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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Trimming of Goosie, by James Hopper
+
+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: The Trimming of Goosie
+
+Author: James Hopper
+
+Release Date: July 5, 2009 [EBook #29319]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TRIMMING OF GOOSIE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Edwards, Jen Haines and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: THE TRIMMING of GOOSIE by JAMES HOPPER]
+
+
+
+
+    The Trimming of Goosie
+
+    BY
+    JAMES HOPPER
+    Author of "Caybigan," "9009," etc.
+
+    NEW YORK
+    MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY
+    1909
+
+
+
+
+    COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY
+    CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY
+
+    COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY
+    MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY
+
+    Published, September, 1909
+
+
+
+
+    THE QUINN & BODEN CO. PRESS
+    RAHWAY, N.J.
+
+
+
+
+THE TRIMMING OF GOOSIE
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+"Why, Goosie, what are you doing?"
+
+Goosie, otherwise Mr. Charles-Norton Sims, dropped his arms hastily down
+his sides and stood very still, caged in the narrow space between
+porcelain tub and gleaming towel-rack. The mirror before which he had
+been performing his morning calisthenics faced him uncompromisingly; it
+showed him that he was blushing. The sight increased his embarrassment.
+For a moment panic went bounding and rebounding swiftly in painted
+contagion from Goosie to the mirror, from the mirror to Goosie; the
+blush, at first faint on Charles-Norton's brow, flamed, spread over his
+face, down his neck, fell in cascade along his broad shoulders, and then
+rippled down his satiny skin clear to the barrier of the swimming trunks
+tight about his waist. It was some time before he mustered the courage
+to turn his foolish face toward the door through which had sounded the
+cooing cry of his little wife.
+
+The door was but a few inches a-jar; it let pass only the round
+little nose of the round little wife, between two wide-open blue-flowers
+of eyes. "What are you doing, Goosie?" she repeated in a tone slightly
+amused but rich with a large tolerance; "what are you doing, Goosie, eh?"
+
+"Nothing, Dolly," he answered, his straight, athletic body a bit gawky
+with embarrassment; "nothing."
+
+Then, as she peered, still doubtful, through the crack: "It's a new
+exercise I have--a dandy. See?"
+
+And lamely he placed both his hands beneath his armpits and waved his
+elbows up and down three times.
+
+"Oh," she said, as if satisfied.
+
+But, as a matter of fact, this was not the accurate repetition of what
+she had seen. He had been standing before the mirror very straight, then,
+a-tip-toe, his chest bulging; his arms, bent with hands beneath the
+shoulders, had been beating up and down with a rapidity that made of them
+a mere white vibration, their tattoo upon his ribs like the beating of a
+drum; and suddenly, as if to some singular ecstasy, his head had gone
+back and out of his rounded mouth there had clarioned a clear
+cock-a-doo-del-doo-oo, much like that of chanticleer heralding the sun.
+
+"It's fine--it's fine for the pectoral muscles," he went on, more firmly.
+
+"Well," she said charitably, "jump into your bath, quick, dear. Breakfast
+is ready, and you'll be late at the office again if you don't hurry." She
+closed the door softly upon him.
+
+It was seldom that she intruded thus upon the mystery of his morning
+hygienics. It was with a clothed Charles-Norton that she had first fallen
+in love; and like most women (who, being practical, realize that, since
+it is dressed, after all, that men go through the world, it is dressed
+that they must be judged) Dolly appreciated her handsome young husband
+best in his broad-shouldered sack-coat and well-creased trousers.
+
+Charles-Norton, still rather abashed, dropped into the cold green tub,
+splashed, rubbed down, dressed, and sat down to breakfast. As he ate his
+waffles, though, out of the blue breakfast set which Dolly's charming,
+puzzle-browed economy had managed to extort from the recalcitrant family
+budget, his usual glowing loquacity of after-the-bath was lacking. His
+eyes wandered furtively about the little encumbered room; thoughts,
+visibly, rolled within his head which did not find his lips. And when he
+bade Dolly good-by, on the fifth-story landing, she missed in his kiss
+the usual warm linger.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+When Charles-Norton reached the street, a narrow side-street in which
+like a glacier the ice of the whole winter was still heaped, a whiff of
+soft air, perfumed with a suspicion of spring, struck him gently in the
+face. He drew it in deep within his lungs, and exhaled it in a long sigh.
+And then he stopped abruptly, and was standing very still, listening;
+listening to this sigh, to the echo of it still within his consciousness,
+as if testing it. He shook his head disapprovingly. "Gee," he said; "hope
+I'm not getting discontented again!"
+
+As if in response, another gentle gust came down the street; he caught
+it as it came and drew it deep within him. His chest swelled, his eyes
+brightened. And then suddenly he tensed; he rose a-tip-toe, heels close
+together, his head went back; his hands stole to his armpits, and his
+elbows began to wave up and down.
+
+"Good Lord!" he ejaculated, catching himself up sharply; "here goes that
+darned flapping again!"
+
+He looked up and down the street, assuming a negligent attitude. His
+forehead was red. "Nope," he said. No one had seen him. "_She_ saw me
+this morning," he thought, and the red of his forehead came down to his
+cheeks. "It's getting worse; a regular habit. Let me see--two, three; it
+began three weeks ago----"
+
+He shook his head perplexedly and resumed his way toward the Elevated
+station.
+
+"It may have been all right when I was a boy," he said to himself as he
+swung along. "But now!
+
+"Let me see. I was fourteen, the first time."
+
+A picture rose before his eyes. It had happened in a far western land--a
+land that now remained in his memory as a pool of gold beneath a
+turquoise sky. He was lying there in the wild oats, upon his back, and
+above him in the sky a hawk circled free. He watched it long thus,
+relaxed in a sort of droning somnolence; then suddenly, to a particularly
+fine spiral of the bird in the air, something like a convulsion had shot
+through his body, and he had found himself erect, head back and chest
+forward, his arms flapping----
+
+"'Twas the day before I ran away with the circus," he soliloquized in the
+midst of the throng milling up the Elevated station stairs. "And later,
+when I had come back from the circus, I took that long bum on
+brake-beams. And when I had come back from that, a little later I went
+off in the forecastle of the 'Tropic Bird' to Tahiti. And each time that
+flapping business came first. Every time I've done something wild and
+foolish, I've flapped first like this. First I'd flap, then I'd feel like
+doing something, I wouldn't know what, then I'd do it--and it would be
+something foolish----"
+
+The train slid up to the platform; he boarded it and by some miracle
+found on the bench behind the door of the last car a narrow space in
+which he squeezed himself.
+
+"I'll have to stop it," he said decisively.
+
+He drew from his breast pocket a note-book and a pencil. Opening the book
+out across his knees, he bent over it and began to draw. He worked with
+concentration, but seemingly with little result, for he drew only
+detached lines. There were spirals, circles, ovals, parabolas; lines
+that curved upward, broke, and curved again downward, like gothic arches;
+lines that curved in gentle languor; lines that breathed like the
+undulations of a peaceful sea; and then just zipping, swift, straight
+lines that shot up to the upper end of the paper and seemed to continue
+invisibly toward an altitudinous nowhere. This is all he drew, and yet as
+he worked there was in his face the set of stubborn purpose, and in his
+eyes the glow of aspiration. He tried to make each line beautiful and
+firm and swift and pure. When he succeeded, he felt within him
+the bubbling of a sweet contentment. This would be followed by
+dissatisfaction, renewed yearning--and he would begin again.
+
+"By Jove!" he muttered in sudden consternation, straightening away from
+the book.
+
+And then, "They began at the same time."
+
+And a moment later, "And they are the same."
+
+It had struck him abruptly that the strange urge which made him draw
+lines was like that which at times convulsed his body into that
+mysterious manifestation which, for the want of a better word, he called
+his "flapping." The two things had begun together, and they were of the
+same essence. The impulse which possessed him as he tried for beauty with
+paper and pencil was the same which swelled his lungs and his heart,
+which made him rise a-tip-toe and wave his arms. It came from a feeling
+of subtle and inexplicable dissatisfaction; it was made of a vague and
+vast longing. It was the same which, when a boy, had sent him to the
+brake-beam, the circus, and the sea; it was to be distrusted.
+
+He slammed the book shut and put it in his pocket. "No more of this," he
+said.
+
+A certain confidence, though, came gradually into his eyes. "After all,
+these things do not mean much now," he thought. "I was a boy, then, and
+unhappy. I am a man, now, and happy."
+
+His mind idled back over the two years since his marriage, over the warm
+coziness of the last two years. What a wife, this little Dolly! What a
+little swaddler! She wrapped up everything as in cotton--all the
+asperities of Life, and the asperities of Charles-Norton himself also.
+Gone for the two years had been the old uncertainties, the vague
+tumults, the blind surges. Yes, he was happy.
+
+This word happy, for the second time on his tongue, set him a-dreaming.
+A picture came floating before his eyes. And curiously enough, it was
+not of Dolly, nor of the padded little flat----
+
+It was of a boy, a boy in blue overalls and cotton shirt, lying on his
+back amid the wild oats of a golden land, his eyes to the sky, watching
+up there the free wide circle of a hawk----
+
+"Soy, Mister, wot the deuce do you think you're doing?" shouted a husky
+and protesting voice in his ear.
+
+And Charles-Norton came back precipitously to the present. By his side a
+pale youth was squirming indignantly. Charles-Norton's elbow was in the
+youth's ribs, and his elbow was still stirring with the last oscillation
+of the movement that had agitated it. "Soy," cried the youth in disgust;
+"d'yous think you's a chicken?"
+
+"I beg your pardon," said Charles-Norton, in an agony of humility; "I beg
+your pardon."
+
+But the youth refused to be mollified. Though he said nothing more, he
+kept upon Charles-Norton the snarl of his pale face and at regular
+intervals rubbed his ribs as though they pained him exceedingly.
+Charles-Norton was glad to reach his station.
+
+That morning, in his glass cage, he muddled his columns several times. He
+was far from an admirable accountant at his best; but this day he was
+what he termed "the limit." Totals fled him like birds, with a whir of
+wings. A sun-gleam hypnotized him once, for he did not know how long; and
+his nose, a little later, followed for several gymnastic minutes the
+flutter of a white moth.
+
+At lunch, in Konrad's Bakery, he found himself seated, by a singular
+chance, next to the very same youth whose ribs he had crushed on the
+Elevated a few hours before. The young man was in more amiable mood. He
+grinned. "Don't you flap again and spill me coffee, Mr. Chicken," he
+said, with delicate persiflage.
+
+"I won't," said Charles-Norton. "I'll buy you another cup if I do."
+
+"Got a dollar?" asked the youth, irrelevantly. His thin, pale nose
+quivered a bit.
+
+"I don't know," said Charles-Norton, hesitatingly. Dollars were big in
+his budget. "Why?"
+
+The youth drew from a pocket a yellow cardboard. "Got a lottery ticket I
+want to sell," he said easily. "Little Texas. Hundred Thousand first
+prize and lots of other prizes. Got to sell it to pay me lunch. Played
+the ponies yesterday."
+
+Charles-Norton eyed the ticket doubtfully. Usually, he would not have
+considered the matter a moment. But somehow the incident of the morning
+had placed him at a disadvantage toward the pale youth. Vaguely he was
+moved by a wish to regain by some act the respect of this exacting
+person. He bought the ticket.
+
+"Maybe this was the foolish act that all this flapping announced," he
+said to himself, once outside, in answer to a not uncertain prick of his
+marital conscience. "Buying this ticket is like buying a lightning-rod;
+it may draw off the lightning!"
+
+But his singular malady, during the afternoon, did not disappear. It
+waxed, in fact; it passed the borders of the spiritual and assumed
+physical symptoms. "Dolly," he said, when he was again within the warmth
+of the little flat in the evening; "Dolly, would you mind looking at my
+shoulders after a while?"
+
+"Why, of course, I'll look at them, Goosie," answered Dolly, immediately
+alert at the possibility of doing something for the big man; "what is the
+matter with your shoulders, Goosie?"
+
+"I don't know," he said, sinking a bit wearily into the Morris chair.
+"They pain; just like rheumatism or growing pain. And they tickle too,
+Dolly; they tickle all the time." He crossed his arms, raising a hand to
+each shoulder, and rubbed them with a shiver of delight. "It's a
+nuisance," he said.
+
+"Well, we'll see about it right away," said Dolly. "Right after supper."
+Her eyes grew big with concern. "You may have caught cold. Come on,
+dear," she said, brightening; "I've the dandiest, deliciousest soup,
+right out of the _Ladies' Home Journal_, for you!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+"Why, Goosie; I tell you the lumps are growing. They're great big now,
+Goosie. Oh, why don't you let me take you to the doctor! I _know_
+something is the matter!"
+
+Dolly had tears in her eyes almost, and her voice was very dolorous. For
+the fourteenth time in two weeks, she was treating the singular shoulders
+of Charles-Norton. He was sitting beneath the glow of the evening lamp,
+his coat off, his shirt pulled down to his elbows; and she, standing
+behind the chair, was leaning solicitously over him. A wisp of her hair
+caressed his right ear, but somehow did not relax his temper. "Well, let
+them alone, Dolly," he growled; "let them alone. Good Lord, let them
+alone!"
+
+For two weeks he had been getting more and more peevish. To be sure,
+for two weeks, daily, his shoulders had been washed and rubbed and
+massaged and lotioned and parboiled and anointed and fomented and
+capsicon-plastered, till his very soul was sensitive and a suspicion
+was agrowl within him--a bad, mean feeling that Dolly was finding a bit,
+just a bit, of something akin to pleasure in the ardor of her
+ministrations. Besides, he was fighting a moral fight of his own. Great
+bursts of dissatisfaction swept through him every day now; and it was
+only by a constant vigilance that he kept his vagrant elbows close
+to his ribs.
+
+"Let them be for a while, Dolly," he repeated in gentler tone.
+"Besides--besides----"
+
+But he left unsaid the thought following the "besides." "Now, dear," said
+Dolly, kindly, but with a certain firmness; "you've simply got to let me
+see what I can do. Why, Goosie, you can't go on in this way! You'd be
+getting humps on your back! No--no; we'll try a nice little ice-pack
+to-night."
+
+"I don't want any ice-packs!" yelped Charles-Norton (what a bad-mannered
+young man he had become!); "I'm tired of fomentations and things!
+Besides"--and this time the besides did not pause, but burst out of him
+like a stream from a high-pressure hydrant--"besides, it isn't what I
+want----" And to an irresistible impulse his right hand reached out for a
+brush and, crossing over to his left shoulder, began rubbing it
+vigorously.
+
+"Goosie, Goosie, my clothes-brush, my best clothes-brush!"
+
+But the lament in Dolly's voice had little effect upon Charles-Norton. He
+was brushing himself with grave concentration. "Get the flesh-brush," he
+mumbled between set teeth, rubbing the while; "Gee, this feels good. Get
+the pack to-night."
+
+Dolly ran into the bath-room and returned with the flesh-brush;
+Charles-Norton made an exchange without losing a stroke. "That's
+something like it," he murmured.
+
+"But, Goosie," began Dolly. Her voice was low now; she stood withdrawn
+from him as if a bit afraid; her hands were clasped and her lips
+trembled. "Goosie, dear; don't do that. Oh, don't; you'll hurt yourself.
+It's getting all red, Goosie. You're rubbing the skin off, I tell you.
+Why, it's almost bleeding--Goosie, Goosie, stop it, stop it!"
+
+"Feels lots better," he said unfeelingly. "Look at it." And transferring
+the brush to his left hand, he began to rub the right shoulder, raising
+his left for Dolly's inspection.
+
+She approached timidly. "You've rubbed all the poor skin off," she
+announced. "It's bleeding." He felt the light touch of her fingers. "Why,
+Goosie--there's something--something. Why, Goosie!"
+
+The last was almost a cry, and the silence that followed had an
+awe-stricken pulse. "What is it?" he asked, still busily brushing.
+
+"Why, there's something"--again he felt the tender touch of her
+fingers--"there're a lot of little things--a lot of little things
+pricking right through the skin!"
+
+"Let me rub it some more," he said, transferring the brush. "Now, look at
+it," he said, after several more vigorous minutes of his strange
+treatment.
+
+"Goosie!"
+
+This time it was a cry to stab the heart. He dropped the brush and looked
+up at her. She was pale, and her eyes were very big. "Well, what is the
+matter now," he asked impatiently.
+
+She came near again, still pale, but with lips tight. "A-ouch!" he
+yelped.
+
+For with a sudden sharp movement, she had plucked something out of his
+shoulder. A smart came into his eyes; it was as if a lock of hair had
+been pulled out by the roots. "Look at this, Goosie," she said with
+forced calmness, and placed something in his hand.
+
+It was very small and very soft. He dropped his eyes upon it as it lay
+lightly in his palm. "Good lord!" he ejaculated, his bad humor gone
+suddenly into a genuine concern; "Good Lord!" he said, rising to his feet
+in consternation; "it's a; it's a----"
+
+"It's a feather," said Dolly, with sepulchral finality; "it's a feather."
+
+It was a feather--a soft, downy, white, baby feather. Charles-Norton
+looked at it long, as it lay, shivering slightly, there in his palm. He
+took it up and passed the luster of it slowly through his fingers.
+Something like a smile gradually came into his face. He raised the
+feather against the light of the lamp. His eyes brightened.
+
+"Isn't it pretty, Dolly?" he said. "Isn't it pretty? just look at it. So
+white, and fresh, and new, and glistening. And see the curve, the slender
+curve of it--oh, Dolly, isn't it pretty and fine?"
+
+But Dolly, collapsed in a chair, broke out a-crying. "Oh, Goosie, Goosie,
+what are we going to do now?" she wailed; "what are we to do? O--O----"
+
+"Well," said Charles-Norton, the spirit of contradiction which for
+several days had been within him rising to his lips; "well, _I_ don't see
+what there is to make so much fuss about. A few feathers are not going to
+hurt a man, are they? 'Tisn't as if I were insane, or had hydrophobia!"
+
+"But, Goosie, Goosie, _no_ one has feathers on his shoulders! No one
+_ever_ had feathers on his shoulders! No other man _in the world_ ever
+did that; none in the world _ever_ had feathers on his shoulders that
+way! Oh, Goosie, Goosie, what shall we do!!!"
+
+"Let them alone," said Charles-Norton, now quite vexed. "They're mine;
+they don't hurt _you_, do they? Let 'em alone!" He raised his arms and
+began to slip his shirt up again.
+
+The tears ceased to drip from Dolly's eyes. "You can't do that," she
+said, a maternal firmness coming into her voice. "Why, Goosie, what would
+they think of you down at the office?"
+
+"At the office? Why, they won't know it!"
+
+"But _you'll_ know it, Goosie. All the time, you'll know it. Goosie, you
+don't want to be different, do you? You want to be like other men, don't
+you? You don't want to be _different_?"
+
+This argument had some effect on Charles-Norton. He stood very still,
+scratching his head pensively. "Well," he said finally, "maybe you're
+right. Maybe we had better keep them cut short."
+
+"Oh, Goosie!" cried Dolly, joyously, and bounded from the room. She came
+running back with the scissors. "Come, quick!" she panted. "I'll cut
+them, short. 'Twon't be much trouble after all, will it? I'll cut them
+every day. It will be just like shaving--no more trouble than that!"
+
+And she slid the scissors along Charles-Norton's skin with a cold,
+decisive little zip. He could see her head, cocked a bit side-ways with
+concentration, reflected in the glass panes of the side-board as she cut
+and cut, closer and closer. Her rosy nostrils were distended slightly;
+upon her tight lip the tip of a small white tooth gleamed. A light shiver
+passed along Charles-Norton's spine. "Gee, I didn't think she could look
+like this," he thought.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+Following this little disturbance the Sims couple, lowering their heads,
+side by side, resolutely regained the smooth rut of their placid
+existence. Everything in this world is easier than is imagined. Much
+easier. In the case of the Sims' household, it was just a matter of
+adding each morning, to the daily shave of Charles-Norton, another
+operation quite as facile.
+
+"Dolly," he would call, as soon as his hot towel had removed from his
+ruddy cheeks the last bubbles of lather.
+
+And Dolly, her hungry little scissors agleam in her hand, trotted in
+alacriously. She sat Charles-Norton on the edge of the tub and bent over
+him her happy, humming head. Zip-zip-zip, went the scissors, zip-zip--and
+a soft white fluff that looked like the stuffing of a pillow (an A-one
+pillow; not the kind upon which Charles-Norton and Dolly laid their
+modest heads) eddied slowly to Charles-Norton's feet while he shivered
+slightly to the coldness of the steel. (Dolly cut very close.)
+
+Then, "All right; all done," she sang, dropping the scissors into the
+round pocket of her crackling apron; "now to breakfast, quick! And
+here's a kiss for the good boy."
+
+Placing her red lips upon his, she whisked off to the kitchenette; and
+Charles-Norton, emerging all dressed a little later, found the cheerful
+blue ware on the table, and his waffles upon his plate, hot beneath his
+napkin. After which, stuffing the morning paper into his pocket, he
+departed with another kiss on the landing, and strode forth for the L.
+Life was just as before.
+
+And yet, not quite. Because, to tell the truth, Charles-Norton was not
+absolutely happy.
+
+He could not have told what was the matter. Mostly, it was an emptiness.
+An emptiness is hard to analyze. He knew that there was much of which he
+should be content. With the careful repression of the vagaries of his
+shoulders, there had come to him a new attentiveness at his work. His
+nose, now, never wandered after passing butterflies, and his salary had
+been raised to twenty-two dollars a week. Also, the ridiculous flapping
+had gone, and the impulse to draw fool lines upon a card.
+
+But with these--and that was the trouble--other things had vanished. That
+deep filling of his lungs with spring, for instance. And the longing that
+went with it. That was it--the longing. He longed for the longing--if
+that is comprehensible. He longed vaguely for a longing that had been
+his, and which was gone. He never saw, now, a land that was as a golden
+pool beneath a turquoise dome; nor a boy in the wild oats watching a
+circling hawk.
+
+And there was something else, something more definite. He felt that
+Dolly--yes, Dolly took too much pleasure, altogether too much pleasure in
+that clipping business. Of course, the clipping had to be. He knew that.
+A respectable man can't have feathers on his shoulders. It was necessary.
+But somehow he would have felt that necessity more, if Dolly had felt
+it--less. He would have liked a chance to voice it himself. If Dolly,
+now, only would, some fine morning, say, "Oh, Goosie, let them be
+to-day; they are so pretty," then he could have answered, very firmly,
+"No, clip away!" But she never gave him that chance. She was always so
+radiantly ready! As he watched her head in the mirror, bent upon the busy
+scissors with an expression of tight determination, a distinct irritation
+seized him sometimes.
+
+Charles-Norton, in short, was accumulating, drop by drop, a masculine
+grouch. A grouch deeper than he realized, till that morning.
+
+That morning Dolly, in the midst of the daily operation, paused with
+scissors in air, a sudden inspiration upon her brow.
+
+"Oh, Goosie," she exclaimed; "How would it be to cauterize them?"
+
+Charles-Norton gave a jump. "Cauterize!" he cried; "cauterize what?"
+
+"Why, the little feathers. Supposing we burned the place, you know, with
+nitrate of silver, or something like that. They do it to people who have
+moles--or when they have been bitten by a mad dog. Maybe--maybe it would
+stop it--altogether."
+
+Charles-Norton looked up at her. Her cheeks were rosy, her eyes were
+bright; she was excited and pleased with her ingenious idea. A cold wave
+rose about Charles-Norton and closed over his head. "Say,'" he bawled
+ungraciously; "what do you take me for! Think I'm made of asbestos?"
+
+Discreet Dolly immediately dropped the subject; though somehow
+Charles-Norton had the distinct impression that it was only discreetly
+that she did so, that, in fact, she was not dropping the idea, but merely
+tucking it away somewhere within the secret hiding-places of her being,
+for further use. He could still see it, in fact, graven there upon the
+whiteness of her voluntary little forehead.
+
+He brooded black over it all day. He brooded on other things,
+too--insignificant things that had happened in the past, that had not
+mattered one whit then, but which now, beneath his fostering care, began
+to grow into big, flapping boog-a-boos. And when he returned that night,
+he was a very mean Charles-Norton. He spoke hardly a word at dinner,
+pretended he did not like the vanilla custard over which Dolly had toiled
+all day, her soul aglow with creative delight, sipped but half of his
+demi-tasse (as though the coffee were bitter, which it wasn't), and went
+off to bed early with a good-night so frigid that Dolly's little nose
+tingled for several minutes afterward.
+
+And the next morning, when Dolly, astonished at the delay, finally peeped
+into the bath-room, scissors in hand, she found Charles-Norton fully
+dressed, his coat on.
+
+"Why, Goosie," she said in surprise; "I haven't clipped you yet!"
+
+"No?" he growled enigmatically.
+
+"Take off your coat, dearie," she went on.
+
+"And you're not going to," said Charles-Norton, finishing his statement
+with complete disregard of hers.
+
+Dolly stood there a moment, looking at him with head slightly cocked to
+one side. "All right, Goosie," she said cheerily. "Only, don't get mad at
+poor little me. Come on to breakfast, you big, shaggy bear, you!"
+
+"I don't _want_ any breakfast," growled Charles-Norton between closed
+teeth (as a matter of fact, he did, and a fragrance of waffles from the
+kitchen was at the moment profoundly agitating the pit of his being). "I
+don't _want_ any breakfast--where's my hat--quick, I'm in a
+hurry--good-by."
+
+And tossing the hat bellicosely upon his head, he pulled to himself the
+hall door, swaggered through, and let it slam back on his departing
+heels, right before the astonished nose of his little wife.
+
+She remained there before this rude door, examining its blank surface
+with a sort of objective curiosity. At the same time she was listening to
+the sound of steps gradually diminishing down the five flights. She shook
+her head; "the bad, bad boy!" she said.
+
+She pivoted with a shrug of the shoulders and went back to the kitchen
+and sat down at the table, all set for breakfast. She took up her fork
+and cut off a bit of waffle. She placed it in her mouth. Her eyes went
+off far away.
+
+It took it a long time, this little piece of waffle, to go down. Lordie,
+what a tough, resilient, flannelly, bit of waffle this was! Suddenly her
+head went forward. It lit upon the table, in her hands. A cup of the
+precious blue ware, dislodged, balanced itself a moment on the edge of
+the table, then, as if giving up hope, let go and crashed to the floor
+at her feet in many pieces. She gave it no heed. Her head was in her
+hands, her hands were on the table, her hair lay like a golden delta
+among plates and saucers; and the table trembled.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+Meanwhile Charles-Norton was not having such a good time either. Starting
+off swaggeringly, he had halted three times on his way to the station,
+and three times had taken at least two steps back toward the flat which
+he felt desolate behind him. And now in his glass cage, a weight was at
+his stomach, a constant weight like an indigestible plum-pudding. At
+regular intervals, as he bent over his books, he felt his heart descend
+swiftly to the soles of his feet; he paled at the sight of a telegraph
+messenger, at the sound of the telephone bell. He had visions of
+hospitals--of a white cot to which he was brought, a white cot about
+which grave men stood hopelessly, and on the pillow of which spread a
+cascade of golden hair. Too imaginative, this Charles-Norton, too
+imaginative altogether!
+
+He did not know that after a while Dolly had risen, and a bit wearily,
+with heavy sighs, had washed the dishes; that after this she had put the
+little flat in order; that during this operation, in spite of her best
+efforts, she had felt her woe slowly oozing from her; that the
+provisioning tour in the street and stores gay with gossipy, bargaining
+young matrons, had almost completed this process; and that a providential
+peep in a milliner's window, which had suddenly solved for her the
+harassing problem of the spring hat (she had seen one she liked and with
+a flash of inspiration had seen how she could make one just like it out
+of her old straw and some feathers long at the bottom of her trunk) had
+sent her bounding back up her five flights of stairs with a song purring
+in her heart.
+
+So that when, returning in the evening, Charles-Norton opened the door
+with bated breath, to find Dolly humming happily in the kitchen, he was
+struck by something like disappointment. "She's shallow," he thought;
+"doesn't feel." He did not mean by this, of course, that he wished she
+had in despair done something catastrophic. He meant merely--well, he did
+not know what he meant. He was disillusioned, that was all. This was but
+a prosy world after all. Few Heroics here!
+
+And immediately a warning knocked at his consciousness. He must be
+careful if he were to hold what advantage he had gained in the day. He
+turned from the kitchen threshold and silently slunk back into the room
+which was both dining and sitting-room, and isolated himself behind the
+spread pages of the evening paper. He was curt and cold the entire
+evening. And in the morning he again left with calculated
+violence--breakfastless and unsheared.
+
+This time, Dolly did not weep. She sat long on the edge of her bed,
+thinking silently; then a silver rocket of sound broke the sepulchral
+quiet of the flat. Dolly had had a vision of what must inevitably happen;
+and Dolly was laughing.
+
+It took just ten days to happen--ten days which were rather disagreeable,
+of course, but which Dolly, sure of the trumps in her little hands, bore
+with jolly fortitude. All that time, Charles-Norton glowered constantly.
+He was monosyllabic and ostentatiously unhappy. This more than was
+necessary, and very deliberate. It had to be deliberate; for, as a matter
+of fact, on the outside Charles was not having at all a bad time.
+
+The exaltation of the ante-clipping days had returned--returned
+heightened, and was still growing day by day. A constant joyous babbling,
+as of some inexhaustible spring, lay at the bottom of his soul. His
+senses were singularly acute. He thrilled to a leaf, to a bud, to a patch
+of blue sky; and the thrill remained long, a profound satisfaction within
+him, after the stimulant had gone. With the resolution of a roue plunging
+back into his vice after an enforced vacation, he had brought a large
+sketch book; and he passed much time drawing lines into it--rapid beauty
+streaks that gave him a sensation of birds. He saw often, now, a land
+which was as a pool of gold beneath a turquoise sky; and a boy in the
+wild oats watching a circling hawk. At such times his lungs filled deep
+with the spring, and his arms were apt to beat at his sides in rapid
+tattoo. This, in fact made up solely his morning exercises now. Standing
+with legs close together, a-tip-toe, head back and chest forward, placing
+his hands beneath his shoulders he waved his arms up and down in a beat
+that rose in fervid crescendo, till his eyes closed and there went
+through him a soaring ecstasy that threatened at times to lift him from
+the floor.
+
+All this, of course, was not without its disadvantage. Vaguely he felt
+that in some subtle way he was gaining the disapproval of his fellows.
+Men were apt to look at him askance, half doubtful, half-indignant. They
+tread on his toes in the Elevated. His work, too, was going to pot; he
+could not stick to his figures. His chief, an old fragile-necked
+book-keeper, had spoken to him once.
+
+"Mr. Sims," he had said, after a preliminary little cough; "Mr. Sims, you
+ought to take care of your health. You are not well."
+
+"Oh, yes I am," answered Charles-Norton, absent-mindedly. His eyes were
+on the ceiling, where a fly was buzzing. "I'm all right!"
+
+"You should--er--you should consult--a specialist, Mr. Sims. Don't you
+know--your shoulders, your back--you should consult a spine-specialist,
+Mr. Sims."
+
+"Oh, that's all right," said Charles-Norton, easily. "Don't worry." And
+thus he had sent back the old gentleman baffled to his high stool.
+
+And then came Dolly's day.
+
+"Dolly! Dolly! Dolly!"
+
+It was morning, before breakfast. Charles-Norton was in the bedroom;
+Dolly was setting the table in the living-room. She paused, and stood
+very still, while a little knowing smile parted her lips.
+
+"Dolly! Dolly! Dolly!" Again came the call, unmistakable, music to
+Dolly's ear. She tip-toed to the door. From within sounded a threshing
+noise, as of a whale caught in shallows. "Yes. What is it?" she called
+back melodiously, mastering her desire to rush in.
+
+"Come here, Dolly," said the male voice. "Come here."
+
+"I'm coming," said Dolly, and went in with a slightly bored expression.
+
+"Help me, Dolly," said the perspiring and be-ruffled gentleman within. "I
+can't--can't--get my coat on."
+
+"Why, Goosie; of course I'll help you."
+
+But the help, although almost sincere, was powerless. The coat would not
+go on. The sleeves rose to the elbows smoothly, half way to the
+shoulders with more effort--but here they stuck, refusing to slide over
+the top of the shoulders. On each side of the spine, almost cracking the
+shirt, a protuberance bulged which the coat could not leap.
+
+He stood there puffing, his hair mussed up, his eyes wrathful. "Well," he
+growled at length; "why don't you go get your scissors."
+
+"Shall I?" she said doubtfully--and at the same time bounced out like a
+little rabbit. "Take off your shirt, Goosie," she said, returning with
+the gleaming instruments, now symbolical of her superior common-sense.
+
+She aided him. She took off his collar and tie, unfastened the buttons,
+and then she was tugging at the shirt. It slid down, uncovering the
+shoulders. There was a dry, crackling sound, as of a fan stretched
+open--and Dolly sat down on the floor. "Oh-oh-oh," she cried,
+"Go-oo-oo-ssie-ie!"
+
+He stood there, looking out of the corner of his eye at his reflection in
+the mirror, red-faced and very much abashed. For with the slipping of the
+shirt, on his shoulders there had sprung, with the movement of a
+released jack-in-the-box, two vibrant white things.
+
+Two gleaming, lustrous, white things that were----
+
+"They're wings," said Dolly, still on the floor. "_They are wings_," she
+repeated, in the tone of one saying, _He is dead_. "Now, Goosie, you
+_have_ done it!"
+
+But a change had come in Charles-Norton. The blush had left his brow, the
+foolish expression his face; he was pivoting before the mirror like a
+woman with a new bonnet.
+
+"I _like_ them," he said.
+
+And then, "Just look at them, Dolly. Just look at the curve of them.
+Isn't it a beautiful curve! And the whiteness of them, Dolly--like a
+baby's soul. And how downy--soft like you, Dolly. Look at them gleam.
+And they move, Dolly, they move! Dolly, oh, look!"
+
+The wings were gently breathing; their slender tips struck his waist at
+each oscillation. The movement quickened, became a beat, a rapid
+palpitation. A soft whirring sound filled the room; the newspaper on the
+bed, dislodged, eddied to the floor; the wings were a mere white blur.
+Suddenly Charles-Norton's feet left the floor, and he rose slowly into
+the air. "Look, look, Dolly," he cried, as he went up, hovering above
+her up-tilted nose and her wide eyes, as she sat there, paralyzed, upon
+the ground; "Dolly, look!"
+
+The humming sound took a higher note; a picture crashed down; the room
+was a small cyclone. "Dolly, watch me; look!"
+
+And with a sudden leap, Charles-Norton slanted up toward the ceiling and
+lit, seated, on the edge of the shelf that went along the four walls.
+"Look," he said with triumph, balancing smilingly on his perch.
+
+But immediately his expression changed to one of concern, and he sprang
+down quickly and quietly. Dolly was now stretched full-length along the
+carpet; her face was in her arms. He turned it to the light. Her eyes
+were closed.
+
+Dolly had fainted.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+A husband who has a wife that faints is in the grasp of the great It.
+
+Full of fear, pity, remorse, and self-hatred, Charles-Norton danced about
+helplessly for several minutes, sprinkling water upon Dolly's brow (much
+of it went down her neck); trying to pour bad whiskey between her pearly
+teeth; calling himself names; chafing her hands, promising to be good, to
+do always what she wanted; loosening her garments; proclaiming the fact
+that he was a brute, she an angel--while the wings, loose down his back,
+flapped after him in long, mournful gestures. And when finally, from the
+couch upon which he had drawn her, Dolly opened upon him her blue eyes,
+humid as twin stars at dawn, he placed her little scissors in her hand,
+and with head bowed low, in an ecstatic agony of self-renunciation bade
+her do her duty. The little scissors could not do it this time, though.
+It took the shears.
+
+After which there were a mingling of tears, murmurings, embraces, and
+Dolly said that the bad, bad times were all over now, and he agreed that
+they could never come again; and she said they would be happy ever
+afterward, and he agreed they should be happy always. Then Dolly, still a
+bit languid, in a voice still a bit doleful, drove him off to the office.
+
+Where he arrived very late, and had to pass the gauntlet of his chiefs
+frigid ignoring of the dereliction.
+
+When Charles-Norton had gone, Dolly suddenly sat up with a click of small
+heels upon the floor. She remained thus some time, a frown between her
+eyes. She was not triumphant, she was worried. She seemed to recognize
+danger; her transparent nostrils dilated to the smell of powder; and
+plainly, you could see her steel her being. After a while she nodded to
+herself, curtly and very decidedly, and went on about her work.
+
+She met Charles-Norton at the door when he returned in the evening. He
+was somewhat limp after a day of _mea culpas_! and she, a quarter of an
+hour before the time for his reappearance, had powdered her nose--which,
+she knew, gave her an expression half amusing, half piteous, just like
+that of the clown who is playing his tricks at the circus while his
+little daughter is dying at home. "Hello, Goosie," she said breathlessly
+(also she had rubbed a trace of rouge under her eyes); "hello, just in
+time for dinner! Made a fine chocolate cake. Poor dear, you look so
+tired!"
+
+And after supper, which in spite of Dolly's very ostensible effort at
+exuberance, was rather silent, for Charles-Norton, with a man's
+detestation of "scenes," still felt somewhat embarrassed at the
+happenings of the morning, she drew up the Morris chair to the lamp, sat
+Charles-Norton in it, and filled his pipe for him. When thus "fixed up
+comfy," he felt a soft breath upon his neck, and two little hands at his
+neck-tie. Off came tie and collar, and then the coat, and then the shirt,
+and then--zip-zip.
+
+"Say, Dolly," he remonstrated mildly; "couldn't you wait till morning?"
+
+"There," she said; "it's almost all done. Just a wee bit more here.
+There! Now here is a kiss! It didn't hurt, Goosie, did it?"
+
+And Charles-Norton had to concede that it did not hurt. How could he have
+explained the subtle feeling within him, that sort of swooping descent of
+his inwards that came with, and the dullness of all things which followed
+always his shearings?
+
+"No, it didn't hurt," he repeated. But a vague dissatisfaction like a
+yeast stirred within him, and a flicker,--beaten down immediately, it is
+true, trampled, smothered,--of revolt.
+
+Calmly, coolly, efficiently, though, Dolly had taken the upper hand. The
+next morning she sent him sheared to the office; she sent him sheared the
+same night to bed.
+
+And thus day after day for many days. Every morning Charles-Norton went
+out to his work full of emptiness (if that phrase is permissible), empty
+of heart, empty of mind, without a desire, without an anger. The warm
+June days had come; he had changed his underwear. He felt the season only
+as a discomfort. The emerald explosions visible at the end of each street
+as the L train passed along Central Park did not stir him; the tepid airs
+drifting lazily from the sea, the fragrant whiffs from the depths of the
+germinating land, passed over him as though he were made of asbestos. An
+insulation was about him, removing him from all things that thrill, all
+things that distend; there was no color, no vibration in the world;
+iridescences had ceased; the chamber of his soul had been painted a dull
+drab.
+
+He had regained, though, the esteem of his fellows. The subtle and
+unerring instinct which had made them suspicious in the days of
+his--misfortune, now in the same inexplicable way told them that he was
+normal again. They looked at him no longer askance. In fact, they did not
+look at him at all. They accepted him without question in crush of street
+and L; gave him his rightful space (nine and a half inches in diameter);
+trod on his feet only when forced to (by the impulse to obtain a more
+comfortable position); poked their elbows into his stomach only when
+necessary (that is, when they had to get out or in ahead of him); and on
+the whole surrounded him with that indifference which at the bottom is a
+sort of regard, which means that one conforms, that one's derby,
+sack-suits, socks and shoes, habits, ideas, morals and religion are just
+exactly like the derbies, sack-suits, socks and shoes, habits, ideas,
+morals and religion of everyone else, and hence right. At the office he
+had regained the appreciation of his chiefs; his salary had been raised
+to twenty-two dollars and a half a week and his working hours from eight
+to nine hours. His home life was the standard ideal one. That is, he got
+up at the same time every morning, left punctually at the same hour, took
+the L, arrived at the office on the minute, worked with his nose close to
+the ruled pages, steadily, without a distraction, till 12.30, had his
+macaroon tart and cup of coffee at Konrad's Bakery, smoked his five-cent
+cigar in the nearby square till 1.30, worked again till 5.30, returned
+home on the L, pressed tight like a lamb on the way to the packing-house,
+had a cozy little dinner upon which Dolly had spent all her ingenuity,
+smoked his pipe in the Morris chair, and then read the paper till the
+sudden contact of his chin with his chest and Dolly's amused warning sent
+him off to bed. A very moral, regular, exemplary existence. Dolly was
+very happy.
+
+And then, just as this couple could see the track clear ahead,
+stretching smooth and nickel-plated to infinity, an ugly complication
+began to worm itself into the serenity of their lives.
+
+This complication arose from the fact that the suppressed wings of
+Charles-Norton began to grow faster. Each day, now, Charles-Norton,
+returning home, brought with him to Dolly a task more serious and
+considerable. She had long ago discarded the little scissors and used
+special shears made to cut heavy cardboard; and she finished off with a
+safety razor.
+
+The result of this increase in the rate of winged growth was that,
+whereas Charles-Norton every morning left home placid and docile, his
+character gradually changed during the day. Starting at his work in the
+spirit of a blind horse at the mill, by ten o'clock he was apt to find
+himself, pen-holder in mouth, nose up in the air, following the
+evolutions of a buzzing flylet. By eleven o'clock, the cage had become
+very stuffy; spasmodic intakes swelled his chest, ghost longings stirred
+within him. When he got out at 12.30 the sun seemed to pour right through
+his skin, into the drab chamber of his soul, gilding it. He hurried over
+his macaroon tart and cup of coffee, and then had three-quarters of an
+hour left to idle in the square.
+
+He prepared for this gravely, as for a ceremony; first by buying a
+Pippin. A slender, light-brown Pippin, scientifically sprinkled with
+golden freckles, for five cents. (A daily Pippin was a recognized item of
+the family budget; at one time Charles Norton had carried his pipe with
+him, but Dolly, noticing the doubtful fragrance given by said pipe to the
+clothes of Charles-Norton, had insisted upon the extravagance of the
+daily Pippin). Having bought the Pippin, Charles-Norton did not light it
+right away. Oh, no. He ambled first to the square. He selected his bench
+carefully--one upon which the sun shone, but shone with a light filtered
+by the leaves of a low-branching elm. He sat down; he stretched his legs
+straight before him. Then slowly, with deliberation of movement, he
+scratched a match. He brought the spluttering end near his nose. The
+Pippin began to send forth effluvia, an exquisite vapor, faintly-blue.
+Charles-Norton half closed his eyes; his soul began to purr.
+
+Before him a fountain plashed; about the fountain were red blossoms; the
+elms rustled gently against the blue sky; through the delicate lace of
+their leaves the sun eddied down like a very light pollen; and all this,
+through the Pippin's exquisite atmosphere, was enveloped and smoothed and
+glazed into a picture--a slightly hazy dream-picture. Charles-Norton
+stretched his legs still more; his shoulders rose along the sides of his
+head. He was as at the bottom of the sea--a warm and quiet summer sea.
+Down through its golden-dusty waters, a streak of sun, polished like a
+rapier, diagonaled, striking him on the breast; and to its vivifying burn
+he felt within him his heart expand, as though it would bloom, like the
+red flowers about the fountain.
+
+Upon the other benches sprawled some of the city's derelicts. The sun was
+upon them also; they stirred uneasily to its caress, with sighs and
+groans, their warped bodies, petrified with the winter's long cold,
+distending slowly in pain. Pale children in their buggies slept with
+mouths open, gasping like little fish; some played upon the asphalt.
+
+Charles-Norton, by this time, was apt to be far away; far in another
+land. He lay upon his back and watched a hawk on high.
+
+The sparrows usually brought him back. They played about his feet; they
+chirped, hopped, and tattled; they peered side-ways at him and gave him
+jerky nods of greeting. At times one of them, to a sudden inspiration,
+sprang into the air; with a whir he flashed up to the top of a tree. To
+the movement, something within Charles-Norton leaped to his throat.
+
+Across the park, gaunt behind the trees, rose the tall steel frame of a
+new building; and away up at the top of it (which was higher every day) a
+workingman, on a girder, ate his lunch. Charles-Norton liked this man; a
+current of comradeship always ran from him to the little figure
+silhouetted up against the blue. He should have liked to eat his lunch up
+there, side by side with this man, his legs swinging next to his, with
+the void beneath. And then, he thought, after lunching, he would like to
+stand erect, away up there, at the tip edge of one of the projecting
+beams; to stand there a bit, and then spring off; spring off lightly, and
+whiz down; down, down, down with outspread arms.
+
+Which was a very foolish thought for a man that worked in a cage to
+dream. Very foolish, even if the cage were of glass. Just about that time
+the Pippin went out in a black smolder, and from a nearby church, hidden
+between great sky-scrapers, a big ding-dong bell said resonantly that it
+was half-past one.
+
+He returned to the office. Every afternoon, now, was a tingling trial. He
+worked with head down, sweating with repression. An obsession tormented
+him. He wanted to walk out of his glass cage. Out, not through the door,
+but through the glass. Not gently, like Alice going into Wonderland, but
+with ostentation and violence, with a heralding crash of shattered panes,
+scandalously. Out of his cage, into the next; out of that, into the next;
+from one end of the big room, in fact, to the other, crashingly, through
+cage after cage--and then out upon the street through the plate front.
+Half-past five finally freed him; and taking his place in a packed
+herring-box on wheels, he was rolled back to Dolly--and the shearing.
+
+Thus for a while did the young people live securely on a clown's
+tissue-paper hoop. Then one evening, just as Charles-Norton, after
+successfully resisting all day his anarchistic glass-smashing impulse,
+was watching the hands of the clock approach the minute that was to free
+him, his chief, raising his bald head at the end of his long, thin neck,
+said casually, "We work all night, to-night, you know, Mr. Sims."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+"We work all night to-night, Mr. Sims." It is always with just such a
+sentence, quiet, drab, and seemingly insignificant, that Mr. Catastrophe
+introduces himself.
+
+"Yes?" said Charles-Norton, adjusting his neck-tie and looking at the
+calendar.
+
+He was not surprised, for this happened twice a year. Twice a year, on a
+day in December and a day in June, a part of the force worked all night
+to prepare a statistical table for the benefit of the stockholders.
+
+He telephoned to Dolly. Her voice came to him over the wire in a scared
+little squeak. "Oh, Goosie," she pleaded; "come up before starting in
+again. I'll let you go off right away. But please come up, please do!"
+
+"Can't," shouted Charles-Norton. "We're allowed only an hour for dinner,
+and it would take more than that just to go up and back."
+
+"They won't care if you are a little late," suggested Dolly.
+
+"No, can't come up," said Charles-Norton, astonished at his own firmness
+(it is much easier to be firm over a telephone, anyway). "There's too
+much to do. I'll be up in the morning, maybe."
+
+"But Goo-oo-sie----"
+
+"Nope. Can't. Good-by, dearie," said Charles-Norton, and hung up the
+receiver, and with a bad conscience and a soaring heart, went off to
+dinner. No shearing to-night--gee! He ordered a dinner which made the
+red-headed waitress gasp. "Must have got a raise, eh?" she diagnosed.
+
+"No, not a raise, not a raise," hummed Charles-Norton; "skip now; I'm
+hungry."
+
+The night was a long and toilsome one, but an inexhaustible bubble was at
+the pit of Charles-Norton's being; gradually through the night he felt,
+beneath his coat, his shoulders deliciously swelling. And when in the
+morning he stepped out upon the sidewalk, a cry left his lips.
+
+It had showered during the night, and to the rising sun the whole city
+was glowing as with a golden dew. The air was fresh; Charles-Norton
+gulped it down. He felt as though a broad river were streaming through
+him--a clear, cool river. Suddenly, his heels snapped together, his head
+went back; his hands rose to his armpits and his arms began to vibrate up
+and down. A policeman came running across the street. "Say, wot de 'ell
+are you doing?" he bellowed, red-faced and outraged.
+
+"I'm going to breakfast," answered Charles-Norton, cockily.
+
+He went into the bakery, his hat a-tilt, with the air of a conqueror. For
+he had decided not to go up to the flat, but to breakfast right here and
+to spend an hour in the square before going back to the glass cage at
+nine. His chest pouted; his eyes glistened; wine ran in his veins. He
+ordered ham-and-eggs and hot-cakes. An orgy!
+
+He was eating fast, in a hurry for the Pippin and the loll on the bench,
+when he felt someone sit down by him. There was a pause; then, "hello,
+chicken!" piped a thin voice in his ear.
+
+"Hello, Pinny," answered Charles-Norton, even before looking. He had
+recognized the voice of the pale youth whom he had elbowed on the L a
+few weeks before, and whom later he had placated here in the bakery.
+
+"S'pose you're a millionaire by this time, chicken," said the youth,
+jocularly.
+
+"Sure, Pinny," answered Charles-Norton.
+
+"But really, honest, did yuh win anything?" went on Pinny, more
+seriously.
+
+"Win?" Suddenly Charles-Norton remembered the lottery ticket that he had
+bought. He had forgotten it completely. "The drawings was three days
+ago," Pinny was saying; "got 'em here," and out of his pocket he drew a
+soiled newspaper clipping.
+
+Charles-Norton also was searching his pockets with much contortion; and
+it was some time before his hand flashed out triumphantly with a piece of
+dog-eared, yellow cardboard. "Wot's your number?" asked Pinny.
+
+"Nineteen thousand, eight hundred and ninety-seven," Charles-Norton read.
+
+Pinny was perusing the clipping in his hand. "Wot did you say," he piped
+suddenly; "_wot's_ the number?"
+
+"Nineteen thousand, eight hundred and ninety-seven," repeated
+Charles-Norton.
+
+The pale youth seemed to collapse. His chin went forward on his green
+tie, his back slid down the back of his chair, his hands dropped limp
+upon the table. "Well, I'll be eternally dod-gum-good-blasted," he said
+weakly.
+
+"You've done it," he continued, solemnly; "you've gone and done it." He
+looked at his clipping again. "Lemme see your ticket," he said. He placed
+the ticket and the clipping side by side; his stubby, black-fringed
+finger slid from one to the other.
+
+"You've done it, partner," he repeated, with the same funereal intoning.
+"Nineteen thousand, eight hundred and ninety-seven! And I've held that
+ticket in my hands, right in these hands! Eight hundred dollars.--Nineteen
+thousand, eight hundred and ninety-seven wins eight hundred dollars"--his
+tongue lingered, as if it tasted it, upon each opulent number--"Eight
+hundred dollars; that's what you win. And all owing to me, too."
+
+Charles-Norton had forgotten his ham-and-eggs. He took the ticket and the
+clipping from Pinny's nerveless fingers and compared them. 19897! That
+was right. He had won eight hundred dollars. "Where do you cash in?" he
+exclaimed with a sudden ferocity.
+
+"I'll take you to it," murmured Pinny, still in a daze. "Gee--and I had
+that ticket in this here pair of hands. I'll take yuh to it. It's down
+town. No trouble getting the money. You'll treat on it, eh? You'll treat,
+won't yuh?"
+
+His sharp face was almost beneath Charles-Norton's chin; his pale
+eyes rolled upward wistfully. A sudden gust of pity went through
+Charles-Norton. "Surely," he said. "Better than that; we'll share."
+He paused, coughed. A wave of prudence was modifying his impulse--the
+prudence that inevitably comes with wealth. "I'll give you--I'll give
+you twenty-five dollars!" he announced.
+
+"Come on!" said Pinny; "come on--we're losing time, eating in this joint.
+Say, you'll have all you want to eat now, won't yuh--oysters and wine and
+grape-fruit and everything. And girls, eh? Autos and wine and girls--Gee!"
+And his eyes remained fixed on the vision of splendor, of the splendor of
+Charles-Norton, missed so narrowly by himself.
+
+Together they went down to the offices of the Little Texas, where after
+having been warmly congratulated by an oily man with a diamond stud, and
+after signing seven feet of documents and testimonials, Charles-Norton
+was given a long yellow check, which was forthwith photographed, as was
+also Charles-Norton. Then the fat, oily man, the clerk who had prepared
+the documents, Pinny, and Charles-Norton went downstairs and, standing up
+against a polished walnut counter, drank to the long life of the Little
+Texas and to the success of Charles-Norton. After which the courteous
+oily man introduced Charles-Norton to the cashier of a bank, where
+Charles-Norton deposited his check, receiving in return a little yellow
+deposit-book, and a long green check-book.
+
+With Pinny, Charles-Norton rode back toward the office. They stopped at
+the square, and stood a while watching the fountain, each a bit
+uncertain. Finally Pinny put out his hand. "Well, so long, old man," he
+said; "so long."
+
+"So long," said Charles-Norton, indecisively.
+
+But Pinny still stood there, abashed and uncertain. "You was going
+to--but you've changed yer mind, I suppose; I suppose you've changed yer
+mind--You was going to----" His eyes were on the ground; he shuffled one
+foot gently. "You was going to----"
+
+"Oh, of course!" cried Charles-Norton. "I was going to give you a share
+of the swag--of course, of course, of course!"
+
+They sat on a bench. Charles-Norton took out of his pocket the long
+check-book and opened it out, with a little crackling sound, on its first
+clean page. He took out his fountain pen. "No. 1," he wrote down with
+great decision. He paused, looking about him for a moment, in enjoyment
+of this new occupation. "June 19," he wrote on, slowly, languorously.
+"Pay to the order of," the page said next. "Of _Frank Theodore Pinny_,"
+wrote Charles-Norton. "Dollars," the check said next, at the end of a
+blank line. Charles-Norton paused, pen poised above paper.
+
+"Twenty-five," he thought. That is what he had promised. "_T-w-e-n-t-y_,"
+he wrote. The pen stopped again, hovering hesitatingly above the paper.
+"Twenty-five is a whole lot," he thought. "Just for selling a ticket.
+Just for selling a piece of cardboard!" And eight hundred dollars was not
+so much, either. An hour before, eight hundred dollars had seemed an
+immense sum. Now it seemed a modest amount, a very modest amount. And
+twenty-five, twenty-five to give away--that seemed quite big. "Pay to the
+order of Frank Theodore Pinny," he re-read, "twenty----"
+
+The pen made a sudden descent. "And no-hundredths," it wrote swiftly.
+
+Charles-Norton signed the check, tore it from the book, folded it, and
+presented it to Pinny, a bit patronizingly. Pinny stuck it into a side
+pocket without looking at it. He was standing on one leg and seemed in a
+hurry to get away. Charles-Norton, suddenly, had the same feeling. The
+sense of comradeship which had been with them for the last hour had
+abruptly flown with this passing of money. Each man was embarrassed, as
+before a stranger. "So long," said Pinny; "so long," said Charles-Norton.
+Pinny, with averted head, turned and walked away.
+
+Charles-Norton pivoted on his heel, and started for the office, worried
+suddenly by the thought that he was late. He took three long steps,
+collided with a sodden old gentleman who was just arising from a
+bench--and then was standing very still, looking about him as in a daze,
+unconscious of the mutter of apology which, together with an odor of
+stale beer, was fermenting beneath his nose. The old gentleman, pursuing
+a ray of sun, slipped on to a farther bench. But Charles-Norton still
+stood there, gazing about him in a sort of mild astonishment, as if,
+while he was not looking, the scene about him had been transformed like
+so much cardboard scenery.
+
+To the shock of the collision, as to the stroke of a finger upon a
+chemical beaker the reluctant crystallization abruptly takes place, there
+had come to Charles-Norton the realization _that he did not have to go to
+the office_.
+
+He did not have to go to the office! Here, against his heart, represented
+by three black figures within a little yellow book, was eight hundred
+dollars, practically eight months' salary, the assurance of eight months
+almost of independence, of freedom!
+
+"And Dolly?"
+
+You will think, perhaps, that Charles-Norton was seized by an ardent
+desire immediately to run to Dolly, spring up the five flights of
+stairs, push open the door, catch her by the waist and, seating her on
+his knees, to pantingly tell her of the wondrous news? You are mistaken.
+
+For with the vision of Dolly, the thought that irresistibly came to
+Charles-Norton was----
+
+That he didn't have to go to Dolly.
+
+He didn't have to go to Dolly and be clipped. He didn't have to go to the
+glass cage, and he didn't have to go to Dolly. The scissors of Dolly.
+
+Charles-Norton, very pale, his long, strong legs trembling beneath him,
+sank upon the nearest bench, and tried to catch hold of the world again,
+of the reality of the world. His hands, unconsciously expressing his
+mental attitude, held the bench's rim tight with white knuckles.
+
+Eight hundred dollars was not so much. Besides, it was only seven hundred
+and eighty now. And Dolly was a good little wife. A good, faithful,
+loving little wife. In a few months the money would all be gone if he
+stopped working. If he went back to the office and worked, the eight
+hundred (minus twenty) could be kept in the savings bank as a precious
+resource against ill-luck. And some of it could be used to buy
+things--furs for Dolly, for instance, brave little Dolly. Her household
+allowance could be increased a bit--brave, cheerful, careful, economical,
+busy, loving little Dolly!
+
+In the silence of his cogitation, Charles-Norton suddenly heard with
+great distinctness a furtive creaking within the shoulders of his coat.
+
+"Dear Little Dolly!" he exclaimed ostentatiously, making a brave effort
+to keep his eyes upon his beacon.
+
+But right from between his feet a sparrow, like a firecracker exploding,
+sprang and went whirring up in the sky. Charles-Norton followed it with
+his eyes as it went winging, winging up in a series of lines, each of
+which ended in a droop, toward the high sky-scraper. And when his eyes
+reached, with the bird, the top of the building, they lit upon a cloud,
+a great white galleon of a cloud which, with all sails set, flanks
+opulently agleam with the swell of impalpable freights, went sliding
+by with streaming pennons, toward the West.
+
+And Charles-Norton felt as though he were going to die. A great, sad
+yearning seemed to split his breast. He rose to his feet, his eyes upon
+the cloud. A turbulence now churned within him; his shoulders palpitated
+within their cloth prison (you see, they had not been sheared for a full
+twenty-four hours); a wave of madness, of daring, of revolt, rose into
+the head of Charles-Norton. "No, no, no," he growled. "No more, no more,
+I can't, I can't, no more, no, _no_!"
+
+The last no was as a trumpet note--a defiant negative hurled at the Force
+of the Universe. And Charles-Norton began to race around the fountain,
+striking with his right fist his left hand, muttering unintelligible and
+tremendous protests. You see, his wings had grown altogether too long.
+He could feel their ligatures reaching like roots to his soul. When, at
+the end of the third lap, he came to his bench again, his mind was made
+up. Only details remained to be determined.
+
+And when he rose for the last time from the bench, these were fixed. His
+appearance was one of great calmness tense above a suppressed ebullition.
+Before him his programme stretched like a broad, clear road. He followed
+it.
+
+Firstly he went to the bank and drew out three hundred dollars in cash.
+
+With the roll in his breast-pocket, he walked up Broadway till he came to
+a Cook's Tourist agency; entering, after a short discussion aided by the
+perusal of a map, he exchanged part of his roll for a long, green,
+accordeon-pleated ticket.
+
+Then he went out and bought himself a tawny, creaky suit-case, and then,
+successively, going from store to store:
+
+Two collars.
+
+A comb.
+
+A neck-tie.
+
+A tooth-brush.
+
+A safety razor.
+
+A little can of tooth-powder.
+
+A shaving brush and a cake of soap.
+
+A cap.
+
+A pair of much abbreviated swimming trunks.
+
+All of which he placed in his new suit-case.
+
+Then after a moment of frowning consideration, he purchased two thick
+woolen double-blankets which he rolled up and strapped.
+
+After which he boldly strode into the Waldorf-Astoria.
+
+Such affluence, by this time, did his person emanate that four
+brass-buttoned boys simultaneously sprang to their feet and came running
+up to him. He waved them aside with a commanding gesture and went into
+the writing-room.
+
+He opened his check-book. "3," he wrote firmly in the right hand corner.
+"Pay to the order of," he read; "Dolly Margaret Sims," he wrote, "Four
+hundred and eighty and no-hundredths dollars."
+
+He signed the check, tore it off, and let the now looted check-book drop
+negligently to the floor. He placed the folded check in an envelope,
+wrote a little letter and placed it by the check, sealed the envelope,
+and wrote upon it,
+
+     MRS. CHARLES NORTON SIMS
+              267 West 129th St.
+                          New York
+
+and rang for a messenger boy, to whom he gave the letter.
+
+Then calling for a taxi-cab, he whizzed away to the Grand Central
+station.
+
+Ten minutes later, amid a ding-donging of bells and a roaring of steam,
+a big, luxurious train began to strain at its couplings on its way
+overland. As it slid slowly out beneath the resonant cupola,
+Charles-Norton emerged from the rear door and stepped out upon the
+observation platform.
+
+And there, upon this wide, large platform, which was much like a
+miniature stage, Charles-Norton appeared for a moment in undignified
+pantomime. Leaning over the shining rail, chin thrust out, he shook both
+fists at the receding city, and spit into its face.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+Charles-Norton's letter came to Dolly in the evening, after a day full
+of worry. It read:
+
+    "DEAR DOLLY:--Enclosed is $480. It's for you. I'm going
+     away. I simply can't stand it, that's all. I think I
+     still love you, Dolly, but I can't stand the life. I
+     can't, that's all. I must have, I must have--well, I
+     can't stand that clipping business any longer.
+
+    "Please don't grieve. Some day you'll meet a man who is
+     real fond of you and who will make you happy--one that
+     hasn't any wings. There are lots of them.
+
+           "Yours always (in thought),
+                        "CHARLES-NORTON."
+
+    "P.S.--Please don't feel too bad about this.
+
+                                        "C.N."
+
+At the reading of this tactful epistle, Dolly, of course, immediately
+burst out into hysterics. These shall remain undescribed here. There is
+something mysterious about hysteria which paralyzes the pen. Not the
+least mysterious thing about it is the fact that the word, pronounced in
+an assembly of men and women, will simultaneously call up haggard lines
+on the faces of the men and cooing sniggles in the throats of the ladies.
+
+Anyway, poor little Dolly had it bad all that night, and all the next
+day, and all the next night. By the morning of the second day, it had
+passed to a lamentable wandering to and fro within the cage-like
+apartment, with disordered garments and unkempt hair, through which eyes
+shone with a glint of madness. By the afternoon of the same day, it was
+taking some interest in its reflection as it passed the several mirrors
+in its ceaseless pacing. The reflection reminded of Ophelia. Finally,
+when in the evening it caught itself nibbling cracker and cheese in the
+upset kitchen, it realized that it needed new stimulus. It telegraphed
+for Dolly's Boston aunt.
+
+The calculation proved correct. When, twelve hours later, the Boston
+aunt pressed the button at the landing, she found herself almost
+immediately tackled around the neck, while a shriek pierced her right
+ear. This was followed by a palpitant hugging, from the folds of which
+emerged vague, bubbling sounds. The aunt bore the demonstration with
+stoicism and with a certain reservation of self. She was very much unlike
+Dolly--tall and spare, with bushy brows, beneath the deep arcade of which
+glowed two limpid gray eyes. These eyes, during Dolly's little
+performance, remained somehow outside of the enveloping flutter. They
+peered over Dolly's shoulder in an alert examination of the disorder
+evident within the flat, and in their serene depths a slight
+will-o'-the-wisp seemed discreetly dancing. When finally Dolly's outburst
+had moderated, the old lady spoke. "Where is the bath-room?" she said.
+
+Dolly dropped her convulsive hold and drew back a step. "The bath-room!"
+she exclaimed, her eyes very big; "you want to know where the bath-room
+is!"
+
+"Yes, the bath," repeated Auntie, as though astonished at the
+astonishment.
+
+Dolly showed it to her. A calmness had come over her, a calmness of
+indignation. Auntie gave the bottom of the tub a hurried cleaning,
+adjusted the faucet to a tepid flow, dropped in the stopper, and sat down
+on the edge of the porcelain as the water rose within. "I'm going to give
+you a bath," she announced to Dolly, who stood there petrified with hurt
+amazement.
+
+And when the tub was full, she rose lightly to her feet and began to take
+off Dolly's soiled kimono. Dolly, in a daze, felt the garment slip from
+her, and then slid into the warm, green pool, which closed softly about
+her neck. "You lie there a while," said Auntie; "I'll come back and give
+you a shampoo."
+
+And Dolly remained alone in the steaming room. Little by little, to the
+persistent caress of the warm water, she felt her body relax; she shut
+her eyes; from beneath the closed lids tears exuded softly; they came
+freely, without a pang. After a while, even these ceased. From the
+bedroom came the sound of a bed being rolled, a flapping of sheets, a
+whirring of blinds. Auntie returned. "Now," she said alacriously.
+
+Dolly's head was being rubbed; a snow-white bubbly mountain was rising
+upon it, a mountain like an island--that is to say, like that confection
+known as a floating island; she could feel on her scalp the wise,
+soothing fingers of her aunt breaking down the resistance of her nerves;
+her eyes, shut at first merely to keep out the soap, remained closed in
+semi-ecstasy.
+
+"Now, out you go!" suddenly boomed a voice, as a patter of water
+descended upon her head; and Dolly stepped out into the vigorous embrace
+of a turkish towel. It was passing over her body with a firm, rotary
+motion as of machinery; she swayed within it like a palm in a tempest. It
+slid up into her hair and finally twisted itself about it in a turban. A
+fresh night-dress descended about her; "to bed, now," said the voice.
+
+The room was gray and cool within the lowered blinds; passively, Dolly
+slipped in between the fresh white sheets; her head sank into the
+crackling pillow. A little sob rose in her throat. "O, Auntie," she said,
+"O-o-o."
+
+"Not a word now!" the capable lady immediately broke in. "I know all
+about it. You can tell it to me when you wake up. Go to sleep now."
+
+It was a pleasant sort of violence; as a harness of flowers the obedience
+of Dolly's childhood slipped again about her. She shut her eyes, then
+like a puppy-dog snuggling to its mother, turned and dug her round little
+nose into the pillow. A snifflet of a sigh sounded--and as it sounded
+became the first long breath of sleep.
+
+The Boston aunt stood some time by the bed, tall and straight like a
+grenadier on watch. Suddenly she stooped down and placed a kiss upon the
+curve of cheek emerging from the folds of the pillow. Immediately she was
+erect again. "Poor darned little girl!" she said.
+
+She paused again, out in the dining-room, her eyes far away. "_He_ tried
+that once on me," she said reminiscently. A gleam of humor lit up her
+gray eyes. "I fixed him," she said decidedly. And then, with some
+tenderness: "Poor great big things," she said; "what chance have they
+against us!"
+
+Upon which she went into the kitchen where lay a pile of viscous dishes,
+eloquent of the home's demoralization.
+
+When Dolly emerged from her room some twenty-four hours later, her face
+was pale and her little nose was red, and she seemed a bit dazed.
+
+"Hello, Dolly," said the Boston aunt, looking up and giving the
+sofa-cushion she was arranging a final thump; "hello, Dolly; come into
+the kitchen and have some breakfast."
+
+Upon the gas stove she toasted bread and poached two eggs, which she laid
+before Dolly like two triumphant suns glowing through a fragrant haze of
+coffee. Dolly successively suppressed the joyous acclaim which
+instinctively rose from her whole being at the sight; but she ate. Rather
+mincingly, of course; but still, on the whole, efficiently. At times she
+closed her eyes, and then from beneath the lowered lids a few tears came
+gliding without friction. "Now," said the aunt, after the last crumb of
+toast had disappeared; "let's go into the other room and hear about it."
+
+She led the way into that little room, which was fairly encumbered with
+coziness. She took one of the rocking-chairs. Dolly sank into the other.
+By keeping the same rhythm, there was space for both to swing at the
+same time. Dolly swayed back and forth three times, and then burst into
+tears. "He has left me, Auntie; Goosie is gone; ooh-ooh!" The aunt's
+chair ceased rocking with an abruptness that made their knees bump.
+Dolly's chair stopped; she looked at her aunt in astonishment. Aunt
+Hester was sitting up very straight. "Do you mean to say," she began, and
+then paused as though unable to believe the evidence; "do you mean to
+say," she went on, "do you mean to say, Dolly Sims, that you made me come
+down all the way from Boston just because Charles-Norton is gone?"
+
+"Why, yes," answered Dolly, petrified. "Why, yes. Isn't that enough;
+isn't it _enough_? My life is ruined! Ruined! Oo-oo-ooh"--and her eyes,
+ablaze for an instant, became veiled by a filmy cascade.
+
+"Pooh," said Aunt Hester, decidedly; "pooh. Charles-Norton is gone; well,
+he'll come back."
+
+"He's not coming back," wailed Dolly, indignantly; "he's _not_! He has
+dee-s-s-er-ted me!"
+
+"Deserted," jeered Aunt Hester. "Charles-Norton! A fine chance
+Charles-Norton has to desert you, Dolly! First of all, he couldn't make
+himself want to, no matter how much he tried. And if he did want to, he
+couldn't. You wouldn't let him, Dolly!"
+
+"Wouldn't let him! Oh! Do you think, Auntie, that I am so low, so base,
+so devoid of pride, as to keep a man who----"
+
+"Toot-toot," said Aunt Hester; "toot-toot--you can't help it. Have you
+ever read that fellow Darwin, Dolly?"
+
+"Darwin," said Dolly, rather astonished at the turn taken by the
+conversation; "Darwin--did he write 'When Knighthood was in Flower'?"
+
+Aunt Hester opened her mouth like a fish suddenly whisked out of water.
+She closed it again. By the time she spoke, she had suppressed something.
+"No, no, Dolly," she said. "_Darwin_, the--well, it doesn't matter. We've
+been reading him lately, anyway, at the Cooking Club. That chap _knows_
+things, Dolly. He didn't tell me anything I didn't know ahead myself; but
+he _explained_ lots of things I had found out. You should read him."
+
+"I'll read him, Auntie," said Dolly, with dolorous voice. "I suppose I'll
+have to read now, or paint china, or do something like that, now that
+Charles, that Charles, that Charles----"
+
+"Oh, Charles, Charles, Charles," echoed Aunt Hester, but in much
+different tone; "you'll get your Charles back. Charles-Norton! He has as
+much chance to escape you--as the earth has to stop whirling around. You
+baby! Why, you've got all Nature on your side, plotting and scheming for
+you. _His_ dice are loaded; he can't win!"
+
+"Aunty, what _are_ you talking about! Here I am, un-unhappy, and needing,
+needing, needing friendship, and you sit and talk--I don't know what."
+
+"For, what is Charles-Norton?" continued the Boston lady, as though she
+had not heard Dolly. "What is Charles-Norton? A man. Hence, a clung-to."
+
+"A clung-to!" exclaimed Dolly, a dreadful suspicion beginning to add
+itself to her greater trouble.
+
+"Just so--a clung-to. And the direct heir of hundreds and hundreds and
+thousands and thousands of clung-tos. For of the men since the beginning
+of the world, Dolly, it's only the clung-tos that survived, or rather
+that had babies that survived----"
+
+"Auntie!" admonished Dolly.
+
+"Certainly," went on Aunt Hester, seemingly misinterpreting Dolly's
+interruption. "They alone had babies that survived. The babies of the
+others--well, they starved, or fell into the fire, or were massacred in
+the wars. So that now there _are_ no others. There are only descendants
+of clung-tos, and hence clung-tos. Charles-Norton, Dolly, is a clung-to!"
+
+"But, Auntie," protested Dolly, "he isn't any horrid such thing. And he's
+gone, he's gone--and I certainly won't _force_ him to----"
+
+"And you, Dolly," pursued Aunt Hester, unruffled, as though a professor
+addressing a group of freshmen. "And you, Dolly, what are you? A woman.
+Hence a cling-to."
+
+"A cling-to!" screamed Dolly.
+
+"Certainly. A cling-to. The end of a line of thousands and thousands of
+cling-tos. For of the women since the beginning of the world, Dolly,
+which survived? The cling-tos. They alone were able to live, and to have
+baby-girls who survived--if cling-tos. The others, and the babies of the
+others, they starved; that's all, Dolly, they starved. No mastodon steak
+for them, Dolly; no nice wing-bone of ictiosaurus--they starved. So that
+there are now no others--or mighty few. You, Dolly, being alive and well
+and a woman, are inevitably a cling-to."
+
+"Auntie! Auntie!" murmured Dolly, puzzled and horrified.
+
+"To recapitulate," Aunt Hester swept on. "To recapitulate: Charles-Norton
+is a clung-to; you are a cling-to. Neither of you can help him or
+herself. For it is the very essence of the being of the one to hold, of
+the other to be held."
+
+"How horrible!" said Dolly, with a shudder.
+
+"In other words, my dears," went on the aunt; "in other words, you are
+_dreadfully_ in love with each other and can't keep apart."
+
+"Love!" moaned Dolly.
+
+"Love," the aunt repeated firmly.
+
+Dolly rocked for a time; tears again were dropping fast from the end of
+her eye-lashes. "But he _doesn't_ love me," she wailed at length. "And he
+_isn't_ a, a--that horrid Chinesy word you call him, and he is gone,
+gone!"
+
+"Oh, my dear, of course," said Aunt Hester; "of course, things are not
+quite as simple as I have been describing them. A woman has to use some
+sense about it these days. This clinging business has become more
+complicated with civilization. You may have erred in the details. Now,
+tell me what has happened, all that has happened."
+
+And Dolly, in a rush of words, told the lamentable story of her domestic
+woe, of her struggle with the wings of Charles-Norton.
+
+Aunt Hester was silent for a time; then she nodded her head
+affirmatively. "Yes, that's it, my dear," she said. "It is as I
+suspected. You have been clinging with your eyes shut. And in these
+perilous times it is necessary to cling with eyes open. You----"
+
+But Dolly had risen to her feet, vibrant. "Do you mean to say," she
+began, and her voice was very low and tense; "do you mean to say that I
+should be subjected to living with a man--with a man"--her voice
+rose--"with a man, Auntie, who has _Wings_?"
+
+"Oh, my dear!" exclaimed Aunt Hester, hastily, "you mistake me. Of
+_course_, I am not asking _that_ of you. But that is not necessary
+either. The essential--it is to let Charles-Norton _believe_ that he has
+his wings, not that he should have them. And then, my dear, to be frank,
+to be just, I must say that this seems to me a case for compromise. Yes,
+dear, you should allow Charles-Norton part of his wings; oh yes, you
+should really let him have a bit of these wings. And _that_ bit, Dolly,
+if you are the wise and capable little girl I think you can be, you
+should turn to the advantage, to the preservation, to the
+prosperity--hem--of the home!"
+
+Dolly sat down, weak and trembling. She was silent for a long time. When
+she spoke again, it was in a tired voice. "Auntie," she said, "you mean
+well. I know that you are trying to help me and am very thankful to you.
+But we have differing views of Life. I am willing to do much for
+Charles-Norton--Oh, so much! I am willing to meet him half-way,
+three-quarters of the way, the whole way, on ever so many things, and I
+have done so. But when it comes to a question, Auntie, of self-respect,
+of morality, of _Decency_, then, Auntie, never! On that, there can be no
+compromise. Charles-Norton cannot have wings."
+
+"Oh, very well," said Aunt Hester, plainly nettled; "very well, very
+well. Then, what are you going to do?"
+
+"Nothing," said Dolly, decidedly. "I will give him up," she said very
+firmly. "I will give him up," she repeated grandiloquently. "I will give
+him up," she said a third time--and broke out weeping.
+
+"That," said Aunt Hester, "is what is known as the _grand stunt_, and is
+rather popular these days. I've seen many try it, and mighty few achieve
+it. And you, Dolly"--she rose and stood with a hand upon the shaking
+shoulders beneath her--"and you, you little soft Dolly, why, you are
+about the last----"
+
+"I shall not lift a finger," interrupted Dolly. "If he, he, he does not
+love me, I, I shall, not stoop to hold him!"
+
+"Well," said Aunt Hester, briskly, "I am going now. I----"
+
+"Going!" cried Dolly, desolately.
+
+"I am going," repeated Aunt Hester, firmly. "There is nothing I can do
+here. And there're Earl's socks to be looked after (he is just entering
+Cambridge, you know), and Ethel's frocks (she's at the High School), and
+then there is your uncle--suppose he gets it into _his_ head to sprout
+feathers! No, no--I'm going home. _I'm_ willing to be what Nature said I
+had to be. _I_ don't take any chances with those new-fangled grand-stunts.
+Besides, if you are just going to do nothing, why, then, you can do that
+without me."
+
+And setting her bonnet upon her nice gray hair, Aunt Hester picked up her
+grip and marched out into the hall.
+
+"Auntie! Auntie!" cried Dolly, running after her.
+
+Aunt Hester stopped at the opened door and turned. She confronted Dolly,
+and the will-o'-the-wisp was dancing in the profundities of her deep-set
+eyes. A tenderness came into them; she dropped her grip, seized Dolly,
+and drew her close.
+
+"Dear little Dolly," she whispered; "you'll do it, don't you fear. You'll
+bring back your Charles-Norton, you soft little woman, you; you'll get
+him! And now, kiss me good-by. Write to me--when you decide."
+
+The door closed, and leaning against it, Dolly wept a long time. Then
+she went within and in a more comfortable position, wept more. She wept
+for a whole week. And then, suddenly, one afternoon, she stood up in the
+center of the room and began stamping her foot.
+
+"I won't," she said, with each stamp of the little foot. "I won't, I
+won't, I won't!"
+
+And saying "I won't," she did. She sat down at the table and on her pale
+blue letter paper, wrote:
+
+    "DEAR AUNTIE:--Yes, you were right, I guess. I _am_ a
+     cling-to. I want him. I don't care: he's mine and I
+     _won't_ give him up. Tell me how to do it, Auntie, oh,
+     tell me how! Quick, Auntie, quick!"
+
+The answer was not long in coming. "Dearest Little Dolly," wrote Aunt
+Hester; "of course, I knew you would, and I am glad. As to telling you
+how--well, that is very simple. Just go to him, Dolly. Go to him (not too
+soon; wait a while) and just stick around. Your instincts will tell you
+the rest. Rely on your instincts, Dolly," went on this incorrigible
+Darwinian. "They are better than your reason, for they are the reason of
+your mother and grandmother, and all the line of mothers that came before
+you. _They_ had to be right, Dolly, or they wouldn't have been, and then
+_you_ wouldn't be. Go to him, and stick around, and do as you feel like
+doing. In all probability you'll be nice, and humble, and snuggledy, and
+warm. And then, make--your arrangements. _He_ can't help himself. Nature
+is on your side. His dice are loaded. Cling, Dolly, cling."
+
+Dolly blushed. "Auntie is horrid," she said. And then, after a while,
+"But right," she said.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+Meanwhile, unaware of this discussion and of this decision,
+Charles-Norton, inflated with fancied freedom, captain of his soul and
+master of his Fate, was having a beautiful time.
+
+Tableau:
+
+A meadow by a lake, on the western slope of a high Sierra.
+
+Below, and far to the west, lies a great plain, liquid with distance as
+though it were a sea of gold. From its nearer edge, the land comes
+leaping up in wide smooth waves of serried pines, to the meadow. There
+the pines stop abruptly, in the leaning immobility of a man who has
+almost trodden upon a flower. From their feet the meadow spreads, fresh
+and lush, susurrant with the hidden flow of a brook, and jeweled here and
+there with flowers that are like butterflies. It stops, in its turn,
+before a chute of smooth granite in the form of a bowl. In the curve of
+the bowl lies a lake--a silvery lake in the depths of which dark blue
+hues pulse, and over the face of which light zephyrs pass, like painted
+shivers.
+
+On the other side of the lake, to the east, the land continues to rise,
+in accelerated assault, first in long lustrous leaps of glacier-polished
+granite, then in a chaos of dome and spire, and finally breaks up against
+the sky in a serrated edge like the top-crest of a great wind-flagellated
+wave which, attacking Heaven, should have been suddenly petrified by a
+Word.
+
+On the border of the pine-forest, its one door upon the meadow and facing
+the lake, is a log-cabin.
+
+It is early morning, and the air is crisp and cold. To the left of the
+cabin, in the dusk of the trees, a fuzzy little donkey stands immobile as
+if still frozen by the night.
+
+The sun, still behind the high crest to the east, aureoles it with rose;
+its light passes in a broad sheet athwart the sky, leaving the meadow in
+a lower darkish plane, as if in the still half-light of a profound sea;
+it strikes here and there, among the pinnacles, a glacier that
+scintillates frigidly. To the west, above the plain, which is as yet but
+an opalescent gray shift, the last star hangs humidly, like a tear at the
+end of a lash.
+
+The rose halo deepens along the mountain top; the dark-blue dome of the
+sky fills with a lighter azure; the star swoons, and the sun peers over
+the crest. It ascends. Its rays plunge into the pool of darkness still
+upon the meadow; they pierce it, at first separately as with rapier
+thrusts, and then finally billow down into it in a cascade of molten
+gold. The shadows flee; the sunlight strikes the cabin; and
+Charles-Norton Sims appears at the door.
+
+Immediately, the little donkey, rousing to life, comes braying to him
+across the green. Charles-Norton gives him a handful of salt, and with a
+slap sends him off again.
+
+And then he stands in the door-way with arms folded, facing the sun. He
+is nude--except for the abbreviated swimming-trunks which were his last
+buy in New York--and to the light his skin, polished like ivory, takes on
+a warm and subtle glow. From his shoulders there hangs behind him, to his
+heels, something that might be a cloak, except that it does not cloak
+him. It does not envelop him; rather does it stand behind him in
+ornamental background, with a certain sculptural effect. And it is white,
+a wondrous gleaming white, against which the whiteness of his skin seems
+rosy. Starting from his shoulders, it goes out and up in gentle
+undulation to either side, and then descends in two swift slight curves
+that meet in a gothic tip at his heels. It is in shape like a Greek urn,
+but has with it a flowing quality--and the whiteness. It is like a Greek
+urn of pure alabaster that would have turned liquid, and would be pouring
+down behind him in lustrous cascade.
+
+Charles-Norton steps forward--and suddenly this background, this mantle,
+this singular ornament, parts in two glistening sections which rise
+horizontally to either side of him. By Jove, they are wings! The wings of
+Charles-Norton. They have been growing, since that _coup-de-tete_ of his.
+
+He raises them horizontally, and with a dry rustling sound they open out
+like fans. He waves them gently, up and down; his chest fills, his head
+goes back; and from his open mouth, as from a clarion, there goes out a
+great clear cry which, striking the mountain, rebounds along from rock
+to rock in golden echoes. He rises into the air.
+
+He goes up slowly, in wide, negligent circles, with slow, strong flap of
+wings, his body, with pointed feet close together, hanging lithe, a warm
+ivory white between the colder and more radiant whiteness of the wings.
+He turns and floats above the lake, then, folding his wings, like a white
+arrow shoots down into the water. A fountain of foaming drops springs
+toward the sky. Charles-Norton Sims is having his morning bath.
+
+He swims with smooth breast-stroke, his feet and hands below the water,
+but his wings raised above. Their roots, at his shoulders, cleave the
+glazed surface like a prow, leaving, behind, a slender wake; they follow
+above, swinging a bit from side to side, like glorious becalmed sails.
+
+And thus, like a large Nautilus, he drifts to the shore. He emerges,
+glistening, upon a little beach which curves there like a little moon
+dropped by a careless Creator; he takes a hop, a skip, and a jump, and
+lands headlong upon the yellow sand.
+
+He stretches himself taut, his hands, straight above him, clutching the
+sand, his toes digging into it, and spreads his wings in fans at his
+sides. The earth is there beneath him, in his embrace; he feels her
+strength flowing into his veins. The sun is up there, above him; he feels
+pouring upon him, penetratingly, its hot life. Content croons in his
+heart.
+
+But after a while, an uneasiness stirs him. He moves vaguely several
+times, he finally rises to his knees. Oh yes, of course, it is his
+stomach--the old tyranny. He walks to the cabin, kicks into incandescence
+the heap of coals in front of the door, and throws a handful of dry brush
+upon them. He seizes a long pole which is leaning against the facade of
+the cabin, goes back to the lake, climbs a large bowlder, and sitting
+himself comfortably in a hollow of it, extends the pole, and drops into
+the crystalline waters at his feet a bit of red flannel. Immediately
+there is a small convulsion and he whisks out of the lake a vibrant
+little object that looks like a fragment of rainbow. He whisks out
+another, another--twelve in succession. He goes back to the fire with his
+rainbows.
+
+There, he--fries them; and--eats them.
+
+Upon which he squats contentedly upon the grass, and fills and lights his
+pipe. He sits there very quietly, his feet drawn up, his wings behind him
+like a resplendent mantle; he smokes gravely his little black pipe. His
+eyes are half-closed, watching the hazy blue puffs of the bowl rise
+toward the turquoise-blue dome of the sky. Far above him, a hawk is
+circling; to the sight, after a while, a vague melancholy enters his
+heart, a subtle and inexplicable yearning. He rises slowly to it, his
+pipe dropping from his loosened lips. He tucks the pipe into his trunks
+(that is why he wears the trunks); his wings spread out to both sides. He
+gives a little spring--and is up in the air.
+
+He hovers above the meadow a while, a bit aimlessly, as though waiting
+for an inspiration, rising, falling, rising with slow strong flap of
+wing--then suddenly he is off, like a streak, in a whirring diagonal for
+the high crests. He dwindles, higher and higher, farther and farther,
+smaller and smaller, till finally he is among the tip-top pinnacles, a
+mere white palpitation, a snow-flake in the whirl of a capricious wind,
+a little glistening moth flitting from glacier to glacier as from lily to
+lily.
+
+Down in the deserted meadow, the little donkey opens his mouth
+creakingly, and throws forth a lonesome bray.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+This is what Charles-Norton Sims is doing while his little wife, back in
+New York, sits desolate in her empty flat.
+
+On the fourth day of his flight, sitting at the wide window of a Pullman
+which was clicking slowly along a high summit, he had caught between two
+snow-sheds a rapid glimpse of this nook in the chaos of the World. In a
+picture flashed clear for a moment to his eyes, he had seen the cabin,
+the meadow, and the lake; and his heart had given a leap like that of the
+anchor of a ship which at last has come to port. When, thirty minutes
+later, the train, now on the down-grade, had slid with set brakes by a
+little mining-camp huddled at the foot of a great red scar torn in the
+heart of a slanting pine forest, Charles-Norton, without more ado, had
+seized his grip and his blankets, and sidling out to the platform, had
+jumped lightly and neatly to the ground.
+
+When the last gleaming rail of the train had vanished around a bend,
+Charles-Norton descended to the camp. It was a decrepit camp, the mine
+having given out. Charles-Norton found the whole population in the
+general store. It consisted of five men, about which seemed thrown an
+invisible but heavy cloak of somnolence. They had entered languidly but
+politely into his plans. The storekeeper had gladly parted with one-third
+of the comestible stock which was slowly petrifying on shelf and rafter;
+a little burro, grazing on the dump, had been transformed into a
+pack-animal; and after standing treat three times around, Charles-Norton,
+leading by a rope his fuzzy four-footed companion, to a great flapping of
+amicable sombreros had taken the trail winding toward the high hills.
+
+The little burro, now obscurely melancholic, grazed in the meadow. Within
+the cabin, depending from the smoke-polished rafters, a sack of flour, a
+bag of sugar, a ham, and several sides of bacon were strung, while a
+pyramid of tins leaned against the blackened fireplace. The bunk against
+the right wall held Charles-Norton's blankets; the one on the left wall
+was empty. In spite of this empty bunk, which at times yawned with an
+air of vague reproach, the cabin, with its wide fireplace, in the center
+of which a rotund kettle hung, with its neatly strung and stacked
+provisions, had a certain coziness, a sober, sedate expression of
+assurance for days to come.
+
+And it was a fine life to live.
+
+He would get up early in the morning, and reached the sill of the door
+with the sun. He would have his swim, his breakfast, and his smoke--and
+then he was off.
+
+He was off for an all-day winged romp. He made straight for the crest at
+first and lit upon the tip-top of its highest pinnacle, rising there out
+of the rocky chaos like an exclamation of gleaming granite. Its top,
+hollowed by the weathers, made a seat which just fitted him. To the north
+and to the south, the saw-toothed crest extended for miles to purple
+disappearances; within its folds, here and there, a glacier scintillated
+like a jewel. To the west and to the east, the mountain descended; at
+first in a cataract of polished domes and runs, then in long velvety
+waves of stirring pines, and finally in pale-yellow foothills, to the
+plains. These were very far and were elusive of aspect. Sometimes they
+were as a haze; sometimes like a carpet of twined flowers upon a slowly
+heaving sea; sometimes they were liquid, and then the one to the east was
+bluishly white, like milk, the one to the west like pooled molten gold.
+
+Charles-Norton sat here long, his elbow on his knees, his chin in his
+hand, his wings drooping behind, along the perpendicular smoothness of
+the rock, and pondered his happiness. A profound satisfaction was within
+him; it was as if his blood, at last, were flowing submissively along a
+great cosmic stream, to some eternal behest. After a time, he rose
+a-tip-toe, like a diver above a gleaming sheet, extended his wings, and
+sprang.
+
+At first he dropped plumb, into the abyss; then his spread wings caught
+the air and held his fall. He gave one soft flap, and then another, and
+rose. He floated upward; he was even with the top of the pinnacle, passed
+it slowly, saw it beneath his feet, and still, with slow, strong beat of
+wing, continued ascending. It was joyous work; he rose on powerful
+pinion; it was as if his head and shoulders continuously were emerging
+from one layer of the atmosphere into another more fresh and clear and
+more beautiful; the air streamed along his skin in a clean, cold caress
+that enveloped his soul. He passed big sad eagles that flew with lowered
+beaks, their wrinkled and worried eyes upon the peaks below; he laughed,
+and astounded, they fell off beneath him in vertiginous circles. The
+earth beneath was like a bowl, a bowl full of plashing sunshine. He kept
+on up, rising straight in the cold and hollow air, into a great silence,
+the only sound that of his wings, beating a solemn measure. He looked no
+longer down, now. Head rearing back, face to the sun, with half-closed
+eyes he went on up with outspread wings, an ecstasy clutching at his
+heart; clutching at it, clutching at it, till finally it was too
+exquisite to bear, and half-swooning, with dangling pinion he let himself
+swoop back through the dizzy spaces, back to the earth.
+
+Again upon his pinnacle, he lay very still, long, on his back, breathing
+deeply, while slowly the ecstatic languor left his body. He was a little
+afraid of this game, this perpendicular assault of infinities, and
+allowed it to himself only once a day. It was his dissipation; there was
+something vaguely perilous in the absorption of it. So, having rested
+now, he betook himself to less audacious pastimes.
+
+He selected a peak some ten miles away, and shot to it in a line which
+was impeccably straight. Then he repeated the flight, this time in a
+slight even curve, flowing and smooth as the rise, swell, and gradual
+fall of a musical chord. The next time, he flew to the peak in a zipping
+parabola that was as the course of a rocket.
+
+This game was the consummation of the old yearning which, in days gone
+by, had impelled him to draw lines upon a sheet of paper. Where before,
+miserably and inadequately, tormented by a sense of impotence, he had
+drawn with a pencil lines upon paper, he now drew, with his whole
+gleaming white body, stupendous lines of beauty upon the blue of the sky.
+
+He liked this. He sensed his evolution. He seemed to have within his
+brain a delicate instrument that recorded the movements of his body. As
+he cut through the azure, each flown line was deposited within him in a
+record of beauty. He flew from peak to peak, in lean, sizzling white
+lines; in shooting diagonals; in gentle floating curves; in zig-zags as
+of lightning; in rising and drooping lines that hoped and despaired; in
+soarings that aspired and broke; in arabesques that laughed; in gothic
+arches that prayed; in large undulations that wept. Sometimes he drew
+whole edifices--fairy castles, domes, towers, spires--which, once
+created, went floating off forever on the blue, freighted with their
+fantastic inhabitants, invisible, impalpable, and imperishable. And
+always within him was the record of the created thing, the record of
+created beauty, etched forever in the inner chamber of his soul.
+
+Sometimes he played with his shadow; he tried to lose it. With a sudden
+bound that was meant to take it unaware, he was off, along the crest, at
+vertiginous speed. He went on thus, mile after mile; mile after mile,
+razing the peaks, he passed along the crest like a white thunderbolt, his
+wings a blur, his body streaming behind like an arrow. His head struck
+the air, broke it, parted it; it slid along his flanks in a caress that
+penetrated to his heart. But always beneath him, like a menace in
+water-depths, springing from peak to peak in huge flaccid leaps,
+stubborn and black his shadow followed him.
+
+Of all the lines he knew, however, the one that he loved best was the one
+he drew when returning to the cabin at sunset. He would come to the
+meadow from the mountains at a high altitude, and then, placing himself
+carefully above it, he would fold his wings and drop.
+
+He shot down like an arrow, in a long palpitant line, and then, two
+hundred yards from the sward, opened his wings in an explosion of fluffy
+whiteness.
+
+Out of this line he obtained a profound sensation of beauty, of beauty in
+simplicity. It was as though he had drawn a long, slender stalk that
+opened in a white chalice; as though he had planted a flower, a cosmic
+flower, there in the bosom of the sky.
+
+In the evening, after his meal and his pipe, he winged away to a last
+adventure which was as a prayer. Leaving the warm glow of his camp-fire,
+he soared upward into the violet night. The earth fell away beneath him,
+a blue blur, a shadow, till finally the shadow itself whelmed in
+nocturnal profundities, and of the earth there remained nothing but the
+little fire, the little fire gleaming red in the clearing. He rose. The
+night accepted him with silence and solemnity, in a velvety envelopment.
+He rose. The stars, at first, were all above him; gradually new cohorts
+of them appeared to his right and his left, on all sides; and finally,
+his fire, down in the clearing, itself become a star, closed a perfect
+sphere. He was the center of a universe of stars; the soft beating of his
+wings was as the hushed tolling of their eternities; the rustle of his
+wings the crackling of their flames. They moved as he moved; always their
+center, he could not approach them. And thus encircled, sometimes
+bewildered, he lost his way. He forgot which star was his; seized with
+sudden fright, he winged one way and another in mad dashes toward cold
+orbs which fled him.
+
+But always, finally remembering, he could find his way merely by folding
+his wings.
+
+He folded his wings, and immediately, of all the stars the little winking
+red one came rushing to him while the others slid by. It came rushing to
+him fiercely, with a sort of jealous and almost ludicrous haste, its face
+red with effort. And with it came the earth, a shadow, a fragrance; its
+warm, sweet breath fanned his cheek. Spreading largely his wings, he lit
+softly upon the meadow-grass, by the little fire, by the cabin, home for
+the night.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+Man changes. Toward the end of summer, Charles-Norton found himself
+insensibly altering the glorious routine of his altitudinous existence.
+
+One day he was tempted by the great plain that lay golden in the West.
+Idly, he let himself float down the mountain sides, in long descending
+diagonals, and suddenly found himself above a farm in the plain. In
+the backyard, children were playing; a man was sharpening a plowshare
+at a wheel, and out of the kitchen-shed there came a clatter of dishes
+and the voice of a woman in song. Seized by a sudden perverse humor,
+Charles-Norton swooped into the chicken-yard and snatched a hen which,
+feeling herself rising in his hand, straightway shut her eyes and died
+of imagination. A scream rose from the earth, and looking down,
+Charles-Norton saw the three little children, legs apart, hands behind
+them, gazing up with white eyes; the man, back to the wheel, had his
+mouth open, as if inviting his vanishing fowl to drop back into it; and
+out of the kitchen door a wide woman suddenly popped, her lips working
+in malediction. His amusement a bit dampened by this consternation and
+by the unforeseen conduct of the hen, Charles-Norton went winging back,
+the dead fowl dangling at the end of his arm, to his retreat, and that
+night, when the pangs of his conscience had somewhat moderated, enjoyed
+the best dinner he had had for many days.
+
+This incident reawakened in Charles-Norton a certain interest in
+human-kind. He began to visit the Valley more often.
+
+The Valley was some hundred miles south of his meadow. It was a great
+cleft that split the mountain range from crest to center. Its walls were
+perpendicular and glacier-polished, and sculptured at the top into smooth
+domes and fretted spires. Down these sheer walls, here and there, coming
+to them without suspicion, whole rivers fell--some in rockets of
+diamonds, others chastely, in thin flight, like shifting and impalpable
+veils, others in great lustrous columns that struck the rocky bottom with
+thunderous impact and rebounded high in clouds of pulverized silver.
+
+The Valley seemed full of people. They came in from the West, in stages.
+They lived in a large structure, at the bottom, which Charles-Norton
+surmised to be a hotel, and hundreds camped along the banks of the river,
+which wound light-green through the dark-green meadows. They wandered
+about incessantly, like ants; most of the time, at the bottom, but a good
+deal of the time also along the vertical sides, toiling pantingly up
+narrow trails, laid like the coils of a riata, till they reached points
+of vantage--domes, pinnacles, heads of falls--whereupon they immediately
+sat down and devoured sandwiches.
+
+When Charles-Norton had first discovered the Valley, he had fled from it
+at the sight of human beings. But now, often, a secret impulse urged him
+to it. He spent days there, crouching upon the top curve of a great
+half-dome from which he could look down and watch the little beings at
+their lives--walking about, cooking their meals, eating them, or
+following the arduous windings of the trails with sweating noses. At
+night their fires twinkled red; and once, when Charles-Norton, wrapped in
+the secrecy of the dark, had slowly floated the whole length of the
+Valley above them, there had come to him, softened and blended by
+distance, the harmony of their voices in song.
+
+At first, he had felt but disdain for them, but gradually another feeling
+had come to him, they were so slow, and crawly, and helpless--and yet so
+indomitable. A vague pity, almost a respect, swelled within him as he
+watched them panting, and perspiring, and toiling up the slopes, reaching
+thus with untold effort heights insignificant to him, from which they
+presently tumbled down again after their inevitable lunch of sandwiches.
+This new interest expressed itself rudimentarily in a perverse desire to
+tease them. Yielding to it one afternoon, in broad daylight he sailed the
+whole length of the Valley, going slowly, resplendent in the sun. He
+could see the little beings gather in groups, and see the little yellow
+faces screwed up toward him; and upon the stage, gliding in from the West
+like a Cinderella coach drawn by six white mice, all the passengers were
+standing with milling arms. With a few strong beats, he whizzed out of
+range and returned to his meadow, chuckling.
+
+He was back again the next day, though, and the next; and of evenings he
+began to hover about the Upper Inn.
+
+The Upper Inn was a little chalet built on the edge of the Valley's
+northern wall. It crouched there, small as a toy in the chaos of huge
+domes surrounding it, backed up against a great granite-rooted tamarack
+as if in fear of the abyss yawning at its feet. From its veranda, a
+glance fell sheer, along the glacier-polished wall, to the valley floor,
+three thousand feet below.
+
+Charles-Norton, of evenings, liked to hover in the void in front of the
+Inn, his head even with the veranda, his body dangling beneath, while he
+looked through the glass door into the hall within.... Always a red fire
+glowed there, within a large black fireplace; and about it, men and
+women, in garments fresh and clean after the day's climbing, sat chatting
+or reading. Among them was a young woman who interested Charles-Norton.
+She was slim and very fair, with hair that lay light upon her head as a
+golden vapor, and she wore upon her shoulders, negligently draped, a
+scarf within the white shimmer of which a color glowed like a flame.
+Beside her nearly always hovered a big young fellow, dark and handsome,
+but who did not seem very happy.
+
+One evening she rose abruptly, and before Charles-Norton could guess her
+intention, she had opened the door, and was out upon the veranda, gazing
+toward him with eyes yet blind with the darkness. Charles-Norton did not
+move. They two remained thus long, she looking straight out into the
+void, divining perhaps--who knows?--a vague palpitant whiteness, like a
+soul, out there in the night; he, moving his great wings slowly and
+softly, while his heart within him thumped loud. Then he let himself sink
+silently, till beneath the plane of the Inn's floor, circled, and rising
+again, took a position at the end of the veranda, from which, peering
+around the corner of the house, he could still observe her.
+
+She stood there, tight against the rail, as though she had brought up
+abruptly against it, making impetuously for the void. He could see her
+slight pliant form, silhouetted against the jeweled horizon; upon her
+shoulders, her scarf floated like a vague phosphorescence, and her face
+was whitely turned toward the stars. He heard her take a long deep breath
+of the night, and then her arms went up and out in a vibrant gesture.
+
+She remained thus, a long moment, her eyes toward the stars, her arms
+toward the stars, and her whole slender body, arched slightly backward,
+seemed to offer itself to the stars. Then suddenly her head dropped, her
+arms dropped, and she straightened, leaning against the rail. The door
+behind had opened and closed again, and upon the veranda, now, was the
+big loom of another form, a form which carried, at the height of the
+head, a warm pulsing glow, like the incandescent point of a red-heated
+poker.
+
+They stood immobile, the two, a long time. She had not stirred since her
+first start; she remained with her back to the door, her eyes out into
+the void. Then the point of light on the larger form slid down, till it
+dangled at the end of what Charles-Norton guessed was an arm, and a low
+voice toned in the silence. "Why did you leave me?" he said; "why do you
+always leave me?"
+
+Her voice answered immediately, clear and warm as a red crystal. "Oh, I
+wanted to say good-by to the stars," she said; "I wanted to say good-by
+to the stars!"
+
+"And why did you want to say good-by to the stars?" he asked, speaking
+softly, as to a child.
+
+"Because," she said, "I am leaving them. Because I am leaving the stars."
+
+"And why are you leaving the stars?" he asked, taking a step toward her.
+
+She turned toward him, now, and laid both her hands lightly upon his
+shoulders. "Because, John, I am going to you," she said; "because, John,
+I love you."
+
+"Dora!" he cried.
+
+She arrested him with a gesture. "I have loved you long, John," she went
+on; "I have loved you long--but I have fought it, fought it, fought it,
+John!"
+
+"And why have you fought it?" he asked, again gently, as to a child.
+
+"Because, John--oh, I don't know. Because, John, there is something
+within me--which I don't know. Something which yearns, John--for I don't
+know what. For peaks, John, for skies, for the stars; for--I don't
+know----"
+
+"Dora, Dora," he said, a bit sadly.
+
+"And so I fought it, John, I fought your love. But it has poured into me,
+John, as honey fills a chalice; gradually, sweetly, it has filled my
+veins, my blood, my heart, John. And to-night, John, my whole being was
+swollen with it, John, with the love of you, John, and I came out to say
+good-by to the stars----"
+
+"Dora!" he cried again; and this time enveloped her in his arms.
+
+A horrid, impish feeling suddenly pricked Charles-Norton; taking wing he
+slid along the veranda and seized, as he passed, from the shoulders of
+the girl, the scarf, from the conceited head of the young man, his derby
+hat, and flapped off with them in the darkness. The crash of an
+astonished chair and a faint little cry followed him for a moment, then
+dropped off behind.
+
+Charles-Norton laughed all the way home. Half-way over he dropped, into
+the deepest abyss he knew, the derby hat, which arrived at the bottom, no
+doubt, in very bad condition. But the scarf was still with him as he
+alighted in the meadow and felt against his hand the humid greeting of
+Nicodemus, the lonely little donkey.
+
+Across the cabin, as he went to sleep, the empty bunk yawned, somehow,
+with unusual insistence. "I wonder what Dolly is doing," he said vaguely,
+as he slid down the slumber-chute.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+Dolly was getting along very well, thank you. Mostly, she was reading the
+papers. For if Charles-Norton thought for a moment that his indiscretions
+were to go unrecorded, he was very much mistaken.
+
+Cuddled in the big Morris chair of the little flat, a be-ribboned sack
+loose about her comfortable little body, her head golden in the soft
+cascade of light falling from the lamp, an open box of candy at her
+elbow, Dolly was reading the evening paper. It was all about
+Charles-Norton Sims, the paper, though it did not mention him by name,
+but variously, according to the temperaments of its correspondents, as a
+condor, an ichthyosaurus, the moon, an aeroplane, a Japanese fleet, a
+myth, a cloud, a hallucination, a balloon, and a goose. As she read, she
+alternately frowned and laughed. Her brows would draw together very
+seriously, and then suddenly her red lips would part to let through a
+sparkling rocket of laughter, and then her brows would again knit in
+concern. The laughter was of triumph at seeing her prophecy come true,
+for of course, all the time, she had known that Charles-Norton, left
+alone, would make a fool of himself; the concern was at the thought that,
+still alone, he would continue to make a fool of himself.
+
+"Well," she said finally, as the paper slipped from her knees to the
+floor; "well, it's about time I rescued the poor dear. I must go to him."
+
+She sat gazing mentally back over the lonely two months, the period of
+her existence now about to terminate, and was astonished to find that,
+after all, it had not been so bad. Ever since the first crisis, ever
+since she had made up her mind to hold on to Charles-Norton, the worst,
+somehow, had been over. It had seemed as if, that determination once
+made, there was little left to worry over, that things could not possibly
+come out wrong, that the cosmos itself was with her. And so, she had not
+worried. And she had had a pretty good time; a pretty good time. Better,
+in fact, in some ways than----
+
+"Sh-sh-sh," she hissed, stilling the thought.
+
+But why was that?
+
+Well, first of all, there had been the engrossing mystery of the spring
+hat; this, followed by the still more exciting problem of the summer hat;
+and now she was planning for the fall hat--she had seen the cutest
+feathery toque, that came low down about her face, pushing to all sides
+little wisps of golden curls and making her look--well, very nice indeed.
+Then, of course, there had been less housework, and she had had much more
+time to herself, more time and more freedom. The acquaintance with
+Flossie, the young wife of the floor-walker in the flat across the
+landing, had helped a lot. Together they had plunged deep into the
+intoxication of the shops. And several times they had gone off, a bit
+defiantly, on little orgies. They would go to the matinee, and then have
+a chocolate ice-cream soda at Huyler's, and called that "having a fling."
+All this, of course, had been impossible when Charles-Norton had been
+about. But why? Oh, because he worked so hard, and there wasn't much,
+there wasn't so much----
+
+Dolly paused and blushed. "Oh, that money," she said deprecatingly;
+"that horrid, horrid mon----"
+
+She rose to her feet to a sudden new thought and went into her room,
+where from beneath ribbons, stockings, gloves, and theater-programmes,
+she drew out of a drawer a little yellow book and a longer, more narrow,
+green one.
+
+When she returned, she was a bit pale, and sank rather limply into her
+chair. "Ooh," she exclaimed disconsolately; "ooh, now I've _got_ to get
+to him; get to him _soon_!"
+
+Go to him. But where--how--where?
+
+She knew where he was now, it is true--but only relatively. The first
+report of his antics had come from a little town in the California
+foothills; the second from a summer resort in a Valley of the Californian
+Sierra. He was being reported pretty well all over the United States now,
+but the first news in all probability were the only valuable clew. They
+were desolately vague though. A man who flies covers much ground. Where
+did he sleep? Where was his lair--or his nest, rather? It was sleeping,
+not flying, that he was to be caught. How could she locate him? It would
+take time, to do this, and money. And the check-book--oh, Lordie, that
+check-book!
+
+Little Dolly, always at the bottom a pretty level-headed creature, had
+become wonderfully patient in the past month. Patient with a
+determination fixed as a star, as a law of Nature; a determination which
+was stronger far than herself; which was outside herself; which she could
+feel, almost, a huge pressure behind her, as of great reservoirs filled
+through trickling aeons; and which astonished her. She had written of it,
+once, to her aunt.
+
+"Dear Dolly," had answered this Darwinian lady; "you are right. It is not
+of you. It is of all women that have gone before you, of the millions and
+millions of women who have fought, and plotted, and intrigued in order to
+keep alive the spark of Life and hand it down to you. It is, Dolly, the
+Persistence of Woman; the inexorable persistence of Woman, Dolly, holding
+Man. Holding Man, Dolly, in spite of his superior physical strength, of
+his superior brutality; holding him through the ages. The terrific
+persistence of Woman holding Man, Dolly, Man--the restless, the moody,
+the incomprehensible; the erratic one, ever dissatisfied, ever bounding
+to the end of his chain in blind surges toward painted things of the air
+which _we_ know do not exist.
+
+"Oh, no; you cannot help it, dear little Dolly. Cling, Dolly, cling!"
+
+"That's horrid," Dolly had said, when she had finished this epistle.
+
+And then, after a while, but this time with a smile; "how _perfectly_
+horrid!"
+
+But now, this patience, this persistence, was indeed a precious thing. It
+enabled her to wait calmly for the turn of chance which would enable her
+to find Charles-Norton. She read the papers every day. Truth to tell,
+they promised little help, for by this time they were announcing
+Charles-Norton simultaneously in New Orleans, Quebec, Key West, and
+Victoria. Wisely, Dolly had preserved the first clippings. And after all,
+it was from the papers that was to come the solution. The paper, one
+morning, after describing appearances of Charles-Norton in Vladivostock,
+Paris, and Timbuctoo, had slid from her knees to the floor, when her eyes
+lit upon an advertisement on the up-turned back-page.
+
+                BISON BILLIAM
+
+                     AND
+
+      HIS WORLD-RENOWNED WILD-WEST SHOW
+
+                 PERMANENTLY
+
+                     NOW
+
+              AT THE HIPPODROME
+
+                   NIGHTLY
+
+     *       *       *       *       *
+
+     HENRIQUE FARMANO, IN HIS AEROPLANE,
+
+            WILL FLY FIFTY FEET!!
+
+"Ooh!" said Dolly, suddenly clapping both her hands to her heart; "ooh,
+I've got it!"
+
+She sat there, a little weak with excitement, while a rosiness came to
+her cheeks and a light in her eyes. "Yes," she said at length; "yes;
+that's it!"
+
+Upon which she dressed very carefully, put on her hat, and went downtown
+to the Hippodrome.
+
+Once there, she hesitated a moment before the glazed-glass door with its
+shining brass plate, then knocked like a little mouse. A big bass voice
+told her to come in.
+
+The owner of the voice was seated at the desk, leaning back in his
+rolling-chair, a big firecracker of a cigar in the corner of his mouth.
+His feet were on the desk, and Dolly noticed them first: they were
+encased in high-heeled boots that seemed very soft and fitted like
+gloves. A soft, wide-brimmed felt hat sat rakishly upon his head. Hat,
+cigar, and boots dropped to a simultaneous disappearance. The man rose,
+and Dolly saw that his hair was very white and long, and cascaded in
+curls to his shoulders; and that, what with this hair, the little white
+goatee at the end of his chin, and the long rapier-like mustachios, of
+the same color, upon his upper lip, he looked like a French musketeer of
+the seventeenth century. He bowed, sweepingly. Now he was like a Spanish
+grandee. But the little eyes beneath his bushy eyebrows were blue and
+shrewd.
+
+Recovering from her first movement of surprise, Dolly made straight for
+the desk, her eyes set, her lips firm. "Mr. Bison Billiam?" she asked.
+
+He bowed again in assent. "And at your service, madam," he said, and bent
+his head down toward her in courteous attention.
+
+But at the first rush of words from her, an agitation came over him; his
+shrewd little eyes flitted here and there about the room as though
+suspicious. He stopped her with a wide gesture. "Sh-sh," he hissed
+gently; "this is very important indeed; we must not be overheard. Won't
+you step into my private office. Do me this favor," he asked, opening a
+heavily-paneled door behind him.
+
+Dolly had a glimpse of a broad polished mahogany table, of heavy chairs.
+She went in; he followed her; the door closed.
+
+Fifteen minutes later, she stood again at the outer door, Bison Billiam,
+knob in hand, arching above her in deferential leave-taking. "I will see
+to everything," he assured her; "everything. This is certainly most
+worthy of being looked into. And I shall do it myself. Myself," he
+repeated, emphasizing the two little syllables as though that fact were
+of tremendous importance; "myself." He bowed again, to the ground. The
+door closed.
+
+Dolly, alone on the landing, suddenly slid the length of the hall in an
+airy jig. "Oh," she said, "we're going to be rich. I'll have a butler;
+and things!"
+
+"Clang!" went the elevator, stopping at the floor. Dolly abruptly became
+again a very dignified little lady. Once out on the street, however, she
+went straightway to the milliner's, where she purchased almost with the
+last of her bank account the coveted fall hat. It was a furry toque, with
+a white aigrette; it came down to her ears and made her look like a
+little Cossack.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+On the other side of the continent, Charles-Norton's retreat began to be
+haunted.
+
+He was taking his flight above the lake, one morning, in the cool gold of
+sunrise, when suddenly a suspicion, a vague sensing of peril, passed like
+a cloud between him and the light. Immediately he let himself eddy to the
+beach, and there, stretched low along the sand, with craning neck he
+peered carefully about him.
+
+At first he could see nothing. Twice he half rose to resume his flight,
+but each time flattened out again to the same subtle sense of presence.
+And at last, with a thump of his heart, he saw him--on the edge of the
+meadow, a man upon a horse, in the dusk of the pines.
+
+They stood there, man and beast, framed by the pines, immobile and
+silent. The horse was a beautiful silken white, with a bridle of twisted
+rawhide heavily plaqued with silver; the saddle, of high-pommeled Spanish
+style, was also heavily incrusted; and the man sat it as though he had
+been poured molten into it. He wore a wide, flapping sombrero, set
+cavalierly upon long white hair that descended to the shoulders of his
+fringed buckskin jacket; the belt at his waist drooped loosely to the
+weight of a great holster, out of which protruded the lustrous butt of a
+silver-mounted revolver; long gleaming boots rose to his hips, their toes
+within carved tapaderos, their heels, high to the point of feminity,
+roweled with long rotary spurs.
+
+They stood there a long time, man and beast, motionless, a sculptured
+group but for the slight forward pricking of the horse's pointed ears,
+and the man gazed steadily at Charles-Norton, his eyes shaded by his
+heavily-buckskinned hand. Charles-Norton, hypnotized, gazed back. There
+was something about the man, his flaming accouterment, specially about
+the gesture--the theatric peering from beneath gauntleted hand--which
+somehow stirred Charles-Norton with a sense of past experience. They
+gazed thus long at each other in immobility and silence; then suddenly
+there ran lightly through the meadow the resonance of a champed bit; the
+horse, rising on his hind legs, pivoted, the man's waist bending pliably
+to the movement--and they were gone. A soft thudding of hoofs came
+muffled through the trees; it rose to a flinty clatter, which in its turn
+diminished, and ceased.
+
+Charles-Norton, after a while, went on with his usual routine. He had his
+swim, his breakfast, and his pipe. But an uneasiness was with him now; he
+cast abrupt, suspecting glances about him, about his profaned retreat.
+And during the day's long flight, something seemed to follow him like an
+impalpable menace.
+
+When he returned at sundown, the man was again there. This time he was
+among the rocks overlooking the cabin, and was afoot, his white horse
+motionless behind him with long bridle dropped to the ground.
+Charles-Norton watched him from behind a tree. He stood there long, his
+right hand negligently upon the horse's neck, his left hand shielding his
+eyes as he looked; and to the posture, somehow, the whole landscape
+gradually changed its aspect, seemed to take on an air subtly theatrical,
+the waning sunlight like calcium, the rocks like cardboard, the trees
+painted. "Where, oh, where have I seen that before?" murmured
+Charles-Norton, intrigued in the midst of his panic.
+
+The man mounted, the horse came forward, and with a silvery tinkle of
+spur and bit, they went slowly across the meadow and into the forest,
+toward the trail that led to the camp.
+
+"_Where_ have I seen that geezer before?" murmured Charles-Norton again,
+as he was going to sleep that night.
+
+The question was to remain unanswered. The man did not appear again. But
+on the Sunday following, at dusk, as the lake was aflash with leaping
+trout, Dolly came running to him out of the trees.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+Dolly came suddenly out of the fringe of the trees. It was dusk; the lake
+was aflash with leaping trout. And she came to him across the darkened
+meadow like a fawn panting for her retreat. He stood there petrified, but
+as she neared, felt his arms open in an irresistible and large movement;
+she nestled within them, her head on his heart.
+
+They stood there long, without speaking a word, in the center of the
+dusky meadow, by the sparkling lake. Her face was on his breast; his arms
+were about her, but his eyes were looking straight ahead into the
+obscurity. He could feel her palpitate softly against him, and a
+tenderness like a warm pool was collecting in his heart.
+
+"Dolly!" he said at length.
+
+But she did not answer; only pushed farther into his embrace in a blind
+little snuggling movement like that of a puppy. He dropped his eyes down
+upon her, slyly. He could see her shoulders, agitated as if she were
+weeping, and a wisp of her golden hair, and one tip of a rosy ear; and
+then, nearer, he saw the furry toque with its white aigrette.
+
+"You little Cossack!" he said, a bit huskily.
+
+Again there was a silence; then he felt the vibration of her muffled
+voice against his chest. "Do you like it?" she asked timidly.
+
+"It's dandy," he said.
+
+The silence that followed was like that of a kitten after a cup of cream.
+Then the voice sounded again within the depths of his embrace.
+
+"O, Goosie," she sobbed; "I've been so miserable!"
+
+"Poor little girl," he growled, above there in the dark; "poor little
+girl!"
+
+"All my money is gone, Goosie--and the janitor was impolite and treated
+me dreadfully, and oh, Goosie, I've had such a terrible time!"
+
+"Yes, yes, yes," he said soothingly (I'll kill that janitor, he thought,
+gnashing his teeth).
+
+"Goosie," began the voice again; "you won't drive me away, will you? You
+won't drive me away; I can stay to-night, can't I? It's so dark, and so
+cold! And in the morning, if you still don't want me, I'll--I'll go away,
+Goosie. I'll go away and never, never bother you any more, Goosie; never!
+But let me stay to-night; Goosie, don't drive me away to-night!"
+
+"Good God!" groaned Charles-Norton, horrified at the very possibility,
+and suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of the enormity of his past conduct.
+"Good God, Dolly! don't, don't----"
+
+"I can stay--then--to-night?" she asked, with a glimmer of hope, of hope
+that cannot believe itself. "I can stay to-night, Goosie?"
+
+"Oh, Dolly, you can stay to-night, you can stay to-morrow night, you
+can stay always, Dolly, poor little Dolly," moaned the agonized
+Charles-Norton. "We'll stay here, always, together, Dolly. Never will I
+move from you again, Dolly; Dolly, my little wife, my love, my----"
+
+Dolly snuggled back close. "Oh, Goosie," she said, "if you let me stay,
+I'll be so good! I won't bother you at all, Goosie. You can do just what
+you want; I'll let you have--anything! I won't bother you, you won't know
+I'm here. I'll just hide around and take care of you, Goosie, I'll do
+_anything_! If only you'll let me stay, Goosie!"
+
+"Come," he said, not daring to give his voice much of a chance; "come;
+let us go in."
+
+The little nose suddenly popped out like a squirrel's out of its hole.
+She no longer wept, though he could see a tear still at the end of one of
+her lashes, agleam in the dark. She raised her head out of his arms and
+looked about her. "Oh," she cried, "is that your house? What a cute
+baby-house! It's pretty here, isn't it?"
+
+"It is beautiful!" he said enthusiastically. "We'll be happy here. Come,"
+he said; and very close, her head upon his shoulders, his arm about her
+waist, they went slowly across the meadow to the cabin.
+
+It was pleasant, somehow, the next morning, to loll about with trailing
+wings, undesirous of flight. The cabin, the meadow, had taken on a
+certain intimacy, a coziness; it was pleasant to remain there all day,
+upon earth, idle-winged.
+
+Charles-Norton had his morning swim alone after vain attempts to entice
+Dolly, her eyes still full of blue sleep, into the crystal waters. Then
+he fished from his rock--twice as long as he usually fished. And when he
+returned with his string of rainbows, Dolly, uncovering the dutch-oven
+which he had bought on his arrival, but the mystery of which he had never
+mastered, proudly showed him the cracked golden dome of a swelling loaf
+of bread. Its warm fragrance mingled with the pungent puffs coming from
+the curved nozzle of the coffee-pot, set in the glowing coals. He gave
+her the fish, all cleaned, and rolling them in corn-meal, she laid them
+delicately in the sizzling frying-pan, each by the side of a marbled
+strip of bacon.
+
+There was no doubt that this breakfast was an improvement on breakfasts
+that had gone before. Bread is mighty good when one has not had any for
+nearly two months; and warm golden bread just out of the oven and made by
+Dolly is more than mighty good. The coffee had undeniably an aroma that
+it had not had of past mornings. And as you held up to the light,
+delicately between thumb and finger, a little trout with crisply-curved
+tail, and slipped it head first between eager white teeth, your eyes
+smiled into two other eyes (like blue stars), smiling back at you over
+just such another troutlet, golden crisp, entering in successive
+movements between just such eager teeth (small pearly ones, these).
+
+Oh, you Charles-Norton!
+
+He wore a blanket on his back, undulating from his shoulders, over his
+wings, to the ground. Dolly had put it there, fearing he would catch
+cold. Now and then, by some reflex action of which Charles-Norton was
+unconscious, the wings stirred uneasily to the burden and let it slip to
+the ground, upon which Dolly, springing up with a laugh, quickly replaced
+it. This happened so often that it became a game.
+
+After breakfast Dolly, instead of throwing the dishes in a shallow spot
+of the lake, as it was the habit of Master Charles-Norton, placed them in
+a pot of boiling water, at the bottom of which, with wonder-eyes, he saw
+them miraculously dissolve to brightness. "You're a genius, Dolly," he
+said. She laughed, a silver peal that filled the clearing, then, going
+into the cabin, returned with his pipe all filled. Nicodemus came to them
+for his salt, then wandered off again. They sat side by side, their backs
+against the cabin-wall, the meadow before them, sloping to the lake; he
+smoked, and she was silent. The sun had risen. It inundated the western
+slopes with a cascade of light; here and there on the crest glaciers
+flashed signals; far to the west the plain palpitated liquidly; and
+above, the sky domed very high, a miracle of pellucid azure. A big sigh
+escaped Charles-Norton, with a blue wafture of smoke. "Isn't this
+beautiful?" he said; "isn't it beautiful?"
+
+She said nothing, and so he repeated, "Isn't it beautiful?" And then,
+curious of her silence, he turned to her. She was looking about her, at
+the trees, at the lake, and the great crags above, and as she looked,
+with an unconscious movement, she withdrew closer to him. "It's awfully
+big," she said, and her voice was almost a whisper.
+
+"It's big with beauty," he said. "Look at the lake," he went on,
+detailing with the pride of a suburban proprietor; "isn't it silvery and
+fresh and clean!"
+
+"It's cold, isn't it?" said Dolly.
+
+"And the crest up there. Look at it. It is sculptured--domes, spires,
+castles. And those gothic arches. They are like joined hands; the granite
+prays. And see the glisten of that glacier in the haze, like a star in
+the veil of a bride! It's all beautiful!"
+
+"They're terribly big mountains, aren't they?" said Dolly.
+
+"See the plain away down there. It seems to heave slowly, like the flood
+after the rain had ceased."
+
+"Do people live there?" asked Dolly.
+
+"And the sky; did you ever see such sky! And the meadow here, how fresh
+and lush; and the pines, and the cabin, and the lake--isn't it all quiet
+and peaceful?"
+
+She was silent, and after a while he turned to her. A tear was trembling
+at the end of one of her long lashes. "Goosie," she whispered, and she
+snuggled up against him; "Goosie, isn't it a bit--lonely here?"
+
+"_We_ won't find it lonely," he answered stoutly, and drew her close
+within his arms.
+
+The day drawled on, slowly and deliciously. "Let's take a little walk,"
+said Dolly, after a while.
+
+"All right," said Charles-Norton, "I guess I still know how. I haven't
+walked much lately."
+
+"I suppose not," said Dolly, hesitatingly. They were going side by side
+across the meadow, and Charles-Norton could feel her looking at him out
+of the corner of her eye. "I suppose--you have been--doing something
+else."
+
+"Yes," laughed Charles-Norton, flushing a bit; "yes--something else."
+
+Somehow they did not look at each other for a time after that, and walked
+a bit apart.
+
+They drew together again little by little as they wandered over the
+clearing, in a close examination of their domain, which Charles-Norton,
+with his passion for big flights and sweeping outlooks, had up to now
+neglected. They found a miniature cascade that purled over a mossy log; a
+cave, so small and clean and regular that it seemed not the work of the
+big Nature about them, but of delicate, elfin hands; and then, on the
+edge of forest and grass, a flower, a trembling white chalice upon the
+virginal bosom of which one small touch of color burned like a flame. And
+thus, little step after little step, they went from little wonder to
+little wonder. Dolly liked small things; it was the microscopic aspect of
+Nature that touched her heart; she had an adjective all her own for such:
+they were "baby" things--baby flowers, baby brooks, baby stars. This
+appealed less to Charles-Norton, hungry for big sweeps. And even now, he
+caught himself yawning once, and casting a look at the crest far away.
+
+In the afternoon, in the full warmth of the clear sun, he inveigled her
+into the lake for a swim. They splashed in the silver waters like merman
+and mermaid; and when, after a glistening disappearance within the cabin,
+Dolly emerged again, she was tucked in a fuzzy bathrobe that made her
+look like a little bear.
+
+They sat long afterward on a warm slope in the sun. Crickets hopped about
+them; Charles-Norton at intervals heard by his side Dolly's musical
+giggle as one of them struck her. A bird on a long twig balanced above
+them, and for a time a squirrel chattered at them in mock scolding from
+the top of a pine. Little by little Charles-Norton sank into a profundity
+of well-being. He could see ahead, now, his life stretching placid and
+colored, solved at last, with both Dolly and the wings, uniting love and
+freedom, the ecstasies of flight with the tenderness of home----
+
+"Goosie," said Dolly; "let's go in."
+
+The sun was gone. It had sunk into the plain, far off. "Wait," he
+whispered, looking toward the crest, inflamed with living light. The
+peaks gleamed, the domes glowed, the glaciers flashed, the whole sky-line
+crackled with a great band of color. Then swiftly from the plain a shadow
+ran up the mountain sides, extinguished, one after the other, peak, and
+dome, and glacier; it went up toward the clouds with its long swift lope:
+the clouds became burned rags.
+
+"Let us go in," said Dolly.
+
+"Wait," he said.
+
+The night was pouring in over the crest, filling the meadow, the dome
+above; a velvety blueness palpitated vaguely about them; a star, as if
+touched by an unseen torch, suddenly sprang to light.
+
+"Wait," murmured Charles-Norton; "it is beautiful at this hour."
+
+But Dolly pressed against him with a little shiver. "I'm cold, Goosie,"
+she cried; "let us go in."
+
+They rose, went down the slope and across the meadow. Along the grass a
+frigid little haze was forming; it was true that it was cold. If
+Charles-Norton had been a practical man he would have observed that for
+the last two weeks, in fact, the nights had been growing more and more
+cold--which might have introduced a disturbing factor in his dream of the
+coming days. But Charles-Norton, as has been seen, was not a practical
+man.
+
+They sat within, by a glowing fire. "It's nice to be home," said Dolly.
+"It's fine," said Charles-Norton, stoutly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+For three days Charles-Norton remained on earth sedulously. It was a
+pleasant earth. They wandered together in the small area about the cabin;
+they walked, swam, fished, picked flowers, and spent hours concocting, on
+the fire before the cabin, nice little dishes which they negotiated
+gourmandly, like children. On the second day Nicodemus, furry and fat
+with idleness, was saddled, and they three went down the trail toward the
+camp. Charles-Norton hid on the fringe of the forest while Dolly shopped
+sagely in the general store, to the general approval of the somnolent
+inhabitants who, by this time, had diminished to five; and then they
+returned in the twilight, Nicodemus a bit wistful with the weight of the
+many useful and good things within his bags. They worked about the cabin
+the next day, and Dolly performed wonders with burlap and chintz.
+Curtains draped the three small windows, a carpet spread upon the floor,
+and on the big tree-trunk which, sawed off evenly in the center of the
+cabin, served as a table, a shining lamp was set, promising of calm
+evenings.
+
+"We'll live here forever!" cried Charles-Norton, enthusiastically.
+
+Dolly did not answer; her back was turned and she was busy tacking chintz
+along one of the bunks.
+
+On the fourth morning Charles-Norton felt a vague hunger which breakfast
+did not satisfy. It was with him all day as he wandered on the ground,
+the tips of his long wings stained with grass. It was with him stronger
+the following morning; and after breakfast, he sprang suddenly into the
+air. "Look!" he cried to Dolly.
+
+And before her, above the meadow, he went through his flying repertory.
+He cut clashing diagonals through the air; he rose and fell in
+undulations like music; he shot about, gleaming white against the blue
+sky; and finally he came down to her from the very zenith of the dome in
+a sizzing straight line which opened, almost at her feet, in a white
+explosion of suddenly extended wings.
+
+"You baby!" said Dolly, as once more he stood before her, panting
+slightly, and his eyes dilated; "you baby!" she said, indulgently.
+
+Charles-Norton, shifting his position to one foot, scratched his head.
+Somehow, this was not quite what he had expected. He had thought Dolly
+more changed about this flying business; and here she seemed--well, not
+so very much changed. Within him he felt something vaguely bristle. It
+was still bristling there the next morning, and gave to his voice a
+certain brusqueness when, kissing Dolly on the forehead after breakfast,
+he said: "Well, so long, Dolly!"
+
+"So long," he said; and Dolly, from her seat on the sward, saw him leap
+from her and wing away in powerful flight. He made straight for the
+crest; she saw him, flitting up there, a little white confetti in the
+eddy of a breeze. Rising, falling, darting capriciously, he gradually
+slid off down the range, and was gone.
+
+Dolly rose. The meadow suddenly had become very quiet. A tree,
+sap-bursting, cracked resoundingly; the sound went through her like a
+sliver. She stood there, poised as if for flight, feeling upon her from
+every tree, rock and bush, the hostile eyes of peering things; and she
+was mighty glad when Nicodemus came running to her resonantly across the
+clearing, demanding a pancake.
+
+Somehow, Charles-Norton did not enjoy his flight as much as he had
+expected. He bore with him a vague uneasiness which no amount of speeding
+could quite lose. He could feel, all the time, Dolly away down there
+alone in the deserted meadow. He returned much earlier than usual.
+
+Dolly was cooking by the fire in the clearing, and she greeted him
+cheerfully, without the slightest sign of reproach. After a while,
+though, he noted upon her right cheek a little smudge. It was shaped like
+a miniature comet; it was, rather, like the slight sediment left upon a
+window-pane by a drop of rain. Charles-Norton, determinedly, refused to
+see it. But it was there all the same.
+
+And it was there the next day when he returned, and the next, and the
+next. Each night, as he lit again upon earth after his long voyaging
+of the air, Dolly greeted him with an ostentatious cheerfulness
+beneath which could be felt something subtly plaintive, and on her
+cheek--sometimes the right, sometimes the left--always would be
+the little accusing smudge.
+
+It spoiled his flights. Following the three days spent on earth, the
+hunger of the spaces had come back to him, gnawing at his vitals; each
+morning he was leaving earlier, each evening he was returning later. But
+all the time, in his wildest soarings, there went with him ... a leaden
+pellet, a little leaden pellet, very stubborn and indissoluble, there in
+his heart ... the knowledge that, alighting, at the end he would have to
+face that little black smudge; that he would have to meet Dolly's
+cheerful greeting with its subtle, plaintive undercurrent, and the faint
+smudge upon her cheek.
+
+Dolly, as a matter of fact, was not weeping all the time, down there in
+the meadow. The care of the cabin, the preparation of the meals, gave her
+each day several hours of humming content; and in the afternoon she would
+have several good romps with Nicodemus. But there were also heavy hours
+during which the solitude of the land seemed to draw nigh from all
+sides; when she panted, almost, to its pressure, and felt very little
+and miserable indeed. So that Charles-Norton, dropping like an archangel
+out of the sky, found always upon her cheek the trace of an erasure made
+completely enough to show a determination to hide tears, but not quite
+enough to obliterate the determination; and leaving in the morning, he
+felt her eyes wistful upon him in a humble and unspoken reproach which
+all day followed him, stubborn as his own shadow, the shadow which he
+could never escape. He fought well, did Charles-Norton. He tried hard not
+to see the little black smudge, not to think about it; and above all, not
+to let her know that he saw it. But all the time the weight was there
+within him, spoiling his flights.
+
+One morning, seeing in a sudden flash of naive hope a solution of their
+problem, he tried to take her with him. Making a sling out of a strip of
+blanket, he passed it about his waist, sat her in the slack, and rose in
+the air. Thus, holding her beneath the shadow of his wings as in a swing,
+he flitted about, above the meadow, rising, chuting down in long, smooth
+slants, circling, soaring. Once he thought he heard from her a slight
+suppressed cry, and then, after a while, astonished at her silence, he
+came down to the shore of the lake.
+
+Her eyes were closed, her cheeks were white, and her hands were cold; and
+it was only after he had dashed water upon her that she revived.
+
+"Dolly, Dolly," he murmured.
+
+She looked at him, smiling bravely with her white lips. "Goosie, dear,"
+she said, a bit wearily; "Goosie, dear, I can't. I can't dear. I get
+dizzy. It makes me dreadfully sick."
+
+He stood there on one leg, embarrassed. He wanted to take her in his arms
+in great tenderness, but was held back by the tenacity of his purpose, by
+the knowledge of the peril of such a course.
+
+"Go on," said Dolly, finally. "Go, Goosie; go on and fly. I'll stay here.
+With Nicodemus," she added wistfully.
+
+And Charles-Norton, the brute, still inexorable, flapped his great wings
+and went away, leaving her there in the meadow alone, with Nicodemus.
+
+But he was to get his punishment. A few days later, returning at night,
+he found Dolly truly weeping.
+
+She was kneeling by the fire, frying-pan in hand, preparing the evening
+meal; and at regular intervals two big dew-drops trickled out from her
+lowered lashes and dropped upon her hand. Charles-Norton, abashed and
+puzzled, went about a while, making a great show of occupation, and
+pretending not to see. And then, suddenly, out of the corner of his eyes
+he noted the rag which she had wrapped about the handle of the
+frying-pan. It was not the usual rag. It was a filmy thing within which
+ran a color like a flame. Lordy--it was the scarf which, several weeks
+before, he had stolen one night from the girl on the veranda, in the inn
+above the valley, and which he had since forgotten in the clothes-bag
+that served him as pillow.
+
+He kept a prudent silence, and pretended not to see it, though vaguely
+tormented by the very menial service to which Dolly successively put that
+once radiant scarf. And Dolly said not a word about it. She went on with
+her little housekeeping routine very carefully and submissively, while
+now and again a tear oozed from her long lashes. But Charles-Norton felt
+vaguely now that the balance had swung, that he was fighting now at a
+terrible disadvantage.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+Charles-Norton began to grow peevish.
+
+"Good Lord," he would growl, as he flew along the crest; "why can't she
+smile once, for a change, as I leave her in the morning; why can't she
+speed me away with a smile, instead of that look. Why can't she be happy
+in her own way down there, and let me be happy up here? Why, why, why?"
+
+He was passing just then a deep gorge, blue beneath him. From it his
+question reascended to him, tenuous and fluttering, like a lost bird on
+uncertain wings. "Why--why--why?"
+
+"She looks at me--as if I were a murderer. Just because I want to fly.
+Just because I have wings. Just because everything in me says, Fly! And I
+have to carry that look around with me all day long, just like a net,
+just like a net of crape. Dam!"
+
+"Dam!" said the profundities.
+
+Charles-Norton evidently had arrived at the self-pitying stage--which was
+a bad sign, if he only had known it; which showed a certain weakening of
+his moral fiber. He fought on, though. Resolutely he continued to refuse
+to notice the daily little black smudge upon Dolly's cheek. She was more
+submissive and dolorous than ever. She had made him, with blankets, a
+union-suit that buttoned ingeniously about the roots of his wings; he put
+it on every morning, but hid it behind a rock till night as soon as he
+was out of sight.
+
+But the very elements, the perversity of matter, seemed against
+Charles-Norton. "There's no more flour, Goosie," said Dolly one morning.
+
+Charles-Norton did not catch the significance of this remark right away.
+Perched on one foot, just in the act of taking wing, he had become
+absorbed in the examination of a fluffy and cold little white object
+which had just then settled upon his nose. He looked at it close as it
+disappeared between his fingers in a silver trickle. It was a snow-flake.
+He glanced upward; the sky was very gray.
+
+"Goosie, the flour is gone," repeated Dolly.
+
+Charles-Norton came back to earth. "Well, we'll have to buy some more,"
+he said, again preparing for flight.
+
+Dolly was silent, evidently considering this remark. "Have you--have you
+any more--money?" she asked at length, hesitatingly.
+
+Charles-Norton dropped his wings. "No," he said. "No, that I haven't--not
+a cent. It's--it's gone. Have you?"
+
+"_I_ haven't any," said Dolly. Her eyes were very big.
+
+Charles-Norton stood there motionless a while, a bit disturbed. Then his
+lower jaw advanced; he shrugged his shoulders: "Well--I'll see about it;
+to-morrow," he said airily, and was off.
+
+But he didn't see about anything "to-morrow" or after. He had a fine time
+that day. A snow-flurry was passing down the Sierra, and he went with it
+along the crest, mile after mile, to the South, the center of its soft
+white whirl, its winged tutelary God. When he returned, that night, a
+snow-carpet extended down from the top of the chain, down the slopes, to
+the edge of the meadow. Dolly was inside of the cabin, close to the
+fireplace. "Ooh, Goosie, but it's cold," she cried. "Yes," admitted
+Charles-Norton; "it is cold." His wings were encased in ice, and he
+sparkled rosily in the fire's glow.
+
+The next day, though, was warmer; the carpet of snow gradually retreated
+up the slopes. It remained on the crest, however, frozen and
+scintillating. It was a world of increased beauty that now spread beneath
+Charles-Norton. The crest glittered from horizon to horizon; here and
+there little lakes gleamed like hard diamonds; and lower, the willows in
+the hollows lay very light, like painted vapor.
+
+The next morning Dolly said: "There's no sugar, Goosie."
+
+"Coffee is better without sugar," said Charles-Norton, sententiously.
+
+For a few days the young couple, with wry faces, drank unsweetened
+coffee. Then this difficulty disappeared. Taking up the tin before
+breakfast, Dolly discovered that there was no more coffee.
+
+The last of the canned fruit followed, and the last slice of bacon.
+
+"Thank the Lord we can live on trout," said Charles-Norton, piously.
+
+As if in answer, the next morning, the trout refused to take his bait of
+red flannel.
+
+Alone there on the shore of the lake, while Dolly waited within the
+cabin, Charles-Norton passed a bad quarter-of-an-hour. Then he went up
+the slopes back of the meadow and captured a handful of grasshoppers
+springing there in the rising sun. The trout took them with gratitude.
+"Whee!" said Charles-Norton, when at last he had his catch.
+
+And then, to a cold blast from the East, a few days later, the
+grasshoppers all disappeared. Charles-Norton took his axe, went into the
+woods, and chopping open mouldy logs, obtained a store of white grub. The
+trout took them.
+
+But Fatality now was dogging him close. When, with tingling skin, he
+opened the cabin-door a few mornings later, a cry escaped him. A
+snow-carpet spread from the crest over the face of the whole visible
+world, clear down to the western plain. It covered deep the meadow, hung
+in miniature mountain-chains on the boughs of the pines, filigreed the
+lake. The lake was frozen.
+
+Charles-Norton chopped a hole in the ice, then chopped logs and
+replenished his supply of grubs. The trout refused them. They could not
+be blamed; the grubs, hibernating, had shrunk themselves into hard little
+sticks devoid of the least suspicion of succulence.
+
+Charles-Norton and Dolly went breakfastless that morning. All day
+Charles-Norton roamed above the land with a vague idea of catching
+something. But living creatures seemed to have withdrawn into the earth;
+the few still out had put on white liveries; when Charles-Norton flew
+low, they fled him, and when he flew high, he could not distinguish them
+from the earth's impassive mantle. He thought once of the ranch in the
+plain and of its chicken-yard, but dropped the idea immediately. Dolly's
+vigorous little New England conscience would never accept a compromise
+such as this.
+
+Charles-Norton and Dolly that night went supperless to bed; they arose in
+the morning with no prospect of breakfast. Charles-Norton moped long at
+the fire while Dolly, very wisely silent, trotted about her work.
+Suddenly Charles-Norton rose with a smothered exclamation. In two
+strides he made for the door, opened it, and took wing; Dolly saw him
+flitting among the branches of the pines in mysterious occupation. He
+returned in great triumph and threw on the table a double handful of
+small, dry objects that looked like wooden beans. "We'll eat pine-nuts!"
+he cried enthusiastically. "Pine-nuts are just chuck full of protein!"
+
+For three days they lived on pine-nuts. And then, as on the third
+evening, they sat before the little heap which made their meal, Dolly
+fell forward on the table with a wide movement of her arms that scattered
+the supper in a dry tinkle to the floor, and remained thus with heaving
+shoulders.
+
+Charles-Norton rose and stood above her. Dolly was weeping this time,
+truly weeping, beyond the slightest doubt, openly and freely. This was
+the end; he was cornered at last, his last twisting over. She wept there
+in an abandonment of woe, her face in her arms, her hair desolate on the
+surface of the table, her shoulders palpitating. And as he gazed down
+upon her, a great, vague mournfulness slowly rose through him, a
+mournfulness part regret, part sacrifice; he stood there gazing down
+upon her as a child gazing down on a broken toy, a broken toy in the ruin
+of which lay the ruin of his dreams. She wept; and he felt as if a
+wreath, a wreath soft and flowery but very heavy, had fallen about his
+neck and were drawing him down, down out of the altitudes of his will.
+And so, gently, he asked the question, the answer of which he knew, the
+asking of which was renunciation.
+
+"Dolly, Dolly," he whispered; "what is the matter, Dolly?"
+
+"Ooh, ooh, ooh," sobbed Dolly; "ooh, Goosie, I can't--can't eat
+pine-nuts, Goosie! I can't!"
+
+Her shoulders shook, the table trembled, her wail rose to a perfect
+little whistle of woe. Charles-Norton sat down by her and took her in his
+arms. "Well, we won't have to, Dolly," he said gently; "us won't have to.
+We--we'll go back!"
+
+They remained thus long, entwined, while little by little the violence of
+Dolly's despair moderated. At length she freed herself, with a smile like
+the sunlight of an April shower, and still with a little catch in her
+throat, took the lamp from the table and set it on the sill of the
+western window.
+
+Half an hour later there was a knock at the door.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+After a moment of indecision, during which Dolly, rosy with excitement,
+was hurriedly rearranging her disordered apparel, Charles-Norton, picking
+up the lamp, strode to the door and opened it. His lips were unable to
+hold a short exclamation of surprise. For, framed in the door-way, here
+stood the mysterious stranger whom twice he had caught watching him in
+the meadow.
+
+He stood there, very tall, soft hat in hand, his white hair and cavalier
+mustachios shining softly in the rays of the lamp, the fringes of his
+buckskin garments all aglitter with the cold; above his right shoulder
+there peered affectionately the white face of his horse, the vague loom
+of whom could be divined behind in the night. He placed his right foot
+upon the lintel, and to the movement his long spur tinkled in a single
+silver note. "May I come in?" he asked gravely.
+
+"Why, yes; why, yes," exclaimed Charles-Norton, recovering from his
+momentary petrifaction; "come in, make yourself at home, have a chair,
+have a seat!"
+
+"Back!" said the man, over his shoulder, and to the command the
+inquisitive nose of the white horse receded in the darkness. The man shut
+the door, behind which, immediately, a philosophical munching of bit
+began to sound. He walked across the room with a low bow which caused the
+wide brim of his hat to sweep the floor; and to Charles-Norton's
+invitation sat himself on the bench by the fireplace. Dolly perched
+herself on the side of her bunk, Charles-Norton on his. They formed thus
+a triangle, of which the stranger was the apex. Dolly's face was flushed,
+her eyes were bright, but she kept them carefully averted from the
+gleaming visitor. Charles-Norton, on the contrary, stared at him frankly.
+A reminiscence was coming slowly, like a light, into his brain.
+
+"I've seen you before," he said. "Twice I've seen you with your horse,
+here, among the rocks."
+
+"Did you see me?" said the man, with a smile.
+
+"I couldn't place you then. But now I know. I know who you are. You're
+Bison Billiam, aren't you; Bison Billiam, the great scout."
+
+"So I am popularly known," said the man, with a bow.
+
+"I remember you. It's ten, twelve years ago. You came out of a lot of
+cardboard scenery at the end of the hall, hunting buffaloes. The calcium
+light was on you, and you looked like this----"
+
+Here Charles-Norton placed his right hand above his eyes in most approved
+scouting style, and peered to right and left. "Humph," said Bison
+Billiam, seemingly not altogether delighted with this representation.
+
+"And you saw the buffalo--three of them--father and mother and son, I
+guess--standing in the center of the arena. You galloped right into them,
+and emptied the magazine of your Winchester into them--but they wouldn't
+run. They knew you too well, I suppose."
+
+"I suppose," agreed Bison Billiam. "The buffaloes I've hunted in the last
+twenty years have known me pretty well. It was not so once," he said
+reminiscently; "not so, not so----"
+
+There was a little silence at this evocation of the melancholy of gone
+days. The fire crackled. It was Bison Billiam who spoke first. "I've been
+watching you fly," he said.
+
+"Yes?" exclaimed Charles-Norton, flushing with pleasure and doubt.
+
+"I have a permanent show in New York now," went on Bison Billiam.
+
+"Yes?" said Charles-Norton.
+
+"I want you to fly there," said Bison Billiam.
+
+"Yes?" said Charles-Norton.
+
+"I'll give you four hundred a week."
+
+Charles-Norton fell backward into his bunk, his legs swaying
+perpendicularly in the air like two derricks gone amuck. From the depths
+of his involuntary position he heard the silvery pealing of Dolly's
+laughter. When he rose again though, Dolly had ceased laughing, and Bison
+Billiam's face had a gravity which somehow vaguely impressed
+Charles-Norton as without solidity, like fresh varnish. The two looked as
+though they had been gazing at each other, but their eyes now were
+carefully averted.
+
+"I didn't understand," said Charles-Norton, with dignity, and
+surreptitiously took a firm hold of the edge of the bunk.
+
+"The matter is simply this," said Bison Billiam. "I have a permanent Wild
+West show in New York. I want a new feature for it. You are it. I'll give
+you three hundred a----"
+
+"Four hundred; you said four hundred!" exclaimed Dolly.
+
+He turned to her with a bow which held homage. "Four hundred," he
+corrected.
+
+"What will I have to do?" asked Charles-Norton, still somewhat dazed.
+
+"Just fly. Fly every night, and at the matinees, Wednesdays and
+Saturdays. The police will stand for it, I think--except on Sundays. But
+we'll settle the details later. Meanwhile, here's the contract." He
+fumbled in the inside of his buckskin jacket and drew out a typewritten
+document.
+
+Charles-Norton stood long over the contract, spread out on the table. He
+pretended to read it, but was too agitated to do so. The little purple
+characters danced in the glow of the lamp. Upon his right shoulder he
+could feel Dolly's chin; it rested there tenderly, with wistfulness, in
+prayer. Mixed with his excitement was a vague sadness, a sadness,
+somehow, as though he were saying farewell to someone. But he had
+already gone through the crisis; to Dolly's heart-rending cry upon the
+dietary inadequacy of pine-nuts, he had yielded his whole being in
+supreme sacrifice. An exultation possessed him at the thought, a madness
+of self-gift. He straightened to his full height; "I'll sign!" he cried
+with ringing accent.
+
+He felt Dolly turn about him; she laid her head upon his breast. "Sh-sh,
+sh-sh," he whispered, patting her; "it's all right, Dolly." He raised his
+head once more. "I'll sign!" he declared again loudly.
+
+"Well, I should say so," murmured Bison Billiam, a bit amazed at all this
+ceremony. Out of the holster which hung on his belt, he drew a
+fountain-pen, which lay snugly by the silver-mounted revolver. And
+Charles-Norton, his left arm about Dolly, with his right hand signed
+firmly the contract.
+
+"I'll be back in the morning," said Bison Billiam as he mounted his
+horse. "You'll give me an exhibition, and we'll settle on your stunt and
+on the size of your machine--your----"
+
+But his last word flew away with him in the night. Charles-Norton closed
+the door. There was a little silence. "What did he mean?" asked
+Charles-Norton; "what did he mean by the size, the size of----"
+
+"Oh, I don't know," said Dolly. "Goosie, you are a dear; a darling,
+Goosie. Goosie----"
+
+"That's all right, little girl," said Charles-Norton with large
+magnanimity; "glad to do it for you." And then, nudging Dolly with his
+elbow, "four hundred a week, Dolly; four hundred! Gee!" he cried.
+
+The practical side of Charles-Norton seemed at last awakened; he danced
+around the table in glee. But Dolly, singularly, did not join in.
+
+The next morning, bright and early, Dolly and Charles-Norton heard a
+haloo outside and, emerging, found Bison Billiam erect upon his
+motionless horse in the center of the snow-covered meadow. "You've had
+breakfast?" he asked pleasantly.
+
+"Well--yes," said Dolly; "just got through," said the little liar (there
+wasn't anything within the cabin to breakfast upon).
+
+"We'll begin right away, then," said Bison Billiam. "We leave at noon."
+
+He dismounted, and Dolly and he seated themselves side by side, with
+backs against the cabin, while Charles-Norton gave them an exhibition.
+
+He winged off first directly for the crest gleaming high in the distance,
+making his line straight and swift; then returned in a perfect curve that
+spanned the distance like a rainbow. Remaining above the meadow, now, he
+drew all his fantasies against the sky and finally, rising high till he
+was a mere dot in the heavens, he shot down like a white thunderbolt and
+landed at their feet in snowy explosion of extended wings.
+
+He found Bison Billiam and Dolly conferring earnestly. "Two feet, I
+think," Bison Billiam said. Dolly ran into the cabin and returned with a
+pair of glittering scissors.
+
+"What are you going to do?" asked Charles-Norton, suddenly cold and
+distrustful.
+
+"Cut off two feet," said Dolly, laughingly. "Mr. Billiam says to cut off
+two feet."
+
+"Off my wings?" yelped Charles-Norton; "off my wings?"
+
+Dolly turned her eyes to Bison Billiam in doubt, in appeal. "It's in the
+contract, young man," said Bison Billiam. "Haven't you read the contract?"
+he said, drawing the document from his jacket.
+
+"No, I haven't," said Charles-Norton, shortly. "Let me see it."
+
+And he read, beneath Bison Billiam's pointing finger: "It shall be
+regarded as a part of this agreement that the length of the flying
+apparatus, whatsoever it may be, shall be determined by the party of the
+first part."
+
+"I won't!" thundered Charles-Norton.
+
+"Goosie, dear," implored Dolly; "Goosie, dear, only two feet, and it's in
+the contract, Goosie, dear----"
+
+He turned upon her fiercely. "Why can't you eat pine-nuts?" he cried;
+"why, why, why?"
+
+She drew back a step and looked at him with great large eyes, and as he
+met them, he saw them fill slowly with tears. "I can't," she said simply;
+"I can't, Goosie." Again Charles-Norton had that sensation of a wreath
+falling about his neck, a heavy wreath within the soft flowers of which
+was hidden a good stout chain. "All right; go ahead," he said, with a
+sigh.
+
+Dolly, with the firmness of a surgeon inexorably sure of what is best
+for his patient, curtailed the "flying apparatus" to the required length.
+"Now, let's see you," said Bison Billiam.
+
+And Charles-Norton repeated his performance, more heavily this time, in
+smaller compass. But when he descended, again he was met by Bison
+Billiam's disapproving head-shake. "We'll have to take off another foot,"
+said Bison Billiam.
+
+"But why?" remonstrated Charles-Norton (with the first cut there had
+already come to him a certain lassitude, an indifference, almost, which
+made him much more tractable). "Why do you want my wings short?" (also he
+was conscious of a feeling of aspiration amidships, of aspiration for
+something else than pine-nuts). "Don't you want me to fly well? What the
+deuce is the matter?"
+
+"It won't do; it won't do at all," said Bison Billiam, in a tone almost
+of discouragement. "Can't you _see_ it won't do?" he went on impatiently.
+"It's too smooth; there's no effort in it. Lord, you do it as though it
+were _easy_! And there's no _danger_ in it, man! Lord, I sit here and
+watch you without batting an eye-lid; feeling sure you can't fall. That's
+not what I want. I want the audience to get excited, to palpitate! I
+don't want them to sit there like lambs watching a cloud, or a bird
+flying. Your act isn't worth two-bits a week. I want men to groan,
+children to scream, women to faint! Lop 'em off!"
+
+Again Charles-Norton submitted himself to Dolly's gentle fingers and cold
+scissors, and repeated his act with shortened wings. This happened three
+times. Three times the scissors zipped, down eddied to the ground, and
+Charles-Norton tried again, more heavily, more soddenly, his being
+invaded by the emptiness of the old days, the shorn days.
+
+At the end of the third flight, Bison Billiam remained silent a long
+time, evidently the prey of a heavy discouragement. Suddenly the light of
+inspiration sprang to his brow; his voice rang clear in the glade. "Cut
+six inches off the left wing," he cried, "and leave the right as it is.
+Shear the left and leave the right as it is!"
+
+Charles-Norton gazed at him open-mouthed. But by this time there was
+little left in him strong enough for rebellion. He closed his mouth
+again. Dolly interceded with a glance of her soft eyes, but Bison
+Billiam was aglow with his idea. "Cut!" he cried.
+
+Dolly cut.
+
+This time the result was eminently satisfactory. With great effort, with
+cracking sinew and sweating brow, Charles-Norton managed to circle the
+meadow once with heavy, awkward flapping. His neck was awry with the
+uneven pressure, his fine body was twisted; he almost struck the ground
+between each stroke, and as he was passing his audience on the beginning
+of a second lap, he lost control suddenly, turned clear over, and flopped
+to earth at their feet.
+
+Bison Billiam could not restrain his enthusiasm now. He clapped his
+hands, he skipped about like a child. "Fine; fine!" he cried, and his
+deep voice rang clear to the crest; "that's the stuff; now we've got it!
+By Jove," he swore, his satisfaction rising to delirium, "I'll give you
+four hundred _and fifty_ a week!"
+
+They left immediately, Charles-Norton dressing, for the first time in many
+days, in his city suit of clothes. The wings, even though--rectified,
+bulged the coat, but this was hidden by the cape of his mackintosh, which
+Dolly, providentially, had brought with her from the city. They wended
+their way back along the trail to the camp, Charles-Norton bronzed like a
+farmer, choking in his white collar, Dolly very pretty in her tailor
+suit, her furs, and her toque, Bison Billiam resplendent on his white
+horse; and before them Nicodemus trotted demurely, a dress-suit case in
+each saddle-bag, another slung atop. They left him at the camp, grazing
+philosophically on his old dump. Charles-Norton gave him an affectionate
+farewell slap, Dolly kissed him on the nose, and they then climbed aboard
+the shining private-car which stood ready for them on the siding. One end
+of the private-car was a luxurious stable, in which the white horse
+climbed along a cleated gang-way. A half-hour later the passing Overland
+train picked up the car, and slowly clicking along the summit, they saw,
+between two snow-sheds, the little meadow, its lake, and its cabin, pass
+by, out of their vision, out of their lives.
+
+Charles-Norton took off his coat, which felt very tight. A private-car
+had a freedom, and comforts, which a public-car has not; a faint
+appreciation of this fact came to Charles-Norton as he settled back,
+coatless, in his upholstered chair, and with it the first vague snuggle
+of readjustment. This feeling became clearer after the dainty breakfast
+served by Bison Billiam's white-capped cook, and expressed itself in a
+sigh almost of content when Bison Billiam, with the coffee, passed him a
+great fat cigar. Charles-Norton threw a surreptitious glance at the heavy
+band; it was a dollar cigar.
+
+Life, after all, has its compensations.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+And now, how about Charles-Norton and Dolly?
+
+Well, they are getting along very well; very well, very well indeed.
+
+Of course, they have their little differences--as have most couples.
+Mostly, it is about wings. There seems to be a something fundamental
+about both Charles-Norton and Dolly which irresistibly makes them diverge
+on the question of the proper length of wings (male wings at least). For
+a time, in fact, during the first months of their intoxicating public
+success and before they had arrived to the present adjustment, the
+question threatened to bring the conjugal craft to a final wreck.
+Strangely enough (or naturally enough) it is a catastrophe that eased the
+situation. One night, after Dolly, in a sudden access of resentment, had
+taken an immoderate whack out of the left wing, Charles-Norton tumbled
+to the ground in the midst of his performance, and broke his ankle.
+
+It was, of course, in an agony of remorse that Dolly nursed her husband
+during his long month of enforced and bed-ridden idleness. Luckily, Bison
+Billiam behaved beautifully. He let the salary run on during the whole
+course of Charles-Norton's incapacity, and then, with genial inspiration,
+prevailed upon him, when he had recovered, to make his public
+reappearance with the heavy plaster-of-paris cast still upon the injured
+leg--which immensely increased the Flying Wonder's popularity and
+success.
+
+A _modus vivendi_ was agreed upon after this, which is still in force and
+works very well. Bison Billiam was made the permanent arbitrator of the
+wing question. Whenever they have a little difference now, Charles-Norton
+and Dolly go to Bison Billiam, and, standing before him hand in hand,
+listen to a sage adjudication of their rights and their wrongs. They call
+him Papa Bison.
+
+And so, they are quite happy. Dolly, of course, takes a keen pleasure in
+her home. She has a neat little brick house, with a white door, near the
+Riverside Drive, and a butler. A butler always had been Dolly's secret
+dream.
+
+Charles-Norton, also, though unconsciously perhaps, gets a good deal of
+pleasure out of the house (and the butler), for Dolly, with innate
+genius, has given it an air of quiet elegance and culture which he
+secretly enjoys. There is, also, a certain contentment in living life
+along a definite routine. He flies every night but Sunday, and two
+afternoons a week. And then, if Dolly has her house, he has his
+automobile.
+
+A big, high-powered, red automobile. He goes out in it with Dolly every
+Sunday. When he arrives to a certain point in a certain highway, where
+the road is smooth and hard, and undulates up and down like a Coney
+Island chute for many miles, he leans forward and puts his chin close to
+the back of the chauffeur, who is French, and looks like Mephistopheles.
+
+"Let her out," he says.
+
+The chauffeur, with a grin, "lets her out"--and they swoop down and up,
+down and up, in increasing speed. The road is a ribbon, which she rolls
+hungrily within her; the trees, the rare houses on both sides, coalesce
+into two solid, whirling walls.
+
+"Faster," says Charles-Norton.
+
+The world becomes two parallel planes of solid atmosphere, rushing along
+close to right and left; the air strikes their faces like a fist, closing
+their nostrils till they gasp; the machine's hum becomes a cry; its flaps
+rise like wings.
+
+"Faster," says Charles-Norton.
+
+He seems to leave his body; it wafts off behind on a current of air, like
+a hat--and he is only a soul, a delicious kernel of soul ecstatically
+drunk, floating like an atom through the eternities.
+
+"Faster," he says.
+
+But he is aware now of a shrill, insistent, strident sound. It drills
+into his soul; it will not be quiet; it will not let him be. Bing! His
+body, catching up from behind, drops about him again--and then he knows.
+It is Dolly; Dolly screaming, poor little Dolly hysterical with fear.
+
+"Slow up," he says to the chauffeur.
+
+The world gradually changes from a mere blur of parallel lines to visible
+groupings of matter. Trees, houses, the road, the sky reappear as through
+a curtain torn before them. The chauffeur wipes his brow. "Ah,
+Monsieur!" he says.
+
+And Dolly, very pale, says with an impatience that seems weary, as though
+it were repeating itself for the thousandth time "Oh, Goosie, why, why,
+why will you scare me so?"
+
+Charles-Norton is penitent, but a bit morose. "Gee," he says; "that
+wasn't fast. That wasn't fast." His eyes go off, very far; a vague, vague
+yearning, covered over with layer and layer of resignation, palpitates
+faintly at the pit of his being. "You don't know what speeding is," he
+murmurs; "you don't know----"
+
+The machine, at smooth half-speed, is returning toward the city. "I won't
+go with you again," says Dolly.
+
+But she always does. She doesn't like to ride fast, and he does, but she
+never lets him ride alone. 'Cause she loves him!
+
+He will have to be more careful now, however. The other evening, as they
+sat in the cozy reading-room (lined with editions de luxe) after the
+performance, she got upon his knee and, hiding his eyes with her hands so
+he could not look at her, whispered something in his ear.
+
+Charles-Norton sat silent a long moment after that. Then he said, as
+though speaking to himself: "I wonder if _he_ will--if _he_ will also--if
+_he_ will----"
+
+"I wonder; I wonder!" said Dolly, ecstatically, her eyes wide upon a
+splendid vision.
+
+"We could keep them down," said Charles-Norton, consideringly, "by
+beginning early. By beginning early, with bandages, we could keep them
+down----"
+
+To his great amazement, Dolly dissented. "Oh, no, no, no, no!" she cried.
+"Oh, he would look so cute with them--just like a little angel! Just like
+a little angel, Goosie!"
+
+And Charles-Norton is still wondering about this differentiation in
+Dolly's wise little head, wondering why _he_ can, while Goosie--can't.
+
+                              THE END
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's notes
+
+The following were identified as spelling or typographic
+errors and have been emended as noted.
+
+
+page 3 - corrected calisthenics
+
+The mirror before which he had been performing his morning
+calesthenics faced him uncompromisingly;
+
+
+page 27 - corrected you're
+
+"Well," he said finally, "maybe your right.
+
+
+page 41 - corrected telephone
+
+at the sound of the telphone bell.
+
+
+page 42 - corrected harassing
+
+which had suddenly solved for her the harrassing problem of
+the spring hat
+
+
+page 82 - corrected resonant
+
+As it slid slowly out beneath the resonnant cupola,
+
+
+page 105 - corrected susurrant
+
+From their feet the meadow spreads, fresh and lush,
+sussurant with the hidden flow of a brook,
+
+
+page 130 - corrected gliding
+
+and upon the stage, giding in from the West like a
+Cinderella coach drawn by six white mice,
+
+
+page 135 - added opening quotation mark
+
+And so I fought it, John, I fought your love.
+
+
+page 172 - left as is - sizzing as unclear what was correct
+
+and finally he came down to her from the very zenith of the
+dome in a sizzing straight line which opened
+
+
+page 203 - added closing quotation mark
+
+"It shall be regarded as a part of this agreement that the
+length of the flying apparatus, whatsoever it may be, shall
+be determined by the party of the first part.
+
+All other unusual, colloquial or non-standard spelling and
+punctuation has been left as in the original book.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Trimming of Goosie, by James Hopper
+
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