1 files changed, 5499 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/3646.txt b/3646.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c61943b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/3646.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,5499 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Dwelling Place of Light, Volume 1
+by Winston Churchill
+
+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 Dwelling Place of Light, Volume 1
+
+Author: Winston Churchill
+
+Release Date: October 15, 2004 [EBook #3646]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DWELLING PLACE OF LIGHT, ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Pat Castevans and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+THE DWELLING-PLACE OF LIGHT
+
+By WINSTON CHURCHILL
+
+
+Volume 1.
+
+
+1917
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+In this modern industrial civilization of which we are sometimes wont to
+boast, a certain glacier-like process may be observed. The bewildered,
+the helpless--and there are many--are torn from the parent rock, crushed,
+rolled smooth, and left stranded in strange places. Thus was Edward
+Bumpus severed and rolled from the ancestral ledge, from the firm granite
+of seemingly stable and lasting things, into shifting shale; surrounded
+by fragments of cliffs from distant lands he had never seen. Thus, at
+five and fifty, he found himself gate-keeper of the leviathan Chippering
+Mill in the city of Hampton.
+
+That the polyglot, smoky settlement sprawling on both sides of an
+historic river should be a part of his native New England seemed at times
+to be a hideous dream; nor could he comprehend what had happened to him,
+and to the world of order and standards and religious sanctions into
+which he had been born. His had been a life of relinquishments. For a
+long time he had clung to the institution he had been taught to believe
+was the rock of ages, the Congregational Church, finally to abandon it;
+even that assuming a form fantastic and unreal, as embodied in the
+edifice three blocks distant from Fillmore Street which he had attended
+for a brief time, some ten years before, after his arrival in Hampton.
+The building, indeed, was symbolic of a decadent and bewildered
+Puritanism in its pathetic attempt to keep abreast with the age, to
+compromise with anarchy, merely achieving a nondescript medley of
+rounded, knob-like towers covered with mulberry-stained shingles. And the
+minister was sensational and dramatic. He looked like an actor, he
+aroused in Edward Bumpus an inherent prejudice that condemned the stage.
+Half a block from this tabernacle stood a Roman Catholic Church,
+prosperous, brazen, serene, flaunting an eternal permanence amidst the
+chaos which had succeeded permanence!
+
+There were, to be sure, other Protestant churches where Edward Bumpus and
+his wife might have gone. One in particular, which he passed on his way
+to the mill, with its terraced steeple and classic facade, preserved all
+the outward semblance of the old Order that once had seemed so enduring
+and secure. He hesitated to join the decorous and dwindling
+congregation,--the remains of a social stratum from which he had been
+pried loose; and--more irony--this street, called Warren, of arching elms
+and white-gabled houses, was now the abiding place of those prosperous
+Irish who had moved thither from the tenements and ruled the city.
+
+On just such a street in the once thriving New England village of Dolton
+had Edward been born. In Dolton Bumpus was once a name of names, rooted
+there since the seventeenth century, and if you had cared to listen he
+would have told you, in a dialect precise but colloquial, the history of
+a family that by right of priority and service should have been destined
+to inherit the land, but whose descendants were preserved to see it
+delivered to the alien. The God of Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards had
+been tried in the balance and found wanting. Edward could never
+understand this; or why the Universe, so long static and immutable, had
+suddenly begun to move. He had always been prudent, but in spite of
+youthful "advantages," of an education, so called, from a sectarian
+college on a hill, he had never been taught that, while prudence may
+prosper in a static world, it is a futile virtue in a dynamic one.
+Experience even had been powerless to impress this upon him. For more
+than twenty years after leaving college he had clung to a clerkship in a
+Dolton mercantile establishment before he felt justified in marrying
+Hannah, the daughter of Elmer Wench, when the mercantile establishment
+amalgamated with a rival--and Edward's services were no longer required.
+During the succession of precarious places with decreasing salaries he
+had subsequently held a terrified sense of economic pressure had
+gradually crept over him, presently growing strong enough, after two
+girls had arrived, to compel the abridgment of the family ....It would be
+painful to record in detail the cracking-off process, the slipping into
+shale, the rolling, the ending up in Hampton, where Edward had now for
+some dozen years been keeper of one of the gates in the frowning brick
+wall bordering the canal,--a position obtained for him by a compassionate
+but not too prudent childhood friend who had risen in life and knew the
+agent of the Chippering Mill, Mr. Claude Ditmar. Thus had virtue failed
+to hold its own.
+
+One might have thought in all these years he had sat within the gates
+staring at the brick row of the company's boarding houses on the opposite
+bank of the canal that reflection might have brought a certain degree of
+enlightenment. It was not so. The fog of Edward's bewilderment never
+cleared, and the unformed question was ever clamouring for an answer--how
+had it happened? Job's cry. How had it happened to an honest and virtuous
+man, the days of whose forebears had been long in the land which the Lord
+their God had given them? Inherently American, though lacking the saving
+quality of push that had been the making of men like Ditmar, he never
+ceased to regard with resentment and distrust the hordes of foreigners
+trooping between the pillars, though he refrained from expressing these
+sentiments in public; a bent, broad shouldered, silent man of that
+unmistakable physiognomy which, in the seventeenth century, almost wholly
+deserted the old England for the new. The ancestral features were there,
+the lips--covered by a grizzled moustache moulded for the precise
+formation that emphasizes such syllables as el, the hooked nose and
+sallow cheeks, the grizzled brows and grey eyes drawn down at the
+corners. But for all its ancestral strength of feature, it was a face
+from which will had been extracted, and lacked the fire and fanaticism,
+the indomitable hardness it should have proclaimed, and which have been
+so characteristically embodied in Mr. St. Gaudens's statue of the
+Puritan. His clothes were slightly shabby, but always neat.
+
+Little as one might have guessed it, however, what may be called a
+certain transmuted enthusiasm was alive in him. He had a hobby almost
+amounting to an obsession, not uncommon amongst Americans who have
+slipped downward in the social scale. It was the Bumpus Family in
+America. He collected documents about his ancestors and relations, he
+wrote letters with a fine, painful penmanship on a ruled block he bought
+at Hartshorne's drug store to distant Bumpuses in Kansas and Illinois and
+Michigan, common descendants of Ebenezer, the original immigrant, of
+Dolton. Many of these western kinsmen answered: not so the magisterial
+Bumpus who lived in Boston on the water side of Beacon, whom likewise he
+had ventured to address,--to the indignation and disgust of his elder
+daughter, Janet.
+
+"Why are you so proud of Ebenezer?" she demanded once, scornfully.
+
+"Why? Aren't we descended from him?"
+
+"How many generations?"
+
+"Seven," said Edward, promptly, emphasizing the last syllable.
+
+Janet was quick at figures. She made a mental calculation.
+
+"Well, you've got one hundred and twenty-seven other ancestors of
+Ebenezer's time, haven't you?"
+
+Edward was a little surprised. He had never thought of this, but his
+ardour for Ebenezer remained undampened. Genealogy--his own--had become
+his religion, and instead of going to church he spent his Sunday mornings
+poring over papers of various degrees of discolouration, making careful
+notes on the ruled block.
+
+This consciousness of his descent from good American stock that had
+somehow been deprived of its heritage, while a grievance to him, was also
+a comfort. It had a compensating side, in spite of the lack of sympathy
+of his daughters and his wife. Hannah Bumpus took the situation more
+grimly: she was a logical projection in a new environment of the
+religious fatalism of ancestors whose God was a God of vengeance. She did
+not concern herself as to what all this vengeance was about; life was a
+trap into which all mortals walked sooner or later, and her particular
+trap had a treadmill,--a round of household duties she kept whirling with
+an energy that might have made their fortunes if she had been the head of
+the family. It is bad to be a fatalist unless one has an incontrovertible
+belief in one's destiny,--which Hannah had not. But she kept the little
+flat with its worn furniture,--which had known so many journeys--as clean
+as a merchant ship of old Salem, and when it was scoured and dusted to
+her satisfaction she would sally forth to Bonnaccossi's grocery and
+provision store on the corner to do her bargaining in competition with
+the Italian housewives of the neighborhood. She was wont, indeed, to
+pause outside for a moment, her quick eye encompassing the coloured
+prints of red and yellow jellies cast in rounded moulds, decked with
+slices of orange, the gaudy boxes of cereals and buckwheat flour, the
+"Brookfield" eggs in packages. Significant, this modern package system,
+of an era of flats with little storage space. She took in at a glance the
+blue lettered placard announcing the current price of butterine, and
+walked around to the other side of the store, on Holmes Street, where the
+beef and bacon hung, where the sidewalk stands were filled, in the
+autumn, with cranberries, apples, cabbages, and spinach.
+
+With little outer complaint she had adapted herself to the constantly
+lowering levels to which her husband had dropped, and if she hoped that
+in Fillmore Street they had reached bottom, she did not say so. Her
+unbetrayed regret was for the loss of what she would have called
+"respectability"; and the giving up, long ago, in the little city which
+had been their home, of the servant girl had been the first wrench. Until
+they came to Hampton they had always lived in houses, and her adaptation
+to a flat had been hard--a flat without a parlour. Hannah Bumpus regarded
+a parlour as necessary to a respectable family as a wedding ring to a
+virtuous woman. Janet and Lise would be growing up, there would be young
+men, and no place to see them save the sidewalks. The fear that haunted
+her came true, and she never was reconciled. The two girls went to the
+public schools, and afterwards, inevitably, to work, and it seemed to be
+a part of her punishment for the sins of her forefathers that she had no
+more control over them than if they had been boarders; while she looked
+on helplessly, they did what they pleased; Janet, whom she never
+understood, was almost as much a source of apprehension as Lise, who
+became part and parcel of all Hannah deemed reprehensible in this new
+America which she refused to recognize and acknowledge as her own
+country.
+
+To send them through the public schools had been a struggle. Hannah used
+to lie awake nights wondering what would happen if Edward became sick. It
+worried her that they never saved any money: try as she would to cut the
+expenses down, there was a limit of decency; New England thrift, hitherto
+justly celebrated, was put to shame by that which the foreigners
+displayed, and which would have delighted the souls of gentlemen of the
+Manchester school. Every once in a while there rose up before her
+fabulous instances of this thrift, of Italians and Jews who, ignorant
+emigrants, had entered the mills only a few years before they, the
+Bumpuses, had come to Hampton, and were now independent property owners.
+Still rankling in Hannah's memory was a day when Lise had returned from
+school, dark and mutinous, with a tale of such a family. One of the
+younger children was a classmate.
+
+"They live on Jordan Street in a house, and Laura has roller skates. I
+don't see why I can't."
+
+This was one of the occasions on which Hannah had given vent to her
+indignation. Lise was fourteen. Her open rebellion was less annoying than
+Janet's silent reproach, but at least she had something to take hold of.
+
+"Well, Lise," she said, shifting the saucepan to another part of the
+stove, "I guess if your father and I had put both you girls in the mills
+and crowded into one room and cooked in a corner, and lived on onions and
+macaroni, and put four boarders each in the other rooms, I guess we could
+have had a house, too. We can start in right now, if you're willing."
+
+But Lise had only looked darker.
+
+"I don't see why father can't make money--other men do."
+
+"Isn't he working as hard as he can to send you to school, and give you a
+chance?"
+
+"I don't want that kind of a chance. There's Sadie Howard at school--she
+don't have to work. She liked me before she found out where I lived..."
+
+There was an element of selfishness in Hannah's mania for keeping busy,
+for doing all their housework and cooking herself. She could not bear to
+have her daughters interfere; perhaps she did not want to give herself
+time to think. Her affection for Edward, such as it was, her loyalty to
+him, was the logical result of a conviction ingrained in early youth that
+marriage was an indissoluble bond; a point of views once having a
+religious sanction, no less powerful now that--all unconsciously--it had
+deteriorated into a superstition. Hannah, being a fatalist, was not
+religious. The beliefs of other days, when she had donned her best dress
+and gone to church on Sundays, had simply lapsed and left--habits. No new
+beliefs had taken their place....
+
+Even after Janet and Lise had gone to work the household never seemed to
+gain that margin of safety for which Hannah yearned. Always, when they
+were on the verge of putting something by, some untoward need or accident
+seemed to arise on purpose to swallow it up: Edward, for instance, had
+been forced to buy a new overcoat, the linoleum on the dining-room floor
+must be renewed, and Lise had had a spell of sickness, losing her
+position in a flower shop. Afterwards, when she became a saleslady in the
+Bagatelle, that flamboyant department store in Faber Street, she earned
+four dollars and a half a week. Two of these were supposed to go into the
+common fund, but there were clothes to buy; Lise loved finery, and Hannah
+had not every week the heart to insist. Even when, on an occasional
+Saturday night the girl somewhat consciously and defiantly flung down the
+money on the dining-room table she pretended not to notice it. But Janet,
+who was earning six dollars as a stenographer in the office of the
+Chippering Mill, regularly gave half of hers.
+
+The girls could have made more money as operatives, but strangely enough
+in the Bumpus family social hopes were not yet extinct.
+
+Sharply, rudely, the cold stillness of the winter mornings was broken by
+agitating waves of sound, penetrating the souls of sleepers. Janet would
+stir, her mind still lingering on some dream, soon to fade into the
+inexpressible, in which she had been near to the fulfilment of a heart's
+desire. Each morning, as the clamour grew louder, there was an interval
+of bewilderment, of revulsion, until the realization came of mill bells
+swinging in high cupolas above the river,--one rousing another. She could
+even distinguish the bells: the deep-toned, penetrating one belonged to
+the Patuxent Mill, over on the west side, while the Arundel had a high,
+ominous reverberation like a fire bell. When at last the clangings had
+ceased she would lie listening to the overtones throbbing in the air,
+high and low, high and low; lie shrinking, awaiting the second summons
+that never failed to terrify, the siren of the Chippering Mill,--to her
+the cry of an insistent, hungry monster demanding its daily food, the
+symbol of a stern, ugly, and unrelenting necessity.
+
+Beside her in the bed she could feel the soft body of her younger sister
+cuddling up to her in fright. In such rare moments as this her heart
+melted towards Lise, and she would fling a protecting arm about her. A
+sense of Lise's need of protection invaded her, a sharp conviction, like
+a pang, that Lise was destined to wander: Janet was never so conscious of
+the feeling as in this dark hour, though it came to her at other times,
+when they were not quarreling. Quarreling seemed to be the normal
+reaction between them.
+
+It was Janet, presently, who would get up, shivering, close the window,
+and light the gas, revealing the room which the two girls shared
+together. Against the middle of one wall was the bed, opposite this a
+travel-dented walnut bureau with a marble top, with an oval mirror into
+which were stuck numerous magazine portraits of the masculine and
+feminine talent adorning the American stage, a preponderance of the music
+hall variety. There were pictures of other artists whom the recondite
+would have recognized as "movie" stars, amazing yet veridic stories of
+whose wealth Lise read in the daily press: all possessed limousines--an
+infallible proof, to Lise, of the measure of artistic greatness. Between
+one of these movie millionaires and an ex-legitimate lady who now found
+vaudeville profitable was wedged the likeness of a popular idol whose
+connection with the footlights would doubtless be contingent upon a
+triumphant acquittal at the hands of a jury of her countrymen, and whose
+trial for murder, in Chicago, was chronicled daily in thousands of
+newspapers and followed by Lise with breathless interest and sympathy.
+She was wont to stare at this lady while dressing and exclaim:--"Say, I
+hope they put it all over that district attorney!"
+
+To such sentiments, though deeply felt by her sister, Janet remained
+cold, though she was, as will be seen, capable of enthusiasms. Lise was a
+truer daughter of her time and country in that she had the national
+contempt for law, was imbued with the American hero-worship of criminals
+that caused the bombardment of Cora Wellman's jail with candy, fruit and
+flowers and impassioned letters. Janet recalled there had been others
+before Mrs. Wellman, caught within the meshes of the law, who had incited
+in her sister a similar partisanship.
+
+It was Lise who had given the note of ornamentation to the bedroom.
+Against the cheap faded lilac and gold wall-paper were tacked
+photo-engravings that had taken the younger sister's fancy: a young man
+and woman, clad in scanty bathing suits, seated side by side in a
+careening sail boat,--the work of a popular illustrator whose manly and
+womanly "types" had become national ideals.
+
+There were other drawings, if not all by the same hand, at least by the
+same school; one, sketched in bold strokes, of a dinner party in a
+stately neo-classic dining-room, the table laden with flowers and silver,
+the bare-throated women with jewels. A more critical eye than Lise's,
+gazing upon this portrayal of the Valhalla of success, might have
+detected in the young men, immaculate in evening dress, a certain effort
+to feel at home, to converse naturally, which their square jaws and
+square shoulders belied. This was no doubt the fault of the artist's
+models, who had failed to live up to the part. At any rate, the sight of
+these young gods of leisure, the contemplation of the stolid butler and
+plush footmen in the background never failed to make Lise's heart beat
+faster.
+
+On the marble of the bureau amidst a litter of toilet articles, and
+bought by Lise for a quarter at the Bagatelle bargain counter, was an
+oval photograph frame from which the silver wash had begun to rub off,
+and the band of purple velvet inside the metal had whitened. The frame
+always contained the current object of Lise's affections, though the
+exhibits--as Janet said--were subject to change without notice. The
+Adonis who now reigned had black hair cut in the prevailing Hampton
+fashion, very long in front and hanging down over his eyes like a
+Scottish terrier's; very long behind, too, but ending suddenly, shaved in
+a careful curve at the neck and around the ears. It had almost the
+appearance of a Japanese wig. The manly beauty of Mr. Max Wylie was of
+the lantern-jawed order, and in his photograph he conveyed the astonished
+and pained air of one who has been suddenly seized by an invisible
+officer of the law from behind. This effect, one presently perceived, was
+due to the high, stiff collar, the "Torture Brand," Janet called it, when
+she and her sister were engaged in one of their frequent controversies
+about life in general: the obvious retort to this remark, which Lise
+never failed to make, was that Janet could boast of no beaux at all.
+
+It is only fair to add that the photograph scarcely did Mr. Wylie
+justice. In real life he did not wear the collar, he was free and easy in
+his manners, sure of his powers of conquest. As Lise observed, he had
+made a home-run with her at Slattery's Riverside Park. "Sadie Hartmann
+was sure sore when I tangoed off with him," she would observe
+reminiscently....
+
+It was Lise's habit to slight her morning toilet, to linger until the
+last minute in bed, which she left in reluctant haste to stand before the
+bureau frantically combing out kinks of the brown hair falling over her
+shoulders before jamming it down across her forehead in the latest mode.
+Thus occupied, she revealed a certain petulant beauty. Like the majority
+of shop-girls, she was small, but her figure was good, her skin white;
+her discontented mouth gave her the touch of piquancy apt to play havoc
+with the work of the world. In winter breakfast was eaten by the light of
+a rococo metal lamp set in the centre of the table. This was to save gas.
+There was usually a rump steak and potatoes, bread and "creamery"
+butterine, and the inevitable New England doughnuts. At six thirty the
+whistles screeched again,--a warning note, the signal for Edward's
+departure; and presently, after a brief respite, the heavy bells once
+more began their clamour, not to die down until ten minutes of seven,
+when the last of the stragglers had hurried through the mill gates.
+
+The Bumpus flat included the second floor of a small wooden house whose
+owner had once been evilly inspired to paint it a livid clay-yellow--as
+though insisting that ugliness were an essential attribute of
+domesticity. A bay ran up the two stories, and at the left were two
+narrow doorways, one for each flat. On the right the house was separated
+from its neighbour by a narrow interval, giving but a precarious light to
+the two middle rooms, the diningroom and kitchen. The very
+unattractiveness of such a home, however, had certain compensations for
+Janet, after the effort of early rising had been surmounted, felt a real
+relief in leaving it; a relief, too, in leaving Fillmore Street, every
+feature of which was indelibly fixed in her mind, opposite was the blind
+brick face of a warehouse, and next to that the converted dwelling house
+that held the shop of A. Bauer, with the familiar replica of a green
+ten-cent trading stamp painted above it and the somewhat ironical
+announcement--when boar frost whitened the pavement--that ice-cold soda
+was to be had within, as well as cigars and tobacco, fruit and candy.
+Then came a tenement, under which two enterprising Greeks by the name of
+Pappas--spelled Papas lower down--conducted a business called "The
+Gentleman," a tailoring, pressing, and dyeing establishment. Janet could
+see the brilliantined black heads of the two proprietors bending over
+their boards, and sometimes they would be lifted to smile at her as she
+passed. The Pappas Brothers were evidently as happy in this drab
+environment as they had ever been on the sunny mountain slopes of Hellas,
+and Janet sometimes wondered at this, for she had gathered from her
+education in the Charming public school that Greece was beautiful.
+
+She was one of the unfortunate who love beauty, who are condemned to
+dwell in exile, unacquainted with what they love. Desire was incandescent
+within her breast. Desire for what? It would have been some relief to
+know. She could not, like Lise, find joy and forgetfulness at dance
+halls, at the "movies," at Slattery's Riverside Park in summer, in "joy
+rides" with the Max Wylies of Hampton. And beside, the Max Wylies were
+afraid of her. If at times she wished for wealth, it was because wealth
+held the magic of emancipation from surroundings against which her soul
+revolted. Vividly idealized but unconfided was the memory of a seaside
+village, the scene of one of the brief sojourns of her childhood, where
+the air was fragrant with the breath of salt marshes, where she recalled,
+through the vines of a porch, a shining glimpse of the sea at the end of
+a little street....
+
+Next to Pappas Brothers was the grey wooden building of Mule Spinners'
+Hall, that elite organization of skilled labour, and underneath it the
+store of Johnny Tiernan, its windows piled up with stoves and stovepipes,
+sheet iron and cooking utensils. Mr. Tiernan, like the Greeks, was happy,
+too: unlike the Greeks, he never appeared to be busy, and yet he throve.
+He was very proud of the business in which he had invested his savings,
+but he seemed to have other affairs lying blithely on his mind, affairs
+of moment to the community, as the frequent presence of the huge
+policemen, aldermen, and other important looking persons bore witness. He
+hailed by name Italians, Greeks, Belgians, Syrians, and "French"; he
+hailed Janet, too, with respectful cheerfulness, taking off his hat. He
+possessed the rare, warm vitality that is irresistible. A native of
+Hampton, still in his thirties, his sharp little nose and twinkling blue
+eyes proclaimed the wisdom that is born and not made; his stiff hair had
+a twist like the bristles in the cleaning rod of a gun.
+
+He gave Janet the odd impression that he understood her. And she did not
+understand herself!
+
+By the time she reached the Common the winter sun, as though red from
+exertion, had begun to dispel the smoke and heavy morning mists. She
+disliked winter, the lumpy brown turf mildewed by the frost, but one day
+she was moved by a quality, hitherto unsuspected, in the delicate tracery
+against the sky made by the slender branches of the great elms and
+maples. She halted on the pavement, her eyes raised, heedless of
+passers-by, feeling within her a throb of the longing that could be so
+oddly and unexpectedly aroused.
+
+Her way lay along Faber Street, the main artery of Hampton, a wide strip
+of asphalt threaded with car tracks, lined on both sides with incongruous
+edifices indicative of a rapid, undiscriminating, and artless prosperity.
+There were long stretches of "ten foot" buildings, so called on account
+of the single story, their height deceptively enhanced by the
+superimposition of huge and gaudy signs, one on top of another,
+announcing the merits of "Stewart's Amberine Ale," of "Cooley's Oats, the
+Digestible Breakfast Food," of graphophones and "spring heeled" shoes,
+tobacco, and naphtha soaps. "No, We don't give Trading Stamps, Our
+Products are Worth all You Pay." These "ten foot" stores were the
+repositories of pianos, automobiles, hardware, and millinery, and
+interspersed amongst them were buildings of various heights; The
+Bagatelle, where Lise worked, the Wilmot Hotel, office buildings, and an
+occasional relic of old Hampton, like that housing the Banner. Here,
+during those months when the sun made the asphalt soft, on a scaffolding
+spanning the window of the store, might be seen a perspiring young man in
+his shirt sleeves chalking up baseball scores for the benefit of a crowd
+below. Then came the funereal, liver-coloured, long-windowed Hinckley
+Block (1872), and on the corner a modern, glorified drugstore thrusting
+forth plate glass bays--two on Faber Street and three on Stanley--filled
+with cameras and candy, hot water bags, throat sprays, catarrh and kidney
+cures, calendars, fountain pens, stationery, and handy alcohol lamps.
+Flanking the sidewalks, symbolizing and completing the heterogeneous and
+bewildering effect of the street were long rows of heavy hemlock trunks,
+unpainted and stripped of bark, with crosstrees bearing webs of wires.
+Trolley cars rattled along, banging their gongs, trucks rumbled across
+the tracks, automobiles uttered frenzied screeches behind startled
+pedestrians. Janet was always galvanized into alertness here, Faber
+Street being no place to dream. By night an endless procession moved up
+one sidewalk and down another, staring hypnotically at the flash-in and
+flash-out electric, signs that kept the breakfast foods and ales, the
+safety razors, soaps, and soups incessantly in the minds of a fickle
+public.
+
+Two blocks from Faber Street was the North Canal, with a granite-paved
+roadway between it and the monotonous row of company boarding houses.
+Even in bright weather Janet felt a sense of oppression here; on dark,
+misty mornings the stern, huge battlements of the mills lining the
+farther bank were menacing indeed, bristling with projections, towers,
+and chimneys, flanked by heavy walls. Had her experience included Europe,
+her imagination might have seized the medieval parallel,--the arched
+bridges flung at intervals across the water, lacking only chains to raise
+them in case of siege. The place was always ominously suggestive of
+impending strife. Janet's soul was a sensitive instrument, but she
+suffered from an inability to find parallels, and thus to translate her
+impressions intellectually. Her feeling about the mills was that they
+were at once fortress and prison, and she a slave driven thither day
+after day by an all-compelling power; as much a slave as those who
+trooped in through the gates in the winter dawn, and wore down, four
+times a day, the oak treads of the circular tower stairs.
+
+The sound of the looms was like heavy rain hissing on the waters of the
+canal.
+
+The administrative offices of a giant mill such as the Chippering in
+Hampton are labyrinthine. Janet did not enter by the great gates her
+father kept, but walked through an open courtyard into a vestibule where,
+day and night, a watchman stood; she climbed iron-shod stairs, passed the
+doorway leading to the paymaster's suite, to catch a glimpse, behind the
+grill, of numerous young men settling down at those mysterious and
+complicated machines that kept so unerring a record, in dollars and
+cents, of the human labour of the operatives. There were other suites for
+the superintendents, for the purchasing agent; and at the end of the
+corridor, on the south side of the mill, she entered the outer of the two
+rooms reserved for Mr. Claude Ditmar, the Agent and general-in-chief
+himself of this vast establishment. In this outer office, behind the rail
+that ran the length of it, Janet worked; from the window where her
+typewriter stood was a sheer drop of eighty feet or so to the river,
+which ran here swiftly through a wide canon whose sides were formed by
+miles and miles of mills, built on buttressed stone walls to retain the
+banks. The prison-like buildings on the farther shore were also of
+colossal size, casting their shadows far out into the waters; while in
+the distance, up and down the stream, could be seen the delicate web of
+the Stanley and Warren Street bridges, with trolley cars like toys
+gliding over them, with insect pedestrians creeping along the footpaths.
+
+Mr. Ditmar's immediate staff consisted of Mr. Price, an elderly bachelor
+of tried efficiency whose peculiar genius lay in computation, of a young
+Mr. Caldwell who, during the four years since he had left Harvard, had
+been learning the textile industry, of Miss Ottway, and Janet. Miss
+Ottway was the agent's private stenographer, a strongly built, capable
+woman with immense reserves seemingly inexhaustible. She had a deep,
+masculine voice, not unmusical, the hint of a masculine moustache, a
+masculine manner of taking to any job that came to hand. Nerves were
+things unknown to her: she was granite, Janet tempered steel. Janet was
+the second stenographer, and performed, besides, any odd tasks that might
+be assigned.
+
+There were, in the various offices of the superintendents, the paymaster
+and purchasing agent, other young women stenographers whose companionship
+Janet, had she been differently organized, might have found congenial,
+but something in her refused to dissolve to their proffered friendship.
+She had but one friend,--if Eda Rawle, who worked in a bank, and whom she
+had met at a lunch counter by accident, may be called so. As has been
+admirably said in another language, one kisses, the other offers a cheek:
+Janet offered the cheek. All unconsciously she sought a relationship
+rarely to be found in banks and business offices; would yield herself to
+none other. The young women stenographers in the Chippering Mill,
+respectable, industrious girls, were attracted by a certain indefinable
+quality, but finding they made no progress in their advances, presently
+desisted they were somewhat afraid of her; as one of them remarked, "You
+always knew she was there." Miss Lottie Meyers, who worked in the office
+of Mr. Orcutt, the superintendent across the hall, experienced a brief
+infatuation that turned to hate. She chewed gum incessantly, Janet found
+her cheap perfume insupportable; Miss Meyers, for her part, declared that
+Janet was "queer" and "stuck up," thought herself better than the rest of
+them. Lottie Meyers was the leader of a group of four or five which
+gathered in the hallway at the end of the noon hour to enter animatedly
+into a discussion of waists, hats, and lingerie, to ogle and exchange
+persiflages with the young men of the paymaster's corps, to giggle, to
+relate, sotto voce, certain stories that ended invariably in hysterical
+laughter. Janet detested these conversations. And the sex question,
+subtly suggested if not openly dealt with, to her was a mystery over
+which she did not dare to ponder, terrible, yet too sacred to be
+degraded. Her feelings, concealed under an exterior of self-possession,
+deceptive to the casual observer, sometimes became molten, and she was
+frightened by a passion that made her tremble--a passion by no means
+always consciously identified with men, embodying all the fierce
+unexpressed and unsatisfied desires of her life.
+
+These emotions, often suggested by some hint of beauty, as of the sun
+glinting on the river on a bright blue day, had a sudden way of
+possessing her, and the longing they induced was pain. Longing for what?
+For some unimagined existence where beauty dwelt, and light, where the
+ecstasy induced by these was neither moiled nor degraded; where shame, as
+now, might not assail her. Why should she feel her body hot with shame,
+her cheeks afire? At such moments she would turn to the typewriter, her
+fingers striking the keys with amazing rapidity, with extraordinary
+accuracy and force,--force vaguely disturbing to Mr. Claude Ditmar as he
+entered the office one morning and involuntarily paused to watch her. She
+was unaware of his gaze, but her colour was like a crimson signal that
+flashed to him and was gone. Why had he never noticed her before? All
+these months, for more than a year, perhaps,--she had been in his office,
+and he had not so much as looked at her twice. The unguessed answer was
+that he had never surprised her in a vivid moment. He had a flair for
+women, though he had never encountered any possessing the higher values,
+and it was characteristic of the plane of his mental processes that this
+one should remind him now of a dark, lithe panther, tensely strung,
+capable of fierceness. The pain of having her scratch him would be
+delectable.
+
+When he measured her it was to discover that she was not so little, and
+the shoulder-curve of her uplifted arms, as her fingers played over the
+keys, seemed to belie that apparent slimness. And had he not been
+unacquainted with the subtleties of the French mind and language, he
+might have classed her as a fausse maigre. Her head was small, her hair
+like a dark, blurred shadow clinging round it. He wanted to examine her
+hair, to see whether it would not betray, at closer range, an
+imperceptible wave,--but not daring to linger he went into his office,
+closed the door, and sat down with a sensation akin to weakness, somewhat
+appalled by his discovery, considerably amazed at his previous stupidity.
+He had thought of Janet--when she had entered his mind at all--as
+unobtrusive, demure; now he recognized this demureness as repression. Her
+qualities needed illumination, and he, Claude Ditmar, had seen them
+struck with fire. He wondered whether any other man had been as
+fortunate.
+
+Later in the morning, quite casually, he made inquiries of Miss Ottway,
+who liked Janet and was willing to do her a good turn.
+
+"Why, she's a clever girl, Mr. Ditmar, a good stenographer, and
+conscientious in her work. She's very quick, too.
+
+"Yes, I've noticed that," Ditmar replied, who was quite willing to have
+it thought that his inquiry was concerned with Janet's aptitude for
+business.
+
+"She keeps to herself and minds her own affairs. You can see she comes of
+good stock." Miss Ottway herself was proud of her New England blood. "Her
+father, you know, is the gatekeeper down there. He's been unfortunate."
+
+"You don't say--I didn't connect her with him. Fine looking old man. A
+friend of mine who recommended him told me he'd seen better days ...."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+In spite of the surprising discovery in his office of a young woman of
+such a disquieting, galvanic quality, it must not be supposed that Mr.
+Claude Ditmar intended to infringe upon a fixed principle. He had
+principles. For him, as for the patriarchs and householders of Israel,
+the seventh commandment was only relative, yet hitherto he had held
+rigidly to that relativity, laying down the sound doctrine that women and
+business would not mix: or, as he put it to his intimates, no sensible
+man would fool with a girl in his office. Hence it may be implied that
+Mr. Ditmar's experiences with the opposite sex had been on a property
+basis. He was one of those busy and successful persons who had never
+appreciated or acquired the art of quasi-platonic amenities, whose idea
+of a good time was limited to discreet excursions with cronies, likewise
+busy and successful persons who, by reason of having married early and
+unwisely, are strangers to the delights of that higher social intercourse
+chronicled in novels and the public prints. If one may conveniently
+overlook the joys of a companionship of the soul, it is quite as possible
+to have a taste in women as in champagne or cigars. Mr. Ditmar preferred
+blondes, and he liked them rather stout, a predilection that had led him
+into matrimony with a lady of this description: a somewhat sticky,
+candy-eating lady with a mania for card parties, who undoubtedly would
+have dyed her hair if she had lived. He was not inconsolable, but he had
+had enough of marriage to learn that it demands a somewhat exorbitant
+price for joys otherwise more reasonably to be obtained.
+
+He was left a widower with two children, a girl of thirteen and a boy of
+twelve, both somewhat large for their ages. Amy attended the only private
+institution for the instruction of her sex of which Hampton could boast;
+George continued at a public school. The late Mrs. Ditmar for some years
+before her demise had begun to give evidence of certain restless
+aspirations to which American ladies of her type and situation seem
+peculiarly liable, and with a view to their ultimate realization she had
+inaugurated a Jericho-like campaign. Death had released Ditmar from its
+increasing pressure. For his wife had possessed that admirable substitute
+for character, persistence, had been expert in the use of importunity,
+often an efficient weapon in the hands of the female economically
+dependent. The daughter of a defunct cashier of the Hampton National
+Bank, when she had married Ditmar, then one of the superintendents of the
+Chippering and already a marked man, she had deemed herself fortunate
+among women, looking forward to a life of ease and idleness and candy in
+great abundance,--a dream temporarily shattered by the unforeseen
+discomfort of bringing two children into the world, with an interval of
+scarcely a year between them. Her parents from an excess of native
+modesty having failed to enlighten her on this subject, her feelings were
+those of outraged astonishment, and she was quite determined not to
+repeat the experience a third time. Knowledge thus belatedly acquired,
+for a while she abandoned herself to the satisfaction afforded by the
+ability to take a commanding position in Hampton society, gradually to
+become aware of the need of a more commodious residence. In a certain
+kind of intuition she was rich. Her husband had meanwhile become Agent of
+the Chippering Mill, and she strongly suspected that his prudent
+reticence on the state of his finances was the best indication of an
+increasing prosperity. He had indeed made money, been given many
+opportunities for profitable investments; but the argument for social
+pre-eminence did not appeal to him: tears and reproaches, recriminations,
+when frequently applied, succeeded better; like many married men, what he
+most desired was to be let alone; but in some unaccountable way she had
+come to suspect that his preference for blondes was of a more liberal
+nature than at first, in her innocence, she had realized. She was
+jealous, too, of his cronies, in spite of the fact that these gentlemen,
+when they met her, treated her with an elaborate politeness; and she
+accused him with entire justice of being more intimate with them than
+with her, with whom he was united in holy bonds. The inevitable result of
+these tactics was the modern mansion in the upper part of Warren Street,
+known as the "residential" district. Built on a wide lot, with a garage
+on one side to the rear, with a cement driveway divided into squares, and
+a wall of democratic height separating its lawn from the sidewalk, the
+house may for the present be better imagined than described.
+
+A pious chronicler of a more orthodox age would doubtless have deemed it
+a judgment that Cora Ditmar survived but two years to enjoy the glories
+of the Warren Street house. For a while her husband indulged in a foolish
+optimism, only to learn that the habit of matrimonial blackmail, once
+acquired, is not easily shed. Scarcely had he settled down to the belief
+that by the gratification of her supreme desire he had achieved
+comparative peace, than he began to suspect her native self-confidence of
+cherishing visions of a career contemplating nothing less than the
+eventual abandonment of Hampton itself as a field too limited for her
+social talents and his business ability and bank account--at which she
+was pleased to hint. Hampton suited Ditmar, his passion was the
+Chippering Mill; and he was in process of steeling himself to resist,
+whatever the costs, this preposterous plan when he was mercifully
+released by death. Her intention of sending the children away to acquire
+a culture and finish Hampton did not afford,--George to Silliston
+Academy, Amy to a fashionable boarding school,--he had not opposed, yet
+he did not take the idea with sufficient seriousness to carry it out. The
+children remained at home, more or less--increasingly less--in the charge
+of an elderly woman who acted as housekeeper.
+
+Ditmar had miraculously regained his freedom. And now, when he made trips
+to New York and Boston, combining business with pleasure, there were no
+questions asked, no troublesome fictions to be composed. More frequently
+he was in Boston, where he belonged to a large and comfortable club, not
+too exacting in regard to membership, and here he met his cronies and
+sometimes planned excursions with them, automobile trips in summer to the
+White Mountains or choice little resorts to spend Sundays and holidays,
+generally taking with them a case of champagne and several bags of golf
+sticks. He was fond of shooting, and belonged to a duck club on the Cape,
+where poker and bridge were not tabooed. To his intimates he was known as
+"Dit." Nor is it surprising that his attitude toward women had become in
+general one of resentment; matrimony he now regarded as unmitigated
+folly. At five and forty he was a vital, dominating, dust-coloured man
+six feet and half an inch in height, weighing a hundred and ninety
+pounds, and thus a trifle fleshy. When relaxed, and in congenial company,
+he looked rather boyish, an aspect characteristic of many American
+business men of to-day.
+
+His head was large, he wore his hair short, his features also proclaimed
+him as belonging to a modern American type in that they were not
+clear-cut, but rather indefinable; a bristling, short-cropped moustache
+gave him a certain efficient, military look which, when introduced to
+strangers as "Colonel," was apt to deceive them into thinking him an army
+officer. The title he had once received as a member of the staff of the
+governor of the state, and was a tribute to a gregariousness and
+political influence rather than to a genius for the art of war. Ex
+officio, as the agent of the Chippering Mill and a man of substance to
+boot, he was "in" politics, hail fellow well met with and an individual
+to be taken into account by politicians from the governor and member of
+congress down. He was efficient, of course; he had efficient hands and
+shrewd, efficient eyes, and the military impression was deepened by his
+manner of dealing with people, his conversation being yea, yea and nay,
+nay,--save with his cronies and those of the other sex from whom he had
+something to gain. His clothes always looked new, of pronounced patterns
+and light colours set aside for him by an obsequious tailor in Boston.
+
+If a human being in such an enviable position as that of agent of the
+Chippering Mill can be regarded as property, it might be said that Mr.
+Claude Ditmar belonged to the Chipperings of Boston, a family still
+owning a controlling interest in the company. His loyalty to them and to
+the mill he so ably conducted was the great loyalty of his life. For
+Ditmar, a Chippering could do no wrong. It had been the keen eye of Mr.
+Stephen Chippering that first had marked him, questioned him, recognized
+his ability, and from the moment of that encounter his advance had been
+rapid. When old Stephen had been called to his fathers, Ditmar's
+allegiance was automatically, as it were, transferred to the two sons,
+George and Worthington, already members of the board of directors.
+Sometimes Ditmar called on them at their homes, which stood overlooking
+the waters of the Charles River Basin. The attitude toward him of the
+Chipperings and their wives was one of an interesting adjustment of
+feudalism to democracy. They were fond of him, grateful to him, treating
+him with a frank camaraderie that had in it not the slightest touch of
+condescension, but Ditmar would have been the first to recognize that
+there were limits to the intimacy. They did not, for instance--no doubt
+out of consideration--invite him to their dinner parties or take him to
+their club, which was not the same as that to which he himself belonged.
+He felt no animus. Nor would he, surprising though it may seem, have
+changed places with the Chipperings. At an early age, and quite
+unconsciously, he had accepted property as the ruling power of the
+universe, and when family was added thereto the combination was nothing
+less than divine.
+
+There were times, especially during the long winters, when life became
+almost unbearable for Janet, and she was seized by a desire to run away
+from Fillmore Street, from the mills, from Hampton itself. Only she did
+not know where to go, or how to get away. She was convinced of the
+existence in the world of delightful spots where might be found congenial
+people with whom it would be a joy to talk. Fillmore Street, certainly,
+did not contain any such. The office was not so bad. It is true that in
+the mornings, as she entered West Street, the sight of the dark facade of
+the fortress-like structure, emblematic of the captivity in which she
+passed her days, rarely failed to arouse in her sensations of oppression
+and revolt; but here, at least, she discovered an outlet for her
+energies; she was often too busy to reflect, and at odd moments she could
+find a certain solace and companionship in the river, so intent, so
+purposeful, so beautiful, so undisturbed by the inconcinnity, the clatter
+and confusion of Hampton as it flowed serenely under the bridges and
+between the mills toward the sea. Toward the sea!
+
+It was when, at night, she went back to Fillmore Street--when she thought
+of the monotony, yes, and the sordidness of home, when she let herself in
+at the door and climbed the dark and narrow stairway, that her feet grew
+leaden. In spite of the fact that Hannah was a good housekeeper and
+prided herself on cleanliness, the tiny flat reeked with the smell of
+cooking, and Janet, from the upper hall, had a glimpse of a thin, angular
+woman with a scrawny neck, with scant grey hair tightly drawn into a
+knot, in a gingham apron covering an old dress bending over the kitchen
+stove. And occasionally, despite a resentment that fate should have dealt
+thus inconsiderately with the family, Janet felt pity welling within her.
+After supper, when Lise had departed with her best young man, Hannah
+would occasionally, though grudgingly, permit Janet to help her with the
+dishes.
+
+"You work all day, you have a right to rest."
+
+"But I don't want to rest," Janet would declare, and rub the dishes the
+harder. With the spirit underlying this protest, Hannah sympathized.
+Mother and daughter were alike in that both were inarticulate, but Janet
+had a secret contempt for Hannah's uncomplaining stoicism. She loved her
+mother, in a way, especially at certain times,--though she often wondered
+why she was unable to realize more fully the filial affection of
+tradition; but in moments of softening, such as these, she was filled
+with rage at the thought of any woman endowed with energy permitting
+herself to be overtaken and overwhelmed by such a fate as Hannah's:
+divorce, desertion, anything, she thought, would have been
+better--anything but to be cheated out of life. Feeling the fires of
+rebellion burning hotly within her,--rebellion against environment and
+driving necessity she would glance at her mother and ask herself whether
+it were possible that Hannah had ever known longings, had ever been wrung
+by inexpressible desires,--desires in which the undiscovered spiritual
+was so alarmingly compounded with the undiscovered physical. She would
+have died rather than speak to Hannah of these unfulfilled experiences,
+and the mere thought of confiding them to any person appalled her. Even
+if there existed some wonderful, understanding being to whom she might be
+able thus to empty her soul, the thought of the ecstasy of that kenosis
+was too troubling to be dwelt upon.
+
+She had tried reading, with unfortunate results,--perhaps because no
+Virgil had as yet appeared to guide her through the mysteries of that
+realm. Her schooling had failed to instil into her a discriminating taste
+for literature; and when, on occasions, she had entered the Public
+Library opposite the Common it had been to stare hopelessly at rows of
+books whose authors and titles offered no clue to their contents. Her few
+choices had not been happy, they had failed to interest and thrill...
+
+Of the Bumpus family Lise alone found refuge, distraction, and excitement
+in the vulgar modern world by which they were surrounded, and of whose
+heedlessness and remorselessness they were the victims. Lise went out
+into it, became a part of it, returning only to sleep and eat,--a
+tendency Hannah found unaccountable, and against which even her stoicism
+was not wholly proof. Scarce an evening went by without an expression of
+uneasiness from Hannah.
+
+"She didn't happen to mention where she was going, did she, Janet?"
+Hannah would query, when she had finished her work and put on her
+spectacles to read the Banner.
+
+"To the movies, I suppose," Janet would reply. Although well aware that
+her sister indulged in other distractions, she thought it useless to add
+to Hannah's disquietude. And if she had little patience with Lise, she
+had less with the helpless attitude of her parents.
+
+"Well," Hannah would add, "I never can get used to her going out nights
+the way she does, and with young men and women I don't know anything
+about. I wasn't brought up that way. But as long as she's got to work for
+a living I guess there's no help for it."
+
+And she would glance at Edward. It was obviously due to his inability
+adequately to cope with modern conditions that his daughters were forced
+to toil, but this was the nearest she ever came to reproaching him. If he
+heard, he acquiesced humbly, and in silence: more often than not he was
+oblivious, buried in the mazes of the Bumpus family history, his papers
+spread out on the red cloth of the dining-room table, under the lamp.
+Sometimes in his simplicity and with the enthusiasm that demands
+listeners he would read aloud to them a letter, recently received from a
+distant kinsman, an Alpheus Bumpus, let us say, who had migrated to
+California in search of wealth and fame, and who had found neither. In
+spite of age and misfortunes, the liberal attitude of these western
+members of the family was always a matter of perplexity to Edward.
+
+"He tells me they're going to give women the ballot,--doesn't appear to
+be much concerned about his own womenfolks going to the polls."
+
+"Why shouldn't they, if they want to?" Janet would exclaim, though she
+had given little thought to the question.
+
+Edward would mildly ignore this challenge.
+
+"He has a house on what they call Russian Hill, and he can watch the
+vessels as they come in from Japan," he would continue in his precise
+voice, emphasizing admirably the last syllables of the words "Russian,"
+"vessels," and "Japan." "Wouldn't you like to see the letter?"
+
+To do Hannah justice, although she was quite incapable of sharing his
+passion, she frequently feigned an interest, took the letter, presently
+handing it on to Janet who, in deciphering Alpheus's trembling
+calligraphy, pondered over his manifold woes. Alpheus's son, who had had
+a good position in a sporting goods establishment on Market Street, was
+sick and in danger of losing it, the son's wife expecting an addition to
+the family, the house on Russian Hill mortgaged. Alpheus, a veteran of
+the Civil War, had been for many years preparing his reminiscences, but
+the newspapers nowadays seemed to care nothing for matters of solid
+worth, and so far had refused to publish them.... Janet, as she read,
+reflected that these letters invariably had to relate tales of failures,
+of disappointed hopes; she wondered at her father's perennial interest in
+failures,--provided they were those of his family; and the next evening,
+as he wrote painfully on his ruled paper, she knew that he in turn was
+pouring out his soul to Alpheus, recounting, with an emotion by no means
+unpleasurable, to this sympathetic but remote relative the story of his
+own failure!
+
+If the city of Hampton was emblematic of our modern world in which
+haphazardness has replaced order, Fillmore Street may be likened to a
+back eddy of the muddy and troubled waters, in which all sorts of flotsam
+and jetsam had collected. Or, to find perhaps an even more striking
+illustration of the process that made Hampton in general and Fillmore
+Street in particular, one had only to take the trolley to Glendale, the
+Italian settlement on the road leading to the old New England village of
+Shrewsbury. Janet sometimes walked there, alone or with her friend Eda
+Rawle. Disintegration itself--in a paradoxically pathetic attempt at
+reconstruction--had built Glendale. Human hands, Italian hands. Nor,
+surprising though it may seem, were these descendants of the people of
+the Renaissance in the least offended by their handiwork. When the
+southern European migration had begun and real estate became valuable,
+one by one the more decorous edifices of the old American order had been
+torn down and carried piecemeal by sons of Italy to the bare hills of
+Glendale, there to enter into new combinations representing, to an eye
+craving harmony, the last word of a chaos, of a mental indigestion, of a
+colour scheme crying aloud to heaven for retribution. Standing alone and
+bare amidst its truck gardens, hideous, extreme, though typical of the
+entire settlement, composed of fragments ripped from once-appropriate
+settings, is a house with a tiny body painted strawberry-red, with
+scroll-work shutters a tender green; surmounting the structure and almost
+equalling it in size is a sky-blue cupola, once the white crown of the
+Sutter mansion, the pride of old Hampton. The walls of this dwelling were
+wrested from the sides of Mackey's Tavern, while the shutters for many
+years adorned the parsonage of the old First Church. Similarly, in
+Hampton and in Fillmore Street, lived in enforced neighbourliness human
+fragments once having their places in crystallized communities where
+existence had been regarded as solved. Here there was but one order,--if
+such it may be called,--one relationship, direct, or indirect, one
+necessity claiming them all--the mills.
+
+Like the boards forming the walls of the shacks at Glendale, these human
+planks torn from an earlier social structure were likewise warped, which
+is to say they were dominated by obsessions. Edward's was the Bumpus
+family; and Chris Auermann, who lived in the flat below, was convinced
+that the history of mankind is a deplorable record of havoc caused by
+women. Perhaps he was right, but the conviction was none the less an
+obsession. He came from a little village near Wittenburg that has
+scarcely changed since Luther's time. Like most residents of Hampton who
+did not work in the mills, he ministered to those who did, or to those
+who sold merchandise to the workers, cutting their hair in his barber
+shop on Faber Street.
+
+The Bumpuses, save Lise, clinging to a native individualism and pride,
+preferred isolation to companionship with the other pieces of driftwood
+by which they were surrounded, and with which the summer season compelled
+a certain enforced contact. When the heat in the little dining-room grew
+unbearable, they were driven to take refuge on the front steps shared in
+common with the household of the barber. It is true that the barber's
+wife was a mild hausfrau who had little to say, and that their lodgers,
+two young Germans who worked in the mills, spent most of their evenings
+at a bowling club; but Auermann himself, exhaling a strong odour of bay
+rum, would arrive promptly at quarter past eight, take off his coat, and
+thus, as it were stripped for action, would turn upon the defenceless
+Edward.
+
+"Vill you mention one great man--yoost one--who is not greater if the
+vimmen leave him alone?" he would demand. "Is it Anthony, the conqueror
+of Egypt and the East? I vill show you Cleopatra. Und Burns, and
+Napoleon, the greatest man what ever lived--vimmen again. I tell you
+there is no Elba, no St. Helena if it is not for the vimmen. Und vat vill
+you say of Goethe?"
+
+Poor Edward could think of nothing to say of Goethe.
+
+"He is great, I grant you," Chris would admit, "but vat is he if the
+vimmen leave him alone? Divine yoost that." And he would proceed to cite
+endless examples of generals and statesmen whose wives or mistresses had
+been their bane. Futile Edward's attempts to shift the conversation to
+the subject of his own obsession; the German was by far the more
+aggressive, he would have none of it. Perhaps if Edward had been willing
+to concede that the Bumpuses had been brought to their present lowly
+estate by the sinister agency of the fair sex Chris might conditionally
+have accepted the theme. Hannah, contemptuously waving a tattered palm
+leaf fan, was silent; but on one occasion Janet took away the barber's
+breath by suddenly observing:--"You never seem to think of the women
+whose lives are ruined by men, Mr. Auermann."
+
+It was unheard-of, this invasion of a man's argument by a woman, and by a
+young woman at that. He glared at her through his spectacles, took them
+off, wiped them, replaced them, and glared at her again. He did not like
+Janet; she was capable of what may be called a speaking silence, and he
+had never been wholly unaware of her disapproval and ridicule. Perhaps he
+recognized in her, instinctively, the potential qualities of that
+emerging modern woman who to him was anathema.
+
+"It is somethings I don't think about," he said.
+
+He was a wizened little man with faience-blue eyes, and sat habitually
+hunched up with his hands folded across his shins.
+
+"Nam fuit ante Helenam"--as Darwin quotes. Toward all the masculine
+residents of Fillmore Street, save one, the barber's attitude was one of
+unconcealed scorn for an inability to recognize female perfidy. With
+Johnny Tiernan alone he refused to enter the lists. When the popular
+proprietor of the tin shop came sauntering along the sidewalk with nose
+uptilted, waving genial greetings to the various groups on the steps,
+Chris Auermann's expression would suddenly change to one of fatuous
+playfulness.
+
+"What's this I hear about giving the girls the vote, Chris?" Johnny would
+innocently inquire, winking at Janet, invariably running his hand through
+the wiry red hair that resumed its corkscrew twist as soon as he released
+it. And Chris would as invariably reply:--"You have the dandruffs--yes?
+You come to my shop, I give you somethings...."
+
+Sometimes the barber, in search of a more aggressive adversary than
+Edward, would pay visits, when as likely as not another neighbour with
+profound convictions and a craving for proselytes would swoop down on the
+defenceless Bumpuses: Joe Shivers, for instance, who lived in one of the
+tenements above the cleaning and dyeing establishment kept by the Pappas
+Bros., and known as "The Gentleman." In the daytime Mr. Shivers was a
+model of acquiescence in a system he would have designated as one of
+industrial feudalism, his duty being to examine the rolls of cloth as
+they came from the looms of the Arundel Mill, in case of imperfections
+handing them over to the women menders: at night, to borrow a vivid
+expression from Lise, he was "batty in the belfry" on the subject of
+socialism. Unlike the barber, whom he could not abide, for him the
+cleavage of the world was between labour and capital instead of man and
+woman; his philosophy was stern and naturalistic; the universe--the
+origin of which he did not discuss--just an accidental assemblage of
+capricious forces over which human intelligence was one day to triumph.
+Squatting on the lowest step, his face upturned, by the light of the arc
+sputtering above the street he looked like a yellow frog, his eager eyes
+directed toward Janet, whom he suspected of intelligence.
+
+"If there was a God, a nice, kind, all-powerful God, would he permit what
+happened in one of the loom-rooms last week? A Polak girl gets her hair
+caught in the belt pfff!" He had a marvellously realistic gift when it
+came to horrors: Janet felt her hair coming out by the roots. Although
+she never went to church, she did not like to think that no God existed.
+Of this Mr. Shivers was very positive. Edward, too, listened uneasily,
+hemmed and hawed, making ineffectual attempts to combat Mr. Shivers's
+socialism with a deeply-rooted native individualism that Shivers declared
+as defunct as Christianity.
+
+"If it is possible for the workingman to rise under a capitalistic
+system, why do you not rise, then? Why do I not rise? I'm as good as
+Ditmar, I'm better educated, but we're all slaves. What right has a man
+to make you and me work for him just because he has capital?"
+
+"Why, the right of capital," Edward would reply.
+
+Mr. Shivers, with the manner of one dealing with an incurable romanticism
+and sentimentality, would lift his hands in despair. And in spite of the
+fact that Janet detested him, he sometimes exercised over her a
+paradoxical fascination, suggesting as he did unexplored intellectual
+realms. She despised her father for not being able to crush the little
+man. Edward would make pathetic attempts to capture the role Shivers had
+appropriated, to be the practical party himself, to convict Shivers of
+idealism. Socialism scandalized him, outraged, even more than atheism,
+something within him he held sacred, and he was greatly annoyed because
+he was unable adequately to express this feeling.
+
+"You can't change human nature, Mr. Shivers," Edward would insist in his
+precise but ineffectual manner. "We all want property, you would accept a
+fortune if it was offered to you, and so should I. Americans will never
+become socialists."
+
+"But look at me, wasn't I born in Meriden, Connecticut? Ain't that Yankee
+enough for you?" Thus Mr. Shivers sought blandly to confound him.
+
+A Yankee Shades of the Pilgrim fathers, of seven, generations of
+Bumpuses! A Yankee who used his hands in that way, a Yankee with a nose
+like that, a Yankee with a bald swathe down the middle of his crown and
+bunches of black, moth-eaten hair on either side! But Edward, too polite
+to descend to personalities, was silent....
+
+In brief, this very politeness of Edward's, which his ancestors would
+have scorned, this consideration and lack of self-assertion made him the
+favourite prey of the many "characters" in Fillmore Street whose sanity
+had been disturbed by pressure from above, in whose systems had lodged
+the germs of those exotic social doctrines floating so freely in the air
+of our modern industrial communities .... Chester Glenn remains for a
+passing mention. A Yankee of Yankees, this, born on a New Hampshire farm,
+and to the ordinary traveller on the Wigmore branch of the railroad just
+a good-natured, round-faced, tobacco-chewing brakeman who would take a
+seat beside ladies of his acquaintance aid make himself agreeable until
+it was time to rise and bawl out, in the approved manner of his
+profession, the name of the next station. Fillmore Street knew that the
+flat visored cap which his corporation compelled him to wear covered a
+brain into which had penetrated the maggot of the Single Tax. When he
+encountered Mr. Shivers or Auermann the talk became coruscating..
+
+Eda Rawle, Janet's solitary friend of these days, must also be mentioned,
+though the friendship was merely an episode in Janet's life. Their first
+meeting was at Grady's quick-lunch counter in Faber Street, which they
+both frequented at one time, and the fact that each had ordered a ham
+sandwich, a cup of coffee, and a confection--new to Grady's--known as a
+Napoleon had led to conversation.
+
+Eda, of course, was the aggressor; she was irresistibly drawn, she would
+not be repulsed. A stenographer in the Wessex National Bank, she boarded
+with a Welsh family in Spruce Street; matter-of-fact, plodding,
+commonplace, resembling--as Janet thought--a horse, possessing, indeed
+many of the noble qualities of that animal, she might have been thought
+the last person in the world to discern and appreciate in Janet the
+hidden elements of a mysterious fire. In appearance Miss Rawle was of a
+type not infrequent in Anglo-Saxon lands, strikingly blonde, with high
+malar bones, white eyelashes, and eyes of a metallic blue, cheeks of an
+amazing elasticity that worked rather painfully as she talked or smiled,
+drawing back inadequate lips, revealing long, white teeth and vivid gums.
+It was the craving in her for romance Janet assuaged; Eda's was the love
+content to pour out, that demands little. She was capable of immolation.
+Janet was by no means ungrateful for the warmth of such affection, though
+in moments conscious of a certain perplexity and sadness because she was
+able to give such a meagre return for the wealth of its offering.
+
+In other moments, when the world seemed all disorder and chaos,--as Mr.
+Shivers described it,--or when she felt within her, like demons, those
+inexpressible longings and desires, leaping and straining, pulling her,
+almost irresistibly, she knew not whither, Eda shone forth like a light
+in the darkness, like the beacon of a refuge and a shelter. Eda had faith
+in her, even when Janet had lost faith in herself: she went to Eda in the
+same spirit that Marguerite went to church; though she, Janet, more
+resembled Faust, being--save in these hours of lowered vitality--of the
+forth-faring kind .... Unable to confess the need that drove her, she
+arrived in Eda's little bedroom to be taken into Eda's arms. Janet was
+immeasurably the stronger of the two, but Eda possessed the masculine
+trait of protectiveness, the universe never bothered her, she was one of
+those persons--called fortunate--to whom the orthodox Christian virtues
+come as naturally as sun or air. Passion, when sanctified by matrimony,
+was her ideal, and now it was always in terms of Janet she dreamed of it,
+having read about it in volumes her friend would not touch, and never
+having experienced deeply its discomforts. Sanctified or unsanctified,
+Janet regarded it with terror, and whenever Eda innocently broached the
+subject she recoiled. Once Eda exclaimed:--"When you do fall in love,
+Janet, you must tell me all about it, every word!"
+
+Janet blushed hotly, and was silent. In Eda's mind such an affair was a
+kind of glorified fireworks ending in a cluster of stars, in Janet's a
+volcanic eruption to turn the world red. Such was the difference between
+them.
+
+Their dissipations together consisted of "sundaes" at a drug-store, or
+sometimes of movie shows at the Star or the Alhambra. Stereotyped on
+Eda's face during the legitimately tender passages of these dramas was an
+expression of rapture, a smile made peculiarly infatuate by that vertical
+line in her cheeks, that inadequacy of lip and preponderance of white
+teeth and red gums. It irritated, almost infuriated Janet, to whom it
+appeared as the logical reflection of what was passing on the screen; she
+averted her glance from both, staring into her lap, filled with shame
+that the relation between the sexes should be thus exposed to public
+gaze, parodied, sentimentalized, degraded.... There were, however,
+marvels to stir her, strange landscapes, cities, seas, and ships,--once a
+fire in the forest of a western reserve with gigantic tongues of orange
+flame leaping from tree to tree. The movies brought the world to Hampton,
+the great world into which she longed to fare, brought the world to her!
+Remote mountain hamlets from Japan, minarets and muezzins from the
+Orient, pyramids from Egypt, domes from Moscow resembling gilded beets
+turned upside down; grey houses of parliament by the Thames, the Tower of
+London, the Palaces of Potsdam, the Tai Mahal. Strange lands indeed, and
+stranger peoples! booted Russians in blouses, naked Equatorial savages
+tattooed and amazingly adorned, soldiers and sailors, presidents, princes
+and emperors brought into such startling proximity one could easily
+imagine one's self exchanging the time of day! Incredible to Janet how
+the audiences, how even Eda accepted with American complacency what were
+to her never-ending miracles; the yearning to see more, to know more,
+became acute, like a pain, but even as she sought to devour these scenes,
+to drink in every detail, with tantalizing swiftness they were whisked
+away. They were peepholes in the walls of her prison; and at night she
+often charmed herself to sleep with remembered visions of wide, empty,
+treeshaded terraces reserved for kings.
+
+But Eda, however complacent her interest in the scenes themselves, was
+thrilled to the marrow by their effect on Janet, who was her medium.
+Emerging from the vestibule of the theatre, Janet seemed not to see the
+slushy street, her eyes shone with a silver light like that of a mountain
+lake in a stormy sunset. And they walked in silence until Janet would
+exclaim:
+
+"Oh Eda, wouldn't you love to travel!"
+
+Thus Eda Rawle was brought in contact with values she herself was
+powerless to detect, and which did not become values until they had
+passed through Janet. One "educative" reel they had seen had begun with
+scenes in a lumber camp high in the mountains of Galicia, where grow
+forests of the priceless pine that becomes, after years of drying and
+seasoning, the sounding board of the Stradivarius and the harp. Even then
+it must respond to a Player. Eda, though failing to apply this poetic
+parallel, when alone in her little room in the Welsh boarding-house often
+indulged in an ecstasy of speculation as to that man, hidden in the mists
+of the future, whose destiny it would be to awaken her friend. Hampton
+did not contain him,--of this she was sure; and in her efforts to
+visualize him she had recourse to the movies, seeking him amongst that
+brilliant company of personages who stood so haughtily or walked so
+indifferently across the ephemeral brightness of the screen.
+
+By virtue of these marvels of the movies: Hampton ugly and sordid
+Hampton!--actually began for Janet to take on a romantic tinge. Were not
+the strange peoples of the earth flocking to Hampton? She saw them
+arriving at the station, straight from Ellis Island, bewildered, ticketed
+like dumb animals, the women draped in the soft, exotic colours many of
+them were presently to exchange for the cheap and gaudy apparel of Faber
+Street. She sought to summon up in her mind the glimpses she had had of
+the wonderful lands from which they had come, to imagine their lives in
+that earlier environment. Sometimes she wandered, alone or with Eda,
+through the various quarters of the city. Each quarter had a flavour of
+its own, a synthetic flavour belonging neither to the old nor to the new,
+yet partaking of both: a difference in atmosphere to which Janet was
+keenly sensitive. In the German quarter, to the north, one felt a sort of
+ornamental bleakness--if the expression may be permitted: the tenements
+here were clean and not too crowded, the scroll-work on their
+superimposed porches, like that decorating the Turnverein and the stem
+Lutheran Church, was eloquent of a Teutonic inheritance: The Belgians
+were to the west, beyond the base-ball park and the car barns, their grey
+houses scattered among new streets beside the scarred and frowning face
+of Torrey's hill. Almost under the hill itself, which threatened to roll
+down on it, and facing a bottomless, muddy street, was the quaint little
+building giving the note of foreign thrift, of socialism and shrewdness,
+of joie de vivre to the settlement, the Franco-Belgian co-operative
+store, with its salle de reunion above and a stage for amateur
+theatricals. Standing in the mud outside, Janet would gaze through the
+tiny windows in the stucco wall at the baskets prepared for each
+household laid in neat rows beside the counter; at the old man with the
+watery blue eyes and lacing of red in his withered cheeks who spoke no
+English, whose duty it was to distribute the baskets to the women and
+children as they called.
+
+Turning eastward again, one came to Dey Street, in the heart of Hampton,
+where Hibernian Hall stood alone and grim, sole testimony of the departed
+Hibernian glories of a district where the present Irish rulers of the
+city had once lived and gossiped and fought in the days when the mill
+bells had roused the boarding-house keepers at half past four of a winter
+morning. Beside the hall was a corner lot, heaped high with hills of
+ashes and rubbish like the vomitings of some filthy volcano; the
+unsightliness of which was half concealed by huge signs announcing the
+merits of chewing gums, tobaccos, and cereals. But why had the departure
+of the Irish, the coming of the Syrians made Dey Street dark, narrow,
+mysterious, oriental? changed the very aspect of its architecture? Was it
+the coffee-houses? One of these, in front of which Janet liked to linger,
+was set weirdly into an old New England cottage, and had, apparently,
+fathomless depths. In summer the whole front of it lay open to the
+street, and here all day long, beside the table where the charcoal
+squares were set to dry, could be seen saffron-coloured Armenians
+absorbed in a Turkish game played on a backgammon board, their gentleness
+and that of the loiterers looking on in strange contrast with their
+hawk-like profiles and burning eyes. Behind this group, in the half light
+of the middle interior, could be discerned an American soda-water
+fountain of a bygone fashion, on its marble counter oddly shaped bottles
+containing rose and violet syrups; there was a bottle-shaped stove, and
+on the walls, in gilt frames, pictures evidently dating from the period
+in American art that flourished when Franklin Pierce was President; and
+there was an array of marble topped tables extending far back into the
+shadows. Behind the fountain was a sort of cupboard--suggestive of the
+Arabian Nights, which Janet had never read--from which, occasionally, the
+fat proprietor emerged bearing Turkish coffee or long Turkish pipes.
+
+When not thus occupied the proprietor carried a baby. The street swarmed
+with babies, and mothers nursed them on the door-steps. And in this
+teeming, prolific street one could scarcely move without stepping on a
+fat, almond eyed child, though some, indeed, were wheeled; wheeled in all
+sorts of queer contrivances by one another, by fathers with ragged black
+moustaches and eagle noses who, to the despair of mill superintendents,
+had decided in the morning that three days' wages would since to support
+their families for the week .... In the midst of the throng might be seen
+occasionally the stout and comfortable and not too immaculate figure of a
+shovel bearded Syrian priest, in a frock coat and square-topped "Derby"
+hat, sailing along serenely, heedless of the children who scattered out
+of his path.
+
+Nearby was the quarter of the Canadian French, scarcely now to be called
+foreigners, though still somewhat reminiscent of the cramped little towns
+in the northern wilderness of water and forest. On one corner stood
+almost invariably a "Pharmacie Francaise"; the signs were in French, and
+the elders spoke the patois. These, despite the mill pallor, retained in
+their faces, in their eyes, a suggestion of the outdoor look of their
+ancestors, the coureurs des bois, but the children spoke English, and the
+young men, as they played baseball in the street or in the corner lots
+might be heard shouting out derisively the cry of the section hands so
+familiar in mill cities, "Doff, you beggars you, doff!"
+
+Occasionally the two girls strayed into that wide thoroughfare not far
+from the canal, known by the classic name of Hawthorne, which the
+Italians had appropriated to themselves. This street, too, in spite of
+the telegraph poles flaunting crude arms in front of its windows, in
+spite of the trolley running down its middle, had acquired a character, a
+unity all its own, a warmth and picturesqueness that in the lingering
+light of summer evenings assumed an indefinable significance. It was not
+Italy, but it was something--something proclaimed in the ornate, leaning
+lines of the pillared balconies of the yellow tenement on the second
+block, in the stone-vaulted entrance of the low house next door, in
+fantastically coloured walls, in curtained windows out of which leaned
+swarthy, earringed women. Blocking the end of the street, in stern
+contrast, was the huge Clarendon Mill with its sinister brick pillars
+running up the six stories between the glass. Here likewise the sidewalks
+overflowed with children, large-headed, with great, lustrous eyes, mute,
+appealing, the eyes of cattle. Unlike American children, they never
+seemed to be playing. Among the groups of elders gathered for gossip were
+piratical Calabrians in sombre clothes, descended from Greek ancestors,
+once the terrors of the Adriatic Sea. The women, lingering in the
+doorways, hemmed in by more children, were for the most part squat and
+plump, but once in a while Janet's glance was caught and held by a
+strange, sharp beauty worthy of a cameo.
+
+Opposite the Clarendon Mill on the corner of East Street was a provision
+store with stands of fruit and vegetables encroaching on the pavement.
+Janet's eye was attracted by a box of olives.
+
+"Oh Eda," she cried, "do you remember, we saw them being picked--in the
+movies? All those old trees on the side of a hill?"
+
+"Why, that's so," said Eda. "You never would have thought anything'd grow
+on those trees."
+
+The young Italian who kept the store gave them a friendly grin.
+
+"You lika the olives?" he asked, putting some of the shining black fruit
+into their hands. Eda bit one dubiously with her long, white teeth, and
+giggled.
+
+"Don't they taste funny!" she exclaimed.
+
+"Good--very good," he asserted gravely, and it was to Janet he turned, as
+though recognizing a discrimination not to be found in her companion. She
+nodded affirmatively. The strange taste of the fruit enhanced her sense
+of adventure, she tried to imagine herself among the gatherers in the
+grove; she glanced at the young man to perceive that he was tall and well
+formed, with remarkably expressive eyes almost the colour of the olives
+themselves. It surprised her that she liked him, though he was an Italian
+and a foreigner: a certain debonnair dignity in him appealed to her--a
+quality lacking in many of her own countrymen.
+
+And she wanted to talk to him about Italy,--only she did not know how to
+begin,--when a customer appeared, an Italian woman who conversed with him
+in soft, liquid tones that moved her ....
+
+Sometimes on these walks--especially if the day were grey and
+sombre--Janet's sense of romance and adventure deepened, became more
+poignant, charged with presage. These feelings, vague and unaccountable,
+she was utterly unable to confide to Eda, yet the very fear they inspired
+was fascinating; a fear and a hope that some day, in all this Babel of
+peoples, something would happen! It was as though the conflicting soul of
+the city and her own soul were one....
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+Lise was the only member of the Bumpus family who did not find
+uncongenial such distractions and companionships as were offered by the
+civilization that surrounded them. The Bagatelle she despised; that was
+slavery--but slavery out of which she might any day be snatched, like
+Leila Hawtrey, by a prince charming who had made a success in life.
+Success to Lise meant money. Although what some sentimental sociologists
+might call a victim of our civilization, Lise would not have changed it,
+since it produced not only Lise herself, but also those fabulous
+financiers with yachts and motors and town and country houses she read
+about in the supplements of the Sunday newspapers. It contained her
+purgatory, which she regarded in good conventional fashion as a mere
+temporary place of detention, and likewise the heaven toward which she
+strained, the dwelling-place of light. In short, her philosophy was that
+of the modern, orthodox American, tinged by a somewhat commercialized
+Sunday school tradition of an earlier day, and highly approved by the
+censors of the movies. The peculiar kind of abstinence once
+euphemistically known as "virtue," particularly if it were combined with
+beauty, never failed of its reward. Lise, in this sense, was indeed
+virtuous, and her mirror told her she was beautiful. Almost anything
+could happen to such a lady: any day she might be carried up into heaven
+by that modern chariot of fire, the motor car, driven by a celestial
+chauffeur.
+
+One man's meat being another's poison, Lise absorbed from the movies an
+element by which her sister Janet was repelled. A popular production
+known as "Leila of Hawtrey's" contained her creed,--Hawtrey's being a
+glittering metropolitan restaurant where men of the world are wont to
+gather and discuss the stock market, and Leila a beautiful, blonde and
+orphaned waitress upon whom several of the fashionable frequenters had
+exercised seductive powers in vain. They lay in wait for her at the side
+entrance, followed her, while one dissipated and desperate person,
+married, and said to move in the most exclusive circles, sent her an
+offer of a yearly income in five figures, the note being reproduced on
+the screen, and Leila pictured reading it in her frigid hall-bedroom.
+There are complications; she is in debt, and the proprietor of Hawtrey's
+has threatened to discharge her and in order that the magnitude of the
+temptation may be most effectively realized the vision appears of Leila
+herself, wrapped in furs, stepping out of a limousine and into an
+elevator lifting her to an apartment containing silk curtains, a Canet
+bed, a French maid, and a Pomeranian. Virtue totters, but triumphs, being
+reinforced by two more visions the first of these portrays Leila,
+prematurely old, dragging herself along pavements under the metallic
+Broadway lights accosting gentlemen in evening dress; and the second
+reveals her in the country, kneeling beside a dying mother's bed, giving
+her promise to remain true to the Christian teachings of her childhood.
+
+And virtue is rewarded, lavishly, as virtue should be, in dollars and
+cents, in stocks and bonds, in pearls and diamonds. Popular fancy takes
+kindly to rough but honest westerners who have begun life in flannel
+shirts, who have struck gold and come to New York with a fortune but
+despising effeteness; such a one, tanned by the mountain sun, embarrassed
+in raiment supplied by a Fifth Avenue tailor, takes a table one evening
+at Hawtrey's and of course falls desperately in love. He means marriage
+from the first, and his faith in Leila is great enough to survive what
+appears to be an almost total eclipse of her virtue. Through the
+machinations of the influential villain, and lured by the false pretence
+that one of her girl friends is ill, she is enticed into a mysterious
+house of a sinister elegance, and apparently irretrievably compromised.
+The westerner follows, forces his way through the portals, engages the
+villain, and vanquishes him. Leila becomes a Bride. We behold her, at the
+end, mistress of one of those magnificent stone mansions with grilled
+vestibules and negro butlers into whose sacred precincts we are
+occasionally, in the movies, somewhat breathlessly ushered--a long way
+from Hawtrey's restaurant and a hall-bedroom. A long way, too, from the
+Bagatelle and Fillmore Street--but to Lise a way not impossible, nor even
+improbable.
+
+This work of art, conveying the moral that virtue is an economic asset,
+made a great impression on Lise. Good Old Testament doctrine, set forth
+in the Book of Job itself. And Leila, pictured as holding out for a
+higher price and getting it, encouraged Lise to hold out also. Mr. Wiley,
+in whose company she had seen this play, and whose likeness filled the
+plush and silver-plated frame on her bureau, remained ironically ignorant
+of the fact that he had paid out his money to make definite an ambition,
+an ideal hitherto nebulous in the mind of the lady whom he adored. Nor
+did Lise enlighten him, being gifted with a certain inscrutableness. As a
+matter of fact it had never been her intention to accept him, but now
+that she was able concretely to visualize her Lochinvar of the future,
+Mr. Whey's lack of qualifications became the more apparent. In the first
+place, he had been born in Lowell and had never been west of Worcester;
+in the second, his salary was sixteen dollars a week: it is true she had
+once fancied the Scottish terrier style of hair-cut abruptly ending in
+the rounded line of the shaven neck, but Lochinvar had been
+close-cropped. Mr. Wiley, close-cropped, would have resembled a convict.
+
+Mr. Wiley was in love, there could be no doubt about that, and if he had
+not always meant marriage, he meant it now, having reached a state where
+no folly seems preposterous. The manner of their meeting had had just the
+adventurous and romantic touch that Lise liked, one of her favourite
+amusements in the intervals between "steadies" being to walk up and down
+Faber Street of an evening after supper, arm in arm with two or three
+other young ladies, all chewing gum, wheeling into store windows and
+wheeling out again, pretending the utmost indifference to melting glances
+cast in their direction. An exciting sport, though incomprehensible to
+masculine intelligence. It was a principle with Lise to pay no attention
+to any young man who was not "presented," those venturing to approach her
+with the ready formula "Haven't we met before?" being instantly
+congealed. She was strict as to etiquette. But Mr. Wiley, it seemed,
+could claim acquaintance with Miss Schuler, one of the ladies to whose
+arm Lise's was linked, and he had the further advantage of appearing in a
+large and seductive touring car, painted green, with an eagle poised
+above the hood and its name, Wizard, in a handwriting rounded and bold,
+written in nickel across the radiator. He greeted Miss Schuler
+effusively, but his eye was on Lise from the first, and it was she he
+took with, him in the front seat, indifferent to the giggling behind.
+Ever since then Lise had had a motor at her disposal, and on Sundays they
+took long "joy rides" beyond the borders of the state. But it must not be
+imagined that Mr. Whey was the proprietor of the vehicle; nor was he a
+chauffeur,--her American pride would not have permitted her to keep
+company with a chauffeur: he was the demonstrator for the Wizard,
+something of a wizard himself, as Lise had to admit when they whizzed
+over the tarvia of the Riverside Boulevard at fifty or sixty miles an
+hour with the miner cut out--a favourite diversion of Mr. Whey's, who did
+not feel he was going unless he was accompanied by a noise like that of a
+mitrailleuse in action. Lise, experiencing a ravishing terror, hung on to
+her hat with one hand and to Mr. Wiley with the other, her code
+permitting this; permitting him also, occasionally, when they found
+themselves in tenebrous portions of Slattery's Riverside Park, to put his
+arm around her waist and kiss her. So much did Lise's virtue allow, and
+no more, the result being that he existed in a tantalizing state of hope
+and excitement most detrimental to the nerves.
+
+He never lost, however,--in public at least, or before Lise's
+family,--the fine careless, jaunty air of the demonstrator, of the
+free-lance for whom seventy miles an hour has no terrors; the automobile,
+apparently, like the ship, sets a stamp upon its votaries. No Elizabethan
+buccaneer swooping down on defenceless coasts ever exceeded in audacity
+Mr. Wiley's invasion of quiet Fillmore Street. He would draw up with an
+ear-splitting screaming of brakes in front of the clay-yellow house, and
+sometimes the muffler, as though unable to repress its approval of the
+performance, would let out a belated pop that never failed to jar the
+innermost being of Auermann, who had been shot at, or rather shot past,
+by an Italian, and knew what it was. He hated automobiles, he hated Mr.
+Wiley.
+
+"Vat you do?" he would demand, glaring.
+
+And Mr. Wiley would laugh insolently.
+
+"You think I done it, do you, Dutchie--huh!"
+
+He would saunter past, up the stairs, and into the Bumpus dining-room,
+often before the family had finished their evening meal. Lise alone made
+him welcome, albeit demurely; but Mr. Wiley, not having sensibilities,
+was proof against Hannah's coldness and Janet's hostility. With unerring
+instinct he singled out Edward as his victim.
+
+"How's Mr. Bumpus this evening?" he would genially inquire.
+
+Edward invariably assured Mr. Wiley that he was well, invariably took a
+drink of coffee to emphasize the fact, as though the act of lifting his
+cup had in it some magic to ward off the contempt of his wife and elder
+daughter.
+
+"Well, I've got it pretty straight that the Arundel's going to run
+nights, starting next week," Lise's suitor would continue.
+
+And to save his soul Edward could not refrain from answering, "You don't
+say so!" He feigned interest in the information that the Hampton Ball
+Team, owing to an unsatisfactory season, was to change managers next
+year. Mr. Wiley possessed the gift of gathering recondite bits of news,
+he had confidence in his topics and in his manner of dealing with them;
+and Edward, pretending to be entertained, went so far in his politeness
+as to ask Mr. Wiley if he had had supper.
+
+"I don't care if I sample one of Mis' Bumpus's doughnuts," Mr. Wiley
+would reply politely, reaching out a large hand that gave evidence, in
+spite of Sapolio, of an intimacy with grease cups and splash pans. "I
+guess there's nobody in this burg can make doughnuts to beat yours, Miss
+Bumpus."
+
+If she had only known which doughnut he would take; Hannah sometimes
+thought she might have been capable of putting arsenic in it. Her icy
+silence did not detract from the delights of his gestation.
+
+Occasionally, somewhat to Edward's alarm, Hannah demanded: "Where are you
+taking Lise this evening?"
+
+Mr. Wiley's wisdom led him to be vague.
+
+"Oh, just for a little spin up the boulevard. Maybe we'll pick up Ella
+Schuler and one or two other young ladies."
+
+Hannah and Janet knew very well he had no intention of doing this, and
+Hannah did not attempt to conceal her incredulity. As a matter of fact,
+Lise sometimes did insist on a "party."
+
+"I want you should bring her back by ten o'clock. That's late enough for
+a girl who works to be out. It's late enough for any girl."
+
+"Sure, Mis' Bumpus," Wiley would respond easily.
+
+Hannah chafed because she had no power to enforce this, because Mr. Wiley
+and Lise understood she had no power. Lise went to put on her hat; if she
+skimped her toilet in the morning, she made up for it in the evening when
+she came home from the store, and was often late for supper. In the
+meantime, while Lise was in the bedroom adding these last touches, Edward
+would contemptibly continue the conversation, fingering the Evening
+Banner as it lay in his lap, while Mr. Wiley helped himself boldly to
+another doughnut, taking--as Janet observed--elaborate precautions to
+spill none of the crumbs on a brown suit, supposed to be the last
+creation in male attire. Behind a plate glass window in Faber Street,
+belonging to a firm of "custom" tailors whose stores had invaded every
+important city in the country, and who made clothes for "college" men,
+only the week before Mr. Wiley had seen this same suit artistically
+folded, combined with a coloured shirt, brown socks, and tie and
+"torture" collar--lures for the discriminating. Owing to certain expenses
+connected with Lise, he had been unable to acquire the shirt and the tie,
+but he had bought the suit in the hope and belief that she would find him
+irresistible therein. It pleased him, too, to be taken for a "college"
+man, and on beholding in the mirror his broadened shoulders and
+diminished waist he was quite convinced his money had not been spent in
+vain; that strange young ladies--to whom, despite his infatuation for the
+younger Miss Bumpus, he was not wholly indifferent--would mistake him for
+an undergraduate of Harvard,--an imposition concerning which he had no
+scruples. But Lise, though shaken, had not capitulated.....
+
+When she returned to the dining-room, arrayed in her own finery, demure,
+triumphant, and had carried off Mr. Whey there would ensue an interval of
+silence broken only by the clattering together of the dishes Hannah
+snatched up.
+
+"I guess he's the kind of son-in-law would suit you," she threw over her
+shoulder once to Edward.
+
+"Why?" he inquired, letting down his newspaper nervously.
+
+"Well, you seem to favour him, to make things as pleasant for him as you
+can."
+
+Edward would grow warm with a sense of injustice, the inference being
+that he was to blame for Mr. Wiley; if he had been a different kind of
+father another sort of suitor would be courting Lise.
+
+"I have to be civil," he protested. He pronounced that, word "civil"
+exquisitely, giving equal value to both syllables.
+
+"Civil!" Hannah scoffed, as she left the room; and to Janet, who had
+followed her into the kitchen, she added: "That's the trouble with your
+father, he's always be'n a little too civil. Edward Bumpus is just as
+simple as a child, he's afraid of offending folks' feelings .... Think of
+being polite to that Whey!" In those two words Hannah announced
+eloquently her utter condemnation of the demonstrator of the Wizard. It
+was characteristic of her, however, when she went back for another load
+of dishes and perceived that Edward was only pretending to read his
+Banner, to attempt to ease her husband's feelings. She thought it queer
+because she was still fond of Edward Bumpus, after all he had "brought on
+her."
+
+"It's Lise," she said, as though speaking to Janet, "she attracts 'em.
+Sometimes I just can't get used to it that she's my daughter. I don't
+know who she takes after. She's not like any of my kin, nor any of the
+Bumpuses."
+
+"What can you do?" asked Edward. "You can't order him out of the house.
+It's better for him to come here. And you can't stop Lise from going with
+him--she's earning her own money...."
+
+They had talked over the predicament before, and always came to the same
+impasse. In the privacy of the kitchen Hannah paused suddenly in her
+energetic rubbing of a plate and with supreme courage uttered a question.
+
+"Janet, do you calculate he means anything wrong?"
+
+"I don't know what he means," Janet replied, unwilling to give Mr. Wiley
+credit for anything, "but I know this, that Lise is too smart to let him
+take advantage of her."
+
+Hannah ruminated. Cleverness as the modern substitute for feminine virtue
+did not appeal to her, but she let it pass. She was in no mood to quarrel
+with any quality that would ward off disgrace.
+
+"I don't know what to make of Lise--she don't appear to have any
+principles...."
+
+If the Wiley affair lasted longer than those preceding it, this was
+because former suitors had not commanded automobiles. When Mr. Wiley lost
+his automobile he lost his luck--if it may be called such. One April
+evening, after a stroll with Eda, Janet reached home about nine o'clock
+to find Lise already in their room, to remark upon the absence of Mr.
+Wiley's picture from the frame.
+
+"I'm through with him," Lise declared briefly, tugging at her hair.
+
+"Through with him?" Janet repeated.
+
+Lise paused in her labours and looked at her sister steadily. "I handed
+him the mit--do you get me?"
+
+"But why?"
+
+"Why? I was sick of him--ain't that enough? And then he got mixed up with
+a Glendale trolley and smashed his radiator, and the Wizard people sacked
+him. I always told him he was too fly. It's lucky for him I wasn't in the
+car."
+
+"It's lucky for you," said Janet. Presently she inquired curiously:
+"Aren't you sorry?"
+
+"Nix." Lise shook her head, which was now bowed, her face hidden by hair.
+"Didn't I tell you I was sick of him? But he sure was some spender," she
+added, as though in justice bound to give him his due.
+
+Janet was shocked by the ruthlessness of it, for Lise appeared relieved,
+almost gay. She handed Janet a box containing five peppermint creams--all
+that remained of Mr. Wiley's last gift.
+
+One morning in the late spring Janet crossed the Warren Street bridge,
+the upper of the two spider-like structures to be seen from her office
+window, spanning the river beside the great Hampton dam. The day,
+dedicated to the memory of heroes fallen in the Civil War, the thirtieth
+of May, was a legal holiday. Gradually Janet had acquired a dread of
+holidays as opportunities never realized, as intervals that should have
+been filled with unmitigated joys, and yet were invariably wasted,
+usually in walks with Eda Rawle. To-day, feeling an irresistible longing
+for freedom, for beauty, for adventure, for quest and discovery of she
+knew not what, she avoided Eda, and after gazing awhile at the sunlight
+dancing in the white mist below the falls, she walked on, southward,
+until she had left behind her the last straggling houses of the city and
+found herself on a wide, tarvia road that led, ultimately, to Boston. So
+read the sign.
+
+Great maples, heavy with leaves, stood out against the soft blue of the
+sky, and the sunlight poured over everything, bathing the stone walls,
+the thatches of the farmhouses, extracting from the copses of stunted
+pine a pungent, reviving perfume. Sometimes she stopped to rest on the
+pine needles, and walked on again, aimlessly, following the road because
+it was the easiest way. There were spring flowers in the farmhouse yards,
+masses of lilacs whose purple she drank in eagerly; the air, which had
+just a tang of New England sharpness, was filled with tender sounds, the
+clucking of hens, snatches of the songs of birds, the rustling of maple
+leaves in the fitful breeze. A chipmunk ran down an elm and stood staring
+at her with beady, inquisitive eyes, motionless save for his quivering
+tail, and she put forth her hand, shyly, beseechingly, as though he held
+the secret of life she craved. But he darted away.
+
+She looked around her unceasingly, at the sky, at the trees, at the
+flowers and ferns and fields, at the vireos and thrushes, the robins and
+tanagers gashing in and out amidst the foliage, and she was filled with a
+strange yearning to expand and expand until she should become a part of
+all nature, be absorbed into it, cease to be herself. Never before had
+she known just that feeling, that degree of ecstasy mingled with divine
+discontent .... Occasionally, intruding faintly upon the countryside
+peace, she was aware of a distant humming sound that grew louder and
+louder until there shot roaring past her an automobile filled with noisy
+folk, leaving behind it a suffocating cloud of dust. Even these
+intrusions, reminders of the city she had left, were powerless to destroy
+her mood, and she began to skip, like a schoolgirl, pausing once in a
+while to look around her fearfully, lest she was observed; and it pleased
+her to think that she had escaped forever, that she would never go back:
+she cried aloud, as she skipped, "I won't go back, I won't go back,"
+keeping time with her feet until she was out of breath and almost
+intoxicated, delirious, casting herself down, her heart beating wildly,
+on a bank of ferns, burying her face in them. She had really stopped
+because a pebble had got into her shoe, and as she took it out she looked
+at her bare heel and remarked ruefully:--"Those twenty-five cent
+stockings aren't worth buying!"
+
+Economic problems, however, were powerless to worry her to-day, when the
+sun shone and the wind blew and the ferns, washed by the rill running
+through the culvert under the road, gave forth a delicious moist odour
+reminding her of the flower store where her sister Lise had once been
+employed. But at length she arose, and after an hour or more of
+sauntering the farming landscape was left behind, the crumbling stone
+fences were replaced by a well-kept retaining wall capped by a privet
+hedge, through which, between stone pillars, a driveway entered and
+mounted the shaded slope, turning and twisting until lost to view. But
+afar, standing on the distant crest, through the tree trunks and foliage
+Janet saw one end of the mansion to which it led, and ventured timidly
+but eagerly in among the trees in the hope of satisfying her new-born
+curiosity. Try as she would, she never could get any but disappointing
+and partial glimpses of a house which, because of the mystery of its
+setting, fired her imagination, started her to wondering why it was that
+some were permitted to live in the midst of such beauty while she was
+condemned to spend her days in Fillmore Street and the prison of the
+mill. She was not even allowed to look at it! The thought was like a
+cloud across the sun.
+
+However, when she had regained the tarvia road and walked a little way
+the shadow suddenly passed, and she stood surprised. The sight of a long
+common with its ancient trees in the fullness of glory, dense maples,
+sturdy oaks, strong, graceful elms that cast flickering, lacy shadows
+across the road filled her with satisfaction, with a sense of peace
+deepened by the awareness, in the background, ranged along the common on
+either side, of stately, dignified buildings, each in an appropriate
+frame of foliage. With the essence rather than the detail of all this her
+consciousness became steeped; she was naturally ignorant of the great
+good fortune of Silliston Academy of having been spared with one or two
+exceptions--donations during those artistically lean years of the
+nineteenth century when American architecture affected the Gothic, the
+Mansard, and the subsequent hybrid. She knew this must be Silliston, the
+seat of that famous academy of which she had heard.
+
+The older school buildings and instructors' houses, most of them white or
+creamy yellow, were native Colonial, with tall, graceful chimneys and
+classic pillars and delicate balustrades, eloquent at once of the racial
+inheritance of the Republic and of a bygone individuality, dignity, and
+pride. And the modern architect, of whose work there was an abundance,
+had graciously and intuitively held this earlier note and developed it.
+He was an American, but an American who had been trained. The result was
+harmony, life as it should proceed, the new growing out of the old. And
+no greater tribute can be paid to Janet Bumpus than that it pleased her,
+struck and set exquisitely vibrating within her responsive chords. For
+the first time in her adult life she stood in the presence of tradition,
+of a tradition inherently if unconsciously the innermost reality of her
+being a tradition that miraculously was not dead, since after all the
+years it had begun to put forth these vigorous shoots....
+
+What Janet chiefly realized was the delicious, contented sense of having
+come, visually at least, to the home for which she had longed. But her
+humour was that of a child who has strayed, to find its true dwelling
+place in a region of beauty hitherto unexplored and unexperienced,
+tinged, therefore, with unreality, with mystery,--an effect enhanced by
+the chance stillness and emptiness of the place. She wandered up and down
+the Common, whose vivid green was starred with golden dandelions; and
+then, spying the arched and shady vista of a lane, entered it, bent on
+new discoveries. It led past one of the newer buildings, the library--as
+she read in a carved inscription over the door--plunged into shade again
+presently to emerge at a square farmhouse, ancient and weathered, with a
+great square chimney thrust out of the very middle of the ridge-pole,--a
+landmark left by one of the earliest of Silliston's settlers. Presiding
+over it, embracing and protecting it, was a splendid tree. The place was
+evidently in process of reconstruction and repair, the roof had been
+newly shingled, new frames, with old-fashioned, tiny panes had been put
+in the windows; a little garden was being laid out under the sheltering
+branches of the tree, and between the lane and the garden, half finished,
+was a fence of an original and pleasing design, consisting of pillars
+placed at intervals with upright pickets between, the pickets sawed in
+curves, making a line that drooped in the middle. Janet did not perceive
+the workman engaged in building this fence until the sound of his hammer
+attracted her attention. His back was bent, he was absorbed in his task.
+
+"Are there any stores near here?" she inquired.
+
+He straightened up. "Why yes," he replied, "come to think of it, I have
+seen stores, I'm sure I have."
+
+Janet laughed; his expression, his manner of speech were so delightfully
+whimsical, so in keeping with the spirit of her day, and he seemed to
+accept her sudden appearance in the precise make-believe humour she could
+have wished. And yet she stood a little struck with timidity, puzzled by
+the contradictions he presented of youth and age, of shrewdness,
+experience and candour, of gentility and manual toil. He must have been
+about thirty-five; he was hatless, and his hair, uncombed but not
+unkempt, was greying at the temples; his eyes--which she noticed
+particularly--were keen yet kindly, the irises delicately stencilled in a
+remarkable blue; his speech was colloquial yet cultivated, his workman's
+clothes belied his bearing.
+
+"Yes, there are stores, in the village," he went on, "but isn't it a
+holiday, or Sunday--perhaps--or something of the kind?"
+
+"It's Decoration Day," she reminded him, with deepening surprise.
+
+"So it is! And all the storekeepers have gone on picnics in their
+automobiles, or else they're playing golf. Nobody's working today."
+
+"But you--aren't you working?" she inquired.
+
+"Working?" he repeated. "I suppose some people would call it work. I--I
+hadn't thought of it in that way."
+
+"You mean--you like it," Janet was inspired to say.
+
+"Well, yes," he confessed. "I suppose I do."
+
+Her cheeks dimpled. If her wonder had increased, her embarrassment had
+flown, and he seemed suddenly an old acquaintance. She had, however,
+profound doubts now of his being a carpenter.
+
+"Were you thinking of going shopping?" he asked, and at the very
+ludicrousness of the notion she laughed again. She discovered a keen
+relish for this kind of humour, but it was new to her experience, and she
+could not cope with it.
+
+"Only to buy some crackers, or a sandwich," she replied, and blushed.
+
+"Oh," he said. "Down in the village, on the corner where the cars stop,
+is a restaurant. It's not as good as the Parker House in Boston, I
+believe, but they do have sandwiches, yes, and coffee. At least they call
+it coffee."
+
+"Oh, thank you," she said.
+
+"You'd better wait till you try it," he warned her.
+
+"Oh, I don't mind, I don't want much." And she was impelled to add: "It's
+such a beautiful day."
+
+"It's absurd to get hungry on such a day--absurd," he agreed.
+
+"Yes, it is," she laughed. "I'm not really hungry, but I haven't time to
+get back to Hampton for dinner." Suddenly she grew hot at the thought
+that he might suspect her of hinting. "You see, I live in Hampton," she
+went on hurriedly, "I'm a stenographer there, in the Chippering Mill, and
+I was just out for a walk, and--I came farther than I intended." She had
+made it worse.
+
+But he said, "Oh, you came from Hampton!" with an intonation of surprise,
+of incredulity even, that soothed and even amused while it did not
+deceive her. Not that the superior intelligence of which she had begun to
+suspect him had been put to any real test by the discovery of her home,
+and she was quite sure her modest suit of blue serge and her $2.99 pongee
+blouse proclaimed her as a working girl of the mill city. "I've been to
+Hampton," he declared, just as though it were four thousand miles away
+instead of four.
+
+"But I've never been here before, to Silliston," she responded in the
+same spirit: and she added wistfully, "it must be nice to live in such a
+beautiful place as this!"
+
+"Yes, it is nice," he agreed. "We have our troubles, too,--but it's
+nice."
+
+She ventured a second, appraising glance. His head, which he carried a
+little flung back, his voice, his easy and confident bearing--all these
+contradicted the saw and the hammer, the flannel shirt, open at the neck,
+the khaki trousers still bearing the price tag. And curiosity beginning
+to get the better of her, she was emboldened to pay a compliment to the
+fence. If one had to work, it must be a pleasure to work on things
+pleasing to the eye--such was her inference.
+
+"Why, I'm glad you like it," he said heartily. "I was just hoping some
+one would come along here and admire it. Now--what colour would you paint
+it?"
+
+"Are you a painter, too?"
+
+"After a fashion. I'm a sort of man of all work--I thought of painting it
+white, with the pillars green."
+
+"I think that would be pretty," she answered, judicially, after a
+moment's thought. "What else can you do?"
+
+He appeared to be pondering his accomplishments.
+
+"Well, I can doctor trees," he said, pointing an efficient finger at the
+magnificent maple sheltering, like a guardian deity, the old farmhouse.
+"I put in those patches."
+
+"They're cement," she exclaimed. "I never heard of putting cement in
+trees."
+
+"They don't seem to mind."
+
+"Are the holes very deep?"
+
+"Pretty deep."
+
+"But I should think the tree would be dead."
+
+"Well, you see the life of a tree is right under the bark. If you can
+keep the outer covering intact, the tree will live."
+
+"Why did you let the holes get so deep?"
+
+"I've just come here. The house was like the tree the shingles all
+rotten, but the beams were sound. Those beams were hewn out of the forest
+two hundred and fifty years ago."
+
+"Gracious!" said Janet. "And how old is the tree?"
+
+"I should say about a hundred. I suppose it wouldn't care to admit it."
+
+"How do you know?" she inquired.
+
+"Oh, I'm very intimate with trees. I find out their secrets."
+
+"It's your house!" she exclaimed, somewhat appalled by the discovery.
+
+"Yes--yes it is," he answered, looking around at it and then in an
+indescribably comical manner down at his clothes. His gesture, his
+expression implied that her mistake was a most natural one.
+
+"Excuse me, I thought--" she began, blushing hotly, yet wanting to laugh
+again.
+
+"I don't blame you--why shouldn't you?" he interrupted her. "I haven't
+got used to it yet, and there is something amusing about--my owning a
+house. When the parlour's finished I'll have to wear a stiff collar, I
+suppose, in order to live up to it."
+
+Her laughter broke forth, and she tried to imagine him in a stiff
+collar.... But she was more perplexed than ever. She stood balancing on
+one foot, poised for departure.
+
+"I ought to be going," she said, as though she had been paying him a
+formal visit.
+
+"Don't hurry," he protested cordially. "Why hurry back to Hampton?"
+
+"I never want to go back!" she cried with a vehemence that caused him to
+contemplate her anew, suddenly revealing the intense, passionate quality
+which had so disturbed Mr. Ditmar. She stood transformed. "I hate it!"
+she declared. "It's so ugly, I never want to see it again."
+
+"Yes, it is ugly," he confessed. "Since you admit it, I don't mind saying
+so. But it's interesting, in a way." Though his humorous moods had
+delighted her, she felt subtly flattered because he had grown more
+serious.
+
+"It is interesting," she agreed. She was almost impelled to tell him why,
+in her excursions to the various quarters, she had found Hampton
+interesting, but a shyness born of respect for the store of knowledge she
+divined in him restrained her. She was curious to know what this man saw
+in Hampton. His opinion would be worth something. Unlike her neighbours
+in Fillmore Street, he was not what her sister Lise would call "nutty";
+he had an air of fine sanity, of freedom, of detachment,--though the word
+did not occur to her; he betrayed no bitter sense of injustice, and his
+beliefs were uncoloured by the obsession of a single panacea. "Why do you
+think it's interesting?" she demanded.
+
+"Well, I'm always expecting to hear that it's blown up. It reminds me of
+nitro-glycerine," he added, smiling.
+
+She repeated the word.
+
+"An explosive, you know--they put it in dynamite. They say a man once
+made it by accident, and locked up his laboratory and ran home--and never
+went back."
+
+"I know what you mean!" she cried, her eyes alight with excitement. "All
+those foreigners! I've felt it that something would happen, some day, it
+frightened me, and yet I wished that something would happen. Only, I
+never would have thought of--nitro-glycerine."
+
+She was unaware of the added interest in his regard. But he answered
+lightly enough:--"Oh, not only the foreigners. Human chemicals--you
+can't play with human chemicals any more than you can play with real
+ones--you've got to know something about chemistry."
+
+This remark was beyond her depth.
+
+"Who is playing with them?" she asked.
+
+"Everybody--no one in particular. Nobody seems to know much about them,
+yet," he replied, and seemed disinclined to pursue the subject. A robin
+with a worm in its bill was hopping across the grass; he whistled softly,
+the bird stopped, cocking its head and regarding them. Suddenly, in
+conflict with her desire to remain indefinitely talking with this strange
+man, Janet felt an intense impulse to leave. She could bear the
+conversation no longer, she might burst into tears--such was the
+extraordinary effect he had produced on her.
+
+"I must go,--I'm ever so much obliged to you," she said.
+
+"Drop in again," he said, as he took her trembling hand .... When she had
+walked a little way she looked back over her shoulder to see him leaning
+idly against the post, gazing after her, and waving his hammer in
+friendly fashion.
+
+For a while her feet fairly flew, and her heart beat tumultuously,
+keeping time with her racing thoughts. She walked about the Common,
+seeing nothing, paying no attention to the passers-by, who glanced at her
+curiously. But at length as she grew calmer the needs of a youthful and
+vigorous body became imperative, and realizing suddenly that she was
+tired and hungry, sought and found the little restaurant in the village
+below. She journeyed back to Hampton pondering what this man had said to
+her; speculating, rather breathlessly, whether he had been impelled to
+conversation by a natural kindness and courtesy, or whether he really had
+discovered something in her worthy of addressing, as he implied.
+Resentment burned in her breast, she became suddenly blinded by tears:
+she might never see him again, and if only she were "educated" she might
+know him, become his friend. Even in this desire she was not
+conventional, and in the few moments of their contact he had developed
+rather than transformed what she meant by "education." She thought of it
+not as knowledge reeking of books and schools, but as the acquirement of
+the freemasonry which he so evidently possessed, existence on terms of
+understanding, confidence, and freedom with nature; as having the world
+open up to one like a flower filled with colour and life. She thought of
+the robin, of the tree whose secrets he had learned, of a mental range
+including even that medley of human beings amongst whom she lived. And
+the fact that something of his meaning had eluded her grasp made her
+rebel all the more bitterly against the lack of a greater knowledge ....
+
+Often during the weeks that followed he dwelt in her mind as she sat at
+her desk and stared out across the river, and several times that summer
+she started to walk to Silliston. But always she turned back. Perhaps she
+feared to break the charm of that memory....
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+Our American climate is notoriously capricious. Even as Janet trudged
+homeward on that Memorial Day afternoon from her Cinderella-like
+adventure in Silliston the sun grew hot, the air lost its tonic, becoming
+moist and tepid, white clouds with dark edges were piled up in the
+western sky. The automobiles of the holiday makers swarmed ceaselessly
+over the tarvia. Valiantly as she strove to cling to her dream,
+remorseless reality was at work dragging her back, reclaiming her;
+excitement and physical exercise drained her vitality, her feet were
+sore, sadness invaded her as she came in view of the ragged outline of
+the city she had left so joyfully in the morning. Summer, that most
+depressing of seasons in an environment of drab houses and grey
+pavements, was at hand, listless householders and their families were
+already, seeking refuge on front steps she passed on her way to Fillmore
+Street.
+
+It was about half past five when she arrived. Lise, her waist removed,
+was seated in a rocking chair at the window overlooking the littered
+yards and the backs of the tenements on Rutger Street. And Lise, despite
+the heaviness of the air, was dreaming. Of such delicate texture was the
+fabric of Janet's dreams that not only sordid reality, but contact with
+other dreams of a different nature, such as her sister's, often sufficed
+to dissolve them. She resented, for instance, the presence in the plush
+oval of Mr. Eustace Arlington; the movie star whose likeness had replaced
+Mr. Wiley's, and who had played the part of the western hero in "Leila of
+Hawtrey's." With his burning eyes and sensual face betraying the
+puffiness that comes from over-indulgence, he was not Janet's ideal of a
+hero, western or otherwise. And now Lise was holding a newspaper: not
+the Banner, whose provinciality she scorned, but a popular Boston sheet
+to be had for a cent, printed at ten in the morning and labelled "Three
+O'clock Edition," with huge red headlines stretched across the top of the
+page:--
+
+        "JURY FINDS IN MISS NEALY'S FAVOR."
+
+As Janet entered Lise looked up and exclaimed:--"Say, that Nealy girl's
+won out!"
+
+"Who is she?" Janet inquired listlessly.
+
+"You are from the country, all right," was her sister's rejoinder. "I
+would have bet there wasn't a Reub in the state that wasn't wise to the
+Ferris breach of promise case, and here you blow in after the show's over
+and want to know who Nelly Nealy is. If that doesn't beat the band!"
+
+"This woman sued a man named Ferris--is that it?"
+
+"A man named Ferris!" Lise repeated, with the air of being appalled by
+her sister's ignorance. "I guess you never heard of Ferris, either--the
+biggest copper man in Boston. He could buy Hampton, and never feel it,
+and they say his house in Brighton cost half a million dollars. Nelly
+Nealy put her damages at one hundred and fifty thousand and stung him for
+seventy five. I wish I'd been in court when that jury came back! There's
+her picture."
+
+To Janet, especially in the mood of reaction in which she found herself
+that evening, Lise's intense excitement, passionate partisanship and
+approval of Miss Nealy were incomprehensible, repellent. However, she
+took the sheet, gazing at the image of the lady who, recently an obscure
+stenographer, had suddenly leaped into fame and become a "headliner," the
+envied of thousands of working girls all over New England. Miss Nealy, in
+spite of the "glare of publicity" she deplored, had borne up admirably
+under the strain, and evidently had been able to consume three meals a
+day and give some thought to her costumes. Her smile under the picture
+hat was coquettish, if not bold. The special article, signed by a lady
+reporter whose sympathies were by no means concealed and whose talents
+were given free rein, related how the white-haired mother had wept tears
+of joy; how Miss Nealy herself had been awhile too overcome to speak, and
+then had recovered sufficiently to express her gratitude to the twelve
+gentlemen who had vindicated the honour of American womanhood. Mr.
+Ferris, she reiterated, was a brute; never as long as she lived would she
+be able to forget how she had loved and believed in him, and how, when at
+length she unwillingly became convinces of his perfidy, she had been
+"prostrated," unable to support her old mother. She had not, naturally,
+yet decided how she would invest her fortune; as for going on the stage,
+that had been suggested, but she had made no plans. "Scores of women
+sympathizers" had escorted her to a waiting automobile....
+
+Janet, impelled by the fascination akin to disgust, read thus far, and
+flinging the newspaper on the floor, began to tidy herself for supper.
+But presently, when she heard Lise sigh, she could contain herself no
+longer.
+
+"I don't see how you can read such stuff as that," she exclaimed.
+"It's--it's horrible."
+
+"Horrible?" Lise repeated.
+
+Janet swung round from the washbasin, her hands dripping.
+
+"Instead of getting seventy five thousand dollars she ought to be tarred
+and feathered. She's nothing but a blackmailer."
+
+Lise, aroused from her visions, demanded vehemently "Ain't he a
+millionaire?"
+
+"What difference does that make?" Janet retorted. "And you can't tell me
+she didn't know what she was up to all along--with that face."
+
+"I'd have sued him, all right," declared Lise, defiantly.
+
+"Then you'd be a blackmailer, too. I'd sooner scrub floors, I'd sooner
+starve than do such a thing--take money for my affections. In the first
+place, I'd have more pride, and in the second place, if I really loved a
+man, seventy five thousand or seventy five million dollars wouldn't help
+me any. Where do you get such ideas? Decent people don't have them."
+
+Janet turned to the basin again and began rubbing her face
+vigorously--ceasing for an instance to make sure of the identity of a
+sound reaching her ears despite the splashing of water. Lise was sobbing.
+Janet dried her face and hands, arranged her hair, and sat down on the
+windowsill; the scorn and anger, which had been so intense as completely
+to possess her, melting into a pity and contempt not unmixed with
+bewilderment. Ordinarily Lise was hard, impervious to such reproaches,
+holding her own in the passionate quarrels that occasionally took place
+between them yet there were times, such as this, when her resistance
+broke down unexpectedly, and she lost all self control. She rocked to and
+fro in the chair, her shoulders bowed, her face hidden in her hands.
+Janet reached out and touched her.
+
+"Don't be silly," she began, rather sharply, "just because I said it was
+a disgrace to have such ideas. Well, it is."
+
+"I'm not silly," said Lise. "I'm sick of that job at the Bagatelle"
+--sob--"there's nothing in it--I'm going to quit--I wish to God I was
+dead! Standing on your feet all day till you're wore out for six dollars
+a week--what's there in it?"--sob--"With that guy Walters who walks the
+floor never lettin' up on you. He come up to me yesterday and says, `I
+didn't know you was near sighted, Miss Bumpus' just because there was a
+customer Annie Hatch was too lazy to wait on"--sob--"That's his line of
+dope--thinks he's sarcastic--and he's sweet on Annie. Tomorrow I'm going
+to tell him to go to hell. I'm through I'm sick of it, I tell
+you"--sob--"I'd rather be dead than slave like that for six dollars."
+
+"Where are you going?" asked Janet.
+
+"I don't know--I don't care. What's the difference? any place'd be better
+than this." For awhile she continued to cry on a ridiculously high,
+though subdued, whining note, her breath catching at intervals. A feeling
+of helplessness, of utter desolation crept over Janet; powerless to
+comfort herself, how could she comfort her sister? She glanced around the
+familiar, sordid room, at the magazine pages against the faded
+wall-paper, at the littered bureau and the littered bed, over which
+Lise's clothes were flung. It was hot and close even now, in summer it
+would be stifling. Suddenly a flash of sympathy revealed to her a glimpse
+of the truth that Lise, too, after her own nature, sought beauty and
+freedom! Never did she come as near comprehending Lise as in such moments
+as this, and when, on dark winter mornings, her sister clung to her,
+terrified by the siren. Lise was a child, and the thought that she,
+Janet, was powerless to change her was a part of the tragic tenderness.
+What would become of Lise? And what would become of her, Janet?... So she
+clung, desperately, to her sister's hand until at last Lise roused
+herself, her hair awry, her face puckered and wet with tears and
+perspiration.
+
+"I can't stand it any more--I've just got to go away anywhere," she said,
+and the cry found an echo in Janet's heart....
+
+But the next morning Lise went back to the Bagatelle, and Janet to the
+mill....
+
+The fact that Lise's love affairs had not been prospering undoubtedly had
+something to do with the fit of depression into which she had fallen that
+evening. A month or so before she had acquired another beau. It was
+understood by Lise's friends and Lise's family, though not by the
+gentleman himself, that his position was only temporary or at most
+probationary; he had not even succeeded to the rights, title, and
+privileges of the late Mr. Wiley, though occupying a higher position in
+the social scale--being the agent of a patent lawn sprinkler with an
+office in Faber Street.
+
+"Stick to him and you'll wear diamonds--that's what he tries to put
+across," was Lise's comment on Mr. Frear's method, and thus Janet gained
+the impression that her sister's feelings were not deeply involved. "If I
+thought he'd make good with the sprinkler I might talk business. But say,
+he's one of those ginks that's always tryin' to beat the bank. He's never
+done a day's work in his life. Last year he was passing around Foley's
+magazine, and before that he was with the race track that went out of
+business because the ministers got nutty over it. Well, he may win out,"
+she added reflectively, "those guys sometimes do put the game on the
+blink. He sure is a good spender when the orders come in, with a line of
+talk to make you holler for mercy."
+
+Mr. Frear's "line of talk" came wholly, astonishingly, from one side of
+his mouth--the left side. As a muscular feat it was a triumph. A deaf
+person on his right side would not have known he was speaking. The effect
+was secretive, extraordinarily confidential; enabling him to sell
+sprinklers, it ought to have helped him to make love, so distinctly
+personal was it, implying as it did that the individual addressed was
+alone of all the world worthy of consideration. Among his friends it was
+regarded as an accomplishment, but Lise was critical, especially since he
+did not look into one's eyes, but gazed off into space, as though he
+weren't talking at all.
+
+She had once inquired if the right side of his face was paralyzed.
+
+She permitted him to take her, however, to Gruber's Cafe, to the movies,
+and one or two select dance halls, and to Slattery's Riverside Park,
+where one evening she had encountered the rejected Mr. Wiley.
+
+"Say, he was sore!" she told Janet the next morning, relating the
+incident with relish, "for two cents he would have knocked Charlie over
+the ropes. I guess he could do it, too, all right."
+
+Janet found it curious that Lise should display such vindictiveness
+toward Mr. Wiley, who was more sinned against than sinning. She was moved
+to inquire after his welfare.
+
+"He's got one of them red motorcycles," said Lise. "He was gay with it
+too--when we was waiting for the boulevard trolley he opened her up and
+went right between Charlie and me. I had to laugh. He's got a job over in
+Haverhill you can't hold that guy under water long."
+
+Apparently Lise had no regrets. But her premonitions concerning Mr. Frear
+proved to be justified. He did not "make good." One morning the little
+office on Faber Street where the sprinklers were displayed was closed,
+Hampton knew him no more, and the police alone were sincerely regretful.
+It seemed that of late he had been keeping all the money for the
+sprinklers, and spending a good deal of it on Lise. At the time she
+accepted the affair with stoical pessimism, as one who has learned what
+to expect of the world, though her moral sense was not profoundly
+disturbed by the reflection that she had indulged in the delights of
+Slattery's and Gruber's and a Sunday at "the Beach" at the expense of the
+Cascade Sprinkler Company of Boston. Mr. Frear inconsiderately neglected
+to prepare her for his departure, the news of which was conveyed to her
+in a singular manner, and by none other than Mr. Johnny Tiernan of the
+tin shop,--their conversation throwing some light, not only on Lise's
+sophistication, but on the admirable and intricate operation of Hampton's
+city government. About five o'clock Lise was coming home along Fillmore
+Street after an uneventful, tedious and manless holiday spent in the
+company of Miss Schuler and other friends when she perceived Mr. Tiernan
+seated on his steps, grinning and waving a tattered palm-leaf fan.
+
+"The mercury is sure on the jump," he observed. "You'd think it was
+July."
+
+And Lise agreed.
+
+"I suppose you'll be going to Tim Slattery's place tonight," he went on.
+"It's the coolest spot this side of the Atlantic Ocean."
+
+There was, apparently, nothing cryptic in this remark, yet it is worth
+noting that Lise instantly became suspicious.
+
+"Why would I be going out there?" she inquired innocently, darting at him
+a dark, coquettish glance.
+
+Mr. Tiernan regarded her guilelessly, but there was admiration in his
+soul; not because of her unquestioned feminine attractions,--he being
+somewhat amazingly proof against such things,--but because it was
+conveyed to him in some unaccountable way that her suspicions were
+aroused. The brain beneath that corkscrew hair was worthy of a Richelieu.
+Mr. Tiernan's estimate of Miss Lise Bumpus, if he could have been induced
+to reveal it, would have been worth listening to.
+
+"And why wouldn't you?" he replied heartily. "Don't I see all the pretty
+young ladies out there, including yourself, and you dancing with the
+Cascade man. Why is it you'll never give me a dance?"
+
+"Why is it you never ask me?" demanded Lise.
+
+"What chance have I got, against him?"
+
+"He don't own me," said Lise.
+
+Mr. Tiernan threw back his head, and laughed.
+
+"Well, if you're there to-night, tangoin' with him and I come up and
+says, `Miss Bumpus, the pleasure is mine,' I'm wondering what would
+happen."
+
+"I'm not going to Slattery's to-night," she declared having that instant
+arrived at this conclusion.
+
+"And where then? I'll come along, if there's a chance for me."
+
+"Quit your kidding," Lise reproved him.
+
+Mr. Tiernan suddenly looked very solemn:
+
+"Kidding, is it? Me kiddin' you? Give me a chance, that's all I'm asking.
+Where will you be, now?"
+
+"Is Frear wanted?" she demanded.
+
+Mr. Tiernan's expression changed. His nose seemed to become more pointed,
+his eyes to twinkle more merrily than ever. He didn't take the trouble,
+now, to conceal his admiration.
+
+"Sure, Miss Bumpus," he said, "if you was a man, we'd have you on the
+force to-morrow."
+
+"What's he wanted for?"
+
+"Well," said Johnny, "a little matter of sprinklin'. He's been sprinklin'
+his company's water without a license."
+
+She was silent a moment before she exclaimed:--"I ought to have been
+wise that he was a crook!"
+
+"Well," said Johnny consolingly, "there's others that ought to have been
+wise, too. The Cascade people had no business takin' on a man that
+couldn't use but half of his mouth."
+
+This seemed to Lise a reflection on her judgment. She proceeded to clear
+herself.
+
+"He was nothing to me. He never gave me no rest. He used to come 'round
+and pester me to go out with him--"
+
+"Sure!" interrupted Mr. Tiernan. "Don't I know how it is with the likes
+of him! A good time's a good time, and no harm in it. But the point is"
+and here he cocked his nose--"the point is, where is he? Where will he be
+tonight?"
+
+All at once Lise grew vehement, almost tearful.
+
+"I don't know--honest to God, I don't. If I did I'd tell you. Last night
+he said he might be out of town. He didn't say where he was going." She
+fumbled in her bag, drawing out an imitation lace handkerchief and
+pressing it to her eyes.
+
+"There now!" exclaimed Mr. Tiernan, soothingly. "How would you know? And
+he deceivin' you like he did the company--"
+
+"He didn't deceive me," cried Lise.
+
+"Listen," said Mr. Tiernan, who had risen and laid his hand on her arm.
+"It's not young ladies like you that works and are self-respecting that
+any one would be troublin', and you the daughter of such a fine man as
+your father. Run along, now, I won't be detaining you, Miss Bumpus, and
+you'll accept my apology. I guess we'll never see him in Hampton
+again...."
+
+Some twenty minutes later he sauntered down the street, saluting
+acquaintances, and threading his way across the Common entered a grimy
+brick building where a huge policeman with an insignia on his arm was
+seated behind a desk. Mr. Tiernan leaned on the desk, and reflectively
+lighted a Thomas-Jefferson-Five-Cent Cigar, Union Label, the excellencies
+of which were set forth on large signs above the "ten foot" buildings on
+Faber Street.
+
+"She don't know nothing, Mike," he remarked. "I guess he got wise this
+morning."
+
+The sergeant nodded....
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+To feel potential within one's self the capacity to live and yet to have
+no means of realizing this capacity is doubtless one of the least
+comfortable and agreeable of human experiences. Such, as summer came on,
+was Janet's case. The memory of that visit to Silliston lingered in her
+mind, sometimes to flare up so vividly as to make her existence seem
+unbearable. How wonderful, she thought, to be able to dwell in such a
+beautiful place, to have as friends and companions such amusing and
+intelligent people as the stranger with whom she had talked! Were all the
+inhabitants of Silliston like him? They must be, since it was a seat of
+learning. Lise's cry, "I've just got to go away, anywhere," found an echo
+in Janet's soul. Why shouldn't she go away? She was capable of taking
+care of herself, she was a good stenographer, her salary had been raised
+twice in two years,--why should she allow consideration for her family to
+stand in the way of what she felt would be self realization?
+Unconsciously she was a true modern in that the virtues known as duty and
+self sacrifice did not appeal to her,--she got from them neither benefit
+nor satisfaction, she understood instinctively that they were impeding to
+growth. Unlike Lise, she was able to see life as it is, she did not
+expect of it miracles, economic or matrimonial. Nothing would happen
+unless she made it happen. She was twenty-one, earning nine dollars a
+week, of which she now contributed five to the household,--her father,
+with characteristic incompetence, having taken out a larger insurance
+policy than he could reasonably carry. Of the remaining four dollars she
+spent more than one on lunches, there were dresses and underclothing,
+shoes and stockings to buy, in spite of darning and mending; little
+treats with Eda that mounted up; and occasionally the dentist--for Janet
+would not neglect her teeth as Lise neglected hers. She managed to save
+something, but it was very little. And she was desperately unhappy when
+she contemplated the grey and monotonous vista of the years ahead, saw
+herself growing older and older, driven always by the stern necessity of
+accumulating a margin against possible disasters; little by little drying
+up, losing, by withering disuse, those rich faculties of enjoyment with
+which she was endowed, and which at once fascinated and frightened her.
+Marriage, in such an environment, offered no solution; marriage meant
+dependence, from which her very nature revolted: and in her existence,
+drab and necessitous though it were, was still a remnant of freedom that
+marriage would compel her to surrender....
+
+One warm evening, oppressed by such reflections, she had started home
+when she remembered having left her bag in the office, and retraced her
+steps. As she turned the corner of West Street, she saw, beside the canal
+and directly in front of the bridge, a new and smart-looking automobile,
+painted crimson and black, of the type known as a runabout, which she
+recognized as belonging to Mr. Ditmar. Indeed, at that moment Mr. Ditmar
+himself was stepping off the end of the bridge and about to start the
+engine when, dropping the crank, he walked to the dashboard and
+apparently became absorbed in some mechanisms there. Was it the glance
+cast in her direction that had caused him to delay his departure? Janet
+was seized by a sudden and rather absurd desire to retreat, but Canal
+Street being empty, such an action would appear eccentric, and she came
+slowly forward, pretending not to see her employer, ridiculing to herself
+the idea that he had noticed her. Much to her annoyance, however, her
+embarrassment persisted, and she knew it was due to the memory of certain
+incidents, each in itself almost negligible, but cumulatively amounting
+to a suspicion that for some months he had been aware of her: many times
+when he had passed through the outer office she had felt his eyes upon
+her, had been impelled to look up from her work to surprise in them a
+certain glow to make her bow her head again in warm confusion. Now, as
+she approached him, she was pleasantly but rather guiltily conscious of
+the more rapid beating of the blood that precedes an adventure, yet
+sufficiently self-possessed to note the becoming nature of the light
+flannel suit axed rather rakish Panama he had pushed back from his
+forehead. It was not until she had almost passed him that he straightened
+up, lifted the Panama, tentatively, and not too far, startling her.
+
+"Good afternoon, Miss Bumpus," he said. "I thought you had gone."
+
+"I left my bag in the office," she replied, with the outward calmness
+that rarely deserted her--the calmness, indeed, that had piqued him and
+was leading him on to rashness.
+
+"Oh," he said. "Simmons will get it for you." Simmons was the watchman
+who stood in the vestibule of the office entrance.
+
+"Thanks. I can get it myself," she told him, and would have gone on had
+he not addressed her again. "I was just starting out for a spin. What do
+you think of the car? It's good looking, isn't it?" He stood off and
+surveyed it, laughing a little, and in his laugh she detected a note
+apologetic, at variance with the conception she had formed of his
+character, though not alien, indeed, to the dust-coloured vigour of the
+man. She scarcely recognized Ditmar as he stood there, yet he excited
+her, she felt from him an undercurrent of something that caused her
+inwardly to tremble. "See how the lines are carried through." He
+indicated this by a wave of his hand, but his eyes were now on her.
+
+"It is pretty," she agreed.
+
+In contrast to the defensive tactics which other ladies of his
+acquaintance had adopted, tactics of a patently coy and coquettish
+nature, this self-collected manner was new and spicy, challenging to
+powers never as yet fully exerted while beneath her manner he felt
+throbbing that rare and dangerous thing in women, a temperament, for
+which men have given their souls. This conviction of her possession of a
+temperament,--he could not have defined the word, emotional rather than
+intellectual, produced the apologetic attitude she was quick to sense. He
+had never been, at least during his maturity, at a loss with the other
+sex, and he found the experience delicious.
+
+"You like pretty things, I'm sure of that," he hazarded. But she did not
+ask him how he knew, she simply assented. He raised the hood, revealing
+the engine. "Isn't that pretty? See how nicely everything is adjusted in
+that little space to do the particular work for which it is designed."
+
+Thus appealed to, she came forward and stopped, still standing off a
+little way, but near enough to see, gazing at the shining copper caps on
+the cylinders, at the bright rods and gears.
+
+"It looks intricate," said Mr. Ditmar, "but really it's very simple. The
+gasoline comes in here from the tank behind--this is called the
+carburetor, it has a jet to vaporize the gasoline, and the vapour is
+sucked into each of these cylinders in turn when the piston moves--like
+this." He sought to explain the action of the piston. "That compresses
+it, and then a tiny electric spark comes just at the right moment to
+explode it, and the explosion sends the piston down again, and turns the
+shaft. Well, all four cylinders have an explosion one right after
+another, and that keeps the shaft going." Whereupon the most important
+personage in Hampton, the head of the great Chippering Mill proceeded,
+for the benefit of a humble assistant stenographer, to remove the floor
+boards behind the dash. "There's the shaft, come here and look at it."
+She obeyed, standing beside him, almost touching him, his arm, indeed,
+brushing her sleeve, and into his voice crept a tremor. "The shaft turns
+the rear wheels by means of a gear at right angles on the axle, and the
+rear wheels drive the car. Do you see?"
+
+"Yes," she answered faintly, honesty compelling her to add: "a little."
+
+He was looking, now, not at the machinery, but intently at her, and she
+could feel the blood flooding into her cheeks and temples. She was even
+compelled for an instant to return his glance, and from his eyes into
+hers leaped a flame that ran scorching through her body. Then she knew
+with conviction that the explanation of the automobile had been an
+excuse; she had comprehended almost nothing of it, but she had been
+impressed by the facility with which he described it, by his evident
+mastery over it. She had noticed his hands, how thick his fingers were
+and close together; yet how deftly he had used them, without smearing the
+cuffs of his silk shirt or the sleeves of his coat with the oil that
+glistened everywhere.
+
+"I like machinery," he told her as he replaced the boards. "I like to
+take care of it myself."
+
+"It must be interesting," she assented, aware of the inadequacy of the
+remark, and resenting in herself an inarticulateness seemingly imposed by
+inhibition connected with his nearness. Fascination and antagonism were
+struggling within her. Her desire to get away grew desperate.
+
+"Thank you for showing it to me." With an effort of will she moved toward
+the bridge, but was impelled by a consciousness of the abruptness of her
+departure to look back at him once--and smile, to experience again the
+thrill of the current he sped after her. By lifting his hat, a little
+higher, a little more confidently than in the first instance, he made her
+leaving seem more gracious, the act somehow conveying an acknowledgment
+on his part that their relationship had changed.
+
+Once across the bridge and in the mill, she fairly ran up the stairs and
+into the empty office, to perceive her bag lying on the desk where she
+had left it, and sat down for a few minutes beside the window, her heart
+pounding in her breast as though she had barely escaped an accident
+threatening her with physical annihilation. Something had happened to her
+at last! But what did it mean? Where would it lead? Her fear, her
+antagonism, of which she was still conscious, her resentment that Ditmar
+had thus surreptitiously chosen to approach her in a moment when they
+were unobserved were mingled with a throbbing exultation in that he had
+noticed her, that there was something in her to attract him in that way,
+to make his voice thicker and his smile apologetic when he spoke to her.
+Of that "something-in-her" she had been aware before, but never had it
+been so unmistakably recognized and beckoned to from without. She was at
+once terrified, excited--and flattered.
+
+At length, growing calmer, she made her way out of the building. When she
+reached the vestibule she had a moment of sharp apprehension, of
+paradoxical hope, that Ditmar might still be there, awaiting her. But he
+had gone....
+
+In spite of her efforts to dismiss the matter from her mind, to persuade
+herself there had been no significance in the encounter, when she was
+seated at her typewriter the next morning she experienced a renewal of
+the palpitation of the evening before, and at the sound of every step in
+the corridor she started. Of this tendency she was profoundly ashamed.
+And when at last Ditmar arrived, though the blood rose to her temples,
+she kept her eyes fixed on the keys. He went quickly into his room: she
+was convinced he had not so much as glanced at her.... As the days went
+by, however, she was annoyed by the discovery that his continued ignoring
+of her presence brought more resentment than relief, she detected in it a
+deliberation implying between them a guilty secret: she hated secrecy,
+though secrecy contained a thrill. Then, one morning when she was alone
+in the office with young Caldwell, who was absorbed in some reports,
+Ditmar entered unexpectedly and looked her full in the eyes, surprising
+her into answering his glance before she could turn away, hating herself
+and hating him. Hate, she determined, was her prevailing sentiment in
+regard to Mr. Ditmar.
+
+The following Monday Miss Ottway overtook her, at noon, on the stairs.
+
+"Janet, I wanted to speak to you, to tell you I'm leaving," she said.
+
+"Leaving!" repeated Janet, who had regarded Miss Ottway as a fixture.
+
+"I'm going to Boston," Miss Ottway explained, in her deep, musical voice.
+"I've always wanted to go, I have an unmarried sister there of whom I'm
+very fond, and Mr. Ditmar knows that. He's got me a place with the
+Treasurer, Mr. Semple."
+
+"Oh, I'm sorry you're going, though of course I'm glad for you," Janet
+said sincerely, for she liked and respected Miss Ottway, and was
+conscious in the older woman of a certain kindly interest.
+
+"Janet, I've recommended you to Mr. Ditmar for my place."
+
+"Oh!" cried Janet, faintly.
+
+"It was he who asked about you, he thinks you are reliable and quick and
+clever, and I was very glad to say a good word for you, my dear, since I
+could honestly do so." Miss Ottway drew Janet's arm through hers and
+patted it affectionately. "Of course you'll have to expect some jealousy,
+there are older women in the other offices who will think they ought to
+have the place, but if you attend to your own affairs, as you always have
+done, there won't be any trouble."
+
+"Oh, I won't take the place, I can't!" Janet cried, so passionately that
+Miss Ottway looked at her in surprise. "I'm awfully grateful to you," she
+added, flushing crimson, "I--I'm afraid I'm not equal to it."
+
+"Nonsense," said the other with decision. "You'd be very foolish not to
+try it. You won't get as much as I do, at first, at any rate, but a
+little more money won't be unwelcome, I guess. Mr. Ditmar will speak to
+you this afternoon. I leave on Saturday. I'm real glad to do you a good
+turn, Janet, and I know you'll get along," Miss Ottway added impulsively
+as they parted at the corner of Faber Street. "I've always thought a good
+deal of you."
+
+For awhile Janet stood still, staring after the sturdy figure of her
+friend, heedless of the noonday crowd that bumped her. Then she went to
+Grady's Quick Lunch Counter and ordered a sandwich and a glass of milk,
+which she consumed slowly, profoundly sunk in thought. Presently Eda
+Rawle arrived, and noticing her preoccupation, inquired what was the
+matter.
+
+"Nothing," said Janet....
+
+At two o'clock, when Ditmar returned to the office, he called Miss
+Ottway, who presently came out to summon Janet to his presence. Fresh,
+immaculate, yet virile in his light suit and silk shirt with red stripes,
+he was seated at his desk engaged in turning over some papers in a
+drawer. He kept her waiting a moment, and then said, with apparent
+casualness:--"Is that you, Miss Bumpus? Would you mind closing the
+door?"
+
+Janet obeyed, and again stood before him. He looked up. A suggestion of
+tenseness in her pose betraying an inner attitude of alertness, of
+defiance, conveyed to him sharply and deliciously once more the
+panther-like impression he had received when first, as a woman, she had
+come to his notice. The renewed and heightened perception of this feral
+quality in her aroused a sense of danger by no means unpleasurable,
+though warning him that he was about to take an unprecedented step, being
+drawn beyond the limits of caution he had previously set for himself in
+divorcing business and sex. Though he was by no means self-convinced of
+an intention to push the adventure, preferring to leave its possibilities
+open, he strove in voice and manner to be business-like; and instinct,
+perhaps, whispered that she might take alarm.
+
+"Sit down, Miss Bumpus," he said pleasantly, as he closed the drawer.
+
+She seated herself on an office chair.
+
+"Do you like your work here?" he inquired.
+
+"No," said Janet.
+
+"Why not?" he demanded, staring at her.
+
+"Why should I?" she retorted.
+
+"Well--what's the trouble with it? It isn't as hard as it would be in
+some other places, is it?"
+
+"I'm not saying anything against the place."
+
+"What, then?"
+
+"You asked me if I liked my work. I don't."
+
+"Then why do you do it?" he demanded.
+
+"To live," she replied.
+
+He smiled, but his gesture as he stroked his moustache implied a slight
+annoyance at her composure. He found it difficult with this dark,
+self-contained young woman to sustain the role of benefactor.
+
+"What kind of work would you like to do?" he demanded.
+
+"I don't know. I haven't got the choice, anyway," she said.
+
+He observed that she did her work well, to which she made no answer. She
+refused to help him, although Miss Ottway must have warned her. She acted
+as though she were conferring the favour. And yet, clearing his throat,
+he was impelled to say:--"Miss Ottway's leaving me, she's going into the
+Boston office with Mr. Semple, the treasurer of the corporation. I shall
+miss her, she's an able and reliable woman, and she knows my ways." He
+paused, fingering his paper knife. "The fact is, Miss Bumpus, she's
+spoken highly of you, she tells me you're quick and accurate and
+painstaking--I've noticed that for myself. She seems to think you could
+do her work, and recommends that I give you a trial. You understand, of
+course, that the position is in a way confidential, and that you could
+not expect at first, at any rate, the salary Miss Ottway has had, but I'm
+willing to offer you fourteen dollars a week to begin with, and
+afterwards, if we get along together, to give you more. What do you say?"
+
+"I'd like to try it, Mr. Ditmar," Janet said, and added nothing, no word
+of gratitude or of appreciation to that consent.
+
+"Very well then," he replied, "that's settled. Miss Ottway will explain
+things to you, and tell you about my peculiarities. And when she goes you
+can take her desk, by the window nearest my door."
+
+Ditmar sat idle for some minutes after she had gone, staring through the
+open doorway into the outer office....
+
+To Ditmar she had given no evidence of the storm his offer had created in
+her breast, and it was characteristic also that she waited until supper
+was nearly over to inform her family, making the announcement in a
+matter-of-fact tone, just as though it were not the unique piece of good
+fortune that had come to the Bumpuses since Edward had been eliminated
+from the mercantile establishment at Dolton. The news was received with
+something like consternation. For the moment Hannah was incapable of
+speech, and her hand trembled as she resumed the cutting of the pie: but
+hope surged within her despite her effort to keep it down, her
+determination to remain true to the fatalism from which she had
+paradoxically derived so much comfort. The effect on Edward, while
+somewhat less violent, was temporarily to take away his appetite. Hope,
+to flower in him, needed but little watering. Great was his faith in the
+Bumpus blood, and secretly he had always regarded his eldest daughter as
+the chosen vessel for their redemption.
+
+"Well, I swan!" he exclaimed, staring at her in admiration and neglecting
+his pie, "I've always thought you had it in you to get on, Janet. I guess
+I've told you you've always put me in mind of Eliza Bumpus--the one that
+held out against the Indians till her husband came back with the
+neighbours. I was just reading about her again the other night."
+
+"Yes, you've told us, Edward," said Hannah.
+
+"She had gumption," he went on, undismayed. "And from what I can gather
+of her looks I calculate you favour her--she was dark and not so very
+tall--not so tall as you, I guess. So you're goin'" (he pronounced it
+very slowly) "you're goin' to be Mr. Ditmar's private stenographer! He's
+a smart man, Mr. Ditmar, he's a good man, too. All you've got to do is to
+behave right by him. He always speaks to me when he passes by the gate. I
+was sorry for him when his wife died--a young woman, too. And he's never
+married again! Well, I swan!"
+
+"You'd better quit swanning," exclaimed Hannah. "And what's Mr. Ditmar's
+goodness got to do with it? He's found-out Janet has sense, she's willing
+and hard working, he won't" (pronounced want) "he won't be the loser by
+it, and he's not giving her what he gave Miss Ottway. It's just like you,
+thinking he's doing her a good turn."
+
+"I'm not saying Janet isn't smart," he protested, "but I know it's hard
+to get work with so many folks after every job."
+
+"Maybe it ain't so hard when you've got some get-up and go," Hannah
+retorted rather cruelly. It was thus characteristically and with
+unintentional sharpness she expressed her maternal pride by a reflection
+not only upon Edward, but Lise also. Janet had grown warm at the mention
+of Ditmar's name.
+
+"It was Miss Ottway who recommended me," she said, glancing at her
+sister, who during this conversation had sat in silence. Lise's
+expression, normally suggestive of a discontent not unbecoming to her
+type, had grown almost sullen. Hannah's brisk gathering up of the dishes
+was suddenly arrested.
+
+"Lise, why don't you say something to your sister? Ain't you glad she's
+got the place?"
+
+"Sure, I'm glad," said Lise, and began to unscrew the top of the salt
+shaker. "I don't see why I couldn't get a raise, too. I work just as hard
+as she does."
+
+Edward, who had never got a "raise" in his life, was smitten with
+compunction and sympathy.
+
+"Give 'em time, Lise," he said consolingly. "You ain't so old as Janet."
+
+"Time!" she cried, flaring up and suddenly losing her control. "I've got
+a picture of Waiters giving me a raise I know the girls that get raises
+from him."
+
+"You ought to be ashamed of yourself," Hannah declared. "There--you've
+spilled the salt!"
+
+But Lise, suddenly bursting into tears, got up and left the room. Edward
+picked up the Banner and pretended to read it, while Janet collected the
+salt and put it back into the shaker. Hannah, gathering up the rest of
+the dishes, disappeared into the kitchen, but presently returned, as
+though she had forgotten something.
+
+"Hadn't you better go after her?" she said to Janet.
+
+"I'm afraid it won't be any use. She's got sort of queer, lately--she
+thinks they're down on her."
+
+"I'm sorry I spoke so sharp. But then--" Hannah shook her head, and her
+sentence remained unfinished.
+
+Janet sought her sister, but returned after a brief interval, with the
+news that Lise had gone out.
+
+One of the delights of friendship, as is well known, is the exchange of
+confidences of joy or sorrow, but there was, in Janet's promotion,
+something intensely personal to increase her natural reserve. Her
+feelings toward Ditmar were so mingled as to defy analysis, and several
+days went by before she could bring herself to inform Eda Rawle of the
+new business relationship in which she stood to the agent of the
+Chippering Mill. The sky was still bright as they walked out Warren
+Street after supper, Eda bewailing the trials of the day just ended: Mr.
+Frye, the cashier of the bank, had had one of his cantankerous fits, had
+found fault with her punctuation, nothing she had done had pleased him.
+But presently, when they had come to what the Banner called the
+"residential district," she was cheered by the sight of the green lawns,
+the flowerbeds and shrubbery, the mansions of those inhabitants of
+Hampton unfamiliar with boardinghouses and tenements. Before one of these
+she paused, retaining Janet by the arm, exclaiming wistfully:
+
+"Wouldn't you like to live there? That belongs to your boss."
+
+Janet, who had been dreaming as she gazed at the facade of rough stucco
+that once had sufficed to fill the ambitions of the late Mrs. Ditmar,
+recognized it as soon as Eda spoke, and dragged her friend hastily,
+almost roughly along the sidewalk until they had reached the end of the
+block. Janet was red.
+
+"What's the matter?" demanded Eda, as soon as she had recovered from her
+surprise.
+
+"Nothing," said Janet. "Only--I'm in his office."
+
+"But what of it? You've got a right to look at his house, haven't you?"
+
+"Why yes,--a right," Janet assented. Knowing Eda's ambitions for her were
+not those of a business career, she was in terror lest her friend should
+scent a romance, and for this reason she had never spoken of the symptoms
+Ditmar had betrayed. She attempted to convey to Eda the doubtful taste of
+staring point-blank at the house of one's employer, especially when he
+might be concealed behind a curtain.
+
+"You see," she added, "Miss Ottway's recommended me for her place--she's
+going away."
+
+"Janet!" cried Eda. "Why didn't you tell me?"
+
+"Well," said Janet guiltily, "it's only a trial. I don't know whether
+he'll keep me or not."
+
+"Of course he'll keep you," said Eda, warmly. "If that isn't just like
+you, not saying a word about it. Gee, if I'd had a raise like that I just
+couldn't wait to tell you. But then, I'm not smart like you."
+
+"Don't be silly," said Janet, out of humour with herself, and annoyed
+because she could not then appreciate Eda's generosity.
+
+"We've just got to celebrate!" declared Eda, who had the gift, which
+Janet lacked, of taking her joys vicariously; and her romantic and
+somewhat medieval proclivities would permit no such momentous occasion to
+pass without an appropriate festal symbol. "We'll have a spree on
+Saturday--the circus is coming then."
+
+"It'll be my spree," insisted Janet, her heart warming. "I've got the
+raise...."
+
+On Saturday, accordingly, they met at Grady's for lunch, Eda attired in
+her best blouse of pale blue, and when they emerged from the restaurant,
+despite the torrid heat, she beheld Faber Street as in holiday garb as
+they made their way to the cool recesses of Winterhalter's to complete
+the feast. That glorified drug-store with the five bays included in its
+manifold functions a department rivalling Delmonico's, with electric fans
+and marble-topped tables and white-clad waiters who took one's order and
+filled it at the soda fountain. It mattered little to Eda that the young
+man awaiting their commands had pimples and long hair and grinned
+affectionately as he greeted them.
+
+"Hello, girls!" he said. "What strikes you to-day?"
+
+"Me for a raspberry nut sundae," announced Eda, and Janet, being unable
+to imagine any more delectable confection, assented. The penetrating
+odour peculiar to drugstores, dominated by menthol and some unnamable but
+ancient remedy for catarrh, was powerless to interfere with their
+enjoyment.
+
+The circus began at two. Rather than cling to the straps of a crowded car
+they chose to walk, following the familiar route of the trolley past the
+car barns and the base-ball park to the bare field under the seared face
+of Torrey's Hill, where circuses were wont to settle. A sirocco-like
+breeze from the southwest whirled into eddies the clouds of germ-laden
+dust stirred up by the automobiles, blowing their skirts against their
+legs, and sometimes they were forced to turn, clinging to their hats,
+confused and giggling, conscious of male glances. The crowd, increasing
+as they proceeded, was in holiday mood; young men with a newly-washed
+aspect, in Faber Street suits, chaffed boisterously groups of girls, who
+retorted with shrill cries and shrieks of laughter; amorous couples
+strolled, arm in arm, oblivious, as though the place were as empty as
+Eden; lady-killers with exaggerated square shoulders, wearing bright
+neckties, their predatory instincts alert, hovered about in eager search
+of adventure. There were men-killers, too, usually to be found in pairs,
+in startling costumes they had been persuaded were the latest Paris
+models,--imitations of French cocottes in Hampton, proof of the smallness
+of our modern world. Eda regarded them superciliously.
+
+"They'd like you to think they'd never been near a loom or a bobbin!" she
+exclaimed.
+
+In addition to these more conspicuous elements, the crowd contained sober
+operatives of the skilled sort possessed of sufficient means to bring
+hither their families, including the baby; there were section-hands and
+foremen, slashers, mule spinners, beamers, French-Canadians, Irish,
+Scotch, Welsh and English, Germans, with only an occasional Italian,
+Lithuanian, or Jew. Peanut and popcorn men, venders of tamales and
+Chile-con-carne hoarsely shouted their wares, while from afar could be
+heard the muffled booming of a band. Janet's heart beat faster. She
+regarded with a tinge of awe the vast expanse of tent that rose before
+her eyes, the wind sending ripples along the heavy canvas from
+circumference to tent pole. She bought the tickets; they entered the
+circular enclosure where the animals were kept; where the strong beams of
+the sun, in trying to force their way through the canvas roof, created an
+unnatural, jaundiced twilight, the weirdness of which was somehow
+enhanced by the hoarse, amazingly penetrating growls of beasts. Suddenly
+a lion near them raised a shaggy head, emitting a series of undulating,
+soul-shaking roars.
+
+"Ah, what's eatin' you?" demanded a thick-necked youth, pretending not to
+be awestricken by this demonstration.
+
+"Suppose he'd get out!" cried Eda, drawing Janet away.
+
+"I wouldn't let him hurt you, dearie," the young man assured her.
+
+"You!" she retorted contemptuously, but grinned in spite of herself,
+showing her gums.
+
+The vague feeling of terror inspired by this tent was a part of its
+fascination, for it seemed pregnant with potential tragedies suggested by
+the juxtaposition of helpless babies and wild beasts, the babies crying
+or staring in blank amazement at padding tigers whose phosphorescent eyes
+never left these morsels beyond the bars. The two girls wandered about,
+their arms closely locked, but the strange atmosphere, the roars of the
+beasts, the ineffable, pungent odour of the circus, of sawdust mingled
+with the effluvia of animals, had aroused an excitement that was slow in
+subsiding. Some time elapsed before they were capable of taking a normal
+interest in the various exhibits.
+
+"`Adjutant Bird,'" Janet read presently from a legend on one of the
+compartments of a cage devoted to birds, and surveying the somewhat
+dissolute occupant. "Why, he's just like one of those tall mashers who
+stay at the Wilmot and stand on the sidewalk,--travelling men, you know."
+
+"Say-isn't he?" Eda agreed. "Isn't he pleased with himself, and his feet
+crossed!"
+
+"And see this one, Eda--he's a 'Harpy Eagle.' There's somebody we know
+looks just like that. Wait a minute--I'll tell you--it's the woman who
+sits in the cashier's cage at Grady's."
+
+"If it sure isn't!" said Eda.
+
+"She has the same fluffy, light hair--hairpins can't keep it down, and
+she looks at you in that same sort of surprised way with her head on one
+side when you hand in your check."
+
+"Why, it's true to the life!" cried Eda enthusiastically. "She thinks
+she's got all the men cinched,--she does and she's forty if she's a day."
+
+These comparisons brought them to a pitch of risible enjoyment amply
+sustained by the spectacle in the monkey cage, to which presently they
+turned. A chimpanzee, with a solicitation more than human, was solemnly
+searching a friend for fleas in the midst of a pandemonium of chattering
+and screeching and chasing, of rattling of bars and trapezes carried on
+by their companions.
+
+"Well, young ladies," said a voice, "come to pay a call on your
+relations--have ye?"
+
+Eda giggled hysterically. An elderly man was standing beside them. He was
+shabbily dressed, his own features were wizened, almost simian, and by
+his friendly and fatuous smile Janet recognized one of the harmless
+obsessed in which Hampton abounded.
+
+"Relations!" Eda exclaimed.
+
+"You and me, yes, and her," he answered, looking at Janet, though at
+first he had apparently entertained some doubt as to this inclusion,
+"we're all descended from them." His gesture triumphantly indicated the
+denizens of the cage.
+
+"What are you giving us?" said Eda.
+
+"Ain't you never read Darwin?" he demanded. "If you had, you'd know
+they're our ancestors, you'd know we came from them instead of Adam and
+Eve. That there's a fable."
+
+"I'll never believe I came from them," cried Eda, vehement in her
+disgust.
+
+But Janet laughed. "What's the difference? Some of us aren't any better
+than monkeys, anyway."
+
+"That's so," said the man approvingly. "That's so." He wanted to continue
+the conversation, but they left him rather ruthlessly. And when, from the
+entrance to the performance tent, they glanced back over their shoulders,
+he was still gazing at his cousins behind the bars, seemingly deriving an
+acute pleasure from his consciousness of the connection....
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+Modern business, by reason of the mingling of the sexes it involves, for
+the playwright and the novelist and the sociologist is full of
+interesting and dramatic situations, and in it may be studied,
+undoubtedly, one phase of the evolution tending to transform if not
+disintegrate certain institutions hitherto the corner-stones of society.
+Our stage is set. A young woman, conscious of ability, owes her promotion
+primarily to certain dynamic feminine qualities with which she is
+endowed. And though she may make an elaborate pretense of ignoring the
+fact, in her heart she knows and resents it, while at the same time,
+paradoxically, she gets a thrill from it,--a sustaining and inspiring
+thrill of power! On its face it is a business arrangement;
+secretly,--attempt to repudiate this as one may,--it is tinged with the
+colours of high adventure. When Janet entered into the intimate
+relationship with Mr. Claude Ditmar necessitated by her new duties as his
+private stenographer her attitude, slightly defiant, was the
+irreproachable one of a strict attention to duty. All unconsciously she
+was a true daughter of the twentieth century, and probably a feminist at
+heart, which is to say that her conduct was determined by no preconceived
+or handed-down notions of what was proper and lady-like. For feminism, in
+a sense, is a return to atavism, and sex antagonism and sex attraction
+are functions of the same thing. There were moments when she believed
+herself to hate Mr. Ditmar, when she treated him with an aloofness, an
+impersonality unsurpassed; moments when he paused in his dictation to
+stare at her in astonishment. He, who flattered himself that he
+understood women!
+
+She would show him!--such was her dominating determination. Her promotion
+assumed the guise of a challenge, of a gauntlet flung down at the feet of
+her sex. In a certain way, an insult, though incredibly stimulating. If
+he flattered himself that he had done her a favour, if he entertained the
+notion that he could presently take advantage of the contact with her now
+achieved to make unbusinesslike advances--well, he would find out. He had
+proclaimed his desire for an able assistant in Miss Ottway's place--he
+would get one, and nothing more. She watched narrowly, a l'affut, as the
+French say, for any signs of sentiment, and indeed this awareness of her
+being on guard may have had some influence on Mr. Ditmar's own attitude,
+likewise irreproachable.... A rather anaemic young woman, a Miss Annie
+James, was hired for Janet's old place.
+
+In spite of this aloofness and alertness, for the first time in her life
+Janet felt the exuberance of being in touch with affairs of import.
+Hitherto the mill had been merely a greedy monster claiming her freedom
+and draining her energies in tasks routine, such as the copying of
+meaningless documents and rows of figures; now, supplied with stimulus
+and a motive, the Corporation began to take on significance, and she
+flung herself into the work with an ardour hitherto unknown, determined
+to make herself so valuable to Ditmar that the time would come when he
+could not do without her. She strove to memorize certain names and
+addresses, lest time be lost in looking them up, to familiarize herself
+with the ordinary run of his correspondence, to recall what letters were
+to be marked "personal," to anticipate matters of routine, in order that
+he might not have the tedium of repeating instructions; she acquired the
+faculty of keeping his engagements in her head; she came early to the
+office, remaining after hours, going through the files, becoming familiar
+with his system; and she learned to sort out his correspondence, sifting
+the important from the unimportant, to protect him, more and more, from
+numerous visitors who called only to waste his time. Her instinct for the
+detection of book-agents, no matter how brisk and businesslike they might
+appear, was unerring--she remembered faces and the names belonging to
+them: an individual once observed to be persona non grata never succeeded
+in passing her twice. On one occasion Ditmar came out of his office to
+see the back of one of these visitors disappearing into the corridor.
+
+"Who was that?" he asked.
+
+"His name is McCalla," she said. "I thought you didn't want to be
+bothered."
+
+"But how in thunder did you get rid of him?" he demanded.
+
+"Oh, I just wouldn't let him in," she replied demurely.
+
+And Ditmar went away, wondering.... Thus she studied him, without
+permitting him to suspect it, learning his idiosyncrasies, his attitude
+toward all those with whom daily he came in contact, only to find herself
+approving. She was forced to admit that he was a judge of men, compelled
+to admire his adroitness in dealing with them. He could be democratic or
+autocratic as occasion demanded; he knew when to yield, and when to
+remain inflexible. One morning, for instance, there arrived from New York
+a dapper salesman whose jauntily tied bow, whose thin hair--carefully
+parted to conceal an incipient baldness--whose wary and slightly weary
+eyes all impressively suggested the metropolitan atmosphere of high
+pressure and sophistication from which he had emerged. He had a machine
+to sell; an amazing machine, endowed with human intelligence and more
+than human infallibility; for when it made a mistake it stopped. It was
+designed for the express purpose of eliminating from the payroll the
+skilled and sharp-eyed women who are known as "drawers-in," who sit all
+day long under a north light patiently threading the ends of the warp
+through the heddles of the loom harness. Janet's imagination was
+gradually fired as she listened to the visitor's eloquence; and the
+textile industry, which hitherto had seemed to her uninteresting and
+sordid, took on the colours of romance.
+
+"Now I've made up my mind we'll place one with you, Mr. Ditmar," the
+salesman concluded. "I don't object to telling you we'd rather have one
+in the Chippering than in any mill in New England."
+
+Janet was surprised, almost shocked to see Ditmar shake his head, yet she
+felt a certain reluctant admiration because he had not been swayed by
+blandishments. At such moments, when he was bent on refusing a request,
+he seemed physically to acquire massiveness,--and he had a dogged way of
+chewing his cigar.
+
+"I don't want it, yet," he replied, "not until you improve it." And she
+was impressed by the fact that he seemed to know as much about the
+machine as the salesman himself. In spite of protests, denials, appeals,
+he remained firm. "When you get rid of the defects I've mentioned come
+back, Mr. Hicks--but don't come back until then."
+
+And Mr. Hicks departed, discomfited....
+
+Ditmar knew what he wanted. Of the mill he was the absolute master,
+familiar with every process, carrying constantly in his mind how many
+spindles, how many looms were at work; and if anything untoward happened,
+becoming aware of it by what seemed to Janet a subconscious process,
+sending for the superintendent of the department: for Mr. Orcutt,
+perhaps, whose office was across the hall--a tall, lean, spectacled man
+of fifty who looked like a schoolmaster.
+
+"Orcutt, what's the matter with the opener in Cooney's room?"
+
+"Why, the blower's out of order."
+
+"Well, whose fault is it?"....
+
+He knew every watchman and foreman in the mill, and many of the second
+hands. The old workers, men and women who had been in the Chippering
+employ through good and bad times for years, had a place in his
+affections, but toward the labour force in general his attitude was
+impersonal. The mill had to be run, and people to be got to run it. With
+him, first and last and always it was the mill, and little by little what
+had been for Janet a heterogeneous mass of machinery and human beings
+became unified and personified in Claude Ditmar. It was odd how the
+essence and quality of that great building had changed for her; how the
+very roaring of the looms, as she drew near the canal in the mornings,
+had ceased to be sinister and depressing, but bore now a burden like a
+great battle song to excite and inspire, to remind her that she had been
+snatched as by a miracle from the commonplace. And all this was a
+function of Ditmar.
+
+Life had become portentous. And she was troubled by no qualms of logic,
+but gloried, womanlike, in her lack of it. She did not ask herself why
+she had deliberately enlarged upon Miss Ottway's duties, invaded
+debatable ground in part inevitably personal, flung herself with such
+abandon into the enterprise of his life's passion, at the same time
+maintaining a deceptive attitude of detachment, half deceiving herself
+that it was zeal for the work by which she was actuated. In her soul she
+knew better. She was really pouring fuel on the flames. She read him, up
+to a certain point--as far as was necessary; and beneath his attempts at
+self-control she was conscious of a dynamic desire that betrayed itself
+in many acts and signs,--as when he brushed against her; and occasionally
+when he gave evidence with his subordinates of a certain shortness of
+temper unusual with him she experienced a vaguely alarming but delicious
+thrill of power. And this, of all men, was the great Mr. Ditmar! Was she
+in love with him? That question did not trouble her either. She continued
+to experience in his presence waves of antagonism and attraction,
+revealing to her depths and possibilities of her nature that frightened
+while they fascinated. It never occurred to her to desist. That craving
+in her for high adventure was not to be denied.
+
+On summer evenings it had been Ditmar's habit when in Hampton to stroll
+about his lawn, from time to time changing the position of the sprinkler,
+smoking a cigar, and reflecting pleasantly upon his existence. His house,
+as he gazed at it against the whitening sky, was an eminently
+satisfactory abode, his wife was dead, his children gave him no trouble;
+he felt a glow of paternal pride in his son as the boy raced up and down
+the sidewalk on a bicycle; George was manly, large and strong for his
+age, and had a domineering way with other boys that gave Ditmar secret
+pleasure. Of Amy, who was showing a tendency to stoutness, and who had
+inherited her mother's liking for candy and romances, Ditmar thought
+scarcely at all: he would glance at her as she lounged, reading, in a
+chair on the porch, but she did not come within his range of problems. He
+had, in short, everything to make a reasonable man content, a life nicely
+compounded of sustenance, pleasure, and business,--business naturally
+being the greatest of these. He was--though he did not know it--ethically
+and philosophically right in squaring his morals with his occupation, and
+his had been the good fortune to live in a world whose codes and
+conventions had been carefully adjusted to the pursuit of that particular
+brand of happiness he had made his own. Why, then, in the name of that
+happiness, of the peace and sanity and pleasurable effort it had brought
+him, had he allowed and even encouraged the advent of a new element that
+threatened to destroy the equilibrium achieved? an element refusing to be
+classified under the head of property, since it involved something he
+desired and could not buy? A woman who was not property, who resisted the
+attempt to be turned into property, was an anomaly in Ditmar's universe.
+He had not, of course, existed for more than forty years without having
+heard and read of and even encountered in an acquaintance or two the
+species of sex attraction sentimentally called love that sometimes made
+fools of men and played havoc with more important affairs, but in his
+experience it had never interfered with his sanity or his appetite or the
+Chippering Mill: it had never made his cigars taste bitter; it had never
+caused a deterioration in the appreciation of what he had achieved and
+held. But now he was experiencing strange symptoms of an intensity out of
+all proportion to that of former relations with the other sex. What was
+most unusual for him, he was alarmed and depressed, at moments irritable.
+He regretted the capricious and apparently accidental impulse that had
+made him pretend to tinker with his automobile that day by the canal,
+that had led him to the incomparable idiocy of getting rid of Miss Ottway
+and installing the disturber of his peace as his private stenographer.
+
+What the devil was it in her that made him so uncomfortable? When in his
+office he had difficulty in keeping his mind on matters of import; he
+would watch her furtively as she went about the room with the lithe and
+noiseless movements that excited him the more because he suspected
+beneath her outward and restrained demeanour a fierceness he craved yet
+feared. He thought of her continually as a panther, a panther he had
+caught and could not tame; he hadn't even caught her, since she might
+escape at any time. He took precautions not to alarm her. When she
+brushed against him he trembled. Continually she baffled and puzzled him,
+and he never could tell of what she was thinking. She represented a whole
+set of new and undetermined values for which he had no precedents, and
+unlike every woman he had known--including his wife--she had an integrity
+of her own, seemingly beyond the reach of all influences economic and
+social. All the more exasperating, therefore, was a propinquity creating
+an intimacy without substance, or without the substance he craved for she
+had magically become for him a sort of enveloping, protecting atmosphere.
+In an astonishingly brief time he had fallen into the habit of talking
+things over with her; naturally not affairs of the first importance, but
+matters such as the economy of his time: when, for instance, it was most
+convenient for him to go to Boston; and he would find that she had
+telephoned, without being told, to the office there when to expect him,
+to his chauffeur to be on hand. He never had to tell her a thing twice,
+nor did she interrupt--as Miss Ottway sometimes had done--the processes
+of his thought. Without realizing it he fell into the habit of listening
+for the inflections of her voice, and though he had never lacked the
+power of making decisions, she somehow made these easier for him
+especially if, a human equation were involved.
+
+He had, at least, the consolation--if it were one--of reflecting that his
+reputation was safe, that there would be no scandal, since two are
+necessary to make the kind of scandal he had always feared, and Miss
+Bumpus, apparently, had no intention of being the second party. Yet she
+was not virtuous, as he had hitherto defined the word. Of this he was
+sure. No woman who moved about as she did, who had such an effect on him,
+who had on occasions, though inadvertently, returned the lightning of his
+glances, whose rare laughter resembled grace notes, and in whose hair was
+that almost imperceptible kink, could be virtuous. This instinctive
+conviction inflamed him. For the first time in his life he began to doubt
+the universal conquering quality of his own charms,--and when such a
+thing happens to a man like Ditmar he is in danger of hell-fire. He
+indulged less and less in the convivial meetings and excursions that
+hitherto had given him relaxation and enjoyment, and if his cronies
+inquired as to the reasons for his neglect of them he failed to answer
+with his usual geniality.
+
+"Everything going all right up at the mills, Colonel?" he was asked one
+day by Mr. Madden, the treasurer of a large shoe company, when they met
+on the marble tiles of the hall in their Boston club.
+
+"All right. Why?"
+
+"Well," replied Madden, conciliatingly, "you seem kind of preoccupied,
+that's all. I didn't know but what the fifty-four hour bill the
+legislature's just put through might be worrying you."
+
+"We'll handle that situation when the time comes," said Ditmar. He
+accepted a gin rickey, but declined rather curtly the suggestion of a
+little spree over Sunday to a resort on the Cape which formerly he would
+have found enticing. On another occasion he encountered in the lobby of
+the Parker House a more intimate friend, Chester Sprole, sallow,
+self-made, somewhat corpulent, one of those lawyers hail fellows well met
+in business circles and looked upon askance by the Brahmins of their
+profession; more than half politician, he had been in Congress, and from
+time to time was retained by large business interests because of his
+persuasive gifts with committees of the legislature--though these had
+been powerless to avert the recent calamity of the women and children's
+fifty-four hour bill. Mr. Sprole's hair was prematurely white, and the
+crow's-feet at the corners of his eyes were not the result of legal
+worries.
+
+"Hullo, Dit," he said jovially.
+
+"Hullo, Ches," said Ditmar.
+
+"Now you're the very chap I wanted to see. Where have you been keeping
+yourself lately? Come out to the farm to-night,--same of the boys'll be
+there." Mr. Sprole, like many a self-made man, was proud of his farm,
+though he did not lead a wholly bucolic existence.
+
+"I can't, Ches," answered Ditmar. "I've got to go back to Hampton."
+
+This statement Mr. Sprole unwisely accepted as a fiction. He took hold of
+Ditmar's arm.
+
+"A lady--eh--what?"
+
+"I've got to go back to Hampton," repeated Ditmar, with a suggestion of
+truculence that took his friend aback. Not for worlds would Mr. Sprole
+have offended the agent of the Chippering Mill.
+
+"I was only joking, Claude," he hastened to explain. Ditmar, somewhat
+mollified but still dejected, sought the dining-room when the lawyer had
+gone.
+
+"All alone to-night, Colonel?" asked the coloured head waiter,
+obsequiously.
+
+Ditmar demanded a table in the corner, and consumed a solitary meal.
+
+Very naturally Janet was aware of the change in Ditmar, and knew the
+cause of it. Her feelings were complicated. He, the most important man in
+Hampton, the self-sufficient, the powerful, the hitherto distant and
+unattainable head of the vast organization known as the Chippering Mill,
+of which she was an insignificant unit, at times became for her just a
+man--a man for whom she had achieved a delicious contempt. And the
+knowledge that she, if she chose, could sway and dominate him by the mere
+exercise of that strange feminine force within her was intoxicating and
+terrifying. She read this in a thousand signs; in his glances; in his
+movements revealing a desire to touch her; in little things he said,
+apparently insignificant, yet fraught with meaning; in a constant
+recurrence of the apologetic attitude--so alien to the Ditmar formerly
+conceived--of which he had given evidence that day by the canal: and from
+this attitude emanated, paradoxically, a virile and galvanic current
+profoundly disturbing. Sometimes when he bent over her she experienced a
+commingled ecstasy and fear that he would seize her in his arms. Yet the
+tension was not constant, rising and falling with his moods and
+struggles, all of which she read--unguessed by him--as easily as a
+printed page by the gift that dispenses with laborious processes of the
+intellect. On the other hand, a resentment boiled within her his
+masculine mind failed to fathom. Stevenson said of John Knox that many
+women had come to learn from him, but he had never condescended to become
+a learner in return--a remark more or less applicable to Ditmar. She was,
+perforce, thrilled that he was virile and wanted her, but because he
+wanted her clandestinely her pride revolted, divining his fear of scandal
+and hating him for it like a thoroughbred. To do her justice, marriage
+never occurred to her. She was not so commonplace.
+
+There were times, however, when the tension between them would relax,
+when some incident occurred to focus Ditmar's interest on the enterprise
+that had absorbed and unified his life, the Chippering Mill. One day in
+September, for instance, after an absence in New York, he returned to the
+office late in the afternoon, and she was quick to sense his elation, to
+recognize in him the restored presence of the quality of elan, of
+command, of singleness of purpose that had characterized him before she
+had become his stenographer. At first, as he read his mail, he seemed
+scarcely conscious of her presence. She stood by the window, awaiting his
+pleasure, watching the white mist as it rolled over the floor of the
+river, catching glimpses in vivid, saffron blurs of the lights of the
+Arundel Mill on the farther shore. Autumn was at hand. Suddenly she heard
+Ditmar speaking.
+
+"Would you mind staying a little while longer this evening, Miss Bumpus?"
+
+"Not at all," she replied, turning.
+
+On his face was a smile, almost boyish.
+
+"The fact is, I think I've got hold of the biggest single order that ever
+came into any mill in New England," he declared.
+
+"Oh, I'm glad," she said quickly.
+
+"The cotton cards--?" he demanded.
+
+She knew he referred to the schedules, based on the current prices of
+cotton, made out in the agent's office and sent in duplicate to the
+selling house, in Boston. She got them from the shelf; and as he went
+over them she heard him repeating the names of various goods now become
+familiar, pongees, poplins, percales and voiles, garbardines and
+galateas, lawns, organdies, crepes, and Madras shirtings, while he wrote
+down figures on a sheet of paper. So complete was his absorption in this
+task that Janet, although she had resented the insinuating pressure of
+his former attitude toward her, felt a paradoxical sensation of jealousy.
+Presently, without looking up, he told her to call up the Boston office
+and ask for Mr. Fraile, the cotton buyer; and she learned from the talk
+over the telephone though it was mostly about "futures"--that Ditmar had
+lingered for a conference in Boston on his way back from New York.
+Afterwards, having dictated two telegrams which she wrote out on her
+machine, he leaned back in his chair; and though the business for the day
+was ended, showed a desire to detain her. His mood became communicative.
+
+"I've been on the trail of that order for a month," he declared. "Of
+course it isn't my business to get orders, but to manage this mill, and
+that's enough for one man, God knows. But I heard the Bradlaughs were in
+the market for these goods, and I told the selling house to lie low, that
+I'd go after it. I knew I could get away with it, if anybody could. I
+went to the Bradlaughs and sat down on 'em, I lived with 'em, ate with
+'em, brought 'em home at night. I didn't let 'em alone a minute until
+they handed it over. I wasn't going to give any other mill in New England
+or any of those southern concerns a chance to walk off with it--not on
+your life! Why, we have the facilities. There isn't another mill in the
+country can turn it out in the time they ask, and even we will have to go
+some to do it. But we'll do it, by George, unless I'm struck by
+lightning."
+
+He leaned forward, hitting the desk with his fist, and Janet, standing
+beside him, smiled. She had the tempting gift of silence. Forgetting her
+twinge of jealousy, she was drawn toward him now, and in this mood of
+boyish exuberance, of self-confidence and pride in his powers and success
+she liked him better than ever before. She had, for the first time, the
+curious feeling of being years older than he, yet this did not detract
+from a new-born admiration.
+
+"I made this mill, and I'm proud of it," he went on. "When old Stephen
+Chippering put me in charge he was losing money, he'd had three agents in
+four years. The old man knew I had it in me, and I knew it, if I do say
+it myself. All this union labour talk about shorter hours makes me
+sick--why, there was a time when I worked ten and twelve hours a day, and
+I'm man enough to do it yet, if I have to. When the last agent--that was
+Cort--was sacked I went to Boston on my own hook and tackled the old
+gentleman--that's the only way to get anywhere. I couldn't bear to see
+the mill going to scrap, and I told him a thing or two,--I had the facts
+and the figures. Stephen Chippering was a big man, but he had a streak of
+obstinacy in him, he was conservative, you bet. I had to get it across to
+him there was a lot of dead wood in this plant, I had to wake him up to
+the fact that the twentieth century was here. He had to be shown--he was
+from Boston, you know--" Ditmar laughed--"but he was all wool and a yard
+wide, and he liked me and trusted me.
+
+"That was in nineteen hundred. I can remember the interview as well as if
+it had happened last night--we sat up until two o'clock in the morning in
+that library of his with the marble busts and the leather-bound books and
+the double windows looking out over the Charles, where the wind was
+blowing a gale. And at last he said, `All right, Claude, go ahead. I'll
+put you in as agent, and stand behind you.' And by thunder, he did stand
+behind me. He was quiet, the finest looking old man I ever saw in my
+life, straight as a ramrod, with a little white goatee and a red,
+weathered face full of creases, and a skin that looked as if it had been
+pricked all over with needles--the old Boston sort. They don't seem to
+turn 'em out any more. Why, I have a picture of him here."
+
+He opened a drawer in his desk and drew out a photograph. Janet gazed at
+it sympathetically.
+
+"It doesn't give you any notion of those eyes of his," Ditmar said,
+reminiscently. "They looked right through a man's skull, no matter how
+thick it was. If anything went wrong, I never wasted any time in telling
+him about it, and I guess it was one reason he liked me. Some of the
+people up here didn't understand him, kow-towed to him, they were scared
+of him, and if he thought they had something up their sleeves he looked
+as if he were going to eat 'em alive. Regular fighting eyes, the kind
+that get inside of a man and turn the light on. And he sat so still--made
+you ashamed of yourself. Well, he was a born fighter, went from Harvard
+into the Rebellion and was left for dead at Seven Oaks, where one of the
+company found him and saved him. He set that may up for life, and never
+talked about it, either. See what he wrote on the bottom--'To my friend,
+Claude Ditmar, Stephen Chippering.' And believe me, when he once called a
+man a friend he never took it back. I know one thing, I'll never get
+another friend like him."
+
+With a gesture that gave her a new insight into Ditmar, reverently he
+took the picture from her hand and placed it back in the drawer. She was
+stirred, almost to tears, and moved away from him a little, as though to
+lessen by distance the sudden attraction he had begun to exert: yet she
+lingered, half leaning, half sitting on the corner of the big desk, her
+head bent toward him, her eyes filled with light. She was wondering
+whether he could ever love a woman as he loved this man of whom he had
+spoken, whether he could be as true to a woman. His own attitude seemed
+never to have been more impersonal, but she had ceased to resent it;
+something within her whispered that she was the conductor, the inspirer..
+
+"I wish Stephen Chippering could have lived to see this order," he
+exclaimed, "to see the Chippering Mill to-day! I guess he'd be proud of
+it, I guess he wouldn't regret having put me in as agent."
+
+Janet did not reply. She could not. She sat regarding him intently, and
+when he raised his eyes and caught her luminous glance, his expression
+changed, she knew Stephen Chippering had passed from his mind.
+
+"I hope you like it here," he said. His voice had become vibrant,
+ingratiating, he had changed from the master to the suppliant--and yet
+she was not displeased. Power had suddenly flowed back into her, and with
+it an exhilarating self-command.
+
+"I do like it," she answered.
+
+"But you said, when I asked you to be my stenographer, that you didn't
+care for your work."
+
+"Oh, this is different."
+
+"How?"
+
+"I'm interested, the mill means something to me now you see, I'm not just
+copying things I don't know anything about."
+
+"I'm glad you're interested," he said, in the same odd, awkward tone.
+"I've never had any one in the office who did my work as well. Now Miss
+Ottway was a good stenographer, she was capable, and a fine woman, but
+she never got the idea, the spirit of the mill in her as you've got it,
+and she wasn't able to save me trouble, as you do. It's remarkable how
+you've come to understand, and in such a short time."
+
+Janet coloured. She did not look at him, but had risen and begun to
+straighten out the papers beside her.
+
+"There are lots of other things I'd like to understand," she said.
+
+"What?" he demanded.
+
+"Well--about the mill. I never thought much about it before, I always
+hated it," she cried, dropping the papers and suddenly facing him. "It
+was just drudgery. But now I want to learn everything, all I can, I'd
+like to see the machinery."
+
+"I'll take you through myself--to-morrow," he declared.
+
+His evident agitation made her pause. They were alone, the outer office
+deserted, and the Ditmar she saw now, whom she had summoned up with
+ridiculous ease by virtue of that mysterious power within her, was no
+longer the agent of the Chippering Mill, a boy filled with enthusiasm by
+a business achievement, but a man, the incarnation and expression of
+masculine desire desire for her. She knew she could compel him, if she
+chose, to throw caution to the winds.
+
+"Oh no!" she exclaimed. She was afraid of him, she shrank from such a
+conspicuous sign of his favour.
+
+"Why not?" he asked.
+
+"Because I don't want you to," she said, and realized, as soon as she had
+spoken, that her words might imply the existence of a something between
+them never before hinted at by her. "I'll get Mr. Caldwell to take me
+through." She moved toward the door, and turned; though still on fire
+within, her manner had become demure, repressed. "Did you wish anything
+more this evening?" she inquired.
+
+"That's all," he said, and she saw that he was gripping the arms of his
+chair....
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+Autumn was at hand. All day it had rained, but now, as night fell and
+Janet went homeward, the white mist from the river was creeping
+stealthily over the city, disguising the familiar and sordid landmarks.
+These had become beautiful, mysterious, somehow appealing. The electric
+arcs, splotches in the veil, revealed on the Common phantom trees; and in
+the distance, against the blurred lights from the Warren Street stores
+skirting the park could be seen phantom vehicles, phantom people moving
+to and fro. Thus, it seemed to Janet, invaded by a pearly mist was her
+own soul, in which she walked in wonder,--a mist shot through and through
+with soft, exhilarating lights half disclosing yet transforming and
+etherealizing certain landmark's there on which, formerly, she had not
+cared to gaze. She was thinking of Ditmar as she had left him gripping
+his chair, as he had dismissed her for the day, curtly, almost savagely.
+She had wounded and repelled him, and lingering in her was that exquisite
+touch of fear--a fear now not so much inspired by Ditmar as by the
+semi-acknowledged recognition of certain tendencies and capacities within
+herself. Yet she rejoiced in them, she was glad she had hurt Ditmar, she
+would hurt him again. Still palpitating, she reached the house in
+Fillmore Street, halting a moment with her hand on the door, knowing her
+face was flushed, anxious lest her mother or Lise might notice something
+unusual in her manner. But, when she had slowly mounted the stairs and
+lighted the gas in the bedroom the sight of her sister's clothes cast
+over the chairs was proof that Lise had already donned her evening finery
+and departed. The room was filled with the stale smell of clothes, which
+Janet detested. She flung open the windows. She took off her hat and
+swiftly tidied herself, yet the relief she felt at Lise's absence was
+modified by a sudden, vehement protest against sordidness. Why should she
+not live by herself amidst clean and tidy surroundings? She had begun to
+earn enough, and somehow a vista had been opened up--a vista whose end
+she could not see, alluring, enticing.... In the dining-room, by the
+cleared table, her father was reading the Banner; her mother appeared in
+the kitchen door.
+
+"What in the world happened to you, Janet?" she exclaimed.
+
+"Nothing," said Janet. "Mr. Ditmar asked me to stay--that was all. He'd
+been away."
+
+"I was worried, I was going to make your father go down to the mill. I've
+saved you some supper."
+
+"I don't want much," Janet told her, "I'm not hungry."
+
+"I guess you have to work too hard in that new place," said Hannah, as
+she brought in the filled plate from the oven.
+
+"Well, it seems to agree with her, mother," declared Edward, who could
+always be counted on to say the wrong thing with the best of intentions.
+"I never saw her looking as well--why, I swan, she's getting real
+pretty!"
+
+Hannah darted at him a glance, but restrained herself, and Janet reddened
+as she tried to eat the beans placed before her. The pork had browned and
+hardened at the edges, the gravy had spread, a crust covered the
+potatoes. When her father resumed his reading of the Banner and her
+mother went back into the kitchen she began to speculate rather
+resentfully and yet excitedly why it was that this adventure with a man,
+with Ditmar, made her look better, feel better,--more alive. She was too
+honest to disguise from herself that it was an adventure, a high one,
+fraught with all sorts of possibilities, dangers, and delights. Her
+promotion had been merely incidental. Both her mother and father, did
+they know the true circumstances,--that Mr. Ditmar desired her, was
+perhaps in love with her--would be disturbed. Undoubtedly they would have
+believed that she could "take care" of herself. She knew that matters
+could not go on as they were, that she would either have to leave Mr.
+Ditmar or--and here she baulked at being logical. She had no intention of
+leaving him: to remain, according to the notions of her parents, would be
+wrong. Why was it that doing wrong agreed with her, energized her, made
+her more alert, cleverer, keying up her faculties? turned life from a
+dull affair into a momentous one? To abandon Ditmar would be to slump
+back into the humdrum, into something from which she had magically been
+emancipated, symbolized by the home in which she sat; by the red-checked
+tablecloth, the ugly metal lamp, the cherry chairs with the frayed seats,
+the horsehair sofa from which the stuffing protruded, the tawdry pillow
+with its colours, once gay, that Lise had bought at a bargain at the
+Bagatelle.... The wooden clock with the round face and quaint landscape
+below--the family's most cherished heirloom--though long familiar, was
+not so bad; but the two yellowed engravings on the wall offended her.
+They had been wedding presents to Edward's father. One represented a
+stupid German peasant woman holding a baby, and standing in front of a
+thatched cottage; its companion was a sylvan scene in which certain
+wooden rustics were supposed to be enjoying themselves. Between the two,
+and dotted with flyspecks, hung an insurance calendar on which was a huge
+head of a lady, florid, fluffy-haired, flirtatious. Lise thought her
+beautiful.
+
+The room was ugly. She had long known that, but tonight the realization
+came to her that what she chiefly resented in it was the note it
+proclaimed--the note of a mute acquiescence, without protest or struggle,
+in what life might send. It reflected accurately the attitude of her
+parents, particularly of her father. With an odd sense of detachment, of
+critical remoteness and contempt she glanced at him as he sat stupidly
+absorbed in his newspaper, his face puckered, his lips pursed, and Ditmar
+rose before her--Ditmar, the embodiment of an indomitableness that
+refused to be beaten and crushed. She thought of the story he had told
+her, how by self-assertion and persistence he had become agent of the
+Chippering Mill, how he had convinced Mr. Stephen Chippering of his
+ability. She could not think of the mill as belonging to the Chipperings
+and the other stockholders, but to Ditmar, who had shaped it into an
+expression of himself, since it was his ideal. And now it seemed that he
+had made it hers also. She regretted having repulsed him, pushed her
+plate away from her, and rose.
+
+"You haven't eaten anything," said Hannah, who had come into the room.
+"Where are you going?"
+
+"Out--to Eda's," Janet answered....
+
+"It's late," Hannah objected. But Janet departed. Instead of going to
+Eda's she walked alone, seeking the quieter streets that her thoughts
+might flow undisturbed. At ten o'clock, when she returned, the light was
+out in the diningroom, her sister had not come in, and she began slowly
+to undress, pausing every now and then to sit on the bed and dream; once
+she surprised herself gazing into the glass with a rapt expression that
+was almost a smile. What was it about her that had attracted Ditmar? No
+other man had ever noticed it. She had never thought herself good
+looking, and now--it was astonishing!--she seemed to have changed, and
+she saw with pride that her arms and neck were shapely, that her dark
+hair fell down in a cascade over her white shoulders to her waist. She
+caressed it; it was fine. When she looked again, a radiancy seemed to
+envelop her. She braided her hair slowly, in two long plaits, looking
+shyly in the mirror and always seeing that radiancy....
+
+Suddenly it occurred to her with a shock that she was doing exactly what
+she had despised Lise for doing, and leaving the mirror she hurried her
+toilet, put out the light, and got into bed. For a long time, however,
+she remained wakeful, turning first on one side and then on the other,
+trying to banish from her mind the episode that had excited her. But
+always it came back again. She saw Ditmar before her, virile, vital,
+electric with desire. At last she fell asleep.
+
+Gradually she was awakened by something penetrating her consciousness,
+something insistent, pervasive, unescapable, which in drowsiness she
+could not define. The gas was burning, Lise had come in, and was moving
+peculiarly about the room. Janet watched her. She stood in front of the
+bureau, just as Janet herself had done, her hands at her throat. At last
+she let them fall, her head turning slowly, as though drawn, by some
+irresistible, hypnotic power, and their eyes met. Lise's were filmed,
+like those of a dog whose head is being stroked, expressing a luxuriant
+dreaminess uncomprehending, passionate.
+
+"Say, did I wake you?" she asked. "I did my best not to make any
+noise--honest to God."
+
+"It wasn't the noise that woke me up," said Janet.
+
+"It couldn't have been."
+
+"You've been drinking!" said Janet, slowly.
+
+Lise giggled.
+
+"What's it to you, angel face!" she inquired. "Quiet down, now, and go
+bye-bye."
+
+Janet sprang from the bed, seized her by the shoulders, and shook her.
+She was limp. She began to whimper.
+
+"Cut it out--leave me go. It ain't nothing to you what I do--I just had a
+highball."
+
+Janet released her and drew back.
+
+"I just had a highball--honest to God!"
+
+"Don't say that again!" whispered Janet, fiercely.
+
+"Oh, very well. For God's sake, go to bed and leave me alone--I can take
+care of myself, I guess--I ain't nutty enough to hit the booze. But I
+ain't like you--I've got to have a little fun to keep alive."
+
+"A little fun!" Janet exclaimed. The phrase struck her sharply. A little
+fun to keep alive!
+
+With that same peculiar, cautious movement she had observed, Lise
+approached a chair, and sank into it,--jerking her head in the direction
+of the room where Hannah and Edward slept.
+
+"D'you want to wake 'em up? Is that your game?" she asked, and began to
+fumble at her belt. Overcoming with an effort a disgust amounting to
+nausea, Janet approached her sister again, little by little undressing
+her, and finally getting her into bed, when she immediately fell into a
+profound slumber. Janet, too, got into bed, but sleep was impossible: the
+odour lurked like a foul spirit in the darkness, mingling with the
+stagnant, damp air that came in at the open window, fairly saturating her
+with horror: it seemed the very essence of degradation. But as she lay on
+the edge of the bed, shrinking from contamination, in the throes of
+excitement inspired by an unnamed fear, she grew hot, she could feel and
+almost hear the pounding of her heart. She rose, felt around in the
+clammy darkness for her wrapper and slippers, gained the door, crept
+through the dark hall to the dining-room, where she stealthily lit the
+lamp; darkness had become a terror. A cockroach scurried across the
+linoleum. The room was warm and close, it reeked with the smell of stale
+food, but at least she found relief from that other odour. She sank down
+on the sofa.
+
+Her sister was drunk. That in itself was terrible enough, yet it was not
+the drunkenness alone that had sickened Janet, but the suggestion of
+something else. Where had Lise been? In whose company had she become
+drunk? Of late, in contrast to a former communicativeness, Lise had been
+singularly secretive as to her companions, and the manner in which her
+evenings were spent; and she, Janet, had grown too self-absorbed to be
+curious. Lise, with her shopgirl's cynical knowledge of life and its
+pitfalls and the high valuation at which she held her charms, had seemed
+secure from danger; but Janet recalled her discouragement, her threat to
+leave the Bagatelle. Since then there had been something furtive about
+her. Now, because that odour of alcohol Lise exhaled had destroyed in
+Janet the sense of exhilaration, of life on a higher plane she had begun
+to feel, and filled her with degradation, she hated Lise, felt for her
+sister no strain of pity. A proof, had she recognized it, that immorality
+is not a matter of laws and decrees, but of individual emotions. A few
+hours before she had seen nothing wrong in her relationship with Ditmar:
+now she beheld him selfish, ruthless, pursuing her for one end, his own
+gratification. As a man, he had become an enemy. Ditmar was like all
+other men who exploited her sex without compunction, but the thought that
+she was like Lise, asleep in a drunken stupor, that their cases differed
+only in degree, was insupportable.
+
+At last she fell asleep from sheer weariness, to dream she was with
+Ditmar at some place in the country under spreading trees, Silliston,
+perhaps--Silliston Common, cleverly disguised: nor was she quite sure,
+always, that the man was Ditmar; he had a way of changing, of resembling
+the man she had met in Silliston whom she had mistaken for a carpenter.
+He was pleading with her, in his voice was the peculiar vibrancy that
+thrilled her, that summoned some answering thing out of the depths of
+her, and she felt herself yielding with a strange ecstasy in which were
+mingled joy and terror. The terror was conquering the joy, and suddenly
+he stood transformed before her eyes, caricatured, become a shrieking
+monster from whom she sought in agony to escape.... In this paralysis of
+fear she awoke, staring with wide eyes at the flickering flame of the
+lamp, to a world filled with excruciating sound--the siren of the
+Chippering Mill! She lay trembling with the horror of the dream-spell upon
+her, still more than half convinced that the siren was Ditmar's voice,
+his true expression. He was waiting to devour her. Would the sound never
+end?...
+
+Then, remembering where she was, alarmed lest her mother might come in
+and find her there, she left the sofa, turned out the sputtering lamp,
+and ran into the bedroom. Rain was splashing on the bricks of the
+passage-way outside, the shadows of the night still lurked in the
+corners; by the grey light she gazed at Lise, who breathed loudly and
+stirred uneasily, her mouth open, her lips parched. Janet touched her.
+
+"Lise--get up!" she said. "It's time to get up." She shook her.
+
+"Leave me alone--can't you?"
+
+"It's time to get up. The whistle has sounded."
+
+Lise heavily opened her eyes. They were bloodshot.
+
+"I don't want to get up. I won't get up."
+
+"But you must," insisted Janet, tightening her hold. "You've got
+to--you've got to eat breakfast and go to work."
+
+"I don't want any breakfast, I ain't going to work any more."
+
+A gust of wind blew inward the cheap lace curtains, and the physical
+effect of it emphasized the chill that struck Janet's heart. She got up
+and closed the window, lit the gas, and returning to the bed, shook Lise
+again.
+
+"Listen," she said, "if you don't get up I'll tell mother what happened
+last night."
+
+"Say, you wouldn't--!" exclaimed Lise, angrily.
+
+"Get up!" Janet commanded, and watched her rather anxiously, uncertain as
+to the after effects of drunkenness. But Lise got up. She sat on the edge
+of the bed and yawned, putting her hand to her forehead.
+
+"I've sure got a head on me," she remarked.
+
+Janet was silent, angrier than ever, shocked that tragedy, degradation,
+could be accepted thus circumstantially. Lise proceeded to put up her
+hair. She seemed to be mistress of herself; only tired, gaping
+frequently. Once she remarked:--"I don't see the good of getting nutty
+over a highball."
+
+Seeing that Janet was not to be led into controversy, she grew morose.
+
+Breakfast in Fillmore Street, never a lively meal, was more dismal than
+usual that morning, eaten to the accompaniment of slopping water from the
+roofs on the pavement of the passage. The indisposition of Lise passed
+unobserved by both Hannah and Edward; and at twenty minutes to eight the
+two girls, with rubbers and umbrellas, left the house together, though it
+was Janet's custom to depart earlier, since she had farther to go. Lise,
+suspicious, maintained an obstinate silence, keeping close to the curb.
+They reached the corner by the provision shop with the pink and orange
+chromos of jellies in the window.
+
+"Lise, has anything happened to you?" demanded Janet suddenly. "I want
+you to tell me."
+
+"Anything happened--what do you mean? Anything happened?"
+
+"You know very well what I mean."
+
+"Well, suppose something has happened?" Lise's reply was pert, defiant.
+"What's it to you? If anything's happened, it's happened to me--hasn't
+it?"
+
+Janet approached her.
+
+"What are you trying to do?" said Lise. "Push me into the gutter?"
+
+"I guess you're there already," said Janet.
+
+Lise was roused to a sudden pitch of fury. She turned on Janet and thrust
+her back.
+
+"Well, if I am who's going to blame me?" she cried. "If you had to work
+all day in that hole, standing on your feet, picked on by yaps for six a
+week, I guess you wouldn't talk virtuous, either. It's easy for you to
+shoot off your mouth, you've got a soft snap with Ditmar."
+
+Janet was outraged. She could not restrain her anger.
+
+"How dare you say that?" she demanded.
+
+Lise was cowed.
+
+"Well, you drove me to it--you make me mad enough to say anything. Just
+because I went to Gruber's with Neva Lorrie and a couple of
+gentlemen--they were gentlemen all right, as much gentlemen as
+Ditmar--you come at me and tell me I'm all to the bad." She began to sob.
+"I'm as straight as you are. How was I to know the highball was stiff?
+Maybe I was tired--anyhow, it put me on the queer, and everything in the
+joint began to tango 'round me--and Neva came home with me."
+
+Janet felt a surge of relief, in which were mingled anxiety and
+resentment: relief because she was convinced that Lise was telling the
+truth, anxiety because she feared for Lise's future, resentment because
+Ditmar had been mentioned. Still, what she had feared most had not come
+to pass. Lise left her abruptly, darting down a street that led to a back
+entrance of the Bagatelle, and Janet pursued her way. Where, she
+wondered, would it all end? Lise had escaped so far, but drunkenness was
+an ominous sign. And "gentlemen"? What kind of gentlemen had taken her
+sister to Gruber's? Would Ditmar do that sort of thing if he had a
+chance?
+
+The pavement in front of the company boarding-houses by the canal was
+plastered with sodden leaves whipped from the maples by the driving rain
+in the night. The sky above the mills was sepia. White lights were
+burning in the loom rooms. When she reached the vestibule Simmons, the
+watchman, informed her that Mr. Ditmar had already been there, and left
+for Boston.
+
+Janet did not like to acknowledge to herself her disappointment on
+learning that Ditmar had gone to Boston. She knew he had had no such
+intention the night before; an accumulated mail and many matters
+demanding decisions were awaiting him; and his sudden departure seemed an
+act directed personally against her, in the nature of a retaliation,
+since she had offended and repulsed him. Through Lise's degrading act she
+had arrived at the conclusion that all adventure and consequent suffering
+had to do with Man--a conviction peculiarly maddening to such
+temperaments as Janet's. Therefore she interpreted her suffering in terms
+of Ditmar, she had looked forward to tormenting him again, and by
+departing he had deliberately balked and cheated her. The rain fell
+ceaselessly out of black skies, night seemed ever ready to descend on the
+river, a darkness--according to young Mr. Caldwell--due not to the clouds
+alone, but to forest fires many hundreds of miles away, in Canada. As the
+day wore on, however, her anger gradually gave place to an extreme
+weariness and depression, and yet she dreaded going home, inventing
+things for herself to do; arranging and rearranging Ditmar's papers that
+he might have less trouble in sorting them, putting those uppermost which
+she thought he would deem the most important. Perhaps he would come in,
+late! In a world of impending chaos the brilliantly lighted office was a
+tiny refuge to which she clung. At last she put on her coat and rubbers,
+faring forth reluctantly into the wet.
+
+At first when she entered the bedroom she thought it empty, though the
+gas was burning, and them she saw Lise lying face downward on the bed.
+For a moment she stood still, then closed the door softly.
+
+"Lise," she said.
+
+"What?"
+
+Janet sat down on the bed, putting out her hand. Unconsciously she began
+to stroke Lise's hand, and presently it turned and tightened on her own.
+
+"Lise," she said, "I understand why you--" she could not bring herself to
+pronounce the words "got drunk,"--"I understand why you did it. I
+oughtn't to have talked to you that way. But it was terrible to wake up
+and see you."
+
+For awhile Lise did not reply. Then she raised herself, feeling her hair
+with an involuntary gesture, regarding her sister with a bewildered look,
+her face puckered. Her eyes burned, and under them were black shadows.
+
+"How do you mean--you understand?" she asked slowly. "You never hit the
+booze."
+
+Even Lise's language, which ordinarily offended her, failed to change her
+sudden impassioned and repentant mood. She was astonished at herself for
+this sudden softening, since she did not really love Lise, and all day
+she had hated her, wished never to see her again.
+
+"No, but I can understand how it would be to want to," Janet said. "Lise,
+I guess we're searching--both of us for something we'll never find."
+
+Lise stared at her with a contracted, puzzled expression, as of a person
+awaking from sleep, all of whose faculties are being strained toward
+comprehension.
+
+"What do you mean?" she demanded. "You and me? You're all right--you've
+got no kick coming."
+
+"Life is hard, it's hard on girls like us--we want things we can't have."
+Janet was at a loss to express herself.
+
+ "Well, it ain't any pipe dream," Lise agreed. Her glance turned
+involuntarily toward the picture of the Olympian dinner party pinned on
+the wall. "Swells have a good time," she added.
+
+"Maybe they pay for it, too," said Janet.
+
+"I wouldn't holler about paying--it's paying and not getting the goods,"
+declared Lise.
+
+"You'll pay, and you won't get it. That kind of life is--hell," Janet
+cried.
+
+Self-centered as Lise was, absorbed in her own trouble and present
+physical discomfort, this unaccustomed word from her sister and the
+vehemence with which it was spoken surprised and frightened her, brought
+home to her some hint of the terror in Janet's soul.
+
+"Me for the water wagon," she said.
+
+Janet was not convinced. She had hoped to discover the identity of the
+man who had taken Lise to Gruber's, but she did not attempt to continue
+the conversation. She rose and took off her hat.
+
+"Why don't you go to bed?" she asked. "I'll tell mother you have a
+headache and bring in your supper."
+
+"Well, I don't care if I do," replied Lise, gratefully.
+
+Perhaps the most disconcerting characteristic of that complex affair, the
+human organism, is the lack of continuity of its moods. The soul, so
+called, is as sensitive to physical conditions as a barometer: affected
+by lack of sleep, by smells and sounds, by food, by the weather--whether
+a day be sapphire or obsidian. And the resolutions arising from one mood
+are thwarted by the actions of the next. Janet had observed this
+phenomenon, and sometimes, when it troubled her, she thought herself the
+most inconsistent and vacillating of creatures. She had resolved, far
+instance, before she fell asleep, to leave the Chippering Mill, to banish
+Ditmar from her life, to get a position in Boston, whence she could send
+some of her wages home: and in the morning, as she made her way to the
+office, the determination gave her a sense of peace and unity. But the
+northwest wind was blowing. It had chased away the mist and the clouds,
+the smoke from Canada. The sun shone with a high brilliancy, the elms of
+the Common cast sharp, black shadow-patterns on the pavements, and when
+she reached the office and looked out of his window she saw the blue
+river covered with quicksilver waves chasing one another across the
+current. Ditmar had not yet returned to Hampton. About ten o'clock, as
+she was copying out some figures for Mr. Price, young Mr. Caldwell
+approached her. He had a Boston newspaper in his hand.
+
+"Have you seen this article about Mr. Ditmar?" he asked.
+
+"About Mr. Ditmar? No."
+
+"It's quite a send-off for the Colonel," said Caldwell, who was wont at
+times to use the title facetiously. "Listen; `One of the most notable
+figures in the Textile industry of the United States, Claude Ditmar,
+Agent of the Chippering Mill.'" Caldwell spread out the page and pointed
+to a picture. "There he is, as large as life."
+
+A little larger than life, Janet thought. Ditmar was one of those men
+who, as the expression goes, "take" well, a valuable asset in semi-public
+careers; and as he stood in the sunlight on the steps of the building
+where they had "snap-shotted" him he appeared even more massive,
+forceful, and preponderant than she had known him. Beholding him thus set
+forth and praised in a public print, he seemed suddenly to have been
+distantly removed from her, to have reacquired at a bound the dizzy
+importance he had possessed for her before she became his stenographer.
+She found it impossible to realize that this was the Ditmar who had
+pursued and desired her; at times supplicating, apologetic, abject; and
+again revealed by the light in his eyes and the trembling of his hand as
+the sinister and ruthless predatory male from whom--since the revelation
+in her sister Lise she had determined to flee, and whom she had persuaded
+herself she despised. He was a bigger man than she had thought, and as
+she read rapidly down the column the fascination that crept over her was
+mingled with disquieting doubt of her own powers: it was now difficult to
+believe she had dominated or could ever dominate this self-sufficient,
+successful person, the list of whose achievements and qualities was so
+alluringly set forth by an interviewer who himself had fallen a victim.
+
+The article carried the implication that the modern, practical, American
+business man was the highest type as yet evolved by civilization: and
+Ditmar, referred to as "a wizard of the textile industry," was
+emphatically one who had earned the gratitude of the grand old
+Commonwealth. By the efforts of such sons she continued to maintain her
+commanding position among her sister states. Prominent among the
+qualities contributing to his success was open-mindedness, "a willingness
+to be shown," to scrap machinery when his competitors still clung to
+older methods. The Chippering Mill had never had a serious strike,
+--indication of an ability to deal with labour; and Mr. Ditmar's views on
+labour followed: if his people had a grievance, let them come to him, and
+settle it between them. No unions. He had consistently refused to
+recognize them. There was mention of the Bradlaugh order as being the
+largest commission ever given to a single mill, a reference to the
+excitement and speculation it had aroused in trade circles. Claude
+Ditmar's ability to put it through was unquestioned; one had only to look
+at him,--tenacity, forcefulness, executiveness were written all over
+him.... In addition, the article contained much material of an
+autobiographical nature that must--Janet thought--have been supplied by
+Ditmar himself, whose modesty had evidently shrunk from the cruder
+self-eulogy of an interview. But she recognized several characteristic
+phrases.
+
+Caldwell, watching her as she read, was suddenly fascinated. During a
+trip abroad, while still an undergraduate, he had once seen the face of
+an actress, a really good Parisian actress, light up in that way; and it
+had revealed to him, in a flash, the meaning of enthusiasm. Now Janet
+became vivid for him. There must be something unusual in a person whose
+feelings could be so intense, whose emotions rang so true. He was not
+unsophisticated. He had sometimes wondered why Ditmar had promoted her,
+though acknowledging her ability. He admired Ditmar, but had no illusions
+about him. Harvard, and birth in a social stratum where emphasis is
+superfluous, enabled him to smile at the reporter's exuberance; and he
+was the more drawn toward her to see on Janet's flushed face the hint of
+a smile as she looked up at him when she had finished.
+
+"The Colonel hypnotized that reporter," he said, as he took the paper;
+and her laugh, despite its little tremor, betrayed in her an unsuspected,
+humorous sense of proportion. "Well, I'll take off my hat to him,"
+Caldwell went on. "He is a wonder, he's got the mill right up to capacity
+in a week. He's agreed to deliver those goods to the Bradlaughs by the
+first of April, you know, and Holster, of the Clarendon, swears it can't
+be done, he says Ditmar's crazy. Well, I stand to lose twenty-five
+dollars on him."
+
+This loyalty pleased Janet, it had the strange effect of reviving loyalty
+in her. She liked this evidence of Dick Caldwell's confidence. He was a
+self-contained and industrious young man, with crisp curly hair, cordial
+and friendly yet never intimate with the other employer; liked by
+them--but it was tacitly understood his footing differed from theirs. He
+was a cousin of the Chipperings, and destined for rapid promotion. He
+went away every Saturday, it was known that he spent Sundays and holidays
+in delightful places, to return reddened and tanned; and though he never
+spoke about these excursions, and put on no airs of superiority, there
+was that in his manner and even in the cut of his well-worn suits
+proclaiming him as belonging to a sphere not theirs, to a category of
+fortunate beings whose stumbles are not fatal, who are sustained from
+above. Even Ditmar was not of these.
+
+"I've just been showing a lot of highbrows through the mill," he told
+Janet. "They asked questions enough to swamp a professor of economics."
+
+And Janet was suddenly impelled to ask:--"Will you take me through
+sometime, Mr. Caldwell?"
+
+"You've never been through?" he exclaimed. "Why, we'll go now, if you can
+spare the time."
+
+Her face had become scarlet.
+
+"Don't tell Mr. Ditmar," she begged. "You see--he wanted to take me
+himself."
+
+"Not a word," Caldwell promised as they left the office together and went
+downstairs to the strong iron doors that led to the Cotton Department.
+The showing through of occasional visitors had grown rather tiresome; but
+now his curiosity and interest were aroused, he was conscious of a keen
+stimulation when he glanced at Janet's face. Its illumination perplexed
+him. The effect was that of a picture obscurely hung and hitherto
+scarcely noticed on which the light had suddenly been turned. It glowed
+with a strange and disturbing radiance....
+
+As for Janet, she was as one brought suddenly to the realization of a
+miracle in whose presence she had lived for many years and never before
+suspected; the miracle of machinery, of the triumph of man over nature.
+In the brief space of an hour she beheld the dirty bales flung off the
+freight cars on the sidings transformed into delicate fabrics wound from
+the looms; cotton that only last summer, perhaps, while she sat
+typewriting at her window, had been growing in the fields of the South.
+She had seen it torn by the bale-breakers, blown into the openers,
+loosened, cleansed, and dried; taken up by the lappers, pressed into
+batting, and passed on to the carding machines, to emerge like a wisp of
+white smoke in a sliver and coil automatically in a can. Once more it was
+flattened into a lap, given to a comber that felt out its fibres,
+removing with superhuman precision those for the finer fabric too short,
+thrusting it forth again in another filmy sliver ready for the drawing
+frames. Six of these gossamer ropes were taken up, and again six. Then
+came the Blubbers and the roving frames, twisting and winding, the while
+maintaining the most delicate of tensions lest the rope break, running
+the strands together into a thread constantly growing stronger and finer,
+until it was ready for spinning.
+
+Caldwell stood close to her, shouting his explanations in her ear, while
+she strained to follow them. But she was bewildered and entranced by the
+marvellous swiftness, accuracy and ease with which each of the complex
+machines, fed by human hands, performed its function. These human hands
+were swift, too, as when they thrust the bobbins of roving on the
+ring-spinning frames to be twisted into yarn. She saw a woman, in the
+space of an instant, mend a broken thread. Women and boys were here,
+doffer boys to lift off the full bobbins of yarn with one hand and set on
+the empty bobbins with the other: while skilled workmen, alert for the
+first sign of trouble, followed up and down in its travels the long frame
+of the mule-spinner. After the spinning, the heavy spools of yarn were
+carried to a beam-warper, standing alone like a huge spider's web, where
+hundreds of threads were stretched symmetrically and wound evenly, side
+by side, on a large cylinder, forming the warp of the fabric to be woven
+on the loom. First, however, this warp must be stiffened or "slashed" in
+starch and tallow, dried over heated drums, and finally wound around one
+great beam from which the multitude of threads are taken up, one by one,
+and slipped through the eyes of the loom harnesses by women who sit all
+day under the north windows overlooking the canal--the "drawers-in" of
+whom Ditmar had spoken. Then the harnesses are put on the loom, the
+threads attached to the cylinder on which the cloth is to be wound. The
+looms absorbed and fascinated Janet above all else. It seemed as if she
+would never tire of watching the rhythmic rise and fall of the
+harnesses,--each rapid movement making a V in the warp, within the angle
+of which the tiny shuttles darted to and fro, to and fro, carrying the
+thread that filled the cloth with a swiftness so great the eye could
+scarcely follow it; to be caught on the other side when the angle closed,
+and flung back, and back again! And in the elaborate patterns not one,
+but several harnesses were used, each awaiting its turn for the impulse
+bidding it rise and fall!... Abruptly, as she gazed, one of the machines
+halted, a weaver hurried up, searched the warp for the broken thread,
+tied it, and started the loom again.
+
+"That's intelligent of it," said Caldwell, in her ear. But she could only
+nod in reply.
+
+The noise in the weaving rooms was deafening, the heat oppressive. She
+began to wonder how these men and women, boys and girls bore the strain
+all day long. She had never thought much about them before save to
+compare vaguely their drudgery with that from which now she had been
+emancipated; but she began to feel a new respect, a new concern, a new
+curiosity and interest as she watched them passing from place to place
+with indifference between the whirling belts, up and down the narrow
+aisles, flanked on either side by that bewildering, clattering machinery
+whose polished surfaces continually caught and flung back the light of
+the electric bulbs on the ceiling. How was it possible to live for hours
+at a time in this bedlam without losing presence of mind and thrusting
+hand or body in the wrong place, or becoming deaf? She had never before
+realized what mill work meant, though she had read of the accidents. But
+these people--even the children--seemed oblivious to the din and the
+danger, intent on their tasks, unconscious of the presence of a visitor,
+save occasionally when she caught a swift glance from a woman or girl a
+glance, perhaps, of envy or even of hostility. The dark, foreign faces
+glowed, and instantly grew dull again, and then she was aware of lurking
+terrors, despite her exaltation, her sense now of belonging to another
+world, a world somehow associated with Ditmar. Was it not he who had
+lifted her farther above all this? Was it not by grace of her association
+with him she was there, a spectator of the toil beneath? Yet the terror
+persisted. She, presently, would step out of the noise, the oppressive
+moist heat of the drawing and spinning rooms, the constant, remorseless
+menace of whirling wheels and cogs and belts. But they?... She drew
+closer to Caldwell's side.
+
+"I never knew--" she said. "It must be hard to work here."
+
+He smiled at her, reassuringly.
+
+"Oh, they don't mind it," he replied. "It's like a health resort compared
+to the conditions most of them live in at home. Why, there's plenty of
+ventilation here, and you've got to have a certain amount of heat and
+moisture, because when cotton is cold and dry it can't be drawn or spin,
+and when it's hot and dry the electricity is troublesome. If you think
+this moisture is bad you ought to see a mill with the old vapour-pot
+system with the steam shooting out into the room. Look here!" He led
+Janet to the apparatus in which the pure air is forced through wet
+cloths, removing the dust, explaining how the ventilation and humidity
+were regulated automatically, how the temperature of the room was
+controlled by a thermostat.
+
+"There isn't an agent in the country who's more concerned about the
+welfare of his operatives than Mr. Ditmar. He's made a study of it, he's
+spent thousands of dollars, and as soon as these machines became
+practical he put 'em in. The other day when I was going through the room
+one of these shuttles flew off, as they sometimes do when the looms are
+running at high speed. A woman was pretty badly hurt. Ditmar came right
+down."
+
+"He really cares about them," said Janet. She liked Caldwell's praise of
+Ditmar, yet she spoke a little doubtfully.
+
+"Of course he cares. But it's common sense to make 'em as comfortable and
+happy as possible--isn't it? He won't stand for being held up, and he'd
+be stiff enough if it came to a strike. I don't blame him for that. Do
+you?"
+
+Janet was wondering how ruthless Ditmar could be if his will were
+crossed.... They had left the room with its noise and heat behind them
+and were descending the worn, oaken treads of the spiral stairway of a
+neighbouring tower. Janet shivered a little, and her face seemed almost
+feverish as she turned to Caldwell and thanked him.
+
+"Oh, it was a pleasure, Miss Bumpus," he declared. "And sometime, when
+you want to see the Print Works or the Worsted Department, let me
+know--I'm your man. And--I won't mention it."
+
+She did not answer. As they made their way back to the office he glanced
+at her covertly, astonished at the emotional effect in her their tour had
+produced. Though not of an inflammable temperament, he himself was
+stirred, and it was she who, unaccountably, had stirred him: suggested,
+in these processes he saw every day, and in which he was indeed
+interested, something deeper, more significant and human than he had
+guessed, and which he was unable to define....
+
+Janet herself did not know why this intimate view of the mills, of the
+people who worked in them had so greatly moved her. All day she thought
+of them. And the distant throb of the machinery she felt when her
+typewriter was silent meant something to her now--she could not say what.
+When she found herself listening for it, her heart beat faster. She had
+lived and worked beside it, and it had not existed for her, it had had no
+meaning, the mills might have been empty. She had, indeed, many, many
+times seen these men and women, boys and girls trooping away from work,
+she had strolled through the quarters in which they lived, speculated on
+the lands from which they had come; but she had never really thought of
+them as human beings, individuals, with problems and joys and sorrows and
+hopes and fears like her own. Some such discovery was borne in upon her.
+And always an essential function of this revelation, looming larger than
+ever in her consciousness, was Ditmar. It was for Ditmar they toiled, in
+Ditmar's hands were their very existences, his was the stupendous
+responsibility and power.
+
+As the afternoon wore, desire to see these toilers once more took
+possession of her. From the white cupola perched above the huge mass of
+the Clarendon Mill across the water sounded the single stroke of a bell,
+and suddenly the air was pulsing with sounds flung back and forth by the
+walls lining the river. Seizing her hat and coat, she ran down the stairs
+and through the vestibule and along the track by the canal to the great
+gates, which her father was in the act of unbarring. She took a stand
+beside him, by the gatehouse. Edward showed a mild surprise.
+
+"There ain't anything troubling you--is there, Janet?" he asked.
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"I wanted to see the hands come out," she said.
+
+Sometimes, as at present, he found Janet's whims unaccountable.
+
+"Well, I should have presumed you'd know what they look like by this
+time. You'd better stay right close to me, they're a rough lot, with no
+respect or consideration for decent folks--these foreigners. I never
+could see why the government lets 'em all come over here." He put on the
+word "foreigners" an emphasis of contempt and indignation, pathetic
+because of its peculiar note of futility. Janet paid no attention to him.
+Her ears were strained to catch the rumble of feet descending the tower
+stairs, her eyes to see the vanguard as it came from the doorway--the
+first tricklings of a flood that instantly filled the yard and swept
+onward and outward, irresistibly, through the narrow gorge of the gates.
+Impossible to realize this as the force which, when distributed over the
+great spaces of the mills, performed an orderly and useful task! for it
+was now a turbid and lawless torrent unconscious of its swollen powers,
+menacing, breathlessly exciting to behold. It seemed to Janet indeed a
+torrent as she clung to the side of the gatehouse as one might cling to
+the steep bank of a mountain brook after a cloud-burst. And suddenly she
+had plunged into it. The desire was absurd, perhaps, but not to be
+denied,--the desire to mix with it, feel it, be submerged and swept away
+by it, losing all sense of identity. She heard her father call after her,
+faintly--the thought crossed her mind that his appeals were always
+faint,--and then she was being carried along the canal, eastward, the
+pressure relaxing somewhat when the draining of the side streets began.
+
+She remembered, oddly, the Stanley Street bridge where the many streams
+met and mingled, streams from the Arundel, the Patuxent, the Arlington
+and the Clarendon; and, eager to prolong and intensify her sensations,
+hurried thither, reaching it at last and thrusting her way outward until
+she had gained the middle, where she stood grasping the rail. The great
+structure was a-tremble from the assault, its footpaths and its roadway
+overrun with workers, dodging between trolleys and trucks,--some darting
+nimbly, dinner pails in hand, along the steel girders. Doffer boys romped
+and whistled, young girls in jaunty, Faber Street clothes and flowered
+hats, linked to one another for protection, chewed gum and joked, but for
+the most part these workers were silent, the apathy of their faces making
+a strange contrast with the hurry, hurry of their feet and set intentness
+of their bodies as they sped homeward to the tenements. And the clothes
+of these were drab, save when the occasional colour of a hooded peasant's
+shawl, like the slightly faded tints of an old master, lit up a group of
+women. Here, going home to their children, were Italian mothers bred
+through centuries to endurance and patience; sallow Jewesses, gaunt,
+bearded Jews with shadowy, half-closed eyes and wrinkled brows,
+broad-faced Lithuanians, flat-headed Russians; swarthy Italian men and
+pale, blond Germans mingled with muddy Syrians and nondescript Canadians.
+And suddenly the bridge was empty, the army vanished as swiftly as it
+came!
+
+Janet turned. Through the haze of smoke she saw the sun drop like a ball
+of fire cooled to redness, whose course is spent. The delicate lines of
+the upper bridge were drawn in sepia against crimson-gilt; for an instant
+the cupola of the Clarendon became jasper, and far, far above floated in
+the azure a cloud of pink jeweller's cotton. Even as she strove to fix
+these colours in her mind they vanished, the western sky faded to
+magenta, to purple-mauve; the corridor of the river darkened, on either
+side pale lights sparkled from the windows of the mills, while down the
+deepened blue of the waters came floating iridescent suds from the
+washing of the wools. It was given to her to know that which an artist of
+living memory has called the incommunicable thrill of things....
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+The after-effects of this experience of Janet's were not what ordinarily
+are called "spiritual," though we may some day arrive at a saner meaning
+of the term, include within it the impulses and needs of the entire
+organism. It left her with a renewed sense of energy and restlessness,
+brought her nearer to high discoveries of mysterious joys which a voice
+out of the past called upon her to forego, a voice somehow identified
+with her father! It was faint, ineffectual. In obeying it, would she not
+lose all life had to give? When she came in to supper her father was
+concerned about her because, instead of walking home with him she had
+left him without explanation to plunge into the crowd of workers. Her
+evident state of excitement had worried him, her caprice was beyond his
+comprehension. And how could she explain the motives that led to it? She
+was sure he had never felt like that; and as she evaded his questions the
+something within her demanding life and expression grew stronger and more
+rebellious, more contemptuous of the fear-precepts congenial to a nature
+timorous and less vitalized.
+
+After supper, unable to sit still, she went out, and, filled with the
+spirit of adventure, hurried toward Faber Street, which was already
+thronging with people. It was bright here and gay, the shops glittered,
+and she wandered from window to window until she found herself staring at
+a suit of blue cloth hung on a form, beneath which was a card that read,
+"Marked down to $20." And suddenly the suggestion flashed into her mind,
+why shouldn't she buy it? She had the money, she needed a new suit for
+the winter, the one she possessed was getting shabby...but behind the
+excuse of necessity was the real reason triumphantly proclaiming
+itself--she would look pretty in it, she would be transformed, she would
+be buying a new character to which she would have to live up. The old
+Janet would be cast off with the old raiment; the new suit would announce
+to herself and to the world a Janet in whom were released all those
+longings hitherto disguised and suppressed, and now become insupportable!
+This was what the purchase meant, a change of existence as complete as
+that between the moth and the butterfly; and the realization of this
+fact, of the audacity she was resolved to commit made her hot as she
+gazed at the suit. It was modest enough, yet it had a certain distinction
+of cut, it looked expensive: twenty dollars was not cheap, to be sure,
+but as the placard announced, it had the air of being much more
+costly--even more costly than thirty dollars, which seemed fabulous.
+Though she strove to remain outwardly calm, her heart beat rapidly as she
+entered the store and asked for the costume, and was somewhat reassured
+by the comportment of the saleswoman, who did not appear to think the
+request preposterous, to regard her as a spendthrift and a profligate.
+She took down the suit from the form and led Janet to a cabinet in the
+back of the shop, where it was tried on.
+
+"It's worth every bit of thirty dollars," she heard the woman say, "but
+we've had it here for some time, and it's no use for our trade. You can't
+sell anything like that in Hampton, there's no taste here, it's too good,
+it ain't showy enough. My, it fits you like it was made for you, and it's
+just your style--and you can see it wants a lady to wear it. Your old
+suit is too tight--I guess you've filled out some since you bought it."
+
+She turned Janet around and around, patting the skirt here and there, and
+then stood off a little way, with clasped hands, her expression almost
+rapturous. Janet's breath came fast as she gazed into the mirror and
+buttoned up the coat. Was the woman's admiration cleverly feigned? this
+image she beheld an illusion? or did she really look different,
+distinguished? and if not beautiful--alluring? She had had a momentary
+apprehension, almost sickening, that she would be too conspicuous, but
+the saleswoman had anticipated that objection with the magical word
+"lady."
+
+"I'll take it," she announced.
+
+"Well, you couldn't have done better if you'd gone to Boston," declared
+the woman. "It's one chance in a thousand. Will you wear it?"
+
+"Yes," said Janet faintly.... "Just put my old suit in a box, and I'll
+call for it in an hour."
+
+The woman's sympathetic smile followed her as she left the shop. She had
+an instant of hesitation, of an almost panicky desire to go back and
+repair her folly, ere it was too late. Why had she taken her money with
+her that evening, if not with some deliberate though undefined purpose?
+But she was ashamed to face the saleswoman again, and her elation was not
+to be repressed--an elation optically presented by a huge electric sign
+on the farther side of the street that flashed through all the colours of
+the spectrum, surrounded by running fire like the running fire in her
+soul. Deliciously self-conscious, her gaze fixed ahead, she pressed
+through the Wednesday night crowds, young mill men and women in their
+best clothes, housewives and fathers of families with children and
+bundles. In front of the Banner office a group blocked the pavement
+staring up at the news bulletin, which she paused to read. "Five
+Millionaire Directors Indicted in New York," "State Treasurer Accused of
+Graft," "Murdock Fortune Contested by Heirs." The phrases seemed
+meaningless, and she hurried on again.... She was being noticed! A man
+looked at her, twice, the first glance accidental, the second arresting,
+appealing, subtly flattering, agitating--she was sure he had turned and
+was following her. She hastened her steps. It was wicked, what she was
+doing, but she gloried in it; and even the sight, in burning red letters,
+of Gruber's Cafe failed to bring on a revulsion by its association with
+her sister Lise. The fact that Lise had got drunk there meant nothing to
+her now. She gazed curiously at the illuminated, orange-coloured panes
+separated by curving leads, at the design of a harp in green, at the sign
+"Ladies' Entrance"; listened eagerly to the sounds of voices and laughter
+that came from within. She looked cautiously over her shoulder, a shadow
+appeared, she heard a voice, low, insinuating....
+
+Four blocks farther down she stopped. The man was no longer following
+her. She had been almost self-convinced of an intention to go to
+Eda's--not quite. Of late her conscience had reproached her about Eda,
+Janet had neglected her. She told herself she was afraid of Eda's uncanny
+and somewhat nauseating flair for romance; and to show Eda the new suit,
+though she would relish her friend's praise, would be the equivalent of
+announcing an affair of the heart which she, Janet, would have
+indignantly to deny. She was not going to Eda's. She knew now where she
+was going. A prepared but hitherto undisclosed decree of fate had bade
+her put money in her bag that evening, directed her to the shop to buy
+the dress, and would presently impel her to go to West Street--nay, was
+even now so impelling her. Ahead of her were the lights of the Chippering
+Mill, in her ears was the rhythmic sound of the looms working of nights
+on the Bradlaugh order. She reached the canal. The white arc above the
+end of the bridge cast sharp, black shadows of the branches of the trees
+on the granite, the thousand windows of the mill shone yellow, reflected
+in the black water. Twice she started to go, twice she paused, held by
+the presage of a coming event, a presage that robbed her of complete
+surprise when she heard footsteps on the bridge, saw the figure of a man
+halting at the crown of the arch to look back at the building he had
+left, his shoulders squared, his hand firmly clasping the rail. Her heart
+was throbbing with the looms, and yet she stood motionless, until he
+turned and came rapidly down the slope of the arch and stopped in front
+of her. Under the arc lamp it was almost as bright as day.
+
+"Miss Bumpus!" he exclaimed.
+
+"Mr. Ditmar" she said.
+
+"Were you--were you coming to the office?"
+
+"I was just out walking," she told him. "I thought you were in Boston."
+
+"I came home," he informed her, somewhat superfluously, his eyes never
+leaving her, wandering hungrily from her face to her new suit, and back
+again to her face. "I got here on the seven o'clock train, I wanted to
+see about those new Blubbers."
+
+"They finished setting them up this afternoon," she said.
+
+"How did you know?"
+
+"I asked Mr. Orcutt about it--I thought you might telephone."
+
+"You're a wonder," was his comment. "Well, we've got a running start on
+that order," and he threw a glance over his shoulder at the mill.
+"Everything going full speed ahead. When we put it through I guess I'll
+have to give you some of the credit."
+
+"Oh, I haven't done anything," she protested.
+
+"More than you think. You've taken so much off my shoulders I couldn't
+get along without you." His voice vibrated, reminding her of the voices
+of those who made sentimental recitations for the graphophone. It sounded
+absurd, yet it did not repel her: something within her responded to it.
+"Which way were you going?" he inquired.
+
+"Home," she said.
+
+"Where do you live?"
+
+"In Fillmore Street." And she added with a touch of defiance: "It's a
+little street, three blocks above Hawthorne, off East Street."
+
+"Oh yes," he said vaguely, as though he had not understood. "I'll come
+with you as far as the bridge--along the canal. I've got so much to say
+to you."
+
+"Can't you say it to-morrow?"
+
+"No, I can't; there are so many people in the office--so many
+interruptions, I mean. And then, you never give me a chance."
+
+She stood hesitating, a struggle going on within her. He had proposed the
+route along the canal because nobody would be likely to recognize them,
+and her pride resented this. On the other hand, there was the sweet
+allurement of the adventure she craved, which indeed she had come out to
+seek and by a strange fatality found--since he had appeared on the bridge
+almost as soon as she reached it. The sense of fate was strong upon her.
+Curiosity urged her, and, thanks to the eulogy she had read of him that
+day, to the added impression of his power conveyed by the trip through
+the mills, Ditmar loomed larger than ever in her consciousness.
+
+"What do you want to say?" she asked.
+
+"Oh, lots of things."
+
+She felt his hand slipping under her arm, his fingers pressing gently but
+firmly into her flesh, and the experience of being impelled by a power
+stronger than herself, a masculine power, was delicious. Her arm seemed
+to burn where he touched her.
+
+"Have I done something to offend you?" she heard him say. "Or is it
+because you don't like me?"
+
+"I'm not sure whether I like you or not," she told him. "I don't like
+seeing you--this way. And why should you want to know me and see me
+outside of the office? I'm only your stenographer."
+
+"Because you're you--because you're different from any woman I ever met.
+You don't understand what you are--you don't see yourself."
+
+"I made up my mind last night I wouldn't stay in your office any longer,"
+she informed him.
+
+"For God's sake, why?" he exclaimed. "I've been afraid of that. Don't
+go--I don't know what I'd do. I'll be careful--I won't get you talked
+about."
+
+"Talked about!" She tore herself away from him. "Why should you get me
+talked about?" she cried.
+
+He was frightened. "No, no," he stammered, "I didn't mean--"
+
+"What did you mean?"
+
+"Well--as you say, you're my stenographer, but that's no reason why we
+shouldn't be friends. I only meant--I wouldn't do anything to make our
+friendship the subject of gossip."
+
+Suddenly she began to find a certain amusement in his confusion and
+penitence, she achieved a pleasurable sense of advantage, of power over
+him.
+
+"Why should you want me? I don't know anything, I've never had any
+advantages--and you have so much. I read an article in the newspaper
+about you today--Mr. Caldwell gave it to me--"
+
+"Did you like it?" he interrupted, naively.
+
+"Well, in some places it was rather funny."
+
+"Funny? How?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know." She had been quick to grasp in it the journalistic
+lack of restraint hinted at by Caldwell. "I liked it, but I thought it
+praised you too much, it didn't criticize you enough."
+
+He laughed. In spite of his discomfort, he found her candour refreshing.
+From the women to whom he had hitherto made love he had never got
+anything but flattery.
+
+"I want you to criticize me," he said.
+
+But she went on relentlessly:--"When I read in that article how
+successful you were, and how you'd got everything you'd started out to
+get, and how some day you might be treasurer and president of the
+Chippering Mill, well--" Despairing of giving adequate expression to her
+meaning, she added, "I didn't see how we could be friends."
+
+"You wanted me for a friend?" he interrupted eagerly.
+
+"I couldn't help knowing you wanted me--you've shown it so plainly. But I
+didn't see how it could be. You asked me where I lived--in a little flat
+that's no better than a tenement. I suppose you would call it a tenement.
+It's dark and ugly, it only has four rooms, and it smells of cooking. You
+couldn't come there--don't you see how impossible it is? And you wouldn't
+care to be talked about yourself, either," she added vehemently.
+
+This defiant sincerity took him aback. He groped for words.
+
+"Listen!" he urged. "I don't want to do anything you wouldn't like, and
+honestly I don't know what I'd do if you left me. I've come to depend on
+you. And you may not believe it, but when I got that Bradlaugh order I
+thought of you, I said to myself 'She'll be pleased, she'll help me to
+put it over.'"
+
+She thrilled at this, she even suffered him, for some reason unknown to
+herself, to take her arm again.
+
+"How could I help you?"
+
+"Oh, in a thousand ways--you ought to know, you do a good deal of
+thinking for me, and you can help me by just being there. I can't explain
+it, but I feel somehow that things will go right. I've come to depend on
+you."
+
+He was a little surprised to find himself saying these things he had not
+intended to say, and the lighter touch he had always possessed in dealing
+with the other sex, making him the envied of his friends, had apparently
+abandoned him. He was appalled at the possibility of losing her.
+
+"I've never met a woman like you," he went on, as she remained silent.
+"You're different--I don't know what it is about you, but you are." His
+voice was low, caressing, his head was bent down to her, his shoulder
+pressed against her shoulder. "I've never had a woman friend before, I've
+never wanted one until now."
+
+She wondered about his wife.
+
+"You've got brains--I've never met a woman with brains."
+
+"Oh, is that why?" she exclaimed.
+
+"You're beautiful," he whispered. "It's queer, but I didn't know it at
+first. You're more beautiful to-night than I've ever seen you."
+
+They had come almost to Warren Street. Suddenly realizing that they were
+standing in the light, that people were passing to and fro over the end
+of the bridge, she drew away from him once more, this time more gently.
+
+"Let's walk back a little way," he proposed.
+
+"I must go home--it's late."
+
+"It's only nine o'clock."
+
+"I have an errand to do, and they'll expect me. Good night."
+
+"Just one more turn!" he pleaded.
+
+But she shook her head, backing away from him.
+
+"You'll see me to-morrow," she told him. She didn't know why she said
+that. She hurried along Warren Street without once looking over her
+shoulder; her feet seemed scarcely to touch the ground, the sound of
+music was in her ears, the lights sparkled. She had had an adventure, at
+last, an adventure that magically had transformed her life! She was
+beautiful! No one had ever told her that before. And he had said that he
+needed her. She smiled as, with an access of tenderness, in spite of his
+experience and power she suddenly felt years older than Ditmar. She could
+help him!...
+
+She was breathless when she reached the shop in Faber Street.
+
+"I hope I haven't kept you waiting," she said.
+
+"Oh no, we don't close until ten," answered the saleswoman. She was
+seated quietly sewing under the lamp.
+
+"I wonder whether you'd mind if I put on my old suit again, and carried
+this?" Janet asked.
+
+The expression of sympathy and understanding in the woman's eyes, as she
+rose, brought the blood swiftly to Janet's face. She felt that her secret
+had been guessed. The change effected, Janet went homeward swiftly, to
+encounter, on the corner of Faber Street, her sister Lise, whose
+attention was immediately attracted by the bundle.
+
+"What have you got there, angel face?" she demanded.
+
+"A new suit," said Janet.
+
+"You don't tell me--where'd you get it? at the Paris?"
+
+"No, at Dowling's."
+
+"Say, I'll bet it was that plain blue thing marked down to twenty!"
+
+"Well, what if it was?"
+
+Lise, when surprised or scornful, had a peculiarly irritating way of
+whistling through her teeth.
+
+"Twenty bucks! Gee, you'll be getting your clothes in Boston next. Well,
+as sure as I live when I went by that window the other day when they
+first knocked it down I said to Sadie, `those are the rags Janet would
+buy if she had the ready.' Have you got another raise out of Ditmar?"
+
+"If I have, it isn't any business of yours," Janet retorted. "I've got a
+right to do as I please with my own money."
+
+"Oh sure," said Lise, and added darkly: "I guess Ditmar likes to see you
+look well."
+
+After this Janet refused obstinately to speak to Lise, to answer, when
+they reached home, her pleadings and complaints to their mother that
+Janet had bought a new suit and refused to exhibit it. And finally, when
+they had got to bed, Janet lay long awake in passionate revolt against
+this new expression of the sordidness and lack of privacy in which she
+was forced to live, made the more intolerable by the close, sultry
+darkness of the room and the snoring of Lise.
+
+In the morning, however, after a groping period of semiconsciousness
+during the ringing of the bells, the siren startled her into awareness
+and alertness. It had not wholly lost its note of terror, but the note
+had somehow become exhilarating, an invitation to adventure and to life;
+and Lise's sarcastic comments as to the probable reasons why she did not
+put on the new suit had host their power of exasperation. Janet
+compromised, wearing a blouse of china silk hitherto reserved for "best."
+The day was bright, and she went rapidly toward the mill, glorying in the
+sunshine and the autumn sharpness of the air; and her thoughts were not
+so much of Ditmar as of something beyond him, of which he was the medium.
+She was going, not to meet him, but to meet that. When she reached the
+office she felt weak, her fingers trembled as she took off her hat and
+jacket and began to sort out the mail. And she had to calm herself with
+the assurance that her relationship with Ditmar had undergone no change.
+She had merely met him by the canal, and he had talked to her. That was
+all. He had, of course, taken her arm: it tingled when she remembered it.
+But when he suddenly entered the room her heart gave a bound. He closed
+the door, he took off his hat, and stood gazing at her--while she
+continued arranging letters. Presently she was forced to glance at him.
+His bearing, his look, his confident smile all proclaimed that he, at
+least, believed things to be changed. He glowed with health and vigour,
+with an aggressiveness from which she shrank, yet found delicious.
+
+"How are you this morning?" he said at last--this morning as
+distinguished from all other mornings.
+
+"I'm well, as usual," she answered. She herself was sometimes surprised
+by her ability to remain outwardly calm.
+
+"Why did you run away from me last night?"
+
+"I didn't run away, I had to go home," she said, still arranging the
+letters.
+
+"We could have had a little walk. I don't believe you had to go home at
+all. You just wanted an excuse to get away from me."
+
+"I didn't need an excuse," she told him. He moved toward her, but she
+took a paper from the desk and carried it to a file across the room.
+
+"I thought we were going to be friends," he said.
+
+"Being friends doesn't mean being foolish," she retorted. "And Mr.
+Orcutt's waiting to see you."
+
+"Let him wait."
+
+He sat down at his desk, but his blood was warm, and he read the
+typewritten words of the topmost letter of the pile without so much as
+grasping the meaning of them. From time to time he glanced up at Janet as
+she flitted about the room. By George, she was more desirable than he had
+ever dared to imagine! He felt temporarily balked, but hopeful. On his
+way to the mill he had dwelt with Epicurean indulgence on this sight of
+her, and he had not been disappointed. He had also thought that he might
+venture upon more than the mere feasting of his eyes, yet found an
+inspiring alleviation in the fact that she by no means absolutely
+repulsed him. Her attitude toward him had undergone a subtle
+transformation. There could be no doubt of that. She was almost
+coquettish. His eyes lingered. The china silk blouse was slightly open at
+the neck, suggesting the fullness of her throat; it clung to the outline
+of her shoulders. Overcome by an impulse he could not control, he got up
+and went toward her, but she avoided him.
+
+"I'll tell Mr. Orcutt you've come," she said, rather breathlessly, as she
+reached the door and opened it. Ditmar halted in his steps at the sight
+of the tall, spectacled figure of the superintendent on the threshold.
+
+Orcutt hesitated, looking from one to the other.
+
+"I've been waiting for you," he said, after a moment, "the rest of that
+lot didn't come in this morning. I've telephoned to the freight agent."
+
+Ditmar stared at him uncomprehendingly. Orcutt repeated the information.
+
+"Oh well, keep after him, get him to trace them."
+
+"I'm doing that," replied the conscientious Orcutt.
+
+"How's everything else going?" Ditmar demanded, with unlooked-for
+geniality. "You mustn't take things too hard, Orcutt, don't wear yourself
+out."
+
+Mr. Orcutt was relieved. He had expected an outburst of the exasperation
+that lately had characterized his superior. They began to chat. Janet had
+escaped.
+
+"Miss Bumpus told me you wanted to see me. I was just going to ring you
+up," Ditmar informed him.
+
+"She's a clever young woman, seems to take such an interest in things,"
+Orcutt observed. "And she's always on the job. Only yesterday I saw her
+going through the mill with young Caldwell."
+
+Ditmar dropped the paper-weight he held.
+
+"Oh, she went through, did she?"
+
+After Orcutt departed he sat for awhile whistling a tune, from a popular
+musical play, keeping time by drumming with his fingers on the desk.
+
+That Mr. Semple, the mill treasurer, came down from Boston that morning
+to confer with Ditmar was for Janet in the nature of a reprieve. She sat
+by her window, and as her fingers flew over the typewriter keys she was
+swept by surges of heat in which ecstasy and shame and terror were
+strangely commingled. A voice within her said, "This can't go on, this
+can't go on! It's too terrible! Everyone in the office will notice
+it--there will be a scandal. I ought to go away while there is yet
+time--to-day." Though the instinct of flight was strong within her, she
+was filled with rebellion at the thought of leaving when Adventure was
+flooding her drab world with light, even as the mill across the waters
+was transfigured by the heavy golden wash of the autumn sun. She had made
+at length the discovery that Adventure had to do with Man, was
+inconceivable without him.
+
+Racked by these conflicting impulses of self-preservation on the one hand
+and what seemed self-realization on the other, she started when, toward
+the middle of the afternoon, she heard Ditmar's voice summoning her to
+take his letters; and went palpitating, leaving the door open behind her,
+seating herself on the far side of the desk, her head bent over her book.
+Her neck, where her hair grew in wisps behind her ear, seemed to burn:
+Ditmar's glance was focussed there. Her hands were cold as she wrote....
+Then, like a deliverer, she saw young Caldwell coming in from the outer
+office, holding a card in his hand which he gave to Ditmar, who sat
+staring at it.
+
+"Siddons?" he said. "Who's Siddons?"
+
+Janet, who had risen, spoke up.
+
+"Why, he's been making the Hampton `survey.' You wrote him you'd see
+him--don't you remember, Mr. Ditmar?"
+
+"Don't go!" exclaimed Ditmar. "You can't tell what those confounded
+reformers will accuse you of if you don't have a witness."
+
+Janet sat down again. The sharpness of Ditmar's tone was an exhilarating
+reminder of the fact that, in dealing with strangers, he had come more or
+less to rely on her instinctive judgment; while the implied appeal of his
+manner on such occasions emphasized the pleasurable sense of his
+dependence, of her own usefulness. Besides, she had been curious about
+the `survey' at the time it was first mentioned, she wished to hear
+Ditmar's views concerning it. Mr. Siddons proved to be a small and sallow
+young man with a pointed nose and bright, bulbous brown eyes like a
+chipmunk's. Indeed, he reminded one of a chipmunk. As he whisked himself
+in and seized Ditmar's hand he gave a confused impression of polite
+self-effacement as well as of dignity and self-assertion; he had the air
+of one who expects opposition, and though by no means desiring it, is
+prepared to deal with it. Janet smiled. She had a sudden impulse to drop
+the heavy book that lay on the corner of the desk to see if he would
+jump.
+
+"How do you do, Mr. Ditmar?" he said. "I've been hoping to have this
+pleasure."
+
+"My secretary, Miss Bumpus," said Ditmar.
+
+Mr. Siddons quivered and bowed. Ditmar, sinking ponderously into his
+chair, seemed suddenly, ironically amused, grinning at Janet as he opened
+a drawer of his desk and offered the visitor a cigar.
+
+"Thanks, I don't smoke," said Mr. Siddons.
+
+Ditmar lit one for himself.
+
+"Now, what can I do for you?" he asked.
+
+"Well, as I wrote you in my letter, I was engaged to make as thorough an
+examination as possible of the living conditions and housing of the
+operatives in the city of Hampton. I'm sure you'd be interested in
+hearing something of the situation we found."
+
+"I suppose you've been through our mills," said Ditmar.
+
+"No, the fact is--"
+
+"You ought to go through. I think it might interest you," Ditmar put a
+slight emphasis on the pronoun. "We rather pride ourselves on making
+things comfortable and healthy for our people."
+
+"I've no doubt of it--in fact, I've been so informed. It's because of
+your concern for the welfare of your workers in the mills that I ventured
+to come and talk to you of how most of them live when they're at home,"
+replied Siddons, as Janet thought, rather neatly. "Perhaps, though living
+in Hampton, you don't quite realize what the conditions are. I know a man
+who has lived in Boston ten years and who hasn't ever seen the Bunker
+Hill monument."
+
+"The Bunker Hill monument's a public affair," retorted Ditmar, "anybody
+can go there who has enough curiosity and interest. But I don't see how
+you can expect me to follow these people home and make them clean up
+their garbage and wash their babies. I shouldn't want anybody to
+interfere with my private affairs."
+
+"But when you get to a point where private affairs become a public
+menace?" Siddons objected. "Mr. Ditmar, I've seen block after block of
+tenements ready to crumble. There are no provisions for foundations,
+thickness of walls, size of timbers and columns, and if these houses had
+been deliberately erected to make a bonfire they couldn't have answered
+the purpose better. If it were not for the danger to life and the pity of
+making thousands of families homeless, a conflagration would be a
+blessing, although I believe the entire north or south side of the city
+would go under certain conditions. The best thing you could do would be
+to burn whole rows of these tenements, they are ideal breeding grounds
+for disease. In the older sections of the city you've got hundreds of
+rear houses here, houses moved back on the lots, in some extreme cases
+with only four-foot courts littered with refuse,--houses without light,
+without ventilation, and many of the rooms where these people are cooking
+and eating and sleeping are so damp and foul they're not fit to put dogs
+in. You've got some blocks with a density of over five hundred to the
+acre, and your average density is considerably over a hundred."
+
+"Are things any worse than in any other manufacturing city?" asked
+Ditmar.
+
+"That isn't the point," said Siddons. "The point is that they're bad,
+they're dangerous, they're inhuman. If you could go into these tenements
+as I have done and see the way some of these people live, it would make
+you sick the Poles and Lithuanians and Italians especially. You wouldn't
+treat cattle that way. In some households of five rooms, including the
+kitchen, I found as many as fourteen, fifteen, and once seventeen people
+living. You've got an alarming infant death-rate."
+
+"Isn't it because these people want to live that way?" Ditmar inquired.
+"They actually like it, they wouldn't be happy in anything but a
+pig-sty--they had 'em in Europe. And what do you expect us to do? Buy
+land and build flats for them? Inside of a month they'd have all the
+woodwork stripped off for kindling, the drainage stopped up, the bathtubs
+filled with ashes. I know, because it's been tried."
+
+Tilted back in his chair, he blew a cloud of smoke toward the ceiling,
+and his eyes sought Janet's. She avoided them, resenting a little the
+assumption of approval she read in them. Her mind, sensitive to new
+ideas, had been keenly stimulated as she listened to Siddons, who began
+patiently to dwell once more on the ill effect of the conditions he had
+discovered on the welfare of the entire community. She had never thought
+of this. She was surprised that Ditmar should seem to belittle it.
+Siddons was a new type in her experience. She could understand and to a
+certain extent maliciously enjoy Ditmar's growing exasperation with him;
+he had a formal, precise manner of talking, as though he spent most of
+his time presenting cases in committees: and in warding off Ditmar's
+objections he was forever indulging in such maddening phrases as, "Before
+we come to that, let me say a word just here." Ditmar hated words. His
+outbursts, his efforts to stop the flow of them were not unlike the
+futile charges of a large and powerful animal harassed by a smaller and
+more agile one. With nimble politeness, with an exasperating air of
+deference to Ditmar's opinions, Mr. Siddons gave ground, only to return
+to the charge; yet, despite a manner and method which, when contrasted to
+Ditmar's, verged on the ludicrous, Mr. Siddons had a force and fire of
+his own, nervous, almost fanatical: when he dwelt on the misery he had
+seen, and his voice trembled from the intensity of his feeling, Janet
+began to be moved. It was odd, considering the struggle for existence of
+her own family, that these foreigners had remained outside the range of
+her sympathy.
+
+"I guess you'll find," Ditmar had interrupted peremptorily, "I guess
+you'll find, if you look up the savings banks statistics, these people
+have got millions tucked away. And they send a lot of it to the other
+side, they go back themselves, and though they live like cattle, they
+manage to buy land. Ask the real estate men. Why, I could show you a
+dozen who worked in the mills a few years ago and are capitalists
+to-day."
+
+"I don't doubt it, Mr. Ditmar," Siddons gracefully conceded. "But what
+does it prove? Merely the cruelty of an economic system based on ruthless
+competition. The great majority who are unable to survive the test pay
+the price. And the community also pays the price, the state and nation
+pay it. And we have this misery on our consciences. I've no doubt you
+could show me some who have grown rich, but if you would let me I could
+take you to families in desperate want, living in rooms too dark to read
+in at midday in clear weather, where the husband doesn't get more than
+seven dollars a week when the mills are running full time, where the
+woman has to look out for the children and work for the lodgers, and even
+with lodgers they get into debt, and the woman has to go into the mills
+to earn money for winter clothing. I've seen enough instances of this
+kind to offset the savings bank argument. And even then, when you have a
+family where the wife and older children work, where the babies are put
+out to board, where there are three and four lodgers in a room, why do
+you suppose they live that way? Isn't it in the hope of freeing
+themselves ultimately from these very conditions? And aren't these
+conditions a disgrace to Hampton and America?"
+
+"Well, what am I to do about it?" Ditmar demanded.
+
+"I see that these operatives have comfortable and healthful surroundings
+in the mill, I've spent money to put in the latest appliances. That's
+more than a good many mills I could mention attempt."
+
+"You are a person of influence, Mr. Ditmar, you have more influence than
+any man in Hampton. You can bring pressure to bear on the city council to
+enforce and improve the building ordinances, you can organize a campaign
+of public opinion against certain property owners."
+
+"Yes," retorted Ditmar, "and what then? You raise the rents, and you
+won't get anybody to live in the houses. They'll move out to settlements
+like Glendale full of dirt and vermin and disease and live as they're
+accustomed to. What you reformers are actually driving at is that we
+should raise wages--isn't it? If we raised wages they'd live like rats
+anyway. I give you credit for sincerity, Mr. Siddons, but I don't want
+you to think I'm not as much interested in the welfare of these people as
+you and the men behind you. The trouble is, you only see one side of this
+question. When you're in my position, you're up against hard facts. We
+can't pay a dubber or a drawing tender any more than he's worth, whether
+he has a wife or children in the mills or whether he hasn't. We're in
+competition with other mills, we're in competition with the South. We
+can't regulate the cost of living. We do our best to make things right in
+the mills, and that's all we can do. We can't afford to be sentimental
+about life. Competition's got to be the rule, the world's made that way.
+Some are efficient and some aren't. Good God, any man who's had anything
+to do with hiring labour and running a plant has that drummed into him
+hard. You talk about ordinances, laws--there are enough laws and
+ordinances in this city and in this state right now. If we have any more
+the mills will have to shut down, and these people will starve--all of
+'em." Ditmar's chair came down on its four legs, and he flung his cigar
+away. "Send me a copy of your survey when it's published. I'll look it
+over."
+
+"Well, what do you think of the nerve of a man like that?" Ditmar
+exploded, when Mr. Siddons had bowed himself out. "Comes in here to
+advise me that it's my business to look out for the whole city of
+Hampton. I'd like to see him up against this low-class European labour
+trying to run a mill with them. They're here one day and there the next,
+they don't know what loyalty is. You've got to drive 'em--if you give 'em
+an inch they'll jump at your throat, dynamite your property. Why, there's
+nothing I wouldn't do for them if I could depend on them, I'd build 'em
+houses, I'd have automobiles to take 'em home. As it is, I do my best,
+though they don't deserve it,--in slack seasons I run half time when I
+oughtn't to be running at all."
+
+His tone betrayed an effort of self-justification, and his irritation had
+been increased by the suspicion in Janet of a certain lack of the
+sympathy on which he had counted. She sat silent, gazing searchingly at
+his face.
+
+"What's the matter?" he demanded. "You don't mean to say you agree with
+that kind of talk?"
+
+"I was wondering--" she began.
+
+"What?"
+
+"If you were--if you could really understand those who are driven to work
+in order to keep alive?"
+
+"Understand them! Why not?" he asked.
+
+"Because--because you're on top, you've always been successful, you're
+pretty much your own master--and that makes it different. I'm not blaming
+you--in your place I'd be the same, I'm sure. But this man, Siddons, made
+me think. I've lived like that, you see, I know what it is, in a way."
+
+"Not like these foreigners!" he protested.
+
+"Oh, almost as bad," she cried with vehemence, and Ditmar, stopped
+suddenly in his pacing as by a physical force, looked at her with the
+startled air of the male who has inadvertently touched off one of the
+many hidden springs in the feminine emotional mechanism. "How do you know
+what it is to live in a squalid, ugly street, in dark little rooms that
+smell of cooking, and not be able to have any of the finer, beautiful
+things in life? Unless you'd wanted these things as I've wanted them, you
+couldn't know. Oh, I can understand what it would feel like to strike, to
+wish to dynamite men like you!"
+
+"You can!" he exclaimed in amazement. "You!"
+
+"Yes, me. You don't understand these people, you couldn't feel sorry for
+them any more than you could feel sorry for me. You want them to run your
+mills for you, you don't want to know how they feel or how they live, and
+you just want me--for your pleasure."
+
+He was indeed momentarily taken aback by this taunt, which no woman in
+his experience had had the wit and spirit to fling at him, but he was not
+the type of man to be shocked by it. On the contrary, it swept away his
+irritation, and as a revelation of her inner moltenness stirred him to a
+fever heat as he approached and stood over her.
+
+"You little--panther!" he whispered. "You want beautiful things, do you?
+Well, I'll give 'em to you. I'll take care of you."
+
+"Do you think I want them from you?" she retorted, almost in tears. "Do
+you think I want anybody to take care of me? That shows how little you
+know me. I want to be independent, to do my work and pay for what I get."
+
+Janet herself was far from comprehending the complexity of her feelings.
+Ditmar had not apologized or feigned an altruism for which she would
+indeed have despised him. The ruthlessness of his laugh--the laugh of the
+red-blooded man who makes laws that he himself may be lawless shook her
+with a wild appeal. "What do I care about any others--I want you!" such
+was its message. And against this paradoxical wish to be conquered,
+intensified by the magnetic field of his passion, battled her
+self-assertion, her pride, her innate desire to be free, to escape now
+from a domination the thought of which filled her with terror. She felt
+his cheek brushing against her hair, his fingers straying along her arm;
+for the moment she was hideously yet deliciously powerless. Then the
+emotion of terror conquered--terror of the unknown--and she sprang away,
+dropping her note-book and running to the window, where she stood
+swaying.
+
+"Janet, you're killing me," she heard him say. "For God's sake, why can't
+you trust me?"
+
+She did not answer, but gazed out at the primrose lights beginning to
+twinkle fantastically in the distant mills. Presently she turned. Ditmar
+was in his chair. She crossed the room to the electric switch, turning on
+the flood of light, picked up her tote-book and sat down again.
+
+"Don't you intend to answer your letters?" she asked.
+
+He reached out gropingly toward the pile of his correspondence, seized
+the topmost letter, and began to dictate, savagely. She experienced a
+certain exultation, a renewed and pleasurable sense of power as she took
+down his words.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Dwelling Place of Light, Volume 1
+by Winston Churchill
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DWELLING PLACE OF LIGHT, ***
+
+***** This file should be named 3646.txt or 3646.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        https://www.gutenberg.org/3/6/4/3646/
+
+Produced by Pat Castevans and David Widger
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+https://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+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
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at https://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+https://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at https://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit https://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including including checks, online payments and credit card
+donations.  To donate, please visit: https://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     https://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.