on the mantelpiece and striking it
+on the heel of her glittering shoe. Then she knelt before the grate and
+set the flame to paper beneath the kindling-wood and coal. "You mustn't
+freeze," she said, with a thoughtful kindness that killed him; and as
+she went out of the room he died again;--for she looked back over her
+shoulder.
+
+She had pushed up her veils and this was his first sight of that
+disastrous face in long empty weeks and weeks. Now he realized that all
+his aching reveries upon its contours had shown but pallid likenesses;
+for here was the worst thing about Julia's looks;--even her most
+extravagant suitor, in absence, could not dream an image of her so
+charming as he found herself when he saw her again. Thus, seeing Julia
+again was always a discovery. And this glance over her shoulder as she
+left a room--not a honeyed glance but rather inscrutable, yet implying
+that she thought of the occupant, and might continue to think of him
+while gone from him--this was one of those ways of hers that experience
+could never drill out of her.
+
+"I'm Robinson Crusoe, Noble," she said, when she came back. "I suppose I
+might as well take off my furs, though." But first she unfastened the
+great bouquet she wore and tossed it upon a table. Noble was standing
+close to the table, and he moved away from it hurriedly--a revulsion
+that she failed to notice. She went on to explain, as she dropped her
+cloak and stole upon a chair: "Papa's gone away for at least a week.
+He's taken his ulster. It doesn't make any difference what the weather
+is, but when he's going away for a week or longer, he always takes it
+with him, except in summer. If he's only going to be gone two or three
+days he takes his short overcoat. And unless I'm here when he leaves
+town he always gives the servants a holiday till he gets back; so
+they've gone and even taken Gamin with 'em, and I'm all alone in the
+house. I can't get even Kitty Silver back until to-morrow, and then I'll
+probably have to hunt from house to house among her relatives. Papa left
+yesterday, because the numbers on his desk calender are pulled off up
+to to-day, and that's the first thing he does when he comes down for
+breakfast. So here I am, Robinson Crusoe for to-night at least."
+
+"I suppose," said Noble huskily, "I suppose you'll go to some of your
+aunts or brothers or cousins or something."
+
+"No," she said. "My trunk may come up from the station almost any time,
+and if I close the house they'll take it back."
+
+"You needn't bother about that, Julia. I'll look after it."
+
+"How?"
+
+"I could sit on the porch till it comes," he said. "I'd tell 'em you
+wanted 'em to leave it." He hesitated, painfully. "I--if you want to
+lock up the house I--I could wait out on the porch with your trunk, to
+see that it was safe, until you come back to-morrow morning."
+
+She looked full at him, and he plaintively endured the examination.
+
+"_Noble!_" Undoubtedly she had a moment's shame that any creature should
+come to such a pass for her sake. "What crazy nonsense!" she said; and
+sat upon a stool before the crackling fire. "Do sit down, Noble--unless
+your dinner will be waiting for you at home?"
+
+"No," he murmured. "They never wait for me. Don't you want me to look
+after your trunk?"
+
+"Not by sitting all night with it on the porch!" she said. "I'm going to
+stay here myself. I'm not going out; I don't want to see any of the
+family to-night."
+
+"I thought you said you were hungry?"
+
+"I am; but there's enough in the pantry. I looked."
+
+"Well, if you don't want to see any of 'em," he suggested, "and they
+know your father's away and think the house is empty, they're liable to
+notice the lights and come in, and then you'd have to see 'em."
+
+"No, you can't see the lights of this room from the street, and I lit
+the lamp at the other end of the hall. The light near the front door,"
+Julia added, "I put out."
+
+"You did?"
+
+"I can't see any of 'em to-night," she said resolutely. "Besides, I want
+to find out what you meant by what you said in the taxicab before I do
+anything else."
+
+"What I meant in the taxicab?" he echoed. "Oh, Julia! Julia!"
+
+She frowned, first at the fire, then, turning her head, at Noble. "You
+seem to feel reproachful about something," she observed.
+
+"No, I don't. I don't feel reproachful, Julia. I don't know what I feel,
+but I don't feel reproachful."
+
+She smiled faintly. "Don't you? Well, there's something perhaps you do
+feel, and that's hungry. Will you stay to dinner with me--if I go and
+get it?"
+
+"What?"
+
+"You can have dinner with me--if you want to? You can stay till ten
+o'clock--if you want to? Wait!" she said, and jumped up and ran out of
+the room.
+
+Half an hour later she came back and called softly to him from the
+doorway; and he followed her to the dining-room.
+
+"It isn't much of a dinner, Noble," she said, a little tremulously,
+being for once (though strictly as a cook) genuinely apologetic;--but
+the scrambled eggs, cold lamb, salad, and coffee were quite as "much of
+a dinner" as Noble wanted. To him everything on that table was hallowed,
+yet excruciating.
+
+"Let's eat first and talk afterward," Julia proposed; but what she
+meant by "talk" evidently did not exclude interchange of information
+regarding weather and the health of acquaintances, for she spoke freely
+upon these subjects, while Noble murmured in response and swallowed a
+little of the sacred food, but more often swallowed nothing. Bitterest
+of all was his thought of what this unexampled seclusion with Julia
+could have meant to him, were those poisonous violets not at her
+waist--for she had put them on again--and were there no Crum in the
+South. Without these fatal obstructions, the present moment would have
+been to him a bit of what he often thought of as "dream life"; but all
+its sweetness was a hurt.
+
+"_Now_ we'll talk!" said Julia, when she had brought him back to the
+library fire again, and they were seated before it. "Don't you want to
+smoke?" He shook his head dismally, having no heart for what she
+proposed. "Well, then," she said briskly, but a little ruefully, "let's
+get to the bottom of things. Just what did you mean you had 'in black
+and white' in your pocket?"
+
+Slowly Noble drew forth the historic copy of _The North End Daily
+Oriole_; and with face averted, placed it in her extended hand.
+
+"What in the world!" she exclaimed, unfolding it; and then as its title
+and statement of ownership came into view, "Oh, yes! I see. Aunt Carrie
+wrote me that Uncle Joseph had given Herbert a printing-press. I suppose
+Herbert's the editor?"
+
+"And that Rooter boy," Noble said sadly. "I think maybe your little
+niece Florence has something to do with it, too."
+
+"'Something' to do with it? She usually has _all_ to do with anything
+she gets hold of! But what's it got to do with me?"
+
+"You'll see!" he prophesied accurately.
+
+She began to read, laughing at some of the items as she went along; then
+suddenly she became rigid, holding the small journal before her in a
+transfixed hand.
+
+"Oh!" she cried. "_Oh!_"
+
+"That's--that's what--I meant," Noble explained.
+
+Julia's eyes grew dangerous. "The little fiends!" she cried. "Oh,
+really, this is a long-suffering family, but it's time these outrages
+were stopped!"
+
+She jumped up. "Isn't it frightful?" she demanded of Noble.
+
+"Yes, it is," he said, with a dismal fervour. "Nobody knows that better
+than I do, Julia!"
+
+"I mean _this_!" she cried, extending the _Oriole_ toward him with a
+vigorous gesture. "I mean this dreadful story about poor Mr. Crum!"
+
+"But it's true," he said.
+
+"Noble Dill!"
+
+"Julia?"
+
+"Do you dare to say you believed it?"
+
+He sprang up. "It isn't true?"
+
+"Not one word of it! I told you Mr. Crum is only twenty-six. He hasn't
+been out of college more than three or four years, and it's the most
+terrible slander to say he's ever been married at all!"
+
+Noble dropped back into his chair of misery. "I thought you meant it
+wasn't true."
+
+"I've just told you there isn't one _word_ of tr----"
+
+"But you're--engaged," Noble gulped. "You're engaged to him, Julia!"
+
+She appeared not to hear this. "I suppose it _can_ be lived down," she
+said. "To think of Uncle Joseph putting such a thing into the hands of
+those awful children!"
+
+"But, Julia, you're eng----"
+
+"Noble!" she said sharply.
+
+"Well, you _are_ eng----"
+
+Julia drew herself up. "Different people mean different things by that
+word," she said with severity, like an annoyed school-teacher. "There
+are any number of shades of meaning to words; and if I used the word you
+mention, in writing home to the family, I may have used a certain shade
+and they may have thought I intended another."
+
+"But, Julia----"
+
+"Mr. Crum is a charming young man," she continued with the same
+primness. "I liked him very much indeed. I liked him very, very much. I
+liked him very, _very_----"
+
+"I understand," he interrupted. "Don't say it any more, Julia."
+
+"No; you don't understand! At _first_ I liked him very much--in fact, I
+still do, of course--I'm sure he's one of the best and most attractive
+young men in the world. I think he's a man any girl ought to be happy
+with, if he were only to be considered by himself. I don't deny that. I
+liked him very much indeed, and I don't deny that for several days after
+he--after he proposed to me--I don't deny I thought something serious
+_might_ come of it. But at that time, Noble, I hadn't--hadn't really
+thought of what it meant to give up living here at home, with all the
+family and everything--and friends--friends like you, Noble. I hadn't
+thought what it would mean to me to give all this up. And besides, there
+was something very important. At the time I wrote that letter mentioning
+poor Mr. Crum to the family, Noble, I hadn't--I hadn't----" She paused,
+visibly in some distress. "I hadn't----"
+
+"You hadn't what?" he cried.
+
+"I hadn't met his mother!"
+
+Noble leaped to his feet. "Julia! You aren't--you aren't engaged?"
+
+"I am not," she answered decisively. "If I ever was--in the slightest--I
+certainly am not now."
+
+Poor Noble was transfigured. He struggled; making half-formed gestures,
+speaking half-made words. A rapture glowed upon him.
+
+"Julia--Julia----" He choked. "Julia, promise me something. Will you
+promise me something? Julia, promise to promise me something."
+
+"I will," she said quickly. "What do you want me to do?"
+
+Then he saw that it was his time to speak; that this was the moment for
+him to dare everything and ask for the utmost he could hope from her.
+
+"Give me your word!" he said, still radiantly struggling. "Give me your
+word--your word--your word and your sacred promise, Julia--that you'll
+never be engaged to anybody at all!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
+
+
+At six minutes after four o'clock on the second afternoon following
+Julia's return, Noble Dill closed his own gate behind him and set forth
+upon the four-minute walk that would bring him to Julia's. He wore a bit
+of scarlet geranium in the buttonhole of his new light overcoat; he
+flourished a new walking-stick and new grey gloves. As for his
+expression, he might have been a bridegroom.
+
+Passing the mouth of an alley, as he swung along the street, he was
+aware of a commotion, of missiles hurled and voices clashed. In this
+alley there was a discord: passion and mockery were here inimically
+intermingled.
+
+Casting _a_ glance that way, Noble could see but one person; a boy of
+fourteen who looked through a crack in a board fence, steadfastly
+keeping an eye to this aperture and as continuously calling through it,
+holding his head to a level for this purpose, but at the same time
+dancing--and dancing tauntingly, it was conveyed--with the other parts
+of his body. His voice was now sweet, now piercing, and again far too
+dulcet with the overkindness of burlesque; and if, as it seemed, he was
+unburdening his spleen, his spleen was a powerful one and gorged. He
+appeared to be in a torment of tormenting; and his success was proved by
+the pounding of bricks, parts of bricks and rocks of size upon the other
+side of the fence, as close to the crack as might be.
+
+"Oh, dolling!" he wailed, his tone poisonously amorous. "Oh, dolling
+Henery! Oo's dot de mos' booful eyes in a dray bid nasty world. Henery!
+Oh, _has_ I dot booful eyes, dolling Pattywatty? Yes, I _has_! I _has_
+dot pretty eyes!" His voice rose unbearably. "_Oh_, what prettiest eyes
+I dot! Me and Herbie Atwater! _Oh_, my booful eyes! Oh, my _booful_----"
+
+But even as he reached this apex, the head, shoulders, and arms of
+Herbert Atwater rose momentarily above the fence across the alley,
+behind the tormentor. Herbert's expression was implacably resentful, and
+so was the gesture with which he hurled an object at the comedian
+preoccupied with the opposite fence. This object, upon reaching its
+goal, as it did more with a splash than a thud, was revealed as a
+tomato, presumably in a useless state. The taunter screamed in
+astonishment, and after looking vainly for an assailant, began
+necessarily to remove his coat.
+
+Noble, passing on, thought he recognized the boy as one of the Torbin
+family, but he was not sure, and he had no idea that the episode was in
+any possible manner to be connected with his own recent history. How
+blindly we walk our ways! As Noble flourished down the street, there
+appeared a wan face at a prison window; and the large eyes looked out
+upon him wistfully. But Noble went on, as unwitting that he had to do
+with this prison as that he had to do with Master Torbin's tomato.
+
+The face at the window was not like Charlotte Corday's, nor was the
+window barred, though the prisoner knew a little solace in wondering if
+she did not suggest that famous picture. For all purposes, except during
+school hours, the room was certainly a cell; and the term of
+imprisonment was set at three days. Uncle Joseph had been unable to
+remain at the movies forever: people do have to go home eventually,
+especially when accompanied by thirteen-year-old great-nieces. Florence
+had finally to face the question awaiting her; and it would have been
+better for her had she used less imagination in her replies.
+
+Yet she was not wholly despondent as her eyes followed the disappearing
+figure of Noble Dill. His wholesome sprightliness was visible at any
+distance; and who would not take a little pride in having been even the
+mistaken instrument of saving so gay a young man from the loss of his
+reason? No; Florence was not cast down. Day-after-to-morrow she would
+taste Freedom again, and her profoundest regret was that after all her
+Aunt Julia was not to be married. Florence had made definite plans for
+the wedding, especially for the principal figure at the ceremony. This
+figure, as Florence saw things, would have been that of the "Flower
+Girl," naturally a niece of the bride; but she was able to dismiss the
+bright dream with some philosophy. And to console her for everything,
+had she not a star in her soul? Had she not discovered that she could
+write poetry whenever she felt like it?
+
+Noble passed from her sight, but nevertheless continued his radiant
+progress down Julia's Street. Life stretched before him, serene,
+ineffably fragrant, unending. He saw it as a flower-strewn sequence of
+calls upon Julia, walks with Julia, talks with Julia by the library
+fire. Old Mr. Atwater was to be away four days longer, and Julia, that
+great-hearted bride-not-to-be, had given him her promise.
+
+Blushing, indeed divinely, she had promised him upon her sacred word,
+never so long as she lived, to be engaged to anybody at all.
+
+
+                           THE END
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+                   BOOKS BY BOOTH TARKINGTON
+
+     ALICE ADAMS
+     BEASLEY'S CHRISTMAS PARTY
+     BEAUTY AND THE JACOBIN
+     CHERRY
+     CONQUEST OF CANAAN
+     GENTLE JULIA
+     HARLEQUIN AND COLUMBINE
+     HIS OWN PEOPLE
+     IN THE ARENA
+     MONSIEUR BEAUCAIRE
+     PENROD
+     PENROD AND SAM
+     RAMSEY MILHOLLAND
+     SEVENTEEN
+     THE BEAUTIFUL LADY
+     THE FLIRT
+     THE GENTLEMAN FROM INDIANA
+     THE GIBSON UPRIGHT
+     THE GUEST OF QUESNAY
+     THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS
+     THE MAN FROM HOME
+     THE TURMOIL
+     THE TWO VANREVELS
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Transcriber's Notes:
+
+1. Punctuation normalized to contemporary standards.
+
+2. List of "Books by Booth Tarkington" originally before frontispiece
+   moved to end of text.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Gentle Julia, by Booth Tarkington
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