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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Rough-Hewn, by Dorothy Canfield
+
+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: Rough-Hewn
+
+Author: Dorothy Canfield
+
+Release Date: September 18, 2011 [EBook #37451]
+[Last updated: August 22, 2012]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROUGH-HEWN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Cathy Maxam, Suzanne Shell and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ROUGH-HEWN
+
+
+_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
+
+  THE SQUIRREL-CAGE
+  A MONTESSORI MOTHER
+  MOTHERS AND CHILDREN
+  THE BENT TWIG
+  THE REAL MOTIVE
+  FELLOW CAPTAINS
+    (With SARAH N. CLEGHORN)
+  UNDERSTOOD BETSY
+  HOME FIRES IN FRANCE
+  THE DAY OF GLORY
+  THE BRIMMING CUP
+
+
+
+
+  ROUGH-HEWN
+
+  BY
+  DOROTHY CANFIELD
+
+  "There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
+  Rough-hew them how we will."
+
+  [Illustration]
+
+  NEW YORK
+  HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY
+
+
+
+
+  COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
+  HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.
+
+  PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                           PAGE
+
+  ANY LITTLE BOY                                              1
+
+  CULTURE IN THE AIR                                         29
+
+  NEALE BEGINS TO BE NEALE                                   85
+
+  "TO-DAY SHALL BE THE SAME AS YESTERDAY"                   129
+
+  AN EDUCATION IN THE HUMANITIES AND THE LIBERAL ARTS       209
+
+  BIRTHDAYS IN SEVERAL LANGUAGES                            317
+
+  THE END OF ALL ROADS                                      379
+
+
+
+
+_ANY LITTLE BOY_
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+In the spring of 1893 Strindberg had just published "A Fool's
+Confession," D'Annunzio was employing all the multicolored glory of his
+style to prove "The Triumph of Death"; Hardy was somberly mixing on his
+palette the twilight grays and blacks and mourning purples of "Jude the
+Obscure"; Nordau, gnashing his teeth, was bellowing "Decadent" at his
+contemporaries who smirked a complacent acceptance of the epithet ...
+and, all unconscious of the futility and sordidness of the world, Neale
+Crittenden swaggered along Central Avenue, brandishing his shinny stick.
+
+It was a new yellow shinny stick, broad and heavy and almost as long as
+the boy who carried it. Ever since he had seen it in the window of
+Schwartz's Bazar, his soul had yearned for it. For days he had hoarded
+his pennies, foregoing ice-cream sodas, shutting his ears to the
+seductive ding-dong of the waffle-man's cart, and this very afternoon
+the immense sum of twenty-five cents had been completed and now he owned
+a genuine boughten stick, varnished and shiny. What couldn't he do with
+such a club! He beat it on the sidewalk till the flag-stones rang; he
+swung it around his head. What stupendous long-distance goals he was
+going to make! How he would dribble the ball through the enemy!
+
+Spring had turned the vacant lots into sticky red mud, but Central
+Avenue was hard if somewhat undulating macadam. It had stone curbs too,
+that bounced the ball back as if specially designed for side-boundaries
+by a philanthropic Board of Supervisors. Somewhere along it he was sure
+to find a game in progress. Yes, there they were in front of Number Two
+School. Neale broke into a run and coming up breathless plunged into the
+scrimmage.
+
+Shinny as played on Union Hill in the nineties had none of the
+refinements of its dignified cousin, field-hockey. Roughly divided into
+two sides, an indeterminate number of players tried with their sticks to
+knock a hard rubber ball to opposite ends of a block. Team work was
+elementary: the slowest runner on each side lay back to "tend gool"; the
+rest, following the fortunes of the ball, pelted to and fro in a
+seething melee of scuffling feet and clashing sticks. After each goal
+the ball was brought to the middle of the block, the two captains took
+their stand with sticks on either side of it. "One," they rapped their
+sticks on the pavement; "two," they rapped them together; "one, two,
+one, two." Then pandemonium broke out shrilly, sticks rapping against
+each other or against opposing shins, yells of "shinny on your own
+side," a welter of little boys battling around the ball as it shot up
+and down, sometimes advancing rapidly, sometimes stationary among a
+vortex of locked sticks until finally a lucky knock drove it past one or
+the other side street.
+
+Once as they were walking back after a goal, Fatty Schmidt noticed
+Neale's new weapon. "Oh, you gotta new shinny. Where'd you get it?
+Schwartz? Huh, them kind ain't no good; they split." Neale was silent as
+an Iroquois, but he had already begun to doubt. The heavy new stick
+didn't seem to be turning out what he had expected. It tripped him up
+occasionally and he never got it on the ball as quickly as he had his
+old home-made locust-shoot with the knob of root at the end. But he kept
+his doubts to himself, let out another notch of speed, and tried harder.
+It began to go better. He stopped a dangerous rush by hooking Franz
+Uhler's stick just as he was about to shoot for goal. Another time
+unaided he took the ball away from Don Roberts, lost it, but Marty Ryan
+retrieved it, and Neale and Marty raced down almost on top of the
+opposing goal keeper. Marty hit the ball a terrific crack. "Gool!" they
+cried exultingly, then on another note, indignantly, "Hi there, drop
+that!" For as the ball bounded along the street, a ragged little boy who
+had sprung up from nowhere grabbed it and made off. The pack gave chase.
+The little gamin had a good start but the bigger boys ahead of Neale
+were gaining on him. He turned off eastward. As Neale tore along he saw
+Marty and Franz catch up with the little kid, and then ... what was
+this? Where did all those other boys come from?
+
+With a whoop of joyous exultation he recognized the familiar ambush, the
+welcome invitation to battle. "Come on, fellers!" he yelled back to his
+own crowd. "Hoboken micks!" And with the rest of the Union Hill crowd
+charged through a fire of stones at the invaders.
+
+Then it was that the new shinny stick vindicated itself. Swinging it
+like a crusader's two-handed sword, Neale hacked and hewed. He landed on
+the funny-bone of a boy struggling with Marty for the ball. He landed on
+another mick's ribs. He heaved the stick up and was going to smash a
+hostile head when the enemy broke and ran. Triumphant, the Union Hill
+boys chased them to the edge of the hill, and sent a volley of stones
+after them as they scrambled down the steep path among the rocks, but
+pursued them no further. Below was the enemy's country. The Union Hill
+crowd never ventured down the rocks to the level cinder-filled flats
+beside the railroad tracks. That was Hoboken and a foreign land.
+
+It was supper time now. The victors said "So long" to each other and
+dispersed. Neale, somewhat lame but elated, went up the wooden steps of
+the porch. He stood his stick up in the umbrella-stand, went to the
+bathroom, washed his hands, brushed his hair, at least the top layer of
+it, and went quietly down to the dining-room. There he ate his buttered
+toast and creamed potatoes and drank his cocoa silently, while his
+father and mother talked. He paid no attention to what they said. He was
+living over again the fight of the afternoon, and forecasting fresh
+conquests for the future. His mother passed him a sauce-dish of
+preserved cherries and a piece of cake. After he had eaten this, he got
+up silently and went back to his room. His mother looked after him
+tenderly. "Neale is a _good_ boy," she said. Although he was no longer
+there, she still saw his honest round face, clear eyes, fresh color. She
+smiled to herself lovingly.
+
+Her husband nodded, "Yes, he's a good boy." After a thoughtful pause, he
+added, "Seems an awfully _quiet_ kid, though. I mean he keeps things to
+himself. You haven't any idea whether he's having a real boy's fun or
+not. He makes so little noise about it."
+
+As he passed through the hall Neale lingered a moment to handle the
+shinny stick again. He looked at it carefully to see if perhaps there
+was not a little blood on it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+Union Hill had been created by two very different classes of
+home-makers, a fact which was obvious from its aspect. Its
+undistinguished frame buildings for the most part sheltered families
+who, having to live somewhere, had settled there where inadequate
+communication with the rest of the world kept rents down. Side by side
+with this drab majority, but mingling with it little, a few well-to-do
+business men had built comfortable, roomy homes in an uninspired
+compromise between their business connections in the city and their
+preference for open-air life for their families. This narrow ridge of
+trap rock continuing the Palisades southward between the partly
+reclaimed back lots of Hoboken and the immense, irreclaimable salt
+marshes of the Hackensack Valley, had a certain picturesqueness, had
+seemed to promise freedom from malaria (supposed at that time to result
+from the breathing the "miasma" hanging low about swamp land), and
+certainly offered fresher air than a flat on a New York street or a town
+beside a New Jersey marsh. It was a one-sided sort of compromise in
+which the families came out rather badly. Whatever natural beauty might
+be inherent in the site was largely nullified by the tawdry imaginings
+of small architects and building contractors, and despite popular
+medical theories, the malaria was about the same on the hill as on the
+flats. But though the advance of the suburban idea was already
+developing more attractive sites at no very great distance, few families
+moved away. With the massive immobility characteristic of humanity, the
+scattered well-to-do families of Union Hill stuck it out, grim and
+disillusioned, taking the consequences of their error of judgment rather
+than lose the sensation of stability, which means home.
+
+Little Neale was quite unconscious of all this. To his ten-year-old
+thoughts "the Hill" was home, and where could you live except at home?
+It never occurred to him that there might be other or better homes--the
+Hill was where he lived. He accepted it as uncritically as he accepted
+life, school, his parents. Being, for that region where every one took
+quinine as a matter of course, rather a healthy boy, he accepted the
+initial facts of nature without criticism or much interest, working off
+the surplus of his young energy in baseball, shinny and guerilla
+skirmishes with the boys from other localities.
+
+His unconcern with the world around him, except for the details of
+boy-life, was complete. Home was warm and secure; he did not inquire
+whether other homes might be less warm or more elegant. Food was good to
+eat, though meals with adult conversation between his father and mother
+were tedious and occupied far too much time that might have been spent
+in play. His father was kind and remote. Neale thought very little about
+his father. He went away in the morning after breakfast and came in just
+before supper. He was in the lumber business, and when he went away, it
+was to the "office." Neale never went to the office; but once in a
+while, on Saturdays, Father took him walking down the long flight of
+wooden steps, down to the enemy's country where, thanks to the size of
+his father's protecting figure, never a Hoboken mick dared to throw a
+mudball; across the railroad track and a long, long way on paved
+sidewalks till they came out on a wide, noisy, muddy street filled with
+trucks drawn by horses with gleaming round haunches. And on the other
+side of the street there wasn't any more land, but long sheds that stuck
+out into the oily, green Hudson River. These sheds had huge doors
+through which the big, dappled horses kept hauling trucks, in and out.
+Some of the wharves had ships tied beside them. Occasionally these were
+sailing ships with bow-sprits slanting forward over the street, but more
+often steamers, black except for a band of red down near the water. As
+Neale walked along, although he never ventured to ask his busy father to
+stop and let him stare his fill, he could catch glimpses through the
+doorways of what went on inside the sheds. There were steep gang-ways,
+sloping from the plank floor of the pier to the ships, and up and down
+these, big men in blue jumpers wheeled hand-carts, always moving at a
+dog-trot. Through other openings, bundles of boxes tied together with
+rope slid down sloping boards, and other men with sharp hooks were
+always loading them on trucks or unloading them from trucks; or huge
+bales descended from the air, dangling at the end of a clinking chain.
+This bustle and noise, the strange tarry smells and the clatter of steam
+winches exhilarated Neale, excited him, made something quiver and glow
+within him. He longed to go in and be part of it.
+
+But Father never went inside, and it never occurred to Neale to explain
+how he felt, and to ask Father please to take him in. Silent as an
+Iroquois, he walked beside his father, who often glanced down, baffled,
+at the healthy, personable little boy beside him, looking so exactly
+like any other well-dressed, middle-class little boy.
+
+And yet, often before he fell asleep at night, Neale heard again the
+clanking clatter of the great unloading cranes, smelled again the
+intoxicating tarry salty ocean smells and felt again something quiver
+and glow within him.
+
+There was neither quiver nor glow about the place where Father finally
+stopped of his own accord. In a wide part of the street, huge piles of
+lumber were stacked. Father would walk slowly along these, looking at
+them very hard, and then he would go into a tiny, stuffy little wooden
+clap-boarded house--just one room, with men in shirt sleeves writing at
+desks--and there he would talk incomprehensible grown-up talk with one
+of the men, and the man would write at his desk, and Father standing up,
+would write in a note-book with a fountain pen ... and that was all the
+fun there was to the lumber business!
+
+Left to himself, Neale sat on the door-step and watched the fascinating
+life on the docks. Once he slipped across the street and tried to follow
+a truck in, but a big man with a red face yelled at him so loudly to
+"get out of there" that Neale ran back again, furiously angry but not
+knowing how to get around the big watchman. All he could do was to sit
+just inside the door, hating the watchman, and stare at the tantalizing
+activity so far away, and wish with all his heart that Father's business
+were more romantic.
+
+Mother meant more to Neale than Father did. He knew her better ... a
+little better. He had even some abstract ideas about her, that she was
+beautiful when she dressed up to go out in the afternoon. Mother fussed
+about his clothes more than was convenient, and insisted on baths, and
+washing hands before meals, but when he was sick, Mother read him
+stories, and let him leave the gas turned on in his room when he went to
+bed. Mother gave him pennies, too, and when Father was away on a
+business trip, he and Mother would eat alone together, and she would
+talk to him and ask him questions about school and play, and his boy
+friends. Neale didn't mind telling her things ... he liked Mother ...
+but he couldn't seem to manage to think of a great deal to tell her. It
+sounded foolish to talk about games to grown-ups.
+
+And games were really all that Neale cared about, almost all that he
+ever thought about. As to telling Mother other things, the few other
+things he did occasionally think about, why, there didn't seem to be
+anywhere to start. He'd have to begin "way back at the beginning" and
+now that Neale was ten years old, the beginning was too far back for him
+to lay hold of.
+
+As a matter of fact, she did not often ask about any of it, even in her
+distant careful way of asking. She just took good care of him, and had
+what he liked for supper, and put the kind of books he liked up in his
+room, and kept his buttons sewed on, and every night, till he was a big,
+big boy came into his room to kiss him good-night in his bed. She didn't
+say anything much then; just, "Have you enough covers?" maybe; or, "I
+believe I'd better open that window wider," and then, with the kiss,
+"Good-night, Neale."
+
+"Good-night, Mother."
+
+Then he turned over and nearly always went instantly to sleep.
+
+When Father was at home, mostly Father and Mother talked together at
+table, and read together after supper in the sitting-room, while Neale
+"did" his lessons upstairs. Or else Mother would dress up in one of her
+pretty dresses and Father would put on a clean shirt and his dark suit
+and they would go across the river to a theater in New York, leaving
+Neale to Katie, the good-natured, middle-aged Irish cook who had been
+with them since before Neale's birth. Or sometimes they had "company";
+other ladies in pretty dresses and other husbands in clean shirts and
+dark suits. Then they had a specially good supper, the sort of expensive
+things that were usually reserved for Sunday dinner, planked shad and
+roast chicken and ice-cream, and coffee in the little gold-lined cups
+that Mother always washed herself. Neale didn't mind company since
+nobody paid much attention to him, and he liked the extra Sunday
+eatables on a week-day, but one of his few impressions about his father
+and mother was that, although they always talked and laughed a great
+deal more when there was company, and seemed to have a lively time, they
+really liked it better when there were only the two of them talking over
+Neale's head at the table, and settling down afterwards to read and talk
+to one another around the drop-light.
+
+Another of those impressions was the tone of his father's voice when
+looking up from his book, he said, "Oh, Mary!" Neale always knew just
+the look there would be in Mother's eyes as she laid down her own book
+and asked, "Yes, what is it, dear?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+Among the many things which Neale never thought of questioning was the
+fact that he did not go to a public school as all his play-mates did. If
+he had asked, he would have found that his father and mother had an
+answer all ready for him, the completeness and thoroughness of which
+might have indicated that they had perhaps silenced some questionings of
+their own with it. He would have heard that of course they approved of
+public schools, and that if they had continued to live in Massachusetts,
+even if they had gone to live in a nice part of New York City, they
+would certainly have sent their son to a public school. But here at
+Union Hill, with the public schools so thickly populated by foreign
+children, the conditions were really different. What could a little
+American boy learn in a class-room with forty foreign children, whose
+constant study must needs be English?
+
+There was no flaw in the reasoning they were prepared to present to
+their son when he should ask the natural question about his schooling.
+But Neale never asked it. By the time he was old enough to think of it,
+habit had made him incapable of conceiving it. He no more wondered why
+he went every morning to the Taylors' house on Bower Street, instead of
+to Public School Number Two, than why he had two eyes instead of one.
+That was the way things were. Neale was slow to question the way things
+were.
+
+Dr. Taylor was another transplanted New Englander like Neale's father,
+with another college-graduate wife (rarer in those days than now), like
+Neale's mother. His ideas on children and the public schools would have
+been exactly like those of the Crittendens, even if they had not been
+fortified by the lameness of his only son. Jimmy's crutches made Public
+School definitely out of the question, and since Jimmy must have
+instruction at home, why, his two sisters, Elsie and Myrtle, might as
+well profit by it. Dr. Taylor was glad enough to have the expense of
+paying Miss Vanderwater shared by Mr. Crittenden, and to let Neale share
+in the benefits of Miss Vanderwater's instruction.
+
+Hence it happened that every morning Neale rang at the Taylors' front
+door, and when the maid let him in, went upstairs to the big front room
+on the top floor and there did whatever Miss Vanderwater told him to do.
+He was under her command from nine in the morning till noon, when he
+went home and had lunch with Mother, who always asked how school had
+gone, to which question Neale always made the same truthful answer that
+he guessed it was all right. At one he returned for two more hours with
+Miss Vanderwater. In this way he went through a series of Appleton's
+Readers, filled copy-books with thin Spencerian script, copied maps in
+colored ink with the coast-line shaded with scallops, did arithmetic on
+a slate and made very fair progress in learning German. German was much
+in the air in that locality.
+
+Of course he did not spend all those years of his life, side by side
+with three other children without becoming intimately acquainted with
+them. But one of the instinctive watertight compartments in Neale's
+Anglo-Saxon mind was the one in which he kept his school separate from
+his life. He studied with the Taylor children, but he never dreamed of
+staying after hours to play with them. And yet he knew them infinitely
+better than any of the innumerable chance street-acquaintances with whom
+he flew kites or played one-old-cat. He knew instinctively, knew without
+thinking of it, knew to the marrow of his brutally normal bones that
+Jimmy Taylor was lame not only in his legs but in his character. Jimmy's
+delicacy, the great care taken of him, the fact that he always played in
+the house or back-yard with his sisters, made a sissy of him. That was
+the plain fact, and Neale was not one to refuse to admit plain facts. He
+was always kind to Jimmy, at least not unkind, but he was always
+secretly relieved when the front door shut behind him, hiding from him
+Jimmy's too-white hands, thin neck and querulous invalid's voice.
+
+Of the two girls, Elsie was only a little kid, so much younger than
+Jimmy and Neale that they were barely aware of her existence. Myrtle, on
+the contrary, was very much there, a little girl whose comments on
+things never failed to arouse in Neale the profoundest astonishment. How
+could anybody think of such dotty things to say? You never had the least
+idea how anything was going to strike her, except that it was likely to
+strike her so hard that she made an awful fuss about it.
+
+Myrtle lived in mortal terror of any little dirt, it seemed to Neale.
+One day in May, when they had had a picnic-lunch out in the back-yard of
+the Taylors' house, Myrtle carried on perfectly wild about a little
+flying white thing that had fallen into her glass of lemonade. Holy
+smoke! thought Neale, if she was afraid to get it out, _he_ wasn't. So
+he fished it out with a spoon, and handed her back the glass. And what
+did she do? She made up an awful face and threw the lemonade on the
+ground! Neale was horrified at the waste.
+
+And the day when Miss Vanderwater in their "natural history lesson" told
+them about angle-worms and how they keep the ground light and open,
+didn't Myrtle go off in another fit, with her eyes goggling and her
+fingers all stretched apart as though she felt angle-worms everywhere.
+She insisted that Miss Vanderwater must be wrong, that such an awful
+thing could not be true.
+
+"Why, what do you mean?" asked Miss Vanderwater, for once, Neale noticed
+with satisfaction, as much at a loss as he.
+
+"Ugh! _Nasty!_" cried Myrtle. "So all we eat has grown out of what
+angle-worms have vomited up! And so they're wriggling around,
+_every_where, touching everything that grows! I never dreamed of such a
+nasty thing! I'll never eat a radish again! It makes me sick to think of
+it--to put my mouth where a horrible old angle-worm has been rubbing all
+its slime off!"
+
+"Now what do you think of that?" Neale asked himself.
+
+Mostly, Myrtle was just the worst dead loss you ever saw; but once in a
+while you got some good out of her foolishness, like the time when she
+bit into a lovely-looking apple and laid it down, looking very white
+and sick at her stomach. She had bitten into a rotten place, and
+although Neale pointed out honestly to her that it was the only bad
+spot, and that the rest of the apple was a corker, she refused to touch
+it, or even to look at it. She said she never wanted to see another
+apple again as long as she lived! So Neale ate it to save it, sinking
+his strong teeth through the taut red skin, reveling in the craunchy,
+juicy white flesh, chewing away on huge crisp delicious mouthfuls. It
+was perhaps as well, too, that Myrtle hadn't tried to go on eating it,
+for Neale found another rotten spot. But he spit out the
+cottony-feeling, brown, bad-tasting stuff into the waste basket, and
+having got rid of it, went on with the apple, his zest undiminished to
+the last mouthful gnawed off the core. The idea of going back on apples
+because you struck a rotten place! Nobody asked you to _eat_ the rotten
+places! It was perfectly easy to spit them out, or, if you saw them
+beforehand, to eat your way around them. He couldn't make anything out
+of Myrtle, at all.
+
+But he didn't allow himself to be bothered by her, any more than by
+rotten spots in apples, and he escaped from her and from the whole
+genteel atmosphere of the Taylor household, the moment three o'clock
+came. The instant Miss Vanderwater said, "dismissed," he hurried home,
+left his books and hurried out again to hang around Number Two School,
+till four o'clock sent all its mingled conglomeration, ranging from
+tattered ragamuffins to little boys in white sailor-suits, yelling and
+whooping out to the vacant lots.
+
+For, although the Crittendens' New England Americanism was not quite
+resolute enough to make them send Neale to a public school full of
+foreigners, it was more than enough to make them incapable of conceiving
+so odious an act of tyranny as forbidding a little boy to play freely
+with other little boys, whether any one knew their parents or not. They
+would have detested the idea of keeping Neale alone in their safe,
+sheltered back-yard, and would have been horrified to detect in him any
+trace of feeling himself better than the public-school children--which
+he certainly did not.
+
+Sundays had a special color of their own, not at all the traditional
+one. The Crittendens were Unitarians, not much given to church-going
+anywhere, and the nearest Unitarian church was across the river in New
+York. Mr. Crittenden had enough of New York on week-days. So they never
+went. Few of the Union Hill families did. Union Hill was anything but a
+stronghold of Sabbatarianism. It considered Sunday rather as a
+heaven-sent opportunity for much comfortable beer-drinking, attendance
+on a Turn-verein, and for enormous family gatherings around a big
+dinner.
+
+For Neale, with no other children in the family, the day was always
+solitary; not unpleasantly so. It was a day for long imaginings,
+stirring, warlike imaginings, realized through lead soldiers. Lead
+soldiers were a passion of his little boyhood. He had two hundred and
+ten, counting the ones with their legs broken, that he had mounted on
+half corks. He did not move them around much. He did not knock them
+down. When he got them set up in the order he wished, he fell into a
+trance, imagining stories and incidents. It took a long time to get them
+arranged to his satisfaction, with stiff marching columns, at
+shoulder-arms in the middle, some Indian sharp-shooters prone or
+kneeling behind painted lead shrubbery out in front, a squadron of
+parade cavalry on one wing, a troop of galloping Arabs on the other.
+Always he had a pile of blocks behind which a coal-black charger was
+tethered, and on top, leaning against a spool of thread, stood the
+general surveying his army. By uniform and whiskers the toymaker had
+intended the figure for Kaiser Wilhelm I; but to the boy's eyes it was
+no Prussian king, but Neale--Neale commanding his victorious troops. It
+was all arranged with a careful hand and a loving heart, and it took a
+long, long time.
+
+Very often the dinner-bell rang before he had even finished setting them
+up. At Sunday dinner there was generally "company," men friends of
+Father's mostly, but sometimes husbands and wives. Neale knew all their
+names, and shook hands without self-consciousness. He grinned silently
+if they spoke to him, and retired to his shell, busying himself with his
+own thoughts, all concentrated on the impending battle. He liked the
+things you had to eat on Sunday and had found that on Sunday he could
+eat the soft parts out of his bread and hide the crusts under the edge
+of his plate. Mother always caught him if he tried that on week-days,
+but on Sundays, with company there, she never said a word.
+
+But no matter how slowly he ate, he was always through, wriggling
+uncomfortably on his chair and horribly bored, while those tedious
+grown-up people were still gabbling on. Mother always saw this, took
+pity, and smiled a permission to him to be off. He slipped from his
+chair and tip-toed silently into the kitchen where Katie was dressing
+the salad. But she stopped long enough to open the pasteboard ice-cream
+box from Schlauchter's candy-store and give him a saucer-full from the
+soft part on top.
+
+Then he hurried upstairs again to act out with his army the glorious
+scenes he had been imagining during dinner. Sometimes it was a surprise
+attack on the march, with cavalry sweeping down on limbered guns,
+sometimes it was artillery formed in triangles, a muzzle at each apex,
+blowing the advancing cavalry to flinders. Sometimes it was a
+magnificent parade of triumph through a city gate with Kaiser Wilhelm
+(Neale) at their head.
+
+But at any moment, especially as he came on to be ten years old, quite
+suddenly and inexplicably he grew tired of it. The illusion would
+pass ... they would be just lifeless stupid dead soldiers, with broken
+legs and rifles, and the paint flaking off ... impossible to imagine
+anything with them. Also his arms and legs would feel numb with sitting
+still on the floor so long. Then Neale would slide noiselessly down the
+banisters, using his hands and legs as a brake to keep from crashing
+into the newel-post, slip by the dining-room door with its clinking
+coffee-cups and blue haze of cigar smoke, grab his cap and go quietly
+outdoors.
+
+Nobody would have stopped him, he knew that, but it was more fun to keep
+it quiet. Free from the house he would act out his drama of escape by
+running for a block or so, and then drop into the roaming boy's slow,
+zig-zag ramble.
+
+You can walk south or north on Union Hill for miles beyond a boy's
+endurance, without finding a single feature to quicken the imagination;
+but if you go east or west from anywhere on the Hill, you come at once
+to a jumping-off place where below you stretches the flat, marshy river
+or the flats. Neale preferred the western edge, even though it had no
+steep rocks. He was far from having any conscious love for landscape,
+but he found a certain satisfaction in looking over the yellow and brown
+expanse of the marsh-grass and cat-tails, hazy in the afternoon sun, cut
+with straight black lines of railroads (he named them over to himself,
+identifying every one, the Jersey Central, Pennsylvania, Erie,
+Lackawanna, and Jersey Northern), each with little toy-trains, each tiny
+locomotive sending up little balls of cotton-wool to hang motionless in
+the still afternoon air. To the southwest a hazy blur that was Newark,
+and right in front, like a doomed mountain, bogged and sinking into the
+marsh, the sinister bulk of Snake Hill. Neale used to stand and brood
+over it, sometimes till the sun went down, all red and orange. He did
+not stir till the cold roused him to think of home and supper.
+
+But his feet did not always turn westward. Sometimes he walked to the
+eastern edge. The rocks were steeper here, steep enough to be the
+impregnable fortress he always imagined them. When he came here, after
+reconnoitering the ground (for his tribal enemy did not observe the
+Truce of God on Sundays), Neale would go out to the edge of the sheerest
+promontory and dangle his legs down. Under his feet were railroad tracks
+again, then a belt of vacant lots, some of them black with
+cinder-filling, others green with the scum of stagnant water, then a
+belt of frame houses where the enemy lived, then a zone of city brick
+and flat tin roofs. Beyond it all was Castle Point, high and green
+(healthy green this, not scum), jutting out into the Hudson.
+Indistinctly he could make out the other side of the river, the line of
+ships at the wharves and more city ... New York.
+
+Occasionally Neale thought of New York, an almost mythical spot, though
+he went there once in a while with Mother on tiresome quests for
+clothes, as well as to matinees; sometimes he thought of the ships and
+the wharves, and how much he wished he could see more of them. But
+mostly he forgot the actual world. He was in command of the fort. All
+around him his brave men were working the guns. Bang! Bang! The enemy
+were marching along those straight paved streets. Their cannon balls
+were bursting all around, but the garrison did not quail. Their
+sharp-shooters were starting to climb the rocks. Ah, this was serious!
+No time for delay. The commander seized the rifle from the hand of a
+dying soldier ... how plainly Neale saw that dying soldier there at his
+feet ... bang! bang! bang! ... with every shot one of the foremost
+scalers dropped headlong.
+
+The engagement was a decisive victory.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+Inevitably Saturdays were all devoted to play. Neither Neale's parents
+nor he himself could have conceived of any other way of spending
+Saturdays. What were Saturdays for?
+
+It is true that in some of the more prosperous German-American families,
+Saturday was music-lesson day, just as four o'clock instead of ushering
+in roller-skating or marbles meant sitting in front of a piano, or
+stooping over a 'cello. But Neale felt for play-mates thus victimized
+the same slightly contemptuous pity he felt for Jimmy Taylor's lameness,
+and the same unsurprised acceptance of his own good luck in being free
+from such limitations.
+
+Once in a while, too, Mother took him over to New York to a matinee, and
+that was all right, too, if it didn't happen too often. Neale liked
+going out with Mother pretty well, and if there was fighting in the play
+he liked it fine. But all that was having something done to you, a
+sensation of which school gave Neale more than enough, and which he
+didn't like half so well--oh, not a quarter as well--oh, really not at
+all, compared to the sensation of starting something and running it
+yourself. If it really came right down to a comparison, there wasn't any
+fun at all in seeing Irving pretend to be a crazy man, compared to the
+fun of starting out Saturday morning, with no idea what you were going
+to do, and rustling around till you got enough fellows together for the
+game of the season.
+
+To stand in your old play-clothes on your front-step, of a Saturday
+morning, all the world before you, unfettered by obligations, a long,
+long, rich day of play before you that was _yours_ ... how could anybody
+be expected to prefer to dress up in things you had to try to keep
+clean, sit in a dark, hot theater and watch painted-up men and women
+carry on like all possessed about things that weren't really so. But
+that was all right enough for a change, and was as good a way as any to
+spend a rainy afternoon. Also, you could occasionally get ideas about
+fights, out of a play.
+
+But the real occupation of life was the playing of games. He nourished
+his soul and grew strong on the emotional thrills of games. They were
+the rich, fertile, substantial soil out of which he shot up into boyhood
+from childhood. They were his religion, and his business-in-life, the
+wide field where, unhampered, free as any naked savage, for all his
+decent knickerbockers and sweater, he raced to and fro, elastic,
+exultant, wild with the intoxication of the heady young strength poured
+into him by every new day.
+
+The astounding volume of sound, bursting up like flame and lava from a
+volcano, which rose from every group of boys at play bore witness to the
+extravagant and superabundant splendor of the intensity with which they
+lived, a splendor not at all recognized by suffering householders near
+whose decent and quiet homes a gang of boys settled down to play and
+yell and shriek and quarrel and run and yell again.
+
+It was the boys' world, not only untouched by grown-ups but blessedly
+even unsuspected by parents. Since it was theirs, since they created it
+anew every day, it exactly fitted their needs, and it grew and changed
+with their inner growth as their school never did. They were far from
+any self-conscious notion that they created it. Rather they seemed to
+themselves to accept it from the outside, as they accepted the weather.
+What had they to do with the succession of the seasons, either of games
+or temperature? In the nature of things you could no more play marbles
+in the autumn than pick wild strawberries in December.
+
+In the autumn, they played football, a sort of association-football with
+no limit to the number on each side, played with a heavy black rubber
+ball, blown up with a brass tube. The tube always got lost, and the
+valve always leaked. After a few games it became deflated, with the
+resiliency of a soggy sponge. But it was kicked to and fro just the
+same.
+
+When snow came, there was snow-balling, with forts of a rich, chocolate
+color, from the street-dirt mixed with the snow. About these raged
+feudal chivalry, loyalty and pride of place, one street against another.
+Sometimes all the district united against invading Huns from Hoboken or
+Jersey City Heights. Only a few boys skated, and Neale was not one of
+them, but everybody made slides in the slush.
+
+With spring came roller-skates, marbles (utilizing the cracks between
+sidewalk slabs), tops, kites, cat (a game for two), and, ah! baseball in
+the vacant lots!
+
+Neale was neither a star nor a dub at any game, but craving proficiency
+more than anything else in the world, he learned to do pretty well at
+all of them. At baseball, the major sport of the year, he toiled
+incessantly, and when he was ten years old, he was pretty sure of his
+job at second base on the Hancock Avenue Orioles. On ground balls he was
+erratic, but so was everybody on those rough, vacant-lot diamonds, where
+the ball ricocheted zig-zag from one stone to another. Long practice
+catching fungoes gave him a death-like certainty on pop flies. His "wing
+was poor," as he expressed it; strong enough in the arm, he had never
+mastered the wrist snap that gives velocity. As a batsman he was
+temperamental; one day he would feel right, and hit everything, another
+day his batting eye would inexplicably be gone, and he would fan at the
+widest dew-drops.
+
+One Saturday afternoon they were playing the Crescent Juniors, a
+glorious swat-fest of a game in which Neale had run wild all the
+afternoon. It was in the ninth, the score was 17 to 15, with the
+Crescents ahead. One was down, Neale at the bat, Marty Ryan, the
+captain, was dancing on the base line, ready to dart in from third,
+Franz Uhler was taking a dangerous lead off second. Neale rapped his bat
+professionally on the plate and glared at the pitcher.
+
+"Hit it out, Crit, old man!" yelled Fatty Schwartz, with a perfectly
+unnecessary steam-calliope volume of tone, "Hit it out! Save me a lick!"
+
+"Much good you'd do with a lick," thought Neale to himself. "You
+couldn't hit a basket-ball with a telegraph pole." Yes, it was up to
+him, to him alone. It was like a scene from one of his favorite stories
+about himself, actually happening; and it went on actually happening. A
+wide one, another wide. They didn't call balls in Neale's league. He
+rapped the plate, "Aw! put it over if you know how!" he taunted. A foul
+tip caught, another wide one haughtily ignored, a strike. The catcher
+put on his mask and moved up close behind the bat. Neale felt himself
+nerved to great things. He glued his eyes to the pitcher. By the motion
+it should be a slow out. It wasn't breaking. Neale stabbed at it, sliced
+it and landed a Texas leaguer back of short.
+
+He didn't see what happened. He ran. He flew. As he rounded second he
+caught a glimpse of the left fielder and short-stop falling over their
+feet, both trying to pick up the ball. As he turned the corner at third
+he saw the pitcher starting to run in to cover the plate and guessing
+that the catcher was chasing a wild throw, Neale put his head down and
+sprinted for dear life. Fifteen feet from the plate he dove, and shot
+over in a cloud of dust.
+
+Neale, the ball, and the pitcher all arrived there at the same moment,
+but a partial umpire called it "safe." Don Roberts fouled to the
+catcher, Fatty Schwartz fanned. But the game was won.
+
+With his chest a couple of inches bigger than normal, Neale started for
+home, and there on the sidewalk watching him, stood his father, looking
+right at him, instead of over his head as Father was apt to do. Father
+patted him on the shoulder. "That was a good swat, Neale," he said.
+
+Neale wriggled. "Well, we had to have a hit," he explained, "and I knew
+Don and Fatty wouldn't do much."
+
+His father found no other comment to make. Neale had said his say.
+Silent as Iroquois, they walked home to supper.
+
+The next afternoon Father brought him a Louisville Slugger bat and Neale
+was in the seventh heaven.
+
+And yet, at the next game, he fanned the first three times up and Marty
+waved him to the bench. This was terrible.
+
+But the sting did not last because two days later Miss Vanderwater gave
+each of them a present of a little book in German, and said auf
+wiedersehn for the summer.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+The end of school always meant the beginning of the yearly romance, the
+beginning of the two months when Neale really lived all the time, not
+just after four o'clock, and on Saturdays. And yet it was not all made
+up of games! In fact there weren't any games at all. Queer!
+
+Neale's life was largely made up of things that happened over and over
+the same way, and so did this. The last day of school he always went
+home and found the house smelling trunky and Mother with piles of
+clothes folded on all the chairs, packing a Saratoga trunk. All the
+afternoon she would pack it, putting things in and taking things out to
+make room for other things, and when Father came home, things would be
+all unfinished. It happened just that way, always. When Father came home
+things _were_ all unfinished, and Father took out his watch, and said
+the expressman had said he'd come at five-thirty, and Mother answered,
+"You know they're always two hours late."
+
+Nevertheless she stopped taking things out, and there was a scramble and
+things put in any old way, with a good deal of laughing and funning from
+Father and Mother, and finally with Mother and Neale sitting on the lid,
+Father in his shirt sleeves strapped and locked it. Then while they were
+eating supper, the expressman drove up (only an hour late, no, not even
+quite an hour late, Neale thought), and took the trunk away, and now
+Neale felt they were going.
+
+He lay awake that night thinking of the coming adventure, his heart
+beating faster, and then it was morning, and Mother was shaking him and
+getting him into his clothes. A hurried breakfast on lukewarm oatmeal.
+They went outside and got into a coupe standing there. Father and Mother
+sat on the back seat, and Neale on the little front seat you had to
+unfold. Then jog, jog, they went along Griffith Street down the
+curlycue road, the horse's feet going clatter on the cobblestones. Then
+jog, jog, jog again till at last they stopped and got out. They had come
+to the ferry.
+
+After they were on the ferry-boat, Father and Mother always waited so
+that Neale could see the deck-hand pull down the gates that closed the
+end of the boat and take out the iron hooks that held her fast to the
+dock. Then the whistle blew, and the boat started, leaving the dock
+looking as though a giant had bitten a half-circle out of it. Father
+walked with him out to the front deck, where, holding to his
+wide-brimmed sailor hat, Neale watched the waves and tug boats, and the
+gulls flapping about. Father made him look at the city ahead, and
+pointing out a building with a gold dome, told him that it was the World
+Building, and the highest in the city. Neale looked, found it of no
+interest and went back to his waves and gulls, which stirred something
+of the quiver and wonder the wharves made him feel.
+
+When the boat got across, it went smash into the piles and slid along
+into the dock, where men hitched it fast with iron hooks and pulled the
+hooks tight by turning a wheel around. Neale always noticed just how
+such things were managed, and Father always gave him plenty of time to
+look.
+
+Then up went the gates and off went everybody. Outside they got into a
+horse-car. After a while the horse-car began to run through a long,
+white-washed cellar, and Father explained (just as he had last year and
+the year before that), that _he_ could remember when the trains used to
+be pulled through that tunnel by horses. At the other end of the tunnel
+they all got out once more, and now, at last, you were really getting
+quite "warm," for this was the railway station.
+
+After Father had bought the tickets and checked the baggage, they got on
+the train, and Father and Mother talked for a while, till Father said,
+with a long breath, "Well, it might as well be soon as late," and kissed
+Mother and she kissed him.
+
+Until Neale was a pretty big boy, Father always stooped and kissed him
+too. But Neale felt that this was quite a different sort of kiss, and he
+noticed too, that after it, Father always kissed Mother again, and held
+his cheek for an instant close to hers. But after this he always walked
+right away, quietly, turning around once or twice to wave his hat at
+them, his face as composed as that of any man in the crowd coming and
+going beside the train.
+
+Mother let Neale settle things in the train, making no comment as he
+fussed over it, putting the satchel up in the rack, and then deciding
+that it would be better to have it down where he could put his feet on
+it, arranging his coat and her golf-cape over the back of the seat and
+then remembering the hook between the windows. Then the train started. A
+smoky tunnel, a scraggly belt of half-city--and then the real country.
+Neale never called anything the real country unless there were cows in
+the fields.
+
+He was always astonishingly glad to see it, and stared and stared till
+his eyes ached, and drooped shut, and he had a nap, hunched up with his
+feet on the seat. When he woke up there was more real country, and
+finally they got there.
+
+There was Grandfather Crittenden waiting for them, with the team and the
+three-seater, only the two back seats were out to make room for the big
+trunk. This was something like living! Grandfather Crittenden let him
+hold the lines. He remembered--_how_ he remembered--every step of the
+eight miles, every hill, every house and barn and big rock, till finally
+they drove into the yard, got out, were kissed, and went up to the same
+room as last year, with its rag-carpet and painted yellow bed. Mother
+washed his face very hard in the cold water from the big white pitcher,
+there was supper of fried ham and scrambled eggs and _soft_ rolls, and
+cherry pie--and that was all a tired little boy could remember that
+night.
+
+Next morning vacation really began with a rush outdoors to see the mill,
+the saw-mill, the center of Neale's life in the country. There it was,
+just as it ought to be, the big saw snarling its way through a pine log,
+and old Silas with the lever in his hand, standing as though he hadn't
+moved since the day Neale had gone away last September. Neale ran around
+to the back, climbed on the carriage and rode back and forth as Silas
+fed the log methodically down on the saw, and raced it back to set a
+fresh cut. Silas only nodded without speaking. He didn't like wasting
+words, and speaking was mostly wasted when the saw was screaming, the
+belts slapping, and down below was the pound! pound! pound! of the
+mill-wheel.
+
+After a time Neale went down to the far end of the mill where the fresh
+sawed boards fell off from the logs. A new lad he didn't know was
+"taking away." He wasn't keeping up with the work very well, and to help
+him Neale picked up a slab and started to cut it into stove lengths on
+the cut-off saw.
+
+"Hey there! Whacher doin'? You'll saw your arm off, boy!" yelled the
+lad. But Silas, stopping the saw so that his voice could be heard, saved
+Neale's face, "Let be, Nat. He won't get hurt. He knows more about the
+mill now than you do, or ever will."
+
+Neale felt his heart swell with pride. He sawed pine slabs till his back
+ached from lifting and his shirt and hands were black from the dried
+resin.
+
+There were other things to do at Grandfather Crittenden's, all the other
+things that boys do in the country, and Neale did them all. But none of
+them came up to the mill. Day in and day out it was around the mill that
+he spent his time, lying on the piles of fresh sawed boards in the
+sunlight, watching teamsters roll huge logs on the skidway with
+cant-hooks. Or he went below where you could look through the doorway at
+the flapping belts, and watch the sawdust raining down and making a
+great yellow pyramid. Even such an experienced millhand as Neale was not
+allowed to go into the cellar while the mill was running, under pain of
+all sorts of violent and disagreeable deaths. Getting your coat caught
+by the shafting and being whirled round and round and beaten to a pulp
+against the beams was one of the mildest.
+
+But after supper, when the mill was shut down, he used to saunter out to
+it, in the long soft twilight, and then tip-toe down into the cellar and
+play uneasily in the sawdust, casting scared looks now and then at the
+shining semi-circle of the saw, with its wicked hooked teeth just over
+his head.
+
+One day, as he played thus about the mill, his destiny came and tapped
+him on the shoulder, and he knew not that day from any other day.
+
+As he was watching Silas take up the slack in a belt, a strange man, an
+elderly, powerful, bent, old countryman came into the mill, and asked,
+without salutations to any one, "Where's Jo?"
+
+"Gone to town for feed," said Silas. He added with a grin, "Mr. Burton,
+make you acquainted with a relation of yours, Dan'el's boy." He jerked
+his head at Neale.
+
+The stranger looked hard at the boy, out of sharp gray eyes, and the
+harder he looked the sharper grew his eyes.
+
+"What's he doin' here?" he asked Silas.
+
+"Oh, he's always hangin' round. He knows the trade as well as some folks
+twice his size," said Silas.
+
+"Well, what do you think of the sawyer's trade?" asked the old man
+suddenly of Neale.
+
+Neale could not think of anything to answer except that he guessed he
+liked it all right.
+
+The stranger seemed to dismiss him from his mind, fingered his gray
+goatee, and looked all around as if seeing the establishment for the
+first time. "Mebbe. Mebbe. All right for Massachusetts pine and saft
+maple. But if you want to see a real mill, that'll handle tough Vermont
+yellow birch and rock-maple, you come back to Ashley with me."
+
+The stranger stayed to supper, and Neale learned that he was his
+great-uncle Burton Crittenden. He asked many sharp-sounding questions
+that made his brother, Neale's grandfather, snort and say hotly, "Oh, we
+all know there ain't any proper mill practice outside Vermont, but the
+Commonwealth of Massachusetts is managing to worry along somehow, in her
+shiftless fashion."
+
+But when the old man spoke to Neale there was a gentler note in his
+voice. He talked of sugaring-off, and twenty-two-foot snowdrifts, and
+asked Neale's mother if she wouldn't send the boy to Ashley some time,
+to visit his great-uncle.
+
+His mother agreed to do it--"some time."
+
+
+
+
+_CULTURE IN THE AIR_
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+April 10, 1898.
+
+Old Jeanne Amigorena was on her way to Bayonne to complain to her niece
+of her rheumatism and her daughter-in-law. She detested the railroad, as
+she did everything new and not Basque, but at her age it was not easy to
+foot it along the fourteen kilometres of white road between Midassoa and
+Bayonne. So, grimly disapproving, she hoisted her square, stalwart,
+black-clad body into the third-class compartment of the slow way-train
+which comes shuffling up from the Spanish frontier about noon.
+
+Even for a Basque of the oldest rock, there is one satisfaction to be
+had out of the forty-minute trip by rail to Bayonne. This is at the
+station of La Negresse where your way-train meets the down express from
+Paris. The chic people from the first-class compartments are there
+summoned to get out and change to the little local line which jolts them
+the three kilometres to Biarritz. This change of cars is never announced
+at Paris, it is always furiously exasperating to tourists, and in
+consequence they afford an entertaining spectacle to any one with a low
+opinion of human nature. Jeanne, who had less than no regard for any
+human nature outside the Basque race, always enjoyed the contempt she
+felt for these fashionably-dressed, ineffectual French weaklings. She
+took advantage of the leisurely wait at La Negresse, while the luggage
+was noisily transferred from one train to the other, to lean her head
+and shoulders out of the window, and to indulge herself in a hearty bout
+of derision for the uncomely fashionable Parisians, city-pale and
+flabby. She drew a long breath of satisfaction in her own untrammeled
+ribs, to see their rigid bodies like badly carved pieces of wood in the
+steel armor of their corsets, their shoulders grotesquely widened by
+their high puffed sleeves. Used to stepping out for a daily ten-mile
+walk over mountain paths, free and rhythmic in her flexible
+cord-and-canvas sandals, she laughed inwardly at these fine ladies,
+tottering on their high-heeled leather shoes.
+
+Some of them were dragging along tired, over-dressed, pasty-faced
+children. Jeanne had a passion for children, and she now cried to
+herself, for the thousandth time, "What can the Blessed Virgin be
+thinking of, to trust babies to such creatures!" Straight as a lance,
+with more vigor in her body at seventy than any of them at twenty, with
+more glistening black hair of her own under her close black coif than
+any of them could afford to buy, Jeanne who never altered her costume by
+a hair or a line from one year's end to another, who looked forward
+confidently to fifteen or twenty years of iron health, felt a cheerful
+glow of contempt as she watched them, running here and there, screaming
+nervously that one of their innumerable bags or valises was lost, their
+faces distorted with apprehension for some part of their superfluities.
+
+She did not altogether approve of the hatted, conventionally dressed
+women she passed half an hour later in the sunny streets of the little
+city on her way to the home of Anna Etchergary. Anna was concierge of
+one of the apartment houses on the Rue Thiers, opposite the Old Castle,
+and to reach it, Jeanne had to pass through the new quarter of Bayonne,
+the big open square where the fine shops are and the Frenchified madames
+walking about. Bayonne was a poor enough apology for a Basque city,
+thought Jeanne, but its somewhat backsliding and partly Gascon and
+Spanish inhabitants were at least not such grimacing monkeys as those
+Parisians.
+
+She strode along with the swift, sure, poised gait of sandal-wearing
+people, her mind full of the grievances she wanted to pour out to Anna;
+the disrespect of her son's wife, and the scandalous extravagances of
+her expenditures. "Consider, Anna," she rehearsed her story beforehand.
+"She uses the eggs herself, instead of sending them to market. She
+serves _omelettes_, as though Michel's house were a hotel! And she will
+not spin! She uses Michel's money to _buy yarn_! To think that money
+from the Amigorena farm should go to buy yarn, with a distaff hanging on
+the wall and ten idle, good-for-nothing fingers at the end of her arms."
+
+On the terrible subject of lack of children in that house Jeanne could
+not trust herself to speak. It was too sore a spot that with all
+Jeanne's five grown sons, she had not a grandchild to hold in her arms.
+The two, Americans now, who were in the Argentine making their fortunes,
+were married and had families, but what were grandchildren on the other
+side of the globe to Jeanne? The two younger ones, who were sailors,
+were not married, and Michel, who had promised to be the mainstay of her
+life and had stayed at home to run the farm, here he had been caught by
+that impudent little French girl, one of the chambermaids in a Biarritz
+hotel, a girl who did not know how to spin, who laughed at the decent
+Basque ways, and who had no shame for her sterility, refusing to go to
+Lourdes to pray for children.
+
+Jeanne had never had any romantic feeling for her shiftless,
+hard-drinking husband, whose irregular earnings as a fisher she had been
+forced to piece out with much domestic service in the houses of others;
+and now he was dead, she never thought of him. She had never been to a
+theater in her life, nor read a novel, for she could not read at all.
+None of her native capacity for emotion had been used in her youth, nor
+frittered away later in the second-hand make-believes of modern life. It
+had all been poured out upon children; on her five sons, and on the one
+little dark-eyed, black-haired daughter, the little Marie--who had died
+at eleven, so many years ago, just after her first communion--the
+blessed saint Marise had looked, slim and straight in her white dress!
+The Blessed Virgin had found her namesake too sweet to wait for, and had
+taken her at once.
+
+And now those strong, yearning old arms were empty of young life, and
+Jeanne's heart was bitter. She might scold her loudest over the waste of
+butter and eggs at the farm, she might gossip her head off about the
+faults of the neighbors, and shriek out maledictions on the stingy
+bourgeoise who wanted to buy her vegetables for nothing, she could not
+drown out the forlorn echo of emptiness and loneliness within.
+
+She turned up the Rue Thiers, glanced frowningly at the Paris-like
+department store on the other side of the street with its gaudy
+plate-glass show-windows, the pride of the younger generation in
+Bayonne, and looked up with approval at the huge, thick, battlemented
+walls of the Old Castle, substantial enough that, and plain enough and
+old enough to please even a Basque.
+
+As she turned in at the door of Anna's apartment house, her mouth was
+open to begin her litany of grievances; but when she entered Anna's
+one-room, brick-paved lodging, she found her niece with a budget of
+exciting news of her own, "Oh, Tante Jeanne, what do you think...." she
+burst out as the old woman swung lightly in; but before she would go on,
+she went to close the door, bearing herself so secretly, with such
+self-importance that Jeanne was between exasperation and greediness to
+hear. Like all illiterates who cannot glut on the newspapers their
+appetite for gossip, she was insatiable for it in talk. She sat down on
+the front of her chair, her ear cocked eagerly. Anna drew her own chair
+up close and began to speak in Basque very rapidly. "I'm so glad you've
+come, Tante Jeanne, you've had so much experience in working out in
+families, you know about things. You know about those American farm
+machines, that they're beginning to use on the big farms, painted red,
+you know. Well, the American agent for that company, he has come here to
+live, here in this house, the grand second-floor apartments, the ones
+old Pere Lapagorry rents furnished, on _both_ sides of the landing, yes,
+the two of them, because his wife, a very chic madame, didn't think one
+was big enough, and what can one family do with two kitchens, tell me
+that, and they with only one child to their name, a little girl, who
+doesn't take up any more room than a flea, so to speak, and the lady has
+asked me to find her a cook and a maid, and listen, Tante, she says she
+will pay sixty francs a month _each_, and fed and lodged!"
+
+She paused to underline this and looked triumphantly at her aunt, who
+for years had worked as cook in families for forty francs a month and
+lodged herself. Jeanne looked back at her hard, a new possibility
+lifting a corner of its veil in her mind.
+
+"What are they like, these Americans?" she asked, "Spanish-Basque or
+French-Basque?" (To a Basque, the term "_American_" means one of his own
+race who has emigrated to South America, made his pile, and returned to
+his own country to spend it.)
+
+"They're not Basques at all," said Anna.
+
+"What, French?" said Jeanne instantly incredulous of Anna's story. There
+was no use trying to tell _her_ that any French family was willing to
+pay twice the usual wage for servants.
+
+"No, they don't even understand French, but the madame can read it a
+little."
+
+"Oh, Spanish, then."
+
+"No, I had Pedro Gallon go up to see them and they don't speak a word of
+Spanish. They're not even Catholics!"
+
+The two women stared at each other. What could people be who were not
+Spanish or French or Basque, or even Catholics?
+
+Anna went on, "Tante Jeanne, come upstairs and see for yourself what
+they are like. You have seen so many bourgeois families, you can tell
+better than I. I'll only say you have come to help me find servants for
+them."
+
+Anna followed her aunt out into the hall and locked the door behind her.
+The key to the door hung with a dozen others, large and clanking at the
+belt of her blue jeans apron. Anna's philosophy of life consisted in
+having plenty of keys and keeping them in constant use. The only things
+you could be sure of were the things you yourself had locked up.
+
+They climbed the shining, well-waxed, oaken stairway, Anna's special
+care and pride, turning itself around and around in the circular
+white-washed well, lighted by small pointed windows, which showed the
+three-foot thickness of the stone walls. They stood before the dark
+paneled door, its highly polished brass knob in the middle, and pulled
+hard at the thick, tasseled bell-rope. A bell jangled nervously, light
+uneven footsteps sounded on the bare floor inside, and a small, pretty,
+fair-haired woman stood before them, dressed in a pale blue house-gown
+elaborately trimmed with white silk. She smiled a pleasant recognition
+at Anna, and gave a friendly nod to the older woman.... Jeanne disliked
+her on sight.
+
+The old peasant assumed a respectful, decorous, submissive attitude as
+became her social position, and made a quick estimate at the age of the
+other woman. She made it thirty-six at a guess although she reflected
+that probably any man would guess not more than twenty-eight. Jeanne
+knew by the sixth sense which comes from many years of unbiased
+observation of life, that the other woman was the sort who looks much
+younger than she is. She also was aware as by an emanation, that the
+other woman was not French. That was apparent from every inch of her,
+the way she stood and smiled and wore her gown; and yet she was dressed
+like any French lady, with a high, boned collar up to her ears, sleeves
+with a stiff puff at the shoulders, and a full, long, heavy skirt that
+hung in ripples and lay on the floor behind. Also her fair hair was
+tousled up into a pompadour, with a big, shining knot on top. Jeanne,
+her head a little to one side and bent forward in a patient pose of
+silent respect, wondered if that fair hair were her own or were false,
+and made a guess that a good deal of it was false.
+
+All this Jeanne took in and pondered while Anna was trying to explain by
+dumb-show who her aunt was and why she had come. The foreign lady
+listened intently, but it was evident that she did not understand at
+all.
+
+Jeanne took advantage of her absorption with Anna to look at her
+intently, with the ruthless peasant scrutiny, going straight through all
+the finer distinctions of character, deep down to the one fundamental,
+the one question essential to the peasant mind in all human
+relationships, "Is she stronger than I?"
+
+Jeanne saw at once that the lady before her was not stronger than she,
+was not indeed strong at all, although she looked as though she might
+have an irritable temper. She was one you could always get around,
+thought Jeanne, her strong hands folded meekly before her, her powerful
+body a little stooped to make herself look politely mild. She was one
+who didn't know what she wanted enough to go after it and get it,
+thought Jeanne, casting her black eyes down, the picture of a
+well-trained, European servant, with a proper respect for the upper
+classes she served.
+
+The lady, laughing and fluttering, now motioned them into the salon.
+Some of the furnishings had been taken away, thought Jeanne, looking
+about out of the corner of her eye--no lace over the windows! In this
+room sat the monsieur of the family, a large man, smoking a large cigar,
+and reading an enormous newspaper.
+
+On encountering a new member of the male sex, Jeanne, although she had
+long passed the age when she needed personally to make the distinction,
+always made a first, sweeping division of them into two classes: those
+who were dangerous to women and those who were not. She instantly put
+down the monsieur of the new family among those who were not, although
+he was not bad looking, not more than forty-five, with all his teeth
+still in his mouth and all his thick, dark hair still on his head. But a
+woman of Jeanne's disillusioned experience of human nature knew from the
+expression of his listless brown eyes, from his careless attitude in his
+chair, from the indifferent way he looked at the three women before him,
+from the roughness of his hair, evidently combed but once a day, with no
+perfumed dressing on it, that he was not now and never had been a man
+who cared for conquests among women, or who had had many. She
+immediately felt for him a slight contempt as for somebody not all there
+mentally, and wondered if his wife were not occasionally unfaithful to
+him. She looked as though she might be that kind, a rattling,
+bird-headed little thing like that, reflected Jeanne behind her downcast
+eyes, changing imperceptibly from one humble, self-effacing pose to
+another.
+
+Anna now turned to her aunt with a long breath, "I cannot make her
+understand," she said in Basque. "Think of a nice, pretty-looking lady
+like that not being able to talk! I cannot make her think anything but
+that you have come to be the cook yourself."
+
+"Well, I might do worse," said Jeanne unexpectedly, her mouth watering
+at the chance for pickings. She spoke in Basque. Her face remained as
+unmoved as though it were the wood-carving it seemed.
+
+Her niece stared for a moment, horizons opening before her. "Oh, Tante
+Jeanne, if you only would! With you here and me in the concierge's loge,
+what a chance for commissions off everybody from the grocer to the
+wash-woman!"
+
+Jeanne agreed although with no enthusiasm. "But I'm not young. I don't
+need the money, if only Michel's wife would...." She gave a quick look
+at the man and woman before her, who were now exchanging some words in
+their queer-sounding tongue. "They seem such odd people. Who knows what
+they are like? Their not being able to talk, and all--and not even
+Catholics!" She hesitated, feeling a distaste for their foreignness, and
+for the fussy, effusive smilingness of the madame. Jeanne always
+distrusted ladies who smiled at their servants. There could only be war
+to the knife between servants and their employer. Why pretend anything
+else?
+
+A little girl in a white dress came swiftly into the room now, a
+long-legged, slim child of eleven. She darted in as though she was
+looking for something, and in a hurry to find it. When she saw the two
+Basque women, she paused, suddenly motionless, and gave them a steady
+inquiring gaze out of clear dark eyes.
+
+Jeanne stared at her, startled. The child had thick black hair, glossy
+and straight, a cream-like skin, and long eyes with arching eyebrows as
+black as her hair, which made a finely-drawn curving line on her
+forehead and ran back at the sides upon her temples.
+
+Anna noticed the older woman's surprise and said casually, "Yes, isn't
+it queer how the little girl looks like one of us, a real little Basque?
+She seems nice enough, only with no manners. See how she comes bursting
+into a room and then only stares; but none of the family have any
+manners, if it comes to that."
+
+The child made a quick move now and still moving swiftly stepped to
+Jeanne's side. To Jeanne's astonishment she put out her small white
+fingers and took Jeanne's gnarly old hand in a firm grip. "Bonjour,
+Madame," she said, smiling faintly at her attempt to speak the foreign
+language, although her eyes were grave.
+
+Jeanne had for an instant a strange impression that the child seemed to
+think that she had found what she was looking for. At the sight of the
+little girl, at the living touch of that small, warm hand, Jeanne forgot
+the chic madame with the shallow eyes, and the dull monsieur with the
+tired eyes. She looked down at the child who had eyes that were looking
+for something. The old woman and the little girl exchanged a long
+serious gaze, one of those deep, inarticulate contacts of human souls
+which come and go like a breath taken, and leave human lives altered for
+always.
+
+Jeanne drew a long breath. She said in a low tone to the child,
+forgetting that she could not understand, "What do you call yourself,
+dear?"
+
+The child answered in French haltingly, but with a pure accent, "I call
+myself Mary."
+
+"Oh, yes," explained Anna, "the little girl is picking up French fast. I
+can make her mother understand now, through her. She does the ordering
+for them at the Bouyenval pension already. They are taking their meals
+there, till they get servants to begin housekeeping. Madame Bouyenval
+was telling me this morning...."
+
+Jeanne interrupted her niece, speaking in Basque, "Well, if you think
+you can make that featherhead of her mother understand anything, you can
+tell them that I'll come to-morrow to stay, and I'll bring a
+chamber-maid with me."
+
+To the foreign lady she said respectfully in French, with a deferential
+inclination of her tall strong body, "A votre service, Madame."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+May 10, 1898.
+
+Marise sat in her room, in front of her table, a copy-book opening blank
+pages of coarse paper before her, a thin, mean-looking, pale-blue book
+marked "Mots Usuels" on her lap. It was her own impression that she had
+stopped for a minute's rest from study (although she had not yet begun),
+and that she was thinking hard. But she was not thinking. She was
+feeling.
+
+She sat with her elbows on the table, her chin in her two hands, braced
+so that she was quite motionless. Her eyes were fixed on the candle
+flame, burning bright, fluttering and throbbing in the draughts which
+came into the old room, around the decrepit window-casing, under the
+door, through the worm-eaten base-board. There seemed to be a thousand
+wandering puffs from every direction. What Marise called her "thoughts"
+were burning bright, fluttering and throbbing like the tiny flame at
+which she stared. They too were blown upon by a thousand breaths from
+every direction. If they would only hold still for a moment, Marise
+thought, and give out a steady light that she could see something by! If
+she only had some shade to put around those flickering thoughts so they
+wouldn't quiver so! It upset her, jerking around so, from one way of
+seeing things to another. What she wanted to know was, how did things
+_really_ look?
+
+Of course it was worse here in France, where everything was so
+uncertain, but it had started back home in America, it had always been
+going on ever since she could remember. It had always made her feel
+queer, as though she were holding an envelope up to a mirror to read the
+address and saw it wrong end to, the way everything looked different at
+Ashley the moment Maman came up to Vermont to take her home after
+vacations with Cousin Hetty. Marise loved it so there at Ashley, the
+dear darling old house in the mountains, with its nice atticky smell
+that no other house in the world had! It just fitted all around you,
+when you went in the door, the way Cousin Hetty's arms fitted around
+you, when she took you up on her lap, and rocked and sang, "We hunted
+and we hallooed."
+
+At the memory, Marise's heart gave a great homesick throb. How far away
+she was from Cousin Hetty and Ashley now! How long since she had sat on
+anybody's lap.
+
+And yet when Maman came to take you away, from the first minute she went
+in and looked around her, you could see right through her eyes and what
+you saw was something different. After all it was just a homely old
+house with ugly crocheted tidies on the chairs, and splashers done in
+outline stitch back of the wash-stands, and old red figured carpets on
+the floors, the way _no_body did at home in Belton. And Cousin Hetty
+talking so queer and Vermonty, her white hair smoothed down flat over
+her ears instead of all roughed up, fluffy, over a rat the pretty way
+other ladies did, with her funny clothes, her big cameo pin holding down
+her little flat round collar, and all other ladies so stylish with high
+collars under their ears. Yes, of course, the minute Maman looked at
+her, you saw how ashamed you'd be of Cousin Hetty if she came to visit
+your school at Belton. And yet there _was_ the other Cousin Hetty you'd
+been having such a good time with. You just flickered away from Maman's
+way of seeing it to yours and never could make up your mind which was
+the real way.
+
+Marise shook her head, drew a long breath and looked down again at her
+spelling lesson. It was a list of the names of furniture and household
+utensils, all very familiar to her from old Jeanne's thinking them so
+terribly important. My! How much more Jeanne cared about her work than
+any girl they'd ever had in Belton.
+
+"_Lit ... sommier ... traversin ..._" all the names of the complicated
+parts of a bed, a sacred French bed. As Marise looked at them on the
+page she could see Jeanne in the mornings, taking poor stupid little
+Isabelle's head right off because she didn't make the bed up smoothly
+enough; and all the time it was about a million times smoother than any
+bed ever was in America! Marise didn't believe the President of the
+United States had his bed-clothes pulled so tight and smooth. And she
+wondered if Jeanne worked in the White House, if she would let even the
+President's little girl sit down on the bed in the daytime. How
+_particular_ they were about things in France! About everything. When
+you bought anything in a store how they did drive you wild with their
+slowness in getting it put up in the package just _so_, as if it
+mattered, when you were going to take it out of the package three
+minutes later, as soon as you got home. And at school how they did fuss
+about neatness! The lessons were easy enough to learn. Marise never had
+any trouble with lessons, but how could anybody ever do things as neatly
+as they wanted you to. And how the teacher jumped on you if you didn't,
+ever so much worse than if you got the answer to an arithmetic problem
+wrong. Mercy! How she did scold! There wasn't anybody in America knew
+_how_ to scold like that even if they wanted to, and they didn't. It had
+scared Marise at first, and made her feel like crying, and she never had
+got entirely used to it although she saw how all the other girls did,
+just took it and didn't care and did whatever they liked behind her
+back.
+
+Marise couldn't get used to Jeanne that way either, to her yelling so
+when she scolded. Marise hated to have people get mad and excited. And
+how Jeanne did carry on about the house being neat, the part that is,
+where company could come; (under her kitchen sink it smelled awfully and
+was full of greasy rags) and yet she'd shine up the salon floor over and
+over when it was already shiny, and never think of those rags. The least
+little bit of clutter left around in the dining-room, or even your own
+room, and how she would scold! And yet she was so awfully good to you,
+and was always giving you big, smacking kisses, and hugging you, and she
+always saved over the best things to eat when Maman had a lunch party,
+and you were at school. Even when Maman had said you couldn't have any
+of something Jeanne always brought it to your room, under her apron,
+after you'd gone to bed. It wasn't very nice to do things behind Maman's
+back, but everybody seemed to be doing things behind everybody else's
+back. Maman did behind Father's, lots of times, and it was perfectly
+understood between them that Marise was never to tell Father on her. And
+it would be telling on Jeanne if you told Mother. And anyhow Marise
+didn't see Maman so very much any more, to tell her things; it was
+mostly Jeanne who did things for her.
+
+Marise laid down her book again, lost in one of her recurrent attacks of
+amazement at there being so many different Jeannes inside that one
+leathery skin. There was the Jeanne who came every morning to take
+orders, and folded her hands on her apron, and sort of stooped herself
+over and said, "Oui, Madame," to everything Maman said. You'd think she
+was scared to death of Maman, and yet she went away to the kitchen on
+the other side of the landing and became another Jeanne who never paid
+the least attention to what Maman had said, but ran the house just the
+way she thought it ought to be.
+
+There were two Jeannes right there, and there was another one, the
+outdoor Jeanne, who took her to school every morning--how funny that in
+France a great girl of eleven had to have somebody tagging along every
+time she stepped outside the house! This was the most interesting Jeanne
+of all. She told stories every single minute. Lots of them were about
+when she had been a little girl--gracious! think of Jeanne ever having
+been a little girl! That was ever so long ago, before the Emperor and
+the Empress had made Biarritz the fashion. Jeanne said those were the
+good days, when the Basques had their country to themselves, and you
+never saw a hat on any woman's head; they all wore the black kerchief
+for everyday and mantillas on Sunday for Mass, and lived like
+Christians. Jeanne could remember when Biarritz was just a little
+fishing village, a decent place, and _now_ look at it! She could
+remember just as well when Napoleon and his Spanish wife first began to
+come down there so the Empress could get as near to Spain as possible.
+Many and many's the time Jeanne had seen them in their springy
+barouche, driving right along this very street, he with his eyes as dead
+as a three-days-caught fish's, and she as handsome as any Basque girl!
+
+They weren't all stories of Jeanne when she was a little girl. Lots of
+them were of what had happened hundreds and hundreds of years ago around
+here. There were ever so many stories of witches and ghosts and
+sorcerers. There were plenty of those still in the Basque country. There
+was a sorcerer living in that little tumble-down house near the river on
+the road to St. Barthelemy. Why, Jeanne's own mother, years ago, one day
+looked up from her spinning and saw a monstrous pig, big and black. She
+jumped up and ran out to try to catch it. Her grandmother went out too,
+and there were a lot of the neighbors who were trying to drive the pig
+away. But it didn't pay a bit of attention, butted at them so fierce
+when they came near they were afraid, for he was as tall as a calf, and
+whoever saw a pig as big as that? And then the grandmother made the sign
+of the cross, Spanish fashion ... and like snapping your fingers, didn't
+the pig change, right before their eyes, into a little wee woman they'd
+never seen, and she went up in the air as thin and light as a loose
+spider's thread, and drifted away and there was nothing there.
+
+The little American girl knew enough to know that this story couldn't be
+true, of course. And yet Jeanne's mother and all those people had seen
+it. They saw a pig and it turned into a wee witch woman.
+
+Marise stopped thinking about that, leaned forward and began kneading
+the softened tallow at the upper end of the candle. Father could say all
+he liked about candles being a bother, they were lots of fun. This part
+up next the flame got just right so you could poke it and it stayed put,
+any way you wanted it. And it was fun to lean the candle over and drop
+the melted tallow on your hands in little drops that got hard and you
+could peel them off.
+
+As she poked at it, a dozen pictures flickered through her mind; the
+bridge over the Adour with the river flowing yellow and strong under
+it, and the bright painted vessels loading and unloading; the Sister who
+opened the door at school, always so calm and silent; the playground at
+school with the black-aproned girls, their faces twisted up with running
+and screaming and catching each other; and the same girls at their
+desks, with their faces all smoothed and empty, looking up at
+Mademoiselle as though they had never thought of doing anything she told
+them not to; the school-room itself, battered and gray with age, the old
+black desks with the slant lids that lifted up; Reverend Mother stopping
+in to hear a lesson, with her old, old quiet face; Maman so pretty and
+stylish, looking so sweet when she made mistakes in French that nobody
+minded, or thought of laughing at her.
+
+Marise tipped the candle over carefully and let some melted tallow fall
+on the back of her hand. As she set it back and waited for the tallow to
+harden, she was thinking how very different from home Bayonne was; the
+Basque fish-women, with the shiny fish in the round flat baskets on
+their heads; the white oxen with the sheep-skin on their horns, and
+their red-striped white canvas covering, pulling those two-wheeled
+carts; everybody streaking it along in canvas sandals and berets,
+talking French and Basque and Spanish and never a word of English. And
+yet, Marise reflected as she slowly peeled off the hardened tallow
+drops, none of that was the _real_ difference. And there was a real
+difference. The real difference was something inside you. You felt
+different, as if you'd looked in the glass and seen somebody not quite
+you. It was....
+
+Somebody was walking slowly down the brick-floored hall to her room. It
+was Father's heavy step. That was nice! She hadn't thought she would see
+either Father or Maman, because there had been company to dinner again.
+She gathered the tallow drops together and dropped them in the base of
+the brass candle-stick. Then she remembered that Jeanne would scold if
+she did that. These candle-sticks like everything else in the house had
+to be just _so_, or everybody caught it. She swept them out again with
+her fingers, and stood holding them in her hand, looking around her for
+some place to put them. The waste-paper basket was too open, they would
+fall right through on the floor, and what a fuss there would be over
+that! Oh, there was the fireplace, if you put things way back of the
+sticks, Jeanne didn't see them.
+
+She was just straightening up from reaching back of the wood, when
+Father came in. He said, "Hello, kid," and she answered, "Hello, Poppa."
+They did this for a kind of a joke, to be extra American when Maman
+couldn't hear them.
+
+Father sat down on the edge of the bed, making a big dent in the
+fluffed-up crimson, eider-down quilt, which Jeanne rounded so carefully
+each morning, and which she never let anybody disturb. Not, of course,
+that Jeanne would dare to say anything to Father, le patron. She would
+only grumble in Basque, under her breath, and Marise would feel her
+opinion of Americans going down even lower than it was. Marise could
+always feel everybody's opinions as they went up and down. And how she
+did hate to feel them going down, anybody's about anything! She always
+tried to fix it so they would go up. She now planned to fluff the
+edredon to a puff again, after Father had gone back. She didn't say
+anything about it to Father. You never did, about that sort of thing,
+even Maman didn't, although it made her awfully provoked not to have
+Father care, and she always said a lot afterwards. Marise didn't even
+say anything to him about the white down that would be sure to work
+through the cover of the edredon and get on his clothes. Father wouldn't
+care if it did. There were such lots of things Father didn't care about.
+But Maman would. She must remember to brush him off before he went to
+the salon.
+
+"Having a good time?" asked Father slowly, the way he did, that let you
+see how he knew perfectly well you weren't.
+
+"Not so very," she answered.
+
+"Neither am I," he returned, "though you needn't mention it to Momma."
+There were always a great many things that were not to be mentioned to
+Maman, and a lot of quite other things that were not to be mentioned to
+Father, and Isabelle told her things she didn't want Jeanne to know, and
+_everything_ that Jeanne said was not to be mentioned either to Father
+or Maman. Marise, coming back from school, used to feel when she opened
+the door of the apartment, as though she were walking into cobwebs
+spread around in the dark, and you mustn't on any account brush into any
+one of them.
+
+Father now went on, "What are you doing with yourself?"
+
+Marise looked down at the cahier, its pages as blank as when she had sat
+down. Her father looked with her. "That's lovely paper, I must say," he
+commented, always with his way of showing that he meant just the
+opposite. "Are you supposed to write on it in ink?"
+
+"Oh, yes," cried Marise, flashing up to seize the chance of sympathy for
+one of her grievances, "they _never_ let you use lead-pencils because in
+lead-pencil there's a chance to rub out your mistakes. You're not
+supposed to _make_ any mistakes."
+
+"Doesn't your pen get stuck in it--it must be like writing on
+mosquito-netting," said Father.
+
+"Yes, it does," complained Marise, "and you spatter the ink all over and
+break off the tips of the pen, and everything. And the teachers just
+kill you if it's not perfectly neat."
+
+Father took up the cahier and looked at the paper hard, scratching it a
+little with his finger-nail. "Well, there's culture in the air, anyhow,"
+he said without smiling, although Marise knew he was quoting Maman. He
+looked around the room now without saying anything more. Marise followed
+his eyes and saw with him the dingy, high-ceilinged room, dimly lighted
+by the one weak candle-flame, the heavy, figured tapestry curtains drawn
+over the window, the draught, although the window was closed, making
+them suck in and out; the ugly, ugly wall-paper, dark and scriggly; the
+stuffed red chair, the only comfortable one, where Jeanne would never
+let her curl up with her feet under her, because she said the place for
+shoes was on the floor; the marble-topped wash-stand with its little
+chipped white earthen-ware basin and pitcher like the old things at
+Cousin Hetty's; the clock on the chimney-piece that looked as though it
+were carved out of greasy, dark-green soap with a greasy dark-green man
+in a Roman toga on top of it; the shabby, dingy, red-and-white checked
+curtains hanging over the hooks where Marise hung up her dresses, the
+tall dark armoire whose slightly greenish mirror reflected all these
+things as if you were looking at them through water; and finally over
+the bed, the big, shiny lithograph of Our Lady of Lourdes in her bright
+blue cloak, standing in front of her grotto.
+
+"Well, maybe it's in the _air_," said Father. He spoke in his usual
+tired, slow voice, sagging down on the bed the way he always sat.
+
+But then he surprised Marise very much and said something she never
+forgot. It gave her such a jump of astonishment to have Father say
+something as though he really meant it, that she sat up straight at his
+first words, staring at him. He said in a strong voice, "But look here,
+Molly, there _is_ something in the air here, by heck, and I wish you'd
+get it. I mean the way every one of them in this country keeps right
+after what he's doing, till he's got it just right. That's the way to
+do, and we're all off the track with our 'that'll do,' the way we say
+back in America. It's the only thing in their whole darned country _I_
+can see, that don't make you sick. Now, look here, kid, you go after it
+and get it. Start right in now. Learn how to make that infernal
+note-book perfectly all right in spite of the bad paper. I wish to the
+Lord _I_ had been taught that."
+
+And then, while Marise was still staring, the words echoing loudly in
+her ears because of the strangeness of hearing them from Father, he went
+on in his usual voice, "It might be _something_ to hold on to, and I
+don't see much else."
+
+Marise had never before known Father in any way to try to "bring her
+up!" He made Maman so much provoked because he always said that he
+didn't know, any more than Marise, how she ought to be brought up, and
+he didn't see that it made so much difference what you did, everything
+turned out about the same in the long run. Now her little room seemed
+full of the oddness of his thinking that something did matter, of his
+telling her so hard that he wished she'd do something. In the loud
+silence which followed, she could hear his voice and what it said,
+sinking deeper and deeper into her mind.
+
+After a while Father yawned very wide and rubbed his hair forward and
+back so that it was all rumpled up the way Maman didn't like to see it.
+"What did you say you were doing?" he asked again.
+
+"I'm writing down my lecon d'orthographe," said Marise.
+
+"Your _what_!" said Father.
+
+"My spelling lesson," Marise corrected herself with a jerk. She knew how
+Father hated to have people mix up their languages.
+
+"Well, I don't know that you're any worse off at that than we are in the
+sitting-room," said Father. He always called the _salon_ the
+sitting-room. He added, glancing at her blank note-book, "You haven't
+got very far, I see." He paused, and smiled a little with one corner of
+his mouth, "But then neither have we in the sitting-room."
+
+It came into Marise's mind that perhaps Father, seeing he was so
+specially serious to-night, might tell her some way to keep her thoughts
+from jiggling around so, from one way of feeling to another, according
+to what other people thought of things, instead of knowing what she
+thought of things. But she had no chance to ask him, for when she began,
+"Well, I sort of forgot about my spelling. I got to thinking," Father
+broke in, as he got up heavily to go, "I wouldn't advise you to do
+_that_, either. It never gets anybody anywhere."
+
+Marise forgot till after he had got clear back to the salon that she had
+not brushed off the down from the edredon. Maman wouldn't like that a
+bit, to have him look untidy when company was there! Oh, dear!
+
+But she forgot this as she thought again about the queerness of Father's
+seeming to care so much about her doing one thing rather than another.
+It was still there, this wonder at him, when she turned to her book
+finally to study that spelling lesson. "Lit ... sommier ...
+traversin...." She wrote the words down on the coarse paper, with
+infinite care, drawing on some deep, unfamiliar store of patience when
+the pen sputtered and caught its point and stuck. She was going to try
+to do as Father said. She would take as much trouble with writing those
+words about a bed, as old Jeanne took in making the bed every morning;
+and that was more trouble than anybody in America ever took about
+anything.
+
+Her dark, shining hair fell forward about her cheeks as she leaned over
+the copy-book, writing slowly, chewing her tongue, frowning in her
+concentration on the formation of those letters.
+
+She forgot all about her uncertainties as to how things really were; she
+forgot her loneliness. All her flickering thoughts steadied themselves
+and grew quiet as she worked. A stillness came over her. She felt
+happier than she had since they came to France to live.
+
+Later, ever so much later, after she had undressed, washed in the cold
+water in the little earthen-ware basin, gone to bed and to sleep, the
+night-time Jeanne tip-toed in to see that she was all right. This Jeanne
+was very different from all the others, because she was so quiet. Marise
+half-waked up when she felt the energetic French kiss on her cheek
+(Jeanne always kissed you so hard), and as she dozed off again, she
+heard Jeanne saying a prayer over her, half in Basque and half in Latin.
+Marise couldn't understand either Latin or Basque, but she understood
+the intention of that nightly prayer at her bed, and she caught sleepily
+at old Jeanne to return her kiss. It wasn't as good as Cousin Hetty's
+taking you on her lap and putting her arms around you, but it was enough
+sight better than nothing. Also she heard Jeanne carefully close the
+window. Jeanne always did this every night, although Maman said to leave
+it open. Jeanne was the last one in there always so she had it her way.
+She didn't think it healthy to let night air into rooms. Marise was too
+sleepy to get up and open it again. Anyhow Jeanne often told her about
+the evil spirits, that come in through open bedroom windows, and sit on
+your chest and suck your life into their black bodies, as you sleep.
+Marise did not believe this, in the least, of course, and yet....
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+I
+
+May 12, 1898.
+
+Two plump ladies with large busts and very small waists were sitting in
+the salon of the Allen apartment, waiting for the mistress of the house.
+They wore very tight-fitting dresses of excellent silk, obviously not
+new, obviously made by the sort of "little dressmaker" who goes from
+house to house. Their shoes were stout and clumsy, their hats somewhat
+heavy in line, their gloves exquisitely fitting, perfectly fresh, made
+of the finest-grained leather. Although the sky was blue, each lady
+carried a small silk umbrella of the very best quality, tightly rolled
+with a masterly smoothness, as smoothly tubular as the day it was
+bought.
+
+The two women held their cruelly corseted bodies very erect, and sat
+squarely on their chairs, both feet on the floor, their knees close
+together, their backbones very straight. Under the brims of their heavy,
+much-ornamented hats, their fresh, healthy faces wore an expression of
+perfect stability. They knew that they produced exactly the impression
+they meant to produce, and that they looked exactly like what they were.
+From every inch of them was proclaimed the fact that they were fine
+housekeepers and economical managers of their husbands' incomes, that
+they were of the well-to-do bourgeoisie and proud of it, as of
+everything else they were and did. They looked out on their lives and
+found them good in every detail, from their slightly and purposely
+behind-the-fashion dresses to their stout shoes, evidence of their
+respectability; from their fixed ideas to their excellent gloves.
+
+They glanced about them now, keenly, with the penetrating survey of the
+professional good housekeeper, and found much to comment on.
+
+"How strange to have no lace curtains over the windows, only the heavy
+ones at the side. Why, people outside must be able to _look right in_!
+Do you suppose they have taken them out to be washed? Or don't they know
+about curtains in America?"
+
+They murmured their remarks in a low tone, keeping a weather-ear cocked
+to the hall.
+
+"That wall-paper is disgraceful. It was on when the Charpentiers lived
+here."
+
+"M. Lapagorry had expected, you know, of course, to do this apartment
+over after the Charpentiers moved out. But these new people never made a
+single comment, or complaint. Just accepted it."
+
+"I daresay they are used to log-cabins at home, with Indians at the
+door."
+
+"Oh, no, Madame Garnier, my Henri says that the Indians are quite
+civilized in America now."
+
+Madame Garnier frowned slightly at the mention of Henri.
+
+The other woman went on, "Apparently they thought it was all right to
+have faded paper and those awful old curtains. M. Lapagorry was so
+astonished he almost fell over backward. And when he saw they didn't
+find fault with anything, he asked a higher rent, ever so much higher
+than the Charpentiers had paid, and they took _that_ too without a word.
+People say M. Lapagorry can't sleep nights now because he didn't ask
+more."
+
+Madame Garnier observed, as one mentioning an obvious fact, "Oh, well,
+Madame Fortier, he will, of course, next time."
+
+Madame Fortier saw nothing to smile at in this. "Yes, of course," she
+said seriously.
+
+Madame Garnier now said, "They must be _very_ rich. Where is it they are
+from, Buenos Aires?"
+
+"Oh, no, Madame Garnier. I think it is somewhere in North America. My
+Henri says that...."
+
+Madame Garnier broke in, irritated, to say with suppressed heat, "Oh,
+North America or South America, what's the difference? They are all
+foreigners, and who knows what strange, immoral ideas they have? They
+don't come to Mass, you know. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that the
+man is a Free-Mason. I wish M. Garnier had not asked me to call on
+them."
+
+The other shrugged her shoulders resignedly, "Yes, it's a very strange
+thing to do, make the first call, and on people you know nothing about.
+But M. Fortier says the man, M. Allen, is very important in a business
+way, and he specially asked all the business men to have their wives
+call on his wife. He almost seemed to make it a sort of condition, so M.
+Fortier said, almost made them promise before he would talk business
+with them. It may be in America, they do. And of course anything M.
+Fortier thinks may be good for his business...."
+
+Madame Garnier's nod signified that of course that principle went
+without saying for any good wife; the expression of her face adding that
+this was an application of it which might count as one of a good wife's
+sacrifices. But she said hopefully, "Well, they won't stay very long,
+foreigners never do."
+
+Madame Fortier now murmured, "They say she's very free with the
+gentlemen. M. Fortier and his friends are laughing about her. They say
+they really don't know how much of what she says is due to her bad
+French; or how far she really does expect them to go."
+
+This did not surprise Madame Garnier. "What can you expect? I shall see
+to it that our Jean-Pierre has nothing to do with them."
+
+This apparently started a new train of thought for Madame Fortier, for
+she now said with the cheery warmth of one who brings out something
+which will be a bitter pill to her interlocutor. "It seems the American,
+M. Allen, has taken quite a fancy to our Henri. We think we can get a
+position for Henri, through him, in America, where Henri can learn
+English, and study the American market. It would be a great help in the
+business if Henri knew English and all about American imports. And of
+course the salaries paid in America are enormous."
+
+Madame Garnier's eyes opened wide. She fell into a trance-like
+meditation, and presently murmured, "Our Jean-Pierre made quite a
+specialty of English in the lycee. I should think...."
+
+The mother of Henri shook her head decidedly, "I don't think America
+would suit your Jean-Pierre's temperament," she said. "He's not at all
+practical. And you get skinned alive by American business men if you're
+not as sharp as they. No, you'd better keep Jean-Pierre away from them."
+
+The two looked at each other hard. A brilliant light of rivalry came
+into their eyes. It brought an animation, a zest into their faces, which
+made them look years younger. A main-spring had been touched, and all
+their wheels began visibly to turn.
+
+Steps were heard in the hall.
+
+They composed their faces, and turned towards the door. The American
+lady now came in, and they rose to greet her. They were extremely
+cordial, a competitive friendliness in their manner.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They went down the well-polished oaken stairs in silence, each holding
+up her long heavy skirt with one gloved hand and letting the other rest
+on the railing. At the bottom, each with an automatic gesture like a
+reflex action, looked at the palm of her glove to see if it had been
+soiled by the railing, and with a similar mechanical action, shook their
+heads disapprovingly, although there was not a grain of dust on the
+smooth, tightly-stretched, pale kid.
+
+They shook out the trains of their skirts and swept into the street,
+conscious of the pouncing inspection of Anna Etchergary, gazing at them
+from the loge of the concierge, and proudly aware that there was nothing
+to criticize in any detail of their backs or anywhere else about them.
+They turned to the left and began to climb the steep street which led
+towards the Cathedral. Madame Fortier remarked presently, "Very bad
+taste, that dress, like an actress. All that white silk and lace. And
+slippers like a dancing girl's. It must be she never puts her hand to
+anything in the house."
+
+"No, she doesn't," returned the other disapprovingly. "My Marguerite
+meets her Jeanne every morning at market. She says that Jeanne says the
+American lady never does anything about the house, and doesn't even
+verify her accounts. You can just imagine what Jeanne is getting out of
+it. It quite upsets Marguerite, and I have to be specially careful with
+my own accounts. Everybody near them is getting a rake-off on
+everything." She made these revelations with a satisfied look as though
+the words had a pleasant taste in her mouth.
+
+Madame Fortier's comment was made with the accent of mature, worldly
+experience, "Mark my words, money spent in a loose careless way like
+that _must have been ill come by_. That's the way disreputable women
+spend money."
+
+"It's very hard on the rest of us, at any rate. And Jeanne tells our
+Margot that she is a very poor housekeeper, as heedless as a child,
+wears her best tailored street dress in the house as like as not, lies
+down on the bed when she is not sick at all, and doesn't do a thing but
+read novels all the time; or fool away a whole afternoon in the Museum.
+Very suspicious, that, too. Why should anybody go to the Museum so much?
+I'd just like to know whom she meets there. A regular place of
+rendezvous, the Museum. I wonder if her husband knows."
+
+They were enjoying the conversation so much that their faces looked
+quite sunny and bright. The other shook her head forebodingly. There was
+a silence as they climbed steadily up the steep, narrow, stone-flagged
+street.
+
+Then Madame Garnier remarked, "The little girl is quite pretty, though
+so mannerless."
+
+"Her dress was covered with grease spots, and had a hook off the back,"
+reported Madame Fortier.
+
+"I didn't see but _three_ grease spots," demurred Madame Garnier, "and
+she really has lovely eyes and hair."
+
+"How badly that woman speaks French. Without the little girl to
+interpret, it would actually have been hard to know what she was saying.
+Strange they don't know French better. But perhaps they don't have
+regular schools like ours."
+
+Madame Garnier made no answer to this conjecture, but asked, looking
+sideways at her neighbor, "Shall you ask them to dinner?"
+
+Madame Fortier all but groaned, and said in a martyr's tone, "Oh, I
+suppose so, for Henri's sake."
+
+The other digested this thrust in silence, and then changed the subject.
+"What was that she was saying about De Maupassant? Was she quoting him,
+to _us_? What did she take us for?"
+
+"Yes, she didn't realize what we might think of her. It was that
+indecent Boule-de-Suif, too. But she knows so little French most likely
+she didn't understand what it was all about."
+
+"Have you read that?" asked Madame Garnier.
+
+"Yes, I thought it my duty to, as a mother, to know what it is. But I
+burned the book, and you may be sure _I_ don't go around letting
+everybody know I've read it. Did you find her pretty?"
+
+Madame Garnier answered obliquely, but quite understandably. "I daresay
+a man would think so. I couldn't think of anything but her manners. How
+she lolled in her chair, and crossed her legs. I wouldn't want my
+Gabrielle to see her. And to my eyes she had a faded look. Queer, her
+being so fair. I don't see any trace of Indian blood. I thought all
+Americans had Indian blood."
+
+"Oh, no, Madame Garnier, my Henri says that...."
+
+Madame Garnier made a gesture of one thoroughly out of patience with
+Henri, and ended the conversation abruptly, "Oh, here we are at the
+corner. I must turn down here. Good-day, Madame Fortier."
+
+
+II
+
+May 15, 1898.
+
+The rosy, wrinkled face of the Sister of Charity shone out from the
+white quilled band over which the black veil was draped. Beside her the
+distinguished old lady showed, under her long crape veil, a face as
+quiet as that of the nun. The two elderly women sat at ease, their hands
+folded in their laps, chatting in a pleasant low tone.
+
+"Yes, so every one says, a great deal of money, Madame la Marquise,"
+said the nun in her murmuring monotone, "as all Americans have."
+
+The other breathed out with a great wistful sigh, "Oh, Soeur Ste. Lucie,
+if only the good God has sent us at last the opportunity to get our
+chapel."
+
+"Yes, yes indeed," assented the nun, drawing in her breath sharply
+between her teeth. She raised her eyes, singularly bright and personal
+in her professionally passive face. "They say there is a child, too.
+Perhaps a soul to save. Our Mother Superior always so zealous for the
+honor of our Order has asked us specially, specially ... the Bishop has
+so much to say about one of the Sisters of the St. Francis Order because
+of the conversion of a Swedish sailor, whom she nursed in their
+hospital. The Mother Superior hopes very much that some one in _our_
+Order...."
+
+"Yes, yes, I understand," said the great lady, nodding.
+
+The nun went on, deferentially, "Madame la Marquise is so good to be
+willing to come to call on the foreign lady! I shall see to it that the
+foreign lady understands the honor done her."
+
+The other made a graceful deprecatory gesture with a shapely
+black-gloved hand, and explained with great simplicity and gentleness,
+"Oh, no, ma soeur, it is nothing, nothing to praise. I would make a far
+greater sacrifice for the sake of our beloved work. But in this case,
+there is no risk of being misunderstood. It is not as though they were
+French bourgeois, who might have their heads turned. There can be no
+question of social equality with transient foreigners." She smiled,
+bowed her head with humility and said, "So you see, dear Soeur Ste.
+Lucie, that I deserve no praise for making a sacrifice."
+
+The nun nodded her understanding. It was evident that they understood
+each other to perfection. "Yes, yes, of course, I see. No social
+equality possible," she murmured, drawing in a sharply taken breath
+again.
+
+They looked about them in silence now, the restrained calm of their
+faces uncolored by their thoughts. Hearing steps in the hall, Soeur
+Ste. Lucie shook out her long black sleeves to cover her hands more
+completely, and cast down her eyes so that her sweet, rosy, wrinkled old
+face was once more blank and impassive.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Anna Etchergary was waiting at the door of her loge as they descended
+the stairs, and she ran before them out to the old closed carriage,
+which stood at the curb. Bowing deferentially and murmuring under her
+breath, "... Madame la Marquise...." she held the door open for them.
+The lady smiled her thanks at her, a pre-occupied, well-modulated smile
+which took for granted the deference and the service.
+
+As the nun stepped into the carriage she said with unction, "Now I see
+how lives in the world can be as useful to Our Lady as those of the
+convent. No one could have resisted Madame this afternoon. To have a
+great name and all worldly graces, and to use them only for the greater
+glory of Our Lady!"
+
+The other sighed and said sadly, "Dear Ste. Lucie, since the death of my
+dear one, there is nothing for me in the life of the world, except an
+opportunity to serve our good work." She went on more cheerfully, with a
+little animation, "Yes, I must say, it seemed like fruitful ground this
+afternoon, fruitful ground. I think we may say we made a good
+beginning."
+
+The old coachman came to the door for his orders. "To 4 rue Marengo, in
+the Petit Bayonne," said his mistress, and as he stepped to his seat,
+she explained to the nun, "I feel so much encouraged that I am going
+straight to an architect to have him make an estimate of what the chapel
+would cost."
+
+The carriage proceeded very slowly and rackingly over the rounded
+boulders of the pavement. Inside it, the two women, accustomed to such
+joltings, thrust their arms through the broad, hanging loops, and went
+on talking.
+
+"Not a disagreeable person," said the great lady in a kind tone of
+tolerance. "A very middle-class little woman, but no harm in her, I
+should say. I was afraid to find some one not quite--not quite--you know
+it is said that American women are not very moral--so many divorces in
+America."
+
+"And still you went...!" breathed the nun, lost in admiration of the
+other's heroic devotion, "when you ran the risk of meeting a _divorced_
+woman!"
+
+The Marquise made another gentle, fatigued gesture of warding off
+praise. It was a practised gesture as though she had occasion to make it
+often.
+
+After a time she said, "Odd she should be so interested in the Cathedral
+here, and yet a free-thinker. What made her talk so much about the South
+Portal? I never heard of anything unusual about it, did you? Except that
+that disagreeable, anti-clerical fountain is somewhere near there, to
+the memory of those wicked revolutionists."
+
+The nun shook her head, indifferently. "I always enter by the North
+Portal," she said. "I don't believe I ever happened to see the south
+one."
+
+After reflection, the marquise said, "I don't believe I ever saw it
+either. Why should any one? You never enter from that side. Nobody lives
+on the rue d'Espagne, that anybody would ever have occasion to visit."
+
+
+III
+
+May 20, 1898.
+
+Anna Etchergary measured accurately the social status of the two ladies
+who asked for Madame Allen's apartment, and without getting up, or
+stopping her sewing, she answered in the careless tone suitable for
+people who wore home-made hats and cotton gloves, that Madame Allen was
+at the top of the first flight. After they had passed, she thought to
+herself that she believed she knew them, Mlle. Hasparren, the
+school-teacher and her married sister. They were Basques, like Anna, but
+of the small government employee class, who put on airs of gentility,
+and wore hats and leather shoes. Mlle. Hasparren gave music lessons, as
+well as teaching school. Probably she had come to try to be taken on as
+Marise's music-teacher.
+
+The two ladies were mounting the stairs in silence and very slowly,
+because the school-teacher had taken off her cotton gloves and was
+putting on a pair of kid ones, which she had pulled from her hand-bag.
+She explained half-apologetically, to her sister, who had only cotton
+gloves, "It's to do honor to America!" and then with a long breath, "The
+first American I ever saw."
+
+"What do you care if it is, Rachel?" asked her sister languidly. She
+added with more animation, "Your hat is over one ear again."
+
+The other stopped short on a stair. "America! ... free America!" she
+said passionately, "don't you remember what Voltaire said, 'Europe can
+never be wholly a prison so long as it has America for open window?'"
+She knocked her hat back into place with the effect of using the gesture
+to emphasize violently what she said.
+
+"I wouldn't quote Voltaire, if I were you," advised her sister mildly.
+"You never know who may be listening. People think badly enough of you
+for being a school-teacher in a lay-school as it is."
+
+"There you are!" Rachel caught this up as a point for her side. "There
+it is, our airless, stagnant European prison-house of prejudice!" She
+struck a hand, gloved in kid now, on her breast, with the gesture of one
+suffocating.
+
+Her sister shrugged her shoulders resignedly and said, "Which door do
+you suppose it is? We forgot to ask which side."
+
+They were now on the landing, hesitating between the two exactly similar
+doors. Rachel made a quick decision at random, crossed to the right-hand
+side, and pulled the bell-rope.
+
+The door opened, and showed the upright frame of Jeanne Amigorena. There
+was a moment of mutual surprise, and exclamations of greeting and
+inquiry. "Why, Jeanne, you here? I thought you were on the farm at
+Midassoa!"
+
+Jeanne broke out upon them with a great rush of Basque, enchanted to see
+familiar faces, enchanted to have a new audience. "Oh, good-day, Madame
+Hardoye. Good-day, Mlle. Hasparren. Who ever would think to see you
+here? Yes, here I am in a family of the queerest foreigners you ever
+saw. But they pay very well. They have both apartments on this floor.
+Yes, they must be _made_ of money, and I have little Isabelle from
+Midassoa with me, as femme de chambre, and what do you think, we have
+each a room, a real furnished bedroom, just as though we were guests.
+The madame took one look at the maids' rooms, under the roof, on the
+fifth floor, you know, and when she saw they are all dark except that
+little sky-light, with no furniture to speak of, she said she wouldn't
+let a dog sleep there. The idea! It would have been plenty good enough
+for Isabelle and enough sight better than what she ever had at home. She
+is getting beyond herself all the time, Isabelle is. I have an awful
+time keeping her in her place. The lady hasn't the least idea of doing
+it. They are such queer people, I can't tell you! She knows no more
+about taking care of a child, our madame! She started to let our little
+mademoiselle go _alone_ to school, through the _streets_! And the poor
+child was so disgraceful with spots and dirt on her dresses that I was
+ashamed to have people see her and had Madame buy her some aprons and
+now I keep her in order myself. She is a sweet child, only brought up
+the way you'd expect a little savage to be, puts her _feet_ on the
+_chairs_! Or else sits on the _floor_! And _runs_ on the street, or else
+loiters along looking at shop-windows. But she is learning fast. I don't
+complain, oh, no. I know well enough that when you are a servant, you
+must take what comes to you, and make the best of it. But I never
+thought I would work in a family of free-thinkers! Still, they sleep
+over there on that side of the landing, and Isabelle and I sleep here. I
+keep the holy-water shell well filled, and we brought the branch of box
+from home that had been blessed last Palm Sunday, and we sprinkle a few
+drops of Lourdes water on the table before we eat. I hope we are safe.
+M. le Cure says that is enough. I often think that...."
+
+Madame Hardoye had been listening to this flood of talk, her lively
+interest in the matter struggling with her distaste for Jeanne's
+familiar manner.
+
+She now broke in with an accent which she meant to express, "There
+you've talked quite enough. After all, though my sister has queer ideas,
+we are not in your class. We are not peasants. And it's high time you
+remembered that." What she actually said in a curt tone was, "Where do
+we ring to make a call on your mistress?"
+
+Jeanne understood the implication perfectly. It was one quite familiar
+to her. With a change of manner she motioned them silently across the
+hall. "There," she said laconically, her face suddenly hard and somber.
+
+Rachel Hasparren also understood the implication and flushed an even
+more vivid color than that habitually on her dark cheeks. She held out
+her hand, her kid-gloved hand, to Jeanne, with a defiant gesture of
+equality, "Good-by, Jeanne. I'm glad we had a glimpse of you."
+
+Jeanne took the hand awkwardly, with a sort of rancorous reluctance to
+have her grievance appeased, and turning back, shut the door behind her.
+
+"Now, Rachel!" expostulated her sister.
+
+Rachel breathed ragingly and stared at her sister in an old resentment,
+which the other took calmly, looking inside her card-case.
+
+Rachel advanced provocatively, "Did you hear what old Jeanne said, how
+the American lady would not put a dog to sleep in lodgings in which we
+French expect to house our servants?"
+
+The married sister resented this spiritedly. "Spoiling servants for the
+rest of us, that's what it is!" she said impatiently. "And what good
+does it do? You saw how old Jeanne only thinks the less of her for it.
+The more you try to do for that class, the less they think of you."
+
+"That's because Jeanne's whole nature has been degraded by our caste
+ideals!" shouted Rachel. "She's a poor, superstitious, medieval old
+thing, incapable of ordinary decent human relations. If she'd lived in
+America...!"
+
+Angele pulled the other bell-cord here with an air of cutting short
+another out-burst, and they both stood silently looking at the closed
+door, which presently was opened by little Isabelle.
+
+As they went down the stairs, Angele remarked, "Well, she seems to be
+all right. Like everybody else, as far as I can see. I expected to see
+her with a Liberty cap on her head and swinging a lighted bomb, to hear
+you going on."
+
+Rachel was taking off her kid gloves and putting on cotton ones. She
+said dreamily, her black eyes deep and glowing, "When I asked her how
+the peasants lived in America, she said ... the dear American ... 'there
+aren't any peasants in America.'"
+
+Her dark flushed face was shining as they came out on the rue Thiers and
+stood for an instant, glancing up at the battlemented walls of the dark
+old Castle.
+
+Rachel suddenly shook her fist at it, her cotton-gloved fist, and cried
+out, "You needn't glower down like that, you hideous old relic of an
+evil past! There's a great, wide, rich country across the seas, that
+never heard of such as you, that never had a feudal castle in it, that
+isn't darkened by a single hateful shadow such as you still throw down
+on us here."
+
+"Hush, Rachel," said her sister, patiently attempting to quiet her,
+"Anna Etchergary is looking out of the window at us."
+
+Rachel instantly lowered her voice, with an instinctive response of
+caution to this warning, but she was furious that she had done so.
+"That's Europe, that's Europe for you!" she said hotly, under her
+breath. "Spied upon every minute by suspicious, mean, malicious eyes."
+
+Angele broke in on her to say reasonably, "Well, anyhow, your hat is on
+one side again."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+_Round-robin Letter to Mrs. Horace Allen's Neighbors and Friends in
+Belton, New Jersey_
+
+
+Bayonne, France, May 25, 1898.
+
+MES CHERE AMIES:
+
+Je vous demande pardon for being so late with this letter, I know I
+promised to write just as soon as we got here. But, chere amies, I know
+you would forgive me if you knew how _marvelous_ our new life is here in
+this old, beautiful, _civilized_ world. I have just been letting myself
+go in it, just _grabbing_ at its charm and wonder, and all I can tell
+you is that Europe is even more _wonderful_ than I thought. I just wish
+every one of you could persuade your husbands, as I did, to take a
+position that will bring you across the seas to this "fabled old land of
+story and art." _You owe it to your children_ to give them the culture
+which they would get here.
+
+But let me begin first with the material things. Mr. Allen, you know,
+felt sort of badly because the position here didn't seem to be as
+important and have as big a salary as the job the Company offered him in
+Chicago--_Chicago_! Well, you cannot imagine anything like the cheapness
+of the life here. We have two flats of six rooms each, on the same
+floor, just the landing between them, twelve rooms in all, furnished
+elaborately down to the last little things in the kitchen even, and we
+pay about half the rent we paid in Belton for our unfurnished house.
+There is perhaps a little old-world dinginess about the wall-paper and
+the curtains and things, but that only adds to the delightful
+_atmosphere_ and makes you realize that you are really in old Europe and
+not raw young America.
+
+We have two maids for _less than three dollars a week_ each, and such
+maids! In America we haven't any idea what it is to have good servants.
+I am not expected to lift my hand or think about the housekeeping. My
+old cook, the most _fas_cinating creature, in a quaint peasant's
+costume, takes _all_ the responsibility on her own shoulders. She gets
+up frightfully early in the morning, and goes off to market with a big,
+flat basket, and comes bringing it in _on her head_ all filled with the
+loveliest things to eat you ever saw, and bought for almost nothing! But
+she buys just as closely for me as she would for herself. Servants
+identify themselves with the family of their masters here, and are glad
+to! I know the word "masters" sounds very un-American; but one so soon
+gets used to the vocabulary of the country. Pardonnez moi!
+
+Jeanne--that is our cook--brings our breakfast to us _in bed_, all
+except of course for Mr. Allen, who can't seem to adapt himself to other
+ways of living. The first morning when she started to, he just jumped
+out of bed as though the house were on fire, and slammed the door shut
+in her face. He can't get over his Anglo-Saxon prudishness. But we have
+separate rooms now, and I have my tray in bed, and read my mail there,
+and between you and me, it makes me feel just like a heroine in a novel,
+to lie there in my pretty negligee--you know in America we don't realize
+what negligees are for. When do you ever have a chance to wear one
+except when you are sick? And then you don't care. Marise has hers--her
+breakfast I mean--in her room, too, as she dresses, and Jeanne always
+expects to help her dress, so I don't have to think at all about getting
+her off to school! Oh, mes amies, _what_ a rest to one's nerves that is!
+Not to have that horrid, hurried hour trying to find clothes and books
+and get Marise off in time. I just lie in bed reading the mail or a book
+and Marise comes in, all fresh and combed (Jeanne is wonderful with her
+hair), and kisses me and says, "Au revoir, Maman." We always try to
+speak French together for the practice.
+
+Then, as I am getting dressed, Jeanne comes in, with a clean apron to
+"take her orders," in the good old European way. And from that minute
+on, I have no more bother about it. Everything is set on the table at
+the right time, beautifully cooked, the house is kept clean and in the
+most _perfect_ order.
+
+Perhaps you are wondering why I call Mary, "Marise?" It is a quaint
+nickname for her that the servants have, and I have picked it up from
+them. Isn't it delightful? I never liked Mary, and I detest "Molly."
+Both the maids are devoted to Marise, and it is the European custom for
+the servants to do a great deal more for the children of the house than
+our girls ever dream of doing. Without a word, Jeanne has simply taken
+over the care of Marise's clothes as a part of her regular work, and she
+is always ready to go out with her, for it seems that no nice children
+go alone on the streets here. Every morning, Jeanne takes Marise to her
+school, and goes for her in the afternoon and brings her back. Marise is
+perfectly happy here, in a splendid school, and having wonderful
+opportunities. I am so happy about her advantages. It is not a public
+school (the "lay" schools as they say, because all the others are run by
+Catholic nuns). It seems the public schools are something quite new in
+France, and nobody sends children to them except the poor, or people who
+are queer in some way, with unbalanced ideas. I can easily believe this,
+since I had a call the other day from a school-teacher in the public
+schools, who also gives music lessons. She is a very queer and dowdy
+person, with the most awful hat you ever saw. Didn't you think that all
+Frenchwomen wore pretty, stylish hats? Not in the least. Quite the
+contrary. Her sister was with her, quite middle-class, both of them, and
+not at all like the other ladies who have called on me.
+
+For they _have_ called! Do you remember that little old French teacher
+who came to see me about getting a job in our High School, how
+discouraging she was about our coming to live in France, and how she
+said nobody would come to see me, at all? Well, if you ever see her,
+just tell her she is _entirely mistaken_. People are just as cordial as
+_they can be_, with the most beautiful manners you ever saw.
+
+Do you wonder how I manage about the language? It is _much_ easier to
+get along than I expected. Of course my thorough reading and writing
+knowledge of the language is a great help. And I have been making
+_won_derful progress in speaking it. Being right in the midst of the
+language all the time it just soaks into you. No one here speaks any
+English; not from provincial ignorance, the sort we have in America, but
+from choice, because of their concentration on their own perfect
+language. They are all deeply cultured. It is _won_derful to be in the
+midst of cultured people, to be able in casual afternoon calls to
+discuss De Maupassant with one lady and Gothic architecture with
+another.
+
+For we have here in Bayonne--you notice that I already say "We,"--a
+simply splendid Gothic cathedral, the first one of my life. It is right
+up the street from where we live, and it is _won_derful. Chere amies,
+think what it means for a town to have in its midst such a marvelous
+thing! Think what people must be like who live right close to it, go in
+and out of it every day, and feel its "beauty and puissant power" (as
+Matthew Arnold says). The South Portal is especially fine, _starred by
+Baedeker_, which means a great deal, as you know. I make a pilgrimage
+there every day, to just _gaze_ at that South Portal. _I_ have a
+life-time of arrears to make up, not having lived with it from
+childhood, as these fortunate people have. It is no wonder that you meet
+here people absolutely _won_derful in their polish, like a lady who
+called on me the other day, the Marquise de Charmieres. Her husband's
+family dates back to the days of Louis XII. I am ashamed to say I had to
+go and look up who Louis XII was, after she had gone. She had with her a
+nun, who lives with her, by special permission, the dearest old thing
+with her sweeping black robes and the quaint, quilled, picturesque
+head-dress. I suppose they used, in the old days, the Charmieres did, to
+live in the _won_derful old castle, just across the street from us,
+which is another of my great admirations. Think of living across the
+street from a real castle! It was constructed in 1100, on the remains of
+the _old Roman wall_, if you please, for Bayonne is very, very old. And
+it is right there, just the way it always was, with battlements and a
+real drawbridge and everything, just as it was in feudal times. Many
+famous people have lived there, Richard Coeur de Lion, Louis Quatorze,
+and others. It was there that Catherine de Medicis planned the St.
+Bartholomew massacre, and in a house on this very street that Napoleon
+took the Spanish crown away from the King, and gave it to his brother.
+Isn't it marvelous to think of?
+
+I have had some of the curtains taken down in our _salon_ (the French
+simply swathe their windows in curtains, simply _swathe_ them!) and I
+often stand at the window and just gaze out at those old castle walls
+and try to imagine the splendid life that went on here then, the streets
+full of people in costumes and knights in armor and everything. I see
+the modern crowds coming and going under those massive walls, and I keep
+thinking how proud they must be of such an inheritance from the past,
+and how they must often wish the good old feudal days back again, when
+"life had color," as a writer said in a book I was reading the other
+day. No such inspiriting reminders of past glories in America! No such
+past glories! Nothing but what Ruskin calls the drab, dead level of
+democracy.
+
+There is a fine Museum here too, with perfectly splendid works of art in
+it, pictures by Van Dyck, Rembrandt, Raphael, Rubens, Ribera, Murillo,
+Poussin, Delacroix, Ingres, Troyon, Meissonier, Corot, Isabey, Bonnat,
+Bouguereau, Gervex, and many others. I am simply _studying_ them,
+absorbing them, I go every day with a handbook on art which I bought
+here (in French, of course), and just gaze at them till their very
+spirit enters into me. I must tell you that Bouguereau is considered
+very much out of fashion here, and not at all admired any more. The
+Meissonier are simply _mar_velous. You could take a microscope to them,
+and still not see any brush-marks. Indeed it is said that he painted
+with a microscope. There is a _perfect_ copy here of the Mona Lisa,
+which people who know say is just as good as the original. Mes chere
+amies, think what a privilege it is to sit there, right before her, with
+the book in my hand, looking up into that mysterious face, and reading
+those wonderful words of Pater's, which I have studied with you so
+often. "Here is the head upon which all the ends of the world are come,
+and the eyelids are a little weary. She is older than the rocks among
+which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times and
+learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and
+keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with
+Eastern merchants; and as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and as
+Ste. Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the
+sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it
+has molded the changing lineaments and tinged the eyelids and the
+hands."
+
+Mes amies, we have often read and studied this marvelous passage
+together, and now I can only say to you _that it is true_! But every bit
+of culture means so much more to me than it ever did before and now that
+I know what European life is, I can understand why they are more
+cultured than we are. It is because they have _leisure_. Here the
+working classes _expect to work_, as our American working class does
+not. And the material cares are just taken right off the shoulders of
+the upper classes. _We_ are _expected_ to occupy ourselves with higher
+things. I am reading, reading, reading as never before, and getting a
+closer knowledge of French literature, even than our studies together
+gave me. It all _means_ so much more to me, now that I am right among
+the very people who are described in it. Think of looking up from a
+volume of Zola, and having a caller come in, who might be a character
+right out of the book. I often tell Mr. Allen, that the life around me
+illustrates and explains the literature, and the literature illustrates
+and explains the life. It is a wonderful, _won_derful experience!
+
+I have just finished De Maupassant's "Notre Coeur," and I am not
+surprised that we found it impossible to get hold of the French edition
+in America. Our strait-laced, old-fashioned, Puritanic America doesn't
+know enough to appreciate such a picture of this _free_ European world,
+where relations between men and women are different from those between
+high school boys and girls. At home the girls rule the roost, if you
+will excuse a vulgar expression. But not here. Here they are put off in
+a corner, till they get a husband, and _then_ they are allowed to
+blossom out. A woman of my age, so a French gentleman told me the other
+day, is considered _just at the right age_ for being fascinating. And he
+assured me he didn't say that because it might apply to me, but _because
+it is so_. The men have temperament here. They really look at you, and
+are just as different as can be from the American business-man who never
+thinks of any woman but his wife, and never pays any attention to _her_!
+Here the men positively sparkle in conversation, and they all say they
+would hardly know I am an American, I have acquired the French manner so
+entirely. Here a woman is not expected to have become a mummy, because
+she puts on a wedding-ring. _Quite the contrary_, I assure you!
+
+But this is a terribly long letter. I have poured out my heart to you in
+untrammeled spontaneity, such as comes to you in the free
+intellectuality of this finished civilization.
+
+May you all be able some day to enjoy it!
+
+Your devouee friend,
+
+FLORA ALLEN.
+
+P.S.--Mr. Allen says the business part seems to be all right.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+As happens to us all, there were certain moments which stayed alive in
+Marise's memory for years; and as is always the case, those moments did
+not at all correspond with apparently important events. Such events
+come, seem of great consequence, happen, and therewith sink down into
+the featureless mass of things which happen only once and then are in
+the past forever. The other moments, those queerly, heterogeneously
+tumbled-together impressions, are the things which happen over again
+every time one thinks of them.
+
+One of Marise's fantastic notions was that the things which had happened
+were piled up in a big junk-heap in your memory in front of a great
+black curtain. But there were pinholes in the curtain, and if you put
+your eye to one, there, right before you, one of the things that had
+happened was alive again, and your heart knocked and your throat felt
+queer just as it did the first time. This notion may have come to her in
+this form because it was generally in the night that she experienced the
+vivid living-over of some long past moment. Wakened from a sound sleep
+by the hoarse whistle of one of the steamers in the Adour, taking
+advantage of a favorable tide to weigh anchor and be off, she saw in the
+instant while she drew a long breath and turned over in bed, one of
+those living scenes again, as actual, as piercingly real to her as
+though it were happening for the first time. Some of these she greatly
+dreaded, some set her to ringing all through with happiness, others she
+never understood at all.
+
+
+I
+
+One of the very happy ones was the moment when she had first really
+heard music. She had been "taking lessons" of Mlle. Hasparren for weeks
+and months. Mlle. Hasparren taught as Marise thought all the teachers
+in France taught, the hardest possible way; scales, scales, scales and
+then thumping, monotonous exercises, played over forty, fifty, sixty
+times, till Marise felt as though there wasn't anything left of her
+except that exercise, pound, pound, pound all over her. Marise saw
+nothing in music except hatefully numerous little black dots on white
+paper, and heard nothing in it beyond a combination of sounds as
+interesting to hear as a problem in arithmetic is to look at.
+
+She rather liked Mlle. Hasparren, although Maman thought she didn't have
+a bit of style; but she certainly did hate the three-times-a-week music
+lesson. She never could have kept on with it in America, but here
+everything was hard work, and if you weren't working at your music
+lesson, they'd expect you to be working at something else. And then,
+too, there was what Father had said about keeping at what you were doing
+until you got it just right. Marise's bed-room seemed to have taken up
+the sound of Father's voice as he said that, so that many times, as she
+sat there doing her lessons and not thinking of it, all of a sudden, the
+very curtains and walls and chairs seemed to be reminding her of it.
+That was really what kept her going, as day by day she sat down heavily
+before the piano, prodding her mind up to keep it fixed on the little
+black dots.
+
+That at least was what had kept her at it till the evening which came
+back to Marise so clearly. Father and Maman had gone out to dinner; she
+had eaten alone, with Jeanne's chatter for company, and then on her way
+back to her room, had wandered into the salon, candle-stick in hand,
+sort of hoping she could think of something nice to do before she
+settled down to study.
+
+But there was certainly nothing nice to do in the salon. It was awfully
+lonely in there, the chairs all empty and stiff, standing around
+heavily, the thick curtains drawn close over the tall windows, and in
+front of the alcove where Maman's writing-desk stood, the polished floor
+shining hard and bright, the stands, the table with one of Maman's
+yellow-covered books on it, the dark little cave of a fireplace. Marise
+set her candle down on a stand, and herself sank down on the piano
+stool, her back towards the keys, staring at the lonesome looking room.
+How perfectly dead it did look. Marise could hear faintly in the
+distance an echo of the brisk voice of Jeanne and Isabelle, laughing and
+carrying on over the dishes. But in here, in the empty salon, there
+wasn't a sound. Her ears fairly rang with the nothingness all around
+her. Her heart was big and heavy.
+
+At school that day, the girls had started up a new fad, the "wishbook."
+You got a little blank book, and then went around asking everybody to
+write down in it what she most wished to be. Marise was astonished at
+what the other girls wrote; one, "I wish I could be a great actress,"
+another, "I wish I could marry a millionaire," another, "I wish I could
+be a great and holy saint." Marise had not been able to understand why
+everybody did not write what she did, instantly, instantly, something
+she had always known she wanted. What she had written in everybody's
+book was, "I wish I could be happy." She thought of this now, and in the
+empty, cold, echoing room cried it aloud, "I wish I could be happy."
+
+There was no answer from the stiff stuffed chairs, from the
+well-polished tables, from the black hole of the fireplace. Marise had
+expected no answer, would not have expected one if her parents had been
+there, never expected one. What answer could Father give, Father who
+apparently never thought of such a thing as being happy, and never hoped
+for anything more than to be a little less tired and bored. And if Maman
+had been there, she wouldn't even have heard what Marise said, busy as
+she always was with thinking something of her own. Maman wasn't nearly
+so cheerful as she had been. What _was_ it Maman was thinking about when
+she sat so still and her face got dark and drawn? Certainly not about
+Marise.
+
+The little girl sat on the piano stool, dangling her long legs and
+looking straight ahead into the empty room, which looked back at her,
+she thought, as though it had a low opinion of her and a very high
+opinion of its own importance and elegance. She knew she ought to get up
+and go into her own room and study a very long lesson on the reign of
+Henri IV. But she couldn't seem to get up the strength to do this,
+sitting fallen together on the piano stool, her heart heavier and
+heavier.
+
+She looked hard at the empty chairs, and thought to herself that it
+wasn't any worse to see them empty, than to see the people that usually
+sat on them--not one who could help a little girl to be more happy.
+There wasn't a single person she knew, whom she'd wish sitting there
+now, unless it might be Cousin Hetty! Marise felt a knot come in her
+throat, and the corners of her mouth began to tremble. She would _like_
+to get up in Cousin Hetty's lap again.
+
+But Cousin Hetty was not there. There was nothing there but the circle
+of unfriendly chairs and tables and the empty, silent room. The
+trembling of her lips got worse; Marise was afraid she was going to cry.
+She turned round on the piano stool, put one bent arm up on the music
+which stood there, and hid her face in it. She was not crying; though
+she wished she could, because the ache in her heart and the knot in her
+throat hurt too much.
+
+The silent, motionless room stood aloof and meaningless about the
+silent, motionless child. Marise pressed her face closer against her
+arm. She was trembling now, all over her body.
+
+The silence was intense.
+
+And then it seemed to her that the silence had been broken by a voice, a
+beautiful, quivering voice, deep and true, which went straight to her
+heart, as though some one had spoken a strong, loving word. At the sound
+she stopped trembling and sat motionless.
+
+Before she could draw her breath in wonder, she knew what it had
+been ... only a note of music. Her own hand falling on a key of the
+piano had struck a note, which was even then echoing in her ears.
+
+But the first impression was ineffaceable. That, too, rang in her ears.
+It seemed as though it was the first time she had ever heard a note of
+music. Really, really that was so. She had never been _still_ enough
+before to hear how a note sounded. How it rang and rang in the
+stillness, its deep vibration stirring echoes deep within Marise's
+heart! She had thought it was a voice. Why, it was like a voice, a
+voice speaking to her, just when she had been so sure that there wasn't
+any voice she could possibly expect to hear.
+
+She sat up marveling, and struck another note. Into the dead, stagnant
+air of the room, and into her loneliness, it sang out bravely, the same
+living voice, thrilling and speaking to her. She struck a chord,
+astonished at what she heard in it--all those separate voices, each one
+rich and true and strong and different from the others, and all shouting
+together in glorious friendliness. "That's the way things _ought_ to
+be," thought Marise, "that's the way _people_ ought to be." But, oh, how
+little they were like that! But here was a world where she could always
+make it come true, where she could have that singing-together any time
+she wished to make it for herself.
+
+She struck more chords, her fingers finding the keys with the
+second-nature sureness, learned in her months of dreary practice.
+
+She listened to the sounds, shaken and transported to hear how they
+flooded the barren emptiness of the room with glory, how they filled her
+heart full, full of happiness ... only if she were happy, why was she
+crying, the tears running as fast as they could down her cheeks?
+
+This was one of the remembered moments which brought nothing but a pang
+of joy to Marise. When it came, the world about her brightened.
+
+
+II
+
+There was another, one of those which came very seldom, which brought
+something deeper than pain or joy. This was the recollection of an
+instant, just one instant, of the day when Maman let Soeur Ste. Lucie
+take her to Lourdes. It was the feast of St. Louis, and Soeur Ste. Lucie
+always went every year then. She had been awfully nice and jolly, the
+way she always was with Marise, and it was fun to start off with her
+early in the morning, at dawn, in the special excursion train. At
+Lourdes it was fun, too, really exciting to be in such a monstrously
+big crowd, oh, _what_ a crowd! She heard somebody tell Soeur Ste. Lucie
+that there were thirty thousand pilgrims there that day. It amused
+Marise very much to hear them called pilgrims and to think that she and
+Soeur Ste. Lucie were counted as pilgrims, too. She had always thought
+of "pilgrims" as people who landed on a stern and rock-bound coast and
+began to fight with Indians; and nothing could be more unlike that than
+the crowd at Lourdes, swimming in the dusty, yellow sunshine, everybody
+dressed up in his best, walking around in groups, talking and singing.
+Marise held on to the Sister's nice, soft, old hand and followed her
+around from one thing to another, taking a good big drink of the water,
+and kneeling down whenever Soeur Ste. Lucie stopped to pray before a
+shrine. Marise didn't pray much, but watched the crowd, the endless
+crowd shuffling slowly past. She was proud to be kneeling there beside a
+Sister, who had the right of entrance everywhere, who opened any gate in
+any railing she liked, and walked right in to say a prayer where the
+common run of people didn't dare go.
+
+At noon, after three hours of this, Soeur Ste. Lucie took her charge off
+up along the bright, quick-flowing stream, off into the real country,
+till finally they came to a field that wasn't too thick with people.
+There they sat down on the grass, under a tree. Soeur Ste. Lucie got out
+the pasteboard shoe-box they had taken turns carrying around all the
+morning and they ate their lunch. Marise was simply starving by that
+time and anything would have tasted good. But that lunch would have made
+a stone statue eat, it was so good. Cold roast chicken, plenty of it,
+big slices cut recklessly right off the breast, tender and juicy and
+_flavored_; and crispy, crunchy rolls and fresh butter; and little
+radishes and green onions and salt, and a half bottle of the best white
+wine, which they watered down in their cups with Lourdes water. Soeur
+Ste. Lucie laughed over this as she poured it out and said they ought to
+be saints at least for a day or so, after drinking Lourdes water with
+their lunch, oughtn't they? She was as jolly as could be, anyhow, and
+was enjoying herself so much that she kept Marise laughing at her jokes
+all the time. One of those numerous friends of hers turned up here too,
+a stout, red-faced farmer's wife, who shouted with pleasure at seeing
+Soeur Ste. Lucie, and came over from the other side of the field to
+bring her lunch and eat with them. She and Soeur Ste. Lucie got into
+gales of laughter in which Marise joined with all her heart although she
+didn't always quite see what the joke was. Then they had their dessert,
+a triangle of creamy Camembert cheese, spread on the crust end of their
+roll, and after this a great golden pear apiece, so full of sweet juice
+that you couldn't take a bite of it without its running down your chin,
+so you had to lean way forward, to the tune of everybody laughing at
+you, and doing the same thing themselves.
+
+After they had packed up what was left, and the farmer woman had gone
+back to her family, Soeur Ste. Lucie got very quiet and still, pulled
+out her rosary and began to murmur her prayers in a very fast, low tone,
+her eyes almost shut up. Marise sat beside her in the grass, watched the
+crowds beginning to turn back towards the Basilica, and a couple of
+little gnats dancing round and round each other in the air. The murmur
+of the prayers was like a bee-hum in her ears. She leaned back against
+the tree and drew a long breath, and the next thing she knew it was
+hours later, and Soeur Ste. Lucie was shaking her gently and saying
+she'd better wake up because it was time to go back if they were going
+to get a place to see the blessing of the sick.
+
+After that ceremony was over, everybody was perfectly worn out and
+almost starved. Soeur Ste. Lucie went to one of the convents for supper,
+where the good Sisters took care of hundreds of the pilgrims, and looked
+as tired as Marise felt, and walked as though their feet hurt as hers
+did. But there was still one more Lourdes sight to see, the procession
+of the lights in the evening. When they came out of the convent, they
+found the weather changed, the wind blowing hard and a light rain
+falling and not a bit of light coming from the black, black sky. The
+damp was bad for rheumatism, and Soeur Ste. Lucie's knee began to pain
+her, so that she said they would not march in the procession but go up
+along the side of the high horse-shoe staircase, where they could see on
+both sides and along the esplanade. How black and empty that looked,
+that enormous stretch of pavement, like a great empty hole, outlined by
+the street lights on all four sides of it. Back of it, down towards the
+Grotto, there seemed to be millions of people, judging by the lights
+which danced around, every way at once; and through the wind and the
+rain and the darkness, Marise and Soeur Ste. Lucie could hear snatches
+of singing, the chant which fairly rings from the stones and walls of
+Lourdes.
+
+[Music: A-ve! A-ve! A-ve Ma-ri-a! A-ve! A-ve! A-ve Ma-ri-a!]
+
+Then as Marise stuck her head through the railing to watch what went on
+there, far, far below them, she saw the lights begin to straighten out
+into two long lines and start streaming up the lower part of the
+horse-shoe staircase where she and Soeur Ste. Lucie stood. The
+procession had started; two by two they were marching up towards the
+blaze of light at the top where the door of the upper church stood open.
+The sound of their voices grew louder and louder and there they were!
+The first ones were a mother and her little girl; after them a couple of
+working men; after them a man and his wife; after them a priest and a
+soldier; after them--after them--Marise lost count, she felt her head
+whirl, she couldn't see the people any more, only the little dancing,
+quivering lights they were carrying, candle-flames, scarcely at all
+protected from the wind by a bit of card-board, or a hand curved about
+them.
+
+They kept going by and going by, those little flames, until Marise's
+eyes ached. And yet she couldn't look at anything else, she couldn't
+stop staring at those flickering, swaying little flames.
+
+After a long time she was able to pull her eyes away from them, to look
+past them down at the great esplanade--and oh! now it was not a black
+and empty hole; it was all full, full of lights, a million little
+marching and singing flames, in endless lines, ordered, purposeful,
+marching to and fro. So small, so tiny and feeble each one, but enough
+all together to make a great light in the blackness, to fill all the
+emptiness with glory.
+
+It was then that the terrible great moment came to Marise, something
+that she could never think about long enough to try to understand,
+because when she tried to think about it, she began to shake all over
+just as she had then, when, across the line of chanting pilgrims, she
+looked down at all those little, marching, singing flames. What was it
+that came to her then? The most aching sorrow; and yet an exaltation as
+though broad wings were lifting her up in a solemn beat of power.
+
+It was all over in an instant. Whenever it came after that, it always
+came and went between heart-beats. But after it had come and gone,
+everything looked different. It was as though, plodding along on foot, a
+great wind had snatched her up, and blowing mightily for an instant so
+that all the world was filled with it, had set her down, ever so much
+farther along the road she had to go. And always after this moment, she
+had an hour or so when she liked people better, everybody, the dirty old
+flower-vendor, the street-sweeper, Jeanne, the teachers at school,
+Father and Maman. It was as though she saw them all in a procession,
+each trying to keep alive a precious, flickering flame.
+
+
+III
+
+There was another, a horrid one from which Marise always looked away the
+instant she knew it was coming because she couldn't bear it. And yet she
+never could be quick enough. She always saw it, as though in her, as in
+a camera, a lens had whirringly clicked open and shut.
+
+And yet there was nothing to it. She had come from school with Jeanne,
+who had gone to the kitchen. Marise had crossed the landing and started
+to pull the bell-rope, and then noticed that the door happened to be a
+little ajar. So she pushed it open and walked in. As she walked past the
+salon door she had glanced in, and saw M. Fortier there, just going
+away from making a call, the father of Elise Fortier, her classmate at
+school. He had his broad, fat back turned to her and was stooping to
+kiss Maman's hand. There was nothing surprising in this; everybody knew
+that gentlemen who kept on with the old ways of doing things, always
+kissed ladies' hands. She had seen the father of one of the girls kiss
+the bony hand of Mlle. Ballot, the head teacher at school. What was
+registered indelibly on Marise's mind was the expression on Maman's
+face. Maman was looking--oh, it was horrid to think such a thing, to say
+such a thing, to have looked at her and seen such a thing.... Maman was
+looking sort of.... Marise could never, try as she might, shut down on
+this moment quickly enough to shut out the ugly thought she hated so....
+Maman was looking sort of foolish and silly, as though, as though....
+But here Marise was always able to snap the shutter shut and put it all
+out of her mind, except the dull heaviness it left.
+
+
+IV
+
+But the worst, the very worst and most awful of all those remembered
+parts of the past, was what happened about the gray cat. No, that
+wasn't the way to put it, because you couldn't say that anything had
+_happened_ ... and yet how sick it had made Marise, and did every time
+something reminded her of it!
+
+One day when Marise came home from school, Jeanne gave her a big,
+pretty, gray, yellow-eyed cat and said she thought it might be company
+for her. Marise was awfully pleased, took the cat in her arms, bending
+her cheek down to rest it against the soft fur, and carried her off to
+her room to try to get acquainted with her.
+
+But there seemed to be something the matter. She didn't act like Cousin
+Hetty's Tommy, up in Ashley, nice and cuddlesome; she seemed to have
+something on her mind. She wouldn't sit still on Marise's lap and be
+petted, she wouldn't play with a string nor drink the milk Marise put in
+a saucer for her, nor lie down and go to sleep the cozy way cats usually
+do. She tramped around and around the room, and every once in a while
+she'd give a loud miauw, in an anxious voice.
+
+Marise thought it was because she was with strangers in a strange place,
+and that as she grew wonted, she would be happier. But she kept this up
+all that day, and at night when Marise shut her up in the extra kitchen
+they didn't use, she yowled so that Maman complained. And the next day
+she was even worse, acting so queer, doing such funny things, stooping
+her front paws down, and tramping hard with her back paws. And as she
+did this, she would look up at Marise and miauw in a loud, anxious way
+as though she were asking Marise to do something for her. At the end of
+that second day, Marise was too worried to keep it to herself, although
+she had resolved not to bother either Maman or Jeanne because they
+didn't like cats. She went across the landing to ask Jeanne to come.
+Jeanne came and Isabelle too, instantly sure of the worst as usual, and
+declaring that the man who had sold them the cat was a thief and a
+robber and had palmed off on them a sick cat that nobody wanted. They
+added emphatic precautions to Marise about not touching her if she was
+sick, because a sick cat's bite meant poison.
+
+They went into the room. The cat got up and came towards them that same
+queer way, stooping and treading and switching her tail. And she gave
+again that strange, anxious cry.
+
+"There, that's the way she does all the time," said Marise, troubled and
+concerned. She came round in front of the two women, so that she could
+look full up into their two faces, to see what they thought.
+
+Not a turn, or color, or tone, or line of what they looked and said and
+did ever faded from her mind. Her first feeling as she looked up into
+their faces was of utter amazement; and after this an instant cold
+premonition of something evil. She stood perfectly still gazing at
+them.... What could it mean?... What made them look so...?
+
+Jeanne and Isabelle looked down at the cat; the anger went out of
+their faces, and in its place came a singular, secret expression, half
+amused ... half _horrid_.... Marise could never think of any other
+name for it.
+
+Then they looked at each other, their eyes meeting, their eyebrows
+arched high, and they laughed.
+
+At the sort of laugh they gave, Marise burned hot all over, although she
+had no idea of what there could be to laugh at. But every line of the
+two women's bodies and faces, the tone of their laugh, the look of their
+glistening, amused eyes told her that it was something they thought
+shameful. And she was ashamed.
+
+Then, as she stood there, cold and burning hot, they had both as by a
+common impulse glanced at her as if something about her also seemed very
+funny to them. That glance was the worst of all--like a smear she could
+never wipe off.
+
+She felt very sick, her knees shook under her. But something furious and
+strong inside her told her that whatever else she did, she must not let
+them see how sick they made her. She stood her ground, her eyes burning,
+utterly at a loss. What could it be? What was this awful joke they
+laughed at and she couldn't see?
+
+Jeanne said, as they looked at the cat with a greedy amusement in their
+eyes, "Oh, she's not _sick_. She's looking for a husband, that's all."
+
+Isabelle laughed again at this, and said something to Jeanne in Basque.
+Marise could not understand a word of this, but her hot, straining eyes,
+fixed on their two faces, with a helpless fascination, received another
+deep and indelible impression of conscious shamefulness.
+
+Jeanne nodded and said to Marise, "I'll take her back to M. Bergeret's
+brother-in-law for a few days, where there are other cats, and then
+she'll be all right again."
+
+She picked the cat up by the middle and held her so, while she listened
+to Isabelle, who now said something else in Basque, half-grinning, her
+lips curled in an embarrassed, half-pleased way. Jeanne glanced sharply
+at Marise, as if to see whether she had understood this, in spite of its
+being said in Basque.
+
+Then they both went out of the room, Jeanne carrying the cat by a hard,
+careless grasp about her middle. Outside the door they both burst into
+giggles, as though they had been restraining themselves before Marise.
+The little girl heard them giggling all the way down the hall, the
+sound broken once by the loud anxious miauw of the cat.
+
+Marise stood perfectly still till she heard the outer door open and
+close. Then she looked about her wildly. She wanted to run somewhere and
+hide her face. She wanted to sink down on the floor; she wanted somebody
+to help her, to make it up to her, some one to wipe it away and put her
+back where she had been three minutes before, when Jeanne and Isabelle
+had come in the door. She _couldn't_ go on, living the way she felt now,
+as though she were dirty inside and couldn't wash herself clean. What
+was it all about? What had it meant? What was there about having a
+husband that people thought was so...?
+
+At this it came over her in a wave again, so that she started as though
+she had been struck a slashing blow, and ran, ran breathlessly out to
+get help.
+
+In the dark hall she stood still, the thump, thump of her heart loud in
+her ears. A murmur of voices came from the salon. Maman had callers....
+But even if she hadn't, Marise now knew she could not have spoken to
+Maman about it. Something came and stood between her and Maman so that
+she knew she could not tell her. She had a horrible fear that Maman
+would look that way, too, perhaps she might laugh that way ... perhaps
+everybody would. Perhaps that was one of the things they _did_. Not
+Father, either ... no, she'd be ashamed of ... not ... why, there was
+_nobody_ she could tell; there was nowhere to run for help.
+
+She went slowly back to her room. The sight of it brought up before her
+again the glistening eyes of the two women as they had looked at the cat
+and laughed. A terrible burning came up all over her so that she was
+almost suffocated. She wanted to hide her face. She found herself
+leaning against the dingy, checked red-and-white curtains. They smelled
+of dust as she buried her face in them, burrowing deeper and deeper
+among them as though she must hide herself, hide herself from ... but
+she couldn't hide herself from what was inside her own mind.
+
+She stood there a long time, her face pressed into the dusty curtains,
+her body buried in them. She was sick, sick from head to foot.
+
+And then ... nobody came to help her, since there was nobody to come;
+nothing happened ... nothing could happen. She had thought she
+_couldn't_ live, feeling like this. But she would have to, since there
+wasn't anything else to do.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This came to her slowly, and slowly sank into her, like still, deep
+cold.
+
+Two days after this, as Jeanne was brushing her hair, she said to
+Marise, "Our cat will be brought back to us to-morrow. She is all right
+now, M. Bergeret says."
+
+Marise waited until the wave of sickness passed and she felt she could
+make her voice sound as usual. Then she said casually, "I've changed my
+mind. I don't want a cat now. It would bother Maman too much."
+
+Jeanne was relieved. "Oh, very well. I don't ask anything better. I hate
+cats around the house anyhow." She went on brushing Marise's hair, with
+careful, loving skill, proud of its thickness, its sheen, its silky
+blackness. She thought to herself, "What a beautiful child our Marise
+is. And how I love her! There isn't anything I wouldn't do for her! May
+the Holy Virgin guard her and keep her safe always, Amen." She never
+thought again of the cat.
+
+
+
+
+_NEALE BEGINS TO BE NEALE_
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+On Neale's thirteenth birthday, his mother gave him a little silver
+watch and his father, a bicycle. In addition to the excitement of
+getting into his teens and of owning these visible and outward symbols
+of advancement, he was told that he would now be sent to a real school,
+with no girls in the classes, where he would really learn something;
+that is to say where he would be prepared for college.
+
+Hadley Prep. was an excellent school, a sort of model school, an
+information factory. You fed a small boy into it and at the end of four
+years the school turned him out completely filled with classified
+information. Boys entered with all sorts of hazy disorders of learning;
+they were ground out, possessed of a chain of facts, every link shining,
+polished and joined by flawless welding to the preceding and consequent
+facts. The curriculum took no count of modern educational fads;
+"spiritual awakening, character building, intellectual growth" had no
+place there. What would you have? Four years is a short enough time to
+prepare boys for their college entrance examinations. The non-essentials
+had to be cut out. The great point was that when the Principal signed a
+certificate of graduation he knew that the boy in question could produce
+any piece of information required of him, from the preterit of recevoir
+to the formula for accelerated motion of falling bodies, at any college
+entrance examination in the United States.
+
+Into the hopper of this mental polishing-machine, Neale was poured with
+fifty other little boys and began painfully to adapt himself to its
+rigorous codes. It was a process trying to the most robust among them,
+and devastating to the weaker ones. The devastating quality was not only
+recognized and admitted but sedulously fostered by the faculty and
+Principal. It was part of their business to see that the weaklings fell
+by the wayside long before the flock was led up to the narrow gate of
+the college entrance examinations. And as some hospitals achieve a
+miraculously low death-rate by the simple process of never admitting a
+patient whom they are not sure they can cure, so Hadley Prep. achieved
+the miraculously low rate of examination mortality for which it was
+famous the country over, by the simple process of knocking on the head
+and throwing out on the scrap-heap any boy whose brains seemed reluctant
+to admit college-entrance examination facts.
+
+Those whose heads were hard enough to resist the knocking, found
+themselves completely absorbed by the mental gymnastics which filled
+their days. The first two years of his life at Hadley Prep. had almost
+nothing in them for Neale except his over-time struggle to make up for
+the omissions of Miss Vanderwater's haphazard tuition. Everything else,
+even the assuming of long trousers, even the summers in the country,
+_even games_, were banished to the fringe of consciousness, like things
+seen out of the corner of your eye while you are gazing with all your
+might at something else. The life of his personality, his inner self,
+during those two years, realized the ideal of the eighteenth century
+educator who felt that the only safe up-bringing for boys would be to
+shut them up in a barrel, between the ages of twelve and eighteen, and
+feed them through the bung-hole. The record of what was fed through the
+Hadley bung-hole was set down on Neale's report cards, which he
+dutifully brought home to his parents. They glanced up from their
+absorption in each other, read, and smiled over the mathematical
+accuracy of the Hadley information about the state of Neale's mind (the
+Hadley professor often marked a boy as 87.75 proficient in American
+history, or 90.3 learned in German). At times they wondered if Hadley
+were the best place for him. But they were exactly like all other
+parents: they really had no idea what else to do with Neale. His health
+continued good and he did not seem rebellious, so they confined their
+supervision of his education to paying his rather expensive tuition,
+signing his report cards, and handing them back to him.
+
+Towards the end of the second year Neale began to master the new
+technique. He memorized the magic pass-words which are accepted as a
+proof of understanding many subjects. He began to draw breath, to tread
+water less frantically and still not to fear the closing over his head
+of smothering floods. The third year he felt earth beneath his feet
+again, and relaxed enough from his mental concentration to spend
+occasionally an hour or two on the school athletic field. He was fifteen
+years old now, wore long trousers and suits with vests, a stand-up
+collar, ties he tied himself, and carried a fountain pen. Underneath all
+this grown-up bravery of exterior, there was a brain that had learned to
+acquire and pigeon-hole information, and a perfectly dormant
+personality.
+
+Life at the Crittenden home was, as far as he was concerned, exactly the
+same life he had always known, except that instead of playing on the
+streets, he went out on the school athletic-field, and instead of
+playing with his tin soldiers, he usually went up to his room to grind
+over his lessons. At breakfast and supper his father and mother talked
+peaceably to one another just as they always had, and although Neale was
+able now to understand the subjects of their chat, their talk was, as a
+matter of fact, often quite as incomprehensible to him as it had been
+when he was a small boy. They had grown so much together, had so shared
+life with each other and no one else, that they possessed almost a
+language of their own, made up of references, only half-expressed, to
+things they had said long ago, or to experiences they had had together,
+or to opinions they both knew so well there was no need to formulate
+them in words. Neale was not surprised at this, nor yet resentful. On
+his side he was absorbed in his studies and the life at school. It was
+true that every once in a while they talked directly to Neale; asked him
+questions--what studies he liked best--how the teachers treated
+him--what he had to eat at lunch. Whatever they asked Neale always tried
+to answer in accordance with the facts; that he was getting along all
+right he guessed, that everything was satisfactory as far as he could
+see, that he hadn't any idea what he should like to do later on to earn
+his living.
+
+Occasionally, instead of taking the trolley cars, Father and Neale
+walked together down the long steps to Hoboken and along 6th Street to
+Hudson, where his father turned south and Neale went to the school. Then
+talk was harder to dodge--not that Neale ever consciously dodged. They
+would walk a dozen blocks. Father would ask a question, Neale would
+answer it. Another dozen blocks, and another question. Once Father asked
+if Neale wasn't sticking indoors too much. Couldn't he manage to get a
+little more exercise? Neale explained the seriousness of his studies and
+pointed out that he still rode his wheel on Saturdays. But the
+suggestion took root. Neale bought a pair of Indian clubs and an
+instruction book, and took to swinging the clubs fifteen minutes night
+and morning with the windows open.
+
+Another time Father said, "Look here, Neale, haven't you any friends?"
+
+Neale was astonished, "Why, yes, I'm friends with the whole class."
+
+"Yes, I suppose so, but you never seem to be with them outside of
+school. When I went to school we were always playing around in each
+other's yards and barns."
+
+"You went to school in the country," Neale reminded him. "We haven't any
+yards or barns here. We have the athletic field at school."
+
+"Yes, that's so," his father admitted. After a time he made a further
+admission, "Athletics are all right, too." But something in his tone
+intimated that he was baffled rather than convinced. Since Neale
+considered that athletics were not only all right, but all there was to
+life, he found no comment to make.
+
+A moment later, "But, great Scott," began his father with some heat as
+though struck afresh with some aspect of Neale's life. He seemed to hear
+the too-great vivacity of his accent and to wait until he could ask
+quite casually, "Aren't there any of your school-mates you'd like to
+have visit you?"
+
+Neale considered. It hadn't struck him before, but it was a fact that
+after school and athletic practice, all the boys vanished to their
+various homes. Never having known any other than this city relation with
+school-mates it seemed to him obvious and natural. "Visit me?" he said,
+trying to imagine one of his classmates sitting at the Crittenden
+dinner-table, and then, "No, I don't believe I do. There wouldn't be
+anything special to do at home, would there?"
+
+His father drew on his cigar thoughtfully, and walked on in silence.
+
+But he had a long talk with Neale's mother that evening, the two country
+and village-bred parents putting their heads together, earnestly though
+helplessly. The only course which occurred to them was proposed to
+Neale, a week later, when Mother asked him if he would do something to
+please her. Incautiously Neale said, of course, yes, he would. He was
+always willing enough to please Mother, and he had never made the
+slightest objection to anything his parents planned for him. But this
+plan turned out to be something very alarming. It was all arranged,
+Mother told him, that he was to go to dancing-school in the Germania
+Club ball-room on Tuesday afternoons. Mother pointed out that, now he
+was fifteen years old, and half-way through prep.-school, he ought to
+learn to dance. Neale had no theoretic objections to offer and had given
+his word that he would not object. So hiding, except for his first wild
+look of dismay, the terror and repugnance which filled him, he wrapped
+up the newly bought patent-leather oxfords and started. There were
+limits even to the Iroquois stoicism of his acceptance of what Fate
+brought him. No power on earth could have made him walk through the
+streets in those patent-leather shoes. But Mother never pushed him
+anywhere near one of those limits. She did not even suggest that he wear
+his dancing shoes. She helped him find the paper and string to wrap them
+up. Also she did not fuss over him ... not much. She looked at him hard,
+picked a thread off the sleeve of the blue serge which was his dress-up
+costume, and called his attention to the fact that a button of his vest
+was unbuttoned. She did not offer to button it herself, or handle him in
+any way. Mother was all right, if she did want him to go to
+dancing-school.
+
+So he went. And it was not so bad, not nearly so bad as he feared, the
+reassuring factor being that everybody else there was in the same boat.
+You could see how they all despised it. Except, of course, the girls.
+While he was changing his shoes in silent alarm and disgust in the
+cloak-room, who should come in but Jenkins, a "Lower Middle" at school.
+Neale didn't know Jenkins except by name, but at least he was some one
+to lean on. Neale was at once very cordial and Jenkins, surprised and
+flattered by this attention from an upper-class man, promised to show
+him how everything was done. They went into the ball-room, Neale
+clinging morally for dear life to Jenkins. A number of other young men
+of fifteen and sixteen, and girls who looked almost like young ladies,
+were sitting on opposite sides of the room. A bald-headed man to whom
+Jenkins referred as "One Lung" sat at the piano. The dancing master was
+young, German, energetic and thorough. He called the class to their
+feet, explained and illustrated the step and made them all practice it
+en masse, "_One_ and _two_! _One_ and _two_!" Then after a few minutes
+the music struck up and he left them to choose partners and dance.
+Neale, of course, did nothing of the kind, but pretended he couldn't
+find a partner (there were twice as many girls as boys), and went back
+to his seat. This was a tactical error. The Master spotted him at once.
+"Couldn't find a partner? Oh, dance with me, then." He whirled Neale
+about the room till his soul sickened, led him up to the other side of
+the room and sent him off with a bony, red-haired girl with freckles.
+Neale was caught that way twice, but no more after that. He had at least
+ordinary sense, he told himself. Next time the music started, he gulped
+down his objections to the whole proceeding and bowed to the prettiest
+girl in the room.
+
+The course was very thorough, covering much that was obsolescent, and a
+good deal that was definitely dead. In that and succeeding lessons Neale
+received instruction in the steps of the Polka, the Schottische, the
+Varsovienne. The two-step he really learned, managing to "Yale" down the
+length of the hall without stepping on his partner's feet; and although
+he hated the waltz, he was forced by infinite repetition into mastering
+it. Oh, the misery of the hour-long waltz-lesson, with the Master's
+constant exhortation, "Don't hop! _Slide!_"
+
+Neale carried into his dancing the same minute earnestness that won him
+success at his games and studies. He did not see the use of dancing, any
+more than he saw the use of learning German. But as the jobs seemed to
+have to be done, he tackled both of them conscientiously. He remembered
+to reverse in waltzing just as he remembered to put the auxiliary at the
+end of a sentence after "als." He came to be considered a good dancer.
+The girls did not claim to be tired when he asked them to dance with
+him. But he went no further. Even after he had mastered the steps and
+"leading," he did not talk as he spun methodically around. What was
+there to say? And even when he waltzed with Flossie Winters, the
+admitted belle, his heart beat no faster. It was nothing to him to put
+his arm around her waist. In spite of his long trousers and stick-up
+collar, the spirit of the thing escaped him; his time had not come.
+
+After some months (they seemed very long months to Neale), the
+conscientious and thorough instructor gave him a printed testimonial of
+efficiency; there was no more he could teach Neale.
+
+Over this his mother looked at him, "Wouldn't you like to go on, for the
+fun of it, Neale?" she asked him rather urgently. Neale's father took
+his cigar out of his mouth to hear Neale's answer.
+
+"For the _fun_ of it!" said Neale, stupefied at the idea. His parents
+exchanged glances and shook their heads, beaten.
+
+"Oh, of course you don't _have_ to!" his mother assured him hastily. His
+father put his cigar back in his mouth.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+In June 1899 when Hadley Prep. unlocked its grim doors and spewed forth
+the fifteen-year-old Neale for his third vacation, he did not as he had
+always done before, go at once with Mother to West Adams and the
+saw-mill. The invariable program of his journey there, Mother's two
+weeks' stay with him to get him settled, her going on to visit vague
+relatives of her own elsewhere in Massachusetts, and her return to spend
+the rest of the summer with Father, was upset by the news from the West
+Adams Crittendens. Jenny, the hired girl, had been to visit friends in
+Troy, and had fallen ill on her return. The doctor thought it might be
+typhoid. Certainly they did not want a boy visitor bothering around,
+until the matter was settled and they knew whether they were in for a
+long siege.
+
+The Crittendens like all methodical people were quite at a loss when
+circumstances interfered with their routine. If there was one part of
+Neale's year the rightness of which they did not doubt, it was the
+summer spent in the country where his father had grown up. Now they were
+confronted with a perfectly new aspect of the problem of what to do with
+him. They solved it by not doing anything for the present. Mrs.
+Crittenden went off to visit the usual relatives in Massachusetts,
+delicate old ladies, whose nerves could not hold out against the idea of
+a great ramping boy; and Neale was left temporarily with his father to
+wait developments in West Adams.
+
+The first days of liberty were sweet enough, after the strain of
+examinations. Neale loafed or rode his wheel (he had a new 24-inch frame
+bicycle now) at random up to Hudson Heights, and beyond on the
+Palisades. But less than a week of this was enough. He tried to amuse
+himself with baseball again, but it was not as he remembered it. The
+three years he had been at Hadley Prep. had separated him from his old
+friends. They were no longer to be found. Some were at work, some had
+moved away. The boys playing ball seemed absurdly young. The vacant lots
+themselves were absurdly small and rough. How could he have played
+there? He gave the thing up and moped.
+
+What was there to do? He got on his wheel again and went out over the
+Plank Road as far as Passaic, swung left through Montclair, the Oranges,
+out to Elizabeth and home through Newark. Home was just as dull as he
+had left it. Neale was bored to desperation, and on a chance went into
+the parlor and opened the book-case. He was no great reader. In his own
+room there was a fair collection of Henty, G. Manville Fenn and Harry
+Castleman, but none of these seemed worth re-reading. He didn't suppose
+these grown-up books in the library could be worth anything, but he took
+down a volume to see.
+
+"Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within twenty miles of
+the sea. My first most vivid impression of the identity of things seems
+to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening.
+At such a time I found out for certain that this bleak place over-grown
+with nettles was the churchyard ... and that the dark flat wilderness
+beyond the churchyard intersected with dykes and mounds and gates, with
+scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden
+line beyond was the river; and that the distant savage lair from which
+the wind was rushing, was the sea; and that the small bundle of shivers
+growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip.
+
+"'Hold your noise!' cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from
+among the graves at the side of the church porch. 'Keep still, you
+little devil, or I'll cut your throat!'"
+
+Half an hour later Neale was still standing by the book-case, the book
+in his hand, his mouth hanging open, shivering in the clammy mist
+together with Pip and the man with the iron chain. An hour later he was
+tucked into the Morris chair, among the cushions of which he hid the
+book when the dinner bell made him reluctantly lay it aside.
+
+What made him hide it? An invincible sense of moral decency made him
+hide it. He would have shuddered and cowered like a modest girl whose
+bed-room door is opened inadvertently by a stranger, at the very idea of
+carrying the book to the table and pouring out to his father what it
+made him feel. With a shy, virginal delicacy he stood guard,
+half-frightened, half-enchanted, over the first warm gush from the
+unexpected well-springs of emotion in his heart. If his father had come
+into the room, had seen what he was reading and asked him how he liked
+it, he would have answered briefly, "Oh, all right."
+
+But for the next three days he did nothing but live with Pip, and feel
+intolerable sympathy, far deeper than anything he had ever felt in his
+own healthy life, for the convict victim of society. On the afternoon of
+the third day, his heart pounding hard with hope, he was in the
+row-boat, in the track of the steamer. The Morris-chair in which he sat,
+swayed up and down to the ocean rhythm of the great deeps which bore him
+along. He peered forward. There was the steamer at last, coming head on.
+He called to Provis to sit still, "she was nearing us very fast," ...
+"her shadow on us," ... and then, oh, _gosh_! ... the police-boat, the
+betrayal, the summons to surrender!
+
+Neale's soul recoiled upon itself in a shudder of horrified revolt. He
+recognized the traitor, a white terror on his face. Grinding his teeth,
+Neale leaped at his throat. With a roar the water closed over their
+heads ... he would never let him go, never, never.... Down they went to
+the depths, to the black depths, fiercely locked in each other's arms.
+Neale smothered and strangled there ... and came up into another world,
+the world of books.
+
+At the table that night, his father looked at him and asked, "You're not
+getting a cold, are you, Neale?"
+
+"No, I guess not," said Neale, blinking his reddened eyelids, and eating
+with a ravenous appetite his large slice of rare roast beef.
+
+After that, time did not hang heavy on his hands. The days were not long
+enough. The volume which stood next to "Great Expectations" was called
+"The Tale of Two Cities." "Which two cities?" Neale wondered. He opened
+it and began to read. In a moment, wrapped in a caped great-coat, shod
+with muddy jack-boots, he was plodding up-hill beside the Dover Mail,
+his hand on his horse-pistol. The panting rider on his blown horse--the
+message, "Wait at Dover for Mam'selle,"--the answer in capital letters,
+"RECALLED TO LIFE!" With a long quivering breath Neale slid back a
+century and a quarter, into a world vibrating with sorrow, hope,
+indignation, hatred, love.
+
+He dipped his handkerchief in the muddy wine spilled in the street; he
+looked up, not surprised to see the squalid joker scrawl "BLOOD," on the
+wall; he climbed the filthy staircase, and averted his eyes in horrified
+sympathy from the ruin of humanity who sat in the dark, cobbling shoes.
+
+And then, brushed in with great colorful strokes, the causes and authors
+of the filthy stairway, the squalid joker, the ruined man, the endless
+misery. With the four serving-men pouring out the chocolate of
+Monseigneur, Neale began to burn, like a carefully constructed bon-fire,
+alight at last. He had never in his life before, given a conscious
+thought to social injustice or the poor, but every instinct for fair
+play, sound and intact in his heart, flared up hotly and honestly, as he
+gave himself naively to the spell of the magnetic exaggeration and
+over-emphasis of the story. He had "had" the French Revolution in his
+history at Hadley Prep. and could have recited correctly almost any date
+in it. But, quite literally, he had no idea until after he had finished
+the story, that this panting, bleeding, weeping, thundering book had any
+connection with what he had learned at school.
+
+"David Copperfield" was good, not so terribly exciting as the others,
+but solid food on which Neale, aware for the first time of his hunger,
+feasted with a deep content--all except the parts about Dora, who made
+him tired. After this for a change, he reached up to a shelf above and
+took down at random one of the set in green and gold binding. This was
+"Kidnapped." Thereafter he read nothing but green and gold, till his
+eyes gave out and his father drove him out to spend a whole afternoon on
+his wheel.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+Although he had gone reluctantly, once he was out it seemed fine to be
+on his bicycle again. His forgotten body reacted with a rush to exercise
+and fresh air. Generally he expected to make at least fifty miles in a
+half-day but to-day was hot. Pedaling easily through Nutley he caught
+sight of a young man playing tennis against two girls and stopped in the
+shade of a maple to watch the game, still sitting on his wheel, his
+right pedal locked over the curb-stone. Tennis was not so universal then
+as now: Neale knew little about the game.
+
+Presently a chance stroke sent the ball into the street. "Out!"
+announced the young man, and turning ran back to retrieve it. As any
+American would do anywhere in the world when a ball is in question,
+Neale stooped, picked it up and was just going to toss it back when
+amazement paralyzed his arm. Could this slim youth in immaculate
+flannels possibly be Don Roberts? Don, the big boy who had played shinny
+and vacant-lot baseball with him, whom he had never seen but with a
+dirty shirt and unkempt hair! The elegant youth cried out, "Neale
+Crittenden! I'll be blessed if it isn't old man Crit! That's luck! Come
+on and meet my friends and we'll have a set of doubles."
+
+He ushered Neale up to the net, where laying a patronizing hand on his
+friend's shoulder, he presented him. "Ladies, my old friend, Crittenden.
+We used to be boys together long ago. Neale, the Misses Underhill,
+Nutley's peerless blondine duet, Polly and Natalie. Now, how about some
+doubles? Neale can use my old racket."
+
+"But I don't play," said Neale, alarmed at the idea. "No, I honestly
+don't. I've never had a racket in my hand. I'll watch."
+
+"Oh, fudge! That's all right. You'll learn. Nat and Neale, that's your
+team. Polly, my dear, come over to this court and back up your Uncle
+Don. No fair banging everything at Polly."
+
+The essential rudiments were explained. Neale gripped the racket and the
+game began. At first his partner politely kept her own court but as the
+completeness of his ineptness became awfully apparent, she began
+covering more and more territory, running across and snatching the ball
+from in front of his hesitating racket. In vain, for Don continually
+placed his return down her undefended alley. The set was soon over,
+6--love.
+
+"Now, Crit," said Don, jumping over the net, "we'll have sex against
+sex."
+
+The second set went better. Now that he was playing on Don's side, Don
+gave him a little coaching. Neale learned to run in to the net and found
+volleying much simpler than playing ground strokes. Natalie's low
+returns often went through him and he did nothing with her service, but
+not infrequently he managed to pat back Polly's gentle offerings. When
+points were needed Don monopolized the court. The boys won,--a love set.
+
+Don lit a cigarette and pretended to fan himself with his racket. "How
+about lemonade for the victors?" he cried, but the girls demurred. It
+was five o'clock, they had to go home and dress. They laughed over
+nothing at all, shook hands with Neale, told a few friendly lies about
+his progress, and walked off laughing over nothing at all, swinging
+their rackets; white-shod, yellow-haired, pink-skinned.
+
+"Dear little sweethearts, aren't they?" commented Don. "A little insipid
+like most nice girls, but you have to take what you can get. Polly's a
+dub at tennis, of course, uses her racket like a snow-shovel, but she's
+not such a worse little flirt. Look here, Crit, old boy. I've got to
+stay in this stinking hole all summer, cramming for deficient exams. The
+old man won't let me go to the Water Gap till I can answer those damn
+questions. And there isn't a soul to play with but those girls. It's
+rotten for my game. Why don't you come out here? Come to-morrow. Of
+course you can't play, but I'll teach you. I can teach anybody."
+
+Neale blushed and accepted the magnificent offer.
+
+"Well, ta, ta, old man, sorry you can't stay to supper."
+
+Neale mounted his wheel with a very high heart. This was something like.
+Something was beginning to happen in his life. Wasn't Don great? As he
+rode home he decided that he would ask his father to let him go to
+Princeton. Don was at Princeton.
+
+But he didn't. Father read him Mother's latest letter, all about the
+particular great-aunt she was visiting in Cambridge, and after they had
+commented on this, Father looked at his evening paper sideways as he
+ate, and Neale went over in his mind the events of the afternoon, and
+the wonder of Don Roberts turning out such a splendid fellow, such a
+good sport, such clothes, such a way with him. Neale thought about him a
+great deal more than about the girls, and with vastly more admiration.
+He was sure that David Copperfield's Steerforth was nothing to Don
+Roberts. Once when he glanced up, he saw Father looking at him instead
+of his newspaper.
+
+"Well, Neale," he asked, "what are you up to these days?"
+
+This was his opportunity, Neale knew it was, to introduce the subject of
+Princeton, but he could not think of any way to do it. Instead he said
+vaguely, "Oh, nothing much. Sort of hanging around." And then with a
+great effort, he brought out, for once, a vital piece of news, "I'm
+learning to play tennis."
+
+"That's _good_," said Father. "It's a great game."
+
+This seemed to be final. He looked back at his newspaper. But after a
+while, as though something had occurred to him he asked, "Who's teaching
+you? Where do you play?"
+
+"I ran across Don Roberts, over in Nutley. They used to live here, on
+Central Avenue. He used to go to Number Two School." He wanted to go on
+and tell about Don's being in Princeton, but could not propel himself
+past the full-stop, where an inadvertent cadence of his voice had
+dropped him.
+
+Next morning he found Don with a whitewash brush touching up the marking
+of the court. For three hours they practised--a most exhausting three
+hours! He thought he began to make a little progress. He knew he was
+almost all in, when noon came, worn out far more by the mental strain of
+struggling his way into a new technique, than by the physical effort,
+although that had been enough to leave him blown and panting, as they
+went into the house to have lunch.
+
+The two boys were alone at the table. Don swaggered a little as he
+served his guest. "No one at home," he explained. "Mother and the girls
+are down at Asbury. The old man doesn't get back from the office till
+the 5.45. I can hear his train whistle from here. He finds his loving
+son deep in his books, you bet."
+
+Through luncheon Don fired Neale's enthusiasm with stories of Big Bill
+Edwards, Arthur Poe, Lady Jayne and other heroes of his Alma Mater.
+Afterwards he strolled to the living-room, sat down at the piano, and
+sang "The Orange and the Black,"--"There's a college we call Princeton."
+Then lowering his voice, with many nods and knowing winks, he sang a
+long song with the refrain, "Keep your eye on tricky little Sarah."
+
+Neale's play on the streets and in vacant lots with perfectly
+heterogeneous and casual little boys had given him quite enough of a
+vocabulary to understand the words of this song; and odds and ends of
+the older boys' talk overheard in the locker-room at Hadley made the
+spirit of it by no means unfamiliar. But this was the first time that
+either words or spirit had ever been more than one of the casual
+by-products of boy-life. What put it in the center of his attention now
+was his admiration of Don as the model of colorful, sophisticated life.
+Evidently this was a part of such life. Neale applied his mind therefore
+to the words and the spirit and learned to hum the air.
+
+That evening Father read another uneventful letter from Mother; then
+they sat in silence till, as father was filling his pipe, he remarked,
+as if it had just come into his mind, "Oh, I thought you ought to have a
+racket of your own, Neale. I got one. It's in the hall on the
+coat-rack."
+
+Neale bounded upstairs and carried his prize to his room. There was not
+only a Sears racket, but three Wright and Ditson balls, Spalding's
+"Tennis Guide," and a little pamphlet on "How to Play Lawn Tennis."
+Neale dropped into his Morris chair and devoured both books before going
+to bed.
+
+The hard protective husk of his little boyhood was so newly sloughed
+off, that his adolescence had as yet received scarcely a mark upon its
+new freshness to impression. Ready now, responsive with an inward quiver
+to a whole range of experience to which he had been blind and deaf
+before, he was catching up from the chance materials about him, the
+stuff with which to construct his new world. And here was material ready
+to his hand. The editor, an enthusiast, an idealist of sportsmanship had
+put a great deal in his little treatise beside his copious advice as to
+the proper grip on the racket and the laying out of a court. Without the
+slightest self-consciousness (because he had the not-to-be-imitated
+single-heartedness of the sincere devotee) he had charged every section
+of his treatise with the spirit of the game, the spirit of sport, not of
+border warfare. So matter-of-factly was this message conveyed that even
+the adolescent soul, half-crusader, half-Hun, did not guess that it was
+being preached to. The word "honor" was never mentioned, yet Neale
+understood perfectly the significance of what he read, under the caption
+"Tournaments:" "The committee should provide adequate linesmen, for
+while the contestants themselves can generally tell whether a ball is
+good or not, yet close decisions occur in every match and it is
+obviously unfair to force a player to penalize himself (as he naturally
+would feel bound to do) by giving his opponent the benefit of the doubt
+on all uncertain cases." He nodded approvingly over the phrase, "as he
+naturally would feel bound to do." It did not strike him as a new idea,
+but merely a clearer statement of something he had always felt was in
+the air about sports. Yes, that was how a college man would act, how Don
+would act.
+
+Again, among the illustrations he was struck by a photograph of the
+winner and runner-up shaking hands after the Newport tournament. Neale
+looked long at the expression of cordial congratulation and admiration
+on the loser's face. He moved uneasily in his chair at the recollection
+of a nine of disgruntled urchins muttering after a defeat, "Aw, you
+bunch of stiffs, wait till we get you on our own diamond." Neale had
+been one of those who muttered, one of those so stung by defeat that the
+idea of admiring the better playing which had beaten them would have
+been inconceivable to him. Neale knew himself well enough to know the
+fierceness of his lust for victory. He knew it was going to be a job to
+tame that lust to this civilized code. But he would try. Morally on
+tip-toe, he resolved to be worthy of Don's friendship.
+
+When he turned the last page, relaxed the intense concentration with
+which he had been absorbing the essence and spirit of the book, and
+stood up to stretch and yawn before going to bed, he felt that he had
+learned a lot. And he had. Silently, with the incalculable silence of
+natural processes, an ideal had crystallized in his heart around a
+standard of conduct.
+
+And yet this was all under the surface. As he dropped off to sleep, his
+mind retained as the chief lesson of the book a mass of stimulating
+suggestions about rolling strokes, the reverse twist service, and the
+advice for a solitary beginner to practise against a brick wall.
+
+He knew where such a wall could be found; in a vacant lot on Poplar
+Street, just off Summit Avenue. He often had played hand-ball there in
+the old days. Next morning he went there after breakfast, postponing his
+ride to Nutley till after lunch. The result was so good that thereafter
+he spent every morning there.
+
+The summer days went by. Neale progressed far in his imitation of Don
+and Don's manner and standards. He learned after practising with a box
+of his own, to accept the cigarettes Don constantly offered him. To be
+like Don, he learned to call the girls by their first names without
+choking, although he never could bring himself to squeeze their hands or
+pat their shoulders or stroke their hair as Don did so casually; and he
+did manage to pick up a fair game of tennis.
+
+When he challenged Natalie to singles and beat her 7-5, Don looked at
+him with a new expression, and a few days later announced great news.
+"It's all arranged. Tournament here next Saturday, lemonade, lawn party,
+picnic-supper, dance. The old man's agreed not to butt in and spoil
+things. I've got four fellows from here, Peterson, and a friend of his
+from Montclair. You and I make eight. Just right for a day's tournament
+on one court."
+
+"But I don't play well enough," protested Neale.
+
+"You'll be put out in the first round of course," Don admitted, "but I
+need you to make the even eight, and you can chase balls and make
+yourself useful. Entry fee's a dollar. That'll buy a Pim racket as a
+prize. I _need_ a new racket."
+
+The great day came and Neale, flustered and tense, was put out in the
+first round according to schedule. It didn't surprise him, although deep
+in his heart he had had a fluttering hope--but no matter. What happened
+to him was of no consequence. Don came through easily, of course. After
+lunch Neale sat with Natalie and together they gasped and clapped and
+cried, "played!" as Don captured his match in the semi-finals.
+
+"Isn't he splendid?" said Natalie. Neale nodded, too much moved to
+speak.
+
+The finals were called. Neale focussed himself on the game, blind to
+anything else. Don was matched against the Peterson boy, a high-school
+lad from Montclair. Don got the first set. Good. The second set
+unexpectedly went to deuce. What had happened! Neale leaned forward, his
+eyes hot from staring, and tried to make out the meaning of what he saw.
+Peterson didn't hit the ball as hard as Don did, but his long, bony arm
+pulled off the most impossible of "gets." Deuce, vantage, deuce,
+vantage. Don put on more steam, served doubles, lost his service.
+Peterson won his own service, and the sets were even. Don's face was a
+blank. He walked to his place, hitched up his trousers, pulled the brim
+of his white felt sports-hat low over his eyes, set his jaw and faced
+his opponent. Neale's anxious eyes had not left him for a second.
+
+The last set was astounding, paralyzing to the spectators. Don had gone
+to pieces and the high-school boy had pulled himself together. His
+gawky, graceless body and long arms seemed to cover the whole court. Don
+served with murderous force, his rising fury burning with a sensible
+heat all around him as he raced and plunged and stroked the ball.
+Peterson broke through his service again--four-two. Don struck out
+dazzling drives, but many of them landed in the net. He got by Peterson
+with wily stroke after stroke--only so many of them landed in the
+alleys; four-three; five-three. Peterson kept on steadily, with his
+stiff, mechanical, chopped returns, his intent eyes gleaming in his
+impassive face. He had Don forty-love. Neale's heart was bursting. Don
+rushed to the net. Peterson lobbed to the base-line, and it was all
+over. Don was beaten.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In a flash Neale found an excuse for his hero, "Every one has his
+off-days ... but...."
+
+Though half-forewarned by the look on Don's face, he could not turn his
+eyes away from the dashing figure in white flannels, which stood there
+frozen in mid-flight as the fatal ball fell inside the back-line. Then
+with a furious swing of his arm Don flung his racket from him as if he
+wished to break it into a thousand pieces. By good luck it did not hit
+one of the girl spectators, but fell with a little crash of broken twigs
+into the midst of a lilac bush. He took a step or two after this, as if
+he meant to leave the court at once. With an effort, he turned about,
+walked up to the net where the Peterson boy stood panting, and gave him
+in silence, a limp hand-shake.
+
+Then he pushed through the spectators, and went into the house calling
+over his shoulder that Polly was to award the prize. Neale did not dare
+to look at Natalie; the moment was too awful.
+
+The Peterson boy did not stay to flaunt his triumph. Pleading an
+impending thunder-storm as an excuse (the sky was as a matter of fact
+very black and lowering), he scorched off on his wheel back to Montclair
+with the spoils of victory bound to his handle-bars. With his departure,
+the atmosphere of gloom among Don's friends began to lift. When the
+storm broke, as it did shortly, they all hurried indoors. The girls set
+about getting supper with a great clatter of chafing-dishes, and much
+screaming, with each clap of thunder. By the time the cheese was melted,
+Don reappeared in blue serge and negligee silk shirt. Coming down stairs
+he passed Neale standing apart with his back against the newel post.
+
+"Oh, drop your grouch, Crit, old man," he said. "Forget it! Of course
+Nordhoff's a pretty rotten umpire. I suppose he thought he'd give the
+kid a chance, but he needn't have stung me on _all_ the close ones."
+
+On this, he passed lightly to the supper-table, where later, on being
+loudly called, Neale followed him, starting up from his moody silence as
+though he had forgotten where he was. It was his first supper out with
+young people, the first time he had eaten welsh-rabbit; the first time
+he had seen anything prepared over a chafing-dish; the first time he had
+encountered the traditional young people's menu of that
+date--welsh-rabbit, fruit cake, nut-fudge made on the spot, all washed
+down with ginger-ale. It might have been bread and milk for all Neale
+knew. What he saw was the photograph in the Tennis Guide of Davis
+shaking hands with Whitman.
+
+Presently loyalty flared up. If Don fell short of the standard perhaps
+the standard was wrong.... It would not do, even as he thought of this
+excuse, he knew it would not do. He was aware of a streak of iron in his
+soul. An idol might sweep away the warmth and color of life by its
+fall--let them go then! No warping of standards could keep it on its
+pedestal. But the real sorrow in his heart drove him to try to find
+excuses for Don. Great Scott! it _was_ hard to lose! How could you blame
+anybody for not coming up to such a terribly high standard? Anybody on
+earth would naturally feel sore at being beaten in such a....
+
+Even as he tried falteringly thus to lower his ideal to fit his
+affection, he was aware of something stern and relentless within him.
+The gallant face of the defeated player in the photograph stood out
+beside Don's startled, angry resentment at a wound to his vanity. Nine
+generations of Puritan forebears would not let Neale abandon his ideal
+because it hurt him.
+
+He passed into a condition of acute amazement at the others. How could
+they take it so light-heartedly? Perhaps they didn't care. Or perhaps
+they felt themselves obliged to pretend since they were still in Don's
+house. Yes, of course, he ought to pretend too.
+
+Smarting, he sprang up at a new word of command. "How about a little
+rag-time?" Don was crying in his role of master of ceremonies. "Polly,
+you to the piano. Get the old banjo, Dick. Clear the floor, boys. Oh,
+pitch the rugs out of the window, a little rain won't hurt 'em." For
+through the open windows came the steady voice of a summer downpour.
+
+The musicians struck up "Whistling Rufus," couples were formed and
+racketed noisily to and fro from the dining-room to the sitting-room and
+back, with much bumping and giggling at the congested doorway. Neale
+danced absent-mindedly with a girl whose name he could not remember, and
+whom he exchanged for a similarly anonymous girl when the tune changed
+to the "Georgia Camp-meeting." He went on thus, setting his body to do
+the decent thing, while his spirit lay prostrate within him.
+
+They were dancing harder than ever now, racing long-leggedly from one
+end of the room to the other, the boys carrying the girls bodily off
+their feet at some of the turns, the girls abandoning themselves like
+romping children to the whirlwind of the insistent rhythm, which they
+marked by shouting out as they danced, "Oh, la la, la, la-la, la la la!
+There'll be a _hot_ time in the _old_ town _to-night_!" Neale danced on
+with the rest. Under his grimly silent exterior, something fine and high
+and deeply wounded, cried out silently to the others, and received no
+answer.
+
+The music ended with a crash, the exhausted couples sank into chairs,
+gasping and fanning each other. Neale's heart leaped to see, half-way up
+the stairs, Natalie sitting alone as if she had not been dancing. Why,
+of course. There was Natalie! He had forgotten her. She had understood.
+The tragedy of the afternoon must have gone home to her. _She_ was a
+good sport! With a warm glow he hurried up to where she sat, and sank
+down beside her, his stifling sense of isolation gone.
+
+She lifted the sweet, flower-like mask of her youth to him, her eyes
+gleaming in the half-light of the stairs. But at the moment, Neale had
+forgotten whether she was a girl or a boy. She was a good sport. That
+was what he needed. He started to speak, but a shout of laughter burst
+out of the room below them. They looked down. In the center of the
+vociferously amused circle of spectators, Don was making fun of his late
+adversary's gawky manners and poor eye-sight. He had a racket in his
+hand, and glaring through it with a burlesque of Peterson's intent
+short-sighted gaze, he was mimicking the school-boy's strained awkward
+position at the net.
+
+Neale fell back appalled, and looked to Natalie for sympathy and
+understanding.
+
+Natalie had also leaned forward, and as they turned towards each other,
+her face was so close to his that he could see the peach-like bloom on
+her cheeks.
+
+All the pretty face was quivering with mirth. "Isn't Don the _wittiest_
+man!"
+
+Neale got up stiffly and walked down the stairs without a word. Nobody
+in the crowd of laughing boys and girls paid the least attention to his
+silent passage through them. He went out on the porch, the beating
+downpour of the rain suddenly loud in his ears. Oh, all the better! He'd
+like getting soaked.
+
+He found his wheel on the side-porch, mounted it without troubling to
+light his lamp or turn up his coat collar, and delighting in the clammy
+discomfort of the streaming water, pedaled stolidly over the nine miles
+to his home.
+
+Alone in his room he took off his steaming clothes, rubbed down and got
+into pajamas and a bath-robe.
+
+"Crittenden," he said sternly, "the world is no place for you. You're a
+lone wolf. A lone wolf."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+When Neale turned out his Welsbach burner and rolled into bed, he
+encountered a strange, new sensation, an immense relief just to lay
+himself down, and to have darkness about him. For the first time in his
+life he was consciously very tired, for the first time he knew the adult
+sensation of having lived to the point of weariness, for the first time
+he felt the passive sweetness of the resigned adult welcome of repose
+which is perhaps a premonition of our ultimate weariness and our
+ultimate welcome to death.
+
+For a moment Neale lay there, drowned in astonishment at this new,
+unguessed-at pleasure. Then, without warning, the thick cloud of a boy's
+sleep dropped over him like black velvet.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next morning, his father, passing on the way to his cold bath,
+looked in and saw the boy, sunk fathoms deep in sleep, the bright new
+sunlight of the early morning shining full on his face. Heavens! How can
+children sleep so soundly! His father stepped into the room, walking
+silently on bare feet, and drew down the shades. The shadowing of the
+room did not waken the sleeper. He still lay profoundly at rest and yet
+profoundly alive, one long, big-boned arm thrown over his head on the
+pillow, as he always had slept when he was a child.
+
+"As he had when he was a child!" His father was struck by the phrase and
+looked again at the tall, rather gaunt young body flung on the bed. That
+was no child who lay there, nor was that a child's face, for all the
+pure, childlike curves of the young lips, firmly held together even in
+this utter abandon to sleep. The older man stood by the bed for a
+moment, looking down on his son, his own face grave and observant. He
+would be a fine-looking fellow, Neale, with those honest eyes, wide
+apart under his good, square forehead. Yes, Neale's father had always
+known the extreme satisfaction of being able to respect his son, there
+was no doubt about that. But there was something else, the something
+that had always baffled him, that he had never been able to penetrate,
+the closed look, locked tight over ... what? Was it locked tight over
+something, or nothing? Did Neale have a real personal life? Would he
+ever have? Would there ever be anything, anybody who would have the key
+to unlock and set free what was there, before it died of its
+imprisonment?
+
+For an instant the face of Neale's father was unlocked as he stood
+looking down on his son. Then, with a long breath, he stepped back into
+the hallway, silent on his bare feet, and went on to shave, and to take
+his cold bath.
+
+It was after ten when Neale awakened and the day had sunk from its first
+fresh hopefulness into the resigned apathy of a hot mid-morning, with
+the stale smell of dusty, sun-baked pavements, the slow, unimportant
+jog, jog, jog of the horse hauling the grocer's delivery-cart, and the
+distant, jingling of the scissors-grinder's bell.
+
+Neale came slowly to himself and rolled over, a very bad taste in his
+mouth, both physically and mentally. He had not noticed it at the time,
+but he now thought, scraping his coated tongue against his teeth, that
+melted cheese and cake and nut-fudge and ginger-ale were a darned bad
+combination to be swallowing of an evening. And as for the rest ... oh,
+gosh! Never again!
+
+He turned his big, strong feet out of bed and sat sunk together for a
+moment, recalling it all, and steeping his soul in wormwood once more.
+_Now_ what?
+
+The telephone rang; he heard Katie answer, and clump up the stairs to
+see if he were awake.
+
+"Somebody to talk to you, Neale," she said, seeing him sitting up.
+Neale's father might note he was no longer a child, Neale's mother might
+keep her hands from fussing over him, but for Katie he would always be
+the little boy she had helped to bring up. She laid her hand on his head
+now, and Neale did not mind.
+
+"_You_ answer," he said stolidly.
+
+"It's him that's always telephonin'," she explained. "He's after wantin'
+you to go and play tennis."
+
+"You tell him I can't go," Neale repeated.
+
+Katie retreated astonished. Neale heard the sound of her voice at the
+telephone two flights below. Then she shouted up, "Neale!"
+
+He went to the stairs and answered crossly, "What?"
+
+"He wants to know will you be goin' this afternoon?"
+
+"_No!_" shouted Neale, leaning over the banisters.
+
+In a moment she cried again, "He wants to know will you be goin'
+to-morrow morning?"
+
+"NO!" shouted Neale again, and going into the bathroom locked the door
+behind him.
+
+When rather damp as to hair, he came out, silence and the smell of
+frying bacon told him that Katie had left the telephone to get his
+breakfast ready. Gee Whiz! He didn't want any breakfast, not with a
+taste like that in his mouth.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To act the part of a lone wolf of sixteen, one must read poetry. He had
+never read much poetry except some of Milton's Paradise Lost, for a
+specially loathed English Literature course at Hadley. But there were
+plenty of poetry books in the library at home. After some false starts,
+Neale began to know his way among them, concentrating on the slim
+volumes with pasteboard covers and paper backs.
+
+    "Beneath the bludgeonings of chance ..."
+
+Yes, Neale too would hold up an unbowed, bloody head.
+
+    "... without fear, without wish,
+    Insensate save of a dull crushed ache in my heart...."
+
+    ... "Just to reach the dreaming,
+          And the sleep."
+
+Sitting alone in the darkened library how Neale soaked himself in this
+sort of thing, hunting up one page and down another till he found the
+voice that spoke to him.
+
+    "The irresponsive silence of the lands
+    The irresponsive sounding of the sea
+    Breathe but one language and one voice to me
+    Aloof, aloof, we stand aloof!"
+
+When Katie's carpet-sweeper and feather-duster and kind, gossiping voice
+sounded too close, he escaped out of doors, but not on his bicycle.
+That, like his tennis-racket brought up painful memories. Every evening
+he walked to the Boulevard, and gazed over the Hackensack meadows till
+the sun set.
+
+"No sweet thing left to savor; no sad thing left to fear...."
+
+On the evening of the third day, a letter from West Adams arrived,
+announcing that Jenny was up and around, and the farm-house was ready
+for Neale. The evening after that, Neale was undressing in the
+slant-ceilinged big-beamed, white-washed bedroom, as familiar to him as
+his room at Union Hill--but uncontaminated with any of the new,
+troubling sensations. The air of the hills blew in at the window. Neale
+felt that it was a different air. He began to feel a difference in
+himself, but fell asleep in the midst of this perception. The next
+morning, scorning the mill, the barn-yard, the brook, he climbed to the
+highest back-pasture where the young white birches and quivering aspens,
+skirmishers of the unconquered forest, were leading the way in the
+reconquest of the fields man had taken from them. Here he lay down and
+prepared to nurse his sorrow....
+
+"Pain gnaws at my heart like a rat that gnaws in a drain...."
+
+But what was this? What was this? As unexpectedly as the impudent little
+mick had sprung out of the ground to carry off his shinny ball, so did a
+cheerful little imp of high spirits spring up in his heart, leaping and
+skipping to meet the glory of the great sun pouring down its mellow gold
+upon him through the flickering, tricksy aspen leaves. He lay back on
+the soft, deep moss, his hands clasped under his head. Huge,
+jovial-looking clouds floated, piled up in strong, rounded masses
+against the summer sky. Miles off in the valley he could see the Hoosick
+River winding its way among the green, green hills. He was warmed, cool,
+alive ... and, oh, yes, there was no use in pretending otherwise, mighty
+well pleased to be alive.
+
+The ten-year-old Neale when suddenly the glamor had faded from his lead
+soldiers, had never wasted time in pretending that it was there. He had
+risen at once, left the little heap of clumsily-made mannequins to lie
+foolish in their flaking paint, and sliding down the banisters, had gone
+out of doors in a great hurry. Well, he wasted no time now. He looked
+with an ironic eye upon the glamorless lost illusion, with the paint
+flaking off, and hurriedly turning his back on it all, he went,
+metaphorically, out of doors.
+
+What had happened after all? He'd thought the world of Don Roberts, who
+had turned out a four-flusher. Well, he'd been stung. But why holler so
+about it? And whose fault was it? His own, for not knowing better. Don
+hadn't ever pretended to be any less of a four-flusher than he was. It
+was just that he, Neale, had been taken in by a cheap, flashy guy when
+any kid ought to have had enough sense to see through him, and those
+would-be smart college-man airs and manners.
+
+But anyhow if that was a false scent, it had put him on a true one.
+There was a lot inside those slim, pasteboard covered books beside rats
+gnawing in drains, and twilight and all-goneness. You bet your life
+there was. Neale had never dreamed what was inside them, poems that
+stood up to a glorious day like this, and called it brother, poems of
+foot-free wanderings and high-hearted scorn of prosperity and
+conventions.
+
+    "I tell you that we,
+    While you are smirking
+    And lying and shirking
+    Life's duty of duties,
+    Honest sincerity,
+    We are in verity
+    Free!
+    Free as the word
+    Of the sun to the sea;
+    Free!"
+
+Neale's voice quavered with another sort of emotion ... that was the
+doctrine! "Off with the fetters!" He pictured himself in a blue flannel
+shirt and flowing neckerchief, alone, or with some perfect comrade,
+knowing reality, sneering at railway trains and cities.
+
+It was a gorgeous dream ... but of course the first Tuesday in September
+found him back at a desk at Hadley with all the grinding and polishing
+wheels of that well-appointed educational mill at work on the corners of
+his individuality, bent on turning out the fifty young Seniors smooth
+and identical, the perfection of the Hadley type. And since this was the
+last year, the faculty speeded up the hunt and all the pack put their
+noses to the ground and ran their legs off in pursuit of mathematics and
+science. The pace was cruelly hot, and it was specially hard for Neale
+because he had yielded to the captain's entreaties and had come out for
+the football team. He made left tackle with little competition and
+through October and November practised almost without coaching (Hadley
+permitted athletics but was too busy to encourage anything so childish),
+and played and was beaten with painful regularity.
+
+Neale found himself dropping far below the rating he had maintained in
+the lower classes. He began to pant and strain as he had the first year.
+It was a gruelling race; but temperamentally he liked races and his wind
+got better as the months went by. He cut out all superfluities--no
+dancing--no reading for amusement except on Sunday mornings, and then
+only short poems about Vagabondia and the Open Road. Work, work, work
+through every waking hour. By April he had risen to sixth in his class,
+and felt grimly sure of holding his stride to the end.
+
+On the night of Easter Monday, Neale was bent over his desk with a green
+eye-shade, trying various combinations to solve a problem in analytical
+geometry, when his father knocked at the door, walked in and sat down on
+the bed. This was so remarkable that Neale knew something was up. One of
+the things that Neale had always taken for granted in his home-life was
+that his room was practically inviolate when he was in it. His father
+and his mother respected his privacy in this as in other things with
+scrupulous exactitude. It was a little corner of the world which was
+his, where he could come out from his tightly-clutched shell, and move
+about freely with no fear of intruders spying on his nakedness. The
+security of this privacy had been one of the well-squared stones Neale
+had found ready to his hand, when slowly, rather later than most boys,
+he began to build. Hence it was now apparent to him that Father must
+have something on his chest. He looked up, nodded and greeted him with,
+"Hello, Dad."
+
+"Hello, Neale," said Father quite as casually. "Don't want to interrupt
+your studies. How late do you expect to keep at them?"
+
+"Sometime between eleven and twelve, I guess. His Nibs gave us some
+stinkers, and I haven't touched the German prose yet."
+
+"That would be pretty late for me. We'd better take a few minutes now.
+The fact is, Neale, we mustn't let you slide along any more without some
+sort of an idea what you are going to do next."
+
+Neale having no idea beyond that night's work, said nothing.
+
+"The work you're doing this year has given your mother and me a great
+deal of pleasure," Father went on. "Your marks are getting better and
+better. I did think of putting you through an engineering school, but I
+notice you seem to do better at the liberal subjects. Have you set your
+heart on any college in particular?"
+
+"I'm not sure I want to go to any college."
+
+Oh, now for a break into the Open Road, and a flaming neckerchief and
+far lands!
+
+Mr. Crittenden looked thoughtful.
+
+"I'll admit it's a waste of time for some, but I don't think it would be
+for you. I understand your wish to get to work, and begin to make your
+own way, but it's wiser not to start with too little preparation. And
+there's no need for it yet. It's no hardship for me. It's a real
+pleasure for us to be able to help you to an education...."
+
+Neale chewed his pen hard. How hard it was to have things out with a
+father! When a man takes it for granted that if you don't want to go to
+college you must want to be a bank-clerk or sell shoes, how are you to
+make him understand anything about Freedom and the Open Road and
+Comradeship and Vagabondia, distant countries and ships that smell of
+tar and salt like the wharves. How could a man in a three-button,
+pepper-and-salt cut-away understand? A man who wore a derby hat and went
+to his office in the city every day? And Father was getting fat, too,
+the three-button cut-away was heavily rounded. No--all that was in
+another world. There weren't any words to express any of it to a Father.
+So he said nothing, jabbing his pen into the blotting paper. Presently
+Father went on, "Of course, I should like to have you go to my old
+college, Williams, but Mother feels--we both feel--that it would be a
+pity to break up the family circle. What would you think of Columbia?
+They say since it has moved up to Morningside Heights there is more
+college life--and of course it's one of the leading Universities...."
+
+Another pause, so long that Neale felt bound to say something.
+
+"Oh, I guess I would like Columbia as well as any," he finally brought
+out.
+
+Father looked at him several minutes. Then he stood up, "We needn't
+settle it to-night, of course. Think it over; we'll talk it over again."
+
+But of course they never did. They never talked anything over. The
+subject was not raised again. Nevertheless it was somehow understood in
+the family that Neale was going to enter Columbia. And Neale made no
+protest. To tell the truth, as spring advanced and all his classmates
+began talking over their plans for next year, the uniformity of having a
+recognized respectable destination was not disagreeable. It saved talk,
+and useless talk about his affairs was one of the things Neale detested.
+Till he could be really independent and do as he liked without
+suffering the ignominy of having people know about it and talk him over,
+it might be better just to slide along the grooves provided, get the
+usual labels stuck on you. It couldn't do you any harm. They'd soak off
+easy enough, later on.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+With June came examinations at Hadley. Long, long experience and
+concentration on the subject had taught Hadley administrators exactly
+how to time their training so that when examinations came, the boys
+would be in the pink of condition. Two weeks later they would be stale,
+horribly, sickeningly stale, but nobody at Hadley cared a continental
+what happened two weeks after examinations. That was no business of
+theirs. Weary, but still docilely answering the crack of the
+ring-master's questions, the thoroughly disciplined Troupe of Trained
+Boys went through subject after subject, with the automatic rear and
+plunge of circus-riders breaking paper hoops. That was all right. Those
+were only the Hadley examinations. They expected to be able to pass
+those.
+
+But now for the College Entrance examinations, the Apollyon which from
+afar their professors at Hadley had pointed out to them, straddling over
+all their roads, belching out brimstone-fire on all who tried to pass.
+With much trepidation hidden under his usual decent impassivity, Neale
+journeyed up to take his first examinations at Columbia. He was glad
+that the first chanced to be in history. That was one of his good
+subjects. He stood a better chance there. With a careful air of
+carelessness, he went up to the proctor's desk, took one off the pile of
+the printed examination sheets, and with it in his hand, not entirely
+steady, he went back to his seat. Safe from observation there, he laid
+it before him and his eyes leaping to know the worst, took in the first
+three questions at one glance. Holy Smoke! Was this all? Was it for this
+he had sweat blood! There was an outline map of the United States, with
+a request to mark on it the location of such idiotically well-known
+places as Acadia, Pittsburgh, New Orleans. There was "_French and Indian
+Wars. State causes immediate and remote._" There was, "_What do you
+consider to be the relation between the Missouri Compromise and the
+Civil War? Justify your opinion in 500 words._"
+
+Neale leaned back in his chair faint with relief. Why, he could eat it
+up like candy. And he ate it up like candy; emerging from it, his head
+in the air and the world at his feet. This aspect caused him to be
+chastened by a gang of Sophomores who played hare and hounds with him
+(he was the hare), through Riverside Park from 120th to 81st Street,
+where his long legs finally distanced them.
+
+The other examinations were of the same sort, exactly the same sort, of
+a childish facility compared to anything the Hadley professors had
+described. Why--it came to Neale with a shock--why, the Hadley purpose
+had not been to enable them to pass the exams,--it had been to use
+Hadley boys to exalt the name of Hadley throughout the collegiate world!
+He felt a deep resentment, a burning bitterness at having been taken in;
+and by people who had consciously intended to, who had known very well
+what they were about, and had taken advantage of his defenselessness. He
+thought of those four years of driving drudgery and causeless dread, and
+hated Hadley as the quintessence of cheating. The idea that the subjects
+of his study had any value other than as legal tender for college
+entrance, that he was the better off for his thorough acquaintance with
+them did not once cross his mind. In that respect, too, he was a product
+of Hadley.
+
+He came away from the last examination, as stale and worthless as an
+overworked colt. The Sophomores let him alone. He looked to them as
+though he had not been able to pass.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A wide, green pasture with running brooks is the best place for a tired
+colt, and it was such a one that Neale now entered, his head hanging,
+his big legs like cotton twine. Oh, shucks! What was the use of
+anything?
+
+Grandfather and Grandmother kept a Crittenden shut mouth about his drawn
+face and sallow skin, and at first were careful to keep out of the way
+and let him even more alone than usual. He fell into bed at eight
+o'clock, unable to keep his eyes open another moment, and lay as though
+he were dead for twelve or fourteen hours every night, awaking to see
+the country sun shining in on the slant, hewed beams over his head, and
+to hear the country sounds, as clear as crystal coming in through the
+open window; the mill-brook chanting, the wind in the big maple, the
+bright, brazen call of the rooster, the sociable grunting of the pigs.
+
+The pigs were a great comfort to Neale at this time. After he had washed
+in the brown rain-water in his wash-bowl, and had gone down to the
+clean, sunny kitchen, always empty at this hour, and had eaten heartily
+of the fried potatoes, hash, and pan-cakes which he found waiting for
+him in the warming-oven of the kitchen stove, he sauntered out, a
+doughnut in his hand, to lean over the pig-pen and commune with the
+pigs. He stood there an hour at a time, occasionally scratching their
+backs as an excuse for staying so long with them, but for the most part
+gazing dreamily down, lost in the magnificent sensuality of their joy in
+life. They had always been fed an hour or so earlier, so there was no
+excitement in their profound beatitude, none of the homeric scramblings
+of meal-times. Neale was not ready for that yet. What he needed, what
+slowly floated him up from the depths, was their rapt ecstasy of
+repletion, their voluptuous pleasure in sinking thoughtfully into the
+cool, wet filth and the glow of their peace as they stood sunning
+themselves, visibly penetrated to every fleshly cell of their vast
+bodies, by the most perfect accord with the scheme of the universe, as
+they saw it. Neale gazed at them as they lay sprawled in the mud, or
+moved about very slowly, grunting very gently, occasionally turning upon
+the boy a small, wise, philosophic eye; and they did his heart good,
+like medicine.
+
+When he was ashamed to stand there any longer ... although no one ever
+commented on it, and indeed no one was there to see it, except
+Grandmother and Jenny busy in the house, he loitered along the path
+which led to the seldom-used foot-bridge across the mill-brook. The
+sound of the water always threw him into another contemplative pause
+here. He often lay down on the rusty-colored pine-needles and lay
+looking up at the distant dark green branches of the forest-roof, the
+voice of the water rising and falling, so insistent that he could think
+of nothing else, so unintelligible that it made him think of nothing at
+all, sliding, breaking, turning, slipping down, leaping up, like an
+endlessly curving line drawn endlessly before his eyes. He usually shut
+his eyes after a little, and not infrequently added an hour or two of
+sleep to the fourteen he had spent in his bed; this time, sleep not
+black and opaque, but shot through with the gleaming pattern of the
+brook's song.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One morning when he woke up, while he still lay in bed staring up at the
+beams over his head, some chance association of ideas made him think of
+Hadley and he was astonished to find his resentment against Hadley had
+gone. Hadley seemed very remote and vague to him. He did not hate it any
+more. He could scarcely remember what Hadley had been like. Nor anything
+that he had studied there. That day for the first time he went down to
+the mill, walking, not sauntering, his legs solid under him again.
+
+He found Grandfather and old Si "making out" very badly, with no boy to
+"take away." The last one had followed all his predecessors into the
+cotton-spinning mills at North Adams, and as this was haying-time no
+other help was to be had. The two old men had to stop the saw every few
+minutes till Si could run around and catch up on taking away. It was
+fretful work, like trying to lace up your shoes with one hand. Neale
+stood and watched them for a while. Then although he had not really
+meant to say it, he was not sorry to hear his voice suggesting, "Why
+don't you take me on? I haven't got anything else to do."
+
+"What say, Si?" asked Grandfather, laughing so at the idea, that Neale
+was nettled and had a picture of how unutterably lazy he had looked for
+the last fortnight!
+
+Si spit tobacco-juice into the mill-race and shifted his quid.
+
+"Wa'll, I know hands is scurse these days, but land! have we got down to
+taking _any_body?"
+
+Neale was used to the Yankee roughness which they meant for humor, but
+this touched him a little closely. Didn't they think he could do any
+work?
+
+Grandfather puckered his old face into a grin and nodded him into the
+job.
+
+"If so be so, then so be it. Kin or no kin, I guess we can afford to pay
+him what we were giving Hubbard."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So Neale bought a suit of overalls at the general store and began to
+work. For the first three days he wished with all his heart he'd kept
+his mouth shut. Handling green beech for ten hours a day was very
+different from helping out a half-hour at a time. Besides, his muscles
+and above all his hands were pitifully soft after an indoor winter and
+his fortnight of vegetating. It didn't seem worth while to make an ox of
+himself for five cents an hour and board--the wage of unskilled labor in
+that non-unionized Arcadia--but he was ashamed to quit on a job that was
+always handled by boys of his age. Nobody had asked him to do it. He had
+offered himself, pushed himself in. It would be too worthless to back
+out. But, oh gee! he was tired when he got through at six o'clock, and
+clumped heavily up the hill after Grandfather and Si, walking, it seemed
+to him, with as stiff and aged a gait as theirs. He shovelled supper up,
+starved, starved to his toes, and staggered to bed immediately
+afterward. The first week he lost five pounds. Thereafter he gained
+steadily, and all solid muscle.
+
+After a time he mastered the mill-hand's basic axiom, "Never lift a
+plank if you can slide it," his hands stopped blistering and hardened,
+and he grew muscles in various places up and down his back, where he had
+never had any before, so that the boards became singularly lighter in
+his hands.
+
+And then, just when he had mastered his job, the water-god took a hand
+in the game. Since the spring rains, there had been nothing but the
+gentlest showers. The mill-pond had shrunk to a pool, and grass began to
+show far down its dried-up sides. The water no longer ran over the
+mill-dam. One day about five o'clock the mill stopped, with a log
+half-sawed.
+
+"No water," said Silas, "got to shut down till the pond fills up." They
+sat down instantly, hanging their empty hands over their knees, in an
+ecstasy of idleness. They managed to finish that log by supper time, but
+the drought held.
+
+Soon they could saw only by pondfuls. A couple of hours in the early
+morning, a scant hour after lunch, and somewhat less after supper, in
+the twilight. Between times Si patched belts, or hoed corn, or sat and
+smoked, Grandfather pottered around the garden, or sat and smoked as he
+waited for the pond to fill.
+
+This was delightful--just enough work for exercise, and lots of
+blameless leisure. But with so many hours to read, Neale ran through at
+an alarming rate the books he had brought with him. Even "Vanity Fair"
+didn't hold out forever, and with Dobbin and Amelia finally united,
+Neale was at the end of his literary resources. Boredom settled down
+heavily. Si's reiterated anecdotes lost all savor; he had read all the
+books on the sitting-room book-shelves, or had given them up as
+hopeless. He felt bound by his contract to be on hand whenever the mill
+could be run, so that long walks were out of the question.
+
+At last as he sat gloomily killing time trying to whittle a wooden
+chain, and making a botch of it, he seemed to remember one rainy day
+when he was a little boy, wandering into a room with another book-case
+in it. Not being a little girl, he had had small interest in exploring
+the inside of the house, and where that room was he had forgotten; but
+if there had been any books in it, they were there still; no single
+decade ever made any change in that house. It was worth having a look.
+
+Anybody but a Crittenden, dealing with Crittendens, would have gone to
+Grandfather or Grandmother and asked where that book-case was. But it
+did not occur to Neale to do that, and if he had thought of the
+possibility, he would never have done it. That would have meant talk
+about his wanting to read, about what books he liked, and why he liked
+them ... all sorts of talk from which Neale shrank away as he did from
+physical pawing-over. He set off silently, with a casual air, upon his
+search, looking first into the darkened best-room, and going from that
+to the garret, the attic over the ell, and the woodshed loft. There were
+scattered books in all these places; in the best-room a few big,
+illustrated, show-off books, with gold on the bindings, like the Dore
+Bible he had so often looked at, and the big Pilgrim's Progress that he
+had opened only once. In the garret were dusty old school-books of past
+generations, and in the attic over the ell, piles of well-bound black
+books, with gold lettering, which turned out to be, desolatingly,
+nothing but by-gone Congressional Records and Census Reports. But he had
+not found the little brown book-case which he dimly remembered. Perhaps
+it wasn't here at all. Well, he'd try the chambers, mostly vacant now,
+which had been so full in the days Grandfather liked to tell about, when
+he was a little boy, one of fourteen children all growing up
+tumultuously together in this big old house.
+
+Neale went down the attic stairs and began to open doors. Nothing doing.
+Everywhere the same sparsely furnished room, with painted floor, braided
+mat, dark old bed and battered dresser, and ladder-back, flag-bottomed
+chairs. Their vacancy struck cold even on Neale's not very
+impressionable mind. "A room that hadn't been lived in for a long time
+was the limit, anyhow," he thought.
+
+But at the other end of the hall from his own low-ceilinged, little
+boy's room, he found one like it, rather more cheerful. The sun came in
+through a dormer window as it did in his own room. He remembered now
+that this was the room Father had always had, till he went away to
+college and after that to New York to live. And there, sure enough was
+the little book-case. Of course. He must have seen it lots of times,
+going by when the door was open. Now, what was in it? Maybe, after all,
+nothing to his purpose; probably this had been used like the shelves in
+the attic as a place to put volumes that nobody wanted to read.
+
+Mather's Invisible Providence--sounded religious. Neale did not even
+take it out. A big, old book with the back off proved, when he opened
+it, to be Rollin's Ancient History. With a true Hadley horror for
+learning anything out of hours, he slammed it shut, and took down the
+next one, Butler's Analogy. Seemed as though he had heard of that one.
+He sat down on the edge of the little four-poster, and opened it at
+random, skimming the pages. Oh, awful! Fierce! _Worse_ than religious!
+He put it back, discouraged, and ran over the titles on that shelf. A
+name struck his eye. Emerson. Wasn't there a poem by Emerson at the
+beginning of "The Children of the Zodiac?" Neale like every one else at
+that time had read a good deal of Kipling, although he was vague as to
+Emerson.
+
+He took down Volume I, and opened to the first page.
+
+"But thought is always prior to the fact; all the facts of history
+pre-exist in the mind as laws."
+
+"Pretty rough sledding!" thought Neale, "bad as Butler."
+
+He turned over a page. His eye was struck by a thick black pencil-mark
+along the margin; a passage that had interested somebody. Neale read, "I
+have no expectation that any man will read history aright, who thinks
+that what was done in a remote age, by men whose names have resounded
+far, has any deeper sense than what he is doing to-day."
+
+An idea knocked at Neale's head. He looked up from the book to take it
+in. It echoed and re-echoed in his brain, the first idea about history
+which had ever penetrated to fertilize the facts piled up by Hadley.
+Gee! there was something _to_ that! Neale began to walk around it
+speculatively. Wonder if that's true? Sounds good.
+
+Were there perhaps more passages marked? He turned over the pages again
+and came on another of the black pencil lines in the margin.
+
+"When a thought of Plato becomes a thought to me--when a truth that
+fired the soul of Pindar fires mine, time is no more."
+
+"Time is no more...." The grandeur of those four words unrolled a great
+scroll from before Neale's eyes.
+
+Say, who was it who had marked these places, anyhow? Who was it, who,
+before Neale, had sat in this low-ceilinged room and had caught that
+glimpse of timeless infinity? Neale turned back to the fly-leaf and
+found written in a familiar handwriting, "Daniel W. Crittenden, Williams
+1876."
+
+Why, that was _Father_!
+
+Neale stared at the name. Could it be Father? Yes, he had gone to
+Williams and although 1876 was incredibly long ago, that might have been
+Father's class. And this was Father's room! He looked about him,
+astonished.
+
+For the first time in his life it occurred to Neale that his father had
+not always been a father and a successful, conservative business man of
+forty-something, but that long, long ago he had also been a person.
+
+The idea made Neale feel very shy and queer as though through the pages
+of this chance-found book he were spying on the privacy of that
+unsuspecting person. But all the same, it was too strange that _Father_
+should have ... what else had he marked? Intensely curious, Neale turned
+the pages over. What else had struck the fancy of that young man, so
+many years ago, before he dreamed that he was to be a business man and a
+father. It was like looking straight into some one's heart; the first
+time Neale had ever dreamed of such a thing.
+
+There they were, those glimpses of what had fed his father's spirit.
+Neale read them because they were marked. Some he understood, others he
+only felt.
+
+"In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they
+come back to us with a certain alienated majesty."
+
+"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the
+conviction that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his
+portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, one kernel of
+nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that
+plot of ground which is given to him to till."
+
+"Life only avails, not having lived." Good enough!
+
+"For every stoic was a stoic, but in Christendom, where is the
+Christian?" every word underlined in ink.
+
+"Crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is a fruit that
+unsuspected ripens within the flower of pleasure which concealed it."
+On the margin the note was, "True, think of E. B." "Wonder who E. B.
+was," thought Neale, "but the old man's right."
+
+Ah, this is bully! "Life itself is a bubble and a skepticism, and a
+sleep within a sleep. Grant it, and as much more as they will ... but
+thou, God's darling, heed thy private dream; thou wilt not be missed in
+the scorning and skepticism; there are enough of them...."
+
+Why, this was not marked! The old man must have been asleep at the
+switch.
+
+Neale stopped turning the pages and jumping from one marked passage to
+another. He began to read for himself, a deep vibration within answering
+the organ-note which throbbed up at him out of the page.
+
+"This," he said to himself, after a long, absorbed silence, "this is my
+meat."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was a good place on top of the plate-beam of the mill, dry and
+safe. One morning before Grandfather and Si came down to work, Neale
+climbed up to this, dusted it clean of the litter of a century or more
+and put the three volumes there. Whenever the water got low, and the
+mill shut down, and Si went off to oil the harness and Grandfather to
+have a visit with Grandmother in the kitchen, Neale clambered up and
+clinging with one hand, reached in and took out a volume ... any one of
+the three. From there to the top of the highest lumber-pile outside, in
+the clean sunlight.
+
+The pungent smell of the newly-sawed wood, the purifying wind, wide
+space about him, solitude, silence, and this deep, strong voice,
+purifying, untroubled, speaking to him in a language which was his own,
+although he had not known it.
+
+
+
+
+"_TO-DAY SHALL BE THE SAME AS YESTERDAY_"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+March, 1902.
+
+Flora Allen found she was not following the words on the page, and let
+the book slowly fall shut. As it lay there among her hair-brushes and
+cold-cream pots, she looked at it with a listless distaste. How sick she
+was of reading instructive books! She never wanted to see another! She
+turned sideways in her chair with the gesture of a person about to stand
+up, but the motive power was not enough, and she continued to sit, one
+arm hanging over the back of her chair. Why get up? Why do anything more
+than anything else?
+
+How horribly lonely she was! How horribly empty her room was!
+
+The emptiness echoed in her ears. It was an echo she often heard. She
+always heard it more or less. She told herself that it was like the
+emptiness of a long stone corridor along which she seemed to be always
+hurrying, hoping to come to a door that would let her out into life--the
+warm, quivering life that other people--women in books for
+instance--seemed to have.
+
+Now she was tired. She had almost worn herself out in the long flight
+down the empty passage-way that led from birth to death. She began
+dreadfully to fear that she would never find a door. Wherever she
+thought she saw one ajar, it was slammed in her face.
+
+Looking back, how she envied her earlier rebellious unhappy self, bright
+with the animation of her naive hatred for Belton and America; quivering
+with her aspiring cry of "Europe" and "culture!" She had been married
+almost sixteen years--was it possible! A life-time! A life-time filled
+with nothing. A life-time spent between Belton and Bayonne! Oh, it
+wasn't fair! She had never had a chance--never! And soon it would be too
+late for her chance!
+
+How hideously fate always discriminated against her. She was always
+thrown in the dreariest places with the dreariest dead-and-alive people,
+flat and insipid and tiresome.
+
+Other women encountered big and moving things in their lives, knew
+adventure and excitement, had something to look forward to, something to
+look back on. But she had nothing but stagnation. And nobody to care
+_what_ she had, because they all assumed that if sawdust and chips were
+good enough for them, that diet ought to be good enough for any one.
+
+The days, that might be so precious, slid by, one like another, and
+there were not so very many days left to her, when vivid personal life
+might be possible. Where was she to find it, where, where? She was so
+_tired_ of stagnation.
+
+She was reduced to envying the exciting life of the women of the
+demi-monde of whom she was aware here as never before in her life, of
+whom everybody was conscious. It was indeed precisely to avoid
+resembling their bright colors and gaiety that all the appallingly
+respectable women wore such ill-fitting dark clothes and heavy shoes on
+the street, never broke their solemn silence in a public place, and
+never laughed freely anywhere except safely behind walls. The women they
+were so determined not to resemble seemed from a distance to Flora Allen
+the only people in France who openly enjoyed life as she thought people
+in Europe did, the only ones who bore the slightest relationship to the
+vivacious, animated picture of European existence as she had imagined it
+in Belton. Except, of course, such dusty, vulgar excursion-train crowds
+of common people as you saw at Lourdes. Flora hated vulgar people.
+
+And yet--ugh!--life couldn't be all gaiety and brightness for the women
+of the "half-world." That evening last year, when she had tried to
+lighten the deadly dullness by a little, playful flirtation with M.
+Fortier, such as any American would have answered by half-sentimental
+banter--she had never forgotten how frightened she had been by his
+instant misunderstanding--the horrible spring he had made at her in the
+dusk of the carriage; his brutal hands on her shoulders, his flabby, old
+face suddenly inflamed; the terrifying weight of his obese body against
+her hands as she pushed him furiously away! For months afterwards she
+had been afraid to smile at any man, as she said "good-evening"; and she
+read in their eyes, in all their eyes, what they would think of her if
+she but looked squarely and frankly at them.
+
+But wasn't there _ever_ to be anything for her, between the deadly flat
+propriety of things like those awful progressive-euchre parties in
+Belton and _that_ sort of thing?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Isabelle came into the room now, floor-brush and cleaning cloths in
+hand. She was surprised to find her mistress still before her
+dressing-table at half-past ten in the morning. To herself she made the
+comment, not by any means for the first time, "Well, the good God
+certainly never created a lazier good-for-nothing." Aloud she said
+respectfully, "I beg Madame's pardon for not knocking. I thought the
+room was empty. Do I disturb Madame by coming to clean?"
+
+Madame got up hastily, murmured a "no, oh no," and disappeared down the
+hall. Isabelle opened the windows, fell on her knees and set to work
+with energy, suppressing (lest her mistress still be within earshot) the
+lively dance-air which came to her lips, as she rattled the brush
+against the furniture and base-boards. She would be nineteen at her next
+birthday. What a lovely spring day, how sweet the air was, Jeanne had
+promised to let her walk out beyond the city-walls next Sunday afternoon
+with Pierre, and she had a new pair of shoes, real leather shoes, to
+show off there. Perhaps Pierre would take her to a confiserie and buy
+her some candied chestnuts! Her pulse beat strong and full, the
+dance-tune jigged merrily inside her head, she reached far under the bed
+with her brush, and enjoyed so heartily the elastic stretch and recoil
+of the muscles in her stout shoulders, that she reached again and again,
+although there was no need for it. "Jig! Jig! Pr-r-rt!" went the dance
+tune in her head ... new shoes ... sunshine ... candied chestnuts ...
+Pierre ... kisses.
+
+Her mistress, detesting the sight of Isabelle's broad, vacuous face had
+walked aimlessly away, anywhere to escape the slatternly flap of her
+heelless sandals, and the knock of her brush as she went through the
+never-varying routine of the morning cleaning. Around and around, every
+slow dawn brought exactly the same sequence of tiresome, insignificant
+events. Only stolid, vegetable natures like Isabelle's could endure it.
+Flora's small, thin, white hands fluttered piteously out into the air as
+though trying physically to lay hold on something else. There _must_ be
+something else. The tears stood for a moment in her blue eyes, not so
+blue now as they had been--oh, she knew how they were fading!
+
+She went through the corridor into the salon, and pulling the curtains
+aside, stepped into the alcove where her writing desk stood. But she had
+no intention of writing a letter. To whom? If she wrote what she really
+felt, there was nobody to understand her. She did not now, as had been
+her habit in the first days, go to the window and amuse an idle hour by
+looking down on the crowd below, the ox-drivers, the fish-women, the
+soldiers, the Spanish peddlers, all the bright-colored, foreign throng
+that had seemed to her like a page out of a book. Not for nothing had
+she lived four years in Bayonne! That first simple candor of hers was
+darkly dyed with new knowledge. She knew now that people talked about a
+woman still young enough to be desirable, who showed herself at an open
+window. She knew they talked, and she knew what they said. That hearsay
+knowledge had been sharpened by her gradual perception of the way
+certain men among the passers-by had looked up at her; and it had been
+driven deeply home one day, by one of those men. As she leaned out, her
+fair hair bright in the sun, a passer-by, a well-dressed man with a
+walking-stick in his hand, had stared hard at her, caught her eye,
+hesitated and looked again. Flora had not avoided his eye. Why should
+she? It was early in her life in the half-Spanish town. She did not fear
+men's eyes. When he saw this he turned and mounted the stairs to ring at
+the bell. Isabelle had let him in, not knowing him from any other
+caller. He stepped quietly to the salon, where the lady of the house,
+not dreaming that any one had entered, still stood before the window.
+When she turned in answer to a discreet little cough on his part, she
+had seen him standing there, hat in hand, waiting, with a singular
+little smile on his lips, a smile she never forgot.
+
+Oh, he had been perfectly polite, indeed quite desolated at having made
+a mistake, and had speedily bowed himself out of the place, apologizing
+gracefully to the moment of door-closing. But that very day, Flora Allen
+had the swathing lace-curtains put back in their original position,
+covering every inch of the glass; and when dusk fell, she was always the
+first to think of drawing the heavy damask curtains over them, so that
+there seemed to be no windows at all in the room.
+
+That seemed to her to express her life--no windows except these opening
+on what was physically sickening and coarse; no doors save those leading
+back and forth between the deadly familiarity of the imprisoning rooms.
+
+What was it she had not done which other women did to let them into the
+center of life, while she was exiled to the outer fringes? How was it
+that while other women's arms seemed to close about warm, living
+substances, hers grasped at shadows. Or did other women only pretend to
+be satisfied, for fear of facing the emptiness which echoed in her ears
+more and more loudly?
+
+Did they really and honestly find the absorbing joy in their children,
+which was the sentimental tradition? And if they did, how did they
+manage it? She loved Marise, nobody had a nicer little girl, nor a
+prettier. But the plain facts were that a little girl and a grown woman
+were very different beings, with very different needs and interests.
+There was nothing she would not do for Marise, she often told herself,
+if Marise needed it. But Marise apparently did not need a single thing
+her mother could do for her, any more than any healthy little girl
+absorbed in her school and play. There was no sense in doing
+uninteresting things for people when they were just as well off without
+them. She often looked at Marise across the dinner-table, fresh and
+well-groomed by Jeanne's competent hands, and wondered with a sincere
+bewilderment how any one could expect her to make an occupation out of
+loving a very busy, self-centered, much-occupied little girl, who left
+the house before her mother was out of bed, was gone all day, spent
+most of her few free hours with her music teacher, and in the nature of
+things went to bed just at the beginning of the evening.
+
+From time to time, when they had first come to Bayonne, she had made
+various attempts to connect her life with Marise's, annoyed by the
+affection Marise showed to Jeanne and to that singularly unattractive
+Mlle. Hasparren. Breaking through the tyrannical regularity of the
+child's hard-working life, she had carried her off, now for a day on the
+beach at Guethary, now for a day in the shops at Biarritz, once for a
+week-end at Saint Sauveur. But she had come home after such attempts,
+mortally weary and depressed. What was the use of trying to pretend that
+the things which delighted and amused a child were not inconceivably
+tiresome to a grown-up? Those endless hours while she sat in the sun on
+the sand (which got into her Shoes), and watched Marise inanely prance
+in the surf, or dig for clams which she did not care to keep after she
+had caught them! How could she see anything but very visible
+repulsiveness and dirt, and quite probably diseases in the lank stray
+dogs and cats which always turned up when Marise went along a street,
+and which Marise always felt an inexplicable and perverse desire to
+fondle? And those cheap bazaars, where Marise loved to linger, gazing
+with dazzled eyes at the trumpery, papier-mache gimcracks and
+playthings...! Of course, as Marise had grown less childish, walks had
+been free of hoop-rolling with its inevitable encounters with irascible
+old gentlemen's legs, but she had developed other tastes quite as
+bothersome. Flora's pretty, slender feet ached with fatigue at the
+recollection of the long hours she had stood beside Marise, who, sucking
+hard on a barley-sugar stick, and hooking her elbows over the parapet of
+the bridge over the Adour, gazed endlessly down on dirty, smelly ships
+being unloaded by dirty, smelly workmen.
+
+Flora had come to the conviction that the European custom of sending a
+servant around with children was based on a realistic recognition of
+facts. It was better for both sides; for she knew that, although she
+tried to be patient, Marise felt her lack in interest in chatter about
+whether the stone would hit the tree _this_ time, or how long Marise
+could walk over flagged sidewalks without once stepping on a crack. Good
+Heavens! What difference did it make! It was inevitable that a servant's
+vacant mind should be naturally more nearly on the childish level.
+
+And yet, once in a while, when Marise came into the salon to kiss her
+mother good-night, Flora's arms caught her fast, wistfully, feeling an
+aggrieved, helpless resentment at somehow being cheated out of what
+seemed to mean so much more to other mothers. Marise always felt
+instantly this special mood in her mother and always flashed up in an
+ardent return, straining her mother to her in a great silent hug. It was
+a good moment for them both, but so quickly gone.
+
+She looked now at her watch and remembered an engagement at her
+dressmaker's to try on a new house-dress. It suddenly made her sick to
+think of bothering with it. What was the use of a new house-dress? Who
+would see it except Horace, who never saw anything, or perhaps some one
+like Madame Fortier or Madame Garnier, who would think it unbecoming for
+a married woman to wear pretty, frilly things, or to think of anything
+but how to shove their husbands and sons and daughters ruthlessly ahead
+of other women's. Heavens above! How tiresome they were about their
+families! They never saw another thing in the world! Except scandalous
+suppositions about other people's actions.
+
+She discovered that she did not feel at all well, not nearly well enough
+to go to have the dress tried on. She was always tired. The enervating
+climate certainly did not agree with her. The doctor paid no real
+attention to her case, and the sulphur baths at Saint Sauveur had done
+her no good, for all they cost so much. How she had hated the dreary
+little village, full of sick women, perched on the narrow ledge, from
+which the sanitarium and the bathing establishment looked dizzily down
+into the frightful gorge where the gave of Gavarnie boiled among its
+rocks. It had given her materials for many a nightmare, that long black
+cleft in the earth, so full of the wild haste of the waters that the ear
+was never for an instant, asleep or awake, freed from their plunging
+roar. It had given her nightmare; and the sulphur baths had not helped
+her worn feeling of prostrated weakness in the least. And now she feared
+there was something else--her heart was certainly not quite normal.
+There were times as now (she put her fingers to her wrist) when sitting
+perfectly still, she felt her pulse drop almost to nothing. A muffled,
+listless beat, like a clock that is running down....
+
+"Running down?"--the chance phrase caught her attention. Was she running
+down to middle-age, without once having...? She started up, stung by the
+thought, frightened, angry--a way out into life--a way to escape from
+the stagnant pools where Fate always cast her--a way to find some
+vibrant stirring aim--if it were only for an hour--something to care
+about intensely! Other people did--women in books.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Jeanne, passing the door on her way out saw her mistress standing in the
+alcove, and paused to ask a question. "... if Madame wished Mademoiselle
+Marise to wear a white ribbon in her hair that afternoon? Because if so,
+a fresh one was needed." Her old voice thrilled as she pronounced the
+child's name.
+
+Madame brought her thoughts back from their wanderings with an effort.
+"A white ribbon?" she said vaguely.
+
+Jeanne reminded her, "The annual competition for the prize in music at
+Mademoiselle's school. The young ladies are to dress in white." Madame
+remembered, "Oh, yes, yes, yes." A pause, while she seemed to begin to
+drift away again, and then, with a perception that Jeanne still stood
+before her, waiting, "Why, yes, of course, buy a white ribbon if she
+needs it."
+
+Jeanne took her tall, black-clad body off into the hall and thence into
+the street, her mistress instantly gone from her mind. She had no time
+or strength that momentous day for anything beyond her passionate
+absorption in her dear girl's ordeal, Marise's first step into the
+battle of life. Her little Marise almost a young lady, her fifteenth
+birthday so near, contending with rival young ladies! Jeanne ground her
+strong yellow teeth and prayed furiously that the other competitors
+might all have cramps in their fingers, that a fog might come before
+their eyes, that they might have blinding headaches or at least that
+their petticoats might hang below their skirts and disgrace them as they
+walked across on the platform.
+
+She went to the best shop in town for the ribbon, the only detail
+lacking in the spotless costume which had been ready for days, pressed
+by Isabelle and pressed over again by herself. Jeanne had all the
+possible shades brought down; dead white--ivory white--pearl
+white--cream, she took them to the door to see how they looked in full
+daylight, and withdrawing herself by a swoop of her will power, from the
+clattering confusion of the street, she held up the rolls of ribbon one
+by one, imagining, as though Marise were there before her, each one
+against the gleaming dark head. Not the dead white--no, that looked like
+nun's stuff, and there was nothing of the nun in Marise, thank God! Not
+the pearl white--that bluish tinge--oh, no! that was only fit for a
+corpse--The cream? No, the white organdie of the dress would make it
+look dirty. The ivory--yes, the ivory.
+
+She carried the others back and looked hard at the ivory on both sides,
+making a deft fold or two with her stiff old fingers, to see how it
+would tie into a bow. She held it out at arm's length, her
+tightly-coifed, gargoyle-head on one side. She drew a long breath,
+having been so absorbed in the ribbon that she had forgotten to breathe
+for some time. "Well, give me a metre and a half," she said finally to
+the clerk, adding scornfully, "if that's the best you have!"
+Cloth-of-gold embroidered with pearls would not have satisfied her.
+
+As she came out, she turned her head sideways to estimate the height of
+the sun, having a low opinion of the accuracy of clocks, and was
+startled to find it so late. If she were to get across to the river, to
+the Holy Ghost Church, to set a candle burning before Our Lady for
+Marise's success, she would need to hurry, and of late Jeanne had found
+hurrying not so easy a process as it had been. If Marise was older, so
+was she, seventy-six her last birthday. It was harder for her to stretch
+her long legs to the old stride. Something happened to her breathing,
+all the blood seemed to go to her head and a blackness came before her
+eyes, so that once or twice she had been obliged like any weakling
+Parisian to lean against a wall or table till the roaring in her ears
+stopped and the dull heavy fullness in her head subsided. But Jeanne
+despised people who gave way to little notions like that, and had no
+intention of putting on any such airs. Certainly not now, when Marise's
+welfare was at stake.
+
+Of course she must make her prayer for her darling's success, and set a
+candle burning before Our Lady. The easy way to do this was to step up
+the street to the Cathedral but Jeanne did not care for the Cathedral,
+where all the heretic tourists from Biarritz went to stare, and which
+was as big and bare as the waiting-room of a railway station. How could
+Our Lady notice one little candle or one old woman there! No, Jeanne was
+set on lighting her candle in her own half-ruined, dark Church of the
+Holy Ghost, where the Basques go on pilgrimages to pray before the holy
+"Flight into Egypt." Our Lady of the Saint-Esprit had already performed
+many miracles for good Basques.... Oh, for a miracle now!
+
+She began to pray as swiftly and violently as she walked, "Blessed
+Mother of God, be with her this afternoon! Holy Infant Jesus! Help her!
+Blessed little Saint Theresa, help my darling!"
+
+She cast herself so vehemently into her supplications that she felt her
+heart blazing like a torch. She soared high out of her body. She was
+swinging along through space among the clouds, wrestling with the
+Saints, clinging to their knees, dominating them by the fury of her
+prayers.... No, they would not _dare_ refuse her.... She would not give
+them an instant's peace...!
+
+"Blessed St. Cecilia, stand at her side! Oh, most Holy Mother of God,
+guide her fingers...!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"... a way out into life? How could she find it? Other people did ...
+women in books...." Flora Allen's eyes moving slowly about the room fell
+on a photograph of the South Portal of the Bayonne Cathedral. It was
+framed in dark wood with a little Gothic arch at the top. It made her
+sick to look at it. How much trouble she had taken to get that
+photograph and to find the frame that would suit it. How eagerly she had
+hung it on the wall; and then had turned round to find it had made no
+difference in her life, or in any one's life. She looked at it now, her
+pretty lips set bitterly. What an idiot she had been! What difference
+_could_ it have made? What had she ever thought it could do for her, she
+and the other women of Belton, everlastingly studying something or
+other, going after culture with such eagerness, bringing it home,
+hanging it on the wall, and turning round to find it had changed
+nothing, nothing. How silly they were! Nobody over here cared anything
+for "culture" or art, or sculptures--except badly-dressed, queer people
+with socialistic ideas, like Marise's music-teacher.
+
+And they were right not to care. What was there in it for any one? What
+could she ever have thought there was? What earthly difference did the
+sculptures on the South Portal make to her, Flora Allen, driven along
+through life, without getting out of it a single one of the things women
+really wanted? What good did it do any one to go and gape at the
+paintings in the Museum, most of them ugly, and all of them as dead as
+dead? When what you wanted was to be alive! To have gaiety and sparkle
+and cheerfulness in your life, not to vegetate and mold like the
+primitive lower forms of life around you, like Isabelle; not to dry and
+harden and become a mere block of wood like old Jeanne!
+
+There was nothing unreasonable in not wanting to shrivel and stagnate.
+It was _right_ to want to have an ardent life, full and deep, that
+carried you out of yourself.
+
+But in her life, as by a fatality, there were never any occasions for
+emotion, for fresh, living sensations. Nothing ever happened to her that
+_could_ stir her to anything but petulance and boredom--nothing!
+nothing! If anything seemed to promise to--why, Fate always cut it
+short. Those wonderful afternoons when Sister Ste. Lucie had taken her
+to the convent to talk to Father Elie! From the first of her Bayonne
+life she had felt it very romantic to know real Catholics, who used
+holy-water and believed in saints, and she had loved to go round with
+Sister Ste. Lucie in her long black gown and frilled white coif, just
+like a picture out of a book. But this was different. When the dark,
+gaunt, hollow-eyed, old missionary-priest had given her one somber look
+and made the sign of the cross over her, she had felt her heart begin to
+beat faster. And as he talked to her afterwards, in the bare,
+white-washed parlor of the convent, with the light filtering in through
+the closed shutters, he had made her tremble with excitement, as he
+himself had trembled throughout all his thin powerful old body. His
+deep-set eyes had burned into her, as he talked, his emaciated fingers,
+scorched brown by tropical suns, shook as he touched the Crucifix. How
+he had yearned over her as he told her that, never, never would she know
+what it really was to live, till she cast out her stubborn unbelief and
+threw herself into the living arms of her true Mother, the Church of
+God. Flora had not known that she had any belief in particular to cast
+out ... she had never thought anything special about religion at all,
+one way or the other. She only wanted him to go on making her tremble
+and feel half-faint, while Sister Ste. Lucie clasped her rosary beads
+and prayed silently, the tears on her cheeks! And then the very next day
+the Father Superior of his Order had sent him off to Africa. Would he
+ever come back?
+
+Perhaps she _could_ become a Catholic. Why not? If it moved you like
+this just to be in contact with the Church--what must it bring you to be
+intimately of it? She remembered that in a book Sister Ste. Lucie had
+given her, stories were told of women who lost consciousness from sheer
+emotion, when they felt the consecrated wafer of Communion on their
+tongues; others who were caught up among the saints for hours, hearing
+heavenly music and when they came to themselves, the room was all
+scented richly with invisible roses....
+
+Also, without a word spoken she thought she had understood that the
+Marquise de Charmieres and all that old aristocratic set would not be so
+stand-offish if she were converted.
+
+But as this last idea slid into her mind from behind something else,
+there came with it as frighteningly as if she had seen the walls of her
+stone corridor closing in on her, a doubt that cast a stale sallow
+reflection on all her thoughts;--suppose she were really taken up by the
+Marquise and all the old aristocratic set, _would things be any
+different then_? Mightn't that, too, be just something else she had gone
+out after and brought home and hung on the wall, only to find that it
+changed nothing? She turned away from this idea, cold and frightened at
+all it implied ... that life was not deep at all, anywhere, but a
+shallow mud-hole, and that she had sunk far enough down to touch the
+bottom.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She heard now the uneven clattering jangle of the bell, heard Isabelle
+come out of the bed-room and go down the tile-paved corridor. Her
+sandals dragged at the heel as they always did in the morning before she
+put on her street shoes. That slatternly flap and drag of Isabelle's
+sandals made her mistress sick. She had spoken about them a thousand
+times. She had come to have a nervous hatred of the sound, had actually
+flown into rages over it, stamping and shrieking at Isabelle as she
+despised French housekeepers for doing. But how much impression had she
+made? For one morning, perhaps two, Isabelle laced up her early morning
+foot-gear, and after that she always forgot, slid back, flop, scuff,
+flop. That was the sort of sandals all the chambermaids in Bayonne wore
+for the first cleaning of the morning; that was the kind they always had
+worn; the American mistress might as well make up her mind to the fact
+that that was the kind they always would wear. There was about this
+trivial matter of the sandals, the same nightmare quality of passive,
+inert resistance to the idea of any change, which sagged smotheringly
+down on Flora Allen everywhere she turned in her French life. They
+called it stability. She and her friends in Belton had called it a
+"background of tradition."
+
+And yet she knew herself now incapable of going back to live in Belton
+where she would not be able always to depend on an Isabelle, where at
+times she would have to sweep her own rooms, and scour her own greasy
+pots herself. It made her sick to think of living that way again--nobody
+to bring her breakfast in the morning! To get up in a cold house with
+all the responsibility for everything on her shoulders. She felt weak
+at the thought of it.
+
+Isabelle scuffed in, the mail in one rough, strong, red hand, and
+flapped back to her cleaning. This time her mistress made no comment on
+her laceless sandals.
+
+What might there be in the mail? Nothing interesting, that she knew
+beforehand. She turned the letters over, recognizing from their very
+aspect the flatness of their contents. A letter from America? Oh, yes,
+only from Horace's old Cousin Hetty, for Marise. How she did keep up
+that correspondence! Did she suppose for a minute that any child could
+go on remembering some one she hadn't seen for four years, especially a
+child like Marise, so self-centered and absorbed in her own life, caring
+really about nothing but her music.
+
+A bill for Marise's school for the last quarter--to be put with Horace's
+mail; a circular from that something-or-other society Mlle. Hasparren
+was always fussing over, trying to raise money to keep some quartet
+running in Bayonne; a bill from the dressmaker; another circular--oh, as
+bad as Mlle. Hasparren's, that association with the long name, that took
+care of foundling babies--they were always wanting money too! A notice
+from the school, another bill? No, the announcement of the music-contest
+that afternoon. Heavens! Never again for her! Once was enough, to sit
+silently all a long afternoon on a teetering folding chair in the midst
+of stodgy, dowdy mothers, whose boring eyes saw right through the fabric
+of your dress to the safety-pin with which you had replaced a missing
+petticoat button, and who had no more interest in the music banged out
+by the schoolgirls than you had, except to wish ill to every child not
+their own.
+
+There was one letter, addressed to her in the pointed, fine convent
+handwriting of Soeur Ste. Lucie. She opened this with more interest. Ah,
+Father Elie was coming back. And wished to see her to-morrow afternoon.
+She felt a little stir of her pulse, the first in so long. What dress
+would she wear to the convent? Her black voile--and the little
+close-fitting hat?
+
+Still thinking of this she turned from the letters to the printed
+matter. There were a couple of battered, out-of-date New York
+newspapers, weary with their long traveling, and the deadly little
+Bayonne paper, with its high-flown, pious articles, and its nasty hints
+at scandals. She stood leaning against the table, looking down
+scornfully at it, till her eye caught a name, and her face changed.
+
+Mme. Garnier's son back from his two year stay in New York, where he had
+been studying American business methods....
+
+Flora Allen looked up quickly at her pretty blonde smiling reflection in
+the mirror, turning her head to get the three-quarter view which was her
+favorite. So he was back, was he? So he was back. His dear mama must
+have decided that he was now old enough to protect himself from
+golden-haired American ladies. So he was coming back to perch on the
+front edge of his chair and look volumes out of those great soft eyes of
+his that were so shy and yet could be so expressive. He was coming back
+to be so nervous and moved that his shaking fingers could not hold his
+tea-cup, and yet so persistent that he came week after week whenever she
+was at home to visitors; so timid that he hadn't a word to say for
+himself but so bold that he often spent the entire evening, romantically
+sitting on the bench across the way, staring up at her windows.
+
+He was coming back after his exile in America, was he? And two years
+older. Well, we would see what we would see. And in the meantime Father
+Elie could wait.
+
+She had a singular little smile on her lips, as she turned from this
+item to a card from Horace, saying that business would keep him longer
+in Bordeaux than he had thought and he would not be back till a week
+from Saturday. She tossed this card with the letters on the table, and
+began to turn over the canary-colored books scattered on her desk. No,
+the volume was not there. She must have put it back long ago in the
+book-case. She ran her finger along the titles on a shelf near her,
+found it, pulled it out. With it in her hand she sank down on the
+chaise-longue. But before she began to read, she sat for a moment, her
+lips curved, remembering what was in it, and remembering how more than
+two years ago she had looked up from it to see Jean-Pierre Garnier for
+the first time. Yes....
+
+She opened the book, fluttered the pages, read a little here and there;
+and then, as if slowly drawn by an undertow, sank into the book, with a
+long breath.
+
+After a time Jeanne let herself in, stood for an instant in the door,
+despising her mistress, and passed on to Marise's room. But the
+novel-reader heard nothing, drowned deep in the book, reading very
+slowly, her eyes dwelling long on every word. "... I wakened, thinking I
+heard my name called, slipped out of bed and went to the window. The
+moon poured liquid silver upon the garden, and there in the midst of it
+stood Urbain, slim and young as a lady's page, his soft eyes glittering
+like jewels. With a bound he leaped up towards me, and found a foot-hold
+on the rough stones of the old wall, so that he stood beside me with
+only the low window-sill between us. He took my hand in his. He was
+trembling like a leaf. He looked at me imploringly."
+
+"'Go! Go! Urbain!' I whispered, trying to steel my heart against his
+youth and ardor, 'Go, I am like an old woman to thee, a mere child.' His
+answer was to put one trembling arm around my bare shoulders and gently
+lay his velvet cheek upon my breast. I felt myself melting, melting in a
+delicious languor. After all, why not? Where would the dear boy find a
+more devoted and delicate initiation into life.... Think into whose
+hands he might fall if I repulsed him!
+
+"He raised his face adoringly to mine, drew me down to his lips ... his
+young, firm lips ... sweet as the petals of a rose ... perfumed with
+youth. I closed my eyes...."
+
+The only break in the intense immobility of the reader was that
+occasionally she moistened her lips with her tongue, and once in a while
+she drew a long, sighing breath.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+"There!" said Madame Garnier, scanning the chair-filled assembly-room
+from the back, "up there in the second row there are three seats. We can
+take two and hold one and perhaps after Danielle has played, she can
+come and sit by us."
+
+They were in plenty of time, long before the contest began, so that she
+gave herself the pleasure of walking slowly down the aisle, stopping
+wherever she saw a familiar face to exchange greetings and to say
+proudly, "Yes, Jean-Pierre is returned from America. Looking very well,
+isn't he? Yes, that's the style in America, neither beard nor mustache.
+But I think after a while he'll let his mustache grow again. I tell him
+he looks like a priest."
+
+But she did not think that he looked in the least like a priest. She
+thought him the most beautiful young man in the world, and she was so
+ecstatically happy to have him back again after the rending anguish of
+the two years' separation, that she forgave him all the anxiety he had
+caused them by that foolish infatuation of his. That was in the past
+now, she hoped. Perhaps he had outgrown his foolish idea, as they had
+hoped he might when they had sent him away. He had certainly said
+nothing about it in any of his letters. But even if he hadn't forgotten,
+if he but knew it, she was more than ready to yield the point to him, to
+yield anything that would end his alienation from her, that would bring
+him back to live in Bayonne. She had grown old during those two endless
+years. They had broken her resolution. He was too precious. She could
+deny him nothing. If he still wanted it, why, let him _have_ his little
+American girl, as soon as she was old enough to marry. She might be made
+over into a passable wife for Jean-Pierre. There was no doubt she was
+pretty and fine, with nice hands and feet; and she seemed gentle and
+quiet. Once get her away from those impossible parents, into a decent
+home...!
+
+Her heart was rippling full with joy to feel Jean-Pierre there beside
+her. At times it overflowed, and she all but opened her lips to tell him
+she would sacrifice anything for him, that she would put no obstacle in
+his way. But for the moment a prudent thought restrained her. She would
+wait and see whether perhaps Jean-Pierre had not forgotten that curious
+infatuation with a mere child. There was no use putting the idea back in
+his head, if his exile and two years' time had blotted it out.
+
+They sat in a decorous silence, waiting for the beginning of the
+program. Madame Garnier moved nearer to Jean-Pierre, for the pleasure of
+feeling his arm, a man's arm now, inside a very well-cut masculine
+coat-sleeve. She remembered what it had been, the rosy translucent flesh
+of her first baby, then the little thin, white arm of his long ailing
+boyhood--how she had fought with ill-health to keep him--all those
+years, never an instant's relaxation of her care, her prayers, her
+piercing anxiety! Oh, well, it was all over now. There he sat, a
+splendid young man, still a little delicate, but sound and well. Her
+reward had come. How goldenly the years stretched out before her!
+Perhaps it was just as well to have him marry young, to have his wife
+come to him intact in the first bloom of her early girlhood. He himself
+was so unworldly, he would never be able to manage an older woman. A
+fleeting picture came to her of a rosy baby's face--Jean-Pierre's first
+child. The thought flooded over her, rich with pride and joy.
+
+She continued to gaze at a certain spot in the curtain, her face framed
+in her heavy velvet hat, composed in decorous vacancy.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Beside her Jean-Pierre also fixed his eyes on a certain spot in the
+curtain, and composed his face to quiet. But he was afraid of the
+silence. He wished his mother had gone on chatting, or that they had sat
+down near acquaintances with whom he would have been forced to talk.
+Then he would not have been so conscious of the dryness of his mouth, of
+the roaring of his pulse in his ears. He stared hard at the curtain,
+trying to interest his eyes in the design of the tapestry. But they
+could see nothing but what they had seen for two years, liquid dark eyes
+looking straight into his heart, his poor heart that he could not hide
+from them; dark eyes that seemed to be looking wistfully for something
+they did not find, something that he knew he could give, something that
+he longed to give with such an abandon of desire that he felt now, as so
+many times before, the sweat start out on his forehead.
+
+He shifted his position, folded his arms, looked away from the curtain
+and down at the floor. Come, come, this was becoming nothing more than a
+fixed idea, a mania! It was idiocy to let it master him so! Good God,
+what had she been but a little girl! What was she now but a little girl!
+A girl of fifteen was no more than a child. His heart sprang up at him
+with a tiger's leap--"only three more years to wait--perhaps only two
+more--." He frowned, cleared his throat, and taking his handkerchief out
+of his pocket, passed it across his lips.
+
+And then she might be totally changed by this time; girls often did
+change. Suppose she had grown very stout--or were gawkily thin like his
+sister Danielle, or bold and forward, or dull. He rolled himself in the
+hair-shirt of all the possible changes for the worse, and felt his
+passion burn hotter. Well, he would see. In a few moments he would see.
+He looked at his watch.
+
+"It must soon begin," said his mother anxiously, leaning towards him,
+evidently fearing that the delay might bore him.
+
+He smiled at her reassuringly, and put his watch back. Dear Maman! How
+she did spoil him! How he had missed her, missed his home, those two
+years in America. He thought of the boarding-house on 59th Street with a
+qualm. How good it was to get back to a real home.
+
+But there were fine things in America, too, even if they did not know
+how to create real homes, even if the men did not know how to love their
+mothers, or cherish their wives. He had learned a great deal there, a
+great deal even beyond the revelation of new business methods. What he
+had learned commercially was enormous! He faced his future here in
+France, sure of success.
+
+But he had taken in other things too--he was thankful that he had been
+to Marise's native country and had learned something about the attitude
+towards women there--not that he would ever, ever treat Marise as
+American wives were treated, with that rough-and-ready, cowboy lack of
+ceremony, nor would he ever neglect her, leave her out of his life, as
+American husbands did. He would know how to combine the American honesty
+and sincerity with what no American ever felt or showed, with what no
+American woman ever experienced--tenderness, cherishing tenderness. He
+would be tender for Marise as no other human being could be; he would
+find the most exquisite ways to surround her with tenderness, to protect
+that sweet mouth of hers from bitterness or sorrow, or knowledge of the
+world's evil.
+
+He looked down steadily at the floor, a knot in his throat, his heart
+aching, and swallowed hard.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Three wooden thumps sounded from the platform, and the curtain drew
+itself aside, showing the stage decorated with a stand, two potted
+palms, an armchair, and a sprawling black grand piano with two
+cane-bottomed chairs before it.
+
+From the wings trudged in a red-cheeked young girl, with a large bust,
+and brawny rough arms, hanging down over her starched white dress.
+Behind her trotted a short withered elderly woman, a black silk waist
+crossed over her flat chest, her scanty gray hair smoothed down in thin
+bandeaux over her ears. They sat down before the piano, opened the
+music, carried by the older woman, waited till she had adjusted drooping
+eye-glasses on her high thin nose, and had peeringly found her place.
+Then the young girl began to pound out the Raindrop Prelude while the
+other turned over the pages.
+
+The audience preserved a respectful silence, bestowing a minute
+attention on the hang of the player's skirt, the fit of her bodice, the
+crimped waves of her light brown hair, her over-plump hands, and the
+bulging patent-leather shoes, which she pressed nervously up and down on
+the pedals.
+
+Something seemed to break and clear away in Jean-Pierre's head, like
+fumes drifting away from a shattered retort. So this was a school-girl,
+this solid, unformed lump of human flesh, neither child nor woman, who
+had lost a child's poetry and had not yet come to woman's seductiveness.
+He looked coolly at the girl (his mother whispered her name, the younger
+sister of a lycee friend of his), dissecting her with his eyes,
+immeasurably relieved. Was it for an amorphous creature like this, too
+old to kiss on the cheek, too young to kiss on the mouth, that he had
+suffered? Why, it was nothing; a mere morbid whim of his ignorant
+boyhood. How right Maman had been in making Papa send him away from it!
+He had grown to be a man without realizing it, a man of the world, in no
+danger of losing his head over chits.
+
+The Prelude was finished. The player got to her feet, and bowed
+self-consciously to the muted thuddings of gloved palms on gloved palms
+which greeted the cessation of her activities. She got herself off the
+stage, walking heavily in her too-tight slippers. Jean-Pierre, who sat
+at one side could see a little behind the scenes and observed that as
+soon as she thought she was out of sight of the audience, she gave way
+to childish relief that the ordeal was over, and skipped forward,
+running. He suppressed a supercilious smile of aesthetic scorn. Her body,
+as large and heavy as a woman's, no longer expressed the impulses of the
+child she still was. She skipped clumsily, with an inelastic energy of
+gesture like a cow capering in a spring-time pasture. Jean-Pierre felt
+the keenest pleasure in his ruthless perception of her lack of grace.
+This was emancipation!
+
+"She plays very nicely," murmured his mother, on the general chance that
+some member of her family might be sitting within earshot.
+
+"Yes, very agreeably," he concurred.
+
+Neither of them had heard a note of the music.
+
+They continued to sit in decorous silence, looking with vacant faces
+straight before them, till the next performer appeared. This was Elise
+Fortier, whom they were both prepared to detest because of her father
+and mother and brother. They did detest her, everything about her from
+her thin, dry hair, frizzed out to imitate abundance, to her shifty eyes
+exactly like her mother's, from her stooping shoulders, to her long bony
+hands, which clattered out loudly the Schubert Marche Militaire. When
+she had finished, "Really quite a talent," observed Mme. Garnier taking
+pains to be audible; and, "Remarkable for her age," agreed Jean-Pierre.
+
+He was relaxing morally, in an inexpressible ease at finding his head
+clear, his heart at rest. To own yourself, to look at life from behind a
+stout wall of critical cynicism--it was to be in safety at last! He
+barely glanced at the next player, a nondescript, precocious child, who
+murdered a Moment Musical, her short thin legs dangling from the stool.
+And the next, the one who played the Liebestraum, a tall young lady with
+the self-admiring graces and manners of an opera singer on the concert
+platform. He looked at his watch again and wondered how long it would be
+before the stupid school performance would be over, and he could get
+away for an aperitif at the Cafe du Grand Bouleau on the Place d'Armes
+and an evening with----
+
+He saw that another player was coming forward, a slim tall girl with
+thick shining dark hair held back by a white ribbon like the others. She
+stood for an instant to bow to the audience before sitting down at the
+piano, and he could look up full into her unconscious face, gazing out
+over his head impersonally with shy, liquid, dark eyes. She was
+breathing a little rapidly, her young breast rising and falling under
+the filmy white of her dress. A timid propitiatory smile curved her
+sensitive mouth and arched her long, finely-drawn eyebrows.
+
+Not a muscle of Jean-Pierre's face changed; every line of his careless,
+confident attitude froze taut as it was. And underneath this motionless
+exterior, he felt his heart hotly, joyfully weeping in a passion of
+thanksgiving, like a frightened lost child who has come into the right
+way. He lost all sense of connection with his body and yearning,
+worshipping, clamoring, imperiously calling, humbly beseeching, he gazed
+out from the bars of his immobile, well-dressed external self at the
+girl sitting before the piano. Two years, two long years of exile, how
+could life ever make up to him for those two lost years? How he had
+starved! His famished eyes fed ravenously on what they saw, the supple,
+elastic slimness of the young body, the fine, thin ankle and shapely
+foot, the creamy forearm, the agile, strong, white fingers, so bravely
+flinging out harmonies beyond the comprehension of the smooth broad
+brow, inviolate, intact, innocent, ignorant, which bent its full child's
+curve over the keys.
+
+Jean-Pierre looked and looked, prostrating himself in awe before the
+revelation of divine, stainless youth. Never till that moment, he told
+himself, had he understood the meaning of the holy word, virgin.
+
+And he had thought, those two long years, that he had always held her
+before his eyes! He had remembered nothing, nothing of what she was.
+Yet, how could he have divined what she was becoming--that mouth, her
+pure girl's mouth, cleanly drawn in scarlet against the flower-like
+flesh perfumed with youth. Would he--would he know the first cool touch
+of those young lips ... he found that he could see her no more, for a
+mist before his eyes, and yet he continued to strain his eyes through
+the mist towards where she sat.
+
+Some one touched him on the arm. It was Maman--Maman who looked at him
+in tender sympathy. As their glance met, she smiled at him, and nodded
+her head once, reassuringly. She looked as she had when he was a little
+boy, and she had yielded at last to some desperately held whim of his.
+Dearest Maman! It was a promise she gave him silently, a promise to help
+him towards his happiness. She too had succumbed to Marise. Who would
+not? He pressed her hand gently, and smiled in return. A calm peace came
+upon him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Madame Garnier knew very well beforehand when the little American girl
+was to come on the program, and after that ill-bred, over-dressed Yvonne
+Bredier had wriggled and grinned her way off the stage, she felt an
+anxious, nervous expectation. Jean-Pierre had no idea what was coming.
+She could feel that. Although she dared not change her position to look
+at him, she was acutely aware of the relaxed careless pose of his body,
+and of the nonchalant turn of his head as he glanced at the girl who now
+came forward on the stage.
+
+And then she felt with that sixth sense of her passion for Jean-Pierre
+that he had been struck, had been pierced, as though a knife had thrust
+him through and through. Although he had not moved--because he had not
+moved, had not changed a line of his careless attitude, she divined that
+he had been stricken into immobility. What was it? Was it the shock of
+disillusion, of disappointment at prosaic reality after a long, romantic
+dream? Or did he still find in the girl whatever strange sorcery had so
+bewitched his boyish fancy?
+
+She herself sat as stiffly motionless as he, suffering so exquisite a
+torture of suspense that she dared not bring herself to end it by a look
+at his face.
+
+Some one back of her coughed, and the sound broke the spell. She drew a
+long breath and resolutely turned her head towards her son.
+
+"Oh, my Jean-Pierre, oh, my little boy! is it so you feel? Oh, my
+darling, do you want her, do you want anything in the world like that?
+My little boy, a man! To think that it is my little boy, thus burning
+with a man's desire! Oh, yes, Jean-Pierre, you shall have her ... what
+is your mother for but to help you have what you want? Oh, poor boy,
+poor boy, to look at any woman so.... Oh, Jean-Pierre, if you knew
+women, how they only live to fool men ... no woman on earth is
+worth...."
+
+She saw now that his flaming young eyes were veiled with tears. She
+touched his arm, she smiled at him, closer to him than since his early
+childhood. And he took her hand, he smiled back, he looked at her as he
+had not once since his infatuation began--like her son, her only son
+once more letting her into his heart. She held tightly to his hand, now
+happy and at peace.
+
+Thus together, hand in hand, they were looking up at the stage when the
+girl struck the final chord, and rising, turned once more towards the
+front to make her bow in acknowledgment of the applause. The excitement,
+the effort, had brought a shell-like color into her subtly modeled
+cheeks. Once more she looked out into the audience impersonally and
+then, as she turned to go, unconsciously drawn by the intense gaze of
+the couple in the second row, her dark eyes dropped to them for an
+instant's glance of friendly recognition. Madame Garnier felt her son
+draw a sudden, gasping breath through half-open lips and tighten his
+hold on her hand.
+
+During the rest of the program her thoughts and plans rose in a busy
+circling swarm. After all, there were advantages. It might be much
+worse! Impressionable, sensitive, inexperienced as Jean-Pierre was, it
+might very well have been some mature married woman in search of a new
+sensation who had thus caught his first young passion. Or even not his
+passion at all. Even if he himself had felt nothing, any woman could
+have victimized him by working on that foolish sensibility of his. If
+she could make him think--and his mother always had a scared sense of
+how easy that would be--that she was in love with him, he would never
+know how to retreat, as more brutal men knew so well how to do. She had
+always been afraid of some such entanglement as that, in which
+Jean-Pierre's weakness (in her heart she called it plainly that, and not
+chivalry or sensibility) would make him a helpless victim of a woman
+either an old fool herself or a calculating sensualist. Heavens! How
+many dangers there were in the world for one's son! And sons could not
+be guarded like daughters, by keeping them under your thumb. There were
+also, for such a romantic, unworldly boy as Jean-Pierre, all the
+variations on the Camille theme. How easily some shrewd woman of the
+demi-monde could have pulled the wool over his eyes! Madame Garnier had
+no doubts that Jean-Pierre knew such women. Her son was a man like all
+other men, for all his poetic, high-strung ideas, and had certainly had
+his part of an ordinary man's life, especially those last two years away
+from home, irresponsible and alone. Oh, yes, the more she thought
+shudderingly of the dangers he had escaped, the more harmless appeared
+this fancy for a school girl. And if his fancy was to light on a young
+girl, in some ways it was more convenient to have her a foreigner with
+no family, so to speak, rather than a girl of Bayonne society, whose
+family would expect to have much to say about all the arrangements of
+Jean-Pierre's life. Heavens! suppose it had been Elise Fortier--think of
+Jean-Pierre saddled with Madame Fortier as a mother-in-law! Not that
+that worthless idle American mother-in-law was much better; except that
+those people _must_ go back to America some time! Everybody did go back
+to his native country ultimately. And too, she was a weak, foolish thing
+who would never have the force to make trouble. Look at the way she let
+herself be run by her servants. Also, until now, she had paid precious
+little attention to her daughter; there was no reason to think she would
+develop any more interest in her later on. And the child herself seemed
+malleable material. There was no doubt she would be a pretty woman, and
+marrying very young, she would certainly assimilate the standards of the
+Garnier family.
+
+When the concert was over, she said to Jean-Pierre, "If you like, we
+will wait till the girls come out, and walk home with Danielle and her
+classmates." As she spoke she nodded to old Jeanne Amigorena, the cook
+in the American family, who stood there, also waiting, her young
+mistress' cloak and hat on her arm. It occurred to her that one of the
+first things to do would be to eliminate that servant. She probably knew
+altogether too much about Marise's family. It would not be prudent to
+have her around a young menage; and anyhow, old servants were an
+intolerable nuisance with their airs of belonging to the family.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Behind the scenes where the girls were waiting for the concert to begin,
+there had been a deal of giggling and whispering and rustling.
+Mademoiselle Vivier, chosen to turn the pages for the players because
+she was so severe it was thought she could keep them in order, was
+"gend'arming around" as the girls called it, pouncing on one group for
+laughing too loud, and on another for making too much noise as they
+executed grotesque caricatures of the way they intended to make their
+entries on the stage. The moment her back was turned, they whispered
+and giggled and pranced more wildly than ever, turning deep bows into
+pirouettes, shaking out their full skirts and whirling about like
+dervishes. Everybody took care to lose her music and get it all mixed up
+with everybody's else, just to see Mlle. Vivier go into the air.
+
+"Here's that missing sheet from your Schubert, Marguerite! Oh, no, it's
+Gabrielle's Chopin!"
+
+"Oh, all the scherzo pages have gone from my Delibes!"
+
+"Mademoiselle, Mademoiselle, I feel so faint, I don't believe I _can_
+play."
+
+"Oh, Mademoiselle, I forgot to bring my--oh, yes, here it is, right
+under Danielle! Get up, Danielle! Get up! _Mademoiselle!_ Danielle
+Garnier won't get off my music! Oh, Mademoiselle, can't I play my
+Nocturne instead of the Autumn Leaves! I _feel_ like a nocturne; just
+ready to go to sleep."
+
+Poor Mademoiselle Vivier, single-handed as she was, grew more and more
+frantic, rushing about, a dark red flush on her thin face, crying, "Sh,
+_sh_!" much more loudly than the girls were whispering, exhorting them
+angrily to have some manners, not to behave like so many barbarians, and
+to realize the seriousness of the occasion, the Gambert music prize at
+stake!
+
+But one of those flint-like school traditions originating God only knows
+how, and utterly impervious to exhortations from any faculty, decreed in
+that school that the Gambert music prize was a joke, a scream of a joke.
+The girls would kill themselves with work and worry to win any other
+prize, for dramatic recitation, for dancing, even for French
+composition, much as they hated that, but care who won the music prize
+they would not; although, of course, it was exciting to have no classes
+that afternoon, to wear your best white dress and parade out on the
+stage. They had handed down from one school generation to another the
+fixed idea that M. Gambert had been short, red-faced and ridiculously
+fat, and they enraged their teachers by drawing on the margins of their
+music, impudent sketches of a paunchy, bald little man ceremoniously
+bestowing a huge wreath on a knock-kneed, scrawny girl. Whereas, as a
+matter of historic fact, M. Gambert had been a very good-looking
+bourgeois, who in his youth had been a dashing lieutenant under Napoleon
+I. Also the Gambert prize was not a wreath at all but an album of piano
+music, beautifully bound in bright red leather, which, because the
+Mother Superior feared arousing the vanity of the winner, was privately
+bestowed behind the scenes. But historic facts have no bearing on a
+cherished school joke of long standing. For the girls, the Gambert prize
+continued always to be one gigantic lark, one of those perennial farces,
+the indestructible quality of which so endears them to fourteen and
+fifteen year olds.
+
+This year they had a new variation on their usual fooleries. Elise
+Fortier told them that her grown-up young lady cousin had discovered
+something as good as the rouge which was so strictly forbidden to them
+by the Sisters, that its very name was not allowed to be pronounced in
+school. If you bent over double and hung your head upside down, way
+over, thus, till it was on the same level with your knees, and held it
+there till you felt as though you'd burst, you'd have the loveliest
+color in your cheeks, just like an actress.
+
+Of course they all wanted to look like actresses. What could be more
+delightful than to look like an actress!
+
+In an instant the horrified Mademoiselle Vivier was treated to an
+appalling spectacle. All of her charges utterly forgetting their manners
+or even decency, were stooping double, their full starched skirts
+sticking out at acute angles behind, and to the tune of muffled shrieks
+of laughter were dangling and shaking their heads, like so many
+lunatics, their carefully dressed hair sweeping the floor. She rushed at
+the nearest one, Marise Allen, and forced her back to an upright
+position. But this did not improve things. When Marise caught a glimpse
+of the others, like great white mushrooms, stooping and shaking, she
+burst out into anything but a muffled shout of laughter, which brought
+them all up, one after another, to gaze and scream, and lean, convulsed
+and hysterical, against the walls.
+
+It was a critical moment. The curtain was due to go up, and the girls
+were really out of hand. Mademoiselle Vivier could do nothing with them.
+They had lost control of themselves; her experienced eye knew the
+signs. In a moment more, one of the more high-strung ones would begin to
+cry and then.... Good God! what a mess! What diabolically infernal
+creatures girls were to handle! How sick she was of their imbecility!
+
+She ran hastily around to the side door and beckoning in the Mother
+Superior told her what was happening. The nun nodded understandingly,
+meditated for an instant, casting about in her mind, and then, her aged
+face taking on an expression of majestic calm, she swept back to the
+little room behind the stage. The girls were startled to see her and
+alarmed by the intense gravity of her face.
+
+"My children," she said quietly in the clear, gentle, masterful voice
+which had kept the Community in whole-hearted subservience to her for
+thirty years, "my children." She bent her wasted old face on them,
+raising one thin white hand, peremptorily. Her long flowing black sleeve
+gave a commanding amplitude to this gesture. "My little children, lift
+up your hearts...." She waited an instant, till she held every eye, and
+then she said reverently, "My children, at every important moment of our
+lives we must turn to Our Very Holy Mother, to bless us. Before you go
+on the stage to-day, to represent your school in public, and to do honor
+to music, which God has blessed as an instrument of good, let us pray
+Our Mother to be with you, and guide you."
+
+She bowed her head. Hypnotically, all the young heads bowed with hers.
+She began in a low murmur, "Ave Maria, sancta tu in mulieribus...." All
+the young voices murmured with her, discharging in the reverenced words,
+the nervous tension of their excitement and frolic. When they finished,
+they were all quiet, with serious faces. The Mother Superior raised her
+hand over them, murmuring a short, inaudible prayer of her own. There
+was an instant's silence.
+
+"Go tell Mathurin to raise the curtain," said the Reverend Mother
+hurriedly in a low tone to Mademoiselle Vivier; a command which
+Mademoiselle Vivier lost no time in executing.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+Marise had noticed as she left the stage, that Madame Garnier was there
+with her son,--oh, yes, Danielle _had_ said her brother was back from
+America. Now he'd be tagging around everywhere, tied to his mother's
+apron-strings, as Papa said all young Frenchmen were. Yes, they were
+holding hands this minute. How Papa would laugh to see that, as much as
+he did when Frenchmen with beards kissed each other. And now he'd be
+everlastingly coming in with his tiresome mother on Maman's days at
+home, to fidget and stammer and drop his teaspoon. Oh, well, she thought
+with a superior condescension, he had been hardly more than a boy, just
+out of the lycee, only twenty-one. He might be better now. Perhaps he
+had got rid of a little of his shyness in New York; although
+twenty-three, for a _man_, was of course no age at all.
+
+The fashion at school just then, was to look down on boys and young men
+as green and insipid. The ideal of all the girls was an _old_ man of
+forty, with white hair, and black eyebrows, a little pointed gray beard,
+and such sad, sad eyes! Every girl was waiting for such a chance to
+devote herself to healing the wounds made by other women, faithless,
+heartless creatures who had ravaged his youth and destroyed his faith.
+To prove to him what a woman's fidelity and love could be, and then die
+in his remorseful arms, of slow consumption brought on by his
+neglect...! Or, as the pious ones had it, to bring him back to the
+Church, and have him become a monk after your death. Or, perhaps, as
+some of the more dramatic ones imagined the matter, to find a plot
+against his life, and to sacrifice yourself to defeat it, throwing back
+at the last moment the hood of your long dark cloak, and showing a
+beautiful white satin gown, stained with your heart's blood, as you
+gasped out, "For you, for you, adored Rene."
+
+The books from which the girls got these ideas, and many others not so
+harmless, were kept in a hole hidden behind a big loose stone in the end
+wall of the school garden. Though they were religiously wrapped in
+oil-cloth, the damp did more or less penetrate. But spots of green mold
+and limp damp pages which tore unless you held your breath as you turned
+them, only added to their charm as you read them, two or three heads
+bent over the page, while a friend kept guard at the turn of the path by
+the magnolia tree.
+
+Marise had read them with the others, and although neither Father nor
+Maman paid the slightest attention to what she read, and there were lots
+of places in Maman's novels ever so much worse than these, she naturally
+felt an agreeable thrill at the thought of what an explosion there would
+be if they were ever discovered, reading love-stories at school. It was
+the fashion with the girls to do it. So she did, and as dramatically as
+any of the others. But far down, deep under all this, was a hermetically
+sealed chamber where she kept a secret disgust for the whole subject of
+falling in love, a secret distaste for men, old or young, and a
+furiously held determination never to have anything to do with them. It
+was all very well to carry on against the rules and to play-act with the
+girls about something in a book, but the faintest approach of the same
+thing in reality, froze her stiff with indignation and repugnance. When,
+walking on the street with Jeanne, some well-dressed young man cast a
+glance of admiration at her, or some half-tipsy workman called out a
+rough compliment she shrank away from them, hating them and herself; a
+feeling which old Jeanne zealously fostered.
+
+She did not often think about the gray cat now, but she had never
+forgotten it, and she had picked up a great deal more information than
+she had had, about what made people like Isabelle snigger and grin, when
+there was talk of getting a husband. She intensely loathed all that she
+had seen and learned, whether it were the shocked, nauseated expression
+on the face of one of the older nuns at school, when she forbade any
+talk among the girls over the gossip that one of the kitchen-girls had
+let a young man into the kitchen at midnight; or a passage in one of
+Maman's novels, which she had found lying open on the salon table, and
+read before she could stop herself. Every such experience was like a
+blow on a bruised spot, deep under the surface of her life, which was so
+sore now that it ached at the slightest touch, ached and made her sick.
+She had learned that she must protect it at all costs, and she fought
+off blindly whatever seemed to threaten it, fought it off with
+indignation, with brusqueness, with stiffness, with silence, using any
+weapon she could snatch up. At school, if she found a group of older
+girls with their heads together, and a certain expression on their
+faces, the weapon was often simply to run away into another part of the
+playground. "I can run away faster than they can run after me!" she told
+herself, fleeing away to where the little girls were playing hop-scotch
+and "chat-perche."
+
+There were times of course when you couldn't run away literally, but
+Marise had other methods of running away, the best one being a sudden
+change of subject--"Oh, Isabelle, your chignon is coming untied!" or
+"Gabrielle, isn't Sister Ste. Marie coming down the hall?" "Jeanne,
+you're pulling my hair!"
+
+And she had found, too, that to head people off from beginning on the
+sort of thing you had to run away from, there was no better device than
+lively spirits. If you kept joking and laughing and carrying on, the
+girls didn't have time to lower their voices, look over their shoulders
+and begin to talk with their faces close to yours.
+
+She was still flushed from laughing and talking and carrying on, when
+she emerged from the side-stairs into the half empty assembly-room,
+looking for her wraps, and saw beside Jeanne, Mme. Garnier and her son
+evidently waiting for Danielle, for Mme. Garnier had Danielle's hat and
+cloak on her arm. "Oh, zut! What a bore!" She'd have to speak to them;
+the young man would fidget and make her nervous, and she did think Mme.
+Garnier the tiresomest of all the frumps who came to call on Maman. She
+was an old snake-in-the-grass, too,--to use one of Papa's expressions.
+She pretended to say such sweet things to Maman, and really they were
+all different ways to slight poor Maman, who didn't understand half the
+time. But Marise did, and resented it for her. Poor Maman!
+
+"Good morning, Madame Garnier," she said with a little bow, coming up to
+them, and, "Good morning, Monsieur Jean."
+
+She remembered to drop her eyes, following the precepts of the teacher
+of deportment, and profited by the gesture to despise Mme. Garnier's
+shoes, stuffed lumpily full, like badly made sausages.
+
+When Mme. Garnier finished a long speech, she didn't mean a word of,
+about how nicely Marise had played, "Oh, thank you very much, Madame
+Garnier," she answered, looking up for a moment.
+
+Jeanne put her hat and coat on now, as Danielle romped in, talking at
+the top of her voice. Madame Garnier, with the perfunctory air of one
+attending to a familiar duty, savagely reproached her for
+boisterousness, and general heathenishness of manners. Danielle took
+this as it was meant, and paying not the slightest attention to the
+rebuke, went on talking at the top of her voice, telling her mother and
+brother all about the foolishness back of the scenes. "It was simply
+_killing_!" she shouted, laughing so that no one but Marise had any idea
+what she was talking about, "I thought I'd die, didn't you, Marise? You
+never saw anything in your life so funny! All of us wrong side up, with
+our heads ... oh, ha! ha! ha!"
+
+She and Marise went off into peals of laughter which they immediately
+suppressed to giggles and then to smothered muffled gasps, as they saw
+the Reverend Mother's dignified black draperies moving down the
+side-aisle. They'd hear from it at school if Reverend Mother caught them
+in such a breach of manners as _laughing in a public place_!
+
+"Who won the prize, my darling?" whispered Jeanne, in Marise's ear, as
+she smoothed down the collar of her coat.
+
+"Oh, I did," Marise whispered back casually. She had left the big red
+album of Morceaux de Salon with Mlle. Vivier, because she knew if she
+tried to carry it home and passed by a school-mate she would be greeted
+with howls of jeering laughter. She would bring some paper to-morrow, to
+wrap it up.
+
+"We may as well walk along together," said Mme. Garnier now. "Our road
+lies your way."
+
+Jeanne dropped respectfully behind, Mme. Garnier walked with Marise,
+Danielle with her brother. Marise shot one sideways glance at Mme.
+Garnier as they started along the sidewalks. "Sapristi," as Jeanne said,
+"what an ugly hat! How could anybody not just drop dead to be seen with
+such a horror on!" "Yes, Madame," she answered politely, at random, not
+paying any attention to Mme. Garnier's drone. How vulgar it was to let
+your dress wrinkle across the back where the top of your corset came.
+And it was worse to let it cave in in front, at the same place. When she
+was grown up, she would never let _her_ dress do that! Marise reflected
+with the utmost satisfaction on the excellent cut and hang of her own
+dress. There hadn't been a better one there, and she had silk stockings
+while most of the girls had clumsy cotton ones, or at best lisle thread.
+Jeanne certainly did know how to buy clothes, and Papa never said a word
+against paying the bills. Well, she could wear them too! She had style.
+She cast a pleased sideways glance at her slim straight silhouette,
+reflected in the large window of a shop, saw in the same mirror Mme.
+Garnier's uninteresting middle-aged figure, and then surprisingly she
+also caught a glimpse of Jeanne, behind the others, her handkerchief at
+her eyes as if she were crying. Marise stopped short, and turned sharply
+to look back. For mercy's sake, what could be the matter with Jeanne?
+Why, yes, she was, she was actually crying, the big tears rolling down
+her leathery cheeks. With an unceremonious excuse to Mme. Garnier,
+Marise left her planted there on the sidewalk, and darted back to
+Jeanne, asking anxiously what had happened.
+
+Jeanne looked at her fondly, her wrinkled old face bright with love, "I
+am thanking Our Holy Mother and all the Saints for your triumph, my
+darling!" she said, her voice trembling. "All this day I have been
+praying for you, all this day."
+
+Marise's first impulse was to inquire stupidly, "What triumph?" and her
+next was to burst into laughter as she realized that Jeanne had worked
+herself up so about that old Gambert music prize, of all things! But
+these gusts had come and gone before the expression of her face had had
+time to change; and when they had gone, all she could see was the
+affection shining in the old woman's eyes. Dear, _darling_ old Jeanne!
+_Let_ her think it was a triumph! She should never know anything else
+about it, bless her!
+
+Marise remembered Danielle, the mocking, and glanced uneasily towards
+where the Garniers stood, waiting for her to go on with them. No,
+Danielle had not heard. Jeanne was safe.
+
+Marise had grown so that she no longer needed to reach up to put her
+arms around the neck of the tall old woman, and kiss her hard on both
+tear-wet cheeks. "I owe my victory to thee, dear Jeanne, to thy
+prayers," she whispered fervently. "And I shall never, never forget it."
+
+All this was a lie, of course, but lies were easy to tell, and what harm
+were they, if you made somebody more comfortable by telling them?
+
+She pirouetted about on her toes, and ran back to take her place with
+Mme. Garnier. "Jeanne had bad news from one of her family," she murmured
+pensively in answer to Mme. Garnier's look of inquiry. "Oh, bah!" she
+thought carelessly. "What was one more lie to head off an old cat like
+that?" Besides, it was amusing to see how easy it was to lie, how with
+one little phrase, this way or that, you could change facts.
+
+After she had come in, and gone to her room to change to her usual dark
+woolen school-dress, with the long-sleeved linen apron over it, Marise
+happened to glance out through the lace curtain over her window and saw
+that Mme. Garnier's son was sitting on the bench across the street in
+front of the Chateau Vieux. "Well, that was queer, why hadn't he gone on
+with his mother and Danielle?" She looked again, to make sure, herself
+hidden at one side behind the heavy tapestry curtain, as Jeanne had
+taught her, lest she be seen by men on the street. "Yes, it was
+Danielle's brother, sure enough. Well, what could he be doing there?"
+
+She turned back to her greenish mirror to take off the white ribbon from
+her hair, and found that she had a dim recollection that before he went
+away to America, he used to sit on that bench in the late afternoon and
+evening. There was something unpleasant connected with that vague
+memory, and after a time that came to her also. She had heard Anna
+Etchergary, the concierge, and Jeanne laughing about it, and had
+overheard them conjecture that the young man was no such innocent
+mother's boy as he seemed, and then they had seen that Marise was there,
+and stopped abruptly, looking at her with the expression that she hated.
+
+Before she went in to dinner, she looked out once more to see if he were
+still there. Yes, there he was leaning forward, the light from the
+street-lamp full on his face. Marise could see that he was pale, but
+there was a smile on his lips as if his thoughts were very pleasant.
+
+When she stepped into the salon, she did not for a moment see that Maman
+was already there, because she stood at one side of the window, half
+hidden in the thick tapestry curtain, looking out through the lace over
+the glass. By the expression of her back, Marise knew that she, too, was
+looking at Mme. Garnier's son on the bench. For an instant, as though
+Marise's fingers had dropped on white-hot metal, the wild idea came to
+her that it was at Maman that Jean-Pierre was smiling, that it was for
+Maman that he sat there. She jerked herself away angrily and
+instantaneously from this thought, ashamed of herself. She was getting
+like Jeanne, like the girls at school.
+
+Maman had heard her move, and now turned sharply around from the window,
+with the startled look of some one into whose bed-room you've walked
+without knocking at the door. But Marise never knocked at the salon door
+before going in. Why should she have thought of it to-day? Maman drew
+the heavy curtain over the window with a sweep of her bare white arm.
+For Maman was in grande tenue with her mauve satin low-necked evening
+dress on, and a camellia in her hair. Marise's first thought was that
+she was to have another solitary dinner. "Oh, Maman, are you going out?"
+
+"Certainly not, what makes you think I am?" asked Maman quickly. She
+added because it was perfectly evident what made Marise think it, "The
+belt on this dress has been changed and I tried it on to see if it was
+right. And then I saw it was dinner time."
+
+Marise was about to say something about the flower in her hair, but her
+antennae-like sensitiveness to what other people were feeling, made her
+shut her lips. She looked hard at her mother, who made herself opaque,
+looking back at Marise, her face and eyes and mouth firmly closed over
+what was in her mind. Being able to see only the surface, Marise took
+that in with a fresh impression of not having looked at Maman for some
+time. How pretty she was, with her hair like gold threads, catching the
+light, and how different from her crinkly hair like a golden mist around
+her head, were the thick, thick petals of the camellia, with their
+dense, close, fine-grained surface.
+
+Jeanne came to the door. "Madame is served," she said in a correct tone,
+standing aside as they came out. She did not look at Marise at all, but
+Marise knew perfectly well that she too was wondering about the evening
+dress and the flower. Marise began to try to invent some plausible
+explanation for it which she could let drop in talk to-morrow as they
+walked to school.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Marise had lessons to get that evening, lots of them, and hard ones, as
+usual. After dinner, she went back to her room, opened her history and
+began. It was very still in the apartment. No sound at all from Maman in
+the salon. Of course, Jeanne and Isabelle were both across the landing
+in the other kitchen, doing the work as they always were unless Maman
+expected callers.
+
+Marise leaned over her table and concentrated with all her might on the
+role played by Colbert in the economic organization of the seventeenth
+century. She was trying to memorize the outline of his introduction of
+sounder account-keeping in government administration, when all at once,
+there in her mind, instead of Louis XIV and his court, was the picture
+of Maman standing beside the window, looking out. If Marise were now to
+step quickly into the salon, would she again find Maman...?
+
+Marise tossed her head angrily at the possibility of her doing such a
+sneaky thing as to go to see.... Like some nasty idea of Jeanne's that
+was! She drew her history closer to her, changed her position and went
+on studying. "Colbert a souvent repete que c'est par le commerce qu'un
+pays s'enrichit...."
+
+Although she had not meant to, she started up and went to the window,
+opening the heavy curtains a tiny crack, to look out.
+
+Yes, he was still there, two hours after they had left him. He had not
+even gone home for dinner. But old Madeleine, the flower seller must
+have passed by on her way home, after shutting up her flower-stand, for
+now he had a white rose bud in his hands, looking down at it fixedly,
+turning it about between his fingers, once in a while touching a petal
+delicately, or holding it up to draw in its fragrance.
+
+Marise pulled the curtain shut, and hurried back to the improvement of
+the French army from 1680 on. She felt very miserable, as though she'd
+eaten something she ought not to ... was it a headache? She had heard
+ladies talk so much about headaches, and had never had one. Yes, it must
+be a headache. That was it, her first headache. By thinking about it she
+felt it very distinctly now in the back of her head--like a great weight
+there drawing her head back. She tried to think of Colbert; she looked
+hard at the familiar picture of Colbert rubbing his hands in glee over
+all the work piled up on his desk, but what she saw was Maman standing
+at one side of the window looking out. Was that Maman she heard moving
+about in the salon?
+
+What time was it? Wasn't it time for her to go to bed? The soapy dark
+green clock on her mantel piece showed only half past eight. Too early.
+She started at a sudden sound, her hand beginning to tremble. The
+door-bell rang. Jeanne and Isabelle were both on the other side of the
+landing and would not hear. She listened, her hands and feet cold, heard
+Maman go to the door herself and Jean-Pierre Garnier's voice asking if
+Monsieur and Madame and Mademoiselle Allen were at home. Maman laughed
+and said that Monsieur was away on business and Mademoiselle was, of
+course, busy with her lessons, but Madame was there!
+
+Marise heard Mme. Garnier's son also laugh nervously and say that he
+would come in for a moment to pay his respects to Madame. They both
+spoke English, which Jean-Pierre had learned so well in New York. Well,
+why not? In America anybody might happen to make an evening call at half
+past eight. And Mme. Garnier's son had just been in America. Heavens!
+How her head ached! She would go to bed anyway, whether it was time or
+not. She undressed rapidly and getting into bed pulled the covers over
+her head. It seemed to her that she lay thus for ages, her eyes pinched
+shut in the smothering air under the blankets. Then she pulled them down
+to breathe and found that she had forgotten to put out her candle, which
+was guttering low and showing by the clock that her "ages" had been less
+than an hour. It was twenty minutes past nine.
+
+She blew out her candle, and decided that Jeanne or no Jeanne, she must
+have more air. She was suffocating. She drew the curtains aside and
+secure in the darkness of the room, opened both sides of the window
+wide. The fresh air came in like waking up from a nightmare.
+
+But she had not waked up, for there on the bench across the street was
+Mme. Garnier's son again. Had she dreamed that he had come to the door?
+How strangely he sat now, flung down sideways, his face hidden on his
+arm. As Marise stared, understanding nothing of what she saw, he started
+up spasmodically as though some one had struck him from behind. Then he
+collapsed again, his face buried on his out-flung arm. After this he was
+perfectly motionless, like everything around him, the somber wall of the
+Chateau Vieux, the sickly light of the street-lamp, the bench, the rough
+paving-stones, the vacant, gray shutters of the department store further
+along the street.
+
+As Marise stood there, shivering in her night-gown, staring, she heard
+Maman's quick light step at the other end of the corridor, and the sound
+of Maman's voice, humming a little trilling song. She turned her head,
+and saw the cheerful yellow flicker of a candle coming nearer her open
+door. Maman was going down to her dressing-room to get ready for bed.
+She thought of course that Marise was in bed and asleep by this time
+and when she came by, looking down at the lighted candle in the pretty
+little gilt candle-stick she did not even glance into the dark room
+where the child stood bewildered. For the instant she was framed in the
+square of the open door, she was brilliantly painted on the darkness,
+all the bright colors of her fair hair, her shining eyes, her red lips,
+softly gleaming in the warm, golden light of the little flame. The
+picture was printed indelibly on the child's wide eyes sensitized by the
+darkness; and long after the sound of the gay little song had died away,
+long years after the sound of the light footstep was silent, Marise
+could see, hung on the blackness around her bed at night, the shining
+picture, golden-bright in the quivering, living flame of the candle, the
+dense waxy petals of the camellia against the vaporous blonde hair, the
+smiling curved lips, the velvet white of the slender bare neck and arms,
+the rich sheen of the mauve satin flowing about the quick, light feet.
+
+She got into bed warmed, comforted. Nothing could be the matter if Maman
+was smiling so cheerfully. She fell asleep at once, desperately tired,
+giving up as an unanswerable and no longer very interesting riddle, the
+question of what was the trouble with Mme. Garnier's son.
+
+But in the night, without knowing how, she found herself once more by
+the open window--she had been dreaming, she had got up to see about
+something in her dream--something about ... why, there he was still on
+the bench, all huddled and stooped together now, his face hidden in both
+arms crossed on his knees. Perhaps he had dropped asleep there.
+Br-r-r-r! he would be cold when he woke up. How chilly it still was at
+night! Well, yes, it was evident that she had dreamed it about his
+ringing at the door. She plunged back under the covers, she heard the
+long sonorous hoot of a steamer going out to sea, and was asleep before
+it died away.
+
+She overslept in the morning, so that Jeanne, when she came with the
+tray, ran to shake her and said she must hurry to dress or she would be
+late to school. Marise sprang up, thinking of nothing but the reprimand
+she risked, and flung on her clothes, stopping to bite off big
+mouthfuls of the buttered croissants and drink big swallows of the
+cafe-au-lait. Jeanne buttoned her behind while she brushed furiously at
+her hair. "Where are my books? Oh, never mind that last hook, it'll
+never show. Oh, just _once_ without my gloves! No I don't _need_ my
+coat, the sun is so warm." She ran out to the corridor, snatched her
+hat, and, her teeth set in the last morsel of her bread, darted down the
+hall, Jeanne galloping stiffly behind her, as anxious as she over the
+possibility of being late.
+
+But at the outer door, she paused, one hand on the knob, something
+imperatively urging her to return. What had she seen as she passed the
+open door of the salon? Just the every morning scene, Isabelle with her
+head tied up in a cloth, a brush-broom in her hand, all the windows wide
+open, the rugs hanging over the sills, the sun streaming in with the
+particular clean fresh brilliance it always seemed to have early in the
+morning, while the room was still empty of life. How could there have
+been anything threatening about that familiar sight? It was Isabelle's
+face. She had been standing perfectly still, the long handle of her
+brush-broom held under one arm, looking down with a puzzled expression
+at something she held in her hand.
+
+Marise had wheeled so instantly in answer to the vague warning of
+danger, that she was back at the door of the salon, before Isabelle's
+position had changed. She still stood there, looking down at a wilted,
+white rose-bud. And now her face was suspicious as well as puzzled.
+Glancing up she said meaningly to Jeanne, over Marise's shoulder, "Now,
+_where_ do you suppose _this_ came from? I found it on the floor by the
+sofa! There were no roses brought into the house by any one _we_ saw
+yesterday!"
+
+Jeanne thrust her long stringy neck forward, and passed her head over
+Marise's shoulder to verify the fact. Marise could see the glitter in
+her eye. Marise cried out instantly, "Oh, my poor rose! _That's_ where
+it was! I looked for it everywhere last night to put it in water."
+
+Jeanne and Isabelle turned their eyes on her penetratingly. She held
+them energetically at bay, hardening her gaze, defying them.
+
+"I didn't see you have any rose yesterday," said Jeanne. But Marise knew
+by the tone of her voice that she was not sure.
+
+"Well, I did," she repeated, "Gabrielle Meunier gave it to me out of her
+bouquet. Oh, I'm so sorry it's spoiled."
+
+"I believe you, that it's spoiled," said Isabelle carelessly, dropping
+it into the dustpan. "Somebody must have stepped on it to crush it like
+that."
+
+Her interest in it was gone. She began to hum her favorite dance-tune,
+"jig-jig, pr-r-rt!" and to shake out a rug.
+
+Marise fled down the slippery waxed stairway, three steps at a time, and
+dashed out on the street, Jeanne, purple-faced and panting, close at her
+heels. How she hurried, how breathlessly she hurried that morning; but a
+thought inside her head doggedly kept pace with her hurry.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+
+I
+
+Now that she was in an advanced class, she stayed all day in the school
+and convent, taking her lunch with the "internats" in the refectory. So
+that it was always six o'clock before Jeanne came for her, with the
+first, thin twilight beginning to fall bluely in the narrow, dark
+streets, and sunset colors glimmering from the oily surface of the
+Adour. That evening when Jeanne came for her, she said that Maman had
+decided to go back for a day or two to Saint Sauveur for the sake of the
+change of air and to try the baths again. Jeanne never permitted herself
+the slightest overt criticism of her mistress in talking to Marise, but
+she had a whole gamut of intonations and inflections which Marise
+understood perfectly and hated--hated especially because there was
+nothing there to quarrel with Jeanne about. Jeanne had told her the news
+in the most correct and colorless words, but what she had really said
+was, "Just another of her idle notions, gadding off for more sulphur
+baths. Nothing in the world the matter with her. And it's much too early
+for the Saint Sauveur season."
+
+Marise could resent such intimations, although Jeanne was too adroit to
+give her grounds for open reproach. She had her own gamut of expression
+and attitudes, with which to punish the old woman. She immediately
+stopped chattering, looked coldly offended, and walked beside Jeanne,
+her face averted from her, out towards the street, now crowded with
+two-wheeled ox-wagons, and donkeys, and men with push-carts starting
+back into the country after market day. She could feel that she was
+making Jeanne suffer and she was glad of it.
+
+As she kept her eyes steadily turned through the tangle of traffic
+across to the sidewalk on the other side, not more than ten feet away,
+so narrow was the street, she caught sight of Mme. Garnier's son. He had
+a small valise in his hand, and was idling along as though he were
+waiting for something. As she looked, their eyes met. He looked at her
+hard, and crossed the street towards her. He came swiftly now, as if,
+all of a sudden, he were in a great hurry. How oddly he was staring at
+her! Not as though he recognized her, as though he took her for somebody
+else. Oh, perhaps he wasn't looking at her at all! Perhaps there was
+somebody behind them, at whom he was staring so hard. The tall
+school-girl jerked her head around for a quick glance over her shoulder.
+But there was nobody else on the sidewalk!
+
+The young man had come up to them now, had taken off his hat and stood
+there, bowing. How white that bluish light made people look! Marise and
+Jeanne slackened their pace for an instant, thinking that he wished to
+speak to them, but all that he brought out was, "Good evening,
+Mademoiselle," in a low voice.
+
+They stood for an instant, Marise feeling very awkward, as though she
+had misunderstood something. Then he put his hat back on, and stooping
+forward as though he were tired and his valise heavy, hurried on. Marise
+looked over her shoulder again and saw that he was almost running. But
+he had plenty of time to catch that train to Lourdes, which was the only
+one due to leave Bayonne that evening.
+
+Jeanne's turn had come, in the little guerilla skirmish between Marise
+and herself. "_Don't_ turn around in the street that way!" she cried in
+a shocked tone. "Haven't you any sense of what is proper? Don't you know
+if you turn around like that, just after a young man has passed you, he
+is likely to think that you are _looking after him_!" She had no idea
+that Marise was really guilty of such a heinous misdemeanor, and had
+only snatched the phrase up as a weapon.
+
+
+II
+
+That night Jeanne rolled the little fold-up cot-bed in across the
+landing and setting it up in Marise's room, slept there beside her.
+This was what they had done before, when Maman was at Saint Sauveur, on
+the nights when Father had to be away too. Isabelle hadn't the slightest
+intention of sleeping over on the other side by herself, and she always
+came too, bringing her own sheets to put on Maman's bed. She remarked
+that she couldn't afford to have it said of her that she had spent the
+night in the apartment without another woman with her. Marise did not
+see in the least why any one should object to having this said of her,
+but the tone of Isabelle's voice as she spoke, and the fact that it had
+something to do with passing the night warned her off from asking any
+explanation. She had already gleaned from many sources, in and out of
+books, that there was something about accounting for where you were at
+night, about which she didn't want to have Jeanne and Isabelle talk. So
+she began to sing a new satirical verse to the air of "Maman, les petits
+bateaux" which one of the girls had made up that day.
+
+Everything went exactly as usual the next morning, the absence of the
+mistress of the house not making the faintest difference. Jeanne and
+Isabelle went through their usual domestic ritual in exactly the same
+order, whether Madame told them or not. Indeed, whatever she might tell
+them, they changed no slightest tittle of what they did, as she had long
+ago found out. Jeanne brought in the breakfast tray, and did Marise's
+hair as usual, and although not a soul had stepped into the salon since
+the day before, Isabelle was skating back and forth on the waxed floor,
+woolen cloths on her feet, when Marise passed the door. Outside it was a
+breathless still day, with a hazy sun, very hot for so early in the
+spring.
+
+As they crossed the Adour, Marise caught the first whiff of its summer
+smell, compounded of decaying sea-weed, tar and stale fish. She and
+Jeanne said little, although they had wordlessly made up their tiff the
+evening before, and had gone to sleep after exchanging their usual
+hearty good-night kisses. Their quarrels although frequent never lasted
+long.
+
+Everybody at school was dull, too, from the first heat. The hours seemed
+very long, with little in them. Marise felt listless and rather cross,
+and dreaded the exertion of taking her music lesson, although she
+usually looked forward eagerly to those hours with Mlle. Hasparren, the
+best and happiest of her days.
+
+At four o'clock the music-teacher called to take her home. She also was
+hot and tired and fearfully nervous, she said, after a terribly trying
+day in her class-room, with her forty-five squirming little Basques. As
+a rule she and Marise had a good deal to say to each other, because
+Mlle. Hasparren was the only person Marise knew who had any interest in
+America. The rest never spoke of it, or if by chance they did, they only
+asked about buffaloes and Indians, and evidently didn't believe her when
+she said she'd never seen either. But Mlle. Hasparren knew better, and
+loved to talk about it, and actually knew the difference between the
+Civil War and the Revolution, and had heard of Abraham Lincoln and
+thought he was a greater man than _Napoleon_! Marise, who was reading a
+great deal of Victor Hugo, hardly knew whether to agree with this
+startling idea or not, but she felt when she was with Mlle. Hasparren,
+that it was safe to open many doors which she usually kept locked, and
+to talk with her about things she never dreamed of mentioning to anybody
+else. Which did not, of course, at all prevent her from wishing to
+goodness Mlle. Hasparren didn't wear such fearful hats, and that her
+skirts would hang better.
+
+But this hot day of early spring, she thought neither of America or of
+hats, as she plodded silently beside the equally weary school-teacher,
+through the dusty stone streets. The depression which had hung over her
+all day deepened till she felt ready to cry. Wherever she looked she saw
+Maman standing in that stealthy attitude, looking out of the window.
+Mlle. Hasparren's worn, swarthy face, under her home-made hat, was
+plainer than usual.
+
+Isabelle let them in to the empty salon, with her usual air of being
+cheered up to have something happen, and bustlingly arranged two seats
+before the piano. Mlle. Hasparren took off her hat and pushed her
+fingers through her graying hair. Marise fumbled among the music on the
+piano and pulled out what they were working on, the Toccata in D minor.
+She flattened it out with both hands on the music-rack above the keys,
+and sat down. She raised her fingers, made sure of the notes of the
+first twiddle, and began to play.
+
+She had not wished to take this music-lesson. She had been hot and
+listless and tired; with a secret heartache and a dread like a black
+shadow on her heart. She had sat down before a great black varnished
+wooden box and,--detached, indifferent, pre-occupied, had set her
+fingers to pushing first one and then another bit of wood covered with
+white bone.
+
+And what happened?
+
+Out of the black, varnished box, like the mighty genii of the Arabian
+Nights, soared something beautiful and strong, something that filled the
+dreary, empty salon and her heavy heart with sonorous life, something
+which like the genii put its greatness at the service of the being who
+knew the charm to free it from imprisonment.
+
+"Stronger there, as you come up from the bass," said Mlle. Hasparren,
+and Marise knew from her voice that she too was soaring up. And yet,
+although she sounded no longer dull and weary, but strong and joyful,
+she abated nothing of her exacting rigor. "No, don't blur it because you
+make it louder. Don't lean on the pedal. Clean power of stroke, that's
+the thing for Bach. Now try again. Roll it up from that lowest note,
+like a mid-ocean wave."
+
+She listened, all her personality concentrated on her hearing, her head
+turned sideways, her eyes fixed on a point in the very far distance.
+With all her intelligence she listened, and when the immature
+intelligence of the pupil faltered or failed, she came swiftly to the
+rescue. "No, take care! you're losing yourself in that passage. You're
+playing each note correctly but you haven't the sense of the whole
+thing. There's a rhythmic progression there that starts four measures
+back, and doesn't end till you swing into those chords. Don't lose your
+way in what is only a little ornamentation of the line. See, to
+here--all that is half of the rhythmic figure, and here it is repeated
+in the bass. Now again! Read it so the meaning comes out."
+
+The nimble flexible young fingers went flying at the passage again,
+guided and informed by the ripe soundness of the older mind, and from a
+passage which Marise had physically mastered as mechanically as she
+would an exercise, she heard the master-voice speak out again.
+
+Her teacher leaned forward beside her, working as hard as Marise,
+although she did not touch the keys. Four years of incessant work
+together had made them almost like one mind. From time to time, they
+wiped the perspiration away from their foreheads with a hasty pass of
+their handkerchiefs, Mlle. Hasparren's gesture as hurried as Marise's.
+
+"Pearly in the treble--clear, clear--try that bar of triplets again.
+Again! Again! Once more! There, now start at the double bar--like
+running water. No, not so much shading, ugh! _no_, that's not classic,
+let it speak for itself! You don't need to use those theatrical swells
+and die-aways here. You're not playing Gounod. Start that movement over
+again. Every note's a pearl, remember, string them together in a
+necklace. Don't jumble them in a heap."
+
+They were still at it, laboring like slaves, putting their backs into it
+like ditch-diggers, exalted as young-eyed cherubim, when Jeanne came
+discreetly to the door to look in on them. This was her decorous method
+of intimating that she was about to put Marise's dinner on the table.
+
+"Oh, la! la!" cried Mlle. Hasparren, "is it as late as that? And my
+sister told me to be sure to start early enough to buy some salad for
+our supper." She slammed on her hat, took her bag, and darted away.
+
+Marise got up, feeling numb, flung her arms high over her head, and
+stretched herself like a cat, although she knew that like any other
+vigorous and forthright bodily gesture this would call down a reproof
+from Jeanne as not being "convenable." But she did not care what Jeanne
+said to her. She did not care about anything in the world but the
+deep-rolling waves of rhythm, and the clear tinkling rain of pearls
+which went on and on in her head as she ate her solitary dinner, and
+studied her lessons in her solitary room afterwards.
+
+When Jeanne came to set up her bed for the night, she remarked "What a
+horrid sticky hot day it has been!"
+
+"Has it?" asked Marise, in genuine forgetfulness of the weather. Also,
+caught up into another world as she was, she forgot for an hour or two
+all about the white rose-bud.
+
+
+III
+
+But she was reminded of it as she opened her eyes the next morning. It
+was her fifteenth birthday and to celebrate it, Jeanne had already been
+out to the market and brought home a great bouquet of white rose-buds.
+She was loitering around, pretending to pick up the room, but really
+waiting to hear what Marise would say, so of course Marise must conquer
+the nausea that white rose-buds gave her and exclaim that they were
+lovely, and kiss Jeanne and thank her and lean over them and smell them
+rapturously. What a lot of this sort of thing there was to do, Marise
+thought, if you didn't want to hurt people's feelings, or let them
+suspect things you didn't want them to know.
+
+Jeanne tried to restrain herself to decorum, but her overwhelming
+jealousy of any one else who touched Marise's life was too much for her,
+"They're nicer than that one wilted old thing Gabrielle Meunier gave
+you, hein?" Marise understood then why Jeanne had chosen white
+rose-buds. Down below the surface where she kept her real feelings she
+heard a sick sort of laugh. What she said was, with fervor, "Oh, yes,
+Jeanne, a thousand times better!" (You might as well make it a thousand
+times while you were about it.)
+
+"Well, I should hope so!" said Jeanne, satisfied at last.
+
+That morning when Marise stepped into the courtyard at school a group of
+older girls had their heads together over a newspaper, and when they saw
+her, they all started. Elise Fortier rolled the paper up rapidly and put
+it in her leather portfolio with her school-books. They looked at her
+very oddly. Four years ago, Marise would have run up to them, demanding,
+"What's the matter? What makes you look so funny? What is it in the
+paper?" That was before she became aware of any mire in the world,
+invisible, wide-spreading, into which almost any casual inquiry seemed
+likely to plunge you. Marise knew what it was to have some of that
+indelibly staining mire splashed upon her, from a look, an intonation or
+a phrase that meaningly expressed much more than it said. She walked
+with a desperate wariness now, trying to pick her way dry-shod, in the
+dark. So that morning she was only afraid that the girls _would_ tell
+her what it was they had found in the paper that made them look so. She
+pretended that she had seen nothing, ran up to them with a funny story
+to tell, and went at once to hang up her wraps in the hall outside the
+class-room door. Sister Ste. Julie passed her and said, "Good-morning,
+my child." It seemed to Marise that she too looked queerly at her. She
+reached her hand over her shoulder to make sure her dress was hooked,
+and felt of the ribbon in her hair. No mirrors were allowed inside the
+school and convent walls, or she would have stepped to look in one to
+see what was wrong.
+
+At eleven o'clock while the class in advanced geography was reciting,
+the street bell rang. Sister Ste. Marie went to answer, and came back to
+say that Mlle. Allen was wanted. Her maman was ill, and the bonne had
+come for her. All the girls turned instantly and looked at her without
+surprise, as though they had been expecting this. Marise started up,
+suddenly very pale, put on her wraps in a great hurry and ran to where
+Jeanne was waiting for her. Jeanne looked just as usual, although
+everything else seemed to have changed in an instant and to look
+threateningly upon Marise.
+
+"Your maman is home from the baths," said Jeanne, as though she were
+saying something she had made up to say beforehand, "and she doesn't
+feel very well. Since Monsieur is not here, I thought we would better
+come and get you."
+
+Marise seized Jeanne's arm and dug her fingers deep into it, "Jeanne ...
+Jeanne ... nothing's happened ... Maman's not...."
+
+Jeanne said with the very accent of truth, "No, no, no. Madame is not
+dead--never fear, my darling. She is only very ... nervous." She said it
+with the very accent of truth, but Marise knew perfectly well that
+Jeanne could say anything she pleased with that accent. She never
+believed a thing Jeanne said unless she knew it already.
+
+But in spite of herself she was relieved from her first wild panic.
+Nothing so very bad could have happened, with Jeanne standing there,
+carved out of brown wood, just as usual. They began to hurry up the
+narrow short-cut by the market, and Jeanne told her a little more. Maman
+had come back by the first train. She must have taken the afternoon
+train down from Saint Sauveur to Lourdes, and have waited hours in the
+station at Lourdes, till the west-bound train from Toulouse came along.
+And she had come in, perfectly worn out, staggering, and pushed right by
+Isabelle to go to her room. And she had locked the door, and wouldn't
+answer when they knocked, and wouldn't open when they brought a tray
+with some food, only called out to them in a queer hoarse voice to go
+get Soeur Ste. Lucie. And they could hear her crying and sobbing, so
+they had sent Anna Etchergary to get the nun, and she, Jeanne, had come
+of her own idea to get Marise.
+
+Marise read into this Jeanne's dislike of the nun and her usual
+suspicious idea about poor Maman that it was all just some new notion of
+hers. But she also felt that the old woman had had a real fright and she
+walked faster and faster.
+
+The door on the landing was ajar, and inside the hall they saw a tall
+old monk, his bare feet in sandals, his bald head bowed over his clasped
+hands, his lips moving in prayer. When he saw the girl and the old
+servant, he made way for them to pass, and without interrupting his
+prayers, motioned them to enter. His gesture was so imperious that
+without a word they tip-toed in past him. Isabelle, her eyes wide, and
+not as red-faced as usual, was standing uncertainly in the door of the
+salon, her apron up to her lips, looking scared, "Soeur Ste. Lucie has
+gone in to Madame," she said to Jeanne in a whisper. "She said you and
+Mademoiselle were to go to Mademoiselle's room and wait until she came."
+
+Jeanne inquired wildly with a silent jerk of the head who in the world
+was the monk who stood praying before Madame's closed door; and Isabelle
+answered with a desperate rolling of her eyes that she had no more idea
+of that than Jeanne.
+
+They all went down the corridor on tip-toes, to Marise's room, where
+automatically Marise took off her hat and coat. She saw to her amazement
+that Jeanne had dropped down on the crimson quilt on the bed. Nothing
+that had happened had startled Marise so much as to see this.
+
+Almost at once Soeur Ste. Lucie entered, and coming up to Marise put her
+arms around her and kissed her very tenderly. Then she turned and
+motioned the two servants out of the room, "I must speak to Mlle. Marise
+alone," she said. Isabelle was only too glad to go, but Jeanne looked
+furious and stood for a moment with darkened face, lowering down on the
+nun, as if she were on the point of defying her. But she finally thought
+better of it, and followed Isabelle out.
+
+Soeur Ste. Lucie stood in the open door till they were both well down
+the corridor. Then she shut it carefully and came back to Marise whose
+heart was beating wildly and whose knees were shaking under her. Soeur
+Ste. Lucie sat down, and made Marise sit down, holding both the child's
+cold hands in her soft, kind, old fingers. "Dear child, there are times
+in every life when we must ask God for courage. Your mother is not sick
+or hurt, but she needs all your prayers. She has had a terrible shock, a
+dreadful tragedy that took place before her eyes, and she will need all
+the help our Holy Mother can give her, to recover her calm. It seems
+that----" Soeur Ste. Lucie stopped an instant, as if to consider how to
+put what she had to say, and changed the form, "Your dear mother was in
+Saint Sauveur, and by chance a person from Bayonne passed through, whom
+your dear mother knew. And it seems they went out to walk together, as
+any one might, and descended the paths and steps, that lead visitors
+down the face of the Gavarnie Gorge, towards the place arranged so that
+tourists can look up at the arch of the great bridge. And then--nobody
+knows just what happened--the water was very high and violent, the other
+person must have slipped and fallen in, and was instantly killed by
+being flung by the current against a great rock. Your dear mother saw
+it, and sensitive and high-strung as she is, it ... it slightly unhinged
+her. She said a great many wild things...." Soeur Ste. Lucie stopped,
+drew a long breath and began again. Nothing that she had said had made
+the slightest impression on Marise. It sounded far off, as though Soeur
+Ste. Lucie were reading something out of a book. Marise could not seem
+to put her mind on it, and when she did, she could not understand it.
+
+Soeur Ste. Lucie went on, "But by the mercy of God, I had just written
+her that the holy Father Elie was once more here; and after they had got
+the body out of the water and carried it to the hotel they--your mother
+remembered about Father Elie and turning in her trouble to the only
+source of strength, she--your mother wishes to make a retreat for a few
+days at our convent, and I am sure that it is much the best thing for
+her to do. It is a shelter for her--Father Elie is with her now, I have
+sent for a carriage...."
+
+"Oh, but can't I see her? Can't I kiss her good-by? How long will she be
+away?" cried Marise wildly, starting from the fascinated immobility in
+which she had gazed at the nun's face.
+
+Soeur Ste. Lucie laid a quieting hand on her shoulder, her kind old face
+yearning over the child. "Dear little Marise, I think it will be better
+for your mother not to see you, or any one just now. She needs quiet,
+perfect quiet."
+
+Marise looked at her hard. She had no idea whether she was being told
+the truth, or only some kind invention which they thought suitable for
+her to hear. "Can't I go to see her at the Convent?" she asked in a
+whisper, giving up the first point.
+
+"Oh, yes, yes, my darling, _any_ time ... only a little later, when your
+mother is calmer." Soeur Ste. Lucie's face shone suddenly, radiantly,
+"God uses all means to His great ends," she said fervently. "This may be
+the means of giving your dear mother in the end, the holy peace of
+faith."
+
+She looked so serenely trusting and hopeful that Marise felt comforted,
+"I'll do just as you say, dear Soeur," she said in a trembling voice.
+
+Soeur Ste. Lucie drew a long breath, as though she had been steering a
+difficult course. She kissed Marise again, told her to stay in her room
+for the time being, to say her prayers, not to worry, her Maman would
+soon be all right, and probably happier than she had ever been in her
+life. All this might open the door to salvation for her.
+
+She left Marise standing in the middle of the floor, and closed the door
+carefully behind her. But not so carefully that Marise could not, a
+moment later, hear Maman crying and crying and crying as she went down
+the hall and out of the door. Marise began to tremble and cry at the
+sound. She ran to her window, and saw down below, Maman, her hands over
+her face, with Soeur Ste. Lucie's arm around her, the tall old monk on
+the other side, cross the sidewalk and get into the carriage.
+
+As the carriage rolled away the weeping child at the window remembered
+that Soeur Ste. Lucie had not mentioned who the person from Bayonne was
+who had been killed. Well, what did Marise care who it was!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+
+It occurred to Marise, and the idea of a responsibility dried her tears
+with a start, that she ought to get word somehow to Papa. Her heart
+sprang up to think that perhaps if he knew Maman was so upset he would
+come back at once. She did _want_ somebody so much, beside Jeanne and
+Isabelle.
+
+But she never knew Papa's address when he was away on business. Perhaps
+there was something on Maman's writing-desk. She went quickly into the
+salon, drew aside the curtains which shut off the writing-desk's alcove
+from the salon, and began rather helplessly to fumble among Maman's
+papers and novels. There were very few letters of any sort. Maman didn't
+keep up her correspondence with America very much. Jeanne had heard
+Marise moving and through the alcove curtains Marise saw her now come
+into the salon with a basin of water in her hand, pretending that she
+needed to water a plant. Marise remembered that she must as usual
+arrange something to present to Jeanne that would not reflect on Maman's
+fancifulness. But perhaps Soeur Ste. Lucie had told her something. She
+inquired cautiously but Jeanne said stiffly, still outraged at having
+been shut out of the room, that she knew nothing. Everything about her
+except her words, said forcibly that she cared less, and that all this
+foolishness was a part of the usual nonsense.
+
+"Oh, Jeanne, a terrible thing has happened to poor Maman--she saw
+somebody swept away in the Gavarnie and killed right before her eyes,
+and it's upset her fearfully."
+
+Jeanne's sulkiness vanished in the delight of her kind at having any
+inside information about a violent death or a scandal. Marise remembered
+how absorbed and excited Jeanne had been when somebody in the apartment
+overhead had taken an over-dose of morphine and how proud she had been
+to have everybody in the market stop to ask her details.
+
+"Killed?" said Jeanne with a greedy eagerness, her eyes shining, "how
+killed? Drowned? or knocked against the rocks? Man? or woman? Have they
+got the body out?"
+
+Marise did not, as a rule, enjoy Jeanne's interest in murders and deaths
+and kidnappings, but this time she welcomed it and passed on to the old
+woman all she could remember of what Soeur Ste. Lucie had told her.
+Jeanne was much disappointed that Marise had not heard the name of the
+dead person, but Marise promised to tell her as soon as the paper was
+out, the next morning, since it would probably be printed. And with the
+mention, there came back to her, with one of those sickening lurches,
+the recollection of the girls putting their heads together over the
+newspaper at school, and then looking at her so oddly and hiding it
+away. "It was probably in this morning's paper," she said to Jeanne. "If
+you'll get it, I'll read it to you."
+
+But Jeanne came back in a moment with an astonished face, saying that
+Isabelle reported that, of all queer things, Mlle. Hasparren, the
+music-teacher had stopped in that morning and asked to borrow the paper.
+Jeanne's astonishment never on any occasion remained more than an
+instant untinged with suspicion, and Marise, who knew the old face so
+well, saw the suspicious expression begin slowly to color the surprise.
+"What in the name of God did the Hasparren want with our newspaper?" she
+asked herself aloud, obviously snuffing around a new scent. Marise hated
+Jeanne's face when it looked like that,--crafty and zestful, as though
+she were licking her chops over a nasty smell.
+
+They were still standing in the alcove, beside the writing-desk when the
+door-bell rang. Jeanne turned to go, heard Isabelle open, and standing
+between the half-open curtains turned her head to listen. Marise heard
+nothing but a man's voice, and Isabelle answering, "Oui Monsieur, oui
+Monsieur, oui Monsieur." But Jeanne started, stiffened, and darting on
+tip-toe to the door, looked around the corner. The door shut, steps were
+heard at the other end of the long hallway. Isabelle was evidently
+bringing the visitor to the salon. Jeanne looked around wildly at
+Marise, her face suddenly the color of lead, her eyes panic-struck. The
+steps were nearer, there seemed to be more than one man. Jeanne ran
+back, pushed Marise into the chair in the corner of the alcove,
+motioning her violently but without a sound, to keep perfect silence,
+and noiselessly drew the curtains together before the alcove. Marise
+heard her step quickly back to the stand where the plant stood and the
+click of her tin basin against the earthen-ware of the pot. And then she
+heard her say in exactly her usual voice, only with a little surprise,
+"Good-day, Messieurs, what can I do for you?"
+
+"We have been sent," said a man's deep voice and not a "monsieur" but a
+common sort of man, Marise could tell by his accent and intonation, "to
+see and question Madame Allen." Jeanne evidently went through some
+pantomime of astonishment for he explained, "a part of the inquest over
+the death of M. Jean-Pierre Garnier, but the maid tells me she is
+already not here."
+
+Jeanne answered, and if she caught her breath or flinched, there was not
+the smallest external sign of it, "No, M. l'Inspecteur, our poor lady
+was so terribly upset over seeing such an awful thing, that the doctor
+has just sent her for a few quiet days' retreat at the Holy Ghost
+Convent. What a terrible thing, to be sure, M. l'Inspecteur."
+
+The man answered wearily, "Eh bien, we shall have to see her, retreat or
+no retreat. We have the blanks to fill out by all witnesses, and she is
+the only witness. This is the inspecteur from St. Sauveur."
+
+"Oh, the poor lady is in no state to be questioned," said Jeanne with an
+affectionate warmth in her voice. "She is as tender-hearted as a child,
+and besides had been a great invalid. She took the whole course of baths
+at Saint Sauveur last season, and was starting in again."
+
+"Oh," said the man as if surprised, "she had been at Saint Sauveur
+before? For the baths?" and then as if speaking to some one else, "it
+would be harder then, to establish that she was there to meet the young
+Garnier."
+
+Jeanne seemed so astounded at this idea, that she could scarcely get her
+breath to protest. "Oh, M. l'Inspecteur, oh! Who ever heard of anything
+so wild! Is _that_ what people are saying? Oh, why!" she laughed out in
+her amazement, "she hardly knew him by sight."
+
+"Why," said the man evidently not speaking to Jeanne, "didn't you say
+that she ran down along the bank of the river, screaming that he had
+killed himself for her sake?"
+
+"Yes, I said that," answered another man's voice, astonished and on the
+defense, "and she _did_ too! and when the body was pulled out she flung
+herself down on it, and shrieked that she wanted to die with him."
+
+Jeanne broke in now, at the top of her voice, calling Heaven and earth
+and all the saints to witness that she never heard of anything so
+preposterous in her life, and that anybody in Bayonne could tell them
+so, and what crazy stories would people be making up next out of whole
+cloth? "Some one is trying to play a joke on M. l'Inspecteur from Saint
+Sauveur. Nobody _could_ have heard our Madame say such things, because
+she couldn't possibly have said them, any more than she could about a
+clerk who sold her a yard of cloth over the counter. For she didn't know
+any more about the young man than that! Why, she _never_ knew him except
+as the son of one of her friends. He never came to the house, and more
+than that she hadn't even laid eyes on him for more than two years. He
+had been in America and is only just returned, day before yesterday.
+_Any_body you ask here can tell you that."
+
+"Nom de Dieu!" said the first man's voice in extreme surprise. "Hadn't
+seen him for two years!"
+
+"No, he hasn't even been in France since he was a little young boy!" The
+first man laughed as though the joke were on his comrade.
+
+The second man's voice said, still defending himself, but now
+uncertainly, "Very queer his following her right up there, if he
+scarcely knew her--what was _he_ doing in Saint Sauveur at this season,
+I'd like to know, if not...."
+
+"Oh, as to that," said Jeanne carelessly, "I happen to know why he was
+there. I saw the young monsieur day before yesterday, just as he was
+about to take the seven o'clock train, valise in hand, and I had a talk
+with him, our young mademoiselle and I."
+
+"Why, I thought you hardly knew him by sight in this house and he never
+came here," broke in the second policeman suspiciously.
+
+"I didn't say it was here we saw him," said Jeanne, "and I said it was
+Madame who hardly knew him. But he is the brother of a little girl
+classmate of our mademoiselle. They are all children together. Well,
+every evening at six, except the days when Mademoiselle takes her music
+lesson, I go to the school to fetch her home, and that afternoon, as we
+were coming up the rue Port Neuf, we met the young man going towards the
+station, and when he saw our mademoiselle, he stopped for a moment for a
+chat, as young folks will. He was in high good spirits and said he was
+off for a fine business trip to the mountains and expected to have a
+good time as well as do business, and would be in Cauterets the next
+morning. Well, you know Cauterets is just over a ridge of the Pyrenees
+from Saint Sauveur and Mlle. Marise said, 'Why, is not that queer, my
+maman is at Saint Sauveur just now! Why don't you take the other train
+at Pierrefitte-Nestalos and run up to Saint Sauveur for half a day and
+take Maman a message from me, something I forgot to ask her before she
+left,' and the young man said he had been half planning to go to Saint
+Sauveur on business anyhow, and to tell him the message and if he saw
+her maman, he'd repeat it. Only he said, 'I don't believe your maman
+knows me,' and Mlle. Marise said, 'Well, you tell her you are Danielle's
+big brother, and she'll know. She knows all about my school-mates,' and
+the young man asked which sanitarium it was in Luz and Mlle. Marise
+reminded him, 'No, it's at Saint Sauveur where Maman is,' and told him
+the name of the sanitarium, and then he said he hoped he'd get a little
+fishing in the Gavarnie, and I said the water would be too high, and he
+said he'd go and have a look at it anyway. And then he went along with
+his valise. Mlle. Marise is at school or you could ask her all about
+this too."
+
+"Eh _bien_, my friend from Saint Sauveur!" said the first man's voice,
+in a rallying tone of jocularity. "This sounds as though some of you
+country-people must have lost your heads a bit. Come now. Did you
+yourself _hear_ her, saying all that?"
+
+"No, of course I didn't," said the other man stiffly, "I was in the
+office at Luz. How could I know anything was happening? But the men who
+got the body out said she was awful to hear."
+
+"Oh, I don't doubt," agreed Jeanne, "that she was. Any woman would have
+been driven half crazy by such an awful thing, the only son of a friend,
+killed before your eyes. And she is terribly nervous into the bargain,
+the least little thing sends her off into hysteria. Some nights I have
+to rub her back until eleven o'clock to quiet her. And the doctor has
+warned her against the least excitement. Why, two days ago there was an
+important prize-contest at our mademoiselle's school and the poor woman,
+although she would have given anything to go, was forbidden by the
+doctor. He said the excitement would be too much for her, and she would
+feel it so if her daughter were defeated. You can ask any one whether
+she was there! And that evening, although Mlle. Marise had won the
+prize, she was so worked up, I had to give her a sleeping draught to get
+her a little rest, poor thing...."
+
+"Were they _sure_ of what she said?" asked the first man of the other.
+"Would they swear to it?"
+
+"I don't see how anybody could hear anything!" put in Jeanne. "In
+ordinary weather the gave of Gavarnie makes such a noise down there in
+that gorge, you can't hear your own voice even if you yell. I remember
+last summer when Madame was taking the cure, when we went to see her ...
+and now in flood...."
+
+"They'd certainly swear to her being in a terrible state of agitation,"
+said the other in a rather nettled tone. He went on, "You saw for
+yourself what was put in the paper about it this morning, how they had
+met there by design and spent the night together at the hotel and all."
+
+"You won't get far in an inquest, my young friend, if you take what a
+newspaper says. Newspapers are always wrong," said the first man
+pityingly, in a tone of experienced scepticism. "If this happened at ten
+in the morning, they can't have been together more than an hour. If he
+was seen here in Bayonne at six o'clock the evening before, he couldn't
+possibly have reached Saint Sauveur before nine the next morning. You
+know you wait three or four hours for the connection at Lourdes. To my
+mind there's nothing in it. I will take you to the convent to see her,
+if you insist, but I have no liking for scenes with hysteric women."
+
+"Oh, messieurs!" said Jeanne shocked at the idea, "you couldn't possibly
+expect to see her _now_! Not for a week, at least, the doctor said."
+
+"A _week_!" cried the second voice, dismayed, "sacrebleu, I can't kick
+my heels for a week, waiting."
+
+"Well, suppose we go through the usual routine?" suggested the other.
+"Go to see the family of the young man, and if they confirm all this ...
+there's no use going further. There is plenty of time for you to get all
+the facts you need for your report, and catch the one o'clock train back
+to Saint Sauveur."
+
+Jeanne said now jocularly, with a change of manner to the intimate
+knowing tone of a servant-girl speaking to a policeman, "If you're not
+in a hurry, you must stay to have a glass in honor of the house. We have
+an excellent white wine, and the patron never counts the bottles."
+
+Marise heard her lead them down the hall and across the landing to the
+dining-room, and then in an instant heard her come back and run on
+tip-toe up the hall. She thrust her head through the curtains, showing a
+haggard gray face, glistening with sweat, and whispered, "Don't move,
+don't speak to a soul till I get back. I must see the Garniers before
+they do."
+
+Even without this, Marise would have been incapable of moving hand or
+foot. Half an hour later, she was sitting in exactly the same position
+frozen and deathly sick, when Jeanne let herself in cautiously. From the
+gust of sounds that came in from across the landing, as the door was
+opened, the two policemen seemed to be greatly enjoying both Isabelle
+and the white wine.
+
+Then Jeanne shut the door on the loud voices and laughter; and in their
+place Marise heard the sound of dreadful hoarse gasps as Jeanne tried to
+get her breath after running. It did not sound like the breathing of a
+human being, but like that of some large animal, like a horse or cow,
+exhausted and panting.
+
+Jeanne came up the hall, fighting thus for her breath, and dragging her
+feet. She shuffled heavily into the salon, and across to the closed
+curtains, where locked in her nightmare, the child waited for some one
+to come to the rescue.
+
+The old woman drew the curtain a little aside. Marise caught one glimpse
+of her face, now swollen and darkly congested. She saw that Jeanne was
+nodding reassuringly at her; she heard Jeanne say in a whisper, "They
+understood, it's all right, they...." Then, without the slightest
+warning, she turned to one side and fell headlong inside the curtains.
+
+For an instant she lay as if dead, her ghastly face at Marise's feet.
+But almost at once she opened her eyes and tried to smile and to speak.
+Only a guttural sound came from her lips. A look of terrible anxiety
+came into her face. She motioned with one hand passionately, that the
+curtain should be drawn shut to conceal her.
+
+Marise, frightened out of her palsy, was kneeling by her sobbing,
+"Jeanne, Jeanne."
+
+She thought of what Jeanne had done for her mother, and flinging her
+arms around her as she lay, she kissed her furiously, the tears coming
+in a flood and pouring down on the dreadful face, now strangely twisted
+to one side. Jeanne put one arm around her, and tried again to say
+something. But her tongue moved senselessly in her distorted mouth; the
+sweat stood out on her forehead as she struggled to speak.
+
+Finally she gave up her desperate attempt, and put her finger to her
+lips, exhorting Marise to silence. Such a wildness of apprehension was
+in her eyes, that the girl muffled her sobs, hiding her face on the
+inert breast, clinging with all her might to the half-dead body.
+
+She thought that Jeanne was dying. She thought that she herself was
+dying. She longed to die, there, that instant, and escape the shame and
+sorrow and misery that buried her so deep, so much deeper even than
+Jeanne knew.
+
+The sound of laughter and voices chimed out merrily again. Isabelle had
+opened the other door. Marise held her breath, her face buried on
+Jeanne's breast. The old woman tightened the clasp of her arm. They
+strained their ears.
+
+Then they heard the men's feet clatter down the stairs.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+
+I
+
+It was Mlle. Hasparren who found them so, Mlle. Hasparren with her
+shabby coat buttoned crookedly, who ran up the stairs as the sergents de
+ville went down, who came in without a word of explanation to take
+charge of things.
+
+She expressed no surprise at finding Marise where she was, nor at
+Jeanne's condition. She acted as if nothing she found could have
+surprised her. She lifted Marise up with strong loving arms, led her
+into her own room and made her lie down with a handkerchief soaked in
+smelling salts under her nose, and a cold bandage across her forehead,
+while Isabelle stayed with Jeanne. She did not pet Marise or kiss her,
+but from all her quiet presence breathed an assurance that she was there
+to take care of her, and when she said, "I'll stay right here, dear,
+till your father comes," Marise fell into a fit of quiet thankful
+weeping that washed away the nervous trembling of her hands and lips.
+She lay, turned on her side, sobbing, the tears running fast from her
+eyes, and thought of nothing, except the steady look on Mlle.
+Hasparren's face. "Now I must leave you here, dear child. I will send
+Isabelle for the doctor, and I will stay with Jeanne."
+
+Presently Mlle. Hasparren came back and sat down again by the bed. She
+looked perfectly self-possessed and exactly as usual, which gave Marise
+the most inexpressible comfort. She said that the doctor was there, had
+seen Jeanne and that she was not dying at all, not likely to, but had
+simply had a partial stroke of paralysis, such as often happened to
+people of her age--nothing in the least unusual about it. Jeanne was so
+old, that any little thing might bring on a stroke of this sort and she
+had worked so valiantly all her life, she was really older than her age.
+She and Isabelle and the doctor had got Jeanne undressed and in her own
+bed, and now she would be all right, only she had made them understand
+that she wanted to see Marise. The doctor had told her that she mustn't
+see any one, but she had become so agitated that he thought it best to
+humor her. "Only, of course, poor thing, she can't say a word that any
+one can understand. It's just an old woman's whim." Marise thought to
+herself that it might be more than an old woman's whim, and getting up
+at once went with Mlle. Hasparren into the room where Jeanne lay on the
+bed. The doctor was on one side; on the other was Isabelle, half
+frightened and half delighted with the excitement; a visit from gallant
+sergents de ville, and from the doctor all in one day!
+
+Jeanne motioned them all out with her one arm, and only when the door
+had closed after them, did she beckon Marise to her. She did not try to
+speak now. She only looked at the girl, with a terrible concentration,
+and put her finger to her lips.
+
+"Do you mean, Jeanne?" whispered Marise, her lips trembling, "that I am
+not to tell any one?"
+
+Jeanne closed her eyes rapidly in assent.
+
+"Oh, no, no, _no_," cried the poor child. "Of course not, never, never,
+never!"
+
+But the old woman was not satisfied. She reached out for Marise's hand
+and drew her close, her eyes burning in her disfigured face. She struck
+her lips repeatedly with her fingers, as though, try as she might, she
+could not express the urgency of her command.
+
+"No one--no one at all?" asked Marise, and then with a gasp, "Not even
+Papa?"
+
+At this Jeanne's eyes leaped up to a hotter flame of intensity.
+
+"No! no! no!" they cried to Marise. "No!"
+
+Marise thought she understood, and hanging her head she said in a low
+shamed voice, "Oh, no, of course, I see."
+
+With the words and the acceptance of their meaning which Jeanne's
+passionate eyes thrust upon her, Marise sank for many years into another
+plane of feeling and saw all the world in another perspective, very ugly
+and grim. That was the way Jeanne saw things. With all her immature
+personality, with the pitiably insufficient weapons of a little girl,
+Marise had fought not to accept Jeanne's way of seeing things. That had
+been the real cause of their quarrels. But now the weapons were struck
+from her hands. Jeanne had been right all the time it seemed. That was
+the way things really were. Now she knew. With a long breath she
+admitted her defeat.
+
+"No, _specially_ not Papa," she whispered.
+
+
+II
+
+It was four o'clock that afternoon. They had had something to eat,
+talking quietly about indifferent things, and they had found Papa's
+address in Bordeaux and sent a telegram to him, before Marise thought to
+ask, "But, Mademoiselle, how is it you can be out of your class-room
+to-day?" She had often known the teacher to drag herself to work when
+she was scarcely able to stand, and knew how the stern discipline of her
+profession frowned on an absence from duty.
+
+"Oh, I arranged this morning to have a substitute come. I heard--I heard
+your maman was not well, and I knew your papa was not here, and I wasn't
+sure that any of your maman's friends might be able to come to look out
+for you."
+
+As a matter of fact, Marise never saw one of her mother's callers again.
+
+That evening, Anna brought up a blue telegram from Papa, which since it
+had been sent in English, as Papa always insisted on doing, was
+perfectly unintelligible, reading:
+
+     "Com inga nmorninjtrain ta kigo adca rof Maman."
+
+     Papa.
+
+Marise who had with Maman puzzled over many other similar telegrams from
+Papa, made out "morning-train" and that was enough.
+
+The doctor had sent in a nursing sister to take care of Jeanne during
+the night, and Isabelle had gone off to a tenement near the Porte
+d'Espagne where some relations of hers lived and had brought back an old
+cousin to help her with the work and marketing and to sleep with her in
+the other apartment.
+
+Mlle. Hasparren slept in the folding-bed beside Marise's so that every
+time Marise, with a great scared start, realized anew that what had
+happened was not a bad dream, she felt the other's hand reaching for
+hers in the dark, and holding firm. She said very little and Marise was
+glad of that, but the clasp of her muscular musician's hand pulled
+Marise out of the black pit many times that night.
+
+Later on Marise fell into a real sleep, deep and unbroken, and when she
+woke up, much later than usual, to find Mlle. Hasparren all dressed, the
+folding-bed put away, the window open and the sunshine coming in, she
+found that she seemed to have grown stronger since yesterday, that the
+black pit was not so fathomless. She felt infinitely older and as though
+she would never laugh again. She lay in bed, looking up at the ceiling,
+thinking fixedly about what had happened, and found that she could
+endure it now without crying out or bursting into tears as she had done
+yesterday. She could stand up under her burden, because there was no
+other way. But she felt her shoulders bowed and aching with the weight.
+
+Mlle. Hasparren heard her stir in bed, and sensed the awakened quality
+of the movement. She came to look anxiously down at her. Marise looked
+back and remembering that, so far as she knew, Mlle. Hasparren knew
+nothing beyond the surface of the happenings of yesterday and so might
+expect her to be able to smile, she produced a faint smile.
+
+"I overslept," she said, in order to say something. "Has somebody
+brought your breakfast?"
+
+"No, I waited for you," answered Mlle. Hasparren. "I'll ring for
+Isabelle now."
+
+When Isabelle came, very self-important at taking Jeanne's place, she
+reported that the Sister said Jeanne had passed a very good night and
+was perfectly comfortable, with no complications. "She says Jeanne may
+get all over it and be as good as ever. All old people have these
+seizures, she says," chattered Isabelle, setting down the tray and
+pouring out Marise's cafe-au-lait. She was full of her new dignity, and
+bustled off to give orders to her assistant, leaving Marise and Mlle.
+Hasparren to eat their breakfast. Mlle. Hasparren did not seem to feel
+like talking much, and neither did Marise. She was trying to think what
+it was she was to tell Papa. She must remember now just what it was that
+everybody was to be told.
+
+An hour later, as they went down the hall, on their way to the station
+to meet the morning train, they saw the salon as usual at that hour, the
+chairs pushed about, the rugs hanging over the window-sills, the fresh,
+clean, new morning sun streaming in through the wide-open windows on the
+familiar spectacle of Isabelle on her knees, a brush-broom in her hand
+reaching under the piano for dust. The alcove curtains were drawn back,
+the cheerful sunshine poured in, glittering on the dark polished wood of
+the desk, on the yellow-covered books, on the pretty little inlaid chair
+which stood beside the desk.
+
+Was it only yesterday that Jeanne had flung her into that chair? She
+stood in the door, as she put on her hat, looking steadily at the
+alcove. No, that had been somebody else ... a little girl, a lucky,
+lucky little girl, who had no idea what things were like.
+
+"Come, dear," said Mlle. Hasparren, looking at her watch.
+
+It had been agreed since there were so few trains in and out of Bayonne
+and since as yet no news had been sent to Jeanne's family, that if
+Marise's father did come on the train from the north, Mlle. Hasparren
+would board it as he left it, and go on down to Midassoa to tell the
+Amigorenas about their mother's illness. "But do tell them,
+Mademoiselle," Marise said over and over, anxiously, "that we will take
+care of Jeanne, that we will do everything for her that anybody could,
+that they needn't worry. I know Papa will see that she's taken care of.
+I _know_ he will, if I ask him." But really she was not as sure as she
+said. She did not know Papa so very well, after all. She had very little
+idea what he would feel or say about anything. And then everything
+depended on the way things turned out...!
+
+They stood there in the smoky dusk of the station, a long ray of
+sunshine thick with golden motes striking the ground at their feet.
+They still said very little, Marise not daring to talk for fear of
+making a mistake, for fear that she would not remember just what and how
+much Mlle. Hasparren knew. The music-teacher held the girl's slim
+fingers close. Marise answered their pressure with a nervous fervor,
+inexpressibly grateful to the other, loving everything about her from
+her steady face and kind, shadowed eyes, to her heavy, badly-cut shoes,
+dusty now, which would be dustier later after they had trudged along the
+hot white road at Midassoa. Never, so long as she lived, was she able to
+forget how Mlle. Hasparren had looked to her, when she came quietly into
+the salon and lifted her up from Jeanne and said in a plain
+matter-of-fact way as though nothing were the matter but Jeanne's
+sickness, that they must get a doctor and probably Jeanne wasn't as sick
+as she looked. She had just taken Marise by the hand and showed her how
+to go on living ... when it seemed to Marise that she had come to the
+end.
+
+They heard the train whistle shriekingly in the distance, and the
+somnolent porters roused themselves. Marise tightened her hold on the
+strong fingers which held hers. Her heart ached with longing, with
+confusion. Suppose Papa did not come ... what _would_ she do? But
+suppose he did ... wouldn't it be impossible not to make mistakes, not
+to forget what you were to say and what you weren't?
+
+But when the train came in, and Marise saw at the other end of the long
+platform her father's massive bulk heavily descending from a
+compartment, and saw his eyes begin to search the crowd for her face,
+all her confusion melted away in a great burst of relief.... Papa was
+there, something of her very own in the midst of all those strangers!
+Her heart almost broke with its release from tension.
+
+And yet before she ran to meet him, she put her arms around the
+music-teacher and kissed her hard on both swarthy cheeks.
+
+
+III
+
+Then she ran with all the speed of her long legs, and flung herself upon
+Papa's broad chest and tried to put her arms around him, as she had
+around Mile. Hasparren, and began to cry on Papa's great shoulder. How
+good it was to feel him, to feel him so entirely as Papa always felt! It
+would not have seemed like Papa if there were not more of him than she
+could get her arms around.
+
+Her tears, her agitation gave Papa such a turn that he set his satchels
+down hastily and looking alarmed, shook her a little, and asked what had
+happened to Maman.
+
+In the hurry and noise and bustle of the crowd it was easier than Marise
+had feared to get over that first moment when Papa must be told. It all
+came out straight, just what she had planned to tell him, that nothing
+had really happened to Maman, she wasn't sick or anything only she had
+had a terrible nervous shock, had seen somebody killed right before her
+eyes, and it had pretty nearly driven her wild.
+
+"Oh!" said Papa, evidently relieved, and caring as little as Marise had
+about the person who had been killed. He picked up his satchels again
+(by this time the porters at the Bayonne station were resigned to his
+strange mania for carrying his own hand-baggage), and said, "Well, yes,
+that's too bad! I remember I saw a brakeman killed once, and it made me
+pretty sick, too."
+
+They walked out of the station together. Not two minutes had passed
+since his arrival, and already Marise's joy that he had come, had faded
+to a frightened sense that he had not come at all, that he was still
+very far away, that he would never really come, as he used to.
+
+And yet Jeanne had been right of course; whatever else she did, she must
+not tell Papa.
+
+"When did it happen?" asked Papa now, as they turned the corner and were
+finally escaped from the last of the clamorous cab-drivers, who had not
+yet accepted, as the porters had, the eccentricities of the American
+gentleman.
+
+As they crossed the bridge, Marise told him the version she had
+prepared, the version Jeanne had presented. She had had a good deal of
+practice in saying something different from what she thought, and she
+got through this without any hesitation or mistake. But every word of it
+set her further away from Papa, raised a wall between them, the wall of
+things she knew and Papa must never know.
+
+"Well, to be sure," said Papa, when she finished, "you certainly have
+had goings-on, for sure."
+
+"Oh, Papa," went on Marise earnestly, "you _will_ have Jeanne taken care
+of! It was when she was working for us, she got her paralysis. _Don't_
+you feel we ought to--for always, for always? It was for us...."
+
+"Oh, as to that," said Papa, "anybody of Jeanne's age, who rustles
+around as Jeanne does, is apt to get a stroke, whether she was working
+for us or not. It might have happened just as easily in her own home."
+
+Marise's heart went down.
+
+Papa added, with a change of tone, "I don't like her lying very well,
+but the old woman has been awfully good to you, Molly, awfully good,
+more like your grandmother than the cook, and I guess we'll see that
+she's taken care of, all right."
+
+Marise squeezed his arm hard, and said nothing. After all, wall or no
+wall, Papa was there, good old Papa, so broad and solid, her very own
+Papa; somebody who, even if he didn't understand much of what went on,
+would look out for them all, Maman, Jeanne, herself.
+
+
+IV
+
+Papa went in at once to see Jeanne and told her through Marise--for
+Jeanne had never learned to understand his brand of French--that he
+would see that she was well taken care of till she recovered. Jeanne
+contrived with her one living hand and her eyes, to convey her
+respectful thanks, and to conceal everything else which Marise knew she
+must be thinking.
+
+Then Papa wanted to go at once to the convent, and bring Maman home.
+What had he come back for, if not for that? As a matter of fact, Marise
+was not very sure why he had come back, or why she had felt it so
+necessary to get word to him at once. Now that she had had time to think
+about it, she realized that she dreaded very much having Maman see Papa
+just now, right after ... after all that. It would have been better for
+her to have had a little time to get over it, and like Marise, to think
+what to say.
+
+But, of course, this was one of the things she could not speak to Papa
+about. All she could do was to find out that lunch was nearly ready and
+they would better eat that before they went to the convent.
+
+Isabelle, her head turned with the sudden removal of Jeanne's
+heavy-handed authority, had prepared a gala luncheon with the best
+silver and linen, and "What a pretty bunch of flowers," remarked Papa.
+
+Marise looked silently at the white rose-buds, now opening into roses.
+Was it only yesterday morning that Jeanne had given her those? Was it
+only two days before, that she had been walking along with the Garniers,
+with nothing in her head but mockery of Madame Garnier's shoes and hat?
+No, that must have been somebody else, some one she had distantly known,
+that girl who had laughed with the others so, over their foolishness
+behind the scenes.
+
+"Let me see," remarked Papa, "you must be almost fifteen, aren't you,
+Molly?"
+
+"Yesterday was my birthday."
+
+"Funny kind of celebration."
+
+Marise looked at him across an immense chasm, and said nothing. She
+couldn't ever remember having a meal at a table alone with Papa before.
+
+"Don't you want to go with me?" he asked later, as the dessert was
+served. "I don't know how to find my way around a convent--of all
+places! Whatever possessed your Mama to go there anyhow?"
+
+"She and Soeur Ste. Lucie are such good friends," explained Marise. She
+decided not to say anything about the old monk, because she didn't know
+whether Papa knew about Maman's going to see him before; but after
+thinking for an instant she decided that it would do no harm to add,
+"Soeur Ste. Lucie wants Mama to be a Catholic, you know."
+
+Papa said quickly, "What's that?"
+
+Marise was surprised at his tone. Perhaps that _was_ one of the things
+she oughtn't to tell about. "Why, would you mind if she did?" she asked.
+
+Papa thought for a moment, and dropped back into his usual slow casual
+comment, "Oh, no, I guess not, if she wants to." There was a silence
+broken by Papa's saying something else, in an earnest tone as though
+this time he really wanted Marise to listen to him. "All I _ever_ want,
+Molly, is for Mama to have things the way she wants them."
+
+Marise's heart was nervously sensitive that day, in a sick
+responsiveness to the faintest indication of what was in other people's
+hearts.
+
+She could not put another morsel of food to her lips. She sat looking
+down at her plate, trying to master or at least understand the surge of
+feeling within her. "_All I ever want is for Mama to have things the way
+she wants them._" There was so much to think of in that, that she was
+still lost in thinking, when Papa pushed back his chair and got up,
+pulling down his vest, with his usual after-dinner gesture.
+
+"I'll have a look at the mail while you get your things on," he
+suggested. Evidently he was still set on going at once to see Maman.
+Perhaps more than he admitted, he really didn't like her being in a
+convent.
+
+Marise went to get her hat, and with it in her hand, went to join her
+father, standing by her mother's writing-desk in the alcove. He had an
+American newspaper in his hand, his fore-finger inserted in the wrapper.
+
+He tore it open and stood looking at the headlines, while Marise put on
+her broad-brimmed sailor-hat and, tilting her head forward, slipped the
+rubber under her hair behind.
+
+"All ready?" said Papa, and they set out.
+
+How much less _exciting_ everything was, now that Papa was home. But
+would it be--if he--but he never would! Who would tell him? Not Maman
+certainly, although Marise wished that poor Maman could have had a few
+days more without seeing Papa, to get over being excited so she could be
+surer of what she was saying. Not Jeanne. Not herself. Nobody else knew
+him well enough to tell him anything. If Maman could only get through
+to-day all right....
+
+
+V
+
+At the convent they waited in the usual bare, white-washed convent
+parlor with the shutters drawn, with the usual little rush-bottomed
+chairs, so light that the one Papa sat down on, groaned and creaked
+under his great weight. The usual black-walnut book-case displayed the
+usual Lives of the Saints. Through an open door they could look down a
+long, long, gray stone corridor, very empty, till they saw Soeur Ste.
+Lucie hurrying noiselessly down it towards them.
+
+As she came near, Marise saw that her sweet face looked anxious and
+worried. She told them at once that Madame Allen had been taken very
+ill, that they had been up all night with her and had sent for the
+doctor early that morning.
+
+Papa was startled by this unexpected news, and apparently never dreamed
+of what occurred to Marise at once, that this was just something they
+had made up to prevent anybody's talking to her. Marise thought it a
+good idea. She had hoped something like that could be arranged ... in
+case those horrible sergents de ville came back again. She was not
+alarmed by Soeur Ste. Lucie's worried face, because this was by no means
+the first time that she had observed how easy it was for people's faces
+to look anything they wished to have them.
+
+Papa was asking rather sharply, "What is the matter? What did the doctor
+say? Is it the effect of nervous shock?"
+
+All the same, it was too bad, thought Marise to have Papa worried for
+nothing.
+
+Soeur Ste. Lucie shook her head hurriedly, "Oh, no, something much more
+acute than that, a terrible, terrible chill which has gone to her lungs.
+The poor lady must have been in soaking wet clothes, for nobody knows
+how long. Monsieur has been told of the...." She hesitated and paused.
+
+"Yes, yes, I know she was with some one who fell into a river somewhere
+and was drowned. But did she fall in, too? How did she get wet? Why
+_weren't_ her clothes changed?" His voice rose as he asked the
+questions.
+
+Soeur Ste. Lucie explained in a low, hurried, agitated voice. "Nobody
+knows of course just what happened. Perhaps she tried to save the poor
+fellow. Perhaps she slipped as he did. In any case she was too
+distraught to think of herself or to realize the danger of going so long
+in wet clothes. And every one there was so absorbed in the tragedy...!
+She was all alone among strangers, the poor lady. She must have sat in
+her dripping garments in the cold train all the way to Lourdes, and then
+half the night in the unheated station there, waiting for the train. It
+was terrible. The doctor said it was terrible to think of--weakened with
+the shock, as she was, and no food!"
+
+Papa now said ungently and impatiently, yet as though he were
+restraining himself, "Well, we must get her home at once, where we can
+take care of her!" Marise could see that he believed every word that
+Soeur Ste. Lucie said.
+
+But of course Soeur Ste. Lucie hadn't the least intention of letting
+Papa take Maman away. "I'm afraid that is impossible," she said, "the
+doctor came back this afternoon, is here now in fact, and says"--her
+voice broke--"he says she is much too ill to be moved."
+
+At this Papa burst out angrily, his face very red, "Why under the
+heavens didn't you send word of this to her own home? Here I have been
+there, ever since the morning train, eating my lunch ... with no _idea_
+that...."
+
+The nun defended herself reasonably, sadly, showing no resentment at his
+anger, "No one knew you were come back, Monsieur, and I was just
+starting to fetch our dear little Marie."
+
+Marise saw over the nun's shoulder a gentleman with a bald head, a great
+brown beard and very white hands coming down the corridor, "Here is the
+doctor, now," said Soeur Ste. Lucie, drawing in her breath quickly.
+Taking Papa and motioning Marise to stay where she was, she stepped down
+the corridor. Marise watched them, her eyes on the doctor's serious,
+spectacled eyes. Something about the way he looked at Papa made Marise
+for the first time wonder if Maman really were a little sick after all.
+
+They all came back to where Marise stood. Papa's face was no longer red.
+He said to Marise in a queer voice, "The doctor says that Maman must not
+be disturbed, but we may go in to see her for a moment if we will be
+quiet and not talk."
+
+They turned, all of them, and started down the long, gray stone
+corridor. Marise tip-toed along beside her father. She was a little
+frightened in spite of herself, at a loss to know what to think or feel
+or believe. The emptiness of the corridor echoed around them. Marise's
+ears rang with the emptiness of it! And how long it was. It took them
+forever to walk through it. Marise looked up at the small windows set
+high in the wall, and wondered when they would ever come to a door that
+opened out.
+
+But the only door was at the very end, and that opened into the
+white-washed room where Maman lay in a narrow bed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As soon as she saw her mother, Marise was sure again that she was not
+really sick because she looked even better than usual, with a deep
+shell-pink in her cheeks. She did seem a little tired and sleepy,
+however, for her eyelids looked heavy and kept dropping down over her
+eyes. They stood there for a moment, looking at her, till she should
+open them again.
+
+When she did, and saw Papa there, she flung out her arms towards him. As
+he stooped over her she clung to him with all her might just as Marise
+had at the station.
+
+She did not look at Marise at all, only at Papa. He patted her shoulder,
+and smiled at her, and Marise saw the tears run out of Maman's eyes in a
+gush.
+
+Papa sat down on the little chair by the bed which creaked under his
+weight, and leaned forward, his arms around Maman, his cheek against
+hers. She said to him in a hurried, frightened whisper, "Horace, I want
+to go home. I want to go home."
+
+He answered steadily, "It's all right, Flora ... we'll have you home in
+a few days."
+
+She closed her eyes again, all the expression dropping out of her face.
+The doctor stepped to the other side of the bed, and his fingers on her
+wrist, his eyes on his watch, motioned them silently to leave, with a
+sideways jerk of his head.
+
+They tip-toed out and down the long, gray, empty corridor.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Marise's mother died that night, without seeing them again.
+
+
+
+
+_AN EDUCATION IN THE HUMANITIES AND THE LIBERAL ARTS_
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+
+September, 1900.
+
+The first weeks of Freshman year were like a return to the formless
+impersonality of little boyhood. Just as Neale had felt himself an
+amoeba-like cell among the finished, many-membered adults of his
+parents' circle, so he was now again only one more wriggle in the mass
+of Freshmen. Nobody could tell him apart from any other Freshman. He
+could scarcely tell himself apart from the other Freshmen.
+
+This did not afflict him as it might a more sensitive, self-conscious
+boy. Indeed he rather enjoyed the anonymity of his condition, the space
+and vacuum about him which it created, where he floated free from any
+threat of the handling or pawing-over which was his especial fear when
+he entered into relations with other people. There was so much that was
+new to him in college life that it was occupation enough to look on
+without taking any part. He enjoyed the variety of his experiences, from
+the Greek-and-Roman feeling that came with walking up the Library steps,
+to the fairy-cave enchantment of floating on the shimmering water of the
+electric-lighted, marble-lined swimming pool. And he enjoyed most of all
+his aloof spectator's scorn of footless classes like Rhetoric A, or
+class-meetings where a few loud-mouthed blow-hards ran the show, while
+the real scouts like himself preserved a cautious, sardonic silence. He
+discovered the perilous secret, always a temptation to natures like his,
+that if you attempt nothing, share in no effort, you are automatically
+freed from any blame for the inevitable foolishness and blunders; you
+can stand on your safe little hillock and scorn the poor fools who try
+to do things and fail. The lone-wolf motive sang seductively in his
+seventeen-year-old ears. Nothing in any of his classes, nothing in the
+Library or in any of the books in it gave the seventeen-year-old a hint
+of any valid, compelling reason for his assuming the heavy, distasteful
+burden of responsibility.
+
+Then one day, word was passed around that the Flag Rush would be held
+that afternoon; the Flag Rush unanimously deplored by the directing
+forces of the University; the Flag Rush, that out-burst of meaningless
+brutality so shocking to all the European members of the Faculty,
+secretly contemptuous of the prosperous, illiterate, childish country
+where they taught.
+
+Neale never dreamed of staying out of the Flag Rush. There was a row on,
+and his class needed his muscles and his head. He went to the Gym. at
+the appointed hour, where all the Freshmen were assembled. Gathering
+confidence at being all together for once, they marched in a body over
+to South Field. There they found the Sophs. gathered about a tree, from
+a branch of which fluttered a 1903 flag. Juniors took charge of the
+affair, coaching and urging on the Freshmen. Still buoyed up by their
+mass, by being together, they advanced to the charge. They were
+uncertain, and for the most part, amiable big little boys, who really
+cared nothing about that flag, who really cared only about doing what
+was expected of them. As they advanced, they began to hurry, to rush
+forward nervously. Several detached Sophs. dived in at the leaders' feet
+and broke up the formation, but there was mass impetus enough to carry
+the rush forward. The Freshmen crashed into the defenders of the flag,
+pushed them back, circled them round ... at the first physical contact
+with the enemy they were no longer big little boys doing what was
+expected of them, they were young Berserk fighters, blind and furious
+with the delight of battle. A roar went up, a roar from their very
+hearts, like the yell which had burst up from their little-boy
+game-centers. Except for a few rare and artistic natures, who were
+suffering horribly from shock, every one of them was twice what he had
+been two minutes before. A Freshman somehow shot up through the crowd,
+hoisted on his classmates' shoulders, and laid his hands on the sacred
+branch; but defenders spouted up around him, grabbed his legs and
+pulled him down. With this, all semblance of organized purpose left the
+rush. It broke up into a disorganized melee, rolling and tumbling,
+panting and struggling in a hundred separate encounters.
+
+Neale rolled and tumbled, panted and struggled with the rest, far, far
+from any cool Olympian detachment. He was one of the biggest and
+strongest of the Freshmen and felt his responsibility. He did what he
+could. But that was not much. The Freshmen did not know one another, and
+had no plan. Sometimes Neale collared his own classmates by mistake;
+sometimes a couple of Sophs. tackled him together, ran him back and
+dropped him on the grass.
+
+A half-hour later the flag was still in the tree, and the furious
+boiling over of insensate young life had cooled to a simmer. The Juniors
+called the rush off, the Freshmen began to stream back to the Gym. Neale
+was surprised to find one sleeve to his jersey missing and innumerable
+rips and tears all over his other garments. He was bruised from head to
+foot and spat blood from a cut lip. Calmed, appeased, exhausted, he made
+limping for the gate.
+
+As he passed through it, he passed through another and invisible gate,
+opening into quite a different path from the solitary, self-satisfied
+way of aloofness which he had been following. He did not, as a matter of
+fact, pass through the invisible gate. He was shoved through by a
+vigorous hand that slapped him on the shoulder. Turning, Neale looked
+into the masterful face of the Varsity Coach. "Report for football
+practice to-morrow!" was the order. "I'm Andrews!"
+
+The information was unnecessary. Neale would not at this date have
+recognized President Low or Dean Van Amringe, but he knew the football
+coach. The next twenty hours were beatific. His mind refused to grasp
+facts. It wandered off into gorgeous day-dreams. He was on the
+Varsity ... no, he was a sub, called in at the last minute ... a long
+run! ... better, a recovered fumble ... then down the field, shaking
+off one tackler after another.
+
+He would wake up to real life, blushing, swearing at himself for a
+condemned fool. And yet a few minutes later, in fancy he was the last
+defender between the goal line and a rushing Yale back...!
+
+Not the faintest hint of any of this appeared on the surface. At home he
+preserved his normal appetite which was his mother's gauge for his
+health and spirits, and although he told them, not unwillingly, about
+the Flag Rush, he preserved the sacred secret of his summons from
+Andrews, as though it had been his first sentimental rendezvous. The
+next day dragged endlessly, filled with the paper-like silhouettes of
+talking professors. But three o'clock was finally there, and he was at
+the Gym., silent, his face composed, his heart given to sudden swelling
+bulges, which made it hard for him to hear what was being said.
+
+They gave him a suit. He trotted with the squad, _with the Squad_ over
+to South Field!
+
+"Ever played?" asked the scrub quarter.
+
+"Yes," said Neale. He did not feel obliged to tell how little.
+
+"What position?"
+
+"Half-back," he lied brazenly, having made up his mind that he hadn't
+the weight to aspire to the Varsity line.
+
+They ran through signals. Then a scrimmage started but Neale was not in
+the line-up. A scrub back had his wind knocked out and didn't get up
+quickly enough for the coach. "Put in that Freshman bean-pole. Jump in,
+what's your name?"
+
+Neale jumped and floundered for five minutes, then the peppery scrub
+quarter consigned him profanely to the side-lines. For two days after
+that he moped without a job, although still in a suit, out in the field.
+Then he had another trial.
+
+Gradually he made sure of his place as right-half on the scrub--not that
+he was any good, as they told him plainly: but because in those days the
+whole squad, including hopeless dubs, seldom numbered over thirty men,
+and thanks to the work in the mill at West Adams, Neale was physically
+fit.
+
+With this place, minor though it was, came the great privilege of
+dinner, after practice, at the football house. There he picked up a
+little of the theory of the game from the blackboard talks; there after
+the Pennsylvania's guards-back had battered through for thirty points,
+he heard the coach, white and shaking with emotion, pour out his biting
+post-mortem. "You, Jackson," shaking his fore-finger at the left-guard,
+"did you shoot your body in low and spill them in their own territory?
+No, you STOOD UP!"
+
+Neale's flesh crept, he was almost glad that he had escaped the fearful
+responsibility of being on the Varsity. It was terrible, such a weight
+on your shoulders. He shrank from it, and with all his being, aspired to
+it.
+
+He made no impression on the football world, but his own interior world
+was transformed. He was no longer an isolated, formless Freshman, dumped
+down into the midst of the most callously laissez-faire of Universities,
+he was no more a forgotten molecule with no share in, or responsibility
+for the ultimate reaction. He had a shelter for his personality against
+the vast, daunting indifference of the universe. He was on the football
+squad.
+
+He had feared he might have some trouble in explaining his absence from
+the supper-table at home, but that proved unexpectedly easy. The second
+evening after he began to play on the scrub, he found Father in the
+library at home, reading the sporting sheet of the Evening Telegram.
+
+"Any other Crittendens in college, Neale?" he asked.
+
+"Not that I know about."
+
+"That's you on the football team, then?"
+
+"Only on the scrub, yes, I'm trying. We have dinner together after
+practice. You don't mind, do you?"
+
+"Me? Of course not," said Father.
+
+Mother heard all this, apparently had known it before, and did not ask
+him to take care of himself and not get hurt. Neale looked over at her
+gratefully. Mother was all right.
+
+The football season slid along, the Varsity improving every week. Neale
+glowed with caste-loyalty as Saturday after Saturday he watched the
+prowess of his big brothers. Every day he felt himself stretching up,
+broadening out, nearer to their stature, though nobody else gave him a
+thought. Life was full of big and generous and absorbing matter.
+
+Then came Thanksgiving Day, the climax ... and oh, after that, what a
+vacuum! Nothing in life but classes! Holy smoke! It was fierce! What did
+the fellows do who hadn't had anything but classes! How could they stand
+it? But of course, it wasn't such a come-down for them.
+
+Going home as Neale did every afternoon, he had none of the scanty,
+ill-organized college social life. Sliding into college as he had, with
+no introduction from the right kind of Prep. school, and with a
+noticeably colorless personality, he was not thought of as a possibility
+for any fraternity. Time hung heavy on his hands. Lectures took up but
+three hours a day, on the busiest days. To fill in the rest of the time
+there was the swimming pool, the Gymnasium and the Library. He swam,
+practised the overhand racing stroke, dived; in the Gym. he fooled
+awkwardly on the parallel bars and side-horse; he tossed medicine balls
+with any pick-up acquaintance; what he really enjoyed was the line of
+traveling rings which hung in front of the visitors' gallery--but one
+day he heard an upper classman refer to these as "Freshmen's Delight,"
+and thereafter he avoided them.
+
+The Library, the first one to which he had had access, wasn't so bad.
+Neale went there first to look up a reference for Comp. Lit. A. Of
+course you ran the risk of being thought a grind if you spent too much
+time there, but you could kill the hours very pleasantly with the bound
+volumes of the magazines in the shelves about the general reading-room.
+Neale and most of his friends wasted an unconscionable number of hours
+on those magazines: but little by little the library habit began to form
+itself, by slow, infinitesimal accretions. He found it a good place to
+study, wrote English A. themes there, finally even got into the way of
+running through the card catalogue, and drawing books with titles that
+sounded good.
+
+Christmas came. Father, recognizing manhood achieved, gave him a box of
+a hundred Milo cigarettes. Mother--poor, dear, ignorant Mother!--gave
+him a white sweater decorated with a light blue C! Even more than by
+smoking Father's cigarettes, Neale proved that he had begun to outgrow
+the cruel egotism of adolescence, by kissing Mother and thanking her,
+without telling her that almost any fool finally gets his diploma, but
+only the chosen few--and these as Juniors or Seniors--win the right to
+adorn themselves with the proud insignia of their Varsity letter.
+
+After Christmas came the mid-year exams. Neale went into them
+confidently enough--and to his astonishment emerged with passing marks,
+but with no great credit. D in German was the worst, and he'd studied
+German since he was a little boy! Greek, English and Latin marked him as
+mediocre with a C. Comparative Literature alone rated him B--and every
+one knew that Comp. Lit. was a snap course. Neale had never thought of
+himself as a grind, but he had been used to high marks at school, and
+the low grades nettled him. He began to see that there was more to this
+college work than he had understood. The studies themselves were not
+unlike those of high school; indeed they were easier than the science
+and mathematics that had been hammered into him at Hadley. But the point
+of view was different, and that had fooled him. There was a "take it or
+leave it" attitude about everything at college; the professors did not,
+as at Hadley, hold their jobs only because they were able to drive the
+bright, the dull, the scatter-brained, the sluggish, all through passing
+grades for the next year's work. No, these college professors and
+instructors gave themselves no such trouble. They set out their wares.
+If the students helped themselves, so much the better: if they didn't,
+so much the worse--for the students. Neale mis-called the professors for
+lazy time-servers: but he wasn't going to let them put it over on him
+that way another time. He would read everything they suggested and more!
+They would be astonished by the brilliance of his finals. But just then
+baseball practice started in the cage and Neale forgot all about his
+vendetta against the professors.
+
+At baseball he expected to shine. This he had really played before
+coming to college. April saw the Freshman baseball squad practising on
+South Field. It was a terrible jolt to Neale to find himself in the
+discard. His vacant-lot, light-of-nature game had not compared favorably
+with the play of graduates of well-coached Prep. schools. He was thrown
+back on the Library. Perhaps it was just as well, he told himself with
+sour-grape philosophy. After all he was there, among other things, to
+get an education.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+
+The event of that summer, the only one that counted for him, was a long,
+timber-cruising trip which he took, as chain-boy and camp-helper, up
+into the mountains of southern Vermont. Grandfather's whole life had
+been spent in handling timber in one way and another and all his old
+friends and associates were in that world. Every one had the greatest
+respect for old Mr. Crittenden's "timber-sense" even now when he was so
+old that he could do no more cruising, engage in no more active
+speculation. Sitting around on the lumber-piles at the mill, or on the
+porch of the Crittenden house, Grandfather somehow had a finger in many
+a timber deal. People came to consult him, and to get him to go halves
+on buys bigger than they had capital for. From the time he had been a
+little boy, Neale had been the unconsidered witness of innumerable such
+interviews, and had laughed inwardly with considerable family pride to
+see how completely Grandfather in his baggy old country clothes held his
+own and better against the smartly-dressed younger men who came to talk
+business with him.
+
+The summer after Neale's Freshman year, the proposition was a big buy of
+wild land from which Grandfather himself had skimmed the cream thirty
+years ago and sold for nothing afterwards, but which old Mr. Crittenden
+opined, cocking a shrewd old eye in reflection, must have again come to
+some exploitable value. Three men were to go up unobtrusively, and
+timber-cruise through it, back and forth, zig-zag, till they could make
+a fair report on what was there. The plans were being made, one evening,
+out on the porch where they all sat in the long, clear summer twilight.
+Grandfather had not seemed to notice Neale's half-wistful interest in
+the talk of camp outfits and compasses and packs, but suddenly, looking
+down to where the boy stretched his long, gaunt body on the
+porch-floor, he said, "What say, Neale? How'd you like to go along? You
+could carry chain when they had to run a line, and I guess you're smart
+enough to keep a fire going and help make camp, ain't you?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That had been a great month; full of discomfort and hardship and fatigue
+and deep, deep satisfaction. Neale was the only boy with three men,
+hardened, wiry woodsmen, who had spent their lives in forests, not at
+all in the loafing irregular manner of sportsmen, with occasional spurts
+of nervous effort, and with long periods, in unfavorable weather, of
+idling around a camp-fire. Neale's three companions had always worked in
+the woods as regularly as his father worked in his office. Rain and heat
+and cold and insect-plagues were nothing to them. The main business of
+every day was work: and camp-life was organized sketchily (without much
+regard for comfort), not to interfere with work. Neale found that his
+gymnasium-practice, athletic-sports, college-life had left him as soft
+as dough beside these lean, iron-like men. He doggedly sweated himself
+into a hardness that made it possible for him to keep pace with them. At
+first when they turned in under their blankets at night as soon as dark
+came, Neale had been too exhausted to sleep and had lain awake aching,
+every one of his big bones bruised by the roughness of the hastily-made
+balsam-bough bed. But inside a week, he was able, as his companions did,
+to stretch out with one long, deep breath, and to know nothing more till
+morning came, and the light woke him to roll over and open his eyes to
+the unimaginable freshness of dawn, filtering through the thick-leaved
+branches over his head. He drew in a chest-full of the sweet, new air, a
+heart-full of immaculate beauty, and fell heavily asleep again, till
+half-an-hour later one of his companions kicked him awake to take his
+share of getting breakfast and packing up for the day's tramp.
+
+The three timber-cruisers talked very little of anything, most of their
+prodigious capacity for effort going into their work, and they never
+talked at all of the beauty which was the background of their lives; but
+they occasionally paid a silent, offish tribute to that beauty by going
+a little out of their way to some "look-out" evidently, from their talk,
+familiar to them since boyhood. This was generally the top of a cliff or
+rocky slide, where there were no trees to obscure the view. Arrived
+there, they never did anything but sit and swing their feet over
+emptiness, pitch stones into the void below them, and quarrel with each
+other about the identification of different peaks and hollows in the
+vast wooded expanse of mountains before them. But they were always more
+than usually silent after such a glimpse of the spaciousness of the
+world and, for one, Neale found a greatness in his heart to match the
+greatness which had filled his eyes.
+
+Once as they sat thus on a crag, throwing stones and smoking, the head
+timber-cruiser, old Martin Hoardman, remarked to Neale, of whom they
+usually took little notice, "See that high range ... and then that other
+beyond it, the one with the three-peaked mountain in the middle?"
+
+Neale nodded.
+
+"Wa'l, you'd never guess it, but there's a valley down in between them
+two, with a sight of folks in it, and farms and everything."
+
+Another man said, "Why, old man Crittenden's got a brother lives there.
+Ain't that the Ashley valley? He runs an old-fashioned water-power mill
+there."
+
+Martin observed, "Yep, I've drawed many a load of logs to the old man's
+mill."
+
+Neale remembered the sharp-spoken old man who had visited Grandfather's
+mill one day when he was a little boy. He had said then, he would go up
+to Ashley some day and make Uncle Burton a visit. Well, if he were a
+crow or a hawk, he could do it now, in about half an hour. He sat
+dreaming, his eyes fixed on the two hazy blue lines of mountains which
+stood up so high and so close to each other that they entirely hid the
+valley between. It must be a quiet, sheltered spot, that valley.
+
+"Time to be movin' on," said old Martin, getting to his feet, and
+striding off into the woods, with his strong, unelastic, never-tiring
+gait.
+
+At the end of five weeks they were plodding back up the road to the
+Crittenden house, Neale not to be distinguished from the other men. The
+road seemed hard and narrow and foolish to them, the house and barn like
+toys, the world about them on so small a scale that their widened eyes
+could scarcely distinguish one thing from another. Neale had the
+distinct impression, when he stepped into the kitchen that if he stood
+up straight, he would put his head through the ceiling. And what a
+comical, trifling thing a chair was! He felt afraid to let his whole
+weight come down on it and expected it to go to pieces in his hand, it
+felt so flimsy.
+
+But his bed was good--oh, very good. He slept till noon the next day and
+was wakened by Grandfather coming up to see what the matter was. He
+scrambled up, half-awake, rubbing his eyes and staring, his pyjamas open
+upon his broad chest, his long arms bare. Grandfather stood looking at
+him for a moment before he went back downstairs. He did not say a word
+except, "You're going to eat breakfast and dinner together, I guess,"
+but Neale knew that Grandfather was very well pleased with what he saw.
+Grandfather was a pretty good old scout, anyhow, he thought, as he
+washed gingerly in the white earthen-ware basin, which seemed
+appallingly breakable to him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+
+And then it was time to go back to college. Sophomore year was _entirely
+different_. What a change from his cat-in-a-strange-garret sensation of
+a year ago! Now he was blatantly sure of every step in the elaborate and
+illogical ritual that makes up undergraduate life. He stood between
+College Hall and the Library all one happy afternoon, wringing the hands
+of Sophomores, as uplifted with their status as he. There Griswold the
+Assistant Manager hailed him and carried him off to the football house
+on 117th Street. He found the office on the first floor crowded with all
+the leaders and hangers-on of the football organization.
+
+Andrews shook hands with him and actually remembered his name instead of
+calling him "Freshman Bean-pole"--it was great to be a Soph.! "Report in
+the Gym. at three," said Andrews, "you'd better live at the house this
+season; fix him up with a room, Charley." He turned and went on talking
+with McClurg, something about officials for the Fordham game.
+
+Bixby reached over and picked up a paper from the welter on his desk,
+"Top-floor, Crittenden, you'll find a lot of cots in the front room;
+take any one that's loose."
+
+"I haven't any clothes with me," explained Neale. It had never occurred
+to him that he would be accepted into the very center of things this
+way.
+
+"Never mind, bring 'em to-morrow; but you'd better beat it up and stake
+out your claim to a cot now...." The telephone rang and Bixby snatched
+it up, "Columbia football house, yes, this is Bixby speaking. No, that
+_won't_ do! Those shoes were promised for this afternoon. Yes, yes, you
+can make it if you send them right away. See here, there are lots of
+sporting-goods firms who want our trade...."
+
+Neale went upstairs and found a room, with six cots made up. Four of
+them had suit-cases or books on them to show occupancy. Over by the
+window he saw Billings, last year's full-back, sitting at a table with a
+thin, slight upper classman. Neale thought he recognized him,--Grant his
+name was--one of the college leaders, debating team, Spec. Managing
+Board, Phi Beta Kappa; that sort of chap. Billings' big body was hunched
+miserably forward over a book, his forehead wrinkled. As Neale looked at
+them, Grant reached forward, shut up the book and pulled it towards him.
+
+"No use, Billings. It'd only ball you up to keep on with that math. Not
+a chance! Don't try the exam. Anyway they can't keep you off the team
+with only one condition. But, God, how _did_ you manage to flunk Comp.
+Lit.? Any child of three ought to pass Comp. Lit. But don't you worry!
+We'll get you through. Have you learned those pieces I gave you?"
+
+Billings straightened up and recited in a stumbling sing-song, "As
+Shelley beautifully says, 'I could lie down like a sick child and
+weep ... and weep ... and weep!...'"
+
+"'Away this life of woe,'" prompted Grant. "And it's like a 'tired
+child.'... No, don't change it! It'll look less as if you were copying a
+crib if you don't get it quite right. All right for that. Now, let's
+have the other ones."
+
+At this point, Billings said violently in very forcible language, that
+poems were all such damn silly rot he couldn't learn them. And Grant,
+unsurprised and peremptory, answered that it didn't make a damned bit of
+difference how silly and rotten they were, they could be learned.
+"You've got brains enough to get a racing-dope sheet by heart, you can
+memorize poetry too. Now, your time's up. Beat it over to the Library
+where you can't talk and learn all _three_ pieces! Remember you're to
+work 'em in, no matter what he asks. And if you have a chance, praise
+Shelley and knock Matthew Arnold. That's his line."
+
+He turned to Neale, "You're Greenway, aren't you, with two years'
+conditions in French B?"
+
+"No," said Neale, "I'm Crittenden."
+
+"Oh, are you? Not on my list. You ought to have reported before. I
+can't do everything at the last minute. No matter, I'll give you till
+Greenway shows up. He's only a sub-end anyway, and we're lousy with
+ends. What did _you_ flunk?"
+
+"I didn't flunk anything," Neale admitted, half-ashamed that he might be
+considered a grind.
+
+Grant jumped up. "What, _nothing_! And on the football squad, too." He
+stared hard at Neale as at a strange animal, and conjectured aloud,
+"Well, you must be a dub, of course. Never knew a Varsity man whose
+brain-cavity wasn't stuffed with cabbage-leaves."
+
+Neale apparently showed some of the alarm this caused him, for the
+upper-classman added, "Oh, you'll get your chance just the same. Judging
+by the number of boobs Alpine and I are coaching, any dub who is
+eligible will have a smell at the Varsity, at least for the early games,
+till we can shove the regular Varsity men through their conditions."
+
+"EVERYBODY OVER TO THE GYM.," roared a voice from the lower hallway.
+
+Neale tossed his derby on one of the unpreempted cots and ran
+downstairs. As he bounded down flight after flight he could hear Grant
+leaning over the top banister yelling to the Manager to have Greenway
+found and delivered to him at once.
+
+It was great to breathe the sweaty air of the dressing-room again, to
+strip and pull on your rough jersey and feel it rubbing the skin of your
+shoulders, great to hail the men you knew and have them slap you on the
+back.
+
+"ALL OVER.... On the jump!" The squad clattered out, their cleats
+scraping and slipping on the marble steps.
+
+Practice that afternoon was what the coaches called light--that is, no
+bones were broken: they fell on the ball, and it gladdened Neale's heart
+to see the new men hop into the air and bang down on one hip, just as he
+used to last season. They tackled the dummy, they went down under punts
+that sultry September afternoon--all of them, even the line men, time
+after time, till the sweat soaked even through their elbow-pads. Neale
+was dog-tired as he hobbled back to the dressing-room and pulled off
+his dripping jersey. What luxury to slip under the shower, hot first
+till the dirt was all off, then turn the handle, cool, cool, cooler,
+cold--to lean forward and feel it patter on your back, lean backward and
+feel the cold hard drops sting your face and chest. As he lay in
+Pompeian ease on the rubbing table, Josh went so far as to tell him that
+his muscles were in pretty fair shape compared to some of them. That was
+the timber-cruising trip. And how he tore into the roast-beef that
+night! It was good to be alive--to be a Soph.--to be on the football
+squad!
+
+Grant's prophecy turned out correct. Four of the regular Varsity men
+were debarred by the faculty committee and the eligible subs made the
+most of their opportunity. One of the vacant places was left half-back
+and Neale, who that summer had grown some flesh and muscle on his lanky
+limbs and now weighed a hundred and sixty-three stripped, put his whole
+soul into the quest and nosed out Biffy McFadden for the job. McFadden
+knew more than Neale (the coach made no secret of Neale's lack of
+sophistication) but he weighed less and was only a little faster.
+
+So Neale was given, although grudgingly, his chance and took it as
+though it had been his one chance to save his soul alive. He played
+against Rutgers, proud, half-scared, yet reassured at lining up by the
+side of big Tod McAlpine, and was fairly translated when he went over
+the line (just as easily as if it had been in practice) for one of
+Columbia's five touchdowns. Against Williams a week later, he played
+again and did nothing either very good or very bad. Just before the
+Harvard game, Garland was squeezed through a special examination in
+Latin and after that Neale had no chance for the Varsity. But he _was_
+considered about neck and neck with Biffy as first sub for the
+back-field, and he and Biffy grew together in a loyal comradeship, as
+brothers-in-arms.
+
+Like a young tree which suddenly puts out a long new shoot in a new
+direction, Neale learned a lot of things that autumn, different from
+anything he had learned before. In the first place, living in the
+constant unrepressed society of thirty other young men, he acquired a
+good deal of social ease of a rough-and-tumble sort, learned much
+profanity, many foul and a few funny stories by the aid of which he was
+able to piece together the isolated facts he had already picked up about
+sex, and appear to his brothers a great deal more sophisticated than he
+was.
+
+He also learned much technical football: to pick openings in a broken
+field, to jump from a crouching start the instant the ball began to
+move, to find his stride and be going at top speed in three paces,
+instinctively to hurdle when the defense was on the ground, to bull over
+it with churning knees when it was waist high, to lower his head and ram
+through when it was standing up, and always to kick, crawl, squirm the
+ball forward even if it was only a half an inch.
+
+He learned a great deal more than that. All that autumn he played
+football, thought football, dreamed football, lived football. The savage
+Spartan football code was his code: to do anything, everything for a
+team-mate, for the team; to fight as hard in midfield with the score
+hopelessly against him as half a yard from the enemy's goal-line; to
+endure the agony of being tackled on muscle-bruised thighs, to get up
+and drive back as hard as ever into the line to the same certain
+torment; to go to any length to put an opponent out of the game--any
+length except being caught and having his team penalized by the
+officials; and no matter to what outbreaks of emotion his exhausted body
+and over-strained nerves might give way in the dressing-room, to walk
+out of it with his jaw set, his face impassive and never let an enemy
+rooter see a tear in his eye. It was by no means the education in the
+humanities and liberal arts with which the University was supposed to be
+providing him, but an education of a kind, it certainly was. Above all,
+at a period when his raw new personality was all one huge void,
+clamoring for something to fill it, football filled his life full to the
+brim. There was no vacuum left to be filled either by culture or
+deviltry.
+
+All through the rest of that in-and-out season he played regularly at
+left half-back on the scrub, relishing to the full those afternoons when
+the scrub, with all the best of the decisions, scored on a crippled
+Varsity; rejoicing even more (for it meant power to the team) when the
+Varsity struck its gait and pounded rough-shod over the bleeding and
+prostrate scrub.
+
+After the season Neale found himself entitled to wear the "Varsity
+stripe" and monogram. This gave him a certain position in his class. He
+was somebody. Two fraternities made discreet overtures to him. Neale
+considered, encouraged Lamma Kappa Pi, which seemed to have more
+athletic men than the other, was duly pledged and initiated.
+
+And now came a change in his manner of living. The chapter needed
+roomers to help pay the rent for the Frat. house. Couldn't Brother
+Crittenden move into a top-floor bedroom? Neale broached the subject to
+his father and mother, pointing out how much more time he would have for
+study if he lived near the University. They surprised him by treating
+the matter with unexpected solemnity and delaying decision for several
+days; but in the end they gave their consent.
+
+It did not occur to Neale as he slung his clothes into a trunk that he
+was saying good-by to his home-life; and if it occurred to his mother,
+silently helping him pack, she kept her thoughts to herself. An event
+that seemed of much more importance to Neale was a move that Father made
+on his own initiative. After a long homily on responsibility and
+learning the value of money, he proposed to grant Neale an allowance of
+fifty dollars a month to be paid on the first of the month in advance.
+Out of this Neale was to buy food, shelter and incidentals. Father was
+to go on paying college fees.
+
+So Brother Crittenden installed himself in the top-floor hall bedroom,
+and according to fraternity practice, decorated it with pennants, foils
+and masks (although he did not fence), and sword bayonets, because they
+looked impressive and were cheap at Bannerman's. To make a real college
+room, he knew by comparing it with others, it should have a dozen girls'
+photographs, but Neale knew no girl well enough to beg photographs from
+her. He excused this lack by telling himself that he had no use for
+women, he was at college for the stern man's business of making the
+football team. Nothing that might interfere with the pink of physical
+condition or the singleness of mental resolution should have a place in
+his life.
+
+And indeed for the six weeks which separated the end of the season from
+mid-year examinations, he stuck to a monastic schedule. The mandate had
+gone forth that football men must somehow manage to pass a majority of
+their subjects, and Neale's fraternity brothers never tried to coax him
+away from the table where he sat wrestling with Cicero's Letters or the
+Carolingian Empire, not even to play poker, or go night-hawking around
+little Coney Island.
+
+But after mid-years it was different. Nobody could possibly start
+worrying about the finals for three months yet. The basket-ball season
+began and with it the informal Gym. dances after each game. "Nunc est
+bibendum, nunc pede libero" was in the air, not only in Latin classes.
+Neale went to the first games in the cap and sweater he wore about the
+campus, and when the dance began, sneaked out, dodging behind pillars to
+avoid compromising those of his chapter, resplendent in evening clothes
+with girl partners more resplendent still. But such seclusion was not to
+last. Other fellows, the "fussers" of his chapter were caught with extra
+girls on their hands, sisters or cousins, or ex-girls, and Neale in
+spite of his avowed principle of dancing only when he couldn't run away
+fast enough to escape, was hauled in to be the necessary extra man for
+the more or less anonymous out-of-town girl to be provided for.
+
+Logically enough, other advances followed. Finding that they had landed
+not only a promising athlete in Brother Crittenden, but a passable
+social member, the rest of the chapter hastened to count him in. He
+learned to play poker; to drink more beer than he wanted; to keep a pipe
+going without burning his mouth; he learned where to go for chop suey;
+to sniff at a cigar, and look wise before he bought it; to pretend to
+like his cocktails dry, although as a matter of fact, he did not like
+them at all; he learned to rattle off a line of bright, slangy
+compliments at college dances or Frat. teas, and to take a flashier line
+with chippies at the dance halls; he added to his store of oaths and
+smutty stories ... the chapter thought well of him and he thought even
+better of himself.
+
+By the time spring came Neale felt happily sure that he was seeing life
+without making a fool of himself, which was, according to his latest
+philosophy (borrowed from Horace) the right thing to do. He would be
+nineteen in a few months now, time to attain a calm, mature, unsurprised
+acceptance of the world. No half-baked enthusiasms about anything.
+Except football, of course. That was far above all philosophies of life.
+In the spring of his Sophomore year Neale was consuming pipefuls of
+tobacco and meditating on what he called his "past life," censuring or
+approving his actions by the newly acquired yard-stick of the "golden
+mean." What a youthful idiot he had been about Don Roberts! That was so
+long ago that he could smile cynically at both his enthusiasm and his
+disillusion, each equally far from balance. Balance. Poise. That was the
+right dope for a man of the world.
+
+And yet, spring was in the air, and it was hard, even for the ripe
+maturity of nineteen to be perfectly balanced. Neale had no girl at
+hand, and was betrayed into working off the excitement of spring days by
+writing an English theme on the tulips in Union Square. So much early
+May, both of style and personality seeped into this, that the jaded,
+discouraged young professor of English felt his heart leap up with
+incredulous hope and pleasure. To encourage the writer he read parts of
+it aloud to the class, while Neale's very soul scorched with shame. One
+of his non-athletic classmates, a brilliant, precocious, foreign-born
+fellow, with literary aspirations, came up to him afterwards and
+congratulated him enviously on his success. It was a terrible experience
+all around. Neale vowed furiously to himself that never again would he
+let any real feeling slip into a college theme.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+
+West Adams and Grandfather's house looked queer and countrified and
+old-fashioned. It was a long, long way from a Frat. house on 113th
+Street to that plain bedroom so full of his little-boy and prep-school
+personality that Neale felt ill at ease and restless there. How could
+you live up to your ideal of Horatian calm and sophisticated tolerance
+towards human life in the presence of people who had known you when you
+were in short trousers, who only a few years before had been giving you
+hot lemonade for a cold and tucking you up in bed? No, West Adams was
+impossible! He looked inside the Emerson one day, remembering what an
+impression it had made on him, and found it like West Adams, very dull.
+"The man is so terribly in earnest!" he told himself and was enchanted
+at the superior, Oscar Wilde tone of his dictum.
+
+The next day he thought of Billy Peters and knew that he was saved.
+Billy was the most amusing of his Frat. brothers, the one now nearest to
+him, for he remembered that Billy spent the summers in the Berkshires.
+He wrote to Billy asking him to come up for a couple of weeks and go
+camping with him, somewhere up the Deerfield. Neale would meet him at
+whatever station Billy could make and they would start at once. He
+didn't invite Billy to Grandfather's, not because he was ashamed of
+Grandfather's--not at all--he just didn't think it would interest Billy
+there. In due time Billy's answer came, asking Neale to cut out the
+wilderness project and come down to make him a visit in the Berkshires.
+Neale considered, he liked Billy; and West Adams was deadly dull. Why
+not? There was no good reason why not; he packed his suit-case and went.
+
+Billy met him and drove him to the Peters' cottage, a remodeled
+farm-house several miles from town. Mrs. Peters was cordially polite,
+Billy's little high-school kid sister turned blue, admiring eyes on her
+big brother's friend, who was presented as a most prodigious athlete.
+After supper, at Billy's suggestion they walked over to the hotel, two
+remodeled farm-houses with shingled sides joined by mission-furnitured
+piazzas. Billy introduced him to the "finest little girl ever" and Neale
+was only half-surprised (knowing Billy fairly well) to find she wasn't
+the same as the "finest little girl" of the winter before. But that was
+nothing to Neale; there were plenty of other girls, all delighted to
+buzz around him, to have him dance or play ping-pong, to make fudge, or
+walk in the moonlight. Some were pretty and some were not, some were
+bright and some just boisterous. And it was all the same to Neale. The
+Horatian pose was a great success. He was delighted with himself.
+
+At the end of a week he prepared to leave. But Billy couldn't see it
+that way. It was true that Polly was going to have a couple of girl
+friends at the house next week, and would want Neale's room, but then
+they'd want Bill's room too. If Billy was to be exiled to a tent, why
+couldn't Crit keep him company? They'd move the tent up into the Glen,
+and really camp out, cook their own grub and everything. Crit had said
+he wanted to camp out! Why not? After all there wasn't any real reason
+why he should go...! Next week there was the coaching parade, and all
+sorts of fun, decorating the hotel three-seater, with ferns and daisies.
+Then there was a boating excursion to Long Pond where Sarah Davis fell
+overboard and Neale pulled her out.
+
+Then there was a fateful straw-ride in the August full moon, very near
+to Neale's nineteenth birthday, and there he met Miss Austin, a new
+arrival at the hotel. She was almost as tall as Neale, which was very
+tall indeed for a girl, and she looked to Neale as though she might have
+stepped right out of a Gibson illustration. This utterly superlative
+impression of beauty and good form was not lessened even in broad
+daylight the next morning, when he saw her again on the tennis-court,
+where she said good-morning with a special look for him in her very fine
+gray eyes. She did not play tennis, she sat on a bench at the side,
+under a purple silk parasol, her long, full, white skirts frilling out
+in a plaited cone, her pretty, fluffy, brown hair arranged in a high
+pompadour, which stayed impeccable as the tennis-playing girls grew hot
+and red, their hair straggling in straight wisps across their shining
+wet foreheads.
+
+Had Neale ever thought he scorned girls who sat cool and dressed-up on a
+bench while others played tennis? As soon as the set was over, he went
+to sit beside her. She glanced at him out of her gray eyes and looked
+away again. Neale's pulse beat more quickly and he looked hard at the
+curve of her cheek. Then they began to talk. Before she went in to
+lunch, she had told him with a wistful note in her voice, that she was
+glad she'd met him, because most of the people at the hotel bored her
+so. Neale answered (the truth striking him for the first time), that
+_most_ of the people bored him too.
+
+If other people were what bored them, they certainly must have been free
+from ennui for the next few days, for they saw little of any one but
+each other. Neale's days and evenings were good or bad, according to the
+extent of his success in monopolizing Miss Austin. On the whole the
+evenings were the best, the evenings when they sat in a far corner of
+the hotel piazza and compared notes about their views on life and
+literature. Miss Austin paid Neale the compliment he most appreciated.
+She affected to consider him as well-read as she was--what did he think
+of Meredith, and Ibsen? She discussed Bernard Shaw and "The Second Mrs.
+Tanqueray." Neale had to trust to copious bluffing: to confide heavily
+in his taciturnity, letting her run on, till she expressed opinions
+tangible enough for him to agree with her.
+
+The climax of the season was the fancy dress dance at the Prospect
+House. Everybody went; Billy in a blanket, woodchuck skins and turkey
+feathers considered himself a passable Uncas. Neale who had caught the
+early morning train up to West Adams and the milk train back, wore his
+football suit, with his white sweater like a cloak, the arms tied under
+his chin--hot but very becoming.
+
+With Billy he started conscientiously to dance in rotation with all the
+girls from their hotel. His second dance was with Miss Austin. She was
+in black with a black lace mantilla, and pinned in her hair was one of
+the roses Neale had ransacked Pittsfield to buy--he forgot the
+others--forgot everything but the rhythm of their steps together--they
+danced, sat out on the verandah--danced again.
+
+It was pointed, shameless--the chaperon, whose daughter was sitting a
+disconsolate wall-flower, glared at them--and they danced on. Had this
+red-blooded young blade, giving himself up wholly to the glamor of the
+moment, had he ever taken the cold, dry, heartless doctrine of Horace as
+a guide to life? He danced on--had he said he only danced when he was
+caught and had to?--he danced on, thrilling to the rhythm, like the
+swinging beat of hearts in young bodies. At last, the piano, violin and
+cornet (the "orchestra" imported from the city of North Adams), broke
+into "Home, Sweet Home," and the last waltz began; slow, languorous, the
+climax of the wonderful evening for Neale.
+
+Then Miss Austin staged her dramatic effect. As the party broke up, she
+said, putting out one hand to Neale and resting the other on her
+mother's arm, "Good-night, Mr. Crittenden, and ..." she looked down at
+the roses he had given her, "and good-by. Mother and I are leaving on
+the morning train. I only waited to have that last dance." She waited an
+instant to let this have its effect, and added in a lower tone, "Thank
+you--thank you for--for making my stay here so pleasant."
+
+Now there was, under Neale's skin, neither a calm Horatian philosopher
+nor a dashing red-blooded young blade. There was only a shy, awkward boy
+of nineteen, taken entirely unawares, struck dumb by the surge of
+emotion within him. Helpless and inarticulate, except for a muttered
+"good-by" he shook Miss Austin's hand and walked away with apparent
+steadiness.
+
+But afterwards...! When Billy was snoring inside the tent, Neale sat on
+the platform outside, and wrestled with Destiny. What a stiff, frozen
+lump he had been, not to have been able to speak out what was in his
+heart. She was _going_! And he had no photograph of her...! What an
+idiot never to have thought to ask for one! Not a keepsake! Not even a
+kiss! It was too hideous. No man with any virility would let Destiny
+ride rough-shod over him like that. He would be masterful. He would take
+the same train with her in the morning, he would be reckless, follow her
+up.... Great Caesar's ghost! But it was cold out there! The night
+dampness pierced through even his thick sweater. He staggered to his
+cot, rolled up in the blankets and fell instantly asleep.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He half-wakened once at dawn with the first rays of sunlight, rolled
+over, looked out into the breathless, pure beauty of the new day
+dropping slowly in a rain of golden light through the great trees,
+thought hazily that he was timber-cruising in the Green Mountains again,
+and fell asleep more profoundly than ever. He was really very tired and
+his old faculty for prodigious sleeping reasserted itself.
+
+When he finally awoke, the day was ripe, and the light had a late look.
+Sure enough, his watch said a quarter past eleven. He sat up and
+stretched, and rubbed his hands back and forth through his frowsy hair.
+Billy had eaten his breakfast and gone. But he must have brought up the
+mail and left it for Neale to find; for a letter now fell off Neale's
+cot to the floor.
+
+The letter was typed, brief and direct like the writer.
+
+     "Dear Crittenden:
+
+     "We have a hard schedule ahead of us this season. I want all last
+     year's squad to report at the football house for practice on
+     September 1st. I can count on you not to be late.
+
+     "R. McAlpine, Capt."
+
+Neale read it over and over, stupidly at first and then with growing
+excitement. Alone in the tent, he allowed a broad, childish,
+unrestrained smile of pure pleasure and pride to shine all over his
+face.
+
+Then the date struck his eye. He was to report on September first and
+this was August twenty-fourth. Gosh! Less than a week to get into
+condition! Not a single minute to lose. His chance might depend on his
+being in condition.
+
+_His chance...!_ He tossed the blankets off and sprang up, making plans
+rapidly. The coffee-pot left by Billy was still warm in the banked
+ashes, but Neale put it aside. No coffee! After his breakfast of oatmeal
+and toast, he looked longingly at his pipe, but did not light it. No
+tobacco! He remembered that this was about the time for Miss Austin's
+train, but he did not change his clothes to go down to see her off. No
+girls!
+
+Still in his football togs, just as he had danced the last waltz, he set
+off for the first of his training, a two-mile jog-trot over the hills.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+
+September, 1902.
+
+After the first day's practice Neale and Biffy McFadden were jogging
+back to the dressing-room together.
+
+"Great, isn't it?" grunted Biffy, rubbing his jersey sleeve over his
+sweaty forehead. "Looks like a job for either you or me."
+
+"I'll have to step lively, if I get the job. Just you wait till I get
+some of the fat off me. I'm soft yet." He thought bitterly of time
+wasted on the hotel piazza.
+
+"Soft? Hell!" cried Biffy. "All I'll say is I hope you never tackle me
+when you're hard--thought you'd slapped me with a piece of lead pipe
+just after I caught that punt."
+
+McAlpine and Andrews were standing outside the Gym. door. Neale stopped
+to shake hands with his Captain whom he had not seen before practice.
+McAlpine punched him appraisingly in the abdomen.
+
+"Not so bad. Some fat but there's muscle behind it."
+
+Neale made way for Atkins of the '99 team, an alumnus always hanging
+around the squad every season. He was supposed to be devoting his
+heart's blood to bond-brokerage, down on Wall Street, but, a wistful
+exile from the world to which he had given the passion of his youth, he
+always came uptown in the fall to watch football practice. Also, which
+was of much more importance, he spent his summer vacation looking up
+available football material, "out in the bushes" as he expressed it. He
+now stopped in front of the Captain with a grin of pride, and jerking
+his head towards an approaching player, he inquired, "Well, how about
+him?"
+
+McAlpine replied with enthusiasm, "Built like a piano, isn't he? Where'd
+you raise him?"
+
+Neale followed their eyes and saw a squat, swarthy,
+two-hundred-and-fifty-pound linesman rolling past them towards the Gym.
+door.
+
+"Where'd I raise him? Stole him from the U. of P. Father's something or
+other up in the coal-fields--oodles of money. Son was all set up to go
+to Pennsy, but we got him down here and led him up and down the Great
+White Way a couple of nights. Nobody could coax him away now--unless
+there's a University at Paris."
+
+McAlpine stared after the powerful back and shoulders filling the
+doorway. "God, what a brute! Baby hippo walking on his hind legs. What's
+his breed anyway?"
+
+"Some sort of hunky. I'm not up on their stud book, but I'd say off-hand
+he's a cross between a Slovak cart-horse and a Ruthenian wild boar--lots
+of space in his garret, but you can't hurt him with a pick-ax."
+
+"But, how in merry hell, are we going to keep him eligible? What courses
+did you get him entered for?"
+
+"Oh, assorted snap courses--English Lit. mostly. And he has a tame tutor
+that lives with him and does the studying. How'd you suppose he ever got
+through High School?"
+
+Neale left them talking and stepped into the Gym., admiring enviously
+the massive bone-structure of the new student of English Literature.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There were horribly emotional ups and downs in the Junior football
+season for Neale, ups and downs that ploughed and harrowed his young
+soul, planted many seeds in his heart, and left him at the end of the
+season with so much new knowledge of himself and others to digest, with
+experiences so rich and varied, dark and brilliant, to look back on,
+that he needed the entire rest of the year to grow up to them. The other
+students, those who did not play football, seemed to him like little
+boys, fooling around with marbles and kites, so little did they know of
+the black depths of depression and despair, and the hard-won heights of
+exultation which crammed his own personal life full, and gave him a
+premature maturity of experience, like that of a boy who has been
+through a war.
+
+The day after his third game on the Varsity, Father called him on the
+telephone and asked if he couldn't come home and have dinner with them
+to celebrate his success--would that be breaking training? Oh, no, Neale
+answered, not if he got back to the house at nine. So he went home to a
+specially good dinner, just the kind he remembered as a little boy, when
+there was company. They talked football mostly: that meant he and Father
+talked and Mother saw to it that the plates of her two men were filled.
+After dinner they went into the library, the library where he had first
+plunged into the world of books, and there he and Mother sat on the
+sofa, while Father sat in his own chair, and they visited some more.
+Neale found it surprisingly easy to talk to his parents now, almost as
+easy as if they were strangers. During the last year he had lived away
+from them except for week-ends and short visits. In that time he had
+acquired a little perspective; and the new shell to his personality had
+set hard enough so that he no longer felt an irritable, shame-faced
+distaste of being looked at by people who had known him as a little boy.
+Great Scott! Had he _ever_ been a little boy? The college Junior looked
+around on the walls, books and furniture that had not changed a hair and
+remembered with difficulty that he had once been a care-free child in
+these surroundings.
+
+When he went away, he shook hands with his father, as he always did, and
+stooped from his great height to kiss his mother as he always did. Why
+not? It did not occur to him that he might not kiss his mother.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But apparently it had occurred to her, for when she felt on her lips the
+cool, fresh, boyish, matter-of-fact pressure of his lips, she gave a sob
+and flung her arms around him, holding him close and crying a little on
+his shoulder.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Why, dear old Mother! What was the matter with her? Neale put both arms
+around her and gave her a great hug, as he used to when he came home
+from West Adams.
+
+It had done him good to see his folks, he thought, as he strode off down
+the familiar, but not much-loved city street. He thought affectionately
+about his father and mother for quite a time thereafter, as far as the
+ferry-house indeed, when the build of a deck-hand reminded him of the
+new Swede on the team. After that he thought football intensively, a
+strong color of Junior cock-sureness tinging all his thoughts. He was
+making the team! He wasn't so worse! How green, how incredibly green the
+thumb-fingered Freshies were who came out to try for the squad. And he
+had beaten Biffy to it, although Biffy had almost killed himself with
+trying.
+
+The weak opponents of the preliminary season were easily swamped.
+McAlpine, Rogers, Neale, with one of the tackles back, the big Swede,
+Gus Larsen, or Atkins' coal miner (whose name, Vaclav Blahoslav, stumped
+the squad till it was shortened to "Mike") tore over Rutgers, Fordham,
+Hamilton and the other small fry. True, the battering-ram machine broke
+tragically down before Princeton's even stronger attack, but none of the
+blame for that attached to Neale. He was kept out of that game by a
+wrenched ankle, and Biffy's rotten luck let him into the line-up for the
+first defeat of the season. Neale really had luck on his side, he
+thought with some complacency. By next Saturday his ankle was all right
+again and he trotted out on Franklin Field supremely confident, trotted
+out to fall straight into the black depths of the bottomless pit.
+
+For after that swelling supreme self-confidence came a queer slowness of
+mind. He found it hard to keep his thoughts on his work as they ran
+through signals. His eyes kept straying to the rioting, flag-waving
+grand-stands. The whistle blew, the kick-off came straight to Neale. For
+the first time since Freshman year he felt a sinking dread that he might
+fumble. The ball hit him on the chest and bounded off. Tod McAlpine fell
+on it and the rushing game began.
+
+For the first half it was anybody's game. Either team when it got the
+ball could gain but could not score. Something was the matter with
+Neale. He wasn't all there. He knew he was playing mechanically, but
+couldn't seem to summon the energy to do better.
+
+He sat listless, almost sullen while Andrews harangued the team between
+the halves. He was hardened by this time to the Neapolitan frenzy of
+emphasis which marked exhortations to play your best football or die.
+He'd do his best, he told himself, looking down at his feet. Nobody
+could do any more.
+
+The second half began with an exchange of punts. Playing behind the
+cyclopean Mike, Neale hadn't much work to do on the defensive, but once
+Mike was boxed out on a straight buck, Neale shot his body in to plug
+the hole and turning, caught a bony knee in the back, right over the
+kidneys. As he lay on the ground gasping for breath, he could see that
+he hadn't even stopped the play. It had gone over him for two yards. Oh,
+Hell! What was the use? How his back ached! The Penn. quarter seemed to
+know he was feeling wobbly. All the plays were coming at him and Mike,
+and most of them got by. Where _was_ the ball? Sometimes it came
+straight through and the next minute on the same formation swung
+outside--and Neale uselessly buried under the interference. He'd have to
+stop it somehow--soon. He glanced back out of the corner of his eye, and
+saw the goal posts less than five yards behind. The Penn. formation was
+on his side again. Mike charged like a buffalo. Neale rushed in behind
+him, but blindly. Then all at once he picked out the man with the
+ball--too late. His sideways drive for a tackle missed and as he fell,
+his arms empty, he saw the red-and-blue jersey go over the line.
+
+He got up shaken, feeling very sick of himself, not meeting anybody's
+eye. While Penn. was kicking the goal, Neale saw Biffy come bounding out
+from the side-lines, "I'm to take Crittenden's place," he reported.
+
+It was like a blow in the face. And he had earned it. Neale walked to
+the bench, took a blanket, looking carefully away from the sub who held
+it out to him, wrapped himself up, forced his face into its usual
+expression of impassivity and watched the game. It was not much to
+watch: Columbia badly up in the air, Pennsy getting stronger every
+minute.
+
+He dreaded the post-mortem at the football house, and took as deserved
+Andrews' verdict. "Crittenden, you were a total loss. I knew you weren't
+much of a defensive back, but I didn't suppose a whale like you would
+let a skinny little runt of a Penn. sub ride you back five yards and
+dump you on your tail."
+
+Day after day went by, with Neale in exile, playing once more on the
+scrub. The night before the Brown game, when the line-up was announced,
+he got together a show of good-will as he shook hands with Biffy and
+wished him luck. But he lay awake in the dark that night, heartbroken,
+sternly motionless and rigid on his cot, his great hands clenched hard.
+It was his virgin sorrow, the first real suffering he had ever known.
+The first real sorrow of most lives is usually tempered to the softness
+of immature hearts by the self-preserving instinct to lay the blame on
+something or somebody else, by merciful self-pity. But for Neale there
+was no Fate, nor chance, nor enemy, nor fickleness of woman on whom to
+lay the blame. There was no one to blame but himself, and before his
+time, he felt the pure rigor of this knowledge cut deep like a clean
+steel blade. It cut out a part of his boyishness forever. It was the
+first scar of the initiation into manhood. Neale stood up to it like a
+man, although so young a man. "No squealing!" he commanded himself
+savagely.
+
+The next day he sat all through the game on the edge of the subs' bench,
+his big muscles quivering with readiness to respond to an order to jump
+into the game, his heart sick, sick within him because the order did not
+come. Nobody so much as looked his way. There he sat, a big, useless
+lump.
+
+"What's the matter with me?" he cried out behind his Iroquois mask of
+insensibility, "I've got the strength. I've got the speed. _Am I a
+quitter?_" The sweat stood out on him at the idea, and at first,
+helpless before the dramatic quality of young imagination, he felt that
+must be the answer. Yes, he was a quitter. As well die, and be done with
+it.
+
+Then the nucleus of what was to become Neale hardened itself against
+this easy, inverted sentimentalism, and small as the nucleus was, it set
+itself to consider the matter in judicial, objective judgment. Neale
+went over his football for the last week as though it had been that of
+another player. "I did quit in the Penn. game. But other fellows have
+had a slump and pulled out of it. And since then, by God, I've played
+myself out in every practice. I've given all there was to give and then
+some!"
+
+He held up his head at this. And yet, if he wasn't a quitter, what _was_
+the matter with him? "Biffy isn't any world-beater. Yet he must be
+better than I am, or Andrews wouldn't give him my place. _Andrews is
+square._" He said that with the accent of the mystic who affirms that
+God is good; and it was very much the same sort of corner-stone in the
+house he was building to live in.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Along in the second half, Atkins (the grad. who had discovered Mike),
+stopped his caged-tiger prowl up and down the side lines and dropped
+into an empty space beside Neale. "Look at that!" he cried suddenly,
+"Did you see that?"
+
+Neale had noticed nothing in particular--just a general tangle of brown
+and blue jerseys. "I don't think they gained," he said.
+
+"Great Scott, no! Haven't you any eyes? They lost about half-a-yard. The
+Brown left-half tripped over Mike's legs, but if he'd been a foot
+further out, he'd be going yet. McFadden was suckered."
+
+Neale took his eyes for a moment from the field to look around
+wonderingly at Atkins. He had never thought of him before except with
+pity as an old exile, who couldn't play any more. Could he really see
+all that in a play, see just what every man had done? Atkins went on
+now, stiffening with his concentration like a pointer dog. "There it
+goes again--see, he's charging right on top of Mike. Just luck if he
+gets the man--missed him! It was Tod who stopped the play. Next time
+they hit the left side of our line, watch the way Rogers handles it."
+Atkins bit savagely on a mouthful of gum, "There!" He dug his finger
+nails into Neale's wrist. Neale could see Rogers rock a second,
+undecided, on tip-toe; side-step an interferer; and then shoot his body
+like a projectile into the play. "Spilled 'em for a yard-and-a-half
+loss: that's the stuff!"
+
+He looked around sharply at Neale. "If _you_ could use your head like
+that, you'd be worth something to the team."
+
+Neale stared at him, his young face candid with the astonishment of
+feeling a brand-new idea inserting itself into his mind. Maybe _that_
+was what was the matter with his game.
+
+He reached up, as he would have said, to the upper story, and turned
+back to watch the game with new eyes, eyes sharpened by intelligence. He
+concentrated on the back-field defense and began for the first time to
+understand the inwardness of it. He couldn't attain Atkins' hawk-like
+vision of the play and what every man in the back field had done; but he
+made out a great deal more than he ever had before.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Next Monday at practice Atkins came and stood behind Neale (the
+bond-selling business never seemed to exist for Atkins during football
+season). To Neale, as he played on the scrub, Atkins poured out his
+accumulated tactical lore, the wisdom that choked and strangled him
+because he was no longer allowed to put it into action. Seizing on
+Neale, whom he did not know personally at all, he forced his way into
+Neale's attention and held it fiercely on the business of playing
+football intelligently.
+
+"Have a look! Have a look! Secondary defense finds the play before it
+stirs out of its tracks! No, you shouldn't have tried a tackle that
+time," he yanked Neale to his feet, "they were too bunched. I made just
+that break in the Princeton game in '99 and I've never forgiven myself.
+If you'd spilled the interference, your end would have got the runner.
+Watch the ball! don't run in till you _know_ where it is--and then _go
+to it_! Sometimes you can tell by the back's eyes, give themselves away
+by looking where they're going to go, but an old hand will cross you on
+purpose. The knees are safer, mostly they lean a little just before the
+ball goes back. Got to use old head! Bill Morley himself couldn't stop a
+play if he didn't know where it was. Ah! _that's_ the stuff! That was
+just right--not too soon or too late--and see how easy it was!"
+
+Day after day the Wall Street bond-broker wrestled with Neale's latent
+acuteness and forced it into action. With shame, with praise, with
+reproach and enthusiasm, he drew out of Neale more than Neale had
+dreamed could be there. If one--even one--of the teachers of English or
+Greek or chemistry or economics had taught Neale as this
+semi-illiterate, wealthy young barbarian taught him...! If Neale had
+given even a tenth as much attention to any of his courses...!
+
+Neale clambered up over himself, raging with hope; up over his first
+realization that there was infinitely more to this problem than he had
+ever supposed; over his next, that he did not know even the rudiments of
+the game he had thought he knew so well; over his occasional glimmers of
+understanding, why he failed sometimes and succeeded at other times;
+over an increasing percentage of successes, and finally stood, a little
+giddy with the new height, on the peak towards which Atkins had urged
+him, where he waited clear-headed, strong, confident, behind the tackle,
+hoping the next play would come his way.
+
+The play did come his way. The Varsity tried out against the scrub its
+new delayed pass from close formation. To the left it worked very well.
+But when they tried it to the right, Neale dropped Rogers for a loss,
+three times in succession. The look on Atkins' face was glory.
+
+The next afternoon Neale was back on the Varsity and Biffy on the scrub.
+
+There was a pang in his beatitude, a painful moment of generous distress
+when Biffy came up to congratulate him. The two hard-faced,
+frowsy-headed, gum-chewing young savages gripped each other's hands in
+an inexpressive silence; and each saw deep into the other's big heart as
+he was rarely, in all his life thereafter, to look into any other human
+being's inner chamber.
+
+Biffy carried it off splendidly, Neale thought, but he couldn't fool a
+man who had just been there himself. He felt sorry for Biffy. He
+remembered to be sorry for Biffy till the whistle blew for the Annapolis
+game.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+
+After the Thanksgiving game, a great peace, a lying-fallow time, a
+period of unconscious adjustment and assimilation of all that mass of
+experience.
+
+Neale moved back to the Frat. house, rooming with Harry Gregg, a
+classmate of his and a fine fellow, thought Neale, even though not
+athletic. He and Gregg had chanced to take much the same courses and
+were in the same class-rooms in several subjects. After a preliminary
+stagger or two, like a man coming indoors after living in the open, who
+cannot walk across the room without tripping over the furniture, Neale's
+mind settled down to his studies. He found them rather more interesting
+than he had expected. A course in general European history especially
+held him, and he gave much more time to the outside reading prescribed
+than he would have confessed to any member of his Frat. except Gregg,
+who took it as a matter of course. He encountered some personalities
+there who held him and about whom he often thought, big figures who
+dwarfed the life around him when they stood up beside his study table.
+Cromwell was one and Garibaldi another. But they were not all soldiers.
+Wise old scouts like Sully, Oxenstierna and Plombal who did the real
+work and let the cloth-of-gold opera-tenor kings and potentates prance
+around in the lime-light, they took Neale's fancy too. They were the
+boys for him! He used to sit back and laugh to himself to think how much
+more they must have enjoyed the real exercise of their own strength than
+the silly sovereigns could have enjoyed their silly lime-light. As for
+Henry IV and _his_ lady-loves, he reminded Neale so forcibly of Mike and
+his lady-loves that he could never take that white-plumed monarch
+seriously. Henry of Navarre made him laugh at Mike and Mike made him
+laugh at Henry of Navarre, and over both those hilarities Neale drew
+the decent veil of his calm, pipe-smoking stolidity.
+
+One day browsing around in the Library, he saw the title of one of the
+books Miss Austin had spoken of the summer before, one of the books
+Neale had pretended to know and had never heard of. He drew it out (it
+was "Richard Feveral"), and read it, entranced, until early the next
+morning. After that he looked up, one by one, all the books she had
+mentioned, and read them, some with delight, some with blank
+incomprehensiveness, some with scorn.
+
+He killed a lot of time discussing things in general with Gregg, reading
+Gregg's books. He fell especially hard for a worn volume of Poems and
+Ballads. For six weeks he was convinced that Swinburne had said the last
+word, a blighting word, on ethical values. Then one day he noticed that
+his favorite credo, "From too much love of living, from hope and fear
+set free" could be sung to the tune of the well-known, extremely coarse
+and very unpoetical song called, "Some die of drinking whiskey, some die
+of drinking beer," and it occurred to him suddenly that when you thought
+about it, both expressed the same philosophy. It was disgusting! It
+wasn't argument--but just the same it somehow put a crimp in Swinburne!
+He went back to his history and economics. But you couldn't stew over
+your books all day long; he drifted more or less with Billy Peters'
+innocuous, evening-dress, dancing-fussing set.
+
+Outwardly he passed as a good fellow, a passable mixer though rather
+silent. Inwardly he had given up his pose of Horatian calm. It didn't
+work--not for him. He found himself very much alone and friendless. The
+other men on the football squad--well, they had been his blood-brothers
+during the season, but after the season they were mostly illiterate
+young rakes without a single mental spark even when they were drunk. As
+for Pete Hilliard's crowd and their small-town, back-alley ways of
+amusing themselves--hell! Neale felt for them the amused scorn of the
+native-born great-city dweller for the uneasy provincial who thinks he
+can hide his provincialism best by assuming a boisterous nastiness.
+
+For the first time Neale began to wonder about himself, to wonder what
+sort of a human being he was anyway, that he didn't seem to fit in
+really, with any crowd. There was always so much of himself left over,
+shut out from companionship, left in the dark, alone and silent, while
+with a little corner of himself he danced and talked to girls, and drank
+and played poker, and talked to Gregg; for there was an immense lot of
+which he never spoke even to Gregg. For instance they never talked about
+girls, and Neale was thinking a good deal about girls. When he read
+love-poems his breath came and went fast, he felt tingling all over. He
+longed to put out his hand and open the door into the wonders and
+marvels that lay beyond it. He drew back from the fear of failure, of
+making a fool of himself at an unfamiliar game. But he never feared that
+there was nothing beyond the door.
+
+At dances, sometimes he stood aloof, trying to look Byronic to save
+himself from looking wistful, sometimes he danced steadily, always with
+a calm exterior, beneath which weltered a confused mass of bewildered
+uncertainties and longings that rose choking to his very throat: and yet
+not a word of it could he ever get out.
+
+What was it he was missing? Moody, out of humor with the bright, warm
+May sunshine, he put the question to himself as he sauntered aimlessly
+down the Library steps. Why, he was missing everything that made life
+worth while! Was he always to live alone with most of him hidden and
+silent? Would he never find his crowd, or at least one other person, to
+meet whom he could go forth, all of him, light and free, without the
+ball and chain of his endless reticences? Other fellows seemed to find
+something satisfying in life. Why not he? Was it his fault, or life's,
+that he walked in inner blackness? He was framing a sweeping indictment
+of life as he passed the gate to South Field.
+
+Somebody ran out and grabbed him by the neck, a tall Senior. "King's
+Crown playing the Deutscher Verein," he explained. "Speed up and get in,
+Crit. Get your coat off. Never mind your togs. You've got to catch next
+inning. Purdy can't hold the ball if I put a hop on it, and the
+Dutchies are swatting my slow curve. There you go, that's the third
+out. Get busy. Give me one finger for a fast one; two for an out; and
+the closed fist for the drop."
+
+The pessimistic philosopher, exiled to eternal solitude, shed coat and
+collar, put on mask and mitt. A ball, a strike, a high foul. As he
+sprinted behind the back-stop to get under it, Neale sloughed off the
+parched skin of introspection. From that time on, he forgot everything
+but the game. He rattled off encouragement to the pitcher, "Keep
+workin', old man _that_-a-boy, make him hit it! Got him swinging wild!"
+He improvised wild flights of kidding to get the goat of one batter
+after another.
+
+After the game when he and his pitcher were shaking hands and grinning
+at each other, he became aware of Berkley and Berkley's girl. What was
+her name? He'd met her at the Junior Ball--oh, yes, Miss Wentworth. They
+stopped to congratulate him. Neale was conscious, wretchedly,
+unphilosophically conscious of a very dirty face, a more than dirty
+shirt--and torn trousers. But Miss Wentworth didn't seem to notice.
+Perhaps she was a good sport. It was conceivable that a girl might be.
+She made a sensible comment on the double play which had saved the game
+in the eighth. Why, she was intelligent as well as good-looking. Neale
+fell into step, forgetting his disheveled looks, and walked along to the
+drug-store at 120th Street, where they all had sodas.
+
+He met her again that spring, in the waiting-room of the 125th Street
+station, of all prosaic places! He had stopped in for a time-table to
+see about getting up to West Adams and she was evidently waiting for a
+train. He touched his cap. She smiled. He stopped to pass the time of
+day, "Vacation's almost here," he said.
+
+"What are you going to do with it?" she inquired.
+
+He hesitated. She wouldn't understand. But he was never very good on
+quick bluffs, and so said briefly, "I've got to learn to kick this
+summer--to kick a football, I mean. I--I play football a little."
+
+She threw back her head and laughed, "Oh, you needn't explain. I know
+you play. I'm a regular fan. I haven't missed a home game in three
+years, and I read the athletic news. McAlpine graduates, so does
+Johnstone. There's nobody left at Columbia who can punt. So you're to
+learn! More power to you. I'll come and root for you next autumn."
+
+He took, with him to West Adams a mental picture of a strong, capable
+body in a shirt-waist and golf-skirt, fluffy yellow hair, smiling lips,
+laughing, honest, blue eyes.
+
+He carried also what was more tangible and important in his summer
+plans, a worn brown football, the center of many an afternoon's battle
+between scrub and Varsity. As soon as he was installed at West Adams he
+went to work. The spare, thin grass on the upper meadow had been cut.
+There, a good mile Neale jogged every day, and there, all the morning,
+he practised punting: booting the ball high and far, racing down, trying
+to get to it while it was still bounding; then kicking it back again,
+experimenting with different ways of holding it. He always kicked at
+some target. "I'll drop that on the stone pile," he would say to
+himself, and before he kicked again, he would try to analyze success and
+failures. He no longer needed an Atkins to spur him to use his brains.
+By eleven o'clock, pretty well fagged-out, he would jog down again, take
+a plunge in the inlet above the mill pond, where no one could see him
+for the thick growth of alders, and come in to luncheon at noon, cool
+and ravenous.
+
+In the afternoon he worked at the mill, or lay round and read. He had
+brought a lot of books up from college in his trunk, but nothing seemed
+to fit his present serious regime as well as Emerson. After much running
+after false prophets the clear, brutal sanity of the Essays was as
+refreshing and tonic as the plunge into the icy, clear water of the
+inlet. He found in them too, what had escaped him at the first reading,
+an austere sonority in the best passages. "Let those fear who will. The
+soul is in her native realm, and it is wider than space, older than
+time, wide as hope, rich as love. Pusillanimity and fear she refuses
+with a beautiful scorn. They are not for her who putteth on her
+coronation robe and goeth out through universal love to universal
+power." He rolled it under his tongue. It beat about his ears like the
+low, dignified threat of distant thunder.
+
+One Saturday in August, a little before his twentieth birthday,
+something happened which cast a long ray of light back on Neale's life.
+It began by the great surprise of seeing Father and Mother drive up to
+the house in a buggy from the village livery-stable.
+
+It was perfectly evident from the moment they set foot in the house that
+there was something in the air, but being a Crittenden, Neale's father
+was in no haste to say what it was, and waited to explode his bomb-shell
+till dessert time, as they were eating the peaches and fruit-cake which
+Grandmother served to honor their arrival. Then it came out.
+
+"We've been doing a pretty big business in cabinet woods lately," Father
+began, looking at no one in particular. "Cocobolo, rosewood, lignum
+vitae, mahogany. The selling end is all right but it's a job to get the
+stuff delivered. The firm has made up its mind that it will pay to send
+a man through the West Indies and Central America to look the production
+end over, get options, sign contracts for regular yearly delivery.
+There's a big territory to cover, the field goes as far south as
+Brazil--it'll take a couple of years at least, maybe three or four. I'm
+telling you all this because they've offered the job to me, and Mother
+and I have about decided to accept."
+
+Mother looked hard at Neale as Father announced this, and they both
+waited to see what he would say. Neale was so astonished at the idea of
+his stationary father and mother being anywhere but in the house on
+Union Hill, that he found nothing to say for a moment, staring at them.
+Then he said (it was the first thing that came into his head), "But what
+will you do with the house? All those things?"
+
+Mother said eagerly, "Oh, we could rent it furnished. We already have a
+good offer for it."
+
+"Well, what do you think about that!" exclaimed Neale in a stupid
+astonishment at the idea that somebody else could live in their house.
+
+He went on eating his peaches and thinking about it in silence since he
+saw no reason why his opinion on the subject was of any interest to
+anybody. It did not dawn on him till afterwards, when he and Father took
+a stroll along the mill-brook that Father and Mother wanted to _know_
+how he felt about it, and would not do it if he very much disliked the
+idea of having no home nearby. This astonishing fact became apparent to
+him along with another matter even more astonishing, that apparently the
+Union Hill house had been arranged largely for his benefit, so that he
+could have the stability of a home atmosphere.
+
+"We always wanted to roam, rather," explained his father casually, "we
+were pretty young when we married. Your mother was only twenty and I was
+twenty-four. We had talked a good deal of cutting loose and seeing the
+world. But--well, you were born the first year afterwards, and we
+thought probably there would be other children. It seemed better to put
+it off, settle down till we had raised our family--though you turned out
+to be the only one."
+
+In the twilight of the maples, Neale was doing some thinking. Mother had
+been _married_ when she was his age; with all her life before her, and
+she'd never had a bit of it till now; only Union Hill and more Union
+Hill. And Father, too.... He murmured something muffled and
+inarticulate, which made no particular sense to the ear, but which
+Father understood, and answered with some vehemence, "No, Great Scott,
+_no_, Neale! Don't think that! Heavens, no! I didn't mean we'd
+sacrificed anything for you--we just got into a rut, the way people do,
+and stayed there so long we began to think we couldn't get out and now
+when this opportunity comes, your mother wanted to make _sure_ it's all
+right with you, that's all! Your mother and I, you've been a great
+comfort to us. We don't want...."
+
+He was almost as muffled and inarticulate as Neale, but Neale understood
+him, and reaching for his hand, gave it a hard grip. He did not try to
+say anything now. The two men, silent under the old maples that had
+sheltered their childhood, exchanged a quick glance of understanding and
+affection, nearer to each other now, at the moment of parting than ever
+before.
+
+Then they went back to the house, silent as Iroquois, and Neale went in
+to where his mother was playing dreamily on the old piano, to tell her
+bluntly that he would not in the least mind their leaving Union Hill,
+since he could be at home very little in any case during his Senior
+year.
+
+She turned around on the piano stool to listen to his sober statement,
+and to look at the great fellow, towering up over her.
+
+"Yes, you're grown up now, Neale, aren't you?" she said faintly, putting
+a hand out towards him and he knew he had hurt her by his bluntness. And
+yet it was the truth he told her, and also what she wanted to hear. He
+could not take it back. But he did stoop to her and take her in his big
+arms for a little-boy hug.
+
+Father came in then and they lighted the lamp and tried to talk a little
+about what Neale was going to do to earn his living when he graduated.
+They had often tried to talk of that. But they never got very far, and
+no farther this time than any other. Neale had no ideas on the subject,
+and being Neale, he would not imaginatively play up to what was expected
+of him, and say he had. No, he did not feel that he would like to be a
+doctor. No, certainly not a lawyer! He wouldn't mind engineering, but
+the old grads in his Frat. who were engineers seemed to have a way of
+turning up, out of a job every once in so often. He didn't think much of
+a profession where you were so entirely at the mercy of people with
+money. It was too much like being a turtle that had to wait for somebody
+to turn it over before it could go on its way. Father looked at him
+rather queerly and remarked that he'd find it difficult to get any work
+in the modern world, where he wouldn't be at the mercy of people with
+money.
+
+Neale said, he thought very pertinently, "Grandfather never has been."
+
+Father looked as though he considered this mere arguing for the sake of
+arguing, and said something drily, looking around at the plain, old
+countrified room, about Neale's not being willing to live as his
+grandfather had, two generations ago.
+
+The upshot of the talk was, as it always was, that they agreed once
+more to let things run on and perhaps something would turn up.
+
+The next morning Father and Mother went back to New York, to finish the
+preparations for their adventure. Mother cried a little when she kissed
+Neale good-by, but Grandmother kissed her son without a quiver, though
+she clung to Grandfather's arm. She and Grandfather and Neale and old Si
+and Jennie stood in the front yard looking after the carriage. It was
+almost like seeing a newly married pair go off after the wedding.
+Neale's mother kept turning to look back at them, her April face like a
+bride's, colored through tears by excitement and anticipation. Neale
+stood up, taller than his tall old grandfather now, broad, massive, his
+tanned face like a man's. But, to his amazement, there awoke in his
+heart for the last time, a little boy, a little boy who was frightened
+and grieved at being left alone.
+
+Half-way down the hill, the carriage stopped and they saw Neale's mother
+spring out and run back up the hill, beckoning to Neale.
+
+"Forgot something," conjectured Grandfather.
+
+Neale bounded down towards her. They met half-way between the carriage
+and the house. Mother's face was still wet with her tears but she was
+not crying now. A glory was on her tremulous face. Neale never forgot
+how she looked at that moment.
+
+There was something she was trying to tell him and although all she
+could bring out, as she took his big hands in hers was, "Neale, dear,
+dear Neale," she knew by the look on his face that she had told him.
+
+The little boy in Neale's heart, appeased, consoled, comforted, melted
+away forever, without bitterness, without regrets. The over-grown young
+man looked down at his mother, with an absolute trust in her love, and a
+robust confidence in himself. "I'll be all right, Mother dear," he told
+her heartily, meaning a great deal more than he said.
+
+Then she went back to her husband, and Neale went back to his punting.
+
+As he ran furiously after the ball, reeking with sweat under the brazen
+August sun, it came to him suddenly, so that he stopped short for an
+instant to think of it, wonderingly, that he had never seen his father
+and mother look at each other, except with affection. And besides this
+old, old knowledge which had hung there so long he had never seen it
+before, there was a new picture ... the animation and excitement on
+their faces, as they talked of their setting off together for distant
+travels, the gaiety of Mother's laugh, as they told of the fun they were
+having to make ready for the unknown, to get the right clothes, to learn
+Spanish.... "I've been on the point of buying a mantilla," she had said.
+"Don't you think I would look well in a mantilla, Neale?"
+
+Mother had never seemed half as young to Neale as now. She must have
+been an awfully nice girl, he thought, going soberly to recover his
+ball.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+
+Although he had of late seen very little of home, and had occasionally
+felt irked to know that his parents expected him to make a semi-regular
+appearance there, Neale found New York rather queer and empty at first
+with no background whatever but the football house.
+
+He encountered something of the same queer, gone feeling as he lined up
+in the first game of the season, with all of the trusted Old Guard
+disappeared, with no Tod McAlpine beside him, on whom to leave the
+responsibility for the outcome of events. Of all the old supermen in
+whom he had put his trust, only Marshall the Captain was still there, at
+right guard. Things looked black to Neale. Such raw beginners could
+never hold together against any seasoned team.
+
+And yet they did. Week after week of the early season, they registered
+victory after victory; never with sensational scores, but with steady
+defense that kept their goal line uncrossed, with drive enough to punch
+out a touch-down of their own. It came to Neale slowly that this was no
+kid team after all. It had about the usual proportion of seasoned
+players and recruits; only now he was one of the old timers. It came to
+him also that Bunny Edwards the Soph quarter was obviously trusting in
+him as he used to trust in Tod McAlpine. At first it was horrifying to
+Neale to have some one depending on _him_! He had all he could do to
+stand up under his own responsibility, heavy on his own shoulders for
+the first time. Presently he realized that possibly Tod McAlpine had had
+his own secret misgivings too, in the days when Neale depended on him.
+It was by no means wholly physical and muscular, the hardening and
+maturing that went on in Neale, those first weeks of his last football
+season.
+
+This deepening of his sense of responsibility deepened his capacity for
+emotion along with the rest of his personality. The other Seniors, even
+good old Gregg theorizing and spinning talk about things he'd read in
+books, seemed off in another world to Neale, a light, bright, boyish,
+somewhat foolishly unreal, although very care-free world. But although
+he sometimes groaned at the fierce, stark suffering which was the
+inevitable penalty of caring so fiercely and starkly about anything as
+he cared about football, he did not envy Gregg and the other outsiders.
+Envy them? Heavens, no! They were playing at life; he was living!
+
+Yes, he was living and at a higher emotional pitch than he had ever
+known. He did not think of himself as an individual. He was flesh of one
+flesh, bone of one bone with his teammates. Once in the Amherst game a
+smash into the line had piled up without gain. The heaped mass of legs
+and bodies squirmed itself apart, friends and enemies crawled to their
+position. All but one, and that was the big Slav tackle, who lay limp
+and white as if dead.
+
+"Time out!"
+
+Neale flung himself against Fate. He fell on his knees beside the
+prostrate man, and took the bullet head into his arms. "Mike," he
+pleaded. "Not now! _We need you, Mike!_" Like a mother with a baby lying
+between life and death, he hung over that coarse, bruised face. All the
+love he had ever felt for any one seemed shallow compared to his
+yearning over this debauched, foul-mouthed, hairy boozer.
+
+He could have kissed the ugly blue mug as the eyelids flickered, the
+color came back, and the giant rolled to his feet and lumbered back into
+the line.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The season rolled along. The luck seemed finally to have changed. They
+were almost through, with the best record in years. Then two days before
+the final game, Marshall the Captain broke a bone in his foot. The faces
+of the team were grave (all but that of Dodd, the sub thus let into the
+Varsity) as they gathered in the dressing-room before the game. The
+coach looked them over, casting about for the right note, and had the
+inspiration to lay by his usual impassioned, florid appeal.
+
+"Nicholson will play center," he began, his plain, heavy words like
+iron; "Burke and Dodd guards; Mike and Larsen tackles; Greenway and
+Huggins, ends; Edwards quarter. Crittenden and Wallace halves; Bascomb
+full-back. Crittenden will act as Captain." He looked full at
+Crittenden, "It's the last time you'll wear the blue and white, Neale
+Crittenden!"
+
+Neale throbbed like a great brazen bell, struck by the hammer.
+
+Andrews turned his eyes on the team and made the rest of his speech
+short and hard.
+
+"Boys, it's easy to lose and it's hard to win. Don't be fooled by the
+rooters saying you made a game fight. What _would_ you do? Run away?
+Take it from me, there's a time in every game when either team can win.
+It's the team that has the sand, that's got the guts to put in an extra
+pound _right then_, that wins! I'm not telling you this Cornell team is
+easy. They're damned hard. But you've got weight enough, you've got
+speed enough, you know football enough. Now you go out there on the
+field, and show me you've got guts enough to win!"
+
+With set jaws and grim, resolute hearts, the team, Neale at their head,
+trotted out on the gridiron. "It's the last time you'll wear the blue
+and white, Neale Crittenden!" He was clanging to that note.
+
+They were lucky to get through the first half with a clean slate.
+Cornell came fast and hard, but time after time they held them and
+punted out of danger. The ten minutes' intermission seemed to last
+barely ten seconds and they were at it again, dead-locked, swaying from
+one forty-yard line to another. "Looks like a tie-game, barring a
+fluke," thought Neale, and then with an angry throb of alarm, "By God, I
+believe we're letting up! Here's where we put in that extra pound!"
+
+"Six, n-int-e-e-n-f-o-r-t-y-f-i-v-e!" the quarter was droning. "No!"
+cried Neale, "Change that! Four-seven-two-eight!" It was his own
+straight buck, and he went into the line with a headlong hurdle. "I'll
+give the signals for a play or two, Bunny," he called to the quarter as
+they lined up again, "Seven-fourteen-thirty-three," he barked and took
+the ball on a cross buck, rolling and plunging for four yards,
+"Three-seven-nine-four." Again he started on the cross buck, bluffed at
+receiving the ball, hit the defense head down, yelling, "Help me!" and
+just as he fell saw Wallace skirting outside of tackle with the delayed
+pass, stiff-arming the end, shaking off the defensive quarter and on for
+a good ten yards. As he got up, Neale grabbed Edwards round the neck and
+whispered, with lips close to his ear, "We've got 'em started, Bunny!
+You run the plays now. Get the idea? Shoot 'em outside, till they open
+up, then plug Billy and Mike through the guards. Keep mixing 'em up, and
+speed, _speed_!"
+
+Bunny got the idea. He snapped out his signals, and shot his offense
+like a boxer hammering a groggy opponent. With Mike back, he ran Neale
+and Wallace outside, inside, across, on the weak side: then suddenly
+dropped back to straight battering-ram football, and sent Mike at the
+apex of a straining, stamping tandem, straight through and over the
+defense to the fifteen yard line. The team was crazy with
+success--prancing like stallions. "Come on, boys!" Neale went a yard on
+a straight buck, dug his toe-cleats in as he fell, plunged and squirmed
+for another yard and a half. Wallace shot through a quick opening for
+three. With Larsen back and first down, Billy sheered off inside for a
+couple of yards, the Swede got another two straight ahead, Mike running
+from position made only a bare yard, but enough!
+
+"First down, to the line to go!" said the referee. Neale heard his
+signal. "Damn the torpedoes, go ahead!" he thought. He flew at the line,
+bone and muscle transfigured by flaming will--a hard body dove against
+his knees--he staggered, leaned forward, churned his knees up and down a
+tenth of a second that seemed to drag for an hour, forward he staggered,
+strained forward, then fell. When the mass got off him he found he had
+got to the two-yard line. "Give it to me again!" he whispered, passing
+Bunny.
+
+Larsen stuck his blonde head close up to theirs, "For Christ's sake, let
+_me_ take it! It's my last game. I won't play no more after to-day!"
+
+"Neither will I," thought Neale, but he nodded and they lined up with
+Larsen back.
+
+"Look out for a funny one," cried the Cornell quarter, as the signals
+began. "Cap and quarter had a consultation--"
+
+As the center's fingers contracted for the snap-back, Neale shot out of
+his tracks, and crashed into the defensive half. "Got him flat-footed,"
+he thought, remembering as they both went down to swing his feet wide in
+the hope of getting the defensive quarter as well. He rolled clear at
+once, and looked back to see if he could be of any help. It wasn't
+necessary. Practically all the two teams were heaped in a human
+haystack, from the base of which emerged a grinning blonde face. Under
+the face were two huge hands some six inches over the line, clutching
+the ball, on which emotional Swedish eyes were weeping beatific tears.
+
+Neale kicked a fairly easy goal. The trainer let him suck a little water
+from a sponge, whispering out of the corner of his motionless mouth,
+"Andy says minute and a half to play. Hold the ball and line up slow!"
+
+But the team had tasted too much blood to stall. They went down on the
+kick-off like a pack of wolf-hounds. They smashed two plays for a loss,
+and after a punt, they punched the ball to midfield before the whistle
+blew and the game was over.
+
+Nicholson tossed the ball to Neale. "Here's your ball, Cap!"
+
+Neale saw Mike Blahoslav kissing Bunny Edwards. He himself was hugging
+Gus Larsen, when the pandemonium from the grand-stand struck them. He
+was lifted on a platform of shoulders and carried to the gate surrounded
+by a cheering, singing, crazy mob of rooters.
+
+"That's so," he thought, "there _was_ a crowd looking on!" He had not
+thought of the bleachers, or heard a cheer since the second half began.
+
+They packed into the 'bus, Varsity inside, scrub on top. The 'bus went
+off at a gallop. For a few blocks the rooters ran along, throwing
+cigarettes and cigars through the windows. Neale leaned back and
+luxuriously lit a cigar. He had been thinking about that first cigar for
+the last month. Oh, faugh! It tasted hot and dry and burned his mouth.
+No matter! He threw it away and leaned back in a golden reverie.
+
+Would he ever again know such blessed unalloyed content?
+
+Probably not.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+
+The end of the football season was a door slammed in Neale's face
+forever. He had given four years of his life to football, flung them
+joyfully and proudly to feed the sacred flame. Now for the rest of his
+life, he was to be shut out from the temple of the only religion which
+had as yet been offered him. For the rest of his life--he was no
+post-mortem Atkins to hang enviously and piteously about watching other
+men doing the real thing.
+
+Neale did not find this realization tragic, because it seemed to him
+that it was the common lot, and he had a poor opinion of those who cry
+out melodramatically against the common lot. The thing to do was to
+accept the common lot without undignified comment. So he did not give a
+Latin groan, nor cry out a Russian curse on Destiny, when he woke to the
+knowledge that the aim of his life had been taken away, that he had
+lived the last of his Homer. He set his jaw and began to try to adjust
+himself to the life without any goal which he was henceforth to share
+with the rest of the under-graduates.
+
+But the days seemed very long and empty, none the less, in spite of his
+grim refusal to complain.
+
+Into the middle of one of these empty days dropped a note from Miss
+Wentworth: "Dear Mr. Crittenden: Now that you can stoop to earthly
+affairs, won't you go Palisading with a party of us next Saturday?
+_Please say yes._ We take the 9 o'clock boat from 125th St."
+
+The first thing he noted next Saturday was that Berkley was not of the
+party. He still thought of Miss Wentworth as "Berkley's girl," and he
+was annoyed at the pleasure he felt in finding her unpre-empted. The
+second thing was that she never did anything to block his manoeuvering
+to break up group formation and string out the party two by two--Neale
+and Miss Wentworth being the important two. But that might very well be
+only because she wanted to talk football. She had seen all the home
+games, knew the players' names, and for a girl, remembered an
+astonishing number of the more spectacular plays. The morning passed
+quickly. At noon they huddled around their camp-fire on the edge of the
+cliffs, ate broiled bacon sandwiches and drank coffee. Then they started
+back. On the last stretch of the road when the other girls began to
+tire, Miss Wentworth still swung along unflagging, and Neale saw to it
+that he was by her side. They ran out of athletic reminiscences. She
+ventured hesitatingly on books and her uncertain face cleared when Neale
+chimed in enthusiastically.
+
+"She's surprised to find a football man who's got beyond Munsey's,"
+thought Neale. No, he hadn't read "The Egoist," but "Richard Feverel"
+was _great_! And wasn't "Harry Richmond" a racy, crazy sort of tale? Did
+she know "The Second Mrs. Tanqueray?" He grinned internally with an
+amused cynicism, remembering for whom he had crammed up on this line.
+But he felt a difference. When she spoke about Henry James, he admitted
+frankly that he'd never heard of him. There was an honest quality about
+Miss Wentworth that made it seem underhanded and unnecessary to bluff.
+
+Silent they stopped where the road pitches steeply down to the river.
+Speech seemed impertinent when the Hudson lay below, vast and mystic in
+the early-falling December dusk.
+
+Then the rest of the party came up, shrieking out, "Oh, didn't he
+_r-a-m-ble_!" Neale saw Miss Wentworth home to the door of her apartment
+house, 114th Street, just off the Drive. He noted the number of the
+apartment. And found it again a good many times in the months to come.
+
+There were other things which helped fill the void left by football. One
+of these, quaintly enough, was class-work! Many electives were open to
+Seniors. Neale had chosen rather at random; Philosophy, Ethics,
+Anthropology, English Lit. and Modern History. There was really nothing
+whatever to do now with his time except study, and to his surprise,
+those courses which had been but names printed in the catalogue, turned
+out very much alive once Neale began to put his mind on them.
+
+Another interest was what he called with pretended scorn, "Gregg's
+gab-fests." It amused Neale to poke fun at Gregg's pretensions to being
+an intellectual, but he liked and admired his room-mate none the less.
+Their room came to be the favorite loafing-place of all the
+speculatively minded of their acquaintance, and Neale was surprised to
+find how many there were of them, who liked, as much as he and Gregg to
+discuss "things in general."
+
+Every Friday evening, unless there was a dance or an athletic contest,
+from ten to two A.M. some of the Gang would haunt the Den, lolling in
+the shabby, easy chairs and on the beds, smoking pipes, drinking beer
+and spouting out all they knew of modern thought. In theory the meeting
+was open to all shades of opinion, but the boys were without exception
+filled with the painless misanthropy of youth, afraid of nothing except
+appearing priggish (by which they, like many other people, meant
+reasonably clean-mouthed), carelessly ready to agree to any sweeping
+indictment of mankind; this, although their youth and gloriously perfect
+digestions made them serenely confident that their own little rafts
+would eventually drift to a smiling harbor in the country of easy money
+and orange blossoms.
+
+They took their pessimism, as they did their beer, in great
+undiscriminating gulps, which affected their healthy organisms no more
+than the blowing of the wind. With it they drugged their bodies,
+swigging away heartily at both narcotics till at last they dropped to
+insensibility, only to crawl out from under the table the next morning,
+their young eyes invincibly bright, their breaths sweet, their stomachs
+indomitably craving good food, finding the honest winter sunshine
+flooding in at the windows, in no way incompatible with the flat, stale
+beer and stinking cigar-butts left from the night before. An adult might
+have drunk of the bitter waters of disillusion with more caution, have
+carried his load of pessimism with less outward unsteadiness, but later
+on, what dead pussy-cat fur upon his tongue, what a sick loathing for
+wholesome fare! But these gilded youth swilled down each his kegful of
+Nietzsche and turned with equal zest to handfuls of gum-drops like "The
+Cardinal's Snuff-box."
+
+As for Neale, he joined in the discussions as briskly as any, but with
+reservations. He never quoted or mentioned Emerson, although he thought
+of him a great deal. He never discussed anything or any one he really
+cared a snap about. In occasional moments of insight (which came to him
+because he talked less babblingly than the others and listened more) he
+suspected that all the other slashing young radicals and iconoclasts
+might also be holding back secret articles of faith from defilement.
+
+One element in his life that he never mentioned to the Gang, was the
+amount of time he was spending with Miss Wentworth. He had called on her
+one evening shortly after the Palisading trip, alleging as an excuse
+that he owed her a dinner call for the picnic lunch she had provided. He
+had called several times since then, with no excuse at all. He had been
+one of her box-party at "Candida" and somewhat over-paid his debt by
+taking her to "Out of the Wilderness," and Barnum and Bailey's circus.
+He had dined several times at the Wentworth apartment, discussed the
+Republican Party with her quiet, widowed, impressive father, and had
+learned to leave him in peace with his Evening Post after dinner. Miss
+Wentworth kept up on her college athletics, and Neale took her to the
+Basket-ball games, the Dual Gym. Meet with Yale, the Hockey games, the
+Indoor Track Meet at the 69th Regiment Armory. She had a great passion
+for walking, so they walked in the afternoons along Riverside Drive, in
+Central Park, along the driveway by Fort Washington Point. By the time
+the ice had broken up in the spring, Neale had discovered two things:
+first that Miss Wentworth was not like any other girl he knew, she
+didn't flirt, wasn't piqued if he was silent, he felt no impulse to
+bluff or play-act before her, she was more like another fellow than a
+girl--only a very much more attractive fellow than he had ever met. The
+secondary discovery, which alarmed as well as thrilled him, was that if
+three days passed without his seeing her, he found himself missing her
+very much indeed.
+
+Meanwhile the mid-years were long past, spring almost at hand, the
+tongues of the Gang, after all the winter's practice, wagged more freely
+than ever. The first Friday in April, Elliott came in, pulling from the
+deep pocket of his rain-coat, a bag of limes and a bottle of gin, and
+announcing something better than beer for that evening.
+
+"It's up to you, kid," Neale ordered Robertson, the Soph., whom they
+tolerated because his self-important airs amused them, "you're the
+youngest. Beat it to the drug-store and bring back as many siphons as
+you can carry."
+
+After the rickeys were mixed, the cheese cut, the cracker-tin set out,
+the tongues began to clack, and the resounding generalities to unroll
+themselves before the fresh gaze of those young eyes, dazzled by the
+brilliance of their explorations into the nature of things. Elliott was
+saying wisely, "Laws? Everybody knows that laws are a conspiracy among
+mediocrities to keep the strong from taking too much property." He let
+this soak in and went on, "And moral systems are similar conspiracies to
+prevent monopolies of less tangible things." Elliott delighted in
+polysyllables, which he did not as yet always handle with entire
+accuracy. Gregg, who did not like either polysyllables or Elliott,
+commented on this, "What book did you get that out of? And what's the
+moral?"
+
+"The moral is, that morals are a sham. Man obeys the law only because he
+is afraid of the herd-majority. But a free spirit doesn't mind the
+criticism of mediocrities, he glories in it."
+
+"So he feels all right, does he?" asked Gregg, "when he clears out to
+Canada with the contents of the safe, or his best friend's wife. As a
+matter of fact, he feels like a dirty dog."
+
+"Oh, but that is just force of habit, race-superstition, cowardice
+before convention."
+
+"Shucks! You fellows are on the wrong track," broke in Brown, "all man
+really cares about is his three meals a day. That's what makes the world
+go round! When the cave-man's wife was stolen, he went on the warpath
+for the same reason a cowboy lynches a horse-thief, because he can't
+afford to lose valuable property. Now the modern woman is no longer an
+asset, but a liability...." He paused, so filled with admiration for his
+own metaphor struck out in the heat of discussion, that he could not go
+on. Great Caesar's ghost! That wasn't so bad! He'd have to remember that
+in the next theme he wrote.
+
+Gregg was disposing of him sardonically, "Oh, yes, we know Brown's
+soaking up the economic interpretation of history like a sponge. Have a
+mind of your own, Brown. You don't have to believe all your Prof. tells
+you. What do _you_ think, Crit?"
+
+Neale sailed cautiously a little nearer his real thought than he usually
+ventured, with the casual comment, "Well, there do seem to be some
+things a man can't bring himself to do, no matter how much he wants to.
+I wonder if maybe it isn't just inherited race-experience warning us off
+from what's bad for man in the long run."
+
+Brown came back for revenge, "Oh, yes, we know the rest, what's that but
+the anthropology course? Have a mind of your own!"
+
+"As a matter of fact, pleasure's the only motive," Elliott laid down the
+final dictum. "Every time you do something you do it because you'd
+rather. If you didn't, you'd do something else."
+
+Some one brought out another profundity deep enough to match this,
+affirming, "Oh, of course, everything's relative!"
+
+And this was still so new an aphorism to them, that they let it alone,
+the party breaking up over a last round of weak rickeys squeezed from
+the bottle.
+
+Neale waited till he saw Gregg deep in "Venice Preserved"; then he
+opened a small volume, and shielding it from any random glances of his
+room-mate, began reading, "The Last Ride Together."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+
+The two had passed a long evening together. Miss Wentworth's father was
+attending the annual banquet of the American Philological Association
+and the young people, left to themselves, had dined downtown at the
+Lafayette. It was their first meal alone together, all the more
+intimately alone because of the shifting crowd of strangers about them.
+How natural it had seemed to look across the table and see Miss
+Wentworth there! As natural as though he could look forward to an
+endless succession of days together; yet so tinged with romance that
+even the banalities of their small-talk had vibrated with emotional
+significance.
+
+When dessert and coffee and Neale's cigar could be dragged out no
+longer, they had strolled side by side up deserted lower Fifth Avenue.
+
+Now they were standing silent, watching the periodical rise and fall of
+the gushing fountain in Madison Square. At first the pool lay quiet;
+then the surface was troubled; then swelling, mounting, the jet of water
+burst through and shot upward, to sink again, leaving only waning
+ripples behind it. It made the young man think of a great many things,
+which were none the less moving and poignant to him because they have
+moved every thoughtful human being since the beginning of time. As he
+looked gravely down on the pulsations of the gleaming water, it
+symbolized to him the rhythm of the universe; the recurrent rhythm of
+the generations--human life with its one little spurt of youth and glory
+sinking so soon, so fatally soon to the sterile, routine movements of
+age. But when he spoke, his voice was as casually off-hand as ever.
+
+"There's a fountain in Rome," he said, "where, if you throw a coin in,
+you're sure to come back to it. I wonder if it would work with this
+one!"
+
+"I didn't know you'd ever been in Rome."
+
+"I haven't. I got that out of Crawford's 'Ave Roma.'"
+
+"What makes you so anxious to come back to Madison Square?"
+
+"I'm not. I'd rather find a fountain that would send me round the world.
+But there isn't much chance of that, and I thought if you'd throw one in
+too--both at the same time, you know--it might fix things so that we'd
+come back together."
+
+She gave him a steady, thoughtful look, took a penny out of her purse.
+"All ready, go!"
+
+The two coins splashed into the pool. "I hope there will be as lovely a
+moon then as there is to-night," she said.
+
+"I wonder," thought Neale, "just how much she meant by that."
+
+When Neale got back to his room, the Gang was not there in full force,
+only Robertson, the knowing little Soph. and Gregg, drinking beer and
+smoking their pipes. Neale kept back a grimace of distaste at seeing
+Robertson, his broad boy's face set in its usual expression of solemn,
+self-conscious wiseness in the ways of the world. The rest of the Gang
+found Robertson comic and enjoyed having him around to laugh at, as many
+people enjoy a visit to the monkey-house in a zoo, and see nothing but
+the comic in the humanness of simian antics. But he disquieted Neale to
+his very soul, as another set of people are disquieted and troubled by a
+visit to the monkey-house and see nothing to laugh at in simian antics.
+
+One evening of little Robertson and his loud-proclaimed disillusion with
+the world and the human race moved the rest of the Gang to delighted
+howls of laughter for days afterwards; but though Neale laughed with the
+rest (nobody could help laughing at Robertson, he was such an owl!), it
+rather took the shine off Schopenhauer and pessimism, and that was a
+real privation for a Senior.
+
+As he came in, Gregg was quoting,
+
+    "But sweet as the rind was, the core is;
+      We are fain of thee still, we are fain,
+    O sanguine and subtle Dolores,
+      Our Lady of Pain."
+
+Neale lifted a stein from its hook, poured it full from the pitcher and
+took a long drink.
+
+"Go ahead, Johnny," he said, "sounds lovely--like any other fairy tale."
+
+"Fairy tale!" cried little Robertson. "Fairy tale, you blue-nosed
+Puritan! That's all _you_ know. You've been neglecting your
+opportunities."
+
+Neale answered sharply, "Puritan be damned! I'm no Earl Hall Christer! I
+know Swinburne enough sight better than you do."
+
+At the sight of Robertson's round eyes goggling at him under his bulging
+forehead, he was amused at his own annoyance, and taking another drink
+went on indifferently, "All I'm saying is, maybe prostitution was a
+dainty art in Ancient Greece, or maybe Swinburne knew some high class
+practitioners, but here in New York, on the Heights--maybe the thought
+of Becky Blumenthal without her shimmy gives you an aesthetic thrill, but
+if it does, you've got a stronger stomach than I have. Take it from me,
+kid, if you want any poetry out of all that, you'd better stick to
+Swinburne."
+
+"Yep," agreed Gregg, "I'm with you, Crit. I don't like the
+professionals. They're a mercenary crew. They're 'out for the stuff, and
+if you ain't got enough, biff, kerslap, out you go!' Why doesn't some
+gay little lady just looking for a good time give us the high sign, the
+way they do in books. Does she? She does not!"
+
+The subject of the discussion pleased Robertson immensely, of course,
+but he was outraged at the middle-class narrowness of his elders' views.
+He got up languidly, put on his cap, and standing by the door,
+pronounced judgment.
+
+"All women," said little Robertson the Soph., "belong to the Trade, more
+or less, in one way or the other. I won't go so far as to say that every
+woman has her price, only _I_ have never met one who hadn't!"
+
+Neale and Gregg gazed at him spell-bound. He turned away, calling airily
+over his shoulder, "Well, ta! ta! A May night's no time for debates. I'm
+going out for a stroll on Morningside to prove my theory."
+
+After they had had their laugh out, Gregg said, "Doesn't he think he's a
+heller?"
+
+"Wants _us_ to think so," grunted Neale. "Where's all the Gang?"
+
+"Oh, some of them are boning for the exams, and some are chasing
+chippies, and Billy Peters is off on some of his usual footless fussing.
+Been calling on a girl all winter and I don't believe he's even had his
+arm around her yet, except at dances. The kid!"
+
+Neale filled his pipe, held the match over it and puffed gently until
+the tobacco glowed an even red all over the top. What would Gregg say,
+he wondered, to his attitude towards Miss Wentworth? And Gregg himself!
+Neale knew perfectly well Gregg wrote long, weekly letters to that
+innocent-faced up-state girl whose picture stood on the dresser over
+there. He also knew perfectly well that Gregg was a regular Sir Galahad
+when it came to her. Oh, Lord! How like that blatant idiot Robertson,
+they were! It made him feel like a fool kid himself, the bluff they
+always kept up. Weren't they getting grown-up enough to drop this
+inside-out hypocrisy?
+
+He kept all this to himself, smoking in thoughtful silence. When the
+pipe was finished, he yawned and stretched, "Guess I'll turn in. Going
+to read all night?"
+
+Gregg looked up from his book, "I'll put the shade over the light so you
+can get to sleep. I want to finish this Philosophy A stuff, Plato's
+Republic. Have you read the last book yet? It's great dope!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next day Neale and Miss Wentworth were sitting by their little gipsy
+fire in a nook among the Palisades, overlooking the river. Luncheon had
+long been finished, the dishes packed away, and they continued to sit
+still, Miss Wentworth looking at the view, Neale looking at her and
+turning over in his mind the problem, "How can a man with no money, and
+no prospects of ever earning any, ask a girl to marry him? He can't. But
+suppose there's a chance that the girl ... well, no matter what she may
+be thinking, wouldn't it be the decent thing to let her know how he
+feels? Of course he ought to! What's the answer, then? There isn't any
+answer."
+
+"A penny for your thoughts, Mr. Crittenden."
+
+"I was wondering," Neale lied glibly, "whether you didn't know me well
+enough to stop calling me Mr. Crittenden."
+
+She met his eyes squarely, "All right, I'll call you Neale, if you'll
+call me Martha. I hate formality between friends."
+
+He weighed her intonation carefully. Had she accented the word,
+"friends"? Did she mean it as a warning? Well, whether or not she meant
+it, that was the only line he could decently take.
+
+As they started on the five-mile walk back to the ferry, their talk
+dodged personalities. They talked about the trees and rocks and
+wild-flowers and books and music--the music to which Martha had been
+introducing Neale that winter, the music which, little by little, was
+beginning to speak to his heart more powerfully, more directly even than
+poetry. Then, gradually, with a deep sense of tranquil comradeship, they
+stopped dodging personalities, no longer felt any need to talk, strode
+forward side by side, silent, each sure of the other. Neale felt quiet
+and happy and at the same time miserable and uncertain. Could he find
+words to tell her? Must he in honor wait till he had a place in the
+world to offer?
+
+At the end of their long march, they came to the edge of the cliff and
+stood for a long time staring down at the great river, shimmering and
+iridescent far below them in the spring haze. Only a few miles further
+south along these cliffs and only a few years ago, the little Neale had
+sat alone and swung his feet and dreamed. How simple life had been for
+him then!
+
+Still without a word, they went down the zig-zag path to the ferry
+landing, and stood waiting for the boat. It was very still, except for
+the water splashing on the stony beach. Without thought, without
+planning it, the fullness of Neale's heart unsealed his lips. He began
+to speak in a low tone, his voice rough and uneven with emotion.
+
+    "Listen! you hear the grating roar
+    Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
+    At their return, up the high strand."
+
+He was aware that the girl was very still, listening with bent head.
+
+    "Sophocles long ago
+    Heard it on the AEgean, and it brought
+    Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
+    Of human misery; we...."
+
+his breath failed him and he was silent. Over there beyond that wide
+expanse of lapping water lay the world with its houses and railways, its
+business, its spider-web of human relations. Here in the shadow they
+were alone together.
+
+    "But now I only hear
+    Its melancholy, long withdrawing roar,
+    Retreating to the breath
+    Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
+    And naked shingles of the world."
+
+He stopped. Now that he had come to what he wished to say, he dared not.
+
+"Don't you know the rest?" asked the girl softly.
+
+"Yes," said Neale huskily, "I know it."
+
+She waited for him to go on, and when he did not, she said, "Well, no
+matter. I know it too."
+
+She stood beside him in the blue twilight, her fair head raised, her
+eyes looking far over the water. Neale was certain that she too was
+silently repeating,
+
+    "Ah, love, let us be true
+    To one another! for the world, which seems
+    To lie before us like a land of dreams,
+    So various, so beautiful, so new,
+    Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
+    Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
+    And we are here as on a darkling plain
+    Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
+    Where ignorant armies clash by night."
+
+The great day was over. The Yew Tree had been planted and orated over.
+The scared Valedictorian had stumbled through as much of his speech as
+he could remember. Neale, with a hundred other Seniors had stood up and
+received the degree of Bachelor of Arts, which the President,
+"By-the-authority-in-him-vested" scattered broadcast over them. Neale
+was through with college. College was through with Neale.
+
+Father and Mother were there, come up specially from the other side of
+the Equator, though Father tried to pretend that business had brought
+him north. They strolled about the campus, went downtown and had
+luncheon together, all three outwardly calm in the traditional
+Crittenden manner, in spite of the emotion boiling under the surface of
+their little family party.
+
+What boiled hardest under Neale's surface was a great haste to find his
+place in the business-world, to begin to make money, to have something
+to offer Martha. Before he had met Martha he had had dreams of asking to
+go back to college for a Master's Degree--in anything, just to go on
+with the studies he had found so interesting, to play football again, to
+sit, care-free, smoking his pipe and talking philosophy with Gregg. But
+even in his dreams he had felt that all that was only a little boy's
+scheme to dodge real life. And now he felt no sympathy with dreams. He
+wanted to get out and tackle real life with all his strength. He smarted
+under the feeling that he had no right to speak to Martha.
+
+So when Mother went up to her room to rest from the strain of throttling
+her feelings down to her men-folks' standard of outward calm, and he and
+Father went into the lobby to light cigars, he said at once, "Father, I
+want to start in to-morrow to hustle for a job."
+
+Father looked pleased. It even occurred to Neale that Father looked
+relieved. "Anything special in sight?" he asked.
+
+"No, I'm just going to knock at all the office doors till I find one
+where they don't throw me out."
+
+Father puffed awhile. "Naturally I'd like to have you with me, but I
+couldn't offer you anything but a clerkship. And I'm convinced that the
+opportunities to rise are greater here at the center of things. Now I've
+worked a good many years for the firm and I believe Gates would give you
+a job on my recommendation. Want to try it?"
+
+"I'll try anything that'll give me a start."
+
+"To-morrow too soon, if I can make an appointment for you?"
+
+"I'll be there."
+
+"Of course you won't draw much of a salary at first; I think I'd better
+keep your allowance going for a few months at least."
+
+"Nothing doing, Dad! It's white of you to suggest it, but I'm on my own
+now. If you get me a job, that's more than plenty. If I can't live on my
+wages, I'll black boots after office hours."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+
+May, 1905.
+
+Neale had never, so to speak, received any letters in his life until his
+parents had gone off to Rio; but since then letters had filled what
+personal life he had found time for. It was surprising how much more
+freely people spoke out in the written word than in talk. The weekly
+bulletins from Mother, and Father's occasional letters gave him more of
+a feeling of intercourse with his parents than he had ever known when
+they lived under the same roof. And he was sure that in no other way
+could he ever have come to look into the clear integrity of Martha's
+heart as he had in the letters which had come to him from all over
+Europe, where she had been wandering with her father during his
+sabbatical year of freedom.
+
+In the April after his graduation, Martha had written from England that
+she was hurrying the end of her travel-year so that she could be home to
+take a Palisading walk with him on May sixteenth. May sixteenth was the
+date of their last walk together on the Palisades, the walk which had
+ended in the sweet, wordless understanding between them. Her frank
+recognition of it as an anniversary to be remembered showed how far
+along the year of separation and frequent letter-writing had brought
+them.
+
+He was thinking of Martha, the wonderful Martha her letters had
+revealed, as he waited for her on May sixteenth in the parlor of her
+father's apartment. He found it almost impossible to listen to what
+Professor Wentworth was saying, and tried in vain to answer the
+traveler's questions about Columbia news. The Wentworths had been in
+Norway and Spain and England and Greece, while Neale had not been out of
+New York; but he knew no more of Columbia than they. With the bestowal
+of the impersonally broadcasted degree, Columbia had dropped him as
+unceremoniously as it had failed to welcome him when he arrived--"and
+quite right, too," thought Neale. He detested the florid sentimentality
+of some other universities, the maudlin old grads singing of bright
+college years!
+
+So he knew nothing whatever about Columbia to report. Besides, Professor
+Wentworth naturally enough was inquiring about what had been happening
+to the faculty during his absence, and Neale had never had the faintest
+guess that any of his professors led a three-dimensional life. But most
+of all, his year in business, in an office surrounded by men who had
+never been near a university had set him immeasurably far from the
+academic world. In an attempt to satisfy Martha's father he now made a
+great effort to look back at college life, but he was looking back at it
+from the wrong end of a telescope. It was inconceivably small and far
+away. He had not realized till now how much the year in business had
+changed him, how rapidly he had left behind him the horizon of his
+college years. Well, that was as it should be--to live hard in the
+present without brooding over the past or dreaming of the future....
+
+Then Martha came in, and he forgot college altogether, forgot Professor
+Wentworth, he even forgot the business world as he looked half-shyly,
+half-confidently into her blue eyes--the same, but, oh, how startlingly
+more real and alive than the dream-like memory picture he had been
+treasuring all those months.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They crossed the ferry, they stepped off briskly up the zig-zag path,
+then when the last house was hidden behind the rocks, they stopped.
+Martha lifted her smiling face to his. As their lips touched, Neale was
+thrilled by a wave of emotion,--exaltation rather than passion. "How
+dear, how sweet, how incredibly pure and good she was!"
+
+The moment passed; as they walked on from time to time their eyes met
+frankly. "Oh, but I'm glad to be walking with you again, Neale," said
+Martha at last. "It's as if we hadn't been separated at all--yes, you
+do look older--ever so much older--and yet about the same."
+
+"Oh, I'm just the same, Martha," he told her briefly with a weighty,
+significant accent.
+
+It was the only reference made by either of them to what was in their
+hearts. But it was enough for both of them. What a _fine_ girl, Neale
+thought, not to want, any more than he did, a lot of goings-on to
+express feelings! As they tramped along energetically, Martha was
+talking of what the year had been to her. She spoke of picture-galleries
+and Gothic cathedrals, and palaces and ruins; but what she said, and
+what Neale heard was that nowhere had she met any one whom she liked
+better than Neale. Neale felt himself relax in an ineffable content, and
+knew by contrast how anxious he had been.
+
+Then they made their fire and cooked their bacon, ate their lunch, and
+Neale lighted his pipe peaceably and happily. They sat in a sunny,
+sheltered corner of the rocks, overlooking the river, their hearts
+sheltered and sunny, and in the intervals of their talk they looked at
+each other in quiet satisfaction. How good it was to be together again!
+
+Neale's report of his year took longer than Martha's because they both
+felt that hers had the irrelevant passing interest of a vacation-time,
+while his was to have enduring importance for them both. It was, he told
+her, the same phase in the business world as a freshman year in college,
+and although he had not made a brilliant outer success as yet, he felt,
+on the whole, satisfied with the way he had got his feet under him and
+had begun to know his way about. He gave a droll little color to the
+account of his job in the office, the one they had evidently given him
+as an experiment, to be tried out in cheap materials first--he
+representing the cheap materials! The business had grown and grown; at
+first, a generation ago, the product of Mr. Gates' business ability;
+later on, too large even for what the "old man" could keep under his
+remarkably capacious hat. Then twenty years ago, other people--Mr.
+Gates' son, Neale's father, the clever and forceful manager of the
+Chicago office, a branch-manager in Ottawa,--had begun to keep it under
+their respective hats. Important matters were decided orally in a
+personal talk between the different department heads, who, having the
+required information at their finger-tips, needed no figuring or
+statistics to help their decisions. This had lasted all the while Neale
+was growing up, but by the time he graduated, some of the younger
+members of the organization had begun to feel that perhaps the stock of
+information vital to the conduct of the business ought to be copied off
+from the several brains which possessed it, and set down in some more
+accessible form. Mr. Belden, the Ottawa manager, knew all about the
+lumber market in eastern Canada, the average quality of mill-run spruce
+in each section and what the chances were of getting it on time for a
+given order; Mr. Gilman, at the Chicago office, could snap back over the
+long-distance wire any question you cared to put about Wisconsin or
+Northern Michigan lumber regions. But they were neither of them so young
+as they had been nor was Mr. Crittenden, whose specialty was the
+selling-end of Eastern and foreign lumber markets. Even the "young Mr.
+Gates" was now over fifty. They were all mortal, the health of the
+"young Mr. Gates" was far from good; and furthermore the business kept
+steadily growing so that it was very inconvenient to have to wait to
+consult men widely separated.
+
+"Do you get it?" asked Neale, lying in the sun on the Palisades,
+smoking, looking up at a sweet, well-beloved face and delighting in her
+eager, intelligent interest in his story. "Do you get it? Half the bunch
+thought a card-catalogue the foolishest, new-fangled waste of time; half
+of them didn't know whether it was or not; all of them wanted some sort
+of tabulation of inside information, and none of them knew how to go
+about it any more than if they'd been asked to bake a batch of bread or
+write a theme on the Crusades. The half that wanted to stick to the old
+ways and keep it all safe under different people's hats were dead set
+against spending any money on any fool system of collecting and
+classifying information. And the other half weren't by any means so sure
+of their ground that they wanted to spend a lot of cash to get an
+expert. And, anyhow, where could you find an expert? If you let one of
+those 'business-system' people inside the office he'd be trying to run
+the whole works. Maybe the idea was all right, but you couldn't get it
+executed. Well, while the whole proposition was up in the air, and
+everybody chewing the rag about it, somebody knocks at the door, and who
+is it? Why, Crittenden's son, just out of college, wanting a job. All
+nonsense, college, and yet what _would_ it have taught a boy if not how
+to straighten out and classify information? Anyhow you could get him for
+next to nothing: boys out of college never expect to be paid anything to
+speak of, and a good reason why; because they aren't worth anything.
+Give him a year's try at it! Crittenden's son ought to have a _little_
+natural sense. It won't cost much; he can't do any harm; maybe he might
+work out a system that would be useful.
+
+"So they offered the job at slightly more than office-boy wages to the
+college graduate. And what did _he_ think about it? How had he been
+trained for such work? _You_ know, Martha, how he'd been trained. What
+he knew about orderly arrangement of information was about what would go
+on the head of a pin! He'd been learning a _few_ scattered items about
+English Literature and Greek Philosophy, and the latest inaccuracy about
+atoms; and a whole lot about how to get a football over a given line
+under given conditions. But incidentally and on the side, he'd had a
+pretty thorough course in poker, and a poker-face was the necessary
+equipment for _that_ situation!"
+
+He and Martha laughed, a light-hearted young laugh, that did them good
+and made them feel closer than ever to each other in the conspiracy of
+two against the world.
+
+The rest of the year had been, Neale told her, a slow, dogged struggle
+to find out what after all it was nobody's business to tell him; to
+invent a system of recording what he found out that would not only be
+fool-proof but stenographer-proof; to collect exact statistics as to the
+cost of production and transportation; and to bring together items of
+account-keeping that had never before had even a speaking acquaintance
+with each other.
+
+"I've traced a plank from the tree to tide-water, inch by inch, my
+note-book in my hand, setting down every sixteenth of a cent per board
+foot that it cost till we sold it to the retail dealer, watching it as
+if it were the prince-royal of a reigning house and I the secret-service
+man set to keep track of him! I've covered reams of paper figuring out
+the cost of the office-work of getting that plank sold--extra
+office-work, you know, not ordinary overhead;--and, by heck, I don't see
+how they've ever managed to run their old business a minute, the
+haphazard way they've been going at it! Nobody knew anything, not _all_
+of anything! I seem to have been marking time, but just you wait till I
+get out of the office and into the real game. I know more about some
+things than any of the buyers, even the old-timers."
+
+"Well, there must be a big profit in business or they wouldn't be able
+to conduct it that loose way," said Martha.
+
+"Oh, the profits are big, all right," Neale concurred. "Old man Gates
+has more cash than he knows what to do with. And not one of his
+grandchildren amounts to a whoop. When his son, the one who's our
+General Manager now, retires, there won't be a Gates left in the Gates
+Lumber Company."
+
+"They won't mind," said Martha.
+
+"You bet your life they won't _mind_," said Neale. "Far from it! Most
+likely they've hardly heard the name of it. They're all living in Europe
+now, buying villas and things out of the money the Company makes. Our
+Mr. Gates never sees any of his family except when he takes a vacation
+and goes to Florence or England. All _they_ want out of the lumber
+business is a fat wad of easy money."
+
+"That's not right," said Martha suddenly. "That's not right."
+
+"It's not right if getting something for nothing is wrong," Neale agreed
+casually. "But what are you going to do about it? There you are. That's
+the way things go."
+
+Martha made no answer. There was a little silence. Then she said: "All
+that account-keeping, that detail work--it doesn't seem so terribly
+interesting to me, Neale. Haven't you found it awfully dull sometimes?"
+
+Neale rolled over and sat up with an effect of entering again into
+active and energetic life. "Well, I might have," he said finally. "But
+you know, Martha, that I have a special reason for wanting to get on
+quick in business, and I've been mighty glad enough to grab hold of any
+end that was handy." He smiled at her confidently. "All a fellow needs
+in the business world is a crack in the wall to get his toes into for a
+start. I've got my crack. Now you just watch me climb!"
+
+It was perfectly understood between them what he was climbing to reach.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII
+
+
+Father had written from Caracas that Mother was taking the next boat
+back to New York because she needed a lot of dental work done and hadn't
+any confidence in Venezuelan dentists, but when Neale met Mother at the
+dock she told him at once, laughingly, that the dental work was only an
+excuse, and that she had come to have a visit with her son. She had
+added with a whimsical defiance that, such being the fact, she had no
+intention of putting up the usual Crittenden bluff of something
+different.
+
+"I'm not a Crittenden," she told Neale gaily in the cab on the way to
+the hotel, "though I married into the family so young! And now that I've
+worn a mantilla, with a rose in my hair, I'm not going to try any longer
+to pretend that I am."
+
+Neale looked at her, admiring her now quite distinguished appearance,
+but feeling a little alarm at her tone. She sounded almost disturbingly
+electric.
+
+"I've come up to have a real New York spree with my big son and his nice
+girl, now that he has condescended to let us know he has a nice girl,"
+she told him, her smiling eyes at once tender and a little mocking. "You
+can afford it, can't you, since your last raise?"
+
+"Oh, I can afford anything in reason."
+
+"Your father says they tell him you're getting on splendidly."
+
+"They never let on as much to me," said Neale drily, "though they are
+treating me very white as to pay."
+
+They were at the hotel door now, where Mother made arrangements for a
+stay of a month.
+
+"Dental work takes so long," she told Neale gravely in the elevator,
+making him laugh outright. She looked very well pleased at this, and
+after they were inside her room, stood up on tip-toes and gave him
+another kiss.
+
+He had never entirely recovered from his father's chance remark that
+Mother had been only twenty when she married. She must have been about
+as old as he was now when he first began to remember her. Just a
+girl,--and she had seemed older to him then than now.
+
+He told her this as he unstrapped her valise. "You seem younger to me
+every time I see you--lots younger now than when I was six or seven
+years old."
+
+She laughed out. "I was a child myself when you were six or seven." She
+turned grave for a moment. "If I had you to bring up, now that I am a
+really grown person with a personality of my own and some experience of
+the world, I'd do it very differently. I'd make a better job of it."
+
+"You made a good enough job," he protested mildly. "How can you look at
+me and think you could have done any better?"
+
+She stopped her unpacking to laugh. "It just spoils a person for other
+forms of joking to live with one of you dry Crittendens. Other people's
+humor seems so flamboyant. I _like_ the Crittendens," she pronounced
+judicially, "though I did waste about twenty years of my young life
+trying to make myself into one. I'm glad you're one. But if you try to
+make Martha into one--"
+
+"Martha's one already," he told her triumphantly. "We're exactly
+alike--the way we think and do things. That's why we get on so well
+together." At this Neale's mother looked at him so hard that he felt a
+little annoyed, and turned the talk back to its earlier channel.
+
+"How else would you have brought me up, I'd like to know?"
+
+"I'd have taken dynamite to you," she informed him briskly.
+
+"Dynamite?"
+
+"Oh, you don't understand. And I daresay it would have been too early
+anyhow. You'll probably get your share of dynamite when your turn
+comes." She changed the subject: "How's business? Seriously!"
+
+Seriously he told her of the results of his promotion six months before
+from the "intelligence bureau," as he called it, to the real business of
+life, to buying and selling. "The only real money is in that," he told
+her, warming as he spoke. "All those other jobs, office jobs, don't lead
+you anywhere. Buying and selling, especially selling, that's where you
+get ahead. I'm earning twice what I did, and by this time next year I'll
+be doing twice what I'm doing now. I may soon be able to do a little on
+the side, on my own hook, pick up something good and dispose of it well.
+Grandfather is sure I can. He may have some tips for me later on.
+Grandfather is a wise old scout."
+
+Mother laid some underwear away in a drawer. As she shut it, she asked
+casually: "Do you read any Emerson nowadays, Neale?"
+
+How in the world did Mother know he had ever read Emerson? "No, I
+don't," he said.
+
+She noted the shortness of his tone with raised eyebrows, and began to
+hang up her dresses in the closet.
+
+Neale looked at her back with some uneasiness. He felt his privacy
+threatened, and, stiffening, put up the bars. And apparently Mother
+sensed the change, for she at once dropped her intimate tone and began
+making gay plans for "having some fun" during her stay, plans in which
+dental engagements played a conspicuously small part. It turned out to
+be a very light-hearted month, Mother's month in the dentist's chair.
+Neale and Martha were quite shaken up out of the quiet, jog-trot routine
+of their peaceful days and long evenings of serious reading together.
+Mother took them to the theater and to dinner at out-of-the-way
+restaurants of which, like most sober resident New Yorkers, they had
+never heard the names. In the daytime, she and Martha, of whom she had
+grown very fond, went around a good deal together, looking at the
+innumerable expensive and occasionally beautiful objects on view in the
+shops of a big city; or visiting museums, or going to matinees. They
+heard a good deal of music, all three of them. Mother had chosen a hotel
+near Carnegie Hall, so that frequently, when they had nothing else to
+do, they strolled up on foot and listened to whatever was being played.
+They had an occasional dinner with Professor Wentworth and Martha in
+their apartment on 122d Street, and Mother went off by herself to look
+up the old friends of Union Hill days, the few who were not scattered.
+
+Once in a while Neale talked over his business prospects with Mother
+when she asked him about them and he couldn't get out of it, and they
+agreed that he would be able to marry in another year. And having agreed
+in this opinion, Mother was apt to fall very silent for a time. But this
+suited Neale, who found intimate personal talk disconcerting. It always
+made him uneasy when another human being rattled the handle of the door
+to his inner secret garden. One of the things he most loved in Martha
+was that she took so much for granted without talking about it. They
+understood each other instinctively, he felt, without need of
+explanation. He suspected that Martha had her own inner garden, and
+prided himself on respecting her right to it. _He_ was no one to go
+rattling handles of doors that were none of his. He found Martha
+especially restful and satisfying after one of these talks with Mother,
+lightly and passingly as Mother glanced over those sensitive places. He
+constantly felt that Mother was trying to open a door he wished to keep
+shut, that she was trying to say something that he had no desire to
+hear. He and Martha were all right. What business had Mother to look at
+them that way?
+
+She did nothing after all, beyond looking, and went away at the end of
+her month, having committed no greater crime than to whisper brokenly to
+Neale as she kissed him good-by, "Neale, it's not enough to--Neale, you
+must _love_ Martha. You must _love_ her--not just--"
+
+At this Neale had quickly assumed the cold look of distaste which she
+knew so well, and she had ventured no further.
+
+After her departure, Neale fell with relief back into his old routine of
+quiet, comfortable life-in-common with Martha, with none of the
+prickling electric uncertainties he had felt in Mother. Odd how much
+better he knew Martha than he did Mother; how sure he was beforehand of
+what Martha would think and say, whereas he had been uncomfortably
+unsure of Mother. He felt he knew Martha as he knew himself, through and
+through.
+
+This conviction was a great satisfaction to him. He often thought of it
+with pride, and with a secret pity and scorn for people who found life
+and human relationships so complicated and mysterious. That sort of
+thing was just a novel-writer's rubber-stamp convention. What was there
+so darned mysterious about your own nature, about a sensible woman's
+nature? Nothing. If you were a sane, normal man, you found your mate in
+the world just as normally as you found your place in the business
+world. With a healthy, honest, fine girl like Martha, there would be
+none of those double-and-twisted emotional complications you read about
+in books.
+
+He was away from New York a good deal at this time, taking, as one of
+the younger salesmen, the more difficult and less remunerative
+territories, and when he came back to the city it was like coming home,
+to ring the bell of the Wentworths' apartment and have Martha herself
+come to open the door for him, her eyes as clear and honest as sunlit
+water.
+
+They always had a good deal to tell each other after these separations.
+Martha about her work at the Speyer School, where she had begun to help
+a little in visiting the families of the poorer children, Neale about
+his business, which he was finding more and more absorbingly
+interesting, for which he was feeling much of the zestful passion he had
+felt for football. He talked a great deal to Martha about the
+resemblance of football to business. One of the many things he loved
+about Martha was her knowledge of football. Of course, strictly
+speaking, like all other outsiders, she knew nothing whatever about
+football; but she knew as much as any spectator could, and, brought up
+from birth as she had been in one or another college community, she had
+a second-nature familiarity with the psychology of the game, with the
+fierce, driving concentration, the eager, devout willingness to devote
+every throb of your pulse, every thought in your brain to winning the
+game; and it seemed perfectly natural to her, as it did to Neale, to
+step into another world where all the mature energies were focussed in
+the same way.
+
+"It's just like football," Neale often told her, his eyes gleaming.
+"Having played football gives you as great an advantage as though you
+were in training and the other fellows soft. I often feel as if I ought
+to go and look up old Atkins and thank him. He was teaching me enough
+sight more than how to play back-field defense! That everlasting
+pounding of his on the idea of knowing where the ball is before you go
+for it--Gee whiz, you'd never guess how many fool mistakes that's kept
+me from. I see the other fellows wasting money on buying drinks and
+tickets to shows and champagne suppers for hard-shelled old buyers who
+haven't an interest left in life beyond screwing the price down an
+eighth of a cent--wallowing in any-old-how just to get going,--the way I
+used to; and I think of old Atkins, lie low, keep my mouth shut, and
+size up the enemy's formation till I see their weak place, _and then_!"
+The brilliance of his eye, the grimness of his set jaw, the impact of
+one great fist in the palm of the other hand showed what happened then.
+He went on. "One game's just like the other, and the thing that wins in
+both is _wanting to win_ more than the other fellow does." He turned
+serious, almost exalted, and said: "Sometimes I used almost to think it
+was the way religion must be for people who believe in it--it puts you
+in touch with some big force--I've felt it in football--I guess
+everybody always feels it who really gets going enough to care about
+anything with all that is in him--if you give every bit of
+yourself--don't keep anything back--want to win more than anything else
+in the world--why, all of a sudden some outside source of power that's
+hundreds of volts higher than normal begins to flow through you--and you
+_move_ things. It's wonderful, but you can't have it cheap. It costs you
+all you've got."
+
+One evening as they sat thus, Martha perched on the arm of Neale's
+chair, the quiet air about them crackling and tingling with the
+high-tension current, Martha caught and grasped a comparison which had
+long been floating elusive in the back of her mind. She jumped up and
+ran to the piano. "Listen, it's like this," she told him, and played
+with one hand, clear and defiant and compelling, the call of the young
+Siegfried. "That was how it was in football. And now--" She sat down
+before the piano, and, stretching out both hands over the keys, she
+filled the room with the rich clamor of the same theme reinforced by all
+the sumptuous strength of harmony.
+
+Neale sprang to his feet. "You know what Siegfried went through fire to
+find," he cried, stooping to put his lips on Martha's cheek. "All he
+wanted was to get to Brunhilda. And that's all I want, my Brunhilda! All
+I want in the world!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII
+
+
+1907.
+
+He had called her "his Brunhilda" with honest sincerity; with all his
+heart he thought he meant it. Of _course_ he was fighting for success to
+put in Martha's hands. His honor was pledged to win for Martha's sake.
+His deep affection for Martha underlay his delight in learning to play
+the game. All this went without saying, and he said it even to himself
+with less and less frequency during the next year.
+
+He had, as a matter of fact, less and less time and strength to give to
+anything outside his business. This focussing of energies began to have
+its usual result. He felt the eyes of the older men in the organization
+turned on him with curiosity, with approval, and with a little jealous
+alarm which gave him the utmost pleasure. He saw in the younger men's
+eyes the appraising, combative, watchful look with which one tackle
+surveys his opponent. All his life-long mystic intensity of conviction
+of the worthwhileness of winning games, flared and blazed hot and lusty
+in his heart as he recognized that he was now head over ears in the
+turmoil of the biggest game he had yet encountered.
+
+Of course the real purpose of the game was to take care of Martha--that
+was axiomatic!
+
+The middle of his third year in business was marked by a considerable
+raise in salary and an enlargement of territory with corresponding
+increase from sales commissions, which proved conclusively that he was
+now accepted as one of the live-wires of the organization. And when
+barely a week later, Professor Wentworth was notified of his appointment
+as exchange professor for the next academic year to one of the German
+universities, the moral of the two events was clear. It was time for a
+rather long engagement to end; time for Martha to set a definite date
+for the wedding before her father's departure for Berlin.
+
+With the setting of the date the relations of the three took on another
+aspect--like a change of lighting at the theater. Everything was as it
+had been, and yet everything was different. Professor Wentworth
+considered himself already eliminated by the younger generation, and
+although they invited him to share the new home on his return from the
+year in Germany, he assured them that he would under no conditions
+cumber up the background in any such fashion, and began to make plans
+for joining forces with another widowed professor whose children were
+now all married. His resigned, philosophic acceptance of his soon-to-be
+exit from their stage set them further from him and closer to each
+other, as if he had already stepped out from their lives and closed the
+door behind him. They occasionally felt a little self-conscious
+awareness of being alone with each other which was new to them. As
+Martha quaintly phrased it, she now began to feel not only that she was
+engaged but that she was going to be married. The feeling was a new one,
+gave a new color to her thoughts and sometimes made her feel a little
+queer.
+
+Neale told her that he understood this and felt with her that he was
+stepping forward into a new phase of their relation; and he did feel
+this at intervals. But while this was the only change that had occurred
+in Martha's life, it was overshadowed in Neale's by his intuition that
+he had now come to a crucial moment in his business career. He
+recognized perfectly the feel of the moment in the game when one side or
+the other wins, although half the time may yet remain to be played
+through. In football it lasted but an instant, that well-remembered
+poise on the very crest of the will-to-win. In business it would
+last--he had no idea how long--but he felt that he had been well coached
+by life, that his training had left him with the endurance to stick it
+out--years if necessary. His pride as a fighter hardened and set. He
+felt again the single-hearted passion to win out at any cost to himself
+or others which had been the meat and marrow of his football days. In
+short he began to be considered by all the experienced eyes about him
+as a remarkably promising young American business-man.
+
+But now for the first time he did not pass on to Martha the excited
+exuberant sense of triumphant force, the salty tang of pushing a weaker
+man where he had not wished to go. Nowadays when he stepped into
+Professor Wentworth's apartment he found Martha with excitements and
+interests of her own--of her own and his too. After the first slightly
+startled recognition that he had opened the door upon a quite unexpected
+scene, he always focussed his eyes to the other distances, and discussed
+as animatedly as Martha the relative advantages of suburban and
+upper-west-side locations, and looked over with her the list of
+apartments to let. But when he left her, he had scarcely reached the
+bottom of the stairs before he was again in his own world, crouching
+warily with tense muscles, alert to catch his opponents off their
+balance. He occasionally cast a mental glance back at the scene he had
+left, but it was already out of focus. As a matter of plain fact he did
+not care a picayune whether they lived in a suburb or on 145th Street,
+or in what kind of book-case they kept their books, nor whether they had
+twin beds of mahogany or white enamel. He told himself that what he did
+care about was that Martha should be suited in those details about which
+she seemed to care so much.
+
+One evening he found even as he was with her, his attention wavered,
+dimmed, and fixed itself on a deal he was planning with his grandfather,
+a small affair which he hoped to put through on the side, but from
+which, as he was to handle it by himself, he expected quite a brilliant
+percentage of profit. He answered Martha at random, came back to her
+world with a guilty start, excusing his lapse by explaining to himself
+that he was eager for that profit only because it would considerably add
+to the sum he was laying by for the equipment of the new home. As he sat
+listening to Martha and agreeing with her, and at the same time
+speculating about the age and condition of the oak on the tract he hoped
+to buy, and how much of it was big enough to make quarter-sawing
+profitable, he thought whimsically that he was as good as married
+already, that he was doing just what was done by all the husbands he
+knew.
+
+Martha stopped suddenly, as if he had spoken aloud, or as if she had
+been struck by a new thought, "Neale, do you realize it! We're really
+going to be married--just like anybody else. I don't believe I ever
+thought we really would!"
+
+"Didn't you?" he said. "I always had a sort of notion we would." But
+although this was not the first time she had expressed this feeling,
+something about her accent, or aspect, crystallized into tangible form
+anticipations which had been as vague in his case as in hers.
+
+About this time he began to notice that instead of misty,
+in-the-distant-future glances at what marriage was to mean, came
+concrete, definite, recurring pictures of one scene after another in the
+life before them. His imagination, never very quickly aroused or very
+flexible by nature, began to be prodded by circumstances into an
+unwonted activity on the subject of Martha and this marriage. He saw her
+in his mind's eye across the breakfast table, on the other side of the
+hearth, or even sitting on the arm of his chair with his arm around her,
+as she often sat now while they talked over their plans. But (it was one
+of the first intimations he had of the storm before him) he encountered
+some curious dumb resistance deep in his heart when he tried to think of
+her more intimately with the veils of girlhood gone, as his wife.
+Something within flashed up with chivalric swiftness to shut out such
+thoughts. He amazed himself once or twice by feeling his face hot, as
+though with shame at the idea of making Martha, Martha whom he loved so
+much, his wife. What sort of morbid prudery was this? As soon as it was
+passed he found it incredible; and felt it again. "Perhaps it wasn't so
+incredible after all. Maybe that was the price you paid for knowing
+something about life." It was inevitable--what must be felt by every man
+who had not been brought up in a vacuum. And it was really all right and
+nothing to be squeamish over. Human nature is what it is, and there's no
+use dressing it up in high-sounding names!
+
+If that had been all he had to worry him! But there were other things.
+More than once he had felt a new exasperation rise in him when Martha
+would go on discussing the color of wall-paper and window-curtains. Hang
+it all, he was ready to agree with her whatever way she wanted
+it--wasn't that enough without dragging him into a discussion of details
+he didn't understand or care about? Nothing of any great importance,
+such passing moments of impatience, and yet he had gloried in his
+certainty that Martha and he agreed on everything! More troubling
+still--he remembered so distinctly the first time--bending together over
+a book, a strand of Martha's hair had touched his cheek. He could still
+feel the shiver with which he had drawn away--true, he had not realized
+what was taking place--had felt subconsciously as if a spider were
+walking across his face--but just the same, three years ago though he
+might have recoiled, his next impulse would have been to snatch that
+tress of hair and kiss it. Why didn't he kiss it now? Why, here it was
+again, just as if they were married already: that was the way so many
+husbands he knew acted with their wives! Of course all this was to be
+expected, too: you get used to things; you can't go on being thrilled by
+familiar sensations. In the nature of things marriage could not be as
+transcendent as people pretended, when men and women are so far from
+being transcendent!
+
+And yet little by little whenever in the pauses of his business he gave
+a thought to his personal future he felt it all there again, heavier and
+heavier, weighing down leadenly every thought which he tried to send
+ahead into the life he meant to make so happy for Martha.
+
+At this, for a short time, he fell into an inner panic, lost his head,
+thought himself abnormal, incapable of ordinary human life. He was
+afraid to see Martha, and was in his heart immeasurably relieved when
+she was called off by a wedding in her Aunt's family to a somewhat
+lengthy visit in Ohio. He wanted to have it all out with himself while
+she was gone--make an end of all this nonsense. But what he did was to
+think of it as little as possible.
+
+With Martha gone he was able to occupy his mind entirely with business
+problems, and the release from tormenting personal worries was grateful
+to him. He had been intensely ill-at-ease. He was relieved that his
+discomfort was passed, quite passed.
+
+He opened Martha's first letter with pleasure. Letters were all right:
+they didn't harry you with emotional over-tones. He read her
+entertaining account of the prostrate condition of both families over
+the elaborate wedding ceremony impending. Everybody it seemed was
+frantic with nerves--except the bride-to-be and her young man, of
+course, who paid no attention to anybody or anything but themselves.
+Neale thought he felt a note of good-natured satire in this, and smiled
+appreciatively. That was exactly what _he_ felt about fussy weddings.
+Martha always felt as he did.
+
+With the thought an inner door clanged open, and sickeningly there was
+the whole thing to begin again! What if Martha _had_ been feeling as he
+had? What did a decent girl feel before her marriage anyhow? Did she
+dread it perhaps--or on the other hand, had she too lost the
+thrill--were they already like some of the married couples he knew who
+kissed with listless lips, looked at one another with stolid glassy
+eyes? No, Martha was all right! Martha wouldn't change! But didn't that
+make it worse? What did she expect to find in marriage? Could he give
+Martha what she expected to find in marriage? He had never once before
+thought of that, absorbed as he had been by his own disquiet. He was
+overwhelmed by this new complication, and for many days would not allow
+himself even to glance at it. He hated the idea of thinking about it. He
+hated the whole idiotic tangle he kept getting into. Why, damn it,
+getting married was no such complicated affair! Look at all the
+imbeciles who sailed into it, a vacuous smile on their lips and nothing
+whatever in their heads, and made a success of it! A man wasn't a woman,
+thank God! and couldn't be expected to divine what a woman wanted out of
+marriage. People who did not expect too much of it, or of anything, were
+the only ones with intelligence.
+
+Just at this time he got his first chance at a big order. An industrial
+suburb was projected to house the operatives of a new machine-tool
+manufacturing plant in the Connecticut valley. The contractors had never
+been Gates customers and no one in the office thought that young
+Crittenden had the ghost of a show of landing the order--no one, that
+is, but young Crittenden himself. The contract would run up into the
+millions of board feet: forgetting Martha, marriage, every personal
+element in life, Neale started after it.
+
+He studied the buyer, the situation, the sort of lumber needed. He sat
+up nights going over the architect's specifications; made up alternative
+schedules for spruce, oak, yellow pine interior trim; clear or "grade A"
+shingles. Then, delving deep in the information he himself had
+collected, he rechecked his figures, shaving the margin of safety down
+till he was sure his bid would be lower than any other firm's, and yet
+safe--no danger of leaving the firm in the hole. The Gates Lumber Co.
+could count on its usual percentage of profit and Neale Crittenden on
+his biggest commission yet, to add to the sum he was laying aside for
+the new home.
+
+When his bid was finally in the contractor's hands, and routine office
+and road work threatened to leave him with time to think, Neale turned
+hastily back to his private deal with Grandfather. Grandfather's
+intimate knowledge of all the possible timber-tracts in his region was a
+gold mine. There were always wood-lots in the back valleys being sold
+for taxes, or for very little because, all the older generation dying
+off, the western heirs did not care enough about the little old family
+land-holdings to come east and investigate them. And even if they had,
+knowing nothing of the eastern or indeed of any lumber market, they had
+no notion of the potential value of their inheritance. Neale resolved to
+take part of his little savings for the use of the new household, to buy
+up a few such wood-lots, and turn them over at a big profit. He felt
+sure of himself now, sure he could swing such an operation, and taking
+advantage of the Labor Day vacation, he went up to West Adams to spend
+the week-end and talk it over with Grandfather.
+
+Nothing ever changed in Grandfather's home. Grandfather and Grandmother
+did not look so very much older to Neale at twenty-four than they had
+to the eight-year-old, having always looked as old as possible. Jennie,
+the hired girl, had aged more than the old folks, he noted, as she went
+with him up the steep stairs to the little slant-ceilinged room now
+incredibly low and tiny.
+
+He sat down on his little-boy bed, a thousand forgotten memories
+standing thick about him. He saw his mother leading in the sleepy little
+Neale, and now he saw that she was young, young as Martha, so young
+herself ... as young as Martha! He was the strong, purposeful,
+determined young man, sitting on the bed and looking at that long-past
+scene, and yet he was also the sleepy little boy, feeling on his lips
+his young mother's kiss. "Good-night, Neale." "Good-night, Mother."
+
+"Oh, damn it!" he cried impatiently, dismayed to feel that with the
+memory of his mother, he was aware as though of a palpable presence in
+the room there, of women ... of women as different from men, emotionally
+exacting, wanting something different from men, with some fine-spun
+impossible ideal of what could be had out of human nature, troubling,
+hampering the real business of life ... and yet all the time an
+inevitable part of things! For an instant he felt brutally angry with
+them, with their superfine weakening notions, and had for the first time
+the exasperated feeling that they were an element in life
+which you could neither do anything with, nor do without. The
+ewig-weibliche,--good heavens! All it did was to snarl things up! Neale
+got up from the bed and went over to the wash-stand, amazed at himself,
+his fit of fury passed, unable to conceive what had started him off on
+such an explosion. What under the sun possessed him, veering around like
+a crazy weather-cock from one high-strung mood to another, more shifts
+of feeling in a day than he had ever used to know in a year! He would
+put it all out of his mind, all! He simply would not allow himself to
+think of it again, to think of all that, he would not!
+
+He went hastily down the stairs and fell to talking business with
+Grandfather, talking to very good purpose, too. To-day their projects
+went far beyond the little tract of second-growth oak they had first
+thought of. Grandfather, wily old spider, at the center of a wide-flung
+web, knew many tips which he was more than willing to pass on to his
+favorite, Neale,--Neale who had the other half of the combination and
+could sell at top prices what Grandfather could buy at rock-bottom. He
+was in fact delighted with Neale's ideas and the energy with which Neale
+laid his plans. "Why, you're worth two of your father!" he cried
+exultantly, as they sat again, the next morning on the porch and went
+into details. "I never could see why Dan'l didn't get on better! He
+never seemed to care enough about it, and by thunder, you got to care if
+you're going to get anywhere." The old man paused, took breath, and
+brought out, with an attempt to sound casual, "I've thought sometimes
+'twas your mother made him that way. She's a nice girl, your mother is,
+Neale, but I never thought she _pushed_ your father the way she ought
+to."
+
+He glanced at Neale a little apprehensively, but the young man said
+nothing. He was following out a thought, not entirely new, a guess which
+he had subconsciously made before, that there was a long hostility
+between his mother and his grandfather. The idea stirred a great deal in
+his own head, which he felt no desire to examine.
+
+"I tell you what, Neale," said the old man, observing the other's
+silence and emboldened by it. "I tell you what, Neale," the old man took
+his pipe out of his mouth and spoke more loudly, "don't you get to
+thinking women are too darned _important_. That's what your father did.
+He was going good ... but that softened him right up."
+
+Neale still said nothing, a succession of well-remembered scenes from
+his early home-life evoked by his grandfather's words.
+
+The old man cried out now, in a burst of long-contained resentment,
+"Your father ought to have gone enough sight further than he did! Yes,
+he had ought to!" He looked keenly into the hard, strong face of his
+grandson and said proudly, "But _you_ will!"
+
+Neale felt so queer a disquiet at all this, that he got up abruptly and
+clapped on his hat. All kinds of different pieces were fitting together
+before his eyes into some sort of a pattern. He wanted to get away by
+himself and look at it to see what pattern it was.
+
+"I'm going up to the far wood-lot," he said. "I can remember when the
+pines were just coming in there. I want to see how much they grow in
+fifteen or twenty years." But he had no interest in the young pines, and
+he was not at all thinking of them as he strode hurriedly up the stony
+sunken wood-road. He was thinking of Martha. Out of nowhere there had
+come to him the recollection of saying good-by to her at the station. He
+had kissed her good-by, and as clearly as though he had just now stooped
+to her, he could remember that the very instant their lips met he had
+been wondering if he would have time to get down to the office before
+Mr. Gilman came in from Chicago. He wanted Gilman's support for his
+scheme to follow the shifting center of supply with a branch office in
+the Gulf States. Were the figures he wanted filed under L for Louisiana
+or Y for Yellow pine?
+
+He laughed rather grimly to himself, marching rapidly up through the
+second-growth birch on which with one corner of his eye he was
+automatically setting a possible value. If Grandfather only knew, he
+wouldn't think he needed any exhortation to avoid uxoriousness. He was
+not very proud of that remembered moment at the station. It was all very
+well not to be uxorious but ...
+
+When a clear tiny brook crossed the road, he stopped to draw breath,
+for, without knowing it, he had been hurrying as if not to miss an
+appointment up on the mountain. He saw his father stooping to say
+good-by to his mother at the train as the yearly summer vacation began.
+He had seen that good-by every June of his little boyhood, but he had
+never looked at it, till, a man grown, he now stood stock-still on the
+mountain and stared back through the years into his father's face. What
+he saw there was startling and troubling to him. He stood frowning
+sternly down at the brook. He was very, very unhappy and he resented his
+unhappiness. But his unhappiness was nothing to the remorse which now
+shook him. If that was what marriage could mean to a man and a woman,
+what right had he to ask Martha to accept what he had to give? Martha
+was so fine, so true--dear, dear Martha! To his amazement, almost to his
+fright, he saw the brook waver and flicker and knew that the tears were
+in his eyes. For God's sake, what was the matter with him?
+
+He sat down on a fallen log, looking back down towards the valley and
+found that far beneath him lay the sunburned, flat, upper pasture where
+in his junior year he had practised so fiercely to learn how to punt. He
+cast a glance of heart-sick envy back at the sweating, anxious boy who
+could conceive of nothing worse in life than to have a kick blocked. How
+lucky kids were, only they didn't know it, never for a moment to dream
+of such a heavy burden of obscure misery as that which now sickened his
+heart.
+
+What was the trouble? What _was_ the trouble? He had everything in the
+world a man could work for. Why then, did he stand there leaden-hearted,
+as wretched as a man who cannot pay his debts?
+
+The feeling of oppression, of weight was intolerable, like a physical
+constriction. He stretched his great arms and shook himself and drew a
+long breath, trying to throw it off physically. In the back of his mind
+stood his father, looking down at his mother, but now he would not look
+him in the face, for if he did he would see that he was not in love with
+Martha, deep and tender as was his affection for her.
+
+With this sudden involuntary formulation of what he had been fighting
+not to formulate, the trouble and restlessness and disquiet dropped
+away, and left Neale, sitting, his face gray and grim, looking steadily
+at what he ought to have seen long ago, at what he had known for a long
+time.
+
+That was what the trouble was: he _was_ a man who could not pay his
+debt, and he owed it to the person he loved best.
+
+Well, it was better, infinitely better now that he knew what there was
+to face. He could face anything, anything, if he could see it. His
+native energy rose up, that energy which had been so carefully and
+steadily trained to aggressive strength. He wouldn't take anything lying
+down! He would stand up to this!
+
+The young man with the hard strong face sat as silent and motionless as
+though he did not breathe. The bright sun wheeled slowly across the sky.
+The shadows stretched longer.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When he finally rose to his feet, stiff and lame with his long
+immobility, he had constructed a new little world in which to live,
+different from what he had foreseen but tolerable, probably all that
+could be expected by any one who had an honest mind. At least it was
+constructed on things exactly as they were.
+
+These were the foundations and boundaries of his new world: a profound
+doubt as to whether any one outside of books is ever in love as men and
+women are traditionally supposed to be; a certainty that with his deep
+affection for Martha, his respect for her, his liking for all her ways,
+he could make her happy ... happy enough ...; and be happy with her ...
+as happy as any one in this world was likely to be; the probability that
+a normal healthy man married to a young and comely woman would fall in
+love with her sufficiently at least to satisfy any conception she would
+be likely to have of love, sufficiently to satisfy what any honest
+open-eyed man had a right to expect from love; a guess that in the long
+run such a marriage would be more to his taste (possibly also to
+Martha's) than a more absorbing, exciting union. It would certainly be
+all right for Martha if they had children. The point was that he could
+do infinitely more for her, advance and succeed and triumph, unclogged
+by too much personal life. He did not, he decided, looking back over his
+life, seem to be the sort of man who really cared much for personal
+life. He never had. His few tentative steps towards it had always made
+him miserable, a fish out of water. What he really did care for, what he
+had always liked when he got it, was a chance to use his strength and
+wits in competition with other men. Wasn't that after all the real
+business of life? Wasn't that after all what women wanted of men? That
+was at the bottom of the marriages he saw about him, in the homes of the
+older men where he occasionally was asked to dinner. He could give
+Martha all they gave to their apparently quite-satisfied wives ... and
+more, much more! ... because Martha was such a dear, dear girl.
+
+And that was enough! Enough for any one! He did not feel very
+light-hearted, it is true. But life evidently was not a very
+light-hearted business. And he was no grimacing, God's-in-His-Heaven,
+professional optimist. You took what was coming to you. And what was
+coming to him was plenty good enough for anybody!
+
+The thought of Father and Mother knocked at the door, but he turned the
+key in the lock, and started down the mountain to his grandfather, the
+most promising young business man who had ever entered the employ of the
+Gates Lumber Company.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIV
+
+
+Martha came into the room with a little rush as though she had been
+waiting impatiently to see Neale, and yet when she saw him she gave a
+little quavering "oh!" as of fright, and stood stock-still near the
+door.
+
+Neale, conscious of nothing but his own heavy heart, was so startled
+that he had for an instant the fantastic notion that his mountain
+colloquy with himself was perhaps written on his face, and that Martha
+had read it at a glance. But before he could move, she had moved herself
+and come towards him as swiftly as she had first entered the room. She
+spoke swiftly too, as though she were afraid of losing her breath before
+she could say what she had to say; and yet she had already lost her
+breath, and was panting.
+
+"Neale, dear, dear Neale ..." her voice was quavering and very low, "I
+must tell you quickly. Neale, I'm afraid I've done you a great wrong.
+Neale, I love you better than any one I ever saw, but," her voice sank
+so low Neale could scarcely hear her, "I don't want to marry you."
+
+Her lips began to tremble. She hung her head, and Neale could see the
+dark red flooding up to the roots of her hair.
+
+He was for a moment literally incapable of speech. She went on
+falteringly, "Out in Cleveland, at Margaret's wedding you know,
+everybody talking about getting married, and Margaret ... she's like my
+sister ... we're so near each other ... and we talked. She was just
+going to be married, and she thought I was, too. And I thought so.
+Truly, Neale, I'd never dreamed of anything else. And she talked to me
+as one woman about to be married talks to another--not girls' talk."
+
+She began to cry a little now, though she made a great effort to control
+herself, drawing long, long breaths, and halting between her words,
+trying to bring them out quietly, "Neale, I'm afraid you won't
+understand. I don't know how to tell you, I don't know how to tell you!
+You see I never knew my mother and I never liked to talk intimately with
+other girls about ... about ... but Margaret is so fine and----" She
+cried out what she had to say in one burst, in a loud voice of pain,
+"Oh, Neale, when I saw Margaret with her lover I knew, I knew, I'd never
+loved you at all. I knew I'd hate you if we were married."
+
+She turned away and leaned against the wall, sobbing, her face hidden in
+the crook of her arm. "What's the matter with me!" she cried
+desperately, brokenly. "Why don't I? Am I different from other women? I
+can't bear to hurt you so! I want to love you! What can I do with myself
+if I don't?"
+
+The two stood there, the broken pieces of their life lying in a heap
+between them.
+
+Over the heap, Neale took one long step and put his arms around Martha,
+so tenderly, so quietly, that she did not start or shrink away. She
+stopped sobbing, she stood still in his arms, breathlessly still as
+though she were listening intently, as though she were taking in some
+knowledge from a source not articulate.
+
+She turned her face to his, and said abruptly, "Neale, it's just come to
+me.... I hadn't thought of that ... perhaps you don't really love me
+either, not in _that_ way ... perhaps you never did. Perhaps I've just
+found all of it out in time."
+
+Neale was startled, frightened, unutterably desolate but he made no
+pretense of being taken by surprise. "I can't bear to give you up,
+Martha," he said looking down at her. "Perhaps what we have is all we
+could ever have. We may lose this and have nothing. Perhaps there really
+is nothing else. What we have is ... is ... very good to have." His face
+contracted in a pain that really did surprise him by its keenness. He
+was horrified at the idea of losing Martha altogether.
+
+Martha gazed steadily into his face as if trying to understand what he
+said, their old habit of sharing things, of talking things over, strong
+on her. He noted how pale and drawn her face was, with dark rings under
+her eyes. She had been suffering, she too had had broken nights. And as
+he looked he saw from her eyes that she was no longer seeing him, but
+some inner vision.
+
+She shivered and drew away from him. "Yes, there is something else ...
+something we haven't ... and it's what makes it all right," she said.
+"I'd rather have nothing at all ... nothing ... _ever_! than something
+that would make part of me shrink away from you. I couldn't stand that!
+I couldn't stand that!"
+
+She had said the last words wildly, and she was back by the door now, as
+if ready for flight.
+
+Neale sat down heavily in a chair, and hid his face in his hands. "All
+that this means," he said to himself as much as to Martha, "all that
+this means, any of it, is that I have not been man enough to make you
+love me."
+
+At this she came flying back to him, incarnate tenderness, "No, no,
+Neale, I _do_ love you. I know in my heart that even if I should ever
+marry any one else, I'll never feel for anybody the affection, the
+trust ... I couldn't ... it's not that. Loving you as I do only makes it
+more impossible, more utterly impossible. You mustn't think this is just
+the nervous reaction from any sudden shock of knowledge. I knew ... I
+knew well enough what marriage is! But I hadn't felt it."
+
+She moaned aloud in her bewilderment, "How can I tell you? How can I
+make you understand? I don't understand, myself. Why can't I give you
+what Margaret has to give?"
+
+She was bending over him and now snatched his hand and caught it up to
+her breast, "Neale, I'd give anything to want to marry you! Anything!
+I've tried and tried. It's like a mountain between us.... I can't reach
+you through it. Neale, perhaps we're too much alike. Perhaps that is
+what brought us together, but that is what keeps us apart! We can't
+unite! I thought of so many things! We're like two chemicals that can't
+combine. They can't! That's the way they're made!"
+
+Neale found himself resisting her certainty, although it had been his
+own. He sat up, suddenly astounded at all that was being said, and cried
+roughly, "Martha, do you know what this means? You are sending me away.
+What can I do without you?" He caught at her hand. "Martha, why hunt
+for rainbows when we have the pot of gold in our hands?"
+
+She shook her head. "It wouldn't be the pot of gold," she said sadly.
+"It would be a mess of pottage, and you mustn't sell your heritage for
+it, any more than I."
+
+He looked at her hard, and saw that he had no hold on her.
+
+"Oh, it's finished for me!" he cried bitterly, out of all patience. "If
+you send me away for some romantic notion, you need have no idea that I
+will marry any one else. I shall never have anything to do with a woman
+again."
+
+She said steadfastly though her lips were trembling, "I think when it's
+a question of what's the finest in us, that nothing at all is better
+than a halting compromise."
+
+"I don't know what you're talking about," he said angrily and for the
+moment truthfully. "You're ruining our two lives for some hair-spun
+fancy."
+
+She grew paler, and said in a deep voice, "Neale, I have told you that I
+would hate you if you were my husband."
+
+He turned away to the door. "Good-by," he said coldly.
+
+She did not answer.
+
+He went out of the door, and down the stairs. At the bottom he turned
+and came up again. He found her standing where he had left her. He said
+gently, "You're right, Martha."
+
+She held out her arms to him. They kissed, sadly, wistfully, like
+brother and sister parting for a long separation.
+
+Neale went away silently in a confusion so great that from time to time
+he stopped on the sidewalk till the street straightened itself out
+before him, and he could see where to take the next step.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXV
+
+
+Neale had set the wheels of his business life whirring at such speed and
+there were so many of them that they continued to turn clatteringly
+around and around after Martha had gone away, not only from him but from
+America; for she had sailed at once with her father for Berlin. Neale
+watched them whirring for weeks before he perceived that they were
+running down, and for weeks after that before he perceived that he felt
+no impulse to keep them moving. There didn't seem to be much point to
+things, any more. Martha had done what in his heart he wanted done. And
+yet he was far from satisfied. He missed her outrageously, missed having
+her there, didn't know what to do with himself. And yet he had not been
+overjoyed at what he had been on the point of doing with himself. He
+must be hard to suit, he thought, fretting to feel himself still
+confused and uncertain, with no zest in things. Damn it, what _did_ he
+want?
+
+A week after Martha's departure he had a letter from Grandfather,
+written on blue-lined paper, reading, "Dear Neale: Wharton just came in
+to say he wants the Melwin spruce and heard you had bought them. He
+wanted 'em for twelve hundred (couldn't find out what you'd paid for
+them I guess). I said fifteen hundred and stuck to it. He squirmed some.
+But I knew through Ed that he wanted them for a New York order he's got
+for big stuff. And there aren't any others around here that'll come up
+to his specifications. So I made him toe the mark. He left a check for
+$300 (which I enclose) and will pay spot cash for the rest before
+beginning to cut."
+
+Neale sat at his desk, looking hard at the piece of cheap paper which
+brought him the news that in a short time he would have eight hundred
+dollars more in the bank than he had had before. And without turning his
+hand over. All he had done was to know that the Melwin spruce were
+worth a lot more than was thought by the Iowa cousin who had inherited
+that distant wood-lot. Easy money! Somebody had paid him high for that
+piece of knowledge,--who? Wharton, of course, would certainly get it out
+of somebody's else hide, or he would never have gone in for the deal.
+
+He sat dreaming, remembering his timber-cruising trip, remembering the
+choppers and woodmen he had known around Grandfather's. Men like that
+would work all a year around in all weathers, all their days, to get as
+much as he would have for doing nothing.
+
+He drew a long breath and turned to enter the check in his check-book. A
+queer sort of a world. And after all, he stood in much the same relation
+to the Gates family as the lumbermen did to him, working enough sight
+harder for enough sight less money. That seemed to be the way things
+were. But it didn't seem quite square.
+
+A hasty mental calculation showed him that with this money he would have
+over two thousand dollars. Clear. Not so bad! He considered the matter,
+wondering why he felt no more elation, and decided that it was because
+he could not for a moment think of anything he specially wanted to do
+with two thousand dollars. Always before this he had thought he was
+making money to give to Martha. Was it possible that he had been using
+Martha as an excuse? No, no, he explained hastily to himself, the point
+was that Martha had, all women had, some definite use to make of money.
+It bought things they wanted and thought important, suburban houses and
+mahogany twin beds and what not. Martha could easily have spent that sum
+to buy things that pleased her. The only use he could think of for it
+was to use it over again to make more money. And then what? It didn't
+seem much of a life to do that over and over.
+
+He looked around him at the busy outer office, filled with haste and a
+sense of the importance of its processes. There was more to it than
+making money. That was the foolish, reforming-professor's idea of
+"sordid business." You were in it, not because you wanted the money but
+because it was the biggest game in the world, and it was fun to win
+out. All right then. He _would_ win out.
+
+But no matter how much time he put into his efforts to win out, there
+was a lot of time left over. Neale did not succeed in filling that
+leisure to his satisfaction. He went out more than he had ever before,
+accepted invitations to dinner from all the married men in the office
+and lunched with all the unmarried, and had them out for meals with him.
+But still there was time left over. He went to the theater, to loud
+hearty farces that made him laugh, at first; but they very soon seemed
+all cut by the same pattern and he found himself sitting them out as
+grimly and smilelessly as Americans read their comic supplements.
+
+It was not that he was lonely because he was alone. Never in his life
+had he found the slightest alleviation to loneliness in merely having
+some one, any one, with him. The truth was that when he was alone he
+fell to thinking. And he did not know what to make of his thoughts. They
+mostly consisted of an answerless question, so answerless in the nature
+of things, that it was foolish to formulate it--the same old question
+you always ran into when you stopped to think, "what are you doing all
+this _for_, anyhow?"
+
+In football days that question had been silenced by the instant fierce,
+all-sufficient answer, "For the team!" What was the present equivalent
+of the team now? It looked remarkably like Neale Crittenden, all by
+himself--not such a very big inspiring goal when you stopped to think of
+it. The best thing evidently was not to do much stopping to think.
+
+One evening unwarily he allowed something alarming to happen to him,
+something worse than stopping to think. After a solitary dinner at
+Reisenweber's he strolled along 59th Street, and, as it seemed too early
+to go back to his room and he had nothing else to do that evening,
+stepped into a concert at Carnegie Hall. He stepped in to get rid of a
+few hours of his restless uneasiness and he came out so devoured by
+restless uneasiness that he could not think of going to bed, but walked
+up and down the streets for hours trying to forget the shouts of the
+brass, the long sweet cries of the violins. They seemed to call his name
+over and over ... to summon him out, up, to some glory ... little by
+little they died away, leaving him in the same flat, inner silence as
+before, hearing nothing but the banging clatter of the elevated and the
+clang of the surface-car bells. A little before dawn he went back to
+bed, exhausted. What sort of a life was this, anyhow?
+
+He was less away from the city than usual, now, spent more time at his
+desk, which was usually in those days heaped with work that had formerly
+been done by other men. The office was shifting its routine, rearranging
+the work to meet the strain of the Manager's failing health. It was
+whispered that Mr. Gates--the "young Mr. Gates"--though only
+fifty-three, might have to pull out altogether. That would mean
+promotion all around. Neale knew by the character of the work on his
+desk that when promotion was served out, he would get his share.
+
+Flittingly once or twice, it occurred to him that all the managers of
+departments were but mortal, and that in time all their private offices
+would be filled by the men now working at desks in the outer rooms. How
+would he like in the end to move into Mr. Gates' office, he wondered?
+This thought, casual and fantastic though it was, moved him to inquire
+whatever was the matter with Mr. Gates' health anyhow? He was told that
+the older man was "threatened with a complete nervous breakdown due to
+overwork." Neale like all other American business-men had heard that
+phrase all his life. The very wording of it was as familiar to him as
+the name of a standard make of soap or collar. But he found he did not
+after all really know what it meant. What happened to anybody who had a
+complete nervous breakdown? Mr. Gates came and went about as usual
+although not so regularly, looking about the same--spare, dry, hard,
+well dressed, well shaved, attentive, silent. Neale looked at him with
+some curiosity, wondering how a threatened nervous breakdown showed
+itself, and deciding skeptically that there was probably the same amount
+of nervousness about it as about everything--less in it than people made
+out--money for specialists mostly.
+
+One day he was consulting a letter-file near the door to the manager's
+office, which stood ajar. Over the file, Neale could see the familiar
+scene: Mr. Gates' private secretary standing to the right of his
+employer in a respectful attitude, a bunch of letters in his hand. Mr.
+Gates adjusted his eye-glasses, their fine gold chain gleaming yellow
+against the hard gray of his thin cheeks. He took a letter off the pile
+and held it up before him. To Neale's astonishment the paper shook as
+though a high wind were blowing through the room. A look of anxious
+effort came into the older man's face. He leaned his elbows on the table
+and tried to take the letter in both hands, but it fell out of his
+trembling fingers upon the desk and slid to the floor. Mr. Gates
+stooped, secured it with difficulty and lifted his head to recover his
+position. As he did this, with rather a jerk to get his balance, the
+drooping loop of his eye-glass chain caught on the key of the drawer and
+tore his glasses off. They fell on the desk with a little tinkling
+clatter, broken; and instantly Mr. Gates flung the letter from him, put
+both hands over his face and burst into tears. Neale heard the sound of
+his sobbing. His secretary, looking concerned, but not surprised, sprang
+to the heavy door and slammed it shut.
+
+Neale stood frozen with one hand on a letter in the file, frightened for
+the first time in his life, so frightened that it made him sick. When he
+recovered presence of mind enough to move, he tip-toed away to his own
+desk and sat down before it, shaken. So that was a nervous breakdown!
+Good God!
+
+He wasn't so sure he wanted to move up ultimately into that office.
+
+For a long time after this he was haunted by the recollection of that
+scene, and especially by the sound of those strange, shocking sobs.
+Sometimes they woke him up at night, as though it were a sound in the
+room. They recurred to him at the most inopportune moments, in a train,
+at table, as he undressed for the night in a bedroom of a country hotel.
+
+He would have given anything not to have heard them. He tried everything
+to drown them out.
+
+He turned again at this time to books, and took down from the shelves,
+volumes he had not looked at since college, books of speculation,
+abstract thought, history. He found Gregg's marks in one or two and
+wondered how Gregg was liking it being a professor out in California.
+That was far away, and so was Gregg. And so were the books. They looked
+different in his hand; remembered pages had not the same message. He
+could not seem to put his mind on them as he had. It wandered to other
+things. A long time since he had tried to use his mind in that way. He
+had had mighty little time for reading abstract stuff.
+
+Once, starting off on a trip sure to be tiresome, with a long wait in
+the late evening at Hoosick Junction, he chanced to put into his valise
+a volume of Emerson. He read the newspaper on the train up, the news,
+the financial page, and what was going on in the world of sports. But he
+left the paper in the train, and as he settled himself for the dreary
+wait in the dreary, dusty, empty station he opened the Emerson. What
+were some of those places he used to think so fine?... "Society is a
+joint-stock company in which the members agree, for the better securing
+of the bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture
+of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is
+its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and
+customs. Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist....
+
+"The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a
+reverence for our past act or word.... But why should you keep your head
+over your shoulder? Why drag about this corpse of your memory, lest you
+contradict somewhat you have stated in this or that public place?
+Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then? It seems to be a rule
+of wisdom ... to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed
+present, and live ever in a new day. Leave your theory as Joseph his
+coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee!"
+
+He slammed the book shut again. It made him feel as that confounded
+music had, stirred up, restless, unhappy, ashamed. It was a voice from
+another sort of world, a voice that he would rather not hear, because
+there was nothing to be made of what it said. What could you _do_ about
+it? Neale detested stirring up ideas about which there was nothing to be
+done. And he knew a great deal more now than he once had about the many,
+many things that could not be done.
+
+But shutting the book, even slamming it shut, did not silence the voice.
+He sat alone under the one smoky kerosene lamp, staring into the dusty,
+dreary, empty waiting-room and heard it clear and calm and summoning,
+"Leave your theory as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and
+flee!" He looked about him desperately, but there was not a soul in the
+station save himself, nor a house near the tracks. There was not a sound
+to drown out the deep humanity of that summoning, challenging voice.
+
+He made an impatient rebellious gesture. Summoning? That was all very
+well. But to what? To something better than he had, more worth while
+than he was? Well, what was there? Where could it be found? Those vague
+high-sounding phrases were easy enough to write, but what could you _do_
+about it in real life? What was the matter with what he had?
+
+The matter with it was that it was bare and dingy and empty, like the
+room in which he sat. But what was not? Everything was like that, if you
+didn't believe the nonsense written about it, if you looked at it and
+saw it. It wasn't to be supposed that he, Neale Crittenden, would go and
+be a missionary, was it, or any of those pious priggish make-shift
+devices to pretend that you were doing something worth while? Or join
+the Salvation Army and beat a drum? He was an American business-man.
+What in hell did Emerson think you _could_ do?
+
+He got up and walked restlessly around the dreadful little room,
+helpless before its bareness. Nothing to read in the place, not even a
+time-table. Nothing but the Emerson. He went over to where it lay on the
+bench, opened his valise, put the book back in, down among his shirts,
+and snapped the valise shut on it. A whistle sounded down the track. He
+looked at his watch. No, his train was not due for half an hour yet. He
+went to the door and watched a through freight roll past, noting the
+names on the cars as they flashed into the light from the
+station-agent's window,--N. Y. Central, Pere Marquette, Wabash, Erie,
+Boston and Maine,--shoes and groceries and hardware, structural-steel,
+cement--all the thousand things needed every day to keep the wheels of
+daily material life moving, all made, bought and sold, shipped and
+handled by men like him. All necessary honest goods, all necessary
+honest work ... but that couldn't be _all_ of life! The train pounded
+off, the silence of the night closed in on him, and in that silence he
+heard the echo of those appalling sobs, and the slam of the door. Queer
+thing, human life was, wasn't it? Think of poor Mr. Gates paying that
+price, and very likely for something he didn't care so much about when
+he got it. It wasn't the price you paid, that bothered Neale. If it were
+something worth your while, you were willing to pay all you had. But to
+pay so much, just to make money for Neale Crittenden ... he couldn't see
+it that way. He'd have a smoke on it anyhow.
+
+As he filled his pipe it came to him that once before he had felt the
+same aching restlessness, so intense that it was pain. That was the time
+when he had gone stale. He'd been put out of the game, and had sat on
+the side-lines eating his heart out. He was there again, gone stale, out
+of the game. He had the strength, he had the speed, now as then. Why was
+it he stood outside the game? Other men were giving their souls to it.
+Maybe he _was_ a quitter, after all. There had certainly been quitting
+or _something_ the matter in his relations with Martha ... how empty
+life was without Martha.... But he was mighty glad he wasn't going to
+marry her.
+
+He was a fine specimen anyhow!
+
+"Well now, well now," he shook himself together, "let's consider all
+this. What's the best thing to do when you go stale and have a slump?"
+Atkins had showed him what to do that other time. He had actually
+profited by it in the end, profited immensely by being temporarily out
+of the game, so that he could consider and understand the real
+inwardness of what it was all about.
+
+Why, perhaps that was what he needed to do now, pull out for a while,
+get away from the whole thing, look at it from a distance, get a line on
+what it was all about.
+
+He sucked on his pipe, cocking his head sidewise to look at the ceiling,
+his hands deep in his pockets. There was nothing to hinder his taking a
+year off. He had money enough. And not a tie on earth to prevent his
+doing as he pleased. He'd lose his job, of course. But he didn't seem to
+be just madly in love with his job anyhow. And there were other jobs.
+
+"Well, by George, why not?"
+
+Where should he go? Anywhere that wasn't the lumber business. There was
+the whole world, the round globe hurtling through the infinite. What in
+God's name was he doing in Hoosick Junction?
+
+There was England; and France; and Italy; and after that, why, anywhere
+again! Wherever he pleased ... the East, China, and where there were
+Malays and jungles. When his money gave out, if he still wanted to stay
+on he could earn his living as well there as here. "There!" That meant
+anywhere else. Anywhere else must be less dusty and frowsy and empty
+than here.
+
+Why under the sun had he not thought of this before? Their damned old
+labels do stick after all. But he would soak them off!
+
+His heart unfolded from its painful tight compression. The way out? Why
+had he been so long in seeing it? The way out was to put on your hat and
+go.
+
+
+
+
+_BIRTHDAYS IN SEVERAL LANGUAGES_
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVI
+
+
+I
+
+Ashley, Vermont, May, 1904.
+
+Horace Allen's cousin was astonished to the limit of astonishment by the
+news, and cried out accusingly, "Why, I thought the other time it was
+only because Flora wanted to go. I thought you thought it would put you
+on the shelf altogether. I thought you hated it."
+
+Horace considered this, sitting heavily on a bench while cousin Hetty
+pruned a nearby rose-bush, rigorously. Although she did not break in on
+his silence with a, "Well?" or, "Did you hear what I said?" she made him
+quite aware that she was relentlessly waiting for his answer.
+
+"Well, I did," he admitted finally, "and I do yet. And it did put me on
+the shelf. That's all I'm good for now. It's because of my experience in
+Bayonne they want me to take charge of the Paris office."
+
+"You don't have to go if they do," she pointed out; and this as she
+expected, brought out the real reason.
+
+"Those four years in France have spoiled me for living here," he said
+and awaited doggedly her inevitable cry of amazement.
+
+"_You!_" She stood up from her shorn rose-bush, her huge shears in one
+clumsily-gloved hand, a large thorned spray in the other, "Well for
+goodness' sake, _how_?"
+
+He was in no haste to answer this either, meditating silently, the
+spring sun pouring an incongruous flood of golden young light on the
+sagging heaviness of his middle-aged face. Cousin Hetty let him alone
+again, and went on with the ruthless snip! clash! of her great shears.
+
+When he rose again to the surface, it was with a two-fold explanation.
+
+"Everybody that's worth anything over there has learned how to do his
+job. No slap-dash business. And there's plenty of cheap slave-labor.
+You're waited on! You're made comfortable. You've heard people talk of
+the charm of European life. What they mean is cheap labor. There's
+nothing more charming for the employer."
+
+"Well!" commented Cousin Hetty. After a time she remarked, resolutely
+gathering up the villainously prickly shoots she had been cutting off,
+"I should think you'd be sort of ashamed of the slave-labor part of it.
+An American!"
+
+She was not one to hesitate, either to handle thorns herself, or to
+thrust them upon others.
+
+"Oh, I am," admitted Marise's father casually, and then as though it
+gave him a faint amusement to shock her, "I forgot to mention their
+cooking and good wines."
+
+She scorned to take any notice of this, going on, "And I _should_
+think," she stayed her steps for a moment, as she turned away to carry
+the pruned-off trash to the spot where the spring bon-fire with its
+exquisite coils of blue smoke faintly dimmed the exquisite clarity of
+the mountain air, "I should think that if you found good workmanship
+such a fine thing, you might try to do something towards getting more of
+it in your own country, instead of just going off where it grows
+already."
+
+"Oh, heavens! you don't see me trying to 'make the world a better place
+to live in,' do you? What sort of Harold-the-Uplifter do you take me
+for?" he protested, with a yawn.
+
+Cousin Hetty stepped off to the smoldering bon-fire, threw her armful of
+rejected life on the flames, and came back, her wasted elderly face
+looking stern.
+
+"How about Marise? Will it be the best thing for her?"
+
+"Oh, the best thing...." her father disavowed any pretentious claims to
+ideas on that subject.
+
+"Horace, don't pretend you don't know what I mean. Right in the middle
+of her college course!"
+
+"Shucks for her college course!" he said. "How much good does anybody's
+college course amount to? Her music is worth forty times that to her.
+Besides she can keep on going to school in Paris, can't she? What's to
+hinder?"
+
+The reference to music seemed to give her a new idea as to his plans, an
+idea which she challenged with suspicion, "What do you expect she's
+going to do with her music, anyhow? What do you _want_ her to do?"
+
+"What do I expect her to do with her music? Oh, what does anybody do
+with music? Use it to get what she wants. I expect her to succeed on the
+concert platform. And get a lot of applause. And marry one foreign
+monkey after another. And hate every other musically gifted woman, like
+poison. And get so dependent on flattery that she can't live twenty-four
+hours without a big swig of it from no matter whose flask. And die of
+wounded vanity because a younger woman is beginning to be applauded.
+That's what I expect, of course. What else is there to expect?"
+
+At the end of this prophecy which he had brought out slowly and coldly,
+with long pauses between the sentences, he closed his eyes and relapsed
+into silence as though it were all a matter of no consequence.
+
+His cousin made no comment but waited patiently for what he had not
+said. He turned his bulky body sideways on the bench, his shoulder to
+her, like a sulky boy, to indicate that he had no intention of adding
+anything.
+
+But presently her persistent, silent demand for what was really in his
+mind brought out, "Marise's music-teacher in Bayonne was pretty near the
+only human being in the whole damn town that didn't make me tired. She
+was pretty nearly the only human being I ever saw anywhere who had
+enough sense to come in out of the rain. She was an old-maid
+school-teacher, ugly enough to stop a clock. But she was all right. She
+didn't want anything for herself. She was safe. Her music had put her
+where nothing could touch her."
+
+Cousin Hetty was struck by the quality of this statement. She looked at
+him softly.
+
+"That is what you want for Marise," she said, and continued to stand
+before him, looking down at him.
+
+He was as much annoyed as though she had cried out emotionally, "Oh, you
+_do_ love her! You _do_ think of how to be a good father to her!" and he
+cut short her sickly, sentimental display of feeling by affirming
+stolidly, "Well, I won't get it."
+
+"But you don't see any other chance for her."
+
+He felt that she was taking an unfair advantage of a chance lapse on his
+part and, dismayed and disgusted by the pious color of their talk, was
+pointedly silent, conveying the impression that he was trying to command
+his patience till she should consent to stop talking foolishly.
+
+"Marise isn't a bit old," she pointed out, half to herself, half to him.
+"She's just seventeen to-day. And she's not plain, either."
+
+"You bet your life she's not. That's why I know what her music is going
+to do to _her_."
+
+"Well, for goodness' sakes, why take her out of college to go on with
+it?"
+
+He evidently felt that he had more than explained this, for he made no
+answer. She said then, a very plain, human anxiety wrinkling her old
+face, "Do you honestly think, Horace, that you are the right person to
+bring up a pretty, seventeen-year-old girl?"
+
+"As good as anybody else," he said drily, averring the complete
+incompetence of all the world for that task.
+
+"But she is getting on so well at college--she stands so high--and the
+youngest in her class. She is so bright."
+
+"Oh, that hasn't anything to do with her being bright. That comes from
+the schooling she's had in France. She learned to keep at whatever she
+was doing till she got it right.--Lord--the sloshy work in an American
+college--as easy as sliding down hill for her. She may or she may not
+have a good mind. She's learned to work, that's all."
+
+"That's what you're going back for, because of good work," stated Cousin
+Hetty.
+
+"Oh, I'm not expecting to do any of it myself," he enjoyed his usual
+satisfaction in making no pretense to virtue, "but I like being able to
+hire other folks for a nickel or two, to work like that. And I like
+being able to hire other folks to make it their business to keep me
+comfortable. And don't forget the cooking. And the wine. And the beds.
+There's not a decent bed in America."
+
+She made him feel by a lift of the eyebrows that she considered this a
+rather self-conscious, sophomoric continuance of the pose of knowing
+sophistication. At this he looked nettled and cross.
+
+A little later, as she stopped in front of him, with an armful of
+pruned-off shoots, on her way to the bon-fire, she asked, "But will
+Marise have a good time over there? Young folks here do have such good
+times."
+
+In his turn he showed her by a lift of the eyebrows that he considered
+this too unimportant to answer. She stood looking down at her shears,
+cruel, steel-bright and keen, "Oh, well ... I don't suppose I let my
+roses have such a good time," she said to herself.
+
+
+II
+
+After supper they went out on the bench while he smoked his cigar.
+Cousin Hetty did not mind tobacco smoke inside the house, but her
+elderly hired girl did. They were both still under the impression of the
+tepid warmth of the afternoon sunshine, and were surprised to find the
+evening air so cold.
+
+"Feels as though there were still snow on the mountains," he remarked,
+recognizing the peculiar, raw, penetrating chill.
+
+"There is," she told him, drawing her shawl about her.
+
+By his tone he had intimated that he had passed out of the prickly
+irritation of his afternoon mood. By hers, she had told him that she
+would, as usual, meet him half-way, in any mood he chose to feel.
+
+They sat down together on the wooden bench; he began silently to smoke,
+and she to think.
+
+"My visit's over. I must take the noon train to-morrow," he said, "and
+I've half a notion to ask your advice about something."
+
+She refrained from any expression of the astonishment and skepticism she
+felt and said briefly with a friendly accent, "All right."
+
+"About Marise," he said.
+
+"Oh, yes, of course. What is it?" she asked in an altered tone of
+quickened interest.
+
+But for a time he said nothing more. He waited, drawing on his cigar. He
+drew so hard that it began to gleam redly through the dusk. At this, he
+took it from his lips and held it down, his fingers out-curved at his
+side, where he did not see the raging coal at its tip. He had never
+thought consciously about this gesture, but it was an invariable one
+with him. There was something distasteful to him about the naked, raw
+hotness of a newly-lighted cigar-tip. He preferred it later on when all
+you could see was the ghost-form of the burned-out tobacco, the long,
+fine ash held together by nothing at all, ready to be shattered at a
+breath into floating particles of nothingness.
+
+"About Flora, Flora's death," he added presently, knowing although she
+had given no sign, that she was listening intently, "I never told you.
+It wasn't just pneumonia...."
+
+He was silent as if he did not know just how to get on with what he
+wanted to say, and finally said, irritably, "There's nothing to
+it--nothing! But I can't ask you what I want to, unless you know
+something about it."
+
+She divined that he would not have told her if they had not come out
+where it was dark, where he could not see her.
+
+She made herself small, cowering under her shawl, and listened
+forebodingly, as he went on, his intense distaste for every word
+coloring his rough, abrupt statements.
+
+"I was up in Bordeaux on business and one morning didn't I see Flora's
+name in the headlines of the nasty little local paper from Bayonne! An
+accident at Saint Sauveur--that's a kind of Hot Springs where Flora went
+sometimes for sulphur-baths. A young man had fallen into the river, or
+had jumped in. It was in flood, with melting snow. And he was drowned.
+And because Flora happened to know him and be there, the reporter who'd
+written up the accident jumped to the conclusion that he and Flora ...
+to the conclusion they always jump to about everybody."
+
+Cousin Hetty did not stir, allowed herself no inward comment lest she
+color the impersonal attention she was giving, which, she understood
+well enough was, with the darkness, the only condition on which he could
+go on speaking.
+
+"Hell, wasn't it?" he said briefly before continuing. "I didn't know
+anything about French inquests, but I could make a guess they would take
+care to make this one as uncomfortable for Flora as they could. Sounded
+like a good chance for blackmail too. So I telegraphed back to the house
+that I'd be back on the next train. I found out afterwards that Marise
+had wired me, but I never got her telegram. Then before the train
+started, I beat it to the office of a French lawyer in Bordeaux, and
+found out all I wanted to about French inquests. I found out then, that
+there wasn't any real danger, that they couldn't do a thing except talk
+about it. But, Heavens! their talk was apt to be a-plenty. It was up to
+me to get back and look out for Flora. Poor Flora! You know she had no
+more harm in her than a kitten."
+
+Cousin Hetty felt a long, rigorous tremor run through her, partly the
+cold of the mountain evening, partly an inner chill.
+
+"Poor _Flora_!" she said now in a trembling voice. It was the only word
+she spoke, the only comment she made on what he had told her, on what he
+was to tell her.
+
+"Well, when my train pulled into Bayonne the next morning, there was
+Marise to meet me, and great Scott! she almost scared the life out of
+me, crying and hanging on to me. I didn't know what _had_ happened,
+besides what was in the paper, what she had heard! But in a minute, she
+got over that enough to tell me what _she_ thought the matter was ...
+her mother all shaken up from the nervous shock of seeing somebody
+killed, all upset, gone to a convent for a rest-cure. Lots of folks do
+that in France, instead of going to a hospital or sanitarium, as they do
+here. I didn't think from the way she spoke she even knew who it was who
+had been killed. You'd better believe _I_ didn't say anything about who
+it was, either! I wanted to go easy and find out how things were. I kept
+my ears and eyes open: but I didn't get anything that would give me a
+lead from Marise, except that I found that her music-teacher had piled
+right in and stayed by her till I got there. And I was pretty sure she
+wouldn't have told Marise anything, and would have kept anybody's else
+mouth shut. It came out casually, for one thing, that she had
+sequestered that newspaper I saw, before Marise had a chance to look at
+it. Well, it looked as though the first thing was to get Flora home
+where I could stand guard over her, till the thing blew over." He burst
+out savagely, "Good God! How was I to dream that she was so sick!" He
+made some violent gesture which his old kinswoman felt, but could not
+see in the darkness.
+
+"But she was. When we went to see her that afternoon, the doctor was
+there with her, and told me there wasn't a chance in a thousand for her.
+Double pneumonia. We saw her for a moment that afternoon, and the minute
+Marise went to bed that evening, I went back. But I was too late. Hetty,
+you never saw anything like how young she looked ... like a little girl,
+as if she'd died without having lived. The nice old Sister who had taken
+care of her had put flowers around her, white roses. And she was crying.
+She was about the only friend Flora had, the only one of them who didn't
+want something out of her."
+
+Cousin Hetty's face was wet with tears, but she let them fall silently,
+not stirring a hand to wipe them away.
+
+Her cousin stirred a great deal, moving restlessly on the bench, folding
+and refolding his arms impatiently.
+
+"The next three days--I never went through such a crazy
+performance--enough to drive a man out of his mind. The music-teacher I
+told you about took Marise off with her, up to the mountains somewhere
+where her old home was, until the day of the funeral. I don't know how I
+could have managed without that. I _couldn't_ have had Marise around,
+while I was trying to hush up the coroner's men, or whoever they were.
+
+"As soon as I got in touch with the dead boy's family, I found out where
+a lot of the trouble came from. The police had come down from Saint
+Sauveur, just as a matter of routine, to go through the motions of an
+investigation and had gone to where we lived, because they thought Flora
+was there. But she'd gone to the convent, so they saw our old cook and
+asked her a lot of questions. And Jeanne, instead of telling the truth,
+which was that she didn't know a thing about it, saw a chance for some
+tall and fancy lying such as she made a specialty of. She got off a long
+story about how she'd met the boy on his way to the train, and he'd told
+her he was going on business, and Marise had asked him to take a message
+to her mother, and he'd said her mother didn't know him by sight--oh,
+God knows what! I take it she thought she was safe-guarding the family
+honor, by making out that Flora didn't know the young man, but she
+certainly got everything tied up into knots. She'd beat it off to tell
+the dead boy's family what she'd told the police, so their lies would be
+of the same color as hers. Oh, it was the damnedest mix-up! Of course
+they were all set to do their share of lying. They wanted as much as I
+did to keep the police out of it. Jeanne had beat them to it, and so
+they repeated her version rather than start something new. But
+naturally, rattled as they were with the suddenness of it, they didn't
+get it exactly straight, and that started the police off on an idea they
+hadn't had before, that maybe there was something more in it than met
+the eye. They asked some other questions around in Bayonne, and then it
+was all up.
+
+"Of course Jeanne's story couldn't hold water for a minute. They found
+out first that he hadn't any business that could possibly have taken him
+up to the mountains. And the old hag that kept a flower-stand on our
+street said he had sat all the evening before Flora went away, on the
+bench across the street from our house, that she'd sold him some flowers
+at eight when she shut her stall, and when she came back at six the next
+morning he was there again. And our concierge said--oh, hell, you don't
+need to know all the details. Everybody was lying and everybody sure
+that everybody else was, and those fool police inspectors were sure
+they'd unearth something if they only kept on. Inside twenty-four hours,
+I saw there was no sort of chance of getting anything straightened out
+by getting down to the facts, which didn't amount to a whoop anyhow. So
+we did what you always do in France when you want to get anything done.
+We used a pull. Garnier, this boy's father, was a business acquaintance
+of mine, and quite a level-headed man. We got together, away from his
+wife. She was just crazy over her son's death. From one day to the next
+she looked twenty years older. And the way she cursed us all for ever
+coming to Bayonne--not that I cared. She was out of her mind, anyhow.
+All the same, the things she said ... and poor Flora in her coffin...."
+
+He drew a long breath, and cast his dead cigar from him with a vivid
+gesture of disgust.
+
+"The upshot was, that Garnier got busy the right way. He furnished the
+political pull, and I furnished the money. We stopped fooling with the
+police and went straight to the Prefet, and they passed the order down
+quick from one office to another, to have that inquest settled at once,
+with no more noise. When that hit the police who'd been bothering us,
+they curled up and dropped off. I bribed a reporter and the editor of
+the local newspaper, and when the music-teacher brought Marise back to
+the funeral, the whole mess was buried."
+
+In the momentary silence which followed, as he drew breath again, Cousin
+Hetty's self-control gave way. He could feel that she was shaking
+uncontrollably and hear that her teeth were chattering.
+
+He was startled, having forgotten that she was there, forgotten that
+this was anything but one of the sick, silent evocations which blackened
+so many hours for him.
+
+"Great Scott! Hetty, you're freezing to death," he cried, helping her
+roughly to her feet. "Why under the sun didn't you _say_ you were
+getting cold?"
+
+She did not intimate that she was shaken by anything but a physical
+chill. Stiff and bent, clinging to his great arm, unable to stop the
+nervous chattering of her teeth, she hobbled back to the house beside
+him.
+
+The light from the fire on the hearth set them miles apart, as she had
+known it would. His face closed shut. He would never mention all this to
+her again. He was irritated that he had spoken. He blamed her because
+he had spoken. But she cared less than nothing whether she were blamed
+or not. As soon as she was able to control the nervous trembling of her
+hands and lips and head, she asked, "How much does Marise know?"
+
+He said impatiently, "I don't know. I haven't any idea. I thought
+perhaps _you_ might have. Why _else_ do you suppose I told you about
+it?"
+
+"What do you think?" she persisted.
+
+"Well, I don't see how she could. That music-teacher had gone directly
+to be with her, and stayed with her practically every minute I wasn't,
+and I know she'd never tell her anything, nor let anybody else. But you
+never know. You never know. There are a million underground ways--in
+France especially. You find out everything you ever know through the
+back of your head somehow, or by putting two and two together that
+nobody meant you to. Servants--gossip--though, thank God, Jeanne had a
+stroke of paralysis just then, that kept her from saying a word till
+after we had left Bayonne. If Jeanne had been able to talk, I'd have
+been _sure_ that Marise had heard forty times more than there was to
+know. Damn Jeanne! and yet she'd have died to get Marise a new dress or
+something good to eat, any day! I don't see how Marise _could_ have
+heard anything. And of course, if she didn't--least said, soonest
+mended. But if she did, it's a dead sure thing she got it all twisted,
+and I suppose she ought to have it straightened out."
+
+His old cousin broke in with a rush, "Well, I think you'd better tell
+her," and felt instantly that this was not at all the answer he had
+wished for. "You don't want to do it," she said.
+
+"Oh, I never want to do anything," he admitted. "It's always the easiest
+way."
+
+"The easiest way lands you in some pretty hard places," she observed.
+
+He made no comment on this, but his silence did not save him from her
+further going on, "Look where it landed you with Flora."
+
+He was stirred to a moment of heat, "What are you talking about, Hetty?
+By God, I never refused Flora anything she wanted. If you call _that_
+the easiest way!"
+
+She flared up in a momentary impatience at his denseness, but wasted no
+words on an issue no longer vital.
+
+"Well, I think you'd better tell Marise," she repeated stubbornly.
+
+He set this on one side for a moment as irrelevant, and said, "All I
+want to know from you is whether you've ever seen a sign in her to make
+you think she had heard anything. Did you ever notice when she speaks of
+her mother ... or whether she doesn't speak?"
+
+She scorned, as he knew she would, coloring the truth to win a point,
+"No, I never did," she stated honestly.
+
+"Well then, that's all I wanted to know. I know you'd have seen it, if
+it were there, she's been so much with you."
+
+"But I think you ought to tell her," she persisted.
+
+"Why, under the Heavens, _why_?" he asked. "Why put ideas in her head,
+if she's perfectly all right?"
+
+"I think everybody ought to know about everything," she answered
+sweepingly, "and they're not perfectly all right unless they do. At
+least, if she _has_ heard anything, she ought to know that you don't
+blame Flora, that you don't think there was anything but talk. You could
+talk it over with her, get it out into the light."
+
+"It would be poisoning her mind against her mother to mention it."
+
+"I don't believe," Cousin Hetty held to her point steadily, pale, very
+much in earnest, "I don't believe that the truth can poison anybody's
+mind."
+
+"Well, I believe in using ordinary horse-sense about everything," he
+said conclusively, with a peremptory accent.
+
+Cousin Hetty fell back from this brute assertion of his authority.
+
+"You'd made up your mind what to do before you ever spoke to me," she
+told him, not without bitterness.
+
+"That isn't fair, I didn't know enough to make up my mind. You told me
+what I needed to know," he answered.
+
+"I wish I _could_ tell you what you need to know," she flamed out at
+him.
+
+But she evidently found it useless to try any longer, and sank again
+huddled in her low chair. He got up carelessly and shook himself to
+start the blood through his great frame, numbed by immobility. His eye
+was caught by the expression of the old woman's face as she looked up at
+him. He stood still, considering her, "You're going to miss Marise," he
+said.
+
+She turned back hastily towards the fire, to hide the sudden trembling
+of her lips, and presently said in a dry voice, "All I want is for her
+to have what is best for her."
+
+He agreed to this with relief, "Sure! So do I. Poor kid. _She_ never
+asked to be born."
+
+Later, as he started up the stairs, his glass kerosene lamp in his hand,
+he said, "You know, Hetty, as well as I do that it doesn't make any
+difference what we do, or don't do for her. She's got to take what's
+coming to her just like everybody else."
+
+His cousin looked down at the steady, commonplace little flame of her
+own lamp, "I don't suppose I'll ever see her again," she said in a low
+tone of profound sadness. But she added stoically, as she began to climb
+the stairs after him, "Not that that makes any difference to anybody but
+me."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVII
+
+
+Paris, May, 1905.
+
+"Hola ... p-s-st! Allen!" called Marthe Tollet, as Marise passed through
+the glass-covered verandah, on her way to the street door. In her haste
+to stop Marise, she used the abrupt surname hail which the girls thought
+so very chic and truly English, which the older teachers forbade as rude
+and barbarous, a typical manifestation of the crumbling down of
+civilized French ways under the onslaught of modern Anglo-Saxon
+roughness.
+
+"Eh bien, the little Tollet, what is it?" asked Marise in the same
+vernacular, pausing in front of the concierge's door. Marthe left the
+Swedish ladder, where she was twisting her flexible young body in and
+out of the rungs, and coming up to Marise remarked casually, "Oh, I just
+thought maybe you'd like to go to the dormitory and see that little
+compatriot of yours. She's crying like everything, la pauvre, and nobody
+can do a thing with her."
+
+"The pretty little girl with blonde hair?" asked Marise, somewhat vague
+as to the younger girls in the lower classes. "What's the matter with
+her?"
+
+"A perfectly horrible attack of homesickness, they say. The English
+teacher is up there--she's the only one who can talk to her; but you
+know how likely the MacMurray will be to put balm on a sore heart, eh?
+And you could make a wooden man split his sides laughing, once you get
+started. _You_ could cheer her up."
+
+Marise hesitated, looked in at the clock in the concierge's loge, and
+nodded. She started towards the door of the dormitory building, stopped
+and called back, "O la, the little Tollet, what's her name?
+
+"Eugenie," said the other, "Eugenie Mille."
+
+As she climbed the dark, winding, well-waxed stairs, Marise reflected
+that that didn't sound like an American name, and made a guess that, as
+had happened to her before, she would find that the "American girl" was
+from Martinque, or Peru or Sao Paulo.
+
+But it was English, sure enough, that Miss MacMurray was talking, as she
+bent over the sobbing blue-serge heap, on the narrow iron bed. She was
+saying helplessly, "There now, it's verra har-rd, I know, I'm far from
+home, mysel'," patting the heaving shoulders with one hand, and
+anxiously looking at her watch. She was due at a private lesson in ten
+minutes, and a private lesson meant five irreplaceable francs.
+
+She welcomed the tall American girl with relief, "Ah, that's right,
+that's right, you'll know how to get her quieted down," and fled before
+Marise could protest that she did not even know the homesick child.
+
+Rather at a loss, and very unenthusiastically, Marise stood looking down
+on the crumpled, untidy bed, and the mass of disordered golden hair,
+noting the fineness of the tailored blue serge, and the excellently made
+small shoes. They were unmistakably North American in their shapeliness.
+Nothing Peruvian or Brazilian about them!
+
+What could you do for somebody who was homesick? She certainly did not
+know from experience. Nobody had ever done anything for her. She sat
+down on the edge of the bed, laid her arm over the narrow shoulders, and
+said cheerfully, "Hallo there, what's the matter? You'll run out of
+tears, if you aren't careful!"
+
+At the sound of her voice the sobbing stopped abruptly. The girl on the
+bed started, dashed the floating brilliant hair from her face, and
+turned on Marise, blue eyes dimmed with tears. She looked exhausted by
+her passion of sobbing.
+
+"Why, you poor kid!" said Marise compassionately. She hadn't thought it
+was as serious as all _that_!
+
+The other with a rough, scrambling sprawl, got herself to her knees and
+sat up, rubbing the tears away from her eyes with the backs of her
+hands, and drawing long, quivering breaths. Her lips were swollen, her
+cheeks fiery and glazed.
+
+Marise was touched, and putting out her arms drew the other into them.
+"Here, you must let me help you get used to things. _I've_ been
+homesick, too."
+
+The girl tried to speak, was on the point of bursting into tears again,
+struggled wildly to get the better of her excitement and emotion, and
+finally brought out in a strangled voice, "I'm not _homesick_! I _hate_
+my home! I wouldn't go back theah for _any_thing!"
+
+The words in themselves were sufficiently astonishing to Marise, and the
+raging accent with which they were cast out made them even more
+disconcerting. She felt that the little quivering body in her arms was
+clinging desperately to her, and sat silent, holding the unhappy child
+close, because she did not know what else to do with her.
+
+Presently, however, she ventured to ask, "Where is your home?"
+
+"It _was_ in Arkansas," said the other, in a muffled, defiant tone. "It
+isn't anywheah now. It's heah."
+
+Marise not being very intimately acquainted with the shades and phases
+of certain American prejudices, saw nothing peculiar in having one's
+home in Arkansas. Why not?
+
+Apparently some hint of this reached the other, for after a moment of
+silent, expectant tension, she lifted her face from Marise's shoulder
+and looked up searchingly into her face. How pretty she must be, thought
+Marise, when she hadn't been crying. She must look like a pink lily in
+the midst of the dark-skinned, dark-haired, city-sallow little girls of
+her class.
+
+"Have you any of your family here in Paris with you?" she asked now.
+
+"I haven't any family left, only some lawyers and guardians and things,"
+said the other. She spoke as though she were glad of it, Marise thought,
+so that she suppressed the "_oh!_" of sympathy which she was on the
+point of uttering. What a strange little thing!
+
+The strange little thing now looked up at her. "Do you know what I was
+crying for just now?" she said. Marise could not understand why she
+asked this in an accusing tone of blame.
+
+"No!" said Marise, as utterly at a loss as ever in her life. "How could
+I?"
+
+"Because I hate myself so, because I hate my looks and my clothes and
+_every_thing!" the other burst out passionately, "I feel like po' white
+trash. They had plenty of money! Why didn't they send me here befoah?"
+
+"_Before!_" cried Marise. "Why, you're only a child now."
+
+"I'm almost as old as you are," said the other. "I'm seventeen and
+you're eighteen."
+
+She flung it out like a grievance.
+
+"Eh _bien_!" cried Marise in great astonishment. She had not thought the
+other girl over fourteen.
+
+She said now, sitting up straight and looking wistfully at Marise,
+"_Will_ you be friends? You came of your own accord to be nice to me.
+Tell me about things. _Everything!_ I want so like sin to know! I'll do
+anything to learn."
+
+"Know what?" asked Marise, bewildered, looking about her, as if she
+might catch a glimpse of the things the other wanted to know.
+
+"What they all know oveh heah ... everything _you_ know."
+
+Marise drew back with an abrupt gesture, "No, _indeed_!" she cried, her
+face darkening, the words leaping out before she could stop them.
+
+"Oh, I don't mean your secrets. I don't care about that. And I don't
+mean the way you play the piano, although I know some of the girls are
+envious of that. And I'd despise to have to study as hard as you-all in
+the upper classes do. I mean the right way to sit down and hold your
+hands and speak and weah clothes."
+
+Marise began to laugh, "_I_ don't know how to wear clothes. What do you
+want anyhow? You're prettier than any girl in the school, and you are
+wearing a dress that cost more than anybody's else, and finer shoes than
+you could buy in all Paris."
+
+"But they're not right," the girl said petulantly, "or else I don't
+_weah_ them right, or something! I hate them! I have lots of money, but
+I don't know how to buy what I want." She flung herself again on
+Marise, holding her closely, "Help me!" she begged, "help me buy what I
+want."
+
+Marise was touched by the loneliness which underlay the other girl's
+appeal. She knew what it was to be lonely! It was the first time that
+any one had broken through into her loneliness as this quivering,
+passionate, unhappy little thing had done; the first time anybody had
+asked her for help. From the very first word of their talk, the light
+chaffing manner which was her usual shield had been torn into shreds by
+the other girl's driving directness. She looked deep into the other's
+eyes, fixed breathlessly on her, and said seriously, "Yes, Eugenie, I'll
+help you ... all I can."
+
+"There!" said the other, "that's a specimen. My name's not Eugenie. It's
+Eugenia. Isn't that turrible?"
+
+Marise did not follow this at all. "It's just the same thing, only in
+English, isn't it?"
+
+"Yes, but it's horrid and common in English, and it's lovely in French.
+Why can't I _have_ it Eugenie?" She looked up keenly and searchingly
+into Marise's face, and at what she caught there, she contradicted
+herself hastily, before Marise could open her lips.
+
+"No, no, I see. It would be silly to change it--to pretend. I'd better
+make the best of it. There! There's one fool mistake you kept me from
+making, you see!"
+
+Marise felt that the talk was on a plane different from hers, so that
+she did not get its meaning, although the words were clear enough. What
+was all that about Eugenia and Eugenie? She hadn't caught the point of
+that, at all.
+
+Being only eighteen, she found her bewilderment rather comic, and began
+to laugh. "I still don't see that Eugenia isn't just as good as
+Eugenie!" she said, "I honestly don't know what you're talking about,
+Eugenia, but if _you_ do, it's all right."
+
+"Oh, _I_ do," said the other with conviction.
+
+Marise was relieved to see that her small, pretty face, although still
+flushed from her fit of tears no longer looked distraught.
+
+"How strange!" thought Marise. They had never spoken a word to each
+other ten minutes before, and now they were sitting side by side, hand
+in hand, like sisters.
+
+"I'm awfully glad I came in," she said.
+
+"So am I," said Eugenia, "I'd been just crazy to talk to you, but you're
+so many classes higher than me. Oh, how I _hate_ my class--to be put
+back with all those young ones! And study such _turribly_ stupid things!
+And the teacher! Such an old frump. And I'm not having _any_thing of
+what I want. I'm not getting on a bit. What do I care what France did in
+India before the English got there? I didn't come to France to learn
+those sort of things! Marise--please can I call you Marise? Do you
+suppose I'll _ever, ever_ speak French as you do?"
+
+"Why, of course," Marise answered her reasonably, "everybody does, who
+lives here. Why shouldn't you?" The echo of the famished, burning accent
+of the other struck now oddly on her ear. She repeated, "Of course you
+will, if you care to," and went on, "but why should you bother to care
+so much? What difference does it make? They don't bother themselves to
+learn English."
+
+Eugenia flashed a look of quick astonishment at her. Apparently this was
+an entirely new idea to her. After an instant's silent consideration of
+it, she flung it away with the aggrieved cry, "Oh, but you _do_! You
+_do_!" as though, thought Marise, that incapacitated her from having a
+valid opinion about it. But this too, like the Eugenie-Eugenia
+discussion had somehow taken place in another dimension than the one she
+knew. She was not allowed to ponder the question, however, receiving at
+this point another impassioned embrace from Eugenia, who cried, "You
+don't _know_ how glad I am you came! Now it'll be all right. And I've
+been so miserable. Let's talk! Let's talk!"
+
+"I must soon be going to a music-lesson," said Marise, glancing at the
+little jewel-crusted watch, which hung on a black ribbon around the
+other girl's neck.
+
+Eugenia caught at her despairingly. "Oh, don't go away. I haven't
+_begun_ yet! I haven't said a _word_!" Then struck by another
+possibility, "Can't I go with you? We could talk in the cab, and I
+wouldn't say a word at your lesson. Yes, _do_ let me."
+
+"I wasn't going to take a cab," protested Marise, "I don't go round in
+cabs except when I'm dressed up in the evenings. It would be pretty
+expensive, ma foi! to take a cab everywhere I went in the daytime.
+Mostly I walk."
+
+"Oh, I hate to walk, let _me_ take the cab," the other girl begged,
+beginning hastily to arrange her hair. "I've got plenty of money. It's
+the only thing I have got." She paused, the brush in her hand. "Haven't
+you?" she asked, addressing herself to Marise's reflection in the glass.
+
+Marise was passably astonished at the unceremonious question, but
+answered it simply, "I haven't any of my own. I live with my father. And
+he hasn't any either, but he makes a good deal, gets a good salary, I
+mean. He lets me have all I need."
+
+Eugenia's comment on this was to say bitterly, "Think of not knowing
+more than to ask such a question! I told you I don't know anything. But
+I can learn. I can learn in a minute if only I get the chance. I learned
+then ... from the way you looked. I'll never make _that_ fool mistake
+again."
+
+She pinned on a very pretty, costly hat, and Marise saw that she really
+did not look like a child, after all. She ran her arm under Marise's
+now, and gave it an ecstatic squeeze. "Oh, I'm so happy!" she cried, "I
+wish I could buy you a diamond necklace!"
+
+The talk in the cab as they clattered over the big paving-stones of the
+quiet, half-deserted left-bank streets turned on the school, and very
+soon Marise was led to say, "But, see here, I don't believe, Eugenia,
+you've got into the right school at _all_. It's not a bit chic, you
+know, to go to a girl's lycee, and ours is one of the plainest of them
+all. The teachers are terrible grinds, the girls are fearfully
+serious-minded. They don't care a thing about their looks. All they want
+is to pass the competitive exams for the Ecole Normale at Sevres, and
+get in there for four more years of grind, lots and lots worse than at
+the lycee. You'd better believe there's nothing _but_ what France did
+in India before the English got there, et ainsi de suite."
+
+Eugenia made a gesture of despair. "_There!_" she lamented, "that's it!
+Not even to know enough to pick out the right school!"
+
+And then a curious expression of suspicion coming into her eyes, she
+said skeptically, "but _you_ go to that school! If it's good enough for
+you...!"
+
+Here again was something in that baffling other dimension, and this time
+though she understood it as little as ever, Marise did not like it at
+all. She said stiffly, "I'm going because you can get serious
+instruction in some things I need to enter the classes at the Sorbonne
+next year."
+
+Eugenia sprang at her, remorsefully crying, "I won't again. I don't know
+what made me." She kissed her once more, rubbing her cheek against the
+other's shoulder.
+
+Her bewildering alternations of mood, the reckless way in which she
+threw herself on Marise to embrace her; and the way, very startling to a
+girl brought up in France, in which Eugenia kissed her on the mouth like
+a lover, were very exciting to Marise. Not since Jeanne's big double
+kisses had she been so fondled and caressed, and never had she been
+kissed on the lips before. That was something closely associated in her
+mind with secrecy and passion. It made her feel very queer; partly
+stand-offish and startled, partly moved and responsive--altogether
+shaken up, more alive, but apprehensively uncertain of what was coming
+next.
+
+"And what _is_ the Sorbonne?"
+
+"It's the University," Marise explained, "I was half-way through a
+woman's college in America, when we came abroad again. So I wanted to go
+on and study some more here although I have to work so many hours a day
+on my music that I can't ever hope to have a degree."
+
+"College? University?" Eugenia was horrified. "Mercy! What makes you
+want to do that? And music lessons, too. I should think you'd be working
+every minute."
+
+"I do," said Marise.
+
+"Just study, study, study, and practise, practise, practise?" asked the
+other, astonished.
+
+"Mostly," said Marise.
+
+"Why, that's _turrible_!" cried Eugenia, beginning to look alarmed.
+
+"That's the way everybody does over here," said Marise.
+
+"They _do_!" cried Eugenia, aghast and astounded. "Why, I thought
+they...."
+
+Marise corrected herself, "Oh, of course not. What am I talking about? I
+mean the kind of folks I know. There are millions of others, I suppose,
+yes, of course, all the rue de la Paix clientele, who don't work at
+all."
+
+Eugenia was relieved at this, and relapsed for a moment into silence,
+which she finally broke by asking, "Well, wheah _would_ you go to
+school, if you were me?"
+
+Marise had been thinking of this, and was ready, "There's a very grand
+private school, I've heard about out at Auteuil, in what was somebody's
+country estate, when Auteuil was the country, with a chateau and a park.
+It's fearfully expensive and so it must be very chic. The girls never go
+out by themselves, always have a maid, or a teacher with them; the old
+ideas, aristocratic, you know, that ordinary French people don't hold to
+any more. Mrs. Marbury could tell you all about it."
+
+"Who?... Mrs. Mahbury?"
+
+"Oh, she's an American, who's always lived over here, in the American
+colony. Her husband and my father are in the same sort of business. We
+know her. She'd be _sure_ to know what was chic."
+
+"Well, I'll go to that school," announced Eugenia. "I just _knew_
+there'd be a place like that, if I could only find out wheah. I bet you
+I won't have to study French history _theah_."
+
+Marise laughed, "You'll probably have to work like a dog, for the
+teacher who teaches _la tenue_."
+
+"What's that?"
+
+"Oh, all I know about it is what the dancing teacher used to make us do
+in the convent-school I went to in Bayonne; walk into a room, pretend
+to greet somebody, step into a make-believe carriage and out of it, sit
+down with him for a talk; and first he'd pretend to be a girl like you,
+and then he'd pretend to be an older woman, and then he'd pretend to be
+a man (only of course he really was that), and you'd have to have the
+right manner for each one.... All that kind of foolishness, you know."
+
+"No, I don't know!" cried Eugenia angrily.
+
+The cab drew up and stopped. "I suppose we're theah," said Eugenia, "you
+tell him to wait till we come out."
+
+She was cautiously silent during the introduction to Mme. de la Cueva,
+and during the hour of the lesson. But if she gave her tongue little
+employment, she kept her eyes busy, absorbing every detail of the long,
+bare room, with its four long windows opening on a balcony overlooking
+the little, dank, unkempt Jardin de Cluny. After the lesson, Mme. de la
+Cueva stepped into another room to get some music, and Marise, rather
+pale with fatigue, walked wearily out on the balcony for a breath of
+fresh air. Eugenia sprang to follow her, as if she had been wishing to
+do this, and had not known if it were allowable. But before she looked
+down on the medieval building below them she said in a whisper to
+Marise, "You're dog-tired. Why, I wouldn't work that hard for _any_body!
+And for that fat old dowd!"
+
+Marise looked down at her astonished. "I'm not working for _her_!" she
+exclaimed. But this was, evidently, from the look of Eugenia's face a
+fourth dimensional remark for her, for she made no answer, turning
+instead to look at the gray-black old mass of Cluny.
+
+"What is it?" Eugenia asked.
+
+Marise had not yet wholly emerged from a struggle with an exercise which
+she had not been able to execute with the inhuman, neat-fingered
+velocity demanded by Mme. de la Cueva. The hour in that other world to
+which music always transported her had broken the continuity of her
+impressions of her new friend. She stared rather blankly at Eugenia's
+question, and looked from her to the well-known medieval pile below
+them. It did not for the instant occur to her, that the other girl did
+not recognize what the building was. The turn of her phrase suggested an
+inquiry about the architecture, and though she had never thought about
+Cluny before, the look of it stirred recollections of a certain fierce
+history teacher, whose specialty had been the transitions of the reign
+of Louis XII. She looked down on the stone lacework opposite, and said
+doubtfully, "What is it? Domestic Gothic, shouldn't you think? But some
+of it pretty late. Those square dormer-windows are Louis Douze, aren't
+they?"
+
+She looked away from the Cluny and down at Eugenia as she finished, and
+had once more a shock of astonishment. The other's eyes were flaming.
+"Theah, that's it," she said fiercely, showing her white teeth as she
+spoke, but not in a smile. "That's it. That's _just_ it! _Wheah did you
+learn that?_"
+
+She dashed the question in Marise's face as though it had been her fist.
+
+Marise positively drew back from her. Too startled to be anything but
+literal, she answered, "Why, why, I don't know where I did. Oh, yes, in
+my French history class, I suppose. They make you learn everything so
+hard, you know. You yourself were saying what a grind it is."
+
+Eugenia breathed hard and said, "History again, darn it! But I didn't
+dream you'd learn _that_ sort of thing in it." She added defiantly, and
+for Marise quite cryptically, "Well, _I'm_ going to learn it without!"
+
+Mme. de la Cueva came back with the music in her hand. "Voila, mon
+enfant," she said, shaking Marise's hand heartily. She reached for
+Eugenia's hand too, which was hanging at her side, till Eugenia, seeing
+the meaning of the other's gesture, brought it up with an awkward haste,
+a painful red burning in her cheeks.
+
+Some one came in as they went out, another student evidently, for he had
+a roll of music in his hand. He stopped and stood aside with a deep bow
+to let the two girls pass.
+
+"Good-day, Mlle. Allen," he said, looking at her intently.
+
+"Good-day, M. Boudoin," she answered. Neither girl spoke as they went
+down the endless, winding stairs and passed out to the street.
+
+As they turned into the Boulevard, and jogged past the Jardin de Cluny,
+Eugenia asked tensely, "What are those queer-looking broken-down walls?"
+
+Marise answered circumspectly, fearing another out-burst, "I think
+they're Roman ruins ... what's left of the baths the Romans had here."
+
+Eugenia made no answer, but looked at them hard.
+
+Marise went on, "Awfully interesting, isn't it, to see Roman ruins right
+in Paris, across the street from a cafe. But I suppose they'd look like
+small potatoes to anybody who's seen Rome. Mme. Vallery says they look
+comically small, after Rome."
+
+Eugenia put her arm around her neck, and kissed her once more,
+fervently, disturbingly, on the lips, "Would you like to go to Rome?
+I'll _take_ you to Rome. I'll hire a private car for the two of us."
+
+And before Marise could answer, before she could even bring out the
+laugh which rose to her lips, Eugenia said with another of her abrupt
+leaps, "That young man is in love with you. The one who came in
+afterwards. He's awfully good-looking, too." She looked into Marise's
+face with her avid, penetrating gaze, and said, "But you don't like
+him!"
+
+"I never thought about him in my life," cried Marise, exasperated. She
+was beginning to feel desperately tired of the mental gymnastics of such
+talk.
+
+"But there was something you didn't like as I spoke about him. Don't you
+_like_ men? Don't you like men to be in love with you? I do, I love it."
+She made another flying leap, and asked, "Are many French women like
+your music-teacher--so fat--no style?"
+
+"She's not French, Madame de la Cueva."
+
+"What, then?"
+
+"A Levantine."
+
+"A what? What's a Levantine?"
+
+Marise considered, "What _is_ a Levantine, anyhow? A little of
+everything, I should say, and all more or less oriental and southern.
+She's part Spanish, part Jewish from Asia Minor, brought up in Cairo and
+Paris."
+
+Eugenia sheered off on another tack, "And who is Madame Va... Va...
+something?"
+
+"Madame Vallery? She's a ... she's a sort of friend of mine. Yes, she's
+a friend. My old music-teacher, when I was a little girl, got us
+together. She's the wife of a Deputy, you know, like our Congressmen."
+
+"Is she chic, too," asked Eugenia, "like Mrs. Marbury? Is she young? Is
+she pretty?"
+
+Marise laughed, "No, she's not pretty or young. She must be fifty years
+old."
+
+Eugenia was shocked. "And a friend of _youah's_!"
+
+Marise explained, "She has more brains than you and I and forty other
+girls rolled into one. And I've met more interesting people at her house
+than...."
+
+"Will you take me sometime--will you take me?" asked Eugenia.
+
+"Yes, if you like," said Marise.
+
+Eugenia looked around her wildly, as if to find some way of saying her
+thanks. Something in the street caught her eye. They were passing a
+florist's shop. She slammed the door open, curved her flexible little
+body around the frame, and caught at the driver's coat-tails. "Stop a
+minute!" she cried to him and dashed into the shop. When she came out
+she had a huge bunch of mauve-colored orchids in her arms.
+
+"For you, for you," she cried, elated at her idea, thrusting them into
+Marise's hands, and kissing her again. And then, suddenly downcast, "Oh,
+it oughtn't to have been orchids! What? Roses? Lilies? Violets?... Yes,
+violets."
+
+This time Marise protested energetically against this assumption of
+meanings in her face.
+
+"I don't know what makes you _say_ such things," she cried out
+helplessly, half-angrily. "Orchids are lovely--_beautiful_. How could
+anything be better? I never had any before in my life."
+
+But the other was not to be comforted. "Yes, it ought to have been
+violets," she murmured, and then squaring her jaw, "And it _will_ be
+violets, the next time. You just see!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVIII
+
+
+May, 1906.
+
+As Marise started up the front stairway she saw Biron emerging on the
+run from the foot of the servants' stairway, his apron half-off, a net
+marketing-bag in his hand. His broad, red face looked cross and anxious.
+Something must have gone wrong. She turned back, meeting him in front of
+the concierge's door.
+
+"Oh, Mademoiselle, God be praised you're back in time. Desolation and
+ruin! The sole has turned--it has been so hot to-day. I swear on my soul
+as a Christian it was fresh when I got it--unless that blackguard Gagnan
+changed...."
+
+When Biron turned his torrent of objurgation on the tradespeople who
+sold him eatables there was no stopping him. Marise cut in now.
+
+"Were you going out for another? Do you want me to go?"
+
+"Yes, yes--only not for a sole--there wouldn't be one left--and the
+dinner was _planned_ for sole!"
+
+He ground his teeth, white and sound as a wolf's, "I could send Melanie
+if she had the intelligence of an angle-worm--and yet to leave her with
+my sauce till I get back--I was right in the midst of a _sauce piquante_
+for the...."
+
+He turned as if to rush back upstairs, distractedly, and turned again as
+if to rush distractedly out into the street.
+
+Marise put out her hand for the market-bag and spoke with the peremptory
+decision that was always necessary to unloosen Biron from his
+temperamental tangles.
+
+"Go right back to your sauce, Biron. I'll have the fish here in five
+minutes. And have plenty of onion in that sauce. My father thought the
+last not well-balanced, too much vinegar. He likes his sauces suave."
+
+"But not a sole, Mademoiselle, not a sole! Any sole that is left on the
+market at six of the evening is left because nobody would buy it. But
+the dinner was _planned_ for sole!" He stamped his huge, felt-slippered
+feet in exasperation.
+
+"A mackerel," suggested Marise, "they're good at this time of the year."
+
+He flung his arms over his head. "A _mackerel_! A gross, fat, dark
+monster like a mackerel to replace a _sole_!"
+
+"Oh, no, of course not." Marise saw his point. "I didn't think. Nor
+salmon, of course."
+
+He shuddered away from the idea of salmon.
+
+They stood staring at each other, thinking hard, the cook's big,
+parboiled fist clenched on his mouth, his brows knit together, like
+those of the _Penseur_.
+
+"Some merlans?" suggested Marise. "You can cook them _au gratin_ just
+_like_ a sole."
+
+"But will I have time!" he groaned. "Who knows whether the oven is hot
+enough?"
+
+"Well, hurry back and brighten the fire, while I rush out and get the
+fish."
+
+He fled back up the stairs, his slippers flapping. She left her roll of
+music in the concierge's care and darted out into the street, market-bag
+in hand. Twenty minutes later the fish were being disposed with a
+religious care on a bed of chopped parsley, shallots, mushrooms and
+butter. Biron shoved the baking-pan tenderly into the oven, wiped the
+sweat from his face, and stopped storming at his wife.
+
+"You were not to blame, after all, Melanie," he told her magnanimously,
+and with a long breath, "But it was a close call, by God, a close call."
+
+In the salon Marise was pouring an aperitif for her father, brightly
+dishing up the news of the day with the sauce of lively comment, and
+saying nothing about culinary close calls. Her father listened to her,
+sipping his Dubonnet with an air of intense satisfaction. He took plenty
+of time for it, allowing each mouthful to deliver all its complicated
+burden of tang and bitterness and heat before he took another one into
+his mouth.
+
+"Excellent stuff, Dubonnet," he said appreciatively.
+
+"I'm glad you like it," said Marise. She envied her father his
+enjoyments. They were, comparatively speaking, so easy to get.
+
+Looking at her seemed to remind him of something. He reached into a vest
+pocket (with some difficulty, for his vests were more and more tightly
+packed with each year of good living), and took out a little jeweller's
+box.
+
+"It's your birthday to-day," he remarked, taking another careful sip of
+his aperitif.
+
+Marise looked at the present, a little wrist-watch, from a very good
+house.
+
+"Oh, that's awfully good of you, Father," she said, trying it on.
+
+"You can have one if that funny little friend of yours can," he
+advanced.
+
+"Oh, if you start giving me everything Eugenia has...!" protested
+Marise.
+
+"Somebody ought to make _her_ a present of a little ordinary sense," he
+commented, with no great interest in the subject. "I've seen her kind
+before. They tear things loose till they get what they want, and then
+they don't like it."
+
+"Eugenia just loves it, every bit of it," Marise objected.
+
+"Well, let her," he dismissed her from consideration with his usual
+nonchalance, and taking the last of the Dubonnet, he rose to go into his
+room.
+
+In a moment Marise heard an indignant roar, "_Melanie has forgotten my
+hot water again!_" Her father came to the door of his room, vast and
+bulging in his shirt and trousers, outraged by the oversight.
+
+"Oh, yes," said Marise, in annoyance. "You might have known she would.
+Biron has been in another tantrum and taking her head off. It gets her
+so rattled she forgets her own work."
+
+"I don't see what that has to do with _my hot water_," cried the master
+of the house aggrieved.
+
+"It hasn't! It hasn't!" cried Marise hastily, running to tell Melanie of
+her crime.
+
+Not till the hot water was safely delivered, and her father's comments
+on bad service diminished to a distant solitary mutter, did Marise go
+into her own room to dress. She had no hot water, either, but she washed
+in cold, scorning with all her heart the childishness of men, and
+laughing childishly at the picture her father had made, shouting and
+indignant, billowing in his shirt and trousers. He and Biron! One had
+always to be smoothing them down and wrapping them up in the little
+things they wanted. It must be truly lovely to be married to one, as
+poor Melanie was! But, after all, Father did his best to be good to her,
+when everything about the house was all right and he could think of it.
+She hoped the dinner would be all right. It was too bad about that sole.
+Sole was so expensive too. Not that Father ever objected to anything the
+table cost. Oh, _flute_! she had forgotten to see if Biron had exchanged
+that Benedictine for Chartreuse. Father would raise the roof if they
+served him Benedictine again. She put on her dress hurriedly, and
+hooking it up as she went, she stepped hastily down the hall to the
+kitchen. She never had any help from Melanie in dressing, not even
+costumes that hooked up on the shoulders and under the arms, because it
+was important not to disturb the small quantity of gray matter Melanie
+had, at the hour of serving a meal. It was all needed for the matter in
+hand.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Dinner was over, and had been acceptable. Her father had partaken of
+everything with his careful appraising attention, and had found no
+adverse comment to make. Coffee had been served, and the
+Chartreuse--Biron had not forgotten.
+
+Out in the kitchen Biron (first, taught by much experience, loosening
+the sash which bound his mighty paunch), was sitting with his wife at
+table, eating and drinking like a page out of Rabelais. The dinner had
+pleased his exacting and irritable master (Biron immensely respected him
+for being exacting and irritable), and it also had pleased Biron. There
+was plenty of it left and this was a house where the cook was never
+subjected to the indignity of having inquiries made about _les restes_.
+He leaned back in his chair, undid the button at his throat, and smiled
+at his wife, over his glass of excellent Burgundy.
+
+"Life is good, hein, old lady?" he said.
+
+She nodded in agreement, keeping her thoughts to herself in the usual
+stealthy, secretive, feminine fashion.
+
+Over the coffee and Chartreuse, facing another well-satisfied man sat
+another secretive woman, talking in one key, feeling in another, and
+finding the process far from enlivening. Down below the surface of the
+sparkling, chatting Marise, drooped a listless, dispirited Marise for
+whom a birthday was a most depressing occasion.
+
+"You're nineteen, aren't you, Marise?" asked her father over his cigar.
+
+Marise nodded.
+
+"Well, that's another one gone! Congratulations on every one you get
+over with," he commented, sipping the stinging green fire of his liqueur
+with satisfaction.
+
+Marise thought of nothing amusing to say and was silent.
+
+Her father stirred his big body, with the air of some one arousing
+himself to an effort. The effort seemed to be to say, "Is there anything
+you want I can get for you?"
+
+His daughter was at a loss before the comprehensiveness of this blanket
+question. "What kind of a thing?" she inquired.
+
+He professed himself more at a loss than she. "If I had any idea what, I
+wouldn't need to ask you, would I?"
+
+But he managed, all the same, at least to eliminate some of the things
+he didn't mean, "Oh, not dresses or hats," and in a moment, after
+another sip at the liqueur, to give a little more definite idea of what
+he did, "Something going on, social life; what girls of nineteen are
+supposed to want."
+
+"Oh, you needn't bother. I get enough of that," she answered, "between
+Mrs. Marbury and Eugenia and Madame Vallery." She was surprised at her
+father's interest. They seldom talked together, except of what they were
+to eat, had eaten, or were eating, or of the interminable games of chess
+which occupied any leisure moments of his and hers which chanced to
+coincide. He seemed to have something on his mind now. And he always
+hated the effort of bringing out what was in his mind. He stopped
+beating about the bush now and said heavily, "You're no fool, Marise. I
+don't know any of the roundabout ways to say it to you, that a woman
+would have, but you won't mind that. What I mean is, I suppose--I
+imagine that's what's at the bottom of all of it--is this. Are you
+getting a chance to meet the right sort of young man, the kind you'd
+want to marry? For you will be marrying before long, I suppose."
+
+Marise waited a long time before she spoke, so that she would not flame
+out as she felt. That would not be speaking in her father's vernacular,
+and if there was one thing which every instinct of Marise's taught her,
+it was to speak to every one in his own language. Nothing in the world
+would have induced her to expose her own to other people's casual
+comments, her own, in which she spoke to herself, bitterly, caustically,
+skeptically, tragically, as no one had ever heard her speak aloud. When
+she could command herself to select the right phrase out of her father's
+vocabulary, she remarked, pushing her tiny coffee-cup away with a
+gesture of finality, "I don't believe I'm very much of a marrying sort."
+
+Her father's comment on this was to say stolidly, "Oh, every girl thinks
+that." But if he thought he could get a rise out of Marise with this
+provocation, he was mistaken. She now turned away from the little table
+and began with an indifferent air to arrange the coal-fire in the grate.
+They were sitting in the salon.
+
+"Don't you like men?" he asked presently.
+
+She laughed a little, "To dance with."
+
+He looked at her more keenly than he had and asked, "Don't you trust
+men?"
+
+She turned this off by riposting lightly, "How much is it safe to trust
+anybody?"
+
+It was as though a chance stroke had cut through the dyke and let out in
+a rush, waters that had lain sleeping.
+
+"Never trust anybody but yourself," he told her urgently, the words
+heavy with the intensity of his conviction.
+
+A moment later he added, more deliberately, his manner tinged with his
+habitual saturnine humor, "And it's not safe to trust yourself very
+far."
+
+It wasn't at all what he had meant to say to her. But it was such an
+undertaking to say anything. And what was there to say anyhow? He
+decided to let it go at that, drank the last of his liqueur, fell back
+in his armchair and reached for the chess-board.
+
+"I hope you got a good supply of that Chartreuse," he said, beginning to
+set up the men. "It's very much better than what we've been having. Not
+so syrupy. I do loathe syrupy things."
+
+After the game was over, he took up his Paris Herald and Marise, freed
+from the necessity to make talk, went to the piano. She began to play,
+not Chopin as she would have liked, but a dance from the Arlesienne
+Suite. Father detested melancholy music.
+
+After she had finished, she sat still, sunk together on the piano stool,
+staring at the music but not seeing it. She heard her father rustle his
+newspaper as if he had lowered it to look at her. But for once she made
+no attempt to arouse herself. She continued to present to him a silent,
+dejected back.
+
+He must have considered this for some minutes when he finally remarked,
+"I suppose there are people who _like_ birthdays!" Then with a yawn,
+"But for me, they always make me think of all the ones I have still to
+get through with, year after year, one by one."
+
+Marise's shoulders bowed under the weight of his words and his accent.
+She still said nothing.
+
+He took up the newspaper again, but before he began to read he exhorted
+her, "Oh, well, stick it out! Stick it out, Molly, as best you can. It
+doesn't last so very long."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIX
+
+
+Paris, May, 1907.
+
+"Wouldn't you _think_," asked Eugenia, looking about her, "that anybody
+who could get up such a room as this, such a perfect room, would know
+how to get herself up better?"
+
+"You don't suppose for a minute that she doesn't know how to!" Marise
+rejoined. She added after a moment, to tease Eugenia, "Perhaps she
+thinks it ordinary to be chic. Perhaps she thinks it is more
+distinguished to have her very own genre."
+
+Eugenia said with a nettled accent, "Well, wouldn't you think if she
+were going in for a genre of her own, she'd pick out one that was a
+little more ornamental than her flat-chested, old-maid, provincial
+school-teacher variety?"
+
+Marise laughed. It always gave her a little malicious amusement to make
+Eugenia uneasy. To make her still more so, she added, "Yet you know well
+enough, Eugenia, in any room full of people, let Mme. Vallery come in
+with that mild, oh-I'm-nobody, don't-mind-me sort of air of hers, and
+everybody else looks like a dressmaker's mannequin."
+
+Eugenia, alarmed for her standards, annoyed and aroused, disputed the
+point with warmth, "That's only because you know who she is. If you
+didn't, you'd take her for the concierge's country cousin."
+
+Marise shook her head exasperatingly, "No you wouldn't. She has
+_cachet_. You can see it a mile away."
+
+Eugenia suddenly conceded the point with grudging wonder, "How does she
+_do_ it?" she marveled, unreconciled.
+
+"Personality," diagnosed Marise, and then seeing that Eugenia's face
+looked really clouded, she stopped her teasing abruptly, ashamed of the
+unkind impulse which drove her to it, and of the malicious pleasure she
+took in it. What was the inner irritation with everything that kept her
+so aware of other people's weak points and so easily led into playing
+ill-naturedly on them. Now, here and now, let her resolve she would
+never tease Eugenia again.
+
+But she knew she would.
+
+She did, however, resist an easy opening, given her by the next remark
+of Eugenia's, as she looked across the beautiful room, "What _makes_ it
+all so just right? I'm going to start in at that corner, and look at
+every single thing, and find out _what_ makes it right."
+
+Marise restrained the mocking words on the tip of her tongue, and turned
+away to the half-open window, near which she stood. Across the empty
+street in the pale gold of the spring sunshine, the vaporous young green
+of the Luxembourg showed like a mist through the tall iron palings. The
+light blue sky above was veiled with hazy white clouds, stirred by a
+young little spring breeze, which blew languorously on the girl's cheek.
+
+It came over her, all of it, with a soft rush, the invitation to life,
+the lovely, treacherous, ever-renewed invitation to live. And she drew
+back from it, with her ever-renewed determination not to be taken in by
+it. It was always too horribly lovely in May. It made her ache, it made
+her want to cry, it made her horribly unhappy. How detestable to have it
+so lovely, looking so seductive as though this were only the promise of
+something lovelier ... when there wasn't anything to redeem the promise,
+when it was all just a part of the general scheme to fool you.
+
+Behind her Eugenia's voice said enviously, "Where did she get all these
+terribly quaint Louis XVI things?"
+
+How thoroughly Eugenia's English diction teacher had rooted out that
+"turribly" of Eugenia's, thought Marise.
+
+Aloud she answered, "She began collecting years ago, before anybody else
+thought of it."
+
+"I shouldn't think a teacher would have much money to collect."
+
+"Oh, she picked them up for nothing, in corners of whatever province
+she happened to be in, out of barns and chicken-houses and attics."
+
+Eugenia said complainingly, "It seems to me she always has been able to
+pick up something for nothing. Look at her husband."
+
+Marise said over her shoulder, "Oh, she didn't get much, when she got
+him. He never would have been anything except his good looks, if she
+hadn't taken him up. And she didn't get him for nothing--not much! Mlle.
+Hasparren says--every one who knows them says--that she made him. She
+writes his speeches now. I've seen her. And never bothers him by being
+jealous."
+
+"I should hope _not_," commented Eugenia. "She's ages older than he. And
+he's such a ripping good-looker."
+
+Marise found Eugenia's fervent accent rather distasteful. Not that she
+minded her latest fad of finding married men so much more interesting
+subjects than the others. Eugenia's affairs never lasted more than a
+minute anyhow. But she wished Eugenia would pick out somebody with more
+brains than Mme. Vallery's husband, somebody not so well satisfied with
+himself.
+
+"He's an awful imbecile," she said.
+
+"What did Mme. Vallery marry him for, if she's so terribly intelligent?"
+challenged Eugenia. She delighted in using the words she had formerly
+mis-pronounced, and giving them the purest, most colorless intonation.
+There was not a trace now, in her speech, of the sweet, thick,
+unstrained honey of her original southern accent.
+
+"She has brains for two," said Marise shortly, displeased by the
+direction of the talk. As a matter of fact, Mme. Vallery had once
+informed her why she had married her handsome, unintelligent husband.
+She had said warningly one day, when Marise had drawn back from a match
+Mme. Vallery had proposed for her, "Don't carry that too far, dear
+child. You will have to give in to the flesh sooner or later. You might
+as well do it young, before the growth of your intelligence spoils your
+enjoyment of it, as wait till you're driven to it, as I was. It's not
+amusing in the least, to have to take it all mixed with the contempt of
+your brains. You'll find you have to take your share, one way or
+another."
+
+Marise looked out frowningly at a great beech tree bursting into life in
+the garden across the street. It held its huge, flowering crest proudly
+into the spring air. To look at it was like hearing a flourish of
+trumpets, triumphal, exulting.
+
+That was all very well for trees, thought Marise, that stupid, yearly
+emergence into a life that promised so much and brought futility.
+
+Along the gravel-walk, inside the Luxembourg, under the hedge of lilacs,
+under the new splendor of the great beech, a young man and a girl in a
+pale gray dress were strolling. They looked at each other, and smiled.
+
+"That's the way my father and mother probably walked together," thought
+Marise, wincing. "That" was one of the clumsiest, most obvious parts of
+the general conspiracy to fool you. But when you had the key to the
+code, as Marise had, there was little danger that you would be taken in.
+
+"I think I hear them coming," said Eugenia, "I do hope Monsieur is with
+her! Not that he ever condescends to pay the slightest attention to me!"
+She assumed carefully a pose of unconscious ease on her small,
+spindle-legged chair. Marise turned around from the window and looked at
+her with appreciation. Was it only two years ago, that Eugenia had
+scrambled up from the crumpled bed on which she had lain a-sprawl?
+
+"Nobody can say _your_ genre is not decorative, Eugenia," she remarked
+with the sincere intention of pleasing the other girl, "that's a
+perfectly glorious toilette, just right. And oh, how divinely that
+broadcloth is tailored."
+
+Eugenia looked at her resentfully, with a flash of her old suspicion
+that she was not being treated as an equal.
+
+"I haven't any _cachet_, and you know it," she said, "if Mme. Vallery
+can have _cachet_ do you suppose I'm going to be satisfied with just
+chic?"
+
+Marise felt one of her claps of laughter rising within her, but kept it
+back, as the beautifully proportioned paneled door opened to admit their
+hostess. A tall, spare, stooped, gray-haired woman, dressed plainly in
+fine black, with a shrewd, wrinkled, fresh-colored face, well-washed and
+guiltless of the smallest trace of powder. She looked like an elderly
+Jesuit, one who wields a great deal more power than he likes to show.
+
+"Good-day, my children," she greeted the girls in a clear voice, with
+the utmost simplicity and directness of intonation. "Have we kept you
+waiting long? I told Auguste that we were a little late."
+
+Auguste, magnificently tall and magnificently bearded, having now
+followed her in, the four sacramental hand-shakes were accomplished,
+Eugenia's this time the promptest of all.
+
+After the equally sacramental exchange of salutations and questions and
+answers had been achieved, questions as to health and general news,
+which did not in the least denote any interest in these matters, answers
+which were pronounced with perfunctory indifference and received in the
+same way, the necessary civilized preliminaries were considered disposed
+of, and the first moves of the game could be taken. M. Vallery's gambit
+was to say, looking admiringly at Eugenia, "Such a piece of the month of
+May oughtn't to be within four walls. Come over to the balcony a moment,
+and let me show you your sister, the Luxembourg, in flower."
+
+Mme. Vallery's move was to sit in the winged, brocaded, deep-cushioned
+_bergere_, and motion Marise to sit beside her.
+
+"Let's get our business done and off our hands first of all," she said,
+smiling up at the tall girl in an admiration as frank as her husband's
+for Eugenia, and for Marise, vastly more valuable.
+
+The others, in a little chiming burst of chatter and high spirits, moved
+off towards the balcony. Mme. Vallery glanced after them with an
+inscrutable expression and then at Marise with a brisk, business-like
+manner.
+
+The matter at issue just then, the occasion of the girls' call, was a
+fete de charite at the lycee, over which Mme. Vallery's sister was
+Directrice, shoved up to that position, so the lycee teachers said, by
+the political pull of Madame Vallery herself. But even they could not
+deny that the connection was highly advantageous for the lycee. There
+was not another one in Paris, which felt itself more "protege" in high
+places, more sure of its standing with the Ministry of Education. And
+its annual charity fete, from being the usual small-bourgeois bazar with
+home-made aprons and pin-cushions on sale, and perhaps an inexpensive
+conjuror pulling rabbits out of silk hats in the assembly-room to amuse
+the children, had become one of the most elaborate and unique annual
+events of the city. A good part of Tout-Paris lent its highly ornamental
+presence to these affairs, and helpless before Mme. Vallery's energy and
+acumen, always left much more of the contents of its purse than it had
+the slightest intention of leaving in the amusingly decorated stalls
+where pretty, well-trained amateur salesgirls sold the goods furnished
+at cost (under pressure from Mme. Vallery), by the most fashionable
+shops in Paris.
+
+This year Marise had been asked to play, along with two other de la
+Cueva pupils, in the afternoon concert which was the _clou_ of the three
+days' fete. Mme. Vallery had written her to ask her to come to talk over
+the choice of music, and to Eugenia's surprise and extreme pleasure had
+mentioned casually that she would be glad to see her pretty friend, Miss
+Mills, also. Marise had instantly wondered what she wanted to get out of
+Eugenia, and now behind her fresh, open, unlined young face she was
+hiding a determination to find out what, and to keep Eugenia from being
+unduly exploited. She might tease Eugenia herself, but she had an
+elder-sister feeling of protective care towards her. Eugenia was so
+awfully defenseless, in spite of her money, and so naive still in spite
+of the sophisticated lore and manners which she had so energetically
+acquired. She had not learned that thorough-going suspicion of
+everything, which is the only valid protection against life.
+
+But Mme. Vallery said nothing whatever about Eugenia, other than to
+comment in passing on how excessively pretty she was, a real
+late-Regence type, such as one seldom sees nowadays. Marise found
+herself, as usual, quite helpless before the Vatican antechamber suavity
+of the older woman, and reflected, not without some resentment, that she
+probably seemed as naive to Mme. Vallery, as Eugenia did to her.
+
+After some desultory talk about other features of the fete, they got out
+a pile of music, went together to the piano, where Marise tried the
+effects of various combinations, and finally decided on a desirable one.
+
+All this time M. Vallery and Eugenia spent on the balcony, leaning over
+the railing, the sound of their voices and occasional laughter coming in
+pleasantly through the open windows. They came in together, when Mme.
+Vallery summoned them to share the Muscat and hard sweet biscuits which
+it was part of her genre to serve at four o'clock instead of the newly
+introduced tea.
+
+"Business is over," she announced, settling herself in the chair back of
+the little stand, where the tray stood. "Now for some talk." She put her
+hand to the crystal carafe and held it there for a moment. Another of
+the ecclesiastical details of her appearance was the beauty of her
+hands, white and shapely.
+
+M. Vallery seated the girls and then himself, smiling into his
+beautiful, glistening brown beard. Eugenia too was smiling, with a
+dazzled look of pleasure. Mme. Vallery looked down at the wine she was
+pouring. Marise suppressed a qualm of distaste for M. Vallery, and
+started the talk by laughing outright as at a sudden recollection of
+something comic. She explained that she had just had a letter from
+America, from an old cousin of her father, who always kept her au
+courant of the quaint and humorous goings-on of the country-side.
+
+"Her letters are as good as a comic paper," said Marise, sipping her
+wine.
+
+"Translatable?" asked M. Vallery, "most of the comic things that happen
+in the French country-side aren't. But they're very funny for all of
+that." He laughed reminiscently and stroked his beard.
+
+Memories of Jeanne and Isabelle, and what they considered comic stories
+rose blackly to Marise's mind. She turned a gay, laughing face to M.
+Vallery and translated for his benefit Aunt Hetty's latest story about
+what happened when a skunk got into the hen-house, and she and Agnes
+went to the rescue at midnight in their night-gowns and night-caps. It
+was as much to drown out what was going on inside her own mind, as to
+amuse the others that she did her liveliest best by the story, telling
+it with the gusto and brio which made her a favorite with people who
+liked youthful high spirits. It was broad farce, nothing else, and she
+did not draw back from the farcical color it needed to carry it off. It
+was a story, she told herself, that either made people laugh _aux
+eclats_, or it was a failure. Her audience was certainly laughing _aux
+eclats_ when she finished the account of the homeric night-battle,
+laughing and wiping their eyes.
+
+"That reminds me," said M. Vallery, his eyes glistening with mirth, "of
+a story about a love-sick dog that my uncle used to have."
+
+"You're not going to tell that story here," announced his wife, with the
+calm accent of mastery, which once in a while slipped from her in an
+unguarded moment. He went through the form of protesting, claiming that
+it was nothing--nowadays people were not prudish--but his wife settled
+the matter by taking the floor herself, turning to the girls, and saying
+laughingly, "That uncle of my husband's--he was one of the old
+school--out of a Balzac novel of the provinces. There aren't any more
+like him. It was through a to-the-death quarrel with him that Auguste
+and I met each other."
+
+This slid her easily along into talk of early days, a quarter of a
+century before, when she was in one of the first lycees, at the time
+when lay-school teachers were an abomination and a hissing to the decent
+church-going bourgeois.
+
+Dryly, with the inimitable terse picturesqueness of phrase which made
+her famous as a talker with people who demanded a great deal more than
+youthful high spirits, she took them back with her, twenty years, into
+the remote provincial city where she had encountered every narrowness
+possible to bigotry and reaction, and had wound it all around her little
+finger. Through her highly amusing recital of how she had played on the
+prejudices of those provincials, how adroitly she had employed against
+them their very vices, their jealousy and suspicion of each other, their
+grasping avarice, their utter dumb-beast ignorance of what modern
+education meant, through all this played, like a little sulphurous
+flame, her acrid scorn and contempt for them, her vitriolic satisfaction
+in having cheated and beaten them, in having turned them inside out and
+made fools of them, without their ever once suspecting it. Her husband's
+admiration of her powers was boundless.
+
+"That is now one of the most prosperous and successful lycees in eastern
+France," he told the girls, "and every year they have a big dinner with
+my wife as guest of honor, with speeches and things, and somebody lays a
+wreath on her as though she were a statue. Quite a joke, hein?"
+
+"Well, that must be an enjoyable occasion indeed," thought Marise,
+seeing the scene as though she had been there; the simple-minded
+provincials, trying simple-mindedly to honor the founder of their lycee;
+Mme. Vallery sitting at the right hand of their Mayor, with her mild air
+of deprecating the too-great honor done her--and her little sulphurous
+flame of vitriolic contempt playing over the convolutions of her brain.
+"Yes, it is a very pretty world we live in," thought Marise, laughing
+heartily at Mme. Vallery's satirical imitation of one of the clumsy
+speeches made in her honor on the last occasion.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She thought it still a prettier world, when in the cab as she was
+accompanying Eugenia back to Auteuil, Eugenia said, radiating
+satisfaction, "I'm to have my part in the fete-de-charite, too!"
+
+"You _are_!" said Marise, "what are you going to do?"
+
+"I'm going to give the money to pay for the appearance of a Russian
+dancer ... the very newest thing. It will be the _clou_ of the entire
+fete. And my name is going on the program!"
+
+"Eh bien!" cried Marise in the liveliest surprise, "why, I didn't hear a
+word about all this."
+
+"No, it was in talking with M. Vallery that the plan was made. He hadn't
+dreamed of their being able to afford such a thing. It was my own idea.
+He was quite carried away by it, couldn't see how I came to think of
+it."
+
+Marise was silent, meditating profoundly on the prettiness of the world
+in which we are called upon to live. The more she meditated, the hotter
+grew her resentment. It was all very well to be cynical, and it was
+foolish and raw to be surprised at cynicism, but this was a little ...
+really a _little_ excessive! She flushed angrily as she went over in her
+mind the oiled exactitude with which each cog had slipped into the next,
+the casual invitation to Eugenia, M. Vallery's admiration of her beauty,
+the talk on the balcony ... oh, poor Eugenia! what a fool she must have
+seemed, with her naive impression that it was her own idea! And how that
+fatuous barber's model must have laughed with his wife after they had
+left! The shameless team-work with which they had turned the talk to
+something far-away, and kept it there ... and, she flinched, her vanity
+cut to the quick, her own naive blindness to the little game they were
+putting up on her. Well, she would know better next time. She had
+unpeeled one more layer from this pretty, pretty world of ours.
+
+Speaking on impulse, she now said rather abruptly, to Eugenia, "I
+wouldn't have much to do with the Vallerys, if I were you. He's really
+an awful cad."
+
+Eugenia looked at her with a knowing smile, "You're jealous," she said
+laughing, "he didn't take _you_ off to show you the Luxembourg in
+spring!"
+
+Marise was for an instant stricken so speechless by this idea that she
+could only stare. And by the time she could have spoken, she perceived
+that there was nothing to say, no comment on the prettiness of the world
+and the people who live in it, that began to be adequate.
+
+At the great gates of the school-parc, Eugenia and her maid descended.
+Eugenia kissed Marise good-by, the correct kiss on each cheek this time.
+Nothing annoyed Eugenia more than any reference, intended or imaginary,
+to the time when she had gone about kissing her school-mates on the
+mouth.
+
+After the other two had rung the clanging bell and been admitted, Marise
+stood for a moment, hesitating. Then she decided to walk home, although
+home was a long, long way from Auteuil. It would do her good, she
+thought, setting out at the powerful, swinging gait she had for the long
+walks which for her, as for the more energetic of her classmates, had
+been the only form of outdoor sport accessible.
+
+She had decided to walk so that she could cool off, and think over the
+Vallerys' manoeuver, and as she walked she had it out with herself,
+going deep. By the end of the first mile she knew it was foolish and
+futile to resent the afternoon's comedy. That was the sort of thing
+everybody tried to do, only few people were as successful as Mme.
+Vallery. She knew well enough what she would get, if she pelted right in
+on them now, as they sat laughing over their little triumph. They would
+never dream of denying it, any more than she or her father would deny
+being the author of a far-laid plan in chess, which led to an opponent's
+defeat.
+
+It was all a part of the game, and she might as well make up her mind to
+it, and renew her determination to keep out of the game as far as she
+personally was concerned. They were no worse than other people, only
+more intelligent and more interesting. She could tell, to the very turn
+of the phrase, what Mme. Vallery would say to her if she should have the
+crassness to go in and make a scene.
+
+"My dear child, no power on earth can protect naivete! It is a lamb
+whose wool belongs to the best shearer. Let her sharpen her wits, your
+young friend. She'll need to, sooner or later. It ought to have been the
+best of practice for her, a little skirmish like the one we just
+furnished her. She would do well to practise before she gets into a
+serious skirmish with somebody who _really_ wants something out of her.
+What is this fete-de-charite for? To please me? Not at all. To make some
+money for poor people, mothers and anaemic babies. Show me another woman
+in our circle who puts herself out as much as I do for the poor! Your
+pretty friend has more money than is good for her. I'm only securing a
+little of it for the needy."
+
+That was true, too, thought Marise. Mme. Vallery really did a lot of
+good, and very unostentatiously. If people were only far enough beneath
+her in intelligence and social position and money, she would do anything
+for them, very simply, in the nicest sort of way. And if she took a
+rather horrid delight in making fools of people more pretentious, what
+had Marise to reproach her with--she who could not refrain from
+malicious teasing! It was part of the same thing. Everything was part of
+the same thing. And the same thing always turned out to be very much the
+same. Also, Mme. Vallery had really always been very kind to Marise,
+seemed really fond of her, had given her innumerable opportunities which
+otherwise she would never....
+
+"What does she want to get out of _me_?" Marise suddenly asked herself,
+struck by a sudden suspicion and wondering why she had never thought of
+this before.
+
+Pondering this, unpeeling another layer, an acrid odor in her nostrils,
+she struck out into a longer, swifter gait, at her old futile trick of
+trying to hurry away from what was inside her heart.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The tall, slim, lithe girl, walking swiftly through the sweet spring
+twilight looked like the personification of spring-time with her fresh
+young face, her dewy dark eyes, her sensitive mobile young mouth, red as
+a dark red rose. She looked like Youth itself, welcoming in the new
+season. Several people glanced after her, and smiled with sympathy for
+her freshness and bloom and untouched virginal candor.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XL
+
+
+I
+
+Paris, May, 1908.
+
+Eugenia had been complaining that her new teacher in advanced French
+diction was very ill-natured and exacting, and had asked Marise to go
+with her to a lesson to back her up in a protest against his
+unreasonable demands.
+
+The two girls drove up to the Francais in Eugenia's inevitable cab, and
+leaving her inevitable maid to wait in it, passed through the dingy
+little side-door into an ill-lighted corridor and felt their way
+toilsomely up a stairway not lighted at all. A dingy, stone-colored
+corridor with painted and numbered doors on each side, like a needy
+old-man's home or ill-kept reformatory. A knock at one of these, opened
+by a bald, pale, elderly man, with a knobby nose and several chins. A
+tiny, cluttered, stuffy room, with a lumpy sofa, two chairs, an easel
+and a window.
+
+After her presentation to M. Vaudoyer, Marise sat down on one of the
+hard chairs to await developments. The actor was in a long,
+paint-stained blouse, and excused himself by saying that his pupil was a
+little ahead of time, "A real American," he said, smiling at both of
+them. He had been painting, he explained, waving a wrinkled old hand
+towards a canvas on an easel.
+
+"Oh, you are twice an artist," remarked Marise, doing as she had been
+taught to do, automatically turning a pretty speech. As a matter of
+fact, she thought the sketch anything but artistic.
+
+The old man's face clouded. "To be a painter, that was all I ever
+wanted," he said, looking with affection at the very mediocre landscape,
+and adding sadly, "All my life ... all my life."
+
+"But to have been--to be such an artist as you are on the stage--surely
+that ought to be enough," said Marise. This time she spoke sincerely,
+out of a very genuine admiration for his acting.
+
+"One does what one can, what one can," said the old man, resignedly,
+unbuttoning his blouse and dragging it off, revealing snuffy and
+crumpled black garments. He looked, thought Marise, like the parish
+priest of a very poor and neglected parish. And he had been for
+years--why, for a life-time, one of the most solidly esteemed and
+admired actors in the finest theatrical company in the world. "What more
+does any man want?" Marise asked herself, wondering why his face in
+repose was so bitter and melancholy.
+
+Before beginning his lesson, he gave a last look at his painting, "What
+do you think of it? What do you think of it?" he asked suddenly, turning
+on Marise, the question like a loaded revolver at her temple.
+
+Much practice had steadied Marise's nerves against any sort of hold-up
+that could be practised in social relations. She said instantly, "I
+think it shows one of the most charming landscapes I ever saw. Where in
+the world is there such a delightful composition?"
+
+She was dealing with some one infinitely more practised than she, who
+was not in the least taken in by her evasion. Sighing, he turned the
+canvas with its face to the easel, and told her over his shoulder, "It's
+in my own country, where I ought to have stayed and been a dumb-beast,
+and happy. Nowhere you ever heard of, a far corner of the Pyrenees.
+Saint-Sauveur is the name." And as if, in spite of himself, to pronounce
+the name moved him, he broke out, "It's the most beautiful place--a
+little heaven on earth--why should any one leave it to spend his life in
+this boulevard hell of malignity? Such noble lines in its mountains,
+such grand pacifying harmony in the valleys--enough to reconcile a man
+to being alive! Such details as it has too! There is a gorge there where
+the _gave de_ Gavarnie rushes down. Always on the hottest, dustiest,
+most blinding summer day, it is cool there, the air green like Chartres
+stained-glass, and alive with the thunder of the water."
+
+He frowned, shook his head, put his hand to a book on the table, and
+said, dismissing his evocation with a shrug, "Eh bien ... eh bien...!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The lesson began but Marise heard not a word of it, not a word. She sat
+straight on the hard chair, her face a blank, and walked up the street
+with Jeanne, seeing in the blue twilight, the pale face of Jean-Pierre
+Garnier approaching them. The alcove curtains hung close before her, and
+Jeanne's voice was on the other side. And then, the burst of men's
+laughter from across the landing, cut short by Jeanne's closing the
+door; and then the heavy, dragging step in the corridor, the loud, harsh
+breathing. She waited, tense with fright, to see the curtains twitch
+open, and Jeanne's dreadful face appear ... some one was speaking to
+her, urgently, insistently, by name....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Marise, Marise...." It was Eugenia speaking to her, "Help me explain to
+M. Vaudoyer that I haven't the least desire to become an actress, or to
+know every word of Moliere by heart! That I simply want lessons in how
+to pronounce French correctly, the kind of lessons my English-diction
+teacher gives me." She spoke with an impatient accent, and Marise coming
+to herself saw the two facing each other with angry looks.
+
+M. Vaudoyer said indignantly, "It's not worth my while to give
+instruction to a student who will not do the necessary work."
+
+"I will do any _necessary_ work," Eugenia answered hotly, "but what has
+reading a lot of deadly dull old books to do with pronouncing French
+correctly? And if I'm not going to be an actress or a singer, what _is_
+the use of all those idiotic ah! ah! oh! oh! fee! fee! exercises?"
+
+M. Vaudoyer sat down abruptly, and reaching for a large red-and-white
+checked handkerchief, mopped his bald head and perspiring face with it.
+He was evidently containing himself with difficulty and waiting till he
+could be sure of speaking with moderation before he opened his lips.
+
+Eugenia explained to Marise with dignity, glad of the opportunity to
+state her case, "I come to M. Vaudoyer for lessons in diction. I don't
+come to study singing or seventeenth-century history. I hate history and
+all those dull studies. I don't see why everybody should always be
+trying to force me into them. M. Vaudoyer gets very angry because I will
+not practise singing lessons and because I cannot find the time to spend
+hours in the Bibliotheque Nationale reading all about everything that
+happened in Moliere's time. What do I care what happened in Moliere's
+time? What I want, what I am paying for, is a very simple thing.
+Instruction in French diction. I don't see that I am getting it."
+
+Her accent showed that she considered her case unassailably good and
+reasonable.
+
+M. Vaudoyer listened with attention, looking at her very hard, and when
+she had finished he nodded, "You are right, Miss Mills. I am not the
+teacher for you. I am a poor, old, impractical Frenchman, incapable of
+satisfying a practical American girl, who knows what she wants and has
+the money to buy it. You are the race of the future, you Americans, I of
+the past. There is no common ground between us." He spoke mildly.
+Eugenia stared. Marise winced.
+
+"What do you mean, M. Vaudoyer?" asked Eugenia. "Are you sending me
+away?"
+
+He said with a little smile, "You have sent me away, Miss Mills, far
+away. And as to what I mean, if you like, I will try to tell you. But
+you will not understand. I cannot talk the American language. I can only
+speak the French language." He paused, wiping his perspiring forehead
+again with his checked handkerchief. "There are two parts to every art.
+One is the thorough command of your medium; the other is the personality
+you express through your medium. Neither has the slightest value without
+the other. Neither is to be had without paying the price of all you
+have ... _all_, all!
+
+"You must have perfect command of your medium, just in itself, as a
+tool. Listen," he stood up, his heavily jowled face grim and stern, drew
+a long breath, as if he were about to speak, and then as at a sudden
+thought, paused, the expression of his face changing with comical
+suddenness to a broad smile, and began to laugh. The girls stared at him
+in amazement, wondering if he had taken leave of his senses. Apparently
+something very funny had popped into his mind, just as he was about to
+go on with his statement to them. It must have been really _very_ funny
+indeed, for he could not stop his laughter, try as he might. It was too
+much for him. Both hands on his hips, throwing back his head, he pealed
+out an irresistible, "Ha! Ha!" as though he would burst if he did not
+laugh. Seeing their astonished faces, he tried to stop to tell them the
+joke, choked himself down to rich chuckles, opened his mouth to speak,
+and, the joke striking him afresh, went off again in a huge roar of
+mirth that made them both smile and then laugh outright in sympathy.
+
+At this, his face instantly resumed its sad, stern expression, and he
+was looking at them severely as before, breathing quickly, it is true,
+as though he had been running, but without a trace of any feeling.
+
+"There you see," he said drily. "That is an example of what I mean by
+command of a medium. To be master of _my_ tool I must not only be able
+to laugh, when I feel like it, but whenever I need to laugh, whether I
+feel like it or not. And I assure you, young ladies, I do not feel in
+the least like laughing now, having had this glimpse of the future as it
+will be, shaped to the American mold, by the people of the future."
+
+The girls were stricken silent by all this, their lips, frozen in
+astonishment, still curving in the set smile that was all that was left
+of their foolish, induced mirth. Marise was nettled and angry. He had no
+business playing tricks like that on them. She had been made to appear
+foolish, horribly foolish, and she resented it.
+
+"Well, Miss Mills," he went on, addressing Eugenia, "you cannot get such
+a control of your medium, you cannot learn to speak any language
+beautifully, without long, long dull hours of the oh! oh! ah! ah!
+practice that you scorn. You cannot buy such a command of your medium,
+not for millions of your great round dollars. No, not the wealthiest,
+sharpest American who ever lived can possess European culture, by buying
+little pieces of it here and there, and hanging it up on his wall. By
+changing the very fibre of your being, that is the only way to become
+anything that is worth becoming. And you cannot change the fibre of your
+being without dying a thousand deaths and knowing a thousand births."
+
+He puffed out a scornful breath and went on, "And for the other half,
+Miss Mills. You want to learn diction by reading to me. But what you
+read has sense. It is not just consonants and vowels. And to read it
+well, you must understand it. And to understand it, you must know
+something--do you understand me? You must _know_ something. I soon found
+that you could not understand Moliere, because you know no history, no
+literature, nor anything else you should have been learning. You cannot
+read with any over-tones in your voice, unless you understand the
+over-tones of what you are reading. You cannot read Moliere, or anybody
+else, as if you were reading,
+
+"'_Barbara; celarent; darii; ferio; baralipton._'
+
+"Or at least--" His carefully repressed indignation burst for a moment
+from his control; he said in a roar, "At least you cannot in _my_
+loge--not, not even an American, not even a representative of the people
+of the future!"
+
+He had risen to his feet, trembling with his anger, a high-priest
+rebuking a blasphemy. The girls shrank back, startled.
+
+At once he extinguished the flame, went for a moment to the window, and
+when he turned back, said quietly, "You must excuse an old man's bad
+temper, Miss Mills, and you must look for a politer, more practical
+teacher. I can give you the address of one who will suit you. I can, in
+fact," he said smoothly, "give you the addresses of several hundred who
+will suit you perfectly. I will send the addresses of several to you.
+Good-day, Miss Mills. Good-by, Miss...." He was vague as to Marise's
+name, but murmured something with an absent courtesy. He stepped to the
+door, opened it with an urbane inclination of the head.
+
+Eugenia held in her hand the sealed envelope which contained the usual
+fee for a lesson, and now looked down at it, uncertain whether she dared
+offer it. He saw her glance at it, and relieved her of her uncertainty,
+"No, no fee to-day, Miss Mills. I have given you no lesson." As they
+passed before him, he added under his breath, "No lesson, that is, that
+will be of any value to you."
+
+Marise glancing over her shoulder, saw him turn at once to the easel and
+reach for his palette and brushes. He had dropped them from his mind. It
+was the airy, finishing touch to their humiliation. She burned with
+anger and shame.
+
+They groped their way down the darkened stairs in silence, neither
+trusting herself to speak, lest she burst into tears.
+
+At the bottom Marise said neutrally, "I have a music lesson now. Would
+you like to come along?"
+
+Eugenia said in a loud, quavering voice, "I should think not! I have had
+enough of their hatefulness for _one_ day!" She went on, her voice
+shaken by suppressed sobs which did not at all fit what she was saying,
+"And I h-have an appointment w-with the hairdresser anyhow." She fumbled
+with a desperate haste in her little gold-beaded hand-bag, jerked out a
+lacy handkerchief and wiped her eyes angrily. But more tears came, a
+flood of nervous, excited tears, which ran down in big drops. She flung
+her arms around Marise's neck and hiding her face on her shoulder, cried
+out pitifully, "Oh, Marise, don't you ever just want to go back _home_?"
+
+Marise's heart was very full of compassion, very barren of consolation.
+"I haven't any home to go back to, any more than you," she said in a
+whisper.
+
+Eugenia reached up, pulled her head down and kissed her, still sobbing.
+Marise kept her cheek pressed against the other's tear-wet face, aching
+with her helplessness, burning to find some word of comfort, finding
+nothing but loving silence to express her tenderness and pity.
+
+A door opened upstairs, laughing voices sounded on the landing above.
+The two girls drew apart and moved towards the door hand in hand.
+
+
+II
+
+Mme. de la Cueva had been crying and Marise guessed that she was getting
+ready to have a new husband. She seemed to have had bad luck in
+husbands. The one who had just been put to the door was the second
+Marise had known in the four years of her study with the pianist, and
+there had been at least two before that. It was a terrible grief to her
+always to find out that she no longer cared for the one she had; but she
+faced the facts with courage, allowing herself no dissembling, no
+bourgeoise timidity. The old one disappeared, and in a few months a new
+one was there.
+
+"Good-day, my child," said the pianist affectionately, pulling Marise
+down to kiss her on both cheeks. "No lesson to-day nor to-morrow," she
+spoke solemnly, the tears in her eyes.
+
+She began to cry openly.
+
+Marise sat down by her, startled out of her own mood of resentment.
+"Why, dear Madame de la Cueva, why?" she asked, "What has happened?"
+
+"I am going to America," said the older woman. "Georges Noel and I are
+booked for a concert tour of the world. We will be married in
+Australia."
+
+The inevitable first thought of the magnificent egotism of youth was for
+itself, "Why, what shall _I_ do?" cried Marise aggrieved.
+
+Mme. de la Cueva did not resent this. She never resented anything which
+she recognized as natural. And this seemed to her pre-eminently natural
+and proper. She took Marise's hand in hers tenderly, maternally.
+
+"It is for your good, my dear child, the change, though I know how you
+will miss me. You need some one else. A year with the old Visconti will
+be the making of you."
+
+"The old Visconti!" cried Marise, "but he lives in Rome!"
+
+"But it is perfectly possible for other people to live in Rome too! My
+dear child, a year in Rome at your age ... it will be the making of you!
+You will always bless your poor old de la Cueva who secured it for you.
+Youth, talent, beauty, Rome!" she drew the picture with envious
+admiration of its possibilities.
+
+There was no use trying to reason with her, as one would with any one
+else, Marise knew that from experience--no use trying to show the
+material, practical obstacles in the way. What would her father say? How
+could she go alone to Rome to live? Not that Mme. de la Cueva would have
+hesitated at any age to go anywhere alone to live--but she would not
+long have remained alone! How like Mme. de la Cueva to dispose of her so
+calmly! Even as Marise said all this to herself she was aware by a
+sudden warm gush of pleasure and excitement in her heart that she was
+delighted beyond measure with the plan, that she had been longing for
+some change in her life, that she had been growing deathly stale in the
+same old round, the absurdly life-and-death consultations with Biron in
+the kitchen, the same old professors at the Sorbonne with the same old
+glass of sugar-and-water and the same high-keyed nasal delivery of the
+same old lectures, even Mme. de la Cueva with her same old cliches about
+mass and bulk in the bass. She felt no guilt about this last, for if
+there were one person in the world who understood entirely the fatigue
+at the recurrence of the same old things, it was Mme. de la Cueva! The
+pianist looking at her young disciple with discerning and experienced
+eyes, saw something of this and smiled sympathetically.
+
+"You have been working, working, working, and now it is time to run a
+little free, my Marisette," she said, patting her hand, "you are ... how
+old?"
+
+"Twenty-one to-day," said Marise.
+
+"Exactly! As though Fate had timed it. Very likely Fate did." She had a
+great faith in Fate provided one did not hang back before the doors Fate
+set open before one. Personally she had never hesitated to step through
+every one that had been even ajar.
+
+"A year in Rome with the old Visconti, who has the most wonderful sense
+of rhythm of any man alive--the real, the living rhythm--the life, the
+personality of music! Make yourself a docile little pair of ears and
+nothing else when he talks to you of rhythm! And pay _no_ attention,
+none, do you hear, to his fingering! It is _infecte_, _ignoble_! Then
+after a year, I shall be here again to see what else you need before I
+launch you--good old Maman de la Cueva will be thinking of you all the
+time...."
+
+"But I am not in the least sure I can manage a year in Rome," protested
+Marise, breaking in with a hurried protest against this
+taking-for-granted of everything, "I never dreamed of going to Rome! My
+father...."
+
+"Oh, you can manage it," Madame de la Cueva assured her carelessly, "one
+can always manage whatever one really wants to do. Especially if it
+depends on a man."
+
+She crossed the room now to pull at a bell-cord and to order tea of the
+stout, elderly maid who came. Such a cosmopolitan as Madame de la Cueva
+would of course have tea.
+
+"We shall have tea together, my dear, to celebrate your birthday and my
+new plans, and to have a last talk together, the last talk before you
+grow up."
+
+Her tears were forgotten. They had been shed, and that was the end of
+them. It was thus that one should live, she believed, crying heartily
+when one felt like it, and having it over with. She detested what she
+called the "brain-sickening Anglo-Saxon mania of bottling up emotion
+till it grows so intense you get no enjoyment out of it," and she was
+much given to cautioning against this mania those few of her pupils whom
+she took seriously and for whom she labored her valiant best, pouring
+out for them all her wisdom, musical and otherwise.
+
+She came back now, and sat before the piano, her amplitude overflowing
+the stool as a mighty inflooding wave overflows a rock.
+
+"While Giuseppina is making our tea, I'll play to you," she announced.
+She put her beautiful hands on the keys like a millionaire plunging his
+hands into a coffer of jewels and offering a choice between pearls and
+rubies, "What will you have? What do you feel like?"
+
+Marise felt more like an earthquake in full activity than anything else,
+and chose accordingly, "If I'm going to Rome for a year, I feel like
+fireworks," she said with a rather breathless laugh, "something
+Hungarian ... Liszt, perhaps."
+
+Madame de la Cueva settled herself and was off, Marise's heart galloping
+beside her in the wild rush over the plain. The little lean, wiry,
+ewe-necked horse under her tore along, sure-footed, as carried away by
+the stampede as his rider. There was a lance in her hand, a lance with a
+little blood-red, ragged flag, fluttering loudly against the wind of
+their forward rush like a bird struggling to escape and fly. Marise
+heard its throbbing struggle above the rhythmic thunder of the hoofs and
+felt her heart fluttering like a caught bird in sympathy. And now, with
+a long, rending slide from bass to treble, it tore itself loose, the
+wind caught it and whirled it up high over their heads as they plunged
+along. There it rode among the clouds, like a scarlet storm-bird,
+sinking and falling and advancing to a longer, nobler, more ample rhythm
+than that of their many-hoofed clattering. Marise's heart soared up with
+it, soared out of the noisy clattering, up to the clouds, to the noble,
+long curves of the wind's soundless advance ... soundless ... the piano
+was silent. Madame de la Cueva had played the last half-heard, velvet
+note that was prolonged, prolonged by the sweep of that noble line. She
+and Marise floated with it for a moment, and then as it swept on and
+left them, they slowly eddied down to the ground like dry leaves.
+
+Giuseppina came in with the tea. Madame de la Cueva turned round on the
+piano-stool, a fat, elderly woman with three chins.
+
+"Not so bad for the old lady, hein?" she said, well-pleased with herself
+and with Marise's dazzled look.
+
+Marise attempted no thanks, no comment. Silently, like a person
+hypnotized she took the proffered cup, nodding her desire for two lumps
+and lemon; and silently, like a person hypnotized she listened to Madame
+de la Cueva's monologue. The music like a rich wine had unloosed the
+musician's tongue. In a mood like this she "turned the faucet and it
+ran."
+
+"My little one," she said fondly to Marise, "my little one, so here you
+are on the beach ready to take the plunge--twenty-one to-day! And your
+poor old de la Cueva will not be here to advise you. Oh well, there's
+only one mistake that is worse than giving advice, and that is taking
+it. Never take anybody's advice, my darling, nobody's at all."
+
+She drank the half of her cup of tea, not by any means noiselessly,
+wiped her mustache with the tiny, beautifully fine, embroidered
+tea-napkin, and hanging lovingly over the plate of patisseries, chose
+the fluffiest with a sigh of satisfaction.
+
+"The only thing not to do, the only mistake possible to make, is to
+stand shivering on the beach, not to plunge in and breast the waves.
+Breast the waves!" she showed by a wide gesture of her powerful arm what
+she meant.
+
+"And you can't swim with anything or anybody hanging around your neck.
+The moment they begin to weigh on you ... p-f-f-t! off with them!
+Nothing you can do will help people who can't swim themselves. They'll
+only drag you down with them.
+
+"My dear child, remember this, that if there is an element in life
+hateful to the free human soul it is what is called permanence. The only
+permanent thing any human being should recognize is his tomb. From
+everything else he must climb out and go on, go on.
+
+"Above all, beware of permanence in love. It is a paradox ever to speak
+of love and permanence in the same breath. Life and death! They cannot
+exist together. Women as a rule, all women who are not artists, make
+their mistakes in that way. You are a woman now, and an artist, it is
+the duty of an older woman and an artist to warn you against it. The
+only way not to be a life-long victim of men is to take love as they
+it ... for the pleasure. Men wish nothing from love but their pleasure.
+It is a vain and foolish striving to try and give them more, or to try
+and get more from them."
+
+She took another eclair and said on a softer note, "I don't deny that
+women are more naturally given to the folly of seeking permanence in
+love than men. I myself have a weakness in that direction." Marise
+looked down into her cup to hide an involuntary smile at this. "Each
+time I love, the illusion is that it is now for eternity. Each time the
+wrench costs me tears.... You saw my tears, my dear!
+
+"No, the only thing to do is to use it, as men do, to feed one's art.
+You heard how superbly I played that Liszt! That is Georges, that is the
+new flame leaping up from a lamp that was burning out!"
+
+She poured another cup, and seasoned it with care. Marise ventured to
+say mildly, "I'm afraid I'm rather cold. I don't ... I haven't ever
+cared much for men."
+
+Madame de la Cueva shook her head, "Every unawakened girl thinks that.
+And once in a while there is a monster born, sometimes a man, more often
+a woman, who is born really cold--like a born half-wit or a two-headed
+cat. But any one of experience can feel them in the room, as you feel a
+snake. _You_ are not cold, my darling. No one who can play The Tragica
+as you do, is cold. You are only a child. You Anglo-Saxons take so long
+to ripen. But all the better for your technique--that quaint
+prolongation of infancy. But _now_," she put down her cup and looked at
+Marise deeply and masterfully, "now your infancy has lasted long enough.
+In with you! Dive from the nearest rock! Head over heels! I shall hear
+the splash from across the world and rejoice."
+
+Marise laughed a little nervously, partly because she was amused and
+partly because she was excited. That great mass of personality,
+radiating magnetism, would excite a statue on a tomb, she thought to
+herself, even though you didn't at all share her tastes, or like the
+things she did.
+
+"And when I say, 'in with you,' I don't mean any of the sentimental
+slip-noose business of becoming a house-mother with children--oh,
+whatever else, my dear, no children. The only artists who can afford to
+have children are men, because men never really love their children and
+can abandon them at any time they need to. No woman can do that. Even
+_I_ could never have done that!
+
+"You see, carissima mea, in love a man always keeps most of himself for
+himself, as in everything else. You must do the same if you are not to
+be cheated in every bargain that life offers you. It is a hard lesson to
+learn. It will cost you many tears. But tears are valuable. You cannot
+live and be an artist, without tears. Shed them freely and you will see
+how you will grow."
+
+She looked at her watch, "I expect Georges at five," she explained, and
+swept on to her peroration, "Remember, think of all I tell you when your
+wise old friend who knows life is far away. Remember! None of your
+Anglo-Saxon nonsense about trying to get along without sex-life. Take
+it, take all you need of it, but keep it separate from your real life as
+a man does, and it will never poison or embitter you." She laughed a
+little, triumphantly, "You will _do_ all the embittering instead of
+enduring it. You have beauty. You can buy anything you want with it, if
+you learn how to use it. You have what will advance you more than any
+talent for music! You have a nice talent, but you will go ten times as
+far as a woman with a big nose and poor hair. Make your brain a little
+mint, my darling, coin your good looks into legal tender, and buy
+success."
+
+She kissed the girl and dismissed her, with another look at her watch
+and then into the mirror.
+
+Marise stumbled down the stairs, a little dizzied by the sudden removal
+of that pressing, urgent, magnetic personality. To step out suddenly
+from under it, was like stepping into a vacuum. Her ears rang.
+
+At the street-door she paused, waiting for the mist to clear from before
+her eyes. She peered out into the quiet street, as if she were looking
+into life itself, the life that Madame de la Cueva had so magisterially
+set before her. And she loathed in anticipation everything that was
+waiting for her there.
+
+There lay the world, grown-up life, Rome, her career, before her, and
+apparently there was nothing in it which she would not detest. Love ...
+the love that Madame de la Cueva had shown her how to get ... she shrank
+away from it with a proud, cold scorn, her nostrils quivering. Music ...
+there was no music in that program, only an exploitation of music to buy
+personal success for her. And she loved music ... fiercely she clung to
+that, as the one thing that would not betray her, the one thing she
+dared love with all her heart.
+
+She stood on the threshold of the street-door, dreading to take even one
+step forward into it all, till the concierge looked at her hard, with a
+disagreeable smile, suspecting a rendezvous with a lover. Marise saw the
+look, knew what it meant, felt it push her forward, knew in anticipation
+how that sort of look and what lay back of it would be always pushing
+her forward into what she hated.
+
+With a long breath she stepped into the street, into the road that
+stretched before her. She held her head high, with an angry pride. The
+concierge-soul of the world must never know what was inside her life.
+The thing to do, the only thing she saw that was tolerable to do, was to
+take care that she was not being fooled. Well, she thought with a grave,
+still bitterness, she certainly ought to know something about that.
+
+
+
+
+_THE END OF ALL ROADS_
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLI
+
+
+1909
+
+Neale sat idly in front of the black-and-white facade of the Orvieto
+Cathedral, trying idly to make up his mind on a matter of no importance
+whatever and not getting on very fast. In his pocket was his ticket back
+to New York and his ship sailed in a week. But, of course, it did not
+sail from Orvieto. Should he go south to Naples where most of the
+passengers took ship? If he did, he could stop over four or five days in
+Rome. It might be interesting to revisit Rome. Or should he go north to
+Genoa, where the ship was due to stop the day after leaving Naples? He
+had not seen Genoa at all and he might be missing something worth while.
+It ought to stir any American's imagination to hang about the docks
+where a certain visionary, middle-aged sailor-man had gone up and down
+trying to raise the funds for a mad attempt to prove the world
+absolutely different from what everybody else had thought.
+
+He sat there looking up at the Cathedral, deciding now for Genoa and now
+for Rome, and in between times forgetting all about the matter, so
+evenly balanced were the advantages, so unimportant was the whole
+business. When he finally stood up to go back to his inn, he remembered
+that he had still not settled which train to take.
+
+He took a coin out of his pocket. He'd toss up. Heads for Naples, tails
+for Genoa.
+
+The coin flashed up in the sun, and fell on the stone steps. In the
+intense, somnolent silence of the little provincial square its tinkle
+sounded loud and clear. All the loungers turned their heads quickly at
+the sound. Neale stooped over it.
+
+Heads, Naples. All right. He'd inquire when he got to Rome if they
+didn't perhaps run a boat-train down, just before sailing time.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As he was unstrapping his suit-case that night in his room in the Roman
+pension, it did not greatly surprise him to have Livingstone knock at
+the door and step in. Livingstone had been at that pension before,
+during Neale's first leisurely sauntering visit to Rome; Livingstone had
+turned up at the pension in Florence before Neale left; he had run
+across Livingstone in a Paris cafe sitting alone at a table, looking as
+much like an attache of the Embassy as he could manage. Livingstone was
+no tourist but one of the professional inhabitants of Europe; an
+American, that much he admitted, though neither hints nor direct British
+questioning had ever extracted from him his birthplace in the States. He
+was the sort of man who had learned how to cross his long thin legs
+elegantly so that the toe of one slim foot pointed downward. As at the
+same time he was wont to fold his arms over his hollowed chest, stoop
+his shoulders and droop his neck, and as he wore gray gaiters and
+carried a walking stick he had good reason to flatter himself that he
+had altogether the distinguished, pinched, sickly, aristocratic look of
+the traditional promising young-old diplomat. Neale was not surprised to
+see him in Rome. He would not have been surprised to see him
+anywhere--except perhaps at work. It was Neale's guess that three or
+four years from now he would have screwed up his courage to wearing a
+monocle.
+
+"Hello, Crittenden," he said, "it _is_ you, is it? When Michele told me
+you had turned up again, I was sure he must be mistaken. I understood
+you were on the high seas, on your way back to the land of the free and
+the home of bad cooking."
+
+Without being invited, he sank down in a chair to watch Neale unpack and
+wash, asking, "You were going back to New York, weren't you?"
+
+"Yes, I still am. I'm only in Rome for five days. But I won't be long in
+the States. I'll be on my way to China and the East."
+
+Livingstone was mildly interested. "You don't say so! Well, you might
+really get there by starting off to New York. But I admit I don't see
+the connection. Why don't you take a P. and O. for India?"
+
+"A little business to attend to first. A small inheritance to cash in
+on."
+
+"Inheritance!" cried Livingstone, sitting up straight. "The very word
+makes my mouth water. Why doesn't that ever happen to me?" The
+expression on his face was like that of the loungers in front of the
+Cathedral when they heard the coin drop.
+
+Through the lather of soap-suds on his face, Neale laughed, "A very
+two-for-a-cent inheritance. An old great-uncle I hardly knew--never saw
+him but once or twice, years ago when I was a kid, left me his home and
+his little old-fashioned saw-mill and wood-working plant, back up at the
+end of nowhere in Vermont."
+
+"_No money!_" sympathized Livingstone. "But then of course you can sell
+all that for _some_thing. But no real money at all?"
+
+"There's what he had in the savings bank--about four thousand dollars,
+the executor writes. Just enough to do nothing at all with."
+
+Livingstone made a mental calculation. "I wouldn't wonder if you might
+get fifty dollars a month out of the whole thing. And that's enough. Ma
+foi! That's enough if you cut corners a little. _I_ only have
+eighty-five. And then you can always give an occasional English lesson
+to piece out. You won't need ever to do a lick of work or ever live in
+the States. Mes felicitations! That's the life! You'll be knowing Europe
+as well as I do, next. How soon will you be back?"
+
+"I'm not coming back," said Neale, buttoning on a clean collar. "When
+I've cashed in and got what I can out of my uncle's business I'm going
+overland to San Francisco, and from there to the East."
+
+Livingstone considered this, "Well, they do say that Chinese cooking is
+super-excellent once you get used to it."
+
+"I'm not going for the cooking."
+
+"No? What _are_ you going for?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know," said Neale rather sharply. "Because I feel like it.
+Why shouldn't I?"
+
+Livingstone perceived that he had run on a hidden reef and backed off.
+"Don't you want to come on into the salon and let me present you to the
+crowd?" he asked standing up and moving towards the door. "Since you
+were here some awfully nice people have come over from the Pension
+Alfierenti. Poor old Alfierenti died suddenly and his place is shut up
+for the present."
+
+"No, thanks," said Neale. "I'm going up on the roof for a smoke before I
+go to bed."
+
+"Oh, yes," Livingstone remembered, "you always did prefer the terrazza
+and your solitary pipe to the society of the ladies. Well, there is a
+nice view from up there; but between a view and a pretty girl who could
+hesitate?"
+
+"Who, indeed?" said Neale dryly, going off up the stairs.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The plaster floor and low walls of the terrazza gleamed white and empty.
+As Neale had hoped there was not a soul there. Below him spread the
+roofs and domes and streets of Rome, richly-colored even in the white
+light of the moon, hanging like a great lamp over the city.
+
+He took the corner that had been his favorite before, in the black
+shadow cast by a thick-leaved grapevine, and perching on the edge of the
+wall, looked down meditatively on the city as he filled his pipe.
+
+Well, so here he was in Rome--just as if something had pushed him here,
+where least of all places he had expected to find himself again. Odd
+that his year of travel should end with a second visit to the first
+European city that had stirred his imagination, that had given him a
+hint of what it was he had come to Europe to see. It was during his
+first stay in Rome that he stopped being a dumb, Baedecker-driven
+tourist, that he first got the idea of what Europe might teach him
+better than America could. It was here that he first thought of trying
+to get from Europe some idea of what men during a good many centuries
+had found worth doing.
+
+For, unlike America, Europe was crammed full of objects little and big
+that men alone or in groups had devoted their lives to create. America
+had tried a number of experiments--once; but Europe had tried them all,
+so many times, at such different periods, in so many, so various
+centers of civilization! Such a crowded graveyard of human endeavor
+might perhaps suggest a satisfactory motive (if one existed) for going
+on living.
+
+For a long time he had made no headway, had discovered no general
+underlying motive--indeed much of what he saw filled him with utter
+astonishment at the things men had cared for, even to the point of
+giving their lives to win them.
+
+He still remembered that morning during his first stay, when he had
+stared with stupefaction at the rows of portrait-busts in the Capitoline
+Museum. So many men, most of them apparently intelligent had schemed and
+plotted through long years--and what for? To be the conventional head of
+an unworkable Empire, top-heavy with administration; to endure the
+hideous tedium of ceremony and pompous ritual which the office had
+imposed; to be forced to work through sycophants and grafters, to be
+exiled from healthy human life into a region where in the nature of
+things you could never hope to see one spontaneous sincere expression on
+any human face; where your life, your work, your reputation hung on the
+whim of the Praetorian Guard or the disgruntled legions on a distant
+frontier--why, if you lay awake nights you couldn't think of a more
+thankless job than being a Roman Emperor! And yet for centuries men had
+sacrificed their friends, their honor, their very lives to hold the
+office. Those old Romans, for all they looked so like ordinary everyday
+men you meet in the street, must have had a queer notion of what was
+worth-while in life!
+
+Then he had left Rome and gone away without plan, anywhere the train
+would take him; and wherever he had gone he had walked about, silently
+attentive to what men had done with their lives. That was what he had
+been looking for as he walked around on battle-fields, or gazed up at
+Cathedrals or looked seriously at the statues thick-sown as the sands of
+the sea all over European cities; that was what he had been looking for
+as he sat alone in a pension bed-room reading a history or a biography
+that helped him fit together into some sort of a system all the diverse
+objects he had been considering.
+
+Wherever he went, wherever he looked, he was like an archaeologist raking
+over an inexhaustible kitchen-midden--he was surrounded by relics of
+innumerable generations crowding the long centuries during which men had
+lived and died on this old continent. Perhaps if he looked hard enough
+at what they had left behind them he might find out what men really
+wanted to do with their lives--perhaps he might get some hint of what he
+could do with his own life.
+
+That was a subject he had never stopped to consider in America. Nothing
+in American life had suggested that you might have any choice except
+between different ways of earning your living. And yet he reflected it
+was rather an important question--at least as important as which
+baseball league you were going to root for.
+
+It was so absolutely new to Neale to consider that question--any
+abstract question indeed--that for some months after he had shut down
+his desk in the office of the Gates Lumber Company, he felt his head
+whirl at the notion of trying to find an answer--an answer to any
+question, let alone so compendious a one as what it was that men wanted
+to do with their lives. The cogs and wheels of disinterested impersonal
+thought which had started to work in college, were stiff with disuse and
+refused to turn. All he had been able to do was to wonder, and stare,
+and read memoirs and histories, feeling like a strange cat in a very
+much cluttered garret. Was there anything in Europe that would really
+mean anything to him, to an American who was not esthetic, who refused
+to pretend, who frankly thought the average picture-gallery a dreary
+desert?
+
+And then, very slowly, he had begun to make a guess that there was an
+arrangement in what looked so wildly hit-or-miss; as on the day when
+happening upon the little triumphal arch in Rheims he had at last got
+under his skin the idea of the Roman Empire, far-reaching, permeating
+with its law, customs, speech, the tiniest crevices of the provinces. To
+think of Romans living and governing and doing business in a little,
+one-horse, Gallic town like this! Maybe it hadn't been such a crazy
+aspiration to want to be Emperor--sort of like being President of the
+Standard Oil Company to-day. You knew in your heart that the job was too
+big for any man, but it was warming to your imagination even to pretend
+you were running a machine that covered the whole known world. And
+probably all of them had an illogical hunch that _they_ would get away
+with it--and, by Jupiter, a lot of them had, and died peacefully in
+their beds. After all, so far as ordinary horse-sense went, wasn't
+devoting yourself to gathering together a great deal more money than you
+could possibly use, at least as odd a way of spending a human life as
+trying to hang on to the tail of the Roman Empire? And yet there were
+countless thousands of men all over Europe as well as in the United
+States who were hoping with all their souls that Fate would allow them
+to do just that. And a few did get away with it--just as some of the
+Emperors had. But it killed a great many--the Manager of the Gates
+Lumber Company, for instance. Every man knew that it might be the death
+of him, just as in the first century an Emperor knew he'd be lucky if he
+were killed quick. But nobody hung back for that in either century.
+Nobody really believed it would get _him_! Why, a year ago, Neale
+Crittenden himself had been tearing along towards it as hard as he could
+pelt.
+
+Well, good God, you had to do _some_thing with yourself. You couldn't
+float along, your boneless tentacles rising and falling with the tides,
+like that jelly-fish of a Livingstone!
+
+What was there for a man to do with himself? At all times evidently,
+some men had been satisfied in producing art of some kind or
+another--that wasn't any good for Neale. He hadn't an ounce of artistic
+feeling, wasn't even a craftsman, let alone an artist. And many men in
+every epoch had cared about fighting. That was more his sort--if you
+were sure you could find something worth fighting for! And many men had
+wanted to run things--not only for the feeling of personal power, but to
+straighten out the hopeless muddles humanity was always getting itself
+into.... He had lost the frail thread of his thought in a maze of
+speculations, comparisons, half-formulated ambitions.
+
+But he had always come back to his problem. He did not hurry. He had
+left the Gates Lumber Company so that he would not need to hurry!
+Sometimes he had caught a glimpse of the thread, lost it, felt it
+between his closing fingers, let it slip again. And whenever it escaped
+him and he found himself staring again at a jumbled confusion with no
+clue to its pattern, he had lit his pipe and smoked reflectively, his
+eyes fixed on whatever detail of European life chanced to be before
+them, a stained-glass window at Chartres, a crowded noisy cafe in Milan,
+the hydraulic cranes unloading cargoes from the Congo under the tower of
+Antwerp Cathedral. What men had left behind them looked from the outside
+like a heaped-up pile of heterogeneous junk, some good and some bad, and
+no way of guessing how any of it came to be. But Neale hung fast to that
+guess of his that there might be some meaning for him in it all, if he
+could only be patient enough and clear-headed enough to pick it out. He
+had never been an impatient temperament but he certainly had not of late
+years been especially clear-headed. During this reflective pause in his
+life, he felt his mind re-acquiring its capacity to do some abstract
+thinking. Released temporarily as he was from the necessity for
+immediate activity his head slowly cleared itself from the cloudy fumes
+given off by energy automatically rushing into action, blindly,
+planlessly. He began to perceive that he had been carried off his feet
+by the conviction of his time that activity, any activity at all, is
+all-sufficient, provided it is taken with speed, energy and decision.
+Neale had acquired speed, energy and decision in activity, but he'd be
+damned, he told himself once in a while, if he'd run his legs off any
+longer without seeing which way he was going.
+
+As he sat now alone on the roof, overlooking the many, many monuments
+left as token of what men had wanted to do with their lives, he brought
+up and considered the few conclusions--the guesses at truth--the year
+had brought him. They didn't seem to amount to much, they were
+ridiculously slight as the sum-total of a year's earnest thought, but
+all this sort of thinking was so new and hard for him! At least such as
+they were, they were his own thoughts--he hadn't taken them on anybody
+else's say-so; and simple and inadequate as they seemed from the
+outside, they might be the first step towards understanding the
+truth--the truth for _him_.
+
+To begin with, he hadn't in the least found out what men wanted or why
+they wanted it--all his classification had been like pressing
+wild-flowers and sticking them in a herbarium with the right Latin name
+tacked on--it cleared up some of the clutter, perhaps, but it left you
+mighty far from understanding life. All that he had learned from his
+classification was that men wanted a lot of contradictory things, and
+what one man would sell his soul to get, would break another one's heart
+to have. Well, wasn't that perhaps a clue? Wasn't it just that innate
+diversity which was at the root of a great many tragedies? Wasn't the
+trouble that men wouldn't let themselves act as individuals? Men were so
+hopelessly tied to the fashion of their century. Yes, men
+were fashion-ridden: they had no call to laugh at women's
+continuous-performance-vaudeville of big-sleeves, tight-lacing,
+hobble-skirts! Women cared about clothes, and every woman except a few
+dowds was out to look like every other woman, and just a little more so;
+men cared about the business of the world, and every man except a few
+freaks felt that he ought to outdo every one else at whatever all the
+men of his time were doing. And nobody wanted to be a freak. But the
+truth was that there were all sorts of men in the world all the
+time--who ought normally to do all sorts of different things. But did
+they? No, they didn't. No matter what you really wanted to do with your
+life, no matter what your particular life was best suited for, human
+tradition was always inflexibly insisting that you try to cut your life
+by the pattern considered fashionable at the time and in the place where
+you lived--try to be an Emperor in Imperial Rome, try to be a
+millionaire in twentieth century New York. People didn't seem able to
+consider even for a moment that there must be lots of men so made that
+they would prefer anything to the process of becoming an Emperor or a
+millionaire.
+
+There rose before Neale now the restless, unhappy face of the young
+Frenchman he had come to know in Bourges, who one evening as they sat in
+the park near the Cathedral, poured out to him in a bitter flood his
+horrified sense of the closing in on him of bonds which he hated, which
+were being forged around him by the irresistible forces of social
+tradition and family affection. Fighting helplessly against overwhelming
+odds, he was slowly being shoved into becoming a _petit fonctionnaire_
+in Bourges for all his life.... "_Here_, in this _hole_!" he had cried
+looking around him with wild young eyes, like a rat in a trap. But there
+was his dear Maman's certainty that this feeling was mere youth, that he
+would soon settle down, and be contented in his office, and always,
+always be quite close to her; there was the relief of the family far and
+wide, now that he was _safe_, safe for life in a good little position
+with a nice little pension at the end! "Safe! How I loathe being safe!"
+he had cried. "Why wasn't I born three hundred years ago, so that I
+could have gone out with Champlain! Or later with Du Chaillou?"
+
+In spite of all his sympathy for the poor kid, Neale hadn't seen then
+nor could he see now why anybody need wait for a Champlain or a Du
+Chaillou to come along. It looked as though the boy's grievance was
+because what he was meant to do didn't happen to be in fashion when he
+lived. Neale couldn't see what prevented him from getting right up on
+his feet from off the bench where he agonized, and marching off to the
+nearest port to work his way to Senegal, if that was where he thought
+he'd have the chance to use that latent stifled something in him which
+could never live in Bourges. Of course, it would give his mother a jolt,
+but if she was any kind of a mother, she'd want her son to have what was
+best for him. That was sure, if anything was. And as for the cousins and
+the aunts and uncles butting in ... to hell with them! What business was
+it of theirs?
+
+Neale had a suspicion that very likely the boy would be horrified by
+Senegal, not get on a bit better than in Bourges, and be mighty glad to
+come back to the safeness and comfort that irked him so now. If he had
+had pep enough to get on in Senegal, or anywhere else on his own,
+wouldn't he have had pep enough to cut loose from his leading-strings
+before this? Now was the time to do it, now or never, before he had
+acquired any personal responsibilities of his own choosing, that would
+_really_ be an insuperable barrier to change. Neale felt nothing but the
+profoundest sympathy for people who found out they were in the wrong
+pigeon-hole after they had tied themselves up so they couldn't move.
+That was so awful a fate, that it did seem as though all grown-ups ought
+to league together in an impassioned effort to give youth as free a
+choice as possible. Instead of which--look what they'd done to this poor
+kid! Neale knew by the look of him how nervously sensitive he was.
+They'd trained nervous sensibility into him, instead of energy and
+combativeness. And then they brought to bear on him the
+thousand-pound-to-the-square-inch pressure of public opinion which
+provincial and family life in a small French town exerts on youth, to
+prevent its ever guessing at its essential freedom to seek out its own.
+
+What sheep men were! ... making long detours through open country to get
+around fences that had long since blown down.
+
+In all the centuries of Roman Emperors had there been a single one of
+the misfits with good enough sense to see that he had got into the wrong
+job, and energy enough to pull out? Galba had declined the nomination a
+term or two, but in the end he'd accepted office--and got his throat cut
+inside a year. Even a high-class mind like Marcus Aurelius could think
+of no solution except, after office-hours, to write a book sympathizing
+with himself, like a fine-haired Corporation President solacing his soul
+by collecting cloisonne.
+
+Of course the fashion of the country and the century was sure to fit
+some men. Old man Gates now: he _had_ wanted to succeed in business, to
+be a millionaire, as much as Vespasian had wanted to be Emperor, and he
+had furiously enjoyed every hard-hitting moment of the life-and-death
+struggle which had carried him up from owning a small saw-mill in
+Connecticut to being the head of a rich and powerful company. He had
+died at eighty, as lusty and hard and sound an old condottiere as any
+other professional fighter who bestrode a bronze horse in an Italian
+piazza. But how about his son? What perhaps would the "young Mr. Gates"
+have liked to do with _his_ life, if it had ever been suggested to him
+that he might do something else than go on making money by selling
+lumber for as much as possible above the price that had been paid for
+it?
+
+What life-long mal-adjustment had resulted in that dreadful, twisted,
+weeping, elderly face which even now Neale could not forget?
+
+Neale puffed a while silently, staring over at the Janiculum Hill, black
+with its dense trees beyond the moonlit city, until the distressing
+memory became less acute and he could go back calmly to his own problem.
+He was that much to the good anyhow. At least he'd found out what he did
+not want to do. He did not want to give his life to doing something
+simply because a lot of other men thought it was the only thing to do.
+At least he was sure that failure was certain along that road. And he
+was convinced that happiness--satisfaction, at least--was possible in
+human life. All his stored-up and accumulated health and strength and
+vitality made him sure that a sort of happiness was probable, even
+inevitable, if you had the good sense to get hold of the job you were
+intended to do. But what did he, Neale Crittenden, want to do? What was
+he intended for? He had asked himself that question a great many times
+and never had answered it yet. He looked again over at the Janiculum
+from which the beacon was flashing its message of red--white--green
+across Imperial Rome, across the Vatican. Over there stood the Garibaldi
+monument. There was a man who had known what to do with his life. He had
+created something. Oh, he was a product of his time, no doubt, and the
+busy little frock-coated Cavour had played a necessary part, but
+admitting all that, where would the Risorgimento have been without
+Garibaldi? In the fire and passion of his great heart, he had forged the
+sword of Italian Unity. Out of chaos he had created something with an
+ordered unity of its own. That was real creation. Was there any of it
+left to do--some little corner that an ordinary man could tackle?
+
+Alone on the roof he pondered this, his hands clasped across his knees,
+his head tipped back, looking across the ancient city at the man who had
+kindled a fire in those old ashes.
+
+And then, little by little, as the silence and beauty of the night
+spread out before his eyes in widening silver circles, he ceased
+pondering, ceased thinking even vaguely of himself, his life, other
+men's lives. He sat dreaming, his eyes as wide as a child's, his lips
+relaxed, his face absent and unconscious of self as that of one who
+listens absorbed and entranced to distant music. Moonlight--Italy!
+
+Aware that he was no longer alone, he turned his head slowly and saw
+that a tall girl in white had come silently up the winding iron steps
+and was standing at the top looking at the sky. The moon shone full and
+soft upon her, from head to foot. He saw her as clearly as though it had
+been noon, and yet she looked as unearthly and mysterious as the night.
+She evidently thought herself alone. She stood perfectly motionless, her
+dark eyes fixed on a palely distant star. Neale thought he had never in
+his life seen anything more touching than the profound sadness of her
+young face.
+
+He had not moved, had scarcely had time to draw breath; but she had felt
+him there. She turned her face toward where he sat, her head a little
+bent, searching the darkness of the corner from under long, finely-drawn
+brows. She saw him, looked straight into his eyes, her own shining deep
+and soft upon him. He was still too lost in his own enchanted dream to
+be able to move, to look away. He gazed at her as though she were part
+of the night, of the beauty.
+
+Without a sound she turned back and sank like a dream from his sight.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLII
+
+
+The next morning very early when he stepped out of his room, he saw at
+the end of the hall a little group of three people, the half-grown burly
+boy who carried water-pitchers and blacked shoes, the tall, aproned,
+black-moustached house-servant who swept the rooms and waited on the
+table, and the girl he had seen on the roof the night before. He knew
+her at once although she was in a street-dress now, and he saw only her
+back and the gleaming coils of her hair. He found that he had no
+intention of doing anything in the world but of going to speak to her,
+somehow; and turning down the tiled corridor he walked towards the
+three. They had their backs towards him and were all talking Italian
+with extreme rapidity. "Oh!" it came to Neale with a shock, "she was an
+Italian!" Of course, with those dark eyes and hair. It had not once
+occurred to him, during the night, that she might be an Italian. He felt
+hot with vexation. Damn it! He spoke so little Italian!
+
+He stopped short in the passage-way irresolute, suffering that most
+wretched and miserable of human embarrassments, the one that began with
+the Tower of Babel. He wasn't going to make an idiot of himself trying
+to talk to her in that horrible broken tourist-Italian of his. His
+disappointment was so acute that he could not for an instant collect
+himself enough to turn away, and stood glowering at the three backs.
+
+They were talking far too rapidly for him to understand what they said,
+but by their pantomime it was plain that the girl was moved by something
+which left the two men quite unaffected, that she was making a low-toned
+agitated appeal to them, which they received with the shrugged shoulders
+and uplifted eyebrows of reasonable men before an unreasonable idea. She
+was pointing out, leaning forward, shrinking back, she was saying, "Oh!
+oh! _oh!_" her low voice rising to a little wail of distress that went
+to Neale's heart. He looked over their backs out of the window following
+the direction of the girl's hand, and saw at first only the beautiful,
+early-morning, myriad-winged swoop of the Roman swallows filling the
+bright air with their rhythmic wheelings. He had watched them for hours
+on his former visit, had thought them one of the most purely lovely
+elements of the city's charm.
+
+"Oh!" cried the girl again, and covered her face with her hands.
+
+Neale saw at last what she saw, a lean yellow cat crouching in ambush in
+a corner between a dormer window and a sky-light. As he looked the cat
+sprang up suddenly, a streak of murdering speed high into the air, and
+seized an incautious swallow swooping too low.
+
+The two men at the window looked at the girl, shrugged their shoulders
+again and went back coolly to their work. The comedy was finished. What
+could any one do about it? Most evidently nothing. The man lifted his
+broom to sweep. The boy stooped to take up his water-pitcher. The girl
+took her hands from her face, and turned away from the window. Neale had
+expected to see her look agitated and excited; but her pale face was set
+in an expression of unsurprised endurance. It was evident that she too
+perceived that there was nothing to do about it.
+
+"Well, there _was_ something to do about it!" thought Neale wildly,
+feeling a fury of resentment at the two men. He'd show them!
+
+He sprang past the girl with a great bound to the window and saw that,
+as he thought, a slope of tiled roof lay below it, the slope so gentle,
+the tiles so rough that it would be quite easy to keep his footing on
+it, although the drop to the court below would be dizzying if he stopped
+to look at it. But he did not stop to look at that, or anything but the
+cat, slinking slowly off across the roof beyond, the swallow in her
+mouth.
+
+He took one long step out over the low window-sill and stood on the
+tiles. He heard the girl behind him give a cry, and it sped him forward.
+He ran along the narrow slope of tiles, one hand on the wall to steady
+himself till he could, with a leap, reach the roof where the cat was
+making off towards the ridge-pole with her prey. Here it was easier, a
+wide stretch of tiles over which he could really run.
+
+The cat heard him, saw him, paused an instant, dazed by the suddenness
+of his appearance, turned her head and flattened herself for a leap
+forward. But his leap was quicker than hers. He reached her, and pounced
+on her with a swoop that was part of the forward rhythm of his running,
+pounced, seized her firmly, and forced open her jaws. The swallow
+dropped out on the tiles, wet and ruffled, its eyes closed, its poor,
+slim, gleaming head bent limply to one side as if its neck were broken.
+
+Neale stooped and picked it up, stroking it pityingly and smoothing its
+pretty, rumpled plumes. He had been too late after all. But as it lay in
+his hand it seemed to him he felt its delicate body stir. Perhaps it was
+only half dead with fright. Did it move a little or had he imagined it?
+As he stood astride the ridge-pole of the roof, the level rays of the
+early sun shone straight into his eyes so that he could not see whether
+the bird's eyes had opened or not. He turned his back to the sun and
+held his hand, with the bird in it, closer to his face. Why, yes, the
+eyes were open, soft dark eyes that looked wildly and despairingly into
+his. The intensity of that sudden look gave him a start. He opened his
+fingers and the bird burst out of his hand with a loud beating flutter
+and soared up into the air. Neale threw back his head to watch it, moved
+almost to a shout of exultation as the twittering flock swooped past his
+head.
+
+Then he saw that the cat was calmly making her way back to her ambush
+corner. "Hey, there!" he shouted gaily at her, and, sprinting along,
+snatched her up. "You're going back down cellar to catch rats, kitty
+mio," he told her aloud, laughing. He was astonished at his own high
+spirits. High up on the richly colored old roof, close to that glorious
+sun with the swallows dashing, twittering about his head, the rescued
+one among them, he could have flung his arms about and danced for sheer
+lightness of heart.
+
+What he did was to tuck the protesting cat under his arm and make his
+way back with considerably more caution than he had gone up. The passage
+along the narrow slope of tile below the window was worse than he had
+thought, made him a little sick to face. A damn-fool performance anyhow,
+he reflected, picking his steps, looking carefully away from the sheer
+black drop to the stone-paved courtyard below him. A very damn-fool
+performance for a serious-minded man of twenty-six to go careering over
+roofs like that.
+
+With a short, quickly-taken breath of relief, he stepped over the
+window-sill back into the corridor. The men and the girl who had been
+leaning tensely out, watching him, stepped back respectfully to give him
+room.
+
+Before he could turn to the girl, the servant had snatched the cat from
+under his arm, and with a fine air of virtuous indignation was cuffing
+her savagely over the head, pouring out on her a loud, highly-articulate
+flood of vituperation. The boy lifted his hand to join in the game,
+crying out, "Bestia del diavolo," "animaluzzo dannato!" and the like.
+
+"Oh, good Lord!" thought Neale impatiently. "Isn't that just _like_
+them! Hey, _stop_ that!" he cried aloud, and as the man paid no
+attention to this he seized him somewhat roughly by the shoulder in a
+grip that paralyzed the arm. He caught the cat as she fell and held her
+up over his head. He was so tall, so long-armed, that she now dangled
+high in the air, quite out of reach, yowling at the top of her voice, a
+ridiculous scene altogether!
+
+He tried sternly to explain his feelings and issue his commands, but
+as was to be expected his Italian gave way under the strain: "Troppo
+in ritardo punire il gatto ... it's too late to jump on the cat _now_,
+you poor chump; she wouldn't have any idea what it's for. Gatto non
+capisce ... it's not her fault anyhow. She doesn't know any better.
+Take her down cellar, dans la cave; she's all right catching rats.
+That's what she's for! And look here," he stopped his pitiful attempt at
+Italian and ended fiercely, trusting to a grim eye and a set jaw to make
+his meaning plain, "Don't you try any funny business on the cat when I'm
+not around, or I'll knock your heads together till you can't see."
+
+He heard the girl speak to the men in an Italian that was so rapid it
+made him dizzy and at the end caught the phrase, "do you understand?"
+The men nodded, by no means pleased at the rebuff, the boy motioned
+Neale to give him the cat, and carried her off carefully down the
+corridor.
+
+"That was the very most splendid thing for you to do," the girl said to
+him, with a soft energy of accent.
+
+He whirled about towards her, the immensity of his relief flooding his
+face. "Oh, you _do_ speak English! You're _not_ Italian!" he cried, the
+intonation of his phrase seeming to indicate that she had lifted from
+his mind an apprehension of infinitely long standing.
+
+"Oh, yes," she said, smiling and looking directly at him, "of course I
+speak English. I'm an American girl. My name is Marise Allen."
+
+Neale was so affected by the sweetness of her smile on him, by the
+softness of her shining dark eyes, that he felt himself blushing and
+stammering like a little boy. "M-mine is Neale Crittenden," he
+answered.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLIII
+
+
+The dream-like Arabian Night unexpectedness which had descended on Neale
+the evening before, on the roof, continued shimmeringly to wrap
+everything in improbability. Instead of receiving his unfamiliar name
+with the vague, conventional smile of a new acquaintance, the girl
+raised her eyebrows high in a long, delicate arch and cried out, "You
+are! Really! The one who has inherited Crittenden's?" Seeing Neale's
+look of almost appalled amazement, she broke into a sudden laugh. Neale
+had never heard any one laugh like that, almost like some one singing,
+so clear and purely produced was its little trill. And yet it had been
+as sudden and spontaneous as a gush of water from a spring.
+
+"I don't wonder you look astonished," she told him. "But you see when I
+was a little girl I used often to play in and out of old Mr.
+Crittenden's house and mill. I've never seen anything since in all my
+life that seemed as wonderful and mighty to me as the way the saw used
+to gnash its teeth at the great logs and slowly, shriekingly tear them
+apart into boards. Didn't you use to love the moss on the old
+water-wheel, too?"
+
+"I never saw the mill or the house," he told her. "I never saw my
+great-uncle but once or twice in my life." He was too amazed to do
+anything but answer her literally and baldly.
+
+"Why, how in the world...?" she began to ask, and then as a bell from
+one of the innumerable church belfries outside began clangorously to
+strike the hour, she glanced at her wrist-watch, and shook her head.
+"It's breakfast-time," she said. She nodded, smiled and turned away,
+stepping down the corridor with a light, supple gait. Neale had never
+seen any one walk like that, as though every step were in time to music.
+
+He went back to his room to wash his hands and brush his clothes, which
+showed signs of contact with dusty Roman walls and roofs. When, ten
+minutes later, he went into the dining-room, five or six people were
+already at table, Livingstone among them. Miss Oldham, the head of the
+pension, introduced the newcomer to the others, mentioning names on both
+sides. To Neale's surprise, Miss Allen did not explain (as he had opened
+his mouth to do) that she had already seen and talked to Mr. Crittenden
+that morning. Instead, she now gave him the conventional smile he had
+expected ten minutes before, accepted the introduction as though she had
+never seen his face and went on drinking her cafe-au-lait.
+
+More Arabian Nights. What did _this_ mean? Neale swallowed the reference
+he had begun to their earlier meeting. Miss Oldham said to him with the
+wearily playful accent of the conscientious pension-keeper, fostering
+cheerful talk around her table, "I understand, Mr. Crittenden, that you
+and Miss Allen are in a way related, as I might say."
+
+Livingstone joined in with his usual sprightliness: "Yes, Crittenden,
+why didn't you tell me you had a fellow-townswoman in Rome? Last evening
+when I went back into the salon and told the assembled company about you
+and your inheritance there was Mademoiselle Allaine, who had often, in
+her remote childhood, climbed on the respected knees of Monsieur your
+Great-uncle."
+
+Miss Allen smiled quietly over her cup, remarked that it would have
+taken a bolder child than she had ever been to climb on the knees of old
+Mr. Crittenden, and, looking at her watch, rose to go. "Music, divine
+music?" inquired Livingstone.
+
+"Yes, divine music," she answered lightly. "We are getting ready to play
+at a soiree at Donna Antonia Pierleoni's. I'm due there at half past
+nine to try out the piano in a new position in the room."
+
+"Clear out there by half-past nine!" cried Livingstone, as if exhausted
+by the idea.
+
+She did not seem to consider that this required any answer, made a
+graceful inclination of the head to the company at table and went off.
+
+Neale was repeating to himself, in mortal terror of forgetting it,
+"Pierleoni. Pierleoni." He drank his coffee and ate his roll as though
+he had a train to catch, and, rushing back to his room, seized his hat
+and made off to the nearest cafe to consult the directory. With a sigh
+of relief he found that there was only one Pierleoni, and that the
+address was indeed as Livingstone had said, far away in the rich, new,
+fashionable quarter. He set off on foot, but before he had walked five
+minutes he was overcome with panic lest he be late, and hailed a rickety
+cab. Thinking of nothing but the precious address which he had committed
+to memory, he shouted it out to the cabman. Half-way there, he suddenly
+remembered that he had no possible business at that address. He had a
+horrid vision of driving up to the door, having the _portiere_ ask him
+his errand, perhaps of having Miss Allen look out of the window and see
+the scene.
+
+This threw him into such a fright that for an instant he could think of
+no escape and sat passive, borne along to his fate by the unconscious
+cabman. Then his wits came back to him, he called out to the cabman to
+drive to number seventy-five and not a hundred and twenty; and having
+thus snatched himself from destruction, perceived that they were even
+then turning into the street. At number seventy-five he descended,
+hastily paid the driver a good deal more than was due him, stepped into
+the house, inquired if a gentleman by the name of Robinson lived there,
+professed surprise and regret on hearing that he did not and walked on,
+settling his necktie nervously.
+
+He told himself that he was acting like an imbecile, but he could not
+seem to consider that important fact seriously. Having started in to do
+anything, naturally he liked to put it through. Everybody did. And he
+really would like to know how under the sun a dark-eyed girl in Rome
+happened to know anything about his Great-uncle Burton. Any one would
+feel a natural human curiosity on that score. And he had only five days
+in Rome.
+
+The idea that he had only five days in Rome fell on him like a
+thunderbolt, as though he had had no idea of it till that moment. Had
+he said he had only five days in Rome?
+
+He walked along, looking up at the green waves of feathery foliage which
+foamed down over the fawn-colored walls from the verdure of the gardens
+inside. What a beautiful spot Rome was! He had not begun to appreciate
+it on his last visit. It was wonderful! Such light! He had never seen
+such sunlight anywhere.
+
+Ah, here was number a hundred and twenty, a fine great doorway in the
+wall, with a gleaming brass plate, marked Pierleoni, at which Neale
+looked with pleasure. He walked on some distance, as far as he could go
+and keep the house in view, and, crossing over, walked slowly back. He
+was not now in the least ashamed of his conduct. By this time it seemed
+quite natural and suitable to him, just what any one would have done in
+his place. Of course he wanted to know about his great-uncle. Who would
+not?
+
+He had made the trip to the end of the street and back perhaps a dozen
+times, his pulse beating more and more quickly, when from a distance he
+saw a little door beside the great one open, and a tall girl in a
+familiar light gray street-dress step out. But she was not alone. Beside
+her walked a man, a tall, stooped old man with a black coat and a
+wide-brimmed black felt hat. The girl's hand was on his arm. Neale felt
+as astonished and grieved as though he had caught his best friend
+cheating him at cards. It had never occurred to him that she might not
+be alone! And yet he now remembered that she had said "we."
+
+He walked along behind them at a considerable distance, feeling for the
+first time rather foolish, a sensation which instantly took wings as he
+saw them, after turning into another street, stop at a door in the wall
+and ring. Perhaps she was going to leave him there. Neale gave a great
+start forward.
+
+But perhaps she was going in with him? He halted where he stood, feeling
+very sick of himself and angrily resolving to turn his back on them and
+go off about his business. He had never played the born fool so in his
+life!
+
+But he did not turn his back on them. He stood observing them, while
+they went through a leave-taking which seemed to him very formal and
+long-drawn-out; and when the old man went in and the infernal gate
+actually shut behind him, Neale started forward with a bound.
+
+But he reflected at once that it was too absurd to meet her here, in a
+quarter of Rome where no business of his could possibly have brought him
+at that hour. The cautious, adroit thing to do was to walk along behind
+her at a distance, till she had turned into a thoroughfare with shops,
+where he might conceivably be strolling. While he was making this
+sagacious plan, his feet bore him rapidly up beside her, where he took
+off his hat and said, "Good morning, Miss Allen," with a wide smile of
+satisfaction which he knew must look nothing less than imbecile.
+
+Well, he had done what he had set out to do.
+
+She gave him a "good morning, Mr. Crittenden," that showed no surprise,
+and with great tact began the talk on the only basis which gave him a
+reasonable claim on her time. "You want to hear how somebody in Rome
+knows about your great-uncle Burton, don't you? I'm afraid it's like so
+many other things that sound mysterious and interesting. It will only be
+quite flat and commonplace when you really know. It is no more than
+this. When I was a little girl in America, and then later when I was in
+college for a couple of years, I was sent to spend my summers in Ashley,
+visiting an old cousin of my father's." She looked at him from under her
+broad-brimmed blue hat, with a mock-regretful air, one eyebrow raised
+whimsically, and made a little apologetic gesture with her shoulders.
+"That's all," she said, smiling and shaking her head.
+
+"Oh, _no_, it's not all!" Neale cried to himself with intense
+conviction.
+
+Aloud he said, "But I want to hear more about what kind of a place it
+is. You see, to tell the truth, I'd forgotten that I had any Great-uncle
+Burton. And I never was in Ashley. Think of being in Florence and
+getting a letter saying that a saw-mill in Vermont has suddenly become
+yours!"
+
+"I should call it a most nice sort of surprise," remarked the girl with
+a quaintly un-English turn of phrase which he had already noticed and
+thought the most delightful thing in the world.
+
+"And I'm on my way back to America now to see about it."
+
+"What does that mean--to 'see about it'?" she inquired.
+
+"Oh, sell it, of course."
+
+She was horrified. "_Sell_ it? To whom?"
+
+"Oh, to anybody who'll buy it."
+
+"Sell that darling old house, and those glorious elms. Sell that
+beautiful leaded-glass door, with the cool white marble steps leading up
+to it, and the big peony-bushes, and the syringas and that cold pure
+spring-water that runs all day and all night in the wooden trough. Sell
+that home! And to anybody!" She paused where she was, looking at him out
+of wide, shocked eyes. Neale was profoundly thankful for anything that
+would make her look straight at him like that.
+
+"But, you see," he told her, "I hadn't the least idea about that darling
+old house, or the elms or the spring-water or anything. I never heard a
+word about it till this minute. I think the only thing is for you to
+start in and tell me everything."
+
+As she hesitated, professing with an outward opening of her palms that
+she really didn't know exactly where to begin, he prompted her.
+
+"Well, begin at the beginning. How in the world do you get there?"
+
+"Oh, if you want to know from the beginning," she told him, "I must tell
+you at once that you change cars at Hoosick Junction. Always, always, no
+matter from which direction you approach, you must change cars at
+Hoosick Junction, and wait an hour or so there." Seeing on his face a
+rather strange expression, she feared that he had lost the point of her
+little pleasantry, and inquired, "But perhaps it is that you do not know
+Hoosick Junction."
+
+"Oh, yes, I know Hoosick Junction all right." He said it with a long
+breath of wonder. "_I_ changed cars at Hoosick Junction to get here!"
+
+"Eh bien, and then a train finally takes you from Hoosick Junction. You
+sit pressing your little nose against the window, waiting to see the
+mountains, and when the first one heaves up softly, all blue against the
+horizon, you feel a happy ache in your throat, and you look harder than
+ever. And by and by some one calls out 'Shley!' (you know he means
+Ashley) and you take your little satchel and stumble down the aisle, and
+the conductor lifts you down the steps and there is dear old Cousin
+Hetty with her wrinkled face shining on you. She only gives you a dry
+little peck on your lips, quick and hard, and says, 'Well, Marise, you
+got here, I see,' but you feel all over you, _warm_, how glad she is to
+see you. And you hug her a great deal till she says, 'there! there!' but
+you know she likes it very much."
+
+She was talking as she walked, as if her words were set to music, her
+voice all little ripples, and bright upward and downward swoops like
+swallows flying, her hands and arms and shoulders and eyebrows acting a
+delicate pantomime of illustration, the pale, pure olive of her face
+flushed slightly with her animation. Every time she flashed a quick look
+up at him to make sure he was not bored, Neale caught his breath. He
+felt as though he were drinking the strongest kind of wine, he had the
+half-scared, half-enchanted feeling of a man who knows he is going to
+get very drunk, and has little idea of what will happen when he does.
+
+"Yes, and then, and then?" he prompted her, eagerly.
+
+"Well, and then you get into a phaeton. Oh, I don't suppose you have
+ever seen a phaeton!"
+
+"Yes, I have," he contradicted her. "I've driven my grandfather miles in
+one when I was a little boy."
+
+"Oh, you _know_, then, about this sort of--you have perhaps lived in a
+place like Ashley?" She was as eager as though it had been a question of
+finding that they were of the same family.
+
+"I spent all my summers in West Adams, not so very far from Vermont."
+
+"Ah then, you can understand what I tell you!" she said with
+satisfaction. "And in the phaeton you jog through the village, past the
+church, under the elms, with the white houses each under its thick
+green trees, and such green, green grass everywhere--not like Italy, all
+brown and parched; and then down the road till the turn-off for
+Crittenden's. For, you see, I also go to Crittenden's. My Cousin Hetty's
+home is one of the three or four houses that stand around your
+great-uncle's house and mill. And so up the road to Crittenden's between
+the mountains closer and higher, up into the quiet valley." Her voice
+deepened on the last words, and so did her eyes. She was silent a
+moment, looking out unseeingly on the tropical palms and bright, huge
+flowers of the Pincian Gardens through which they were now walking.
+
+"Eh bien, since it's you who are going home, you drive on a little
+farther than my Cousin Hetty's house, until up before you slopes a
+lovely meadow, smooth, bright, shining green, like the enamel green
+field in the Limbo where Dante puts Electra and Hector and Caesar. At the
+top of the slope, a long line of splendid, splendid elms, like this, you
+know ..." with her two hands and a free, upward gesture of her arms, she
+showed the airy opening-out of the wineglass elms, "and back of them a
+long old house, ever so long, because everything is fastened along
+together, house, porch, woodshed, hay-barn, carriage-shed, horse-barn."
+She laughed at the recollection, turning to him. "You've seen those long
+New England farm-homes? I remember a city man said once that you could
+see the head of the lady of the house leaning from one window and the
+head of a cow from another. He thought that the most crushing thing that
+could be said, but _I_ think those homes perfectly delightful, homely,
+with a _cachet_ of their own, not copied from houses in other countries.
+And really, you know," she turned serious, thinking suddenly that
+perhaps he needed reassurance, "really, it's just as _clean_ as any
+other way of living. You're just as far away from the animals as with
+any other barn, because you have so much woodshed and hay-barn and
+things between you."
+
+To see her face with that quite new, housekeeping, matter-of-fact,
+practical look gave him the most absurd and illogical amusement. He
+laughed outright. "Oh, don't think for a moment that I would object," he
+cried gaily. "I'm not a bit fastidious. I wouldn't care _how_ near the
+cows were--if they were nice cows!"
+
+She thought for an instant he might be laughing at her, and peered
+keenly into his face, a more openly observing look than she had as yet
+given him. What she saw evidently reassured her, for she went on with a
+lighter tone, "Truly it has its own sort of architectural beauty. It
+doesn't have a bit of the packing-box, brought-in-and-dumped-down look
+that most dwelling-houses have, no matter how they're planned. It seems
+to have grown that way. The long, low old farm-house, weathered so
+beautifully, it looks like an outcrop of the very earth itself, like a
+ridge or rock or a fold in a field."
+
+It was about at this time that Neale began to lose the capacity of
+listening to what she was saying. With the best will in the world he
+could not keep his mind on it. He found that he felt a giddy, dazzled
+uncertainty of where he was putting his feet and tried to pull himself
+together. He must really notice a little more what he was about. Her
+quick, rising and falling, articulate speech, her quick, flashing
+changes of expression, the play of her flexible hands and shoulders--no,
+how could he listen to what she was saying?
+
+But she was asking him a question now. She was saying, "You're not
+really going to _sell_ all that, to just _any_body?"
+
+"But really," he answered, helplessly honest, "it sounds wonderful as
+you tell it, but what could _I_ do with it? I couldn't very well go to
+_live_ in Ashley, Vermont, could I?"
+
+"Why not?" she asked. "A good many people have."
+
+"Well! But ..." he began, incapable of forming any answer, incapable of
+thinking of anything but the dark softness of her gaze on him. What was
+it they were talking about? Oh, yes, about selling out at Ashley. "Oh,
+but I have other plans. I am just about to go to China."
+
+"_China!_ Why to China?"
+
+Neale lost his head entirely ... "notice more what he was about?" He had
+not the least idea what he was about. He said to her rather wildly, "I
+hardly know myself why I am going to China. I'd like, if you will let
+me--I'd like ever so much to tell you--about it. And see what you
+think. You know about Ashley, don't you see?" He was aware that the
+last of what he had said had no shadow of connection with the first, but
+that seemed of no importance whatever to him.
+
+They were standing now near a low wall, under some thick dark ilex
+trees, a fountain dripping musically before them. Mechanically they sat
+down, looking earnestly at each other. "You see," began Neale, "I'm
+trying to find my way. I was in business in the States, and getting
+along all right ... 'getting on,' I mean, as they say. And then I got to
+wondering. It seemed as though, as though ... I wasn't sure it was what
+I wanted to do with my life, just to buy low and sell high, all my life
+long. Perhaps there was more to it than I could make out. It certainly
+seemed to suit a lot of folks, fine. But I couldn't seem to see it. I
+was all right. Nothing the matter. Only I couldn't ... why, I tell you,
+I felt like a perfectly good torch that wouldn't catch on fire. I
+couldn't seem to _care_ enough about it to make it worth while to really
+tear in and do it. And I thought maybe if I got off a little way from
+it ... sometimes you do see the sense of things better that way. So I
+went away. I took a year off. I'd saved a little money, enough for that.
+And I've been trying to figure something out. Of course I've been
+enjoying the traveling around, too. Perhaps that's the real reason why I
+want to go to China, just to keep going, see new things, get away, keep
+free. But I think about the other a good deal ... what can I do with my
+life ... that's sort of _worth while_, you know, if only in a very small
+way. I'm a very ordinary man, no gifts, no talents, but I have lots of
+energy and health. It seems as though there ought to be _some_thing ...
+doesn't it?"
+
+He had stumbled on, breathlessly, involuntarily, hardly aware that he
+was speaking at all, aware only that she was listening. With her head
+bent, her eyes fixed on the ground, the pure pale olive of her face like
+a pearl in the shadow of her hat, she was listening intently. He knew,
+as he had never known anything else, that she was listening to what he
+really meant, not to what he was saying in those poor, plain, broken
+words.
+
+And yet, how could he go on?
+
+The sudden plunge he had made, deep into an element new to him, the
+utter strangeness of his having thus spoken out what he had before but
+shyly glanced at, the awfulness of having opened his heart to the day,
+his shut, shut heart.... Good God, what was he doing?
+
+At his silence, she raised her face towards him. To his amazement her
+eyes were shining wet with tears. And yet there was no sadness in her
+face. She was smiling at him, a wavering, misty smile.
+
+She stood up, made a little, flexible, eloquent gesture with her hands
+and arms and shoulders, as if to explain to him that she could not trust
+herself to speak, and, still smiling at him, the tears still in her
+eyes, walked rapidly away.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLIV
+
+
+After dinner that evening Miss Allen came up to where Mr. Livingstone
+and Mr. Crittenden stood together near the window and said to them,
+"Would it interest you at all to go to the soiree at Donna Antonia's
+to-morrow? She has been kind enough to offer me some cards of
+invitation, and it occurred to me--if you haven't anything better to do
+that evening--?"
+
+Livingstone carried one hand to his heart, the other to his brow, and
+professed inability to recover from the shock. "My dear young lady, it's
+inhuman to shatter my nerves with a bomb-shell like that without a word
+of warning! You know well enough I'd gladly give one of my ears for an
+invitation to Donna Antonia's. Why then the false modesty, as who should
+say, 'If you've nothing more interesting on hand just step up and let me
+make you a Duke, do!'"
+
+Miss Allen acknowledged the facetious intention of this with a suitable
+laugh and looked at Neale. He said, "Oh, of course I shall be glad to
+go."
+
+"That's good then. I shall hope to see both of you."
+
+When she had turned away to another group in the salon Livingstone put
+his head on one side and smiled down at his cigarette. "That's what
+comes of a little judicious attention bestowed in the right direction,"
+he informed Neale. "I've been getting up at the unearthly hour that girl
+takes her breakfast for a fortnight now. Quite a charmer, isn't
+she?--though nothing to her friend Miss Mills. It's Miss Mills I'm
+interested in. Just wait till you see _that_ joint production of
+American cash and European civilization! M-m-m! Hair like gold thread,
+and scads of money in her own right." He added seriously, "Miss Allen
+hasn't, you know--money, I mean, too bad, isn't it? Her father is only a
+salaried man--something or other for Paris for the something or other
+sewing-machine company. Oh, no, I believe it's mowing machines,--or
+maybe twist drills--anyhow one of those missionaries from our own little
+home-paradise of cogs and gears. But of course the fair Allaine may make
+a lot herself if she really does get on the concert stage. Still you
+never can tell. There's an awful lot of interior wire-pulling to be
+done, managers and musical critics and so on, before anybody really is
+allowed to get to the bacon in the concert business, and is she really
+anywhere near professional skill, who knows? However, a pretty girl
+always stands enough sight better show than a plain one; or than a man.
+If she uses those dark eyes of hers to good account I should think 'most
+any manager or music critic would fall for her. _She_ has a good skin,
+too; quite pleasant, that clear olive, though of course it's awfully
+common here in Italy. Just the same, a dark woman never has the _eclat_
+of a blonde. Wait till you see Miss Mills."
+
+Neale broke in on his flow to remark in a suffocated voice that he had
+letters to write, and disappeared.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The soiree was horrible to Neale, a nightmare, a glittering wall through
+which he could by no means break to reach her, over which he could
+scarcely see at an immense distance her slim figure, dressed in yellow,
+a thin gold fillet binding her smooth dark head. She was talking,
+smiling, animated, at ease; and after she had played, much acclaimed.
+There was nothing surprising about _that_, thought Neale, applauding
+with all his might. Heavens, how beautifully she made music, how
+beautifully, how intelligently, with such a clear, sure certainty of her
+own powers! Of course everybody there admired her, paid court to her,
+made her the center of one group after another--always except the group
+where he stood! He felt heart-sick to be so cut off from her. As a
+matter of fact he was not in the least literally cut off from her. She
+kept relentlessly introducing him to one person after another whom he
+did not wish to meet. She kept coming up to him every time he had
+succeeded in shaking off a tiresome companion and was standing alone at
+last in a corner, looking everywhere over the curled, powdered, bobbing,
+restless, grinning crowd to catch a glimpse of her. There she would be
+at his elbow, gliding up from nowhere. He restrained an impulse to
+snatch at her and hold her there, because each time she melted away
+after she had said, "Won't you let me take you to Donna Antonia
+Pierleoni," or "to Miss Mills," or "to Signor Ambrogi," or to somebody
+or other with whom it was necessary to talk and on whom it was necessary
+to try to keep those wandering, seeking eyes of his. He took them in
+with the top-layer of his consciousness, one after another of the people
+with whom he was forced to talk. Donna Antonia Pierleoni, a haughty,
+elderly Roman lady who was, as Neale said to himself, feeding her
+haughty Roman face as though she scorned and despised lemon ice but
+_would_ eat it since it seemed to be her duty. It amused him greatly to
+observe that after finishing one she took another at once.
+
+Miss Mills--oh, yes, this must be the girl Livingstone had been yarning
+about. Of course after praise from Livingstone it was to be expected
+that she'd look like a very high-priced wax image in a hair-dresser's
+window; and yet Neale's attention was caught for a moment by her
+pronunciation of a French phrase. Her inflection reminded him of Marise
+Allen's, and he hung about her for some time in the hope of hearing it
+again. Every time she repeated it, which she often did, he smiled down
+broadly on her. She was a pretty little thing. Livingstone was right.
+She was really quite an object of art, if that was what you called them.
+
+Signor Ambrogi turned out to be in politics, an assistant Minister of
+Commerce or Industry or something. Why, he looked for all the world like
+a New York business man--might be old man Gates as he had been at
+forty-five. As they tried to talk to each other in French that was not
+very fluent on either side, Neale was reflecting that the Roman
+governing type had changed very little. This strongly-marked,
+clean-shaven, heavy-jowled head with its thick, hooked nose, bold eyes,
+hard mouth and wrinkled forehead, could be put without change in among
+the portraits of Roman Emperors.
+
+They talked in their halting "lingua Franca" of business, of railroads,
+of the use of commercial fertilizers on Italian fields, of the
+conversion of water-power into electrical energy, and, finding Neale a
+good listener, the Italian told him about a power-plant in a volcanic
+region of Italy that ran its machinery by the steam escaping from the
+thin crust of earth over internal volcanic goings-on. For an instant
+Neale was quite stirred by this conception. It seemed a very neat idea,
+and it tickled him to have Italians turn such a traditionally American
+trick.
+
+"Pretty good, pretty good!" he said applaudingly. "That's beating us at
+our own game."
+
+"Pas si bete, en effet," said the other, well pleased by Neale's
+comment.
+
+But this interlude was the only time when, even for a moment, Neale was
+delivered from his desolation at seeing her so far from his world, from
+any world he could possibly hope ever to make his own. That brilliant
+musician--how wonderful to be able to play the piano like that!--that
+beautiful young woman of the world, the center of this brilliant
+cosmopolitan crowd, friend of titled Roman ladies, and ministers--was it
+she whom he had followed in the street like any pushing, thick-skinned
+bumpkin, to whom he had poured out what he had never before breathed to
+any living being? What on earth could she think of him? For what kind of
+a flamboyant idiot did she take him? Well, the best thing to do--Great
+Scott, the _only_ thing to do was to shut up and back out. As he walked
+home with Livingstone at midnight he had made up his mind to take the
+first train to Naples the next morning.
+
+But he made no move whatever to do this, when the morning came. Dumb and
+stupid as a sheep, he made his way doggedly to the dining-room at the
+earliest hour, to see Miss Allen take her cafe-au-lait. As he went in at
+the door, he realized that his calculations were all wrong, that she had
+been up late the night before and would certainly sleep late that
+morning. But Livingstone had already seen him and hailed him. It was too
+late to go back and wait. He sat down, gloomily stirred the sugar into
+his coffee and listened to Livingstone fizz all over the place about the
+evening's entertainment which had uplifted him to exaltation. "You
+don't _realize_, Crittenden, what an opportunity that was to see
+exclusive Roman society, the kind that foreigners like us never meet,
+not the flashy, big-hotel, off-color crowd. Why, I was introduced to
+name after name that sounded like a page out of Roman history."
+
+Neale thought with a passing grim irony that Livingstone's phrase was
+accurately turned--"introduced to names"--yea, verily. Well, names were
+what Livingstone was after.
+
+"Oh, you up already, Miss Allen," said Livingstone, springing to seat
+her with an agility for which Neale hated him. He himself sat like a
+lump, incapable because of the sudden rush of blood to his head, of
+anything but nodding a silent answer to her greeting.
+
+Livingstone needed no help in keeping up the conversation. He flowed on,
+delightedly passing in review every detail of the evening of which he
+had not missed a single one, apparently, from the way Donna Antonia's
+maid did her hair to the dandruff on the coat-collar of the old
+Visconti. "Of course I know he's a great musician and all that, but
+really if you will let your hair grow so long, you ought to have a
+pocket clothes-brush and _use_ it, oughtn't you? Why don't you do it for
+him, Miss Allen? Every one says he is absolutely gone on you, that you
+could do anything with him!" He passed from this without transition to
+Miss Mills' toilette which had been, so it seemed, a veritable triumph.
+
+"Yes, yes, wasn't it beautiful! Eugenia's clothes are simply wonderful."
+Miss Allen broke in to say enthusiastically, "She has the most
+never-failing taste."
+
+"A never-failing pocket-book," corrected Livingstone. "You don't get far
+with mere taste _dans ce bas monde_."
+
+Miss Allen finished her coffee, and, setting down her cup, remarked,
+"You two Americans seem to have made a most agreeable impression last
+evening. Donna Antonia called me back to say that Signor Ambrogi would
+be glad to see more of you. She wished me to ask you both if you
+couldn't come to have tea with her and with Signor Ambrogi this
+afternoon at five."
+
+Livingstone fell back in his chair, dramatically. "The long struggle is
+over, Crittenden. Our fortunes are made!" he cried with his usual
+facetiousness, but by the expression on his face he was really moved and
+dazzled. "Kindly convey to Donna Antonia Pierleoni the assurance of our
+condescending regards and say that if we can spare the time from the
+press of other more important duties...."
+
+Neale said plainly and bluntly, "I'm afraid I'd better excuse myself. I
+have a previous engagement."
+
+The other two turned on him with faces of astonishment. "You're not
+_going_?" cried Livingstone, appalled.
+
+"Why should I break an engagement?" said Neale.
+
+"Why _should_ you?" Livingstone gaped at him. "Only the trifling,
+insignificant reason that Donna Antonia is one of the greatest _grandes
+dames_ in Rome, and Ambrogi one of _the_ coming men in the government."
+
+"Has that anything to do with me?" Neale asked with the sincerest
+incapacity to imagine any reason why it should. He was stricken with
+anticipatory boredom at the idea of having to make talk again with that
+disagreeable old woman.
+
+Livingstone wondered if Crittenden had really understood from whom the
+invitation came. "Don't you remember meeting her? The one with the
+wonderfully high-bred type?"
+
+"Oh, I remember her all right, the old lady with the predatory sharpness
+of beak and claw that's called aristocratic," said Neale, trying to get
+a rise out of Livingstone. That was usually easy enough, but he was now
+too genuinely concerned to defend his standards. "Now, Crittenden," he
+said, laying down his napkin and speaking from his heart, "to seem not
+to wish to continue the acquaintance of a lady who makes a civil
+advance--it simply _isn't done_!"
+
+"Oh, go on!" said Neale, laughing at the idea. "Much she'd care what an
+impecunious American in a pension does or doesn't do!"
+
+Livingstone had recovered himself enough to reflect that Neale's refusal
+would not at all hinder his own acceptance--in fact, on the
+contrary--"Well, well, no matter," he said with a change of manner,
+"perhaps you're right. Without a knowledge of the language,
+conversation in a small group _is_ rather--Five o'clock, did you say,
+Miss Allen?"
+
+"Yes, five," she answered. She went on, with a manner suddenly gay,
+"Perceive the difference in human fate. At five you will be taking tea
+with personages, and I shall be scurrying to take a belated music
+lesson."
+
+"Why at _that_ hour?" inquired Livingstone.
+
+"I've put it off to help Eugenia get settled here. For she's coming
+over, bag and baggage, Josephine and Mlle. Tollet, to live with us for a
+while. Isn't that jolly?"
+
+Livingstone was visibly affected. He flushed a little, and cleared his
+throat before he asked with a careful reassumption of his usual airy
+manner, "Might I perhaps, if it is not indiscreet to ask, be permitted
+to breathe out upon the air a request to be informed what possible
+reason any one can have for leaving the golden bath-tubs (if I may so
+express myself) of the Grand Hotel, and sojourning at the respectable
+but hardly luxurious Pensione Oldham?"
+
+"That's what I asked her last night when she told me. But it seems she's
+just tired of gilded bath-tubs (if I may borrow the expression) and
+wants a change."
+
+"I might say without exaggeration that she would be reasonably sure of
+getting it," surmised Livingstone, looking around him.
+
+Neale could think of nothing to add to the conversation. You never could
+get a word in edgeways when Livingstone was in the room, anyhow. His
+mind was full of something else too. "A music lesson at five." The name
+Visconti was as apt to be in the directory as Pierleoni had been.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At five he saw her go into the little gate in the wall from which during
+the next hour he did not take his eyes. He stood in the doorway of an
+apartment house across the street, and when the _portiere_ came out
+responsibly to ask whom he wished to see, Neale told him in English,
+seriously with a long breath, "The girl I've lost my head over." As he
+accompanied this unintelligible information with a large tip, as his
+clothes were respectable, as he was evidently a foreigner, and had
+moreover a rather strange spark of excitement in his eyes, the
+_portiere_ pocketed the tip, looked with respect at Neale's powerful
+proportions, and went discreetly back to his own affairs.
+
+When she came out at six Neale was struck speechless. He had spent the
+entire hour thinking how she looked, remembering every detail of her
+beauty. And yet it was as though he saw for the first time that noble
+carriage of her head and shoulders, that heart-taking curve of her long
+fine brows, the smooth pale oval of her face, the touching wistfulness,
+the _seeking_ look in her dark eyes. That was before she saw him. When
+he came up to her she broke at once into a laugh, her face sparkling and
+merry, a delicate malice in the mobile lines of her red lips.
+
+"Oh, Mr. Crittenden, I've been wanting to see you! To share a joke with
+you! Such a joke! That invitation to tea, you know. You see, _you_ were
+really the one Signor Ambrogi wants to see, you were the only one Donna
+Antonia spoke of. But I knew it would hurt Mr. Livingstone so, if he
+were left out. I made her understand that. So she said, 'Oh, well, if
+you insist, he can come too.' It's rather--don't you think it
+is?--rather a joke?" She began to laugh again. "Don't you see it, the
+scene when he walks in alone--the good Livingstone in his best clothes,
+so happy and so important, with his best brand of European conversation
+in the show-window--a comparison most likely of Caravaggio's theory of
+treating wall spaces with Correggio's. And what Ambrogi wants to discuss
+is American railroad terminal facilities! Ambrogi is a man of the
+people. He's made his own way up from the bottom. He has probably never
+heard of Correggio in his life. And doesn't see why he should," she
+finished with a peal of laughter.
+
+Neale laughed, but he did not find it as comic as she. "I'd no idea of
+all that," he said uncomfortably. "Perhaps I ought to have gone. It
+rather looks like putting poor old Livingstone in a hole."
+
+"Oh, no; oh, _no_," she reassured him. "They'll be good to him. They may
+look at each other once or twice. But nothing more. He'll never know.
+He _doesn't_, Mr. Livingstone--often he doesn't know."
+
+"Not much, that's a fact," agreed Neale, reflecting that he did not seem
+to either.
+
+She asked him suddenly, "But really why _didn't_ you accept?"
+
+"Do you want to know?" he asked warningly.
+
+"Yes, I really wonder."
+
+"Simplest reason in the world. I didn't like Donna Antonia Pierleoni
+very well. She seemed to me like a bad-tempered, stupid old lady,
+mightily full of her own importance. Why under the sun _should_ I go and
+have tea with such a person?"
+
+"Eh bien...!" she breathed out a long, soft ejaculation of surprise,
+looking at him very queerly.
+
+"You're thinking I'm very rude to say such a thing about a friend of
+yours," he said, hanging his head.
+
+"I'm thinking no such thing at all," she contradicted him. "I don't
+believe you could _imagine_ what I'm thinking."
+
+"You never said a truer thing," Neale admitted ruefully.
+
+"Well, I'll tell you," she said, "though it couldn't be interesting to
+anybody but me. I was thinking that I had never heard anybody before who
+spoke the truth right out about somebody who had wealth and position."
+
+"You mustn't blame me for it!" Neale excused himself. "I'm a regular
+outsider on all that sort of thing--you remember the Sioux Indian in the
+eighteenth century who was taken to see the court at Versailles? How he
+strolled around in his blanket and couldn't make out what all the bowing
+and scraping was about? Well, he and I are about on a level of blank
+ignorance of social distinctions."
+
+"But you don't _wish_ to know," the girl divined, "you don't care if you
+_are_ an outsider. Why, I believe," she said with a little burst of
+astonishment, "I believe you'd rather be an outsider."
+
+He looked apologetic. "That's part of my dumbness, don't you see? I just
+can't conceive why anybody should bother his head about it. _I_ tell
+you," he hit on the right phrase of explanation, "I just don't know any
+better."
+
+"Would you learn?" she pressed him more closely.
+
+"Not if I could run faster than the person who was trying to teach me!"
+he confessed helplessly.
+
+The girl broke into another laugh. There never was anybody who laughed
+like that, with her lips, and her gleaming, dancing eyes, and her
+eyebrows--even her hands had a droll little gesture of delightedly
+giving him up. What in the world had ever made him imagine that her
+expression was pensive or her eyes wistful?
+
+"Do you mind?" he asked, rather uncertain what she was laughing at, and
+hoping it was not at him.
+
+"Oh, I _like_ it!" she told him, heartily. "But it's the very first time
+I ever ran into it. It makes me laugh, it's so unexpected."
+
+"Well, it has its disadvantages," he broke in, seeing an opening to say
+something that had been on his conscience for two days. "It makes you do
+all sorts of unusual and unconventional things without meaning to at
+all. Like my talking to you yesterday morning, for instance, in the
+corridor of the pension, when I hadn't been introduced to you."
+
+She stopped laughing, her face all blank with surprise. "Why, that was
+not unconventional! People at the same pension never wait for
+introductions. And anyhow I'm not a _jeune fille du monde_. I'm just a
+music-student. If you only knew how _some_ people try to take advantage
+of that! Why, what in the world made you think it was not all right?"
+
+"Well, when you didn't say anything about it at the breakfast table,
+when Miss Oldham introduced us, the way you looked as though you'd never
+seen me before. I thought you--I thought I--well, why _didn't_ you
+mention we'd just been talking?"
+
+"Oh--" She remembered the incident. "Why didn't I? Why _should_ I? You
+always hide what you don't have to tell, don't you?"
+
+Neale pondered this negligent axiom for a time, and then said
+hesitatingly, "But if the servants happened to mention it?"
+
+"Oh," she explained quickly, as if mentioning something that went
+without saying, "oh, of course I told the servants not to speak of it."
+
+"You did!" He felt that he was looking through what he had always
+thought was the opaque surface of things, and seeing a great deal more
+going on there than he had dreamed. "But can you count on them?"
+
+She continued to be as surprised at his surprise as he at the whole
+manoeuver. "Oh, of course you can never count on servants unless there's
+something in it for them. I gave them a little tip apiece."
+
+"You _did_!" He could only stupidly repeat his exclamation. "What did
+they say?"
+
+"Why, they found it perfectly natural. They won't mention it--not of
+course unless somebody else tips them more, and I don't see why anybody
+should, do you?"
+
+Neale stood looking at her, a little consternation mingling with his
+astonishment. This was what it was to have been brought up in what
+people called a civilized way, this smooth mastery of concealment ...
+how easy it had been for her, at the breakfast table yesterday, not to
+give the faintest hint she had just been talking animatedly with him;
+and this morning not the faintest hint to Livingstone that she was
+laughing at his expense. Why, that lovely face was just like a mask. You
+hadn't the least idea what was going on behind it.
+
+There was a silence. She was looking up at him with a new expression,
+almost timidly. "You don't like my hiding things?" she asked him, coming
+to a stop. They were near the pension now, standing in the twilight on a
+deserted street.
+
+He aroused himself to shrug his shoulders and answer evasively, "Oh,
+it's not in the least any business of mine."
+
+"But you don't like it?" she insisted, looking straight at him with the
+deadly soft gaze that always made him lose his head entirely. "It's of
+no consequence--none," he murmured. But she still looked at him. He
+tried to think of some other evasive answer, but in the confusion of his
+mind he could not think at all. And he must say _something_. With alarm,
+with horror, he heard himself saying baldly, as he would to a man, to an
+intimate, the literal truth, "Well, no, not so very well, if you really
+want to know."
+
+It was as though he had seen himself swinging an ax at an angle that
+would bring the edge deep into his own flesh. He felt it cut deep and
+bleed. He dared not look at her. He wished to God he had gone on
+straight to Naples.
+
+Somehow he _was_ looking at her. Her face was deeply flushed. She looked
+as though he had struck her in the face. Well, now it was certainly all
+over. He might as well turn around and walk away and never look at her
+again.
+
+He said blunderingly, in a trembling voice, "I'm _so_ sorry! I didn't
+mean to say that. It's no business of mine. I'm awfully ashamed of
+myself. _Please_ forget it. What do _you_ care what I think? I'm nobody,
+nobody at all."
+
+"Why did you say that?" she asked him in a low voice, with a driving
+intensity of accent, as though more than anything else she must have an
+answer from him.
+
+"Well, you asked me," he said in abject misery, aware of the hideous,
+flat futility of such an answer. If only he were an expansive Italian
+now, he could think of some way openly to abase himself, instead of
+standing there callously and dully. "Oh, please don't think of it
+again," he implored her, wishing he could get down on his knees to beg
+her pardon.
+
+She drew a long breath and put her hand to her heart. "It's the first
+time anybody ever told the truth to me, you see," she said faintly, with
+a strange accent. "I ... I'll like it ... I think ... when I can get my
+breath."
+
+To his amazement he saw that she was trying bravely to smile at him.
+
+To his greater amazement he snatched up both her hands and carried them
+roughly and passionately to his lips.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLV
+
+
+During the interminable process of hanging the skirt of that yellow
+dress for Donna Antonia's soiree, Marise kept thinking of the Pantheon.
+The dressmaker's lodging was near there. If they could only be done with
+those draperies she would have time to step into the place which she
+loved best in Rome. She cast a look at herself in the cracked mirror
+which was all the inexpensive little dressmaker could afford. "I'm
+afraid it's higher on the right hip," she said, and settled with a sigh
+to endure more pinnings and unpinnings. "Strange, how important it is
+for the correct playing of Beethoven," she thought ironically, "that the
+drapery on one hip shall not be higher than on the other." She caught a
+glimpse of herself as she thought this, and frowned to see her lip
+curled in a cold, ugly line of distaste. Her thoughts were showing more
+and more on her face. She knew well enough what Mme. Vallery would say.
+She would say, "Don't pretend, dear child, that you don't know perfectly
+well that the kind of dress you wear has a great deal to do with
+everything that anybody cares about, and that the kind of people you
+must depend on to make your music profitable are the kind who care
+nothing about music and altogether about looks."
+
+That was true, of course, but all the same it did make Marise sick to
+have people call a "soiree musicale" what really was a "sartorial
+evening." Of course it was understood that people were hypocritical
+about everything. She granted that they never called anything by its
+right name. But she did wish they would leave music alone! She _cared_
+about that!
+
+"That's right now," she said aloud, looking intently from one hip to the
+other. "Perhaps a _little_ more--no, it will do as it is."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She would have time for the Pantheon after all--ten minutes at least.
+Ten minutes for the Pantheon! She had been three-quarters of an hour
+with the dressmaker! That was her life! She walked in through the gray
+old portico, and, still fretting, her mouth still in the cold, ugly
+line, she stepped through the huge bronze doorway and stood under the
+vault ... "_ah!_"
+
+She always forgot how it affected her or she would come in every day as
+other people said their prayers. It was as though it had been made for
+her and had waited till she came, sore-hearted, to look at it and find a
+passing peace.
+
+She lifted her face to the huge open circle at the center of the dome
+high over her head. Quiet strength came into her heart from those great
+gray stones. Century after century they had enclosed that lovely circle
+of open sky and sunlit cloud and swallow-flights. Every other ancient
+roof in Rome had gone down to heaps of rubbish, save only this,
+steadfast, enduring, letting in the innocent clear light of every day
+down to the heart of the old temple.
+
+Daylight--that was what made the Pantheon a place apart for her--honest
+daylight. How cheap beside it was the theatrical yellow of the windows
+back of the altar in St. Peter's!
+
+She looked about her for a place to sit, and, seeing no chair, took a
+prie-dieu and sank to her knees on it as though she were praying. She
+was praying in her way. She continued to look up at the heaped golden
+clouds, at the infinite depth of the blue, blue sky, at the ineffable
+clarity of the light, pouring in through the great round opening. It
+seemed to smile at her, an honest, loving, reassuring smile that flooded
+her vexed, somber heart as it flooded the somber, ancient building. What
+strength, what strength in those gray stones, to hold together where
+everything else had been broken and dispersed! How beautiful primitive
+things were! How consoling and healing--the hardness and strength of
+stones, the clarity of light, the transparency of the sky! If you could
+only somehow make your life up of such things--strength, sunshine,
+simplicity--and music!
+
+She continued to gaze up, her hands clasped. Yes, she was praying, she
+was praying for a little share of all that.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+What was that absurd Mr. Livingstone saying? Marise glanced up sharply
+from her book and listened. Why, he was talking about Crittenden's--old
+Mr. Crittenden dead and had left that lovely old mountain home to some
+indifferent nephew? To make sure, she put her book down and asked a
+question or two. How strange that she should be talking about _Ashley_
+to people here in a Roman _pension_! Ashley! Crittenden's! Cousin Hetty!
+
+She seemed to have gone again back to her book, but she was not reading.
+She was looking at a sunlit green valley, a white road winding through
+it, a glass-clear little river chanting under willows, low, friendly
+homes under tall elms, ugly old people with plain speech and honest,
+quiet eyes, smiling down lovingly on a skipping, frisking little girl.
+
+    "... I see them shining plain,
+    The happy highways where I went
+    And may not go again."
+
+After a time she closed her book and went up on the roof for a quiet
+moment alone, to go back to Ashley, to look at those blue, remembered
+hills.
+
+But there was some one else on the terrazza. She made out a man's figure
+under the grapevine. Being a girl, she thought impatiently, she was
+obliged to turn back and shut herself up in her stuffy room. It
+continued to be exactly as it had been in Bayonne. The world was one
+great Jeanne, with a nose twitching for scandal. Ashley was far away!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She had watched the horrid little tragedy of the swallow with such
+intensity that when the catastrophe came she almost felt those curved
+claws sink into her own flesh ... _bon Dieu!_ What was that man doing
+climbing out of the window--a madman! No, _he_ had seen the cat, too!
+What a leap! And now how he ran--like a _prestissimo alla forte_
+passage! _Ah!_ He had caught that wretched cat. But the swallow was
+dead. He was too late! How gently he picked it up. Did _men_ ever feel
+compassion for things hurt?
+
+Oh! _oh!_ the swallow had flown out of his hands! How it soared up and
+up! Who would not soar, saved by a strong, kind hand from such terror!
+
+He had turned to come back. It was a good face--but after she had seen
+the expression of the deep-set, steady eyes she could see nothing but
+that. Eyes that looked kind, but not weak. In the world about Marise it
+had been an understood axiom that only weak people were kind.
+
+And what now--eh _bien_! To defend the cat! What did he care about a
+cat?
+
+Yet she saw it at once. What he wanted was justice. Think of any one's
+wanting justice for anything--let alone a _cat_!
+
+No--how quaint, how amusing--one unexpected thing after another!--he
+wasn't a bit conceited about what he'd done--how _funny_ that he was
+embarrassed and shy! Why, no man with Latin blood could have restrained
+himself by any effort of self-control from a little flourish of
+self-satisfaction after such a dashing exploit. He wasn't thinking how
+she must be admiring him. He wasn't thinking of himself at all. How--how
+_nice_--to see him blushing and stammering like a nice, nice boy. She
+could scarcely keep back the laugh of touched and pleased amusement that
+came to her lips.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Eh bien, he might blush easily and be shy, but he knew as well as any
+Latin how to catch at a chance indication from a woman, and how to be at
+the right place at the right hour. When she and il Maestro came out of
+Donna Antonia's door, she saw his tall figure at the end of the street.
+Ridiculous, what a start it gave her! And as soon as Visconti had left
+her there he was beside her with one long bound. Now she would really
+look at him enumeratingly and see what sort of face he had.
+
+But when she looked at him she saw that his eyes were smiling down at
+her, and she went no further than the eyes again.
+
+She began to tell him about Ashley, of which she had dreamed the night
+before, the first time in so long. It had been a good dream, all about
+going home to Cousin Hetty and playing dolls up in the attic again. And
+it was good, how good, to talk to some one about it, the first
+time--why, since she had left Ashley! He seemed like--like what
+Americans meant when they spoke of their "own home folks." Marise had
+never had any such. There was a real reason to give herself the fun of
+telling about Crittenden's too, since this Crittenden was soon to be
+there. She would just let herself go for once!
+
+But how she did run on when she let herself go! She hardly knew herself,
+chattering like this, as fast as her tongue could wag. Chattering and
+laughing and gesticulating--and not able to stop--the foolish way people
+do who have drunk too much champagne, the foolish way a canary does when
+you take the dark cloth from his cage and he sees that the sun is
+shining, the way silly girls do the first time they have a conversation
+with a young man. Yes, that was the way her voice sounded. Why could she
+not stop chattering and laughing? What must he be thinking of her? She
+would stop. She would change the subject. She would look at her watch
+and say that she was late for an engagement and must take a tram-car and
+leave him.
+
+Forming this plan, she led him rapidly through the gate into the
+Borghese Gardens where there are no tram-cars, through which lay the
+longest possible way home. She thought glancingly of this inconsistency,
+but it did not seem very important to her, because she began to be aware
+of something that startled her a little. She was now taking him all over
+the old house at Crittenden's. Yes, it was as though she had taken his
+hand and were leading him through those fine old rooms. She was aware of
+him--like that--as though their hands really did touch, warmly and
+actually touch--and she liked it! She who detested above everything else
+the slightest physical contact with another human body--who hated men
+for only looking at her bare arm as if they would like to touch it.
+
+Oh, well, oh, well, it was nothing--she brushed it aside, it was gone.
+She told herself hastily in a phrase she had heard Mme. Vallery use,
+that a very fine physical specimen of a man exercises a sort of
+unconscious magnetism on every one near him, that has no more real human
+significance than the way a pebble naturally rolls down hill and not up.
+And he certainly was what any one would call a fine physical specimen,
+so tall, so solidly, vigorously built, with such a long, swinging
+step--she glanced at him as she talked--but it wasn't his strength that
+gave him his individuality--it was his _quiet_ look.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They had come out from the Pincian now, stopped and were looking at each
+other, under the ilex trees. From the way he had answered her astonished
+question about China she had known that he was going to say something to
+her, really something that he meant, as people never do, something from
+far underneath the surface. But she had never dreamed that he would so
+throw open the doors of his heart and let her look in to see something
+she had never thought was in any one's heart,--the honest desire to do
+something with his life beyond getting out of it all he could for
+himself. It was like daylight shining down, clear, into dark shadows.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Marise dreaded Donna Antonia's musical entertainments. They were
+nightmares, at least for a girl with no recognized definite rung on the
+social ladder as her own, at least for a paid entertainer who was paid
+not only to play a Beethoven sonata, but to look well, to add to the
+social brilliancy of the evening, to make up for Donna Antonia's
+prodigious inertia by rushing about, seeing that everything went
+smoothly, that the servants did not sequester half the ices, that each
+guest had some one to talk to. If she could only come in, play her
+Beethoven and go away again!--That was really all she was paid for. No,
+of course the pay for the rest of what she did was Donna Antonia's
+"taking her up," her familiarity in the great house, those occasional
+condescending "cards for her personal friends," all that Donna Antonia
+could do for a young pianist's future. Every one told her that her
+fortunes were made, now that Donna Antonia had taken a fancy to her,
+every one expected her as a matter of course to make the most of her
+great opportunity, to flatter Donna Antonia, to run briskly on her
+errands, to accept with apparent pleasure the amused, patronizing
+friendliness of a capricious great lady who on some days was caressing
+and petting, like a person with a pet cat, and on others was cold and
+distant, like a person who has no use for cats. She was not only to play
+for Donna Antonia whenever she was asked, but sit on a cushion, let her
+hair be stroked and talk intimately with Donna Antonia of things Marise
+would much prefer not to know about; or on another day to be willing to
+dash out in a cab to get a delayed dress from the dressmaker's because
+the maid was busy with hair-dressing; or, as on this evening, act the
+part of helpful daughter of the house, when her real position (which all
+the guests knew perfectly well how to make her feel) was that of
+temporary toy and amusement. What really underlay all that advice to
+make the most of this great opportunity was a doubt whether she was
+genuinely gifted enough to make her own way by her talent, was the
+feeling that the best way to make up for deficiencies in her musical
+equipment was by accumulating personal influences of social importance
+on her side. The "great opportunity" which Visconti's other pupils so
+envied her was nothing more or less than making the acquaintance of
+these wealthy, important, unmusical people, and being more adroit in
+making use of them than they of her. This was perfectly understood all
+around--especially by the men watching to find a weak spot, who looked
+at her admiringly and found graceful things to say about her playing and
+her arms and her hands and her hair and everything else they dared
+mention; especially by the old Ambrogi, with his brutal certainty that
+as long as he was mounting in power, any woman--oh, they made her
+_sick_!--Donna Antonia and Ambrogi! Such _old_ people, with bags under
+their eyes and flabby necks! And they really didn't care a sou about
+each other--he wanted only to make use of the position that Donna
+Antonia's birth gave her, and she only wanted to have the prestige of
+owning a politician; or perhaps the prestige of showing that in spite of
+bags under her eyes she was still not too old for that sort of thing.
+
+Before she ran up to make sure that no guests were stranded in the
+library without being served with ices, Marise looked cautiously into
+the dark corner on the landing to make sure that Ambrogi was not there.
+Horrid--an old man like that who could not keep his hands off women
+thirty years younger than he! But as for that, the old Visconti himself
+could not keep his off women fifty years younger than he! As she sped
+swiftly along the upper hall, a crocus-colored Atalanta in her
+pale-yellow dress, she was saying to herself, "Oh, well, that's the way
+men are, none of them can keep their hands off women"--all except
+self-conscious posing marionettes like that absurd Livingstone, or men
+like her father, who took it out in caring about what they ate and
+drank. How harmless that was--in comparison! How _nice_ it was in
+comparison! Had she ever been impatient with Father because he cared so
+much about what he ate and drank? She felt a little wave of affection
+for him. She really must try to get back to Paris for a few days, and
+make sure that Biron was keeping up to the mark.
+
+There, the last person was served. And everybody had somebody to talk
+to. Oh, how tired she was, how sick of all this! This was a soiree
+musicale! These were the people on whom she was to count for musical
+success. She was supposed to be here to play Beethoven! She broke into a
+nervous laugh at the idea.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Of course she had known that Mr. Livingstone would be enchanted at the
+invitation from Donna Antonia. And of course Mr. Crittenden would be
+too. Anybody would. To have made such an impression on Ambrogi--it was
+remarkable!
+
+But he wasn't enchanted. He said he wasn't going. What under the sun did
+that mean? Did he think he could get an invitation to dinner if he held
+off from this one to tea? Yes, probably that was it. Well, she wasn't
+sure, that was the way to work Ambrogi. Still you never could tell.
+Perhaps the boldness of it might take Ambrogi's fancy.
+
+How funny, funny, funny, the head Ambrogi would show at the tea-table
+when poor Livingstone turned up alone with that self-conscious,
+naively-sophisticated manner of his, so proud of seeming a man of the
+world. And Ambrogi despising men of the world for imbeciles! She would
+tell Mr. Crittenden about it, when she next saw him, and make him laugh
+too.
+
+But when she told him he did not laugh--not so very heartily. He seemed
+concerned about Livingstone--of all people! Was it possible that he
+_liked_ Mr. Livingstone? Could it be he was standing up for him whether
+he liked him or not, as he had for the cat?
+
+And now what a queer question he was asking her--about why she had said
+nothing at the breakfast table about having already met him. Why, how
+naive that would have been! Why should you? And he kept on talking about
+it as though he saw something in it she did not. He was looking at her
+very queerly, not at all admiringly. How strange it seemed to have any
+man look at a woman and not pretend at least to be admiring
+her--strange--and rude--and uncomfortable! She must make him _say_
+something. He'd be forced then to smile and turn it off--whatever it
+was, with a pretty phrase that pretended to be admiring.
+
+Oh--horrible! How could any one be so rude! Why, it was as though he had
+struck a blow at her! Brutal! And why? Why? What harm had she done him?
+Why did he want to hurt her? He was cruel! She had not known any one
+could be so cruel and hard--hard as a stone (where was it she lately had
+seen great hard stones?).
+
+What could you do when some one was rude to you? What did any one do who
+was so affronted?
+
+Beyond the dark fury of her amazement, her resentment, her anger, her
+bewilderment, a light began to break slowly like a distant dawn. As she
+looked at him, stammering, remorseful, horribly unhappy, aghast at what
+he had said, but never once dreaming that he might simply unsay it, she
+became aware of what had really happened:
+
+She had asked him a question and he had told her the truth.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLVI
+
+
+"This is the life!" thought Livingstone many times during the next
+weeks. He had not enjoyed himself so thoroughly since he came to Europe
+to live. He was now provided, as he expressed it, with all the cultural
+advantages of Europe and all the social atmosphere of an American
+summer-resort; for Miss Mills seemed to wish to try, along with pension
+life, the unchaperoned familiarity of real American girl-life. Mlle.
+Vallet, her old school-teacher, companion-dragon was unceremoniously
+left behind, or sent out by herself to do the conscientious sight-seeing
+which took all her evenings to record in her diary.
+
+Miss Mills did sight-seeing too. The tacit understanding which grew up
+at once was that they were all four seriously to see Rome and to make up
+for the very haphazard way in which heretofore they had been profiting
+by their situation. It was certainly, thought Livingstone, a most
+agreeable way to do sight-seeing, in the company of two such
+good-looking girls, one of them with money to burn. Of course he could
+have wished, they all would have preferred, some one less lumpish than
+that great, grim Crittenden to complete their quartet. But not every
+American is capable, thought Livingstone, tying his necktie in the
+morning and looking at himself in the glass, not every American is
+_capable_ of taking on European polish. And of an American business-man
+what could you expect? Livingstone admired and did his best to imitate
+the exquisite good-breeding of the two young ladies, which kept them
+from ever showing the slightest impatience with Crittenden. As far as
+they were concerned it would have been impossible for Crittenden to
+guess that he was not in the same class with the other three. An
+occasional quick look of astonishment from Miss Allen when Crittenden
+made one of those crude speeches of his, and a recurring expression of
+quiet fatigue on Miss Mills's face when they had had a little too large
+a dose of Crittenden were the only traces of their real feelings which
+showed on the surface.
+
+That famous soiree at Donna Antonia Pierleoni's had seemed to be the
+start of all this agreeable new period of sociability. Livingstone
+abhorred fatuous men, but it really was rather a remarkable coincidence
+that after seeing him for the first long talk they had ever had, Miss
+Mills should at once have decided to come to the _pension_ where he was
+staying. She had never had a real opportunity to know him before that,
+Mlle. Vallet always shadowing her around, the conversation always
+stiffly in French in deference to Mlle. Vallet's feelings. That, after
+her first real impression of him, she should immediately have moved into
+a room three doors down the corridor from his--any man might be pardoned
+for considering it marked, really marked. It quite fluttered Livingstone
+with the idea of the possibilities involved--although he scorned
+fortune-hunters above all other men. It was not her fortune, it was her
+wonderful little person that he admired, the perfection of the finish of
+every detail of her body and mind. Livingstone often felt a sincere
+reverence as he looked at her beautiful hair and skin and clothes and
+hands and feet that had cost--oh, nobody knew how much to bring them to
+that condition. And her accomplishments, her exquisite French and pure
+Italian, her knowledge of art-critics, and which Luini was considered
+authentic and which spurious! The harmonious way she sat down or stood
+or sat at table! There was a product of European civilization at its
+finest! How crude and coarse-grained the usual striding, arm-swinging
+American girl would seem beside her, like a rough, splintery board
+beside a finished piece of marquetry. Even Miss Allen, who was, one
+might say, carelessly and indifferently European simply because she
+happened to have been brought up in France, often seemed rough and
+abrupt compared to her. There was nothing of the deliberate, finished
+self-consciousness about Miss Allen's manners, which Livingstone had
+learned to admire as the finest flower of sophistication. It was true
+she really did play the piano very brilliantly. But still she had to
+make her living somehow! One could be reasonably sure with her good
+looks that she was counting on using the concert platform, if indeed she
+got to it, as an angling station from which to fish for wealthy
+eligibles. Crittenden needn't fool himself that she would ever look at
+_him_, with that ridiculous little inheritance he had played up so, on
+his arrival in Rome!
+
+Not that Crittenden seemed to be trying to make an impression! Quite the
+contrary. Was there anybody who, more than that poor fellow, seemed
+possessed to put his worst foot foremost? If they hadn't been pitiable,
+Livingstone could have laughed at the breaks Crittenden constantly made,
+at the way he was everlastingly showing himself up as entirely an
+outsider to their world.
+
+That evening, when they fell to talking of their favorite dishes, was a
+sample. As a parlor amusement they had been challenging each other to
+construct imaginary meals such as would be perfection if you could only
+get them together,--sole frite from the Ambassadeurs; roast duck with
+the inimitable sauce of Foyot's; Asti Spumanti, the _real_; Brie
+straight from the only farm in the Seine-et-Marne that made it right ...
+all that sort of mouth-watering, exquisite imaginings. When Crittenden's
+turn came, had he risen to the occasion? Had he made the slightest
+effort to make a decent appearance? No, he had said, "Oh, count me out
+on this. I have a regular hired-man's appetite, and if it begins to
+fail, I go out and run a mile and then I can eat anything!"
+
+Livingstone tried his best to cover up such breaks with hasty, tactful
+improvisations of talk, but he had noticed the amazed stare with which
+Miss Allen had received this particular revelation of Crittenden's
+crudity.
+
+Miss Mills had stared, too, or as near to it as she ever came, over in
+the Capitoline, when she had asked Crittenden if he happened to know
+anything about Constantius Chlorus, at whose ugly face they were just
+then looking. Crittenden had answered in that coarse, would-be comic
+jargon he occasionally affected, that he didn't remember reading a
+thing about him, but if there was anything in physiognomy he must have
+been a ward-heeler who had sandbagged his way to the head of the
+machine. Miss Allen had not been able to avoid laughing at him outright
+then, and Miss Mills's look had been all too eloquent.
+
+But the worst was the pig-headed provinciality of his attitude about
+picture-galleries, his avowal of a regular commercial-traveler's
+ignorance of paintings and his refusal to try to learn to appreciate
+them. "There are only, so far as I can make out," he said, "about a
+dozen canvases in all Europe that I really _like_ to look at. And you
+don't catch me trailing around till my feet drop off, looking at all the
+thousands of second-raters that give me a pain. Why should I?"
+
+Livingstone was so shocked and grieved by the crassness of such a
+statement that he really longed to take Crittenden in hand. He knew so
+well how to learn to like pictures, because (although he would not have
+admitted it to any one) he had begun as crassly as Crittenden. He _knew_
+what to do; he could tell Crittenden step by step how to pull himself up
+to a higher level, because he had done it himself. You read esthetic
+books, lots of them, and all the descriptions of paintings you could lay
+your hands on, and all the stories you could find in Vasari or any one
+else about the lives of the painters (Livingstone had a whole shelf of
+books of that sort that were _fascinating_ reading--as amusing as La Vie
+Parisienne)--and you read what Ruskin and Symonds had thought about this
+or that canvas, and what Berenson's researches had proved about its
+authenticity. If you could, you took the book right along with you to
+the gallery, reading about the picture as you looked at it; and you kept
+at it till you _did_ see in it what people said was there. That was the
+way to form your taste! Even Crittenden could get somewhere along those
+lines if he tried.
+
+But he seemed to have no interest in anything but history and Michael
+Angelo; Crittenden was perversely fond of dragging them over to the
+Sistine Chapel till their heads were ready to drop off with the
+neck-breaking fatigue of staring up at those sprawling figures.
+
+There was, however, one advantage about the expedition to the Sistine
+Chapel. They were always so fearfully tired afterwards that they took a
+cab back to the Piazza Venezia and had ices together at a cafe. It was
+the first time since he had lived in Europe that Livingstone had been
+able to walk into a cafe with a handsome woman and watch the other men
+stare. That was a European manoeuver which he had not somehow been able
+to accomplish, a tailor-suited, low-heeled, sailor-hatted American
+girl-tourist with her Baedecker in her ungloved hand, being by no means
+a figure to make other men stare. Of course it was perfectly evident
+that Miss Mills and Miss Allen were only nice girls (he hoped it was not
+_too_ apparent that they were only Americans), but they were handsome
+and Miss Mills was always stunningly dressed. It was next best to what
+Livingstone had always secretly longed to do, as, eating his frugal
+demi-glace, he had watched a medaled Italian officer or monocled,
+heavy-eyed man-about-town sitting opposite a conspicuous woman-de-luxe
+with high-heeled slippers, a provocative gown, and a huge hat shading
+her black-rimmed, roving eyes, the only movable feature of her
+spectacular face, painted and powdered to a hierarchic immobility.
+
+That was the life! That was what Livingstone would love to do! Thus to
+_afficher_ yourself with a really bad woman, how deliciously un-American
+and cosmopolitan! On the other hand, those women were said to be very
+expensive and hard to handle, rapacious, without the slightest scruple
+as to how they emptied your pockets. Livingstone was in mortal terror of
+letting one of them get any hold on him and his tiny resources. He knew
+he would be no match for her. And anyhow all he wanted of one was to
+sit, jeweled and painted and conspicuously non-respectable, across a
+table from him at a cafe, so that other men would look at him as he now
+looked at other men. He often wished he could hire one just to do that.
+
+However, in the meantime, it was a very pleasant pastime (and might, by
+George, _lead_ to something, who knew!) to sit across the table from two
+merely nice but really very good-looking and well-dressed girls and
+listen to their innocent prattle.
+
+And although they were Americans, they had lived abroad so much that
+they had many European ways which Livingstone found very fascinating and
+superior. For instance, they were quite at home in Roman churches, and
+whenever they went to listen to special music in some chapel the girls
+had a quick, easy capacity for dropping to their knees in a quite
+unself-conscious way that made them to Livingstone's eyes fit right in
+with the picture. If it had not been for Crittenden, whose stiff
+provincial American joints never dreamed of bending, he would have knelt
+beside the girls. Not that he _believed_ in any of the religious part of
+it! But it was so European to go down on your knees in public. If he
+did, he was sure that people around them would think that he was a
+member of one of those ultra-smart English Catholic families.
+
+Crittenden always was the great, hulking obstacle in the way of any
+flexible and gracious Europeanizing of their lives. Livingstone had seen
+the two girls recoil time and time again, shocked by his bruskness. And
+it was not only to women that he was brusk. He had occasionally an
+insufferable way of treating any one who approached him with a civil
+question, as when Livingstone on a sudden recollection had said to him,
+"Oh, but by the way, Crittenden, how about your being only five days in
+Rome?"
+
+"_How_ about it?" Crittenden had repeated as though he'd never heard of
+it before.
+
+"Why, you said you had to return at once--that inheritance, you
+know--you said you had only five days."
+
+Crittenden had had the impertinence to stare at him hard and say coolly,
+"Oh, you must be mistaken about that."
+
+Civilized people didn't have such manners!
+
+And that other time, the evening when he had stayed up late on the
+terrazza to smoke with Crittenden, when he had asked, "But all men of
+the world agree that nothing is so full of flavor as an affair with a
+married woman. You, no doubt, Crittenden, have also had your
+experiences, eh?"
+
+What sort of an answer did Crittenden consider it, to burst out with
+that sudden great horse-laugh as though Livingstone had been telling him
+a funny story? The man simply had no experience or understanding--a raw,
+crude, bumptious provincial, that's what _he_ was! One who had not even
+sense enough to know how pitifully narrow his life was.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLVII
+
+
+Coming to know a new acquaintance was, thought Marise, as though you
+stood back of a painter, watching him stroke by stroke paint the
+portrait of a sitter whom you could not see.
+
+Of course Mr. Neale Crittenden, like every one else, was physically
+quite visible, and, like every one else, entirely hidden by this
+apparent visibility. What you saw of people's surfaces and what was
+really there were two very different matters--Marise had learned this
+axiom if no other. What she saw of the newcomer was quite startlingly,
+disturbingly attractive to her. All the more reason to draw back warily
+and look carefully before she took a step forward. When on seeing him
+for the first time in the morning, or coming on him unexpectedly
+towering up above the crowd in some narrow, dark Roman street, she felt
+the ridiculous impulse to run to meet him like a child, she told herself
+impatiently that it was due to mere physical elements--his health, the
+great strength which made itself felt in his quietest movements, and a
+certain expression of his deep-set eyes which might very well not have
+the slightest connection with his personality, which might be a mere
+trick of bone-structure, the way his eyes were set in his head perhaps.
+They chose the show priests for the great festivals at Lourdes for some
+such casual gifts of physical magnetism.
+
+No, there was nothing whatever to be known from surfaces, Marise told
+herself. The subject of the portrait was always really quite invisible
+behind the thick, thick screen of his physical presence. All that was
+safe to do was to watch the strokes by which one by one he himself
+painted his own portrait.
+
+Marise often told herself all this as she was hurrying down the corridor
+to be the first person in the breakfast room--the first, that is, after
+Mr. Crittenden, who was a very early riser.
+
+
+I
+
+To begin with there was the dashing outline sketch of the first two or
+three days when, in a few bold lines, he had seemed to set up the figure
+on the canvas; the rescue of the swallow; justice for the cat; that
+first walk and homesick talk about Ashley, and at the end those
+stammering words of his which had seemed to show--Oh, that had now
+turned unreal to Marise! He couldn't have said that--and meant it!
+
+Then the soiree, the impression of force and originality he had made on
+the people he had met there, her natural certainty that he must of
+course have calculated that impression in order to profit by it--and
+then--at this recollection, Marise always laughed silently at her own
+astonishment when he had called Donna Antonia "a bad-tempered, stupid
+old woman." Donna Antonia certainly was that, and every one knew it. But
+nobody else would dream of saying it out loud, any more than they would
+give their honest impression of the ritual of a secret society.
+
+
+II
+
+And then, just when she had been so drawn towards him by his strength
+and kindness--that brusk blow in the face. Marise had felt many times
+before this a thin, keen blade slipped into her back by a hand that took
+care to be invisible. But never before had she encountered open
+roughness. It was staggering! Breath-taking! Always, as she remembered
+it, her first thought was, as it had been then, a horrified wonder why
+any one should wish to hurt her. Always afterward with the memory of his
+dreadful, stammering distress, his remorseful kissing of her hands, his
+helpless inability to unsay what he had said, she knew once more, as she
+had known then, that she had encountered something new, something
+altogether different from any human relationship she had ever known, a
+relationship where you did not say things in order to please or
+displease people, or to make this or that impression, but because you
+thought they were true. That was fine--oh, yes, that was fine. But it
+was like dashing yourself against hard stones--it hurt! And it made her
+fear the hand that had hurt her. She watched it, and sometimes all but
+put out her fingers to touch it, to see if it were really so strong and
+hard as it looked. She feared it. She envied its strength.
+
+
+III
+
+That had been a stroke of the portrait-painting brush which frightened
+her to remember. But there were others that made her laugh, like the
+time, off in a hill-village in the Roman country-side, when he stepped
+into a little shop to buy a box of cigarettes, and came back with a
+great paper-bag of the villainous, hay-like tobacco issued to the
+Italian army, unsmokable by any but an Italian private soldier. To their
+amazed laughter, he had replied sheepishly, with a boy's grin of
+embarrassment that the little daughter of the shop-keeper, ambitiously
+doing her best to wait on a customer, had misunderstood his order and
+had weighed it out and tied it up before he realized what she was doing.
+"I was afraid if I let them know she'd made a mistake her father would
+jump on her. Fathers do seem to do such a tall amount of scolding
+anyhow. And she was so set up over having made a sale all by herself."
+
+Marise had laughed with the others over that, and laughed when she
+thought of it--but her laugh often ended abruptly in bewilderment--how
+was it he could be so kind, so tenderly kind to an Italian child he had
+never seen before, and so sternly rough with her? That rankled; and
+then, when she had had time to think, she recognized it, all over again,
+with the same start of astonishment, for the truth-telling she had never
+encountered.
+
+
+IV
+
+Mr. Livingstone had said something sentimental about man's love being
+based on the instinct to cherish and protect, and woman's on the desire
+to be cherished and protected. Eugenia had acquiesced; Marise, who hated
+talk, sentimental or otherwise, about love, had said nothing. But Mr.
+Crittenden had protested, "Oh, Livingstone, you've got that twisted.
+That's the basis of love between group-ups and children. You don't
+insult your equals trying to 'protect them'! Nothing would get me more
+up in the air than to have somebody 'protect' me from life. Why should I
+want to do it to anybody else? Protect your grandmother! A woman wants
+to be let alone to take her chances in life as much as a man!"
+
+
+V
+
+They were crossing the Forum, on their way to a stroll in the shady
+walks of the Palatine. From the battered, shapeless ruins of what had
+been the throbbing center of the world rose suffocatingly to Marise's
+senses the effluvium of weariness and decay. She always felt that Rome's
+antiquity breathed out upon her a cold, dusty _taedium vitae_.
+
+She thought of this, turning an attentive face and inattentive ear to
+Mr. Livingstone, who was trying to make out from his guide-book where
+the Temple of Mars had stood.
+
+"You're holding that map wrong end to," said Mr. Crittenden.
+
+"It's too hot to stand here in the sun," said Eugenia very sensibly.
+
+They passed on, over heaps of ancient refuse, into the ruins of the
+myriad-celled palace of the Caesars, silent now, not an echo left of all
+the humming, poisonous intrigues that had filled it full.
+
+"Here," said Mr. Livingstone, stopping in a vaulted, half-wrecked
+chamber, ostensibly to comment on things, really to get his breath after
+the climb, "here in such a room, only lined and paved with priceless
+marbles, and hung with Asiatic silks, here you lay at ease in an
+embroidered toga on a gold-mounted couch, and clapped your hands for a
+slave to bring you your Falernian wine, cooled with snow from Monte
+Cavo,--that was the life!"
+
+"I thought it was in the Arabian Nights you clapped your hands for a
+slave," said Eugenia.
+
+"In Rome you probably cracked a whip," suggested Mr. Crittenden. "But I
+bet you a nickel it didn't make any difference _what_ you did, your
+slave came when he got good and ready and brought you another kind of
+wine from the one you ordered--and lukewarm at that. They'd probably
+used up all the Monte Cavo snow to cool the wine down in the slaves'
+hall."
+
+"What possible basis have you for saying all _that_?" cried Mr.
+Livingstone, exasperated.
+
+"That's the way things are! Folks that try to use slave labor always get
+what's coming to them in the way of poor service."
+
+"Oh, but in Rome you had the right to kill him!" cried Mr. Livingstone,
+jealous of his rights.
+
+"Sure you could kill him--and in New York you can fire your
+stenographer. What good would that do you? You couldn't get intelligent
+service out of the next slave either, unless you had him educated to be
+intelligent, and if you did that he'd be such a rare bird that you'd
+save him for something better than standing around waiting for you to
+clap your hands at him. He'd be running your business for you."
+
+"Oh, pshaw, Crittenden, why be so heavy-handed and literal! Why
+wet-blanket _every_ imaginative fancy?"
+
+"Oh, I didn't realize you were imaginatively fancying," said Mr.
+Crittenden, laughing. "I thought you were trying imaginatively to
+reconstruct the life of ancient Rome. And I was trying to do my share."
+
+They passed through dusky, ill-smelling passages, clambered over a pile
+of rubble and stood in twilight at the foot of a long, steep, vaulted
+stairway. Far up, like a bright roof to its obscurity, were green
+leaves, blue sky, bright sunshine. All that sparkling, clear radiance
+seemed to heighten the boyish fit of high spirits that had entered into
+the usually rather silent Mr. Crittenden. He pointed up to the stairway
+and cried, "From antiquity to the present! I'll meet you at the top!"
+and off he went, bounding up the high, steep steps two at a time, as if
+his vitality had suddenly swept him away in the need for violent
+exertion.
+
+When the two girls emerged later, "Ladies, allow me to introduce to you
+the present day," he said, calling to their attention with a sweep of
+his hat the dark, sumptuous green of the cypresses and pines, the
+splendor of the golden-blue sky, the fresh sprinkled smell of the earth
+on the shady paths. "Not so bad for poor little old actuality, is it?"
+
+The girls sank breathlessly on a bench. Livingstone appeared, slowly
+hoisting himself up the steps, one at a time, and puffing. Mr.
+Crittenden walked around and around restlessly, as though that upward
+swoop had been but an appetizer to his desire to let out the
+superabundance of his strength. He looked, Marise thought, like a
+race-horse fretting and pawing and stepping sideways. How could he have
+that eager look in this dusty cemetery of human strength and eagerness?
+
+Glancing up at his face, she saw it lighted and shining with
+amusement--what seemed like tender, touched amusement. He was looking at
+something down the path. Marise looked with him and saw a workingman,
+one of the gardeners, digging in the earth of a rose-bed. Beside him
+capered and staggered a little puppy, a nondescript little brown cur
+with neither good looks nor distinction, but so enchanted with life,
+with itself, with the soft, good earth over which it pranced that to see
+it was, thought Marise, like playing Weber's "Perpetual Motion." As she
+looked it tried to run in a wavering circle around its master, tripped
+over its own feet, tumbled head over heels in a soft ball, clumsily
+struggled up and sat down to draw breath, a pink tongue hanging out of
+its wide, laughing mouth, its soft young eyes beaming with mirth at its
+own adventures. Its master glanced down and addressed some clucking,
+friendly greeting to it, which threw it into an agony of joy. Wagging
+its tail till its whole body wagged, it flung itself adoringly at its
+master's trousers, pawing and wriggling in ecstasy.
+
+Mr. Crittenden caught Marise's eye, and shared with her in a silent
+smile his delighted sense of the little animal's absurdity. "Perhaps if
+we looked down from this height and got a bird's-eye view we could
+settle that point," said Eugenia to Mr. Livingstone, who was still
+concerned about the location of the Temple of Mars. "There's a fine view
+from the wall at the end of this path."
+
+They strolled together to the wall, and Mr. Livingstone spread out on it
+his plan of the Forum.
+
+Marise looked down dispiritedly at the mutilated pillars and broken
+pieces of carved marble, and most of all at the bits of old Roman
+flagged paving. Nothing gave her a more acrid sense of futility than
+those old, old flag-stones over which so many thousands of human feet
+had eagerly, blindly sought their journey's end. Had any of them ever
+found what they sought? She murmured under her breath, "Isn't it all
+horribly, horribly depressing? Doesn't it make you feel all those
+endless centuries bowing your shoulders down to the earth--why not now
+as well as later?"
+
+She had stated it as she felt it, a truism, what every one must feel.
+Eugenia and Livingstone accepted it as such. "Yes, I often feel as
+ancient as the stones," said Eugenia pensively.
+
+Mr. Crittenden put in hastily, "Not on your life, it doesn't depress me!
+Why should it? You don't seem to realize, Miss Allen, what an immense
+difference there is between us! I never really took it in before
+myself--not until this visit to Rome. But it's immense! Enormous! Let me
+tell you about it. They're dead and we are alive! Alive!"
+
+Marise looked up at him, thinking that in truth she had never felt any
+one so alive. He bent his eyes to hers as Livingstone, with a little
+gesture of giving him up, drew Eugenia to the corner of the wall and
+traced lines on his map.
+
+Mr. Crittenden went on whimsically, "I don't believe you ever fully
+considered the great importance of that point, Miss Allen. It came home
+to me all over again as I was looking at that puppy. Millions of dogs
+have lived and died before him; but by some amazing miracle life is just
+as fresh a wonder to him as if he were the first puppy ever born into
+the world! It's incredible! I never realized it till I struck all these
+relics of dead-and-gone men--it's incredible how none of them, not all
+the millions of them, can tarnish the newness of my own life for me! I
+can go my own new path over those old paving-stones--me and the
+puppy--and you--and all of us!"
+
+Marise laughed a little, still looking at him, listening to something he
+was not saying, which played about his bold, clear face like sunlight
+and shone on her as warmly.
+
+Now a spark of wildness came into his eyes, half laughingly reckless,
+half desperately in earnest. "You saw what happened to the puppy when
+its master threw it a kind word? Well, I haven't the gift of wriggling
+all over so wonderfully as that, and I haven't any tail to wag, but when
+you look at me like that, Miss Allen, I...."
+
+"We _think_ the third line of pillar-stumps is the side wall of the
+Basilica Julia," said Eugenia, stepping towards them, the guide-book in
+her hand.
+
+
+VI
+
+They were standing under the great gray dome of the Pantheon, innocent
+clear daylight flooding all the great gray building.
+
+"Oh, isn't it beautiful, their idea of leaving the circle open to the
+sky?" Marise burst out. "Doesn't it make our dark, modern churches with
+their imitation Gothic stained-glass seem cheap and affected? Every
+church all over the world ought to be like this, and then we human
+beings might be fit to live with."
+
+Livingstone put in a horrified protest, "What! Miss all that exquisite
+twilight that makes a church a church? I was just thinking how fiercely,
+literally bright this noonday sun is. Daylight leaves no mystery,
+nothing to your imagination."
+
+Marise turned confidently to Mr. Crittenden as an ally. She was sure, as
+sure of anything in the world, that he must be on her side. But he
+hedged and said neutrally, "Oh, great Scott! It would be a horrible act
+of tyranny to have every church like this. There are lots of folks
+who'd hate it. They have a right to have some things their way, haven't
+they?"
+
+"Oh, I _didn't_ think _you'd_ take that side," said Marise, feeling
+betrayed and longing for a sweeping, exclusive affirmation to match her
+own. He so often hedged, it seemed to her, wanted to qualify statements.
+Oh--it came to her with a start--that was another form of truth-telling!
+He was trying to make his statements express the truth, rather than his
+feelings!
+
+He now said, judicially, "As far as I personally go, it depends what I'm
+looking at. If I'm looking at a very fine statue or something that seems
+really beautiful to me, I want as good a light as possible to see it in.
+If--if I should ever have any personal happiness in my life, I'd want
+daylight to see it by. But when it's a question of looking at the
+interior decoration of the average modern church, why, the more mystery
+and twilight the better."
+
+This made Marise laugh. He often made her laugh, more than she had ever
+laughed before. And yet he never told funny stories.
+
+He now went on, "I suppose it depends on your opinion of what there is
+to see. If you think your imagination can do better for you than
+reality, of course you want a lot left to it, and plenty of dark corners
+for it to work in. Just now, it seems to me that reality is so much
+beyond anything my poor, starved imagination could have done...."
+
+He did not look at Marise as he spoke. His tone was perfectly matter of
+fact. She wondered what the other two made out of it. She knew very well
+what she made out of it.
+
+
+VII
+
+They were sitting on the terrazza in the evening, with several other
+people from the _pension_, having their coffee sociably around the big
+round table and looking out over the roofs and domes and church-towers
+of Rome. The conversation had been chit-chat, as was usual during
+meal-times, and Mr. Crittenden had contributed little to it. His
+massive capacity for silence when he had nothing special to say was a
+constant source of wonder to Marise. Not to "make talk," even very
+commonplace talk, was a betrayal of a tacitly accepted code as much as
+calling Donna Antonia a "bad-tempered, stupid old woman." She had been
+taught that it was one of the pretenses which must be kept up under
+penalty of the ruin of all civilized intercourse. She envied and
+resented his freedom from it.
+
+She addressed herself directly to him now to force him out of his
+reflective taciturnity. "Do you agree to that, Mr. Crittenden?"
+
+"To what?" he asked, making no decent pretense of being abashed because
+he had not been following the conversation.
+
+"Why, Mr. Livingstone was saying that artists are the only human beings
+to be envied, the only human beings who really _live_, intensely."
+
+"They're the only ones who talk about it," he offered as his variation
+on the dictum. "That's what an artist _is_, isn't he? Somebody who
+happens to be put together so that it kills him to keep anything to
+himself. He just goes up in smoke, if he can't run and tell the world
+what he has seen, or tasted, or handled, or got hit by, and the way it
+made him feel. I admire and revere artists. They certainly do a lot for
+the rest of us. But I don't see any reason to think that they feel
+things any more intensely than anybody else, and I don't see anything so
+terribly enviable in their lot. There seems to be a lot of hard work
+about it, if you judge by the way they carry on. I don't see why you
+can't enjoy beauty and feel tragedy, even if you keep your mouth shut.
+You can feel it just the same, can't you? I'm sure I've felt things
+about a million times more intensely than anything that ever got into a
+book. And I can't say I'm any less satisfied with my fate because I'm
+not thriftily trying to use those same feelings as raw material for an
+art."
+
+Marise was laughing outrageously by the time he had finished, partly at
+what he said, partly at Mr. Livingstone's scandalized expression. She
+was ashamed of the way she laughed over Mr. Crittenden's teasing of
+poor unconscious Mr. Livingstone.
+
+"You don't understand, Crittenden, you don't get my point at all.
+There's something--something--" Livingstone brought it out with a
+remnant of the provincial self-consciousness before fine phrases which
+he so deplored, "there's something god-like, divine, in being an artist,
+_creating_ something."
+
+Mr. Crittenden moved from his negligent pose, tightened up a little.
+"Oh, if you mean by 'artist' a class broad enough to take in everybody
+who creates something, yes, of course, they're the only ones who really
+live. That's what most of us are trying to get a chance to do, trying to
+create a little order out of chaos. But that's pretty nearly the whole
+ant-heap of the human race, isn't it? Except the leisure classes."
+
+Mr. Livingstone was in despair of making the Philistine understand.
+"It's something we have so little of in America, it's hard for an
+American to recognize its existence," he murmured to the company in
+extenuation of his compatriot's denseness.
+
+Mr. Crittenden sat up straighter. "I used to make my living buying and
+selling lumber in the New England states," he said, addressing himself
+for once to the company, "and on one of my trips I met a man in a narrow
+mountain valley up there who was a creator if there ever was one. He had
+started life as a mechanic, left school and went to work at sixteen, in
+a shop filled with soulless cogs and bolts and screws and springs. And
+his creative instinct rose up and seized on those things as the
+appointed raw stuff for his creation. When I saw him he was the head of
+one of the biggest metal-working factories in the country, a good many
+hundred men working for him, and devoted to him, turning out tools that
+have simplified the tasks of mechanics the world around. I never saw a
+happier man. I never saw a human life more completely fulfilled. Yes,
+you're right, Livingstone. The creators are the enviable ones."
+
+"That wasn't in the least what I said, or meant!" protested Mr.
+Livingstone warmly.
+
+"It happens to be fresh in my mind," said Mr. Crittenden, half
+apologizing for his unusual loquacity, "because to-day, walking on the
+Due Macelli, I happened to see a case of his tools, and outside, just
+glued to the window, a young Italian mechanic, gazing in at them, his
+face on fire with his admiration and appreciation. Quite a long way,
+isn't it, for a Yankee creator to reach out a helpful and stimulating
+hand? But he's a first-rater, of course, a genius. The rest of us can't
+hope to do that."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Later, as they all went down the stairs together, Marise asked him, "But
+there isn't anything ... is there? ... that the rest of us, not creative
+geniuses, can hope to do that's creative?"
+
+She had not the faintest idea what he could find to answer. She herself
+could conceive of no answer possible. With all the intelligent people
+she had ever known, it had been axiomatic that there _was_ no answer.
+
+He did not speak at once. She had noticed that he often took time to
+reflect seriously on what you had said before he replied. Marise had
+never seen any one before who seemed to give so much more care to
+understanding what you said than to concocting something that would
+sound well to say in answer. There were times when, incredible as it
+seemed, Mr. Crittenden seemed really to use language to express what he
+meant rather than to attain his ends. She waited now, and as she waited
+she was aware of the erectness and vigor of the tall body stepping
+beside her. In the corridor he halted for a moment, facing her, his head
+bent thoughtfully, his eyes shadowed by his broad brow, his hand, that
+powerful athlete's hand of his, meditatively over his mouth as he
+considered.
+
+He had given her question a good deal of thought, and yet when he took
+his hand down to speak he said abruptly, impulsively, as though the
+words had broken up through what he had been meaning to say, "Couldn't
+we ... any of us ... couldn't we hope to create a beautiful human
+relationship? Beautiful and enduring?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLVIII
+
+
+Neale was in despair at his dumb helplessness before the inert
+resistance of social relations. A man with any adroitness would not
+submit passively to this sprung-up-from-nowhere tradition that he and
+Livingstone and Marise Allen and Eugenia Mills formed an indissoluble
+foursome, never to advance or retreat save in a solid bloc, like a
+French family, with all the uncles and cousins and aunts. How had it
+started? _He_ certainly had had nothing to do with it. That's what you
+got for being stiff-jointed and literal as he was about personal
+relations. The practised old hands ran circles around you, and had
+things all their own way.
+
+Such at least was the color of Neale's meditations when he was alone in
+his own room. When, as one of the quartet, he set off on a new
+expedition, he could think of nothing but his light-headed pleasure at
+being there at all, walking beside her, catching sidelong glimpses of
+her when he was supposed to be looking at a statue or a fresco, talking
+to her over the others' heads, trying to say something to _her_, through
+the infernally "general" conversation which Livingstone kept up as
+though his tongue were hung in the middle.
+
+And there was a certain advantage too--he was not flexible-minded enough
+to label it, but he recognized and was quick to profit by it--this
+parading around in a group gave the most intoxicating quality of
+intimacy to the brief, snatched occasions when he did manage to see her
+alone; even though a good many of these few precious moments were, as a
+matter of actual fact, passed on a noisy street-corner, waiting for a
+tram-car to come and carry her off, or on a narrow Roman sidewalk,
+trying to keep abreast of her as she stepped quickly through the dense,
+sauntering Italian crowd, stopping five deep to stare at something in a
+window, or holding noisy and affectionate family reunions on the
+sidewalk. None of that mattered. The noise, the clatter of tongues, the
+pressing and shoving of the crowd, the ear-piercing yells of the
+street-vendors--it was all essential silence to Neale because none of it
+was directed at keeping him apart from Marise, as was the low-toned
+urbane conversation of the sight-seeing quartet.
+
+He let himself go like a boy--as indeed he never had as a boy--on the
+few occasions when he waylaid her in the street, without Eugenia Mills,
+who seemed to have as great a passion for her society as he had. He was
+really a little out of his head with suspense, after an hour of anxious
+waiting about, smoking nervous cigarettes, his eyes on both ends of the
+street at once, his heart leaping up when he thought he saw her tall,
+nobly borne figure in the distance, dying down sickly when it turned out
+to be some other dark-haired girl. When finally she was really there he
+was too elated for pretense, swooping down on her, his hat in his hand,
+grinning--he knew it--like an idiot. He saw people in the street turn
+and look after him meaningly and smile to each other--and what did he
+care how big a fool he looked to them!
+
+They fostered, for these queer, unprivate, intimate moments, a little
+tradition of their own, a tacit understanding that they would save up
+for them the things they specially wanted to talk about, the questions
+they wanted to ask each other that were no business of other people.
+They talked as fast as they could, sometimes Marise, sometimes Neale, as
+though they could never get caught up on what they had to tell each
+other. Neale was astounded to hear himself chattering, fairly
+chattering. They talked a good deal about Ashley, a great deal about
+their personal likes and dislikes, a good deal about what Neale was
+trying to get out of Europe. This seemed to interest Marise, curiously
+to interest her. She was always bringing him back to it. He was, she
+told him, new in her experience of Americans-in-Europe. She had seen so
+many, all her life, and thought she had them all sorted and labeled "...
+the kind, like my father, who find themselves just in their element at
+last in the religious seriousness of Europe about eating and drinking.
+Sometimes I think they're the ones who get the most out of it. No, oh,
+no, there's another sort, the ones I specially love. The middle-aged
+school-teacher who saves up her money and comes just once comes at
+forty-five with a ripe mind and fresh, fresh eyes, such as no European
+can have. I'll never forget what I heard one of them say in Paris. I was
+tearing along, trying to get to the market and back before I had to go
+to a class, my mind full of nothing but the price of new potatoes and a
+terribly hard set of velocity exercises I'd just begun. I came up behind
+two such dear, dear American tourists, and heard one of them say, so
+happily, with a long breath of satisfaction, 'I've waited all my life to
+see that.' I looked around wildly to see what she was talking about. And
+there stood Notre Dame! Had I seen it? No, too many picayune cares on my
+mind. But I looked at it then, looked as though it were the first time
+_I'd_ ever seen it.
+
+"And then there are the rich Americans who want to buy everything and do
+buy everything, and go away empty-handed. And the kind who want to be
+what they think is sophisticated, who feel it's really worth spending
+your life learning how to order a meal with the right manner in the most
+expensive restaurants in every city, and to know how to find the
+horridest cafe-chantants that don't dare advertise in the papers, and
+that the people of the country never go to see.
+
+"And then the other kind, who come over, the whole family of them, and
+go to register at the New York Herald--you know the sort, 'Mr.
+Jehoshaphat Jones, President of the J. Jones Farm Implement Company of
+Broken Ridge, Indiana, together with Mrs. Jones, Miss Elizabeth Jones,
+Miss Margaret Jones and Master J. Jones Jr. are stopping at the Hotel
+Vouillemont. They will shortly start on a tour of the chateau Country,
+and after that expect to travel in Switzerland.' You can see Mrs. Jones
+cutting that notice out and sending it home to Broken Ridge. They're
+_nice_, I like that kind, when they don't get too tired and begin to
+snap at each other. I always feel such a deep sympathy for Jehoshaphat
+when I see him dragging his sore feet around over a hard, hard museum
+floor; and such a sympathy for Mrs. Jones, when he makes them all stand
+around at an Alpine railway station while he delightedly figures out and
+explains how the funicular works."
+
+There were times when she ran on, mirthful, flashing, keen, droll,
+amusing herself and making him laugh as nothing had ever made him laugh
+before, out of sheer, light-hearted hilarity. As he watched her, talking
+animatedly in her beautiful, clearly articulated English, her plastic
+face a comic mask, fooling and bantering till she had him shouting, and
+yet with that core of shrewd observation and real intelligence
+underlying all she said, sometimes he remembered with a start his first
+sight of her up there on the roof--what was the meaning of that
+unearthly sadness the moon had shown him?
+
+She was not, it is true, by any means always gay on these stolen talks
+together. She could be stern and brief, as when he asked her
+challengingly, one day, "Well, you've been in Europe all your life,
+nearly. What have _you_ got out of it?" She answered, "To work hard and
+not to expect much from anything--except from music."
+
+Her face that was sometimes as meltingly soft as a Correggio girl-saint,
+looked dark and set. He had been so disconcerted by her look and accent,
+that like the lump he was, he had found nothing to say before she hailed
+her tram-car and left him.
+
+Often she made him talk, talk as he had never dreamed of talking to any
+one, leading him on to flight of wordy self-expression, such as he
+blushed afterwards to remember, sure that he must have bored and wearied
+her. And yet there never was such a listener as she, attentive, silent,
+except for just the occasional comment that launched him off on further
+talk, when his self-consciousness coming warningly forward bade him stop
+before he seemed a solemn ass. She made him intensely desire to share
+with her everything that was in his mind. Helpless before the compelling
+personal look with which she listened to him, he poured it all out
+pell-mell, what he had been struggling to lay hold of, ever since he had
+left Hoosick Junction.
+
+"One of the things that keeps coming over me, is the variousness of
+folks. We don't begin to take enough account of that. Plants now,
+they're various too--sure they are. An Alpine harebell is as different
+from an oleander as I am from a natural-born artist. But everybody that
+has any sense knows that an oleander would freeze and starve to death if
+you planted it up near a glacier. You can tell that much, just by
+looking at it. But you can't tell a thing, not a doggoned _thing_ about
+a human being just by looking at him, can you?"
+
+Marise agreed with intense conviction that you can tell less than
+nothing by looking at a human being.
+
+"And then the human race has got itself so mixed up. There isn't the
+slightest chance, not one in a million, that a harebell will spring up
+in a Roman garden, and be burned to a crisp by sunlight that just makes
+an oleander feel good and comfortable. But that's what happens the whole
+enduring time with folks."
+
+"Why, I wonder," cried Marise, with a startled look, "if that is what
+happened to me."
+
+"I know it's what happened to me," said Neale. "I believe it happens to
+lots more folks than have any idea of it. They blame it on the climate,
+so to speak. But the climate's all right for some one else. It's not
+_their_ climate, that's all. Let's start out on a hunt for our climate,
+will you?"
+
+"I'm afraid it's very hard to make a guess at it," said Marise soberly
+but making no comment on the "our."
+
+"It surely is. It's terribly hard. The point is that nobody but the
+person himself can make any sort of a guess at it. And it's awfully hard
+for _him_. Wouldn't you think, when it is so hard under the best of
+circumstances, that folks would try to teach every youngster to make the
+best sort of guess possible as to where he really belongs? But they
+never give you any hint of that, in any of the 'education' you get in
+school or out of it. They seem to be in mortal terror for fear you will
+find it out yourself. They jam your beak down on the chalk-line and hope
+to goodness you'll never look up long enough to see that only your own
+foolishness keeps you there. Or they keep you there till you've tied
+yourself up with responsibilities, so you _can't_ get out. Whatever is
+the fashion of your country and of your century, that's the thing for
+you to do, whether or not.
+
+"I believe that's what Europe has done for me, made me realize that our
+present fashion isn't foreordained, nor the only one natural to men.
+Think of all the centuries after the Roman bridges went down, when
+people got along without bridges, because no provision was made to keep
+alive the minds that happened to be born with latent constructive
+powers. No, no, there must be no fooling around with godless abstract
+mathematical ideas, nor fiddling with compasses. A crucifix or a sword
+must be in every man's hand. Every man must be a fighter or a saint, if
+he was to be allowed by public opinion to have his necessary share of
+esteem and self-respect. And there are so many kinds of folks besides
+fighters and saints! Century after century they died without having
+lived, and we're walking around over their dust this minute. And yet
+even the fighters and the saints needed bridges! And here we are in the
+twentieth century, jumping the life out of anybody who isn't interested
+in building bridges, and hooting at him if he feels the impulse to try
+to be a saint. It's enough to make you tear your hair out by handfuls,
+isn't it?"
+
+Another day Marise launched him off on the same theme by asking him
+skeptically, "Well, suppose you could have your own way about things,
+what would you do to help people find their own right group and work and
+climate and surroundings? I don't see how there is the faintest
+possibility of helping them."
+
+"I'd start in," said Neale, "by suggesting to them, all through their
+youth, in every way possible, the idea that folks could and should move
+freely from the life they're born to, to another one that suits their
+natures. They have to do it while they're young and foot-free, don't
+they? I wouldn't start in by hammering them over the head with the idea
+that there are only one or two classes that anybody wants to belong to.
+I'd jump with all my weight on that idiotic notion that one class is
+better than another, as if any class was any good at all for you, if
+it's not the one you belong to naturally! I'd grease the ways to get
+from one to another, instead of building fences, especially if the
+change would mean making less money. Just think of all the natural-born
+carpenters and mechanics that fall by chance into professors' families,
+or millionaires' homes. They never get any chance in life. Just look at
+the hullaballo that was made about poor old Tolstoi's wanting the
+simplicity of a working-man's life. Just look at the fiendishly
+ingenious obstacles that are put in the way of any working-man's son who
+wants the culture and fineness and harmonious living that got so on
+Tolstoi's nerves. And look, even Tolstoi was just as bad as the rest.
+Because _he_ happened to want simplicity and a hardy open life, didn't
+he start on the warpath to drive everybody else to it. Good Lord, why
+try to hold up one ideal as the only one for millions of men, who have a
+million various capacities and ideals and tastes? They'd enrich the
+world like a garden, with their lives, if public opinion only allowed
+them to be lived."
+
+"Do you know Rabelais," asked Marise, "and his motto, '_Fay ce que
+vouldras_?' Everybody in his day thought it fearfully immoral."
+
+"Oh, I suppose that every wise man since the beginning of the world has
+found it out in his way before now. But they're not allowed to tell the
+rest of us plain folks so we understand. Or maybe you don't understand
+anything till you find it out for yourself. I don't believe I do. Do
+you?"
+
+"I'm sure," said Marise with a quiet bitterness in her tone that burned
+like a drop of acid in Neale's mind, "I'm sure that I personally haven't
+found out anything, nor do I understand anything whatever. Nor, till
+this minute did anybody ever suggest to me that there was really
+something worth while to find out. Nobody--nobody but you--ever dreamed
+of asking me to go on a quest to understand. That's why I--go on, go on
+with it. Why do you stop?"
+
+But that day Neale had been too much startled by the glimpse of a somber
+discontent under her keen bright intelligence, and too much moved by her
+speaking of his bringing something different into her life to "go on."
+
+He tried desperately to think of some way to ask her about it, to offer
+to help her, to implore her to open her heart as he was opening his.
+But he was stricken with shyness, with a fear lest he had misunderstood,
+lest he say the wrong thing. He could only look at her hopelessly. What
+a clumsy, heavy-handed china-smasher he was, anyhow!
+
+But such glimpses of what lay beneath the surface did not come often,
+though he thought about them a great deal. He wondered if there was any
+connection between them and her evident habit of not talking seriously,
+of bantering keenly about superficial things, rather than giving any
+idea of what she was really thinking. Perhaps she did not trust people
+enough to give them any idea of what she was really thinking. Perhaps
+she fell into that grim mood when she thought seriously. Why should she?
+And yet she was always making him talk seriously, about ideas he really
+cared about.
+
+Once he said to her clumsily, "I must bore you to death, with all these
+half-baked ideas of mine, when you're used to such brilliant talkers."
+
+She startled him with the energy and vivacity of her answer, "Oh, I
+_hate_ what you call brilliant talkers. I'm so sick of them! You can't
+imagine what it is to me, like a long drink of clear water, to hear
+somebody trying to say what he really thinks."
+
+He asked, sincerely and naively at a loss, "Why, why does anybody talk
+at all, if not to say what he thinks?"
+
+She answered, with a certain smile of hers which always made him uneasy,
+a dry, ugly smile, "Don't you realize that the real purpose of talk is
+to pull the wool over the eyes of the person you are talking to, to make
+him think you are more clever than you are, and to get something out of
+him for yourself that he would not let you have if he knew you were
+taking it?"
+
+Then with one of her lightning changes to that melting look and smile
+before which he always succumbed wholly, she went on, "The truth is that
+I hope all the time that in your thinking over and over there may be a
+hint for me, who was never taught to do the least bit of thinking for
+myself. So go on, let me see it all, just as it comes. Let me pick out
+for myself what will be of use to me."
+
+Well, if she wanted that, she should have it--or anything else he could
+give her. It was part of the reeling, glamorous intoxication into which
+she cast him, to hear himself going on like a stump-speaker. And she was
+adroit at hitting on subjects that made him talk. One day as they were
+amusing each other by describing their school-life, his as different
+from hers as if they had been brought up on different planets, football
+was mentioned. In no time she had him helplessly loquacious, explaining
+football to her. Think of having to explain football to anybody! He
+explained how you played it, and some of the rules, and how terribly you
+cared about it. And suddenly found that he had explained it to himself,
+that he really understood it for the first time.
+
+"It's a kind of education that America has worked out for herself
+unconsciously, I believe, the American college idea of sports. No
+American undergraduate dreams of playing to amuse himself. He'd scorn
+to. _He plays to win._ That's the American idea. And it's a splendid
+one. To give every ounce in you to do what you set out to do--no
+lackadaisical dilettantism--your whole heart in it--and _go to it_!
+That's the way for men to live."
+
+He was aware that Marise looked at him surprised by his fire. He was
+surprised by it, himself. He guessed perhaps he was ready to go back to
+work; perhaps he'd had enough of sauntering around. "That's what you
+learn in college athletics--how to give yourself to some aim and not to
+keep anything back for yourself. That's great, you know," he told her
+imperatively. "It is! It takes the personal littleness out of a boy to
+give his all to reach a goal. It makes a man out of a boy. But, oh,
+Lord!" he burst out with a great swing of his arm, "When that _has_ made
+you a man, why don't they let you know that you have more goals to
+choose from than just different ways of making your living, most of them
+just buying and selling different sorts of things? You're trained in
+athletics to put your very heart and all of it, into what you do. That's
+_fine_! But why don't they train you just as hard to put your whole
+intelligence into being sure that what you're putting your heart into is
+worth doing, and is what you're meant to do? They don't train you for
+that, they won't even let you have a quiet minute to think of it
+yourself. They keep you up in the air all the time, whooping it up about
+your duty to 'win out!' to win the game! Sure, any man that's got blood
+in his veins wants to win the game. But _which_ game? It's all very
+well, turning a boy into a grown-up human being, but you've got to...."
+
+"I wonder," broke in Marise thoughtfully, "I wonder what might turn a
+girl into a grown-up human being?" And then before Neale could open his
+lips she blushed, shook her head as if at a slip on her part, and said
+quickly, "Oh, there's my car, now."
+
+She ran out to take it. Neale stood on the corner, cursing the whole
+race of tram-cars.
+
+When it passed him, close to him in the narrow street, he caught sight
+of her face. It was bent downward as if to hide it from the other people
+in the car. He saw that there was a very faint smile on her lips as if
+she could not keep it back, a little sweet, secret, happy smile. Her
+whole face was softly shimmering with it.
+
+Good heavens! why hadn't he gone on with her! He leaped forward and
+sprinted after the rapidly disappearing car.
+
+And stopped short in the midst of the traffic. You can't make love in a
+_street-car_! What an imbecile he was!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Often, after she had left him, he pelted off into the Campagna, walking
+for miles "like a madman," said the leisurely Italian countrymen, slowly
+stepping about their work. Neale felt himself rather mad, as though the
+steady foundations of his life had been rent and shattered, as by a
+blast of dynamite.
+
+Dynamite? What was it somebody had said to him once, about dynamite? He
+tried to think, but could not remember. Perhaps it was something he had
+read in a book.
+
+Once, after such a headlong tramp, he came in and wrote a long letter to
+his mother, telling her all about Marise; a strange thing for him to do,
+he thought, as he dropped the letter in the box. But everything he did
+now seemed strange to him. Strange and yet irresistibly natural.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLIX
+
+
+If only Marise would go away, would go _away_ and give her a chance,
+thought Eugenia despairingly, coming slowly into her sitting-room where
+Mlle. Vallet sat writing in her journal. Josephine heard the door close
+and hurried in with her quick silent step to take off her mistress'
+wraps.
+
+"Mademoiselle looks so _tired_ after these long walks!" she said
+solicitously, scrutinizing with a professional expertness the color of
+the young face. "I don't think they agree with Mademoiselle at all. This
+climate is too soft to walk about so. Nobody does. Mademoiselle
+might--without presuming to advise--Mademoiselle might be wiser to go in
+cabs."
+
+Eugenia held out her arms as Josephine slipped off her pretty,
+fawn-colored silk coat and then let them fall at her sides. She was
+thinking, "_Cabs!_ What would he say to some one who went everywhere in
+cabs!"
+
+"Oh!" cried Josephine. "Those abominable ruins! Mademoiselle's dear
+little bronze shoes! Cut to pieces! Oh, Mlle. Vallet, just look at our
+poor Mademoiselle's shoes, the beautiful bronze ones. And there's no
+replacing them in the shops of _this_ country!"
+
+Mlle. Vallet tipped her head forward to look seriously over her
+steel-rimmed spectacles, agreed seriously that there was certainly very
+little left of the pretty bronze shoes, and went seriously back to
+writing with her sharp steel pen a detailed description of her
+expedition to the Catacombs. Mlle. Vallet was a very happy woman in
+those days. To be in Rome, after years of grinding drudgery in the
+class-room, to be free to look and wander and observe at her leisure for
+so much of the day--she often told Eugenia that she had never in her
+wildest dreams supposed she would have such an opportunity! She studied
+and sight-saw with conscientious and absorbed exactitude, and wrote down
+voluminous accounts of every day's sights and the thoughts they aroused
+in her. "It will be the treasure-book of my old age!" she said. "I shall
+take it down from the shelf when I am old, and live myself back into
+this wonderful experience!"
+
+"Her old age!" Eugenia wondered when she thought old age would begin.
+She looked a thousand years old already to Eugenia. Heavens! Think of
+ever being old like that, yourself. What use _could_ there be in living
+if you were old and reduced for your amusement to writing down dates and
+things in a journal!
+
+"If Mademoiselle will step into her own room," said Josephine. Eugenia
+came to herself with a start. She had been standing in the middle of the
+room staring at Mlle. Vallet's back. But she had been thinking about
+Neale Crittenden, about those deep-set eyes of his, and how his face was
+lighted up when he smiled. When he smiled at her, Eugenia felt like
+moving from wherever she was and going to stand close beside him. What
+made her feel so? It was like a black-art. There was that girl at school
+who had been bewitched by the Breton mission-priest,--bewitched so that
+she fell into a fever if she could not see him every day.
+
+"There! Sit there!" said Josephine, pressing her competently into an
+easy chair, and beginning to undo her hooks and eyes. "I haven't much
+time. Mademoiselle is so late in coming in. Just a little
+cold-cream--this horrible southern sun burns so! Oh, I can feel this
+awful Roman dust thick on every hair! I do wish--without seeming to
+presume--I do _wish_ that Mademoiselle would consent to wear a
+veil--everybody does."
+
+Eugenia moved her head from one side to the other wearily. How Josephine
+did chatter! She never had a quiet moment, _never_, and she was so
+_tired_. Feeling the supple, smooth professional fingers beginning to
+put on the cold cream, she held her head still and thought.
+
+Very bitter thoughts and bewildered ... of a person betrayed. She _was_
+betrayed! She had done everything ... everything that she had known how
+to do. She had spared neither time nor money nor effort. She had worked
+(and she hated to work) she had _worked_ to learn all the things she
+should know. She had beaten Marise at her own game. She talked better
+French than she, so her diction teacher said; and ever so much more
+distinguished English--she _never_ made those slips into Americanisms or
+Gallicisms that Marise did. At least not in conversation, sometimes she
+still thought in American. She knew ever so much more about dressing
+than Marise, and about lace, and about manners. She had come to the
+point at last of being sure of her manners, of being able to sit down,
+instinctively composing herself so that she would look well from all
+angles, of not having to think of how to shake hands or leave a room,
+any more than she thought of the adjustment of a gown that Josephine had
+put on her. Whereas Marise still fumbled at the back of her neck at
+times to make sure of a hook, or had that common trick of feeling her
+hair to see if it were in order. Marise had stood still in all that, and
+she had gone forward to the goal. But as she reached it...!
+
+How could she have thought for a moment that she cared a thing about
+him--he was horrible and rough and as American as--as--a typewriter!
+What _made_ her care about such a man? She wouldn't have, if it had not
+been for Marise. It was Marise's fault. She never would have dreamed of
+looking at him if she hadn't seen that first evening at Donna Antonia
+Pierleoni's soiree that Marise had lost her head over him. That made her
+curious about him of course, and somehow before she knew it something
+about his eyes or smile--oh, it _was_ as if she were bewitched that he
+should make her feel so, make her want and want and want till she ached,
+to have him look at her--and all the time he never looked away from
+Marise.
+
+"There," said Josephine, slipping out the hairpins, and taking up a
+handful of the bright hair to inspect it, "I believe--I _believe_," she
+pondered the matter profoundly, her dark, sharp intelligent face
+selflessly focussed on the problem, "I _wonder_ if we ought to wash it a
+little oftener here than in Paris? There is more dust. But washing it
+takes the oil out so. Perhaps a little more of the Meylan dressing.
+That has a little fine oil in it. I know the recipe."
+
+Josephine knew everything there was to know about toilet-preparations,
+and about how to use them. She adored her profession and adored Mlle.
+Mills for being such a beautiful subject. There were times, when she had
+pinned the last shining curl in place, put the last breath of invisible
+powder on the rounded young white neck, fastened the last hook in the
+exquisitely fitting gown, and got down on her knees to straighten the
+gleaming silk of the fine silk stockings, when she wondered what she had
+done to deserve such good fortune.
+
+She often watched Eugenia out of the door, as tenderly, impersonally
+proud of her as a painter of his canvas, as a patissier of his tart; and
+then feeling somewhat worn with activity and emotion, stepped back, took
+off her corsets, got into the rumpled untidy wrapper which was her
+personal favorite, put carpet slippers on her tired feet, and sat down
+with a novel of high-life to rest.
+
+Eugenia occasionally thought seeing her thus, that _she_ never was
+allowed to relax in unpicturesque ease. It seemed to her that Mlle.
+Vallet and Josephine were the ones who were _really_ enjoying Rome! She
+worked so hard, she had paid the full price--and somehow the coin was of
+no value in this new country to which she was now transported, where she
+had not wanted to come, from which she would give anything to get away.
+She did not _like_ Mr. Crittenden--she never had liked him--oh, why
+wouldn't he just once look at her and see what was there, instead of
+talking over her head that queer talk of his? She put on her loveliest
+toilettes, things that made Josephine almost weep for pleasure, while
+Marise wore that same old gray dress day after day--she ruined her
+bronze shoes for him, stumbling around on foot over those horrible old
+ruins--how she loathed ruins! Why on earth did any one want to _pretend_
+to like to look at them!
+
+History! That was what he was always talking about--history that she had
+always hated. Here it was again to plague her! How could she have
+guessed that he would care about history? She sat up now till all hours
+reading it, till Mlle. Vallet was afraid for her eyes, and yet he didn't
+seem to notice when she said something about it. He just took it for
+granted, as if she were a man.
+
+What did Marise _want_ of him anyhow? She couldn't possibly expect to
+_marry_ him ... neither of them had a cent of money. She ought to think
+of that, to think what was best for him. It was selfish, self-centered
+of Marise. A man like Neale ought of course to marry money. When she
+thought what _she_ could do for him! Married to her he could have
+exactly the life he was meant for--travel, leisure, ease--! What was it
+about Marise that he liked? She could do everything better than Marise
+now, except play the piano, and it evidently wasn't _that_ he cared for
+in her, because the afternoon they had all gone to the Visconti recital,
+he had listened just as intently to the men students and the other girls
+as to Marise. And when Marise asked him afterwards what music he liked
+best he told her bluntly the Bach that Professor Visconti himself had
+played, and Marise had said she did too. She hadn't seemed to realize
+what an affront to her that was. _Why_ did Marise care so much about
+him? Why did anybody? Eugenia couldn't understand. She couldn't
+understand. Her throat had a hard aching lump in it because she couldn't
+understand.
+
+"A loose soft coiffure for to-night," murmured Josephine dreamily to
+herself, happily twisting together the beautiful golden strands, "and
+the pale-blue mousseline de soie--not the evening-dress!" she was
+shocked at the idea, though nobody had suggested it, "the high-necked
+one with the little myosotis embroidered on the ruffles." Josephine
+worshipped that dress.
+
+Her strong dark flexible fingers hovered around the golden head as
+though she were calling down blessings on it. As a matter of fact she
+was. She slipped off the silk peignoir, washed with almond-scented water
+the white arms and neck, and the white tired feet. She dried them with a
+fine linen towel by gentle pattings, not to coarsen the skin. She put on
+the white silk stockings and white high-heeled slippers, and a white
+satin underslip. She stood a moment to be sure she had thought of
+everything. Then carefully, carefully she slipped on the pale blue
+mousseline-de-soie. "A-ah!" it _was_ as sweet as she remembered it!
+
+Eugenia had submitted to all this with a forlorn patience. That was all
+the good it would do. He would look at her as if she were dressed in a
+meal-sack, never even notice that she had changed her dress. What _else_
+could she do, could any one do? What more did he want? She was betrayed;
+somehow life had played her false, a callous heartless dishonest trick!
+Why _should_ she care so much? She didn't want to care. Why did she long
+to have him look kindly at her, till her heart ached? Why every day,
+every day, should the disappointment _hurt_ her so? She hadn't done
+anything wrong to deserve to be hurt so. If she could only stop caring.
+If only Marise would go away.
+
+Eugenia sat very still, while Josephine set a jeweled comb at exactly
+the right angle in the golden hair. One lovely little hand was at her
+heart as if by pressing hard on it she could stop the ache, the other
+held the fresh, scented handkerchief clutched tightly, in case this time
+she could not keep back the tears. She mustn't cry. She mustn't cry,
+because Josephine would have to do her face all over.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER L
+
+
+One night Marise woke up with a start, staring into the darkness,
+feeling very cold and sick. She knew what had happened. She had come to
+her senses in time. She had almost slipped into the trap, the trap set
+for her by life, which she had so mortally feared. She had been playing
+a foolish, reckless game of hide-and-seek with herself, pretending that
+she did not know what was happening. She knew perfectly well what was
+happening. Neale Crittenden was in love with her. And she was falling in
+love with him. She wanted him.
+
+Oh, this was the way it must always happen. This was the way all women
+were caught in the trap ... these dizzying moments of joy, this
+causeless singing of your heart, this blind, rapturous rushing forward
+with outstretched arms to clasp all life to your heart ... treacherous
+deadly life that only sought to debase you.
+
+She had always wondered how women could go on, go on to the fatal moment
+from which there was no drawing back. Now she knew. You were poisoned,
+you were made mad till you longed for that moment with all your being.
+
+But she had come to her senses in time to draw back. She would save
+herself, defend herself, since there was no one to help her, now more
+than ever. First of all, she knew passionately, she must not think of
+him for a moment or she would not draw back. She must not remember how
+he looked or spoke or moved, not even the sound of his voice. She must
+concentrate her thoughts on the one fact that she had almost been caught
+in that great dreadful trap, that she, Marise, who knew so much better,
+had almost fallen in love ... love!
+
+She drew the covers about her, as she sat bolt-upright in the dark, her
+teeth chattering. Love! She sickened at the sound. The gray cat ...
+Jeanne ... Isabelle ... the pictures in one of the hidden books at
+school ... the passages in her mother's novels ... her mother ...
+Madame Vallery ... Madame de la Cueva ... they were all of them looking
+at her out of the dark, pointing at her, shaming her, exulting over
+her.... "You too ... you have come to it."
+
+The gray cat! She was like the gray cat! She began to sob hysterically
+and thrust the covers into her mouth to smother the sound.
+
+What could she do? What could she do? She had no strength left. She did
+not know how to defend herself! She did not want to defend herself!
+
+She could run away. Even poor defenseless things could run away. She
+stopped sobbing, and sprang out of bed, lighting her candle with
+trembling fingers. Her watch showed three in the morning. There was a
+railroad time-table down in the dining room. She huddled on her wrapper,
+thrust her feet into slippers and, shading her candle-flame, crept
+downstairs.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At five, hatted and cloaked, she was gently shaking Eugenia and saying,
+"I'm so sorry to bother you, but do you happen to have some money on
+hand? I've been worrying about Father for some time. It's so long since
+I've been back to straighten out the household for him. I've just
+decided to get off on the early morning train. I ought to go to see
+Jeanne too. It's past my regular time for making her a visit. If you
+could just loan me enough to buy the ticket to Paris? I've almost enough
+as it is, but I must leave some for Miss Oldham and my _pension_."
+
+How kind Eugenia had been! How discreet and uninquisitive! She reached
+under her pillow, pulled out her gold-meshed purse with the ridiculously
+large sum in cash she always carried with her, and gave her a
+five-hundred-lira note together with a kiss on each cheek. "When will
+you be back, Marise?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know. I don't know. Quite a long time. I may--I shall
+probably not come back at all. It won't be worth while. Mme. de la Cueva
+will soon be in Paris again. Good-by, Eugenia dear. You'll be soon
+coming north, too, won't you?"
+
+"Oh, I dare say," said Eugenia, "if it gets too hot here."
+
+Going down the hall, silent and empty in the dawn, Marise stopped for an
+instant before his door. For an instant she was forced to think of him,
+the thought like a weakening potion. She stared hard at his door, her
+hands pressed tightly together, trembling from head to foot. She was
+going away. She would never see him again. She turned back towards her
+own room. She could not go. She ran desperately down the stairs, sick at
+the idea of what love is. She had almost been caught. She heard the
+steel jaws snap shut as she fled.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LI
+
+
+"Yes," said Eugenia at the breakfast table, "Marise was suddenly called
+back to France by family matters. She is her widowed father's
+housekeeper, you know; and then too, there is an old servant somewhere
+who brought her up, whom she feels it her duty to go to see every once
+in a while."
+
+"What's her address in Paris?" asked Mr. Crittenden urgently.
+
+"I can give that to you, but if you're thinking of writing her a card it
+wouldn't reach her, for she was to go directly on to the south, and I
+haven't the least idea what _that_ address is. Some tiny village on the
+sea-coast, I believe. Or is it in the Pyrenees? But she will be back
+very soon, almost any day. It's hardly worth while trying to write her.
+She'll be here before a card could follow her around."
+
+Mr. Crittenden got up, leaving his coffee untouched, and left the
+breakfast-room in his unceremonious American way, without a sign of
+decent civility.
+
+Mr. Livingstone looked at Miss Mills eloquently, with a shrug which
+meant, "What can you expect?"
+
+Eugenia waited till every one, except herself and Mr. Livingstone had
+left the room, and then said hesitatingly, "Mr. Livingstone, I
+wonder...." He was on the alert in an instant, surprised at her personal
+manner. "It's an outrageously big favor to ask of you, but I don't know
+any one else adroit enough to manage it." She paused, reflected and drew
+back shaking her head, "Oh, no; no! What am I thinking of?"
+
+By this time Mr. Livingstone was in the chair beside her, assuring her
+warmly that if there was anything, _any_thing he could do to be of
+service--"I shall consider it an honor, Miss Mills, I assure you, an
+_honor_!"
+
+Miss Mills let her blue eyes rest on his deeply, as if sounding the
+depths of his sincerity, and then, with a yielding gesture of abandon,
+decided to trust him, "I've been foolish, and I'm so afraid I shall
+have trouble unless you can help me. Promise me you won't tell Mlle.
+Vallet. Or _any_ one."
+
+Impassioned protestations from Mr. Livingstone.
+
+She looked over her shoulder to be sure they were alone, "You know the
+rule of the Italian government about taking out of Italy any valuable
+antiquities. They are so afraid that tourists of means will carry off
+some of the fragments of Greek and Roman sculpture. I _knew_ about it of
+course, but I'd no idea it was really enforced--those things so seldom
+are in Europe. And I bought a lovely little antique bas-relief to go
+over a mantel-piece in my Paris apartment. I had it sent yesterday, up
+by the Simplon route; it's too late to get it back and now I'm in mortal
+terror of what may happen at the Italian frontier. I heard last night
+the most dreadful tales of what they do to any one who tries to smuggle
+out such things--not only fines, you know, but lawsuits, lawyers to
+frighten you--_publicity_!"
+
+She looked very pale and anxious as she explained all this so that
+Livingstone was deeply touched. But he wondered what she thought he
+could do about it.
+
+"I'm really ashamed, now I've come to the point, to ask you what I
+thought. But I _will_--and if you think it too preposterous--more than I
+have any right to--it's this. To take a pocket full of money (I don't
+care _what_ it costs) and go up to the frontier station and when it
+comes along, bribe it through the inspectors. You see, Mr. Livingstone,
+it's something that not everybody could manage, even with ever so much
+money. But you understand the European mentality so perfectly. It would
+need to be done with just the right manner.... Oh, no, _no_," she broke
+off abruptly, getting up from her chair. "What a thing to dream of
+asking any one to do! What claim have I on your...?"
+
+Livingstone, blinking joyfully, sprang up too, protesting that nothing
+would amuse and interest him more than such a mission. And for _her_,
+any mission would be his joy!
+
+"Well, think it over. Let me know to-night. I'm ashamed to have
+mentioned it," she said in confusion. "I don't know how I dared. But oh
+Mr. Livingstone, I am so troubled about it. And I am so alone! No one
+on whom to...." She had gone, murmuring apologies, touched by his
+instant response, leaving Livingstone as much moved and agitated as she.
+
+She went through into her own rooms and told Josephine, "Put those
+manicure things away for the time being. I must go out to do a bit of
+shopping. But you can have them ready at ten. I'll be back by that time.
+It won't take me long."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Neale stood, frowning and looking at his watch, waiting for Eugenia to
+come down from the ladies' dressing-room and have dinner. As he fidgeted
+about, looking glumly at the brilliant scene about him, he was wondering
+with inward oaths of exasperation what in hell could be the matter with
+anybody's clothes and hair after the slight exertion of sitting
+perfectly still in a cab from the door of the pension to the door of the
+restaurant. It was not, God knew, that he was impatient to have her join
+him. It was because he was in a steady fever of impatience to have
+everything over, the evening, the day, the night--to put back of him
+another of those endless, endless days--to be one day nearer to the time
+when Marise would return.
+
+"_What?_" he said irritably to the smooth-voiced waiter who now
+approached him with an intimate manner. "Oh, _I_ don't care which
+table!"
+
+"Here, sir, is one right by the edge of the terrace, where the view is
+finest," said the waiter in excellent English. "Perhaps the lady would
+like a screen. There is occasionally a draught from below."
+
+He hastened to set a small screen, to rearrange fussily the handsome
+silver and linen on the daintily-set table, to slant the single fine
+rose in the vase at another angle.
+
+Another waiter, also impeccably polyglot, with gleaming hair, admirably
+cut clothes, and an insinuating manner, now murmured in Neale's ear,
+"What wine, sir?"
+
+Neale answered on a mounting note of irritation, "Oh, I don't _care_
+what wine!"
+
+"We have an excellent Frascati, sir, that is our specialty. Not found
+everywhere, sir. The ladies usually like it. Or...."
+
+"All right, serve that," said Neale, adding to himself unreasonably, "If
+you knew so well, why bother me about it?"
+
+The real waiter in charge of his table now arrived in all his majesty,
+the first one having been but an aide. Neale saw by the earnest
+expression in his eyes that he intended to make their conference a
+serious one, and cut him short as he began to call over the
+possibilities of the menu by a repeated, "All right, that'll do," before
+he had had time to do more than mention one sort of fish or one entree,
+or one variety of fowl.
+
+"There, _that's_ over!" he said to himself with a long breath of relief
+as the pained waiter turned away to carry into execution that brutally
+impromptu order.
+
+Eugenia arrived now, followed by a little stir all over the restaurant,
+as people turned to pay tribute to her beauty and her toilette. "He
+can't help noticing _that_!" she thought happily, her pride and
+satisfaction showing itself only in an increase of the perfectly
+unconscious naturalness with which she took her seat.
+
+"Oh, what a beautiful view!" she said in a low tone to Neale, looking
+down over the cypresses of the Palatine to the city, like a heap of
+uncut jewels, dully, deeply colored, under the light of the setting sun.
+"You know how to choose a table, I see!" she added admiringly, in an
+intimate tone. She wondered if perhaps he had come out in the afternoon
+to reserve it. She noticed the screen now, and looked at him gratefully,
+really touched.
+
+The waiter arrived with the soup.
+
+"Yes, it is a fine view," said Neale, rousing himself. "A very fine view
+indeed. That's the Colosseum over there, isn't it?"
+
+"Yes," said Eugenia, "and that's the Arch of Titus."
+
+"That's the one with the awfully bad bas-reliefs, isn't it?" said Neale.
+
+"Oh, _no_," corrected Eugenia, "the one with the poor sculptures is the
+arch of Septimius Severus. The arch of Titus is the _good_ one, you
+know, with the bas-reliefs of the Hebrews."
+
+"Oh, yes, of course. You're right," admitted Neale.
+
+Eugenia thought to herself triumphantly, "Ah, it's not only Marise who
+can talk history with him!"
+
+She was very happy, happier than she ever remembered feeling. Everything
+had played into her hands. Everything was going perfectly. She had
+succeeded in getting him into just the sort of restaurant where she
+could show to the best advantage.
+
+She was eating her soup with a lively appreciation of its excellence and
+found herself perfectly able to keep up an artistic and historic
+conversation with Neale; but she was also acutely aware through the
+pores of her skin that every woman around her was jealously scrutinizing
+her costume. She expanded joyously, like a cut flower set in water. How
+_well_ everything was going! Certainly Neale must be aware how he was
+being envied.
+
+She made a remark about the style of the gigantic statues on St. John
+Lateran, visible in the distance, and turned her arm slightly so that
+her sleeve would hang better.
+
+Neale answered the remark about the statues on St. John Lateran and
+continued to look in that direction as though he were thinking about
+them.
+
+He was saying to himself, "Five days since she left! Only five days!
+God! How am I going to live through any more of them. How many more
+sleepless nights! Will she ever get back!"
+
+"Yes, isn't it warm to-night?" said Eugenia, seeing that he was wiping
+his wet forehead with his handkerchief.
+
+"Unseasonable, very," agreed Neale. He had turned sick with his
+recurrent panic lest she _never_ come back. He ought to have taken that
+next train and gone right after her, as he wanted to.
+
+The waiter brought the fish. It was not what Neale had ordered, but a
+more expensive variety. He looked somewhat apprehensively at the
+gentleman as he offered it, but the gentleman did not seem to notice. On
+this the waiter disappeared and brought back a bottle of wine, not the
+variety Neale had bargained for.
+
+"Have you any news from Miss Allen?" asked Neale.
+
+"Oh, no," said Eugenia, slightly surprised. "When she's coming back so
+soon, she probably doesn't see there's any need to write."
+
+She began on the fish. After the first mouthful she said to Neale with
+enthusiasm, "You know how to order a dinner as well as to choose a
+table, that's evident."
+
+"It was the first fish he proposed," said Neale.
+
+Eugenia thought, "How much better breeding he has, after all, than Mr.
+Livingstone, always boasting of his savoir-faire."
+
+Neale's thoughts were jumping incoherently from one thing to another.
+"Funny place Rome is, to be planning how to run a wood-working plant in
+Vermont. Funny change of direction, from planning to go out to China and
+the East, about-face to planning to settle down and take root. You
+wouldn't think that would appeal to a man who had had the idea of
+ranging the world a while longer, to tie himself...." This attempt at
+reasonable consideration of things vanished in an explosion of emotion,
+as if a spark had fallen into gunpowder. "Oh, if she _will_! If she
+_will_! Why didn't I make a chance to see her alone before she went
+away?"
+
+Eugenia was talking about traveling. She had noticed Neale's interest in
+travels. "I'm thinking, Mr. Crittenden, of making a leisurely trip
+around the world--not one of those detestable, herded, conducted tours.
+And yet how else can I go about it? What would _you_ do? I'm so ignorant
+of anything outside of Europe. I _wish_ I had some one intelligent and
+enlightened to go with me. It's so forlorn to travel alone!"
+
+"Why, you'll _like_ traveling alone!" said Neale reassuringly, thinking
+of his own past year. "It's great not to have to bother with some one's
+else tastes and notions and foolishness and limitations."
+
+"Oh, but," said Eugenia, looking down at her wineglass pensively, "of
+course it's better to be alone than with some one whose tastes and
+interests are nothing to you. But to have with you some one you really
+_care_ for...."
+
+Neale thought suddenly what the past year would have been if he had had
+Marise with him, and cried out fervently, "Oh, of course, _that_ would
+be the ideal!"
+
+The waiter brought the roast and the Frascati. And still the gentleman
+made no objection. Well, he would bring a cordial with the coffee,
+ordered or not. The gentleman didn't seem to know what he had ordered or
+what he was eating. And no wonder, with such a beautiful girl across the
+table. The waiter shot an experienced, appraising eye at Eugenia's
+clothes. "He ought to be good for a big tip," he reflected hopefully.
+
+Eugenia thought best to leave a thoughtful silence after the remarks on
+companionship in travel, and sipped her wine with downcast eyes.
+
+Neale was trying again to think things over reasonably, trying to do as
+he had always done about everything, to get things clear and straight
+and sure in his head. There must be no possibility of a mistake where
+Marise was concerned. "How _about_ this now? I've gone stale on other
+things. How do I know I won't have a slump some time later? A human
+being is so full of such damn unexpected things--I must be _sure_ for
+Marise's sake. How can any man be...." At this he was shaken by so
+terrible a throe of desire, of longing for Marise that he was
+frightened. He sat pale, breathless, helpless before it; suffering,
+tortured, exalted.
+
+When he could breathe he wiped his forehead again. His fingers were
+shaking. He would go out of his mind if she didn't come back soon. His
+need for her was like a man's need for air and food and water and sleep.
+Think reasonably about such essential needs as that! A man cannot live
+without them. He could not live without Marise. He had not lived before
+he knew her.
+
+"How moved he is," thought Eugenia, seeing his pale, shaken look. "But
+he doesn't dare speak. He will to-morrow. Or the day afterwards."
+
+The waiter brought the dessert. Also coffee with the unordered cordial.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LII
+
+
+Father had grown stouter. He always did. But he looked very well. And
+his shirts and socks seemed to be all right. Melanie had seen to them,
+although the dust was thick all over the furniture, and the windows were
+semi-opaque with smoke. Father was glad to see her, said she was looking
+very pretty and asked her kindly if she didn't need some more money; but
+he was not in the least enthusiastic over her reforms in the
+housekeeping. "Who cares about dust!" he told her. "And as for smoke on
+the windows, I'm never here in the daytime anyhow except for lunch--and
+I don't want to look out of the windows then." And as for getting hold
+of Biron to keep him up to the mark, Marise found that it was trying to
+put your finger between the tree and the bark, to get between Biron and
+her father. Every evening after they had both earnestly finished the
+serious business of eating dinner, Biron left Melanie to the mere brute
+labor of cleaning up and washing dishes while he put on a clean apron
+and came into the salon to consult with his employer about the two meals
+of the morrow. Marise was astonished at the learning and acumen
+displayed by both of them in the matter. However had her father learned
+so intimately all the resources of Les Halles in all the seasons? He
+subscribed to a newspaper which gave a complete report of the arrivals
+at the market from both sea-shore and country-side, over which he and
+Biron pored intently, putting on round spectacles and bending their
+portly frames over the page. And there was a wine-sellers' journal too,
+the news items of which were brought up for consideration once a week.
+
+"_When it fails, I go out and run a mile, and then I can eat anything._"
+
+Melanie was no longer allowed to serve the meals thus prayerfully
+planned and created. It was Biron himself who brought in the _plat_,
+set it down and waited anxiously till it had been tasted and the
+verdict pronounced. He did not sit down opposite his master and share
+the meal ... not yet! But Marise had an intuition that it would not be
+long before he would. Why not? He was the only other person capable of
+appreciating that meal. He and her father were bound together by a
+common passion: they completed and rounded out each other's lives. Where
+else could Mr. Allen find such another cook? Where else could Biron find
+another such employer? They were blood-brothers, fellow-priests of a
+common cult. They might be thankful that somehow they had found each
+other in the world.
+
+When, after a few days of sharing this menage, she told her father she
+thought she would go down to see Jeanne, he said, sure, that was all
+right if she felt like it, and was she sure she didn't need any more
+money?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Under the thick green shade of pollarded sycamores sat old Jeanne in the
+wheeled-chair Marise and her father had given her. The young girl, whom
+Marise and her father paid to take care of Jeanne, came running to
+unlock the gate and let the visitor in.
+
+There was old Jeanne, her head tied up in the black coif, just as Marise
+had seen her a thousand times, her face all twisted to one side just as
+she had seen her that one time she could not forget. And how glad she
+was to see Marise, pulling her down to kiss her on both cheeks, crying a
+little for joy and wiping away the tears with her one active hand; for
+although she had recovered somewhat, so that she could eat and talk a
+little if she formed the words very slowly and was not excited, she had
+never been able to use her paralyzed arm or leg again.
+
+Marise must sit beside her, and let old Jeanne look into her face
+closely with her loving old eyes, and stroke her white young hand with
+her gnarled fingers that had worked so hard for the child Marise. And
+when her first agitation was over, and she was calm enough to try to
+talk, the questions, the loving, anxious questions: Was she well, the
+darling, darling girl? And was she happy? And did that Parisian slut of
+a maid look out for her decently? And who did the marketing? And who did
+her hair, her beautiful, beautiful hair? Jeanne's brown hand rested
+lightly on the shining dark head. No one had hair like her Marise. She
+must let it down so that Jeanne could see it again as in the old days.
+And how about her linen? Jeanne was troubled on this point. Linen was
+not what it had been and the way it was washed in Paris was a crime. A
+Parisian family were staying near by, and Jeanne's daughter-in-law did
+their washing. Such grimy, gray linen--it made Jeanne sick to think that
+perhaps her darling was no better cared for. Marise must needs open her
+valise there and then, and take out a chemise to show Jeanne, who
+handled it, held it close to her one good eye, touched the tip of her
+tongue to it, and gave it back, saying, with an attempt at tolerance,
+"Oh, well, it's as good as a laundress can do nowadays, I dare say," and
+possessed herself of Marise's hand again, holding it to her heart
+fondly.
+
+Marise found the tears were in her eyes. How sweet it was to be loved!
+She clung to the old hand as she had when she was a child and Jeanne's
+had been the only hand held out to her.
+
+The old, crafty wrinkles came around Jeanne's eyes. She pulled Marise's
+head close to her and whispered, "You've never told? Nobody at all?"
+
+"No, no," said Marise hastily. "No one." She felt the old sickness rise
+to her throat as she said it.
+
+"And you're not ... no man ... you're not engaged or...."
+
+"No, oh, no!" said Marise, still more hastily.
+
+Jeanne's face quieted. She drew a long breath and stroked Marise's hand.
+"That's right! That's right! They're all alike, my darling. Don't forget
+that. They're all alike when it comes to women."
+
+Next morning Marise was amazed to have Jeanne greet her all over again,
+as though she had not seen her, with fresh surprise and joy, the same
+questions, the same trembling stroking of her hair. Only why was her
+hair up on her head? That must be just a joke. She must be playing
+being a lady. And was she sure she knew her catechism? Her white veil
+was ready, finer than any other little girl's veil. How lovely she would
+look in it!
+
+"Yes," whispered the young caretaker, in answer to Marise's look of
+bewilderment, "she doesn't remember you were here yesterday. She often
+imagines you are with her when she is quite alone. We hear her talking
+happily to you. And now she does not know the difference between you and
+her own daughter who died. No, she will never know if you just slip away
+now. She will never know that you came or that you are not still here."
+
+When Marise went quietly out at the gate she left Jeanne dozing in her
+chair under the plane-trees, dozing, and waking to talk lovingly to the
+two little girls who had both died so long ago.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She had learned in the village that Mlle. Hasparren was no longer
+teaching in Bayonne, had gone back to her own little hill-town in the
+Pyrenees. Marise knew the way there very well, having spent many a
+week-end and vacation with Mlle. Hasparren in the old days. The boy from
+the farm where Jeanne was living chanced to have an errand that took him
+over the pass and down into that valley. On an impulse Marise asked to
+go with him. She stowed her valise away under the plank seat and
+scrambled up beside the bullet-headed boy in the blue beret. How it all
+took her back to her childhood! The little two-wheeled cart flew off
+behind the swift small horse, rattling and jolting up hill and down,
+just as when she and Mlle. Hasparren had gone off together.
+
+At the beginning of the long steep road up to the divide, she and the
+boy got out and walked, her shoes soon powdered white with dust. How
+dusty Mlle. Hasparren's shoes had been the day they stood waiting in the
+station...!
+
+They plunged down the other side into the green, poplar-planted valley
+with every home, every turn of the road as it had been. They stopped at
+the tiny, white-washed cabin, with its leafy atrium of sycamores. As the
+boy drove away and the sound of his rattling wheels died to silence,
+Marise heard from within the first notes of the Sonata in G, the one she
+had first studied with Mlle. Hasparren.
+
+She went in without knocking, sure that the little home contained no
+servant, and there sat Mlle. Hasparren, her hair several shades whiter,
+her black dress several degrees shabbier, her quiet worn face and steady
+eyes bent lovingly over the keys. The music was like the very sound of
+her voice.
+
+They sat up late that night talking--Marise must tell all about Rome and
+the old Visconti, as legendary a figure to Mlle. Hasparren as Paganini;
+and Mlle. Hasparren must tell how she came to leave her city-school and
+go back to the little mountaineers in the rough, plain village
+class-room. "I seemed to feel nearer to them," she said, not knowing
+very well how to tell why she had, "and I felt a great longing for my
+mountains and my own old home. And they need music here. Do you remember
+Father Armandariz?"
+
+"Oh, yes," Marise nodded. She had never forgotten the lean young priest
+who led the open-air singing of his improvised chorus in front of his
+fortress-like old church. "Oh, yes, don't you remember we used to drive
+over just to hear his choir sing here and in another parish too?"
+
+"He is doing wonderful work. We work together a great deal."
+
+"You! With a cure!" Marise was astounded.
+
+Mlle. Hasparren laughed. "Oh, yes, yes, those radical ideas of mine. Of
+course I still have them. But they don't seem so important as they did.
+Father Armandariz and I are good friends. We both love music. That's
+enough. He puts cotton in his ears when I let fall a heresy, and I dip
+my fingers in the holy-water font and cross myself when I go to play the
+organ in church. Those are little things, and little things mustn't be
+allowed to interfere with great ones."
+
+That evening Marise watched a choir rehearsal, Mlle. Hasparren at her
+piano, Father Armandariz, bony, threadbare, hollow-cheeked, his eyes
+gleaming with ardor, leading now the group of serious-faced Basque girls
+in black mantillas, now the great-chested, burly Basque men whose
+resonant basses shook the little house. One of them (Mlle. Hasparren
+had said he was the village shoemaker) was given a bass solo and
+practised it over several times, while the others listened. He held his
+head high, drew in a great breath and sang as though it were the meaning
+of his life he were singing out, "Magnificat anima mea Dominum!" And
+then all the others with him, "My soul magnifies God!" Father Armandariz
+stopped them. "No, the altos were too slow on coming in. Once more." And
+then again, "Once more."
+
+They all kept their eyes on him earnestly; they began again
+unfalteringly as many times as was necessary; before the evening was
+over they looked tired; but it was a good fatigue, and when they finally
+finished and turned to smile at each other and fold their music sheets
+together, their faces wore a quiet, purified serenity which Marise
+envied them. This was music. Not one of them was thinking of himself nor
+how the music had made him appear to advantage nor how he could use
+music as a tool to get ahead of other people, or get himself talked
+about.
+
+The memory of Donna Antonia's soirees, of Mme. de la Cueva's good advice
+came into her mind. People called that sort of thing "art-atmosphere,"
+didn't they? It was the cemetery of art, that's what it was, with the
+egotism of the performer dancing on the grave. One evening here, such an
+evening as this--there was more music in it than in months of chatter
+about the clothes and hair and morals and incomes of the people who make
+it on the platform.
+
+At the piano Mlle. Hasparren and Father Armandariz were talking together
+of the next evening's rehearsal, Mlle. Hasparren occasionally
+illustrating with one hand what she was saying. How deeply human was the
+look of intimate confidence they bent on each other, the ugly young
+priest and the ugly old school-teacher. They might well be thankful that
+they had found each other in the world.
+
+Mlle. Hasparren turned around now and asked Marise if she would not play
+for them. "I would be so proud to show my friends what an old pupil of
+mine has come to be," she said fondly.
+
+It seemed to Marise that she had never in her life felt so like playing.
+What should it be? She swerved on her way to the piano to stoop to kiss
+Mlle. Hasparren's swarthy cheek, and, sitting down, with an affectionate
+smile at her, began the Toccata in D minor, just as Mlle. Hasparren had
+taught it to her, with all she had learned since then. She had never
+played to such an audience; when she turned around Father Armandariz was
+looking beatific and Mlle. Hasparren exalted with pride. She had never
+played so well. She had, she felt, just begun to know what music was.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mlle. Hasparren had set up for her a folding cot in her own room, since
+there was no other bedroom in the tiny house. They slept side by side,
+near enough so that they could have reached out and clasped each other's
+hands as on that night so long ago when Mlle. Hasparren had pulled
+Marise out of the black pit. Marise could not go to sleep. Long after
+Mlle. Hasparren lay breathing deep, her dark face relaxed in a selfless
+quiet that was not more selfless than her waking look, Marise lay
+looking out at the stars and the mountains, thinking, trembling,
+sometimes feeling hot bitter tears in her eyes, sometimes feeling her
+heart swell high with strange, unearthly aspiration.
+
+Mlle. Hasparren was right. She had always been right. To keep clear of
+all troubling, maddening, personal relations that were sure to end by
+poisoning you, not to want anything for yourself, to give all for
+music--how _safe_ you would be, to live like that. And how sweet it
+would be to feel safe! She never had. She was so _tired_ of feeling
+afraid. Why _not_ live like that? When you knew it was the only safe
+way! When you knew that if you did not, you would fall headlong into
+that dreadful mire that splashed up such indelible stains upon your mind
+at even the few chance contacts with it which life brought to a girl.
+Yes, that was the only safe way. Never to go back to Rome at all.
+Somehow to devise a life all devotion to music, with the miserable
+personal affections burned up in that greater ardor. Yes, that, Marise
+decided, that was the only tolerable, the only endurable future she
+could see.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+People began to stand up, to put on their wraps and collect their
+valises. The train was passing the outskirts of Rome. It would be in the
+station in a few minutes.
+
+Marise tied on her veil over a piteous white face. She had said she
+would not go back to Rome at all. She had scarcely been ten days away.
+She had come back. Like any other woman she had come back to the trap.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LIII
+
+
+She had not seen him yet. She had had her breakfast sent to her room
+when she heard he was still at the pension. She had thought certainly he
+would be gone away by this time.
+
+She knew he would not have gone away!
+
+She stood now with Eugenia at the entrance to the Pincian, up on the
+hill, by the fountain, under the ilex trees looking down over the city.
+
+This was where their first walk together had ended.
+
+"I think I see Mr. Crittenden just come up the Trinita steps and turning
+this way," remarked Eugenia, looking in that direction.
+
+If Marise could have stirred, she would have run away. She turned her
+head and saw him coming. Although he was still so far away that she
+could not make out his face, she knew by the sudden tautness of his
+figure, by the spring forward of his step that he had seen her.
+
+There he came, striding strongly towards her, as he had come to seek her
+out, across the world, across all time. He looked infinitely familiar to
+her, and yet infinitely different from all she had been thinking of him.
+She had forgotten! What had she been imagining him?
+
+When he drew near enough to be sure it was she, he snatched off his hat
+and swung it around his head with a bright, boyish gesture of joy. The
+wind ruffled his hair, the sun shone full on his bold, clear face, on
+his deep eyes, on his tender, full-lipped mouth.
+
+He was smiling at her, all his heart in his smile. He was welcoming her
+back.
+
+Marise felt a warm gush all over her body, as though her heart had
+suddenly begun to beat again, as though he had welcomed her back into
+life. Why, this was Neale! This was no monster to dread. If she had
+seen him, only seen his face that morning, only had one look from his
+eyes that both smiled and were steady ... she would never have run away.
+
+She was not hurt at all, only frightened half to death! She was not just
+a woman in love, ready to give herself up to a man. She was Marise in
+love with Neale.
+
+He had come up to them now, his breath coming fast as though he had been
+running. For an instant he did not speak, taking her hand silently in
+his. All that life had made of him looked out on her from his clear
+eyes.
+
+With a beating flutter, her heart sprang up from its numb torpor of
+fright and spread its wings.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Well, we certainly have missed you!" was what he finally said.
+
+"I'm very glad to be back in Rome," she answered.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LIV
+
+
+I
+
+He had stood this gregarious flocking around just all he was going to,
+Neale decided that morning, up under the ilex trees, exchanging
+commonplaces with the two girls, unable to say or even to look what he
+felt, because Eugenia was there. And he'd had plenty of Eugenia during
+the last ten days.
+
+What a nightmare those ten days had been to him! What a hideous
+block-head he had been to let Marise slip away from him, even for a
+time, before he had made a chance to see her, _really_ to see her, in a
+quiet place where they could hear themselves think--with none of those
+third and fourth persons hanging around. What had he been thinking of,
+drifting along like a man in a dream, with no sense of time?
+
+But that absence of hers had waked him up. Yes, it had waked him up! He
+had not had one consecutive night's sleep since she had been gone,
+starting up continually from a doze with his arms empty when he had
+dreamed she was lying in them. How had he ever lived through that
+suspense and uncertainty without losing his mind? He was very grateful
+to Eugenia for having kept him from making an awful fool of himself and
+getting into a blind mess of confusion. She had kept him in Rome by
+telling him that Marise would be back any day. If it hadn't been for
+that--where would _he_ have been? Looking for a needle in a haystack all
+over Southern France, and Marise back in Rome.
+
+Well, she was back and he had been too frightened not to have learned a
+little sense. He'd manage a walk with her alone, just the two of them
+before the day was out or--How could he?
+
+How did you do anything? You just went and did it.
+
+He went boldly to her room and knocked on the door. When Marise came to
+open it, he said, "To celebrate your return, won't you let me show you
+a specially lovely spot on the Campagna I've found? I've been taking
+some long, solitary walks while you were away." He added firmly, "No,
+not Miss Mills and Mr. Livingstone because they don't like to tramp, and
+this is 'cross country."
+
+There! It had been no harder than that. Why in the name of heaven hadn't
+he thought of the simple, obvious way to get the thing done? He went
+back to his room and sat down, staring at the wall, to wait till
+afternoon came and to try to plan what he would say when it came. He
+hoped a great deal that she had read Browning.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But she hadn't. As they passed through the city walls and came out, just
+the two of them, under the wide sky he asked her about it, timidly; for
+he was horribly frightened and moved, now that he had her to himself.
+And she said that she was sorry, she was very ignorant of English and
+American poetry, having been so little in an English-speaking country.
+Neale sighed. No luck! She went on to suggest apologetically that she
+ought some time to go back to America and take a course in English
+Literature, or at least gather the books about her and read. "My old
+Cousin Hetty's front porch wouldn't be a bad place," she said
+thoughtfully.
+
+"I'm going to see that front porch before so very long, you know," said
+Neale, springing one of his surprises, with a rapidly beating heart and
+an impassive face.
+
+She darted one of her swallow-swift glances at him.
+
+"Yes, you've persuaded me. I've persuaded myself. I'm not going to sell
+the Ashley property right away, not without going up to look at it at
+least. I've been thinking a great deal about what you said that first
+day. I've been thinking a great deal anyway--can't--can't we sit down
+somewhere?" He flung away any pretense of having a special place to show
+her. She too had apparently forgotten it. They sat down on the short
+grass, their backs against a low heap of stones, part of the ruins of a
+very ancient aqueduct. Far in the distance a flock of sheep roamed with
+a solitary shepherd leaning on his staff.
+
+"You know--you know what we've been talking about, trying to find one's
+way, know what you were meant to do. Well, my guess about myself is that
+I'm a maker by birth, not a buyer or seller. The more I think of it the
+better it looks to me, like something I'd like to put my heart into
+doing as well as I could--taking raw material, you know, that's of no
+special value in itself and helping other men to make it worth more by
+adding work and intelligence to it. You know what somebody said about
+the ounce of iron that's of no use, and the hundred hair-springs the
+watchmaker makes out of it. I don't see why I didn't think of it at once
+when I knew Uncle Burton had left me the mill. But I'd never have
+thought of it if you hadn't helped me. It takes me so _long_ to get
+around to anything anyhow. And you are so quick! You see, I know a lot
+about the lumber-business, and quite a bit about saw mills, and I can
+get on fine with workmen. I _like_ them, and I _love_ working in the
+woods. And--and--" he brought out the second of his carefully planned
+points, "it would be a home too. You said it was a home. Everybody wants
+a home, Marise."
+
+He sat silent, listening to the word as it echoed over their two
+homeless heads. And then he took his courage in his two hands and turned
+towards Marise. What he saw in her face so shocked and startled him that
+every carefully planned word dropped from his mind. He forgot everything
+except that the dark, set look was on her face and all that tragic
+sadness he could not forget.
+
+"Marise, Marise--what is it?" he cried, frightened. What could he have
+said?
+
+With her shoulders and eyebrows she made an ugly, dry little gesture of
+dismissing the subject, and said ironically, "What makes you so sure
+everybody wants a home?"
+
+He stared at her stupidly, not able to think of anything to say, till
+she went on impatiently, irritably, "It's just sentimental to talk like
+that. I never heard you say a sentimental word before. You know what
+homes are like,--places where people either lie to each other or
+quarrel."
+
+Neale was startled by the quivering, low-toned violence of her accent.
+Why should she wince and shrink back as if he had struck on an
+intolerably sensitive bruise--at the word, _home_?
+
+"Why, let me tell you about my home," he said eagerly to her, in answer
+to the tragic challenge he felt in her look, her tone. "I don't believe
+I ever told you about what my home was like; just the usual kind, of
+course, what any child has, I suppose, but--let me _tell_ you about it."
+
+He began anywhere, the first thing that came into his mind, what the
+house was like, and where the library was, and how he liked his own
+room, and the security of it; his free play with little boys on the
+street that was his great world, and how he felt back of him, as a sure
+refuge from the uncertainties of that or any other great world, the
+certainties of what he found when he ran up the steps every afternoon,
+opened the door, his door, and stepped into his home, where he was sure
+of being loved and cared for, and yet not fettered or shut in. "Father
+and Mother always let me alone, let me grow."
+
+He told of the meal-times and his boy's raging appetite, and his
+mother's delight in it. He told of the evenings when Father and Mother
+sat reading together; of the free-flowing tide of trust and affection
+between his parents, changing with their changes, never the same, never
+different; trust and affection of which he had never been really
+conscious but which had always been the background of his life. He
+remembered even to his father's tone as he said, "Oh, Mary," and her
+instant, "Yes, dear, what is it?"
+
+He had not thought of it for years, he had never before thought
+consciously of it, had always taken it for granted as he took daylight,
+or his own good health. But there in that foreign land it all stood up
+before him, clear in its own quiet colors, visible to him for the first
+time against the other worlds he had been seeing and divining. He
+thought of foolish little gay things to tell her--he could not have
+guessed why they came into his mind--about the house smelling "trunky"
+when it was time to go to West Adams, and Mother, who could never get
+the trunk packed, and Father's joking her about it. And the long trip
+over to the city; Father always waiting to let him see how the
+ferry-boat was tied up. And in the train how Father kissed Mother
+good-by and then Neale, and then Mother again, and put his cheek for an
+instant against hers. This time Neale looked back through the years
+straight into his father's face, proudly, and held his head high.
+
+He found himself telling things that he himself had never thought of
+till then--his parents' tolerant patience with his boy's fits and
+starts, with his egotism and absurdities, with his periods of causeless
+and violent energy, his other periods of causeless, violent indolence.
+
+And West Adams, he had always till this moment taken for granted the
+stability of that second home of his, that had been his father's before
+him, like a rock to which his tossing little boat was moored whenever he
+wished. Grandfather and Grandmother, plain old people--like Marise's old
+Cousin Hetty perhaps--grown as much alike as an old brother and sister,
+who still went off blue-berrying on the mountain together every summer.
+
+And then, when he had needed his home no longer, the adventuring-forth
+of his father and mother, and his guessing for the first time how they
+had tamed their self-centered youth to be parents; the moment when he
+and Father stood together under the old maple-tree and understood each
+other so deeply, with no words, all the years of affection and trust
+rising up and standing there with them; and how Father and Mother had
+driven away as if for an Indian Summer honeymoon, Mother's face smiling
+through her tears. He told--yes, even that--how for an instant he had
+felt hurt and left out, and Mother had known it and come running back to
+say a last loving good-by to the little boy he had been.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Marise had not said a word as he brought this all up for her to see, nor
+did she when he had finished and was silent. But he could see that her
+hands, folded together in her lap, were shaking. He waited for her to
+speak. He knew there was something ominous in her silence, like
+gathering thunder. His heart was heavy with it. He was afraid of what
+might be coming. But he longed to have it come, to have it tear down
+the barrier between them.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"So that's what you have known--what every child has, you suppose!" she
+said passionately, her voice quivering and breaking. She stopped herself
+abruptly. She could scarcely breathe, her agitation was so great. She
+knew what she would do if she opened her lips again. But she would die
+of suffocation if she did not speak. It rose within her like a devouring
+flood, all that old, ever-new bitterness; and beat her down.
+
+She heard herself, in a desperate, stammering voice, telling him ...
+_telling_ him!
+
+The words that passed her lips did not seem words but bleeding, living,
+tortured things. She was mortally sick and faint, but she could not
+stop. Once as in a flicker of lightning she knew what she was doing, and
+tried to stop--but she had torn it loose from those fibers that had
+grown so close and hard around it, she had wrenched it away--bloody and
+raw--it was too late to stop.
+
+When she finished she leaned her face on her hands and was silent,
+feeling as though she had died. When she finally looked up at him she
+saw that the tears stood thick in his eyes. She had never dreamed that
+for good or ill one human being could feel so close to another. It was
+as though she could not tell whether those tears were his, or had come
+healingly into her own dry eyes.
+
+She saw the anguish of his yearning sympathy--and yet what was it he
+said? Something she had not dreamed any one could say, "Oh, the poor
+little girl you were! Wasn't there _any one_ to help you to get it
+straight, to understand it?"
+
+"Understand it!" she said harshly. "I understood it only too well."
+
+He looked away from her, across the plain, and kept a thoughtful
+silence. Then he said, "I don't believe you understood it in the least.
+Is it likely that any fourteen-year-old little girl could understand
+anything like that, anything that must have begun, had its real causes
+back before you were born--and why should you take the point of view of
+an ignorant old woman who certainly had the ignorant old woman's
+appetite for scandal? You probably didn't even get straight what really
+happened then--it sounds fearfully mixed up, you know, as though there
+must be more than that to it. Let alone its _real_ meaning, its human
+meaning, that you couldn't possibly have understood at fourteen, if you
+had known all the facts--and there certainly were lots more facts than
+what you saw and what that old woman put into your head.
+
+"And, anyhow--oh, Marise, no matter _what_ it was, it has nothing to do
+with your life _now_! Why do you let it mean so much to you? Just think
+how long ago it happened! It hasn't a thing to do with _you_. How can
+it?"
+
+She flushed a deep, shamed red, and asked in a whisper, "You don't think
+that I ... that I would be like that?"
+
+He cried out furiously, "No, no, _no_! What an idea! It's nothing to
+you--nothing, I tell you. It's been nothing to you for years. You ought
+to have stopped thinking of it ever so long ago. Everybody starts all
+over again. You're yourself. You don't have to keep carrying that around
+with you. It doesn't belong to you. Let it fall. Leave it here!" he
+commanded abruptly, springing to his feet and holding out his hand to
+help her rise. "Leave it here! And walk off into your own life."
+
+She stood up beside him now, so giddy with a strange new lightness that
+she laid her hand on his arm to steady herself.
+
+At her touch he flushed hot with the desire to put his arms about her
+and hold her passionately close. The desire was so intense that he had
+for an instant the hallucination that he had done it, that she leaned
+her head against his breast. But he had been so harrowed by sympathy for
+her poor bruised heart, had been so touched by the revelation of the
+delicacy and fineness of fiber which had but served to deepen the
+dreadful, unhealed hurt with which she had lived helplessly, he was so
+moved by her white, drawn face, lifted to his own with a childlike faith
+in what he said, he was so wrung with his thankfulness to see on that
+pale face a sensitive reflection of his own certainty ... oh, now was no
+time to burst out on her with the flame of his passion, now when she
+was so weak, so defenseless. He put aside his passion with a strong
+hand, resolutely.
+
+Looking at him, she saw his face flush darkly with his desire, and felt
+herself as safe from a touch as though she looked down on him from a
+high tower. Had she ever felt safe before?
+
+She leaned on his arm like a convalescent. She walked off beside him
+quietly, into her own life.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The walk back to the city walls was as full of a comforting, silent
+sense of each other's presence as though they had lived their lives
+together.
+
+Once in a while they spoke together as simply and naturally as children,
+of small, everyday things, of little changes he would need to make in
+his house, an old cistern to be drained and filled in, the half-rotten
+maple which darkened the living-room cut down to let the sunlight in.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In one of the quiet silences, full to the brim with their nearness to
+each other, Neale remembered what he had meant to do with this
+afternoon, what he had so self-consciously planned to say. The thought
+made him abashed and humble. How infinitely deeper life was than you
+could ever know till you began to live. He had thought he loved Marise
+as much as a man could love a woman. He saw that he had only begun to
+guess what love could be, that it is a tie between two struggling human
+beings, as well as between a man and a woman, and that it is not to be
+had without effort and growth. It was something that would take all
+there was in him to live up to.
+
+As he walked beside her, he was dedicating all there was in him to
+loving her.
+
+
+II
+
+She was tired, heavenly tired, when she reached her room that late
+afternoon. She had not been tired like that since she was a little girl;
+relaxed, abandoned before the soft-footed advance of sleep. She could
+scarcely think coherently enough to remember to send word that she would
+not appear at dinner, before she was undressed and in her bed. There was
+nothing in her mind but this exquisite fatigue, from which presently,
+even now, as she thought of it, sleep would drift her away. She laid her
+tired head on the pillow with a long breath. Some weak tears gathered in
+her eyes and ran slowly down, but they were sweet tears, not bitter. And
+so she fell asleep.
+
+It was late, when she woke, well on into the next day, and the room was
+filled with the crystal clarity of daylight. As she opened her eyes, she
+was thinking as though it were the continuation of a dream, that if she
+ever had children she would ... she would take _care_ of them! She would
+learn how always to be close to them, so that she would be there, ready
+to help them when.... She wouldn't leave them helplessly to think that
+the evil was in life itself and not in coarse and evil minds. She
+wouldn't leave them for years to think that the poor, mean joking of
+sniggering servants is all there is to life and love. She would stand up
+for them, look out for them! Marise stood fiercely on her guard for them
+now, up in arms against what threatened them.
+
+It had never before in her life, not even fleetingly, not once, occurred
+to her that she might ever have children. She knew now that she wanted
+them. That was the second step into her own life.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LV
+
+
+Neale could not sleep. Of course he could not sleep. Sleep was for fools
+with nothing to think about. But Neale had ... such things to think
+about!
+
+She had let him in. She had let him in. He stood in the holy of holies
+and knew that he was welcome.
+
+Now he knew the meaning of her look that first evening on the roof. Now
+he knew why, up there under the ilex trees that morning, her dear eyes
+had been for an instant wild as if with fright when he drew near. And
+yet, even before she had let him in, her eyes had softened from fright
+to quiet trust as he looked down at her, had softened to that look,
+_her_ look, which thrust him through and through with love for her.
+
+He turned impatiently back and forth on his bed, seeing, everywhere he
+looked, those liquid dark eyes, that sweet, sweet mouth, till he held
+his empty arms out longingly in the dark. His desire was like a fire. He
+knew such pain as he had not dreamed of, and he would not for any price
+have lost an instant of that pain. Had he ever said he was an unlighted
+torch? He was flaming now, to his last fiber.
+
+Presently he got up, lighted his candle and dressed. It was impossible
+to lie still with this fire of life blazing in him. He would be beside
+himself by dawn, if he had not worked some of it off. He let himself out
+carefully into the corridor, and walked down to her door. There, before
+it were her shoes, her little, dusty shoes which had brought her back to
+him. He picked one up and held it in his hand. He stroked it like
+something alive. The dust on it was dear to him.
+
+When he stepped out into the silent, deserted piazza a church clock
+struck two, boomingly. The night air was cool on his cheek. The great,
+starlit dusky sky, spacious over his head, was none too large to hold
+the greatness in his heart that night. It filled all space to the last
+dim, shining star. He set off at random, anywhere, not noticing where
+his feet took him, up one street and down another--blindly, as he had
+lived. And yet somehow he had found his goal.
+
+The splash of water struck on his ear. He saw in the starlight the dim
+sheen and sparkle of a fountain--Trevi. He stood still to think of what
+it reminded him--Madison Square and Martha.
+
+His heart went out to Martha as he stood there. He thought of her not
+with embarrassment, as the woman he had loved before he met Marise. He
+had not loved her. He thought of Martha tenderly, calmly, with deep
+gratitude. He owed all this to her. She had saved him from the
+second-rate, dingy life he had been so dingily ready to accept. She had
+somehow divined that there must be something else. Something else! Neale
+was shaken at the thought! Why, now, this instant, if some one struck
+him down dead as he stood there, he would have lived more, known more of
+the joy and sacredness of love than after forty years with Martha. He
+wished he knew how to pray, so that he could pray that Martha too might
+know it.
+
+And then, with a rush, Martha was gone from his mind, and Marise stood
+there, Marise, looking up at him with piteous, frightened eyes that
+softened to trust, to quiet trust.
+
+He set off swiftly, swinging his arms and talking to himself. How could
+he be worthy of such a trust! He _would_ be worthy of it. By God, he
+would give her a square deal. A square deal such as no other woman ever
+had! The whole of his heart, his respect, his honor. He would share his
+life with her loyally, as with an equal ... no hidden thoughts, no
+half-way openness, no dark corners of compromise, no secret chambers
+kept for himself. All the great gates flung open to welcome her into her
+own home.
+
+He flung his arms wide, and looked up at the stars, which were beginning
+faintly to grow dim against the whitening sky.
+
+His passion seized on him now and shook him till he was faint with it.
+
+When it passed for a little, he turned back towards the east, towards
+the Pincian hill where he had so often walked with her, where he had
+seen her that morning. The shade of the ilex trees was full of her
+presence to him. He was far from there, half across the city. As if it
+were a goal he had set himself, he began to hasten, to lengthen his
+stride, to let out some of the strength that boiled up in him like a
+geyser.
+
+It did him good to walk furiously fast, to tire himself a little. His
+thoughts grew less wild, his heart stopped leaping and pounding. She had
+looked frightened because she was afraid of love, poor darling, as she
+was of life. He would show her what love could be. He would wash all
+that old poison of doubt and distrust and fear out of her life with the
+ocean of his love. They would live together so openly, so honestly, so
+naturally, that she could forget wholly all the sick, morbid impressions
+that her life had left on her, that she would come to trust and love
+life and love and nature, with its serene progression of birth, growth,
+death, even the decay which is only preparation for another birth.
+
+Why, that was something he could _do_ for her! He had something to give
+her, something she needed, something to match a little the golden
+treasure she poured out on him with her every glance. It was incredible
+good fortune! How under the sun could a man, a poor, plain, ordinary
+human being, live so that he might be worthy of such transcendent good
+fortune?
+
+He was swinging up the long steps now, the dawn white and clear about
+him. Here was where he had turned that morning and saw her standing afar
+off, bright under the black shade, come back to him! Here was where he
+had been near enough to see her face, her brows drawn together, the
+seeking look in her eyes. He had always thought Marise's eyes seemed to
+be looking for something. Here was where he had seen that they looked
+frightened. And now he stood on the very spot where she had stood, and
+he saw again her eyes soften into quiet trust.
+
+If somehow she might find in him what she was looking for! His heart
+stood still in awe.
+
+He looked out over the sleeping city, its roofs and domes and towers
+coming palely into the new day; and he saw her dark eyes soften from
+fright to quiet trust.
+
+God! Suppose he had never lived, never known Marise! The sweat stood out
+on him at the thought.
+
+If she could ... if she could look into his face and find that life had
+put there what she sought.
+
+The sun rose magnificently and cast over all the world a flood of golden
+light.
+
+Neale stood in it, praising and magnifying God, who had sent him into
+life.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LVI
+
+
+They were on their way to hear a Palestrina mass in a chapel at St.
+Peter's, and stopped beside one of the great fountains rushing with a
+leap into the brilliant air and falling in white clouds of spray.
+
+"I've heard," said Livingstone, "that if you get at the right angle to
+the sun, you can see a million little rainbows."
+
+They began to walk here and there over the wet, moss-grown paving-stones
+around the base of the fountain, looking up at the glittering splendor
+of the upward plunging water, their ears filled with the liquid silver
+plashing and dripping of its fall. "Perhaps this isn't the right
+fountain, with the sun where it is," suggested Livingstone. He and
+Eugenia walked off across the wide piazza towards the other fountain.
+Neale turned towards Marise. She was standing on the other side of the
+basin, and as he looked at her the wind flung the huge white veil of
+spray over her. She stood in its midst like a novice in her white
+robes ... or like a bride. Her eyes were lifted to the great plume
+of the leaping water.
+
+He sprang toward her, crying jealously, "What do you think of when you
+look like that?" He raised his voice to drown out the shouting uproar of
+the water.
+
+The wind caught the spray and cast it away to the other side.
+
+She answered him, dreamily, "I was wondering how we could ever know what
+we are made for?"
+
+The wind shifted and for an instant cast the white veil over them both.
+Through it he called to her, "_I_ know! I know what I was made for! To
+love you all the days of my life."
+
+The wind whirled away the sparkling curtain of water. They stood in the
+quiet golden sunshine. His ears rang in the silence. Had he really at
+last cried it out to her? Or was it only one more of the thousand times
+when he had cried it soundlessly to his own heart? Eugenia and
+Livingstone had come back, were beside them now, between them; carrying
+them along up the endless steps to the church door. It was like walking
+in a dream. Neale tried to see Marise's face, but it was hidden by the
+broad-brimmed droop of her hat. Only the sweet, sweet lines of her
+lips....
+
+No, it could not be that he had spoken. It had been only another of
+those blinding moments when his heart flung itself up, shouting, into
+the sunshine of her look.
+
+They stepped silently into the dusky, incense-perfumed chapel. Mass had
+begun. Eugenia and Marise sank to their knees, Livingstone standing on
+one side, Neale on the other, the crowd pressing thick and close about
+them.
+
+From the choir came a long, sonorous chant, and then a silence, in which
+Neale's thoughts, pounding and hammering in his head, were stilled to
+one great, solemn petition.
+
+The priest turned and passed from one side of the altar to the other. He
+raised his hands over the heads of the kneeling people and chanted the
+"Pax vobiscum."
+
+"Et cum spiritu tuo," responded the choir, on three long, sighing notes
+that brought peace with them.
+
+Standing there, upright, looking over the heads of the densely packed
+crowd, his eyes fixed on the steady yellow flame of the altar-candles,
+Neale felt a touch on his hand. His heart stopped beating. He knew the
+lightest touch of that hand, as he knew the lightest sound of that
+voice.
+
+He stood motionless, not breathing ... waiting.
+
+He felt Marise slip her hand into his, and hold it fast in a close,
+close clasp. But not so firm as his own on hers. Through the dear flesh
+of that dear hand he felt her pulse beating against his own, as if he
+held her in his arms.
+
+The yellow flames of the altar-candles flickered and blurred before his
+eyes.
+
+A great "Hosanna!" burst from the choir. Or was it in his heart?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LVII
+
+
+How suddenly it had all broken up, Livingstone thought forlornly, their
+pleasant little quartet of walks and talks. He had the sensation of
+being left stranded by the ebbing of a tide which had seemed to buoy him
+up on great depths. With the disappearance of Miss Mills back to her
+Paris apartment, the very light had gone out of everything. Miss Allen
+never had had the social grace and ease of Miss Mills, and now she ate
+her meals silently and vanished immediately, and Crittenden, not being a
+social light on any occasion, was of less than no use in saving the
+situation.
+
+Livingstone was reduced to solitary mornings spent in museums, with a
+book of art criticism in his hand; or on Sunday mornings, when admission
+was free, on a bench in the park on the Palatine. The benches were very
+comfortable there, not mere backless slabs of stone, and when you felt
+like sight-seeing you could get up and lean over the wall and look down
+into the Forum and pick out where the different buildings had stood.
+
+He stood thus, his back to the long, cypress-shaded path, trying to be
+archeological, his guide-book open on the wall. Which of the battered
+rows of stumps of pillars had been the Temple of Vesta and which the
+Fornix Fabianus?
+
+He heard voices back of him. To be exact he heard Miss Allen's voice
+back of him. Livingstone was so paralyzed by the quality of it that,
+gentleman though he tried to be to the marrow of his bones, he was for
+an instant incapable of stirring and announcing his presence. _That_,
+Miss Allen's voice! She sounded as though she had come into a fortune.
+But what under the sun was she saying?
+
+"Here, exactly here, is where we stood when you said you were like the
+puppy, and when you rolled the dusty weight of all those centuries off
+my shoulders. And now come along. The next place in the pilgrimage is
+St. John Lateran, where you said, you brutal Prussian, that nothing
+would induce you to protect a woman!"
+
+"Come, come, this is eavesdropping. Something must be done!" said
+Livingstone to himself. He shut his guide-book with a slam to give them
+warning, and faced about resolutely. But they had paid no attention to
+his warning. They stood with their backs to him, and, oh! hand in hand
+like rustics at a country fair. But she had called him a brutal
+Prussian! And a puppy!
+
+"Ahem!" said Mr. Livingstone, loudly, not knowing what else to say.
+
+They turned about, and saw him, and seemed neither surprised nor
+ashamed. Miss Allen stepped quickly towards him, smiling and saying,
+"Oh, Mr. Livingstone, we were meaning to tell you anyhow.... Mr.
+Crittenden and I are going to be married."
+
+She smiled at him dazzlingly as she spoke, but Livingstone was not at
+all sure from the expression of her eyes that she saw him. It crossed
+his mind that she would have smiled as dazzlingly as that if a lamp-post
+had stood in his place.
+
+"Married!" he cried, really aghast for both of them. That sensitive,
+imaginative girl tied for life to that unfeeling, rough, hard fellow.
+What on earth did she, even for a moment, see in him? And as for
+Crittenden ... any man with a little money of his own, personable enough
+to marry advantageously, throwing himself away on a girl without a penny
+either now or in prospect! To what a wretched, cramped life he was
+dooming himself and her ... back rooms in greasy, third-rate pensions,
+never any margin for decent clothes....
+
+"Yes, and we're going to live in Ashley, Vermont."
+
+Livingstone sank down on his bench, appalled. Worse than third-rate
+pensions! Worse than the human mind could conceive!
+
+"Oh, no! No! No!" he cried to her as though he were clutching at her as
+she sank to ruin. "No! Don't say that! You've no idea ... my dear young
+lady, you haven't the faintest idea what an impossible life that would
+be. You mustn't consider it for a moment. Crittenden, you mustn't let
+her consider it. An American country village. Good God! You don't know
+what it is, what the people are!"
+
+"Yes, I do, too," she told him gaily, giving the effect, though she
+stood quite still, of executing a twirling pirouette of high spirits.
+"I've lived there. It's really going back home for both of us."
+
+"Home! Why, Crittenden certainly told me he'd never been there in his
+life!"
+
+"Oh, pshaw, Livingstone, don't be so heavy-handed and literal. Why
+wet-blanket _every_ imaginative fancy?" said Crittenden, laughing loudly
+as though some one had made a joke. He might, for the impression he made
+on Livingstone, have joined hands with the girl to dance madly around
+him in a circle. But this was no laughing matter. This was terrible!
+Tragic! They had simply lost their heads, both of them, lost their heads
+and had no idea what they were doing. You could tell that by the wild
+glitter in their eyes. They were infatuated, that was it, infatuated. He
+must try to recall them to their senses. He turned imploringly to the
+girl. "But ... but ... but...." He was so agitated that he could not
+bring out his words. He stopped, drew a long breath, and passed his hand
+over his forehead. Then, very solemnly, "Do you know," he said to her,
+warningly, "do you know that you will probably have to _do your own
+work_?"
+
+At this, she burst into an inexplicable, foolish shout of laughter,
+opening her eyes very wide at him and saying, "Appalling!"
+
+She looked up at Crittenden, who for his part never took his eyes an
+instant from her.
+
+How foolishly she talked! How foolishly she laughed! Why, they were
+acting as sentimentally as ... Mr. Livingstone could not think of any
+comparison adequate to their foolishness.
+
+They were moving away now, nodding good-by to him and smiling at each
+other. At the top of the dark steps leading down through the Palace of
+the Caesars to the Forum they turned and cast a backward glance at him,
+who stood stock-still where they had left him, staring after them,
+dumfounded. Miss Allen looked at him and then came flying back, running,
+her light dress fluttering. What did she want? What was she going to do,
+with that shining, tremulous, mirthful face? Livingstone felt afraid of
+her, as if, like a swift bolt of summer lightning, she might strike him
+through and through.
+
+What she did was to take his face in her two hands and give him a hearty
+kiss on each cheek. "_Dear_ Mr. Livingstone!" she said (or was it
+"_poor_"?)
+
+Livingstone had the impression, from the expression of her face, that
+she would have kissed a cabman with equal fervor, and that Crittenden
+would have watched her do it with the same fatuous look he had now.
+
+They went down together into the vaulted darkness and desolation of the
+ruined palace. Livingstone, leaning on the wall high above, saw them
+emerge together into the Forum and step off over the ancient flagged
+paving. And still hand in hand! Mr. Livingstone had by this time thought
+of an adequate comparison. They were as sentimental as a couple of
+Rogers statuettes!
+
+Looking up, they saw him leaning there. They waved their hands and
+called up some laughing greeting to him. But he could not understand
+what they said, because they were too far away from him.
+
+Hand in hand in the fierce, literal brightness of the noonday sun, they
+trod their new path over the ancient stones.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE
+
+
+Obvious typographical errors have been corrected without comment.
+
+Minor inconsistencies in hyphenated words have been adjusted to conform
+with the author's most frequent usage, except for bed-room/bedroom which
+are left as in the original.
+
+On page 68, "Meisonnier" was changed to "Meissonier" to correspond with
+the correct spelling of the 19th century painter, as found later on the
+same page.
+
+Accent marks have been added to the following words, based on context,
+and author's most frequent usage:
+
+  aperitif: page 152 (in the phrase, "... aperitif at the cafe....")
+  menage:  page 156 (in the phrase, "... a young menage;...")
+  chateau: page 452 (in the phrase, "... of the chateau Country....")
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Rough-Hewn, by Dorothy Canfield
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