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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Sick-a-Bed Lady, by Eleanor Hallowell
+Abbott
+
+
+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 Sick-a-Bed Lady
+       And Also Hickory Dock, The Very Tired Girl, The Happy-Day, Something That Happened in October, The Amateur Lover, Heart of The City, The Pink Sash, Woman's Only Business
+
+
+Author: Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
+
+
+
+Release Date: January 3, 2011  [eBook #34829]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SICK-A-BED LADY***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell and the Online Distributed Proofreading
+Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by
+Internet Archive/American Libraries
+(http://www.archive.org/details/americana)
+
+
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
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+      See 34829-h.htm or 34829-h.zip:
+      (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/34829/34829-h/34829-h.htm)
+      or
+      (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/34829/34829-h.zip)
+
+
+      Images of the original pages are available through
+      Internet Archive/American Libraries. See
+      http://www.archive.org/details/sickabedlady00abborich
+
+
+
+
+
+THE SICK-A-BED LADY
+
+[Illustration: "_That_ will help you remember where your mouth is"]
+
+
+THE SICK-A-BED LADY
+
+And Also
+Hickory Dock, The Very Tired Girl, The Happy-Day,
+Something That Happened in October, The Amateur Lover,
+Heart of The City, The Pink Sash, Woman's Only Business
+
+by
+
+ELEANOR HALLOWELL ABBOTT
+
+Author of "Molly Make-Believe"
+
+Illustrated
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+New York
+The Century Co.
+1911
+
+Copyright, 1911, by
+The Century Co.
+
+Copyright, 1905, 1907, by P. F. Collier & Son
+Copyright, 1905, by J. B. Lippincott Company
+Copyright, 1906, 1907, 1908, 1909, 1910, by The Ridgway Company
+Copyright, 1910, by The Success Company
+
+Published, October, 1911
+
+
+
+
+          TO
+          THE MEMORY OF
+          TWO FATHERS
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                            PAGE
+    THE SICK-A-BED LADY                                        3
+    HICKORY DOCK                                              33
+    THE VERY TIRED GIRL                                       57
+    THE HAPPY-DAY                                             89
+    THE RUNAWAY ROAD                                         127
+    SOMETHING THAT HAPPENED IN OCTOBER                       161
+    THE AMATEUR LOVER                                        195
+    HEART OF THE CITY                                        253
+    THE PINK SASH                                            291
+    WOMAN'S ONLY BUSINESS                                    331
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+  "_That_ will help you remember where your mouth is"     _Frontispiece_
+                                                            FACING PAGE
+  With no other object, except to get home                           58
+  The blue ocean was the most wonderful thing of all                 96
+  Instinctively she clasped it to her                               146
+  The four of us who remained huddled very close around the fire    164
+  "Hello, all you animals!" she cried                               244
+  The lone, accentuated figure of a boy violinist                   256
+  "Is--a--pink--sash--exactly a--a--passion?"                       298
+  "Oh, I wish I had a sister," fretted the boy                      364
+
+
+
+
+THE SICK-A-BED LADY
+
+
+THE Sick-A-Bed Lady lived in a huge old-fashioned mahogany bedstead,
+with solid silk sheets, and three great squashy silk pillows edged with
+fluffy ruffles. On a table beside the Sick-A-Bed Lady was a tiny little,
+shiny little bell that tinkled exactly like silver raindrops on a golden
+roof, and all around this Lady and this Bedstead and this Bell was a
+big, square, shadowy room with a smutty fireplace, four small paned
+windows, and a chintzy wall-paper showered profusely with high-handled
+baskets of lavender flowers over which strange green birds hovered
+languidly.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Sick-A-Bed Lady, herself, was as old as twenty, but she did not look
+more than fifteen with her little wistful white face against the creamy
+pillows and her soft brown hair braided in two thick pigtails and tied
+with great pink bows behind each ear.
+
+When the Sick-A-Bed Lady felt like sitting up high against her pillows,
+she could look out across the footboard through her opposite window. Now
+through that opposite window was a marvelous vista--an old-fashioned
+garden, millions of miles of ocean, and then--France! And when the wind
+was in just the right direction there was a perfectly wonderful smell to
+be smelled--part of it was Cinnamon Pink and part of it was
+Salt-Sea-Weed, but most of it, of course, was--France. There were days
+and days, too, when any one with sense could feel that the waves beat
+perkily against the shore with a very strong French accent, and that all
+one's French verbs, particularly "_J'aime_, _Tu aimes_, _Il aime_," were
+coming home to rest. What else was there to think about in bed but funny
+things like that?
+
+It was the Old Doctor who had brought the Sick-A-Bed Lady to the big
+white house at the edge of the Ocean, and placed her in the cool, quaint
+room with its front windows quizzing dreamily out to sea, and its side
+windows cuddled close to the curving village street. It was a long,
+tiresome, dangerous journey, and the Sick-A-Bed Lady in feverish fancy
+had moaned: "I shall die, I shall die, I shall _die_," every step of the
+way, but, after all, it was the Old Doctor who did the dying! Just like
+a snap of the finger he went at the end of two weeks, and the
+Sick-A-Bed Lady rallied to the shock with a plaintive: "Seems to me he
+was in an _awful_ hurry," and fell back on her soft bed into days of
+unconsciousness that were broken only by riotous visions day and night
+of an old man rushing frantically up to a great white throne yelling:
+"One, two, three, for Myself!"
+
+Out of this trouble the Sick-A-Bed Lady woke one day to find herself
+quite alone and quite alive. She had often felt alone before, but it was
+a long time since she had felt alive. The world seemed very pleasant.
+The flowers on the wall-paper were still unwilted, and the green paper
+birds hung airily without fatigue. The room was full of the most
+enticing odor of cinnamon pinks, and by raising herself up in bed the
+merest trifle she could get a smell of good salt, a smell which somehow
+you couldn't get unless you actually _saw_ the Ocean, but just as she
+was laboriously tugging herself up an atom higher, trying to find the
+teeniest, weeniest sniff of France, everything went suddenly black and
+silver before her eyes, and she fell down, down, down, as much as forty
+miles into Nothing At All.
+
+When she woke up again all limp and wappsy there was a Young Man's Face
+on the Footboard of the bed; just an isolated, unconnected sort of face
+that might have blossomed from the footboard, or might have been merely
+a mirage on the horizon. Whatever it was, though, it kept staring at
+her fixedly, balancing itself all the while most perfectly on its chin.
+It was a funny sight, and while the Sick-A-Bed Lady was puckering her
+forehead trying to think out what it all meant the Young Man's Face
+smiled at her and said "_Boo!_" and the Sick-A-Bed Lady tiptilted her
+chin weakly and said--"Boo _yourself_!" Then the Sick-A-Bed Lady fell
+into her fearful stupor again, and the Young Man's Face ran home as fast
+as it could to tell its Best Friend that the Sick-A-Bed Lady had spoken
+her first sane word for five weeks. He thought it was a splendid
+victory, but when he tried to explain it to his friend, he found that
+"Boo _yourself_!" seemed a fatuous proof of so startling a truth, and
+was obliged to compromise with considerable dignity on the statement:
+"Well, of course, it wasn't so much what she said as the _way_ she said
+it."
+
+For days and days that followed, the Sick-A-Bed Lady was conscious of
+nothing except the Young Man's Face on the footboard of the bed. It
+never seemed to wabble, it never seemed to waver, but just stayed there
+perfectly balanced on the point of its chin, watching her gravely with
+its blue, blue eyes. There was a cleft in its chin, too, that you could
+have stroked with your finger if--you could have. Of course, there were
+some times when she went to sleep, and some times when she just seemed
+to go _out_ like a candle, but whenever she came back from _anything_
+there was always the Young Man's Face for comfort.
+
+The Sick-A-Bed Lady was so sick that she thought all over her body
+instead of in her head, so that it was very hard to concentrate any
+particular thought in her mouth, but at last one afternoon with a mighty
+struggle she opened her half-closed eyes, looked right in the Young
+Man's Face and said: "Got any arms?"
+
+The Young Man's Face nodded perfectly politely, and smiled as he raised
+two strong, lean hands to the edge of the footboard, and hunched his
+shoulders obligingly across the sky line.
+
+"How do you feel?" he asked very gently.
+
+Then the Sick-A-Bed Lady knew at once that it was the Young Doctor, and
+wondered why she hadn't thought of it before.
+
+"Am I pretty sick?" she whispered deferentially.
+
+"Yes--I think you are _very pretty_--sick," said the Young Doctor, and
+he towered up to a terrible, leggy height and laughed joyously, though
+there was almost no sound to his laugh. Then he went over to the window
+and began to jingle small bottles, and the Sick-A-Bed Lady lay and
+watched him furtively and thought about his compliment, and wondered why
+when she wanted to smile and say "Thank you" her mouth should shut
+tight and her left foot wiggle, instead.
+
+When the Young Doctor had finished jingling bottles, he came and sat
+down beside her and fed her something wet out of a cool spoon, which she
+swallowed and swallowed and swallowed, feeling all the while like a very
+sick brown-eyed dog that couldn't wag anything but the far-away tip of
+its tail. When she got through swallowing she wanted very much to stand
+up and make a low bow, but instead she touched the warm little end of
+her tongue to the Young Doctor's hand. After that, though, for quite a
+few minutes her brain felt clean and tidy, and she talked quite
+pleasantly to the Young Doctor: "Have you got any bones in your arms?"
+she asked wistfully.
+
+"Why, yes, indeed," said the Young Doctor, "rather more than the usual
+number of bones. Why?"
+
+"I'd give my life," said the Sick-A-Bed Lady, "if there were bones in my
+silky pillows." She faltered a moment and then continued bravely: "Would
+you mind--holding me up stiff and strong for a second? There's no bottom
+to my bed, there's no top to my brain, and if I can't find a hard edge
+to something I shall topple right off the earth. So would you mind
+holding me like an _edge_ for a moment--that is--if there's no lady to
+care? I'm not a little girl," she added conscientiously--"I'm twenty
+years old."
+
+So the Young Doctor slipped over gently behind her and lifted her limp
+form up into the lean, solid curve of his arm and shoulder. It wasn't
+exactly a sumptuous corner like silken pillows, but it felt as glad as
+the first rock you strike on a life-swim for shore, and the Sick-A-Bed
+Lady dropped right off to sleep sitting bolt upright, wondering vaguely
+how she happened to have two hearts, one that fluttered in the usual
+place, and one that pounded rather noisily in her back somewhere between
+her shoulder-blades.
+
+On his way home that day the Young Doctor stopped for a long while at
+his Best Friend's house to discuss some curious features of the Case.
+
+"Anything new turned up?" asked the Best Friend.
+
+"Nothing," said the Young Doctor, pulling moodily at his cigar.
+
+"Well, it certainly beats _me_," exclaimed the Best Friend, "how any
+long-headed, shrewd old fellow like the Old Doctor could have brought a
+raving fever patient here and installed her in his own house under that
+clumsy Old Housekeeper without once mentioning to any one who the girl
+was, or where to communicate with her people. Great Heavens, the Old
+Doctor knew what a poor 'risk' he was. He knew absolutely that that
+heart of his would burst some day like a firecracker."
+
+"The Old Doctor never was very communicative," mused the Young Doctor,
+with a slight grimace that might have suggested professional memories
+not strictly pleasant. "But I'll surely never forget him as long as
+ether exists," he added whimsically. "Why, you'd have thought the old
+chap invented ether--you'd have thought he ate it, drank it, bathed in
+it. I hope the _smell_ of my profession will never be the only part of
+it I'm willing to share."
+
+"That's all right," said the Best Friend, "that's all right. If he
+wanted to go off every Winter to the States and work in the Hospitals,
+and come back every Spring smelling like a Surgical Ward, with a lot of
+wonderful information which he kept to himself, why, that was his own
+business. He was a plucky old fellow anyway to go at all. But what I'm
+kicking at is his wicked carelessness in bringing this young girl here
+in a critical illness without taking a single soul into his confidence.
+Here he's dead and buried for weeks, and the Girl's people are probably
+worrying themselves crazy about not hearing from her. But why don't they
+write? Why in thunder don't they write?"
+
+"Don't ask me!" cried the Young Doctor nervously. "I don't know! I don't
+know anything about it. Why, I don't even know whether the Girl is
+going to live. I don't even know whether she'll ever be sane again. How
+can I stop to quiz about her name and her home, when, perhaps, her whole
+life and reason rests in my foolish hands that have never done anything
+yet much more vital than usher a perfectly willing baby into life, or
+tinker with croup in some chunky throat? There's only one thing in the
+case that I'm sure of, and that is that she doesn't know herself who she
+is, and the effort to remember might snap her utterly. She's just a
+thread.
+
+"I have an idea--" the Young Doctor shook his shoulders as though to
+shake off his more somber thoughts--"I have an idea that the Old Doctor
+rather counted on building up a sort of informal sanitarium here. He was
+daft, you know, about the climate on this particular stretch of coast.
+You remember that he brought home some athlete last Summer--pretty bad
+case of breakdown, too, but the Old Doctor cured him like a magician;
+and the Spring before that there was a little lad with epilepsy, wasn't
+there? The Old Doctor let me look at him once just to tease me. And
+before that--I can count up half-a-dozen people of that sort, people
+whom you would have said were 'gone-ers,' too. Oh, the Old Doctor would
+have brought home a dead man to cure if any one had 'stumped' him. And
+I guess this present case was a 'stump' fast enough. Why, she was raging
+like a prairie fire when they brought her here. No other man would have
+dared to travel. And they put her down in a great silk bed like a
+fairy-story, and the Old Doctor sat and watched her night and day
+studying her like a fiend, and she got better after a while: not keen,
+you know, but funny like a child, cooing and crooning over her pretty
+room, and tickled to pieces with the ocean, and vain as a kitten over
+her pink ribbons--the Old Doctor wouldn't let them cut her hair--and
+everything went on like that, till in a horrid flash the Old Doctor
+dropped dead that morning at the breakfast table, the little girl went
+loony again, and every possible clew to her identity was wiped off the
+earth!"
+
+"No baggage?" suggested the Best Friend.
+
+"Why, of course, there was baggage!" the Young Doctor exclaimed, "a
+great trunk. Haven't the Housekeeper and I rummaged and rummaged it till
+I can feel the tickle of lace across my wrists even in my sleep? Why,
+man alive! she's a _rich_ girl. There never were such clothes in our
+town before. She's no free hospital pauper whom the Old Doctor
+obligingly took off their hands. That is, I don't see how she can be!
+
+"Oh, well," he continued bitterly, "everybody in town calls her just the
+Sick-A-Bed Lady, and pretty soon it will be the Death-Bed Lady, and
+then it will be the Dead-and-Buried Lady--and that's all we'll ever know
+about it." He shivered clammily as he finished and reached for a
+scorching glass of whisky on the table.
+
+But the Young Doctor did not feel so lugubrious the next day and the
+next and the next, when he found the Sick-A-Bed Lady rallying slowly but
+surely to the skill of his head and hands. To be frank, she still lay
+for hours at a time in a sort of gentle daze watching the world go by
+without her, but little by little her body strengthened as a wilted
+flower freshens in water, and little by little she struggled harder for
+words that even then did not always match her thoughts.
+
+The village continued to speculate about her lost identity, but the
+Young Doctor seemed to worry less and less about it as time went on. If
+the sweetest little girl you ever saw knew perfectly whom you meant when
+you said "Dear," what was the use of hunting up such prosy names as May
+or Alice? And as to her funny speeches, was there anything in the world
+more piquant than to be called a "beautiful horse," when she meant a
+"kind doctor"? Was there anything dearer than her absurd wrath over her
+blunders, or the way she shook her head like an angry little heifer,
+when she occasionally forgot altogether how to talk? It was at one of
+these latter times that the Young Doctor, watching her desperate
+struggle to focus her speech, forgot all about her twenty years and
+stooped down suddenly and kissed her square on her mouth.
+
+"There," he laughed, "_that_ will help you remember where your mouth
+is!" But it was astonishing after that how many times he had to remind
+her.
+
+He couldn't help loving her. No man could have helped loving her. She
+was so little and dear and gentle and--lost.
+
+The Sick-A-Bed Lady herself didn't know who she was, but she would have
+perished with fright if she had realized that no one in the village, and
+not even the Young Doctor himself, could guess her identity.
+
+The Young Doctor knew everything else in the world; why shouldn't he
+know who she was? He knew all about France being directly opposite the
+house; he had known it ever since he was a boy, and had been glad about
+it. He stopped her trying to count the green birds on the wall-paper
+because he "knew positively" that there were four hundred and seventeen
+whole birds, and nineteen half birds cut off by the wainscoting. He
+never laughed at her when she slid down the side of her bed by the
+village street window, and went to sleep with her curly head pillowed on
+the hard, white sill. He never laughed, because he understood perfectly
+that if you hung one white arm down over the sidewalk when you went to
+sleep, sometimes little children would come and put flowers in your
+hand, or, more wonderful still, perhaps, a yellow collie dog would come
+and lick your fingers.
+
+Nothing could surprise the Young Doctor. Sometimes the Sick-A-Bed Lady
+took thoughts she did have and mixed them up with thoughts she didn't
+have, and _sprung_ them on the poor Young Doctor, but he always said,
+"Why, of _course_," as simply as possible.
+
+But more than all the other wise things he knew was the wise one about
+smelly things. He knew that when you were very, very, _very_ sick,
+nothing pleased you so much as nice, smelly things. He brought wild
+strawberries, for instance, not so much to eat as to smell, but when he
+wasn't looking she gobbled them down as fast as she could. And he
+brought her all kinds of flowers, one or two at a time, and seemed so
+disappointed when she just sniffed them and smiled; but one day he
+brought her a spray of yellow jasmine, and she snatched it up and kissed
+it and cried "_Home_," and the Young Doctor was so pleased that he wrote
+it right down in a little book and ran away to study up something. He
+let her smell the fresh green bank-notes in his pocketbook. Oh, they
+were good to smell, and after a while she said "Shops." He brought her
+a tiny phial of gasoline from his neighbor's automobile, and she
+crinkled up her nose in disgust and called it "gloves" and slapped it
+playfully out of his hand. But when he brought her his riding-coat she
+rubbed her cheek against it and whispered some funny chirruppy things.
+His pipe, though, was the most confusing symbol of all. It was his best
+pipe, too, and she snuggled it up to her nose and cried "_You, y-o-u_!"
+and hid it under her pillow and wouldn't give it back to him, and though
+he tried her a dozen times about it, she never acknowledged any
+association except that joyous, "_Y-o-u_!"
+
+So day by day she gained in consecutive thought till at last she grew so
+reasonable as to ask: "Why do you call me _Dear_?"
+
+And the Young Doctor forgot all about his earliest reason and answered
+perfectly simply: "Because I love you."
+
+Then some of the evenings grew to be almost sweetheart evenings, though
+the Sick-A-Bed Lady's fragile childishness keyed the Young Doctor into
+an almost uncanny tenderness and restraint.
+
+Those were wonderful evenings, though, after the Sick-A-Bed Lady began
+to get better and better. A good deal of the Young Doctor's practice was
+scattered up and down the coast, and after the dust and sweat and glare
+and rumble of his long day he would come back to the sleepy village in
+the early evening, plunge for a freshening swim into the salt water,
+don his white clothes and saunter round to the quaint old house at the
+edge of the ocean. Here in the breezy kitchen he often sat for as long
+as an hour, talking with the Old Housekeeper, till the Sick-A-Bed Lady's
+tiny silver bell rang out with absurd peremptoriness. Then for as much
+time as seemed wise he went and sat with the Sick-A-Bed Lady.
+
+One night, one full-moon night, he came back from his day's work
+extraordinarily tired and fretted after a series of strident
+experiences, and hurried to the old house as to a veritable Haven of
+Refuge. The Housekeeper was busy with village company, so he postponed
+her report and went at once to the Sick-A-Bed Lady's room.
+
+Only fools lit lights on such a night as that, and he threw himself down
+in the big chair by the bedside, and fairly basked in peacefulness and
+moonlight and content, while the Sick-A-Bed Lady leaned over and stroked
+his hair with her little white fingers, crooning some pleasant, childish
+thing about "nice, smoky Boy." There was no fret or fuss or even sound
+in the room, except the drowsy murmur of voices in the Garden, and the
+churky splash of little waves against the shore.
+
+"Hear the French Verbs," said the Sick-A-Bed Lady, at last, with
+deliberate mischief. Then she shut her lips tight and waved her hands
+distractedly after a manner she had when she wished to imply that she
+was suddenly stricken dumb. The Young Doctor laughed and reached over
+and kissed her.
+
+"_J'aime_," he said.
+
+"_J'aime_," the Sick-A-Bed Lady repeated.
+
+"_Tu aimes_," he persisted.
+
+"_Tu aimes_," she echoed on his lips.
+
+--Then--"There'll be no '_he_ loves' to our story," he cried suddenly,
+and caught her so fiercely to his breast that she gave a little quick
+gasp of pain and struggled back on her pillows, and the Young Doctor
+jumped up in bitter, stinging contrition and strode out of the room.
+Just across the threshold he met the Old Housekeeper with a clattering
+tray of dishes.
+
+"I'm going down to the Library to smoke," he said huskily to her. "Come
+there when you've finished. I want to talk with you."
+
+His thoughts of himself were not kind as he wandered into the library
+and settled down in the first big chair that struck his fancy.
+
+Then he fell to wondering whether there was anything gross about his
+love, because it took no heed of mental qualifications. He thought of at
+least three houses in the village where that very night he would have
+found lights and laughter and clever talk, and the prodding sympathy of
+earnest women who made the sternest happening of the day seem nothing
+more than a dress rehearsal for the evening's narration of it. Then he
+thought again of the big, quiet room upstairs, with its unquestioning
+peace and love and restfulness and content. What was the best thing
+after all that a woman could bring to a man? Yet a year ago he had
+bragged of the blatant braininess of his best woman friend! He began to
+laugh at himself.
+
+Slowly the incongruities of the whole situation bore in upon him, and he
+sat and smoked and smiled in moody silence, staring with skeptical
+interest at the dimly lighted room around him. It was certainly the Old
+Doctor's private study, and realization of just what that meant came
+over him ironically.
+
+The Old Doctor had been very stingy with his house and his books and his
+knowledge and his patients. It was natural perhaps under the
+professional circumstances of waning Age and waxing Youth. Yet the fact
+remained. Never before in five years of village association had the
+Young Doctor crossed the threshold of the Old Doctor's home, yet now he
+came and went like the Man of the House. Here he sat at this instant in
+the Old Doctor's private study, in the Old Doctor's chair, his feet upon
+the Old Doctor's table, and the whole great room with its tier after
+tier of bookcases, and its drawer after drawer of probable memoranda
+_free_ before him. He could imagine the Old Doctor's impotent wrath over
+such a contingency, yet he felt no sentimental mawkishness over his own
+position. As far as he knew the Dead were dead.
+
+Sitting there in the Old Doctor's study, he conjured up scene after
+scene of the Old Doctor's irascibility and exclusiveness. Even as late
+as the Sick-A-Bed Lady's arrival, the Old Doctor had snubbed him
+unmercifully before a crowd of people. It was at the station when the
+little sick stranger was being taken off the car and put into a
+carriage, and the Old Doctor had hailed the Younger with unwonted
+friendliness.
+
+"I've got a case in there that would make you famous if you could master
+it," he said.
+
+The Young Doctor remembered perfectly how he had walked into the trap.
+
+"What is it?" he had cried eagerly.
+
+"That's none of your business," chuckled the Old Doctor, and drove away
+with all the platform loafers shouting with delight.
+
+Well, it seemed to be the Young Doctor's business _now_, and he got up,
+turned the lamp higher and began to hunt through the Old Doctor's rarest
+books for some light on certain curious developments in the Sick-A-Bed
+Lady's case.
+
+He was just in the midst of this hunt when the Old Housekeeper glided
+in like a ghost and startled him.
+
+"Sit down," he said absent-mindedly, and went on with his reading. He
+had almost forgotten her presence when she coughed and said: "Excuse me,
+sir, but I've something very special to say to you."
+
+The Young Doctor looked up in surprise and saw that the Woman's face was
+ashy white.
+
+"I--don't--think--you quite--understand the case," she stammered. "I
+think the little lady upstairs is going to be a Mother!"
+
+The Young Doctor put his hand up to his face, and his face felt like
+parchment. He put his hand down to the book again, and the book cover
+quivered like flesh.
+
+"What do you m-e-a-n?" he asked.
+
+"I'll tell you what I mean," said the Old Housekeeper, and led him back
+to the sick room.
+
+Two hours later the Young Doctor staggered into his Best Friend's house
+clutching a sheet of letter paper in his hand. His shoulders dragged as
+though under a pack, and every trace of boyishness was wrung like a rag
+out of his face.
+
+"For Heaven's sake, what's the matter?" cried his friend, starting up.
+
+"Nothing," muttered the Young Doctor, "except the Sick-A-Bed Lady."
+
+"When did she die? What happened?"
+
+The Young Doctor made a gesture of dissent and crawled into a chair and
+began to fumble with the paper in his hand. Then he shivered and stared
+his Best Friend straight in the face.
+
+"You might say," he stammered, "that I have just heard from the
+Sick-A-Bed Lady's Husband--" he choked at the word, and his Friend sat
+up with astonishment: "You heard me _say_ I had heard from the
+Sick-A-Bed Lady's Husband?" he persisted. "_You_ heard me say it, mind
+you. You heard me say that her Husband is sick in Japan--detained
+indefinitely--so we are afraid he won't get here in time for her
+confinement--"
+
+The sweat broke out in great drops on his forehead, and his hand that
+held the sheet of paper shook like a hand that has strained its muscles
+with heavy weights.
+
+The Best Friend took a scathing glance at the scribbled words on the
+paper and laughed mirthlessly.
+
+"You're a good fool," he said, "a good fool, and I'll publish your
+blessed lie to the whole stupid village, if that's what you want."
+
+But the Young Doctor sat oblivious with his head in his hands,
+muttering: "Blind fool, blind fool, how could I have been such a blind
+fool?"
+
+"What is it to _you_?" asked his Best Friend abruptly.
+
+The Young Doctor jumped to his feet and squared his shoulders.
+
+"It's _this_ to me," he cried, "that I wanted her for my own! I could
+have cured her. I tell you I could have cured her. I wanted her for my
+own!"
+
+"She's only a waif," said the Best Friend tersely.
+
+"Waif?" cried the Young Doctor, "_waif_? No woman whom I love is a
+_waif_!" His face blazed furiously. "The woman I _love_--that little
+gentle girl--a waif?--without a home?--I would make a cool home for her
+out of Hell itself, if it was necessary! Damn, damn, _damn_ the brute
+that deserted her, but _home is all around her_ NOW! Do I think the Old
+Doctor guessed about it? _N-o!_ Nobody could have guessed about it.
+Nobody could have known about it much before this. You say _again_ she
+isn't _anybody's_? I'll prove to you as soon as it's decent that she's
+_mine_."
+
+His Best Friend took him by the shoulder and shook him roughly.
+
+"It is no time," he said, "for you to be courting a woman."
+
+"I'll court my Sweetheart when and where I choose!" the Young Doctor
+answered defiantly, and left the house.
+
+The night seemed a thousand miles long to him, but when he slept at
+last and woke again, the air was fresh and hopeful with a new day. He
+dressed quickly and hurried off to the scene of last night's tragedy,
+where he found the Old Housekeeper arguing in the doorway with a small
+boy. She turned to the Doctor complacently. "He's begging for the
+postage stamp off the Japanese letter," she exclaimed, "and I'm just
+telling him I sent it to my Sister's boy in Montreal."
+
+There was no slightest trace of self-consciousness in her manner, and
+the Young Doctor could not help but smile as he beckoned her into the
+house and shut the door.
+
+Then, "Have you told her?" he asked eagerly.
+
+The Old Housekeeper humped her shoulders against the door and folded her
+arms sumptuously. "No, I haven't told her," she said, "and I'm not going
+to. I don't dar'st! I help you out about your business same as I helped
+the Old Doctor out about his business. That's all right. That's as it
+should be. And I'll go skipping up those stairs to tell the little lady
+any highfaluting, pleasant yarn that you can invent, but I don't budge
+one single step to tell that poor, innocent, loony Lamb--the _truth_. It
+isn't ugliness, Doctor. I haven't got the strength, that's all!"
+
+Just then the little silver bell tinkled, and the Doctor went heavily up
+the few steps that swung the Sick-A-Bed Lady's room just out of line of
+real upstairs or downstairs.
+
+The Sick-A-Bed Lady was lying in glorious state, arrayed in a wonderful
+pale green kimono with shimmering silver birds on it.
+
+"You stayed too long downstairs," she asserted and went on trying to cut
+out pictures from a magazine.
+
+The Young Doctor stood at the window looking out to sea as long as his
+legs would hold him, and then he came back and sat down on the edge of
+the bed.
+
+"What's your name, Honey?" he asked with a forced smile.
+
+"Why, 'Dear,' of course," she answered and dropped her scissors in
+surprise.
+
+"What's my name?" he continued, fencing for time.
+
+"Just '_Boy_,'" she said with sweet, contented positiveness.
+
+The Young Doctor shivered and got up and started to leave the room, but
+at the threshold he stopped resolutely and came back and sat down again.
+
+This time he took his Mother's wedding ring from his little finger and
+twirled it with apparent aimlessness in his hands.
+
+Its glint caught the Sick-A-Bed Lady's eye, and she took it daintily in
+her fingers and examined it carefully. Then, as though it recalled some
+vague memory, she crinkled up her forehead and started to get out of
+bed. The Young Doctor watched her with agonized interest. She went
+direct to her bureau and began to search diligently through all the
+drawers, but when she reached the lower drawer and found some
+bright-colored ribbons she forgot her original quest, whatever it was,
+and brought all the ribbons back to bed with her.
+
+The Young Doctor started to leave her again, this time with a little
+gesture which she took to be anger, but he had not gone further than the
+head of the stairs before she called him back in a voice that was
+startlingly mature and reasonable.
+
+"Oh, Boy, come back," she cried. "I'll be good. What do you want?"
+
+The Young Doctor came doubtfully.
+
+"Do you understand me to-day?" he asked in a voice that sent an ominous
+chill to her heart. "Can you think pretty clearly to-day?"
+
+She nodded her head. "Yes," she answered; "it's a good day."
+
+"Do you know what marriage is?" he asked abruptly.
+
+"Oh, yes," she said, but her face clouded perceptibly.
+
+Then he took her in his arms and told her plainly, brutally, clumsily,
+without preface, without comment: "Honey, you are going to have a
+child."
+
+For a second her mind wavered before him. He could actually see the
+totter in her eyes, and braced himself for the final hopeless crash, but
+suddenly all her being focused to the realization of his words, and she
+pushed at him with her hands and cried: "No--No--Oh, my God--_n-o_!" and
+fainted in his arms.
+
+When she woke up again the little-girl look was all gone from her face,
+and though the Young Doctor smiled and smiled and smiled, he could not
+smile it back again. She just lay and watched him questioningly.
+
+"Sweetheart," he whispered at last, "do you remember what I told you?"
+
+"Yes," she answered gravely, "I remember that, but I don't remember what
+it means. Is it all right? Is it all right to _you_?"
+
+"Yes," said the Young Doctor, "it's--all--right to--me."
+
+Then the Sick-A-Bed Lady turned her little face wearily away on her
+pillow and went back to those dreams of hers which no one could fathom.
+
+For all the dragging weeks and months that followed she lay in her bed
+or groped her way round her room in a sort of timid stupor. Whenever the
+Young Doctor was there she clung to him desperately and seemed to find
+her only comfort in his presence, but when she talked to him it was
+babbling talk of things and places he could not understand. All the
+village feared for the imminent tragedy in the great white house, and
+mourned the pathetic absence of the young husband, and the Young Doctor
+went his sorrowful way cursing that other "boy" who had wrought this
+final disaster on a girl's life.
+
+But when the Sick-A-Bed Lady's hour of trial came and some one held the
+merciful cone of ether to her face, the Sick-A-Bed Lady took one deep,
+heedless breath, then gave suddenly a great gasp, snatched the cone from
+her face, struggled up and stretched out her arms and cried, "Boy--Boy!"
+
+The Young Doctor came running to her and saw that her eyes were big and
+startled and sharp with terror:
+
+"Oh, Boy--_Boy_," she cried, "the Ether!--I remember _everything_
+now--I--was his wife--the Old Doctor's Wife!"
+
+The Young Doctor tried to replace the cone, but she beat at him
+furiously with her hands, crying:
+
+"No, No, No!--If you give me Ether I shall die thinking of him!--Oh,
+no!--_n-o_!"
+
+The Young Doctor's face was like chalk. His knees shook under him.
+
+"My God!" he said, "what _can_ I give you!"
+
+The Sick-A-Bed Lady looked up at him and smiled a tortured, gallant
+smile. "Give me something to keep me here," she gasped! "Give me a token
+of you! Give me your little briarwood pipe to smell--and give it to
+me--quickly!"
+
+
+
+
+HICKORY DOCK
+
+Used by permission of _Lippincott's Magazine_.
+
+
+THIS is the story of Hickory Dock, and of a Man and a Girl who trifled
+with Time.
+
+Hickory Dock was a clock, and, of course, the Man, being a man, called
+it a clock, but the Girl, being a girl, called it a Hickory Dock for no
+more legitimate reason than that once upon a time
+
+          "Hickory, Dickory, Dock,
+           A Mouse ran up the Clock."
+
+--Girls are funny things.
+
+The Man and the Girl were very busy collecting a Home--in one room. They
+were just as poor as Art and Music could make them, but poverty does not
+matter much to lovers. The Man had collected the Girl, a wee diamond
+ring, a big Morris chair, two or three green and rose rugs, a shiny
+chafing-dish, and various incidentals. The Girl was no less
+discriminating. She had accumulated the Man, a Bagdad couch-cover,
+half-a-dozen pictures, a huge gilt mirror, three or four bits of fine
+china and silver, and a fair-sized boxful of lace and ruffles that
+idled under the couch until the Wedding-Day. The room was strikingly
+homelike, masculinely homelike, in all its features, but it was by no
+means home--yet. No place is home until _two_ people have latch-keys.
+The Girl wore _her_ key ostentatiously on a long, fine chain round her
+neck, but its mate hung high and dusty on a brass hook over the
+fireplace, and the sight of it teased the Man more than anything else
+that had ever happened to him in his life. The Girl was easily mistress
+of the situation, but the Man, you see, was not yet Master.
+
+It was tacitly understood that if the Wedding-Day _ever_ arrived, the
+Girl should slip the extra key into her husband's hand the very first
+second that the Minister closed his eyes for the blessing. She would
+have chosen to do this openly in exchange for her ring, but the Man
+contended that it might not be legal to be married with a
+latch-key--some ministers are so particular. It was a joke,
+anyway--everything except the Wedding-Day itself. Meanwhile Hickory Dock
+kept track of the passing hours.
+
+When the Man first brought Hickory Dock to the Girl, in a mysteriously
+pulsating tissue-paper package, the Girl pretended at once that she
+thought it was a dynamite bomb, and dropped it precipitously on the
+table and sought immediate refuge in the Man's arms, from which
+propitious haven she ventured forth at last and picked up the package
+gingerly, and rubbed her cheek against it--after the manner of girls
+with bombs. Then she began to tug at the string and tear at the paper.
+
+"Why, it's a Hickory Dock!" she exclaimed with delight,--"a real, live
+Hickory Dock!" and brandished the gift on high to the imminent peril of
+time and chance, and then fled back to the Man's arms with no excuse
+whatsoever. She was a bold little lover.
+
+"But it's a _c-l-o-c-k_," remonstrated the Man with whimsical
+impatience. He had spent half his month's earnings on the gift. "Why
+can't you call it a clock? Why can't you _ever_ call things by their
+right names?"
+
+Then the Girl dimpled and blushed and burrowed her head in his shoulder,
+and whispered humbly, "Right name? Right names? Call things by their
+right names? Would you rather I called _you_ by your right name--Mr.
+James Herbert Humphrey Jason?"
+
+_That_ settled the matter--settled it so hard that the Girl had to
+whisper the Man's wrong name seven times in his ear before he was
+satisfied. No man is practical about everything.
+
+There are a good many things to do when you are in love, but the Girl
+did not mean that the _Art of Conversation_ should be altogether lost,
+so she plunged for a topic.
+
+"I think it was beautiful of you to give me a Hickory Dock," she
+ventured at last.
+
+The Man shifted a trifle uneasily and laughed. "I thought perhaps it
+would please you," he stammered. "You see, now I have given you _all my
+time_."
+
+The Girl chuckled with amused delight. "Yes--all your time. And it's
+nice to have a Hickory Dock that says 'Till he comes! Till he comes!
+Till he comes!'"
+
+"Till he comes to--_stay_," persisted the Man. There was no sparkle in
+his sentiment. He said things very plainly, but his words drove the Girl
+across the room to the window with her face flaming. He jumped and
+followed her, and caught her almost roughly by the shoulder and turned
+her round.
+
+"Rosalie, Rosalie," he demanded, "will you love me till the _end of
+time_?" There was no gallantry in his face but a great, dogged
+persistency that frightened the Girl into a flippant answer. She brushed
+her fluff of hair across his face and struggled away from him.
+
+"I will love you," she teased, "until--the clock stops."
+
+Then the Man burst out laughing, suddenly and unexpectedly, like a boy,
+and romped her back again across the room, and snatched up the clock and
+stole away the key.
+
+"Hickory Dock shall _never_ stop!" he cried triumphantly. "I will wind
+it till I die. And no one else must ever meddle with it."
+
+"But suppose you forget?" the Girl suggested half wistfully.
+
+"I shall _never_ forget," said the Man. "I will wind Hickory Dock every
+week as long as I live. I _p-r-o-m-i-s-e_!" His lips shut almost
+defiantly.
+
+"But it isn't fair," the Girl insisted. "It isn't fair for me to let you
+make such a long promise. You--might--stop--loving me." Her eyes filled
+quickly with tears. "Promise me just for one year,"--she stamped her
+foot,--"I won't take any other promise."
+
+So, half provoked and half amused, the Man bound himself then and there
+for the paltry term of a year. But to fulfil his own sincerity and
+seriousness he took the clock and stopped it for a moment that he might
+start it up again with the Girl close in his arms. A half-frightened,
+half-willing captive, she stood in her prison and looked with furtive
+eyes into the little, potential face of Hickory Dock.
+
+"You--and I--for--_all time_," whispered the Man solemnly as he started
+the little mechanism throbbing once more on its way, and he stooped
+down to seal the pledge with a kiss, but once more the significance of
+his word and act startled the Girl, and she clutched at the clock and
+ran across the room with it, and set it down very hard on her desk
+beside the Man's picture. Then, half ashamed of her flight, she stooped
+down suddenly and patted the little, ticking surface of ebony and glass
+and silver.
+
+"It's a wonderful little Hickory Dock," she mused softly. "I never saw
+one just like it before."
+
+The Man hesitated for a second and drew his mouth into a funny twist. "I
+don't believe there _is_ another one like it in all the world," he
+acknowledged, half laughingly,--"that is, not _just_ like it. I've had
+it fixed so that it won't strike _eleven_. I'm utterly tired of having
+you say 'There! it's eleven o'clock and you've _got_ to go home.' _Now_,
+after ten o'clock nothing can strike till twelve, and that gives me two
+whole hours to use my own judgment in."
+
+The Girl took one eager step towards him, when suddenly over the city
+roofs and across the square came the hateful, strident chime of
+midnight. Midnight? _Midnight?_ The Girl rushed frantically to her
+closet and pulled the Man's coat out from among her fluffy dresses and
+thrust it into his hands, and he fled distractedly for his train without
+"Good-by."
+
+That was the trouble with having a lover who lived so far away and was
+so busy that he could come only one evening a week. Long as you could
+make that one evening, something always got crowded out. If you made
+love, there was no time to talk. If you talked, there was no time to
+make love. If you spent a great time in greetings, it curtailed your
+good-by. If you began your good-by any earlier, why, it cut your evening
+right in two. So the Girl sat and sulked a sad little while over the
+general misery of the situation, until at last, to comfort herself with
+the only means at hand, she went over to the closet and opened the door
+just wide enough to stick her nose in and sniff ecstatically.
+
+"Oh! O--h!" she crooned. "O--h! What a nice, smoky smell."
+
+Then she took Hickory Dock and went to bed. This method of bunking was
+nice for her, but it played sad havoc with Hickory Dock, who lay on his
+back and whizzed and whirred and spun around at such a rate that when
+morning came he was minutes and hours, not to say days, ahead of time.
+
+This gain in time seemed rather an advantage to the Girl. She felt that
+it was a good omen and must in some manner hasten the Wedding-Day, but
+when she confided the same to the Man at his next visit he viewed the
+fact with righteous scorn, though the fancy itself pleased him
+mightily. The Girl learned that night, however, to eschew Hickory Dock
+as a rag doll. She did not learn this, though, through any particular
+solicitude for Hickory Dock, but rather because she had to stand by
+respectfully a whole precious hour and watch the Man's lean, clever
+fingers tinker with the little, jeweled mechanism. It was a fearful
+waste of time. "You are so kind to _little_ things," she whispered at
+last, with a catch in her voice that made the Man drop his work suddenly
+and give all his attention to _big_ things. And another evening went,
+while Hickory Dock stood up like a hero and refused to strike eleven.
+
+So every Sunday night throughout the Winter and the Spring and the
+Summer, the Man came joyously climbing up the long stairs to the Girl's
+room, and every Sunday night Hickory Dock was started off on a fresh
+round of Time and Love.
+
+Hickory Dock, indeed, became a very precious object, for both Man and
+Girl had reached that particular stage of love where they craved the
+wonderful sensation of owning some vital thing together. But they were
+so busy loving that they did not recognize the instinct. The man looked
+upon Hickory Dock as an exceedingly blessed toy. The Girl grew gradually
+to cherish the little clock with a certain tender superstition and
+tingling reverence that sent her heart pounding every time the Man's
+fingers turned to any casual tinkering.
+
+And the Girl grew so exquisitely dear that the Man thought all women
+were like her. And the Man grew so sturdily precious that the Girl knew
+positively there was no person on earth to be compared with him. Over
+this happiness Hickory Dock presided throbbingly, and though he balked
+sometimes and bolted or lagged, he never stopped, and he never struck
+eleven.
+
+Thus things went on in the customary way that things do go on with men
+and girls--until the Chronic Quarrel happened. The Chronic Quarrel was a
+trouble quite distinct from any ordinary lovers' disturbance, and it was
+a very silly little thing like this: The Girl had a nature that was
+emotionally apprehensive. She was always looking, as it were, for "dead
+men in the woods." She was always saying, "Suppose you get tired of me?"
+"Suppose I died?" "Suppose I found out that you had a wife living?"
+"Suppose you lost all your legs and arms in a railroad accident when you
+were coming here some Sunday night?"
+
+And one day the Man had snapped her short with "Suppose? Suppose? What
+arrant nonsense! Suppose?--Suppose I fall in love with the Girl in the
+Office?"
+
+It seemed to him the most extravagant supposition that he could
+possibly imagine, and he was perfectly delighted with its effect on his
+Sweetheart. She grew silent at once and very wistful.
+
+After that he met all her apprehensions with "Suppose?--Suppose I fall
+in love with the Girl in the Office!"
+
+And one day the Girl looked up at him with hot tears in her eyes and
+said tersely, "Well, why don't you fall in love with her if you _want_
+to?"
+
+That, of course, made a little trouble, but it was delicious fun making
+up, and the "Girl in the Office" became gradually one of those
+irresistibly dangerous jokes that always begin with laughter and end
+just as invariably with tears. When the Girl was sad or blue the Man was
+clumsy enough to try and cheer her with facetious allusions to the "Girl
+in the Office," and when the Girl was supremely, radiantly happy she
+used to boast, "Why, I'm so happy I don't care a _rap_ about your old
+'Girl in the Office.'" But whatever way the joke began, it always ended
+disastrously, with bitterness and tears, yet neither Man nor Girl could
+bear to formally taboo the subject lest it should look like the first
+shirking of their perfect intimacy and freedom of speech. The Man felt
+that in love like theirs he ought to be able to say anything he wanted
+to, so he kept on saying it, while the Girl claimed an equal if more
+caustic liberty of expression, and the Chronic Quarrel began to fester
+a little round its edges.
+
+One night in November, when Hickory Dock was nearly a year old in love,
+the Chronic Quarrel came to a climax. The Man was very listless that
+evening, and absent-minded, and altogether inadequate. The Girl accused
+him of indifference. He accused her in return of a shrewish temper. She
+suggested that perhaps he regretted his visit. He failed to contradict
+her. Then the Girl drew herself up to an absurd height for so small a
+creature and said stiffly,--
+
+"You don't have to come next Sunday night if you don't want to."
+
+At her scathing words the Man straightened up very suddenly in his chair
+and gazed over at the little clock in a startled sort of way.
+
+"Why, of course I shall come," he retorted impulsively, "Hickory Dock
+needs me, if you don't."
+
+"Oh, come and wind the clock by all means," flared the Girl. "I'm glad
+_something_ needs you!"
+
+Then the Man followed his own judgment and went home, though it was only
+ten o'clock.
+
+"I'm not going to write to him this week," sobbed poor Rosalie. "I think
+he's very disagreeable."
+
+But when the next Sunday came and the Man was _late_, it seemed as
+though an Eternity had been tacked onto a hundred years. It was fully
+quarter-past eight before he came climbing up the stairs.
+
+The Girl looked scornfully at the clock. Her throat ached like a bruise.
+"You didn't hurry yourself much, did you?" she asked spitefully.
+
+The Man looked up quickly and bit his lip. "The train was late," he
+replied briefly. He did not stop to take off his coat, but walked over
+to the table and wound Hickory Dock. Then he hesitated the smallest
+possible fraction of a moment, but the Girl made no move, so he picked
+up his hat and started for the door.
+
+The Girl's heart sank, but her pride rose proportionally. "Is that all
+you came for?" she flushed. "Good! I am very tired to-night."
+
+Then the Man went away. She counted every footfall on the stairs. In the
+little hush at the street doorway she felt that he must surely turn and
+come running back again, breathless and eager, with outstretched arms
+and all the kisses she was starving for. But when she heard the front
+door slam with a vicious finality she went and threw herself, sobbing on
+the couch. "Fifty miles just to wind a clock!" she raged in grief and
+chagrin. "I'll punish him for it if that's all he comes for."
+
+So the next Sunday night she took Hickory Dock with a cruel jerk, and
+put him on the floor just outside her door, and left a candle burning so
+that the Man could not possibly fail to see what was intended. "If all
+he comes for is to wind the clock, just because he _promised_, there's
+no earthly use of his coming in," she reasoned, and went into her room
+and shut and locked her door, waiting nervously with clutched hands for
+the footfall on the stairs. "He loves some one else! He loves some one
+else!" she kept prodding herself.
+
+Just at eight o'clock the Man came. She heard him very distinctly on the
+creaky board at the head of the stairs, and her heart beat to
+suffocation. Then she heard him come close to the door, as though he
+stooped down, and then he--laughed.
+
+"Oh, very well," thought the Girl. "So he thinks it's funny, does he? He
+has no business to laugh while I am crying, even if he does love some
+one else.--I _hate him_!"
+
+The Man knocked on the door very softly, and the Girl gripped tight hold
+of her chair for fear she should jump up and let him in. He knocked
+again, and she heard him give a strange little gasp of surprise. Then he
+tried the door-handle. It turned fatuously, but the door would not open.
+He pushed his weight against it,--she could almost feel the soft whirr
+of his coat on the wood,--but the door would not yield.--Then he turned
+very suddenly and went away.
+
+The Girl got up with a sort of gloating look, as though she liked her
+pain. "Next Sunday night is the last Sunday night of his year's
+promise," she brooded; "then everything will be over. He will see how
+wise I was not to let him promise forever and ever. I will send Hickory
+Dock to him by express to save his coming for the final ceremony." Then
+she went out and got Hickory Dock and brought him in and shook him, but
+Hickory Dock continued to tick, "Till he comes! Till he comes! Till he
+comes!"
+
+It was a very tedious week. It is perfectly absurd to measure a week by
+the fact that seven days make it--some days are longer than others. By
+Wednesday the Girl's proud little heart had capitulated utterly, and she
+decided not to send Hickory Dock away by express, but to let things take
+their natural course. And every time she thought of the "natural course"
+her heart began to pound with expectation. Of course, she would not
+acknowledge that she really expected the Man to come after her cruel
+treatment of him the previous week. "Everything is over. Everything is
+over," she kept preaching to herself with many gestures and
+illustrations; but next to God she put her faith in promises, and hadn't
+the Man promised a great, sacred lover's promise that he would come
+every Sunday for a year? So when the final Sunday actually came she went
+to her wedding-box and took out her "second best" of everything, silk
+and ruffles and laces, and dressed herself up for sheer pride and joy,
+with tingling thoughts of the night when she should wear her "first
+best" things. She put on a soft, little, white Summer dress that the Man
+liked better than anything else, and stuck a pink bow in her hair, and
+big rosettes on her slippers, and drew the big Morris chair towards the
+fire, and brought the Man's pipe and tobacco-box from behind the gilt
+mirror. Then she took Hickory Dock very tenderly and put him outside the
+door, with two pink candles flaming beside him, and a huge pink rose
+over his left ear. She thought the Man could smell the rose the second
+he opened the street door. Then she went back to her room, and left her
+door a wee crack open, and crouched down on the floor close to it, like
+a happy, wounded thing, and _waited_--
+
+But the Man did not come. Eight o'clock, nine o'clock, ten o'clock,
+eleven o'clock, twelve o'clock, she waited, cramped and cold, hoping
+against hope, fearing against fear. Every creak on the stairs thrilled
+her. Every fresh disappointment chilled her right through to her heart.
+She sat and rocked herself in a huddled heap of pain, she taunted
+herself with lack of spirit, she goaded herself with intricate
+remorse--but she never left her bitter vigil until half-past two. Then
+some clatter of milkmen in the street roused her to the realization of a
+new day, and she got up dazed and icy, like one in a dream, and limped
+over to her couch and threw herself down to sleep like a drunken person.
+
+Late the next morning she woke heavily with a vague, dull sense of loss
+which she could not immediately explain. She lay and looked with
+astonishment at the wrinkled folds of the white mull dress that bound
+her limbs like a shroud. She clutched at the tightness of her collar,
+and fingered with surprise the pink bow in her hair. Then slowly, one by
+one, the events of the previous night came back to her in all their
+significance, and with a muffled scream of heartbreak she buried her
+face in the pillow. She cried till her heart felt like a clenched fist
+within her, and then, with her passion exhausted, she got up like a
+little, cold, rumpled ghost and pattered out to the hall in her
+silk-stockinged feet, and picked up Hickory Dock with his wilted pink
+rose and brought him in and put him back on her desk. Then she brought
+in the mussy, pink-smooched candlesticks and stowed them far away in her
+closet behind everything else. The faintest possible scent of
+tobacco-smoke came to her from the closet depths, and as she reached
+instinctively to take a sad little whiff she became suddenly conscious
+that there was a strange, uncanny _hush_ in the room, as though a soul
+had left its body. She turned back quickly and cried out with a
+smothered cry. Hickory Dock had stopped!
+
+"Until--the--end--of--Time," she gasped, and staggered hard against the
+closet-door. Then in a flash she burst out laughing stridently, and
+rushed for Hickory Dock and grabbed him by his little silver handle,
+opened the window with a bang, and threw him with all her might and main
+down into the brick alley four stories below, where he fell with a
+sickening crash among a wee handful of scattered rose petals.
+
+--The days that followed were like horrid dreams, the nights, like
+hideous realities. The fire would not burn. The sun and moon would not
+shine, and life itself settled down like a pall. Every detail of that
+Sunday night stamped and re stamped itself upon her mind. Back of her
+outraged love was the crueller pain of her outraged faith. The Man of
+his own free will had made a sacred promise and broken it! She realized
+now for the first time in her life why men went to the devil because
+women had failed them--not disappointed them, but _failed_ them! She
+could even imagine how poor mothers felt when fathers shirked their
+fatherhood. She tasted in one week's imagination all possible woman
+sorrows of the world.
+
+At the end of the second week she began to realize the depth of
+isolation into which her engagement had thrown her. For a year and a
+half she had thought nothing, dreamed nothing, cared for nothing except
+the Man. Now, with the Man swept away, there was no place to turn either
+for comfort or amusement.
+
+At the end of the third week, when no word came, she began to gather
+together all the Man's little personal effects, and consigned them to a
+box out of sight--the pipe and tobacco, a favorite book, his soft
+Turkish slippers, his best gloves, and even a little poem which he had
+written for her to set to music. It was a pretty little love-song that
+they had made together, but as she hummed it over now for the last time
+she wondered if, after all, _woman's music_ did not do more than man's
+words to make love Singable.
+
+When a month was up she began to strip the room of everything that the
+Man had brought towards the making of their Home. It was like stripping
+tendons. She had never realized before how thoroughly the Man's
+personality had dominated her room as well as her life. When she had
+crowded his books, his pictures, his college trophies, his Morris chair,
+his rugs, into one corner of her room and covered them with two big
+sheets, her little, paltry, feminine possessions looked like chiffon in
+a desert.
+
+While she was pondering what to do next her rent fell due. The month's
+idling had completely emptied her pewter savings-bank that she had been
+keeping as a sort of precious joke for the Honeymoon. The rent-bill
+startled her into spasmodic efforts at composition. She had been quite
+busy for a year writing songs for some Educational people, but how could
+one make harmony with a heart full of discord and all life off the key.
+A single week convinced her of the utter futility of these efforts. In
+one high-strung, wakeful night she decided all at once to give up the
+whole struggle and go back to her little country village, where at least
+she would find free food and shelter until she could get her grip again.
+
+For three days she struggled heroically with burlap and packing-boxes.
+She felt as though every nail she pounded was hurting the Man as well as
+herself, and she pounded just as hard as she possibly could.
+
+When the room was stripped of every atom of personality except her
+couch, and the duplicate latch-key, which still hung high and dusty, a
+deliciously cruel thought came to the Girl, and the irony of it set her
+eyes flashing. On the night before her intended departure she took the
+key and put it into a pretty little box and sent it to the Man.
+
+"He'll know by that token," she said, "that there's no more 'Home' for
+him and me. He will get his furniture a few days later, and then he will
+see that everything is scattered and shattered. Even if he's married by
+this time, the key will hurt him, for his wife will want to know what it
+means, and he never can tell her."
+
+Then she cried so hard that her overwrought, half-starved little body
+collapsed, and she crept into her bed and was sick all night and all the
+next day, so that there was no possible thought or chance of packing or
+traveling. But towards the second evening she struggled up to get
+herself a taste of food and wine from her cupboard, and, wrapping
+herself in her pink kimono, huddled over the fire to try and find a
+little blaze and cheer.
+
+Just as the flames commenced to flush her cheeks the lock clicked. She
+started up in alarm. The door opened abruptly, and the Man strode in
+with a very determined, husbandly look on his haggard face. For the
+fraction of a second he stood and looked at her pitifully frightened and
+disheveled little figure.
+
+"Forgive me," he cried, "but I _had_ to come like this." Then he took
+one mighty stride and caught her up in his arms and carried her back to
+her open bed and tucked her in like a child while she clung to his neck
+laughing and sobbing and crying as though her brain was turned. He
+smoothed her hair, he kissed her eyes, he rubbed his rough cheek
+confidently against her soft one, and finally, when her convulsive
+tremors quieted a little, he reached down into his great overcoat pocket
+and took out poor, battered, mutilated Hickory Dock.
+
+"I found him down in the Janitor's office just now," he explained, and
+his mouth twitched just the merest trifle at the corners.
+
+"Don't smile," said the Girl, sitting up suddenly very straight and
+stiff. "Don't smile till you know the whole truth. _I_ broke Hickory
+Dock. I threw him _purposely_ four stories down into the brick alley!"
+
+The Man began to examine Hickory Dock very carefully.
+
+"I should judge that it was a _brick_ alley," he remarked with an odd
+twist of his lips, as he tossed the shattered little clock over to the
+burlap-covered armchair.
+
+Then he took the Girl very quietly and tenderly in his arms again, and
+gazed down into her eyes with a look that was new to him.
+
+"Rosalie," he whispered, "I will mend Hickory Dock for you if it takes
+a thousand years,"--his voice choked,--"but I wish to God I could mend
+my broken promise as easily!"
+
+And Rosalie smiled through her tears and said,--
+
+"Sweetheart-Man, you do love me?"
+
+"With all my heart and soul and body and breath, and past and present
+and future I _love you_!" said the Man.
+
+Then Rosalie kissed a little path to his ear, and whispered, oh, so
+softly,--
+
+"Sweetheart-Man, I love _you_ just that same way."
+
+And Hickory Dock, the Angel, never ticked the passing of a single
+second, but lay on his back looking straight up to Heaven with his two
+little battered hands clasped eternally at Love's _high noon_.
+
+
+
+
+THE VERY TIRED GIRL
+
+
+ON one of those wet, warm, slushy February nights when the vapid air
+sags like sodden wool in your lungs, and your cheek-bones bore through
+your flesh, and your leaden feet seem strung directly from the roots of
+your eyes, three girls stampeded their way through the jostling, peevish
+street crowds with no other object in Heaven or Earth except just to
+get--HOME.
+
+It was supper time, too, somewhere between six and seven, the caved-in
+hour of the day when the ruddy ghost of Other People's dinners flaunts
+itself rather grossly in the pallid nostrils of Her Who Lives by the
+Chafing-Dish.
+
+One of the girls was a Medical Masseuse, trained brain and brawn in the
+German Hospitals. One was a Public School Teacher with a tickle of chalk
+dust in her lungs. One was a Cartoon Artist with a heart like chiffon
+and a wit as accidentally malicious as the jab of a pin in a flirt's
+belt.
+
+All three of them were silly with fatigue. The writhing city cavorted
+before them like a sick clown. A lame cab horse went strutting like a
+mechanical toy. Crape on a door would have plunged them into hysterics.
+Were you ever as tired as that?
+
+It was, in short, the kind of night that rips out every one according to
+his stitch. Rhoda Hanlan the Masseuse was ostentatiously sewed with
+double thread and backstitched at that. Even the little Teacher, Ruth
+MacLaurin, had a physique that was embroidered if not darned across its
+raveled places. But Noreen Gaudette, the Cartoon Drawer, with her
+spangled brain and her tissue-paper body, was merely basted together
+with a single silken thread. It was the knowledge of being only basted
+that gave Noreen the droll, puckered terror in her eyes whenever Life
+tugged at her with any specially inordinate strain.
+
+Yet it was Noreen who was popularly supposed to be built with an
+electric battery instead of a heart.
+
+The boarding-house that welcomed the three was rather tall for beauty,
+narrow-shouldered, flat-chested, hunched together in the block like a
+prudish, dour old spinster overcrowded in a street car. To call such a
+house "Home" was like calling such a spinster "Mother." But the three
+girls called it "Home" and rather liked the saucy taste of the word in
+their mouths.
+
+Across the threshold in a final spurt of energy the jaded girls pushed
+with the joyous realization that there were now only five flights of
+stairs between themselves and their own attic studio.
+
+On the first floor the usual dreary vision greeted them of a hall table
+strewn with stale letters--most evidently bills, which no one seemed in
+a hurry to appropriate.
+
+It was twenty-two stumbling, bundle-dropping steps to the next floor,
+where the strictly Bachelor Quarters with half-swung doors emitted a
+pleasant gritty sound of masculine voices, and a sumptuous cloud of
+cigarette smoke which led the way frowardly up twenty-two more toiling
+steps to the Old Maid's Floor, buffeted itself naughtily against the
+sternly shut doors, and then mounted triumphantly like sweet incense to
+the Romance Floor, where with door alluringly open the Much-Loved Girl
+and her Mother were frankly and ingenuously preparing for the
+Monday-Night-Lover's visit.
+
+The vision of the Much-Loved Girl smote like a brutal flashlight upon
+the three girls in the hall.
+
+Out of curl, out of breath, jaded of face, bedraggled of clothes, they
+stopped abruptly and stared into the vista.
+
+Before their fretted eyes the room stretched fresh and clean as a newly
+returned laundry package. The green rugs lay like velvet grass across
+the floor. The chintz-covered furniture crisped like the crust of a
+cake. Facing the gilt-bound mirror, the Much-Loved Girl sat joyously in
+all her lingerie-waisted, lace-paper freshness, while her Mother hovered
+over her to give one last maternal touch to a particularly rampageous
+blond curl.
+
+[Illustration: With no other object, except to get home]
+
+The Much-Loved Girl was a cordial person. Her liquid, mirrored
+reflection nodded gaily out into the hall. There was no fatigue in the
+sparkling face. There was no rain or fog. There was no street-corner
+insult. There was no harried stress of wherewithal. There was just
+Youth, and Girl, and Cherishing.
+
+She made the Masseuse and the little School Teacher think of a pale-pink
+rose in a cut-glass vase. But she made Noreen Gaudette _feel_ like a
+vegetable in a boiled dinner.
+
+With one despairing gasp--half-chuckle and half-sob--the three girls
+pulled themselves together and dashed up the last flight of stairs to
+the Trunk-Room Floor, and their own attic studio, where bumping through
+the darkness they turned a sulky stream of light upon a room more
+tired-looking than themselves, and then, with almost fierce abandon,
+collapsed into the nearest resting-places that they could reach.
+
+It was a long time before any one spoke.
+
+Between the treacherous breeze of the open window and a withering
+blast of furnace heat the wilted muslin curtain swayed back and forth
+with languid rhythm. Across the damp night air came faintly the
+yearning, lovery smell of violets, and the far-off, mournful whine of a
+sick hand-organ.
+
+On the black fur hearth-rug Rhoda, the red-haired, lay prostrated like a
+broken tiger lily with her long, lithe hands clutched desperately at her
+temples.
+
+"I am so tired," she said. "I am so tired that I can actually feel my
+hair fade."
+
+Ruth, the little Public School Teacher, laughed derisively from her
+pillowed couch where she struggled intermittently with her suffocating
+collar and the pinchy buckles on her overshoes.
+
+"That's nothing," she asserted wanly. "I am so tired that I would like
+to build me a pink-wadded silk house, just the shape of a slipper, where
+I could snuggle down in the toe and go to sleep for a--million years. It
+isn't to-morrow's early morning that racks me, it's the thought of all
+the early mornings between now and the Judgment Day. Oh, any sentimental
+person can cry at night, but when you begin to cry in the morning--to
+lie awake and cry in the morning--" Her face sickened suddenly. "Did you
+see that Mother downstairs?" she gasped, "fixing that curl? Think of
+having a Mother!"
+
+Then Noreen Gaudette opened her great gray eyes and grinned
+diabolically. She had a funny little manner of cartooning her emotions.
+
+"Think of having a Mother?" she scoffed. "What nonsense!--_Think of
+having a c-u-r-l!_
+
+"You talk like Sunday-Paper debutantes," she drawled. "You don't know
+anything about being tired. Why, I am so tired--I am so tired--that I
+wish--I wish that the first man who ever proposed to me would come back
+and ask me--_again_!"
+
+It was then that the Landlady, knocking at the door, presented a card,
+"Mr. Ernest T. Dextwood," for Miss Gaudette, and the innocent-looking
+conversation exploded suddenly like a short-fused firecracker.
+
+Rhoda in an instant was sitting bolt upright with her arms around her
+knees rocking to and fro in convulsive delight. Ruth much more
+thoughtfully jumped for Noreen's bureau drawer. But Noreen herself,
+after one long, hyphenated "Oh, my _H-e-a-v-e-n-s_!" threw off her damp,
+wrinkled coat, stalked over to the open window, and knelt down
+quiveringly where she could smother her blazing face in the inconsequent
+darkness.
+
+For miles and miles the teasing lights of Other Women's homes stretched
+out before her. From the window-sill below her rose the persistent
+purple smell of violets, and the cooing, gauzy laughter of the
+Much-Loved Girl. Fatigue was in the damp air, surely, but Spring was
+also there, and Lonesomeness, and worst of all, that desolating sense of
+patient, dying snow wasting away before one's eyes like Life itself.
+
+When Noreen turned again to her friends her eyelids drooped defiantly
+across her eyes. Her lips were like a scarlet petal under the bite of
+her teeth. There in the jetty black and scathing white of her dress she
+loomed up suddenly like one of her own best drawings--pulseless ink and
+stale white paper vitalized all in an instant by some miraculous
+emotional power. A living Cartoon of "_Fatigue_" she stood
+there--"_Fatigue_," as she herself would have drawn it--no flaccid
+failure of wilted bone and sagging flesh, but _Verve_--the taut Brain's
+pitiless rally of the Body that can not afford to rest--the verve of
+Factory Lights blazing overtime, the verve of the Runner who drops at
+his goal.
+
+"All the time I am gone," she grinned, "pray over and over, 'Lead Noreen
+not into temptation.'" Her voice broke suddenly into wistful laughter:
+"Why to meet again a man who used to love you--it's like offering
+store-credit to a pauper."
+
+Then she slammed the door behind her and started downstairs for the
+bleak, plush parlor, with a chaotic sense of absurdity and bravado.
+
+But when she reached the middle of the bachelor stairway and looked down
+casually and spied her clumsy arctics butting out from her wet-edged
+skirt all her nervousness focused instantly in her shaking knees, and
+she collapsed abruptly on the friendly dark stair and clutching hold of
+the banister, began to whimper.
+
+In the midst of her stifled tears a door banged hard above her, the
+floor creaked under a sturdy step, and the tall, narrow form of the
+Political Economist silhouetted itself against the feeble light of the
+upper landing.
+
+One step down he came into the darkness--two steps, three steps, four,
+until at last in choking miserable embarrassment, Noreen cried out
+hysterically:
+
+"Don't step on me--I'm _crying_!"
+
+With a gasp of astonishment the young man struck a sputtering match and
+bent down waving it before him.
+
+"Why, it's _you_, Miss Gaudette," he exclaimed with relief. "What's the
+matter? Are you ill? What are you crying about?" and he dropped down
+beside her and commenced to fan her frantically with his hat.
+
+"What _are_ you crying about?" he persisted helplessly, drugged
+man-like, by the same embarrassment that mounted like wine to the
+woman's brain.
+
+Noreen began to laugh snuffingly.
+
+"I'm not crying about anything special," she acknowledged. "I'm just
+crying. I'm crying partly because I'm tired--and partly because I've got
+my overshoes on--but _mostly_"--her voice began to catch again--"but
+mostly--because there's a _man_ waiting to see me in the parlor."
+
+The Political Economist shifted uneasily in his rain coat and stared
+into Noreen's eyes.
+
+"Great Heavens!" he stammered. "Do you always cry when men come to see
+you? Is that why you never invited _me_ to call?"
+
+Noreen shook her head. "I never have men come to see me," she answered
+quite simply. "I go to see _them_. I study in their studios. I work on
+their newspapers. I caricature their enemies. Oh, it isn't _men_ that
+I'm afraid of," she added blithely, "but _this_ is something particular.
+_This_ is something really very funny. Did you ever make a wish that
+something perfectly preposterous would happen?"
+
+"Oh, yes," said the Political Economist reassuringly. "This very day I
+said that I wished my Stenographer would swallow the telephone."
+
+"But she didn't swallow it, did she?" persisted Noreen triumphantly.
+"Now I said that I wished some one would swallow the telephone and she
+_did_ swallow it!"
+
+Then her face in the dusky light flared piteously with harlequined
+emotions. Her eyes blazed bright with toy excitement. Her lips curved
+impishly with exaggerated drollery. But when for a second her head
+drooped back against the banister her jaded small face looked for all
+the world like a death-mask of a Jester.
+
+The Political Economist's heart crinkled uncomfortably within him.
+
+"Why, you poor little girl," he said. "I didn't know that women got as
+tired as that. Let me take off your overshoes."
+
+Noreen stood up like a well-trained pony and shed her clumsy footgear.
+
+The Man's voice grew peremptory. "Your skirt is sopping wet. Are you
+crazy? Didn't have time to get into dry things? Nonsense! Have you had
+any supper? What? _N-o?_ Wait a minute."
+
+In an instant he was flying up the stairs, and when he came back there
+was a big glass of cool milk in his hand.
+
+Noreen drank it ravenously, and then started downstairs with abrupt,
+quick courage.
+
+When she reached the ground floor the Political Economist leaned over
+the banisters and shouted in a piercing whisper:
+
+"I'll leave your overshoes outside my door where you can get them on
+your way up later."
+
+Then he laughed teasingly and added:
+"I--hope--you'll--have--a--good--time."
+
+And Noreen, cleaving for one last second to the outer edge of the
+banisters, smiled up at him, so strainingly _up_, that her face, to the
+man above her, looked like a little flat white plate with a
+crimson-lipped rose wilting on it.
+
+Then she disappeared into the parlor.
+
+With equal abruptness the Political Economist changed his mind about
+going out, and went back instead to his own room and plunged himself
+down in his chair, and smoked and thought, until his friend, the Poet at
+the big writing-desk, slapped down his manuscript and stared at him
+inquisitively.
+
+"Lord Almighty! I wish I could draw!" said the Political Economist. It
+was not so much an exclamation as a reverent entreaty. His eyes narrowed
+sketchily across the vision that haunted him. "If I could draw," he
+persisted, "I'd make a picture that would hit the world like a knuckled
+fist straight between its selfish old eyes. And I'd call that picture
+'Talent.' I'd make an ocean chopping white and squally, with _black_
+clouds scudding like fury across the sky, and no land in sight except
+rocks. And I'd fill that ocean full of sharks and things--not showing
+too much, you know, but just an occasional shimmer of fins through the
+foam. And I'd make a sailboat scooting along, tipped 'way over on her
+side toward you, with just a slip of an eager-faced girl in it. And I'd
+wedge her in there, wind-blown, spray-dashed, foot and back braced to
+the death, with the tiller in one hand and the sheet in the other, and
+weather-almighty roaring all around her. And I'd make the riskiest
+little leak in the bottom of that boat rammed desperately with a box of
+chocolates, and a bunch of violets, and a large paper compliment in a
+man's handwriting reading: 'Oh, how _clever_ you are.' And I'd have that
+girl's face haggard with hunger, starved for sleep, tense with fear,
+ravished with excitement. But I'd have her chin _up_, and her eyes
+_open_, and the tiniest tilt of a quizzical smile hounding you like mad
+across the snug, gilt frame. Maybe, too, I'd have a woman's magazine
+blowing around telling in chaste language how to keep the hair 'smooth'
+and the hands 'velvety,' and admonishing girls above all things not to
+be eaten by sharks! Good Heavens, Man!" he finished disjointedly, "a
+girl doesn't know how to sail a boat anyway!"
+
+"_W-h-a-t_ are you talking about?" moaned the Poet.
+
+The Political Economist began to knock the ashes furiously out of his
+pipe.
+
+"What am I talking about?" he cried; "I'm talking about _girls_. I've
+always said that I'd gladly fall in love if I only could decide what
+kind of a girl I wanted to fall in love with. Well, I've decided!"
+
+The Poet's face furrowed. "Is it the Much-Loved Girl?" he stammered.
+
+The Political Economist's smoldering temper began to blaze.
+
+"No, it isn't," ejaculated the Political Economist. "The Much-Loved Girl
+is a sweet enough, airy, fairy sort of girl, but I'm not going to fall
+in love with just a pretty valentine."
+
+"Going to try a 'Comic'?" the Poet suggested pleasantly.
+
+The Political Economist ignored the impertinence. "I am reasonably well
+off," he continued meditatively, "and I'm reasonably good-looking, and
+I've contributed eleven articles on 'Men and Women' to modern economic
+literature, but it's dawned on me all of a sudden that in spite of all
+my beauteous theories regarding life in general, I am just one big shirk
+when it comes to life in particular."
+
+The Poet put down his pen and pushed aside his bottle of rhyming fluid,
+and began to take notice.
+
+"Whom are you going to fall in love with?" he demanded.
+
+The Political Economist sank back into his chair.
+
+"I don't quite know," he added simply, "but she's going to be some
+tired girl. Whatever else she may or may not be, she's got to be a tired
+girl."
+
+"A tired girl?" scoffed the Poet. "That's no kind of a girl to marry.
+Choose somebody who's all pink and white freshness. That's the kind of a
+girl to make a man happy."
+
+The Political Economist smiled a bit viciously behind his cigar.
+
+"Half an hour ago," he affirmed, "I was a beast just like you. Good
+Heavens! Man," he cried out suddenly, "did you ever see a girl cry?
+Really cry, I mean. Not because her manicure scissors jabbed her thumb,
+but because her great, strong, tyrant, sexless brain had goaded her poor
+little woman-body to the very cruelest, last vestige of its strength and
+spirit. Did you ever see a girl like that Miss Gaudette upstairs--she's
+the Artist, you know, who did those cartoons last year that played the
+devil itself with 'Congress Assembled'--did you ever see a girl like
+_that_ just plain thrown down, tripped in her tracks, sobbing like a
+hurt, tired child? Your pink and white prettiness can cry like a rampant
+tragedy-queen all she wants to over a misfitted collar, but my hand is
+going here and now to the big-brained girl who cries like a child!"
+
+"In short," interrupted the Poet, "you are going to help--Miss Gaudette
+sail her boat?"
+
+"Y-e-s," said the Political Economist.
+
+"And so," mocked the Poet, "you are going to jump aboard and steer the
+young lady adroitly to some port of your own choosing?"
+
+The older man's jaws tightened ominously. "No, by the Lord Almighty,
+that's just what I am not going to do!" he promised. "I'm going to help
+her sail to the port of her own choosing!"
+
+The Poet began to rummage in his mind for adequate arguments. "Oh,
+allegorically," he conceded, "your scheme is utterly charming, but from
+any material, matrimonial point of view I should want to remind myself
+pretty hard that overwrought brains do not focus very easily on domestic
+interests, nor do arms which have tugged as you say at 'sheets' and
+'tillers' curve very dimplingly around youngsters' shoulders."
+
+The Political Economist blew seven mighty smoke-puffs from his pipe.
+
+"That would be the economic price I deserve to pay for not having
+arrived earlier on the scene," he said quietly.
+
+The Poet began to chuckle. "You certainly are hard hit," he scoffed.
+
+          "Political Economy
+           Gone to rhyme with Hominy!
+
+It's an exquisite scheme!"
+
+"It's a rotten rhyme," attested the Political Economist, and strode over
+to the mantelpiece, where he began to hunt for a long piece of twine.
+
+"Miss Gaudette," he continued, "is downstairs in the parlor now
+entertaining a caller--some resurrected beau, I believe. Anyway, she
+left her overshoes outside my door to get when she comes up again, and
+I'm going to tie one end of this string to them and the other end to my
+wrist, so that when she picks up her shoes a few hours later it will
+wake me from my nap, and I can make one grand rush for the hall and--"
+
+"Propose then and there?" quizzed the Poet.
+
+"No, not exactly. But I'm going to ask her if she'll let me fall in love
+with her."
+
+The Poet sniffed palpably and left the room.
+
+But the Political Economist lay back in his chair and went to sleep with
+a great, pleasant expectancy in his heart.
+
+When he woke at last with a sharp, tugging pain at his wrist the room
+was utterly dark, and the little French clock had stopped aghast and
+clasped its hands at eleven.
+
+For a second he rubbed his eyes in perplexity. Then he jumped to his
+feet, fumbled across the room and opened the door to find Noreen staring
+with astonishment at the tied overshoes.
+
+"Oh, I wanted to speak to you," he began. Then his eyes focused in
+amazement on a perfectly huge bunch of violets which Noreen was clasping
+desperately in her arms.
+
+"Good Heavens!" he cried. "Is anybody dead?"
+
+But Noreen held the violets up like a bulwark and commenced to laugh
+across them.
+
+"He did propose," she said, "and I accepted him! Does it look as though
+I had chosen to be engaged with violets instead of a ring?" she
+suggested blithely. "It's only that I asked him if he would be apt to
+send me violets, and when he said: 'Yes, every week,' I just asked if I
+please couldn't have them all at once. There must be a Billion dollars'
+worth here. I'm going to have a tea-party to-morrow and invite the
+Much-Loved Girl." The conscious, childish malice of her words twisted
+her lips into an elfish smile. "It's Mr. Ernest Dextwood," she rattled
+on: "Ernest Dextwood, the Coffee Merchant. He's a widower now--with
+three children. Do--you--think--that--I--will--make--a--good--stepmother?"
+
+The violets began to quiver against her breast, but her chin went higher
+in rank defiance of the perplexing _something_ which she saw in the
+Political Economist's narrowing eyes. She began to quote with playful
+recklessness Byron's pert parody:
+
+          "There is a tide in the affairs of women
+           Which taken at its flood leads--God Knows Where."
+
+But when the Political Economist did not answer her, but only stared
+with brooding, troubled eyes, she caught her breath with a sudden
+terrifying illumination. "Ouch!" she said. "O-u-c-h!" and wilted
+instantly like a frost-bitten rose under heat. All the bravado, all the
+stamina, all the glint of her, vanished utterly.
+
+"Mr. Political Economist," she stammered, "Life--is--too--hard--for--me.
+I am not Rhoda Hanlan with her sturdy German peasant stock. I am not
+Ruth MacLaurin with her Scotch-plaited New Englandism. Nationality
+doesn't count with me. My Father was a Violinist. My Mother was an
+Actress. In order to marry, my Father swapped his music for discordant
+factory noises, and my Mother shirked a dozen successful roles to give
+one life-long, very poor imitation of Happiness. My Father died of too
+much to drink. My Mother died of too little to eat. And I was bred, I
+guess, of very bitter love, of conscious sacrifice--of thwarted
+genius--of defeated vanity. Life--is--too--hard--for--me--_alone_. I can
+not finance it. I can not safeguard it. I can not weather it. _I am not
+seaworthy!_ You might be willing to risk your _own_ self-consciousness,
+but when the dead begin to come back and clamor in you--when you laugh
+unexpectedly with your Father's restive voice--when you quicken
+unexplainably to the Lure of gilt and tinsel--" A whimper of pain went
+scudding across her face, and she put back her head and grinned--"You
+can keep my overshoes for a souvenir," she finished abruptly. "I'm not
+allowed any more to go out when it storms!" Then she turned like a flash
+and ran swiftly up the stairs.
+
+When he heard the door slam hard behind her, the Political Economist
+fumbled his way back through the darkened room to his Morris chair, and
+threw himself down again. Ernest Dextwood? He knew him well, a
+prosperous, kindly, yet domestically tyrannical man, bright in the
+office, stupid at home. Ernest Dextwood! So much less of a girl would
+have done for him.
+
+A widower with three children? The eager, unspent emotionalism of
+Noreen's face flaunted itself across his smoky vision. All that hunger
+for Life, for Love, for Beauty, for Sympathy, to be blunted once for all
+in a stale, misfitting, ready-made home? A widower with three children!
+God in Heaven, was she as tired as that!
+
+It was a whole long week before he saw Noreen again. When he met her at
+last she had just come in from automobiling, all rosy-faced and out of
+breath, with her thin little face peering almost plumply from its heavy
+swathings of light-blue veiling, and her slender figure deeply wrapped
+in a wondrous covert coat.
+
+Rhoda Hanlan and Ruth MacLaurin were close behind her, much more
+prosaically garnished in golf capes and brown-colored mufflers. The
+Political Economist stood by on the stairs to let them pass, and Noreen
+looked back at him and called out gaily:
+
+"It's lots of fun to be engaged. We're all enjoying it very much. It's
+bully!"
+
+The next time he saw her she was on her way downstairs to the parlor, in
+a long-tailed, soft, black evening gown that bothered her a bit about
+managing. Her dark hair was piled up high on her head, and she had the
+same mischievous, amateur-theatrical charm that the blue chiffon veil
+and covert coat had given her.
+
+Quite frankly she demanded the Political Economist's appreciation of her
+appearance.
+
+"Just see how nice I can look when I really try?" she challenged him,
+"but it took me all day to do it, and my work went to smash--and my
+dress cost seventy dollars," she finished wryly.
+
+But the Political Economist was surly about his compliment.
+
+"No, I like you better in your little business suit," he attested
+gruffly. And he lied, and he knew that he lied, for never before had he
+seen the shrewd piquancy of her eyes so utterly swamped by just the
+wild, sweet lure of girlhood.
+
+Some time in May, however, when the shop windows were gay with women's
+luxuries, he caught a hurried glimpse of her face gazing rather
+tragically at a splurge of lilac-trimmed hats.
+
+Later in the month he passed her in the Park, cuddled up on a bench,
+with her shabby business suit scrunched tight around her, her elbows on
+her knees, her chin burrowed in her hands, and her fiercely narrowed
+eyes quaffing like some outlawed thing at the lusty new green grass, the
+splashing fountain, the pinky flush of flowering quince. But when he
+stopped to speak to her she jumped up quickly and pleaded the haste of
+an errand.
+
+It was two weeks later in scorching June that the biggest warehouses on
+the river caught fire in the early part of the evening. The day had been
+as harsh as a shining, splintery plank. The night was like a gray silk
+pillow. In blissful, soothing consciousness of perfect comfort every one
+in the boarding-house climbed up on the roof to watch the gorgeous,
+fearful conflagration across the city. The Landlady's voice piped high
+and shrill discussing the value of insurance. The Old Maids scuttled
+together under their knitted shawls. The Much-Loved Girl sat amiably
+enthroned among the bachelors with one man's coat across her shoulders,
+another man's cap on her yellow head, and two deliciously timid hands
+clutched at the coat-sleeves of the two men nearest her. Whenever she
+bent her head she trailed the fluff of her hair across the enraptured
+eyelids of the Poet.
+
+Only Noreen Gaudette was missing.
+
+"Where is Miss Gaudette?" probed the Political Economist.
+
+The Masseuse answered vehemently: "Why, Noreen's getting ready to go to
+the fire. Her paper sent for her just as we came up. There's an awful
+row on, you know, about the inefficiency of the Fire Department, and
+there's no other person in all the city who can make people look as
+silly as Noreen can. If this thing appeals to her to-night, and she gets
+good and mad enough, and keeps her nerve, there'll be the biggest
+overhauling of the Fire Department that _you_ ever saw! But I'm sorry it
+happened. It will be an all-night job, and Noreen is almost dead enough
+as it is."
+
+"An 'all-night job'?" The Much-Loved Girl gasped out her startled sense
+of propriety, and snuggled back against the shoulder of the man who sat
+nearest to her. She was very genuinely sorry for any one who had to be
+improper.
+
+The Political Economist, noting the incident in its entirety, turned
+abruptly on his heel, climbed down the tremulous ladder to the
+trunk-room floor and knocked peremptorily at Noreen's door.
+
+In reply to the answer which he thought he heard, he turned the handle
+of the door and entered. The gas jet sizzled blatantly across the room,
+and a tiny blue flame toiled laboriously in a cooking lamp beneath a pot
+of water. The room was reeking strong with the smell of coffee, the rank
+brew that wafted him back in nervous terror to his college days and the
+ghastly eve of his final examinations. A coat, a hat, a mouse-gray
+sweater, a sketch-book, and a bunch of pencils were thrown together on
+the edge of the divan. Crouched on the floor with head and shoulders
+prostrate across her easel chair and thin hands straining at the
+woodwork was Noreen Gaudette. The startled face that lifted to his was
+haggard with the energy of a year rallied to the needs of an hour.
+
+"I thought you told me to come in," said the Political Economist. "I
+came down to go to the fire with you."
+
+Noreen was on her feet in an instant, hurrying into her hat and coat,
+and quaffing greedily at the reeking coffee.
+
+"You ought to have some one to look after you," persisted the man.
+"Where's Mr. Dextwood?"
+
+Noreen stood still in the middle of the floor and stared at him.
+
+"Why, I've broken my engagement," she exclaimed, trying hard to speak
+tamely and reserve every possible fraction of her artificial energy.
+
+"Oh, yes," she smiled wanly, "I couldn't afford to be engaged! I
+couldn't afford the time. I couldn't afford the money. I couldn't afford
+the mental distraction. I'm working again now, but it's horribly hard to
+get back into the mood. My drawing has all gone to smash. But I'll get
+the hang of it again pretty soon."
+
+"You look in mighty poor shape to work to-night," said the Political
+Economist. "What makes you go?"
+
+"What makes me go?" cried Noreen, with an extravagant burst of
+vehemence. "What makes me go?--Why, if I make good to-night on those
+Fire-Department Pictures I get a Hundred Dollars, as well as the
+assurance of all the Republican cartooning for the next city election.
+It's worth a lot of money to me!"
+
+"Enough to kill yourself for?" probed the Man.
+
+Noreen's mouth began to twist. "Yes--if you still owe for your
+automobile coat, and your black evening gown, and your room rent and a
+few other trifles of that sort. But come on, if you'll promise not to
+talk to me till it's all over." Like a pair of youngsters they scurried
+down the stairs, jumped into the waiting cab, and galloped off toward
+the river edge of the city.
+
+True to his promise, the Political Economist did not speak to her, but
+he certainly had not promised to keep his eyes shut as well as his
+mouth. From the very first she sat far forward on the seat where the
+passing street-lights blazed upon her unconscious face. The Man, the
+cab, love-making, debt-paying, all were forgotten in her desperate
+effort to keep keyed up to the working-point. Her brain was hurriedly
+sketching in her backgrounds. Her suddenly narrowed eyes foretold the
+tingling pride in some particular imagining. The flashing twist of her
+smile predicted the touch of malice that was to make her pictures the
+sensation of--a day.
+
+The finish of the three-mile drive found her jubilant, prescient,
+pulsing with power. The glow from the flames lit up the cab like a room.
+The engine bells clanged around them. Sparks glittered. Steam hissed.
+When the cabman's horse refused to scorch his nose any nearer the
+conflagration, Noreen turned to the Political Economist with some
+embarrassment. "If you really want to help me," she pleaded, "you'll
+stay here in the cab and wait for me."
+
+Then, before the Political Economist could offer his angry protest, she
+had opened the door, jumped from the step, and disappeared into the
+surging, rowdy throng of spectators. A tedious hour later the cab door
+opened abruptly, and Noreen reappeared.
+
+Her hat was slouched down over her heat-scorched eyes. Her shoulders
+were limp. Her face was dull, dumb, gray, like a Japanese lantern robbed
+of its candle. Bluntly she thrust her sketch-book into his hands and
+threw herself down on the seat beside him.
+
+"Oh, take me home," she begged. "Oh, take me home _quick_. It's no use,"
+she added with a shrug, "I've seen the whole performance. I've been
+everywhere--inside the ropes--up on the roofs--out on the waterfront.
+The Fire Department Men are not 'inefficient.' They're simply _bully_!
+_And I make no caricatures of heroes!_"
+
+The lurch of the cab wheel against a curbstone jerked a faint smile into
+her face. "Isn't it horrid," she complained, "to have a Talent and a
+Living that depend altogether upon your _getting mad_?" Then her eyes
+flooded with worry. "What _shall_ I do?"
+
+"You'll marry me," said the Political Economist.
+
+"Oh, no!" gasped Noreen. "I shall never, never marry any one! I told you
+that I couldn't afford to be engaged. It takes too much time, and
+besides," her color flamed piteously, "I didn't like being engaged."
+
+"I didn't ask you to be engaged," persisted the Political Economist. "I
+didn't ask you to serve any underpaid, ill-fed, half-hearted
+apprenticeship to Happiness. I asked you to be married."
+
+"Oh, no!" sighed Noreen. "I shall never marry any one."
+
+The Political Economist began to laugh. "Going to be an old maid?" he
+teased.
+
+The high lights flamed into Noreen's eyes. She braced herself into the
+corner of the carriage and fairly hurled her defiance at him.
+Indomitable purpose raged in her heart, unutterable pathos drooped
+around her lips. Every atom of blood in her body was working instantly
+in her brain. No single drop of it loafed in her cheeks under the flimsy
+guise of embarrassment.
+
+"I am not an 'Old Maid!' I am not! No one who creates anything is an
+'Old Maid'!"
+
+The passion of her mood broke suddenly into wilful laughter. She shook
+her head at him threateningly.
+
+"Don't you ever dare to call me an 'Old Maid' again.--But I'll tell you
+just what you can call me--Women are supposed to be the Poetry of Life,
+aren't they--the Sonnet, the Lyric, the Limerick? Well--I am blank
+verse. _That_ is the trouble with me. I simply _do not rhyme_.--That is
+all!"
+
+"Will you marry me?" persisted the Political Economist.
+
+Noreen shook her head. "No!" she repeated. "You don't seem to
+understand. Marriage is not for me. I tell you that I am Blank Verse. I
+am _Talent_, and I do not _rhyme_ with Love. I am _Talent_ and I do not
+rhyme with _Man_. There is no place in my life for you. You can not come
+into my verse and rhyme with me!"
+
+"Aren't you a little bit exclusive?" goaded the Political Economist.
+
+Noreen nodded gravely. "Yes," she said, "I am brutally exclusive. But
+everybody isn't. Life is so easy for some women. Now, the Much-Loved
+Girl is nothing in the world except 'Miss.' She rhymes inevitably with
+almost anybody's kiss.--_I_ am not just '_Miss_.' The Much-Loved Girl is
+nothing in the world except 'Girl.'--She rhymes inevitably with 'Curl.'
+_I_ am not just '_Girl_.' She is 'Coy' and rhymes with 'Boy.' She is
+'Simple' and rhymes with 'Dimple.' _I am none of those things!_ I
+haven't the Lure of the Sonnet. I haven't the Charm of the Lyric. I
+haven't the Bait of the Limerick. At the very best I am 'Brain' and
+rhyme with 'Pain.' And I wish I was _dead_!"
+
+The Political Economist's heart was pounding like a gong smothered in
+velvet. But he stooped over very quietly and pushed the floor cushion
+under her feet and snuggled the mouse-gray sweater into a pillowed roll
+behind her aching neck. Then from his own remotest corner he reached out
+casually and rallied her limp, cold hand into the firm, warm clasp of
+his vibrant fingers.
+
+"Of course, you never have rhymed," he said. "How could you possibly
+have rhymed when--_I am the missing lines of your verse_?" His clasp
+tightened. "Never mind about Poetry to-night, Dear, but _to-morrow_
+we'll take your little incomplete lonesome verse and quicken it into a
+Love-Song that will make the Oldest Angel in Heaven sit up and
+carol!"
+
+
+
+
+THE HAPPY-DAY
+
+
+IT was not you, yourself, who invented your Happy-day. It was your
+Father, long ago in little-lad time, when a Happy-Day or a Wooden
+Soldier or High Heaven itself lay equally tame and giftable in the
+cuddling, curving hollow of a Father's hand.
+
+Your Father must have been a very great Genius. How else could he have
+invented any happy thing in the black-oak library?
+
+The black-oak library was a cross-looking room, dingy, lowering, and
+altogether boggy. You could not stamp your boot across the threshold
+without joggling the heart-beats out of the gaunt old clock that loomed
+in the darkermost corner of the alcove. You could not tiptoe to the
+candy box without plunging headlong into a stratum of creakiness that
+puckered your spine as though an electric devil were pulling the very
+last basting thread out of your little soul. Oh, it must have been a
+very, very aged room. The darkness was abhorrent to you. The dampness
+reeked with the stale, sad breath of ancient storms. Worst of all,
+blood-red curtains clotted at the windows; rusty swords and daggers hung
+most imminently from the walls, and along the smutted hearth a huge,
+moth-eaten tiger skin humped up its head in really terrible ferocity.
+
+Through all the room there was no lively spot except the fireplace
+itself.
+
+Usually, white birch logs flamed on the hearth with pleasant, crackling
+cheerfulness, but on this special day you noted with alarm that between
+the gleaming andirons a soft, red-leather book writhed and bubbled with
+little gray wisps of pain, while out of a charry, smoochy mass of
+nothingness a blue-flowered muslin sleeve stretched pleadingly toward
+you for an instant, shuddered, blazed, and was--gone.
+
+It was there that your Father caught you, with that funny, strange sniff
+of havoc in your nostrils.
+
+It was there that your Father told you his news.
+
+When you are only a little, little boy and your Father snatches you
+suddenly up in his arms and tells you that he is going to be married
+again, it is very astonishing. You had always supposed that your Father
+was perfectly married! In the dazzling sunshine of the village church
+was there not a thrilly blue window that said quite distinctly, "Clarice
+Val Dere" (that was your Mother) "Lived" (_Lived_, it said!) "June,
+1860--December, 1880"? All the other windows said "Died" on them. Why
+should your Father marry again?
+
+In your Dear Father's arms you gasped, "Going to be _married_?" and your
+two eyes must have popped right out of your head, for your Father
+stooped down very suddenly and kissed them hard--whack, whack, back into
+place.
+
+"N--o, not going to be married," he corrected, "but going to be
+married--again."
+
+He spoke as though there were a great difference; but it was man-talk
+and you did not understand it.
+
+Then he gathered you into the big, dark chair and pushed you way out on
+his knees and scrunched your cheeks in his hands and ate your face all
+up with his big eyes. When he spoke at last, his voice was way down deep
+like a bass drum.
+
+"Little Boy Jack," he said, "you must never, never, never forget your
+Dear Mother!"
+
+His words and the bir-r-r of them shook you like a leaf.
+
+"But what was my Dear Mother like?" you whimpered. You had never seen
+your Mother.
+
+Then your Father jumped up and walked hard on the creaky floor. When he
+turned round again, his eyes were all wet and shiny like a brown
+stained-glass window.
+
+"What was your Dear Mother like?" he repeated. "Your Dear Mother was
+like--was like--the flash of a white wing across a stormy sea. And your
+Dear Mother's name was 'Clarice.' I give it to you for a Memorial. What
+better Memorial could a little boy have than his Dear Mother's name? And
+there is a date--" His voice grew suddenly harsh and hard like iron, and
+his lips puckered on his words as with a taste of rust--"there is a
+date--the 26th of April--No, that is too hard a date for a little boy's
+memory! It was a Thursday. I give you Thursday for your--Happy-Day.
+'Clarice' for a Memorial, and Thursday for your Happy-Day." His words
+began to beat on you like blows. "As--long--as--you--live," he cried,
+"be very kind to any one who is named 'Clarice.' And no matter what Time
+brings you--weeks, months, years, centuries--_keep Thursday for your
+Happy-Day_. No cruelty must ever defame it, no malice, no gross
+bitterness."
+
+Then he crushed you close to him for the millionth, billionth fraction
+of a second, and went away, while you stayed behind in the scary
+black-oak library, feeling as big and achy and responsible as you used
+to feel when you and your Dear Father were carrying a heavy suit-case
+together and your Dear Father let go his share just a moment to light
+his brown cigar. It gave you a beautiful feeling in your head, but way
+off in your stomach it tugged some.
+
+So you crept away to bed at last, and dreamed that on a shining path
+leading straight from your front door to Heaven you had to carry all
+alone two perfectly huge suit-cases packed tight with love, and one of
+the suit-cases was marked "Clarice" and one was marked "Thursday." Tug,
+tug, tug, you went, and stumble, stumble, stumble, but your Dear Father
+could not help you at all because he was perfectly busy carrying a fat
+leather bag, some golf sticks, and a bull-terrier for a strange lady.
+
+It was not a pleasant dream, and you screamed out so loud in the night
+that the Housekeeper-Woman had to come and comfort you. It was the
+Housekeeper-Woman who told you that on the morrow your Father was going
+far off across the salt seas. It was the Housekeeper-Woman who told you
+that you, yourself, were to be given away to a Grandmother-Lady in
+Massachusetts. It was also the Housekeeper-Woman who told you that your
+puppy dog Bruno--Bruno the big, the black, the curly, the waggy, was not
+to be included in the family gift to the Grandmother-Lady. Everybody
+reasoned, it seemed, that you would not need Bruno because there would
+be so many other dogs in Massachusetts. That was just the trouble. They
+_would_ all be "other dogs." It was Bruno that you wanted, for he was
+the only _dog_, just as _you_ were the only _boy_ in the world. All the
+rest were only "other boys." You could have explained the matter
+perfectly to your Father if the Housekeeper-Woman had not made you cry
+so that you broke your explainer. But later in the night the most
+beautiful thought came to you. At first perhaps it tasted a little bit
+sly in your mouth, but after a second it spread like ginger, warm and
+sweet over your whole body except your toes, and you crept out of bed
+like a flannel ghost and fumbled your way down the black hall to your
+Dear Father's room and woke him shamelessly from his sleep. His eyes in
+the moonlight gleamed like two frightened dreams.
+
+"Dear Father," you cried--you could hardly get the words fast enough out
+of your mouth--"Dear--Father--I--do--not--think--Bruno--is--a--very--good
+--name--for--a--big--black--dog--I--am--going--to--name--him--Clarice
+--instead!"
+
+That was how you and Bruno-Clarice happened to celebrate together your
+first Happy-Day with a long, magic, joggling train journey to
+Massachusetts--the only original _boy_ and the only original _dog_ in
+all the world.
+
+The Grandmother-Lady proved to be a very pleasant purple sort of
+person. Exactly whose Grandmother she was, you never found out. She was
+not your Father's mother. She was not your Mother's mother. With these
+links missing, whose Grandmother could she be? You could hardly press
+the matter further without subjecting her to the possible mortification
+of confessing that she was only adopted. Maybe, crudest of all, she was
+just a Paid-Grandmother.
+
+The Grandmother-Lady lived in a perfectly brown house in a perfectly
+green garden on the edge of a perfectly blue ocean. That was the Sight
+of it. Salted mignonette was the Smell of it. And a fresh wind flapping
+through tall poplar trees was always and forever the Sound of it.
+
+The brown house itself was the living image of a prim, old-fashioned
+bureau backed up bleakly to the street, with its piazza side yanked out
+boldly into the garden like a riotous bureau drawer, through which the
+Rising Sun rummaged every morning for some particular new shade of
+scarlet or yellow nasturtiums. As though quite shocked by such bizarre
+untidiness, the green garden ran tattling like mad down to the ocean and
+was most frantically shooed back again, so that its little trees and
+shrubs and flowers fluttered in a perpetual nervous panic of not knowing
+which way to blow.
+
+[Illustration: The blue ocean was the most wonderful thing of all]
+
+But the blue ocean was the most wonderful thing of all. Never was there
+such an ocean! Right from the far-away edge of the sky it came, roaring,
+ranting, rumpling, till it broke against the beach all white and frilly
+like the Grandmother-Lady's best ruching. It was morning when you saw
+the ocean first, and its pleasant waters gleamed like a gorgeous,
+bright-blue looking-glass covered with paper ships all filled with Other
+Boys' fathers. It was not till the first night came down--black and
+mournful and moany--it was not till the first night came down that you
+saw that the ocean was Much Too Large. There in your chill linen bed,
+with the fear of Sea and Night and Strangers upon you, you discovered a
+very strange droll thing--that your Father was a Person and might
+therefore leave you, but that your Mother was a _feeling_ and would
+never, never, never forsake you. Bruno-Clarice, slapping his fat, black
+tail against your bedroom floor, was something of a _feeling_ too.
+
+Most fortunately for your well-being, the Grandmother-Lady's house was
+not too isolated from its neighbors. To be sure, a tall, stiff hedge
+separated the green garden from the lavender-and-pink garden next door,
+but a great scraggly hole in the hedge gave a beautiful prickly zest to
+friendly communication.
+
+More than this, two children lived on the other side of the hedge.
+You had never had any playmates before in all your life!
+
+One of the children was just Another Boy--a duplicate of you. But the
+other one was--_the only original girl_. Next to the big ocean, she was
+the surprise of your life. She wore skirts instead of clothes. She wore
+curls instead of hair. She wore stockings instead of legs. She cried
+when you laughed. She laughed when you cried. She was funny from the
+very first second, even when the Boy asked you if your big dog would
+bite. The Boy stood off and kept right on asking: "Will he bite? Will he
+bite? _W-i-l-l_ he _bite_?" But the Girl took a great rough stick and
+pried open Bruno-Clarice's tusky mouth _to see if he would_, and when he
+_g-r-o-w-l-e-d_, she just kissed him smack on his black nose and called
+him "A Precious," and said, "Why, of course he'll bite."
+
+The Boy was ten years old--a year older, and much fatter than you. His
+name was Sam. The Girl was only eight years old, and you could not tell
+at first whether she was thin or fat, she was so ruffledy. She had a
+horrid dressy name, "Sophia." But everybody called her Ladykin.
+
+Oh, it is fun to make a boat that will flop sideways through the waves.
+It is fun to make a windmill that will whirl and whirl in the grass. It
+is fun to make an education. It is fun to make a fortune. But most of
+anything in the world it is fun to make a _friend_!
+
+You had never made a _friend_ before. First of all you asked, "How old
+are you?" "Can you do fractions?" "Can you name the capes on the west
+coast of Africa?" "What is your favorite color? Green? Blue? Pink? Red?
+Or yellow?" Sam voted for green. Ladykin chose green _and_ blue _and_
+pink _and_ red _and_ yellow, _also_ purple. Then you asked, "Which are
+you most afraid of, the Judgment Day or a Submarine Boat?" Sam chose the
+Submarine Boat right off, so you had to take the Judgment Day, which was
+not a very pleasant fear to have for a pet. Ladykin declared that she
+wasn't afraid of anything in the world except of Being Homely. Wasn't
+that a silly fear? Then you got a little more intimate and asked, "What
+is your Father's business?" Sam and Ladykin's Father kept a huge candy
+store. It was mortifying to have to confess that your Father was only an
+Artist, but you laid great stress on his large eyes and his long
+fingers.
+
+Then you three went off to the sandy beach and climbed up on a great
+huddly gray rock to watch the huge yellow sun go down all shiny and
+important, like a twenty-dollar gold piece in a wad of pink cotton
+batting. The tide was going out, too, the mean old "injun-giver,"
+taking back all the pretty, chuckling pebbles, the shining ropes of
+seaweed, the dear salt secrets it had brought so teasingly to your feet
+a few hours earlier. You were very lonesome. But not till the gold and
+pink was almost gone from the sky did you screw your courage up to its
+supreme point. First you threw four stones very far out into the surf,
+then--
+
+"What--is--your--Mother--like?" you whispered.
+
+Ladykin went to her answer with impetuous certainty:
+
+"Our Mother," she announced, "is fat and short and wears skin-tight
+dresses, and is President of the Woman's Club, and is sometimes cross."
+
+A great glory came upon you and you clutched for wonder at the choking
+neck of your little blouse.
+
+"M-y Mother," you said, "m-y Mother is like the Flash of a White Wing
+across a Stormy Sea!"
+
+You started to say more, but with a wild war-whoop of amusement, Sam
+lost his balance and fell sprawling into the sand. "Oh, what a funny
+Mother!" he shouted, but Ladykin jumped down on him furiously and began
+to kick him with her scarlet sandals. "Hush! hush!" she cried, "Jack's
+Mother is dead!" and then in an instant she had clambered back to your
+side again and snuggled her little soft girl-cheek close against yours,
+while with one tremulous hand she pointed way out beyond the surf line
+where a solitary, snow-white gull swooped down into the Blue. "Look!"
+she gasped, "L-o-o-k!" and when you turned to her with a sudden gulping
+sob, she kissed you warm and sweet upon your lips.
+
+It was not a Father kiss with two tight arms and a scrunching pain. It
+was not a Grandmother-Lady kiss complimenting your clean face. It was
+not a Bruno-Clarice kiss, mute and wistful and lappy. There was no pain
+in it. There was no compliment. There was no doggish fealty. There was
+just _sweetness_.
+
+Then you looked straight at Ladykin, and Ladykin looked straight at you,
+looked and _looked_ and LOOKED, and you both gasped right out loud
+before the first miracle of your life, the Miracle of the Mating of
+Thoughts. Without a word of suggestion, without a word of explanation,
+you and Ladykin clasped hands and tiptoed stealthily off to the very
+edge of the water, and knelt down slushily in the sand, and stooped way
+over, oh, way, way over, with the cold waves squirting up your cuffs;
+and kissed two perfectly round floaty kisses out to the White Sea-Gull,
+and after a minute the White Gull rose in the sky, swirled round and
+round and round, stopped for a second, and then with a wild cry swooped
+down again into the blue--Once! Twice! and then with a great fountainy
+splash of wings rose high in the air like a white silk kite and went
+scudding off like mad into the Grayness, then into the Blackness, then
+into the Nothingness of the night. And you stayed behind on that
+pleasant, safe, sandy edge of things with all the sweetness gone from
+your lips, and nothing left you in all the world but the thudding of
+your heart, and a queer, sad, salty pucker on your tongue that gave you
+a thirst not so much for water as for _life_.
+
+Oh, you learned a great deal about living in those first few days and
+weeks and months at the Grandmother-Lady's house.
+
+You learned, for instance, that if you wanted to _do_ things, Boys were
+best; but if you wanted to _think_ things, then Girls were infinitely
+superior. You, yourself, were part Thinker and part Doer.
+
+Sam was a _doer_ from start to finish, strong of limb, long of wind,
+sturdy of purpose. But Sam was certainly prosy in his head. Ladykin, on
+the contrary, had "gray matter" that jumped like a squirrel in its cage,
+and fled hither and yon, and turned somersaults, and leaped through
+hoops, and was altogether alert beyond description. But she could not
+_do_ things. She could not stay in the nice ocean five minutes without
+turning blue. She could not climb a tree without falling and bumping
+her nose. She could not fight without getting mad. Out of these proven
+facts you evolved a beautiful theory that if Thinky-Girls could only be
+taught to _do_ things, they would make the most perfect playmates in all
+the wide, wide world. Yet somehow you never made a theory to improve
+Sam, though Sam's inability to think invariably filled you with a very
+cross, unholy contempt for him, while Ladykin's inability to _do_ only
+served to thrill you with the most delicious, sweet, puffy pride in
+_yourself_.
+
+Sam was very evidently a Person. Ladykin was a Feeling. You began almost
+at once to distinguish between Persons and Feelings. Anything that
+straightened out your head was a Person. Anything that puckered up your
+heart was a Feeling. Your Father, you had found out, was a Person. The
+Grandmother-Lady was a Person. Sam was a Person. Sunshine was a Person.
+A Horse was a Person. A Chrysanthemum was a Person. But your Mother was
+a Feeling. And Ladykin was a Feeling. And Bruno-Clarice was a Feeling.
+And the Ocean Blue was a Feeling. And a Church Organ was a Feeling. And
+the Smell of a June Rose was a Feeling. Perhaps your Happy-Day was the
+biggest Feeling of All.
+
+Thursday, to be sure, came only once a week, but--_such a Thursday_!
+Even now, if you shut your eyes tight and gasp a quick breath, you can
+sense once more the sweet, crisp joy of fresh, starched clothes, and
+the pleasant, shiny jingle of new pennies in your small white cotton
+pockets. White? Yes; your Father had said that always on that day you
+should go like a little white Flag of Truce on an embassy to Fate. And
+Happiness? Could anything in the world make more for happiness than to
+be perfectly clean in the morning and perfectly dirty at night, with
+something rather frisky to eat for dinner, and Sam and Ladykin
+invariably invited to supper? Your Happy-Day was your Sacristy, too.
+Nobody ever punished you on Thursday. Nobody was ever cross to you on
+Thursday. Even if you were very black-bad the last thing Wednesday
+night, you were perfectly, blissfully, lusciously safe until Friday
+morning.
+
+Oh, a Happy-Day was a very simple thing to manage compared with the
+terrible difficulties of being kind to everybody named "Clarice." There
+was _nobody_ named Clarice! In all the town, in all the directory, in
+all the telephone books, you and Ladykin could not find a single person
+named Clarice. Once in a New York newspaper you read about a young
+Clarice-Lady of such and such a street who fell and broke her hip; and
+you took twenty shiny pennies of your money and bought a beautiful,
+hand-painted celluloid brush-holder and sent it to her; but you never,
+never heard that it did her any good. You did not want your Father to
+be mad at you, but Ladykin reasoned you out of your possible worry by
+showing you how if you ever saw your Father again you could at least
+plant your feet firmly, fold your arms, puff out your chest, and affirm
+distinctly: "Dear Father, I have _never_ been cruel to _any one_ named
+'Clarice.'" Ladykin knew perfectly well how to manage it. Ladykin knew
+perfectly well how to manage everything.
+
+Sam was the stupid one. Sam took a certain pleasure in Bruno-Clarice,
+but he never realized that Bruno-Clarice was a sacred dog. Sam thought
+that it was very fine for you to have a Happy-Day, with Clean Clothes,
+and Ice-Cream, and Pennies, but he never almost _burst_ with the wonder
+of the day.
+
+Sam thought that it was pleasant enough for you to have a dead Mother
+who was like "the flash of a white wing across a stormy sea," but he did
+not see any possible connection between that fact and stoning all the
+white sea-gulls in sight. Ladykin, on the contrary, told Sam distinctly
+that she'd knock his head off if he ever hit a gull, but fortunately--or
+unfortunately--Ladykin's aim was not so sure as Sam's. It was you who
+had to stay behind on the beach and pommel more than half the life out
+of Sam while Ladykin, pink as a posy in her best muslin, scared to death
+of wet and cold, plunged out to her little neck in the chopping waves
+to rescue a quivering fluff of feathers that struggled broken-winged
+against the cruel, drowning water. "Gulls are gulls!" persisted Sam with
+every blubbering breath. "Gulls are _Mothers_!" gasped Ladykin,
+staggering from the surf all drenched and dripping like a bursted
+water-pail. "Well, boy-gulls are gulls!" Sam screamed in a perfect
+explosion of outraged _truth_. But Ladykin defied him to the last.
+Through chattering teeth her vehement reassertion sounded like some
+horrid, wicked blasphemy: "Nnnnnnnnnnnn-oo! Bbb-o-y ggggg-ggulls are
+MMMMMM-Mothers too!" Then with that pulsing drench of feathers cuddled
+close to her breast, she struggled off alone to the house to have the
+Croup, while you and Sam went cheerily up the beach to find some shiners
+and some seaweed for your new gull hospital. Not till you were quite an
+old boy did you ever find out what became of that gull. Sacred
+Bruno-Clarice ate him. Ladykin, it seems, knew always what had happened
+to him, but she never dreamed of telling you till you were old enough to
+bear it. To Ladykin, Truth out of season was sourer than strawberries at
+Christmas time.
+
+Sam would have told you _anything_ the very first second that he found
+it out. Sam was perfectly great for Truth. He could tell more Great
+Black Truths in one day than there were thunder-clouds in the whole hot
+summer sky. This quality made Sam just a little bit dangerous in a
+crowd. He was always and forever shooting people with Truths that he
+didn't know were loaded. He was always telling the Grandmother-Lady, for
+instance, that her hair looked _exactly_ like a wig. He was always
+telling Ladykin that she smelled of raspberry jam. He was always telling
+you that he didn't believe your Father really loved you. Oh, everything
+that Sam said was as straight and lank and honest as a lady's hair when
+it's out of crimp. Nothing in the world could be straighter than that.
+
+But sometimes, when you had played sturdily with Sam for a good many
+hours, you used to coax Ladykin off all alone to the puffy,
+scorchy-looking smoke tree, where you could cuddle up on the rustic seat
+and rest your Honesty. And when you were thoroughly rested, you used to
+stretch your little arms behind your yawning face and beg:
+
+"Oh, Ladykin, wouldn't you, couldn't you _please_ say something curly?"
+
+Ladykin's mind seemed to curl perfectly naturally. The crimp of it never
+came out. Almost any time you could take her words that looked so little
+and tight, and unwind them and unwind them into yards and yards and
+yards of pleasant, magic meanings.
+
+There were no magic meanings in Sam's words. Sam, for instance, could
+throw as many as a hundred stones into the water, yet when he got
+through he just lay down in the sand and groaned, "Oh, how tired I am!
+Oh, how tired I am!" But Ladykin, after she'd thrown only two
+stones--one that hit the beach, and one that hit you--would stand right
+up and declare that her arm was "_be_-witched." Tired? No, not a bit of
+it, but "_be_-witched!" Hadn't she seen, hadn't you seen, hadn't
+everybody seen that _perfectly awful_ sea-witch's head that popped out
+of the wave just after she had thrown her first stone? Oh, indeed, and
+it wasn't the first time either that she had been so frightened! Once
+when she was sitting on the sand counting sea-shells, hadn't the Witch
+swooped right out of the water and grabbed her legs? So, now if you
+wanted to break the cruel spell, save Ladykin's life, marry Ladykin, and
+live in a solid turquoise palace--where all the walls were papered with
+foreign postage-stamps, and no duplicates--you, not Sam, but _you_,
+_you_, chosen of all the world, must go down to the little harbor
+between the two highest, reariest rocks and stick a spiked stick through
+every wave that came in. There was no other way! Now you, yourself,
+might possibly have invented the witch, but you never, never would have
+thought of harpooning the waves and falling in and drowning your best
+suit, while Ladykin rested her arms.
+
+Yet in the enforced punishment of an early bedtime you were not
+bereaved, but lay in rapturous delight untangling the minutest detail of
+Ladykin's words, till turquoise cities blazed like a turquoise
+flashlight across your startled senses, wonderful little princes and
+princesses kowtowed perpetually to royal Mother Ladykin and royal Father
+Yourself, and life-sized postage-stamps loomed so lusciously large that
+envelopes had to be pasted to the corners of stamps instead of stamps to
+the corners of envelopes. And before you had half straightened out the
+whole thought, you were fast asleep, and then fast awake, and it was
+suddenly morning! Oh, it is very comforting to have a playmate who can
+say curly things.
+
+Sometimes, too, when Sam's and Ladykin's Mother had been rude to them
+about brushing their teeth or tracking perfectly good mud into the
+parlor, and Sam had gone off to ease his sorrow, scating hens or stoning
+cats, you and Ladykin would steal down to the gray rock on the beach to
+watch the white, soft, pleasant sea-gulls. There were times, you think,
+when Ladykin wished that _her_ Mother was a sea-gull. Then you used to
+wonder and wonder about your own Mother, and tell Ladykin all over
+again about the creaky, black-oak library, and the smoky, smelly
+hearth-fire with the hurt red book, and the blue-flowered muslin sleeve
+beckoning and beckoning to you; and Ladykin used to explain to you how,
+very evidently, you were the only souvenir that your Father did not
+burn. With that thought in mind, you used to try and guess what could
+possibly have happened long ago on a Thursday to make a Happy-Day
+forever and ever. Ladykin said that of course it was something about
+"Love," but when you ran off to ask the Grandmother-Lady just exactly
+what Love was, the Grandmother-Lady only laughed and said that Love was
+a fever that came along a few years after chicken-pox and measles and
+scarlet fever. Ladykin was saucy about it. "That may be _true_," Ladykin
+acknowledged, "but _t'aint so_!" Then you went and found Sam and asked
+him if he knew what Love was. Sam knew at once. Sam said that Love was
+the feeling that one had for mathematics. Now that was all _bosh_, for
+the feeling that you and Ladykin had for Mathematics would not have made
+a Happy-Day for a cow.
+
+But even if there were a great many things that you could not find out,
+it was a good deal of fun to grow up. Apart from a few stomach-aches
+and two or three gnawing pains in the calves of your legs, aging was a
+most alluring process.
+
+Springs, summers, autumns, winters, went hurtling over one another, till
+all of a sudden, without the slightest effort on your part, you were
+fifteen years old, Bruno-Clarice had grown to be a sober, industrious,
+middle-aged dog, Sam was idolatrously addicted to geometry, and Ladykin
+subscribed to a fashion magazine for the benefit of her paper dolls.
+
+Most astonishing of all, however, your Father had invited you to go to
+Germany and visit him. It was a glorious invitation. You were all
+athrill with the geography and love of it. Already your nostrils
+crinkled to the lure of tar and oakum. Already your vision feasted on
+the parrot-colored crowds of Come-igrants and Go-igrants that huddled
+along the wharves with their eager, jabbering faces and their soggy,
+wadded feet.
+
+Oh, the prospect of the journey was a most beautiful experience, but
+when the actual Eve of Departure came, the scissors of separation
+gleamed rather hard and sharp in the air, and you hunched your neck a
+little bit wincingly before the final crunching snip. That last evening
+was a dreadful evening. The Cook sat sobbing in the kitchen. The
+Grandmother-Lady's eyes were red with sewing. The air was all heavy with
+_goingawayness_. To escape the strangle of it, you fled to the beach
+with Bruno-Clarice tagging in mournful excitement at your heels, his
+smutty nose all a-sniff with the foreboding leathery smell of trunks and
+bags. There on the beach in a scoopy hollow of sand backed up against
+the old gray rock were Sam and Ladykin. Sam's round, fat face was
+fretted like a pug-dog's, and Ladykin's eyes were blinky-wet with tears.
+
+It was not a pleasant time to say good-by. It had been a beautiful,
+smooth-skied day, crisp and fresh and bright-colored as a "Sunday
+supplement"; but now the clouds piled gray and crumpled in the west like
+a poor stale, thrown-away newspaper, with just a sputtering blaze in one
+corner like the kindling of a half-hearted match.
+
+"_Please_ be kind to Bruno-Clarice," you began; "I shall miss you very
+much--very, very much. But I will come back--"
+
+"N--o, I do not think you will come back," said Ladykin. "You will go to
+Germany to live with your Father and your Play-Mother, and you will
+gargle all your words like a throat tonic till you don't know how to be
+friends in English any more; and even if you did come back Bruno-Clarice
+would bark at you, and I shall be married, and Sam will have a long,
+black beard."
+
+Now you could have borne Ladykin's marriage; you could even have borne
+Bruno-Clarice's barking at you; but you could not, simply could not bear
+the thought of Sam's growing a long black beard without you. Even
+Ladykin with all her wonderfulness sat utterly helpless before the
+terrible, unexpected climax of her words. It was Sam who leaped into the
+breach. The clutch of his hand was like the grit of sand-paper. "Jack,"
+he stammered, "Jack, I promise you--anyhow I won't _cut_ my beard until
+you come!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was certainly only the thought of Sam's faithful beard that sustained
+you on your rough, blue voyage to Germany. It was certainly only the
+thought of Sam's faithful beard that rallied your smitten forces when
+you met your Father face to face and saw him reel back white as chalk
+against the silky shoulder of your Play-Mother, and hide his eyes behind
+the crook of his elbow.
+
+It is not pleasant to make people turn white as chalk, even in Germany.
+Worse yet, every day your Father grew whiter and whiter and whiter, and
+every day your pretty Play-Mother wrinkled her forehead more and more in
+a strange, hurty sort of trouble. Never once did you dare think of
+Ladykin. Never once did you dare think of Bruno-Clarice. You just named
+all your upper teeth "Sam," and all your lower teeth "Sam," and ground
+them into each other all day long--"Sam! Sam! Sam!" over and over and
+over. There were also no Happy-Days in Germany, and nobody ever spoke of
+Clarice.
+
+You were pretty glad at last after a month when your Father came to you
+with his most beautiful face and his most loving hands, and said:
+
+"Little Boy Jack, there is no use in it. You have got to go away again.
+You are a wound that will not heal. It is your Dear Mother's eyes. It is
+your Dear Mother's mouth. It is your Dear Mother's smile. God forgive
+me, but I cannot bear it! I am going to send you away to school in
+England."
+
+You put your finger cautiously up to your eyes and traced their round,
+firm contour. Your Mother's eyes? They felt like two heaping
+teaspoonfuls of tears. Your Mother's mouth? Desperately you poked it
+into a smile. "Going to send me away to school in England?" you
+stammered. "Never mind. Sam will not cut his beard until I come."
+
+"_What?_" cried your Father in a great voice. "_W-h-a-t?_"
+
+But you pretended that you had not said anything, because it was
+boy-talk and your Father would not have understood it.
+
+Never, never, never had you seen your Father so suffering; yet when he
+took you in his arms and raised your face to his and quizzed you:
+"Little Boy Jack, do you love me? Do you love me?" you scanned him out
+of your Mother's made-over eyes and answered him out of your Mother's
+made-over mouth:
+
+"N--o! N--o! I _don't_ love you!"
+
+And he jumped back as though you had knifed him, and then laughed out
+loud as though he were glad of the pain.
+
+"But I ask you this," he persisted, and the shine in his eyes was like a
+sunset glow in the deep woods, and the touch of his hands would have
+lured you into the very heart of the flame. "It is not probable," he
+said, "that your Dear Mother's child and mine will go through Life
+without knowing Love. When your Love-Time comes, if you understand all
+Love's tragedies _then_, and forgive me, will you send me a message?"
+
+"Oh, yes," you cried out suddenly. "Oh, yes! Oh, yes! Oh, yes!" and
+clung to him frantically with your own boyish hands, and kissed him with
+your Mother's mouth. But you did not love him. It was your Mother's
+mouth that loved him.
+
+So you went away to school in England and grew up and up and up some
+more; but somehow this latter growing up was a dull process without
+savor, and the years went by as briefly and inconsequently as a few
+dismissing sentences in a paragraph. There were plenty of people to work
+with and play with, but almost no one to think with, and your
+hard-wrought book knowledge faded to nothingness compared to the three
+paramount convictions of your youthful experience, namely, that neither
+coffee nor ocean nor Life tasted as good as it smelled.
+
+And then when you were almost twenty-one you met "Clarice"!
+
+It was a Christmas supper party in a cafe. Some one looked up suddenly
+and called the name "Clarice! Clarice!" and when your startled eyes shot
+to the mark and saw her there in her easy, dashing, gorgeous beauty,
+something in your brain curdled, and all the lonesomeness, all the
+mystery, all the elusiveness of Life pounded suddenly in your heart like
+a captured Will-o'-the-Wisp. "Clarice?" Here, then, was the end of your
+journey? The eternal kindness? The flash of a white wing across _your_
+stormy sea? "Clarice!" And you looked across unbidden into her eyes and
+smiled at her a gaspy, astonished smile that brought the strangest light
+into her face.
+
+Oh, but Clarice was very beautiful! Never had you seen such a type. Her
+hair was black and solemn as crape. Her eyes were bright and noisy as
+jet. Her heart was barren as a blot of ink. And she took your dreamy,
+paper-white boy life and scourged it like a tongue of flame across a
+field of Easter lilies!
+
+And when the wonder of the flame was gone, you sat aghast in your room
+among the charred, scorched fragments of your Youth. The thirst for
+death was very strong upon you, and the little, long, narrow cup of your
+revolver gleamed very brimming full of death's elixir. Even the
+June-time could not save you. Your Mother's name was an agony on your
+lips. The frenzied reiteration of your thoughts scraped on your brain
+like a sledge on gravel. You would drink very deep, you thought, of your
+little slim cup of death. Yet the thing that was tortured within you was
+scarcely Love, and you had no message of understanding for your Father.
+Just with wrecked life, wrecked faith, wrecked courage, you huddled at
+your desk, catching your breath for a second before you should reach out
+your fretted fingers for the little cool cunning, toy hand of Death.
+
+"Once again," you said to yourself, "once again I will listen to the
+children's voices in the garden. Once again I will lure the smell of
+June roses into my heart." The children prattled and passed. Your hand
+reached out and fumbled. Once more you shut your scalding eyes, hunched
+up your shoulders, and breathed in like an ultimate tide the ravishing
+sweetness of the June--one breath, another, another--longer--longer. Oh,
+God in Heaven, if one could only die of such an anesthetic--smothered
+with sweetbrier, spiced with saffron, buried in bride roses. _Die?_ Your
+wild hand leaped to the task and faltered stricken before the strange,
+grim fact that blazed across your consciousness. It was Thursday. It was
+your "Happy-Day!" Your Father's words came pounding back like blows into
+your sore brain! Your "Happy-Day!" "No cruelty must ever defame it, no
+malice, no gross bitterness!" Somewhere in air or sky or sea there was a
+Mother-Woman who must not be _hurt_. Your "Happy-Day?" HAPPY-DAY? Rage
+and sorrow broke like a fearful storm across your senses, and you put
+down your head and cried like a child.
+
+Tears? Again you felt on your lips that queer, sad, salty pucker, that
+taste of the sea that gave you a thirst not so much for water as for
+Life. _Life?_ _Life?_ The thought thrilled through you like new nerves.
+Your ashy pulses burst into flame. Your dull heart jumped. Your vision
+woke. Your memory quickened. You saw the ocean, blue, blue, blue before
+you. You saw a small, rude boy lie sprawling in the sand. You saw a
+little girl's face, wild with wonder, tremulous with sweetness. You felt
+again the flutter of a kiss against your cheek. The little girl
+who--understood. Your salt lips puckered into a smile, and the smile ran
+back like a fuse into the inherent happiness of your heart. Sam?
+Ladykin? Home? You began to laugh! Haggard, harried, wrecked, ruined,
+you began to laugh! Then, faltering like a hysterical girl, you
+staggered down the stairs, out of the house, along the streets to the
+cable office, and sent a message to Sam.
+
+"How long is your beard?" the message said. "How long is your beard?"
+Just that silly, magic message across miles and miles and miles of waves
+and seaweeds. How the great cable must have simpered with the
+foolishness of it. How the pink coral must have chuckled. How the big,
+tin-foiled fishes must have wondered.
+
+You did not wait for an answer. What answer was there? You could picture
+Sam standing in stupefied awkwardness before the amazing nothingness of
+such a message. But Ladykin would remember. Oh, yes, Ladykin would
+remember. You could see her peering past Sam's shoulder and snatching
+out suddenly for the fluttering paper. Ladykin would remember. What were
+six years?
+
+Joy sang in your heart like a purr of a sea-shell. The blue blur of
+ocean, the dear green smell of mignonette, the rush of wind through the
+poplar trees were tonic memories to you. You did not wait to pack your
+things. You did not wait to notify your Father. You sped like a wild boy
+to the first wharf, to the first steamer that you could find.
+
+The week's ocean voyage went by like a year. The silly waves dragged on
+the steamer like a tired child on the skirts of its mother. Haste raged
+in your veins like a fever. You wanted to throw all the fat, heavy
+passengers overboard. You wanted to swim ahead with a towing rope in
+your teeth. You wanted to kill the Captain when he stuttered. You wanted
+to flay the cook for serving an extra course for dinner. Yet all the
+while the huge machinery throbbed in rhythm, "Time _will_ pass. It
+_always does_. It _always does_. It _always does_."
+
+And then at last you stood again on your Native Land, _alive, well,
+vital, at home_!
+
+With the sensation of an unbroken miracle, you found your way again to
+the little Massachusetts sea town, along the peaceful village walk to
+the big brown house that turned so bleakly to the street. There on the
+steps, wonder of wonders, you found two elderly people, Bruno-Clarice
+and the Grandmother-Lady, and your knees gave out very suddenly and you
+sank down beside Bruno-Clarice and smothered the bark right out of him.
+
+"Good lack!" cried the Grandmother-Lady, "Good _lack_!" and made so
+much noise that Sam himself came running like mad from the next house;
+and though he had no beard, you liked him very much and shook and shook
+his hand until he squealed.
+
+With the Grandmother-Lady plying you with questions, and Sam feeling
+your muscle, and Bruno-Clarice trying to crawl into your lap like a
+pug-dog baby, it was almost half an hour before you had a chance to ask,
+
+"Where is Ladykin?"
+
+"She's down on the beach," said Sam. "I'll go and help you find her."
+
+You looked at Sam speculatively. "I'll give you ten dollars if you
+won't," you said.
+
+Sam considered the matter gravely before he began to grin. "I wouldn't
+think of charging you more than five," he acquiesced.
+
+So you went off with Bruno-Clarice hobbling close at your heels to find
+Ladykin for yourself. When you saw her she was perched up on the very
+top of the huddly gray rock playing tinkle tunes on her mandolin, and
+you stole up so quietly behind her that she did not see you till you
+were close beside her.
+
+Then she turned very suddenly and looked down upon you and pretended
+that she did not know you, with her color coming and going all luminous
+and intermittent like a pink and white flashlight. In six years you had
+not seen such a wonderful playmatey face.
+
+"Who are you?" she asked. "Who are you?"
+
+"I am 'Little Boy Jack' come back to marry you," you began, but
+something in the wistful, shy girl-tenderness of her face and eyes
+choked your bantering words right off in your throat.
+
+"Yes, Ladykin," you said, "I have come home, and I am very tired, and I
+am very sad, and I am very lonesome, and I have not been a very good
+boy. But please be good to me! I am so lonesome I cannot wait to make
+love to you. Oh, _please_, _please_ love me _n-o-w_. I _need_ you to
+love me N-O-W!"
+
+Ladykin frowned. It was not a cross frown. It was just a sort of a cosy
+corner for her thoughts. Surprise cuddled there, and a sorry feeling,
+and a great tenderness.
+
+"You have not been a very good boy?" she repeated after you.
+
+The memory of a year crowded blackly upon you. "No," you said, "I have
+not been a very good boy, and I am very suffering-sad. But _please_ love
+me, and forgive me. No one has ever loved me!"
+
+The surprise and the sorry feeling in Ladykin's forehead crowded
+together to make room for something that was just _womanliness_. She
+began to smile. It was the smile of a hurt person when the opiate first
+begins to overtake the pain.
+
+"Oh, I'm sure it was an accidental badness," she volunteered softly. "If
+I were accidentally bad, you would forgive _me_, wouldn't you?"
+
+"Oh, yes, yes, yes," you stammered, and reached up your lonesome hands
+to her.
+
+"Then you don't have to make love," she whispered. "It's all made," and
+slipped down into your arms.
+
+But something troubled her, and after a minute she pushed you away and
+tried to renounce you.
+
+"But it is not Thursday," she sobbed; "it is Wednesday; and my name is
+not 'Clarice'; it is Ladykin."
+
+Then all the boyishness died out of you--the sweet, idle reveries, the
+mystic responsibilities. You shook your Father's dream from your eyes,
+and squared your shoulders for your own realities.
+
+"A Man must make his own Happy-Day," you cried, "and a Man must choose
+his own Mate!"
+
+Before your vehemence Ladykin winced back against the rock and eyed you
+fearsomely.
+
+"Oh, I will love you and cherish you," you pleaded.
+
+But Ladykin shook her head. "That is not enough," she whispered. There
+was a kind of holy scorn in her eyes.
+
+Then a White Gull flashed like an apparition before your sight.
+Ladykin's whole figure drooped, her cheek paled, her little mouth
+quivered, her vision narrowed. There with her eyes on the White Gull and
+your eyes fixed on hers, you saw her shy thoughts journey into the
+Future. You saw her eyes smile, sadden, brim with tears, smile again,
+and come homing back to you with a timid, glad surprise as she realized
+that your thoughts too had gone all the long journey with her.
+
+She reached out one little hand to you. It was very cold.
+
+"If I should pass like the flash of a white wing," she questioned,
+"would you be true to me--and _mine_?"
+
+The Past, the Present, the Future rushed over you in tumult. Your lips
+could hardly crowd so big a vow into so small a word. "Oh, YES, YES,
+YES!" you cried.
+
+In reverent mastery you raised her face to yours. "A Man must make his
+own Happy-Day," you repeated. "A Man must make his own Happy-Day!"
+
+Timorously, yet assentingly, she came back to your arms. The whisper of
+her lips against your ear was like the flutter of a rose petal.
+
+"It will be Wednesday, then," she said, "for us and--ours."
+
+Clanging a strident bell across the magic stillness of the garden, Sam
+bore down upon you like a steam-engine out of tune.
+
+"Oh, I say," he shouted, "for heaven's sake cut it out and come to
+supper."
+
+The startled impulse of your refusal faded before the mute appeal in
+Ladykin's eyes.
+
+"All right," you answered; "but first I must go and cable 'love' to my
+Father."
+
+"Oh, hurry!" cried Ladykin. Her word was crumpled and shy as a kiss.
+
+"Oh, hurry!" cried Sam. His thought was straight and frank as a knife
+and fork.
+
+Joy sang in your heart like a prayer that rhymed. Your eager heart was
+pounding like a race horse. The clouds in the sky were scudding to
+sunset. The surf on the beach seemed all out of breath. The green meadow
+path to the village stretched like the paltriest trifle before a man's
+fleet running pace.
+
+"But I can't hurry," you said, for Bruno-Clarice came poking his
+grizzled old nose into your hand. "Oh, wait for me," he seemed to plead.
+"Oh, please, _please_ wait for me."
+
+
+
+
+THE RUNAWAY ROAD
+
+
+THE Road ran spitefully up a steep, hot, rocky, utterly shadeless hill,
+and then at the top turned suddenly in a flirty little green loop, and
+looked back, and called "Follow me!"
+
+Wouldn't you have considered that a dare?
+
+The Girl and the White Pony certainly took it as such, and proceeded at
+once to "follow," though the White Pony stumbled clatteringly on the
+rolling stones, and the Girl had to cling for dear life to the rocking
+pommels of her saddle.
+
+It was a cruel climb, puff--pant--scramble--dust--glare--every step of
+the way, but when the two adventurers really reached the summit at last,
+a great dark chestnut-tree loomed up for shade, every sweet-smelling
+breeze in the world was there to welcome them, and the whole green
+valley below stretched out before them in the shining, woodsy wonder of
+high noon and high June.
+
+You know, yourself, just how the world looks and feels and smells at
+high noon of a high June!
+
+Even a pony stands majestically on the summit of a high hill--neck
+arched, eyes rolling, mane blowing, nostrils quivering. Even a girl
+feels a tug of power at her heart.
+
+And still the Road cried "Follow me!" though it never turned its head
+again in doubt or coquetry. It was a kind-looking Road now, all gracious
+and sweet and tender, with rustly green overhead, and soft green
+underfoot, and the pleasant, buzzing drone of bees along its clovered
+edges.
+
+"We might just as well follow it and see," argued the Girl, and the
+White Pony took the suggestion with a wild leap and cantered eagerly
+along the desired way.
+
+It was such an extraordinarily lonesome Road that you could scarcely
+blame it for picking up companionship as best it might. There was
+stretch after stretch of pasture, and stretch after stretch of woodland,
+and stretch after stretch of black-stumped clearing--with never a house
+to cheer it, or a human echo to break its ghostly stillness. Yet with
+all its isolation and remoteness the landscape had that certain vibrant,
+vivid air of self-consciousness that thrills you with an uncanny sense
+of an invisible presence--somewhere. It's just a trick of June!
+
+Tramps, pirates, even cannibals, seemed deliciously imminent. The Girl
+remembered reading once of a lonely woman bicyclist who met a runaway
+circus elephant at the turn of a country road. Twelve miles from home is
+a long way off to have anything happen.
+
+Her heart began to quicken with the joyous sort of fear that is one of
+the prime sweets of youth. It's only when fear reaches your head that it
+hurts. The loneliness, the mystery, the uncertainty, were tonic to her.
+The color spotted in her cheeks. Her eyes narrowed defensively to every
+startling detail of woods or turf. Her ears rang with the sudden, new
+acuteness of her hearing. She felt as though she and the White Pony were
+stalking right across the heartstrings of the earth. Once the White Pony
+caught his foot and sent a scared sob into her throat.
+
+Oh, everything was magic! A little brown rabbit reared up in the Road as
+big as a kangaroo, and beckoned her with his ears. A red-winged
+blackbird bulky as an eagle trumpeted a swamp-secret to her as he
+passed. A tiny chipmunk in the wall loomed like a lion in his lair, and
+sent a huge rock crashing like an avalanche into the field. The whole
+green and blue world seemed tingling with toy noises, made suddenly big.
+
+The White Pony's mouth was frothing with the curb. The White Pony's
+coat was reeking wet with noon and nervousness, but the Girl sat tense
+and smiling and important in her saddle, as though just once for all
+time she was the only italicized word in the Book of Life.
+
+"It's just the kind of a road that I like to travel alone," she gasped,
+a little breathlessly, "but if I were engaged and my man let me do it, I
+should consider him--careless."
+
+That was exactly the sort of Road it was!
+
+Yet after three or four miles the White Pony shook all the skittishness
+out of his feet, and settled down to a zigzag, browsing-clover gait, and
+the Girl relaxed at last, and sat loosely to ease her own muscles, and
+slid the bridle trustingly across the White Pony's neck.
+
+Then she began to sing. Never in all her life had she sung outside the
+restricting cage of house or church. A green and blue loneliness on a
+June day is really the only place in the world that is big enough for
+singing! In dainty ballad, in impassioned hymn, in opera, in anthem, the
+Girl's voice, high and sweet and wild as a boy's, rang out in fluttering
+tremolo. Over and over again, as though half unconscious of the words,
+but enraptured with the melody, she dwelt at last on that dream-song of
+every ecstatic young soul who tarries for a moment on the edge of an
+unfocused exultation:
+
+          The King of Love my Shepherd is
+            Whose Goodness faileth never,
+          I nothing lack if I am _his_
+            And he is _mine f-o-r-e-v-e-r_!
+            Forever!----Is _mine f-o-r-e-v-e-r_!
+
+Her pulsing, passionate crescendo came echoing back to her from a gray
+granite hillside, and sent a reverent thrill of power across her senses.
+
+Then--suddenly--into her rhapsody broke the astonishing, harsh clash and
+clatter of a hay-rake. The White Pony lurched, stood stock-still, gave a
+hideous snort of terror, grabbed the bit in his teeth, and bolted like
+mad on and on and on and on till a quick curve in the Road dashed him
+into the very lap of a tiny old gray farmhouse that completely blocked
+the way.
+
+In another second he would have stumbled across the threshold and hurled
+his rider precipitously into the front hall if she had not at that very
+second recovered her "yank-hold" on his churning mouth and wrenched him
+back so hard that any animal but a horse would have sat down.
+
+Then the girl straightened up very tremblingly in her saddle and said
+"O--h!"
+
+Some one had to say something, for there in the dooryard close beside
+her were an Artist, a Bossy, and a White Bulldog, who all
+instantaneously, without the slightest cordiality or greeting, stopped
+whatever they were doing and began to stare at her.
+
+Now it's all very well to go dashing like mad into a person's front yard
+on a runaway horse. Anybody could see that you didn't do it on purpose;
+but when at last you have stopped dashing, what are you going to do
+next, particularly when the Road doesn't go any farther? Shall you say,
+"Isn't this a pleasant summer?" or "What did you really like best at the
+theater last winter?" If you gallop out it looks as though you were
+frightened. If you amble out, you might hear some one laugh behind your
+back, which is infinitely worse than being grabbed on the stairs.
+
+The situation was excessively awkward. And the Artist evidently was not
+clever in conversational emergencies.
+
+The Girl straightened her gray slouch hat. Then she ran the cool metal
+butt of her riding-whip back and forth under the White Pony's sweltering
+mane. Then she swallowed very hard once or twice and remarked inanely:
+
+"Did the Road go right into the house?"
+
+"Yes," said the Artist, with a nervous blue dab at his canvas.
+
+The Girl's ire rose at his churlishness. "If that is so," she announced,
+"if the Road really went right into the house, I'll just wait here a
+minute till it comes out again."
+
+But the Artist never smiled an atom to make things easier, though the
+Bossy began to tug most joyously at his chain, and the White Bulldog
+rolled over and over with delight.
+
+The Girl would have given anything now to escape at full speed down the
+Road along which she had come, but escape of that sort had suddenly
+assumed the qualities of a panicky, ignominious retreat, so she parried
+for time by riding right up behind the Artist and watching him change a
+perfectly blue canvas sky into a regular tornado.
+
+"Oh, do you think it's going to rain as hard as that?" she teased.
+"Perhaps I'd better settle down here until the storm is over."
+
+But the Artist never smiled or spoke. He just painted and sniffed as
+though he worked by steam, and when his ears had finally grown so
+crimson that apoplexy seemed impending, she took pity on his miserable
+embarrassment and backed even the shadow of her pony out of his sight.
+Then with a desperate effort at perfect ease she remarked:
+
+"Well--I guess I'll ride round to your back door. Perhaps the Road came
+out that way and went on without me."
+
+But though she and the White Pony hunted in every direction through
+white birch and swaying alders, they found no possible path by which the
+Road could have escaped, and were obliged at last to return with some
+hauteur, and make as dignified an exit as possible from the scene.
+
+The Artist bowed with stiff relief at their departure, but the White
+Bulldog preceded them with friendly romps and yells, and the Bossy
+pulled up his iron hitching stake and chain and came clanking after them
+with furious bounds and jingles.
+
+No one but the White Pony would have stood the racket for a moment, and
+even the White Pony began to feel a bit staccato in his feet. The Girl
+kept her saddle like a circus rider, but the amusement on her face was
+just a trifle studied. It was a fine procession, clamor and all, with
+the Bulldog scouting ahead, the White Pony following skittishly, and the
+Bossy see-sawing behind, clanking a dungeon chain that left a cloud of
+dust as far as you could see.
+
+It must have startled the Youngish Man who loomed up suddenly at a bend
+of the Road and caught the wriggling Bulldog in his arms.
+
+"Who comes here?" he cried with a regular war-whoop of a challenge. "Who
+comes here?"
+
+"Just a lady and a bossy," said the Girl, as she reined in the Pony
+abruptly, and sent the Bossy caroming off into the bushes.
+
+"But it's my brother's Bossy," protested the Youngish Man.
+
+"Oh, no, it isn't," the Girl explained a little wearily. "It's mine now.
+It chose between us."
+
+The Youngish Man eyed her with some amusement.
+
+"Did you really see my brother at the house?" he probed.
+
+The Girl nodded, flushing. It was very hot, and she was beginning to
+feel just a wee bit faint and hungry and irritable.
+
+"Yes, I saw your brother," she reiterated, "but I didn't seem to care
+for him. I rode by mistake right into the picture he was painting.
+There's probably paint all over me. It was very awkward, and he didn't
+do a thing to make it easier. I abominate that kind of person. If a man
+can't do anything else he can always ask you if you wouldn't like a
+drink of water!" She scowled indignantly. "It was the Road's fault
+anyway! I was just exploring, and the Road cried 'Follow me,' and I
+followed--a little faster than I meant to--and the Road ran right into
+your house and shut the door. Oh, _slammed_ the door right in my face!"
+
+"Would you like a drink of water, _now_?" suggested the Youngish Man.
+
+"No, I thank you," said the Girl, with stubborn dignity, and then
+weakened to the alluring offer with "But my White Pony is very cruelly
+thirsty."
+
+Both adventurers looked pretty jaded with heat and dust.
+
+The Youngish Man led the way into a tiny, pungent wood-path that ended
+in a gurgling spring-hole, where the White Pony nuzzled his nose with
+deep-breathed, dripping satisfaction, while the Girl kept to her saddle
+and looked down on the Youngish Man with frank interest.
+
+He looked very picturesque and brown and clever in his khaki suit with a
+game bag slung across his shoulder.
+
+"You're not a hunter," she exclaimed impulsively. "You're not a
+hunter--because you haven't any gun."
+
+"No," said the Man, "I'm a collector."
+
+The Girl cried out with pleasure and clapped her hands. "A
+collector?--oh, goody! So am I! What do you collect? Minerals? Oh--dear!
+_Mine_ is lots more interesting. I collect adventures."
+
+"Adventures?" The Man made no slightest effort to conceal his amused
+curiosity. "Adventures? Now I call that a jolly thing to collect. Is it
+a good country to work in? And what have you found?"
+
+The Girl smiled at him appreciatively--a little flitting, whimsical
+sort of smile, and commenced to rummage in the blouse of her white
+shirt-waist, from which she finally produced a small, red-covered
+notebook. She fluttered its diminutive pages for a second, and then
+began to laugh:
+
+"You'd better sit down if you really want to hear what I've found."
+
+The Man dropped comfortably into place beside the spring and watched
+her. She was very watchable. Some people have to be beautiful to rivet
+your attention. Some people _don't_ have to be. It's all a matter of
+temperament. Her hair was very, very brown, though, and her eyes were
+deep and wide and hazel, and the red in her cheeks came and went with
+every throb of her heart.
+
+"Of course," she explained apologetically, "of course I haven't found a
+lot of things yet--I've only been working at it a little while. But I've
+collected a 'Runaway Accident with the Rural Free-Delivery Man.' It was
+awfully scary and interesting. And I've collected a 'Den of Little Foxes
+Down in the Woods Back of My House,' and 'Two Sunrises with a Crazy
+Woman who Thinks that the Sun Can't Get Up Until She Does,' and I've
+collected a 'Country Camp-Meeting all Hallelujahs and By Goshes,' and a
+'Circus Where I Spent All Day with the Snake-Charmer,' and a 'Midnight
+Ride Alone through the Rosedale Woods in a Thunder-Storm.' Of course,
+as I say, I haven't found a lot of things yet, but then it's only the
+middle of June and I have two more weeks' vacation yet."
+
+The Man put back his head and laughed, but it was a pleasant sort of
+laugh that flooded all the stern lines in his face.
+
+"I'm sure I never thought of making a regular business of collecting
+adventures," he admitted, "but it certainly is a splendid idea. But
+aren't you ever afraid?" he asked. "Aren't you ever afraid, for
+instance, riding round on a lonesome trip like this?"
+
+The Girl laughed. "Yes," she acknowledged, "I'm often afraid
+of--squirrels--and falling twigs--and black-looking stumps. I'm often
+afraid of toy noises and toy fears--but I never saw a real fear in all
+my life. Even when you jumped up in the Road I wasn't afraid of
+you--because you are a gentleman--and--gentlemen are my friends."
+
+"Have you many friends?" asked the Man. The question seemed amusingly
+justifiable. "You look to me about eighteen. Girls of your age are
+usually too busy collecting Love to collect anything else--even ideas.
+Have you collected any Love?"
+
+The Girl threw out her hands in joking protest. "Collected any Love?
+Why, I don't even know what Love looks like! Maybe what I'd collect
+would be--poison ivy." Her eyes narrowed a little. Her voice quivered
+the merest trifle. "There's a Boy at Home--who talks--a little--about
+it. But how can I tell that it's Love?"
+
+Her sudden vehemency startled him. "Where _is_ 'Home'?" he asked.
+
+For immediate answer the Girl slipped down from the White Pony's back,
+and loosened the saddle creakingly before she helped herself to a long,
+dripping draught from the birch cup that hung just over the spring.
+
+"You're nice to talk to," she acknowledged, "and almost no one is nice
+to talk to. It's a whole year since I've talked right out to any one!
+Where do I live? Well, my headquarters are in New York, but my
+heartquarters are over at Rosedale. There's quite a difference, you
+know!"
+
+"Yes," said the Man, "I remember--there used to--be--quite a difference.
+But how did you ever happen to think of collecting adventures?"
+
+The girl pulled at the White Pony's mane for a long, hesitating moment,
+then she turned and looked searchingly into the Man's face. She very
+evidently liked what she saw.
+
+"I collect adventures because I am lonesome!" Her voice shook a little,
+but her eyes were frankly untroubled. "I collect adventures because the
+life that interests me doesn't happen to come to me, and I have to go
+out and search for it!--I'm companion all the year to a woman who
+doesn't know right from wrong in any dear, big sense, but who could
+define propriety and impropriety to you till your ears split. And all
+her friends are just like her. They haven't any mental muscle to them.
+It's just dress and etiquette, dress and etiquette, dress and etiquette!
+So I have to live all alone in my head, and think and think and think,
+till my poor brain churns and overlaps like a surf without any shore. Do
+you know what I mean? Then when my June vacation comes, I run right off
+to Rosedale and collect all the adventures I possibly can to take back
+with me for the long dreary year. Things to think about, you know, when
+I have to sit up at night giving medicine, or when I have to mend heavy
+black silk clothes, or when the dinners are so long that I could scream
+over the extra delay of a salad course. So I make June a sort of pranky,
+fancy-dress party for my soul. Do you know what I mean?"
+
+"Yes, I know what you mean," said the Man. "I know just what you mean.
+You mean you're eighteen. That's the whole of it. You mean that there's
+no fence to your pasture, no bottom to your cup, no crust to your bread.
+You mean that you can't sleep at night for the pounding of your heart.
+You mean most of all that there's no limit to your vision. You're
+inordinately keen after life. That's all. You'll get over it!"
+
+"_I won't get over it!_" There was fire in the Girl's eyes and she drew
+her breath sharply. "I say I _won't_ get over it! There's nothing on
+earth that could stale me! If I live to be a hundred I sha'n't
+wither!--why, how could I?"
+
+Buoyant, blooming, aquiver with startled emotions, she threw out her
+hands with a passionate gesture of protest.
+
+The Man shook his shoulders and jumped up. "Perhaps you're right," he
+muttered. "Perhaps you _are_ the kind that won't ever grow old. If you
+are--Heaven help you! Youth's nothing but a wound, anyway. Do you want
+to be a wound that never heals?" He laughed stridently.
+
+Then the Girl began to fumble through sudden tears at the buckles of her
+saddle. Her growing hunger and faintness and the heat of the day were
+telling on her.
+
+"You must think me a crazy fool," she confessed, "the way I have plunged
+into personalities. Why, I could go a whole year with an alien
+running-mate and never breathe a word or a sigh about myself, but with
+some people--the second you see them you know they are part of your
+chord. Chord is the only term in music that I understand, and I
+understand that as though I had made the word myself." She tried to
+laugh. "Now I'm going home! I've had a good time. You seem almost like a
+friend. I've never had a talky friend."
+
+And she was in her saddle and half-way down the wood-path before his
+mind quickened to cry out "Stop! Wait a minute!"
+
+A little out of breath he caught up with her, and stood for a moment
+like an embarrassed schoolboy, though his face in the sunlight was as
+old as young forty.
+
+"I'm afraid you haven't had much of an adventure this morning," he
+volunteered whimsically. "If you really want an adventure why don't you
+come back to the house and have dinner with my brother and me? There's
+no one else there. Think how it would tease my brother! You're twelve or
+fifteen miles from home, and it's already two o'clock and very hot. My
+brother has done some pictures that are going to be talked about next
+winter, and I--I've got rather a conspicuous position ahead of me in
+Washington. Wouldn't it amuse you a little bit afterward, if any one
+spoke of us, to remember our little farmhouse dinner to-day?--Would you
+be afraid to come?" His last question was very direct.
+
+A look came into the Girl's eyes that was very good for a man to see.
+
+"Why, of course I wouldn't be afraid to come," she said. "Gentlemen are
+my friends."
+
+But she was shy about going, just the same, with a certain frank, boyish
+shyness that only served to emphasize the general artlessness of her
+verve.
+
+With a quick dive into the bushes the Man collared the Bossy and
+transferred his clanking chain to the bit of the astonished White Pony.
+
+"Now you've got to come," he laughed up at her, and the whole party
+started back for the tiny old gray farmhouse where the Artist greeted
+them with sad concern.
+
+"I've brought Miss Girl back to have dinner with us," announced the
+Pony-leader cheerfully, relying on his brother's serious nature to
+overlook any strangeness of nomenclature. "You evidently didn't remember
+meeting her at Mrs. Moyne's house-party last spring?"
+
+The Girl fell readily into the game. She turned the White Pony loose in
+the dooryard, and then went into the queer old kitchen, rolled up her
+sleeves, wound herself round with a blue-checked apron, and commenced to
+work. She had a deft touch at household matters, and the Man followed
+her about as humbly as though he himself had not been adequately
+providing meals for the past two months.
+
+The color rose high in the Girl's cheeks, and her voice took on the
+thrill and breathiness of amused excitement. Wherever she found a huddle
+of best china or linen or silver she raided it for her use, and the
+table flared forth at last with a dainty, inconsequent prettiness that
+quite defied the Artist's prescribed rules for beauty.
+
+It was a funny dinner, with an endless amount of significant bantering
+going on right under the Artist's sunburned nose. Yet for all the mirth
+of the situation, the Girl had quite a chance to study the face of her
+special host, in all its full detail of worldliness, of spirituality, of
+hardness, of sweetness. Her final impression, as her first one, was of a
+wonderful affinity and congeniality. "His face is like a harbor for all
+my stormy thoughts," was the way she described it to herself.
+
+After dinner the three washed up the dishes as sedately as though they
+had been working together day-in, day-out through the whole season, and
+after that the Artist escaped as quickly as possible to catch a cloud
+effect which he seemed to consider preposterously vital.
+
+Then with a dreary little feeling of a prize-pleasure all spent and
+gone, the Girl went over to the mirror in the sitting-room and pinned on
+her gray slouch hat and patted her hair and straightened her belt.
+
+But it was not her own reflection that interested her most. The mirror
+made a fine frame for the whole quaint room, with its dingy landscape
+wall-paper from which the scarlet petticoat of a shepherdess or the
+vivid green of a garland stood out with cheerful crudity. The battered,
+blackened fireplace was lurid here and there with gleams of copper
+kettles, and a huge gray cat purred comfortably in the curving seat of a
+sun-baked rocking-chair.
+
+It was a good picture to take home in your mind for remembrance, when
+walls should be brick and rooms ornate and life hackneyed, and the Girl
+shut her eyes for a second, experimentally, to fix the vision in her
+consciousness.
+
+When she opened her eyes again the Man was struggling through the
+doorway dragging a small, heavy trunk.
+
+"Oh, don't go yet!" he exclaimed. "Here are a lot of your things in this
+trunk. I brought them in to show you."
+
+And he dragged the trunk to the middle of the room and knelt down on the
+floor and commenced to unlock it.
+
+"_My_ things?" cried the Girl in amazement, and ran across the room and
+sat down on the floor beside him. "_My_ things?"
+
+There was a funny little twist to the Man's mouth that never relaxed all
+the time he was tinkering with the lock. "Yes--_your_ things," was all
+he said till the catch yielded finally, and he raised the cover to
+display the full contents to his companion's curious eyes.
+
+[Illustration: Instinctively she clasped it to her]
+
+"Oh--_books_!" she cried out, with a sudden, sweeping flush of
+comprehension, and darted her hand into the dusty pile and pulled out a
+well-worn copy of the Rubaiyat. Instinctively she clasped it to her.
+
+"I thought so!" said the Youngish Man quizzically. "I thought that was
+one of your books.
+
+          "When Time lets slip a little, perfect hour,
+           Oh, take it--for it will not come again."
+
+His eyes narrowed, and his hands reached nervously to regain possession
+of the volume. Then he laughed.
+
+"_I_, also, used to think that Life was made for me," he scoffed
+teasingly. "It's a glorious idea--as long as it lasts! You take every
+harsh old happening and every flimsy friendship and line it with your
+own silk, and then sit by and say, 'Oh, _isn't_ the World a rustly,
+shimmery, luxurious place!' And all the time the happening _is_ harsh,
+and the friendship _is_ flimsy, and it's just your own perishable silk
+lining that does the rustle and the shimmer and the luxury act. Oh, I
+suppose that's 'woman talk' about silk linings, but I know a thing or
+two, even if I am a man."
+
+But the radiancy of the Girl's face defied his cynicism utterly. Her
+eyes were absolutely fathomless with Youth.
+
+Then his mood changed suddenly. He reached out with a little brooding
+gesture of protection. "These are my college books," he confided, "my
+Dream Library. I've scarcely thought of them for a dozen years. I don't
+meet many dreamers nowadays. You've probably got a lot of newer books
+than these, but I'll wager you anything in the world that every book
+here is a precious friend to you. I shouldn't wonder if your own copies
+opened exactly to the same places. Here's young Keats with his shadowing
+tragedy. How you have mooned over it. And here's Tennyson. What about
+the starlit vision:
+
+          "And on her lover's arm she leant,
+            And round her waist she felt it fold,--"
+
+The Girl took up the words softly in unison:
+
+          "And far across the hills they went
+           To that new world which is the old."
+
+In rushing, eager tenderness she browsed through one book after another,
+sometimes silently, sometimes with a little crooning quotation, where
+corners were turned down. And when she had quite finished, her eyes
+were like stars, and she looked up tremulously, and whispered:
+
+"Why, we--like--just--the--same--things."
+
+But the Youngish Man did not smile back at her. His face in that second
+turned suddenly old-looking and haggard and gray. He threw the books
+back into their places, and slammed the trunk-cover with a bang.
+
+For just the infinitesimal fraction of a second the Man and the Girl
+looked into each other's eyes. For just that infinitesimal fraction of a
+second the Man's eyes were as unfathomable as the Girl's.
+
+Then with a great sniff and scratching and whine, the White Bulldog
+pushed his way into the room, and the Girl jumped up in alarm to note
+that the sun was dropping very low in the west, and that the shadows of
+late afternoon crept palpably over her companion's face.
+
+For a moment the two stood awkwardly without a word, and then the Girl
+with a conscious effort at lightness queried:
+
+"But _where_ did the Runaway Road go to? I _must_ find out."
+
+The Youngish Man turned as though something had startled him.
+
+"Wouldn't you rather leave things just as they are?" he asked.
+
+"NO!" The Girl stamped her foot vehemently. "NO! I want everything. I
+want the whole adventure."
+
+"The whole adventure?" The Youngish Man winced at the phrase, and then
+laughed to cover his seriousness.
+
+"All right," he acquiesced. "I'll show you just where the Runaway Road
+goes to."
+
+Without further explanation he stepped to the dooryard and scooped up
+two heaping handfuls of gravel from the Road. As he came back into the
+room he trailed a little line of earth across the floor to the foot of
+the stairs, and threw the remaining handful up the steps just as a
+heedless child might have done.
+
+"Go follow your Runaway Road," he smiled, "and see where it leads to, if
+you are so eager! I'm going down to the woods to see if my brother is
+quite lost in his clouds."
+
+Wasn't that _another_ dare? It seemed a craven thing to tease for a
+climax and then shirk it. She had never shirked anything yet that was
+right, no matter how unusual it was.
+
+She started for the stairs. One step, two steps, three steps, four
+steps--her riding-boots grated on the gravel. "Oh, you funny Runaway
+Road," she trembled, "where _do_ you go to?"
+
+At the top stairs a tiny waft of earth turned her definitely into the
+first doorway.
+
+She took one step across the threshold, and then stood stock-still and
+stared. It was a _woman's room_. And from floor to ceiling and from wall
+to wall flaunted an incongruous, moneyed effort to blot out all
+temperament and pang and trenchant life-history from one spot at least
+of the little old gray farmhouse. Bauble was there, and fashion and
+novelty, but the whole gay decoration looked and felt like the sumptuous
+dressing of a child whom one _hated_.
+
+With a gasp of surprise the Girl went over and looked at herself in the
+mirror.
+
+"Wouldn't I look queer in a room like this?" she whispered to herself.
+But she didn't look queer at all. She only felt queer, like a flatted
+note.
+
+Then she hurried right down the stairs again, and went out in the yard,
+and caught the White Pony, and climbed up into her saddle.
+
+The Youngish Man came running to say good-by.
+
+"Well?" he said.
+
+The Girl's eyes were steady as her hand. If her heart fluttered there
+was no sign of it.
+
+"Why, it was a _woman's_ room," she answered to his inflection.
+
+"Yes," said the Youngish Man quite simply. "It is my wife's room. My
+wife is in Europe getting her winter clothes. All people do not
+happen--to--like--the--same--things."
+
+The Girl put out her hand to him with bright-faced friendliness.
+
+"In Europe?" she repeated. "Indeed, I shall not be so local when I think
+of her. Wherever she is--all the time--I shall always think of your wife
+as being--most of anything else--_in luck_."
+
+She drew back her hand and chirruped to the White Pony, but the Youngish
+Man detained her.
+
+"Wait a second," he begged. "Here's a copy of Matthew Arnold for you to
+take home as a token, though there's only one thing in it for us, and
+you won't care for that until you are forty. You can play it's about the
+mountains that you pass going home. Here it is:
+
+          "Unaffrighted by the silence round them,
+             Undistracted by the sights they see,
+          _THESE_ demand not that the things about them
+             Yield them love, amusement, sympathy."
+
+"Rather cracked-ice comfort, isn't it?" the Girl laughed as she tucked
+the little book into her blouse.
+
+"Rather," said the Youngish Man, "but cracked ice is good for fevers,
+and Youth is the most raging fever that I know about."
+
+Then he stood back from the White Pony, and smiled quizzically, and the
+Girl turned the White Pony's head, and started down the Road.
+
+Just before the first curve in the alders, she whirled in her saddle and
+looked back. The Youngish Man was still standing there watching her, and
+she held up her hand as a final signal. Then the Road curved her out of
+sight.
+
+It was chilly now in the gloaming shade of the woods, and home seemed a
+long way off. After a mile or two the White Pony dragged as though his
+feet were sore, and when she tried to force him into a jarring canter
+the sharp corners of the Matthew Arnold book goaded cruelly against her
+breast.
+
+"It isn't going to be a very pleasant ride," she said. "But it was quite
+an adventure. I don't know whether to call it the 'Adventure of the
+Runaway Road' or the 'Adventure of the Little Perfect Hour.'"
+
+Then she shivered a little and tried to keep the White Pony in the
+rapidly fading sun spots of the Road, but the shadows grew thicker and
+cracklier and more lonesome every minute, and the only familiar sound of
+life to be heard was 'way off in the distance, where some little lost
+bossy was calling plaintively for its mother.
+
+There were plenty of unfamiliar sounds, though. Things--nothing special,
+but just Things--sighed mournfully from behind a looming boulder.
+Something dark, with gleaming eyes, scudded madly through the woods. A
+ghastly, mawkish chill like tomb-air blew dankly from the swamp. Myriads
+of tiny insects droned venomously. The White Pony shied at a flash of
+heat lightning, and stumbled bunglingly on a rolling stone. Worst of
+all, far behind her, sounded the unmistakable tagging step of some
+stealthy creature.
+
+For the first time in her life the girl was frightened--hideously,
+sickeningly frightened of Night!
+
+Back in the open clearing round the tiny farmhouse, the light, of
+course, still lingered in a lulling yellow-gray. It would be an hour
+yet, she reasoned, before the great, black loneliness settled there. She
+could picture the little, simple, homely, companionable activities of
+early evening--the sputter of a candle, the good smell of a pipe, the
+steamy murmur of a boiling kettle. O--h! But could one go back wildly
+and say: "It is darker and cracklier than I supposed in the woods, and I
+am a wilful Girl, and there are fifteen wilful miles between me and
+home--and there is a cemetery on the way, and a new grave--and a
+squalid camp of gypsies--and a broken bridge--_and I am afraid! What
+shall I do?_"
+
+She laughed aloud at the absurdity, and cut at the White Pony sharply
+with her whip. It would be lighter, she thought, on the open village
+road below the hill.
+
+Love? Amusement? Sympathy? She shook her young fist defiantly at the
+hulking contour of a stolid, bored old mountain that loomed up through a
+gap in the trees. "_Drat_ Self-sufficiency," she cursed, with a vehement
+little-girl curse. "I won't be a bored old Mountain. I _won't_! I
+_won't_! I _won't_!"
+
+All her short, eager life, it seemed, she had been floundering like a
+stranger in a strange land--no father or mother, no chum, no friend, no
+lover, no anything--and now just for a flash, just for one "little,
+perfect hour" she had found a voice at last that _spoke her own
+language_, and the voice belonged to a Man who belonged to another
+woman!
+
+She remembered her morning's singing with a bitter pang. "_Nothing_ is
+mine forever. Nothing, _nothing_, NOTHING!" she sobbed.
+
+A great, black, smothering isolation like a pall settled down over her,
+and seemed to pin itself with a stab through her heart. Everybody, once
+in his time, has tried to imagine his Dearest-one absolutely
+nonexistent, unborn, and tortured himself with the possibility of such a
+ghostly vacuum in his life. To the Girl suddenly it seemed as though
+puzzled, lonely, unmated, all her short years, she had stumbled now
+precipitously on the Great Cause Of It--a _vacuum_. It was not that she
+had lost any one, or missed any one. _It was simply that some one had
+never been born!_
+
+The thought filled her with a whimsical new terror. She pounded the
+White Pony into a gallop and covered the last half-mile of the Runaway
+Road. At the crest of the hill the valley vista brightened palely and
+the White Pony gave a whimper of awakened home instinct. Cautiously,
+warily, with legs folding like a jack-knife he began the hazardous
+descent.
+
+Was he sleepy? Was he clumsy? Was he footsore? Just before the Runaway
+Road smoothed out into the village highway his knees wilted suddenly
+under him, and he pitched headlong with a hideous lurch that sent the
+Girl hurtling over his neck into a pitiful, cluttered heap among the
+dust and stones, where he came back after his first panicky run, and
+blew over her with dilated nostrils, and whimpered a little before he
+strayed off to a clover patch on the highway below.
+
+Twilight deepened to darkness. Darkness quickened at last to stars. It
+was Night, real Night, black alike in meadow, wood, and dooryard,
+before the Girl opened her eyes again. Part of an orange moon, waning,
+wasted, decadent, glowed dully in the sky.
+
+For a long time, stark-still and numb, she lay staring up into space,
+conscious of nothing except consciousness. It was a floaty sort of
+feeling. Was she dead? That was the first thought that twittered in her
+brain. Gradually, though, the reassuring edges of her cheeks loomed into
+sight, and a beautiful, real pain racked along her spine and through her
+side. It was the pain that whetted her curiosity. "If it's my neck
+that's broken," she reasoned, "it's all over. If it's my heart it's only
+just begun."
+
+Then she wriggled one hand very cautiously, and a White Doggish
+Something came over and licked her fingers. It felt very kind and
+refreshing.
+
+Now and then on the road below, a carriage rattled by, or one voice
+called to another. She didn't exactly care that no one noticed her, or
+rescued her--indeed, she was perfectly, sluggishly comfortable--but she
+remembered with alarming distinctness that once, on a scorching city
+pavement, she had gone right by a bruised purple pansy that lay wilting
+underfoot. She could remember just how it looked. It had a funny little
+face, purple and yellow, and all twisted with pain. And she had gone
+right by. And she felt very sorry about it now.
+
+She was still thinking about that purple pansy an hour later, when she
+heard the screeching toot of an automobile, the snort of a horse, and
+the terrified clatter of hoofs up the hill. Then the White Doggish
+Something leaped up and barked a sharp, fluttery bark like a signal.
+
+The next thing she knew, pleasant voices and a lantern were coming
+toward her. "They will be frightened," she thought, "to find a body in
+the Road." So, "Coo-o! Coo-o!" she cried in a faint little voice.
+
+Then quickly a bright light poured into her face, and she swallowed very
+hard with her eyes for a whole minute before she could see that two men
+were bending over her. One of the men was just a man, but the other one
+was the Boy From Home. As soon as she saw him she began to cry very
+softly to herself, and the Boy From Home took her right up in his great,
+strong arms and carried her down to the cushioned comfort of the
+automobile.
+
+"Where--did--you--come--from?" she whispered smotheringly into his
+shoulder.
+
+The harried, boyish face broke brightly into a smile.
+
+"I came from Rosedale to-night, to find _you_!" he said. "But they sent
+me up here on business to survey a new Road."
+
+"To survey a new Road?" she gasped. "That's--good. All the Roads that I
+know--go--to--Other People's Homes."
+
+Her head began to droop limply to one side. She felt her senses reeling
+away from her again. "If--I--loved--you," she hurried to ask,
+"would--you--make--me--a--safe Road--_all my own_?"
+
+The Boy From Home gave a scathing glance at the hill that reared like a
+crag out of the darkness.
+
+"If I couldn't make a safer Road than _that_--" he began, then stopped
+abruptly, with a sudden flash of illumination, and brushed his trembling
+lips across her hair.
+
+"I'll make you the safest, smoothest Road that ever happened," he said,
+"if I have to dig it with my fingers and gnaw it with my teeth."
+
+A little, snuggling sigh of contentment slipped from the Girl's lips.
+
+"Do--you--suppose," she whispered,
+"do--you--suppose--that--after--all--_this_--was--the real--end--of--the
+Runaway Road?"
+
+
+
+
+SOMETHING THAT HAPPENED IN OCTOBER
+
+
+MONDAY, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, it had rained. Day in, day
+out, day in, day out, day in, it had rained and rained and rained and
+rained and rained, till by Friday night the great blue mountains loomed
+like a chunk of ruined velvet, and the fog along the valley lay thick
+and gross as mildewed porridge.
+
+It was a horrid storm. Slop and shiver and rotting leaves were rampant.
+Even in Alrik's snug little house the chairs were wetter than moss.
+Clothes in the closets hung lank and clammy as undried bathing-suits.
+Worst of all, across every mirror lay a breathy, sad gray mist, as
+though ghosts had been back to whimper there over their lost faces.
+
+It had never been so before in the first week of October.
+
+There were seven of us who used to tryst there together every year in
+the gorgeous Scotch-plaid Autumn, when the reds and greens and blues
+and browns and yellows lapped and overlapped like a festive little kilt
+for the Young Winter, and every crisp, sweet day that dawned was like
+the taste of cider and the smell of grapes.
+
+That is the kind of October well worth living, and seven people make a
+wonderfully proper number to play together in the country, particularly
+if six of you are men and women, and one of you is a dog.
+
+Yet, after all, it was October, and October alone, that lured us. We
+certainly differed astonishingly in most of our other tastes.
+
+Three of us belonged to the peaceful Maine woods--Alrik and Alrik's Wife
+and his Growly-Dog-Gruff. Four of us came from the rackety cities--the
+Partridge Hunter, the Blue Serge Man, the Pretty Lady, and Myself--a
+newspaper woman.
+
+Incidentally, I may add that the Blue Serge Man and the Pretty Lady were
+husband and wife, but did not care much about it, having been married,
+very evidently, in some gorgeously ornate silver-plated emotion that
+they had mistaken at the time for the "sterling" article. The shine and
+beauty of the marriage had long since worn away, leaving things quite a
+little bit edgy here and there. Alrik's young spouse was, wonder of
+wonders, a transplanted New York chorus girl. No other biographical
+data are necessary except that Growly-Dog-Gruff was a brawling, black,
+fat-faced mongrel whose complete sense of humor had been slammed in the
+door at a very early age. For some inexplainable reason, he seemed to
+hold all the rest of the crowd responsible for the catastrophe, but was
+wildly devoted to me. He showed this devotion by never biting me as hard
+as he bit the others.
+
+Yet even with Growly-Dog-Gruff included among our assets, we had always
+considered ourselves an extremely superior crowd.
+
+There were seven of us, I said, who _used_ to tryst there together every
+autumn. But now, since the year before, three of us had _gone_, Alrik's
+Wife, Alrik's Dog, and the Blue Serge Man. So the four of us who
+remained huddled very close around the fire on that stormy, dreary,
+ghastly first night of our reunion, and talked-talked-talked and
+laughed-laughed-laughed just as fast as we possibly could for fear that
+a moment's silence would plunge us all down, whether or no, into the
+sorrow-chasm that lurked so consciously on every side. Yet we certainly
+looked and acted like a very jovial quartet.
+
+The Pretty Lady, to be sure, was a black wisp of crape in her prim,
+four-footed chair; but Alrik's huge bulk tipped jauntily back against
+the wainscoting in a gaudy-colored Mackinaw suit, with merely a broad
+band of black across his left sleeve--as one who, neither affirming nor
+denying the formalities of grief, would laconically warn the public at
+large to "Keep Off My Sorrow." I liked Alrik, and I had liked Alrik's
+Wife. But I had loved Alrik's Dog. I do not care especially for temper
+in women, but a surly dog, or a surly man, is as irresistibly funny to
+me as Chinese music, there is so little plot to any of them.
+
+[Illustration: The four of us who remained huddled very close around the
+fire]
+
+But now on the hearth-rug at my feet the Partridge Hunter lay in amiable
+corduroy comfort, with the little puff of his pipe and his lips
+throbbing out in pleasant, dozy regularity. He had traveled in Japan
+since last we met, and one's blood flowed pink and gold and purple,
+one's flesh turned silk, one's eyes onyx, before the wonder of his
+narrative.
+
+No one was to be outdone in adventurous recital. Alrik had spent the
+summer guiding a party of amateur sports along the Allagash, and his
+garbled account of it would have stocked a comic paper for a month. The
+Pretty Lady had christened a warship, and her eager, brooky voice went
+rippling and churtling through such major details as blue chiffon velvet
+and the goldiest kind of champagne. Even Alrik's raw-boned Old Mother,
+clinking dirty supper dishes out in the kitchen, had a crackle-voiced
+tale of excitement to contribute about a floundering spring bear that
+she had soused with soap-suds from her woodshed window.
+
+But all the time the storm grew worse and worse. The poor, tiny old
+house tore and writhed under the strain. Now and again a shutter blew
+shrilly loose, or a chimney brick thudded down, or a great sheet of rain
+sucked itself up like a whirlpool and then came drenching and hurtling
+itself in a perfect frenzy against the frail, clattering window-panes.
+
+It was a good night for four friends to be housed together in a red, red
+room, where the low ceiling brooded over you like a face and the warped
+floor curled around you like the cuddle of a hand. A living-room should
+always be red, I think, like the walls of a heart, and cluttered, as
+Alrik's was, with every possible object, mean or fine, funny or
+pathetic, that typifies the owner's personal experience.
+
+Yet there are people, I suppose, people stuffed with arts, not hearts,
+who would have monotoned Alrik's bright walls a dull brain-gray, ripped
+down the furs, the fishing-tackle, the stuffed owls, the gaudy
+theatrical posters, the shelf of glasses, the spooky hair wreaths, the
+really terrible crayon portrait of some much-beloved ancient grandame;
+and, supplementing it all with a single, homesick Japanese print,
+yearning across the vacuum at a chalky white bust of a perfect stranger
+like Psyche or Ruskin, would have called the whole effect more
+"successful." Just as though the crudest possible room that represents
+the affections is not infinitely more worth while than the most esoteric
+apartment that represents the intellect.
+
+There were certainly no vacuums in Alrik's room. Everything in it was
+crowded and scrunched together like a hard, friendly hand-shake. It was
+the most fiercely, primitively sincere room that I have ever seen, and
+king or peasant therefore would have felt equally at home in it. Surely
+no mere man could have crossed the humpy threshold without a blissful,
+instinctive desire to keep on his hat and take off his boots. Alrik knew
+how to make a room "homeful." Alrik knew everything in the world except
+grammar.
+
+Red warmth, yellow cheer, and all-colored jollity were there with us.
+
+Faster and faster we talked, and louder and louder we laughed, until at
+last, when the conversation lost its breath utterly, Alrik jumped up
+with a grin and started our old friend the phonograph. His first choice
+of music was a grotesque _duo_ by two back-yard cats. It was one of
+those irresistibly silly minstrel things that would have exploded any
+decent bishop in the midst of his sermon. Certainly no one of us had
+ever yet been able to withstand it. _But now no bristling, injuriated
+dog jumped from his sleep and charged like a whole regiment on the
+perfectly innocent garden._ And the duo somehow seemed strangely flat.
+
+"Here is something we used to like," suggested Alrik desperately, and
+started a splendid barytone rendering of "Drink to Me Only with Thine
+Eyes." _But no high-pitched, mocking tenor voice took up the solemn
+velvet song and flirted it like a cheap chiffon scarf._ And the Pretty
+Lady rose very suddenly and went out to the kitchen indefinitely "for a
+glass of water." It was funny about the Blue Serge Man. I had not liked
+him overmuch, but I missed _not-liking-him_ with a crick in my heart
+that was almost sorrow.
+
+"Oh, for heaven's sake try some other music!" cried the Partridge Hunter
+venomously, and Alrik clutched out wildly for the first thing he could
+reach. It was "Give My Regards to Broadway." We had practically worn out
+the record the year before, but its mutilated remains whirred along,
+dropping an occasional note or word, with the same cheerful spunk and
+unconcern that characterized the song itself:
+
+          "Give my regards to Broadway,
+           Remember me to Herald Square,
+           Tell all the--whirry--whirry, whirrrrry--whirrrrrrr
+           That I will soon be there."
+
+The Partridge Hunter began instantly to beat muffled time with his soft
+felt slippers. Alrik plunged as usual into a fearfully clever and
+clattery imitation of an ox shying at a street-car. _But what of it? No
+wakened, sparkling-eyed girl came stealing forth from her corner to
+cuddle her blazing cheek against the cool, brass-colored jowl of the
+phonograph horn._ An All-Goneness is an amazing thing. It was strange
+about Alrik's Wife. Her presence had been as negative as a dead gray
+dove. But her _absence_ was like scarlet strung with bells!
+
+The evening began to drag out like a tortured rubber band getting ready
+to snap.
+
+It was surely eleven o'clock before the Pretty Lady returned from the
+kitchen with our hot lemonades. The tall glasses jingled together
+pleasantly on the tray. The height was there, the breadth, the precious,
+steaming fragrance. _But the Blue Serge Man had always mixed our
+nightcaps for us._
+
+With grandiloquent pleasantry, the Partridge Hunter jumped to his feet,
+raised his glass, toasted "Happy Days," choked on the first swallow,
+bungled his grasp, and dropped the whole glass in shattering, messy
+fragments to the floor.
+
+"Lord," he muttered under his breath, "one could stand missing a fellow
+in a church or a graveyard or a mournful sunset glow--but to miss him
+in a foolish, folksy--hot lemonade!--Lord!" And he shook his shoulders
+almost angrily and threw himself down again on the hearth-rug.
+
+The darkening room was warm as an oven now, and the great, soft, glowing
+pile of apple-wood embers lured one's drowsy eyes like a flame-colored
+pillow. No one spoke at all until midnight.
+
+But the clock had only just finished complaining about the hour when the
+Partridge Hunter straightened up abruptly and cried out to no one in
+particular:
+
+"Well, I simply can't bluff this out any longer. I've just _got_ to know
+how it all happened!"
+
+No one stopped to question his meaning. No one stopped to parry with
+word or phrase. Like two tense music-boxes wound to their utmost
+resonance, but with mechanism only just that instant released, Alrik and
+the Pretty Lady burst into sound.
+
+The Pretty Lady spoke first. Her breath was short and raspy and cross,
+like the breath of a person who runs for a train--and misses it.
+
+"It was--in--Florida," she gasped, "the--last--of March. The sailboat
+was a dreadful, flimsy, shattered thing. But he _would_ go out in
+it--_alone_--storm or no storm!" She spoke with a sudden sense of
+emotional importance, with a certain strange, fierce, new pride in the
+shortcomings of her Man. "He must have swamped within an hour. They
+found his boat. But they never found his body. Just as one could always
+find his pocket, but never his watch--his purse, but never his money--his
+song, but never his soul." Her broken self-control plunged deeper and
+deeper into bitterness. "It was a stupid--wicked--wilful--accident,"
+she persisted, "and I can see him in his last, smothery--astonished--
+moment--just--as--as--plainly--as--though--I--had--been--there.
+Do you think for an instant that he would swallow even--Death--without
+making a fuss about it? Can't you hear him rage and sputter: '_This_ is
+too salt! _This_ is too cold! Take it away and bring me another!' While
+all the time his frenzied mind was racing up and down some precious,
+memoried playground like the Harvard Stadium or the New York Hippodrome,
+whimpering, 'Everybody'll be there except--_me_--except M-E!'"
+
+The Pretty Lady's voice took on a sudden hurt, left-out resentment. "Of
+course," she hurried on, "he wasn't exactly sad to go--nothing could
+make him sad. But I know that it must have made him very _mad_. He had
+just bought a new automobile. And he had rented a summer place at
+Marblehead. And he wanted to play tennis in June--"
+
+She paused for an instant's breath, and Alrik crashed like a moose into
+the silence.
+
+"It was lung trouble!" he attested vehemently. "Cough, cough, cough, all
+the time. It came on specially worse in April, and she died in May. She
+wasn't never very strong, you know, but she'd been brought up in your
+wicked old steam-heated New York, and she would persist in wearing
+tissue-paper clothes right through our rotten icy winters up here. And
+when I tried to dose her like the doctor said, with cod-liver oil or any
+of them thick things, I couldn't fool her--she just up an' said it was
+nothin' but liquid flannel, and spit it out and sassed me. And
+Gruff--Growly-Dog-Gruff," he finished hastily, "I don't know what ailed
+him. He jus' kind of followed along about June."
+
+The Partridge Hunter drew a long, heavy breath. When he spoke at last,
+his voice sounded like the voice of a man who holds his hat in his hand,
+and the puffs of smoke from his pipe made a sort of little halo round
+his words.
+
+"Isn't it nice," he mused, "to think that while we four are cozying
+here to-night in the same jolly old haunts, perhaps they three--Man,
+Girl, and Dog--are cuddling off together somewhere in the big,
+spooky Unknown, in the shade of a cloud, or the shine of a
+star--talking--perhaps--about--_us_?"
+
+The whimsical comfort of the thought pleased me. I did not want any one
+to be alone on such a night.
+
+But Alrick's tilted chair came crashing down on the floor with a
+resounding whack. His eyes were blazing.
+
+"She _ain't_ with him!" he cried. "She _ain't_, she AIN'T, she A-I-N-'T!
+I won't have it. Why, it's the middle of the night!"
+
+And in that electric instant I saw the Pretty Lady's face set rigidly,
+all except her mouth, which twisted in my direction.
+
+"I'll wager she _is_ with him," she whispered under her breath. "She
+always did tag him wherever he went!"
+
+Then I felt the toe of my slipper meet the recumbent elbow of the
+Partridge Hunter. Had I reached out to him? Or had he reached back to
+me? There was no time to find out, for the smooth, round conversation
+shattered prickingly in the hand like a blown-glass bauble, and with
+much nervous laughter and far-fetched joke-making, we rose, rummaged
+round for our candles, and climbed upstairs to bed.
+
+Alrik's Old Mother burrowed into a corner under the eaves.
+
+The Pretty Lady had her usual room, and mine was next to hers. For a
+lingering moment I dallied with her, craving some tiny, absurd bit of
+loving service. First, I helped her with a balky hook on her collar.
+Then I started to put her traveling coat and hat away in the closet. On
+the upper shelf something a little bit scary brushed my hands. _It was
+the Blue Serge Man's cap, with a ragged gash across it where
+Growly-Dog-Gruff had worried it on a day I remembered well._ With a
+hurried glance over my shoulder to make sure that the Pretty Lady had
+not also spied it, I reached up and shoved it--oh, 'way, 'way back out
+of sight, where no one but a detective or a lover could possibly find
+it.
+
+Then I hurried off to my room with a most garish human wonder: How could
+a _man_ be all gone, but his silly cap _last_?
+
+My little room was just as I remembered it, bare, bleak, and gruesomely
+clean, with a rag rug, a worsted motto, and a pink china vase for really
+sensuous ornamentation. I opened the cheap pine bureau to stow away my
+things. _A trinket jingled--a tawdry rhinestone side-comb. Caught in the
+setting was a tiny wisp of brown hair._ I slammed the drawer with a
+bang, and opened another. _Metal and leather slid heavily along the
+bottom._ It might have been my beast's collar, if distinctly across the
+name-plate had not run the terse phrase "Alrik's Cross Dog." I did not
+like to have my bureau haunted! When I slammed that drawer, it cracked
+the looking-glass.
+
+Then, with candle burning just as cheerfully as possible, I lay down on
+the bed in all my clothes and began to _wake up_--wider and wider and
+wider.
+
+My reason lay quite dormant like some drugged thing but my memory,
+photographic as a lens, began to reproduce the ruddy, blond face of the
+Blue Serge Man beaming across a chafing-dish; the mournful, sobbing
+sound of a dog's dream; the crisp, starched, Monday smell of the blue
+gingham aprons that Alrik's Wife used to wear. The vision was altogether
+too vivid to be pleasant.
+
+Then the wet wind blew in through the window like a splash of alcohol,
+chilling, revivifying, stinging as a whip-lash. The tormented candle
+flame struggled furiously for a moment, and went out, hurtling the black
+night down upon me like some choking avalanche of horror. In utter
+idiotic panic I jumped from my bed and clawed my way toward the feeble
+gray glow of the window-frame. The dark dooryard before me was drenched
+with rain. The tall linden trees waved and mourned in the wind.
+
+"Of course, of course, there are no ghosts," I reasoned, just as one
+reasons that there is no mistake in the dictionary, no flaw in the
+multiplication table. But sometimes one's fantastically jaded nerves think
+they have found the blunder in language, the fault in science. Ghosts
+or no ghosts--if you _thought_ you saw one, wouldn't it be just as bad?
+My eyes strained out into the darkness. Suppose--I--should--_think_--that
+I heard the bark of a dog? Suppose--suppose--that from that black shed
+door where the automobile used to live, I should _think_--even T-H-I-N-K
+that I saw the Blue Serge Man come stumbling with a lantern? The black
+shed door burst open with a bang-bang-bang, and I screamed, jumped,
+snatched a blanket, and fled for the lamp-lighted hall.
+
+A little dazzled by the sudden glow, I shrank back in alarm from a
+figure on the top stair. It was the Pretty Lady. Wrapped clumsily like
+myself in a big blanket, she sat huddled there with the kerosene lamp
+close beside her, mending the Blue Serge Man's cap. On the step below
+her, smothered in a soggy lavender comforter, crouched Alrik's Old
+Mother, her dim eyes brightened uncannily with superstitious excitement.
+I was evidently a welcome addition to the party, and the old woman
+cuddled me in like a meal-sack beside her.
+
+"Naw one could sleep a night like this," she croaked.
+
+"_Sleep?_" gasped the Pretty Lady. Scorn infinite was in her tone.
+
+But comfortably and serenely from the end of the hall came the heavy,
+regular breathing of the Partridge Hunter, and from beyond that, Alrik's
+blissful, oblivious snore. Yet Alrik was the only one among us who
+claimed an agonizing, personal sorrow.
+
+I began to laugh a bit hysterically. "Men are funny people," I
+volunteered.
+
+Alrik's Old Mother caught my hand with a chuckle, then sobered suddenly,
+and shook her wadded head.
+
+"Men _ain't_ exactly--people," she confided. "Men _ain't_ exactly
+people--at all!"
+
+The conviction evidently burned dull, steady, comforting as a
+night-light, in the old crone's eighty years' experience, but the Pretty
+Lady's face grabbed the new idea desperately, as though she were trying
+to rekindle happiness with a wet match. Yet every time her fretted lips
+straightened out in some semblance of Peace, her whole head would
+suddenly explode in one gigantic sneeze. There was no other sound, I
+remember, for hours and hours, except the steady, monotonous, slobbery
+swash of a bursting roof-gutter somewhere close in the eaves.
+
+Certainly Dawn itself was not more chilled and gray than we when we
+crept back at last to our beds, thick-eyed with drowsy exhaustion,
+limp-bodied, muffle-minded.
+
+But when we woke again, the late, hot noonday sun was like a scorching
+fire in our faces, and the drenched dooryard steamed like a dye-house in
+the sudden burst of unseasonable heat.
+
+After breakfast, the Pretty Lady, in her hundred-dollar ruffles, went
+out to the barn with shabby Alrik to help him mend a musty old plow
+harness. The Pretty Lady's brains were almost entirely in her fingers.
+So were Alrik's. The exclusiveness of their task seemed therefore to
+thrust the Partridge Hunter and me off by ourselves into a sort of
+amateur sorrow class, and we started forth as cheerfully as we could to
+investigate the autumn woods.
+
+Passing the barn door, we heard the strident sound of Alrik's
+complaining. Braced with his heavy shoulders against a corner of the
+stall, he stood hurling down his new-born theology upon the glossy blond
+head of the Pretty Lady who sat perched adroitly on a nail keg with two
+shiny-tipped fingers prying up the corners of her mouth into a smile.
+One side of the smile was distinctly wry. But Alrik's face was deadly
+earnest. Sweat bubbled out on his forehead like tears that could not
+possibly wait to reach his eyes.
+
+"There ought to be a separate heaven for ladies and gentlemen," he was
+arguing frantically. "'Tain't fair. 'Tain't right. I won't have it! I'll
+see a priest. I'll find a parson. If it ain't proper to live with
+people, it ain't proper to die with 'em. I tell you I won't have Amy
+careerin' round with strange men. She always was foolish about men. And
+I'm breakin' my heart for her, and Mother's gettin' old, and the house
+is goin' to rack and ruin, but how--_how_ can a man go and get married
+comfortable again when his mind's all torturin' round and round and
+round about his first wife?"
+
+The Partridge Hunter gave a sharp laugh under his breath, yet he did not
+seem exactly amused. "Laugh for _two_!" I suggested, as we dodged out of
+sight round the corner and plunged off into the actual Outdoors.
+
+The heat was really intense, the October sun dazzlingly bright. Warmth
+steamed from the earth, and burnished from the sky. A plushy brown
+rabbit lolling across the roadway dragged on one's sweating senses like
+overshoes in June. Under our ruthless, heavy-booted feet the wet green
+meadow winced like some tender young salad. At the edge of the forest
+the big pines darkened sumptuously. Then, suddenly, between a scarlet
+sumach and a slim white birch, the cavernous wood-path opened forth
+mysteriously, narrow and tall and domed like the arch of a cathedral.
+Not a bird twitted, not a leaf rustled, and, far as the eye could reach,
+the wet brown pine-needles lay thick and soft and padded like tan-bark,
+as though all Nature waited hushed and expectant for some exquisitely
+infinitesimal tragedy, like the travail of a squirrel.
+
+With brain and body all a-whisper and a-tiptoe, the Partridge Hunter and
+I stole deeper and deeper into the Color and the Silence and the
+Witchery, dazed at every step by the material proof of autumn warring
+against the spiritual insistence of spring. It was the sort of day to
+make one very tender toward the living just because they were living,
+and very tender toward the dead just because they were dead.
+
+At the gurgling bowl of a half-hidden spring, we made our first
+stopping-place. Out of his generous corduroy pockets the Partridge
+Hunter tinkled two drinking-cups, dipped them deep in the icy water, and
+handed me one with a little shuddering exclamation of cold. For an
+instant his eyes searched mine, then he lifted his cup very high and
+stared off into _Nothingness_.
+
+"To the--_All-Gone People_," he toasted.
+
+I began to cry. He seemed very glad to have me cry. "Cry for two," he
+suggested blithely, "cry for two," and threw himself down on the twiggy
+ground and began to snap metallically against the cup in his hand.
+
+"Nice little tin cup," he affirmed judicially. "The Blue Serge Man gave
+it to me. It must have cost as much as fifteen cents. And it will last,
+I suppose, till the moon is mud and the stars are dough. But the Blue
+Serge Man himself is--quite _gone_. Funny idea!" The Partridge Hunter's
+forehead began to knit into a fearful frown. "Of course it _isn't_ so,"
+he argued, "but it would certainly seem sometimes as though a man's
+_things_ were the only really immortal, indestructible part of him, and
+that Soul was nothing in the world but just a composite name for the
+S-ouvenirs, O-rnaments, U-tensils, L-itter that each man's personality
+accumulates in the few years' time allotted to him. The man himself, you
+see, is wiped right off the earth like a chalk-mark, but you can't
+escape or elude in a million years the wizened bronze elephant that he
+brought home from India, or the showy red necktie that's down behind his
+bureau, or the floating, wind-blown, ash-barrel bill for violets that
+turns up a generation hence in a German prayer-book at a French
+book-stall.
+
+"And isn't Death a teasing teacher? Holds up a personality suddenly like
+a map--makes you learn by heart every possible, conceivable pleasant
+detail concerning that personality, and then, when you are fairly
+bursting with your happy knowledge, tears up the map in your face and
+says, 'There's no such country any more, so what you've learned won't do
+you the slightest good.' And there you'd only just that moment found out
+that your friend's hair was a beautiful auburn instead of 'a horrid
+red'; that his blessed old voice was hearty, not 'noisy'; that his table
+manners were quaint, not 'queer'; that his morals were broad, not
+'bad.'"
+
+The Partridge Hunter's mouth began to twist. "It's a horrid thing to
+say," he stammered, "but there ought to be a sample shroud in every
+home, so that when your husband is late to dinner, or your daughter
+smokes a cigarette, or your son decides to marry the cook, you could get
+out the shroud and try it on the offender, and make a few experiments
+concerning--well, _values_. Why, I saw a man last week dragged by a
+train--jerked in and out and over and under, with his head or his heels
+or the hem of his coat just missing Death every second by the
+hundred-millionth fraction of an inch. But when he was rescued at last
+and went home to dinner--shaken as an aspen, sicker than pulp,
+tongue-tied like a padlock--I suppose, very likely, his wife scolded him
+for having forgotten the oysters."
+
+The Partridge Hunter's face flushed suddenly.
+
+"I didn't care much for Alrik's Wife," he attested abruptly. "I always
+thought she was a trivial, foolish little crittur. But if I had known
+that I was never going to see her again--while the sun blazed or the
+stars blinked--I should like to have gone back from the buckboard that
+last morning and stroked her brown hair just once away from her eyes.
+Does that seem silly to you?"
+
+"Why, no," I said. "It doesn't seem silly at all. If I had guessed that
+the Blue Serge Man was going off on such a long, long, never-stop
+journey, I might even have kissed him good-by. But I certainly can't
+imagine anything that would have provoked or astonished him more! People
+can't go round petting one another just on the possible chance of never
+meeting again. And goodness gracious! nobody wants to. It's only that
+when a person actually _dies_, a sort of subtle, holy sense in you wakes
+up and wishes that just once for all eternity it might have gotten a
+signal through to that subtle, holy sense in the other person. And of
+course when a youngster dies, you feel somehow that he or she must have
+been different all along from other people, and you simply wish that you
+might have guessed that fact sooner--before it was too late."
+
+The Partridge Hunter began to smile. "If you knew," he teased, "that I
+was going to be massacred by an automobile or crumpled by an elevator
+before next October--would you wish that you had petted me just a little
+to-day?"
+
+"Yes," I acknowledged.
+
+The Partridge Hunter pretended he was deaf. "Say that once again," he
+begged.
+
+"Y-e-s," I repeated.
+
+The Partridge Hunter put back his head and roared. "That's just about
+like kissing through the telephone," he said. "It isn't particularly
+satisfying, and yet it makes a desperately cunning sound."
+
+Then I put back my head and laughed, too, because it is so thoroughly
+comfortable and pleasant to be friends for only one single week in all
+the year. Independence is at best such a scant fabric, and every new
+friendship you incur takes just one more tuck in that fabric, till
+before you know it your freedom is quite too short to go out in. The
+Partridge Hunter felt exactly the same way about it, and after each
+little October playtime we ripped out the thread with never a scar to
+show.
+
+Even now while we laughed, we thought we might as well laugh at
+everything we could think of, and get just that much finished and out of
+the way.
+
+"Perhaps," said the Partridge Hunter, "perhaps the Blue Serge Man was
+_glad_ to see Amy, and perhaps he was rattled, no one can tell. But
+I'll wager anything he was awfully mad to see Gruff. There were lots of
+meteors last June, I remember. I understand now. It was the Blue Serge
+Man raking down the stars to pelt at Gruff."
+
+"Gruff was a very--nice dog," I insisted.
+
+"He was a very growly dog," acceded the Partridge Hunter.
+
+"If you growl all the time, it's almost the same as a purr," I argued.
+
+The Partridge Hunter smiled a little, but not very generously. Something
+was on his mind. "Poor little Amy," he said. "Any man-and-woman game is
+playing with fire, but it's foolish to think that there are only two
+kinds, just Hearth-Fire and Hell-Fire. Why, there's 'Student-lamp' and
+'Cook-stove' and 'Footlights.' Amy and the Blue Serge Man were playing
+with 'Footlights,' I guess. She needed an audience. And he was New York
+to her, great, blessed, shiny, rackety New York. I believe she loved
+Alrik. He must have been a pretty picturesque figure on that first and
+only time when he blazed his trail down Broadway. But _happy_ with
+him--H-E-R-E? Away from New York? Five years? In just green and brown
+woods where the posies grow on the ground instead of on hats, and even
+the Christmas trees are trimmed with nothing except real snow and live
+squirrels? G-L-O-R-Y! Of course her chest caved in. There wasn't kinky
+air enough in the whole state of Maine to keep her kind of lungs active.
+Of course she starved to death. She needed her meat flavored with harp
+and violin; her drink aerated with electric lights. We might have done
+something for her if we'd liked her just a little bit better. But I
+didn't even know her till I heard that she was dead."
+
+He jumped up suddenly and helped me to my feet. Something in my face
+must have stricken him. "Would you like my warm hand to walk home with?"
+he finished quite abruptly.
+
+Even as he offered it, one of those chill, quick autumn changes came
+over the October woods. The sun grayed down behind huge, windy clouds.
+The leaves began to shiver and shudder and chatter, and all the gorgeous
+reds and greens dulled out of the world, leaving nothing as far as the
+eye could reach but dingy squirrel-colors, tawny grays and dusty
+yellows, with the far-off, panting sound of a frightened brook dodging
+zigzag through some meadow in a last, desperate effort to escape winter.
+As a draft from a tomb the cold, clammy, valley twilight was upon us.
+
+Like two bashful children scuttling through a pantomime, we hurried out
+of the glowery, darkening woods, and then at the edge of the meadow
+broke into a wild, mirthful race for Alrik's bright hearth-fire, which
+glowed and beckoned from his windows like a little tame, domesticated
+sunset. The Partridge Hunter cleared the porch steps at a single bound,
+but I fell flat on the bruising doormat.
+
+Nothing really mattered, however, except the hearth-fire itself.
+
+Alrik and the Pretty Lady were already there before us, kneeling down
+with giggly, scorching faces before a huge corn-popper foaming white
+with little muffled, ecstatic notes of heat and harvest.
+
+The Pretty Lady turned a crimson cheek to us, and Alrik's tanned skin
+glowed like a freshly shellacked Indian. Even the Old Mother's asthmatic
+breath purred from the jogging rocker like a specially contented
+pussy-cat.
+
+Nothing in all the room, I remember, looked pallid or fretted except the
+great, ghastly white face of the clock. I despise a clock that looks
+worried. It wasn't late, anyway. It was scarcely quarter-past four.
+
+Indeed, it was only half-past four when the company came. We were making
+such a racket among ourselves that our very first warning was the
+sudden, blunt, rubbery _m-o-o_ of an automobile directly outside. Mud
+was the first thing I thought of.
+
+Then the door flew open peremptorily, and there on the threshold stood
+the Blue Serge Man--not dank and wet with slime and seaweed, but fat and
+ruddy and warm in a huge gray 'possum coat. Only the fearful, stilted
+immovability of him gave the lie to his reality.
+
+_It was a miracle!_ I had always wondered a great deal about miracles. I
+had always longed, craved, prayed to experience a miracle. I had always
+supposed that a miracle was the supreme sensation of existence, the
+ultimate rapture of the soul. But it seems I was mistaken. A miracle
+doesn't do anything to your soul for days and days and days. Your heart,
+of course, may jump, and your blood foam, but first of all it simply
+makes you very, very sick in the pit of your stomach. It made a man like
+Alrik clutch at his belt and jump up and down and "holler" like a
+lunatic. It smote the Partridge Hunter somewhere between a cramp and a
+sob. It ripped the Old Mother close at her waist-line, and raveled her
+out on the floor like a fluff of gray yarn.
+
+But the Pretty Lady just stood up with her hands full of pop-corn, and
+stared and stared and stared and STARED. From her shining blond head to
+her jet-black slippers she was like an exploded pulse.
+
+The Blue Serge Man stepped forward into the room and faltered. In that
+instant's faltering, Alrik jumped for him like a great, glad, loving
+dog, and ripped the coat right off his shoulders.
+
+The Blue Serge Man's lips were all a-grin, but a scar across his
+forehead gave a certain tense, stricken dignity to his eyes. Very
+casually, very indolently, he began to tug at his gloves, staring all
+the while with malevolent joy on the fearful crayon portrait of the
+ancient grandame.
+
+"That's the very last face I thought of when I was drowning," he
+drawled, "and there wasn't room enough in all heaven for the two of us.
+Bully old face, I'm glad I'm here. I've been in Cuba," he continued
+quite abruptly, "and I meant to play dead forever and ever. But there
+was an autumn leaf--a red autumn leaf in a lady's hat--and it made me
+homesick." His voice broke suddenly, and he turned to his wife with
+quick, desperate, pleading intensity. "I'm not--much--good," he gasped.
+"But I've--_come back_!"
+
+I saw the flaky white pop-corn go trickling through the Pretty Lady's
+fingers, but she just stood there and shook and writhed like a tightly
+wrung newspaper smoldering with fire. Then her face flamed suddenly with
+a light I had never, never seen since my world was made.
+
+"I don't care whether you're any good or not," she cried. "You're alive!
+You're alive! You're alive! You're _alive_! You're--ALIVE!"
+
+I thought she would never stop saying it, on and on and on and on.
+"You're alive, you're alive, you're alive." Like a defective phonograph
+disk her shattered sense caught on that one supreme phrase, "You're
+alive! You're alive! You're alive! You're alive!"
+
+Then the blood that had blazed in her face spread suddenly to her
+nerveless hands, and she began to pluck at the crape ruffles on her
+gown. Stitch by stitch I heard the rip-rip-rip like the buzz of a
+fishing-reel. But louder than all came that maddening, monotonous cry,
+"You're alive! You're alive! You're alive!" I thought her brain was
+broken.
+
+Then the Blue Serge Man sprang toward her, and I shut my eyes. But I
+caught the blessed, clumsy sound of a lover's boot tripping on a
+ruffle--the crushing out of a breath--the smother of a half-lipped word.
+
+I don't know what became of Alrik. I don't know what became of Alrik's
+Old Mother. But the Partridge Hunter, with his arm across his eyes, came
+groping for me through the red, red room.
+
+"Let's get out of this," he whispered. "Let's get out of this."
+
+So once again, amateurs both in sorrow and in gladness, the Partridge
+Hunter and I fled fast before the Incomprehensible. Out we ran through
+Amy's frost-blighted rose-garden, _where no gay, shrill young voice
+challenged our desecration_, out through the senile old apple orchard,
+_where no suspicious dog came bristling forth to question our innocent
+intrusion_, up through the green-ribbon roadway, up through the
+stumbling wood-path, to the safe, sound, tangible, moss-covered
+pasture-bars, where the warm, brown-fur bossies, sweet-breathed and
+steaming, came lolling gently down through the gauzy dusk to barter
+their pleasant milk for a snug night's lodging and a troughful of yellow
+mush.
+
+A dozen mysterious wood-folk crackled close within reach, as though all
+the little day-animals were laying aside their starched clothes for the
+night; and the whole earth teemed with the exquisite, sleepy,
+nestling-down sound of fur and feathers and tired leaves. Out in the
+forest depths somewhere a belated partridge drummed out his excuses.
+Across on the nearest stone wall a tawny marauder went hunching his way
+along. It might have been a fox, it might have been Amy's thrown-away
+coon-cat. Short and sharp from the house behind us came the fast,
+furious crash of Alrik's frenzied young energies, chopping wood enough
+to warm a dozen houses for a dozen winters for a dozen new brides. But
+high above even the racket of his ax rang the sweet, wild, triumphant
+resonance of some French Canadian _chanson_. His heart and his lungs
+seemed fairly to have exploded in relief.
+
+And over the little house, and the dark woods, and the mellow pasture,
+and the brown-fur bossies, broke a little, wee, tiny prick-point of a
+star, as though some Celestial Being were peeping down whimsically to
+see just what the Partridge Hunter and I thought of it all.
+
+
+
+
+THE AMATEUR LOVER
+
+
+WITH every night piercing her like a new wound, and every morning
+stinging her like salt in that wound, Ruth Dudley's broken engagement
+had dragged itself out for four long, hideous months. There's so much
+fever in a woman's sorrow.
+
+At first, to be sure, there had been no special outward and visible sign
+of heartbreak except the thunderstorm shadows under the girl's blue
+eyes. Then, gradually, very gradually, those same plucky eyes had dulled
+and sickened as though every individual thought in her brain was
+festering. Later, an occasional loosened finger ring had clattered off
+into her untouched plate or her reeking strong cup of coffee. At the end
+of the fourth month the family doctor was quite busy attesting that she
+had no tubercular trouble of any sort. There never yet was any
+stethoscope invented that could successfully locate consumption of the
+affections.
+
+It was about this time that Ruth's Big Brother, strolling smokily into
+her room one evening, jumped back in tragic dismay at the astonishing
+sight that met his eyes. There, like some fierce young sacrificial
+priestess, with a very modern smutty nose and scorched cheeks, Ruth
+knelt on the hearth-rug, slamming every conceivable object that she
+could reach into the blazing fire. The soft green walls of the room were
+utterly stripped and ravished. The floor in every direction lay
+cluttered deep with books and pictures and clothes and innumerable small
+bits of bric-a-brac. Already the brimming fireplace leaked forth across
+the carpet in little gray, gusty flakes of ash and cinder.
+
+The Big Brother hooted right out loud. "Why, Ruthy Dudley," he gasped.
+"What _are_ you doing? You look like the devil!"
+
+Blissfully unconscious of smoke or smut, the girl pushed back the
+straggling blond hair from her eyes and grinned, with her white teeth
+shot like a bolt through her under lip to keep the grin in place.
+
+"I'm not a 'devil,'" she explained. "I'm a god! And what am I doing? I'm
+creating a new heaven and a new earth."
+
+"You won't have much left to create it with," scoffed the Big Brother,
+kicking the tortured wreck of a straw hat farther back into the flames.
+
+The girl reached up impatiently and smutted her other hand across her
+eyes. "Nothing left to create it with?" she mocked. "Why, if I had
+anything left to create it with, I'd be only a--mechanic!"
+
+Then, blackened like a coal-heaver and tousled like a Skye terrier, she
+picked up the scarlet bellows and commenced to pump a savage yellow
+flame into a writhing, half-charred bundle of letters.
+
+Through all the sweet, calm hours of that warm June night the sacrifice
+progressed with amazing rapacity. By midnight she had just finished
+stirring the fire-tongs through the ghostly, lacelike ashes of her
+wedding gown. At two o'clock her violin went groaning into the flames.
+At three her Big Brother, yawning sleepily back in his nightclothes,
+picked her up bodily and dumped her into her bed. He was very angry.
+"Little Sister," he scolded, "there's no man living worth the fuss
+you're making over Aleck Reese!" And the little sister sat up and rubbed
+her smutty, scorched cheek against his cool, blue-shaven face as she
+tilted the drifting ashes from the bedspread. "I'm not making any
+'fuss,'" she protested. "I'm only just--burning my bridges." It was the
+first direct allusion that she had ever made to her trouble.
+
+Twice after that--between three o'clock and breakfast time--the Big
+Brother woke from his sleep with a horrid sense that the house was on
+fire. Twice between three o'clock and breakfast time he met the
+Housekeeper scuttling along the halls on the same sniffy errand. Once
+with a flickering candle-light Ruth herself crept out to the doorway and
+laughed at them. "The house isn't on fire, you sillies," she cried.
+"Don't you know a burnt bridge when you smell it?" But the doctor had
+said quite distinctly: "You must watch that little girl. Sorrow in the
+tongue will talk itself cured, if you give it a chance; but sorrow in
+the eyes has a wicked, wicked way now and then of leaking into the
+brain."
+
+It was the Housekeeper, though, whose eyes looked worried and tortured
+at breakfast time. It was the Big Brother's face that showed a bit sharp
+on the cheek-bones. Ruth herself, for the first time in a listless,
+uncollared, unbelted, unstarched month, came frisking down to the table
+as white and fresh and crisp as linen and starch and curls could make
+her.
+
+"I'm going to town this morning," she announced nonchalantly to her
+relieved and delighted hearers. The eyes that turned to her brother's
+were almost mischievous. "Couldn't you meet me at twelve o'clock," she
+suggested, "and take me off to the shore somewhere for lunch? I'll be
+shopping on Main Street about that time, so suppose I meet you at Andrew
+Bernard's office."
+
+Half an hour later she was stealing out of the creaky back door into
+the garden, along the gray, pebbly gravel walk between the tall tufts of
+crimson and purple phlox, to the little gay-faced plot of heart's-ease
+where the family doctor, symbolist and literalist, had bade her dig and
+delve every day in the good, hot, wholesome, freckly sunshine. Close by
+in the greensward an absurd pet lamb was tugging and bouncing at the end
+of its stingy tether. In a moment's time the girl had transferred the
+clumsy iron tether-stake to the midst of her posy bed. Then she started
+for the gate.
+
+Pausing for just one repentant second with her hand on the gate latch,
+she turned and looked back to the ruthlessly trodden spot where the
+bland-eyed lamb stood eyeing her quizzically with his soft, woolly mouth
+fairly dripping with the tender, precious blossoms. "Heart's-ease.
+B-a-a!" mocked the girl, with a flicker of real amusement.
+"Heart's-ease. B-a-a-a!" scoffed the lamb, just because his stomach and
+his tongue happened to be made like that. Then with a quick dodge across
+the lane she ran to meet the electric car and started off triumphantly
+for the city, shutting her faint eyes resolutely away from all the
+roadside pools and ponds and gleams of river whose molten, ultimate
+peace possibilities had lured her sick mind so incessantly for the past
+dozen weeks.
+
+Two hours later, with a hectic spurt of energy, she was racing up three
+winding, dizzy flights of stairs in a ponderous, old-fashioned office
+building.
+
+Before a door marked "Andrew Bernard, Attorney at Law," she stopped and
+waited a frightened moment for breath and courage. As though the
+pounding of her heart had really sounded as loud as it felt, the door
+handle turned abruptly, and a very tall, broad-shouldered, grave-faced
+young man greeted her with attractive astonishment.
+
+"Good morning, Drew," she began politely. "Why, I haven't seen you for a
+year." Then, with alarming vehemence, she finished: "Are you all alone?
+I want to talk with you."
+
+Her breathlessness, her embarrassment, her fragile intensity sobered the
+young man instantly as he led her into his private office and stood for
+a moment staring inquiringly into her white face. Her mouth was just as
+he had last seen it a year ago, fresh and whimsical and virginal as a
+child's; but her eyes were scorched and dazed like the eyes of a
+shipwreck survivor or any other person who has been forced unexpectedly
+to stare upon life's big emotions with the naked eye.
+
+"I hear you've been ill this spring," he began gently. "If you wanted to
+talk with me, Ruthy, why didn't you let me come out to the house and see
+you? Wouldn't it have been easier?"
+
+She shook her head. "No," she protested, "I wanted to come here. What
+I've got to talk about is very awkward, and if things get too
+awkward--why, an embarrassed guest has so much better chance to escape
+than an embarrassed host." She struggled desperately to smile, but her
+lips twittered instead into a frightened quiver. With narrowing eyes the
+young man drew out his big leather chair for her. Then he perched
+himself on the corner of his desk and waited for her to speak.
+
+"Ruthy dear," he smiled, "what's the trouble? Come, tell your old chum
+all about it."
+
+The girl scrunched her eyes up tight, like a person who starts to jump
+and doesn't care where he lands. Twice her lips opened and shut without
+a sound. Then suddenly she braced herself with an intense effort.
+
+"Drew," she blurted out, "do you remember--three years ago--you asked me
+to--marry--you?"
+
+"Do I remember it?" gasped Drew. The edgy sharpness of his tone made the
+girl open her eyes and stare at him. "Yes," he acknowledged, "I remember
+it."
+
+The girl began to smooth her white skirts with excessive precision
+across her knees. "What made you--ask me?" she whispered.
+
+"What made me ask you?" cried the man.
+
+"What made me ask you? Why, I asked you because I love you."
+
+The girl bent forward anxiously as though she were deaf. "You asked me
+because--_what_?" she quizzed him.
+
+"Because I love you," he repeated.
+
+She jumped up suddenly and ran across the room to him. "Because
+you--love me?" she reiterated. "'Love?' Not 'loved'? Not past tense? Not
+all over and done with?"
+
+There was no mistaking her meaning. But the man's face did not kindle,
+except with pain. Almost roughly he put his hands on her shoulders and
+searched down deep into her eyes. "Ruth," he probed, "what are you
+trying to do to me? Open an old wound? You know I--love you."
+
+The girl's mouth smiled, but her eyes blurred wet with fright and tears.
+
+"Would you care anything--about--marrying me--now?" she faltered.
+
+Drew's face blanched utterly, and the change gave him such a horridly
+foreign, alien look that the girl drew away from his hands and scuttled
+back to the big chair, and began all over again to smooth and smooth the
+garish white skirt across her knees. "Oh, Drew, Drew," she pleaded,
+"please look like--_you_. Please--please--don't look like anybody
+else."
+
+But Drew did not smile at her. He just stood there and stared in a
+puzzled, tortured sort of way.
+
+"What about Aleck Reese?" he began with fierce abruptness.
+
+The girl met the question with unwonted flippancy. "I've broken my
+engagement to Aleck Reese," she said coolly. "Broken it all to smash."
+
+But the latent tremor in her voice did not satisfy the man. "Why did you
+break it?" he insisted. "Isn't Aleck Reese the man you want?"
+
+Her eyes wavered and fell, and then rallied suddenly to Drew's utmost
+question.
+
+"Yes, Drew," she answered ingenuously, "Aleck Reese _is_ the man I want,
+_but he's not the kind of man I want_!" As the telltale sentence left
+her lips, every atom of strength wilted out of her, and she sank back
+into her chair all sick and faint and shuddery.
+
+The impulsive, bitter laugh died dumb on Drew's lips. Instantly he was
+at her side, gentle, patient, compassionate, the man whom she knew so
+well. "Do you mean," he stammered in a startled sort of way, "do you
+mean that--love or no love--I, I am the kind of man that you do want?"
+
+Her hand stole shyly into his and she nodded her head. But her eyes were
+turned away from him.
+
+For the fraction of a second he wondered just what the future would hold
+for him and her if he should snatch the situation into his arms and
+crush her sorrow out against his breast. Then in that second's hesitancy
+she shook her hair out of her eyes and looked up at him like a sick,
+wistful child.
+
+"Oh, Drew," she pleaded, "you've never, never failed me yet--all my hard
+lessons, all my Fourth-of-July accidents, all my broken sleds and lost
+skates. Couldn't you help me now we're grown up? I'm so unhappy."
+
+The grimness came back to Drew's face.
+
+"Has Aleck Reese been mean to you?" he asked.
+
+Her eyebrows lifted in denial. "Oh, no--not specially," she finished a
+trifle wearily. "I simply made up my mind at last that I didn't want to
+marry him."
+
+Drew's frown relaxed. "Then what's the trouble?" he suggested.
+
+Her eyebrows arched again. "What's the trouble?" she queried. "Why, I
+happen to love him. That's all."
+
+She took her hand away from Drew and began to smooth her skirt once
+more.
+
+"Yes," she repeated slowly, "as long ago as last winter I made up my
+mind that I didn't want to marry him--but I didn't make up my courage
+until Spring. My courage, I think, is just about six months slower than
+my mind. And then, too, my 'love-margin' wasn't quite used up, I
+suppose. A woman usually has a 'love-margin,' you know, and, besides,
+there's always so much more impetus in a woman's love. Even though she's
+hurt, even though she's heartbroken, even though, worst of all, she's a
+tiny bit bored, all her little, natural love courtesies go on just the
+same of their own momentum, for a day or a week, or a month, or half a
+lifetime, till the love-flame kindles again--or else goes out
+altogether. Love has to be like that. But if I were a man, Drew, I'd be
+awfully careful that that love-margin didn't ever get utterly exhausted.
+Aleck, though, doesn't understand about such things. I smoothed his
+headaches just as well, and listened to his music just as well, so he
+shiftlessly took it for granted that I loved him just as well. What
+nonsense! 'Love?'" Her voice rose almost shrilly. "'Love?' Bah! What's
+love, anyway, but a wicked sort of hypnotism in the way that a mouth
+slants, or a cheek curves, or a lock of hair colors? Listen to me. If
+Aleck Reese were a woman and I were a man, I certainly wouldn't choose
+his type for a sweetheart--irritable, undomestic, wild for excitement.
+How's that for a test? And if Aleck Reese and I were both women, I
+certainly shouldn't want him for my friend. Oughtn't that to decide it?
+Not a vital taste in common, not a vital interest, not a vital ideal!"
+
+She began to laugh hysterically. "And I can't sleep at night for
+remembering the droll little way that his hair curls over his forehead,
+or the hurt, surprised look in his eyes when he ever really did get
+sorry about anything. My God! Drew, look at me!" she cried, and rolled
+up her sleeves to her elbow. The flesh was gone from her as though a
+fever had wasted her.
+
+The muscles in Drew's throat began to twitch unpleasantly. "Was Aleck
+Reese mean to you?" he persisted doggedly.
+
+A little faint, defiant smile flickered across her lips. "Never mind,
+Drew," she said, "whether Aleck Reese was mean to me or not. It really
+doesn't matter. It doesn't really matter at all just exactly what a man
+does or doesn't do to a woman as long as, by one route or another,
+before her wedding day, he brings her to the place where she can
+honestly say in her heart, 'This man that I want is not the kind of man
+that I want.' Honor, loyalty, strength, gentleness--why, Drew, the man I
+marry has _got_ to be the kind of man I want.
+
+"I've tried to be fair to Aleck," she mused almost tenderly. "I've tried
+to remember always that men are different from women, and that Aleck
+perhaps is different from most men. I've tried to remember always that
+he is a musician--a real, real musician with all the ghastly, agonizing
+extremes of temperament. I've tried to remember always that he didn't
+grow up here with us in our little town with all our fierce, little-town
+standards, but that he was educated abroad, that his whole moral,
+mental, and social ideals are different, that the admiration and
+adulation of--new--women is like the breath of life to him--that he
+simply couldn't live without it any more than I could live without the
+love of animals, or the friendship of children, or the wonderfulness of
+outdoors, all of which bore _him_ to distraction.
+
+"Oh, I've reasoned it all out, night after night after night, fought it
+out, _torn_ it out, that he probably really and truly did love me quite
+a good deal--in his own way--when there wasn't anything else to do. But
+how can it possibly content a woman to have a man love her as well as
+_he_ knows how--if it isn't as well as _she_ knows how? We won't talk
+about--Aleck Reese's morals," she finished abruptly. "Fickleness,
+selfishness, neglect, even infidelity itself, are such purely minor,
+incidental data of the one big, incurably rotten and distasteful fact
+that--such and such a man is _stupid in the affections_."
+
+With growing weakness she sank back in her chair and closed her eyes.
+
+For an anxious moment Drew sat and watched her. "Is that all?" he asked
+at last.
+
+She opened her eyes in surprise. "Why, yes," she said, "that's all--that
+is, it's all if you understand. I'm not complaining because Aleck Reese
+didn't love me, but because, loving me, he wasn't _intelligent_ enough
+to be true to me. You do understand, don't you? You understand that it
+wasn't because he didn't pay his love bills, but because he didn't know
+enough to pay them. He took my loyalty without paying for it with his;
+he took my devotion, my tenderness, my patience, without ever, ever
+making any adequate return. Any girl ought to be able to tell in six
+months whether her lover is using her affection rightly, whether he is
+taking her affection and investing it with his toward their mutual
+happiness and home. Aleck invested nothing. He just took all my love
+that he could grab and squandered it on himself--always and forever on
+himself. A girl, I say, ought to be able to tell in six months. But I am
+very stupid. It has taken me three years."
+
+"Well, what do you want _me_ to do?" Drew asked a bit quizzically.
+
+"I want you to advise me," she said.
+
+"Advise you--_what_?" persisted Drew.
+
+The first real flicker of comedy flamed in the girl's face. Her white
+cheeks pinked and dimpled. "Why, advise me to--marry _you_!" she
+announced. "WELL, WHY NOT?" She fairly hurled the three-word bridge
+across the sudden, awful chasm of silence that yawned before her.
+
+Drew's addled mind caught the phrase dully and turned it over and over
+without attempting to cross on it. "Well, why not? Well, why not?" he
+kept repeating. His discomfiture filled the girl with hysterical
+delight, and she came and perched herself opposite him on the farther
+end of his desk and smiled at him.
+
+"It seems to me perfectly simple," she argued. "Without any doubt or
+question you certainly are the kind of man whom I should like to marry.
+You are true and loyal and generous and rugged about things. And you
+like the things that I like. And I like the people that you like. And,
+most of anything in the world, you are _clever in the affections_. You
+are heart-wise as well as head-wise. Why, even in the very littlest,
+silliest thing that could possibly matter, you wouldn't--for
+instance--remember George Washington's birthday and forget mine. And you
+wouldn't go away on a lark and leave me if I was sick, any more than
+you'd blow out the gas. And you wouldn't--hurt me about--other
+women--any more than you'd eat with your knife." Impulsively she reached
+over and patted his hand with the tips of her fingers. "As far as I can
+see," she teased, "there's absolutely no fault in you that matters to me
+except that I don't happen to love you."
+
+Quick as her laugh the tears came scalding back to her eyes.
+
+"Why, Drew," she hurried on desperately, "people seem to think it's a
+dreadful thing to marry a man whom you don't love; but nobody questions
+your marrying _any_ kind of a man if you do love him. As far as I can
+make out, then, it's the love that matters, not the man. Then why not
+love the right man?" She began to smile again. "So here and now, sir, I
+deliberately choose to love _you_."
+
+But Drew's fingers did not even tighten over hers.
+
+"I want to be a happy woman," she pleaded. "Why, I'm only twenty-two. I
+can't let my life be ruined now. There's _got_ to be some way out. And
+I'm going to find that way out if I have to crawl on my hands and knees
+for a hundred years. I'm luckier than some girls. I've got such a
+shining light to aim for."
+
+Almost roughly Drew pulled his hand away, the color surging angrily into
+his cheeks. "I'm no shining light," he protested hotly, "and you shall
+never, never come crawling on your hands and knees to me."
+
+"Yes, I shall," whispered the girl. "I shall come creeping very humbly,
+if you want me. And you do want me, don't you? Oh, please advise me. Oh,
+please play you are my Father or my Big Brother and advise me to--marry
+_you_."
+
+Drew laughed in spite of himself. "Play I was your Father or your Big
+Brother?" Mimicry was his one talent. "Play I was your Father or your
+Big Brother and advise you to marry me?"
+
+Instantly his fine, straight brows came beetling down across his eyes in
+a fierce paternal scrutiny. Then, quick as a wink, he had rumpled his
+hair and stuck out his chest in a really startling imitation of Big
+Brother's precious, pompous importance. But before Ruth could clap her
+hands his face flashed back again into its usual keen, sad gravity, and
+he shook his head. "Yes," he deliberated, "perhaps if I truly were your
+Father or your Brother, I really should advise you to marry--me--not
+because I amount to anything and am worth it, but because I honestly
+believe that I should be good to you--and I know that Aleck Reese
+wouldn't be. But if I'm to advise you in my own personal capacity--no,
+Ruthy, I don't want to marry you!"
+
+"What? What?" Staggering from the desk, she turned and faced him, white
+as her dress, blanched to her quivering lips.
+
+But Drew's big shoulders blocked her frenzied effort to escape.
+
+"Don't go away like that, Little Girl," he said. "You don't understand.
+It isn't a question of caring. You know I care. But don't you, don't you
+understand that a man doesn't like to marry a woman who doesn't love
+him?"
+
+Her face brightened piteously. "But I _will_ love you?" she protested.
+"I _will_ love you. I promise. I promise you faithfully--I will love
+you--if you'll only give me just a little time." The old flicker of
+mischief came back to her eyes, and she began to count on her fingers.
+"Let me see," she said. "It's June now--June, July, August, September,
+October, November--six months. I promise you that I will love you by
+November."
+
+"I don't believe it." Drew fairly slashed the words into the air.
+
+Instantly the hurt, frightened look came back to her eyes. "Why, Drew,"
+she whispered, "if it were money that I wanted, if I were starving, or
+sick, or any all-alone anything, you wouldn't refuse to help me just
+because you couldn't possibly see ahead just how I was ever going to pay
+you. Drew, I'm very unhappy and frightened and lost-feeling. I just want
+to borrow your love. I promise you I will pay it back to you. You won't
+be sorry. You won't. You won't!"
+
+Drew's hand reached up and smothered the words on her lips. "You can't
+borrow my love," he said sternly. "It's yours, always, every bit of it.
+But I won't marry you unless you love me. I tell you it isn't fair to
+you."
+
+Impulsively she took his hand and led him back to the big chair and
+pushed him gently into it, and perched herself like a little child on a
+pile of bulky law books at his feet. The eyes that looked up to his were
+very hopeful.
+
+"Don't you think, Drew," she argued, "that just being willing to marry
+you is love enough?"
+
+He scanned her face anxiously for some inner, hidden meaning to her
+words, some precious, latent confession; but her eyes were only blue,
+and just a little bit shy.
+
+She stooped forward suddenly, and took Drew's hand and brushed it across
+her cheek to the edge of her lips. "I feel so safe with you, Drew," she
+whispered, "so safe, and comforted always. Oh, I'm sure I can teach you
+how to make me love you--and you're the only man in the world that I'm
+willing to teach." Her chin stiffened suddenly with renewed
+stubbornness. "_You_ are the Harbor that was meant for me, and Aleck
+Reese is nothing but a--Storm. If you know it, and I know it, what's the
+use of dallying?"
+
+Drew's solemn eyes brightened. "Do you truly think," he said, "that
+Aleck Reese is only an accident that happened to you on your way to me?"
+
+She nodded her head. Weakness and tears were only too evidently
+overtaking her brave little theories.
+
+"And there's something else, too," she confided tremulously. "My head
+isn't right. I have such hideous dreams when I do get to sleep. I dream
+of drowning myself, and it feels good; and I dream of jumping off high
+buildings, and it feels good; and I dream of throwing myself under
+railroad trains, and it feels good. And I see the garish announcement in
+the morning papers, and I picture how Uncle Terry would look when he got
+the news, and I cry and cry and cry, and it feels good. Oh, Drew, I'm so
+bored with life! It isn't right to be so bored with life. But I can't
+seem to help it. Nothing in all the world has any meaning any more.
+Flowers, sunshine, moonlight--everything I loved has gone stale. There's
+no taste left to anything; there's no fragrance, there's no rhyme. Drew,
+I could stand the sorrow part of it, but I simply can't stand the
+emptiness. I tell you I _can't_ stand it. I wish I were dead; and, Drew,
+there are so many, many easy ways all the time to make oneself dead. I'm
+not safe. Oh, please take me and make me safe. Oh, please take me and
+make me want to live!"
+
+Driven almost distracted by this final appeal to all the chivalrous love
+in his nature, Drew jumped up and paced the floor. Perplexity,
+combativeness, and ultimate defeat flared already in his haggard face.
+
+The girl sensed instantly the advantage that she had gained. "Of
+course," she persisted, "of course I see now, all of a sudden, that I'm
+not offering you very much in offering you a wife who doesn't love you.
+You are quite right; of course I shouldn't make you a very good wife at
+first--maybe not for quite a long, long time. Probably it would all be
+too hard and miserable for you--"
+
+Drew interrupted her fiercely. "Great heavens!" he cried out, "my part
+would be easy, comfortable, serene, interesting, compared to yours.
+Don't you know it's nothing except _sad_ to be shut up in the same
+house, in the same life, with a person you love who doesn't love you?
+Nothing but sad, I tell you; and there's no special nervous strain about
+being sad. But to be shut up day and night--as long as life lasts--with
+a person who takes the impudent liberty of loving you against your wish
+to be loved--oh, the spiritual distastefulness of it, and the physical
+enmity, and the ghastly, ghastly ennui! That's your part of it. Flower
+or book or jewel or caress, no agonizing, heart-breaking, utterly
+wholesome effort to please, but just one hideously chronic, mawkishly
+conscientious effort to _be_ pleased, to act pleased--though it blast
+your eyes and sear your lips--to _look_ pleased. I tell you I won't have
+it!"
+
+"I understand all that," said Ruth gravely. "I understand it quite
+perfectly. But underneath it all--I would rather--you had taken me in
+your arms--as though I were a little, little hurt girl--and comforted
+me--"
+
+But before Drew's choking throat-cry had reached his lips she had sprung
+from her seat and was facing him defiantly. Across her face flared
+suddenly for the first time the full, dark flush of one of Life's big
+tides, and the fear in her hands reached up and clutched at Drew's
+shoulders. The gesture tipped her head back like a fagged swimmer's
+struggling in the water.
+
+"I am pleading for my life, Drew," she gasped, "for my body, for my
+soul, for my health, for my happiness, for home, for safety!"
+
+He snatched her suddenly into his arms. "My God! Ruth," he cried, "what
+do you want me to do?"
+
+Triumph came like a holiday laugh to her haggard face.
+
+"What do I want you to do?" she dimpled. "Why, I want you to come with
+me now and get a license. I want to be married right away this
+afternoon."
+
+"What!" Drew hurled the word at her like a bomb, but it did not seem to
+explode.
+
+Laughingly, flushingly, almost delightedly, she stood and watched the
+anger rekindle in his face.
+
+"Do you think I am going to take advantage of you like this?" he asked
+hotly. "You would probably change your mind to-morrow and be very, very
+sorry--"
+
+She tossed her head. It was a familiar little gesture. "I fully and
+confidently expect to be sorry to-morrow," she affirmed cheerfully.
+"That's why I want to be married to-day, this afternoon, this minute, if
+possible, before I have had any chance to change my mind."
+
+Then, with unexpected abruptness, she shook her recklessness aside and
+walked back to him childishly, pulling a long, loose wisp of hair across
+her face. "See," she said. "Smell the smoke in my hair. It's the smoke
+from my burned bridges. I sat up nearly all night and burned everything
+I owned, everything that could remind me of Aleck Reese, all my dresses,
+all my books, all my keepsakes, all my doll houses that ever grew up
+into dreams. So if you decide to marry me I shall be very expensive.
+You'll have to take me just as I am--quite a little bit crumpled, not an
+extra collar, not an extra hairpin, not anything. Aleck Reese either
+loved or hated everything I owned. I haven't left a single bridge on
+which one of my thoughts could even crawl back to him again--"
+
+Half quizzically, half caressingly, Drew stooped down and brushed his
+lips across the lock of hair. Fragrant as violets, soft as the ghost of
+a kiss, the little curl wafted its dearness into his senses. But ranker
+than violets, harsher than kisses, lurked the blunt, unmistakable odor
+of ashes.
+
+He laughed. And the laugh was bitter as gall. "Burning your bridges," he
+mused. "It's a good theory. But if I take your life into my bungling
+hands and sweat my heart out trying to make you love me, and come home
+every night to find you crying with fear and heartbreak, will you still
+protest that the sting in your eyes is nothing in the world except the
+_smudge_ from those burnt bridges? Will you promise?"
+
+With desperate literalness she clutched at the phrase. Everything else
+in the room began to whirl round and round like prickly stars. "I
+promise, I promise," she gasped. Then sight--not air, but just
+sight--seemed to be smothered right out of her, and her brain reeled,
+and she wilted down unconscious on the floor.
+
+Cursing himself for a brute, Drew snatched her up in a little, white,
+crumpled heap and started for the window. Halfway there, the office
+door opened abruptly and Ruth's Big Brother stood on the threshold.
+Surprise, anxiety, ultimate relief chased flashingly across the
+newcomer's face, and in an instant both men were working together over
+the limp little body.
+
+"Well, old man," said the Big Brother, "I'm glad she was here safe with
+you when she fainted." His spare arm clapped down affectionately across
+Drew's shoulders and jarred Drew's fingers brownly against the
+death-like pallor of the girl's throat. The Big Brother gave an ugly
+gasp. "Damn Aleck Reese," he said.
+
+Drew's eyes shut perfectly tight as though he was smitten by some
+unbearable agony. Then suddenly, without an instant's warning, he pulled
+himself together and burst out laughing uproariously like a schoolboy.
+
+"Oh, what's the use of damning Aleck Reese?" he cried. "Aleck Reese is
+as stale an issue as yesterday morning's paper. If you've no particular
+objection to me as a brother-in-law as well as a tennis chum, Ruth and I
+were planning to marry each other this afternoon. Maybe I was just a
+little bit too vehement about it."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Three hours later, in a dusty, musty, mid-week church vestry, an
+extraordinarily white and extraordinarily vivacious girl was quite busy
+assuring a credulous minister and a credulous sexton and a credulous Big
+Brother that she would love till death hushed her the perfectly
+incredulous bridegroom who stood staring down upon her like a very tall
+man in a very short dream.
+
+And then, because neither groom nor bride could think of anything
+specially married to say to each other, they kidnapped Big Brother and
+bore him away in an automobile to a nervous, rollicking, wonderfully
+entertaining "shore dinner," where they sat at an open window round a
+green-tiled table in a marvelously glowering, ice-cool, artificial
+grotto, and ate bright scarlet lobsters while the great, hot, blowzy
+yellow moon came wallowing up out of the night-shadowed sea, and the
+thrilly, thumpy brass band played "I Love You So"; and the only, only
+light in the whole vague, noisy room seemed to be Big Brother's beaming,
+ecstatic face gleaming like some glad phosphorescent thing through the
+clouds of murky tobacco smoke.
+
+Not till the wines and dines and roses and posies and chatter and
+clatter were all over, and the automobile had carried Big Brother off to
+his railroad station and whisked the bride and groom back to the wobbly
+city pavements, did Drew begin to realize that the frolicking, jesting,
+crisp-tongued figure beside him had wilted down into a piteous little
+hunch of fear. Stooping to push her slippery new suit case closer under
+her feet, he caught the sharp, shuddering tremor of her knees, and as
+the automobile swayed finally into the street that led to his apartment,
+her lungs seemed to crumple up in a paroxysm of coughing. Under the
+garish lights that marked his apartment-house doorway her slight figure
+drooped like a tired flower, and the footsteps that tinkled behind him
+along the stone corridor rang in his ears with a dear, shy, girlish
+reluctance. The elevator had stopped running. One flight, two flights,
+three, four, five they toiled up the harsh, cool, metallic stairway.
+Four times Ruth stopped to get her breath, and twice to tie her shoe.
+Drew laughed to himself at the delicious subterfuge of it.
+
+Then at the very top of the strange, gloomy, midnight building, when
+Drew's nervous fingers fumbled a second with his door-lock, without the
+slightest possible warning she reached out suddenly with one mad,
+frenzied impulse and struck the key from his hand. To his startled eyes
+she turned a face more wild, more agonized than any terror he had ever
+dreamed in his most hideous, sweating nightmare. Instantly her hands
+went clutching out to him.
+
+"Oh, Drew, for God's sake take me home!" she gasped. "What have I done?
+What have I done? What have I done? Oh, ALECK!"
+
+Wrenching himself free from her hands, Drew dropped down on the floor
+and began to hunt around for the key. The blood surged into his head
+like a hot tide, and he felt all gritty-lunged and smothered, as though
+he were crawling under water. After a minute he stumbled to his feet and
+slipped the recreant key smoothly into the lock, and swung his door wide
+open, and turned back to Ruth. She stood facing him defiantly, her eyes
+blazing, her poor hands twisting.
+
+Drew nodded toward the door, and shoved the suit case with his foot
+across the threshold. His face was very stern and set.
+
+"You want me to take you 'home'?" he said. "_This_ is home. What do you
+mean? Take you back to your Brother's house? You can't go back to your
+Brother's house on your wedding day. It wouldn't be fair to me. And I
+won't help you do an unfair thing _even_ to me. You've _got_ to give me
+a chance!"
+
+He nodded again toward the open door, but the girl did not budge. His
+face brightened suddenly, and he stepped back to where she was standing,
+and lifted her up in his arms and swung her to his shoulder and stumbled
+through the pitch-black doorway. "Do you remember," he cried, "the day
+at your grammar-school picnic when I carried you over the railroad
+trestle because the locomotive that was swooping down upon us round the
+curve had scared all the starch out of your legs? Look out for your head
+now, honey, and I'll give you a very good imitation of a cave man
+bringing home his bride."
+
+In another moment he had switched a blaze of electric light into his
+diminutive library, and deposited his sobbing burden none too formally
+in the big easy chair that blocked almost all the open space between his
+desk and his bookcases. "What! Aren't you laughing, too?" he cried in
+mock alarm. But the crumpled little figure in the big chair did not
+answer to his raillery.
+
+Until it seemed as though he would totter from his wavering foothold,
+Drew stood and watched her dumbly. Then a voice that sounded strange
+even to himself spoke out of his lips.
+
+"Ruth--come here," he said.
+
+She raised her rumpled head in astonishment, gaged for a throbbing
+instant the new authoritative glint in his eyes, and then slipped
+cautiously out of her chair and came to him, reeking with despair. For a
+second they just stood and stared at each other, white face to white
+face, a map of anger confronting a map of fear.
+
+"You understand," said Drew, "that to-day, by every moral, legal,
+religious right and rite, you have delivered your life over utterly into
+my hands?" His voice was like ice.
+
+"Yes, I understand," she answered feebly, with the fresh tears gushing
+suddenly into her eyes.
+
+Drew's mouth relaxed. "You understand?" he repeated. "Well--forget it!
+And never, never, never, as long as you and I are together, never, I
+say, understand anything but this: you can cry about Aleck Reese all you
+want to, but you sha'n't cry about me. You can count on that anyway." He
+started to smile, but his mouth twitched instead with a wince of pain.
+"And I thought I could really bring you heart's-ease," he scoffed.
+"Heart's-ease? Bah!"
+
+"Heart's-ease. Bah!" The familiar phrase exploded Ruth's inflammable
+nerves into hysterical laughter. "Why, that's what the lamb said," she
+cried, "when I fed him on my pansy posies. 'Heart's-ease. B-a-h!'" And
+her sudden burst of even unnatural delight cleared her face for the
+moment of all its haggard tragedy, and left her once more just a very
+fragile, very plaintive, very helpless, tear-stained child. "You _b-a-a_
+exactly like the lamb," she suggested with timid, snuffling pleasantry;
+and at the very first suspicion of a reluctant twinkle at the corner of
+Drew's eyes she reached up her trembling little hands to his shoulders
+and held him like a vise with a touch so light, so faint, so timorous
+that it could hardly have detained the shadow of a humming-bird.
+
+For a moment she stared exploringly round the unfamiliar, bright little
+room crowded so horribly, cruelly close with herself, her mistake, and
+the life-long friend loomed so suddenly and undesirably into a man. Then
+with a quick, shuddery blink her eyes came flashing back wetly and
+wistfully to the unsolved, inscrutable face before her. Her fingers dug
+themselves frantically into his cheviot shoulders.
+
+"Oh, Drew, Drew," she blurted out, "I am so
+very--very--very--frightened! Won't you please take me and play you are
+my--Mother?"
+
+"Play I am your Mother? _Play I am your Mother!_" The phrase ripped out
+of Drew's lips like an oath, and twitched itself just in time into
+explosive, husky mirth. "Play I am your Mother?" The teeniest grimace
+over his left shoulder outlined the soft silken swish and tug of a
+lady's train. A most casual tap at his belt seemed to achieve instantly
+the fashionable hour-glass outline of feminine curves. "Play I am your
+Mother!" He smiled and, stooping down, took Ruth's scared white face
+between his hands, and his smile was as bright--and just about as
+pleasant--as a zigzag of lightning from a storm-black sky.
+
+"Ruthy dear," he said, "I don't feel very much like your Mother. Now if
+it was a cannibal that you wanted, or a pirate, or a kidnapper, or a
+body-snatcher, or a general all-round robber of widows and orphans,
+why, here I am, all dressed and trained and labeled for the part. But a
+_Mother_--" The smile went zigzagging again across his face just as a
+big, wet, scalding tear came trickling down the girl's cheek into his
+fingers. The feeling of that tear made his heart cramp unpleasantly.
+"Oh, hang it all," he finished abruptly, "what does a Mother do,
+anyway?"
+
+The little white face in his hands flooded instantly with a great
+desolation. "I don't know," she moaned wearily. "I _never_ knew."
+
+For some inexplainable reason Aleck Reese's devilish, insolent beauty
+flaunted itself suddenly before Drew's vision, and he gave a bitter
+gasp, and turned away fiercely, and brushed his arm potently across his
+forehead as though Sex, after all, were nothing but a trivial mask that
+fastened loosely to the ears.
+
+When he turned round again, his conquered face had that strange, soft,
+shining, translucent wonder-look in it which no woman all her life long
+may reap twice from a man's face. Tenderly, serenely, uncaressingly,
+without passion and without playfulness, he picked up his sad little
+bride and carried her back to the big, roomy, restful chair, and
+snuggled her down in his long arms, with her smoke-scented hair across
+his cheek, and told her funny, giggly little stories, and crooned her
+funny, sleepy little songs, till her shuddering sobs soothed
+themselves--oh, so slowly--into lazy, languid, bashful little smiles,
+and the lazy, languid, bashful little smiles droned off at last into
+nestling, contented little sighs, and the nestling, contented little
+sighs blossomed all of a sudden into merciful, peaceful slumber.
+
+Then, when the warm, gray June dawn was just beginning to flush across
+the roofs of the city, he put her softly down and slipped away, and took
+his smallest military brushes, and his smallest dressing-gown, and his
+smallest slippers, and carried them out to his diminutive guest-room.
+"It isn't a very big little guest-room," he mused disconsolately, "but
+then, she isn't a very big little guest. It will hold her, I guess, as
+long as she's willing to stay."
+
+"As long as she's willing to stay." The phrase puckered his lips. Again
+Aleck Reese's face flashed before him in all its amazing beauty and
+magical pathos, a face this time staring across a tiny, ornate cafe
+table into the jaded, world-wise eyes of some gorgeous woman of the
+theatrical demi-monde. At the vision Drew's shoulders squared suddenly
+as though for a fair fight to the finish, and then wilted down with
+equal abruptness as his eyes met accidentally in the mirror his own
+plain, matter-of-fact reflection. The sight fairly mocked him. There was
+no beauty there. No magic. No brilliance. No talent. No compelling
+moodiness. No possible promise of "Love and Fame and Far Lands."
+Nothing. Just eyes and nose and mouth and hair and an ugly baseball scar
+on his left cheek. Merciful heavens! What had he to fight Aleck Reese
+with, except the only two virtues that a man may not brag of--a decently
+clean life and an unstaled love!
+
+Grinning to rekindle his courage, he started tiptoeing back along the
+hall to his bedroom and his kitchen, and rolled up his sleeves and began
+to clean house most furiously; for even if you are quite desperately in
+love, and a fairly good man besides, it is just a little bit
+crowded-feeling and disconcerting to have the lady walk unannounced
+right into your life and your neckties and your pictures, to say nothing
+of your last week's unwashed cream-jars.
+
+Frantically struggling with his coffee-pot at seven o'clock, he had
+almost forgotten his minor troubles when a little short, gaspy breath
+sound made him look up. Huddling her tired-out dress into the ample
+folds of his dressing-gown, Ruth stood watching him bashfully.
+
+"Hello!" he said. "Who are you?"
+
+"I'm--Mrs.--Andrew Bernard, attorney at law," she announced with
+stuttering nonchalance, and started off exploringly for the cupboard to
+find Drew's best green Canton china to deck the kitchen breakfast
+table. All through the tortuous little meal she sat in absolute
+tongue-tied gravity, carving her omelet into a hundred infinitesimal
+pieces and sipping like a professional coffee-taster at Drew's over-rank
+concoction. Only once did her solemn face lighten with an inspirational
+flash that made Drew's heart jump. Then, "Oh, Drew," she exclaimed, "do
+you think you could go out to the house to-day and see if they fed the
+lamb?"
+
+"No, I don't," said Drew bluntly, and poured himself out his fifth cup
+of coffee.
+
+After breakfast, all the time that he was shaving, she came and sat on
+the edge of a table and watched him with the same maddening gravity, and
+when he finally started off for his office she followed him down the
+whole length of his little hallway. "I like my cave!" she volunteered
+with sudden sociability, and then with a great, pink-flushing wave of
+consciousness she lifted up her face to him and stammered, "Do I kiss
+you good-by?"
+
+Drew shook his head and laughed. "No," he said, "you don't even have to
+do that; I'm not much of a kisser," and turned abruptly and grabbed at
+the handle of the door.
+
+But before he had crossed the threshold she reached out and pulled him
+back for a moment, and he had to stoop down very far to hear what she
+wanted to tell him. "It's nothing much, Drew," she whispered. "It's
+nothing much at all. I just wanted to say that--considering how strong
+they are, and how--wild--and strange--I think men are--very--_gentle_
+creatures. Thank you." And in another instant she had gone back alone to
+face by crass daylight the tragedy that she had brought into three
+people's lives.
+
+Certainly in all the days and weeks that followed, Drew never failed to
+qualify as a "gentle creature." Not a day passed at his office that he
+did not telephone home with the most casual-sounding pleasantry, "Is
+everything all right? Any burnt-bridge smoke in the air?" Usually, clear
+as his own voice, and sometimes even with a little giggle tucked on at
+the end, the answer came, "Yes, everything's all right." But now and
+then over that telephone wire a minor note flashed with unmistakably
+tremulous vibration: "N-o, Drew. Oh, could you come right home--and take
+me somewhere?"
+
+Drew's brown cheeks hollowed a bit, perhaps, as time went on, but always
+smilingly, always frankly and jocosely, he met the occasionally
+recurrent emergencies of his love-life. Underneath his smile and
+underneath his frankness his original purpose never flinched and never
+wavered. With growing mental intimacy and absolute emotional aloofness
+he forced day by day the image and the consciousness of his personality
+upon the girl's plastic mind: his picture, for instance, as a matter of
+course for her locket; his favorite, rather odd, colors for her clothes;
+his sturdy, adventuresome, fleet-footed opinions to run ahead and break
+in all her strange new thought-grounds for her. More than this, in every
+possible way that showed to the world he stamped her definitely as the
+most carefully cherished wife among all her young married mates.
+
+At first the very novelty of the situation had fed his eyes with rapture
+and fired the girl's face with a feverish excitement almost as pink as
+happiness. The surprise and congratulations of their friends, the speech
+of the janitor, the floral offering of the elevator boy, the long
+procession of silver spoons and cut-glass dishes, had filled their days
+with interest and laughter. Trig in her light muslin house gowns or her
+big gingham aprons, Ruth fluttered blissfully around her house like a
+new, brainy sort of butterfly. By some fine, instinctive delicacy,
+shrewder than many women's love, she divined and forestalled Drew's
+domestic tastes and preferences, and lined his simplest, homespun needs
+with all the quiver and sheen of silk. Resting his weariness, spurring
+his laziness; equally quick to divine the need of a sofa pillow or a
+joke; equally interested in his food and his politics; always ready to
+talk, always ready to keep still; cramping her free suburban ways into
+his hampered accommodations; missing her garden and her pets and her
+piazzas without ever acknowledging it--she tried in every plausible way
+except loving to compensate Drew for the wrong she had done him.
+
+Only once did Drew's smoldering self-control slip the short leash he had
+set for himself. Just once, round the glowing coziness of a rainy-night
+open fire, he had dropped his book slammingly on the floor and reached
+out his hand to her soft hair that brightened like bronze in the
+lamplight. "Are you happy?" he had probed before he could fairly bite
+the words back; and she had jumped up, and tossed her hair out of her
+eyes, and laughed as she started for the kitchen. "No, I'm not exactly
+happy," she had said. "But I'm awfully--interested."
+
+So June budded into July, and July bloomed into August, and August
+wilted into September, and September brittled and crisped and flamed at
+last into October. Tennis and boating and picnics and horseback riding
+filled up the edges of the days. Little by little the bright, wholesome
+red came back to live in Ruth's rounding cheeks. Little by little the
+good steady gleam of normal interests supplanted the wild
+will-o'-the-wisp lights in her eyes. Little by little her accumulating
+possessions began to steel shyly out from her tiny room and make
+themselves boldly at home in the places where hitherto they had ventured
+only as guests. Her workbasket crowded Drew's tobacco-jar deliberately
+from the table to the top of the bookcase. Her daring hands nonchalantly
+replaced a brutally clever cartoon with a soft-toned sketch of a little
+child. Once, indeed, an ostentatiously freshly laundered dress, all lace
+and posies and ruffles, went and hung itself brazenly in Drew's roomy
+closet right next to his fishing clothes.
+
+And then, just as Drew thought that at last he saw Happiness stop and
+turn and look at him a bit whimsically, Aleck Reese came back to
+town--Aleck Reese, not as Fate should have had him, drunken with
+flattery, riotous with revelry, chasing madly some new infatuation, but
+Aleck Reese sobered, dazed, temporarily purified by the shock of his
+loss, if not by the loss itself.
+
+For a week, blissfully unconscious of any cause, Drew had watched with
+growing perplexity and anxiety the sudden, abrupt flag in the girl's
+health and spirits and general friendliness. Flowers, fruit, candy,
+books, excursion plans had all successively, one by one, failed to rouse
+either her interest or her ordinary civility. And then one night,
+dragging home extra late from a worried, wearisome day at the office,
+faint for his dinner, sick for his sleep, he found the apartment
+perfectly dark and cheerless, the fire unlighted, the table unset, and
+Ruth herself lying in a paroxysm of grief on the floor under his
+stumbling feet. With his dizzy head reeling blindly, and his hands
+shaking like an aspen, he picked her up and tried to carry her to the
+couch; but she wrenched herself away from him, and walked over to the
+window and halfway back again before she spoke.
+
+"Aleck Reese has come home," she announced dully, and reached up
+unthinkingly and turned a blast of electric light full on her ghastly
+face.
+
+Drew clutched at the back of the nearest chair. "Have you seen him?" he
+almost whispered.
+
+The girl nodded. "Yes. He's been here a week. I've seen him twice.
+Once--all day at the tennis club--and this afternoon I met him on the
+street, and he came home with me to get--a book."
+
+"Why didn't you tell me before that he was here?"
+
+She shrugged her shoulders wearily. "I thought his coming wasn't going
+to matter," she faltered, "but--"
+
+"But what?" said Drew.
+
+Her arms fell limply down to her sides and her chin began to quiver.
+
+"He kissed me this afternoon," she stammered, "and I--kissed him. And,
+worse than that, we were both--glad."
+
+Trying to brush the fog away from his eyes, Drew almost sprang across
+the room at her, and she gave a queer little cry and fled, not away
+from him, but right into his arms, as though _there_ was her only haven.
+"Would you be apt to hurt me?" she gasped with a funny-sad sort of
+inquisitiveness. Then she backed away and held out her hand like a man's
+to Drew's shaking fingers. "I'm very much ashamed," she said, "about
+this afternoon. Oh, very, very, very much ashamed. I haven't ever been a
+really good wife to you, you know, but I never have cheated before until
+to-day. I promise you faithfully that it sha'n't happen again. But,
+Drew"--her face flushed utterly crimson--"but, Drew--I honestly think
+that it _had_ to happen to-day."
+
+Drew's tortured eyes watched her keenly for a second and then his look
+softened. "Will you please tell Aleck," he suggested, "that you told me
+all about it and that I--laughed?"
+
+It was not till some time in December, however, after a nervous,
+evasive, speechless sort of week, that Ruth appeared abruptly one day at
+Drew's office, looking for all the world like the frightened child who
+had sought him out there the June before.
+
+"Drew, you're five years older than I am, aren't you?" she began
+disconnectedly. "And you've always been older than I am, and stronger
+than I am, and wiser than I am. And you've always gone ahead in school
+and play and everything, and learned what you wanted to and then come
+back--and gotten me. And it always made everything--oh, so much easier
+for me--and I thought it was a magic scheme that simply couldn't fail to
+work. But I'm afraid I'm not quite as smart as I used to be--I can't
+seem to catch up with you this time."
+
+"What do you mean?" said Drew.
+
+She began to fidget with her gloves. "Do you know what month it is?" she
+asked abruptly.
+
+"Why, yes," said Drew, just a bit drearily. "It's December. What of it?"
+
+Her eyes blurred, but she kept them fixed steadily on her husband. "Why,
+don't you remember," she gasped, "that when we were married I promised
+you faithfully that I would love you within six months? The six months
+were up in November--but I find I'm not quite ready--yet. You'll have to
+give me a little more time," she pleaded. "You'll have to renew my
+love-loan. Will you?"
+
+Drew slammed down his law books and forced his mouth into a grin. "I'd
+forgotten all about that arrangement," he said. "Of course I'll renew
+what you call your 'love-loan.' Really and truly I didn't expect you to
+love me before a full year was up. Heart-wounds don't ever even begin to
+heal until their first anniversaries are passed--all the Christmases and
+birthdays and Easters. And, really, I'd quite as soon anyway that you
+didn't love me till Spring," he added casually. "I'm so hideously busy
+and worried just now with business things."
+
+She gave him an odd little look that barely grazed his face and settled
+flutteringly on the book in his hand. It was a ponderous-looking
+treatise on "The Annulment of Marriage." Her heart began to pound
+furiously. "Drew!" she blurted out, "I simply can't stand things any
+longer. I shall go mad. I've tried and tried and tried to be good, and
+it's no use. I must be stupid. I must be a fool. BUT I WANT TO GO HOME!"
+
+"All right," said Drew very quietly, "you--can--go--home."
+
+In another instant, without good-by or regret, she had flashed out of
+the office and was racing down the stairs. Halfway to the street she
+missed her handkerchief, and started reluctantly back to get it. The
+office door was locked, but she tiptoed round to a private side entrance
+and opened the door very cautiously and peeped in.
+
+Prostrate across his great, cluttered desk, Drew, the serene, the
+laughing, the self-sufficient, lay sobbing like a woman.
+
+Startled as though she had seen a ghost, the girl backed undetected out
+of the door, and closed it very softly behind her, nor did she stop
+tiptoeing until she had reached the street floor. Then, dropping down
+weak-kneed upon the last step, she sat staring out into the dingy patch
+of snow that flared now and then through the swinging doorway. Somewhere
+out in that vista Aleck Reese was waiting and watching for her. Two or
+three of her husband's business acquaintances paused and accosted her.
+"Anything the matter?" they probed.
+
+"Oh, no," she answered brightly. "I'm just thinking."
+
+After a while she jumped up abruptly and stole back through a
+box-cluttered hall to the rear door of the building, and slid out
+unnoticed into a side street, gathering her great fur coat--Drew's
+latest gift--closer and closer around her shivering body. The day was
+gray and bleak and scarily incomplete, like the work of some amateur
+creator who had slipped up on the one essential secret of how to make
+the sun shine. The jingliest sound of sleigh-bells, the reddest flare of
+holiday shop windows, could not cheer her thoughts away from the
+stinging, shuddering memory of Drew's crumpled shoulders, the gasping
+catch of his breath, the strange new flicker of gray at his temples.
+Over and over to herself she kept repeating dully: "I've hurt Drew just
+the way that Aleck hurt me. It mustn't be. It mustn't be--it mustn't!
+There's got to be some way out!"
+
+Then most unexpectedly, at the first street corner she was gathered up
+joyously by a crowd of her young married chums who were starting off in
+an automobile for their sewing-club in Ruth's own old-home suburb
+fifteen miles away. It was a long time since she had played very freely
+with women, and the old associations caught her interest with a novel
+charm. Showered with candy, gay with questions, happy with laughter, the
+party whizzed up at last to the end of its journey, and tumbled out rosy
+with frost and mischief to join the women who had already arrived. From
+every individual corner of the warm, lazy sewing-room some one seemed to
+jump up and greet Ruth's return. "Oh, you pampered young bride!" they
+teased, and "Will you look at the wonderful fur coat and hat that have
+happened to Ruth!" Even the sad-faced, widowed little dressmaker who
+always officiated professionally at the club wriggled out of her seat
+and brought her small boy 'way across the room to stroke the girl's
+sumptuous mink-brown softness.
+
+"Why, am I so very wonderful?" stammered Ruth, staring down with her
+hands in her pockets at the great fur length and breadth of her.
+
+"Well, if I had a coat like that," scoffed a shrill voice from the sofa,
+"I should think that it was the most wonderful thing in life that could
+happen to me."
+
+Standing there scorching herself in the fire-glow, Ruth looked up
+suddenly with a fierce sort of intentness. "You wise old married
+people," she cried, "tell me truly what really is the most wonderful
+thing in life that can happen to a woman?"
+
+"Goodness, is it a new riddle?" shouted her hostess, and instantly a
+dozen noisy answers came rollicking into the contest. "Money!" cried the
+extravagant one. "A husband who goes to the club every night!" screamed
+the flirt. "Health!" "Curls!" "Dresden china!" "Single blessedness!" the
+suggestions came piling in. Only the dressmaker's haggard face whitened
+comprehendingly to the hunger underneath Ruth's laughing eyes. Staring
+scornfully at the heaping luxuries all around her, the shabby,
+widow-marked woman snatched up her child and cuddled it to her breast.
+"The most wonderful thing in life that can happen to a woman?" she
+quoted passionately. "I'll tell you what it is. It's being able to hope
+that your son will be _exactly_ like his father."
+
+"Exactly like his father?" The shrewd sting and lash of the words ripped
+through Ruth's senses like the scorch of a red-hot fuse. Strength,
+tenderness, patience, love, loyalty flamed up before her with such
+dazzling brilliance that she could scarcely fathom the features behind
+them, and the room whirled dizzily with sudden excessive heat. "Exactly
+like his father." A dozen feminine voices caught up the phrase and
+dropped it blisteringly. The wife of the town's _bon vivant_ winced a
+trifle. The most radiant bride of the year jabbed her fingers
+accidentally with her scissors. Some one started to sigh and laughed
+instead. A satirical voice suggested, "Well, but of course there's got
+to be some improvement in every generation."
+
+Smothering for air, Ruth reached up bunglingly and fastened her big fur
+collar and started for the door. "Oh, no," she protested to every one's
+detaining hands, "honestly I didn't intend to stay. I've got to hurry
+over to the house and get some things before dark," and, pleading
+several equally legitimate excuses, she bolted out into the snowy fields
+to take the quickest possible short cut to her Big Brother's house.
+
+Every plowing step drove her heart pounding like an engine, and every
+lagging footfall started her scared thoughts throbbing louder than her
+heart. Hurry as fast as she could, stumbling over drift-hidden rocks or
+floundering headlong into some hollow, she could not seem to outdistance
+the startling, tumultuous memory of the little dressmaker's
+passion-glorified eyes staring scornfully down on the slowly sobering
+faces of the women around her. The vision stung itself home to the girl
+like sleet in her eyes.
+
+"O-h!" she groaned. "What a wicked thing Life is--wasting a man like
+Drew on a girl--like me. 'To be able to hope that your son will be
+exactly like his father!'" Her heart jumped. Merciful heavens! If
+Happiness were really--only as simple a thing as that--just to look in
+your husband's eyes and find them good. Years and years hence, perhaps,
+she herself might have a son--with all his father's blessed, winsome
+virtues. Her eyes flooded suddenly with angry tears. "Oh, could Fate
+possibly, possibly be so tricky as to make a woman love her son because
+he _was_ like his father, and yet all, all the long years make that
+woman just miss loving the father himself?"
+
+With a little frightened gasp she began to run. "If I only can get to
+the house," she reasoned, "then everything will be all right. And I'll
+never leave it again."
+
+Half an hour later, panting and flushing, she twisted her latch-key
+through the familiar home door. No one was there to greet her. From
+attic to cellar the whole house was deserted. At first the emptiness and
+roominess seemed to ease and rest her, but after a little while she
+began to get lonesome, and started out to explore familiar corners, and
+found them unfamiliar. "What an ugly new wall-paper!" she fretted; "and
+what a silly way to set the table!" Her old room smote upon her with
+strange surprise--not cunningly, like one's funny little baby clothes,
+but distastefully, like a last year's outgrown coat. In the large, light
+pantry a fresh disappointment greeted her. "What an insipid salad!" she
+mourned. "It isn't half as nice as the salad Drew makes." Cookies,
+cakes, doughnuts failed her successively. "And I used to think they were
+the best I ever tasted," she puzzled. In the newly upholstered parlor a
+queer unrest sickened her. "Why, the house doesn't seem quite to--fit me
+any more," she acknowledged, and bundled herself into her coat again,
+and stuffed her pockets with apples, and started off more gladly for the
+barn.
+
+As she pushed back the heavy sliding doors a horse whinnied, possibly
+for welcome, but probably for oats. Teased by the uncertainty, the girl
+threw back her head and laughed. "Hello, all you animals," she cried; "I
+have come home. Isn't it fine?"
+
+Up from the floor of his pen the lamb rose clatteringly like a
+mechanical toy, and met the glad news with a peculiarly disdainful
+"B-a-a-a!" Back to the sheltering wood-pile her old friends the
+kittens--little cats now--fled from her with precipitous fear. The
+white-nosed cow reared back with staring eyes. The pet horse snapped at
+her fingers instead of the apple. The collie dog, to be sure, came
+jumping boisterously, but the jumpiness was unmistakably because he was
+"Carlo," and not because she was "Ruth." And yet only six months before
+every animal on the place had looked like her with that strange, absurd
+mimicry of human expression that characterizes the faces of all
+much-cherished birds or beasties. And now even the collie dog had
+reverted to the plain, blank-featured canine street type--and the pet
+horse looked like the hired man.
+
+[Illustration: "Hello, all you animals," she cried]
+
+The girl's forehead puckered up into a bewildered sort of frown. "I
+don't quite seem to belong anywhere," she concluded. The thought was
+unpleasant. Worst of all, the increasing, utterly unexplainable sob in
+her throat made her feel very reluctant to go back into the house and
+wait for her Brother and the Housekeeper and the inevitable questions.
+Dallying there on the edge of the wheelbarrow, munching her red-cheeked
+apples, it was almost eight o'clock before her mind quickened to a
+solution of her immediate difficulties. She would hide in the hay all
+night, there in the sweetness and softness of last summer's beautiful
+grass, and think out her problems and decide what to do.
+
+Deep in the hay she burrowed out a nest, and lined it with the biggest
+buffalo robe and the thickest carriage rug. Then one by one she carried
+up the astonished kittens, and the heavy, fat lamb, and the
+scrambling collie dog to keep her company, and snuggled herself down,
+warm and content, to drowse and dream amidst the musty cobwebs, and the
+short, sharp snap of straws, and the soothing sighs of the sleepy cow,
+and the stamp, stamp of the horse, and all the extra, indefinite, scary,
+lonesome night noises that keep your nerves exploding intermittently
+like torpedoes and start your common sense scouring like a silver polish
+at all the tarnished values of your everyday life.
+
+Midnight found her lying wide awake and starry-eyed, with her red lips
+twisted into an oddly inscrutable smile. Close in her left hand the
+collie dog nestled his grizzly nose. Under her right arm the woolly lamb
+slumbered. Over her quiet feet the little cats purred with fire-gleaming
+faces.
+
+Attracted by the barking of his new bulldog, Big Brother came out in the
+early morning and discovered her in the hay.
+
+"Well, for heaven's sake!" he began. "Where did you come from? Where
+does Drew think you are? He's been telephoning here all night trying to
+find you. I guess he's scared to death. Great Scott! what's the matter?
+What are you hiding out here for? Have you had any trouble with Drew?"
+
+She slid down out of her nest with the jolliest sort of a laugh. "Of
+course I haven't had any trouble with Drew. I just wanted to come home.
+That's all. Drew buys me everything else," she dimpled, "but he simply
+won't buy me any hay--and I'm such a donkey."
+
+Big Brother shrugged his shoulders. "You're just as foolish as ever," he
+began, and then finished abruptly with "What a perfectly absurd way to
+do your hair! It looks like fury."
+
+An angry flush rose to her cheeks, and she reached up her hands
+defensively. "It suits Drew all right," she retorted.
+
+Big Brother laughed. "Well, come along in the house and get your
+breakfast and telephone Drew."
+
+The funniest sort of an impulse smote suddenly upon Ruth's mind. "I
+don't want any breakfast," she protested, "and I don't want any
+telephone. I'm going home this minute to surprise Drew. We were going
+to have broiled chicken, and a new dining-room table, and a pot of
+primroses as big as your head. Shall I have time to wash my face before
+the car comes?"
+
+Ten minutes after that she was running like mad to the main street. An
+hour later the big, whizzing electric car that was speeding her back to
+the city crashed headlong at a curve into another brittling, splintering
+mass of screams and blood and broken glass and shivering woodwork.
+
+When she came to her senses she was lying in her blood-stained furs on
+some one's piazza floor, and the horrid news of the accident must have
+traveled very quickly, for a great crowd of people was trampling round
+over the snowy lawn, and Big Brother and Aleck Reese and the old family
+doctor seemed to have dropped down right out of the snow-whirling sky.
+Just as she opened her eyes, Aleck Reese, haggard with fear and
+dissipation, was kneeling down trying to slip his arms under her.
+
+With the mightiest possible effort she lifted her forefinger warningly.
+
+"Don't you dare touch me," she threatened. "I promised Drew--"
+
+The doctor looked up astonished into her wide-open eyes. "Now, Ruth," he
+begged, "don't you make any fuss. We've got to get you into a carriage.
+We'll try not to hurt you any more than is absolutely necessary."
+
+Her shattered nerves failed her utterly. "What nonsense!" she sobbed.
+"You don't have to hurt me at all. My own man never hurts me at all. I
+tell you I want my own man."
+
+"But we can't find Drew," protested the doctor.
+
+Then the blood came gushing back into her eyes and some wicked brute
+took her bruised knees, and her wrenched back, and her broken collar
+bone, and her smashed head, and jarred them all up together like a bag
+of junk, and she gave one awful, blood-curdling yell--and a horse
+whinnied--and everything in the world stopped happening like a run-down
+clock.
+
+When Time began to tick normally again, she found herself lying with an
+almost solid cotton face in a pleasant, puffy bed that seemed to rock,
+and roll, and tug against her straining arm that clutched its fingers
+like an anchor into somebody's perfectly firm, kind hand. As far away as
+a voice on a shore, tired, hoarse, desperately incessant, some one was
+signaling reassurance to her: "You're all right, honey, You're all
+right, honey."
+
+After a long time her fingers twittered in the warm grasp. "Who are
+you?" she stammered perplexedly.
+
+"Just your 'own man,'" whispered Drew.
+
+The lips struggling out from the edge of the bandage quivered a little.
+"My 'own man'?" she repeated with surprise. "Who was the tattletale that
+told you?" She began to shiver suddenly in mental or physical agony.
+"Oh, I remember it all now," she gasped. "Was the little boy killed who
+sat in the corner seat?"
+
+"Why, I don't know," said Drew, and his voice rasped unexpectedly with
+the sickening strain of the past few hours.
+
+At the sound she gave a panic-stricken sob. "I believe I'm dead myself,
+Drew," she cried, "and you're trying to keep it from me. Where am I?
+Tell me instantly where I am."
+
+Drew's laugh rang out before he could control it. "You're here in your
+own little room," he assured her.
+
+"Prove it," she whimpered hysterically. "Tell me what's on my bureau."
+
+He jumped up and walked across the room to make sure. "Why, there's a
+silver-backed mirror, and a box of violet powder, and a package of
+safety pins."
+
+"Pshaw!" she said. "Those might be on any angel's bureau. What else do
+you see?"
+
+He fumbled a minute among the glass and silver and gave a quick sigh of
+surprise. "Here's your wedding ring."
+
+"Bring it to me," she pleaded, and took the tiny golden circlet blindly
+from his hand and slipped it experimentally once or twice up and down
+her finger. "Yes, that's it," she assented, and handed it back to him.
+"Hurry--quick--before anybody comes."
+
+"What do you want?" faltered Drew.
+
+She reached up wilfully and yanked the bandage away from the corner of
+one eye.
+
+"Why, put the ring back on my finger where it belongs!" she said.
+"We're going to begin all over again. Play that I am your wife!" she
+demanded tremulously.
+
+Drew winced like raw flesh. "You are my wife," he cried. "You are! You
+are! You are!"
+
+With all the strength that was left to her she groped out and drew his
+face down to her lips.
+
+"Oh, I've invented a lots better game than that," she whispered. "If
+we're going to play any game at all--let's--play--that--I--love--you!"
+
+
+
+
+HEART OF THE CITY
+
+
+THE dining-room was green, as green could be. Under the orange-colored
+candle-light, the walls, rugs, ceiling, draperies, ferns, glowed
+verdant, mysterious, intense, like night woods arching round a camp
+fire. Into this fervid, pastoral verdure the round white table,
+sparkling with silver, limpid with wine-lights, seemed to roll forth
+resplendent and incongruous as a huge, tinseled snowball.
+
+Outside, like fire engines running on velvet wheels, the automobiles
+went humming along the pavement. Inside, the soft, narrow, ribbony voice
+of a violin came whimpering through the rose-scented air.
+
+It was the midst of dinner-party time. In the oak-paneled hallway a
+shadowy, tall clock swallowed gutturally on the verge of striking nine.
+
+The moment was distinctly nervous. The _entree_ course was late, and the
+Hostess, gesticulating tragically to her husband, had slipped one
+chalky white shoulder just a fraction of an inch too far out of its
+jeweled strap. The Host, conversing every second with exaggerated
+blandness about the squirrels in Central Park, was striving frantically
+all the while with a desperately surreptitious, itchy gesture to signal
+to his mate. Worse than this, a prominent Sociologist was audibly
+discussing the American penal system with a worried-looking lady whose
+brother was even then under indictment for some banking fraud. Some one,
+trying to kick the Sociologist's ankle bone, had snagged his own foot
+gashingly through the Woodland Girl's skirt ruffle, and the Woodland
+Girl, blush-blown yet with country breezes, clear-eyed as a trout pool,
+sweet-breathed as balsam, was staring panic-stricken around the table,
+trying to locate the particular man's face that could possibly connect
+boot-wise with such a horridly profane accident. The sudden, grotesque
+alertness of her expression attracted the laggard interest of the young
+Journalist at her left.
+
+"What brought you to New York?" the Journalist asked abruptly. "You're
+the last victim in from the country, so you must give an account of
+yourself. Come 'fess up! What brought you to New York?"
+
+The Journalist's smile was at least as conscientious as the smile of
+daylight down a city airshaft, and the Woodland Girl quickened to the
+brightening with almost melodramatic delight, for all previous
+conversational overtures from this neighbor had been about actors that
+she had never heard of, or operas that she could not even pronounce, and
+before the man's scrutinizing, puzzled amazement she had felt convicted
+not alone of mere rural ignorance, but of freckles on her nose.
+
+"What brought me to New York?" she repeated with vehement new courage.
+"Do you really want to know? It's quite a speech. What brought me to New
+York? Why, I wanted to see the 'heart of the city.' I'm twenty years
+old, and I've never in all my life been away from home before. Always
+and always I've lived in a log bungalow, in a wild garden, in a pine
+forest, on a green island, in a blue lake. My father is an invalid, you
+know, one of those people who are a little bit short of lungs but
+inordinately long of brains. And I know Anglo-Saxon and Chemistry and
+Hindoo History and Sunrises and Sunsets and Mountains and Moose, and
+such things. But I wanted to know People. I wanted to know Romance. I
+wanted to see for myself all this 'heart of the city' that you hear so
+much about--the great, blood-red, eager, gasping heart of the city. So I
+came down here last week to visit my uncle and aunt."
+
+[Illustration: "The lone, accentuated figure of a boy violinist"]
+
+Her mouth tightened suddenly, and she lowered her voice with ominous
+intensity. "But there _isn't_ any heart to, your city--no!--there is no
+heart at all at the center of things--just a silly, pretty, very much
+decorated heart-shaped box filled with candy. If you shake it hard
+enough, it may rattle, but it won't throb. And I hate--hate--hate your
+old city. It's utterly, hopelessly, irremediably jejune, and I'm going
+home to-morrow!" As she leaned toward the Journalist, the gold locket on
+her prim, high-necked gown swung precipitously forth like a wall picture
+in a furious little earthquake.
+
+The Journalist started to laugh, then changed his mind and narrowed his
+eyes speculatively toward something across the room. "No heart?" he
+queried. "No Romance?"
+
+The Woodland Girl followed his exploring gaze. Between the plushy green
+_portieres_ a dull, cool, rose-colored vista opened forth refreshingly,
+with a fragment of bookcase, the edge of a stained glass window, the
+polished gleam of a grand piano, and then--lithe, sinuous, willowy, in
+the shaded lamplight--the lone, accentuated figure of a boy violinist.
+In the amazing mellow glow that smote upon his face, the Woodland Girl
+noted with a crumple at her heart the tragic droop of the boy's dark
+head, the sluggish, velvet passion of his eyes, the tortured mouth,
+the small chin fairly worn and burrowed away against his vibrant
+instrument. And the music that burst suddenly forth was like scalding
+water poured on ice--seething with anguish, shuddering with ecstasy,
+flame at your heart, frost at your spine.
+
+The Girl began to shiver. "Oh, yes, I know," she whispered. "He plays,
+of course, as though he knew all sorrows by their first names, but
+that's Genius, isn't it, not Romance? He's such a little lad. He can
+hardly have experienced much really truly emotion as yet beyond
+a--stomach ache--or the loss of a Henty book."
+
+"A stomach ache! A Henty book!" cried the Journalist, with a bitter,
+convulsive sort of mirth. "Well, I'm ready to admit that the boy is
+scarcely eighteen. But he happens to have lost a wife and a son within
+the past two months! While some of us country-born fellows of
+twenty-eight or thirty were asking our patient girls at home to wait
+even another year, while we came over to New York and tried our
+fortunes, this little youngster of scarcely eighteen is already a
+husband, a father, and a widower.
+
+"He's a Russian Jew--you can see that--and one of our big music people
+picked him up over there a few months ago and brought him jabberingly to
+America. But the invitation didn't seem to include the wife and
+baby--genius and family life aren't exactly guaranteed to develop very
+successfully together--and right there on the dock at the very last
+sailing moment the little chap had to choose between a small, wailing
+family and a great big, clapping New York--just temporarily, you
+understand, a mere matter of immediate expediency; and families are
+supposed to keep indefinitely, you know, and keep sweet, too, while
+everybody knows that New York can go sour in a single night, even in the
+coldest weather. And just as the youngster was trying to decide,
+wavering first one way and then the other, and calling on high every
+moment to the God of all the Russias, the old steamer whistle began to
+blow, and they rustled him on board, and his wife and the kid pegged
+back alone to the province where the girl's father lived, and they got
+snarled up on the way with a band of Cossack soldiers, and the little
+chap hasn't got any one now even as far off as Russia to hamper his
+musical career.... So he's playing jig-tunes to people like us that are
+trying to forget our own troubles, such as how much we owe our tailors
+or our milliners. But sometimes they say he screams in the night, and
+twice he has fainted in the midst of a concert.
+
+"No heart in the city? No Romance? Why, my dear child, this whole
+city fairly teems with Romance. The automobiles throb with it. The
+great, roaring elevated trains go hustling full of it. There's
+Romance--Romance--Romance from dawn to dark, and from dark to dawn
+again. The sweetness of the day-blooming sunshine, the madness of the
+night-blooming electric lights, the crowds, the colors, the music, the
+perfume--why, the city is _Romance-mad_! If you stop anywhere for even
+half an instant to get your breath, Romance will run right over you.
+It's whizzing past you in the air. It's whizzing past you in the street.
+It's whizzing past you in the sensuous, ornate theaters, in the jaded
+department stores, in the calm, gray churches. Romance?--Love?
+
+"The only trouble about New York Romance lies just in the fact that it
+is so whizzingly premature. You've simply got to grab Love the minute
+before you've made up your mind--because the minute after you've made
+up your mind, it won't be there. Grab it--or lose it. Grab it--or
+lose it. That's the whole Heart-Motto of New York. Sinner or
+Saint--RUSH--RUSH--RUSH--like Hell!"
+
+"Grab it--or lose it. Grab it, or--l-o-s-e it." Like the impish raillery
+of a tortured devil, the violin's passionate, wheedling tremolo seemed
+to catch up the phrase, and mouth it and mock it, and tear it and tease
+it, and kiss it and curse it--and SMASH it at last into a great,
+screeching crescendo that rent your eardrums like the crash of steel
+rails.
+
+With strangely parched lips, the Woodland Girl stretched out her small
+brown hand to the fragile, flower-stemmed glass, and tasted for the
+first time in her life the sweety-sad, molten-gold magic of champagne.
+"Why, what is it?" she asked, with the wonder still wet on her lips.
+"Why, what is it?"
+
+The Journalist raised his own glass with staler fingers, and stared for
+a second through narrowing eyes into the shimmering vintage. "What is
+it?" he repeated softly. "This particular brand? The Italians call it
+'_Lacrymae Christi_.' So even in our furies and our follies, in our cafes
+and carousals, in our love and all our laughter--we drink--you
+see--the--'Tears of Christ.'" He reached out suddenly and covered the
+Girl's half-drained glass with a quivering hand. "Excuse me," he
+stammered. "Maybe--our thirst is partly of the soul; but '_Lacrymae
+Christi_' was never meant for little girls like you. _Go back to your
+woods!_"
+
+Scuttle as it might, the precipitate, naked passion in his voice did not
+quite have time to cover itself with word-clothes. A little gasping
+breath escaped. And though the Girl's young life was as shiningly empty
+as an unfinished house, her brain-cells were packed like an attic with
+all the inherent experiences of her mother's mother's mother, and she
+flinched instinctively with a great lurch of her heart.
+
+"Oh, let's talk about something--dressy," she begged. "Let's talk about
+Central Park. Let's talk about the shops. Let's talk about the subway."
+Her startled face broke desperately into a smile. "Oh, don't you think
+the subway is perfectly dreadful," she insisted. "There's so much
+underbrush in it!" Even as she spoke, her shoulders hunched up the
+merest trifle, and her head pushed forward, after the manner of people
+who walk much in the deep woods. The perplexity in her eyes spread
+instantly to her hands. Among the confusing array of knives and forks
+and spoons at her plate, her fingers began to snarl nervously like a
+city man's feet through a tangle of blackberry vines.
+
+With a good-natured shrug of his shoulders, the Journalist turned to his
+more sophisticated neighbor, and left her quite piteously alone once
+more. An enamored-looking man and woman at her right were talking
+transmigration of souls, but whenever she tried to annex herself to
+their conversation they trailed their voices away from her in a sacred,
+aloof sort of whisper. Across the table the people were discussing city
+politics in a most clandestine sort of an undertone. Altogether it was
+almost half an hour before the Journalist remembered to smile at her
+again. The very first flicker of his lips started her red mouth mumbling
+inarticulately.
+
+"Were you going to say something?" he asked.
+
+She shook her head drearily. "No," she stammered. "I've tried and tried,
+but I can't think of anything at all to say. I guess I don't know any
+secrets."
+
+The Journalist's keen eyes traveled shrewdly for a second round the
+cautious, worldly-wise table, and then came narrowing back rather
+quizzically to the Woodland Girl's flushing, pink and white face.
+
+"Oh, I don't know," he smiled. "You look to me like a little girl who
+might have a good many secrets."
+
+She shook her head. "No," she insisted, "in all the whole wide world I
+don't know one single thing that has to be whispered."
+
+"No scandals?" teased the Journalist.
+
+"No!"
+
+"No love affairs?"
+
+"No!"
+
+The Journalist laughed. "Why, what do you think about all day long up in
+your woods?" he quizzed.
+
+"Anglo-Saxon and Chemistry and Hindoo History and Sunsets and Mountains
+and Moose," she repeated glibly.
+
+"Now you're teasing me," said the Journalist.
+
+She nodded her head delightedly. "I'm trying to!" she smiled.
+
+The Journalist turned part way round in his chair, and proffered her a
+perfectly huge olive as though it had been a crown jewel. When he spoke
+again, his voice was almost as low as the voice of the man who was
+talking transmigration of souls. But his smile was a great deal kinder.
+"Don't you find any Romance at all in your woods?" he asked a bit
+drawlingly.
+
+"No," said the Girl; "that's the trouble. Of course, when I was small it
+didn't make any difference; indeed, I think that I rather preferred it
+lonesome then. But this last year, somehow, and this last autumn
+especially--oh, I know you'll think I'm silly--but two or three times
+in the woods--I've hoped and hoped and hoped--at the turn of a trail, or
+the edge of a brook, or the scent of a camp fire--that I might run right
+into a real, live Hunter or Fisherman. And--one night I really prayed
+about it--and the next morning I got up early and put on my very best
+little hunting suit--all coats and leggings and things just like yours,
+you know--and I stayed out all day long--tramping--tramping--tramping,
+and I never saw _any one_. But I did get a fox. Yes!--and then--"
+
+"And then what?" whispered the Journalist very helpfully.
+
+The Girl began to smile, but her lips were quite as red as a blush.
+"Well--and--then," she continued softly, "it occurred to me all of a
+sudden that the probable reason why the Man-Who-Was-Meant-for-Me didn't
+come was because he--_didn't know I was there_!" She began to laugh,
+toying all the while a little bit nervously with her ice-cream fork. "So
+I thought that perhaps--if I came down to New York this winter--and then
+went home again, that maybe--not probably you know, but just
+possibly--some time in the spring or summer--I might look up suddenly
+through the trees and he _would_ be there! But I've been ten days in New
+York and I haven't seen one single man whom I'd exactly like to meet in
+the woods--in my little hunting suit."
+
+"Wouldn't you be willing to meet me?" pried the Journalist
+injudiciously.
+
+The Girl looked up and faltered. "Why, of course," she hurried, "I
+should be very glad to see you--but I had always sort of hoped that the
+man whom I met in the woods wouldn't be bald."
+
+The Journalist choked noisily over his salted almonds. His heightened
+color made him look very angry.
+
+"Oh, I trust I wasn't rude," begged the Woodland Girl. Then as the
+Journalist's galloping laughter slowed down into the gentlest sort of a
+single-foot smile, her eyes grew abruptly big and dark with horror.
+"Why, I never thought of it," she stammered, "but I suppose that what I
+have just said about the man in the woods and my coming to New York
+is--'husband hunting.'"
+
+The Journalist considered the matter very carefully. "N--o," he answered
+at last, "I don't think I should call it 'husband hunting' nor yet,
+exactly, 'the search for the Holy Grail'; but, really now, I think on
+the whole I should call it more of a sacrament than a sport."
+
+"O--h," whispered the Girl with a little sigh of relief.
+
+It must have been fully fifteen minutes before the Journalist spoke to
+her again. Then, in the midst of his salad course, he put down his fork
+and asked quite inquisitively: "Aren't there any men at all up in your
+own special Maine woods?"
+
+"Oh, yes," the Girl acknowledged with a little crinkle of her nose,
+"there's Peter."
+
+"Who's Peter?" he insisted.
+
+"Why, Peter," she explained, "is the Philadelphia boy who tutors with
+my father in the summers."
+
+Her youthfulness was almost as frank as fever, and, though taking
+advantage of this frankness seemed quite as reprehensible as taking
+advantage of any other kind of babbling delirium, the Journalist felt
+somehow obliged to pursue his investigations.
+
+"Nice boy?" he suggested tactfully.
+
+The Girl's nose crinkled just a little bit tighter.
+
+The Journalist frowned. "I'll wager you two dozen squirrels out of
+Central Park," he said, "that Peter is head over heels in love with
+you!"
+
+The Girl's mouth twisted a trifle, but her eyes were absolutely solemn.
+"I suppose that he is," she answered gravely, "but he's never taken the
+trouble to tell me so, and he's been with us three summers. I suppose
+lots of men are made like that. You read about it in books. They want to
+sew just as long--long--long a seam as they possibly can without tying
+any knot in the thread. Peter, I know, wants to make perfectly
+Philadelphia-sure that he won't meet any girl in the winters whom he
+likes better."
+
+"I think that sort of thing is mighty mean," interposed the Journalist
+sympathetically.
+
+"Mean?" cried the Girl. "Mean?" Her tousley yellow hair seemed fairly
+electrified with astonishment, and her big blue eyes brimmed suddenly
+with uproarious delight. "Oh, of course," she added contritely, "it may
+be mean for the person who sews the seam, but it's heaps of fun for the
+cloth, because after awhile, you know, Pompous Peter will discover that
+there isn't any winter girl whom he likes better, and in the general
+excitement of the discovery he'll remember only the long, long
+seam--three happy summers--and forget altogether that he never tied any
+knot. And then! And then!" her cheeks began to dimple. "And then--just
+as he begins triumphantly to gather me in--all my yards and yards and
+yards of beautiful freedom fretted into one short, puckery, worried
+ruffle--then--Hooray--swish--slip--slide--_out comes the thread_--and
+Mr. Peter falls right over bump-backward with surprise. Won't it be
+fun?"
+
+"Fun?" snapped the Journalist. "What a horrid, heartless little cynic
+you are!"
+
+The Girl's eyebrows fairly tiptoed to reach his meaning. "Cynic?" she
+questioned. "You surely don't mean that I am a cynic? Why, I think men
+are perfectly splendid in every possible way that--doesn't matter to a
+woman. They can build bridges and wage wars, and spell the hardest,
+homeliest words. But Peter makes life so puzzling," she added wryly.
+"Everybody wants me to marry Peter; everybody says 'slow but sure,'
+'slow but sure.' But it's a lie!" she cried out hotly. "Slow is _not_
+sure. It is not! It is not! The man who isn't excited enough to _run_ to
+his goal is hardly interested enough to walk. And yet"--her forehead
+crinkled all up with worry--"and yet--you tell me that 'quick' isn't
+sure, either. _What is sure?_"
+
+"Nothing!" said the Journalist.
+
+She tossed her head. "All the same," she retorted, "I'd rather have a
+man propose to me three years before, rather than three years after, I'd
+made up my mind whether to accept him or not."
+
+"Don't--marry--Peter," laughed the Journalist.
+
+"Why not?" she asked--so very bluntly that the Journalist twisted a bit
+uneasily.
+
+"Oh--I--don't--know," he answered cautiously. Then suddenly his face
+brightened. "Any trout fishing up in your brooks about the first of
+May?" he asked covertly.
+
+Again the knowledge of her mother's mother's mother blazed red-hot in
+the Girl's cheeks. "Y--e--s," she faltered reluctantly, "the
+trout-fishing is very generous in May."
+
+"Will Peter be there?" persisted the Journalist.
+
+Her eyes began to shine again with amusement. "Oh, no," she said. "Peter
+never comes until July." With mock dignity she straightened herself up
+till her shoulder almost reached the Journalist's. "I was very foolish,"
+she attested, "even to mention Peter, or mankind--at all. Of course, I'm
+commencing to realize that my ideas about men are exceedingly
+countrified--'disgustingly countrified,' my aunt tells me. Why, just
+this last week at my aunt's sewing club I learned that the only two real
+qualifications for marriage are that a man should earn not less than a
+hundred dollars a week, and be a perfectly kind hooker."
+
+"A perfectly kind hooker?" queried the Journalist.
+
+"Why, yes," she said. "Don't you know--now--that all our dresses fasten
+in the back?" Her little tinkling, giggling laugh rang out with
+startling incongruity through the formal room, and her uncle glanced at
+her and frowned with the slightest perceptible flicker of irritation.
+She leaned her face a wee bit closer to the Journalist. "Now, uncle, for
+instance," she confided, "is not a particularly kind hooker. He's
+accurate, you understand, but not exactly kind."
+
+The Journalist started to smile, but instantly her tip-most finger ends
+brushed across his sleeve. "Oh, please, don't smile any more," she
+pleaded, "because every time you smile you look so pleasant that some
+lady sticks out a remark like a hand and grabs you into her own
+conversation." But the warning came too late. In another moment the
+Journalist was most horridly involved with the people on his left in a
+prosy discussion regarding Japanese servants.
+
+For another interminable length of time the Woodland Girl sat in
+absolute isolation. Some of the funerals at home were vastly more
+social, she thought--people at least inquired after the health of the
+survivors. But now, even after she had shredded all her lettuce into a
+hundred pieces and bitten each piece twice, she was still quite alone.
+Even after she had surreptitiously nibbled up all the cracker crumbs
+around her own plate and the Journalist's plate, she was still quite
+alone. Finally, in complete despair, she folded her little, brown,
+ringless hands and sat and stared frankly about her.
+
+Across the sparkly, rose-reeking table a man as polished as poison ivy
+was talking devotedly to a white-faced Beauty in a most exciting gown
+that looked for all the world like the Garden of Eden struck by
+lightning--black and billowing as a thunder cloud, zigzagged with
+silver, ravished with rose-petals, rain-dropped with pearls. Out of the
+gorgeous, mysterious confusion of it the Beauty's bare shoulders leaped
+away like Eve herself fleeing before the storm. But beyond the
+extravagant sweep of gown and shoulder the primitive likeness ended
+abruptly in one of those utterly well-bred, worldly-wise, perfected
+young faces, with that subtle, indescribable sex-consciousness of
+expression which makes the type that men go mad over, and the type that
+older women tersely designate as looking just a little bit "too kissed."
+
+But the Woodland Girl did not know the crumpled-rose-leaf stamp of face
+which characterizes the coquette. Utterly fascinated, tremulous with
+excitement, heartsick with envy, she reached out very softly and knocked
+with her finger on the Journalist's plate to beg readmission to his
+mind.
+
+"Oh, who is that beautiful creature?" she whispered.
+
+"Adele Reitzen," said the Journalist, "your uncle's ward."
+
+"My own uncle's ward?" The Woodland Girl gave a little gasp. "But why
+does she worry so in her eyes every now and then?" she asked abruptly.
+
+Even as she asked, Adele Reitzen began to cough. The trouble started
+with a trivial clearing of her throat, caught up a disjointed swallow or
+two, and ended with a rack that seemed to rip like a brutal knife right
+across her silver-spangled lungs. Somebody patted her on the back.
+Somebody offered her a glass of water. But in the midst of the choking
+paroxysm she asked to be excused for a moment and slipped away to the
+dressing-room. The very devoted man seemed rather piteously worried by
+the incident, and the Hostess looked straight into his eyes and shook
+her head ominously.
+
+"I hope you are planning a southern wedding trip next week," she said.
+"I don't like that cough of Adele's. I've sat at three dinner parties
+with her this week, and each individual night she has had an attack like
+this and been obliged to leave the table."
+
+In the moment's lull, the butler presented a yellow telegram on a shiny,
+Sheffield tray, and the Hostess slipped her pink fingers rustlingly
+through the envelope and brightened instantly. "Oh, here's a surprise
+for you, Chloe," she called to the Woodland Girl. "Peter is coming over
+to-night to see you." Like a puckering electric tingle the simple
+announcement seemed to run through the room, and a little wise,
+mischievous smile spread from face to face among the guests. In another
+instant everybody turned and peeped at the Woodland Girl, and the
+Woodland Girl felt her good cool, red blood turn suddenly to bubbling,
+boiling water, and steam in horrid, clammy wetness across her forehead
+and along the prickling palms of her hands, and the Journalist laughed
+right out loud, and the whole green, definite room swam dizzily like
+the flaunting scarlet messiness of a tropical jungle.
+
+Every nook and corner of the house, indeed, was luxuriously heated, but
+when Adele Reitzen came sauntering back to her seat, pungent around her,
+telltale as an alien perfume, lurked the chill, fresh aroma of the
+wintry, blustering street. Only the country girl's smothering lungs
+noted the astonishing fact. Like a little caged animal scenting the
+blessed outdoors, her nostrils began to crinkle, and she straightened up
+with such abrupt alertness that she loomed to Adele Reitzen's startled
+senses like the only visible person at the table, and for just the
+fraction of a heart-beat the two girls fathomed down deep and
+understandingly into each other's eyes, before Adele Reitzen fluttered
+her white lids with a little piteous gesture of appeal.
+
+Breathlessly the Woodland Girl turned to the Journalist, and touched his
+arm. "New York _is_ interesting, isn't it!" she stammered. "I've decided
+just this minute to stay another week."
+
+"Oh, ho," said the Journalist. "So you love it better than you did an
+hour ago?"
+
+"No!" cried the Woodland Girl. "I love it worse. I love it worse every
+moment like a--ghost story, but I'm going to stick it out a week longer
+and see how it ends. And I've learned one clue to New York's plot this
+very night. I've learned that most every face is a 'haunted house.' The
+mouths slam back and forth all the time like pleasant doors, and the
+jolliest kind of speeches come prancing out, and all that--but in the
+eyes ghosts are peering out the windows every minute."
+
+"Cheerful thought," said the Journalist, taking off his glasses. "Who's
+the ghost in my eyes?"
+
+The Woodland Girl stared at him wonderingly. "The ghost in your eyes?"
+she blundered. "Why--I guess--it's 'the patient girl at home' whom you
+asked to wait 'even another year.'"
+
+Like two fever spots the red flared angrily on the Journalist's cheek
+bones.
+
+Not even the Journalist spoke to her again.
+
+Finally, lonesome as a naughty child, she followed the dozen dinner
+guests back into the huge drawing-room, and wandered aimlessly around
+through the incomprehensible mysteries of Chinese idols and teakwood
+tabourets and soft, mushy Asiatic rugs. Then at last, behind a dark,
+jutting bookcase, in a corner most blissfully safe and secret like a
+cave, she stumbled suddenly upon a great, mottled leopard skin with its
+big, humpy head, and its sad glass eyes yearning out to her
+reproachfully. As though it had been a tiny, lost kitten, she gave a wee
+gasp of joy, and dropped down on the floor and tried to cuddle the huge,
+felt-lined, fur bulk into her lap. Just as the clumsy face flopped
+across her knees, she heard the quick swish of silk, and looked up to
+see Adele Reitzen bending over her.
+
+The older girl's eyes were tortured with worry, and her white fingers
+teased perpetually at the jeweled watch on her breast. "Chloe Curtis,"
+she whispered abruptly, "will you do something for me? Would you be
+afraid? You are visiting here in the house, so no one would question
+your disappearance. Will you go up to the dressing-room--quick--and get
+my black evening coat--the one with the gold embroidery and the big
+hood--and go out to the street corner where the cars stop--and tell the
+man who is waiting there--that I couldn't--simply couldn't--get out
+again? Would you be afraid?"
+
+The Woodland Girl jumped to her feet. At that particular instant the
+lump in her throat seemed the only really insurmountable obstacle in the
+whole wide world. "Would I be afraid?" she scoffed. "Afraid of what? Of
+New York? Of the electric lights? Of the automobiles? Of the cross
+policemen? Afraid of nothing!" Her voice lowered suddenly. "Is
+it--Love?" she whispered.
+
+The older girl's face was piteous to see. "Y--e--s," she stammered. "It
+is Love."
+
+The Woodland Girl's eyes grew big with wonder. "But the other man?" she
+gasped. "You are going to be married next week!"
+
+Adele Reitzen's eyes blurred. "Yes," she repeated, "I am going to be
+married next week." A little shiver went flickering across her
+shoulders.
+
+The Woodland Girl's heart began to plunge and race. "What's the matter
+with the man out on the street corner?" she asked nervously.
+
+Adele Reitzen caught her breath. "He's a civil engineer," she said. "His
+name is Brian Baird. He's just back from Central America. I met him on
+the steamer once. He was traveling second cabin. My--family--won't--let
+--me--have--him."
+
+The Woodland Girl threw back her head and laughed, and smothered her
+laugh contritely with her hand. "Your family won't let you have him?"
+she mumbled. "What a funny idea! What has your family got to do about
+it?" Her breath began to quicken, and she reached out suddenly and
+clutched Adele Reitzen's shoulder. "Do you know where my uncle's musty
+old law library is?" she hurried. "It's downstairs, you know, close to
+the store room--nobody ever uses it. You go down there just as fast as
+you possibly can, and wait there, and I'll be back in five minutes with
+the--Love Man."
+
+Before Adele Reitzen's feebler courage could protest, the Woodland Girl
+was scurrying up the short flight to the dressing-room and pawing like a
+prankish terrier through the neatly folded evening coats that snuggled
+across the bed. Tingling with excitement, she arrayed herself finally in
+the luxuriantly muffling black and gold splendor, and started cautiously
+down the long, creaky front stairs.
+
+Like the inimitable, familiar thrill of little wild, phosphorescent eyes
+looming suddenly out of the black night-woods at home, the adventure
+challenged her impetuous curiosity. Bored puzzlingly by the big city's
+utter inability to reproduce the identical, simple lake-and-forest
+emotionalism that was the breath of life to her, she quickened now
+precipitately to the possible luring mystery in human eyes. Through the
+dark mahogany stripes of the balustrade, the drawing-room candles flared
+and sputtered like little finger-pinches of fluid flame, and the
+violin's shuddering voice chased after her, taunting, "Hurry! Hurry! Or
+it won't be there!" Beyond the lights and music, and the friendly
+creaking stairs, the strange black night opened forth like the scariest
+sort of a bottomless pit; but as yet, in all the girl's twenty coltish
+years nothing except headache and heart-beat had ever made her feel
+perfectly throbbing-positive that she was alive. She could spare the
+headache, but she could not spare the heart-beat. Paddling with
+muscle-strained shoulder and heaving breast across a November-tortured
+lake, or huddling under forbidden pine trees in a rackety August
+thunder storm, or floundering on broken snowshoes into the antlered
+presence of an astounded moose--Fun and Fear were synonymous to her.
+
+Once on the street, like water to thirst, the cold night air freshened
+and vivified her. Over her head the electric lights twinkled giddily
+like real stars. On either side of her the huge, hulking houses reared
+up like pleasant imitation mountains. Her trailing cloak slipped now and
+then from her clutching fingers, but she trudged along toward the corner
+with just one simple, supreme sense of pleasurable excitement--somewhere
+out of the unfathomed shadows a real, live Adventure was going to rise
+up and scare her.
+
+But the man, when he came, did not scare her one hundredth part as much
+as she scared him, though he jumped at her from the snuggling fur robe
+of a stranded automobile, and snatched at her arm with an almost
+bruising intensity.
+
+"Oh, Adele," he cried huskily, "I thought you had failed me again."
+
+The Woodland Girl threw back her somber hood and stood there all blonde
+and tousle-haired and astonishing under the electric light. "I'm not
+your Adele," she explained breathlessly. "I'm just Chloe Curtis. Adele
+sent me out to tell you that she absolutely couldn't--couldn't come.
+You yourself would have seen that it was horridly impossible. But you
+are to go back to the house now with me--to my uncle's old unused
+library and see Adele yourself for as much as fifteen minutes. No
+one--oh, I'm sure that no one--could persuade a woman to be brave--on a
+street corner; but I think that perhaps if you had a chance to see Adele
+all alone, she would be very--extraordinarily brave."
+
+Anger, resentment, confusion, dismay flared like successive explosions
+in the man's face, and faded again, leaving his flesh utter ash gray.
+
+"It was plucky of you to come," he muttered grimly, "but I haven't quite
+reached the point yet--thank you--where I go sneaking round people's
+unused rooms to meet any one!"
+
+"Is it so very different from sneaking round street corners?" said the
+Woodland Girl.
+
+The man's head lifted proudly. "I don't go 'sneaking' round street
+corners," he answered simply. "All Outdoors _belongs_ to me! But I won't
+go secretly to any house that doesn't welcome me."
+
+The Woodland Girl began to stamp her foot. "But the house does welcome
+you," she insisted. "It's my visity-house, and you are to come there as
+my friend."
+
+In her ardor she turned and faced him squarely under the light, and
+winced to see how well worth facing he was--for the husband of a
+coward. There was no sleek New York about him, certainly, but rather the
+merge of all cities and many countries, a little breath of unusualness,
+a touch of mystery, a trifling suggestion, perhaps, of more dusty roads
+than smug pavements, twenty-eight or thirty years, surely, of
+adventurous youth. Impulsively she put out her hand to him. "Oh, please
+come," she faltered. "I--think you are so nice."
+
+With a little laugh that had no amusement in it, nor pleasure, nor
+expectation, nor any emotion that the Woodland Girl had ever
+experienced, he stood and stared at her with some sudden impulse. "Does
+Adele really want me to come?" he asked trenchantly.
+
+"Why yes," insisted the Woodland Girl. "It's life or death for you and
+Adele."
+
+Ten minutes later, standing on guard at the edge of the library door,
+the Woodland Girl heard, for the first time in her life, the strange,
+low, vibrant, mysterious mate-tone of a human voice. If she had burrowed
+her head in a dozen pillows, she could not have failed to sense the
+amazing wonder of the sound, though the clearer-worded detail of hurried
+plans and eager argument and radiant acquiescence passed by her
+unobserved. "But I must be perfectly sure that you love me," persisted
+the man's voice.
+
+"You and--you only," echoed the woman's passion.
+
+Then suddenly, like a practical joke sprung by a half-witted Fate, the
+store room door opened with casual, exploring pleasantness, and the
+Journalist and Adele Reitzen's promised husband and big Peter himself
+stepped out into the hallway.
+
+Before the surprised greeting in two men's faces the Woodland Girl
+retreated step by step, until at last with a quick turn she whirled back
+into the dingy, gas-lit library--her chalky face, her staring eyes
+proclaiming only too plainly the calamity which she had no time to stuff
+into words.
+
+Close behind her followed the three smiling, unsuspicious intruders.
+Even then the incident might have passed without gross awkwardness if
+the Woodland Girl's uncle and aunt had not suddenly joined the company.
+From the angry, outraged flush on the two older faces it was perfectly
+evident that these two, at least, had been waylaid by kitchen gossip.
+
+Brian Baird laughed. Like a manly lover goaded and hectored and cajoled
+too long into unworthy secrecy, his pulses fairly jumped to meet the
+frank, forced issue. But with a quick, desperate appeal Adele Reitzen
+silenced the triumphant speech on his lips. "Let me manage it!" she
+whispered, so vehemently that the man yielded to her, and stepped back
+against the fireplace, and spread his arms with studied, indolent ease
+along the mantel, like a rustic cross tortured out of a supple willow
+withe. One of his hands played teasingly with a stale spray of Christmas
+greens. Nothing but the straining, white-knuckled grip of his other hand
+modified the absolute, wilful insolence of his pose.
+
+As for Adele, her face was ghastly.
+
+With crude, uncontrolled venom the Woodland Girl's aunt plunged into the
+emergency. "Adele," she cried shrilly, "I think you owe your _fiance_ an
+explanation! You promised us faithfully last year that you would never,
+never see Mr. Baird again--and now to-night our chauffeur saw you steal
+out to the street corner to meet him--like a common shop-girl. And you
+dare to bring him back--to my house! What have you to say for yourself?"
+
+For the fraction of a moment Adele Reitzen's superb beauty straightened
+up to its full majestic height, and all the love-pride that was in her
+white, white flesh flamed gloriously in her face. Then her sleek,
+prosperous, arrogant city lover stepped suddenly forward where the
+yellow light struck bleakly across his shrewd, small eyes and his thin,
+relentless mouth.
+
+"I should be very glad, indeed, to hear what you have to say," he
+announced, and his voice was like a nicked knife blade.
+
+Flush by flush by flush the red glory fled from Adele Reitzen's face.
+Her throat began to flutter. Her knees crumpled under her. Fear went
+over her like a gray fog.
+
+With one despairing hand she reached back to the Woodland Girl. "Oh,
+tell them it was you," she whispered hotly. "Oh, tell them it was you."
+Her scared face brightened viciously. "It _was_ you--you know! Tell
+them--oh, tell them anything--only save me!"
+
+The Woodland Girl's eyes were big with horror. She started to speak, she
+started to protest, but before the jumbled words could leave her lips
+Adele Reitzen turned to the others and blurted out hysterically:
+
+"Surely I can't be expected to keep even a love-secret under
+these--distressing circumstances. _It was Chloe who went out to the
+street corner to-night--like a common shop-girl--to meet Brian Baird.
+She wore my cloak on purpose to disguise her._"
+
+Like the blaring scream of a discordant trumpet, the treacherous,
+flatted truth crashed into the Woodland Girl's startled senses, and the
+man in the shape of a sagging willow cross started up and cried out, "My
+God!"
+
+For a second the Woodland Girl stood staring into his dreadful, chaotic
+face, then she squared her shoulders and turned to meet the wrathful,
+contemptuous surprise in her uncle's and aunt's features.
+
+"So it was you," sneered the uncle, "embroiling our decent household in
+a common, vulgar intrigue?"
+
+"So it was you," flamed her aunt, "you who have been posing all these
+days as an Innocent?"
+
+Frantic with perplexity, muddled with fear, torn by conflicting
+chivalries, the Woodland Girl stared back and forth from Adele Reitzen's
+agonized plea to the grim, inscrutable gleam in Brian Baird's eyes. As
+though every living, moving verb had been ripped out of that night's
+story, and all the inflexible nouns were printing themselves slam-bang
+one on top of another--Roses, Wine, Music, Silver, Diamonds, Fir-Balsam
+telescoped each other in her senses.
+
+"Your father sent you down here," persisted her aunt brutally, "on the
+private plea to me that he was planning to be married again--but I can
+readily see that perhaps no one would exactly want you."
+
+The Woodland Girl's heart began to pound.
+
+"We--are--waiting," prodded her uncle's icy voice.
+
+Suddenly the Girl's memory quickened. Once, long ago, her father had
+said to her: "Little Daughter, if you are ever in fear and danger by sea
+or land--or city, which is neither sea nor land--turn always to that
+man, and to that man only, whom you would trust in the deep woods. Put
+your imagination to work, not your reason. You have no reason!"
+
+Desperately she turned to Peter. His face, robbed utterly of its
+affection, was all a-shock with outraged social proprieties, merging the
+merest bit unpleasantly into the racy appreciation of a unique
+adventure. Panic-stricken, she turned to the Journalist. Already across
+the Journalist's wine-flushed face the pleasant, friendly smile was
+souring into worldly skepticism and mocking disillusionment.
+
+She shut her eyes. "O Big Woods, help me!" she prayed. "O Cross Storm,
+warn me! O Rough Trail, guide me!"
+
+Behind her tightly scrunched lids her worried brain darkened like a
+jumbled midnight forest. Jaded, bedraggled, aching with storm and
+terror, she saw herself stumbling into the sudden dazzling splurge of a
+stranger's camp fire. Was it a man like Peter? Was it the Journalist?
+She began to shiver. Then her heart gave a queer, queer jump, and she
+opened her eyes stark wide and searched deep into Brian Baird's livid
+face. One of his hands still strained at the wooden mantel. The other
+still bruised the pungent balsam tip between its restive fingers. His
+young hair was too gray about his temples. His shoulders were too tired
+with life's pack burdens. His eyes had probably grown more bitter that
+night than any woman's lips could ever sweeten again. And yet--
+
+Down from the far-away music room floated the quavering, passionate
+violin wail of the boy who had dared to temporize with Fate. Up from the
+close-nudging street crashed the confusing slap of hoofs and the mad
+whir of wheels racing not so much for the Joy of the Destination as for
+the Thrill of the Journey. She gave a little gasping sob, and Brian
+Baird stooped forward incredulously, as though from the yellow glare of
+his camp fire he had only just that instant sensed the faltering
+footfall of a wayfarer in acute distress, and could scarcely distinguish
+even yet through the darkness the detailed features of the apparition.
+
+For a second, startled eyes defied startled eyes, and then suddenly, out
+of his own meager ration of faith or fortune or immediate goodness, the
+man straightened up, and _smiled_--the simple, honest, unquestioning
+camp-fire smile--the smile of food and blanket, the smile of welcome,
+the smile of shelter, the signal of the gladly-shared crust--and the
+Woodland Girl gave a low, wild cry of joy, and ran across the room to
+him, and wheeled back against him, close, tight, with her tousled hair
+grazing his haggard cheek and her brown hands clutching hard at the
+sweep of his arms along the mantel.
+
+"Adele Reitzen is right," she cried out triumphantly. "This is
+my--man!"
+
+
+
+
+THE PINK SASH
+
+
+NO man could have asked the question more simply. The whole gaunt,
+gigantic Rocky Mountain landscape seemed indeed most peculiarly
+conducive to simple emotions.
+
+Yet Donas Guthrie's original remark had been purely whimsical and
+distinctly apropos of nothing at all. The careless knocking of his pipe
+against the piazza's primitive railing had certainly not prepared the
+way for any particularly vital statement.
+
+"Up--to--the--time--he's--thirty," drawled the pleasant, deep,
+distinctly masculine voice, "up--to--the--time--he's--thirty, no man has
+done the things that he's really wanted to do--but only the things that
+happened to come his way. He's forced into business to please his
+father, and cajoled into the Episcopal Church to gratify his mother, and
+bullied into red neckties to pacify his sister Isabel. But once having
+reached the grown-up, level-headed, utterly independent age of thirty, a
+man's a fool, I tell you, who doesn't sit down deliberately, and roll
+up his sleeves, and square his jaw, and list out, one by one, the things
+that _he_ wants in the presumable measure of lifetime that's left
+him--and go ahead and get them!"
+
+"Why, surely," said the young woman, without the slightest trace of
+surprise. Something in her matter-of-fact acquiescence made Donas
+Guthrie smile a trifle shrewdly.
+
+"Oh! So you've got your own list all made out?" he quizzed. Around the
+rather tired-looking corners of Esther Davidson's mouth the tiniest
+possible flicker of amusement began to show.
+
+"No, not all made out," she answered frankly. "You see, I wasn't
+thirty--until yesterday."
+
+Stooping with cheerful unconcern to blow a little fluff of tobacco ash
+from his own khaki-colored knees to hers, Guthrie eyed her delightedly
+from under his heavy brows.
+
+"Oh, this is working out very neatly and pleasantly," he mused, all
+agrin. "Ever since you joined our camping party at Laramie, jumping off
+the train as white-faced and out of breath as though you'd been running
+to catch up with us all the way from Boston--indeed, ever since you
+first wrote me at Morristown, asking full particulars about the whole
+expedition and begging us to go to the Sierra Nevadas instead and
+blotted 'Sierra' twice and crossed it out once--and then in final
+petulance spelled it with three 'r's,' I've been utterly consumed with
+curiosity to know just how old you are."
+
+"Thirty years--and one morning," said the young woman--absent-mindedly.
+
+"W-h-e-w!" gasped Guthrie. "But that's a ripe old age! Surely, you've no
+time to lose!"
+
+Rummaging through his pockets with mock intensity he thrust into her
+hands, at last, a small pad of paper and a pencil.
+
+"Now quick!" he insisted. "Make out your list before it's too late to
+profit by it!"
+
+The woman was evidently perfectly willing to comply with every playful
+aspect of his mood, but it was equally evident that she did not intend
+to be hurried about it. Quite perversely she began to dally with the
+pencil.
+
+"But, you see, I don't know exactly just what kind of a list you mean,"
+she protested.
+
+"Oh, shucks!" laughed the man. "Here, give me the paper! Now--head it
+like this: 'I, Esther Davidson, spinster, _aet._ thirty years and a few
+minutes over, do hereby promise and attest that no matter how unwilling
+to die I may be when my time comes, I shall, at least, not feel that
+life has defrauded me if I have succeeded in achieving and possessing
+the following brief list of experiences and substances.' There!" he
+finished triumphantly. "Now do you see how easy and business-like it
+all is? Just the plainest possible rating of the things you'd like to
+have before you're willing to die."
+
+Cautiously Esther Davidson took the paper from his hand and scanned it
+with slow-smiling eyes.
+
+"The--things--I'd--like to have--before I'm--willing--to--die," she
+mused indolently. Then suddenly into her placid face blazed an
+astonishing flame of passion that vanished again as quickly as it came.
+"My God!" she said. "The things I've _got_ to have before I'm willing to
+die!"
+
+Stretching the little paper taut across her knees, she began to scribble
+hasty, impulsive words and phrases, crossing and recrossing, making and
+erasing, now frowning fiercely down on the unoffending page, now staring
+off narrow-eyed and smilingly speculative into the blue-green spruce
+tops.
+
+It was almost ten minutes before she spoke again. Then: "How do you
+spell amethyst?" she asked meditatively.
+
+The man gave a groan of palpable disgust. "Oh, I say," he reproached
+her. "You're not playing fair! This was to be a really _bona fide_
+statement you know."
+
+Without looking up the young woman lifted her hand and gesticulated
+across the left side of her mannish, khaki-colored flannel shirt.
+
+"Cross my heart!" she affirmed solemnly. "This is a perfectly
+'honest-injun' list!"
+
+Then she tore up everything she had written and began all over again,
+astonishingly slowly, astonishingly neatly, on a fresh sheet of paper.
+
+"Of course, at first," she explained painstakingly, "you think there are
+just about ten thousand things that you've simply got to have, but when
+you really stop to sort them out, and pick and choose a bit, and narrow
+them all down to actual essentials; narrow them all down to just the
+'Passions of the Soul,' as it were, why, then, there really aren't so
+many after all! Only one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight,"
+she counted on her fingers. "At first, for instance," she persisted
+frankly, "it seemed to me that I could never, never die happy until I
+had possessed a very large--oh, I mean an inordinately large amethyst
+brooch that simply wallowed in pearls, but honestly now as a real
+treasure-trove, I can see that I'd infinitely rather be able to remember
+that once upon a time I'd--stroked a lion's face; just one, long, slow,
+soft-furred, yellow stroke from the browny-pink tip of his nose to the
+extremest shaggy end of his mane--and he hadn't bitten me!"
+
+"My Heavens!" gasped the man. "Are you crazy? What kind of a list have
+you been making out anyway?"
+
+A little acridly she thrust both her list and her hands into the side
+pockets of her riding skirt.
+
+"What kind of a list did you think I would make out?" she asked sharply.
+"Something all about machinery? And getting a contract for city paving
+stones? Or publicly protesting the new football rules? Goodness! Does it
+have to be a 'wise' list? Does it have to be a worthy list? Something
+that would really look commendable in a church magazine? This was all
+your idea, you know! You asked me, didn't you, to write out, just for
+fun, the things I'd got to have before I'd be willing to die?"
+
+"Oh, come now," laughed the man. "Please don't get stuffy about it. You
+surprised me so about stroking the lion's face that I simply had to
+chaff you a little. Truly, I care a great deal about seeing that list.
+When you got off the train that day it rattled me a confounded lot to
+see that your camping togs were cut out of exactly the same piece of
+cloth that mine were. Professor Ellis and his wife and Doctor Andrews
+jollied me a good bit about it in fact, but--hang it all--it's beginning
+to dawn on me rather cozily, though I admit still embarrassingly, that
+maybe your mind and mine are cut out of the same piece of cloth, too.
+Please let me see what you've written!"
+
+With a grimace that was half reluctance, half defiance, the young woman
+pulled the paper from her pocket, smoothed it out on her knees for an
+instant and handed it to him.
+
+"Oh, very well, then," she said. "Help yourself to the only authentic
+list of my 'Heart's Desires.'" Then suddenly her whole face brightened
+with amusement and she shook a sun-browned finger threateningly at him.
+"Now remember," she warned him, "I don't have to justify this list, no
+matter how trivial it sounds, no matter how foolish even; it is excuse
+enough for it--it is dignity enough for it, that it happens to be so."
+
+"Yes, surely," acknowledged the man.
+
+Either consciously or unconsciously--then--he took off his battered
+slouch hat and placed it softly on the seat beside him. The act gave the
+very faintest possible suggestion of reverence to the joke. Then, rather
+slowly and hesitatingly, after the manner of a man who is not specially
+accustomed to reading aloud, he began:
+
+[Illustration: "Is--a--pink--sash--exactly a--a--passion?"]
+
+"Things That I, Esther Davidson, Am Really Obliged to Have Before I'm
+Willing to Die: No. 1. A solid summer of horseback riding on a rusty
+brown pony among really scary mountains. No. 2. A year's work at Oxford
+in Social Economics. No. 3. One single, solitary sunset view of the Bay
+of Naples. No. 4. A very, very large oil-painting portrait of a cloud--a
+great white, warm, cotton-batting looking, summer Sunday afternoon sort
+of a cloud--I mean; the kind that you used to see as a child when all
+'chock full' of chicken and ice cream and serene thoughts about Heaven,
+you lay stretched out flat on the cool green grass and stared right up
+into the face of God, and never even guessed what made you blink so. No.
+5. The ability to buy one life-saving surgical operation for some one
+who probably wouldn't otherwise have afforded it. No. 6. A perfectly
+good dinner. No. 7. A completely happy Christmas. No. 8. A pink sash.
+That's all."
+
+With really terrifying gravity, the man put down the finished page and
+lifted his searching eyes to the woman's flushing, self-conscious face.
+
+"Is--a--pink--sash--exactly a--a--passion?" he probed in much
+perplexity.
+
+"Oh, yes!" nodded the young woman briskly. "Oh, yes, indeed! It's an
+obsession in my life. It's a groove in my brain. In the middle of the
+night I wake and find myself sitting bolt upright in bed saying it. The
+only time I ever took ether I prattled persistently concerning it. When
+a Spring sunshine is so marvelous that it makes me feel faint, when the
+Vox Humana stop in a church-organ snarls my heart-strings like an actual
+hand, when the great galloping, tearing fire-engine horses come
+clanging like mad around the street corner, it's the one definite
+idea that explodes in my consciousness. It began way back when I was a
+tiny six-year-old child at a Maine woods 'camp meeting.' Did you ever
+see a really primitive 'camp meeting'? All fir-balsam trees and little
+rustic benches and pink calicoes and Grand Army suits and high
+cheek-bones and low insteps and--lots of noise? Rather inspiring too,
+sometimes, or at least soul excitative. It might do a good deal to any
+high-strung six-year-old kiddie. Anyway, I saw the old village drunkard
+jump up and wave his arms and wail ingenuously: 'I want to be a
+Christian!' And a palsied crone beside me moaned and sobbed 'I want to
+be baptized!' And even my timid, gentle mother leaped impetuously to her
+feet and announced quite publicly to every one 'I want to be washed in
+the Blood of the Lamb!' And all about me I saw frenzied neighbors and
+strangers dashing about making these uncontrollable, confidential
+proclamations. And suddenly, to my meager, indefinite baby-brain, there
+rushed such an exultancy of positive personal conviction that my poor
+little face must have been literally transfigured with it, for my father
+lifted me high to his tight-coated shoulders and cried out ecstatically:
+'A little child shall lead them! Hear! Hear!' And with an emphasis on
+the personal pronoun which I hate to remember even at this remote date,
+I screamed forth at the top of my lungs: 'I want--a pink sash!'"
+
+"And didn't you get it?" said Donas Guthrie.
+
+The young woman crooked one eyebrow rather comically. "N-o," she said,
+"I never got it!"
+
+"But you could get it any time now," argued the man.
+
+Helplessly she threw out the palms of her hands and the unexpected
+gesture displayed an amazing slimness and whiteness of wrist.
+
+"Stupid!" she laughed. "What would I do with a pink sash now?"
+Ruthlessly her quick eyes traveled down the full length of her scant,
+rough skirt to the stubbed toes of her battered brown riding boots.
+"Dust on the highway and chalk in the classroom and 'grown-up-ness'
+everywhere!" she persisted dully. "That's the real tragedy of growing
+up--not that we outgrow our original desires, but that retaining those
+desires, we outgrow the ability to find satisfaction in them. People
+ought to think of that, you know, when they thwart a child's ten-cent
+passion for a tin trumpet. Fifty years later, when that child is a bank
+president, it may drive him almost crazy to have a toy-shop with a whole
+window-full of tin trumpets come and cuddle right next door to his
+bank--and nothing that the man can do with them!"
+
+Like a little gray veil the tired look fell again over her face. The man
+saw it and shuddered.
+
+"Psychology is my subject at Varndon College, you know," she continued
+listlessly, "and so I suppose I'm rather specially interested in
+freakish mental things. Anyway--pink sashes or Noah's arks or enough
+sugar in your cocoa--I have a theory that no child ever does outgrow its
+ungratified legitimate desires; though subsequent maturity may bring him
+to the point where his original desire has reached such astounding
+proportions that the original object can no longer possibly appease it."
+
+Reminiscently, her narrowing eyes turned back their inner vision to the
+far-away grotesque incident of the camp meeting. "It isn't as though a
+child asked for a thing the very first time that he thought of it," she
+protested a trifle pathetically. "An idea has been sown and has grown
+and germinated in his mind a pretty long time before he gets up his
+courage to speak to anybody about it. Oh, I tell you, sir, the time to
+grant anybody a favor is the day the favor is asked, for that day is the
+one psychological moment of the world when supply and demand are keyed
+exactly to each other's limits, and can be mated beatifically to grow
+old, or die young, together. But after that day--!
+
+"Why, even with grown people," she added hastily. "Did you ever know a
+marriage to turn out to be specially successful where the man had
+courted a reluctant woman for years and years before she finally yielded
+to him? It's perfectly astonishing how soon a wife like that is forced
+to mourn: 'Why did he court me so long and so furiously if he really
+cared as little as this? I'm just exactly the same person that I was in
+the beginning!'--Yes, that's precisely the trouble. In the long time
+that she has kept her man waiting, she has remained just exactly the
+same small object that she was in the beginning, but the man's hunger
+for her has materialized and spiritualized and idealized a thousandfold
+beyond her paltry capacity to satisfy it."
+
+"That's a funny way to look at it," mused Donas Guthrie.
+
+"Is it?" said the young woman, a trifle petulantly. "It doesn't seem
+funny to me!"
+
+Then to Guthrie's infinite astonishment and embarrassment the tears
+welled up suddenly into her eyes and she turned her head abruptly away
+and began to beat a nervous tattoo with one hand on the flimsy piazza
+railing.
+
+In the moment's awkward silence that ensued, the little inn's clattery
+kitchen wafted up its pleasant, odorous, noon-day suggestion of coffee
+and bacon.
+
+"W-h-e-w!" gloated Guthrie desperately, "but that smells good!"
+
+"It doesn't smell good to me," said the young woman tartly.
+
+With a definite thud the tilting leg of Guthrie's chair came whacking
+down on the piazza floor.
+
+"Why, you inconsistent little gourmand!" he exclaimed. "Then why did you
+give 'one perfectly good dinner' a place on your list of necessities?"
+
+"I don't know," whispered the young woman, a trifle tremulously. Then
+abruptly she burst out laughing, and the face that she turned to Guthrie
+again was all deliciously mussed up like a child's, with tears and
+smiles and breeze-blown wisps of hair.
+
+"That dinner item was just another silly thing," she explained half
+bashfully, half defiantly. "It's only that although I practically never
+eat much of anything on ordinary occasions, whenever I get into any kind
+of danger, whenever the train runs off the track, or the steamer
+threatens to sink, or my car gets stuck in the subway, I'm seized with
+the most terrific gnawing hunger--as though--as though--" Furiously the
+red flushed into her face again. "Well--eternity sounds so l-long," she
+stammered, "and I have a perfect horror, somehow--of going to Heaven--on
+an empty stomach."
+
+In mutual appreciation of a suddenly relaxed tension, the man's laughter
+and the woman's rang out together throughout the dooryard and startled
+a grazing pony into a whimpering whinny of sympathy.
+
+"I knew you'd think my list was funny," protested the young woman. "I
+knew perfectly well that every single individual item on it would
+astonish you."
+
+Meditatively Donas Guthrie refilled his pipe and evidently illuminated
+both the tobacco and the situation with the same match.
+
+"It isn't the things that are on your list that astonish me," he
+remarked puffingly. "It's the things that aren't on it that have given
+me the bit of a jolt."
+
+"Such as what?" frowned the young woman, sliding jerkily out to the edge
+of her chair.
+
+"Why, I'd always supposed that women were inherently domestic," growled
+Guthrie. "I'd always somehow supposed that Love and Home would figure
+pretty largely on any woman's 'List of Necessities.' But you! For
+Heaven's sake, haven't you ever even thought of man in any specific
+relation to your own life?"
+
+"No, except in so far as he might retard my accomplishment of the things
+on my list," she answered frankly. Out of the gray film of pipe-smoke,
+her small face loomed utterly serene, utterly honest, utterly devoid of
+coquetry or self-consciousness.
+
+"Any man would be apt to 'retard' your desire to stroke a lion's face,"
+said Guthrie grimly. "But then," with a flicker of humor, "but then I
+see you've omitted that item from your revised list. Your only thought
+about man then," he continued slowly, "is his probable tendency to
+interfere with your getting the things out of life that you most want."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Oh, this is quite a novel idea to me," said Guthrie, all a-smile again.
+"You mean then--if I judge your premises correctly--you mean then that
+if on the contrary you found a man who would really facilitate the
+accomplishment of your 'heart's desires,' you'd be willing to think a
+good deal about him?"
+
+"Oh, yes!" said the young woman.
+
+"You mean then," persisted Guthrie, "you mean then, just for the sake of
+the argument, that if I, for instance, could guarantee for you every
+single little item on this list, you'd be willing to marry even me?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+Altogether unexpectedly Guthrie burst out laughing.
+
+Instantly a little alarmed look quickened in the young woman's sleepy
+eyes. "Does it seem cold-blooded to you?" she asked anxiously.
+
+"No, not exactly 'cold' blooded, but certainly a little cooler blooded
+than any man would have dared to hope for," smiled Guthrie.
+
+The frowning perplexity deepened in the young woman's face. "You surely
+don't misunderstand me?" she pleaded. "You don't think I'm mercenary or
+anything horrid like that? Suppose I do make a man's aptitude for
+gratifying my eight particular whims the supreme test of his marital
+attractiveness for me--it's not, you must understand, by the sign of his
+material ability in the matter that I should recognize the Man Who Was
+Made for Me--but by the sign of his spiritual willingness."
+
+"O--h!" said Guthrie very leisurely. Then, with a trifle more vigor, he
+picked up the small list again and scanned it carefully.
+
+"It--wouldn't--be--such--a hard--list to--fulfil!" he resumed presently.
+"'A summer in the mountains?' You're having that now. 'Oxford?' 'Glimpse
+of Naples?' 'Cloud Picture?' 'Surgical Operation?' 'Pink Sash?' 'Good
+Dinner?' 'Christmas?' Why there's really nothing here that I couldn't
+provide for you, myself, if you'd only give me time."
+
+With mischievous unconcern he smiled at the young woman. With equally
+mischievous unconcern the young woman smiled back at him.
+
+"What an extraordinary conversation we've had this morning," she said.
+As though quite exhausted by the uniqueness of it, she slid a little
+further down into her seat and turned her cheek against the firm support
+of the chair-back.
+
+"What an extraordinary understanding it has brought us to!" exclaimed
+the man, scanning her closely.
+
+"I don't see anything particularly--understandy about it," denied the
+young woman wearily.
+
+It was then that Donas Guthrie asked his simple question, boring his
+khaki-colored elbows into his khaki-colored knees.
+
+"Little Psychology Teacher," he said very gently, "Little Psychology
+Teacher, Dr. Andrews says that you've got typhoid fever. He's feared it
+now for some time, and you know it's against his orders--your being up
+to-day. So as long as I've proved myself here and now, by your own test,
+the Man-Whom-You-Were-Looking-For, I suggest that you and I be--married
+this afternoon--before that itinerant shiny-shouldered preacher out in
+the corral escapes us altogether--and then we'll send the rest of the
+party on about their business, and you and Dr. Andrews and Hanlon's Mary
+and I will camp right down here where we are--and scrap the old typhoid
+fever to its finish. Will you, Little Psychology Teacher?"
+
+Lifting her white hands to her throbbing temples the young woman turned
+her astonished face jerkily toward him.
+
+"What--did--you--say?" she gasped.
+
+"I said: 'Will you marry me this afternoon?'" repeated Guthrie.
+
+Bruskly she pushed that part of the phrase aside. "What did you really
+say?" she insisted. "What did Dr. Andrews say?"
+
+"Dr. Andrews says that you've got typhoid fever," repeated Guthrie.
+
+Inertly she blinked her big brown eyes for an instant. Then suddenly her
+hands went groping out to the arms of her chair. Her face was
+horror-stricken. "Why didn't he tell me, himself?"
+
+"Because I asked him to let me tell you," said Guthrie quietly.
+
+"When did he tell you?" she persisted.
+
+"Just before I came up on the piazza," said Guthrie.
+
+"How did he tell you?" she demanded.
+
+"How did he tell me?" mused Guthrie wretchedly. After all, underneath
+his occasional whimsicality he was distinctly literal-minded. "How did
+he tell me? Why I saw them all powwowing together in the corral, and
+Andrews looked up sort of queer and said: 'Say, Guthrie, that little
+Psychology friend of yours has got typhoid fever. What in thunder are we
+going to do?"
+
+The strained lines around Esther Davidson's mouth relaxed for a second.
+
+"Well, what in thunder am I going to do?" she joked heroically. But the
+effort at flippancy was evidently quite too much for her. In another
+instant her head pitched forward against the piazza railing and her
+voice, when she spoke again, was almost indistinguishable.
+
+"And you knew all this an hour ago!" she accused him incoherently. "Knew
+my predicament--knew my inevitable weakness and fear and
+mortification--knew me a stranger among strangers. And yet you came up
+here to jolly me inconsequently--about a million foolish things!"
+
+"It was because at the end of the hour I hoped to be something to you
+that would quite prevent your feeling a 'stranger among strangers,'"
+said Guthrie very quietly. "I have asked you to marry me this afternoon,
+you must remember."
+
+The young woman's lip curled tremulously. "You astonish me!" she
+scoffed. "I had always understood that men did not marry very easily.
+Quick to love, slow to marry, is supposed to be your most striking
+characteristic--and here are you asking marriage of me, and you haven't
+even loved me yet!"
+
+"You women do not seem to marry any too easily," smiled Guthrie gazing
+nervously from his open watch to the furthest corner of the corral,
+where the preacher's raw-boned pony, nose in air, was stubbornly
+refusing to take his bit.
+
+"Indeed we do marry--perfectly easily--when we once love," retorted the
+woman contentiously! "It's the love part of it that we are reluctant
+about!"
+
+"But I haven't asked you to love me," protested the man with much
+patience. "I merely asked you to marry me."
+
+The woman's jaw dropped. "Out of sympathy for my emergency, out of
+mistaken chivalry, you're asking me to marry you, and not even
+pretending that you love me?" she asked in astonishment.
+
+"I haven't had time to love you yet. I've only known you such a little
+while," said the man quite simply. Almost sternly he rose and began to
+pace up and down the narrow confines of the little piazza. "All I know
+is," he asserted, "that the very first moment you stepped off the train
+at Laramie, I knew you were the woman whom I was--going to
+love--sometime."
+
+Very softly he slid back into the rustic seat he had just vacated, and
+taking the woman's small clenched hands in his began to smooth out her
+fingers like poor crumpled ribbons.
+
+"Now, Little Psychology Teacher," he said, "I want you to listen very,
+very carefully to everything I say. Do you like me all right?"
+
+"Y--e--s."
+
+"Better than you like Andrews or Ellis or even the old Judge?"
+
+"Oh, yes!"
+
+"Ever since we all started out together on the Trail you've just sort of
+naturally fallen to my lot, haven't you? Whenever you needed your pony's
+girth tightened, or whenever you wanted a drink of water, or whenever
+the big canyons scared you, or whenever the camp fire smoked you, you've
+just sort of naturally turned to me, haven't you? And it would be fair
+enough, wouldn't it, to say that at least I've never made any situation
+worse for you? So that if anything ugly or awkward were going to
+happen--perhaps you really would rather have me around than any one
+else?"
+
+"Yes--surely."
+
+"Maybe even, when we've been watching Ellis and his Missis riding ahead,
+all hand in hand and smile in smile, you've wondered a bit, woman-like,
+how it would seem, for instance, to be riding along hand in hand and
+smile in smile with me?"
+
+"P-o-s-s-i-b-l-y."
+
+"Never had any special curiosity about how it would seem to go hand and
+hand with--Andrews?"
+
+"Foolish!"
+
+"Hooray!" cried Guthrie. "That's all that I really needed to know! Oh,
+don't feel bashful about it. It surely is an absolutely impersonal
+compliment on your part. It isn't even you that I'm under obligations to
+for the kindness, but Nature with a great big capital 'N.' Somehow I
+always have had an idea that you women instinctively do divide all
+mankind into three classes: first, Those Whom You Couldn't Possibly
+Love; second, Those Whom You Could Possibly Love, and third, the One Man
+of the World Whom You Actually Do Love. And unless this mysterious
+Nature with a capital 'N' has already qualified a man for the second
+class, God himself can't promote that man into the third class. So it
+seems to me that every fellow could save himself an awful lot of
+misunderstanding and wasted time if he'd do just what I've done--make a
+distinctly preliminary proposal to his lady; not 'Do you love me?' which
+might take her fifteen years to decide, but: 'Could you love me?' which
+any woman can tell the first time she sees you. And if she can't
+possibly love you, that settles everything neatly then and there, but if
+she can possibly, why, with Nature once on his side, a man's a craven
+who can't put up a mighty good scrap for his coveted prize. Doesn't this
+all make sense to you?"
+
+Cannily the young woman lifted her eyes to his and fathomed him mutely
+for an instant. Then:
+
+"Perfectly good 'sense' but no feeling," she answered dully.
+
+"It's only 'sense' that I'm trying to make," acknowledged Guthrie. "Now
+look here, you Little Teacher Person, I'm going to talk to you just as
+bluntly as I would to another fellow. You are in a hole--the deuce of a
+hole! You have got typhoid fever, and it may run ten days and it may run
+ten weeks! And you are two thousand miles from home--among strangers!
+And no matter how glad I personally may be that you did push on and join
+us, sick or well, from every practical standpoint, of course, it surely
+was heedless and ill-considered of you to start off in poor health on a
+trip like this and run the risk of forcing perfectly unconcerned
+strangers to pay for it all. Personally, you seem so much to belong to
+me already that it gives me goose-flesh to think of your having to put
+yourself under obligations to any purely conscientious person. Mrs.
+Ellis, of course, will insist, out of common humanity, upon giving up
+her trip and staying behind with you, but Mrs. Ellis, Little Teacher, is
+on her honeymoon, and Ellis couldn't stay behind--it's his party--he'd
+have to go on with his people--and you'd never be able to compensate
+anybody for a broken honeymoon, and the Judge's youngster couldn't nurse
+a sick kitten, and the two women teachers from New York have been
+planning seven years for this trip, they told me, and we couldn't
+decently take it away from them. But you and I, Little Psychology Lady,
+are not strangers to each other. Hanlon's Mary here at the ranch house,
+rough as she is, has at least the serving hands of a woman, and Andrews
+belongs naturally to the tribe which is consecrated to inconveniences,
+and both can be compensated accordingly. And I would have married you,
+anyway, before another year was out! Yes, I would!"
+
+Apparently ignoring everything that he had said, she turned her face
+scowlingly toward the sound of hammering that issued suddenly through
+the piazza door.
+
+"Oh, Glory!" she complained. "Are they making my coffin already?"
+
+With a little laugh, Guthrie relinquished her limp fingers, and jumping
+up, took another swift turn along the piazza, stopping only to bang the
+door shut again. When he faced her once more the twinkle was all gone
+from his eyes.
+
+"You're quite right, what you said about men," he resumed with desperate
+seriousness. "We are a heap sight quicker in our susceptibilities than
+in our mentalities! Therefore, no sane man ever does marry till his
+brain has caught up with his emotions! But sometimes, you know,
+something happens that hustles a man's brain along a bit, and this time
+my brain seems fairly to have jumped to its destination and clean-beaten
+even the emotions in the race. In cool, positive judgment I tell you I
+want to marry you this afternoon."
+
+"You've confessed yourself, haven't you, that you've no severer ideal
+for marriage than that a man should be generous enough to give your
+personality, no matter how capricious, a chance to breathe? Haven't I
+qualified sufficiently as that amiable man? More than that, I'm free to
+love you; I'm certainly keen to serve you; I'm reasonably well able to
+provide for you, and you naturally have a right to know that I've led a
+decent life. It's ten good years now since I was thirty and first found
+nerve enough to break away from the stifling business life I hated and
+get out into the open, where there's surely less money but infinitely
+more air. And in ten years I've certainly found considerable chance to
+fulfil a few of the items in my own little 'List of Necessities.' I've
+seen Asia and I've seen Africa, and I've written the book I've always
+wanted to write on North American mountain structures.
+
+"But there's a lot more that I crave to do. Maybe I've got a bit of a
+'capricious personality' myself! Maybe I also have been hunting for the
+mate who would give my personality a chance to breathe. Certainly I've
+never wanted any home yet, except when the right time came, the arms of
+the right woman. And I guess you must be she, because you're the first
+woman I've ever seen whom I'd trust to help me just as hard to play my
+chosen games as I'd help her to play hers! I tell you--I want--very
+much--to marry you this afternoon."
+
+"Why do you dally with me so? Isn't it your own argument that there's
+only just one day in the love-life of a man and woman when the question
+and the answer mate exactly, and the books are balanced perfectly even
+for the new start together? Demand and supply, debit and credit, hunger
+and food? You, wild for help, and I wild to help you! What difference
+does it make what you call it? Isn't this our day?"
+
+"For a man who's usually as silent as you are, don't you think you're
+talking a good deal, considering how sick you said I was?" asked the
+young woman, not unmirthfully.
+
+Guthrie's square jaws snapped together like a trap. "I was merely trying
+to detain you," he mumbled, "until Hanlon had finished knocking the
+windows out of your room. We're going to give you all the air you can
+breathe, anyway."
+
+A little sullenly he started for the stairs. Then just at the door he
+turned unexpectedly and his face was all smiles again.
+
+"Little Psychology Teacher," he said, "I have made you a formal,
+definite offer of marriage. And in just about ten minutes from now I am
+coming back for my answer."
+
+When he did return a trifle sooner than he had intended, he met her in
+the narrow upper hallway, with hands outstretched, groping her way
+unsteadily toward her room. As though her equilibrium was altogether
+disturbed by his sudden advent, she reeled back against the wall.
+
+"Mr. Donas Guthrie," she said, "I'm feeling pretty wobbly! Mr. Donas
+Guthrie," she said, "I guess I'm pretty sick."
+
+"It's a cruel long way down the hall," suggested Guthrie. "Wouldn't you
+like me to carry you?"
+
+"Yes--I--would," sighed the Little Psychology Teacher.
+
+Even to Guthrie's apprehensive mind, her weight proved most
+astonishingly light. The small head drooping limply back from the
+slender neck seemed actually the only heavy thing about her, yet there
+were apparently only two ideas in that head.
+
+"I'm afraid of Hanlon's Mary, and I don't like Dr.
+Andrews--very--specially--much," she kept repeating aimlessly. Then
+halfway to her room her body stiffened suddenly.
+
+"Mr. Donas Guthrie," she asked. "Do you think I'm probably going to
+die?"
+
+"N-a-w!" said Guthrie, his nose fairly crinkling with positiveness.
+
+"But they don't give you much of anything to eat in typhoid, do they?"
+she persisted hectically.
+
+"I suppose not," acknowledged Guthrie.
+
+With disconcerting unexpectedness she began to cry--a soft, low,
+whimpery cry like a sleepy child's.
+
+"If any day should come when--they think--that I am going to die," she
+moaned, "who will there be to see that I do get--something awfully good
+to eat?"
+
+"I'll see to it," said Guthrie, "if you'll only put me in authority."
+
+As though altogether indifferent to anything that he might say, her
+tension relaxed again and without further parleying she let Guthrie
+carry her across the threshold of her room and set her down cautiously
+in the creaky rocking chair. The eyes that lifted to his were as vague
+and turbid as brown velvet.
+
+"There's one good thing about typhoid," she moaned. "It doesn't seem to
+hurt any, does it? In fact, I think I rather like it. It feels as warm
+and snug and don't-care as a hot lemonade at bed time. But what?"
+brightening suddenly, "but what was it you asked me to think about? I
+feel sort of confused--but it was something, I remember, that I was
+going to argue with you about."
+
+"It was what I said about marrying me," prompted Guthrie.
+
+"Oh, y-e-s," smiled the Little Psychology Teacher. Hazily for a moment
+she continued staring at him with her fingers prodded deep into her
+temples. Then suddenly, like a flower blasted with heat, she wilted down
+into her chair, groping blindly out with one hand toward the sleeve of
+his coat.
+
+"Whatever you think best to do about it," she faltered, "I guess you'd
+better arrange pretty quickly--'cause I think--I'm--going--out."
+
+This is how it happened that Mr. and Mrs. Donas Guthrie and Dr. Andrews
+stayed behind at the ranch house with Hanlon and Hanlon's Mary, and a
+piebald pony or two, and a herd of Angora goats, and a pink geranium
+plant, and the strange intermittent smell of a New England farmhouse
+which lurked in Hanlon's goods and chattels even after thirty years, and
+three or four stale, tattered magazines--and typhoid fever.
+
+It was typhoid fever that proved essentially the most incalculable
+companion of them all. Hanlon's austerity certainly never varied from
+day to day, nor the inherent sullenness of Hanlon's Mary.
+
+The meager sick-room, stripped to its bare pine skin of every tawdry
+colored print and fluttering cheese-cloth curtain, faced bluntly toward
+the west--a vital little laboratory in which the unknown quantity of a
+woman's endurance and the fallible skill of one man, the stubborn
+bravery of another, and the quite inestimable will of God were to be
+fused together in a desperate experiment to precipitate Life rather than
+Death.
+
+So October waxed into November, and so waxed misgiving into
+apprehension, and apprehension into actual fear. In any more cheerful
+situation it would have been at least interesting to have watched the
+infuriated expletives issue from Andrew's perennially smiling lips.
+
+"Oh, hang not having anything to work with!" he kept reiterating and
+reiterating. "Hang being shut off like this on a ranch where there
+aren't anything but sheep and goats and one old stingy cow that Hanlon's
+Mary guards with her life 'cause the lady's only a school teacher, but a
+baby is a baby.' Hang Hanlon's Mary! And hang not being altogether able
+to blame her! And hang not knowing, anyway, just what nanny-goat's milk
+would do for a typhoid patient! And hang--"
+
+But before the expletives, and through the expletives, and after the
+expletives, Andrews was all hero, working, watching, experimenting,
+retrenching, humanly comprehensive, more than humanly vigilant.
+
+So, with the brain of a doctor and the heart of a lover, the two men
+worked and watched and waited through the tortuous autumn days and
+nights, blind to the young dawn stealing out like a luminous mist from
+the night-smothered mountains; deaf to the flutter of sun-dried leaves
+in the radiant noon-time; dull to the fruit-scented fragrance of the
+early twilight, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, sensing nothing, except
+the flicker of a pulse or the rise of a temperature.
+
+And then at last there came a harsh, wintry feeling day, when Andrews,
+stepping out into the hall, called Guthrie softly to him and said, still
+smiling:
+
+"Guthrie, old man, I don't think we're going to win this game!"
+
+"W-h-a-t?" gasped Guthrie.
+
+With his mouth still curling amiably around his words, Andrews repeated
+the phrase. "I said, I don't think we're going to win this game. No,
+nothing new's happened. She's simply burning out. Can't you understand?
+I mean she's probably--going to die!"
+
+Out of the jumble of words that hurtled through Guthrie's mind only four
+slipped his lips.
+
+"But--she's--my--wife!" he protested.
+
+"Other men's wives have died before this," said Andrews still smiling.
+
+"Man," cried Guthrie, "if you smile again, I'll break your head!"
+
+With his tears running down like rain into the broadening trough of his
+smile, Andrews kept right on smiling. "You needn't be so cross about
+it," he said. "You're not the only one who likes her! I wanted her
+myself! You're nothing but a tramp on the face of the earth--and I could
+have given her the snuggest home in Yonkers!"
+
+With their arms across each other's shoulders they went back into the
+sick room.
+
+Rousing from her lethargy, the young woman opened her eyes upon them
+with the first understanding that she had shown for some days.
+Inquisitively she stared from Guthrie's somber eyes to Andrews'
+distorted cheerfulness.
+
+Taking instant advantage of her unwonted rationality, Andrews blurted
+out the question that was uppermost in his professional responsibility.
+
+"Don't you think, maybe, your people ought to know about your being
+sick?" he said. "Now, if you could give us any addresses."
+
+For a second it really seemed as though the question would merely
+safely ignite her common sense.
+
+"Why yes, of course," she acquiesced. "My brother."
+
+Then suddenly, without any warning, her most dangerous imagination
+caught fire.
+
+"You mean," she faltered, "that--I--am--not--going to get well?"
+
+Before either man was quick enough to contradict her, the shock had done
+its work. Piteously she turned her face to the pillow.
+
+"Never--never--to--go--to--Oxford?" she whispered in mournful
+astonishment. "Never--even--to--see my--Bay of Naples?--Never to--have
+a--a--perfectly happy Christmas?" A little petulantly then her brain
+began to clog. "I think I--might at least have had--the pink sash!" she
+complained. Then, equally suddenly her strength rallied for an instant
+and the eyes that she lifted to Guthrie's were filled with a desperate
+effort at raillery. "Bring on your--anchovies and caviar," she reminded
+him, "and the stuffed green peppers--and remember I don't like my fillet
+too well done--and--"
+
+Five minutes later in the hallway Andrews caught Guthrie just as he was
+chasing downstairs after Hanlon.
+
+"What are you going to do?" he asked curiously.
+
+"I am going to send Hanlon out to the telegraph station," said Guthrie.
+"I'm going to wire to Denver for a pink sash!"
+
+"What she was raving about?" quizzed Andrews. "Are you raving too?"
+
+"It's the only blamed thing in the whole world that she's asked for that
+I can get her," said Guthrie.
+
+"It'll take five days," growled Andrews.
+
+"I know it!"
+
+"It won't do her any good."
+
+"I can't help that!"
+
+"She'll--be gone before it gets here."
+
+"You can't help that!"
+
+But she wasn't "gone," at all before it came. All her vitalities
+charred, to be sure, like a fire-swept woodland, but still tenacious of
+life, still fighting for reorganization, a little less feverish, a
+little stronger-pulsed, she opened her eyes in a puzzled, sad sort of
+little smile when Guthrie shook the great, broad, shimmering gauze-like
+ribbon ticklingly down across her wasted hands, and then apparently
+drowsed off to sleep again. But when both men came back to the room a
+few moments later, almost half the pink sash was cuddled under her
+cheek. And Hanlon's Mary came and peered through the doorway, with the
+whining baby still in her arms, and reaching out and fretting a piece
+of pink fringe between her hardy fingers, sniffed mightily.
+
+"And you sent my man all the way to the wire," she asked, "and grubbed
+him three whole days waitin' round, just for that?"
+
+"Yes, sure," said Guthrie.
+
+"G-a-w-d!" said Hanlon's Mary.
+
+And, the next week the patient was even better, and the next week,
+better still. Then, one morning after days and days of seemingly
+interminable silence and stupor, she opened her eyes perfectly wide and
+asked Guthrie abruptly:
+
+"Whom did I marry? You or Dr. Andrews?"
+
+And Guthrie in a sudden perversity of shock and embarrassment lied
+grimly:
+
+"Dr. Andrews!"
+
+"I didn't either!--it was you!" came the immediate, not too strong, but
+distinctly temperish response.
+
+Something in the new vitality of the tone made Guthrie stop whatever he
+was doing and eye her suspiciously.
+
+"How long have you been conscious like this?" he queried in surprise.
+
+The faintest perceptible flicker of mischief crossed her haggard face.
+
+"Three--days," she acknowledged.
+
+"Then why--?" began Guthrie.
+
+"Because I--didn't know--just what to call you," she faltered.
+
+After that no power on earth apparently could induce any further speech
+from her for another three days. Solemn and big-eyed and totally
+unfathomable, she lay watching Guthrie's every gesture, every movement.
+From the door to the chair, from the chair to the window, from the
+window back to the chair, she lay estimating him altogether
+disconcertingly. Across the hand that steadied her drinking glass, she
+studied the poise of his lean, firm wrist. Out from the shadow-mystery
+of her heavy lashes, she questioned the ultimate value of each frown or
+smile.
+
+And then, suddenly--just as abruptly as the first time she had spoken:
+
+"What day is it?" she asked.
+
+"It's Christmas," said Guthrie softly.
+
+"O-h!--O-h!--O-h!" she exclaimed, very slowly. Then with increasing
+interest and wonder, "Is there snow on the ground?" she whispered.
+
+"No," said Guthrie.
+
+"Is it full moon to-night?" she questioned.
+
+"No," said Guthrie.
+
+"Is there any small, freckle-faced, alto-voiced choir boy in the house,
+trotting around humming funny little tail-ends of anthems and carols,
+while he's buckling up his skates?" she stammered.
+
+"No," said Guthrie.
+
+"Are there any old, white-haired loving people cuddled in the chimney
+corner?" she persisted.
+
+"No," said Guthrie.
+
+"Isn't there--any Christmas tree?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Aren't there even any presents?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Oh!" she smiled. "Isn't it funny!"
+
+"What's funny?" asked Guthrie perplexedly.
+
+The eyes that lifted to his were brimming full of a strange, wistful
+sort of astonishment. "Why, it's funny," she faltered, "it's funny--that
+without--any of these things--that I thought were so necessary to
+it--I've found my 'perfectly happy Christmas.'"
+
+Then, almost bashfully, her wisp-like fingers went straying out toward
+the soft silken folds of the precious pink sash which she kept always
+close to her pillow.
+
+"If--you--don't--mind," she said, "I think I'll cut my sash in two and
+give half of it to Hanlon's Mary to make a dress for her baby."
+
+The medicine spoon dropped rather clatteringly out of Guthrie's hand.
+
+"But I sent all the way to Denver for it," he protested.
+
+"Oh, yes, I know all about that," she acknowledged. "But--what--can--a
+great big girl--like me--do with a--pink sash?"
+
+"But you said you wanted it!" cried Guthrie. "Why, it took a man and a
+pony and a telegraph station five entire days to get it, and they had to
+flag the express train specially for it--and--and--"
+
+A little wearily she closed her eyes and then opened them again
+blinkingly.
+
+"I'm pretty tired, now," she said, "so I don't want to talk about
+it--but don't you--understand? I've revised my whole list of
+necessities. Out of the wide--wide--world--I find that I don't really
+want anything--except--just--you!"
+
+
+
+
+WOMAN'S ONLY BUSINESS
+
+
+THE men at the club were horridly busy that night discussing the silly
+English law about marrying your dead wife's sister. The talk was quite
+rabid enough even before an English High-churchman infused his pious
+venom into the subject-matter. When the argument was at its highest and
+the drinks were at their lowest, Bertus Sagner, the biology man at the
+university, jumped up from his seat with blazing eyes and said
+"RATS!"--not anything long and Latin, not anything obscure and evasive,
+not even "rodents," but just plain "RATS!" The look on his face was
+inordinately disgusted, or indeed more than disgusted, unless disgust is
+perhaps an emotion that may at times be served red-hot. As he broke away
+from the gabbling crowd and began to hunt noisily round the room for his
+papers, I gathered up my own chemistry notebook and started after him. I
+was a new man in town and a comparative stranger. But Sagner and I had
+been chums once long ago in Berlin.
+
+At the outside door he turned now and eyed me a bit shamefacedly.
+"Barney, old man," he said, "are you going my way? Well, come along."
+The broad-shouldered breadth of the two of us blocked out the light from
+the shining chandelier and sent our clumsy feet fairly stumbling down
+the harsh granite steps. The jarring lurch exploded Sagner's irritation
+into a short, sharp, damny growl, and I saw at once that his nerves were
+raw like a woman's.
+
+As we turned into the deep-shadowed, spooky-black college roadway, the
+dormitories' yellow lights and laughter flared forth grotesquely like
+the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge cut up for a Jack-o'-Lantern. At the
+edge of the Lombardy poplars I heard Sagner swallowing a little bit
+overhard.
+
+"I suspect that I made rather a fool of myself back there," he confided
+abruptly, "but if there's anything under the day or night sky that makes
+me mad, it's the idiotic babble, babble, babble, these past few weeks
+about the 'dead wife's sister' law."
+
+"What's your grouch?" I asked. "You're not even a married man, let alone
+a widower."
+
+He stopped suddenly with a spurting match and a big cigar and lighted up
+unconsciously all the extraordinary frowning furrows of his face. The
+match went out and he struck another, and that match went out and he
+struck another--and another, and all the time it seemed to me as though
+just the flame in his face was hot enough to kindle any ordinary cigar.
+After each fruitless, breeze-snuffed effort he snapped his words out
+like so many tiny, tempery torpedoes. "Of--all--the--rot!" he
+ejaculated. "Of--all--the nonsense!" he puffed and mumbled.
+"A--whole--great, grown-up empire fussing and brawling about a 'dead
+wife's sister.' A dead wife! What does a dead wife care who marries her
+sister? Great heavens! If they really want to make a good moral law that
+will help somebody, why--don't--they--make--a--law--that will forbid a
+man's flirting with his living wife's sister?"
+
+When I laughed I thought he would strike me, but after a husky second he
+laughed, too, through a great blue puff of smoke and a blaze like the
+headlight of an engine. In another instant he had vaulted the low fence
+and was starting off across lots for his own rooms, but before I could
+catch up with him he whirled abruptly in his tracks and came back to me.
+
+"Will you come over to the Lennarts' with me for a moment?" he asked. "I
+was there at dinner with them to-night and I left my spectacles."
+
+Very willingly I acquiesced, and we plunged off single file into the
+particular darkness that led to Professor Lennart's rose-garden.
+Somewhere remotely in my mind hummed and halted a vague, evasive bit of
+man-gossip about Lennart's amazingly pretty sister-in-law. Yet Sagner
+did not look exactly to me like a man who was going courting. Even in
+that murky darkness I could visualize perfectly from Sagner's pose and
+gait the same strange, bleak, facial furnishings that had attracted me
+so astoundingly in Berlin--the lean, flat cheeks cleaned close as the
+floor of a laboratory; the ugly, short-cropped hair; the mouth, just for
+work; the nose, just for work; the ears, just for work--not a single,
+decorative, pleasant thing from crown to chin except those great, dark,
+gorgeous, miraculously virgin eyes, with the huge, shaggy eyebrows
+lowering down prudishly over them like two common doormats on which
+every incoming vision must first stop and wipe its feet. Once in a cafe
+in Berlin I saw a woman try to get into Sagner's eyes--without stopping.
+Right in the middle of our dinner I jumped as though I had been shot.
+"Why, what was _that_?" I cried. "What was _that_?"
+
+"What was what?" drawled Sagner. Try as I might the tiniest flicker of a
+grin tickled my lips. "Oh, nothing," I mumbled apologetically. "I just
+thought I heard a door slam-bang in a woman's face."
+
+"What door?" said Sagner stupidly. "What woman?"
+
+Old Sagner was deliciously stupid over many things, but he dissected the
+darkness toward Professor Lennart's house as though it had been his
+favorite kind of cadaver. Here, was the hardening turf, compact as
+flesh. There, was the tough, tight tendon of the ripping ground pine.
+Farther along under an exploring match a great vapid peony loomed like a
+dead heart. Somewhere out in an orchard the May-blooms smelled
+altogether too white. Almost at the edge of the Lennarts' piazza he
+turned and stepped back to my pace and began talking messily about some
+stale biological specimen that had just arrived from the Azores.
+
+College people, it seemed, did not ring bells for one another, and the
+most casual flop of Sagner's knuckles against the door brought Mrs.
+Lennart almost immediately to welcome us. "Almost immediately," I say,
+because the slight, faltering delay in her footfall made me wonder even
+then whether it was limb or life that had gone just a little bit lame.
+But the instant the hall light struck her face my hand clutched down
+involuntarily on Sagner's shoulder. It was the same, same face whose
+brighter, keener, shinier pastelled likeness had been the only joyous
+object in Sagner's homesick German room. With almost embarrassing
+slowness now we followed her lagging steps back to the library.
+
+It was the first American home that I had seen for some years, and the
+warmth of it, and the color, and the glow, and the luxurious,
+deep-seated comfort, mothered me like the notes of an old, old song.
+Between the hill-green walls the long room stretched like a peaceful
+valley to the very edge of the huge, gray field-stone fireplace that
+blocked the final vista like a furious breastwork raised against all the
+invading tribes of history. Red books and gold frames and a
+chocolate-colored bronze or two caught up the flickering glint from the
+apple-wood fire, and out of some shadowy corner flanked by a grand piano
+a young girl's contralto voice, sensuous as liquid plush, was lipping
+its magic way up and down the whole wonderful, molten scale.
+
+The corner was rather small, but out of it loomed instantly the tall,
+supple figure of Professor Lennart with his thousand-year-old brown eyes
+and his young gray hair. We were all big fellows, but Lennart towered
+easily three inches over anybody else's head. Professionally, too, he
+had outstripped the rest of us. People came gadding from all over the
+country to consult his historical criticisms and interpretations. And I
+hardly know how to express the man's vivid, luminous, incandescent
+personality. Surely no mother in a thousand would have chosen to have
+her son look like me, and I hope that no mother in a million would
+really have yearned to have a boy look like Sagner, but any mother, I
+think, would gladly have compromised on Lennart. I suppose he was
+handsome. Rising now, as he did, from the murkiest sort of a shadow, the
+mental and physical radiance of him made me want to laugh right out loud
+just for sheer pleasure.
+
+Following closely behind his towering bulk, the girl with the contralto
+voice stepped out into the lamplight, and I made my most solemn and
+profound German bow over her proffered hand before the flaming mischief
+in her finger tips sent my eyes staring up into her astonishing face.
+
+I have never thought that American women are extraordinarily beautiful,
+but rather that they wear their beauty like a thinnish sort of veil
+across the adorable, insistent expressiveness of their features. But
+this girl's face was so thick with beauty that you could not tell in one
+glance, or even two glances, or perhaps three, whether she had any
+expression at all. Kindness or meanness, brightness or dullness, pluck
+or timidity, were absolutely undecipherable in that physically perfect
+countenance. She was very small, and very dark, and very active, with
+hair like the color of eight o'clock--daylight and darkness and
+lamplight all snarled up together--and lips all crude scarlet, and eyes
+as absurdly big and round as a child's good-by kiss. Yet never for one
+instant could you have called her anything so impassive as "attractive."
+"Attracting" is the only hasty, ready-made word that could possibly fit
+her. Personally I do not like the type. The prettiest picture postal
+that ever was printed could not lure me across the borders of any
+unknown country. When I travel even into Friendship Land I want a good,
+clear face-map to guide my explorations.
+
+There was a boy, too, in the room--the Lennarts' son--a brown-faced lad
+of thirteen whose algebraic seance with his beloved mother we had most
+brutally interrupted.
+
+Professor Lennart's fad, as I have said, was history. Mrs. Lennart's fad
+was presumably housekeeping. The sister-in-law's fad was unmistakably
+men. Like an electric signboard her fascinating, spectacular sex-vanity
+flamed and flared from her coyly drooped eyes to her showy little feet.
+Every individual gesture signaled distinctly, "I am an extraordinarily
+beautiful little woman." Now it was her caressing hand on Lennart's
+shoulder; now it was her maddening, dazzling smile hurled like a
+bombshell into Sagner's perfectly prosy remark about the weather, now
+it was her teasing lips against the boy's tousled hair; now it was her
+tip-toeing, swaying, sweet-breathed exploration of a cobweb that the
+linden trees had left across my shoulder.
+
+Lennart was evidently utterly subjugated. Like a bright moth and a very
+dull flame the girl chased him unceasingly from one chair, or one word,
+or one laugh to another. A dozen times their hands touched, or their
+smiles met, or their thoughts mated in distinctly personal if not secret
+understanding. Once when Mrs. Lennart stopped suddenly in the midst of
+my best story and asked me to repeat what I had been saying, I glanced
+up covertly and saw the girl kissing the tip of her finger a little bit
+over-mockingly to her brother-in-law. Never in any country but America
+could such a whole scene have been enacted in absolute moral innocence.
+It made me half ashamed and half very proud of my country. In
+continental Europe even the most trivial, innocent audacity assumes at
+once such utterly preposterous proportions of evil. But here before my
+very eyes was the most dangerous man-and-woman game in the world being
+played as frankly and ingenuously and transiently as though it had been
+croquet.
+
+Through it all, Sagner, frowning like ten devils, sat at the desk with
+his chin in his hands, staring--staring at the girl. I suppose that she
+thought he was fascinated. He was. He was fairly yearning to vivisect
+her. I had seen that expression before in his face--reverence,
+repulsion, attraction, distaste, indomitable purpose, blood-curdling
+curiosity--SCIENCE.
+
+When I dragged him out of the room and down the steps half an hour later
+my sides were cramped with laughter. "If we'd stayed ten minutes
+longer," I chuckled, "she would have called you 'Bertie' and me 'Boy.'"
+
+But Sagner would not laugh.
+
+"She's a pretty girl all right," I ventured again.
+
+"Pretty as h--," whispered Sagner.
+
+As we rounded the corner of the house the long French window blazed
+forth on us. Clear and bright in the lamplight stood Lennart with his
+right arm cuddling the girl to his side. "Little sister," he was saying,
+"let's go back to the piano and have some more music." Smiling her
+kindly good night we saw Mrs. Lennart gather up her books and start off
+limpingly across the hall, with the devoted boy following close behind
+her.
+
+"Then she's really lame?" I asked Sagner as we swung into the noisy
+gravel path.
+
+"Oh, yes," he said; "she got hurt in a runaway accident four years ago.
+Lennart doesn't know how to drive a _goat_!"
+
+"Seems sort of too bad," I mused dully.
+
+Then Sagner laughed most astonishingly. "Yes, sort of too bad," he
+mocked me.
+
+It was almost ten o'clock when we circled back to the college library.
+Only a few grinds were there buzzing like June-bugs round the
+low-swinging green lamps. Even the librarian was missing. But Madge
+Hubert, the librarian's daughter, was keeping office hours in his stead
+behind a sumptuous old mahogany desk. At the very first college party
+that I had attended, Madge Hubert had been pointed out to me with a
+certain distinction as being the girl that Bertus Sagner was _almost_ in
+love with. Then, as now, I was startled by the surprising youthfulness
+of her. Surely she was not more than three years ahead of the young girl
+whom we had left at Professor Lennart's house. With unmistakable
+friendly gladness she welcomed Sagner to the seat nearest her, and
+accorded me quite as much chair and quite as much smile as any new man
+in a university town really deserved. In another moment she had closed
+her book, pushed a full box of matches across the table to us, and
+switched off the electric light that fairly threatened to scorch her
+straight blond hair.
+
+One by one the grinds looked up and nodded and smiled, and puckered
+their vision toward the clock, and "folded their tents like the Arabs
+and silently stole away," leaving us two men there all alone with the
+great silent room, and the long, rangy, echoing metal book-stacks, and
+the duddy-looking portraits, and the dopy-acting busts, and the sleek
+gray library cat--and the girl. Maybe Sagner came every Wednesday night
+to help close the library.
+
+Certainly I liked the frank, almost boyish manner in which the two
+friends included me in their friendship by seeming to ignore me
+altogether.
+
+"What's the matter, Bertus?" the girl began quite abruptly. "You look
+worried. What's the matter?"
+
+"Nothing is ever the matter," said Sagner.
+
+The girl laughed, and began to build a high, tottering paper tower out
+of a learned-looking pack of catalogue cards. Just at the moment of
+completion she gave a sharp little inadvertent sigh and the tower
+fluttered down.
+
+"What's the matter with _you_?" quizzed Sagner.
+
+"Nothing is ever the matter with me, either," she mocked smilingly.
+
+Trying to butt into the silence that was awkward for me, if not for
+them, I rummaged my brain for speech, and blurted out triumphantly,
+"We've just come from Professor Lennart's."
+
+"Just come from Professor Lennart's?" she repeated slowly, lifting her
+eyebrows as though the thought was a little bit heavy.
+
+"Yes," said Sagner bluntly. "I've been there twice this evening."
+
+With a rather playful twist of her lips the girl turned to me. "What did
+you think of 'Little Sister'?" she asked.
+
+But before I could answer, Sagner had pushed me utterly aside once more
+and was shaking his smoke-stained finger threateningly in Madge Hubert's
+face. "Why--didn't--you--come--to the--Lennarts'--to--dinner--to-night
+--as--you--were--invited?" he scolded.
+
+The girl put her chin in her hand and cuddled her fingers over her mouth
+and her nose and part of her blue eyes.
+
+"I don't go to the Lennarts' any more--if I can help it," she mumbled.
+
+"Why not?" shouted Sagner.
+
+She considered the question very carefully, then "Go ask the other
+girls," she answered a trifle hotly. "Go ask any one of them. We all
+stay away for exactly the same reason."
+
+"WHAT IS THE REASON?" thundered Sagner in his most terrible laboratory
+manner.
+
+When Sagner speaks like that to me, I always grab hold of my head with
+both hands and answer just as fast as I possibly can, for I remember
+only too distinctly all the shining assortment of different sized knives
+and scalpels in his workshop and I have always found that a small,
+narrow, quick question makes the smallest, narrowest, quickest,
+soon-overest incision into my secret.
+
+But Madge Hubert only laughed at the laboratory manner.
+
+"Say 'Please,'" she whispered.
+
+"Please!" growled Sagner, with his very own blood flushing all over his
+face and hands.
+
+"Now--what is it you want to know?" she asked, frittering her fingers
+all the time over that inky-looking pack of catalogue cards.
+
+Somehow, strange as it may seem, I did not feel an atom in the way, but
+rather that the presence of a third person, and that person myself, gave
+them both a certain daring bravado of speech that they would scarcely
+have risked alone with each other.
+
+"What do I want to know?" queried Sagner. "I want to know--in fact--I'm
+utterly mad to know--just what your kind of woman thinks of 'Little
+Sister's' kind of woman."
+
+With a startled gesture Madge Hubert looked back over her shoulder
+toward a creak in the literature book-stack, and Sagner jumped up with a
+great air of mock conspiracy, and went tip-toeing all around among the
+metal corridors in search of possible eavesdroppers, and then came
+flouncing back and stuffed tickly tissue paper into the gray cat's
+ears.
+
+Then "Why don't you girls go to the Lennarts' any more?" he resumed with
+quickly recurrent gravity.
+
+For a moment Madge Hubert dallied to shuffle one half of her pack of
+cards into the other half. Then she looked up and smiled the blond way a
+white-birch tree smiles in the sunshine.
+
+"Why--we don't go any more because we don't have a good time," she
+confided. "After you've come home from a party once or twice and cried
+yourself to sleep, it begins to dawn on you very gradually that you
+didn't have a very good time. We don't like 'Little Sister.' She makes
+us feel ashamed."
+
+"Oh!" said Sagner, rather brutally. "You are all jealous!"
+
+But if he had expected for a second to disconcert Madge Hubert he was
+most ingloriously mistaken.
+
+"Yes," she answered perfectly simply. "We are all jealous."
+
+"Of her beauty?" scowled Sagner.
+
+"Oh, no," said Madge Hubert. "Of her innocence."
+
+Acid couldn't have eaten the fiber out of Madge Hubert's emotional
+honesty. "Why, yes," she hurried on vehemently, "among all the
+professors' daughters here in town there isn't one of us who is innocent
+enough to do happily even once the things that 'Little Sister' does
+every day of her life. You are quite right. We are all furiously
+jealous."
+
+With sudden professional earnestness she ran her fingers through the
+catalogue cards and picked out one and slapped it down in front of
+Sagner. "There!" she said. "That's the book that explains all about it.
+It says that jealousy is an emotion that is aroused only by business
+competition, which accounts, of course, for the fact that, socially
+speaking, you very rarely find any personal enmity between men. There
+are so many, many different kinds of businesses for men, that interests
+very seldom conflict--so that the broker resents _only_ the broker, and
+the minister resents _only_ the minister, and the merchant resents
+_only_ the merchant. Why, Bertus Sagner," she broke off abruptly, "you
+fairly idolize your chemistry friend here, and Lennart for history, and
+Dudley for mathematics, and all the others, and you glory in their
+achievements, and pray for their successes. But if there were another
+biology man here in town, you'd tear him and his methods tooth and nail,
+day and night. Yes, you would!--though you'd cover your hate a foot deep
+with superficial courtesies and 'professional etiquette.'"
+
+She began to laugh. "Oh, the book is very wise," she continued more
+lightly. "It goes on to say that woman's only business in the whole
+wide world is LOVE--that Love is really the one and only, the Universal
+Profession for Women--so that every mortal feminine creature, from the
+brownest gypsy to the whitest queen, is in brutal, acute competition
+with her neighbor. It's funny, isn't it!" she finished brightly.
+
+"Very funny," growled Sagner.
+
+"So you see," she persisted, "that we girls are jealous of 'Little
+Sister' in just about the same way in which an old-fashioned, rather
+conservative department store would be jealous of the first ten-cent
+store that came to town." A sudden rather fine white pride paled
+suddenly in her cheeks. "It isn't, you understand," she said, "it isn't
+because the ten-cent store's rhinestone comb, or tinsel ribbon, or
+slightly handled collar really competes with the other store's plainer
+but possibly honester values, but--because in the long run the public's
+frittered taste and frittered small change is absolutely bound to affect
+the general receipts of the more conservative store."
+
+"And it isn't," she added hastily, "it isn't, you know, because we're
+not used to men. There isn't one of us--from the time we were sixteen
+years old--who hasn't been quite accustomed to entertain anywhere from
+three to a dozen men every evening of her life. But we can't entertain
+them the way 'Little Sister' does." A hot, red wave of mortification
+flooded her face. "We tried it once," she confessed, "and it didn't
+work. Just before the last winter party seven of us girls got together
+and deliberately made up our minds to beat 'Little Sister' at her own
+game. Wasn't it disgusting of us to start out actually and deliberately
+with the intention of being just a little wee bit free and easy with
+men?"
+
+"How did it work?" persisted Sagner, half agrin.
+
+The color flushed redder and redder into Madge Hubert's cheeks.
+
+"I went to the party with the new psychology substitute," she continued
+bravely, "and as I stepped into the carriage I called him 'Fred'--and he
+looked as though he thought I was demented. But fifteen minutes
+afterward I heard 'Little Sister' call him 'Psyche'--and he laughed."
+She began to laugh herself.
+
+"But how did the party come out?" probed Sagner, going deeper and
+deeper.
+
+The girl sobered instantly. "There were seven of us," she said, "and we
+all were to meet at the house of one of the girls at twelve o'clock and
+compare experiences. Three of us came home at ten o'clock--crying. And
+four of us didn't turn up till half-past one--laughing. But the ones
+who came home crying were the only ones who really had any fun out of
+it. The game was altogether too easy--that was the trouble with it. But
+the four who came home laughing had been bored to death with their
+_un_-successes."
+
+"Which lot were you in?" cried Sagner.
+
+She shook her head. "I won't tell you," she whispered.
+
+With almost startling pluck she jumped up suddenly and switched the
+electric light full blast into her tense young face and across her
+resolute shoulders.
+
+"Look at me!" she cried. "Look at me! As long as men are men--what have
+I that can possibly, possibly compete with a girl like 'Little Sister'?
+Can I climb up into a man's face every time I want to speak to him? Can
+I pat a man's shoulder every time he passes me in a room? Can I hold out
+my quivering white hand and act perfectly helpless in a man's presence
+every time that I want to step into a carriage, or out of a chair? Can I
+cry and grieve and mope into a man's arms at a dance just because I
+happen to cut my finger on the sharp edge of my dance-order? Bah! If a
+new man came to town and made not one single man-friend but called all
+of us girls by our first names the second time he saw us, and rolled his
+eyes at us, and fluttered his hands, you people would call him the
+biggest fool in Christendom--but you flock by the dozens and the
+hundreds and the millions every evening to see 'Little Sister.' And
+great, grown-up, middle-aged boys like _you_, Bertus Sagner, flock
+_twice_ in the same evening!"
+
+With astounding irrelevance Sagner burst out laughing. "Why, Madge," he
+cried, "you're perfectly superb when you're mad. Keep it up. Keep it up.
+I didn't know you had it in you! Why, you dear, gorgeous girl--WHY
+AREN'T YOU MARRIED?"
+
+Like a scarlet lightning-bolt spiked with two-edged knives the red wrath
+of the girl descended then and there on Sagner's ugly head. With her
+heaving young shoulders braced like a frenzied creature at bay, against
+a great, silly, towering tier of "Latest Novels," she hurled her
+flaming, irrevocable answer crash-bang into Sagner's astonished,
+impertinent face.
+
+"You want to know why I'm not married?" she cried. "You want to know why
+I'm not married? Well, I'll tell you--why--I'm--not married, Bertus
+Sagner, and I'll use yourself for an illustration--for when I do come to
+marry, it is written in the stars that I must of necessity marry your
+kind, a mature, cool, calculating, emotionally-tamed man, a man of brain
+as well as brawn, a man of fame if not of fortune, a man bred
+intellectually, morally, socially, into the same wonderfully keen,
+thinky corner of the world where I was born--nothing but a woman.
+
+"For four years, Bertus Sagner, ever since I was nineteen years old,
+people have come stumbling over each other at college receptions to
+stare at me because I am 'the girl that Bertus Sagner, the big
+biologist, is _almost_ in love with.' And you _are_ 'almost' in love
+with me, Bertus Sagner. You can't deny it! And what is more, you will
+stay 'almost' in love with me till our pulses run down like clocks, and
+our eyes burn out like lamps, and the Real Night comes. If I remain here
+in this town, even when I am middle-aged--people will come and stare at
+me--because of you. And when I am old, and you are gone--altogether,
+people will still be talking about it. 'Almost in love' with me. Yes,
+Bertus Sagner, but if next time you came to see me, I should even so
+much as dally for a second on the arm of your chair, and slip my hand
+just a little bit tremulously into yours, and brush my lips like the
+ghost of a butterfly's wing across your love-starved face, you would
+probably find out then and there in one great, blinding, tingling,
+crunching flash that you LOVE ME NOW! But I don't want _you_, Bertus
+Sagner, nor any other man, at that price. The man who was made for me
+will love me first and get his petting afterward. There! Do you
+understand now?"
+
+As though Sagner's gasp for breath was no more than the flutter of a
+book-leaf, she plunged on, "And as for Mrs. Lennart--"
+
+Sagner jumped to his feet. "We weren't talking about Mrs. Lennart," he
+exclaimed hotly.
+
+It has always seemed to me that very few things in the world are as
+quick as a woman's anger. But nothing in the world, I am perfectly
+positive, is as quick as a woman's amusement. As though an anarchist's
+bomb had exploded into confetti, Madge Hubert's sudden laughter sparkled
+through the room.
+
+"Now, Bertus Sagner," she teased, "you just sit down again and listen to
+what I have to say."
+
+Sagner sat down.
+
+And as casually as though she were going to pour afternoon tea the girl
+slipped back into her own chair, and gave me a genuinely mirthful
+side-glance before she resumed her attack on Sagner.
+
+"You were, too, talking about Mrs. Lennart," she insisted. "When you
+asked me to tell you exactly what a girl of my kind thinks of a girl
+like 'Little Sister,' do you suppose for a second I didn't understand
+that the thing you really wanted to find out was whether Mrs. Lennart
+was getting hurt or not in this 'Little Sister' business? Oh, no, Mrs.
+Lennart hasn't been hurt for a long, long time--several months perhaps.
+I think she looks a little bit bored now and then, but not hurt."
+
+"Lennart's a splendid fellow," protested Sagner.
+
+"He's a splendid fool," said Madge Hubert. "And after a woman once
+discovers that her husband is a fool I don't suppose that any extra
+illustrations on his part make any particular difference to her."
+
+"Why, you don't--really think," stammered Sagner, "that there's any
+actual harm in Lennart's perfectly frank infatuation with 'Little
+Sister'?"
+
+"Oh, no," said Madge Hubert, "of course there's no real harm in it at
+all. It's only that Mrs. Lennart has got to realize once for all that
+the special public that she has catered to so long and faithfully with
+honest values and small profit, has really got a ten-cent taste! Most
+men have. And it isn't, you know, because Professor Lennart really wants
+or needs all these ten-cent toys and favors, but because he probably
+never before in all his studious, straight, idealistic life saw
+glittering nonsense so inordinately cheap and easy to get. Talk about
+women being 'bargain-hunters'!
+
+"But, of course, it's all pretty apt to ruin Mrs. Lennart's business.
+Anybody with half a heart could see that her stock is beginning to run
+down. She hasn't put in a new idea for months. She's wearing last
+year's clothes. She's thinking last year's thoughts. Even that blessed
+smile of hers is beginning to get just a little bit stale. You can't get
+what you want from her any more. Dust and indifference have already
+begun to set in. How will it end? Oh, I'll tell you how it will end.
+Pretty soon now college will be over and the men will scatter in five
+hundred different directions, and 'Little Sister' will be smitten
+suddenly with conscientious scruples about the 'old folks at home,' and
+will pack up her ruffles and her fraternity pins and go back to the
+provincial little town that has made her what she is. And Professor
+Lennart will mope around the house like a lost soul--for as much as five
+days--moaning, 'Oh, I wish "Little Sister" was here to-night to sing to
+me,' and 'I wish "Little Sister" was going to be here to-morrow to go
+canoeing with me,' and 'I wish "Little Sister" could see this
+moonlight,' and 'I wish "Little Sister" could taste this wild-strawberry
+pie.' And then somewhere about the sixth day, when he and Mrs. Lennart
+are at breakfast or dinner or supper, he'll look up suddenly like a man
+just freed from a delirium, and drop his cup, or his knife, or his fork
+'ker-smash' into his plate, and cry out, 'My Heavens, Mary! But it's
+pretty good just for _you_ and _me_ to be alone together again!'"
+
+"And what will Mrs. Lennart say?" interposed Sagner hastily, with a
+great puff of smoke.
+
+For some unaccountable reason Madge Hubert's eyes slopped right over
+with tears.
+
+"What will Mary Lennart say?" she repeated. "Mary Lennart will say:
+'Excuse me, dear, but I wasn't listening. I didn't hear what you said. I
+was trying to remember whether or not I'd put moth-balls in your winter
+suit.' Though he live to be nine hundred and sixty-two, Harold Lennart's
+love-life will never rhyme again. But prose, of course, is a great deal
+easier to live than verse."
+
+As though we had all been discussing the latest foreign theory
+concerning microbes, Sagner jumped up abruptly and began to rummage
+furiously through a pile of German bulletins. When he had found and read
+aloud enough things that he didn't want, he looked up and said
+nonchalantly, "Let's go home."
+
+"All right," said Madge Hubert.
+
+"Maybe you hadn't noticed that I was here," I suggested, "but I think
+that perhaps I should like to go home, too."
+
+As we banged the big, oaken, iron-clamped door behind us, Madge Hubert
+lingered a second and turned her white face up to the waning, yellow
+moonlight. "I think I'd like to go home through the dark woods," she
+decided.
+
+Silently we all turned down into the soft, padded path that ran along
+the piny shore of our little college lake. Sagner of course led the way.
+Madge Hubert followed close. And I tagged along behind as merrily as I
+could. Twice I saw the girl's shoulders shudder.
+
+"Don't you like the woods, Miss Hubert?" I called out experimentally.
+
+She stopped at once and waited for me to catch up with her. There was
+the very faintest possible suggestion of timidity in the action.
+
+"Don't you like the woods?" I repeated.
+
+She shook her head. "No, not especially," she answered. "That is, not
+all woods. There's such a difference. Some woods feel as though they had
+violets in them, and some woods feel as though they had--Indians."
+
+I couldn't help laughing. "How about these woods?" I quizzed.
+
+She gave a little gasp. "I don't believe there are violets in any woods
+to-night," she faltered.
+
+Even as she spoke we heard a swish and a crackle ahead of us and Sagner
+came running back. "Let's go round the other way," he insisted.
+
+"I won't go round the other way," said Madge Hubert. "How perfectly
+absurd! What's the matter?"
+
+Even as she argued we stepped out into the open clearing and met Harold
+Lennart and "Little Sister" singing their way home hand in hand through
+the witching night. For an instant our jovial greetings parried
+together, and then we passed. Not till we had reached Madge Hubert's
+doorstep did I lose utterly the wonderful lilting echo of that young
+contralto voice with the man's older tenor ringing in and out of it like
+a shimmery silver lining.
+
+Ten minutes later in Sagner's cluttered workroom we two men sat and
+stared through our pipe-smoke into each other's evasive eyes.
+
+"Madge didn't--hesitate at all--to tell me a thing or two to-night, did
+she?" Sagner began at last, gruffly.
+
+I smiled. The relaxation made me feel as though my mouth had really got
+a chance at last to sit down.
+
+"Am I so very old?" persisted Sagner. "I'm not forty-five."
+
+I shrugged my shoulders.
+
+Pettishly he reached out and clutched at a scalpel, cleansed it for an
+instant in the flame, and jabbed the point of it into his wrist. The red
+blood spurted instantly.
+
+"There!" he cried out triumphantly. "I have blood in me! It isn't
+embalming fluid at all."
+
+"Oh, quit your fooling, you old death-digger," I said. And then with
+overtense impulse I asked, "Sagner, man, do you really understand Life?"
+
+Sagner's jaw-bones stiffened instantly. "Oh, yes," he exclaimed. "Oh,
+yes, of course I understand Life. That is," he added, with a most
+unusual burst of humility, "I understand everything, I think, except
+just why the gills of a fish--but, oh, bother, you wouldn't know what I
+meant; and there's a new French theory about odylic forces that puzzles
+me a little, and I never, never have been able to understand the
+particular mental processes of a woman who violates the law of species
+by naming her firstborn son for any man but his father. I'm not exactly
+criticising the fish," he added vehemently, "nor the new odylic theory,
+nor even the woman; I'm simply stating baldly and plainly the only three
+things under God's heaven that I can't quite seem to fathom."
+
+"What's all this got to do with Mary Lennart?" I asked impatiently.
+
+"Nothing at all to do with Mary Lennart," he answered proudly. "Mary
+Lennart's son is named Harold." He began to smoke very hard.
+"Considering the real object of our being put here in the world," he
+resumed didactically, "it has always seemed to me that the supreme test
+of character lay in the father's and mother's mental attitude toward
+their young."
+
+"Couldn't you say 'toward their children'?" I protested.
+
+He brushed my interruption aside. "I don't care," he persisted, "how
+much a man loves a woman or how much a woman loves a man--the man who
+deserts his wife during her crucial hour and goes off on a lark to get
+out of the fuss, and the woman who names her firstborn son for any man
+except his father, may qualify in all the available moral tenets, but
+they certainly have slipped up somehow, mentally, in the Real Meaning of
+things. Thank God," he finished quickly, "that neither Harold Lennart
+nor Mary has failed the other like that--no matter what else happens."
+His face whitened. "I stayed with Harold Lennart the night little Harold
+was born," he whispered rather softly.
+
+Before I could think of just the right thing to say, he jumped up
+awkwardly and strode over to the looking-glass, and puffed out his great
+chest and stood and stared at himself.
+
+"I wish I had a son named Bertus Sagner," he said.
+
+"It's all right, of course, to have him named after you," I laughed,
+"but you surely wouldn't choose to have him look like you, would you?"
+
+He turned on me with absurd fierceness. "I wouldn't marry any woman who
+didn't love me enough to want her son to look like me!" he exclaimed.
+
+I was still laughing as I picked up my hat. I was still laughing as I
+stumbled and fumbled down the long, black, steep stairs. Half an hour
+later in my pillows I was still laughing. But I did not get to sleep. My
+mind was too messy. After all, when you really come to think of it, a
+man's brain ought to be made up fresh and clean every night like a hotel
+bed. Sleep seems to be altogether too dainty a thing to nest in any
+brain that strange thoughts have rumpled. Always there must be the white
+sheet of peace edging the blanket of forgetfulness. And perhaps on one
+or two of life's wintrier nights some sort of spiritual comforter thrown
+over all.
+
+It was almost a week before I saw any of the Lennarts again. Then, on a
+Saturday afternoon, as Sagner and I were lolling along the road toward
+town we met Lennart and "Little Sister" togged out in a lot of gorgeous
+golf duds. Lennart was delighted to see us, and "Little Sister" made
+Sagner get down on his knees and tie her shoe lacings twice. I escaped
+with the milder favor of a pat on the wrist.
+
+"We're going out to the Golf Club," beamed Lennart, "to enter for the
+tournament."
+
+"Oh," said Sagner, turning to join them. "Shall we find Mrs. Lennart
+out at the club? Is she going to play?"
+
+A flicker of annoyance went over Lennart's face. "Why, Sagner," he said,
+"how stupid you are! Don't you know that Mary is lame and couldn't walk
+over the golf course now to save her life?"
+
+As Sagner turned back to me, and we passed on out of hearing, I noted
+two red spots flaming hectically in his cheeks.
+
+"It seems to me," he muttered, "that if I had crippled or incapacitated
+my wife in any way so that she couldn't play golf any more, I wouldn't
+exactly take another woman into the tournament. I think that singles
+would just about fit me under the circumstances."
+
+"But Lennart is such a 'splendid fellow,'" I quoted wryly.
+
+"He's a splendid fool," snapped Sagner.
+
+"Why, you darned old copy-cat," I taunted. "It was Miss Hubert who rated
+him as a 'splendid fool.'"
+
+"Oh," said Sagner.
+
+"Oh, yourself," said I.
+
+Involuntarily we turned and watched the two bright figures skirting the
+field. Almost at that instant they stopped, and the girl reached up with
+all her clinging, cloying coquetry and fastened a great, pink wild rose
+into the lapel of the man's coat. Sagner groaned. "Why can't she keep
+her hands off that man?" he muttered; then he shrugged his shoulders
+with a grim little gesture of helplessness. "If a girl doesn't know," he
+said, "that it's wrong to chase another woman's man she's too ignorant
+to be congenial. If she does know it's wrong, she's too--vicious. But
+never mind," he finished abruptly, "Lennart's foolishness will soon
+pass. And meanwhile Mary has her boy. Surely no lad was ever so
+passionately devoted to his mother. They are absolutely inseparable. I
+never saw anything like it." He began to smile again.
+
+Then, because at a turn of the road he saw a bird that reminded him of a
+beast that reminded him of a reptile, he left me unceremoniously and
+went back to the laboratory.
+
+Feeling a bit raw over his desertion, I gave up my walk and decided to
+spend the rest of the afternoon at the library.
+
+At the edge of the reading-room I found Madge Hubert brandishing a
+ferocious-looking paper-knife over the perfectly helpless new magazines.
+With a little cry of delight she summoned me to her by the wave of a
+_Science Monthly_. Looking over her shoulder I beheld with equal delight
+that the canny old Science paper had stuck in Sagner's great, ugly face
+for a frontispiece. At arm's length, with opening and narrowing eyes, I
+studied the perfect, clever likeness: the convict-cropped hair; the
+surly, aggressive, relentlessly busy features; the absurd, overwrought,
+deep-sea sort of eyes. "Great Heavens, Miss Hubert," I said, "did you
+ever see such a funny-looking man?"
+
+The girl winced. "Funny?" she gasped. "Funny? Why, I think Bertus Sagner
+is the most absolutely fascinating-looking man that I ever saw in my
+life." She stared at me in astonishment.
+
+To hide my emotions I fled to the history room. Somewhat to my surprise
+Mrs. Lennart and her little lad were there, delving deep into some
+thrilling grammar-school problem concerning Henry the Eighth. I nodded
+to them, thought they saw me, and slipped into a chair not far behind
+them. There was no one else in the room. Maybe my thirst for historical
+information was not very keen. Certainly every book that I touched
+rustled like a dead, stale autumn leaf. Maybe the yellow bird in the
+acacia tree just outside the window teased me a little bit. Anyway, my
+eyes began only too soon to stray from the text-books before me to the
+little fluttering wisp of Mrs. Lennart's hair that tickled now and then
+across the lad's hovering face. I thought I had never seen a sweeter
+picture than those two cuddling, browsing faces. Surely I had never seen
+one more entrancingly serene.
+
+[Illustration: "Oh, I wish I had a sister," fretted the boy]
+
+Then suddenly I saw the lad push back his books with a whimper of
+discontent.
+
+"What is it?" asked his mother. I could hear her words plainly.
+
+"Oh, I wish I had a sister," fretted the boy.
+
+"Why?" said the mother in perfectly happy surprise.
+
+The lad began to drum on the table. "Why do I want a sister?" he
+repeated a trifle temperishly. "Why, so I could have some one to play
+with and walk with and talk with and study with. Some one jolly and
+merry and frisky."
+
+"Why--what about _me_?" she quizzed. Even at that moment I felt
+reasonably certain that she was still smiling.
+
+The little lad looked bluntly up into her face. "Why you are--_so old_!"
+he said quite distinctly.
+
+I saw the woman's shoulders hunch as though her hands were bracing
+against the table. Then she reached out like a flash and clutched the
+little lad's chin in her fingers. If a voice-tone has any color, hers was
+corpse-white. "I never--let--_you_--know--that--you--were--too--_young_!"
+she almost hissed.
+
+And I shut my eyes.
+
+When I looked up again the woman was gone, and the little lad was
+running after her with a queer, puzzled look on his face.
+
+Life has such a strange way of foreshortening its longest plots with a
+startling, snapped-off ending. Any true story is a tiny bit out of
+rhetorical proportion.
+
+The very next day, under the railroad trestle that hurries us back and
+forth to the big, neighboring city, we found Mrs. Lennart's body in a
+three-foot pool of creek water. It was the little lad's birthday, it
+seems, and he was to have had a supper party, and she had gone to town
+in the early afternoon to make a few festive purchases. A package of
+tinsel-paper bonbons floated safely, I remember, in the pool beside her.
+For some inexplainable reason she had stepped off the train at the wrong
+station and, realizing presumably how her blundering tardiness would
+blight the little lad's pleasure, she had started to walk home across
+the trestle, hoping thereby to beat the later train by as much as half
+an hour. The rest of the tragedy was brutally plain. Somehow between one
+safe, friendly embankment and another she had slipped and fallen. The
+trestle was ticklish walking for even a person who wasn't lame.
+
+Like a slim, white, waxen altar candle snuffed out by a child's
+accidental, gusty pleasure-laugh, we brought her home to the sweet,
+green, peaceful library, with its resolute, indomitable hearthstone.
+
+Out of all the crowding people who jostled me in the hallway I remember
+only--Lennart's ghastly, agonized face.
+
+"Go and tell Sagner," he said.
+
+Even as I crossed the campus the little, fluttery, flickery, hissing
+word "suicide" was in the air. From the graduates' dormitory I heard a
+man's voice argue, "But why did she get off deliberately at the wrong
+station?" Out of the president's kitchen a shrill tone cackled, "Well,
+she ain't been herself, they say, for a good many weeks. And who
+wonders?"
+
+In one corner of the laboratory, close by an open window, I found Sagner
+working, as I had expected, in blissful ignorance.
+
+"What's the matter?" he asked bluntly.
+
+I was very awkward. I was very clumsy. I was very frightened. My face
+was all condensed like a telegram.
+
+"Madge Hubert was right," I stammered. "Mrs. Lennart's--business--has
+gone into the hands of a--receiver."
+
+The glass test tube went brittling out of Sagner's fingers. "Do you mean
+that she is--dead?" he asked.
+
+I nodded.
+
+For the fraction of a moment he rolled back his great, shaggy brows, and
+lifted his face up wide-eyed and staring to the soft, sweet,
+dove-colored, early evening sky. Then his eyelids came scrunching down
+again perfectly tight, and I saw one side of his ugly mouth begin to
+smile a little as a man might smile--as he closes the door--when the
+woman whom he loves comes home again. Then very slowly, very
+methodically, he turned off all the gas-burners and picked up all the
+notebooks, and cleansed all the knives, and just as I thought he was
+almost ready to go with me he started back again and released a fair,
+froth-green lunar moth from a stifling glass jar. Then, with his arm
+across my cringing shoulders, we fumbled our way down the long, creaky
+stairs. And all the time his heart was pounding like an oil-soused
+engine. But I had to bend my head to hear the questions that crumbled
+from his lips.
+
+As we crunched our way across the Lennarts' garden with all the
+horrible, rackety noise that the living inevitably make in the presence
+of the dead, we ran into Lennart's old gardener crouching there in the
+dusk, stuffing cold, white roses into a huge market basket. Almost
+brutally Sagner clutched the old fellow by the arm. "Dunstan," he
+demanded, "how--did--this--thing--happen?"
+
+The old gardener shook with fear and palsy. "There's some," he
+whispered, "as says the lady-dear was out of her mind. A-h, no," he
+protested, "a-h, no. She may ha' been out of her heart, but she weren't
+never out of her mind. There's some," he choked, "as calls it suicide,
+there's some," he gulped, "as calls it accident. I'm a rough-spoke man
+and I don' know the tongue o' ladies, but it weren't suicide, and it
+weren't accident. If it had be'n a man that had done it, you'd 'a'
+called it just a 'didn't-give-a-damn.'"
+
+As we neared the house Sagner spoke only once. "Barney," he asked quite
+cheerfully, "were you ever rude to a woman?"
+
+My hands went instinctively up to my head. "Oh, yes," I hurried, "once
+in the Arizona desert I struck an Indian squaw."
+
+"Does it hurt?" persisted Sagner.
+
+"You mean 'Did it hurt?'" I answered a bit impatiently. "Yes, I think it
+hurt her a little, but not nearly as much as she deserved."
+
+Sagner reached forward and yanked me back by the shoulder. "I mean," he
+growled, "do you remember it now in the middle of the night, and are you
+sorry you did it?"
+
+My heart cramped. "Yes," I acknowledged, "I remember it now in the
+middle of the night. But I am distinctly not sorry that I did it."
+
+"Oh," muttered Sagner.
+
+With the first creaking sound of our steps in the front hall "Little
+Sister" came gliding down the stairway with the stark-faced laddie
+clutching close at her sash. All the sparkle and spangle were gone from
+the girl. Her eyes were like two bruises on the flesh of a calla lily.
+Slipping one ice-cold tremulous hand into mine she closed down her other
+frightened hand over the two. "I'm so very glad you've come," she
+whispered huskily. "Mr. Lennart isn't any comfort to me at all
+to-night--and Mary was the only sister I had." Her voice caught suddenly
+with a rasping sob. "You and Mr. Sagner have always been so kind to me,"
+she plunged on blindly, with soft-drooping eyelids, "and I shall
+probably never see either of you again. We are all going home to-morrow.
+And I expect to be married in July to a boy at home." Her icy fingers
+quickened in mine like the bloom-burst of a sun-scorched Jacqueminot.
+
+"You--expect--to--be--married--in--July to--a--boy--at--home?" cried
+Sagner.
+
+The awful slicing quality in his voice brought Lennart's dreadful face
+peering out through a slit in the library curtains.
+
+"Hush!" I signaled warningly to Sagner. But again his venomous question
+ripped through the quiet of the house.
+
+"You--expected--all--the--time--to--be--married--in--July?"
+
+"Why, yes," said the girl, with the faintest dimpling flicker of a
+smile. "Won't you congratulate me?" Very softly she drew her right hand
+away from me and held it out whitely to Sagner.
+
+"Excuse me," said Sagner, "but I have just--washed--my--hands."
+
+"What?" stammered the girl. "W-h-a-t?"
+
+"Excuse--me," said Sagner, "but I have just--washed my hands."
+
+Then, bowing very, very low, like a small boy at his first
+dancing-school, Sagner passed from the house.
+
+When I finally succeeded in steering my shaking knees and flopping feet
+down the long front steps and the pleasant, rose-bordered path, I found
+Sagner waiting for me at the gateway. Under the basking warmth of that
+mild May night his teeth were chattering as with an ague, and his
+ravenous face was like the face of a man whose soul is utterly glutted,
+but whose body has never even so much as tasted food and drink.
+
+I put both my hands on his shoulders. "Sagner," I begged, "if there is
+anything under God's heaven that you want to-night--go and get it!"
+
+He gave a short, gaspy laugh and wrenched himself free from me. "There
+is nothing _under_ God's heaven--to-night--that I want--except Madge
+Hubert," he said.
+
+In another instant he was gone. With a wh-i-r and a wh-i-s-h and a
+snow-white fragrance, his trail cut abruptly through the apple-bush
+hedge. Then like a huge, black, sweet-scented sponge the darkening night
+seemed to swoop down and wipe him right off the face of the earth.
+
+Very softly I knelt and pressed my ear to the ground. Across the young,
+tremulous, vibrant greensward I heard the throb-throb-throb of a man's
+feet--_running_.
+
+
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's note:
+
+Repeated story titles were removed.
+
+Obvious punctuation errors were corrected.
+
+Page 189, "Patridge" changed to "Partridge" (Partridge Hunter began
+instantly)
+
+Page 257, two lines of text were transposed. The original read:
+
+          one of our big music people picked him up
+          jabberingly to America. But the invitation didn't
+          over there a few months ago and brought him
+          seem to include the wife and baby--genius and
+
+The middle two lines were traded.
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SICK-A-BED LADY***
+
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