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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 38592 ***
+
+
+
+
+                        A Woman of Genius
+
+                         BY MARY AUSTIN
+
+_Author of "The Land of Little Rain," "The Arrowmaker," "Isidro,"
+"Christ in Italy," etc., etc._
+
+    GARDEN CITY   NEW YORK
+    DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
+    1912
+
+    _Copyright, 1912, by_
+    DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & CO.
+
+    _All rights reserved, including that of
+    translation into foreign languages,
+    including the Scandinavian_
+
+
+               TO
+         LOU HENRY HOOVER
+    AND SOME PLEASANT MEMORIES
+               OF
+     THE RED HOUSE IN HORNTON
+             STREET
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK I
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+It is strange that I can never think of writing any account of my life
+without thinking of Pauline Mills and wondering what she will say of it.
+Pauline is rather given to reading the autobiographies of distinguished
+people--unless she has left off since I disappointed her--and finding in
+them new persuasions of the fundamental lightness of her scheme of
+things. I recall very well, how, when I was having the bad time of my
+life there in Chicago, she would abound in consoling instances from one
+then appearing in the monthly magazines; skidding over the obvious
+derivation of the biographist's son from the Lord Knows Who, except that
+it wasn't from the man to whom she was legally married, to fix on the
+foolish detail of the child's tempers and woolly lambs as the
+advertisement of that true womanliness which Pauline loves to pluck from
+every feminine bush.
+
+There was also a great deal in that story about a certain other
+celebrity, for her relations to whom the writer was blackballed in a
+club of which I afterward became a member, and I think it was the things
+Pauline said about one of the rewards of genius being the privilege of
+association with such transcendent personalities on a footing which
+permitted one to call them by their first names in one's reminiscences,
+that gave me the notion of writing this book. It has struck me as
+humorous to a degree, that, in this sort of writing, the really
+important things are usually left out.
+
+I thought then of writing the life of an accomplished woman, not so much
+of the accomplishment as of the woman; and I have never been able to
+make a start at it without thinking of Pauline Mills and that curious
+social warp which obligates us most to impeach the validity of a woman's
+opinion at the points where it is most supported by experience. From the
+earliest I have been rendered highly suspicious of the social estimate
+of women, by the general social conspiracy against her telling the truth
+about herself. But, in fact, I do not think Mrs. Mills will read my
+book. Henry will read it first at his office and tell her that he'd
+rather she shouldn't, for Henry has been so successfully Paulined that
+it is quite sufficient for any statement of life to lie outside his
+wife's accepted bias, to stamp it with insidious impropriety. There is
+at times something almost heroic in the resolution with which women like
+Pauline Mills defend themselves from whatever might shift the centres of
+their complacency.
+
+But even without Pauline, it interests me greatly to undertake this
+book, of which I have said in the title as much as a phrase may of the
+scope of the undertaking, for if I know anything of genius it is wholly
+extraneous, derived, impersonal, flowing through and by. I cannot tell
+you what it is, but I hope to show you a little of how I was seized of
+it, shaped; what resistances opposed to it; what surrenders. I mean to
+put as plainly as possible how I felt it fumbling at my earlier life
+like the sea at the foot of a tidal wall, and by what rifts in the
+structure of living, its inundation rose upon me; by what practices and
+passions I was enlarged to it, and by what well meaning of my friends I
+was cramped and hardened. But of its ultimate operation once it had
+worked up through my stiff clay, of triumphs, profits, all the
+intricacies of technique, gossip of rehearsals, you shall hear next to
+nothing. This is the story of the struggle between a Genius for Tragic
+Acting and the daughter of a County Clerk, with the social ideal of
+Taylorville, Ohianna, for the villain. It is a drama in which none of
+the characters played the parts they were cast for, and invariably spoke
+from the wrong cues, which nevertheless proceeded to a successful
+dénouement. But if you are looking for anything ordinarily called plot,
+you will be disappointed. Plot is distinctly the province of fiction,
+though I've a notion there is a sort of order in my story, if one could
+look at it from the vantage of the gods, but I have never rightly made
+it out. What I mean to go about is the exploitation of the personal
+phases of genius, of which when it refers to myself you must not
+understand me to speak as of a peculiar merit, like the faculty for
+presiding at a woman's club or baking sixteen pies of a morning, which
+distinguished one Taylorvillian from another; rather as a seizure, a
+possession which overtook me unaware, like one of those insidious
+Oriental disorders which you may never die of, but can never be cured.
+You shall hear how I did successfully stave it off in my youth for the
+sake of a Working Taylor and Men's Outfitter, and was nearly intimidated
+out of it by the wife of a Chicago attorney who had something to do with
+stocks; how I was often very tired of it, and many times, especially in
+the earlier periods when I was trying to effect a compromise between it
+and the afore-mentioned Taylorvillian predilections, I should have been
+happiest to have been quit of it altogether.
+
+I shall try to have you understand that I have not undertaken to restate
+those phases of autobiography which are commonly suppressed, because of
+an exception to what the public has finally and at large concurred in,
+that it does not particularly matter what happens to the vessel of
+personality, so long as the essential fluid gets through; but from
+having gone so much farther to discover that it matters not a little to
+Genius to be so scamped and retarded. I have arrived at seeing the
+uncritical acceptance of poverty and heartbreak as essential
+accompaniments of Gift, very much of a piece with the proneness of
+Christians to regard the early martyrdoms as concomitants of faith, when
+every thinking person knows they arose in the cruelty and stupidity of
+the bystanders. Hardly any one seems to have recalled in this
+connection, that the initial Christian experience is a baptism of Joy,
+and it was only in the business of communicating it that it became
+bloody and tormenting. If you will go a little farther with me, you
+shall be made to see the miseries of genius, perhaps also the bulk of
+wretchedness everywhere, not so much the rod of inexplicable
+chastisement, as the reaction of a purblind social complacency.
+
+I shall take you at the sincerest in admitting the function of Art to be
+its re-kneading of the bread of life until it nourishes us toward
+greater achievement, as a basis for proving that much that you may be
+thinking about its processes is wrong, and most that you may have done
+for its support is beside the mark. If I have had any compunction about
+writing this book, it has been the fear that in the relation of
+incidents difficult and sordid, you might still miss the point of your
+being largely to blame for them. And even if you escape the banality of
+believing that my having lived for a week in Chicago on 85 cents was in
+any way important to my artistic development, and go so far as to
+apprehend it as it actually was, a foolish and unnecessary interference
+with my business of serving you anew with entertainment, you must go a
+little farther honestly to accept it, even when it came--this
+revitalizing fluid of which I was for the moment the vase, the cup--in
+circumstances which in the rule you live by, appear, when not actually
+reprehensible, at least ridiculous.
+
+Looking back over a series of struggles that have left me in a frame
+when no man under forty interests me very much, still within the
+possibility of personal romance, and at an age when most women have the
+affectional value of a keepsake only, the arbiter and leader of my
+world, I seem to see my life not much else but a breach in the social
+fabric, sedulously bricked up from within and battered from without,
+through which at last pours light and the fluid soul of Life. Something
+of all this I shall try to make plain to you, and incidentally how in
+the process I have perceived dimly this huge coil of social adjustment
+as a struggle _against_ the invasive forces of blessedness, the smother
+of sheep in the lanes stupidly to escape the fair pastures toward which
+a large Friendliness herds them. If you go as far as this with me, you
+shall avoid, who knows, what indirection, and that not altogether
+without entertainment.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+Of Taylorville, where I grew up and was married, the most distinguishing
+thing was that there was nothing to distinguish it from a hundred towns
+in Ohianna. To begin with, it was laid out about a square, and had two
+streets at right angles known as Main and Broad. Broad Street, I
+remember, ran east and west between the high school and the railway
+station, and Main Street had the Catholic cemetery on the south, and the
+tool and hoe works on the north to mark--there was no other visible
+distinction--the points at which it became country road. There were
+numerous cross streets, east and west, called after the Governors, or
+perhaps it was the Presidents, and north and south, set forth on
+official maps as avenues, taking their names from the trees with which
+they were falsely declared to be planted, though I do not recall that
+they were ever spoken of by these names except by the leading county
+paper which had its office in one corner of the square over the
+Coöperative store, was Republican in politics, and stood for Progress.
+
+The square was planted with maples; a hitching rack ran quite around it
+and was, in the number and character of the vehicles attached to it, a
+sort of public calendar for the days of the week and the seasons. On
+court days and elections, I remember, they quite filled the rack and
+overflowed to the tie-posts in front of the courthouse, which stood on
+its own ground a little off from the square, balanced on the opposite
+side by the Methodist Church. It was a perfect index to the country
+neighbourhoods that spread east and north to the flat, black corn lands,
+west to the marl and clay of the river district, and south to the
+tall-weeded, oozy Bottoms. Teams from the Bottoms, I believe, always had
+cockleburs in their tails; and spanking dapple grays drove in with
+shining top-buggies from the stock farms whose flacking windmills on the
+straight horizons of the north, struck on my childish fancy as some sort
+of mechanical scarecrow to frighten away the homey charms of the wooded
+hills. I recall this sort of detail as the only thing in my native town
+that affected my imagination. When I saw the flakes of black loam
+dropping from the tires, or the yellow clay of the river district caked
+solidly about the racked hubs, I was stirred by the allurement of travel
+and adventure, the movement of human enterprise on the fourwent ways of
+the world.
+
+From my always seeming to see them so bemired with their recent
+passages, I gather that my observations must have been made chiefly in
+winter on my way to school. From other memories of Taylorville arched in
+by the full-leaved elms and maples, smelling of dust and syringas, and
+never quite separable from a suspicion of boredom, I judge my summer
+acquaintance with its streets to have been chiefly by way of going to
+church, for, until the winter I was eleven years old, Taylorville, the
+world in fact, meant Hadley's pasture.
+
+It lay back of that part of the town where our house was, contiguous to
+a common of abandoned orchard and cow lot, and if it lacked anything of
+adventurous occasion and delight, we, Forrie and Effie and I, the McGee
+children, and the little Allinghams, did not know it. There was a sort
+of convention of childhood that we should never go straight to it by the
+proper path, but it must always be taken by assault or stealth: over the
+woodhouse and then along the top of the orchard fence as far as you
+could manage without falling off, and then tagging the orchard trees; I
+remember there were times when we felt obliged to climb up every tree in
+our way and down on the other side, and so to the stump lot where the
+earliest violets were to be found--how blue it would be with them in
+April about the fairy ring of some decaying trunk!--and beyond the stump
+lot, the alder brook and the Stone-pit pond where we caught a pike once,
+come up from the river to spawn. Up from the brook ranged a wood over
+the shallow hills, farther and darker than we dared, and along its banks
+was every variety of pleasantness. There was always something to be done
+there, springs to be scooped out, rills to be dammed; always something
+to eat, sassafras root, minnows taken by hand and half cooked on
+surreptitious fires, red haws and hazelnuts; always some place to be
+visited with freshness and discovery, dark umbrageous corners to provide
+that dreaded and delighted panic of the wild.
+
+But perhaps the best service the pasture did us was as a theatre for the
+dramatization of the bourgeoning social instinct. We played at church
+and school in it, at scalping and Robinson Crusoe and the Three Bears.
+We went farther and played at High Priests and Oracles and
+Sacrifice--and what were we at Taylorville to know of such things?
+
+If this were to be as full an account of my Art as it is of myself, I
+should have to stop here and try to have you understand how at this time
+I was all awash in the fluid stuff of it, buoyed and possessed by
+unknowledgable splendours, heroisms, tendernesses, a shifty glittering
+flood. I am always checked in my attempt to render this submerged
+childhood of mine by the recollection of my mother in the midst of the
+annoyance which any reference to it always caused her, trying judicially
+to account for it on the basis of my having read too much, with the
+lurking conviction at the bottom of all comment that a few more
+spankings might have effectually counteracted it. But though I read more
+than the other children, there was never very much to read in
+Taylorville at any time, and no amount of reading could have put into
+my mind what I found there--the sustaining fairy wonder of the world.
+
+I was not, I think, different in kind from the other children, except as
+being more consistently immersed in it and never quite dispossessed. I
+have lost and rediscovered the way to it some several times; have
+indeed, had to defend its approaches with violence and skill: this whole
+business of the biography has no other point, in fact, than to show you
+how far my human behaviour has been timed to keep what I believe most
+people part with no more distressfully than with their milk teeth.
+Effie, I know, has no recollection of this period other than that there
+was a time when the earth was hung with vestiges of splendour, and if my
+brother has kept anything of his original inheritance, he would sooner
+admit to a left over appetite for jujubes and liquorice; for Forester is
+fully of the common opinion that the fevers, flights and drops of
+temperament are the mere infirmity of Gift. There was a time, before I
+left off talking to Forester at all about my work, when he visibly
+permitted his pity to assuage his disgust at the persistence of so
+patent a silliness in me, and still earlier, before I owned three motor
+cars, an estate in Florida and a house on the Hudson, there were not
+wanting intimations of its voluntary assumption as a pose; pose in
+Forester's vocabulary standing for any frame of behaviour to which he is
+not naturally addicted. But there it was, the flux of experience rising
+to the surface of our plays, the reservoir from which later, without
+having personally contemplated such an act, I drew the authority for how
+Lady Macbeth must have felt, about to do a murder, from which if I had
+had a taste for it, I might have drawn with like assurance the necessity
+of the square of the hypotenuse to equal the squares of the other two
+sides.
+
+It is curious that, though I cannot remember how my father looked nor
+who taught me long division, I recall perfectly how the reddening
+blackberry leaves lay under the hoar frost in Hadley's pasture, and the
+dew between the pale gold wires of the grass on summer mornings, and the
+very words and rites by which we paid observance to Snockerty. I am not
+sure whether Ellen McGee or I invented him, but first and last he got us
+into as much trouble as though we had not always distinctly recognized
+him for an invention. The McGees lived quite around the corner of the
+pasture from us, and, as far as my memory serves, the whole seven of
+them had nothing to do but lie in wait for any appearance of ours in the
+stump lot; though in respect to their father being a section boss, and
+the family Catholic, we were not supposed, when we put on our good
+clothes and went out of the front gate, to meet them socially. I think
+there must have been also some parental restriction on our intercourse
+of play, for they never came to our house nor we to theirs; the little
+Allinghams, in fact, never would play with them. They came to play with
+us and only included the McGees on the implication of their being our
+guests. If at any time we three Lattimores were called away, Pauline,
+who was the eldest, would forthwith marshal her young tribe in exactly
+the same manner in which she afterward held Henry Mills in the paths of
+rectitude, and march them straight out of the big gate to their home. I
+remember how I used perfectly to hate the expression of the little
+Allinghams on these occasions and sympathize with the not always
+successfully repressed jeers of the McGees. Mrs. Allingham was the sort
+of woman who makes a point of having the full confidence of her
+children--detestable practice--and I have always suspected, in spite of
+the friendliness of the families, that the little Allinghams used to
+make a sort of moral instance of us whenever they fell into discredit
+with their parents. At any rate the report of our doings in Hadley's
+pasture as they worked around through her to our mother, would lead to
+episodes of marked coolness, in which we held ourselves each loftily
+aloof from the other, until incontinently the spirit of play swirled us
+together again in a joyous democracy.
+
+At the time when the Snockerty obsession overtook us, Ellen McGee was
+the only real rival I had for the leadership of the pasture; if she had
+not had, along with all her Irish quickness, a touch of Irish
+sycophancy, I should have lost all my ascendency after the advent of
+Snockerty. I feel sure now that Ellen must have invented him; she was
+most enviably furnished in all the signs of lucky and unlucky and what
+it meant if you put your stocking on wrong side out in the morning, with
+charms to say for warts, and scraps of Old World song that had all the
+force of incantations. Her fairy tales too had a more convincing sound,
+for she got them from her father, who had always known somebody who knew
+the human participators. It was commonly insisted by Mrs. Allingham that
+the McGee children would never come to anything, and I believe, in fact,
+they never did, but they supplied an element of healthful vulgarity in
+our lives that, remembering Alfred Allingham's adolescent priggishness,
+I am inclined to think was very good for us.
+
+If I have said nothing of my parents until now, it is because the part
+they played in our lives for the first ten years was, from our point of
+view, negligible. Parents were a sort of natural appendage of children,
+against whose solidarity our performance had room and opportunity. They
+kept the house together; they staved off fear--no one, for instance,
+would think of sleeping in a place where there were no parents--they
+bulked large between us and the unknown. There was a general notion of
+our elders toward rubbing it into us that we ought to be excessively
+grateful to them for not having turned us adrift, _sans_ food and
+housing, but I do not think we took it seriously.
+
+Parents existed for the purpose of rendering the world livable for
+children, and on the whole their disposition was friendly, except in
+cases like Mrs. Allingham, who contrived always to give you a guilty
+sense of having forgot to wipe your feet or tramped on the flower
+borders. I do not think we had a more active belief in our parents'
+profession of absorption in our interests than in my father's pretence
+to be desperately wounded by Forester's popgun, or scared out of his
+wits when Effie jumped at him from behind the syringa bush. It was
+admittedly nice of them and it kept the game going, but there were also
+times when they did not manage it so successfully as we could have
+wished. I think that we never questioned their right to punish us for
+disobedience, perhaps because there is, after all, something
+intrinsically sound about the right of might, though we sometimes
+questioned the occasion, as when we had been told we might play in the
+pasture for an hour, of the passage of which we knew as much as wild
+pigeons. There was always, to me at least, an inexplicableness about
+such reprisals that mitigated against their moral issue. There was one
+point, however, upon which we all three opposed an unalterable front; we
+would not kiss and make up after our private squabbles. We fought, or
+combined against neighbouring tribes, or divided our benefits with an
+even handedness that obtains nowhere as among children, but we would
+not be tricked into a status which it might be inconvenient to maintain.
+I am sure, though, that Mrs. Allingham used rather to put it over my
+mother for her inability to make little prigs of us.
+
+"Mothers," she would say on the rare occasions when she came to call in
+the beaded dolman and black kid gloves which other Taylorvillians wore
+only on Sunday, "MOTHERS," with the effect of making it all capitals,
+"have an inestimable privilege in shaping their children's characters."
+This was when we had had our faces surreptitiously washed and been
+brought in for ceremonial inspection; and a little later she would add,
+with the air of having tactfully conveyed advice under the guise of
+information, "I always insist"--here Forester would kick me
+furtively--"_insist_ on having the full confidence of mine," at which
+point my mother would make excuses to get me out of the room before I,
+who never could learn that people are not always of the mind they think
+they are, made embarrassing disclosures.
+
+Up to this time my mother figures chiefly as a woman who tied up our
+hurts and overruled my father when he tried to beg us off from going to
+church. I suppose it was the baby always in arms or expected that kept
+us from romping all over her as we did with my father; and much of her
+profession of interest in us, which came usually at the end of
+admonitory occasions, had the cold futility of the family prayers that
+my mother tried to make appear part of the habitual order when Cousin
+Judd came to stay with us.
+
+I do not know whether he suspected the hollowness of our morning
+worship, but I am sure I was never in the least imposed upon by the high
+moral attitude from which my mother attempted to deal with my
+misbehaviours. She used to conduct these interviews on the prescription
+of certain books by the reading of which I was afterward corrupted, on a
+basis of shocked solemnity that, as she was not without a sense of
+humour, often broke down under my raw disbelief. Forester, always
+amenable to suggestion, was sometimes reduced to writhing contrition by
+these inquisitorial attempts, but I came away from them oftenest not a
+little embarrassed by her inability to bring anything to pass by them.
+
+I do not think our detachment was greater than is common with young
+children in families where they are pushed out of their privilege of
+cuddling as fast as they were in ours. There was thirteen months between
+Forester and me, another brother, early dead, before Effie, and two that
+came after. The children who died were always sickly; I think it
+probable in the country phrase, so appalling in its easy acceptance, my
+mother had "never seen a well day"; and what was meant to be the joy of
+loving was utterly swamped for her in its accompanying dread. I seem to
+have been born into the knowledge that the breast, the lap, and the
+brooding tenderness were the sole prerogative of babies; it was
+imperative to your larger estate not to exhibit the weakness of wanting
+them. There comes back to me in this connection an evening with us
+three, Forester, Effie and I, squeezed on to the lowest step of the
+stairs for company, my mother in the dusk, rocking and singing one of
+those wildly sweet and tragic melodies that the men brought back out of
+the South as seeds are carried in a sheep's coat. To this day I cannot
+hear it without a certain swelling to let in the smell of the summer
+dusk and the flitter of the bats outside and the quaver of my mother's
+voice. I could see the baby's white gown hanging over her arm--it was
+the next one after Effie, and already she must have been expecting the
+next--and the soft screech of the rocker on the deal floor, and all at
+once I knew, with what certainty it hurts me still to remember, how it
+felt to be held so close ... _close_ ... and safe ... and the swell of
+the breast under the song, and the swing of the rocker ... knew it as if
+I had been but that moment dispossessed ... and the need ... as I know
+now I have always needed to be so enfolded.
+
+I do not remember just what happened; I seem to have come to from a fit
+of passionate crying, climbed up out of it by a hand that gripped me by
+the shoulder and shook me occasionally by way of hastening my
+composure. I was struggling desperately to get away from it ... away
+from the mother, who held me so to the mother I had just remembered ...
+and there was Jule, the maid, holding up the lamp, ordering me to bed in
+the dark for having spoiled our quiet evening. Then after what seemed a
+long time, Effie snuggled up to me under the covers, terrified by my
+sudden accession of sobs but too loyal to call down the household upon
+us.
+
+It came back ... the need of mothering. There was a time when I had lain
+abed some days with the measles or whatever. I was small enough, I
+remember, to lie in the crib bed that was kept downstairs for the
+prevalent baby ... and my mouth was dry with fever. I recall my mother
+standing over me and my being taken dreadfully with the need of that
+sustaining bosom, and her stooping to my stretched arms divinely ... and
+then ... I asked her to put me down again. I have had drops and
+sinkings, but nothing to compare with this, for there was nothing there
+you understand ... the release, the comforting ... it wasn't there ...
+_it was never there at all_!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+But I began to tell you how Ellen McGee and I invented Snockerty and
+arrived at our first contact with organized society, at least Forrie and
+Effie and I did, for it led to our being interdicted the society of the
+McGee children for so long that we forgot to inquire what inconvenience,
+if any, they suffered on account of it.
+
+You will see for yourself that Ellen must have invented him--where,
+indeed, should a saint-abhorring, Sunday-schooled Taylorville child get
+the stuff for it? God we knew, and were greatly bored by His inordinate
+partiality for the Jews as against all ancient peoples, and by the
+inquisitorial eye and ear forever at the keyhole of our lives, as Cousin
+Judd never spared to remind us; and personally I was convinced of a
+large friendliness brooding over Hadley's pasture, to the sense of which
+I woke every morning afresh, was called by it, and to it; walking apart
+from the others, I vaguely prayed. But Snockerty was of the stripe of
+trolls, leprechauns, pucks, and hobgoblins.
+
+We began, I remember, by thinking of him as resident in an old hollow
+apple tree, down which, if small trifles were dropped, they fell out of
+reach and sound. There was the inviting hole, arm high in the apple
+trunk, into which you popped bright pebbles, bits of glass--and I
+suppose He might have sprung very naturally from the need of justifying
+your having parted with something you valued and couldn't get back
+again, at the prompting of an impulse you did not understand. Very
+presently the practice grew into the acknowledgment of a personality
+amenable to our desires.
+
+We took to dropping small belongings in the tree for an omen of the day:
+whether the spring was full or not, or if we should find any pawpaws in
+the wood, and drew the augury from anything that happened immediately
+afterward: say, if the wind ruffled the leaves or if a rabbit ran out of
+the grass.
+
+It was Ellen who showed the most wit in interpreting the signs and
+afterward reconciling their inconsistencies, but it was I conceived the
+notion of propitiating Snockerty, who by this time had come to exercise
+a marked influence on all our plays, by a species of dramatic
+entertainment made up of scraps of school exercises, Sunday hymns,
+recitations, and particularly of improvisations in which Ellen and I
+vied. There were times when, even in the midst of these ritualistic
+observances, we would go off at a tangent of normal play, quite
+oblivious of Snockerty; other times we were so worked upon by our own
+performance as to make sacrifices of really valuable possessions and
+variously to afflict ourselves.
+
+It was I, I remember, who scared one of the little Allinghams almost
+into fits by my rendering in the name of Snockerty of an anathema which
+I had picked up somewhere, but it was Ellen who contrived to extend His
+influence over the whole of our territory by finding in every decaying
+stump and hollow trunk, a means of communication, and deriving therefrom
+authority for any wild prank that happened to come into her head. It is
+curious that in all the escapades which were imposed on us in the name
+of our deity, for which we were duly punished, not one word of the real
+cause of our outbreaks ever leaked through to our parents. It was the
+only thing, I believe, the little Allinghams never told their mother,
+not even when the second youngest in a perfect frenzy of propitiation,
+made a sacrifice of a handful of his careful curls which I personally
+hacked off for him with Forester's pocket knife. He lied like a little
+gentleman and said he had cut them off himself because he was tired of
+looking like a girl baby.
+
+I think it must have been about the end of Snockerty's second summer
+that Ellen's wild humour got us all into serious trouble which resulted
+in my first real contact with authority.
+
+Along the west side of Hadley's pasture, between it and the county road,
+lay the tilled fields of the Ross property, corn and pumpkins and
+turnips, against which a solemn trespass board advised us. It was that
+board, no doubt, which led to our always referring to the owner of it as
+old man Ross, for except as he was a tall, stooping, white-bearded,
+childless man, I do not know how he had deserved our disrespect. I have
+suspected since that the trespass sign did not originate wholly in the
+alleged cantankerousness of farmer Ross, and that the McGees knew more
+of the taste of his young turnips and roasting ears than they admitted
+at the time when Snockerty announced to Ellen through the hollow of a
+dark, gnarly oak at the foot of Hadley's hill, that he would be
+acceptably served by a feast of green corn and turnips out of Ross's
+field. This was the first time the idea of such a depredation had
+occurred to us, I believe, for we were really good children in the main,
+but I do not think we had any notion of disobeying. Personally I rather
+delighted in the idea of being compelled to desperate enterprises. I
+recall the wild freebooting dash, the scramble over the fence, the
+rustle of the corn full of delicious intimations of ambush and surprise,
+the real fear of coming suddenly on old man Ross among the rows, where I
+suspect we did a great deal of damage in the search for ears suitable to
+roast, and the derisive epithets which we did not spare to fling over
+our shoulders as we escaped into the brush with our booty. There was a
+perfect little carnival of wickedness in the safe hollow where we
+stripped the ears for roasting--fires too were forbidden us--where we
+dared old man Ross to come on, gave dramatic rehearsals of what we
+should do to him in that event, and revelled in forbidden manners and
+interdicted words. I remember the delightful shock of hearing Alfred
+Allingham declare that he meant to get his belly full of green corn
+anyway, for belly was a word that no well brought up Taylorville child
+was expected to use on any occasion; and finally how we all took hands
+in a wild dance around the fire and over it, crying,
+
+    "Snockerty, Snockerty, Snockerty!"
+
+in a sort of savage singsong.
+
+Following on the heels of that, a sort of film came over the
+performance, an intimation of our disgust in each other at the
+connivance of wrongdoing. I remember, as we came up through the orchard
+rather late, this feeling grew upon us: the sense of taint, of
+cheapness, which swelled into a most abominable conviction of guilt as
+we discovered old man Ross on the front porch talking to our father. And
+then with what a heaviness of raw turnips and culpability we huddled in
+about our mother, going with brisk movements to and fro getting supper,
+and how she cuffed us out of her way, not knowing in the least what old
+man Ross had come about. Finally the overwhelming consciousness of
+publicity swooped down upon us at my father's coming in through the
+door, very white and angry, wanting to know if this were true that he
+had heard--and it was the utmost limit of opprobriousness that our
+father should get to know of our misdeeds at all. Times before, when we
+downrightly transgressed by eating wild crabs, or taking off our
+stockings to wade in the brook too early in the season, we bore our
+mother's strictures according to our several dispositions. Forester, I
+remember, was troubled with sensibility and used fairly to give us over
+to wrath by the advertisement of guilty behaviour. He had a vocation for
+confession, wept copiously under whippings which did him a world of
+good, and went about for days with a chastened manner which irritated me
+excessively. I believe now that he was quite sincere in it, but there
+was a feeling among the rest of us that he carried the admission of
+culpability too far. Myself, since I never entered on disobedience
+without having settled with myself that the fun of it would be worth the
+pains, scorned repentance, and endured correction with a philosophy
+which got me the reputation of being a hardened and froward child. That
+we did not, on this basis, get into more serious scrapes was due to
+Effie, who could never bear any sort of unpleasantness. Parents, if you
+crossed them, had a way of making things so very unpleasant.
+
+It was Effie who, if we went to the neighbours for a stated visit, kept
+her eye upon the clock, and if she found us yielding to temptation, was
+fertile in the invention of counter exploits just as exciting and quite
+within the parental pale, and when we did fall, had a genius for
+extrication as great as Forester's for propitiatory behaviour. So it
+fell out that our piratical descent on Ross's field was our first
+encounter with an order of things that transcended my mother's personal
+jurisdiction.
+
+Up to this time contact with our parents' world had got no farther than
+vainglorious imaginings of our proper entry into it, and now suddenly we
+found that we were in it, haled there by our own acts in the unhappy
+quality of offenders. I think this was the first time in my life that I
+had been glad it was Forester who was the boy and not I who was made to
+go with my father and Mr. Allingham to Ross's field to point out the
+damage, for which they paid.
+
+It was this which sealed the enormity of our offence, money was paid for
+it, and came near to losing its moral point with Forrie, who felt
+himself immeasurably raised in the estimate of the other boys as a
+public character. It served, along with my father's anger, which was so
+new to us, to raise the occasion to a solemn note against which mere
+switchings were inconsiderable. No doubt my brother has forgotten it by
+now, along with Effie, who got off with nothing worse than the
+complicity of having been one of us, but to me the incident takes rank
+as the beginning of a new kind of Snockertism which was to array itself
+indefinitely against the forces inappreciably sucking at the bottom of
+my life.
+
+It was as if, on the very first occasion of my swimming to the surface
+of my lustrous seas, I was taken with a line at the end of which I was
+to be played into shoals and shallows, to foul with my flounderings some
+clear pools and scatter the peace of many smaller fry--I mean the
+obligation of repute, the necessity of being loyal to what I found in
+the world because it had been founded in sincerity with pains. For what
+my father made clear to us as the very crux of our transgression, was
+that we had discredited our bringing up. Old man Ross could be paid for
+his vegetables, but there was nothing, I was given to understand, could
+satisfy our arrears to our parents' honour, which, it transpired, had
+been appallingly blackened in the event.
+
+Nothing in my whole life has so surprised me as the capacity of this
+single adventure for involving us in successive coils of turpitude and
+disaster; though it was not until we followed my father into the best
+room the next morning after he had seen Mr. Allingham, still rather
+sick, for the turnips had not agreed with us, that we realized the
+worst, rounding on us through a stream of dreadful, biting things that,
+as my father uttered them, seemed to float us clear beyond the pale of
+sympathy and hope. I remember my father walking up and down with his
+hands under his coat behind, a short man in my recollection, with a kind
+of swing in his walk which curiously nobody but myself seems to have
+noticed, and a sort of electrical flash in his manner which might have
+come, as in this instance, from our never being brought up before him
+except when we had done something thoroughly exasperating: I am not sure
+that I did not tell Ellen McGee, in an attempt to render the magnitude
+of our going over, that he rated us in full uniform, waving his sword,
+which at that moment hung with his regimentals over the mantelpiece.
+
+"Good heavens," he said, "you might have been arrested for it--my
+children--_mine_--and I thought I could have trusted you. Good heavens!"
+
+Suddenly he reached out as it were over my brother's shoulder, to whom
+in his capacity as the eldest son most of this tirade was addressed,
+with a word for me that was to go tearing its way sorely to the seat of
+memory and consciousness, and, lodging there, become the one point of
+attachment to support the memory of him beyond his death.
+
+"As for you, Olivia," I started at this, for I had been staying my
+misery for the moment on a red and black table cover which my mother
+valued, and I was amazed to find myself still able to hate--"as for you,
+Olivia May"--he would never allow my name to be shortened in the
+least--"I _am_ surprised at you."
+
+He had expected better of me then; he had reached beyond my surfaces and
+divined what I was inarticulately sure of, that I was different--no, not
+better--but somehow intrinsically different. He was surprised at me; he
+did not say so much of Forester, and he _did_ say that it was exactly
+what he had expected of the McGees, but he had had a better opinion of
+me. I recall a throb of exasperation at his never having told me. I
+might have lived up to it. But with all the soreness of having dropped
+short of a possible estimate, that phrase, which might have gone no
+deeper than his momentary disappointment, is all I have on which to hang
+the faith that perhaps ... perhaps some vision had shaped on his horizon
+of what I might become. I was never anything to my mother, I know, but a
+cuckoo's egg dropped in her creditable nest. "But," said my father, "I
+_am_ surprised at _you_."
+
+He was, I believe, one of those men who make a speciality of integrity
+and of great dependability in public service, which is often brought to
+answer for the want of private success; an early republican type fast
+being relegated to small towns and country neighbourhoods. He had a
+brilliant war record which was partly responsible for his office, and a
+string of debts pendent from some earlier mercantile enterprise, which,
+in the occasion they afforded of paying up under circumstances of great
+stringency, appeared somehow an additional burnish to his name. He was a
+man everybody liked; that he was extremely gentle and gay in his manner
+with us on most occasions, I remember very well, and I think he must
+have had a vein of romance, though I do not know upon what grounds
+except that among the few books that he left, many were of that
+character, and from the names of his children, Forester, Olivia May, and
+Ephemia, called Effie for short, which were certainly not Taylorvillian.
+Forester grew out of a heroic incident of his soldiering, of which I
+have forgotten all the particulars except that the other man's name was
+Forester, and my father's idea of giving it to his son who was born
+about that time, was that when he should grow up, and be distinguished,
+the double name of Forester Lattimore should serve at once as a reminder
+and a certificate of appreciation. I recall that we children, or perhaps
+it was only I, used to abound in dramatic imaginings of what would
+happen when this belated recognition took place, though in fact nothing
+ever came of it, which might have been largely owing to my brother's
+turning out the least distinguished of men.
+
+Whether if my father had lived he would have remained always as much in
+the dark as to the private sources of my behaviour, I try not to guess,
+but this incident picked him out for me among the ruck of fathers as a
+man distinguished for propriety, produced, in the very moment of
+pronouncing me unworthy of it, the ideal of a personal standard. If he
+hadn't up to this time affected greatly my gratitude or affections, he
+began to shine for me now with some of the precious quality which
+inheres in dreams. And before the shine had gone off I lost him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+My father's death, which occurred the March following, came suddenly,
+wholly fortuitous to the outward eye, and I have heard my mother say, in
+its inconsequence, its failure to line up with any conceivable moral
+occasion, did much to shake her faith in a controlling Providence; but
+affects me still as then, as the most incontrovertible of evidences of
+Powers moving at large among men, occupied with other affairs than ours.
+A little while ago, as I sat writing here on my veranda, looking
+riverward, an ant ran across my paper, which I blew out with my breath
+into space, and I did not look to see what disaster. It reminded me
+suddenly of the way I felt about my father's taking off. He was, he must
+have been, in the way of some god that March morning; that is one of the
+evidences by which you know that there are gods at all. You play happily
+about their knees, sometimes they play with you, then you stumble
+against a foot thrust out, or the clamour of your iniquity disturbs
+their proper meditations, and suddenly you are silenced. My mother was
+doubtless right; it would have been better if he had stayed with her and
+the children, certainly happier, but he got in the way of the Powers.
+
+It is curious that until I began just now to reconstruct the
+circumstances in which the news of his death came to me, I never
+realized that I might have been looking on, but high above it, at the
+very instant and occasion, for, from the window of my room in the second
+story of the Taylorville grammar school I could see the unfinished walls
+of the Zimmern block aglimmer with the light which the wind heaped up
+and shattered against their raw pink surfaces, and a loose board of the
+scaffolding allowed to remain up all winter, flacking like a torn leaf
+in the mighty current in which the school building, all the buildings,
+shook with the steady tremor of reeds in a freshet. Between them the
+tops of the maples, level like a shorn hedge, kept up an immensity of
+tormented motion that invaded even the schoolroom with a sense of its
+insupportable fatigues. I remember there were few at their desks that
+day, and all the discipline relaxed by the confusion of the wind. At the
+morning recess there had been some debate about dismissing the session,
+and one of the young teachers on the third floor had grown hysterical
+and been reprimanded by the principal.
+
+It must have been about eleven of the clock, while I was watching the
+little puffs of dust that rose between the planks of the flooring
+whenever the building shuddered and ground its teeth, divided between an
+affectation of timorousness which seemed to grow in favour as a suitable
+frame of behaviour, and the rapid rise of every tingling sense to the
+spacious movement of the weather and my private dramatization of the
+demolition of the building, from which only such occupants as I favoured
+should be rescued by my signal behaviour. Already several children had
+been abstracted by anxious parents, so that I failed to be even startled
+by another knocking until my attention was attracted by the teacher
+opening the door, and opening it wide upon my Uncle Alva.
+
+I saw him step back with a motion of his head sidewise, to draw her
+after him, but it took all the suggestive nods and winks that, as she
+drew it shut behind her, were focussed on my desk, to pull me up to the
+realization that his visit must have something to do with me. It was
+not, in fact, until I was halfway down the aisle after Miss Jessel
+called me, that I recovered my surprise sufficiently to assume the
+mysteriously important air that was proper to the fifth grade on being
+privileged to answer the door.
+
+There was not, I am sure, in the brief information that I was wanted at
+home, one betraying syllable; nothing sufficiently unusual in the way
+Miss Jessel tied me into my hood, nor in finding Effie tied into hers on
+the first floor, nor in the way her teacher kissed her--everybody kissed
+Effie who was allowed--nothing in Forester's having already cleared out
+without waiting for us. We got into the town in the wake of Uncle Alva
+and between the business blocks where the tall buildings abated the
+wind. There was no traffic in the streets that day. Here and there a
+foot passenger with his hat held down by both hands and his coat tails
+between his legs, staggered into doorways which were snapped to behind
+him, and from the glass of which faces looked out featureless in the
+blur of the wind. As we passed the side door of a men's clothing
+establishment one of these pale human orbs approached to the pane,
+exhibited a peering movement, rapped on the glass and beckoned. I know
+now this must have been the working of an instinct to which Taylorville
+was so habituated that it seemed natural to Uncle Alva--he was only my
+mother's half brother, not my father's--to send us on with a word about
+overtaking us, while he crossed the street at the instance of that
+beckoning finger to be chaffered with in the matter of my father's grave
+clothes. All this time there was not a word spoken that could convey to
+us children the import of our unexpected release. We drifted down the
+street, Effie and I, sidling against the blasts that drove furiously in
+the crossways, and finally as we caught our breath under a long red
+sandstone building, I recall being taken violently, as it were, by
+knowledge, and crying out that my father was dead, that he was dead and
+I should never see him again. I do not know how I knew, but I knew, and
+Effie accepted it; she came cuddling up to me in the smother of the
+wind, trying to comfort me as if, as I think did not occur to her, he
+had been my father only and not hers at all. I do not recall very well
+how we got across the town between the shut houses, high shouldered with
+the cold, except that Uncle Alva did not come up with us, and the vast
+lapping of the wind that swirled us together at intervals in a community
+of breathlessness, seemed somehow to have grown out of the occasion and
+be naturally commensurate with its desolating quality. I do not think it
+occurred to us as strange that we should have been left so to come to
+the knowledge that grew until, as we came in sight of our home, we were
+fairly taken aback to find it so little altered from what it had been
+when we left it three hours before. It had never been an attractive
+house: yellow painted, with chocolate trimmings and unshuttered windows
+against which the wind contrived. It cowered in a wide yard full of
+unpruned maples that now held up their limbs protestingly, that shook
+off from their stretched boughs, disclaimers of responsibility; the very
+smoke wrenched itself from the chimney and escaped, hurryingly upon the
+wind; the shrubbery wrung itself; whole flights of fallen leaves that
+had settled soddenly beside the borders all the winter, having at last
+got a plain sight of it, whirled up aghast and fled along the road. The
+blinds were down at the front windows, and no one came in or out.
+
+I remember our hanging there on the opposite side of the street for an
+appreciable interval before trusting ourselves to a usualness which
+every moment began to appear more frightening, and being snatched back
+from the brink of panic by the rattle of wheels in the road behind us as
+a light buggy, all aglitter from point to point of its natty
+furnishings, drew up at our gate and discharged from the seat beside the
+driver a youngish man, all of a piece with the turnout, in the trim and
+shining blackness of his exterior, who, with a kind of subdued tripping,
+ran up the walk and entered at the door without a knock. I am not sure
+that Effie identified him as the man who had taken away the babies,
+indeed, the two who came after Effie were so close together and went so
+soon, that I have heard her say that she has no recollection of anything
+except a house enlivened by continuous baby; but she had the knowledge
+common to every Taylorville child of the undertaker as the only man who
+was let softly in at unknocked doors, with his frock coat buttoned tight
+and the rim of his black hat held against his freshly shaven chin. We
+snatched the knowledge from one another as we caught hands together and
+fairly dove into the side entrance that opened on the living room.
+
+The first thing I was aware of was the sound of Forester blubbering, and
+then of the place being full of neighbours and my mother sitting by the
+fire in a chair out of the best room, crying heartily. We flung
+ourselves upon her, crying too, and were gathered up in a violence of
+grief and rocking, through which I could hear a great many voices in a
+kind of frightened and extenuating remonstrance, "Come now, Mrs.
+Lattimore. Now Sally--there, there----" at every word of which my
+mother's sobbing broke out afresh. I remember getting done with my
+crying first and being very hot and uncomfortable and thinking of
+nothing but how I should wriggle out of her embrace and get away,
+anywhere to escape from the burden of having to seem to care; and then,
+but whether it was immediately after I am not sure, going rather heavily
+upstairs and being overtaken in the middle of it by the dramatic
+suggestion of myself as an orphan child toiling through the world--I
+dare say I had read something like that recently--and carrying out the
+suggestion with an immense effect on Uncle Alva, who happened to be
+coming down at that moment. And then the insidious spread through all my
+soul of cold disaster, out of which I found myself unable to rise even
+to the appearance of how much I cared.
+
+Of all that time my father lay dead in the best room, for by the usual
+Taylorville procedure the funeral could not take place until the
+afternoon of the second day, I have only snatches of remembrance: of my
+being taken in to look at him as he lay in the coffin in a very nice
+coat which I had never seen him wear, and the sudden conviction I had of
+its somehow being connected with that mysterious summons which had taken
+Uncle Alva away from us that morning in the street; of the "sitting
+up," which was done both nights by groups of neighbours, mostly young;
+and the festive air it had with the table spread with the best cloth and
+notable delicacies; and mine and Forester's reprisals against one
+another as to the impropriety of squabbling over the remains of a layer
+cake. And particularly of Cousin Judd.
+
+He came about dusk from the farm--he had been sent for--looking shocked,
+and yet with a kind of enjoyable solemnity, I thought; and the first
+thing he wished to do was to pray with my poor mother.
+
+"We must submit ourselves to the will of God, Sally," he urged.
+
+"O God! _God!_" said my mother, walking up and down. "I'm not so sure
+God had anything to do with it."
+
+"It's a wrong spirit, Sally, a wrong spirit--a spirit of rebellion." My
+mother began to cry.
+
+"Why couldn't God have left him alone? What had he done that he should
+be taken away? What have _I_ done----"
+
+"You mustn't take it like this, Sally. Think of your duty to your
+children. 'The Lord giveth'----"
+
+"Go tell Him to give me back my husband, then----"
+
+Effie and I cowered in our corner between the base burner and the sewing
+machine; it was terrible to hear them so, quarrelling about God. My
+mother had her hands to her head as she walked; her figure touched by
+the firelight, not quite spoiled by childbearing, looked young to me.
+
+"Oh! Oh! Oh!" she cried with every step.
+
+"You mustn't, Sally; you'll be punished for it----"
+
+Cousin Judd shook with excitement; he was bullying her about her
+Christian submission. I went up to him suddenly and struck him on the
+arm with my fist.
+
+"You let her alone!" I cried. "Let her alone!"
+
+Somebody spoke out sharply, I think; a hand plucked me from behind--to
+my amazement my mother's.
+
+"Olivia, Olivia May! I _am_ surprised ... and your father not out of the
+house yet. Go up to your room and see if you can't learn to control
+yourself!"
+
+After all there was some excuse for Cousin Judd. There was, in the
+general estimate, something more than fortuitous circumstance that went
+to my father's taking off. Early in the winter, when work had been
+stopped on the Zimmern building, there had been a good deal of talk
+about some local regulations as to the removal of scaffolding and the
+security of foot passengers. That the contractors had not been brought
+to book about it was thought to be due to official connivance; my father
+had written to the paper about it. But the scaffolding had remained
+until that morning of the high wind, when it came down all together and
+a bit of the wall with it. That my father should have been passing on
+his way to the courthouse at the moment, was a leaping together of
+circumstances that seemed somehow to have raised it to the plane of a
+moral instance. It provided just that element of the dramatic in human
+affairs, which somehow wakens the conviction of having always expected
+it; though it hardly appeared why my father, rather than the contractor
+or the convincing city official, should have been the victim. If it
+wasn't an act of Providence, it was so like one that it contributed to
+bring out to the funeral more people than might otherwise have ventured
+themselves in such weather.
+
+It was also thought that if anything of that nature could have made up
+to her, my mother should have found much to console her in the funeral.
+The Masons took part in it, as also the G. A. R. and the Republican
+Club, though they might have made a more imposing show of numbers if all
+the societies had not been so largely composed of the same members. In
+addition to all this, my mother's crape came quite to the hem of her
+dress and Effie and I had new hats. I remember those hats very well;
+they had very tall crowns and narrow brims and velvet trimmings, and we
+tried them on for Pauline Allingham after we had gone up to bed the
+night before the funeral. Mrs. Allingham had called and Pauline had been
+allowed to come up to us. I remember her asking how we felt, and Effie's
+being as much impressed by the way in which I carried off the situation
+as if she had not been in the least concerned in it. And then we sat up
+in bed in our nightgowns and tried on the hats while Pauline walked
+about to get the effect from both sides, and refrained, in respect to
+the occasion, from offering any criticism.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was the evening after the funeral and everybody had gone away but one
+good neighbour. The room had been set in order while we were away at the
+cemetery; the lamp was lit and there was a red glow on everything from
+the deep heart of the base burner. The woman went about softly to set a
+meal for us, and under the lamp there was a great bowl of quince
+marmalade which she had brought over neighbourly from her own stores;
+the colour of it played through the clear glass like a stain upon the
+white cloth. It happened to have been a favourite dish of my father's.
+
+For the last year it had been a family use, he being delicate in his
+appetite, to make a point of saving for him anything which he might
+possibly eat, and taking the greatest satisfaction in his enjoyment.
+Therefore it came quite natural for me to get a small dish from the
+cupboard and begin to serve out a portion of Mrs. Mason's preserves for
+my father. All at once it came over me ... the meaning of bereavement;
+that there was nobody to be done for tenderly; the loss of it ... the
+need of the heart for all its offices of loving ... and the unavailing
+pain.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+It followed soon on my father's death that we gave up the yellow house
+with the chocolate trimmings and took another near the high school, and
+that very summer my mother lengthened my skirts halfway to my shoe tops
+and began to find fault with my behaviour "for a girl of your age." We
+saw no more of the McGees after that except as Ellen managed to keep on
+in the same class at school with me; and Pauline and I found ourselves
+with a bosom friendship on our hands.
+
+I went on missing my father terribly, but in a child's inarticulate
+fashion, and it is only lately that I have realized how much of my life
+went at loose ends for the loss out of it of a man's point of view and
+the appreciable standards which grow out of his relation to the
+community. Ever since the Snockerty episode there had been glimmers on
+my horizon of the sort of rightness owing from a daughter of Henry
+Lattimore, but now that I had no longer the use of the personal
+instance, I lost all notion of what those things might be; for though I
+have often heard my mother spoken of as one of the best women in the
+world, she was the last to have provided me with a definite pattern of
+behaviour.
+
+Pauline had struck out a sort of social balance for herself grounded on
+the fear of what was "common." Her mother had a day at home, from which
+seemed to flow an orderly perspective of social observances, for which
+my mother, never having arrived at the pitch of visiting cards, afforded
+me no criterion whatever.
+
+She had been a farmer's daughter in another part of the state, and had
+done something for herself in the way of school teaching before she
+married my father. My grandparents I never saw, but I seem to recall at
+such public occasions as county fairs and soldiers' reunions, certain
+tall, farmer-looking men and their badly dressed wives, who called her
+cousin and were answered by their Christian names, whom I understand to
+be my mother's relatives without accepting them as mine. They were all
+soldiers though, the men of our family; you saw it at once in the odd
+stiffness sitting on their farmer carriage like the firm strokes of a
+master on a pupil's smudged drawing. I think I got my first notion of
+the quality of experience in the way they exalted themselves in the
+memories of marches and battles. There had been a station of the
+underground railway not ten miles from Taylorville, and there had gone
+out from the town at the first call, a volunteer company with so many
+Judds and Wilsons and Lattimores on the roster that it read like the
+record of a family Bible. They had gone out from, they had come back to,
+a life as little relieved by adventure as the flat horizon of their
+corn lands, but in the interim they had stretched themselves, endured,
+conquered. I have heard political economists of the cross roads account
+variously for the prosperity of Ohianna in the decade following the
+civil outbreak, but I have never heard it laid to the revitalizing of
+our common stock by the shock of its moral strenuosities.
+
+To this day I question whether Cousin Judd got more out of his religion
+than out of this most unchristian experience, from which he had come
+back silver tipped as it were, from that emperym into which men pass
+when they are by great emotions a little removed from themselves, to
+kindle in my young mind a realization of the preciousness of passion
+over all human assets. It came to me, however, in the years between
+twelve and fifteen that my mother's relations did things with their
+knives and neglected others with their forks that were not done in
+circles that by virtue of just such observances, got themselves called
+Good Society. I was aware of a sort of gracelessness in their vital
+processes, in much the same way that I knew that the striped and
+flowered carpet in my mother's best room did not harmonize with the wall
+paper, and that the curtains went badly with them both. I have to go
+back to this, and to the fact that my clothes were chosen for wearing
+qualities rather than becomingness, to account for a behaviour that, as
+I began to emerge from the illumined mists of play, my mother
+complained of under the head of my "not taking an interest."
+
+How else was I to protect myself from the thousand inharmonies that
+chafed against the budding instinct of beauty: the plum-coloured ribbons
+I was expected to wear with my brown dress, the mottled Japanese pattern
+upon the gilt ground of the wall paper, against which I had pushed out a
+kind of shell, hung within with the glittering stuff of dreams.
+
+For just about the time I should have been absorbed in Cousin Lydia's
+beaded dolman and the turning of my mother's one silk, I was regularly
+victimized by the fits and starts of temperament, instinctive efforts
+toward the rehearsal of greater passions than had appeared above my
+horizon, flashes of red and blue and gold thrown up on the plain
+Taylorville surface of my behaviour, with the result of putting me at
+odds with the Taylorvillians.
+
+It was as if, being required to produce a character, I found myself with
+samples of a great many sorts on my hands which I kept offering, hopeful
+that they might be found to match with the acceptable article, which, I
+may say here, they never did. They were good samples too, considering
+how young I was, of the Magdas, Ophelias, Antigones I was yet to become,
+of the great lady, good comrade and lover, but the most I got by it was
+the suspicion of insincerity and affectation. I sensitively suffered the
+more from it as I was conscious of the veering of this inward
+direction, without being able to prove what I was sure of, its relevance
+to the Shining Destiny toward which I moved. If you ask how this
+assurance differed from the general human hope of a superior happiness,
+I can only say that the event has proved it, and as early as I was aware
+of it, moved me childishly to acts of propitiation. I wanted gratefully
+to be good, with a goodness acceptable to the Powers from which such
+assurance flowed, but it was a long time before I could separate my
+notion of this from my earliest ideal of what would have been suitable
+behaviour to my father, so that all the upward reach of adolescence was
+tinged by my sense of loss in him.
+
+It was when I was about thirteen and had not yet forgotten how my father
+looked, that I made an important discovery; on the opposite side of the
+church, and close to the Amen corner, sat a man with something in the
+cut of his beard, in the swing of his shoulders, at which some dying
+nerve started suddenly athrob. I must have seen him there a great many
+times without noticing, and perhaps the likeness was not so much as I
+had thought, and I had had to wait until my recollection faded to its
+note of faint suggestion, but from that day I took to going out of my
+way to school to pass by Mr. Gower's place of business for the sake of
+the start of memory that for the moment brought my father near again. I
+even went so far as to mention to my mother that I liked sitting in
+church where I could look at Mr. Gower because he reminded me of
+somebody. We were on our way home on Sunday night--we were always taken
+to church twice on Sunday--Forester was on ahead with Effie, and just as
+we came along under the shadow of the spool factory, I had reached up to
+tuck my hand under my mother's arm and make my timid suggestion.
+
+"Well, somebody who?" said my mother.
+
+"Of my father----"
+
+"Oh," said my mother, "that's just your fancy." But she did not shake
+off my hand from her arm as was her habit toward proffers of affection,
+and the moment passed for one of confidence between us. I was convinced
+that she must have taken notice of the likeness for herself. That was in
+the spring, and all that summer vacation I spent a great deal of time
+playing with Nettie Gower for the sake of seeing her father come at the
+gate about five in the afternoon the way mine had done.
+
+Nettie was not an attractive child, and of an age better suited to
+Effie, who couldn't bear her; the relation, it seemed, wanted an
+explanation, but it never occurred to me that so long as I withheld my
+own, another would be found for it. Nettie's brother found it about the
+time that my friendship with his sister was at its most flourishing. He
+was no nicer than you would expect a brother of Nettie's to be, though
+he was good-looking in a red-cheeked way, with a flattened curl in the
+middle of his forehead, and of late he had taken to hanging about
+Nettie and me, looking at me with a curious sort of smirk that I was not
+quite arrived at knowing for the beginning gallantry. He knew perfectly
+well that I did not come to see Nettie because I was fond of her, but it
+was yet for me to discover that he thought it was because I was fond of
+him. I remember I was making a bower in the asparagus bed; I was too old
+to play in the asparagus bed, but I was making a point of being good
+enough to do it on Nettie's account, and I had asked Charlie for his
+knife to cut the stems.
+
+"Come and get it." He was holding it out to me hollowed in his palm; and
+he would not let go my hand.
+
+"You don't want no knife," he leered sickeningly. "I know what you
+want." Suddenly I caught sight of Nettie's face with its straight thick
+plaits of hair and near-sighted eyes narrowed at me behind her glasses,
+and it struck me all at once that she had never taken my interest in her
+seriously either.
+
+"Well, what?" I began defensively.
+
+"This!" He thrust out his face toward mine, but I was too quick for him.
+That was my first sex encounter, and it didn't somehow make it any the
+less exasperating to realize that what lay behind my sudden interest in
+Nettie couldn't now be brought forward in extenuation, but I am always
+glad that I slapped Charlie Gower before the paralyzing sense of being
+trapped by my own behaviour overtook me. I hadn't found the words yet
+for the unimagined disgust of the boy's impertinence when, as I was
+helping to wipe the dishes that evening after supper, I tried to put it
+to my mother on a new basis which the incident seemed to have created,
+of our being somehow ranged together against such offences. It was the
+time for us to have emerged a little from the family relation to the
+freemasonry of sex, but my mother missed knowing it.
+
+"I am not going to Nettie Gower's any more," I began.
+
+"No?" said my mother; and of course I could not conceive that she had
+forgotten the confidence in which the connection with Nettie began.
+
+"That Charlie ... I just hate him. You know, he thought I was coming to
+see Nettie because of him."
+
+"Well," said my mother, turning out the dishwater, "perhaps you were."
+
+And that, I think it safe to say, is as near as my family ever came to
+understanding the processes at work behind the incidents of my growing
+up. Yet I think my mother very often did know that the key to my
+behaviour did not lie in the obvious explanation of it; and a sort of
+aversion toward what was strange, which I have come to think of as
+growing out of her unsophistication, kept her from admitting it. It was
+less disconcerting to have my springs of action accounted for on the
+basis of what Mrs. Allingham would have called "common," than to have
+it arraigned by her own standard as "queer." There was always in
+Taylorville a certain caddishness toward innovations of conduct, which
+we youngsters railed at as countrified, which I now perceive to have
+been no worse than the instinctive movement to lessen by despising it,
+the terror, the deep, far-rooted terror of the unknown. The incident
+served, however, to supersede with resentment the sense of personal
+definite loss in which it had begun.
+
+Before the year was out I had so far forgotten my father that I saw no
+resemblance to him in Mr. Gower and would not have recognized it had I
+met it anywhere, though the want of fathering had its share no doubt in
+landing me, as I cast about for an appreciable rule to live by, in what
+I have already described as a superior sort of Snockertism. The
+immediate step to it was my getting converted. That very winter all
+Taylorville and the six townships were caught up in one of those acute
+emotional crises called a Revival. It had begun in the Methodist, and
+gradually involved the whole number of Protestant churches, and had
+overflowed into the Congregational building as affording the greatest
+seating room; by the middle of February it was possible to feel through
+the whole community the ground swell of its disturbances. Night after
+night the people poured in to it to be flayed in spirit, striped,
+agonized, exalted at the hands of a practised evangelist, which they
+_liked_; as it had the cachet of being supernaturally good for them,
+they liked it with a deeper, more soul-stretching enjoyment than the
+operas, theatres, social adventure of cities, supposing they had been at
+hand.
+
+It hardly seems possible with all she had to do, and yet I think my
+mother could not have missed one of those meetings, going regularly with
+Cousin Judd, who drove in from the farm more times than you would have
+thought the farm could have spared him, or with Forester, who had been
+converted the winter before, though I think he must have regretted the
+smaller occasion. Left at home with Effie who was thought too young to
+be benefited by the preaching and too old to be laid by in an overcoat
+on the Sunday-school benches with dozens of others, heavy with sleep and
+the vitiated air, late, when I had finished my arithmetic and was afraid
+to go to bed in the empty house, I would open the window a crack toward
+the blur on the night from the tall, shutterless windows of the church,
+and catch the faint swell of the hymns and at times the hysteric shout
+of some sinner "coming through," and I was as drawn to it as any savage
+to the roll of the medicine drums.
+
+The backwash of this excitement penetrated even to the schoolroom, as
+from time to time some awed whisper ran of this and that one of our
+classmates being converted, and walking apart from us with the other
+saved in a chastened mystery. And finally Pauline Allingham and I talked
+it over and decided to get converted too. Pauline, I remember, had not
+been allowed to attend the meetings and considered her spiritual welfare
+jeopardized in the prohibition. We knew by this time perfectly well what
+we had to do, and had arranged to get excused from our respective
+rooms--Pauline was a grade behind me on account of diphtheria the
+previous winter--and to meet in the abandoned coal-hole between the
+boys' and girls' basement. Pauline, who had always an aptitude for
+proselyting, brought another girl from the sixth grade, who was also
+under conviction--we had the terms very pat--a thin, hatchet-faced girl
+who joined the Baptist Church and afterward married a minister, so that
+she might very easily have reckoned the incident at something like its
+supposititious value in her life. I remember that we knelt down in the
+dusty coal-hole where the little children used to play I-spy, and prayed
+by turns for light, aloud at first, and then, as we felt the approach of
+the compelling mood, silently, as we waited for the moment after which
+we might rather put it over our classmates on the strength of our
+salvation.
+
+It came, oh, it came! the sweep up and out, the dizzying lightness--not
+very different, in fact, from the breathless rush with which on a first
+night of _Magda_ or _Cleopatra_ I have felt my part meet me as I cross
+between the wings--the lift, the tremor of passion.
+
+"Oh," I said, "I'm saved! I'm saved! I know it."
+
+"So am I," said Flora Haines. "I was a long time ago, but I didn't like
+to say anything." And if I hadn't just been converted I should have
+thought it rather mean of her. In the dusk of the coal-hole we heard
+Pauline sniffling.
+
+"I suppose it's because I'm so much worse a sinner," she admitted, "but
+I just can't feel it."
+
+"You must give yourself into the Lord's hands, Pauline dear." Flora
+Haines had heard the evangelist. I began to offer myself passionately in
+prayer as a vicarious atonement for Pauline's shortcomings.
+
+"Don't you feel anything?" Flora urged, "not the least thing?"
+
+"Well ... sort of ... something," Pauline confessed.
+
+"Well, of course, that's it."
+
+"Yes, that's it," I insisted.
+
+"Well, I suppose it is," Pauline gave in, mopping her eyes with her
+handkerchief, "but it isn't the least like what I expected."
+
+We heard the school clock strike the quarter hour, and got up, brushing
+our knees rather guiltily. Flora Haines and I were kept in all that
+afternoon recess for exceeding our excuse, but Pauline saved herself by
+bursting into tears as soon as she reached her room, and being sent home
+with a headache.
+
+That was on Thursday, and Saturday afternoon we were all to meet at our
+house and go together to a great children's meeting, where we were
+expected to announce that we were saved. Pauline was a little late. I
+was explaining to Flora Haines that I was to join our church on
+probation on Sunday, but Flora, being a Baptist, had been put off by her
+minister until the Revival should be over and he could attend to all the
+baptisms at once. We naturally expected something similar from Pauline.
+
+"I hardly think," she said, stroking her muff and looking very ladylike,
+"that I shall take such an important step in life until I am older."
+
+"But," I objected, "how can anything be more important?"
+
+"It's your _soul_, Pauline!" Flora Haines was slightly scandalized.
+
+"That's just the reason; it's so important my mother thinks I ought not
+to take any steps until I can give it my most mature judgment."
+
+Flora Haines and I looked at one another silently; we might have known
+Pauline's mother wouldn't let her do anything so common as get
+converted.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+I was duly taken into the church on the following Sabbath, to the great
+relief of my family, having for once exhibited the normal reaction of a
+young person in my circumstances, and though I have laid much to the
+door of that institution of the retarding of my development and the
+dimming of the delicate surface of happiness, I think now it was not
+wholly bad for me. If I hadn't up to this time found any way of being
+good by myself, I was now provided with a criterion of conduct toward
+which even those who hadn't been able to manage it for themselves, moved
+a public approbation. I have heard my mother say that even Mr. Farley,
+the banker, who read books on evolution and was a Freethinker
+(opprobrious term), had been known to pronounce the church an excellent
+thing for women.
+
+The church left you in no doubt about things. You attended morning and
+evening service; as soon as you were old enough for it, which was before
+you were fit, you taught in Sunday school; you waited on table at oyster
+suppers designed for the raising of the minister's salary, and if you
+had any talent for it you sang in the choir or recited things at the
+church sociables. And when you were married and consequently
+middle-aged, you joined the W. F. M. S. and the Sewing Society.
+
+It was after the incident of the coal-hole that I began to experience
+this easy irreproachability, and to build out of its ready-to-hand
+materials a sort of extra self, from which afterward to burst was the
+bitter wound of life. For my particular church went farther and provided
+a chart for all the by-lanes of behaviour. "You were never," said the
+evangelist, whose relish of the situation on the day that a score or so
+of us had renounced the devil and all his works, gave me a vague
+sensation of having made a meal and licked his lips over us, "you should
+never go anywhere that you could not take your Saviour with you," and
+when I saw Cousin Judd wag at my mother and she smile and pat her hymn
+book, I was apprised that we had come to the root of the whole matter.
+
+I have wondered since to how many young converts in Ohianna that phrase
+has been handed out and with what blighting consequences.
+
+For a Saviour as I knew Him at thirteen and a half, was a solemn
+presence that ran in your mind with the bleakness of plain, whitewashed
+walls and hard benches and a general hush, a vague sensation of your
+chest being too tight for you, and a little of the feeling you had when
+you had gone to call at the Allinghams and had forgotten to wipe your
+feet; and it was manifest if you took that incubus everywhere you went
+you wouldn't have any fun.
+
+It was fortunate at that time that it was not the desire for
+entertainment that moved me so much as the need of my youth to serve;
+the unparented hunger for authority. But with the pressure of that
+environment, if there had been anybody with the wit to see where my Gift
+lay, what anybody could have done about it it is difficult to say. When
+all that Taylorville afforded of the proper food of Gift, brightness,
+music, and the dance, was of so forlorn a quality, it has been a
+question if I do not owe the church some thanks for cutting out the
+possible cheapening of taste and the satisfaction of ill-regulated
+applause--that is, if Gift can be hurt at all by what happens to the
+possessor. It can be cramped and enfeebled in expression, rendered
+tormenting in its passage and futile to the recipient, but to whom it
+comes its supernal quality rises forever beyond all attainder.
+
+What happened to the actress during all the time I was undertaken by the
+church to be made into the sort of woman serviceable to Taylorville, was
+inconsiderable; what grew out of it for Olivia was no small matter, and
+much of it I lay without bitterness to Cousin Judd, who, from having got
+himself named adviser in my father's will, was in a position to affect
+my life to the worse.
+
+And yet, in so far as I am not an unprecedented sport on the family
+tree, I had more in common with this shrewd-dealing, loud-praying,
+twice-removed soldier cousin than with any of my kin, though I should
+hardly say as much to him, for he has never been in a theatre, and if he
+still considers me a hopeful subject for prayer it is because his
+Christian duty rises superior to his conviction.
+
+He is pricked out in my earlier recollections by the difficulty he seems
+to have had in effecting a compromise between the traditional
+distrustfulness of the Ohianna farmer toward the Powers in general, and
+particularly of the weather, and his obligation of Christian Joy, and
+for a curious effect of not belonging to his wife, a large,
+uninteresting woman with a sense of her own merit which she never
+succeeded in imposing on anybody but Cousin Judd. She had a keen
+appreciation of worldly values which led her always to select the best
+material for her clothes, and another feeling of their expensiveness
+which resulted in her being always a little belated in the styles. She
+approved of religion, though not active in it, and in twenty years she
+and Cousin Judd had arrived at a series of compromises and excuses which
+enabled her to appear at church one Sunday in five and still keep up the
+interest of the clergyman and congregation as to why she didn't come the
+other four.
+
+Whenever the days were short or the roads too heavy, Cousin Judd would
+put up over night at our house, and I remember how my mother would
+always be able to say, looking about the empty democrat wagon as though
+she expected her in ambush somewhere:
+
+"And you didn't bring Lydia?" and Cousin Judd being able to reply to it
+as if it were something he had expected up till the last moment, and
+been keenly disappointed:
+
+"Well, no, Liddy ain't feeling quite up to it," which my mother received
+without skepticism. After this they were free to talk of other things.
+
+What there was between Cousin Judd and me, with due allowance for the
+years, was the spark, the touch-and-go of vitality that rose in me to a
+hundred beckonings of running flood and waving boughs--music and
+movement; and only the moral enthusiasms of war and religion raised
+through his heavy farmer stuff. We should have loved one another had we
+known how; as it was, all our intercourse was marked on his part by the
+gracelessness of rusticity, and by the impertinence of adolescence on
+mine. I used regularly to receive his pious admonitions with what, for a
+Taylorville child, was flippancy; nevertheless there were occasions when
+we had set off of summer Sunday mornings together to early class, when
+the church was cool and dim and the smell of the honey locusts came in
+through the window, that I caught the thrill that ran from the pounding
+of his fist where he prayed at the other end of the long bench; and
+there was a kind of blessedness shed from him as with closed eyes and
+lifted chin he swung from peak to peak of the splendid measure of "How
+Firm a Foundation," that I garnered up and hugged to myself in place of
+Art and the Joy of Living. All of which was very good for me and might
+have answered if it had not come into Cousin Judd's head that he ought
+to overlook my reading.
+
+By this time I had worked through all my father's books and was ready to
+satisfy the itch of imagination even with the vicious inaccuracies of
+what was called Christian literature. The trouble all came of course of
+my not understanding the nature of a lie. Not that I couldn't tell a
+downright fib if I had to, or haven't on occasion, but a lie is to me
+just as silly a performance when it is about marriage or work as about
+the law of gravitation, and when it is presented to me in the form of
+human behaviour it makes me sick, like the smell of tuberoses in a close
+room; and I failed utterly to realize then that there are a great many
+people capable of living sincerely and at the same time blandly
+misrepresenting the facts of life in the interests of what is called
+morality. I do not think it probable that Cousin Judd accepted for
+himself the rule of behaviour prescribed by the books he recommended--I
+shall not tell you what they were, but if there are any Sunday-school
+libraries in Ohianna you will find them on the shelves--but I know that
+he and my mother esteemed them excellent for the young.
+
+So far as they thought of it at all, they believed that in surrounding
+me with intimations of a life in which there was nothing more important
+than settling with Deity the minor details of living, and especially how
+much you would pay to His establishment, they had done their utmost to
+provide me with a life in which nothing more important could happen. If
+you were careful about reading the Bible and doing good to people--that
+is, persuading them to go to church and to leave off swearing--all the
+more serious details such as making a living, marrying and having
+children would take care of themselves; and the trouble was, as I have
+said, that I believed it. And that was how I found myself farthest from
+Art and Life at the time when I found myself a young lady.
+
+I had to make this discovery for myself, for there were no social
+occasions in Taylorville to give a term to your advent into the grown-up
+world, though there was a definite privilege which marked your
+achievement of it. There was a period prior to this in which you bumped
+against things you were too old for, and carromed to the things for
+which you were quite too young, and about the end of your high-school
+term you had done with hair ribbons and begun to have company on your
+own account, and the sort of things began to happen which marked the
+point beyond which if you fell upon disaster it was your own fault. They
+happened to me.
+
+By dint of my doing her compositions and of her doing my arithmetic,
+Pauline Allingham and I had managed to keep together all through the
+high school, and it was in our last year, when we used to put in the
+long end of the afternoons at Pauline's, playing croquet, that I first
+took notice of Tommy Bettersworth. The Bettersworth yard abutted on the
+Allingham's for the space of one woodshed and a horse-chestnut tree, and
+it was along in October that I began to be aware that it was not
+altogether the view of the garden that kept Tommy on the woodshed or in
+the chestnut tree the greater part of the afternoon. It may be that the
+adventure with Charlie Gower had sharpened my perception, at any rate it
+had aroused my discretion; I was carefully oblivious to the proximity of
+Tommy Bettersworth. But there came a day when Pauline was not, when she
+wanted to tell me something about Flora Haines which she was afraid he
+might overhear.
+
+"Come around to the summer-house," she said, "Tommy's always hanging
+about; I can't think what makes him."
+
+"Always?" I suggested.
+
+"Why, you know yourself he was there last Saturday, and Thursday when
+we ..."
+
+"Is he there when you and Flora are there, or only ..."
+
+"Oh," Pauline gave a gasp, "No----Oh, I never thought ... Olive ... I do
+believe ... that's it!"
+
+"Well, what?"
+
+"It's _you_, Olive," solemnly. "It must be that ... he really is...."
+Pauline's reading included more romance than mine.
+
+"Well, he can't say I gave him any encouragement."
+
+"Oh, _of course_ not, darling," Pauline was sympathetic. "You
+couldn't ... it is _so_ interesting. What would the girls say?"
+
+"Pauline, if you ever ..."
+
+"Truly, I never will.... But just _think_!"
+
+But we reckoned without Alfred Allingham. Alfred was not a nice boy at
+that age; he had come the way of curled darlings to be a sly,
+tale-bearing, offensive little cad, and the next Saturday, when Pauline
+turned him off the croquet ground for ribaldry, he went as far as the
+rose border and jeered back at us.
+
+"I know why you don't want me," he mocked; "so's I can't see Olive and
+Tommy Bettersworth makin' eyes." He executed a jig to the tune of
+
+    "Olive's mad and I am glad.
+    And I know what'll please her----"
+
+At this juncture the wrist and hand of Tommy Bettersworth appeared over
+the partition fence armed with horse-chestnuts which thudded with
+precision on the offensive person of Alfred Allingham. Pauline and I
+escaped to the summer-house. I thought I was going to cry until I found
+I was giggling, at which I was so mortified that I did cry.
+
+"He'll tell everybody in school," I protested.
+
+"What do you care?" soothed Pauline, "besides, you have to be teased
+about somebody, you know, and have somebody to choose you when they play
+clap in and clap out. You just _have_ to. Look at me." Pauline had been
+carrying on the discreetest of flirtations with Henry Glave for some
+months. "Tommy Bettersworth is a nice boy, and besides, dear, we'll have
+so much more in common."
+
+Pauline was right. Unless you had somebody to be teased about you were
+really not in things. I was furiously embarrassed by it, but I was
+resigned. Tommy sent me two notes that winter and a silk handkerchief
+for Christmas which I pretended was from Pauline. I am not going to be
+blamed for this. It was at least a month earlier that I had observed
+Tommy Bettersworth's inability to get away from Nile's corner on his way
+home from school until I had passed there on mine. It struck me as a
+very interesting trait of masculine character; I would have liked to
+talk it over with my mother on the plane of human interest; it seemed
+possible she might have noted similar eccentricities. I remember I
+worked around to it Saturday morning when I was helping her to darn the
+tablecloths. My mother was not unprepared; she did her duty by me as it
+was conceived in Taylorville, and did it promptly.
+
+"You are too young to be thinking about the boys," she said. "I don't
+want to hear you talking about such things until the time comes."
+
+This was so much in line with what was expected of parents, that I
+blinked the obvious retort that the time for talking about such things
+was when they began to happen, and went on with the tablecloths. But I
+couldn't tell her about the handkerchief after that. It would have been
+positively unmaidenly. And after he had sent me a magnificent paper lace
+valentine, I distinctly encouraged Tommy Bettersworth.
+
+This being the case, I do not know just how it began to be conveyed to
+me, as in the lengthening evenings of spring, Tommy took to
+church-going, that his hands were coarse and his ears too prominent, and
+as I confided solemnly to Pauline, though I had the greatest respect for
+his character, I simply couldn't bear to have him about. This was the
+more singular since the church-going was the visible sign of the good
+influence that, according to the books, I was exercising; and though
+Tommy was as nearly inarticulate as was natural, I was in no doubt on
+whose account this new start proceeded. If I had not disliked Tommy very
+much at this period, why should I have taken to tucking myself between
+Forester and Effie on the way home, embarrassedly aware of Tommy, whose
+way did not lie in our direction, scuffling along with the Lawrences on
+the other side of the street? I seem to remember some rather heroic
+attempts on Tommy's part to account for his presence there on the ground
+of wanting to speak privately to Forester, certain shouts and sallies
+toward which my brother displayed a derisive consciousness of their not
+being pertinent to the occasion.
+
+I have often wondered how much of these tentative ventures toward an
+altered relation were observed by our elders; not much, I should think.
+At any rate no mollifying word drifted down from their heights of
+experience to our shallows of self-consciousness.
+
+My mother adhered to her notion of my not being at an age for "such
+things," borne out, I believe, by the consensus of paternal opinion that
+she might too easily "put notions" in my head; not inquiring what
+notions might by the natural process of living be already there. Perhaps
+they were not altogether wrong in this, so delicate is the process of
+sex development that nature herself obscures the processes. To this day
+I do not know how much my taking suddenly to going home with Belle
+Endsleigh by a short cut was embarrassment, and how much a discreet
+feminine awareness that in my absence Tommy would better manage to make
+the family take his walking with them as a matter of course, but I
+remember that I cried when my mother, who did not approve of Belle
+Endsleigh, scolded me. And then quite suddenly came the click and the
+loosened tension of the readjustment.
+
+Along about Easter Alfred Allingham told Pauline that Tommy had thrashed
+Charlie Gower, and though it was supposed to be the strictest secret, it
+was because Charlie had teased him about me. Pauline was rather
+scandalized by my insistence that Charlie wouldn't have done it if Tommy
+hadn't rather conspicuously brought it on himself.
+
+"I call it truly noble of him ... like a knight." Pauline could always
+throw the glamour of her reading around the immediate circumstance. "At
+any rate, after this you can't do anything less than treat him
+politely," she urged.
+
+Whether it would have made any difference in my attitude or not, it did
+in Tommy's. I saw that when he came out of the church with us next
+Sunday. There was a certain aggressive maleness in the way he strode
+beside me, that there was no mistaking. I looked about rather feebly for
+Belle.
+
+"I don't see her anywhere," Tommy assured me, "besides, we don't want
+her." As I could see Tommy in the light that streamed from the church
+windows, it occurred to me that if he was not good-looking he certainly
+looked good, and he had a moustache coming.
+
+Forester, who was going through a phase himself, had gone home with Amy
+Lawrence; Effie lagged behind with mother, talking to Mrs. Endsleigh
+about the prospects of the Sewing Society raising the money for
+repainting the parsonage. Looking back to see what had become of them I
+tripped on the boardwalk.
+
+"If you would take my arm" ... suggested Tommy. I was aware of the
+sleeve of his coat under my fingers.
+
+The next turn took us out of sound of the voices; the street lamps
+flared far apart in the long, quiet avenue. The shed pods of the maples
+slipped and popped under us with the sweet smell of the sap.
+
+"How did you like the sermon?" Tommy wished to know. What I had to say
+of it was probably not very much to the point. No one overtook us as we
+walked. There was a sense of tremendous occasions in the air, of things
+accomplished. I had established the privilege. I was walking home from
+church with a young man. I was a young lady.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+As often as I think of Olivia Lattimore growing up, I have wondered if
+there was really no evidence of dramatic talent about, or simply no one
+able to observe it. There was no theatre at Taylorville, and when from
+time to time third-rate stock companies performed indifferent plays at
+the Town Hall, Forrie and Effie and I heard nothing of them except that
+they were presumably wicked.
+
+Occasionally there were amateur performances in which, when I had won a
+grudging consent to take part, I failed to distinguish myself. Effie had
+a very amusing trick of mimicry, and if you had heard her recite "Curfew
+Shall Not Ring To-night," you would have thought that the Gift on its
+way from whatever high and unknowable source, in passing her had lighted
+haphazard on the most unlikely instrument. I was not even clever at my
+books except by starts and flashes.
+
+I graduated at the high school with Pauline, and afterward we had two
+years together at Montecito. This was the next town to Taylorville, and
+its bitter rival. Montecito had a Young Ladies' Seminary, a Business
+College, and the State Institution for the Blind, for which Taylorville
+so little forgave it that the new railroad was persuaded to leave
+Montecito four miles to the right and make its junction with the L. and
+C. at Taylorville. This carried the farmer shipping away from Montecito,
+but the victory was not altogether scathless; young ladies were still
+obliged to go to the seminary, and it enabled Montecito to put on the
+air of having retired from the vulgar competition of trade and become
+the Athens of the West.
+
+Pauline and I went over to school on Mondays and home on Fridays. The
+course of study was for three years, but because there was Effie to
+think of and my mother's means were limited, I had only two, and was
+never able to catch up with Pauline by the length of that extra year.
+She was always holding it out against me in extenuation and excuse; when
+she tried to account for my marriage having turned out so badly on the
+ground of my not having had Advantages, I knew she was thinking of
+Montecito. She thinks of it still, I imagine, to condone as she does, I
+am sure, with an adorable womanliness, what in my conduct she no longer
+feels able to countenance. And yet I hardly know what I might have drawn
+from that third year more than I took away from the other two, which
+was, besides the regular course of study, an acquaintance with a style
+of furnishings not all gilt wall paper and plush brocade, and a renewed
+taste for good reading. They made such a point of good reading at the
+seminary that I have always thought it a pity they could not go a
+little farther and make a practice of it.
+
+The difficulty with most of our reading was that it had no relativity to
+the processes of life in Ohianna; we had things as far removed from it
+as Dante and Euripides, things no nearer than "The Scarlet Letter" and
+"David Copperfield," from which to draw for the exigencies of
+Taylorville was to cause my mother to wonder, with tears in her eyes,
+why in the world I couldn't be like other people. I read; I gorged, in
+fact, on the best books, but I found it more convenient to go on living
+by the shallow priggishness of Cousin Judd's selection. All that
+splendid stream poured in upon me and sank and lost itself in the shifty
+undercurrent that made still, by times, distracting eddies on the
+surface of adolescence.
+
+But whatever was missed or misunderstood of its evidences, the Gift
+worked at the bottom, throve like a sea anemone under the shallows of
+girlishness, and, nourished by unsuspected means, was the source no
+doubt of the live resistance I opposed to all that grew out of
+Forester's making a vocation of being a good son. I do not know yet how
+to deal with sufficient tenderness and without exasperation with the
+disposition of widowed women, bred to dependence, to build out of their
+sons the shape of a man proper to be leaned upon. It is so justified in
+sentiment, so pretty to see in its immediate phases, that though my
+mother was young and attractive enough to have married again, it was
+difficult not to concur in her making a virtue, a glorification of
+living entirely in her boy. I seem to remember a time before Forrie was
+intrigued by the general appreciation, when it required some coercion to
+present him always in the character of the most dutiful son. He hadn't,
+for instance, invariably fancied himself setting out for prayer meeting
+with my mother's hymn book and umbrella, but the second summer after my
+father died, when he had worked on Cousin Judd's farm and brought home
+his wages, found him completely implicated. We were really not so poor
+there was any occasion for this, but mother was so delighted with the
+idea of a provider, and Forester was so pleased with the picture of
+himself in that capacity, that it was all, no doubt, very good for him.
+
+He always did bring home his wages after that, which led to his being
+consulted about meals, and the new curtains for the dining-room, and to
+being met in the evening as though all the house had been primed for his
+return, and merely gone on in that expectation while he was away. Effie,
+I know, had no difficulty in accepting him as the excuse for any amount
+of household ritual, making a fuss about his birthdays and trying on her
+new clothes for his approval, but Effie was five years younger than
+Forester and I was only twenty-two months. It was more, I think, than
+our community in the gaucheries and hesitancies of youth that
+disinclined me to take seriously my brother's opinions on window
+curtains and to sniff at my mother's affectionate pretence of his being
+the head of the family. At times when I felt this going on in our house,
+there rose up like a wisp of fog between me and the glittering promise
+of the future, a kind of horror of the destiny of women; to defer and
+adjust, to maintain the attitude of acquiescence toward opinions and
+capabilities that had nothing more to recommend them than merely that
+they were a man's! I could be abased, I should be delighted to be
+imposed upon, but if I paid out self-immolation I wanted something for
+my money, and I didn't consider I was getting it with my brother for
+whom I smuggled notes and copied compositions.
+
+It never occurred to my mother, until it came to the concrete question
+of spending-money, that there was anything more than a kind of natural
+perverseness in my attitude, which only served to throw into relief the
+satisfactoriness of her relations to her son. Forester, it appeared, was
+to have an allowance, and I wanted one too.
+
+"But what," said my mother, tolerantly, for she had not yet thought of
+granting it, "would you do with an allowance?"
+
+"Whatever Forester does."
+
+"But Forester," my mother explained, waving the stocking she had
+stretched upon her hand, "is a boy." I expostulated.
+
+"What has that got to do with it?"
+
+"Olivia!" The ridiculousness of having such a question addressed to her
+brought a smile to my mother's lips, which hung fixed there as I saw her
+mind back away suddenly in fear that I was really going to insist on
+knowing what that had to do with it.
+
+"I give you twenty-five cents a week for church money," she parried
+weakly.
+
+"That's what you think I ought to give. I want an allowance, and then I
+can deny myself and give what I like."
+
+"Forester earns his," said my mother; she hadn't of course meant the
+discussion to get on to a basis of reasonableness.
+
+"Well," I threatened, "I'll earn mine."
+
+That was really what did the business in the end. All the boys in
+Taylorville worked as soon as they were old enough, but it was the last
+resort of poverty that girls should be put to wages. Before that
+possibility my mother retreated into amused indulgence. She paid me my
+allowance, appreciably less than my brother's, on the first of the
+month, with the air of concurring in a joke, which I think now must have
+covered some vague hurt at my want of sympathy with the beautiful
+fiction of Forester's growing up to take my father's place with her.
+They had achieved by the time Forester was twenty, what passed for
+perfect confidence between them, though it was at the cost of
+Forester's living shallowly or not at all in the courts of boyhood which
+my mother was unable to reënter, and her voluntary withdrawal from
+varieties of experience from which his youth prevented him. My mother
+always thought it was made up to her in affection; what came out of it
+for Forester is still on the knees of the gods.
+
+I began to say how it was that the Gift took care of itself while
+Forester was engrossing the family attention. He had had a year at the
+business college in Montecito, which was considered quite sufficient,
+and rather more, in fact, than his accepted vocation as the support of
+his mother seemed to call for. Any question that might naturally come up
+of a profession for him, seemed to have been quashed beforehand by the
+general notion of an immediate salary as the means to that end. I do not
+recall a voice lifted on behalf of a life of his own. He had worked up
+from driving the delivery wagon in vacations to being dry goods clerk at
+the Coöperative, where his affability and easy familiarity with the
+requirements of women, made him immensely popular. Everybody liked to
+trade with Forester because he took such pains in matching things, and
+he was such a good boy to his mother. He paid the largest portion of his
+salary for his board, and took Effie, who adored him, about with him. I
+don't mean to say that he was not also good friends with Olivia, or that
+there was anything which prevented my doing my best with the three
+chocolate layer cakes and the angel's food I made for his party on his
+twenty-first birthday.
+
+The real unpleasantness on that occasion came of my mother's notion of
+distinguishing it among all other birthdays by paying over to Forester a
+third of the not very considerable sum left by my father, derived
+chiefly from his back pay as an officer, which she had always held as
+particularly set aside for us children. It was owing perhaps to a form
+of secretiveness that in unprotected woman does duty for caution, that
+Effie and I had scarcely heard of this sum until it was flourished
+before us on the day before the birthday, much as if it had been my
+father's sword, supposing the occasion to have required it being girded
+on his son.
+
+Forester was to have a third of that money in the form of a check under
+his plate on the morning of his birthday. Effie and I did full justice
+to the magnificence of the proposal. I was beating the whites of
+thirteen eggs by Pauline's recipe for angel food--mine called for only
+eleven--and Effie was rubbing up Mrs. Endsleigh's spoons, which had been
+borrowed for the party.
+
+I was always happier in the kitchen than in any room of the house, with
+its plain tinted walls, the plain painted woodwork (the parlour was
+hideously "grained"), and the red of Effie's geraniums at the window
+ledge. The stir of domesticity, all this talk of my father, intrigued
+me for the moment into the sense of being a valued and intrinsic part of
+the family.
+
+"His father would have wanted Forester to have that money," said my
+mother, "now that he's of age."
+
+"And when," I questioned, raised by the mention of thirds to the joyous
+inclusion, "are Effie and I to have ours?"
+
+"Oh," my mother's interest waned, "when you are married, perhaps."
+
+It had grown in my mind as I spoke, that I had been of age now more than
+a year and nothing had come of it. The suggestion that my father could
+have taken a less active interest in the event on my behalf, pressed
+upon a dying sensibility; I resented his being so committed to this
+posthumous slight and meant to defend him from it.
+
+"He'd have wanted me to have mine on my birthday, the same as Forester,"
+I insisted.
+
+"Oh, Olivia!" My mother's tone intimated annoyance at my claim to being
+supported by my father in my absurdities, but her good humour was proof
+against it. "Girls have theirs when they are married," she soothed.
+
+I held up the platter and whisked the stiff froth with the air of doing
+these things very dexterously; I wasn't going to admit by taking it
+seriously, that my brother's coming of age was any more important than
+mine, but I spare you the flippancies by which I covered the hurt of
+realizing that to everybody except myself, it was.
+
+"It is so like you, Olivia," said my mother, with tears in her eyes, "to
+want to spoil everything." What I had really spoiled was the free
+exercise of partiality by which she was enabled to distinguish Forester
+over her other children, according to her sense of his deserts; and,
+besides, what in the world would the child do with all that money?
+
+"The same thing that Forester does," I maintained, and then quickly to
+forestall another objection which I saw rising in her face. "If you were
+old enough to be married at nineteen, I guess I am old enough to be
+trusted with a few hundred dollars."
+
+But there I had struck again on the structure of tradition that kept
+Taylorville from direct contact with the issues of life; anybody was old
+enough to be married at eighteen, but money was a serious matter.
+Whenever I said things like that I could see my mother waver between a
+shocked wonder at having produced such unnaturalness, and the fear that
+somebody might overhear us. And I didn't know myself what I wanted with
+that money, except that I craved the sense of being important that went
+with the possession of it. And of course now that I had been refused it
+on the ground of sex, it was part of the general resistance that I
+opposed to things as they were, to have it on principle. Just when I
+had mother almost convinced that she ought to give it to me, she made it
+nearly impossible for me to accept, by asking Forester what she ought to
+do about it. When I had demanded it as the evidence of my taking rank
+with my brother as a personage, it was insufferable that it should come
+to me as a concession of his amiability.
+
+What I really wanted of course was to have it put under my plate with an
+affectionate speech about its being the legacy of a soldier and the
+witness of his integrity, coupled with the hope that I would spend it in
+a manner to give pleasure to my dear father, who was no doubt looking on
+at this happy incident.
+
+There was nothing in me then--there is nothing now--which advised me of
+being inappropriately the object of such an address, or my replying to
+it as gallantly as the junior clerk of the Coöperative. To do Forester
+justice, he came out squarely on the question of my being entitled to
+the money if he was, but he contrived backhandedly to convey his sense
+of my obtuseness in not deferring sentimentally to a male ascendancy
+that I did not intrinsically feel; and I can go back now to these
+disquieting episodes as the beginning of that maladjustment of my
+earlier years, in not having a man about toward whom I could actually
+experience the deference I was expected to exhibit.
+
+Well, I had my check for the same amount and on the same occasion as my
+brother's, but the feeling in the air of its being merely a concession
+to my forwardness, prevented me from making any return for it that
+interfered with Forester's carrying off the situation of coming into his
+father's legacy on coming of age, quite to my mother's satisfaction.
+What it might have made for graciousness for once in my life to have
+been the centre of that dramatic affectionateness, I can only guess.
+Firm in the determination that since no sentiment went to its bestowal
+none should go to its acknowledgment, I carried my check upstairs and
+shook all of the rugs out of the window to account for my eyes being red
+at ten o'clock in the morning. And that was the way the Powers took to
+provide against the complete submergence of the actress in the young
+lady, for though it turned out that I did spend the greater part of the
+money on my wedding clothes, a portion of it went for the only technical
+training I ever had.
+
+The real business of a young lady in Taylorville was getting married,
+but to avoid an obviousness in the interim, she played the piano or
+painted on satin or became interested in missions. If my money had
+fallen in eight months earlier I should undoubtedly have spent it on the
+third year at Montecito; as it was I decided to study elocution. It
+appeared a wholly fortuitous choice. I was not supposed to have any
+talent for it, but I burned to spend some of my money sensibly, and it
+was admittedly sensible for a young lady to take lessons in something.
+Effie was having music, Flora Haines painted plaques; when Olivia joined
+Professor Winter's elocution classes at Temperance Hall mother said it
+looked like throwing money away, but of course I could teach in case
+anything happened, which meant in case of my not being married or being
+left a widow with young children.
+
+Professor Winter was the kind of man who would have collected patch
+boxes and painted miniatures on ladies' fans; not that he could have
+done anything of the sort on his income, but it would have suited the
+kind of man he was. He had small neat ways and nice little tricks of
+discrimination, and microscopic enthusiasms that hovered and fluttered,
+enough of them when it came to the rendering of a favourite passage, to
+produce a kind of haze of appreciation like a swarm of midges. Not being
+able to afford patch boxes or Louis XV enamels, he collected accents
+instead. The man's memory for phonic variations was extraordinary; all
+our accustomed speech was a wild garden over which he took little
+flights and drops and humming poises, extracting, as it were by sips,
+your private history, things you would have probably told for the
+asking, but objected to having wrested from your betraying tongue. He
+would come teetering forward on his neat little boots, upon the toes of
+which he appeared to elevate himself by pressing the tips of his
+fingers very firmly together, and when you committed yourself no farther
+than to remark on the state of the weather or the election outlook, he
+would want to know if you hadn't spent some time of your youth in the
+South, or if it was your maternal or paternal grandfather who was
+Norwegian. Either of which would be true and annoying, particularly as
+you weren't aware of speaking other than the rest of the world, for if
+there was anything quite and completely abhorrent to the Taylorville
+mind it was the implication of being different from other
+Taylorvillians.
+
+Somewhere the Professor had picked up an adequate theory and practice of
+voice production, though I never knew anything of his training except
+that he had been an instructor in a normal school and was aggrieved at
+his dismissal. After he had advertised himself as open for private
+instruction and tri-weekly classes at Temperance Hall, there was
+something almost like a concerted effort at keeping him in the town,
+because of the credit he afforded us against Montecito. With the
+exception of a much-whiskered personage who came over from the business
+college in the winter to conduct evening classes in penmanship, he was
+the only man addressed habitually as Professor, and the only one who
+wore evening dress at public functions.
+
+His dress coat imparted a particular touch of elegance to occasions when
+he gave readings from "Evangeline" and "The Lady of the Lake"
+(Taylorville choice), and thoroughly discredited a disgruntled
+Montecitan who, on the basis of having been to Chicago on his wedding
+trip, insisted that such were only worn by waiters in hotels.
+
+It would be interesting to record that Professor Winter lent himself
+with alacrity to the unfolding of my Gift, but, in fact, his imagination
+hardly strayed so far. He taught phonics and voice production and taught
+them very well; probably he had no more practical acquaintance with the
+stage than I had. Certainly he never suggested it for me, and for my
+part I could hardly have explained why with so little encouragement I
+was so devoted to the rather tedious drill. Pauline was still at the
+seminary, and the regular hours of practice made a bulwark against an
+insidious proprietary air which Tommy Bettersworth began to wear.
+Besides the voice training, I had a system of physical culture,
+artificial and unsound as I have since learned, but serving to restrain
+my too exuberant gesture, and much memorizing of poems and plays for
+practice work. I hardly know if the Professor had any dramatic talent or
+not; probably not, as he made nothing, I remember, of stopping me in the
+middle of a great passion for the sake of a dropped consonant, and
+deprecated original readings on my part.
+
+It was his relish for musical cadence as much as its intellectual
+appreciation that led him to select the Elizabethan drama, in the great
+scenes of which I was letter perfect by the time I had come to the end
+of the Professor's instruction, and at the end too, it seemed, of my
+devices for dodging the destiny of women.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+I have tried to sketch to you how in Taylorville we were allowed to
+stumble on the grown-up consciousness of sex, but I can give you no idea
+of the extent to which we were prevented from the grown-up judgment.
+
+Somewhere between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, one was loosed on a
+free and lively social intercourse from which one was expected to emerge
+later, triumphantly mated. This was obligatory; otherwise your family
+sighed and said that somehow Olivia didn't seem to know how to catch a
+husband, and then painstakingly refrained from the subject in your
+presence; or your mother, if she was particularly loyal, said she had
+always thought there was no call for a girl to marry if she didn't feel
+to want to. But anything resembling maternal interference in your behalf
+was looked upon as worldly minded, or at the least unnecessary. The
+custom of chaperonage was unheard of; girls were supposed to be trusted.
+
+I do not recall now that I ever had any particular instruction as to how
+to conduct myself toward young men except that they were never on any
+account to take liberties. Whatever else went to the difficult business
+of mating you were supposed to pick up. That I did not pass through
+this period in entire obliviousness was due to Pauline, who had the
+keenest appreciation of her effect on the opposite sex. She was the sort
+of girl who is described as having always had a great deal of attention;
+she had a nice Procrustean notion of the sort of young man to be engaged
+to--our maiden imagination hardly went farther than that--and her young
+ladyhood appeared to be a process of trying it on the greatest possible
+number of eligible Taylorvillians. When she came home from Montecito she
+had already met Henry Mills at the house of a roommate where she had
+spent the Easter vacation, and he had sent her flowers at commencement
+and verses of his own composition.
+
+It was Pauline who explained to me that unless I had some young man like
+Tommy Bettersworth who could be counted on, I could hardly hope to be
+"in" things--when they made up a party to go sleighing, for instance, or
+a picnic to Willesden Lake. I liked being in things and did not
+altogether dislike Tommy Bettersworth. He was a thoroughly creditable
+beau and required very little handling, for even as early as that I had
+an inkling of what I have long since concluded, that a man who requires
+overmuch to be played and baited, held off and on, is rather poor game
+after you have got him. It worried Pauline not a little that I forgave
+Tommy so lightly for small offences; she was afraid it might appear that
+I liked him too much, when in truth it was only that I liked him too
+little. And for complacence, if I had had any disposition toward it, I
+was saved by the shocking example of Forester, all of whose relations
+were tinged by his vocation of model son. He had acquired by this time a
+manner, by the intimacy, greater than is common in boys, with which he
+lived into the feminine life of the household, and by his daily
+performance of measuring off petticoats and matching hose, which
+admitted him to families where we visited, on a footing that enabled him
+to flirt with the daughters under the very apron-strings of their
+mothers. You couldn't somehow maintain a strict virginal severity with a
+young man who had just taken an informed and personal interest in your
+mother's flannelette wrappers, the credit of whose dutifulness was a
+warrant for his not meaning anything in particular. In short, Forrie
+spooned.
+
+I think now there was some excuse for him; he had been wrenched very
+early by his affections from the normal outbreaks of adolescence; he had
+never to my knowledge been "out with the boys." Unless he got it in the
+business of junior clerk at the Coöperative, he could hardly be said to
+have a male life at all; he was being shaped to a man's performance at
+the expense of his mannishness. But against his philandering rose up,
+not only the fastidiousness of girlhood, but some latent sense of
+rightness, as keen in me as the violinist's for the variation of tone;
+something that questioned the justice of pronouncing thoroughly moral a
+young man who, if he never went over the brink, was willing to spend a
+considerable portion of his time on the edge of it. I should have
+admired Forester more at this juncture if he had been a little wild--and
+I knew perfectly that my mother would have interdicted any social life
+for me whatever if I had permitted a tithe of the familiarities allowed
+to my brother.
+
+Among the other things which a girl was expected to "pick up," along
+with the art of attracting a husband, was the vital information with
+which she was expected to meet the occasion of marrying one. It was all
+a part of the general assumption of the truth as something not suitable
+for the young to know, that nobody told us any of these things if they
+could help it. I do not mean to say that there was not a certain amount
+of half information whispered about among the girls, who by the avidity
+for such whisperings established themselves as not quite nice. But
+Pauline Allingham and I were nice girls. What this meant was that
+nothing that pertained to the mystery of marriage reached us through all
+the suppression and evasions of the social conspiracy, except the
+obviousness of maternity. I remember how intimations of it as part of
+our legitimate experience, began to grow upon us with a profound and
+tender curiosity toward very young children, and, particularly on
+Pauline's part, a great shyness of being seen in their company. But we
+were not expected to possess ourselves of accurate information until we
+were already involved in it.
+
+We had reached the age when matrons no longer avoided references to its
+most conspicuous phases in our presence, before we found words for
+mentioning it to one another. There was a young aunt of Pauline's lent
+something to that.
+
+She was a sister of Mr. Allingham, come to stay with them while her
+husband was absent somewhere in the West. Pauline told me about it one
+of the week-ends she spent at home from Montecito; this was Saturday
+afternoon, and she had found the aunt in the house on her return the
+evening before.
+
+"Do you know," she said, "it is very queer the way I feel about Aunt
+Alice--the way she is, you know. Mamma hadn't told me, and when I came
+into the sitting room and saw her, I thought I was going to cry; and it
+wasn't that I was sorry either ... I'm awfully fond of her. I just felt
+it."
+
+"Yes, I know," I admitted.
+
+"Aunt Alice is so sensible," Pauline explained a few weeks later, "she
+talks to me a great deal; she's only a few years older than I am. She
+has shown me all her things for the baby. Mamma didn't think she
+ought ... you know how mothers are. They're in the bureau drawer in the
+best room. I'll show them to you some time; Alice won't mind."
+
+Alice didn't mind, it appeared, so it must have been shyness that led
+us to select the afternoon when the married women were away, and though
+I cannot forgive the conditions which led us so surreptitiously to touch
+the fringe of the great experience, I own still to some tenderness for
+the two girls with their heads together that bright hot afternoon, over
+the bureau drawer in Mrs. Allingham's best room. Pauline showed me a
+little sacque which she had crocheted.
+
+"Mother thought I was too young, but Alice said I might."
+
+"You must have liked to, awfully," I envied.
+
+"That's one of the nice things about having children, I should
+think"--Pauline fingered a hemstitched slip--"you can make things for
+them."
+
+"Which would you rather have, girls or boys?" I hazarded.
+
+"Oh, girls; you can always dress them so prettily."
+
+"But boys ... they can do so many things when they grow up." I felt
+rather strongly on that point.
+
+"Alice says"--Pauline folded the little frock--"that she's so glad to
+have it she doesn't care which it is." Something, perhaps an echo of my
+mother's experience, pricked in me.
+
+"They aren't always as glad as that."
+
+"I suppose not. Alice is having this one because she wants it."
+
+We looked at one another. We would have liked to have spoken further, to
+have defined ourselves, despoiled ourselves of tenderness, nobilities,
+but around the whole subject lay the blank expanse of our ignorance. We
+locked the drawer again and went out and played croquet. And that was
+how we stood toward our normal destiny that summer when Pauline was
+wondering if Henry Mills meant to propose to her, and I was wondering
+how much longer I could keep Tommy Bettersworth from proposing to me.
+
+I managed to stave it off until the end of September. On the
+twenty-second of that month there was a picnic at Willesden Lake. There
+were ten couples of us, and Flora Haines, who was wanted to count even
+with a young man who was to join us at the lake, a stranger to most of
+us, nephew to one of the wealthiest farmers in the township. We had
+always wished there might have been young people at the Garrett farm,
+and there was some talk of this nephew, who was to come on a visit,
+being adopted.
+
+Some of our brothers had made his acquaintance, and Pauline, who had met
+him at Montecito, had warranted him as "interesting." I believe Flora
+Haines was invited to pair with him because every girl felt that Flora
+would be eminently safe to trust her own young man to in the event of
+Helmeth Garrett proving more worth while.
+
+Henry Mills, who was reading law at the county seat of the adjoining
+county, had come over for the picnic and was expected to bring matters
+to a crisis with Pauline, and Forester had a day off to take Belle
+Endsleigh, who was at the point of pitying him because, though he had
+such an affectionate disposition, so long as his mother depended on him
+he couldn't think of marrying. We had no chaperone of course; several of
+the couples were engaged, and there were brothers; we wouldn't have to
+put up with the implication that we were not able to manage by
+ourselves.
+
+It was the sort of day ... soft Indian summer, painted woodlands,
+gossamer glinting high in the windless air ... on which Forester found
+it necessary to hope brotherly that I should be able to get through it
+without being silly. By that he meant that the submerged Olivia, however
+interestingly she might read in a book, was highly incomprehensible and
+nearly always ridiculous to her contemporaries.
+
+Willesden Lake was properly a drainage pond of four or five acres in
+extent, drawn like a bow about the contour of two hills; water-lilies
+grew at the head where a stream came in, and muskrats built at the lower
+end. The picnic ground was in the hollow between the two hills, by a
+spring, where the grass grew smooth like a lawn to the roots of oaks
+burning blood red from leaf to leaf. As it turned out, though we put off
+lunch for him for an hour, young Mr. Garrett did not come, and as the
+party sat about on the mossy hummocks in the quiet of repletion, I
+thought nothing could be so much worth while as to leave Tommy in care
+of Flora Haines and get away into the woods by myself. The soul of the
+weather had got into my soul and I felt I should discredit myself with
+Forester if I stayed. There was a little footpath that led down by a
+rill to the lake, and as I took it, there was scarcely a sound louder
+than the soft down-rustle of the painted leaves. There were two or three
+old boats, half water-logged, tied at the head of the lake, and one of
+these I found and paddled across to the opposite bank. I had not known
+there was a path there opening from the dewberry bushes that dipped
+along the border, but the spirit in my feet answered to its invitation.
+I followed it up the hill through the leaf drift that heaped whispering
+in the smoky wood. I spread out my arms as I went and began to move to
+the rhythm of chanted verse. Where the red and gold and russet banners
+brushed me I was touched delicately as with flame. I had on a very
+pretty dress that day, I remember, a thin organdy with a leaf pattern,
+made up over yellow sateen, and the consciousness of suitability worked
+happily on my mind. At the top of the hill I struck into an old wood
+road where it passed through a grove of young hickory, blazing yellow
+like a host. Here I went slowly and dropped the chanting to the measure
+of classic English verse; it was the only means of expression
+Taylorville had provided me. Scene after scene I went through happy and
+oblivious. I had been at it half an hour perhaps, moving forward with
+the natural impetus of the play, in the faint old wagon tracks, and had
+got as far as
+
+    --Flowers that affrighted she let fall
+    From Dis's wagon!--
+
+when I was startled by the clapping of hands, and looked up to see a
+young man sitting on the top of a rail fence that ran straight across
+the way, as though he might have stopped there to rest in the act of
+climbing over.
+
+"I knew you would see me the next minute," he said, "and I wanted to be
+discovered in the act of appreciation." He sprang down from the fence
+and came toward me, taking off his hat. "I suppose you are from the
+picnic; I expected to find you somewhere about. I am Helmeth Garrett."
+
+"They're at the spring--we waited lunch for you. I am Miss Lattimore;
+Olivia May," I supplemented. I was a little doubtful about that point,
+for at Taylorville we called one another by our first names. I was
+pleased with the swiftness with which he struck upon a permissible
+compromise.
+
+"I owe you all sorts of apologies, Miss Olivia, but the mare I was to
+ride went lame and uncle couldn't spare me another, so I had an early
+lunch at the house and walked over." As he stood looking down at me I
+saw that he had a crop of unruly dark hair and what there was in his
+face that Pauline had found interesting. He wore a soft red tie,
+knotted loosely at the collar of a white flannel shirt, and for the rest
+of him was dressed very much as other young men. All at once a spark of
+irrepressible friendliness flashed up in smiles between us.
+
+It seemed the merest chance then that I had come across the wood to meet
+him. In the light of what has happened since, I see that the guardian of
+my submerged self was doing what it could for me; but against the
+embattled social forces of Taylorville what could even the gods do!
+
+"If you will take me to the others," he suggested, "I can make my
+excuses, and then we can talk." It was remarkable, I thought, that he
+should have discovered so early that we would wish to talk. We began to
+move in the direction of the lake.
+
+"Were you doing a play?" he asked. I nodded.
+
+"How long were you watching me?"
+
+"Since you passed the plum brush yonder; it was bully! Are you going on
+the stage?" I explained about Professor Winter and the elocution
+lessons.
+
+"They don't approve of the stage in Taylorville," I finished, touched by
+the vanishing trace of a realization that up to this moment the
+objection would have been stated personally.
+
+"And with all your talent! Oh, I know what I'm saying. I lived in
+Chicago four years and saw a lot of the theatre."
+
+He began to talk to me of the stage, probably much of it neither
+informed nor profitable, but I had never heard it talked of before in
+unembarrassed relevancy to living, and he had that trick of speech that
+goes with the achieving propensity, of accelerating his own energy as he
+talked, so that its backwater fairly floated us into the ease of
+intimacy. There was no doubt we were tremendously pleased with one
+another. I was throbbing still with the measure of verse and moved half
+trippingly to the rhythm of my blood.
+
+"Do you dance too?" What went with that implied something personal and
+complimentary.
+
+"Oh, no--a few steps I've picked up at school. That's another of the
+things we don't approve at Taylorville."
+
+"I say, what a lot of old mossbacks there must be about here anyway.
+Take my uncle, now...." He went on to tell me how he had tried to induce
+his uncle, who could afford it, to advance the money for technical
+training in engineering. Uncle Garrett was of the opinion that Helmeth
+would do better to get a job with some good man and "pick up things ...
+always managed to get along by rule of thumb himself," said the nephew,
+"and thinks all the rest of us ought to. I said, 'How would it be with a
+doctor, now, just to scramble up his medicine?' but you can't get
+through to my uncle. He thinks a man who can run a thrashing machine is
+an engineer."
+
+I remember that we found it necessary to sit down on the slope of the
+hill toward the pond while he sketched for me his notion of what an
+engineer's career might be. "But you've got to have technical
+training ... got to! Talk about rule of thumb ... it's like going at it
+with no thumbs at all." In the midst of this we remembered that we ought
+to be looking for the rest of the picnickers. Once in the boat, however,
+there was a muskrat's nest which, as something new to him, had to be
+poked into, and we stopped to gather lilies, which I could not have done
+by myself without wetting my dress. When we came at last to the spring,
+we found the lunch baskets huddled under the oak and nobody about.
+
+I think we must have been very far gone by this time in the young
+rapture of intimacy. The wood was smokily still, and we scuffed great
+heaps of the leaves together as we walked about pretending to look for
+the others. I remember it seemed a singular flame-touched circumstance
+that the leaves flew up from under our feet and fell lightly on our
+faces and our hair.
+
+"I suppose we can't help finding them; the wonder is they haven't been
+spoiling our good talk before now."
+
+"Oh," I protested, "if you hadn't been coming to look for them you
+wouldn't have met me."
+
+"And now that we have met, we are going to keep on. I'm coming to see
+you. May I?"
+
+"If you care so much...." A little spiral of wind rising fountain-wise
+out of the breathlessness whirled up a smother of brightening leaves; it
+caught my skirts and whipped them against his knees. It seemed to have
+blown our hands together too, though I am at a loss to know how that
+was.
+
+"Care!" he said. "If I care? Oh, you beauty, you wonder!" All at once he
+had kissed me.
+
+The electrical moment hung in the air, poised, took flight upward in
+dizzying splendour. Suddenly from within the wood came a little snigger
+of laughter.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+I do not know how long it took for the certainty that I had been kissed
+by an utter stranger in the presence of the entire picnic, to work
+through the singing flames in which that kiss had wrapped me. We must
+have walked on almost immediately in the direction of the snigger; I
+remember a kind of clutch of my spirit toward the mere mechanical act of
+walking, to hold me fast to the time and place from which there was an
+inward rush to escape. We walked on. They were all sitting together
+under a bank of hazel and the girls' laps were filled with the brown
+clusters. Out of my whirling dimness I heard Helmeth Garrett explaining,
+as I introduced him, how he had come across me in the wood, looking for
+them.
+
+"And of course," suggested Charlie Gower, "in such good company you
+weren't in a hurry about looking for the rest of us." I remembered the
+asparagus bed and was glad I had slapped him.
+
+"No," my companion looked him over very coolly, "now that I've seen some
+of the rest of you I'm glad I didn't hurry." Plainly it wasn't going to
+do to try to take it out of Helmeth Garrett.
+
+As we began by common consent to move back to the spring, Forester drew
+me by the arm behind the hazel. He was divided between a brotherly
+disgust at my lapse, and delight to have caught the prim Olivia
+tripping.
+
+"Well," he exclaimed, "you _have_ done it!" Considering what I knew of
+Forester's affairs this was unbearable.
+
+"Oh! it isn't for _you_ to talk----"
+
+"What I want to know is, whether I am to thrash him or not?"
+
+"Thrash him?" I wondered.
+
+"For getting you talked about ... off there in the woods all afternoon!"
+
+"We weren't----" I began, but suddenly I saw the white bolls of the
+sycamores redden with the westering sun; we must have been three hours
+covering what was at most a half hour's walk. "Don't be vulgar,
+Forester," I went on, with my chin in the air.
+
+"Oh, well," was my brother's parting shot, "I don't know as I ought to
+make any objection, seeing you didn't."
+
+That, I felt, was the weakness of my position; I not only hadn't made
+any objection, I hadn't felt any shame; the annoyance, the hurt of
+outraged maidenliness, whatever was the traditional attitude, hadn't
+come. Inwardly I burned with the woods afire, the red west, the white
+star like a torch that came out above it. On the way home Helmeth
+Garrett rode with us as far as the main road and was particularly
+attentive to Pauline and Flora Haines. I remember it came to me dimly
+that there was something designedly protective in this; there was more
+or less veiled innuendo flying about which failed to get through to me.
+Pauline put it quite plainly for me when she came to talk things over
+the day after the picnic. She was sympathetic.
+
+"Oh, my dear, it must be dreadful for you," she cooed; "a perfect
+stranger, and getting you talked about that way!"
+
+"So I am talked about?"
+
+"My _dear_, what could you expect? And in plain sight of us. If you had
+only pushed him away, or something."
+
+"I couldn't," I said, "I was so ... astonished." In the night I had
+found myself explaining to Pauline how this affair of Helmeth Garrett
+had differed importantly from all similar instances; now I saw its
+shining surfaces dimmed with comment like unwiped glass.
+
+"That's just what I _said_!" Pauline was pleased with herself. "I told
+Belle Endsleigh you weren't used to that sort of thing ... you were
+_completely_ overcome. But of course he wasn't really a gentleman or he
+wouldn't have done it." I do not know why at this moment it occurred to
+me that probably Henry Mills hadn't proposed to Pauline after all, but
+before I could frame a discreet question she was off in another
+direction.
+
+"What will Tommy Bettersworth say?"
+
+"Why, what has he got to do with it?"
+
+"O-_liv_-ia! After the way you've encouraged him...."
+
+"You mean because I went to the picnic with him? Well, what can he do
+about it?" Pauline gave me up with a gesture.
+
+"Tommy is the soul of chivalry," she said, "and anybody can see he is
+crazy about you, simply crazy." What I really wanted was that she should
+go on talking about Helmeth Garrett. I wanted ground for putting to her
+that since all we had been sedulously taught about kissing and all "that
+sort of thing"--that it was horrid, cheapening, insufferable--had failed
+to establish itself, had in fact come as a sword, divining mystery, it
+couldn't be dealt with on the accepted Taylorville basis. I felt the
+quality of achievement in Helmeth Garrett's right to kiss me, a right
+which I was sure he lacked only the occasion to establish. But when the
+occasion came it went all awry.
+
+It was the next Sunday morning, and all down Polk Street the
+frost-bitten flower borders were a little made up for by the passage
+between the shoals of maple leaves that lined the walks, of whole flocks
+of bright winged, new fall hats on their way to church. Mother and Effie
+were in front and two of my Sunday-school scholars had scurried up like
+rabbits out of the fallen leafage and tucked themselves on either side
+of my carefully held skirts. Suddenly there was a rattle of buggy wheels
+on the winter roughed road; it turned in by Niles's corner and drove
+directly toward us; the top was down and I made out by the quick
+pricking of my blood, the Garrett bays and Helmeth with his hat off, his
+hair tousled, and a bright soft tie swinging free of his vest. You saw
+heads turning all along the block in discreet censure of his
+unsabbatical behaviour. He recognized me almost immediately and turned
+the team with intention to our side of the street. He was going to speak
+to me ... he was speaking. My mother's back stiffened, she didn't know
+of course. Forrie wouldn't have had the face to tell her, but how many
+eyes on us up and down the street did know? A Sunday-school teacher in
+the midst of her scholars ... and he had kissed me on Thursday!
+
+"Olivia," said my mother, "do you know that young man? Such manners ...
+Sunday morning, too. Well, I am glad that you had the sense to ignore
+him;" and I did not know until that moment that I had.
+
+It was because of my habit of living inwardly, I suppose, that it never
+occurred to me that the incident could have any other bearing on our
+relations than the secret one of confirming me in my impression of our
+intimacy being on a superior, excluding footing. He had come, as I was
+perfectly aware, to renew it at the point of breaking off, and this
+security quite blinded me to the effect my cold reception might have
+upon him. That he would fail to understand how I was hemmed and pinned
+in by Taylorville, hadn't occurred to me, not even when he passed us
+again on the way home from church, driving recklessly. His hat was on
+this time, determinedly to one side, and he was smoking, smoking a
+cigar. I thought at first he had not seen me, but he turned suddenly
+when he was quite past and swept me a flourish with it held between two
+fingers of the hand that touched his hat.
+
+At that time in Taylorville no really nice young man smoked, at least
+not when he would get found out. This offensiveness in the face of the
+returning church-goers was too flagrant to admit even the appearance of
+noticing it, but that it would be noticed, taken stock of in the general
+summing up of our relation, I was sickeningly aware.
+
+Tommy Bettersworth put one version of it for me comfortingly when he
+came in the evening to take me to church.
+
+"I saw you turn down that Garrett fellow this morning. Served him
+right ... that and the way you behaved Thursday ... just as if you did
+not find him worth rowing about. A lot of girls make a fuss, and it's
+only to draw a fellow on; and now you're going to church with me the
+same as usual; that'll show 'em what _I_ think of it." Now, I had clean
+forgotten that Tommy might come that evening. I was whelmed with the
+certainty that Helmeth Garrett had gone back to the farm after all
+without seeing me; and the moment Tommy came through the gate I had one
+of those rifts of lucidity in which I saw him whole and limited, pasted
+flat against the background of Taylorville without any perspective of
+imagination, and was taken mightily with the wish to explain to him
+where he stood, once for all, outside and disconnected with anything
+that was vital and important to me. But quite unexpectedly, before I
+could frame a beginning, he had presented himself to me in a new light.
+He was cover, something to get behind in order to exercise myself more
+freely in the things he couldn't understand.
+
+Something more was bound to come out of my relation to Helmeth Garrett;
+the incident couldn't go on hanging in the air that way; and in the
+meantime here was an opportunity to put it out of public attention by
+going out with Tommy. It did hang in the air, however, for three days,
+during which I pulsed and sickened with expectancy; by Thursday it had
+reached a point where I knew that if Helmeth Garrett didn't come and
+kiss me again I shouldn't be able to bear it. It was soon after sundown
+that I felt him coming.
+
+I took a great many turns in the garden, which, carrying me occasionally
+out of reach of the click of the gate latch, afforded me the relief of
+thinking that he might have arrived in the interval when I was out of
+hearing. His approaching tread was within me. When it was just seven my
+mother came out and called:
+
+"Olivia, I promised Mrs. Endsleigh a starter of yeast; I have just
+remembered. Could you take it to her?"
+
+The Endsleigh backyard was separated from ours by a vacant lot, the
+houses fronting on parallel streets; there was no sound at the gate and
+mother had the bowl in a white napkin held out to me, with a long
+message about where the sewing circle was to meet next Thursday.
+
+"If any body comes,"--for the life of me I couldn't have kept that
+back,--"you can tell them I'll be back in a minute," I cautioned her.
+
+"Are you expecting anybody?"
+
+"Only Tommy," I prevaricated, instantly and unaccountably. I saw my
+mother look at me rather oddly over the tops of the glasses she had
+lately assumed. On the Endsleigh's back porch I found Belle in evening
+dress gathering ivy berries for her hair.
+
+"Oh," she said, to my plain appearance, "aren't you going?"
+
+"Going where?"
+
+"Oh, if you don't know ... to Flora's." Belle was embarrassed.
+
+"I hadn't heard of it."
+
+"It's just a few friends," Belle wavered between sympathy and
+superiority. "Flora is so particular...."
+
+"I couldn't have gone anyway," I interpolated, "I have an engagement." I
+had to find Mrs. Endsleigh after that and deliver my errand.
+
+When I reached home mother was sitting placidly just outside the circle
+of the lamp, knitting. She only looked up as I entered and I had to drag
+it out of her at last.
+
+"Has anybody been here?"
+
+"Nobody that you would care to see."
+
+"But who?"
+
+"That fast-looking young man who tried to speak to you on Sunday. I'm
+glad you have a proper feeling about such things. Mr. Garrett's nephew,
+didn't you say? I told him you were engaged."
+
+"Oh, mother!" I was out in panting haste. At the gate I ran square into
+Tommy Bettersworth.
+
+"Did you see anybody?"
+
+"Nobody. I came through by Davis's. I was coming in," he suggested, as I
+stood peering into the dark.
+
+"I thought you'd be going to Flora's." A wild hope flashed in me that
+maybe he was going and I should be rid of him.
+
+"Oh, I don't care much for that crowd. I told her I had an engagement
+with you." So he had known I was not to be invited. I resented the
+liberty of his defence. "Let's go down to Niles's and have some ice
+cream," Tommy propitiated.
+
+"It's too cold for ice cream." I led the way back to the house. I was
+satisfied there was no one in the street. When we stepped into the fan
+of light from the lit window, Tommy saw my face.
+
+"Oh, I say, Ollie, you mustn't take it like that. Beastly cats girls
+are! Flora's just jealous because she thought she was invited to the
+picnic for that Garrett chap, and you got him; she wants to have a
+chance at him herself to-night." There was a green-painted garden seat
+on the porch between the front windows. I sat down in it.
+
+"It's not Flora I'm crying about ... it is being so misunderstood." I
+was thinking that Helmeth Garrett would suppose I had stayed away from
+Flora's on his account; she would never dare to say she had not invited
+me. Tommy's arm came comfortingly along the back of the bench.
+
+"It's just because they do understand that they are mad; they know a
+fellow would give his eyes to kiss you. Infernal cad! to snatch it like
+that; and I've never even asked you for one." His voice was very close
+to my ear. "I tell you, Olivia, I've thought of something. If you were
+to be engaged to me ... you know I've always wanted ... then nobody
+would have a right to say anything. They'd see that you just left it to
+me."
+
+"Oh," I blurted, "it's not so bad as that!"
+
+"You think about it," he urged. "I don't want to bother you, but if you
+need it, why here I am." It was because I was thinking of him so little
+that I hadn't noticed where Tommy's arm had got by this time. That
+unfulfilled kiss had seemed somehow to leave me unimaginably exposed,
+assailed. I was needing desperately then to be kissed again, to find
+myself revalued.
+
+"It's awfully good of you, Tommy...."
+
+I do not know how it was that neither of us heard Forester come up from
+the gate; all at once there was his foot on the step; as he came into
+the porch a soft sound drew him, he stared blankly on us for a moment
+and then laughed shortly.
+
+"Oh! it's you this time, Bettersworth. I thought it might be that
+Garrett chap."
+
+That was unkind of Forester, but there were extenuations. I found
+afterward that Belle had teased Flora to ask him and he had refused,
+thinking it unbrotherly when I was not to be invited, and he and Belle
+had quarrelled.
+
+"I don't know as it matters to you"--Tommy was valiant--"whom she
+kisses, if I don't mind it."
+
+"You? What have you got to do with it?"
+
+"Well, a lot. I'm engaged to her."
+
+
+
+
+BOOK II
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+The first notion of an obligation I had in writing this part of my
+story, was that if it is to be serviceable, no lingering sentiment
+should render it less than literal, and none of that egotism turned
+inside out which makes a kind sanctity of the personal experience,
+prevent me from offering it whole. And the next was that the only way in
+which it could be made to appear in its complete pitiableness, would be
+to write it from the point of view of Tommy Bettersworth. For after all,
+I have emerged--retarded, crippled in my affectional capacities, bodily
+the worse, but still with wings to spread and some disposition toward
+flying. And when I think of the dreams Tommy had, how he must have
+figured in them to himself, large between me and all misadventure,
+adored, dependable; and then how he blundered and lost himself in the
+mazes of unsuitability, I find bitterness augmenting in me not on my
+account but his. The amazing pity of it was that it might all have
+turned out very well if I had been what I seemed to him and to my family
+at the time when I let him engage himself to me to save me from immanent
+embarrassment.
+
+My mother, though she took on for the occasion an appropriate
+solemnity, was frankly relieved to have me so well disposed. Tommy had
+been brought up in the church, had no bad habits, and was earning a
+reasonable salary with Burton Brothers, Tailors and Outfitters.
+
+There was nobody whose business it was to tell me that I did not love
+Tommy enough to marry him. I have often wondered, supposing a medium of
+communication had been established between my mother and me, if I had
+told her how much more that other kiss had meant to me than Tommy's mild
+osculation, she would have understood or made a fight for me? I am
+afraid she would only have seen in it evidence of an infatuation for an
+undesirable young man, one who smoked and drove rakishly about town in
+red neckties on Sunday morning. But in fact I liked Tommy immensely. The
+mating instinct was awake; all our world clapped us forward to the
+adventure.
+
+If you ask what the inward monitor was about on this occasion, I will
+say that it is always and singularly inept at human estimates. If, often
+in search of companionship, its eye is removed from the Mark, to fix
+upon the personal environment, it is still unfurnished to divine behind
+which plain exterior lives another like itself! I took Tommy's community
+of interest for granted on the evidence of his loving me, though,
+indeed, after all these years I am not quite clear why he, why Forester
+and Pauline couldn't have walked in the way with me toward the Shining
+Destiny. I was not conscious of any private advantage; certainly so far
+as our beginnings were concerned, none showed, and I should have been
+glad of their company ... and here at the end I am walking in it alone.
+
+About a month after my engagement, Henry Mills proposed to Pauline, and
+she began preparations to be married the following June. Tommy's salary
+not being thought to justify it so soon, the idea of my own marriage had
+not come very close to me until I began to help Pauline work initials on
+table linen.
+
+The chief difference between Pauline and me had been that she had lived
+all her life, so to speak, at home; nothing exigent to her social order
+had ever found her "out"; but Olivia seemed always to be at the top of
+the house or somewhere in the back garden, to whom the normal occasions
+presented themselves as a succession of cards under the door. I do not
+mean to say that I actually missed any of these appointed visitors, but
+all my early life comes back to me as a series of importunate callers
+whose names I was not sure of, and who distracted me frightfully from
+something vastly more pleasant and important that I wanted very much to
+do, without knowing very well what it was. But it was in the long
+afternoons when Pauline and I sat upstairs together sewing on our white
+things that I began to take notice of the relation of what happened to
+me to the things that went on inside, and to be intrigued away from the
+Vision by the possibility of turning it into facts of line and colour
+and suitability. It was the beginning of my realizing what came
+afterward to be such a bitter and engrossing need with me, the need of
+money.
+
+Much that had struck inharmoniously on me in the furnishings of
+Taylorville, had identified itself so with the point of view there, that
+I had come to think of the one as being the natural and inevitable
+expression of the other; now, with the growing appreciation of a home of
+my own as a medium of self-realization, I accepted its possibility of
+limitation by the figure of my husband's income without being entirely
+daunted thereby. For I was still of the young opinion that getting rich
+involved no more serious matter than setting about it. As I saw it then,
+Men's Tailoring and Outfitting did not appear an unlikely beginning; if
+Tommy had achieved the magnificence I planned for him, it wouldn't have
+been on the whole more remarkable than what has happened. What I had to
+reckon with later was the astonishing fact that Tommy liked plush
+furniture, and liked it red for choice.
+
+I do not know why it should have taken me by surprise to find him in
+harmony with his bringing up; there was no reason for the case being
+otherwise except as I seemed to find one in his being fond of me. His
+mother's house was not unlike other Taylorvillian homes, more austerely
+kept; the blinds were always pulled down in the best room, and they
+never opened the piano except when there was company, or for the little
+girls to practise their music lessons. Mrs. Bettersworth was a large,
+fair woman with pale, prominent eyes, and pale hair pulled back from a
+corrugated forehead, and his sisters, who were all younger than Tommy,
+were exactly like her, their eyes if possible more protruded, which you
+felt to be owing to their hair being braided very tightly in two braids
+as far apart as possible at the corners of their heads.
+
+They treated me always with the greatest respect. If there had been
+anybody who could have thrown any light on the situation it would have
+been Mr. Bettersworth. He was a dry man, with what passed in Taylorville
+for an eccentric turn of mind. He had, for instance, been known to
+justify himself for putting Tommy to the Men's Outfitters rather than to
+his own business of building and contracting, on the ground that Tommy
+wanted the imagination for it. Just as if an imagination could be of use
+to anybody!
+
+"So you are going to undertake to make Tommy happy?" he said to me on
+the occasion of my taking supper with the family as a formal
+acknowledgment of my engagement.
+
+"Don't you think I can do it?" He was looking at me rather quizzically,
+and I really wished to know.
+
+"Oh! I was wondering," he said, "what you would do with what you had
+left over." But it was years before I understood what he meant by that.
+
+About the time I was bridesmaid for Pauline, Tommy had an advantageous
+offer that put our marriage almost immediately within reach. Burton
+Brothers was a branch house, one of a score with the Head at Chicago, to
+whom Tommy had so commended himself under the stimulus of being engaged,
+that on the establishment of a new store in Higgleston they offered him
+the sales department. There was also to be a working tailor and a
+superintendent visiting it regularly from Chicago, which its nearness to
+the metropolis allowed.
+
+All that we knew of Higgleston was that it was a long settled farming
+community, which, having discovered itself at the junction of two
+railway lines that approached Chicago from the southeast, conceived
+itself to have arrived there by some native superiority, and awoke to
+the expectation of importance.
+
+It lay, as respects Taylorville, no great distance beyond the flat
+horizon of the north, where the prairie broke into wooded land again,
+far enough north not to have been fanned by the hot blast of the war and
+the spiritual struggle that preceded it, and so to have missed the
+revitalizing processes that crowded the few succeeding years. Whatever
+difference there was between it and Taylorville besides population, was
+just the difference between a community that has fought whole-heartedly
+and one that stood looking on at the fight.
+
+It was not far enough from Taylorville to have struck out anything new
+for itself in manners or furniture, but the necessity of going south two
+or three hours to change cars, and north again several hours more, set
+up an illusion of change which led to a disappointment in its want of
+variety. Tommy went out in July, and in a month wrote me that he would
+be able to come for me as soon as I was ready, and hoping it would not
+be long. If I had looked, as in the last hesitancies of girlhood I
+believe I did, for my mother to have raised an objection to my going so
+far from home, I found myself, instead, almost with the feeling of being
+pushed out of the nest. It seemed as if in hastening me out of the
+family she would be the sooner free to give herself without reproach to
+a new and extraordinary scheme of Forester's. What I guess now to have
+been in part the motive, was that she already had been touched by the
+warning of that disorder which finally carried her off, which, with the
+curious futility of timid women, she hoped, by not mentioning, to
+postpone.
+
+For a long time now Forester had found himself in the situation of
+having grown beyond his virtues. That assumption of mannishness which
+sat so prettily on his nonage was rendered inconspicuous by his
+majority. People who had forgotten that he had never had any boyhood,
+found nothing especially commendable in the mild soberness of
+twenty-three. I have a notion, too, that the happy circumstance of my
+marriage lit up for him some personal phases which he could hardly have
+regarded with complacence, for by this time he had passed, in his
+character of philanderer, from being hopefully regarded as reclaimable
+to constancy, to a sort of public understudy in the practice of the
+affections. However it had come about, the young ladies who still took
+on Forester at intervals, no longer looked on him so much as privileged
+but as eminently safe; and the number of girls in a given community who
+can be counted on for such a performance, is limited. That summer before
+I was married, after Belle Endsleigh had run away from home with a
+commercial traveller who disappointed the moral instance by making her a
+very good husband afterward, my brother found himself, as regards the
+young people's world, in a situation of uneasy detachment. And there was
+no doubt that the Coöperative, where he had been seven years, bored him
+excessively. It was then he conceived the idea of reinstating himself in
+the atmosphere of importance by setting himself up in business.
+
+Adjacent to Niles's Ice Cream Parlours, there was a small stationery and
+news agency which might be bought and enlarged to creditable
+proportions. There was, I believe, actually nothing to be urged against
+this as a matter of business; the difficulty was that to accomplish it
+my mother would be obliged to hypothecate the whole of her small
+capital. What my mother really thought about her property was that she
+held it in trust for the family interest, and that, with the secret
+intimation of her end which I surmise must have reached her by this
+time, she believed to be served by Forester's plan. It was so much the
+general view that by marrying I took myself out of the family
+altogether, that I felt convinced that she meant, so soon as that was
+accomplished, to undertake what, in the face of my protesting attitude,
+she had not the courage to begin. I remember how shocked she was at my
+telling her that this tying up of the two ends of life in a monetary
+obligation, would put her and Forester very much in the situation of a
+young man married to a middle-aged woman. I mention this here because
+the implication that grew out of it, of my marriage being looked forward
+to as a relief, had much to do with the failure out of my life at this
+juncture, of informing intimacy.
+
+A great deal of necessary information had come my way through Pauline's
+marriage, through the comment set free by Belle Endsleigh's affair,
+through the natural awakening of my mind toward the intimations of
+books. Marriage I began to perceive as an engulfing personal experience.
+Until now I hadn't been able to think of it except as a means of
+providing pleasant companionship on the way toward that large and
+shining world for which I felt myself forever and unassailably fit. It
+began to exhibit now, through vistas that allured, the aspect of a vast
+inhuman grin. Somewhere out of this prospect of sympathy and
+understanding, arose upon you the tremendous inundation of Life. Dimly
+beyond the point of Tommy's joyous possession of me, I was aware of an
+incalculable force by which the whole province of my being was assailed,
+very different from the girlish prevision of motherhood which had
+floated with the fragrance of orris root from Aunt Alice's bureau drawer
+in the Allingham's spare room.
+
+I don't say this is the way all girls feel about the approach of
+maternity, but I saw it then like the wolf in the fairy tale, which as
+soon as its head was admitted, thrust in a shoulder and so came bodily
+into the room and devoured the protestant. Long afterward, when I was in
+a position to know something of the private experience of trapeze
+performers, I learned that they came to a point sometimes in mid-spring
+when the body apprised them of inadequacy, a warning sure to be followed
+in no long time by disaster. I have thought sometimes that what reached
+me then was the advice of a body instinctively aware of being unequal to
+the demands about to be imposed upon it.
+
+I hardly know now by what road I arrived at the certainty that some
+women, Pauline for instance, were able to face this looming terror of
+childbearing by making terms with it. Life, it appeared, waited at
+their doors with respect, modified the edge of its inevitableness to
+their convenience. If Pauline had been accessible--but she was living in
+Chicago with Henry Mills, going out a great deal, and writing me
+infrequent letters of bright complacency. It was only in the last
+frightened gasp I fixed upon my mother. You must imagine for yourself
+from what you know of nice girls thirty years ago, how inarticulate the
+whole business was; the most I can do is to have you understand my
+desperate need to know, to interpose between marriage and maternity
+never so slight an interval in which to collect myself and leave off
+shrinking.
+
+About a week before my wedding we were sitting together at the close of
+the afternoon; my mother had taken up her knitting, as her habit was
+when the light failed. Something in the work we had been doing, putting
+the last touches to my wedding dress, led her to speak of her own, and
+of my father as a young man. The mention pricked me to notice what I
+recall now as characteristic of Taylorville women, that, with all she
+had been through, the war, her eight children, so many graves, there was
+still in her attitude, toward all these, a kind of untutored virginity.
+It made, my noticing it then and being touched by it, a sort of bridge
+by which it seemed for the moment she might be drawn over to my side. On
+the impulse I spoke.
+
+"Mother," I said, "I want to know?..."
+
+It seemed a natural sort of knowledge to which any woman had a right.
+Almost before the question was out I saw the expression of offended
+shock come over my mother's reminiscent softness, the nearly animal rage
+of terror with which the unknown, the unaccustomed, assailed her.
+
+"Olivia! Olivia!" She stood up, her knitting rigid in her hands, the
+ball of it speeding away in the dusk of the floor on some private terror
+of its own. "Olivia, I'll not hear of such things! You are not to speak
+of them, do you understand! I'll have nothing to do with them!"
+
+"I wanted to know," I said. "I thought you could tell me...."
+
+I went over and stood by the window; a little dry snow was blowing--it
+was the first week in November--beginning to collect on the edges of the
+walks and along the fences; the landscape showed sketched in white on a
+background of neutral gray. I heard a movement in the room behind me; my
+mother came presently and stood looking out with me. She was very pale,
+scared but commiserating. Somehow my question had glanced in striking
+the dying nerve of long since encountered dreads and pains. We faced
+them together there in the cold twilight.
+
+"I'm sorry, daughter"--she hesitated--"I can't help you. I don't
+know ... I never knew myself."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+It is no doubt owing to the habit of life in Higgleston being so little
+differentiated from Taylorville that I was never able to get any other
+impression of it than as a place one put up at on the way to some other;
+always it bore to my mind the air of a traveller's room in one of those
+stops where it is necessary to open the trunks but not worth while to
+unpack them. Nor do I think it was altogether owing to what I left there
+that my recollection of it centres paganly about the cemetery. In
+Taylorville, love and birth, though but scantily removed from the savour
+of impropriety, were still the salient facts of existence, but in
+Higgleston a funeral was your real human occasion. It was as if the
+rural fear of innovation had thrown them back for a pivotal centre upon
+the point of continuity with their past.
+
+It was a generous rolling space set aside for the dead, abutting on two
+sides on the boardwalks of the town, stretching back by dips and hollows
+to the wooded pastures. Near the gates which opened from the walk, it
+was divided off in single plots and family allotments, scattering more
+and more to the farthest neglected mounds that crept obscurely under the
+hazel thickets and the sapling oaks, happiest when named the least,
+assimilated quickliest to their native earth. It was this that rendered
+the pagan touch, for though nearly all Higgleston was church-going and
+looked forward to a hymn-book heaven, they seemed to me never quite
+dissevered from the untutored pastures to which their whole living and
+dying was a process of being reabsorbed.
+
+Higgleston, until this junction of railroads occurred, had been a close
+settled farming community, and a vague notion of civic improvement had
+ripped through the centre of its wide old yards and comfortable, country
+looking dwellings, a shadeless, unpaved street lined with what were
+known as business blocks, with a tendency to run mostly to front and a
+general placarded state of being to let, or about to be opened on these
+premises.
+
+Beyond the railway station there was a dingy region devoted to car shops
+and cheap lodgings, known locally as Track Town, whose inhabitants were
+forever at odds with the older rural population, withdrawing itself into
+a kind of aristocracy of priority and propriety; and between these an
+intermediary group, self styled, "the leading business men of the town,"
+forever and trivially busy to reconcile the two factions in the
+interests of trade. That Tommy was by reason of his position as managing
+salesman of Burton Brothers, generically of this class, might have had
+something to do with my never having formed any vital or lasting
+relations with either community; and it might have been for quite other
+reasons. For in the very beginning of my stay there, Life had seized me;
+that bubbling, frothing Force, working forever to breach the film of
+existence. I was used by it, I was abused by it. For what does Life care
+what it does to the tender bodies of women?
+
+My baby was born within ten months of my marriage and most of that time
+I was wretchedly, depressingly ill. All my memories of my early married
+life are of Olivia, in the mornings still with frost, cowering away from
+the kitchen sights and smells, or gasping up out of engulfing nausea to
+sit out the duty calls of the leading ladies of Higgleston in the cold,
+disordered house; of Tommy gulping unsuitable meals of underdone and
+overdone things, and washing the day's accumulation of dishes after
+business hours, patient and portentously cheerful, with Olivia in a
+wrapper, half hysterical with weakness--all the young wife's dreams gone
+awry! And Tommy too, he must have had visions of himself coming home to
+a well-kept house, of delicious little dinners and long hours in which
+he should appear in his proper character as the adored, achieving male.
+Not long ago I read a book of a man's life written by a man, in which he
+justified himself of unfaithfulness because his wife appeared before him
+habitually in curl papers--and there were days when I couldn't even do
+my hair!
+
+In the beginning we had taken, in respect to Tommy's position among
+those same live business men, a house rather too large for us, and we
+hadn't counted on the wages of a servant. Now with the necessity upon us
+of laying by money for the Great Expense, we felt less justified in it
+than ever. This pinch of necessity was of the quality of corrosion on
+what must have been meant for the consummate experience. I have to dwell
+on it here because in this practical confusion of my illness, was laid
+the foundation of our later failure to come together on any working
+basis. We hadn't, in fact, time to find it; no time to understand, none
+whatever in which to explore the use of passion and react into that
+superunion of which the bodily relation is the overt sign--young things
+we were, who had not fairly known each other as man and woman before we
+were compelled to trace in one another the lineaments of parents, all
+attention drawn away from the imperative business of framing a common
+ideal, to centre on the child.
+
+What this precipitance accomplished was, that, instead of being drawn
+insensibly to find in the exigencies of marriage the natural unfolding
+of that inward vitality, always much stronger in me than any exterior
+phase, I was by the shock of too early maternity driven apart from the
+usual, and I still believe the happier, destiny of women.
+
+With all this we were spared the bitterness of the unwelcoming thought.
+Little homely memories swim up beyond the pains and depressions to
+mark, like twigs and leafage on a freshet, the swelling of the new
+affection: Effie at Montecito, overruling all my mother's shocked
+suggestions as to her supposed obliviousness of my condition, sitting up
+nights to sew for me ... the dress I tried to make myself ... the bureau
+drawer from which I used to take the little things every night to look
+at them ... the smell of orris.
+
+"See, Tommy; I've done so much to-day. Isn't it pretty?"
+
+"My dear, you've shown that to me at least forty times and I've always
+said so."
+
+"Yes, but isn't it?... the little sleeves ... did you think anything
+_could_ be so small? Tommy, don't you wish it would _come_?"
+
+We had to make what we could of these moments of thrilled expectancy, of
+tender brooding curiosity.
+
+I scarcely recall now all the reasons why it was thought best for me to
+go back to my mother in August, and to the family physician, but I find
+it all pertinent to my subject. Whatever was done there was mostly
+wrong, though I was years finding it out. I mean that whatever chance I
+had of growing up into the competent mother of a family was probably
+lost to me through the inexactitudes of country practice. We hadn't then
+arrived at the realization that the well or ill going of maternity is a
+matter of sceptics rather than sentiment. Taylorville was a town of ten
+thousand inhabitants, but at that time no one had heard of such a thing
+as a trained nurse; the business of midwifery was given over in general
+to a widow so little attractive that she was thought not to have a
+chance of marrying again, and by the circumstance of having had two or
+three children of her own, believed to be eminently fit. To Olivia's
+first encounter with the rending powers of Life, there went any amount
+of affectionate consideration and much old wives' lore of an
+extraordinary character. It seems hardly credible now, but in the
+beginning of things going wrong, there were symptoms concealed from the
+doctor on the ground of delicacy.
+
+My baby, too, poor little man, was feeble from birth, a bottle baby; the
+best that could have been done would hardly have been a chance for him.
+Lying there in the hot, close room, all the air shut out with the light,
+in the midst of pains, I made a fight for him, tried to interpose such
+scraps of better knowledge as had come to me through reading, but they
+made no headway against my mother's confidential, "Well, I ought to
+know, I've buried five," and against Forester, who by the added
+importance of having invested all her fortune, had gained such way with
+my mother that she listened respectfully to his explication of what
+should be done for the baby. It was Forester who overbore with ridicule
+my suggestion that he should be fed at regular hours, for which I never
+forgave him. But I had enough to do to fortify my racked body against
+the time when I should be obliged to get up and go on again, as it
+seemed privately I never should be able.
+
+And they were all so fond and proud of my little Thomas Henry--he was
+named so for his father and mine--Effie simply adored him; the wonder of
+his smallness, the way in which he moved his limbs and opened and shut
+his eyes; quite as if there had never been one born before. The way they
+hung over him, and the wrong things they did! Even Cousin Lydia drove
+into church the first Sunday after, for the purpose of holding him for a
+quarter of an hour in her large, silk poplin arms, at the end of which
+time she had softened almost to the point of confidence.
+
+"I thought I was going to have one once," she admitted, "but somehow I
+couldn't seem to manage it." She looked over to where Cousin Judd sat
+with my mother. "He was always fond of young ones...." It occurred to me
+then that Cousin Lydia was probably a much misunderstood woman.
+
+Of the next six months at Higgleston after I returned to it with a three
+months' old baby I have scarcely any recollection that is not mixed up
+with bodily torment for myself and anxiety for the child. I think it
+probable that most of that time my husband found the house badly kept,
+the meals irregular and his wife hysterical. I hadn't anything to spare
+with which to consider what figure I might have cut in the eyes of the
+onlooker. Tommy shines out for me in that period by reason of the
+unwearying patience and cheerfulness with which he successfully ignored
+the general unsatisfactoriness of his home, and at times for a certain
+exasperation I had with him, as if by being somehow less quiescent he
+might have opposed a better front to the encroachments of distress. We
+did try help in the kitchen after our finances had a little recovered
+from the strain of my confinement, a Higgleston girl of no very great
+competence and a sort of back-door visiting acquaintance with two thirds
+of the community. Her chief accomplishments while she stayed with us,
+were concocted out of the scraps and fag ends of our private
+conversations. I could always tell that Ida had overheard something by
+the alacrity with which she banged the pots about in the kitchen in
+order that she might get through with her work and go out and tell
+somebody. In the end Tommy said that when it came to a choice between
+getting his own meals and losing his best customers he preferred the
+former.
+
+All this time I did not know how ill I was because of the consuming
+anxiety for the baby. I remember times in the night--the dreadful
+momentary revolt of my body rousing to this new demand upon it, before
+the mind waked to the selfless consideration; and the failure of
+composure which was as much weakness as fear; the long watching, the
+walking to and fro, and the debates as to whether we ought or ought not
+to venture on the expense of the doctor. And for long years afterward
+what is the bitterest of bitterness, finding out that we had done the
+wrong thing. To this day I cannot come across any notices of the more
+competent methods for the care of delicate children, without a
+remembering pang.
+
+All the time this was going on I was aware by a secondary detached sort
+of self, that there was a point somewhere beyond this perplexity of
+pain, at which the joyful possession of my son should begin. I was
+anxious to get at him, to have speech with him, to realize his
+identity--any woman will understand--and along about the time the blue
+flags and the live-for-evers and the white bridal wreaths were at their
+best in the cemetery, it came upon me terrifyingly that I might, after
+all, have to let him go without it. We were walking there that day, the
+first we had thought it safe to take the baby out, for it was customary
+to walk in the cemetery on Sunday and almost obligatory to your social
+standing. The oaks were budding, and the wind in the irises and the
+shadow of them on the tombstones, and the people all in their Sunday
+best, walking in the warm light, gave an effect of more aliveness than
+the sombre yards of the town could afford.
+
+Tommy had taken the baby from me, for, though I could somehow never get
+enough of the feel of him, his head in the hollow of my shoulder, his
+weight against my arm, I was so little strong myself that I was glad to
+pretend that it was because he was really getting heavy, and just then
+we passed a little mound, so low, where a new headboard had been set up
+with the superscription, "Only son of ---- and ---- aged eight months,"
+and it was the age, and the little mound was just the length of my boy.
+I think there was a rush of tears to cover that, the realization by a
+kind of prevision that it was just to that he was to come, tears checked
+in mid-course by the swift up-rush of the certainty, of the reality, of
+the absoluteness of human experience. For by whatever mystery or magic
+he had come to identity through me, he was my son as I knew, and not
+even death could so unmake him.
+
+I dwell upon this and one other incident which I shall relate in its
+proper place, as all that was offered to me of the traditional
+compensation for what women are supposed to be. If a sedulous social
+ideal has kept them from the world touch through knowledge and
+achievement, it has been because, sincerely enough, they have not been
+supposed to be prevented from world processes so much as directed to
+find them in a happier way. This would be reasonable if they found them.
+What society fails to understand, or dishonestly fails to admit, is that
+marriage as an act is not invariably the stroke that ushers in the
+experience of being married.
+
+Whatever proportions the change in my life had assumed to the outward
+eye, it was only by the imagined pain of loss that I began to perceive
+that I could never be quite in the same relation to things again, and to
+identify my experience with the world adventure. I had become, by the
+way of giving life and losing it, a link in the chain that leads from
+dark to dark; I had touched for the moment a reality from which the
+process of self-realization could be measured. It was the most and the
+best I was to know of the incident called maternity, that whether it
+were most bitter or most sweet it was irrevocable.
+
+I suppose, though he was always so inarticulate, that Tommy must have
+caught something of my mood from me. He didn't seem to see anything
+ridiculous in my holding on to a fold of the baby's skirt all the way
+home; and when we had come into the house and the boy was laid in his
+crib again, so wan and so little, I sat on my young husband's knee and
+cried with my face against his, and he did not ask me what it was about.
+
+I think, though, that we had not yet appreciated how near we were to
+losing him until my mother came to visit us along in the middle of the
+summer. She was quite excited, as she walked up from the station with
+Tommy, and for her, almost gay with the novelty of spending a month with
+a married daughter, and then as soon as she had sight of the child, I
+saw her checked and startled inquiry travel from me to Tommy and back
+to the child's meagre little features, and a new and amazing tenderness
+in all her manner to me. That night after I was in bed she came in her
+night-dress and kissed me without saying anything, and I was too
+surprised to make any motion of response. That was the first time I
+remember my mother having kissed me on anything less than an official
+occasion ... but she had buried five herself.
+
+Notwithstanding, my mother's coming and the care she took of the baby,
+seemed to make me, if anything, less prepared for the end. There were
+new remedies of my mother's to be tried which appeared hopeful. I
+recovered composure, thought of him as improving, when in fact it was
+only I who was stronger for a few nights' uninterrupted sleep. Then
+there was a day on which he was very quiet and she scarcely put him down
+from her lap at all. I do not know what I thought of that, nor of the
+doctor coming twice that day, unsummoned. I suppose my sensibilities
+must have been blunted by the strain, for I recall thinking when Tommy
+came home in the middle of the afternoon, how good it was we could all
+have this quiet time together. It was the end of June. I remember the
+blinds half drawn against the sun and the smell of lawns newly cut and
+the damask rose by the window; I was going about putting fresh flowers
+in the vases, a thing I had of late little time to do ... suddenly I
+noticed Tommy crying. He sat close to my mother trying to make the
+boy's poor little claws curl round his finger, and at the failure tears
+ran down unwiped. I had never seen Tommy cry. I put down my roses
+uncertain if I ought to go to him ... and all at once my mother called
+me.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+Very closely on the loss of my baby, of which I have spared you as much
+as possible, came crowding the opening movement of my artistic career.
+Within a month I was in a hospital in Chicago, recovering from the
+disastrous termination of another expectancy that had come, scarcely
+regarded in the obsession of anxiety and overwork during the last weeks
+of my boy's life, and had failed to sustain itself under the shock of
+his death. And after the hospital there was a month of convalescence at
+Pauline's. It was the first time I had seen her since her marriage.
+
+I found her living in one of those curious, compressed city houses, one
+room wide and three deep, which, after the rambling, scattered homes of
+Higgleston, induced a feeling of cramp, until I discovered a kind of
+spaciousness in the life within. It was really very little else than
+relief from the accustomed inharmonies of rurality, a sort of scenic air
+and light that answered perfectly so long as you believed it real.
+Pauline's wall papers were soft, unpatterned, with wide borders; her
+windows were hung with plain scrim and the furniture coverings were in
+tone with the carpets. When ladies called in the afternoon, Pauline
+gave them tea which she made in a brass kettle over a spirit lamp. You
+can scarcely understand what that kettle stood for in my new estimate of
+the graciousness of living: a kind of sacred flame, round which gathered
+unimagined possibilities for the dramatization of that eager inward life
+which, now that the strictures of bodily pain were loosed, began to
+press toward expression. It rose insistently against the depressing
+figure my draggled and defeated condition must have cut in the face of
+Pauline's bright competency and the quality of assurance in her choice
+of the things among which she moved. Whatever her standards of behaviour
+or furniture, they were always present to the eye, not sunk below the
+plane of consciousness like mine, and she could always name you the
+people who practised them or the places where they could be bought and
+at what price. My expressed interest in the teakettle, led at once to
+the particular department store where I saw rows of them shining in the
+ticketed inaccessibility of seven dollars and ninety-eight cents. From
+point to point of such eminent practicability I was pricked to think of
+preëmpting some of these new phases of suitability for myself, finding
+myself debarred by the flatness of my purse. The effect of it was to
+throw me back into the benumbing sense of personal neglect with which
+the city had burst upon me. From the first, as I began to go about still
+in my half-invalided condition, I had been tremendously struck with the
+plentitude of beauty. Here was every article of human use made fair and
+fit so that nobody need have lacked a portion of it, save for an
+inexplicable error in the means of distribution. I, for instance, who
+had within me the witness of heirship, had none of it.
+
+That I should have felt it so, was no doubt a part of that Taylorvillian
+fallacy in which I had been reared, that all that was precious and
+desirable was shed as the natural flower and fruit of goodness. Here
+confronted with the concrete preciousness of the shop windows, I
+realized that if there had been anything originally sound in that
+proposition, I had at least missed the particular kind of goodness to
+which it was chargeable. I wanted, I absurdly wanted just then to
+collect my arrears of privilege and consideration in terms of hardwood
+furniture and afternoon teakettles, in graceful, feminine leisure, all
+the traditional sanctity and enthronement of women, for which I had paid
+with my body, with maternal anxieties and wifely submission. What
+glimmered on my horizon was the realization that it was not in such
+appreciable coin the debt was paid, the beginning of knowledge that
+seldom, except by accident, is it paid at all. What I learned from
+Pauline was that most of it came by way of the bargain counter. Not even
+the Shining Destiny was due to arrive merely by reason of your own
+private conviction of being fit, but demanded something to be laid down
+for it; though if you had named the whole price to me at that juncture,
+I should have refused to pay.
+
+Besides all this, the most memorable thing that came of my visit to
+Pauline was that I went to the theatre. It was Henry's suggestion; he
+thought I wanted cheering. Pauline was not going out much that season
+and her reluctance to claim my attention, in the face of my bereavement,
+to her own approaching Event, threw at times a shadow of constraint on
+our quiet evenings. Henry had fallen into a way of taking me out for
+timid and Higglestonian glimpses of the night sights of the city, but I
+am not sure it was the obligation of hospitality which led him to
+propose the theatre. I recall that he displayed a particular knowingness
+about what he styled "the attractions." What surprised me most was that
+I discovered no qualms in myself over a proceeding so at variance with
+my bringing up; and the piece, a broad comedy of Henry's selection, made
+no particular impression on me other than the singular one of having
+known a great deal about it before. My criticism of the acting brought
+Pauline around with a swing from the City Cousin attitude in which she
+had initiated the experience for me, to one æsthetically sympathetic.
+
+"The things men choose, my dear--and to anybody who has been saturated
+in Shakespeare as you have! You really must see Modjeska; it will be an
+inspiration to you. Henry, you must take her to see Modjeska."
+
+I had not yet made up my mind as to whether I liked Henry Mills, but I
+was willing to go and see Modjeska with him; we had orchestra seats and
+Pauline insisted on my wearing her black silk wrap. On the way, Henry
+told me a great deal about Madam Modjeska with that same air of
+knowingness which fitted so oddly with his assumption of the model
+husband. I had accustomed myself to think of Henry as an attorney, which
+in Taylorville meant a man who could be trusted with the administration
+of widows' property and Fourth of July orations. Henry, it transpired,
+was a sort of junior partner in one of those city firms whose concern is
+not with people who have broken the law, but with those who are desirous
+to sail as close to the wind as possible without breaking it. They had a
+great deal to do with stock companies, in connection with which Henry
+had found some personal advantage. He always referred to it as "our
+office" so that I am in doubt still as to the exact nature of his
+connection with it; its only relation to his private life was to lead to
+his habitually appearing in what is known as a business suit, and an air
+of shrewd reliability. If in the beginning he had any notions of his own
+as to what a husband ought to be, he had discarded them in favour of
+Pauline's, and if as early as that he had devised any system of paying
+himself off for his complicity in her ideals, I didn't discover it.
+
+I saw Modjeska with Henry, in "Romeo and Juliet," and afterward stole
+away to a matinée by myself and saw her as Rosalind. I do not know now
+if she was the great artist she seemed, it is so long since I have seen
+her, but she sufficed. I had no words in which to express my
+extraordinary sense of possession in her, the profound, excluding
+intimacy of her art. Long after Henry Mills had gone to his connubial
+pillow I remained walking up and down in my room in a state of intense,
+inarticulate excitement. I did not think concretely of the stage nor of
+acting; what I had news of, was a country of large impulses and
+satisfying movement. I felt myself strong, had I but known the way, to
+set out for it. When I found sleep at last, it was to dream, not of the
+theatre, but of Helmeth Garrett. I was made aware of him first by a
+sense of fulness about my heart, and then I came upon him looking as he
+had looked last in the Willesden woods, writing at a table, a pale blur
+about him of the causeless light of dreams. I recognized the carpet
+underfoot as a favourite Taylorvillian selection, but overhead, red
+boughs of sycamore and oak depended through the dream-fogged atmosphere.
+I stood and read over his shoulder what he wrote, and though the words
+escaped me, the meaning of them put all straight between us. He turned
+as he wrote and looked at me with a look that set us back in the wrapt
+intimacy of the flaming forest ... somehow we had got there and found it
+softly dark! In the interval between my dream and morning, that kiss
+which had been the source of so much secret blame and secret exultation
+was somehow accounted for: it was a waif out of the country of Rosalind
+and Juliet. The sense of a vital readjustment remained with me all that
+day; there had been after all, in the common phrase, "something between
+us." But I explained the recrudescence of memory on the basis that it
+was from Helmeth Garrett that I had first heard of Chicago and Modjeska.
+
+I came back to Higgleston reasonably well, with some fine points of
+achievement twinkling ahead of me, to have my new-found sense of
+direction put all at fault by the trivial circumstance of Tommy's having
+papered the living room. The walls when we took the house, had been
+finished hard and white, much in need of renewing, from the expense of
+which our immediate plunge into the cares of a family had prevented us.
+Casting about for any way of ridding it against my return, of the
+sadness of association, Tommy had hit upon the idea of papering the room
+himself in the evenings after closing hours, and by way of keeping it a
+pleasant surprise, had chosen the paper to his own taste. Any one who
+kept house in the early 80's will recall a type of paper then in vogue,
+of large unintelligent arabesques of a liverish bronzy hue, parting at
+regular intervals upon Neapolitan landscapes of pronounced pinks and
+blues. Tommy's landscapes achieved the added atrocity of having Japanese
+ladies walking about in them, and though the room wanted lighting, the
+paper was very dark. It must have cost him something too! From the
+amount of his salary which he had remitted for my hospital expenses he
+could hardly have left himself money to pay for his meals at
+Higgleston's one doubtful restaurant. The appearance of the kitchen,
+indeed, suggested that he had made most of them on crackers and tinned
+ham.
+
+I was glad to have discovered this before I said to him how much better
+it would have been for him to send me the money and let me select the
+paper in Chicago. What leaped upon me as he waved the lamp about to show
+me how cleverly he had matched the borders, was the surprising, the
+confounding certainty that after all our shared sorrow and anxiety we
+hadn't in the least come together. I had lived in the house with him for
+two years, had borne him a child and lost it, and he had chosen this
+moment of heartrending return, to give me to understand that he couldn't
+even know what I might like in the way of wall papers.
+
+I suppose all this time when the surface of my attention was taken up
+with the baby, I had been making unconscious estimates of my husband,
+but that night just as we had come from the station, the moment of
+calculating that on a basis of necessary economy, I should have to live
+at least three years with the evidence of his ineptitude, was the first
+of my regarding him critically as the instrument of my destiny. And I
+hadn't primarily selected him for that purpose. I do not know now
+exactly why I married Tommy, except that marriage seemed a natural sort
+of experience and I had taken to it as readily as though it had been
+something to eat, something to nourish and sustain. I hadn't at any rate
+thought of it as entangling. I did not then; but certainly it occurred
+to me that for the enlarged standard of living I had brought home with
+me, a man of Tommy's taste was likely to prove an unsuitable tool.
+
+Slight as the incident of the wall paper was, it served to check my
+dawning interest in domesticity, and set my hungering mind looking
+elsewhere for sustenance. We were still a little in arrears on account
+of the funeral expenses and my illness, and no more improvements were to
+be thought of; Tommy and I were of one mind in that we had the common
+Taylorvillian horror of debt. There were other things which seemed to
+put off my conquest of the harmonious environment, things every woman
+who has lost a child will understand ... starting awake at night to the
+remembered cry ... the blessed weight upon the arm that failed and
+receded before returning consciousness. I recall going into the bedroom
+once where a shawl had been dropped on the pillow, like ... so like ...
+and the memories of infinitesimal neglects that began to show now
+preposterously blamable.
+
+In my first year at Higgleston I had been rather driven apart from the
+community by the absorption of my condition and the intimation that
+instead of being the crown of life it merely saved itself by not being
+mentioned. Now, in my desperate need of the social function, I began to
+imagine, for want of any other likeness between us, a community of lack.
+I thought of Higgleston as aching for life as I ached, and began to
+wonder if we mightn't help one another.
+
+As the colder weather shut me more into the haunted rooms, Tommy thought
+it might be a good thing if I took an interest in the entertainment
+which the I. O. O. F., of which he was a Fellow, was undertaking for the
+benefit of their new hall. As the sort of service counted on from the
+wives of prominent members, it might also be beneficial to trade. On
+this understanding I did take an interest, with the result that the
+entertainment was an immense success. It led naturally to my being put
+in charge of the annual Public School Library theatricals and a little
+later to my being connected with what was the acute dramatic crisis of
+the Middle West.
+
+There should be a great many people still who remember a large, loose
+melodrama called "The Union Spy," or "The Confederate Spy," accordingly
+as it was performed north or south of Mason and Dixon's line,
+participated in by the country at large; a sort of localized Passion
+play lifted by its tremendous personal interest free of all theatrical
+taint. There was a Captain McWhirter who went about with the scenery and
+accessories, casting the parts and conducting rehearsals, sharing the
+profits with the local G. A. R. The battle scenes were invariably
+executed by the veterans of the order, with horrid realism. Effie wrote
+me that there had been three performances in Taylorville and Cousin Judd
+had been to every one of them.
+
+With the reputation I had acquired in Higgleston, it came naturally when
+the town, by its slighter hold on the event, achieved a single
+performance, for me to be cast for the principal part, unhindered by any
+convention on behalf of my recent mourning. Rather, so close did the
+subject lie to the community feeling, there was an instinctive sense of
+dramatic propriety in my sorrow in connection with the anguish of
+war-bereaved women. One can imagine such a sentiment operating in the
+choice of players at Oberammergau. In addition to my acting, I began
+very soon to take a large share of the responsibility of rehearsals.
+
+I do not know where I got the things I put into that business. Where, in
+fact, does Gift come from, and what is the nature of it? I found myself
+falling back on my studies with Professor Winter, on slight amateurish
+incidents of Taylorville, on my brief Chicago contact even, to account
+to Higgleston for insights, certainties, that they would not have
+accepted without some such obvious backing. Nevertheless the thing was
+there, the aptitude to seize and carry to its touching, its fruitful
+expression, the awkward eagerness of the community to relive its most
+moving actualities. Never in America have we been so near the democratic
+drama.
+
+In the final performance I surprised Tommy and myself with my success,
+most of all I surprised Captain McWhirter. He was arranging a production
+of "The Spy" at the twin towns of Newton and Canfield, about two hours
+south of us, and asked me to go down there for him and attend to
+alternate rehearsals. Tommy was immensely flattered, pleased to have me
+forget my melancholy, and the money was a consideration. I saw the
+captain through with two performances in each town, and three at
+Waterbury. All this time I had not thought of the stage professionally.
+I returned to Tommy and the wall paper after the final performance with
+a vague sense of flatness, to try to pull together out of Higgleston's
+unwilling materials the stuff of a satisfying existence.
+
+Suddenly in April came a telegram and a letter from Captain McWhirter at
+Kincade, to say that on the eve of production, his leading lady had run
+away to be married, and could I, would I, come down and see him through.
+The letter contained an enclosure for travelling expenses, and a
+substantial offer for my time. No reasonable objection presenting
+itself, I went down to him by Monday's train.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+On the morning between the second and third performance of "The Spy,"
+for McWhirter never let the people off with less than three if he could
+help it, as I was sitting in the dining room of the Hotel Metropole at
+Kincade, enjoying the sense of leisure a late breakfast afforded, I saw
+the captain making his way toward me through an archipelago of whitish
+island upon which the remains of innumerable breakfasts appeared to be
+cast away without hope of rescue from the languid waiters, steering as
+straight a course as was compatible with a conversation kept up over his
+shoulder with a man, who for a certain close-cropped, clean-shaven,
+ever-ready look, might have been bred for the priesthood and given it up
+for the newspaper business. It was a type and manner I was to know very
+well as the actor-manager, but as the first I had seen of that species,
+I failed to identify it. What I did remark was the odd mixture of
+condescension and importance which the captain managed to put into the
+fact of being caught in his company. He introduced him to me as Mr.
+O'Farrell, Mr. Shamus O'Farrell, as though there could be but one of him
+and that one fully accredited and explained. He defined him
+further--after some remarks on the performance of the evening before in
+a key which seemed to sustain the evidence of Mr. O'Farrell's name in
+favour of his nationality--as manager of the Shamrock Players Company,
+billed for the first of the week in Kincade.
+
+It turned out in the course of these remarks, which the captain
+delivered with a kind of proprietary air in us, that Mr. O'Farrell--he
+called himself The O'Farrell in his posters--had a proposition to make
+to me. He put it with an admirable mixture of compliment and
+depreciation, as though either was a sort of stopcock to meet a too
+reluctant modesty on my part or a too exorbitant demand for payment. I
+was afterward to know many variations of this singular blend, and to
+acquaint myself definitely how far it is safe to trust it in either
+direction before the stop was turned, but for the moment I was under the
+impression, as no doubt O'Farrell meant I should be, that a thing so
+perfectly asked for should not be refused.
+
+What he asked was that I should come over to the opera house where the
+rest of the company awaited us, to assist at a rehearsal in the part
+left open by the illness of the star. I do not now recall if the manager
+actually made me an offer in this first encounter, but it was in the air
+that if I suited the part and the part suited me, I was to regard myself
+as temporarily engaged in Miss Dean's place.
+
+So naturally had the occasion come about, that I cannot remember that I
+found any particular difficulty in reconciling myself to a possible
+connection with the professional stage. There had been no church of my
+denomination at Higgleston, and I had affiliated with one made up of the
+remnants of two or three other houseless sects, under the caption of the
+United Congregations, and there was nothing in its somewhat loosened
+discipline that positively forbade the theatre. In my work with
+McWhirter, the play had come to mean so much the intimate expression of
+life, so wove itself with all that had been profound and heroic in the
+experience of the people, that it seemed to come quite as a matter of
+course for me to be walking out between the captain and the manager
+toward the opera house. O'Farrell, too, must have beguiled me with that
+extraordinary Celtic faculty for the sympathetic note, for I am sure I
+received the impression as we went, that his play, "The Shamrock," meant
+quite as much to the Irish temperament, as "The Spy" could mean to
+Ohianna. The manager and McWhirter had crossed one another's trails on
+more than one occasion, which seemed to give the whole affair the colour
+of neighbourliness.
+
+It transpired in the course of our walk that Laurine Dean, America's
+greatest emotional actress--it was O'Farrell called her that--had been
+taken down at Waterbury with bronchitis, and the cast having been
+already disarranged by an earlier defection, he had been obliged to
+cancel several one-night stands and put in at Kincade to wait until a
+substitute could be procured from St. Louis or Chicago, which difficulty
+was happily obviated by the discovery of Mrs. Olivia Bettersworth.
+
+All this, as I was to learn later, was not so near the truth as it might
+be, but it served. I could never make out, so insistent was each to
+claim the credit of it, whether it was O'Farrell or McWhirter first
+thought of offering the part to me, but there it was for me to take it
+or leave it as I was so inclined. Our own performance was in Armory Hall
+and this was my first entrance of the back premises of a proper stage. I
+recall as we came in through the stage door having no feeling about it
+all but an odd one of being entirely habituated to such entrances.
+
+They were all there waiting for us, the Shamrocks, grouped around the
+prompter's table in a dimly lit, dusty space, with a half conscious
+staginess even in their informal groupings, men and women regarding me
+with a queer mixture of coldness and ingratiation. I had time to take
+that in, and an impression of shoppy smartness, before Manager O'Farrell
+with a movement like the shuffling of cards drew us all together in a
+kind of general introduction and commanded the rehearsal to begin. Well,
+I went on with it as I suppose it was foregone I should as soon as I had
+smelled the dust of action, which was the stale and musty cloud that
+rolled up on our skirts from the floor and shook down upon our
+shoulders from the wings, too unsophisticated even to guess at the
+situation which the manager's air of genial hurry was so admirably
+planned to cover. I read from the prompter's book--O'Farrell had
+sketched the plot to me on the way over--and did my utmost to keep up
+with his hasty interpolations of the business. I was feeling horribly
+amateurish and awkward in the presence of these second-rate folk, whom I
+took always far too seriously, and suddenly swamped in confusion at
+hearing the manager call out to me from the orchestra what was meant for
+instruction, in an utterly unintelligible professional jargon. McWhirter
+through some notion, I suppose, of keeping his work innocuously
+amateurish, had used no sort of staginess, and the phrase froze me into
+mortification. With the strain of attention I was already under I could
+not even make an intelligent guess at his meaning, as O'Farrell,
+mistaking my hesitation, repeated it with growing peremptoriness. I
+could see the rest of the cast who were on the stage with me, aware of
+my embarrassment, and letting the situation fall with a kind of sulky
+detachment, which struck me then, and still, as vulgar rather than
+cruel. Suddenly from behind me a voice smooth and full, translated the
+clipped jargon into ordinary speech. I had not time, as I moved to obey
+it, for so much as a grateful glance over my shoulder, but I knew very
+well that the voice had come from a young woman of about my own age,
+who, as I entered at the beginning of the rehearsal, had been sitting in
+the wings, taking in my introduction with the gaze of a tethered cow,
+quiet, incurious, oblivious of the tether. As soon as I was free from
+the first act, I got around to her.
+
+"Thank you so much," I began. "You see I am not used----"
+
+"Why do you care?" she wondered. "It is only a kind of slang. They all
+had to learn it once."
+
+I could see that she sprang from my own class. Taylorville, the high
+school, the village dressmaker, might have turned her out that moment;
+and by degrees I was aware that she was beautiful; pale, tanned
+complexion, thick untaught masses of brown hair, and pale brown eyes of
+a profound and unfathomed rurality. As she moved across the stage at the
+prompter's call, with her skirts bunched up on her hip with a safety
+pin, out of the dust, as if she had just come from scrubbing the dairy,
+I fairly started with the shock of her bodily perfection and her
+extraordinary manner of going about with it as though it were something
+picked up in passing for the convenience of covering. It provoked me to
+the same sort of involuntary exclamation as though one should see a
+child playing with a rare porcelain. By contrast she seemed to bring out
+in the others, streaks and flashes of cheapness, of the stain and wear
+of unprofitable use.
+
+She came to me again at the end of her scene. "Where do you live?" she
+wished to know. "I can come around with you and coach you with your
+part."
+
+"I'm not sure," I hesitated: "I don't know if I shall go on with it."
+She took me again with her slow, incurious gaze.
+
+"Why, what else are you here for?"
+
+That in fact appeared to be Mr. O'Farrell's view of it, and though I
+went through the form of taking the day to think it over and telegraph
+to Tommy, I did finally engage myself to the Shamrock Company for the
+term of Miss Dean's illness. My husband made no objection except that he
+preferred I should not use my own name, as indeed, O'Farrell had no
+notion of my doing, as the posters and programmes stood in Miss Dean's
+name already.
+
+We had from Thursday to Monday to get up my part. With all my quickness
+I could not have managed it, except for the alacrity with which, after
+the first day, all the company played up to my business, prompted me in
+my lines, and assisted in my make-up. There was, if I had but known it,
+a reason for this extra helpfulness, which, remembering the way the
+ladies of the United Congregations had pulled and hauled about the
+Easter entertainment, went far with me toward raising the estimate of
+professional acting among the blessed privileges. Several members of the
+cast had felt themselves entitled to Miss Dean's place, for the manager
+had refused to pay an understudy, and found it easier to concede it to
+me, a brilliant society woman as I had been figured to them--I suspected
+McWhirter there--a talented amateur who would return to privacy and
+trouble the profession no more, rather than to one who might be expected
+to develop tendencies to keep what she had got. Moreover, they had
+played to small houses of late, most of the salaries were in arrears,
+and from the first of my taking hold of it, it began to be certain that
+the piece would go. For I not only played the part of the gay,
+melodramatic Irish Eileen, but I played with it. There was all my youth
+in it, the youth I hadn't had, there was wild Ellen McGee and the wet
+pastures and the woods aflame. With Tommy and a home to fall back upon,
+with no professional standing to keep, with no bitterness and rancours,
+I adventured with the part, tossed it up and made sport of it, played it
+as a stupendous lark. The rest of the company took it from me that it
+was a lark, and were as solicitous to see it through for me as though I
+had been an only child among a lot of maiden aunts. And I did not know
+of course that this charm of good fellowship was based more directly on
+the box-office returns than on the community of art.
+
+Incidentally a great deal that went on in my behalf threw light on the
+character and disposition of the star.
+
+"I 'most wore my fingers off, hookin' 'er up," confided the dresser who
+took in her gowns for me, "but she won't let out an inch, not she. Well,
+this spell 'll pull 'er down a bit, that's one comfort."
+
+Cecelia Brune made me up. She was the youngest member of the company and
+that she was distractingly and unnecessarily pretty didn't obviate the
+certainty that in Milwaukee where she was born she had been known as
+Cissy Brown.
+
+"You don't really need anything but a little colour and black around the
+eyes," she insisted. "Dean is a sight when she's made up; got so much to
+cover. I'll bet she is no sicker than me, she's just taken the slack
+time to get her wrinkles massaged. Gee, if I had a face like hers I'd
+take it off and have it ironed!"
+
+Cecelia, I may remark, lived for her prettiness; she lived by it. She
+had a speaking part of half a dozen lines and a dance in the Village
+Green act, and her mere appearance on the street of any town where we
+were billed, was good for two solid rows clear across the house. In
+Cecelia's opinion this was the quintessence of art, to attract males and
+keep them dangling, and to eke out her personal adornment by gifts which
+she managed to extract from her admirers without having yet paid the
+inestimable price for them. Married woman as I was, I was too
+countrified to understand that inevitably she must finally pay it. She
+had all the dewy, large-eyed softness of look that one reluctantly
+disassociates from innocence, and a degree of cold, grubby calculation
+which she mistook, flaunted about in fact, for chastity. It was she who
+told me as much as I got to know for a great many years of Sarah
+Croyden, who had already taken me with the fascination of her Gift, the
+inordinate curiosity to know, to touch and to prove, which makes me
+still the victim of its least elusive promise and the dupe of any poor
+pretender to it. I wanted something to account for, except when she was
+under the obsession of a part, her marked inadequacy to her perfect
+exterior, for the rich full voice that, caught in the wind of her
+genius, gripped and threatened, but ran through her ordinary
+conversation as flaccid as a velvet ribbon.
+
+She was, by Cecelia's account, the daughter of a Baptist elder in a
+small New York town, strictly brought up--I could measure the weals of
+the strictness upon my own heart--and had run away with an actor named
+Lawrence, after one wild, brief encounter when O'Farrell had been
+playing in the town. That was before Cecelia's time and she had no
+report of the said Lawrence except that he was as handsome as they make
+them and a regular rotter.
+
+"She'd ought to have known," opined Cecelia--though where in her
+nineteen years she could have acquired the groundwork of such knowledge
+was more than I could guess--"She'd ought to have known what she was up
+against by his bein' so willing to marry her. He wouldn't have put his
+head in a noose like that without he had hold of the loose end of it
+himself."
+
+That he had so held it, transpired in less than a year, in the
+reappearance of a former wife who turned up at his lodging one night to
+wait his return from the theatre, where, no one knew by what diabolical
+agency, Lawrence had word of her, and made what Cecelia called a "get
+away." What passed between the two women on that occasion must have been
+noteworthy, but it was sunk forever under Sarah's unfathomable rurality.
+O'Farrell, who of his class was a very decent sort, had been so little
+able to bear the sight of beauty in distress that he offered the poor
+girl an unimportant part as an alternative to starvation, and Sarah had
+very quickly settled what was to become of her by developing
+extraordinary talent.
+
+I think no one of us at that time quite realized how good she was;
+Cecelia Brune, I know, did not even think her beautiful.
+
+"No style," she said, settling her corset at the hips and fluffing up
+her pompadour with my comb, "and no figgur." But myself, I seemed to see
+her the mere embodiment of a gift which had snatched at this chance
+encounter with an actor, to swing into opportunity, regardless of its
+host. Whenever I watched her acting, some living impulse deep within me
+reared its head.
+
+I have set all this down here because with the exception of Manager
+O'Farrell and Jimmy Vantine, the comedian, who was thirty-five,
+objectionable, and in love with Cecelia, these two women were all I ever
+saw again of the Shamrock players. Miss Dean I did not meet on this
+occasion, for though at the end of three weeks, before I had time to
+tire of travel and new towns and nightly triumphs, she wrote she would
+return to her work, it fell out that she did not actually return until I
+was well on my way home.
+
+"I thought she would have a quick recovery when she found out what a
+sweep you'd been makin'," remarked Cecelia. That was all the comment
+that passed on the occasion. If Mr. O'Farrell made no motion toward
+making me a permanent member of his company, there were reasons for it
+that I understood better later. I had to own to a little disappointment
+that nobody came to the station to see me off except Cecelia and Sarah
+Croyden. It is true Jimmy Vantine was there, but he left us in no doubt
+that he only came because Cecelia had promised to spend the interval
+between their train and my own in his company. He fussed about with my
+luggage in order to get me off as quickly as possible.
+
+The very bread-and-buttery relation of the Shamrocks to what was for me
+the community of Art, had never struck so sourly upon me as at the
+casual quality of their good-byes. I remembered noticing that morning
+how very little hair there was on the top of Jimmy Vantine's head, and
+that he did not seem to me quite clean. I found myself so let down after
+the three weeks' excitement that I thought it necessary at Springfield,
+where I changed, to interpose two days' shopping between me and
+Higgleston. Among other things I bought there was a spirit lamp and a
+brass teakettle.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+Understand that up to this time I had not yet thought of the stage as a
+career for myself. I hadn't yet needed it. I had not then realized that
+the insight and passion which have singled me out among women of my
+profession couldn't be turned to render the mere business of living
+beautiful and fit. I hardly understand it now. Why should people pay
+night after night to see me loving, achieving, suffering, in a way they
+wouldn't think of undertaking for themselves? Life as I saw it was
+sufficiently dramatic: charged, wonderful. I at least felt at home in
+the great moments of kings, the tender hours of poets, and I hadn't
+thought of my participation in these things rendering me in any way
+superior to Higgleston or even different. If I had, I shouldn't have
+settled there in the first place. If I had glimpsed even at Tommy's
+exclusion from all that mattered passionately to me, I shouldn't have
+married him. It was because I had not yet begun to be markedly
+dissatisfied with either of them that I presently got myself the
+reputation of having trampled both Tommy and Higgleston underfoot. I
+must ask your patience for a little until I show you how wholly I
+offered myself to them both and how completely they wouldn't have me.
+
+The point of departure was of course that I didn't accept the
+Higglestonian reading of married obligations to mean that my whole time
+was to be taken up with just living with Tommy. It was as natural, and
+in view of the scope it afforded for individual development, a more
+convenient arrangement than living with my mother, but not a whit more
+absorbing. I couldn't, anyway, think of just living as an end, and
+accordingly I looked about for a more spacious occupation; I thought I
+had found it in the directing of that submerged spiritual passion which
+I had felt in the sustaining drama of the war. I had a notion there
+might be a vent for it in the shape of a permanent dramatic society by
+means of which all Higgleston, and I with them, could escape temporarily
+from its commonness into the heroic movement. It was all very clear in
+my own mind but it failed utterly in communication.
+
+I began wrongly in the first place by asking the Higgleston ladies to
+tea. Afternoon tea was unheard of in Higgleston, and I had forgotten, or
+perhaps I had never learned, that in Higgleston you couldn't do anything
+different without implying dissatisfaction with things as they were. You
+were likely on such occasions to be visited by the inquiry as to whether
+the place wasn't good enough for you. As a matter of fact afternoon tea
+was almost as unfamiliar to me as to the rest of them, but I had read
+English novels and I knew how it ought to be done. I knew for instance,
+that people came and went with a delightful informality and had tea made
+fresh for them, and were witty or portentous as the occasion demanded.
+My invitations read from four to five, and the Higgleston ladies came
+solidly within the minute and departed in phalanxes upon the stroke of
+five. They all wore their best things, which, from the number of black
+silks included, and black kid gloves not quite pulled on at the finger
+tips, gave the affair almost a funereal atmosphere. They had most of
+them had their tea with their midday meal, and Mrs. Dinkelspiel said
+openly that she didn't approve of eating between meals. They sat about
+the room against the wall and fairly hypnotized me into getting up and
+passing things, which I knew was not the way tea should be served. In
+Higgleston, the only occasion when things were handed about, were Church
+sociables and the like, when the number of guests precluded the
+possibility of having them all at your table; and by the time I got once
+around, the tea was cold and I realized how thin my thin bread and
+butter and chocolate wafers looked in respect to the huge, soft slabs of
+layer cake, stiffened by frosting and filling, which, in Higgleston went
+by the name of light refreshments. The only saving incident was the
+natural way in which Mrs. Ross, our attorney's wife who visited East
+every summer and knew how things were done, asked for "two lumps,
+please," and came back a second time for bread and butter. I think they
+were all tremendously pleased to be asked, though they didn't intend to
+commit themselves to the innovation by appearing to have a good time.
+And that was the occasion I chose for broaching my great subject,
+without, I am afraid, in the least grasping their incapacity to share in
+my joyous discovery of the world of Art which I so generously held out
+to them.
+
+It hadn't been possible to keep my professional adventure from the
+townspeople, nor had I attempted it. What I really felt was that we were
+to be congratulated as a community in having one among us privileged to
+experience it, and I honestly think I should have felt so of any one to
+whom the adventure had befallen. But I suspect I must have given the
+impression of rather flaunting it in their faces.
+
+I put my new project on the ground that though we were dissevered by our
+situation, there was no occasion for our being out of touch with the
+world of emotion, not, at least, so long as we had admission to it
+through the drama; and it wasn't in me to imagine that the world I
+prefigured to them under those terms was one by their standards never to
+be kept sufficiently at a distance.
+
+Mrs. Miller put the case for most of them with the suggestion thrown out
+guardedly that she didn't "know as she held with plays for church
+members"; she was a large, tasteless woman, whose husband kept the
+lumber yard and derived from it an extensive air of being in touch with
+the world's occupations. "And I don't know," she went on relentlessly,
+"that I ever see any good come of play acting to them that practise it."
+
+Mrs. Ross, determined to live up to her two lumps, came forward
+gallantly with:
+
+"Oh, but, Mrs. Miller, when our dear Mrs. Bettersworth----"
+
+"That's what I was thinking of," Mrs. Miller put it over her.
+
+"Well for my part," declared Mrs. Dinkelspiel, with the air of not
+caring who knew it, "I don't want my girls to sell tickets or anything;
+it makes 'em too forward." Mrs. Harvey, whose husband was in hardware,
+began to tell discursively about a perfectly lovely entertainment they
+had had in Newton Centre for the missionary society, which Mrs. Miller
+took exception to on the ground of its frivolity.
+
+"I don't know," she maintained, "if the Lord's work ain't hindered by
+them sort of comicalities as much as it's helped."
+
+I am not sure where this discussion mightn't have landed us if the
+general attention had not been distracted just then by my husband, an
+hour before his time, coming through the front gate and up the walk. He
+had evidently forgotten my tea party, for he came straight to me, and
+backed away precipitately through the portières as soon as he saw the
+assembled ladies sitting about the wall. It was not that which disturbed
+us; any Higgleston male would have done the same, but it was plain in
+the brief glimpse we had of him that he looked white and stricken. A
+little later we heard him in the back of the house making ambiguous
+noises such as not one of my guests could fail to understand as the
+precursor of a domestic crisis. I could see the little flutter of
+uneasiness which passed over them, between their sense of its demanding
+my immediate attention and the fear of leaving before the expressed
+time. Fortunately the stroke of five released them. The door was hardly
+shut on the last silk skirt when I ran out and found him staring out of
+the kitchen window.
+
+"Well?" I questioned.
+
+"I thought they would never go," he protested. "Come in here." He led
+the way to the living room as if somehow he found it more appropriate to
+the gravity of what he had to impart, and yet failed to make a beginning
+with his news. He shut the door and leaned against it with his hands
+behind him for support.
+
+"Has anything happened?"
+
+"Happened? Oh, I don't know. I've lost my job."
+
+"Lost? Burton Brothers?" I was all at sea.
+
+He nodded. "They're closing out; the manager's in town to-day. He told
+us...." By degrees I got it out of him. Burton Brothers thought they saw
+hard times ahead, they were closing out a number of their smaller
+establishments, centering everything on their Chicago house. Suddenly my
+thought leaped up.
+
+"But couldn't they give you something there ... in Chicago?" I was dizzy
+for a moment with the wild hope of it. Never to live in Higgleston any
+more--but Tommy cut me short.
+
+"They've men who have been with them longer than I have to provide
+for.... I asked."
+
+"Oh, well, no matter. The world is full of jobs." Looking for one
+appealed to me in the light of an adventure, but because I saw how pale
+he was I went to him and began to kiss him softly. By the way he yielded
+himself to me I grasped a little of his lost and rudderless condition,
+once he found himself outside the limits of a salaried employment. I
+began to question him again as the best way of getting the extent of our
+disaster before us.
+
+"What does Mr. Rathbone say?" Rathbone was our working tailor, a thin,
+elderly, peering man of a sort you could scarcely think of as having any
+existence apart from his shop. He used to come sidling down the street
+to it and settle himself among his implements with the air of a brooding
+hen taking to her nest; the sound of his machine was a contented
+clucking.
+
+"He was struck all of a heap. They're better fixed than we are." Tommy
+added this as an afterthought as likely to affect the tailor's attitude
+when he came to himself. "They" were old Rathbone and his daughter, one
+of those conspicuously blond and full-breasted women who seem to take to
+the dressmaking and millinery trades by instinct. As she got herself up
+on Sunday in her smart tailoring, with a hat "from the city," and her
+hair amazingly pompadoured, she was to some of the men who came to our
+church, very much what the brass teakettle was to me, a touch of the
+unattainable but not unappreciated elegancies of life. Tommy admired her
+immensely and was disappointed that I did not have her at the house
+oftener.
+
+"They've got her business to fall back on," Tommy suggested now with an
+approach to envy. He had never seen Miss Rathbone as I had,
+professionally, going about with her protuberant bosom stuck full of
+pins, a tape line draped about her collarless neck, and her skirt and
+belt never quite together in the back, so he thought of her
+establishment as a kind of stay in affliction.
+
+"And I have the stage," I flourished. It was the first time I had
+thought of it as an expedient, but I glanced away from the thought in
+passing, for to say the truth I didn't in the least know how to go about
+getting a living by it. I creamed some chipped beef for Tommy's supper,
+a dish he was particularly fond of, and opened a jar of quince
+marmalade, and all the time I wasn't stirring something or setting the
+table, I had my arms around him, trying to prop him against what I did
+not feel so much terrifying as exciting. We talked a little about his
+getting his old place back in Taylorville, and just as we were clearing
+away the supper things we saw Miss Rathbone, with her father tucked
+under her arm, pass the square of light raying out into the spring dusk
+from our window, and a moment later they knocked at our door. It was one
+of the things that I felt bound to like Miss Rathbone for, that she took
+such care of her father; she did everything for him, it was said, even
+to making up his mind for him, and this evening by the flare of the lamp
+Tommy held up to welcome them, it was clear she had made it up to some
+purpose. It must have been what he saw in her face that made my husband
+put the lamp back on the table from which the white cloth had not yet
+been removed, as if the clearing up was too small a matter to consort
+with the occasion.
+
+I was relieved to have my husband take charge of the visit, especially
+as he made no motion to invite them into the front room where the
+remains of the bread and butter and the chairs against the wall would
+have apprised Miss Rathbone of my having entertained company on an
+occasion to which she had not been invited. It was part of Tommy's sense
+of social obligation that we ought never to neglect Mr. Rathbone, whom,
+though his connection with the business was as slight as my husband's,
+he insisted on regarding as in some sort a partner. So we sat down
+rather stiffly about the table still shrouded in its white cloth, as
+though upon it were about to be laid out the dead enterprise of Burton
+Brothers, and looked, all of us, I think, a little pleased to find
+ourselves in so grave a situation.
+
+Miss Rathbone, who had always a great many accessories to her toilet,
+bags and handkerchiefs and scarves and things, laid them on the table as
+though they were a kind of insignia of office, and made a poor pretence
+to keep up with me the proper feminine detachment from the business
+which had brought them there. We neither of us, Miss Rathbone and I, had
+the least idea what the other might be thinking about or presumably
+interested in, though I think she made the more gallant effort to
+pretend that she did. On this evening I could see that she was full of
+the project for which she had primed her father, and was nervously
+anxious lest he shouldn't go off at the right moment or with the proper
+pyrotechnic.
+
+I remember the talk that went on at first, because it was so much in the
+way of doing business in Higgleston, and impressed me even then with its
+factitious shrewdness, based very simply on the supposition that
+Capitalists--it was under that caption that Burton Brothers
+figured--never meant what they said. Capitalists were always talking of
+hard times; it was part of their deep laid perspicacity. Burton Brothers
+wished to sell out the business; was it reasonable to suppose they would
+think it good enough to sell and not good enough to go on with?
+
+"Father thinks," said Miss Rathbone, and I am sure he had done so
+dutifully at her instigation, "that they couldn't ask no great price
+after talking about hard times the way they have."
+
+It was not in keeping with what was thought to be woman's place, that
+she should go on to the completed suggestion. In fact, so far as I
+remember it never was completed, but was talked around and about, as if
+by indirection we could lessen the temerity of the proposal that old
+Rathbone and Tommy should buy out the shop on such favorable terms as
+Burton Brothers, in view of their own statement of its depreciation,
+couldn't fail to make.
+
+"You could live over the store," Miss Rathbone let fall into the
+widening rings of silence that followed her first suggestion; "your rent
+would be cheaper, and it would come into the business."
+
+I felt that she made it too plain that the chief objection that my
+husband could have was the lack of money for the initial adventure; but
+because I realized that much of my instinctive resistance to a plan that
+tied him to Higgleston as to a stake, was due to her having originated
+it, I kept it to myself. I had a hundred inarticulate objections, chief
+of which was that I couldn't see how any plan that was acceptable to the
+Rathbones, could get me on toward the Shining Destiny, but when you
+remember that I hadn't yet been able to put that concretely to myself,
+you will see how impossible it was that I should have put it to my
+husband. In the end Tommy was talked over. I believe the consideration
+of going on in the same place and under the same circumstances without
+the terrifying dislocation of looking for a job, had more to do with it
+than Miss Rathbone's calculation of the profits. We wrote home for the
+money; Effie wrote back that everything of mother's was involved in the
+stationery business, which was still on the doubtful side of prosperity,
+but Tommy's father let us have three hundred dollars.
+
+The necessity of readjusting our way of life to Tommy's new status of
+proprietor, and moving in over the store, kept my plans for the dramatic
+exploitation of Higgleston in abeyance. It seemed however by as much as
+I was now bound up with the interest of the community, to put me on a
+better footing for beginning it, and on Decoration Day, walking in the
+cemetery under the bright boughs, between the flowery mounds, the Gift
+stirred in me, played upon by this touching dramatization of common
+human pain and loss. I recalled that it was just such solemn festivals
+of the people that I had had in mind to lay hold on and make the medium
+of a profounder appreciation. And the next one about to present itself
+as an occasion was the Fourth of July.
+
+I detached myself from Tommy long enough to make my way around to two or
+three of the ladies who usually served on the committee.
+
+"We ought to have a meeting soon now," I suggested; "it will take all of
+a month to get the children ready."
+
+"That's what we thought," agreed Mrs. Miller heavily. "They was to our
+house Thursday----" She went on to tell me who was to read the
+Declaration and who deliver the oration.
+
+"But," I protested, "that's exactly what they've had every Fourth these
+twenty years!"
+
+"Well, I guess," said Mrs. Harvey, "if Higgleston people want that kind
+of a celebration, they've a right to have it."
+
+"I guess they have," Mrs. Miller agreed with her.
+
+They had always rather held it out against me at Higgleston that I had
+never taken the village squabbles seriously, that I was reconciled too
+quickly for a proper sense of their proportions, and they must have
+reckoned without this quality in me now, for I was so far from realizing
+the deliberateness of the slight, that I thought I would go around on
+the way home and see our minister; perhaps he could do something. It
+appeared simply ridiculous that Higgleston shouldn't have the newest of
+this sort of thing when it was there for the asking.
+
+I found him raking the garden in his third best suit and the impossible
+sort of hat affected by professional men in their more human occasions.
+The moment I flashed out at him with my question about the committee, he
+fell at once into a manner of ministerial equivocation--the air of being
+man enough to know he was doing a mean thing without being man enough to
+avoid doing it. Er ... yes, he believed there had been a meeting ... he
+hadn't realized that I was expecting to be notified. I wasn't a regular
+member, was I?
+
+"No," I admitted, "but last year----" The intention of the slight began
+to dawn on me.
+
+"You see, the programme is usually made up from the children of the
+united Sunday schools...."
+
+"I know, of course, but what has that?..." He did know how mean it was;
+I could see by the dexterity with which he delivered the blow.
+
+"A good many of the mothers thought they'd rather not have them exposed
+to ... er ... professional methods." As an afterthought he tried to give
+it the cast of a priestly remonstrance which he must have seen didn't in
+the least impose on me.
+
+I suppose it was the fear of how I might put it to one of his best
+paying parishioners that led him to go around to the store the next
+morning and make matters worse by explaining to Tommy that though the
+children weren't to be contaminated by my professionalism, it could
+probably be arranged for me to "recite something." To do Tommy justice,
+he was as mad as a hatter. Being so much nearer to village-mindedness
+himself, I suppose my husband could better understand the mean envy of
+my larger opportunity, but his obduracy in maintaining that I had been
+offended led to the only real initiative he ever showed in all the time
+I was married to him.
+
+"I'd just like to _show_ them!" he kept sputtering. All at once he
+cheered up with a snort. "_I'll_ show them!" He was very busy all the
+evening with letters which he went out on purpose to post, with the
+result that when a few days later he made his contribution to the
+fireworks fund, he made it a little larger, as became a live business
+man, on the ground that he wouldn't be able to participate as his wife
+had "accepted an invitation to take charge of the programme at Newton
+Centre." Newton Centre was ten miles away, and though I couldn't do much
+on account of the difficulty of rehearsals, I managed to make the
+announcement of it in the county paper convey to them that what they had
+missed wasn't quite to be sicklied over with Mrs. Miller's asseveration
+of a notable want of moral particularity at Newton Centre. The very
+first time I went out to a Sunday-school social thereafter it was made
+plain to me that if I wanted to take up the annual Library
+entertainment, it was open to me.
+
+"And I always will say," Mrs. Miller conceded, "that there's nobody can
+make your children seem such a credit to you as Mrs. Bettersworth."
+
+"It's a regular talent you have," Mrs. Harvey backed her up, "like a
+person in the Bible." This scriptural reference came in so aptly that I
+could see several ladies nodding complacently. Mrs. Ross sailed quite
+over them and landed on the topmost peak of approbation.
+
+"I've always believed," she asserted, "that a Christian woman on the
+stage would have an uplifting influence."
+
+But by this time my ambition had slacked under the summer heat and the
+steady cluck of old Rathbone's machine and the mixed smell of damp
+woollen under the iron, and creosote shingle stains. There had been no
+loss of social standing in our living over the store; such readjustments
+in Higgleston went by the name of bettering yourself, and were
+commendable. But somehow I could never ask ladies to tea when the only
+entrance was by way of a men's furnishing store. The four rooms, opening
+into one another so that there was no way of getting from the kitchen to
+the parlour except through the bedroom, I found quite hopeless as a
+means of expressing my relation to all that appealed to me as inspiring,
+dazzling. Because I could not go out without making a street toilet, I
+went out too little, and suffered from want of tone. And suddenly along
+in September came a letter from O'Farrell offering me a place in his
+company, and a note from Sarah begging me to accept it. If up to that
+time I had not thought of the stage as a career, now at the suggestion
+the desire of it ravened in me like a flame.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+"And you never seem to think I might not _want_ my wife to go on the
+stage?"
+
+I do not know what unhappy imp prompted Tommy to take that tone with me;
+but whenever I try to fix upon the point of reprehensibleness which led
+on from my writing to O'Farrell that I would join him in ten days in
+Chicago, to the tragic termination of my marriage, I found myself
+whirled about this attitude of his in the deep-seated passionate Why of
+my life. Why should love be tied to particular ways of doing things?
+What was this horror of human obligation that made it necessary, since
+Tommy and I were so innocently fond of one another, that one of us
+should be made unhappy by it? Why should it be so accepted on all sides
+that it should be I? For my husband's feeling was but a single item in
+the total of social prejudice by which, once my purpose had gone abroad
+by way of the Rathbones, I found myself driven apart from the community
+interest as by a hostile tide, across which Higgleston gazed at me with
+strange, begrudging eyes. I recall how the men looked at me the first
+time I went out afterward, a little aslant, as though some ineradicable
+taint of impropriety attached in their minds to any association with
+the stage.
+
+Whatever attitude Tommy finally achieved in the necessity of sustaining
+the situation he had created for himself by his backing of my first
+professional venture, was no doubt influenced by the need of covering
+his hurt at realizing, through my own wild rush to embrace the present
+opportunity, how far I was from accepting life gracefully at his hands,
+the docile creature of his dreams. Little things come back to me ...
+words, looks ... sticks and straws of his traditions made wreckage by
+the wind of my desire, which my resentment at his implication in the
+general attitude, prevented me from fully estimating. My mother too, to
+whom I wrote my decision as soon as I had arrived at it, in a long
+letter designed to convince me that a wife's chief duty and becomingness
+lay in seeing that nothing of her lapped over the bounds prescribed by
+her husband's capacity, contributed to the exasperated sense I had of
+having every step toward the fulfilment of my natural gift dragged at by
+loving hands. Poor mother, I am afraid I never quite realized what a
+duckling I turned out to her, nor with what magnanimity she faced it.
+
+"But I suppose you think you are doing right," she wrote at the end, and
+then in a postscript, "I read in the papers there is a church in New
+York that gives communion to actors, but I don't expect you will get as
+far as that."
+
+It was finally Miss Rathbone who relieved the situation by pulling Tommy
+over to a consenting frame of mind in consideration of the neat little
+plumlet she extracted from it for herself by making me a travelling
+dress in three days. She brought it down to the house for me to try on,
+and it was pathetic to see the way my husband hung upon the effect she
+made for him of turning me out in a way that was a credit to them both.
+
+"You'll see," she seemed to be saying to him by nothing more explicit
+than an exclamation full of pins and a clever way of squinting at the
+hang of my skirt, "that when we two take a hand at the affairs of the
+great world we can come up to the best of them." And all the time I
+could hear the Higgleston ladies drumming up trade for her out of Newton
+Centre with their "Stylish? Oh, very. She makes all her clothes for Mrs.
+Bettersworth--Olivia Lattimore, the actress, you know."
+
+Just at the end though, when we were lying in bed the last morning,
+afraid to go to sleep again lest we shouldn't get up early enough to
+catch the train, I believe if Tommy had risen superior to his
+traditional objection to a married woman having interests outside her
+home, and claimed me by some strong personal need of his own, I should
+have answered it gladly. The trouble with my husband's need of me was
+that it left too much over.
+
+"But of course," he reminded me at the station, "you can give it up any
+minute if you want to." I think quite to the last he hoped I would rise
+to some such generous pretence and come back to him, but we neither of
+us had much notion of the nature of a player's contract.
+
+I had arranged to stay with Pauline until I could look about me, and
+from the little that I had been able to tell her of my affairs I could
+see she was in a flutter what to think of me. During the five days I was
+in her house I watched her swing through a whole arc of possible
+attitudes, to settle with truly remarkable instinct on the one which her
+own future permitted her most consistently to maintain.
+
+"You dear, ridiculous child," she hovered over the point with indulgent
+patronage, "what will you think of next?"
+
+Pauline herself was going through a phase at the time. They had moved
+out to a detached house at Evanston on account of its being better for
+the baby, and there was a visible diminution of her earlier effect of
+housewifely efficiency, in view of Henry's growing prosperity. You could
+see all Pauline's surfaces like a tulip bed in February, budding toward
+a new estimate of her preciousness in terms of her husband's income.
+When she took me by the shoulders, holding me off from her to give play
+to the pose of amused, affectionate bewilderment, I could see just where
+the consciousness of a more acceptable femininity as evinced by her
+being provided with a cook and a housemaid, prompted her to this
+gracious glozing of my not being in quite so fortunate a case. I was to
+be the Wonder, the sport on the feminine bush, dear and extenuated, made
+adorably not to feel my excluding variation; an attitude not uncommon in
+wives of well-to-do husbands toward women who work. It was an attitude
+successfully kept up by Pauline Mills for as long as I provided her the
+occasion. Just at first I suspect I rather contributed to it by my own
+feeling of its being such a tremendous adventure for me, Olivia
+Lattimore, with Taylorville, Hadley's pasture and the McGee children
+behind me, to be going on the stage. How I exulted in it all, the hall
+bedroom where I finally settled across from Sarah Croyden, the worry of
+rehearsals, the baked smell of the streets bored through by the raw lake
+winds, the beckoning night lights--the vestibule of doors opening on the
+solemn splendour of the world.
+
+At the rehearsals I met Cecelia Brune, if anything prettier than before,
+and quite perceptibly harder, and Jimmy Vantine, still in love with her,
+still with his bald crown not quite clean and the same objectionable
+habit of sidling about, fingering one's dress, laying hands on one as he
+talked. I met Manager O'Farrell, not a whit altered, and Miss Laurine
+Dean. I liked and I didn't like her. She drew by a certain warm charm of
+personality that repelled in closer quarters by its odours of
+sickliness. There was a quality in her beauty as of a flower kept too
+long in its glass, not so much withered as ready to fall apart. She had
+small appealing hands, such as moved one to take them up and handle
+them, and served somehow to mitigate a subtle impression of impropriety
+conveyed by her slight sidewise smile. She was probably good-natured by
+temperament and peevish through excessive use of cigarettes. She made a
+point of always speaking well of everybody, but it was a long time
+before I learned that no sort of blame was so deadly as her
+commendation. "Such a beautiful woman Miss Croyden is," she would say,
+"isn't it a pity about her nose," and though I had never thought of
+Sarah's nose as mitigating against her perfection, I found myself after
+that thinking of it. You could see that magnanimity, which was her
+chosen attitude, was often a strain to her. I do not think she had any
+gift at all, but she had a perception of it that had enabled her to
+produce a very tolerable imitation of acting and kept her, in a covert
+way, inordinately jealous of the gift in others. She was jealous of
+mine.
+
+It was not all at once I discovered it. In the beginning, because I
+never detected her in any of the obvious snatchings of lines and
+positions that went on at rehearsals, but even making a stand for me
+against incursions into my part which I was too unaccustomed to
+forestall, I thought of her as being of rather better strain than most
+of the company. I was probably the only member of it unaware of her
+deliberate measures not to permit me such a footing as might lead to my
+supplanting her with Manager O'Farrell, toward whom I began to find
+myself in what, for me, was an interesting and charming relation. It was
+a relation I should have been glad to maintain with any member of the
+company, but it was only O'Farrell who found himself equal to it. I was
+full and effervescing with the joy of creation; night by night as I felt
+the working of the living organism we should have been, transmitting
+supernal energies of emotion to the audience, who by the very
+communicating act became a part of us, I felt myself also warming toward
+my fellow players. I was so charged I should have struck a spark from
+any one of them when we met, but for the fact that by degrees I
+discovered that they presented to me the negative pole.
+
+I was aware of such communicating fluid between particular pairs of
+them. I saw it spark from eye to eye, heard it break in voices; it
+flashed like sheet lightning about our horizons on occasions of great
+triumph; but I was distinctly alive to the fact that the medium by which
+it was accomplished was turned from me. At times I was brushed by the
+wing of a suspicion that among the men, there was something almost
+predetermined in their denial of what was for me, the sympathetic,
+creative impulse. I was a little ashamed for them of the gaucherie of
+withholding what seemed so important to our common success, and yet I
+seemed always to be surprising all of them at it, except Jimmy Vantine
+and the manager. I couldn't of course, on account of his propensity for
+laying hands on one, take it from Jimmy, but between Mr. O'Farrell and
+me it ran with a pleasant, profitable warmth. I was conscious always of
+acting better the scenes I had with him. The thrill of them was never
+quite broken in off-the-stage hours. I felt myself sustained by it. For
+one thing the man had genuine talent, and I think besides Sarah Croyden
+and Jimmy Vantine, no one else in the company had very much. Jimmy had a
+gift, besmeared and discredited by his own cheapness, but O'Farrell had
+a real flowing genius and a degree of personal vitality that sketched
+him out as by fire from the flat Taylorville types I had known. We used
+to talk together about my own possibilities and I had many helpful hints
+from him, but in spite of this friendliness I never made any way with
+him against Miss Dean. Not that I tried, but by degrees I found that
+suggestions made and favours asked, were granted or accepted on the
+basis of their non-interference with our leading lady. I was not without
+intimations, which I usually disregarded because I found their
+conclusions impossible to maintain, that she even triumphed over me in
+little matters too inconsiderable to have been taken into account except
+on the understanding that we were pitted in a deliberate rivalry. I was
+hurt and amazed at times to discover that we presented this aspect to
+the rest of the company. I felt that I was being judged by my conduct of
+a business in which I was not engaged.
+
+The situation, however, had not developed to such a pitch by the time we
+played in Kincade, that it could affect my pleasure in the visit Tommy
+paid me there; I was overjoyed to have the arms of my own man about me
+again; I was proud of his pride in my success as _Polly Eccles_, and
+pleased to have him and Sarah pleased with one another. I thought then
+that if I could only have Tommy and my work I should ask no more of
+destiny; I do not now see why I couldn't, but I like best to think of
+him as he seemed to me then, wholesome and good, raised by his joy of
+our reunion almost to my excited plane, generous in his sharing of my
+triumphs. It seemed for the moment to put my feet quite on solid ground.
+I knew at last where I was.
+
+It was about a month after this that I began to find myself pitted
+against Miss Dean in a struggle for some dimly grasped advantage, with
+the dice cogged against me. I saw myself in the general estimate,
+convinced of handling my game badly, and could form no guess even at the
+expected moves. I smarted under a sense that Manager O'Farrell was not
+backing up the friendliness of our relations, and I remember saying to
+Sarah Croyden once that I suspected Miss Dean was using her sex
+attraction against me, but I missed the point of Sarah's slow,
+commiserating smile. At the time we were all more or less swamped by the
+discomforts of our wintry flights from town to town, execrable hotels,
+irregular and unsatisfying meals. One and another of us went down with
+colds, and finally toward the end of February, I was taken with a severe
+neuralgia. It reached its acutest stage the first night we played at
+Louisville.
+
+I had hurried home from the theatre the moment I was released from my
+part, to find relief from it in rest, but an hour or two later, still
+suffering and discovering that I had taken all my powders, I decided to
+go down to Sarah's room on the lower floor to ask for some that I knew
+she had. I slipped on my shoes and a thick gray dressing gown, and
+taking the precaution of wrapping my head in a shawl against the
+draughty halls, I went down to her. I was returning with the box of
+powders in my hand when I was startled by the sound of a door lifting
+carefully on the latch. The hotel was built in the shape of a capital T,
+with the stair halfway of the stem. I was almost at the foot of it
+facing the cross hall that gave me a view of the door of Miss Dean's
+room, and I saw now that it was slightly ajar. I shrank instinctively
+into the shadow of the recess where the stair began, for I was unwilling
+that anybody should see the witch I looked in my dressing gown and
+shawl. In the interval before the door widened I heard the tick of a
+tin-faced clock just across from me. Part of the enamel was fallen away
+from the face of it so that it looked as if eaten upon by discreditable
+sores; a chandelier holding two smoky kerosene lamps hung slightly awry
+at the crossing of the T, and cast a tipsy shadow. The door swung back
+slightly, it opened into the room, and a man came out of it and crossed
+directly in front of me, probably to his room in the other arm of the T.
+
+Once out of the door it snapped softly to behind him, and the man fell
+instantly into a manner that disconnected him with it to a degree that
+could only have been possible to an accomplished actor. If I had not
+seen him come out of it, I should have supposed him abroad upon such a
+casual errand as my own.
+
+But there was no mistaking that it was Manager O'Farrell. By the
+tin-faced clock it was a quarter past one. And he would have been home
+from the theatre more than an hour!
+
+I got up to my room somehow; I think my neuralgia must have left me with
+the shock; I can't remember feeling it any more after that. You have to
+remember that this was my first actual contact with sin of any sort.
+Generations of the stock of Methodism revolted in me. I had liked the
+man, I had thought of our relation as something precious, to be kept
+intact because it nourished the quality of our art, and I had all the
+conventional woman's horror of being brought in touch with looseness. It
+was part of the admitted business of the men of my class to keep their
+women from such contacts, and Manager O'Farrell had allowed me to enter
+into a sort of rivalry with a shameless woman--with his mistress.
+
+I have always been what the country people in Ohianna call a
+knowledgable woman, I have not much faculty of getting news of a
+situation through the facts as they present themselves, but I have
+instincts which under the stimulus of emotion work with extraordinary
+celerity and thoroughness. Now suddenly the half-apprehended suggestion
+of the last few months took fire from the excitement of my mind, and
+exploded into certainties. I sensed all at once intolerable things, the
+withholden eyes, the covert attention fixed on my relations with the
+manager and Miss Dean. I lay on the bed and shuddered with dry sobs;
+other times I lay still, awake and blazing. About daylight Sarah came up
+to inquire how my neuralgia did. She found me with the unopened box
+clutched tightly in my hand. She turned up the smoky gas and noted the
+dark circles under my eyes.
+
+"What has happened? Something, I know," she insisted gently. I blurted
+it out.
+
+"Mr. O'Farrell ... I saw him come out of Miss Dean's room ... at a
+quarter of one. He was ... oh, Sarah ... he was!..." I relapsed again
+into the horror of it.
+
+"Oh!" she said. She turned out the light and came and forced me gently
+under the covers and got into bed beside me.
+
+"Didn't you know?" she questioned.
+
+"Did you?"
+
+"No one really knows these things. I didn't want to be the first to
+suggest it to you."
+
+"Do the others know?"
+
+"As much as we do. It has been going on a long time."
+
+"And you put up with it--you go about with them?" I was astonished at
+the welling up of disgust in me. Sarah felt for my hand and held it.
+
+"My dear, in our business you have to learn to take no notice. It is not
+that these things are so much worse with actors, but it is more
+difficult to keep them covered up. You must know that a great many
+people do such things."
+
+"I know--_wicked_ people. I never thought of its being done by anybody
+you liked."
+
+"Oh, yes;" she was perfectly simple. "You can like them, you can like
+them greatly." I remembered that I oughtn't to have said that to Sarah
+Croyden.
+
+"You mustn't think Mr. O'Farrell such a bad man. He is probably fond of
+her. In some respects he is a very good man. When I was--left, without a
+penny, he might have made terms with me. Some managers would. But he
+gave me a living salary and left me to myself. He has been very kind to
+me."
+
+"But she----" I choked back my sick resentment to get at what had been
+tearing its way through my consciousness for the last three hours. "She
+must have thought that _that_ was what I wanted of him...."
+
+"Well, it is natural she should be anxious, with other women about. She
+is in love with him."
+
+"Did you think so? About me, I mean?"
+
+"No," said Sarah. "No, I didn't think so."
+
+It was light enough now to show the outline of the drifts along the
+sills and the fine gritty powder which the wind dashed intermittently
+against the panes; the filter of day under the scant blinds brought out
+in the affair streaks of vulgarity as evident as the pattern of the
+paper on the wall. It seemed to borrow cheapness from the broken castor
+of the bureau, as from my recollection of the eaten face of the clock
+and the leaning chandelier. I sat up in the bed and laid hold of Sarah
+in my eagerness to get clear of what by my mere knowledge of it, seemed
+an unbearable complicity.
+
+"I had a feeling for him," I admitted. "I could act better with him; but
+it was different from that--you know it was different."
+
+"Yes," said Sarah, "I know. I know because I am that way myself; it is
+_like_ that, but it isn't that." I was still, holding my breath while
+she considered; we were very close upon the twined roots of sex and
+art.
+
+"There's a feeling that goes with acting, with other sorts of things,
+painting and music, maybe, a feeling of your wanting to get _through_ to
+something and lay hold of it, and your not being able to leaves you ...
+aching somehow, and you think if there's a particular person ... I think
+O'Farrell would understand ... it is being able to act makes you know
+the difference I suppose. He really can act you know, and you can, but
+Dean wouldn't understand, nor the others. My--Mr. Lawrence didn't
+understand!" It was the first time she had ever mentioned him to me.
+"Sometimes I think they might have felt the difference just at first,
+but nobody told them and they got used to thinking it is ... the other
+thing." She drew me down into the bed again and covered me. "You mustn't
+take it to hard ... we all go through it once ... and you are safe so
+long as you know."
+
+"But I can't go on with it." I was positive on that point. "Sarah,
+Sarah, don't say I have to go on with it."
+
+"I know you can't. But you just have to."
+
+"I should never be able to face either of them again without showing
+that I know."
+
+"And then the others will know and they will think ..."
+
+I threw out my arms, seeing how I was trapped. I wanted to cry out on
+them; to despise the woman openly. "And they will think that I am
+jealous ... that I wanted it myself...."
+
+I rolled in the bed and bit my hands with shame and anger. Sarah caught
+me in her arms and held me until the paroxysm passed. I was quieted at
+last from exhaustion.
+
+"You can stay in your room to-day," she suggested. "I can bring your
+meals up to you; this neuralgia will give you an excuse, and you needn't
+see any one until you go to the theatre. That will give you one day.
+Maybe by to-morrow ..."
+
+But I had no confidence that to-morrow would bring me any sensible
+relief. The moral shock was tremendous. All my pride was engaged on the
+side of never letting anybody know; to have been misunderstood in the
+quality of my disgust would have been the intolerable last thing. Sarah
+brought up my breakfast before she had her own; she reported nobody
+about yet except Jimmy Vantine who had inquired for me. About half an
+hour later she came softly in again with a yellow envelope open in her
+hand. I saw by her face that it was for me and that the news it
+contained put the present situation out of question.
+
+"Is it from my husband?" I demanded. I hardly knew what I hoped or
+expected, a possibility of release flashed up in me.
+
+"It has been forwarded." She sat down on the bed beside me. "My poor
+Olivia ... you must try to think of it as anything but a way out. Mr.
+O'Farrell will let you go for this...." If it had to happen it couldn't
+have happened better.
+
+"Give it to me----"
+
+"Remember it is a way out."
+
+I read it hastily:
+
+     Mother had a stroke. Come at once.
+
+     Signed: FORESTER.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+It was a common practice in Taylorville never to send for the doctor
+until you knew what was the matter with you. So long as the symptoms
+failed to align themselves with any known disorder, they were supposed
+to be amenable to neighbourly advice, to the common stock of medical
+misinformation, to the almanac or some such repository of science; and
+though this practice led on too many occasions to the disease getting
+past the curable stages before the physician was called, I never
+remember to have heard it questioned.
+
+"You see," people remarked to one another at the funeral, "they didn't
+know what was the matter with her until it was too late," and it passed
+for all extenuation. It was natural then that my mother should have kept
+any premonitory symptoms of her indisposition even from Forester; close
+as they were in their affections she would have thought it indelicate to
+have spoken to him of her health. The first determinate stroke of it
+came upon her sitting quietly in her usual place at prayer meeting on a
+Wednesday evening.
+
+It had been Forester's habit to close the shop a little early on that
+evening, going around to the church to walk home with her, getting in
+before the last hymn to save his face with the minister by a show of
+regular attendance. But on this evening customers detained him beyond
+his usual hour, so that by the time he reached the corner opposite the
+church, he saw the people dribbling out by twos and threes, across the
+lighted doorway, and noted that my mother was not with them. He thought
+she might have slipped out earlier and gone around to the shop for him
+as occasionally happened, but seeing the lights did not go out at once
+in the church, he looked in to make sure, and saw her still sitting in
+her accustomed place. The sexton and the organist, who were fussing
+together about a broken pedal, appeared not to have observed her there,
+and one of them was reaching up to put out the light when Forester
+touched her on the shoulder. She started and seemed to come awake with
+an effort, and on the way home she stumbled once or twice in a manner
+that led him, totally unaccustomed as he was to think of my mother as
+ill in any sort, to get a little entertainment out of it by gentle
+rallying, which was dropped when he discovered that it caused her
+genuine, pained embarrassment. The following Tuesday he came home to the
+midday meal to find her lying on the floor, inarticulate and hardly
+conscious. There must have been two strokes in close succession, for she
+had managed after falling, to get a cushion from the worn sitting-room
+lounge under her head and to pull a shawl partly over her. Effie, who
+was at Montecito, was summoned home, and that evening, by the doctor's
+advice, the telegram was sent which separated me so opportunely from the
+Shamrocks. By the time I reached her, speech had returned in a measure,
+and by the end of a fortnight she was able to be lifted into the chair
+which she never afterward left.
+
+I remember as if it were yesterday, the noble outline of her face and of
+her head against the pillows, the smooth hair parted Madonna-wise and
+brought low across her ears, the blue of her eyes looking out of the
+dark, swollen circles, for all her fifty-two years, with the unawakened
+clarity of a girl's. Stricken as I was from my first realizing contact
+with sin, and my identification with it through the assumed passions of
+the stage, it grew upon me during the days of my mother's illness that
+there was a kind of intrinsic worth in her which I, with all my powers,
+must forever and inalienably miss. With it there came a kind of
+exasperation, never quite to leave me, of the certainty of not choosing
+my own values, but of being driven with them aside and apart.
+
+It was responsible in part for a feeling I had of being somehow less
+related to my mother's house than many of her distant kin who were
+continually arriving out of all quarters, in wagons and top buggies, to
+express a continuity of interest and kind which had the effect of
+constituting me definitely outside the bond.
+
+The situation was furthered no doubt, by the whisper of my connection
+with the stage which got about and set up in them an attitude of
+circumspection, out of which I caught them at times regarding me with a
+curiosity unmixed with any human sympathy. Yet I recall how keen an
+appetite I had for what this illness of my mother's had thrown into
+relief, the web of passionate human interactions, bone and body of the
+spirituality that went clothed as gracelessly in the routine of their
+daily lives as the figures of the men under the unyielding ugliness of
+store clothing. It came out in the talk of the women sitting about the
+base burner at night with their skirts folded back carefully across
+their knees, in the watches we found it necessary to keep for the first
+fortnight or so. I remember one of these occasions as the particular
+instance by which my mother emerged for me from her condition of
+parenthood, to the common plane of humanity, by way of an old romance of
+her's with Cousin Judd. Cousin Lydia sat up with her that night and
+Almira Jewett, a brisk, country clad woman of the Skaldic temperament
+who from long handling of the histories of her clan had acquired an
+absolute art of it. She was own sister to the woman who married my
+mother's half-brother, and the Saga of the Judds and the Wilsons and the
+Jewetts and the Lattimores ran off the points of her bright needles as
+she sat with her feet on the fender, with a click and a spark. Cousin
+Lydia never knitted; she sat with her hands folded in her large lap and
+time seemed to rest with her.
+
+"It will be hard on Judd," Almira offered to the unspoken reference
+forever in the air, as to the possible fatal termination of my mother's
+illness.
+
+"Yes, it'll be hard on him." A faint, so faint nuance of assent in
+Cousin Lydia's voice seemed to admit the succeeding comment, shorn of
+impertinence. I guessed that the several members of the tribe were
+relieved rather than constrained to drop their intimate concerns into
+Almira Jewett's impartial histories.
+
+"I never," Almira invited, "did get the straight of that. Sally was
+engaged to him, warn't she?"
+
+"Not to say engaged," Cousin Lydia paused for just the right shade of
+relation, "but so as to want to be. Judd set store by her; he'd have had
+it that way anyway, but Sally couldn't make up her mind to it on account
+of their being own cousins."
+
+"I reckon she had the right of it; the Lord don't seem no way pleased
+with kin marrying."
+
+"I don't know, I don't know;" Cousin Lydia dropped the speculation into
+the pit of her own experience. "It looks like He wouldn't have made 'em
+to care about it then. But being as she saw it that way, they couldn't
+have done different. Not that Judd didn't see it in the light of his
+duty, too." There was evidently nothing in the annals of the Judds and
+the Lattimores which allowed a violation of the inward monitor.
+
+"Well, I must say, he has turned it into grace, if ever a man has. Not
+to say but what you've helped him to it." It was in the manner of
+Almira's concession of not in the matter, that Cousin Judd had chosen
+Lydia chiefly for her capacity not to offer any distraction to his
+profounder passion, and nothing in Cousin Lydia's comment to deny it.
+From the room beyond we could hear the inarticulate, half-conscious
+notice of my mother's pain. Cousin Lydia moved to attend her.
+
+"All those years," I whispered to Almira, "she has loved him and he has
+loved my mother!" I was pierced through with the pure sword of the
+spirit which had divided them. But Almira was more practical.
+
+"She was better off," Almira insisted. "Lydia hadn't no knack with men
+folk ever. She knew Judd wouldn't have loved her, but so long as he
+loved your mother she was safe. They got a good deal out of it, her
+knowing and sympathizing. She could sympathize, you see, for she knew
+how it was herself, loving Judd that way. It was no more than right they
+should get what they could out of it. It was the only thing they had
+between them."
+
+"All those years!" I said again. I felt myself immeasurably lifted out
+of the mists and mires of the Shamrocks into clear and aching
+atmospheres.
+
+"I will say this for Lydia," extenuated the Skald, "that though she
+hadn't no gift to draw a man to her, she knew how to hold her hand off
+and let him go his own thought. It was religion kept your mother and
+Judd apart, and yet it was in religion they comforted one another. Lydia
+never put herself forward like she might, claiming it was her religion
+too. And she was one that appreciated church privileges."
+
+But I wondered where my father came in. It had been, I knew, a
+passionate attachment.
+
+"Like a new house," said Almira, "built up where the old one has been,
+but the cellars of it don't change. Real loving is never really got
+over." I felt the phrase sounding in some subterranean crypt of my own.
+
+With this new light on it, it came out for me wonderfully in my mother's
+face, as I watched her through the anxious days, how much her life had
+been stayed in renunciations. I suppose my new appreciation must have
+shone out for her as well, for I could see rising out of her disorder,
+like a drowned person out of the sea, a bond of our common experience.
+We were two women, together at last, my mother and I, and could have
+speech with one another.
+
+Something no doubt contributed to this new understanding by an affair of
+Forester's which, as I began to be acquainted with the incidents
+preceding it, I believed to be partly responsible for my mother's
+stroke. I have already sketched to you how Forester had grown up in the
+need of finding himself always at the centre of feminine interest
+without the opportunity of satisfying it normally by marriage, and how
+the too early stimulation of sentiment and affection had led to his
+being handed about from girl to girl in the attempt to gratify his need
+without transgressing any of the lines marked out by his profession as
+an eminently nice young man. It came naturally out of the mere
+circumstance of there being a limited number of girls at hand whom he
+might conceivably court without the intention of marrying, for him to
+fall into the society of others whom he might not court but who might
+nevertheless find it much to their advantage to marry him.
+
+I do not know how and when it came to my mother's ears that he was
+calling frequently at the Jastrows; very likely they brought it to her
+notice themselves. They were a poor, pushing sort, forever exposing
+themselves to the slights arising from their own undesirability, which
+they forever tearfully attributed to an undeserved and paraded poverty.
+They paraded it now as the insuperable bar to all that they might have
+done for my mother, all that they actually had it in their hearts to do
+on their assumption of a right of being interested, an assumption which,
+even in her weakness, before she could trust herself to talk very much,
+I felt her dumbly imploring me to deny. The girl--Lily they called
+her--was not without a certain appeal to the senses; and knowing rather
+more of my brother's methods, I did not find Mrs. Jastrow's pretension
+to a community of interest in what might be expected to come of his
+attention, altogether unjustified. But in view of mother's condition and
+what Effie told me of the way business was going--rather was not going
+at all--any kind of marriage would have been out of the question. It was
+the way I put the finality of that into my dealings with Mrs. Jastrow,
+that drew mother over into the only relation of normal human
+interdependence I was ever to have with her. Whenever Mrs. Jastrow would
+come to call with that air she had, in her dress and manner, of being
+pulled together and made the best of, I could see my mother's fears
+signalling to me from the region of tremors and faintness in which she
+had sunk, and I would set my wits up as a defence against what,
+considering all there was against her, was a really gallant effort on
+Mrs. Jastrow's part to make out of Forester's philanderings a basis for
+a family intimacy. It was plain that neither my mother nor Mrs. Jastrow
+dared put the question to Forester, but rested their case on such mutual
+admissions of it as they could wring from one another.
+
+I could never make out on my mother's part, whether she was really
+afraid of the issue, or if in the preoccupation of their affection both
+she and Forester had overlooked his young man's right to a woman and a
+life of his own. Through all her dumb struggle against it, never but
+once did my mother openly face the ultimate possibility of his marriage
+with Lily Jastrow.
+
+It was about the third week of her illness, and Mrs. Jastrow, making one
+of her interminable calls, had been brought so nearly to the point of
+tears by my imperiousness, that Effie had been obliged to draw her off
+into the kitchen to have her opinion about a recipe for a mince meat
+such as she knew the Jastrows couldn't afford to be instructed in, and
+so had gotten her out of the side door and started down the walk before
+the situation could come to a head. My mother watched her go.
+
+"Do you think," she hazarded suddenly, "that Forester really is engaged
+to her?"
+
+"To Lily? Oh, no; Forester doesn't get engaged to girls, he
+just--dangles." It was characteristic of my mother's partiality that
+even damaging insinuations such as this, slid off from it as too far
+from the possibility to be even entertained. Perhaps a trace of my old
+exasperation with the whole situation, and the glimpse I had of Mrs.
+Jastrow letting herself out of our gate with her assumption of being as
+good as anybody still to the fore but a little awry, prompted me to add:
+
+"And it is only natural for her mother to make the most of it. She's
+looking out for her own, just as you are."
+
+"A mother has a right to do that;" she protested, "to keep them from
+making themselves miserable. It is no more than her duty."
+
+"Yes," I said; the remark had the effect of a challenge.
+
+"Young people don't know how to choose for themselves; they make
+mistakes." She revolved something in her mind. "You, now ... you're
+unhappy, aren't you, Olivia?"
+
+"Yes; oh, yes." I had not thought of myself as being so particularly,
+but I did not see my way to deny it.
+
+"I've been afraid ... sometimes ... since you wrote me about going on
+the stage, maybe you weren't exactly ... satisfied. But it isn't that,
+is it?"
+
+"No, mother, it isn't that."
+
+"There! You see!" She shook off her weakness with the conviction. "And
+you mightn't have been if I hadn't looked out for you a little."
+
+"Why, mother, what could you possibly----" She triumphed.
+
+"You remember that Garrett boy that was visiting at his uncle's? He
+called that night; the night you were engaged to Tommy."
+
+"Yes, I remember. You sent him away?"
+
+"He wasn't suitable at all ... smoking, and driving about on Sunday that
+way...." Her tone was defensive. "He left a letter that night----"
+
+"Mother! You didn't tell me!"
+
+"I was thinking it over ... I had a right ... you were too young!"
+
+"Mother ... did you read it?"
+
+"I ... looked at it. You hadn't met him but once and I had a right to
+know; and that night you were engaged. I took it for a sign."
+
+"And the letter?" It seemed all at once an immeasurable and irreparable
+loss.
+
+"I sent it back ... and, anyway, it turned out all right." I was
+possessed for the moment with the conviction that it was all dreadfully,
+despairingly wrong.
+
+"I couldn't have borne for you to marry anybody but a Christian,
+Olivia!" I thought of Tommy's exceedingly slender claim to that
+distinction and I laughed.
+
+"Tommy smokes," I said; "he says he has to do it with the customers."
+
+"Oh, but not as a habit, Olivia." I overrode that.
+
+"Tell me what became of him--of Mr. Garrett. Did you ever hear?"
+
+"He went West," she recollected; "I asked his aunt. He quarrelled with
+them because his uncle wouldn't send him to school. At his age they
+thought it wasn't suitable. I wouldn't have wanted you to go West,
+Olivia."
+
+I took her worn hands in mine. "It's all right, mother. I'm not going
+West. And I'm not going on the stage any more. I'm done with it." I felt
+so, passionately, at the time. We sat quietly for a time in that
+assurance and listened to Effie singing in the kitchen.
+
+"Olivia," she began timidly at last, "aren't you ever going to have any
+more children?"
+
+"Oh, I hope so, mother. I haven't been strong, you know, since the first
+one. We didn't think it advisable."
+
+"Well, if you can manage it that way ..." There was a trace in her tone
+of the woman who hadn't been able to manage. I wished to reassure her.
+
+"When I was in the hospital the doctor told me ..." I could see the deep
+flush rising over her face and neck; there were some things which her
+generation had never faced. I let them fall with her hands and sat
+gazing at the red core of the base burner, waiting until she should take
+up her thought again.
+
+"I used to think those things weren't right, Olivia, but I don't know.
+Sometimes I think it isn't right, either, to bring them into the world
+when there is no welcome for them." She struggled with the admission.
+"You and I, Olivia, we never got on together."
+
+"But that's all past now, mother." She clung to me for a while for
+reassurance.
+
+"I hope so, I hope so; but still there are things I've always wanted to
+tell you. When you wrote me about going on the stage ... there are wild
+things in you, Olivia, things I never looked for in a daughter of mine,
+things I can't understand nor account for unless--unless it was I turned
+you against life ... my kind of life ... before you were born. Many's
+the time I've seen you hating it and I've been harsh with you; but I
+wanted you should know I was being harsh with myself ..."
+
+"Mother, dear, is it good for you to talk so?"
+
+"Yes, yes, I've wanted to. You see it was after your father came home
+from the war and we were all broken up. Forester was sickly, and there
+was the one that died. So when I knew you were coming, I--hated you,
+Olivia. I wanted things different. I hated you ... until I heard you
+cry. You cried all the time when you were little, Olivia, and it was I
+that was crying in you. I've expected some punishment would come of it."
+
+"Oh, hush, hush mother! I shouldn't have liked it either in your place.
+Besides, they say--the scientists--that it isn't so that things before
+you are born can affect you as much as that." She moved her head feebly
+on the pillows in deep-rooted denial.
+
+"They can say that, but we've never got on. There's things in you that
+aren't natural for any daughter of mine. They can say that, Olivia, but
+we--we know."
+
+"Yes, mother, we know."
+
+I took her hands again and nursed them against my cheek; after a time
+tears began to drip down her flaccid cheeks and I wiped them away for
+her.
+
+"Don't, mother, don't! We get along now, anyway! And as for the things
+in me which are different, do you know, mother, I'm getting to know that
+they are the best things in me."
+
+I honestly thought so; and after all these years I think so now.
+
+I wheeled her into the bedroom presently, where she fell into the light
+slumber of the feeble, and seemed afterward hardly to remember, but I
+was glad then to have talked it all out with her, for though she lived
+nearly two years after, before I saw her again another stroke had
+deprived her of articulateness.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+I went home to my husband after it began to seem certain that my
+mother's condition would not change for some time, but I knew in the
+going that neither Tommy nor Higgleston could ever present themselves to
+me again in the aspect of an absolute destiny. By the incidents of the
+past few weeks I had been pulled free from the obsession of
+inevitableness with which my life had clothed itself until now; I stood
+outside of it and questioned it in the light of what it might have been,
+what it might yet become. Suppose I had received Helmeth Garrett's
+letter; suppose my interest in Mr. O'Farrell had wavered a hair's
+breadth out of the community of work into that more personal and
+particular passion----?
+
+I quaked in the cold blasts which blew on me out of unsuspected doors
+opening on my life.
+
+And still I went back to Higgleston. There seemed nothing else to do. I
+think I deceived myself with the notion that there was something in
+Tommy's resistance to a more acceptable destiny, that could be resolved
+and dissipated by the proper stimulus. But I knew, in fact, that he and
+Higgleston suited one another admirably. To my husband, that he should
+keep a clothing store in a town of five thousand inhabitants was part
+of the great natural causation. The single change to which our condition
+was liable was that the business might take a turn which would enable us
+to move out of the store into a house of our own. It had not occurred to
+Tommy to take a turn himself. The Men's Tailors and Outfitters lay like
+most business in Higgleston, in the back water, rocking at times in the
+wake of the world traffic, but never moving with it. There was a vague
+notion of progress abroad which resulted in our going through the
+motions of the main current. The Live Business Men organized a Board of
+Trade and rented a room to hold meetings in, but I do not remember that
+when they had met, anything came of it. The great tides of trade went
+about the world and our little fleet rocked up and down. If I had ever
+had any hope that Tommy and I might out of our common stock, somehow
+hoist sail and make a way out of it, in that spring and summer I
+completely lost it.
+
+I believe Tommy thought we were perfectly happy. Considering how things
+turned out, I am glad to have it so; but the fact is, there was not
+between us so much as a common taste in furniture. In the five years of
+married life, our home had filled up with articles which by colour and
+line and unfitness jarred on every sense. Tommy had what he was pleased
+to call an ear for music, and if the warring discords of our furnishings
+could have been translated into sound he would have gone distracted
+with it; being as it was he bought me a fire screen for my birthday.
+Miss Rathbone hand-painted it for the Baptist bazaar, and Tommy had
+bought it at three times what we could have afforded for a suitable
+ornament. It was his notion of our relations that we and the Rathbones
+should do things like that by one another. I suppose you can find the
+like of that fire screen at some county fair still in Ohianna, but you
+will find nothing more atrocious. Tommy liked to have it sitting well
+out in the room where he could admire it. He would remark upon it
+sometimes with complacency, evenings after the store was shut up, before
+he sat down in his old coat and slippers to read the paper. Occasionally
+I read to him out of a magazine or a play I had picked up, in the
+intervals of which I used to catch him furtively keeping up with his
+newspaper out of the tail of his eye.
+
+Now and then we went out to a sociable or to the Rathbones for supper.
+Less frequently we had them to a meal with us. It was characteristic of
+business partnerships in Higgleston that they involved you in
+obligations of chicken salad and banana cake and the best tablecloth.
+Tommy enjoyed these occasions, and if he had allowed himself to
+criticise me at all, it would have been for my ineptitude at the happy
+social usage. Things went on so with us month after month.
+
+And if you ask me why I didn't take the chance life offers to women to
+justify themselves to the race, I will say that though the hope of a
+child presents itself sentimentally as opportunity, it figures primarily
+in the calculation of the majority, as a question of expense. The hard
+times foreseen by Burton Brothers hung black-winged in the air. We had
+not, in fact, been able to do more than keep up the interest on what was
+still due on the stock and fixtures. Nor had I even quite recovered the
+bodily equilibrium disturbed by my first encounter with the rending
+powers of life. There was a time when the spring came on in a fulness,
+when the procreant impulse stirred awake. I saw myself adequately
+employed shaping men for it ... maybe ... but the immediate deterring
+fact was the payment to be made in August.
+
+I went on living in Higgleston where human intercourse was organized on
+the basis that whatever a woman has of intelligence and worth, over and
+above the sum of such capacity in man, is to be excised as a superfluous
+growth, a monstrosity. Does anybody remember what the woman's world was
+like in small towns before the days of woman's clubs? There was a world
+of cooking and making over; there was a world of church-going and
+missionary societies and ministerial coöperation, half grudged and half
+assumed as a virtue which, since it was the only thing that lay outside
+themselves, was not without extenuation. And there was another world
+which underlay all this, coloured and occasioned it, sicklied over with
+futility; it was a world all of the care and expectancy of children
+overshadowed by the recurrent monthly dread, crept about by whispers,
+heretical but persistent, of methods of circumventing it, of a secret
+practice of things openly condemned. It was a world that went half the
+time in faint-hearted or unwilling or rebellious anticipation, and half
+on the broken springs of what as the subject of the endless,
+objectionable discussions, went by the name of "female complaints."
+
+In all this there was no room for Olivia. Somehow the ordering of our
+four rooms over the store didn't appeal to me as a justification of
+existence, and I didn't care to undertake again matching the adventures
+of my neighbours in the field of domestic economy with mine in the
+department of self-expression. Let any one who disbelieves it try if he
+can assure the acceptance of his art on its merit as work, free of the
+implication of egotism. You may talk about a new frosting for cake, or
+an aeroplane you have invented, but you must not speak of a new verse
+form or a plastic effect.
+
+All this time, in spite of my recent revulsion from it, I was consumed
+with the desire of acting. My new-found faculty ached for use. It woke
+me in the night and wasted me; I had wild thoughts such as men have in
+the grip of an unjustifiable passion. All my imaginings at that time
+were of events, untoward, fantastic, which should somehow throw me back
+upon the stage without the necessity on my part, of a moral conclusion.
+Sarah Croyden, to whom I wrote voluminously, could not understand why I
+resisted it; there was after all no actual opposition except what lay
+inherent in my traditions. Sarah had such a way of accepting life; she
+used it and her gift. Mine used me. I saw that it might even abuse me.
+She went, by nature, undefended and unharmed from the two-edged sword
+that keeps the gates of Creative Art, but me it pierced even to the
+dividing of soul and spirit. My husband stood always curiously outside
+the consideration. I think he was scarcely aware of what went on in me;
+if any news of my tormented state reached him, he would have seen,
+except as it was mollified by affection, what all Higgleston saw in it,
+the restlessness of vanity, a craving for excitement, for praise, and a
+vague taint of irregularity. He was sympathetic to the point of
+admitting that Higgleston was dull; he thought we might join the
+Chatauqua Society.
+
+"Or you might get up a class," he suggested hopefully; "it would give
+you something to think about."
+
+"Teach," I cried; "TEACH! when I'm just aching to learn!"
+
+"Well, then," he achieved a triumph of reasonableness, "if you don't
+know enough to teach in Higgleston, how are you going to succeed on the
+stage?"
+
+It was not Tommy, however, but a much worse man who made up my mind for
+me. He had been brought out from Chicago during my absence, to set up in
+Higgleston's one department store, that factitious air of things being
+done, which passed for the evidence of modernity. He had, in the set of
+his clothes, the way he made the most of his hair and the least of the
+puffiness about his eyes, the effect of having done something
+successfully for himself, which I believe was the utmost recommendation
+he had for the place. He preferred himself to my favour on the strength
+of having seen more than a little of the theatre. Very soon after my
+return, he took to dropping into my husband's store which, in view of
+its being patronized by men who were chiefly otherwise occupied during
+the day, was kept open rather late in the evenings. From sheer
+loneliness I had fallen into the habit of going down after supper to
+wait on a stray customer while Tommy made up the books. Mr. Montague,
+who went familiarly about town by the name of Monty, would come in then
+and loll across the counter chatting to me, while Tommy sat at his desk
+with a green shade over his eyes, and Mr. Rathbone, who never came more
+than a step or two out of his character as working tailor, clattered
+about with his irons in the back, half screened by the racks of custom
+made "Nobby suits, $9.98," which made up most of our stock in trade.
+
+I had already, without paying much attention to it, become accustomed
+to the shifting of men's interest in me the moment my connection with
+the stage became known: a certain speculation in the eye, a freshening
+of the wind in the neighbourhood of adventure; but by degrees it began
+to work through my preoccupations that Mr. Montague's attention had the
+quality of settled expectation, the suggestion of a relation apart from
+the casual social contact, which it wanted but an opportunity to
+fulfill. It took the form very early, when Tommy would look up from his
+entries and adding up to make his cheerful contribution to the
+conversation, of an attempt to include me in a covert irritation at the
+interruption. If by any chance he found me alone, his response to the
+potential impropriety of the occasion, awoke in me the plain vulgar
+desire to box his ears. But no experience so far served to reveal the
+whole offensiveness of the man's assurance.
+
+The week that Tommy went up to Chicago to do his summer buying, we made
+a practice of closing rather early in the long, enervating evenings,
+since hardly any customer could have been inveigled into the store on
+any account. I found it particularly irritating then, to have Mr.
+Montague leaning across the counter to me with a manner that would have
+caused the dogs in the street to suspect him of intrigue. The second or
+third time this happened I made a point of slipping around to Mr.
+Rathbone with the suggestion that if he would shut up and go home I
+would take the books upstairs with me and attend them.
+
+I was indifferent whether or not Mr. Montague should hear me, but I
+judged he had not, for far from accepting it as a hint that I wished to
+get rid of him, that air he had of covert understanding appeared to have
+increased in him like a fever. He made no attempt to resume the
+conversation, but stood tapping his boot with a small cane he affected,
+a flush high up under the puffy eyes, the corners of his mouth loosened,
+every aspect of the man fairly bristling with an objectionable maleness.
+I made believe to be busy putting stock in order, and in a minute more I
+could hear old Rathbone come puttering out of his corner to draw the
+dust cloths over the racks of ready-made suits and, after what seemed an
+interminable interval, fumbling at the knobs of the safe.
+
+"Oh," I snatched at the opportunity, "I changed the combination; let me
+show you." I was around beside him in a twinkling.
+
+"Good-night," I called to Montague over my shoulder.
+
+"Good-night," he said; the tone was charged. The fumbling of the locks
+covered the sound of his departure. I got Mr. Rathbone out at the door
+at last, and locked it behind him. I turned back to lower the flame of
+the acetylene lamp and in the receding flare of it between the shrouded
+racks I came face to face with Mr. Montague. He stood at the outer ring
+of the light and in the shock of amazement I gave the last turn of the
+button which left us in a sudden blinding dark. I felt him come toward
+me by the sharp irradiation of offensiveness.
+
+"Oh, you clever little joker, you!" The tone was fatuous.
+
+I dodged by instinct and felt for the button again to throw on the flood
+of light; it caught him standing square in the middle of the aisle in
+plain sight from the street; almost unconsciously he altered his
+attitude to one less betraying, but the response of his mind to mine was
+not so rapid.
+
+"I'm going to shut up the store," I was very quiet about it. "You'll
+oblige me by going----"
+
+"Oh, come now; what's the use? I thought you were a woman of the world."
+
+I got behind the counter, past him toward the door.
+
+"You an actress ... you don't mean to say! By Jove, I'm not going to be
+made a fool of after such an encouragement! I'm not going without----"
+
+"Mr. Montague," I said, "Tillie Hemingway is coming to stay with me
+nights; she will be here in a few minutes; you'd better not let her find
+you here." I unbarred the door and threw it wide open.
+
+"Oh, come now----" He struggled for some footing other than defeat. "Of
+course, if you can't meet me like a woman of the world----you're a nice
+actress, you are!" I looked at him; the steps and voices of passersby
+sounded on the pavement; he went out with his tail between his legs. I
+locked the door after him and double locked it.
+
+I climbed up to my room and locked myself in that. The boiling of my
+blood made such a noise in my ears that I could not hear Tillie
+Hemingway when she came knocking, and the poor girl went away in tears.
+After a long time I got to bed and sat there with my arms about my
+knees. I did not feel safe there; I knew I should never be safe again
+except in that little square of the world upon which the footlights
+shone, from which the tightening of the reins of the audience in my
+hands, should justify my life to me. I was sick with longing for it,
+aching like a woman abandoned for the arms of her beloved. I fled toward
+it with all my thought from illicit solicitation, but it was not the
+husband of my body I thought of in that connection, but the choice of my
+soul.
+
+People wonder why sensitive, self-respecting women are not driven away
+from the stage by the offences that hedge it; they are driven deeper and
+farther into its enfoldment. There is nothing to whiten the burning of
+its shames but the high whiteness of its ultimate perfection. It is so
+with all art, not back in the press of life, but forward on some
+over-topping headland, one loses behind the yelping pack and eases the
+sting of resentment. I did not agree in the beginning to make you
+understand this. I only tell you that it is so. All that night I sat
+with my head upon my knees and considered how I might win back to it.
+
+I tried, when my husband came home, to put the incident to him in a way
+that would stand for my new-found determination. I did not get so far
+with it. I saw him shrink from the mere recital with a man's
+timorousness.
+
+"Oh, come--he couldn't have meant so bad as that." His male dread of a
+"situation" plead with me not to insist upon it. "And he went just as
+soon as you told him to. Of course if he had tried to force you ... but
+you say yourself he went quietly."
+
+He was seeing and shrinking from what Higgleston would get out of the
+incident in the way of vulgar entertainment if I insisted on his taking
+it up; by the code there, I shouldn't have been subject to such if I
+hadn't invited it.
+
+"Of course," he enforced himself, "you did right to turn him down, but I
+don't believe he'll try it again."
+
+"He won't have a chance. I'm going back on the stage so soon;" the
+implication of my tone must have got through even Tommy's
+unimaginativeness; he said the only bitter thing that I ever heard from
+him.
+
+"Well, if you hadn't gone on the stage in the first place it probably
+wouldn't have happened."
+
+He came round to the situation in another frame when he learned that I
+had written to Sarah putting matters in train for an engagement.
+
+"You will probably be away all winter," he said. "It seems to me,
+Olivia, that you don't take any account of the fact that I am fond of
+you." We were sitting on a little shelf of a back balcony we had, for
+the sake of coolness, and I went and sat on his knee.
+
+"I'm fond of you, Tommy, ever so. But I can't stand the life here; it
+smothers me. And we don't do anything; we don't get anywhere."
+
+"I don't know what you mean, Olivia; we're building up quite a business;
+we'll be able to make a payment this year, and as the town improves----"
+
+"Oh, Tommy, come away; come away into the world with me. Let us go out
+and do things; let us be part of things."
+
+"Higgleston's good enough for me. We're building up trade, and everybody
+says the town is sure to go ahead----"
+
+"Oh, Tommy, Tommy, what do I care about a business here if we lose the
+whole world--and we'll be old and gray before we get the business paid
+for. Oh, it isn't because I don't care about you, Tommy, because I am
+not satisfied with you; it is the glory of the world I want, and the
+wonder of Art, and great deeds going up and down in it! I want us to
+have that, Tommy; to have it together ... you and I, and not another.
+It's all there in the world, Tommy, all the colour and the splendour ...
+great love and great work ... let us go out and take it; let us go...."
+I had slipped down from his knees to my own as I talked, pleading with
+him, and I saw, by the light of the lamp from within, his face, charged
+with pained bewilderment, settle into lines of habitual resistance to
+the unknown, the unknowable. My voice trailed out into sobbing.
+
+"Of course, Olivia, I don't want to keep you if you are not happy here,
+but I have to stay myself." His voice was broken but determined, with
+the determination of a little man not seeing far ahead of him. "I have
+to keep the business together."
+
+I went, as it was foredoomed I should, about the middle of September.
+Sarah and I had been so fortunate as to get engagements together. My
+going, upheaving as it had been in respect to my own adjustments, made
+hardly a ripple in the life around me. Even Miss Rathbone failed to rise
+to her former heights, but was obliged to piece out her interest with
+her customary dressmaker's manner of having temporarily overlaid her
+absorption in your affair with an unwilling distraction.
+
+The rest of Higgleston received the announcement with the air of not
+supposing it to be any of their business, but that in any case they
+couldn't approve of it. Mrs. Harvey put a common feminine view of it
+very aptly.
+
+"I shouldn't think," she said, "your husband would let you." It was not
+a view that was likely to have a deterrent effect upon me.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+We had the good fortune that year, Sarah and I, to be with a manager who
+redeemed many O'Farrells. The Hardings--for his wife, under her stage
+name of Estelle Manning, played with him and was the better half of all
+his counsels--were of the sort of actor-managers to whom, if the
+American stage ever arrives at anything commensurate with its
+opportunity, it will owe much. They were not either of them of the
+stripe of genius, but up to the limit of their endowment, sound, sincere
+and able to interpret life to the people through the virtue of being so
+humanly of the people themselves. It was very good for me to be with
+them, not only for the stage craft they taught me, but for the healing
+of my mind against the contagion of irresponsibility. The Hardings
+taught me my way about the professional world, the management of my
+gift, its market value, but I am not sure I do not owe much more to the
+fact that they loved one another quite simply and devotedly, and to the
+certainty which they seemed to make for us all that loyalty, truth, and
+forbearance were part of the natural order of things.
+
+I was aware, when I was with the Shamrocks, of a subconscious current
+against which any mention of my husband appeared a kind of gaucherie;
+it was wholesome for me then, to find it expected of me by the Hardings
+that I should act better after I had received a long, affectionate
+letter from Tommy, and to be able to refer to it quite unaffectedly.
+Everybody in the company took the greatest interest in his coming on at
+Christmas to spend four days with me.
+
+We had a carefully chosen company, and clean, straightforward plays
+which met with gratifying success. At the end of February, when traffic
+was tied up during the great ice storm, I was near enough to get home to
+Taylorville and spend a week there.
+
+Tommy came to meet me and we were all happy together, mother sitting
+nearly inarticulate in her chair, pleased as a child to see me doing all
+the parts in our repertory, and Effie reading my press notices to
+whoever could be got to listen to them. I seemed to have found the
+groove in which the wheels of my life went round smoothly; I was
+justified of much that in my girlhood I had been made to feel so sorely,
+set me reprehensibly apart. I remember Forester telling how he had heard
+Charlie Gowers retailing the incident of my having slapped him when he
+tried to kiss me, getting a kind of reflected glory out of the incident
+being so much to my credit.
+
+I went back to Higgleston in May and was happier than I had been in the
+six years of my married life. I had my work and my husband; all that I
+wanted now was to bring the two into closer relation; it seemed not
+unlikely of accomplishment. With what I had saved of my salary, Tommy
+was able to make quite a payment on the business, and with the release
+of that pressure the whole grip of Higgleston seemed to be loosed from
+him. When I suggested that I might get permanent engagements in Chicago
+or St. Louis, where he could establish himself, he was disposed to view
+it as not unthinkable in connection with what might be expected from a
+live business man.
+
+I had to leave home early in the autumn for rehearsals, and to leave
+Tommy, by some chance of the weather a trifle under it. I felt I
+shouldn't have been able to do so if my husband and Miss Rathbone hadn't
+been eminently on those terms that fulfilled Tommy's ideal in respect to
+the womenfolk of his partner. Very likely, as she maintained, it was a
+feeling of caste that rendered her professional affectionateness
+offensive to me. One had to admit that when she applied it to her
+shuffling, peering old father, with red-lidded eyes and a nose that
+occasionally wanted wiping, it was every way commendable. At any rate I
+was glad on this occasion to take what she did for old Rathbone as an
+assurance that if Tommy fell ill, or anything untoward, he wouldn't lack
+for anything a woman might do for him.
+
+That winter Mr. Harding starred me, and what a wonderful winter it was!
+Sarah says, taking account of the cold and the condition of the roads,
+it was rather a hard one, but I was floated clear of all such
+considerations on the crest of success. Nothing whatever seemed to have
+gone wrong with it except that Tommy failed me at Christmas. He was to
+have spent a week, but wired me at the last moment that he could not
+leave before Wednesday, and then when he came stayed only until
+Saturday. He had something to say about the pressure of the holiday
+trade in neckties and cuff links such as the ladies of Higgleston
+habitually invested in, on behalf of their masculine members, and all
+the time he was with me, wore that efflorescence of appreciation which I
+have long since learned to recognize as the overt sign of male
+delinquency.
+
+If I thought of it at all in that connection, it was clean swept out of
+my mind by meeting early in January with Mr. Eversley and hearing him
+first apply to myself that phrase which I have chosen for the title to
+this writing. Mark Eversley, the greatest modern actor! So we all
+believed. He had been an old friend of Mr. Harding's; they had had their
+young struggles together; we crowded around our manager to hear him tell
+of them; struggles which, in so far as they identified themselves with
+our own, seemed to bring us by implication within reach of his present
+fame. Eversley played in St. Louis while we were there, and having an
+evening to spare, in spite of all the eager social appeal, chose to
+spend it with the Hardings. They had had dinner together, and as Mr.
+Harding did not come on until the second act, the great tragedian sat
+with him in his dressing room, visiting together between the cues like
+two boys in a dormitory. That was how Eversley happened to be standing
+in the wings in my great third act, and as I came out between gusts of
+applause after it, he was very kind to me.
+
+"You will go far, little lady," said he, his lean face alive with
+kindliness, "you will go farther and have to come back and pick up some
+dropped stitches, but in the end you will get where you are bound." It
+was not for me to tell him how the mere consciousness of his presence
+had carried me that night to the utmost pitch of my capacity; I stood
+and blushed with confusion while he fumbled for his card.
+
+"I will hear of you again," he said; "I am bound to hear of you; in the
+meantime here is my permanent address. It may be that I can be of use to
+you when you come to the bad places."
+
+"Oh," said Mrs. Harding, whose failure to win any conspicuous
+distinction for herself had not embittered her, "she seems to have
+cleared most of the hard places at a bound."
+
+"My dear young lady," Eversley appealed to me with a charming
+whimsicality, "whatever you do, don't let them put that into your head;
+you will indeed need me if you get to thinking that. You are, I suspect,
+a woman of genius, and in that case there will always be bad places
+ahead of you--you are doomed, you are driven; they will never let up on
+you."
+
+Well, he should know; he was a man of genius. I hope it might be true
+about me, but I was afraid. For to be a genius is no such vanity as you
+imagine. It is to know great desires and to have no will of your own
+toward fulfilment; it is to feed others, yourself unfed; it is to be
+broken and plied as the Powers determine; it is to serve, and to serve,
+and to get nothing out of it beyond the joy of serving. And to know if
+you have done that acceptably you have to depend on the plaudits of the
+crowd; the Powers give no sign; many have died not knowing.
+
+There is no more vanity in calling yourself a woman of genius if you
+know what genius means, than might be premised of one of the guinea pigs
+set aside for experimentation in a laboratory; but the guinea pigs who
+run free in the garden impute it to us. I wrote my mother and Tommy what
+Eversley had said, but I knew they would see nothing more in it than
+that he had paid me a compliment which it would not be modest to make
+much of in public.
+
+The successes of that year prolonged the season by a month, and by the
+time I got home to Higgleston the leaves were all out on the maples and
+the wide old yards smelled of syringa. I came back to it full of the
+love of the world, alive in every fibre of my being, and the first thing
+I noticed was that it caused my husband some embarrassment. There was a
+shyness in his resumption of our relations more than could be accounted
+for by the native Taylorvillian gaucheries of emotion.
+
+"My dear," I protested, "you don't seem a bit glad to see me."
+
+"You are away so much," he excused. "You're getting to seem almost a
+stranger."
+
+"Getting? I should say I am. This morning it seemed to me almost as if I
+waked up in another woman's house." I meant no more than to suggest how
+little the walls of it, the furniture, the draperies, expressed my new
+mood of creative power, but suddenly I saw my husband colour a deep,
+embarrassed red.
+
+"You never did take any interest in our life here ... in the
+business ... in me." He seemed to be making out a case against me.
+
+"Don't say in you, Tommy; but the life here, yes; there is so little to
+it. Another year and Mr. Harding says I could hope to stay in Chicago."
+My husband pushed away his plate; we were at breakfast the second
+morning.
+
+"Higgleston's good enough for me," he protested. He got up and stood at
+the window with his back to me, looking out at the side street and the
+tardy traffic of the town beginning to stir in it. "When you hate it
+so," he said, "I wonder you come back to it." But my mood was proof
+against even this.
+
+"Oh, Thomas, Thomas!" I got my hands about his arm and snuggled my head
+against it. "And you can't even guess why I come back?" He looked at me,
+vaguely troubled by the caress, but not responding to it.
+
+"Do you care so much?"
+
+"Ever and ever so." I thought he was in need of reassurance.
+
+I hardly know when I began to get an inkling of what was wrong with him;
+it trickled coldly to me from dropped words, inflections, sidelong
+glances. Whenever I went out I was aware of all Higgleston watching,
+watching like a cat at a mouse-hole for something to come out. What?
+Reports of my success had reached them through the papers. Were they
+looking for some endemic impropriety to break out on me as a witness to
+what a popular actress must inevitably become? By degrees it worked
+through to me that all Higgleston knew things about my situation that
+were held from me. What they expected to see come out in my behaviour
+was the stripe of chastisement.
+
+When I had been at home four or five days it occurred to me Miss
+Rathbone had not yet run in to see me with that quasi-familiarity which
+had grown out of the business association of our men. Old Rathbone had
+said that she had the trousseau of one of the Harvey girls in hand, but
+I knew that if the courtesy had been due from me, I couldn't have
+neglected it without the risk of being thought what Miss Rathbone
+herself would have called uppish. So the very next afternoon, having
+fallen in with some Higgleston ladies strolling the long street that led
+through the town from countryside to countryside, passing her gate, it
+struck me that here was an excellent opportunity to run in and exchange
+a greeting with her. I said as much to Mrs. Ross and Mrs. Harvey, as I
+swung the picket gate out across the board walk; there was something in
+their way of standing back from it that gave them the air of sheering
+off from any implication in the incident. They looked at the sidewalk
+and their lips were a little drawn; I should have known that look very
+well by that time. I threw out against it just that degree of impalpable
+resistance that was demanded by my official relation to the women of my
+husband's business partner, and clinched it with the click of the gate
+swinging to behind me, but as I went up the peony-bordered walk I
+wondered what Miss Rathbone would possibly have done to get herself
+talked about.
+
+I was let into the workroom by Tillie Hemingway, in the character of a
+baster, with her mouth full of threads; Miss Rathbone came hurrying from
+a fitting, and in the brief moment of crossing my half of the room to
+meet her I was aware that she had turned a sickly hue of fear. She must
+have seen me coming up the street with the other women, I surmised, and
+guessed that I knew. I felt a kind of compulsion on me to assure her by
+an extra graciousness that I did not know, and that it wouldn't make any
+difference if I did. She was not changed at all except perhaps as to a
+trifle more abundance of bosom and a greater insensibility to the pins
+with which she bristled. There was the same effect of modishness in the
+blond coiffure with the rats showing, and the well cut, half-hooked
+gown, but she seemed to know so little what to do with my visit that I
+was glad to cut it short and get away into the wide, overflowing day. I
+went on under the maples in leafage full and tender, following the faint
+scent of the first cutting of the meadows, quite to the end of the
+village and a mile or two into the country road, feeling the working of
+the Creative Powers in me, much as it seemed the sentiment earth must
+feel the summer, a warm, benignant process. I was at one with the soul
+of things and knew myself fruitful. At last when the dust of the roadway
+disturbed by the homing teams, collected in layers of the cooler air,
+and the bats were beginning, I tore myself away from the fair day as
+from a lover and went back to Tommy waiting patiently for his supper.
+While I was getting it on the table I recalled Miss Rathbone.
+
+"What," I said, "has she been doing to get herself talked about?"
+Suddenly there whipped out on his face the counterpart of the flinching
+which I had noted in the dressmaker.
+
+"Who said she had been talked about? What have they been telling you? A
+pack of lying old cats!"
+
+"So she _has_ been talked about?" I put down a pile of plates the better
+to account to myself for his excitement.
+
+"I might have known somebody would get at you. Why can't they come to
+me."
+
+"Tommy! Has Miss Rathbone been talked about with _you_? Oh, my dear!" I
+meant it for commiseration. Tommy went sullen all at once.
+
+"I don't want to talk about it. I won't talk about it!"
+
+"You needn't. And as for what the others say, you don't suppose I am
+going to believe it?" He turned visibly sick at the assurance.
+
+"I'll tell you about it after supper," he protested. "I meant to tell
+you." I kept my mind turned deliberately away from the subject until it
+was night and I heard the last tardy customer depart, then the shutters
+go up, and after a considerable interval my husband's foot upon the
+stairs.
+
+I hope I have made you understand how good he was, with what simple sort
+of goodness, not meant to stand the strain of the complexity in which he
+found himself. He wanted desperately to get out of it, to get in touch
+again with straight and simple lines of living. As he stood before me
+then his face was streaked red and white with the stress of the
+situation, like a man after a great bodily exertion. I was moved
+suddenly to spare him--after all what was the village dressmaker to us?
+Tommy flared out at me.
+
+"She is as good as you are ... she's as pure ... as kind-hearted. It's
+as much your fault as anybody's. You were away; you were always away."
+His voice trailed out into extenuation. There fell a long pause in which
+several things became clear to me.
+
+"Tell me," I said at last.
+
+Tommy sat down on the red plush couch. He had taken off his coat
+downstairs, for the evening was warm. There was pink in his necktie and
+the freckles stood out across his nose. I was taken with a wild sense of
+the ridiculous. Miss Rathbone, I knew, was six years my husband's
+senior.
+
+"I went there a good deal last winter," he began. "I never meant any
+harm ... my business partner ... it was lonesome here. Of course I ought
+to have known people would talk. Nobody told me. She was brave, she bore
+it a long time, and then I saw that something was the matter. I didn't
+know until she told me, how fond of her I was----"
+
+"Tommy, Tommy!" Strangely, it was I crying out. "Fond of her? Fond of
+_her_?"
+
+"I was fond of her," he insisted dully. "She suffered a lot on account
+of me." The words dropped to me through immeasurable cold space. I
+believe there were more explanations, excusings. I was aware of being
+wounded in some far, unreachable place. I sat stunned and watched the
+widening rings of pain and amazement spread toward me. By and by tears
+came; I cried long and quietly. I got down on the floor at my husband's
+knees and put my arms about his body, crying. After a time I remember
+his helping me to undress and we got into bed. We had but the one. I
+know it now for the sign that I never loved my husband as wives should
+love, that I felt no offence in this; sex jealousy was not awake in me.
+We lay in bed with our arms around one another and cried for the pain
+and bewilderment of what had happened to us.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+As if the attraction Miss Rathbone had for my husband had been a spell,
+the mere naming of which dissipated it, we spent the ensuing three or
+four days in the glow of renewal. It was Miss Rathbone herself who drew
+us out of that excluding intimacy; set us apart where we could feel the
+cold stiffness of our hurts and the injury we had inflicted each on the
+other.
+
+Whatever there had been between them, and I never knew very clearly
+what, they had failed to reckon on the recrudescence of the interest I
+had always had for my husband, and the tie of association. At any rate
+Miss Rathbone failed. I must suppose that she loved Tommy, that she was
+hungering for the sight of him, needing desperately to feel again the
+pressure of whatever bond had been between them. She came into the store
+on the fourth evening after my husband's admission of it, on one of the
+excuses she could so easily make out of her father's being there. I was
+sitting upstairs with some sewing when she came and neither saw nor
+heard her, but the unslumbering instinct, before I was half aware of it,
+had drawn me to the head of the stair.
+
+As I came down it, still in the shadow of the upper landing, I saw her
+leaning across the counter with that factious air of modishness which
+was so large a part of her stock in trade with Higgleston. She had on
+all her newest things, and I think she was rouged a little. Even with
+the width of the counter between them she had the effect of enveloping
+my husband with that manner of hers as with a net; to set up in him the
+illusion of all that I was in fact; mystery, passion, the air of the
+great world. I was pierced through with the realization that with men it
+is not so much being that counts, as seeming. There was a touch of the
+fatuous in the way Tommy submitted to the implication of her attitude as
+she took a flower from her breast and pinned it in his coat. The foot of
+the stair came almost to the end of the counter where they stood, and a
+trick of the light falling from the hanging lamp threw the upper half of
+it in shadow. I stood just within it with my hand upon the rail.
+Something in the avidity of yielding in my husband's manner was like a
+call in me; I moved involuntarily a step downward.
+
+They heard and then they saw me; they stopped frozen in their places and
+the thing that froze them was the consciousness of guilt. They stood
+confessed of a disloyalty. I turned full in their sight and walked back
+up the stair. It was very late that night when Tommy came up to me.
+
+"If that is going on in the house," I notified him, "you can't expect me
+to stay."
+
+"I dare say you'd be glad of a chance to leave."
+
+"Is that why you are offering it to me?"
+
+It was by such degrees we covered the distance between our situation and
+the open question of divorce. But there were lapses of tenderness and
+turning back upon the trail.
+
+"I don't want anybody but you, Olivia," Tommy would protest. "If you
+would only stay with me!"
+
+"Oh, Tommy, if you would only come away with me!"
+
+If either of these things had been possible for us, I think Tommy would
+have recovered from his infatuation and been the happier for it. Or even
+if Miss Rathbone had kept away from him. But that is what she couldn't
+or wouldn't do. She might have thought that by being seen coming in and
+out of the store, she could stave off criticism by the appearance of
+being on good terms with us. At any rate she came. I think her coming
+caused my husband some embarrassment, and, manlike, he made her pay for
+it. As I think of it now, I realize that I really did not know what went
+on in her; whether she had set a trap for my husband or yielded to an
+unconquerable passion. In any case she had imagination enough to see
+that unless she could maintain the tragic status, she cut rather a
+ridiculous figure. Sometimes I think people are drawn into these
+affairs not so much by the hope of happiness as the need, the
+deep-seated, desperate need of emotion, any kind of emotion. I think if
+we had taken her note, had had it out on the world-without-end basis,
+she would have been almost as well satisfied by a recognized romantic
+loss as by success. But I never knew exactly. She was equally in the
+dark about me. Now and then I had a glimpse of the figure I was in her
+eyes, in some stricture of my husband's on my behaviour--some criticism
+which bore the stamp of her suggestion; it was as if he was being
+dragged from me by an invisible creature of which I knew nothing but an
+occasional scraping of its claws. I try to do her the justice in my
+mind, of thinking that the situation which she had built up out of
+Tommy's loneliness was as real for her as it was for him. Nobody in
+Higgleston had ever taken my natural alienation from the people there as
+anything but deliberate and despising. To her, my husband was the victim
+of a cold, neglectful wife, and to him she contrived to be a figure of
+romance.
+
+"I owe her a lot," Tommy insisted; "she has suffered on account of me."
+He went back to that phrase again, "I owe her a lot."
+
+"What do you owe her that you can't pay?"
+
+"Well, I couldn't marry as long as you----"
+
+"You want to marry her?" I cried. "You want to marry _her_?"
+
+"I couldn't expect you to appreciate her," Tommy was sullen again;
+"you're so full of yourself." I held on to a graver matter.
+
+"You want us to be divorced?" I can hear that sounding hollowly in a
+great space out of which all other interests in life seemed suddenly to
+shrink and shrivel. I had learned to talk of divorce in the great world,
+but to me my marriage was one of the incontrovertible things.
+
+"We might as well be," I heard my husband say; "you are never at home
+any more." Then the reaction set in. "Stay with me, Olivia. I don't want
+anybody but you; just stay with me!"
+
+"You want me to give up the stage and live here in Higgleston
+_forever_?" The unfairness of this overcame me.
+
+"Well, why not, if you're married to me?"
+
+I believe he would have done it. He would have wasted me like that and
+thought little of it. I was married, and not altogether to Tommy, but to
+Higgleston and the clothing business. The condition he demanded of me
+was not of loving and being faithful, but of living over the store.
+Until now, though I knew I did not love my husband as life had taught me
+men could be loved, I had never given up expecting to. Somewhere,
+somehow, but I was certain it was not in Higgleston, the transmuting
+touch should find him which would turn my husband into the Lord of Life.
+Now I discovered myself pulled over into another point of view. He had
+become a man capable of being interested in the village dressmaker. The
+farther she drew him from me the more the stripe of Higgleston came out
+in him.
+
+I had planned to go up to Chicago for a week in August; to consult with
+Mr. Harding about the plays he was to produce the next season. I had not
+signed with him yet, but I knew that I should, that I could no more
+dissever myself from that connection than I could voluntarily surrender
+my own breath; I might try, but after the few respirations withheld,
+nature would have her way with me. It was not that I came to a decision
+about it; the whole matter appeared to lie in that region of finality
+that made the assumption of a decision ridiculous. I do not know if I
+expected to divorce my husband or if he or Miss Rathbone expected it. I
+think we were all a little scared by the situation we had evoked, as
+children might be at a dog they let loose. We felt the shames of
+publicity yelping at our heels.
+
+The day before I left, I went to see Miss Rathbone; I had to have a
+skirt shortened. It was absurd, of course, but there was really no one
+else to go to. If there had been I shouldn't have dared; all Higgleston
+would have known of it and drawn its own conclusion. As it was,
+Higgleston was extremely dissatisfied with the affair. It did not know
+whom properly to blame, me for neglecting my husband or Miss Rathbone
+for snapping him up; they felt balked of the moral conclusion.
+
+I hardly know what Miss Rathbone thought of my coming to her. I think
+she had braved herself for some sort of emotional struggle sharp enough
+to drown the whisper of reprobation. My quiet acceptance of the
+situation left her somehow toppling over her own defences. Sometimes I
+think the emotionalism which the attitude of that time demanded to be
+worked up over a divorce, drew people to it with that impulse which
+leads them to rush toward a fire or hurl themselves from precipices.
+Miss Rathbone must have been aching to fling out at me, to justify her
+own position by abuse of mine, and here she was down on the floor with
+her mouth full of pins squinting at the line of my skirt. It was then
+that I told her what I was going to Chicago for. "You'll be away from
+home all winter, then?" The question was a challenge.
+
+"I don't know, I haven't signed yet." For the life of me I couldn't have
+foreborne that; it was exactly the kind of an advantage she would have
+taken of me. If I chose not to sign for the next winter, where was she?
+She stood up blindly at last. "I guess I can do the rest without you,"
+she said. Some latent instinct of fairness flashed up in me.
+
+"But I think I shall sign," I admitted. "I couldn't stand a winter in
+Higgleston." I was glad afterward that I had said that; it gave her
+leave for the brief time that was left to them, to think of him as being
+given into her hands.
+
+I was greatly relieved to get away, even for a week, from the cold
+curiosity of Higgleston which, without saying so, had made me perfectly
+aware that I showed I had been crying a great deal lately. But no sooner
+was I freed from the pull of affection than I began to feel a deep
+resentment against Tommy. His attempt to charge his lapse of loyalty, on
+my art, on that thing in me which, as I read it, constituted my sole
+claim upon consideration, appeared a deeper indignity than his interest
+in the dressmaker. It was all a part of that revelation which sears the
+path of the gifted woman as with a flame, that no matter what her value
+to society, no man will spare her anything except as she pleases him. At
+the first summer heat of it I felt my soul curl at the edges. His
+repudiation of me as an actress began to appear a slight upon all that
+world of fineness which Art upholds, a thing not to be tolerated by any
+citizen of it. In its last analysis it seemed that my husband had
+deserted me in favour of Higgleston quite as much as I had deserted him,
+and it was for me to say whether I should consent to it. In that mood I
+met Mr. Harding and signed with him for the ensuing season, and then
+quite unaccountably, ten days before I was expected, I found myself
+pulled back to Higgleston. I had wired Tommy, and was surprised to have
+Mr. Ross meet me at the station.
+
+"Mr. Bettersworth is not very well," he explained, as he put me into
+Higgleston's one omnibus. "It came on him rather suddenly. Some kind of
+a seizure," he admitted, though I did not gather from his manner that it
+was particularly serious until the 'bus, instead of stopping at our
+store, drove straight on up the one wide street.
+
+"I thought you'd want to see him immediately," the attorney interposed
+to my arresting gesture. "You see he was taken at his partner's house."
+He seemed to avoid some unpleasant implication by not mentioning
+Rathbone's name.
+
+I scarcely remember what other particulars he gave me at the time; my
+next sharp impression was of my husband lying white and breathing
+heavily in the bed in the Rathbone's front room, the drapery of which
+had been torn hastily down to make room for him, regardless of the
+finished pieces of Miss Harvey's trousseau still crowding the chairs
+upon which they had been hastily thrust. Empty sleeves hung down and
+vaguely seemed to reach for what they could not clasp; strangely I was
+aware in them of an aching lack and loss which must have sprung in my
+bosom. I took my husband's hand and it dropped back from my clasp,
+waxlike and nerveless. I think I had been kneeling by the bed for some
+time, talk had been going on whisperingly around me; finally the light
+faded and I discovered that the doctor had gone. The beribboned bridal
+garments hung limply still on the chairs and mocked me with their empty
+arms. Presently I was aware that Miss Rathbone had come in with a lamp.
+She stood there on the other side of the bed and we looked at him and at
+one another.
+
+"How long?" I asked her.
+
+"Two or three days maybe, the doctor says."
+
+"Will he know me again."
+
+"The doctor says not."
+
+"Oh, Tommy, Tommy!" I began to shake with suppressed sobbing. Miss
+Rathbone looked at me with cold resentment.
+
+"You can cry as much as you like, it won't disturb him," she said.
+
+She seemed to have taken the fact that she wasn't to cry herself, as
+final. In a few minutes old Rathbone shuffled in from the shop and stood
+peering at Tommy with his little red-lidded eyes, wiping them furtively.
+I believe the old man was fond of his partner and it was not strange to
+him that Tommy should be lying ill at his home. Miss Rathbone came and
+took him by the shoulders as one does to a grieving child and turned his
+face to her bosom. She was a head taller than he, and as she looked
+across him to me there was compulsion in her look and pleading.
+
+"He is never to know," the look said, and I looked back, "Never."
+
+It was then that I realized how genuine her affection was for the
+feeble, snuffling old man; she would suffer at being lessened in his
+eyes.
+
+Some one came and took me away for a while, and by degrees I got to know
+the story. It had been the night before, just about the time I was taken
+with that strange impulse to return, that Tommy had shut up the store
+and gone over to the half-furnished room belonging to the Board of
+Trade, which had become a sort of club for the soberer men of the
+community. A great deal of talk went on there which gave them the
+agreeable impression of something being done, though there must have
+been much of it of the character of that which was going on in a group
+around Montague when Tommy came in at the door. He came in very quietly,
+blinded by the light, and they had their backs to him, shaking with the
+loose laughter which punctuates a ribald description. Then Montague's
+voice took it up again.
+
+"Rathbone'll get him," he said. "She's got the goods. The other one has
+probably got somebody on the side; these actresses are all alike."
+
+There was a word or two more to that before Tommy's fist in his jaw
+stopped him. Montague struck back, he was a heavier man than my husband,
+but in a minute the others had rushed in between them. They were drawn
+back and held; Tommy's nose bled profusely, he appeared dazed, and
+accepted Montague's forced apology without a word. The men were all
+scared and yet excited; some of them were ashamed of themselves. They
+suspected it was not the sort of thing that should go on at a Board of
+Trade, and agreed it ought to be kept out of the papers. Some one walked
+home with my husband, and on the way he was seized with a violent fit of
+vomiting.
+
+"Who was it hit me?" he asked at the door, and seemed but vaguely to
+remember what it was about. The next morning he opened the store as
+usual and appeared quite himself to old Rathbone, who came shuffling and
+sidestepping in to his nest at the accustomed hour. About half-past ten
+the tailor was made aware by the rapping of a customer on the deserted
+counter, that Tommy had gone out without a word. He must have gone
+straight to Miss Rathbone; those who met him on the street recalled that
+his gait was unsteady. She must have been greatly concerned to have him
+there at that hour, for people were moving about the streets and
+customers beginning to come in, and in the presence of Tillie Hemingway
+he could offer her no adequate explanation.
+
+She was desperately revolving the risk of taking him into the front room
+to have out of him what his distrait presence half declared, when he was
+taken with a momentary retching; she went into the next room to fetch
+him a glass of water and a moment after her back was turned she heard
+him pitch forward on the floor.
+
+When Rathbone had sent for me by the wire that passed me on the way
+home, he sent also to Tommy's father, who got in before noon the next
+day. I remember him as a quizzical sort of man always with his hands in
+his pockets, and a bristling brown moustache cut off square with his
+upper lip, and a better understanding of the situation than he had any
+intention of admitting. I had by some unconscious means derived from him
+that though he was fond of Tommy, he never had much opinion of his
+capacity. I think now it must have been his presence there and his
+manner of being likely to do the most unexpected thing, that pulled
+those same live business men who had stood listening in loose-mouthed
+relish of Monty's ribaldry, out of the possibility of entertainment in
+the case that might be made out of his implication in my husband's
+death, to the consideration of the town's repute as a place where such
+things could not possibly happen. By the time Forester came on, a covert
+discretion had supplied the event with its sole consoling circumstance
+of secrecy. Not even my family got to know what led up to that blow
+which had precipitated an unsuspected weakness. It was quite in
+accordance with what they believed of the life I had chosen, that my
+husband's death in a brawl should be among its contingencies. Poor
+Tommy's end took on a tinge of theatricality.
+
+It was toward the end of the second day that he began to respond to the
+stimulants the doctor had been pouring into him. He opened his eyes and
+looked at us, conscious, but out of all present time. Feebly his glance
+roved over the figures by the bed, and fell at last on me.
+
+"Ollie," he whispered, "Ollie!" It was a name he had not called for a
+long time.
+
+"Oh, my dear, my dear!" I took his hand again and felt a faint pressure.
+Miss Rathbone hardly dared to look at him with the others standing
+about. I whispered her name to him, and his partner's, but he did not so
+much as turn his eyes in their direction. I could see him studying me
+out of half-shut glances; there would be an appreciable interval before
+the sense of what he saw penetrated the dulled brain; I thought I knew
+the very moment when the significance of our standing all about his bed
+crying, took hold of him. All at once he spoke out clearly:
+
+"Is my father here?" I fancied he must have hit on that question as a
+confirmation; but before there could be any talk between them he slid
+off again into the deeps of insensibility. At the end of half an hour or
+so he started up almost strongly.
+
+"Ollie!" he demanded, "where is the baby?"
+
+"Asleep," I told him.
+
+"Then I will sleep too," and in a little while it was so.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Odd Fellows took charge of my husband's funeral, his body was moved
+from the Rathbones', to their hall and did not go back again to the
+rooms over the store. Miss Rathbone made up my crape for me. I believe
+it gave her a little comfort to do so. Forester came and settled up my
+husband's affairs; he was rather inclined to resent what he felt was an
+effort of the Rathbones to claim a larger share in the business than the
+books showed, but he thought my indifference natural to my grief. He was
+shocked a little at my determination to go on with my engagement; we
+were not so poor he thought, that I could not afford a little retirement
+to my widowhood. But in that strange renewal of communion after death, I
+felt my husband nearer than before. He would go with me at last out of
+Higgleston. Strangely, I wanted to see Miss Rathbone, but she kept away
+from me. That was as it should have been in Higgleston. She had tried to
+get my husband, she had been, in a way, the death of him. It was hardly
+expected that I could bear the sight of her, though it would have been
+Christian to forgive her.
+
+I did see her, however, the night before I went away. It was the dusk of
+the first of September. There was a moon coming up, large and dulled at
+the edges by the haze, and that strange earthy smell with the hint of
+decay in it, kept in by the banded mists that lay below the moon. The
+darkness crept close along the earth and spread upward like an
+exhalation into the sky where almost the full day halted. I had slipped
+out down a side street and across an open lot to the cemetery. I would
+have that hour with my dead free from observation.
+
+I went between the white head stones and the flower borders. As I neared
+my husband's grave, something moved upon it. It arose out of the low
+mound as I approached; for one heart-riving second I stopped,
+speechless; it moved again and showed a woman.
+
+"Miss Rathbone!" I called. "Henrietta!" I had not used her name before;
+I have just now remembered it.
+
+"You might have left me this," she said. I saw that she had covered the
+mound with flowers, and I was glad I had not brought any.
+
+"I am leaving," I answered. "I am going to-morrow ... where my work is."
+
+"Yes, _you_ can go. But I have to stay ... where my work is. I stay with
+him. You can go ... you always wanted to go. And I, I have been talked
+about and I daren't even cry for him, not even at night, for my father
+hears me." She was crying now, deeply, bitterly. "You never cared for
+him," she insisted, "and now he knows it; he knows and has come back to
+me ... to _me_."
+
+"He comes back," I admitted. I was stricken suddenly with the futility
+of all human conviction. Moving about the house that day I had been
+conscious of him beside me then, and now, lying there beside my boy,
+touching him ... mine ... sealed to me in the certainty of death. And he
+had come back to _her_. I did not know even now what she and my husband
+had been to one another.
+
+It swept over me somehow, drowningly, that this was the secret that the
+dead know, how to belong to all of us. They had no bond, how could they
+be unfaithful? For a moment I was caught up by the thought to nobility.
+
+"Look here, Henrietta, if you feel that way, I'll leave it to you. I'll
+not come here any more." I did not know what else I could do about it.
+
+"It's the least you _can_ do." She was accepting it as her right. Any
+woman will understand how I wanted to lay my hand there, above his
+breast. She must really have believed I did not love him. I turned back
+across the borders.
+
+"Good-bye, Henrietta." She made a nearly inarticulate sound. The last I
+saw of her in the dusk she was tucking her flowers into the fresh sod as
+one tucks a coverlet about a child. He had been, I suppose, both man and
+child to her.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK III
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+I have to take up my story again about eighteen months later at the
+point of my going out to Suburbia to ask Gerald McDermott for a part in
+his new play, which was being rehearsed with Sarah in the _rôle_ of
+_Bettina_. But before that there had been some rather mortifying
+experiences to teach me that though I was done with Higgleston, it was,
+to a certainty, not done with me. In any case I suppose the shock of my
+husband's death must have affected my work unfavourably, but the
+knowledge of his secret defection, and the excuse he found for it in
+what was best in me, made still corroding poison at the bottom of my
+wound.
+
+What it all amounted to in my career was that the season which should
+have swept me back to Chicago in triumphant establishment of my gift,
+trickled out in faint praise and cold esteem. It was not that you could
+place your finger and say just there was the difficulty, but what came
+of it was another year on the road with Cline and Erskine, in stock. The
+Hardings, notwithstanding their disappointment in what they expected to
+make of me, managed to be kind.
+
+"You'll pull up," they assured me; "it's because you are really an
+artist that you show what you've been through!" And they didn't know the
+half of what that was.
+
+To Henry Mills my engagement with Cline and Erskine, was a step forward
+into that blazoned and banal professionalism which passes in America for
+dramatic success; but Sarah knew, and I think I knew myself, that the
+dance they led us in the spotlight of copious advertisement, was a dance
+of death to much that the plastic art should be. In this instance it was
+demonstrated even to the hopeful eye of Henry Mills, for the play chosen
+proved so little suited to the semi-rural, Middle West cities where we
+played it, that before the season was half over we were recalled, and,
+after an empty interval, finished out the engagement in one of those
+sensation mongering shows with which such combinations as Cline and
+Erskine clutch at the fleeing skirts of a public they never understand.
+
+It was about a month after the closing of this engagement that I took
+Sarah's suggestion about applying to Gerald McDermott, but not before I
+had tried several other things. The truth was, as I knew very well when
+I faced it, that I had at the time nothing in me. To those who haven't
+it, a gift is a sort of extra possession, like an eye or a hand that can
+be commanded to its accustomed trick on any occasion; but to the owners
+of it it is a libation poured to the Unknown God. I had emptied my cup
+of its froth of youth, and as yet nothing had touched the profounder
+experience from which it should be fed and filled again, and I had no
+technique to supply the insufficiencies of my inspiration. Somewhere
+within me I felt the stuff of power, stiff and unworkable, needing the
+flux of passion and the shaping hand of skill.
+
+Looking back now from the vantage of a tolerable success, if you were to
+ask me what, more than any other thing, prevents the fulness of our
+native art, I should say the blank public misapprehension of its
+processes. Turning every way to catch the favourable wind, what met me
+then, was the general conviction on the part of my friends that if you
+had talent you succeeded anyway, and if you weren't succeeding it was
+because you hadn't any talent. I suffered many humiliations before I
+learned how absolutely, by that same society that so liberally resents
+the implication of any separateness in art, the artist is thrust back
+upon himself. To do what seemed necessary for the development of my
+gift, to have a year or two to travel and study, to connote its powers
+with its limitations, required money; and though there in Chicago there
+was money for every sort of adventure that stirred the imagination of
+man, there was none for the particular sort of investment I represented.
+At least not at the price I was prepared to pay.
+
+The half of what had been put into setting my brother on his feet would
+have served me, but I learned from Effie, that as much of my mother's
+capital as had been put into Forester's business, was not only
+impossible to be withdrawn from keeping him upright, but threatened not
+to hold him so for as long as it was necessary for mother to see in him
+the figure of a provider. This had been made plain at Christmas, when
+Effie had written me that a particular wheeled chair which my mother had
+set her heart upon because of a hope it held out of church-going, would
+be impossible unless I came forward handsomely. I did come forward on a
+scale commensurate with the Taylorville estimate of my salary, which was
+by no means comparable to its purchasing power in Chicago; and now I was
+beginning to realize that unless some one came forward for me, I stood
+to lose the Shining Destiny to which I felt myself appointed. I was slow
+in understanding that it was not to be looked for by any of the paths by
+which interest and succour are traditionally due. Not, for instance,
+from Pauline and Henry Mills.
+
+I was seeing a great deal of them since I had come to Chicago, not only
+because of our earlier friendship, but because I found myself constantly
+thrown back on all that they stood for, by my distaste for much that I
+saw myself implicated in as a theatrical star who had not quite made
+good. I hated, quite unjustly, I believe, the players with whom for the
+time I was professionally classed; I loathed the shallow shop talk, the
+makeshift rooms we lived in, the outward smartness and the pinch of
+anxiety it covered. I was irritated by my external and circumstantial
+resemblance to much that I felt instinctively, kept them where they
+were, and vexed at some cheapness in myself which seemed to be revealed
+by the irritation. I had been thrown up out of the freemasonry of the
+preliminary struggle into a kind of backwater of established
+second-rateness, where there were also second-rate manners and morals
+and social perceptions. It was a great relief to get away from it to
+Pauline's home in Evanston, and the air it had of being somehow
+established at the pivot of existence. Pauline had two children by now,
+and a manner of being abundantly equal to the world in which she moved,
+a manner which I was only just realizing was largely owing to the figure
+of her husband's income. What Pauline furnished me at her home, over and
+above the real affection there was still between us, was a sort of
+continuous performance of the domestic virtues.
+
+That faculty for knowing exactly what she wanted, which had led her to
+make the most of her housekeeping allowance in the days when making the
+most of it was her chief occupation, now that the centres of her
+activity had been shifted from the practical to the social and cultural,
+stood her in remarkable stead. I was so constantly amazed by the
+celerity and sureness with which she seized on just the attitude or
+opinion which suited best with the part she had cast herself for as the
+perfect wife and mother, that it was only when I discovered its complete
+want of relativity to the purpose of the play or to the rest of the
+company, that I was not taken in by it. I doubt now if Pauline ever had
+an idea or permitted herself a behaviour which was not conditioned by
+the pattern she had set for herself, which she intrigued both Henry and
+myself into believing was the only real and appreciable life.
+
+At the time of which I write it was a great comfort to me to get away
+from my own dreary professionalism, to the nursery at Evanston, or to
+add my small flourish to the _scene à faire_ of Henry's homecoming, made
+every day to seem the one event for which the household waited, from
+which, indeed, it took its excuse for being. For all of this was so well
+in line with what Henry, who with the amplification of his income had
+taken on a due rotundity of outline and a slight tendency to baldness,
+conceived as proper for a man's home to be, that he played up to it as
+much as was in him. He had still his air of knowingness about the
+theatre, and if there was at times in his manner a suggestion that he
+might have found it pleasanter to adjust his relation to me on the basis
+of what I was as an actress, if I had not been quite so much the friend,
+it was so far modified by his genuine admiration for his wife and his
+cession to her of every right of judgment in the home, that I was
+inclined to accept him at his own and Pauline's estimate as the model
+husband.
+
+It was only a few days before my visit to Gerald McDermott, that I had
+undertaken to state to Pauline the nature of the help I required and my
+title to it. I had gone out to dinner and found her putting on a new
+gown, one of those garments admirably contrived between the smartness of
+evening dress and the intimacy of negligée, in which Evanston ladies of
+that period were wont to receive their lords.
+
+"I'm needing something new myself," I said for a beginning, "and I'm
+divided between the certainty that if I don't get an engagement I can't
+afford it, and if I don't afford it I probably won't get an engagement."
+Pauline stopped in the process of hooking up, to take stock of me.
+
+"You absurd child!" The note of amused admonition with which she
+ordinarily accepted my professional exigencies turned on the note of
+correction. "Don't you think you put too much stress on those things?"
+
+"What things?" She had touched upon the spring of irritation.
+
+"Clothes, you know, and appearances. Isn't it better just to do your
+work well and rest upon that?"
+
+"Pauline, if you had ever looked for an engagement you would know that
+getting it is largely a matter of appearing equal to it, and clothes
+are the better part of appearing."
+
+"But if you know that your work is good, what do you care what people
+think of you?" I dodged the moral situation about to be precipitated on
+me.
+
+"It's about the only way you know it is good, knowing what people think
+of it."
+
+"Now see here," Pauline protested, reinforced by the evident superiority
+of her viewpoint to mine, "you're getting all wrong; these things you
+are thinking of, they are not the real things; they don't count, not in
+the long run; it's only the spiritual things that really matter." She
+had put on all the plastic effect of nobility that was part of her stock
+in trade with Henry Mills. I thrust out against it sharply.
+
+"Do you realize, Pauline, that if I don't get an engagement soon I
+shan't be able to pay my board?"
+
+"Oh, you poor dear!" She came over and took my hand. I don't know why
+women like Pauline do that, but when they do it it is a sign they are
+not equal to the situation and are trying to fake it with you.
+
+"I know it is hard"--she found the cooing note with facility--"but it
+will come right; it always does. I've always found that there is a way
+provided."
+
+Something flashed into my mind that I had read in the newspapers
+recently about the corporations Henry worked for, and I wondered if
+Pauline had the least notion how the way, for her, was humanly provided,
+but the sound of Henry's latchkey put an end to the conversation, which
+I hadn't felt sufficiently encouraging to warrant my taking up again.
+
+I went from Pauline's, at the very first opportunity, to Sarah Croyden,
+who was playing in Chicago, and doing her kindliest to blow the wind of
+hope into my sagging sails. I met Cecelia Brune there. It had been to me
+the witness of how far I had fallen from my mark, that I had been thrown
+with her again in my last engagement. Hers was the sort of talent that
+Cline and Erskine could play up to the limit of the inadmissible. There
+were not wanting intimations that Cecelia had moved her own limit a
+notch or two in that direction. She had taken a characteristic view of
+my reappearance in her neighbourhood.
+
+"Got into the band-wagon, didn't you?" she remarked. "I saw Dean on the
+road last year and she said you was going in for high-brow stunts.
+Nothin' to it. You stay with Cline and Erskine; they get you on like
+anything." Her own notion of getting on was to figure as the sole female
+attraction in a song and dance skit in what she pronounced "Vawdville."
+
+"It's the only place havin' a figgur does you any good!" That she did
+not recommend it for me must be taken for her estimate of mine.
+Nevertheless I was amused by her, and Sarah, I knew, was even a little
+fond. Sarah's affections were a sort of natural emanation from her, like
+the rays of a candle, and warmed all they lighted on. On this afternoon
+I found Cecelia drinking tea there and I wasn't able to conceal my
+professional depression from her sharp, shallow inquisitiveness. There
+were never two or three players got together, I believe, but the talk
+turned on the comparative ineffectiveness of Merit as against Pull in
+the struggle for success.
+
+"There's no two ways about it," insisted Cecelia Brune; "you gotta get a
+hold of some rich guy and freeze to him." The extent to which Cecelia
+had blossomed out in ostrich tips and orchids that bright spring
+afternoon, might have suggested to an experienced eye, that the freezing
+process had already begun. I say might have, because Sarah and I found
+it difficult to disassociate her from the hard, grubby innocence in
+which our acquaintance had begun. Sarah, I know, believed in her and had
+her in often to informal occasions as a bulwark against what, with all
+her faith and pains, she didn't finally save her from.
+
+"You can talk all you want to," Cecelia asseverated, "about man being
+the natural provider. I've noticed he don't work at the job much without
+he's gettin' something out of it. If you're sufferin' with that little
+old song and dance about men doin' for you because you're a woman and
+need it, you gotta get over it. There's nothin' laid down over that
+counter unless you deliver the goods." She was nibbling lumps of sugar
+moistened in her tea, and the wild rose of her cheeks and the
+distracting rings of her hair made her offensiveness a mere childish
+impertinence.
+
+"Look at Helen Matlock," she ran on, "gettin' five hundred a week. And
+when old Sedgwick put it up to her she said she'd die rather; and then
+she went home and found her mother sick, and what did she do? Never
+batted an eye, but told her she'd got an engagement, and went back and
+made it good. An' now she's gettin' five hundred. That's what I call
+doin' well by yourself."
+
+"She can't mean it," Sarah extenuated when Cecelia had gone; "she's too
+frank about it. When she stops talking I shall begin to suspect her."
+
+"But is it true, about Miss Matlock, I mean?" Just at that juncture
+Helen Matlock was doing the work I felt most drawn to, most fit to
+undertake.
+
+"I suppose so," Sarah allowed; "it's a common saying that the way to the
+footlights in the Majestic is through the manager's private room." She
+came over and sat beside me on the bed, which, under a Bagdad curtain,
+did duty as a couch. "There are other theatres besides the Majestic,"
+she said.
+
+"None that want me," I averred.
+
+"Oh," she cried, "you don't mean----?"
+
+"No," I had to own, "I don't mean that I have a chance to get on even
+by misbehaving myself. I'm not the kind to whom that sort of chance
+comes." Sarah stroked my hand a while.
+
+"I've been thinking, if you could get a small part or a season, you
+could take it under another name until you are quite yourself again.
+It's often done." I could see she had gone much farther than that with
+it in her thought. It was just such cover as that I was seeking for the
+renaissance of my acting power.
+
+And that was what led to my going out to Suburbia to see Gerald
+McDermott about the part of _Mrs. Brandis_ in "The Futurist."
+
+It was out quite in the frayed edge of outer fringe of real estate
+ventures which hedged Chicago round, in a district which was spoiled for
+country and not quite made into town, and from the number of weedy plots
+not built upon between the scroll-saw cottages, had almost a rural air.
+Leaning trolleys went zizzing along the banked highways, and at the ends
+of the unpaved avenues there were flat gleams of the lake. Depressed as
+I was by the consciousness of having fallen from the estate of actresses
+who command engagements to those who seek them, I was still able to be
+touched a little by curiosity by what Sarah had told me of McDermott and
+his wife, whom he had married for her pretty, feminine inconsequence,
+who, having no point of attachment to her husband's life but femininity,
+was able to imagine none for any other woman, and suffered incredibly in
+consequence.
+
+"If one could only discover why clever men marry that sort of women!" I
+wondered.
+
+"Oh, Jerry thought he was going to bend her to his will," Sarah
+explained. "But that kind don't bend, they just slump." I had hardly
+knocked at the door before I had an inkling of how painful to the author
+of "The Futurist" the process of slumping might be.
+
+I could hear the fretting of a child, hushed suddenly by my knock, then
+the patter of little feet across the floor and voices startled and
+pitched low. I was just debating whether I shouldn't pretend I hadn't
+heard anything and go away again, when Mr. McDermott opened the door. I
+had met him once at Sarah's and should have known him again by the
+pallor of his countenance against the dead blackness of his hair,
+straight and shining like an Indian's. The effect of boyishness that one
+derived from his tall, thin figure was increased now by the marks of
+weeping about his eyes. In the glimpse of the room behind him I was
+aware of a disorder only excusable in the face of a family catastrophe;
+one of the children that ran to his knee was still in its little
+petticoat, without a slip, and had not been washed or combed that day. I
+wavered an instant between the obligation of politeness to ignore the
+situation and the certainty that I couldn't.
+
+"Oh!" I cried. I snatched at my repertory for the proper mixture of
+commiseration and consternation. "Is any one ill?"
+
+His desperate need of help opened the door to me.
+
+"My wife" ... he began, but the state of the room accounted for that, as
+he perceived, taking it in afresh through my eyes. Mrs. McDermott was
+lying on the sofa in the coma of exhaustion. She lifted her face to me
+for a moment, swollen with crying, and then let herself go again into
+that pit in which a woman sinks an impossible situation. She was really
+faint, poor thing, and, if I judged by the state of the house, had had
+no luncheon. I took all that in at a glance, but it was none of my
+business.
+
+"Is it her heart?" I wanted to know of her husband as I bent over her.
+He caught up the suggestion eagerly.
+
+"Yes, her heart ... she is very weak." He did whatever I suggested on
+that explanation. I would have proposed putting her to bed if I had not
+feared that that would involve more revelations of the family disorder
+than I was willing to tax him with.
+
+We got her out of her faintness presently and found her a safety valve
+in pitying her poor children with that sloppy sort of maternal affection
+which is not inconsistent with a good deal of neglect. I wasn't working
+for anything but to save Jerry--I came to call him that before many
+weeks--from the embarrassment of what I was sure had been a family
+fracas which threatened at every moment to break out again. I suggested
+tea, for I was satisfied that both of them wanted food, and while I was
+making toast before the sitting-room fire, Mrs. McDermott managed to
+get herself and the children into some sort of order. I could see then
+how pretty she had been in a large-eyed, short-lipped way, and how
+charming in her youth had been the inconsequence which as the mistress
+of a family made her a sloven. Not to seem to notice too much the
+superficial air of being prepared for company which she managed to give
+the children by washing their faces surreptitiously, I explained to Mr.
+McDermott that I had come about the part of _Mrs. Brandis_.
+
+"Oh, you'll do," he assented heartily. "You'll do just as you are. _Mrs.
+Brandis_ is a widow you know ... that is, the _Mrs. Brandis_ that I
+created----"
+
+"Just as you conceived it of course," I insisted, "I should want to play
+it that way."
+
+"The trouble is that Moresco isn't satisfied so easily; he wants me to
+make changes in the part."
+
+"Well ..." I was prepared to make concessions.
+
+"I'm afraid he has somebody in mind ..."
+
+"Fancy Filette," his wife broke in, "a painting, flirting, immoral!..."
+Jerry scraped his chair back along the floor to cover the word, but I
+knew where I was in a twinkling.
+
+"Fancy Filette! She'll play it in short skirts!"
+
+"I'll be lucky if she doesn't insist on a song and dance."
+
+"He doesn't need to have her unless he wants to." Mrs. McDermott was
+positive on that point. She was sitting with both children on her lap,
+chiefly in order to keep up the fiction that I didn't know she had just
+been having hysterics, I had cautioned her against letting them climb
+over her, and she promptly let them, because the idea that she was
+tending them at a risk to her health, rather helped out with her own
+notion of herself as a misused but devoted wife and mother.
+
+Jerry looked at me over her head in a mute appeal to me to understand.
+
+"Unless Moresco puts on my play there is no chance for it," he
+protested. "I've been to the others. I'll tell you, though, if you go to
+him just as you are, he may think better of it. He can't possibly get
+anybody so good."
+
+We neither of us believed that Mr. Moresco would turn down Fancy Filette
+for anybody, but we kept up the game of thinking so from sheer
+desperation. I played too at the pretence that Jerry's wife was a
+delicate, idealized sort of creature who did not understand the great
+hard world. That was no doubt what had appealed to him in the beginning,
+but she wasn't made up for the part. She had begun to put on weight
+after she had children, and her hair wanted washing. I got away as soon
+as I could and went straight to Sarah.
+
+"They'd been having some kind of a row," I told her.
+
+"Oh, it must have been Fancy Filette who set her off," Sarah was
+certain. "She took to you as a relief, but you'll be in for it too if
+you get the part."
+
+I had to admit to myself after I had been to Mr. Moresco, that there was
+not much likelihood that I would get it. He laid the tips of his pudgy
+fingers together and addressed me with the slight blur in his speech
+which convinced one of the racial affinity which he commonly denied.
+
+"Mr. McDermott thinks it will suit me admirably," I told him.
+
+"Ah, yes, the author," the manager mentioned him as though it were a
+fact indulgently admitted to the discussion, "but then, my dear Miss
+Lattimore, we have to think of the audience."
+
+There was this peculiarity of Moresco's handling of an audience, that he
+treated it as an entity, a sort of human stratification of which the
+three front rows were lubricious, the body of the orchestra high-brow,
+the first balcony sentimental and virtuous, the gallery facetious. As
+far as possible he arranged his plays to meet the requirements.
+
+"Now we have Miss Croyden for _Bettina_, she is your type."--He meant as
+a woman, not as an artist; Sarah and I were both serious and
+respectable.--"For _Mrs. Brandis_ I think we should have something a
+little more snappy."
+
+"It isn't written snappy in the play," I reminded him.
+
+"Ah, no, that is the trouble; I have spoken to Mr. McDermott; he will
+perhaps change it."
+
+"And if he doesn't you will keep me in mind for it." I kept my voice
+with difficulty from being urgent. "You see, I don't feel like playing a
+heavy part this year." I glanced down at my mourning; I hoped he would
+accept it as an explanation. Two or three days later I saw Sarah and she
+remarked that Jerry was rewriting some parts of his play at the request
+of the manager.
+
+"The part of _Mrs. Brandis_?" Sarah nodded.
+
+"Mr. Moresco wants it more--more----"
+
+"Snappy," I supplied. "And who is to have it, have you heard?"
+
+"Fancy Filette!"
+
+"Oh, well, she's snappy enough, I suppose."
+
+"I know; I don't even like to be billed with her; but, anyway, the part
+wasn't worthy of you." But I felt as I went home to my lodging that that
+was only Sarah's kind way of putting it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+I saw more than a little of Jerry McDermott during the spring and summer
+that I stayed in Chicago, haunting managers' offices in my winter's suit
+and a fixed determination not to let any of them suspect that I knew I
+couldn't, for the moment, act at all. Where the gift had gone I did not
+know, nor when, in some desperate encounter with the chance of an
+engagement, I attempted to draw about me the tattered remnants of my old
+facility, had I any notion what would bring it back again.
+
+Effie wrote me to come home for the hot weather, but though I regretted
+afterward not having done so I could not make up my mind to leave
+Chicago. It seemed to me then that the deadly quality of Taylorville lay
+waiting like a trap, which in my present benumbed condition might close
+on me if I put myself in the way of it. I thought that if I got out of
+reach of the flare of light from the theatre doors, of the smell of back
+scenes and the florid grip of the posters, that I should never in this
+world win back to them. A summer in Taylorville would have saved me
+money, would have rested and perhaps restored the balance of my powers,
+but the inward monitor of which I was the mere shell and surface,
+clutched upon the city with the grip of desperation. I hung upon
+whatever slight attachments to the theatre my circumstances afforded,
+like the drowned upon a rope, and waited for the resuscitating touch.
+Somewhere beyond me I was aware of succour; not knowing from whence it
+should come, I grasped at everything within reach and was buffeted and
+torn about in the eddy of reverses.
+
+What more even than his need of me, drove me back on Gerald McDermott,
+was the certainty that he was deriving from Fancy Filette the quality I
+missed. She was playing in one of the cheaper theatres in one of those
+entertainments that men are supposed to resort to when their families
+are out of town, and I had a moment's feeling that he exposed his sex to
+ridicule by the avidity with which he surrendered himself to her
+perfectly obvious methods. Until he sent his family north to one of the
+lake resorts for the hot weather, I found myself involved in certain
+obligations of visiting at his house, where I saw that his wife created
+for him by her incompetence much the same sort of background that my
+bereaved and purse-pinched condition made for me, and watched with
+alternate sympathy and resentment his flight from it to the effective
+self-complacency which Miss Filette induced in him.
+
+I don't mean that Jerry wasn't fond of his wife in a way, and faithful
+to her, in so far as she didn't interfere with his male prerogative of
+being played upon by other women, but I do not think he had ever an
+inkling that the vortex of anger and despair which she forced him to
+share with her, in lieu of the passion which she couldn't any more
+excite, was of the same stripe as his need of the high, inflated mood
+that Miss Filette provided for him with her little bag of tricks. For
+from the first Jerry seized on me, poured himself out, despoiled himself
+of all the hopes, conjectures, half-guesses of his career, and that
+without in the least discovering that I was in need of much the same
+sort of relief myself. After his wife had taken the children to the
+country--though she used even then to come down on him suddenly with
+both of them and break up his work for days, or just when it was running
+smoothly, wire to him to rush up to Lake View and allay the horrors of
+her too active imagination--often evenings after the day's work, he
+would take me to dine at queer little French or Italian restaurants
+which were supposed to be preferred on account of the "atmosphere"
+rather than their cheapness, and uncoil for me there all the intricate
+turnings of his work upon itself, and the rich shapes and colours it
+took, played upon by the slanting eyes and carmine smile of Miss
+Filette. He would sit opposite me with a cigarette and a glass of "Dago
+red," his black, shining hair, which he wore too long, slanting above
+his forehead like a boding wing, uncramping his soul; and though I liked
+him as a friend, and as a playwright thought him immensely worth while,
+I was divided between exasperation at his tacit exclusion of me from the
+world of excited powers in which any stimulation of his maleness threw
+him, and fear that in missing his capacity for quick, shallow passions,
+I had missed the one indispensable thing for my art.
+
+"It is the chance of a lifetime," Jerry would be reassuring me, "to
+delineate a character that will be so intimate an expression of the one
+who is to play it ... it's really extraordinary that she should have
+been named Fancy ... it's symbolic."
+
+"Oh, if you imagine she is really in the least like the _Mrs. Brandis_
+you are creating ... besides, I happen to know her name is Powers,
+Amanda Powers." He caught at this delightedly.
+
+"Ah, she's a poet, a poet! Such self-knowledge! To think of her knowing
+what would suit her so exactly!"
+
+But I was not in the least interested in Miss Filette's psychology. What
+I was trying to get at was the source of the creative mood which I was
+sensible did not arise from anything Miss Filette was, but from what
+Jerry was able to think of her. I admitted it was a mood you had to be
+helped to, but I wasn't going to accept it from any male compliment to
+his inamorata. I set up Jerry's case alongside of Miss Dean and Manager
+O'Farrell, and a kind of fine intolerance drove me from it as ships are
+driven apart upon the tide.
+
+It drove me back in the first instance upon what Pauline and Henry Mills
+stood for in my life. I was full of a formless importunate capacity,
+like the motor impulses of a paralytic, and I imagined a relief from it
+in the shadow of some succoring male who, by assuming the traditional
+responsibility of getting a living, should leave me free to produce the
+perfect flower of Art. At the time I was as far from realizing as
+Pauline, that she was eminently the sort of woman the sheltered life
+produced; had Henry Mills been upon the market I should have seized upon
+him promptly as the solution of all my difficulties.
+
+Pauline did her best for me--that is to say, she brought out for me an
+infinite variety and arrangement of the sentimentalized sex attractions
+with which she charmed dull care from Henry's brow. It was only by
+degrees that I perceived that the utter want of relativity of the
+quality that was known in Evanston as True Womanliness, was due to its
+being conditioned very much as I thought of myself as happiest to be. It
+was not until Pauline went to the country for the hot weather without
+making any sensible change in my affairs, that I began to understand how
+little she contributed. What I chiefly missed was a place to walk to
+when I went out for exercise.
+
+I spent a great deal of time just walking, for there was not much doing
+in the theatrical line to interest me, and I was sustained and
+tormented by intimations that somewhere, not far from me, my Help walked
+too. I don't know where this conviction came from that there was help
+somewhere in the world; but by the middle of the summer the terrible,
+keen need of it walked with me through all my days and lay down with me
+at night. There were times when the certainty that it was there seemed
+almost enough to lift me again to a plane of power, other times when the
+sheer hunger of it bit into the bone. It was most like the sense I had
+had as a child of the large friendliness that brooded over Hadley's
+pasture; it was like the promise of the shining destiny that had moved
+between my youth and the common occurrence; but now at times, just along
+the edge of sleep, or out of the thick, waking drowse of heat, it shaped
+familiarly human. I think about that time I must have dreamed again the
+dream I had of Helmeth Garrett just after I had seen Modjeska, writing
+that letter in his uncle's house; and with the help of what my mother
+had told me I was able to read it plain. I do not distinctly remember
+dreaming this, but there were times when, just after waking, my mind
+would be full of him, and there would be a stir in me of the wings of
+power. But in the broad day, though I thought of him often, I could not
+so much as recall his face clearly.
+
+The one thing that I remembered about him was that I had pleased him. It
+was a mortifying certainty that Jerry's ready acceptance of me as a
+woman of whom his wife could not possibly be jealous, had defined for
+me, that I didn't in general know how to please and interest men. They
+often were interested in me, but I was never in the least conscious of
+what drew them or caused them to sheer away. I had a suspicion,
+doubtless of Taylorvillian extraction, that there was a sort of
+culpability in knowing; but it came back to me now almost with a thrill
+that I had known with Helmeth Garrett. I had been able, out of all the
+possible things which might be said, to choose the thing that swayed
+him. I hadn't known ever for what things my husband loved me; but in a
+brief hour with Helmeth Garrett I was conscious of much in my manner to
+him arising from his conscious need. And I had no more than shaped this
+in my mind than I felt a faint stirring within me as of power.
+
+About this time I began to be more aware of the Something Without,
+toward which my work tended, just after I had been asleep, as if the
+self of me had gone on seeking more successfully in the silences. I
+would arise very early with such a faint consciousness as a vine might
+have toward the nearest wall, and get up in the blue of the morning to
+go for long walks through the pleasant, empty streets, sometimes out to
+the lake shore where the glint of the moving water under the mist,
+struck faint sparkles from my stagnant surfaces. I would come back from
+these excursions beginning to faint with the day's heat, to wear through
+the afternoon with books and long drowses, and then in the cool of the
+evening It would call me again, and I would seek It until late at night,
+sometimes in the lit streets, fetid with the day's smells, sometimes on
+a roof garden or at a park concert, where the lights, the gayety, and
+the music served merely as a drug to my outer sense, which went on
+busily at its absorbing quest. Sometimes men spoke to me in these lonely
+wanderings; I would remember it afterward as one recalls little,
+unnoticed incidents in the midst of great excitement; but for the most
+part I was, except for the invisible presence, as unaccompanied as if
+the city had been quite empty. If I could have laid the anxiety of my
+diminishing bank account and the dread of not getting an engagement, I
+should have been almost happy.
+
+It was along early in August that Chicago was greatly stirred by the
+visit of one of the Presidential candidates--for that was a Presidential
+year--who was also a popular hero. It had come rather unexpectedly and
+the preparations for it were of the hastiest. There was to be speaking
+at Armory Hall, and a reception afterward, and I thought I would go and
+clasp hands with the great man, as if, perhaps, I might find in it, as
+many of his admirers did, a sort of king's touch for the lethargy of my
+spirit. The meeting began early in the sweating afternoon and dragged
+out three heavy hours. Nothing of any importance transpired there until
+we were moving up the right side of the hall toward the receiving
+committee. The hall was split lengthwise by a bank of chairs, and down
+the left aisle the company of those who had already gripped the broad
+palm of the candidate, had been elbowed to oblivion by the committee. It
+was in the very beginning of the handshaking and there were not so many
+of them as of us. They lingered in groups and talked with one another. I
+was about midway of the aisles and several persons deep in the crush,
+when I saw him. How well I knew the lock falling over his forehead, and
+the quick unconscious motion of the head that tossed it back! There was
+the indefinable air of the outdoor man about him, though he was quite
+correctly dressed and had a lady's light wrap over his arm.
+
+"Helmeth! Helmeth!" I cried out to him from the centre of my will. I
+fought my way to the outer edge of the moving crowd, I caught at chairs
+and struggled to maintain my position opposite him. He was talking to
+two or three men, and just at the edge of the group a woman stood with
+an air of waiting. I resented her immobility, so near him and so little
+moved by him.
+
+"Helmeth, Helmeth, Look! Look at me!" I demanded voicelessly across the
+bank of chairs.
+
+He heard me; slowly he turned; his attention wandered from the group.
+
+"Helmeth! Helmeth!" All my will was in my cry. Now he looked in my
+direction. There was that in his face that told me my cry had touched
+the outer ring of his consciousness. Then the lady who stood by, took
+advantage of his detachment to touch him on the arm. Only a man's wife
+touches him like that. I knew her at once; she was the type of woman who
+subscribes to the _Delineator_, and belongs to the church because she
+thinks it is an excellent thing for other people. She had blond hair,
+discreetly frizzled about the temples, and her dress had been made at
+home.
+
+As soon as she touched him, Helmeth Garrett turned to her with divided
+attention. I saw her take his arm; he looked back; the cry held him; his
+eyes roved up and down; the moving mass closed between us and carried me
+completely out of sight.
+
+It was fully a quarter of an hour before the crowd released me, and by
+that time he had quite vanished. I hung about the entrance to the hall,
+I pushed here and there in the press, elbowed out of it by resentful
+citizens. At last when the hall was closed and even the policemen had
+gone from before it, I went home, to lie awake half the night planning
+how to get at him. And the moment I woke from the doze of exhaustion
+into which I finally fell, I knew that the thread which bound me to
+Chicago had snapped. I stayed on two or three days, vaguely hoping to
+come across him. I even looked in the hotel registers before I accepted
+Sarah's urgent invitation to spend the rest of the month with her at
+Lake View.
+
+One night when the wind out of the lake was fresh enough to suggest, in
+the closed window and the drawn blind, a reciprocated intimacy, I told
+Sarah all about Helmeth Garrett.
+
+"And to think," I said, "how different it all might have been if only I
+had got that letter."
+
+"Yes," Sarah admitted, "but that doesn't prove you'd have been happy."
+
+"Not if we loved one another?"
+
+"Oh, I am not sure loving has anything to do with happiness, or is meant
+to. Sometimes I think God--or whoever it is manages things--has a very
+poor opinion of happiness, because you don't find it invariably along
+with the best of experiences. It happens, or it doesn't. If love does
+anything for you it is just to give you the use of yourself."
+
+"But it hasn't," I protested; "I'm just stumping along."
+
+"You haven't really had it--just being kissed once, what does that
+amount to?"
+
+"Oh, Sarah, Sarah, that is what hurts me! I haven't really had it. I'm
+never going to. I'll just go halting like this all my life."
+
+"No, you won't," Sarah shook her head, piecing her own knowledge slowly
+into comfort for me. "You remember what I told you that time when you
+found out about Dean and Mr. O'Farrell? There's a kind of feeling that
+goes with acting that is like loving, only it isn't. I don't know where
+it comes from. Maybe it is what they call genius, but I know you can
+slide off from loving into it. That is what makes Jerry think he has to
+be in love all the time; it is a little stair he climbs up, and then he
+goes sailing off. You don't think Fancy Filette really does anything for
+him?"
+
+"Goodness, no; she hasn't a teaspoonful of brains!"
+
+"Well, then," she triumphed. "After a while his genius will be so strong
+in him that he won't need that sort of thing and he will think it
+ridiculous."
+
+"And you think that will come to me?"
+
+"It did come. You didn't have to be in love to begin," Sarah objected.
+
+"Sarah, I will tell you the truth! I was in love all the time, I didn't
+know with whom, but always wanting somebody ... trying to get through to
+something; trying to mate. That was it. Nights when I would do my best,
+and the house would be storming and cheering, I would look around
+for ... for somebody. And I would go to my room, and he wouldn't be
+there! I used to think Tommy would be He, I wanted him to be. I thought
+some day I would turn around suddenly and find him changed into ...
+whatever it was I wanted. But I know now he never could have been that.
+And all this summer ... I've heard it calling. I've walked and walked.
+Sometimes it was just around the corner, but I never caught up with it.
+And when I saw Helmeth Garrett, I _knew_!"
+
+I had leaned back out of the circle of our small shaded lamp to make my
+confession, but Sarah came forward into it the better to show me the
+condoning tenderness of her smile.
+
+"It's no use, Sarah, I'm no genius; I have to be in love like the rest
+of them." She shook her head gently.
+
+"You'll get across. Love would help; I wish you had it. But I'll confess
+to you; I had love and it only opened the door. There's something
+beyond, bigger than all men. You must reach out and lay hold of it. Oh,
+if it were love one needed, I should die--I should die!" I had never
+seen her so moved before.
+
+"Tell me, Sarah; I've always wanted to know."
+
+"I want you to know, but it isn't easy! I didn't know anything about
+love ... how could I the way I was brought up! My father was a Baptist
+preacher. I had been taught that it was wrong to let anybody ... touch
+you; and when he kissed me I felt as if he had the right...."
+
+"I know, I know!" I had been kissed that way myself.
+
+"How can anybody know? I loved him, and I was the only one of many. He
+left me without a word, ... like a woman of the street ... not looking
+backward." She got up and moved about the room, the thick coil of her
+rich brown hair slipping to her shoulders, and her bodily perfection
+under the thin dressing gown distracting me even from the passion of her
+speech. I had a momentary pang of sympathy with the delinquent Lawrence,
+I could see how a man might be afraid almost, of the quality of her
+beauty.
+
+"Sometimes," she said, "I think marriage is a much more real relation
+than people think--that something real but invisible happens between
+them so that even if they are parted they are never quite the same
+again. It is like having a limb torn from you; you ache always, in the
+part you have lost." I knew something of what that ache could be, but I
+could only turn my face up to hers that she might see my tears.
+
+"You have enough of your own to bear," she said. "I must not lay my
+troubles on you; but I wanted to tell you how I know it is not love that
+makes art. I was dying for love when Mr. O'Farrell put me to acting. I
+was bleeding so ... and suddenly I reached out and laid hold of Whatever
+is, and I found I could act. It was as if the half of me that had been
+torn away had been between me and It, and I laid hold of It. That's how
+I know." She came behind me, leaning on my chair, and I put up my hands
+to her.
+
+"Oh, Sarah, Sarah, help me to lay hold of it, too!" But for all her shy
+confidences, deep within I didn't believe her.
+
+Toward the first of September we went back to the city, Sarah to begin
+rehearsals for _The Futurist_, and I to take up the dreary round of
+manager's offices and dramatic agencies. The best that was offered me
+was poor enough, but it had a faint savour of a superior motive clinging
+to it. It was from a Mr. Coleman, an actor manager of the old,
+heavy-jowled Shakespearian type, who was projecting a classic revival
+with himself in all the tragic parts, and I signed with him to play
+_Portia_, _Cleopatra_, and the wife of _Brutus_. We had been busy with
+rehearsals about ten days when I had a telegram from Forester saying
+that mother had died that day and I was to come immediately.
+
+It was late Sunday evening when I received it and I hunted up the
+manager at the hotel.
+
+"I'm going," I told him.
+
+"Well, of course, your contract----"
+
+"I'm going anyway ... and I know the lines." He was as considerate, I
+suppose, as could be expected.
+
+"I can give you three days," he calculated.
+
+"Four," I stipulated.
+
+"Well, four," he grudged. That would allow two days for the funeral.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+As it turned out I was more than a month in Taylorville and so saved
+myself from the Coleman players for a more kindly destiny, though at the
+time it did not appear so. It grew out of my realizing, in Effie's first
+clasp of me, something more than our common loss, more than family,
+something that I felt myself answer to before we could have any talk
+together that did not relate to the funeral and the manner of my
+mother's death.
+
+They thought from little things that came to mind afterward, that she
+must have been prepared for it, but forebore to trouble them with a
+presentiment of what could not in any case have been much longer
+delayed: she had clung to them more and been still more loath to trouble
+them with her wants. The Saturday before, she had made Effie understand
+that she wished all the photographs of my father brought together,
+queer, little old daguerrotypes of him as a young man, a tintype of him
+in his volunteer soldier dress, and a large, faded photo of him as an
+officer leaning on his sword. She kept them by her and would be seen
+poring upon them, as though she tried to fix the identity of one about
+to be met under unfamiliar or confusing circumstances, though they did
+not think of this until afterward. The Sunday of her death Cousin Judd
+had come in to sit with her, as his custom was, an hour earlier than the
+morning service. He had read the day's lesson from the Bible and sung
+the hymn, and then after an interval Effie, who was busy about the back
+of the house, heard him sing again my mother's favourite hymn,
+
+    "Come, Thou fount of every blessing,
+    Tune my heart to sing Thy praise."
+
+and as he sung she saw the tears rolling down his face. So she turned
+her back on them and let them say their good-byes without her, though
+she had no notion how near the final parting was.
+
+Forester was dressing--he and Effie had taken turns at church-going ever
+since mother's stroke--and he was surprised to find that Cousin Judd had
+gone off without him. Mother clung to him when he went to kiss her
+good-bye; she struggled with her impotence, but they made out that it
+was not because she wanted him to stay at home with her; and for the
+first time since her illness she wished not to be propped up at the
+window where she could sign to the neighbours going by, but seemed to
+want greatly to sleep. Effie wheeled her into the corner of the sitting
+room; and a little later she noticed that mother's head had slipped down
+on the pillow as it did sometimes, past her power to lift it up again.
+So my sister straightened the poor head with a kiss and went back to
+getting the dinner. She moved softly because mother seemed asleep, but
+at last when she went as usual to tell her that Forester was visible at
+the end of the street, on the way home, she saw that the head had
+slipped down again, and this time as she lifted it up there was no life
+in it at all.
+
+One of the strange incidents of that morning, and yet not strange when
+you think how much they had been to one another, was that Cousin Judd,
+though he had started home directly after church, could not get there,
+but when he had driven a little way out of town, drawn by he knew not
+what unseen force, turned back and pulled up in front of our door just
+as the doctor who had been summoned hastily was saying that mother had
+been dead an hour.
+
+It was Monday morning when I arrived, and the funeral could not be until
+Tuesday, to allow time for the news to penetrate to all the distant
+country places from which my mother's relatives would be drawn to it,
+moved and anxious to come, though many of them had not seen her for a
+matter of years. I think I realized at once how it would be about my
+getting back to Chicago, especially when I spoke to Effie about it. She
+cried out and clung to me in a way that made me see that I stood for
+something more to her than just sisterliness. Without saying anything I
+wrote to Mr. Coleman that I should be detained a week or longer, and
+that though I hoped he would be able to save my place for me, I didn't
+really expect that he would.
+
+It was not in the Taylorville cemetery that we buried my mother, but in
+a little plot set aside from the old Judd place, along with the rest of
+the Wilsons, Judds, and Jewetts, those that had dropped back peacefully
+to their native sod, and those sent home from Gettysburg and Appomattox.
+It was a longish ride; from turn to turn of the country road, teams
+dropped into the procession that led out from town. On either side the
+woods blazed like the ranked Cherubim, host on host; great shoals of
+fiery leaves lay in the shallows of the burying ground. At the last,
+shaken by the light breeze that sprung up, little flamy darts from the
+oak whirled into the grave with her. They were to say in their own
+fashion that there was nothing more natural. I think my mother must have
+found it so.
+
+We had scarcely got home again, still sitting about, veiled and
+voluminous, when I was drawn out of grief to meet Effie's emergency. It
+was Almira Jewett who brought me face to face with it. Almira had taken
+off her things and was getting tea for us in her brisk, capable way.
+
+"Anyhow," she said, "I 'spose you'll stay with your sister until she
+gets sort of used to things." It flashed on me that what she was
+expected to get used to, was going on just as she had been without the
+excuse of my mother's needing her.
+
+"Oh, I'll stay till the breaking up," I met her promptly.
+
+"My land!" said Almira Jewett, "you talking of the breakin' up and your
+mother ain't hardly out of the house yet. They do say there's nothing
+like play-acting to make you nimble in your feelings." I knew of course
+that they would lay it to the defibricating influence of my profession
+that I should take the breaking up of my mother's home so lightly, but I
+had caught a brief hiatus in Effie's sobs and I realized that what the
+poor child was afraid of, was being hypnotized into a situation against
+which her natural good sense revolted. I was bracing myself against the
+tradition of filial obligation that I felt was going to be put in force
+against me, when suddenly help arrived from an unsuspected quarter.
+
+"I 'spose you're going with a troupe yet?" Cousin Lydia interposed, for
+the first time in her life, I believe, delivering herself of a
+conclusion. "It's a pity, because if you was anyways settled you could
+take Effie with you. Forester was a good son;" she ruminated on that for
+a while. "He was what you call a real model son, but I don't know as I
+want to see Effie married to him the same as your mother was." It gave
+me a shock to think that all these years she must have been seeing how
+things were.
+
+"She shan't," I assured her, "not if I have to stay with Forrie myself."
+I had thought a good many times what was to become of Effie. I couldn't
+take her with me, of course, but I wasn't in the least prepared to see
+her intrigued by the popular sentiment into becoming a mere figurehead
+for Forester's _rôle_ of provider. "Keeping up a home" they called it in
+Taylorville, as though the house and furniture and the daily habit of
+coming back to it, were the pivotal facts of existence.
+
+It almost seemed as if it might come to that. After the others were all
+gone and the night closed in on us three, the spirit of the dead came
+and stood among us. Effie wept in Forrie's arms and said that he should
+not be quite bereft, he should have her anyway.
+
+"You poor child ... you've got a brother left; you too, Olivia. You
+shan't want for a home while I live." That of course was the sort of
+thing Taylorville expected of him. It began to seem as if I might have
+to make good my word about staying with my brother to let Effie free. I
+believe he would have accepted that without even a suspicion of what I
+surrendered by it. If anything, he would have seen in it only another
+dramatization of his _rôle_ of dutifulness. That a woman had any
+preferred employment beside cushioning life for the males of her family,
+had not impinged on the consciousness of Taylorville.
+
+But the very next morning I awoke anew to the purpose of rescuing Effie,
+and to the recollection of an incident of the funeral, noted but not
+taken into the reckoning in the stress of more absorbing emotions.
+
+"Effie, wasn't that Mrs. Jastrow I saw at the cemetery yesterday with
+her head done up in a black veil--crape, too? I have just recalled it."
+Effie nodded.
+
+"One would have thought," I resented, "that she was one of the family."
+
+"Ah, that's it; she thinks she is."
+
+"One of the family? Oh! you don't mean that Forrie----Where was Lily
+then?" I demanded.
+
+"She wouldn't come, of course, not being recognized as one of the family
+and yet counting herself one."
+
+"But, explain ... how could she? I thought that was broken off long
+ago."
+
+"When mother was first taken," Effie agreed, "but you see she made such
+a dead set at him, she had to keep it up somehow; she couldn't admit
+that Forrie hadn't wanted her. So they made it up between them, Lily and
+her mother, I mean, that she and Forrie had really been engaged, but it
+had been broken off because Forrie couldn't marry so long as mother----"
+She broke off with tears again, remembering how mother was now.
+
+"That was two years ago; you don't mean to say they've kept it up all
+the time?"
+
+"They've had to. You see Lily hadn't been careful about not getting
+herself talked about with Forester. Oh, not scandal, of course, but you
+know how it is when a girl is crazy after a man; everybody gets to hear
+of it. And then they had to make so much of the engagement never coming
+to anything on mother's account, it quite spoiled Lily's chances, and
+you know, Forester...."
+
+"Oh, he was taken in by it, no doubt; it was something to sentimentalize
+over and be self-sacrificing about."
+
+"Well, of course, he couldn't quite abandon the poor girl; and she
+really _is_ fond of him."
+
+"And perfectly safe to philander with. Well, now that he has no one
+depending on him I suppose he will marry her!"
+
+"That's what is worrying me," protested Effie; "you see it all depends
+on whether I go on depending on him." She broke down over that. Mother
+hadn't wanted Forester to marry Lily Jastrow, and everybody by the mouth
+of Almira Jewett, had thought it was Effie's duty to keep him from it if
+she could.
+
+"And I could, by just staying on. It's mother's money in the business,
+your's and mine as much as his, and this house ... it's partly ours ...
+if we stay in it."
+
+"Well if you _want_ to...."
+
+Effie came over and sobbed on my shoulder, "Oh, I don't," she said. "I
+suppose it is horrid and selfish. I'm fond of Forrie, but I want to do
+things in the world ... like you have ... and I want to marry and have
+babies. Oh, oh!" She was quite overwhelmed with the turpitude of it.
+
+"You shall, you shall," I determined for her.
+
+"Oh, Olivia, I have _wanted_ you so. I knew you'd understand. It was all
+right so long as mother lived; I could do anything for her, but now I
+want--I want to be _me_!" I understood very well what that want was. But
+first off I had to explain to Effie why I couldn't take her with me. It
+was wonderful how she entered into my feeling about my work, and my lack
+of success in Chicago.
+
+"_Of course_, you ought to go to New York. You'll be a great tragic
+actress, Olive, I know _that_. You could go, too, if you could get your
+share out of the business. You could have mine and yours!" She glowed
+over it. But the fact was we couldn't get the money out of the business.
+As it stood we couldn't have sold the shop for what mother had put into
+it, and, besides, we should have had to deal first with Forester's
+conviction that he was taking care of our shares for us. I needn't have
+worried about Effie; she was too pretty and competent not to have
+arranged for herself. The principal and his wife drove over from
+Montecito to say that they would be glad to have her come back and
+finish the course interrupted within a few months of graduation by my
+mother's illness. And for her board and tuition she was to act as the
+principal's secretary. Within a year she wrote that she was engaged to
+their son.
+
+In the meantime I undertook to stop the capacious maw of Forrie's need
+of being important; and the only way I saw to do it, involved my
+surrender of any hope I had of finding my own release in what my mother
+had left us of my father's hard won savings. I shouldn't have had any
+compunction, so fierce was my own need of success, about forcing my
+brother's hand, but I meant definitely not to leave any gap in his life
+for Effie to be drawn back into. Before we had come to this point, the
+second afternoon after the funeral in fact, circumstances had begun to
+work for me. Effie and I, looking out of the window, saw Mrs. Jastrow
+coming along by the front fence with all her gentility spread, as it
+were, by the feeling she had of her call on us being a diplomatic
+function.
+
+"She's coming to see how we take it," Effie averred.
+
+"Her coming to the funeral as one of the family? Well, how do we take
+it, Effie?"
+
+"Mother couldn't bear the idea of it." Tears came into my sister's eyes;
+I could see the wings of self-immolation hovering over her.
+
+"Look here, Effie, you go and take home Mrs. Endsleigh's spoons." There
+had been so many out of town connections dropping in for a meal that we
+had been obliged to fall back on our nearest neighbour.
+
+"Lily's respectable, isn't she? and Forester has encouraged her. Well,
+you don't want to spoil the poor girl's life, do you?"
+
+"Oh," said Effie, "oh, Olivia!" I could see she was torn between
+compunction and admiration for my way of putting it on high moral
+grounds. I heard her counting out the spoons in the kitchen as I went to
+let Mrs. Jastrow in.
+
+I think she didn't know any more than Effie did, what to make of my
+manner of receiving her. She sat on the edge of a chair and snivelled a
+little into a handkerchief which was evidently her husband's, but it was
+chiefly, I could see, because she had come prepared to snivel and
+couldn't quickly adjust herself to my change of base.
+
+"Poor Lily," she moaned, "she thought such a lot of Mr. Lattimore's
+mother; but I tell her she must bear up."
+
+"She must indeed," I assured her. "Forester needs all the sympathy he
+can get just now." I could see her peeping over the top of her
+handkerchief, trying to guess what to make of that; but the sentimental
+was easy for her.
+
+"That's what I tell her; they'll have to comfort each other. Them poor
+young things, they'd ought to be together. But Lily's so sensitive she
+couldn't bear to put herself forward."
+
+"I'll tell Forrie you called," I assured her.
+
+Mrs. Jastrow fanned herself with her damp handkerchief; her poor little
+pretence broke quite down under my friendliness.
+
+"He's got to marry her," she whispered. "Lily's been talked about, and
+he's _got to_." I could guess suddenly what it meant to her to have
+reached up so desperately for something better for her daughter than she
+had been able to manage for herself, and to come so near not getting it.
+I was able to put something like sympathy into my voice when I spoke to
+Forester at supper.
+
+"Mrs. Jastrow called to-day. She says Lily isn't bearing up as she
+might. I suppose you ought to go and see her!"
+
+Effie's eyes grew round at me over the teacups, but after all Forrie
+didn't know what had passed between mother and me in regard to Lily. If
+I chose to take his relation to her as a matter of course, he couldn't
+object to it. We heard Forrie in his room changing his collar before he
+went back to the shop again.
+
+"He'll go to her to-night after he closes up," Effie told me. "It will
+end with her getting him."
+
+"So long as he doesn't get you----" But it was unfair to put ideas like
+that in Effie's head. "After all it is a very good match for him in some
+ways; she'll always look up to him, and that is what Forrie needs."
+
+It was natural to Effie to judge every situation by what it had for
+those concerned; she wasn't troubled as I was by the pressure of an
+outside ideal. By the end of a month, when I thought of going back to
+the city, it was tacitly understood that as soon as convenient Forester
+was to marry Lily Jastrow. He meant, however, to be fair with us both
+about the property; he had given us notes for our share, and expected to
+pay interest. The note wasn't negotiable, as I learned immediately, and
+the interest wasn't any more than Effie would need for her clothing. I
+felt that the jaws of destiny which had opened to let Effie out, had
+closed on me instead. I returned to Chicago early in November; my place
+with the Coleman players had long been filled, and there was nothing
+whatever to do.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+Jerry's play, which had had its premier while I was away, was going on
+successfully. One of the first items of news Sarah told me about him was
+that his wife was expecting another child, undertaken in the hope that,
+if she couldn't hold her husband's roving fancy, she could at least fix
+his attention on her situation. All that she had got out of it so far,
+was a reason for staying at home, which left Jerry the freer to bestow
+his society where it was most acceptable.
+
+"Does she know--Miss Filette, I mean--about the child."
+
+"Not unless Jerry has told her--which he'd hardly do." Sarah laughed a
+little, and that was not usual with her; she had very little humour.
+"Fancy is so up in the air about the success of the play, she thinks she
+inspired it. I imagine they'd feel it an indelicacy of Mrs. McDermott to
+have intruded her condition on their relation. Of course it is
+understood that there's nothing really wrong about it...."
+
+"It is wrong if his wife is made unhappy by it." I hadn't Sarah's reason
+for being lenient. "Somebody ought to speak to Jerry."
+
+"You might--he would listen to you. It is just because there is so
+little in it that it is so hard to deal with."
+
+I suppose I took to interfering in the McDermott's affairs because I had
+so little of my own to interest me. Besides, I was fond of Jerry and
+didn't see how he was to be helped by getting his family into a muddle.
+
+"But after all," Sarah reminded me, "it is his own wife and his own
+inspiration." It wasn't in me to tell her, even if I had understood it
+myself at the time, that the secret of my resentment was that it should
+be so accepted on all sides that one must choose between them. I wanted,
+oh, I immensely wanted, what Jerry was getting out of his relation to
+Miss Filette, but I wanted it free of the implication that my
+abandonment of my husband to the village dressmaker put me in anything
+like the same case.
+
+"The real trouble with you," Jerry told me, "is that you are trying to
+live in Chicago and Taylorville at the same time."
+
+Not being able to make any headway with him, I went to call on Miss
+Filette. I wasn't on terms with her that would admit of an assault on
+her confidence, I didn't know her well enough to call on her in any
+case, but I wasn't to be thwarted of good intention by anything so small
+as a breech of manners in doing it. It wasn't so much the offense of my
+undertaking it that counted, I found, as Miss Filette's determination
+not to hear anything that would ruffle the surface of her complacency. I
+had to drop plumb into my revelation out of the opportunity she made for
+me in the question, as to whether the play would or would not go on the
+road before Christmas.
+
+"I should hope so," I dropped squarely on her; "Jerry's wife needs him.
+There's a child coming in April."
+
+"Yes," said Miss Filette; she was giving me tea and she poised the
+second lump over my cup with an inquiring eyebrow. "Have you seen what
+we have done with the second act lately?"
+
+"Anyway," I said to myself as I went, "she knows. She can't skid over
+the facts as she has my telling her."
+
+But it was the certainty that, knowing, she kept right on with Jerry,
+that drove me back on Pauline and Henry Mills. I fled to them to be
+saved from what, in the only other society I had access to, fretted all
+my finer instincts; to be ricocheted by them again on to that reef of
+moral squalour upon which the artist and woman in me were riven asunder.
+
+What I should have done was to take my courage in my hands and have gone
+on from Taylorville to New York. But the most I was equal to was a fixed
+determination to accept anything which would take me nearer Broadway,
+which, even then, was to the player world all that the lamp is to the
+moth. In the meantime I had settled in two housekeeping rooms in a
+street that I wouldn't have dared to give to a manager as an address;
+one of those neighbourhoods where there are always a great many
+perambulators, and waste paper blowing about. There was never anything
+for me, in the frame of life called Bohemian, more than a picturesque
+way of begging the question of poverty. What I looked for in a lodging,
+was escape from the bedraggled professionalism which went on in what
+were called studios, by means of a cot bed, an oil stove, and a few
+yards of art muslin. That I hadn't managed it so successfully as I
+hoped, was made plain to me a few days after I had moved in, by the
+discovery of a card tacked on the opposite door, that read, "Leon
+Griffin, the Varieté." It was the same theatre at which Cecelia Brune
+was playing the chief attraction in song and dance. In the glimpses I
+had of Mr. Griffin in the dark hall going in and out, I was aware that
+he gave much the same impression of unprofitable use that was associated
+in my mind with the Shamrocks.
+
+All this time I kept going through the motions of looking for an
+engagement. Now and then some shining bubble of opportunity seemed to
+float toward me, to dissolve in thin air as soon as I put my hand out to
+it. One of these brought me to Cline and Erskine's waiting room on the
+day that Cecelia Brune elected to register her complaint against what
+she considered a slight of her turn at the Varieté. She flounced about
+more than a little, not to let the rest of us escape the inference that
+she was not used to being kept waiting. When she had hooked and unhooked
+her handsome furs for the fourth time, she introduced me to Leon
+Griffin, who except for the name, I shouldn't have recognized for my
+hall neighbour. It was like being slapped in the face with my own hard
+condition to have him crowded on me in that character before the whole
+roomful. Life seemed so to have beggared him. In broad day he looked the
+sort of a man who has failed to sustain himself in the man's world, and
+must reinforce his value with the favour of women. Little touches of
+effeminacy about his dress failed to take the attention away from its
+shabbiness. His hair had the traditional thespian curl in spite of being
+cropped short, to allow of various make-ups, one surmised, and his very
+blue eyes were in a perpetual state of extenuating the meagreness of his
+other features. Being ashamed of my shame at meeting him there, I began
+to be very nice to him. Cecelia, in spite of her magnificent raiment,
+perhaps on account of it, had been disposed to graciousness. She drew us
+together with a wave of her hand.
+
+"She ought to be doin' _Ophelia_ on Broadway," she introduced me
+handsomely; "wouldn't that get you!"
+
+"I saw you with the Hardings last year," Griffin assented, almost as
+though I might think it a liberty. "Where are you playing now?" He had
+the stamp of too many reverses on his face not to estimate mine at its
+proper worth. He had fine instincts too, for as soon as I told him that
+I was out of an engagement that season, he put himself on record quite
+simply. "My turn goes off next week--I'm trying to get Cline to put it
+on the circuit." When we came out of the office together he fell into
+step with me. One of the young women ahead of us made the shape of a
+bubble with her hands and blew it from her. "Pouff" she said. "There
+goes another of my chances." She laughed with a fine courage.
+
+"They all go through with it," Griffin affirmed. "There's Eversley----"
+I have forgotten which of the well-known incidents he related.
+
+"Eversley told me I might come to it. What made you think of him?" I
+demanded.
+
+"I saw his name in the paper; he's to play here this winter. He's a
+wonder."
+
+"He said wonderful things to me once." I had just recalled them.
+
+"They'll come true then. Eversley never makes a mistake. Why, I remember
+once----" He broke off as though he had changed his mind about telling
+me. I was wondering if I couldn't get rid of him by stopping in at
+Sarah's, when he broke out again suddenly.
+
+"To think of you being out of an engagement and a girl like Cecelia
+Brown--yes, I know her name is Brown, Cissy Brown of Milwaukee----"
+
+"I've always suspected it," I admitted, "but it is her looks of course,
+and the clothes; Cecelia has lovely clothes."
+
+"Well, so could you if...." He checked himself. "I don't mean to say
+anything against a lady...."
+
+"I've always suspected that, too," I admitted, "but one doesn't like to
+say it."
+
+"Well, you know what she gets--thirty-five a week. A girl doesn't wear
+diamond sunbursts on that."
+
+"Mr. Griffin, I wish you'd tell me what sort of man it is that gives
+diamond sunbursts to Variety girls: I've never seen any of them."
+
+"You have probably, but you don't know it. You meet their wives in
+society."
+
+"Henry Mills." I don't know what made me say it; the image of him came
+tripping along the surface of my mind and slid off my tongue without
+having more than momentarily perched there.
+
+"Is he in business downtown, and has he got a perfectly proper family
+and too many dinners under his vest?"
+
+"Mr. Mills's home life is ideal; but I didn't mean----"
+
+"Neither did I, but that's the type. They mostly have ideal families,
+but they couldn't live up to them if they didn't have Cecelia Brunes on
+the side.... I beg your pardon."
+
+He had looked up and caught me blushing a deep, painful red, but it
+wasn't on account of what he had intimated. I was blushing because of
+the discovery in myself of needs which, compared to the ideal of life I
+had set for myself, were as much of a defection as anything our
+conversation had suggested for Henry Mills. I was conscious in those
+days of a slow, steady seepage of all my forces toward desperation.
+
+"You'll have to take a company out for yourself," was Jerry's solution.
+"I'll write you a play. I've got a ripping idea--a man, with a gift, and
+two women, good women both of them--that's where I score against the
+eternal triangle--each of them trying to save him from the other and
+breaking him between them." Jerry's plays were never anything more than
+dramatizations of his immediate experience. "You and Sarah Croyden, you
+set each other off; I'll write it for both of you." He walked up and
+down in my little room with his hands in his pockets and his shining
+black hair rising like quills.
+
+"Jerry, how long will it take you to write that play? And how much will
+it cost to produce it?"
+
+"Ten thousand dollars," he answered to the last question. "About
+eighteen months if I go right at it."
+
+"And I've money enough to last me to the end of February. No," to his
+swift generous gesture. "You have to live eighteen months on yours--and
+another child coming." I made up my mind that I should have to speak to
+Pauline and Henry Mills.
+
+Greater than any mystery of creative art to me, is the mystery by which
+the recipients of its benefits manage to keep ignorant of its essential
+processes. I have never been able to figure to myself how Pauline and
+Henry escaped knowing that the creative mood, the keen hunger of which
+is more importunate than any need of food or raiment, was to be had for
+very little more than they spent fattening their souls on its choice
+products. For it is always to be bought; it is the distinction of genius
+as against talent, always to know in what far, unlikely market the
+precious commodity is to be bought. How was it that Henry escaped
+knowing that the appealing femininity which plays so large a part in the
+success of an actress with an audience of Millses, is largely the result
+of having been the object of that solicitious protection which it is
+supposed to provoke? With what, since it was agreed between Pauline and
+me that I was not to pay down on that counter what Cecelia and Jerry
+parted with cheerfully, was I ultimately to pay for it? Now that I had
+on all sides of me the witness of desperation, I began to be irritated
+at the way in which, in view of our long friendship, they accepted it
+for me.
+
+As the holiday season approached, without any change in my circumstances
+other than a steady diminution of my bank account, I came to the
+conclusion that the only possible move was toward New York and that I
+should have to ask Henry to advance me the money for it. In view of what
+came to me afterward it was a reasonable proposition, but I reckoned
+without that extraordinary blankness to the processes of art which is
+common to those most entertained by it.
+
+It was a day or two after Christmas, from which I had been excused by my
+recent bereavement, that I went out to dinner there with the
+determination to bring something to pass commensurate with their usual
+attitude of high admiration for and confidence in my gift. We had gone
+into the library after dinner, at least it was a room that went by that
+name, though I don't know for what reason except that Henry smoked there
+and the furniture was upholstered in leather, as in Evanston it was
+indispensable that all libraries should be.
+
+Here and there were touches that suggested that if Henry moved his
+income up a notch or two, Pauline's taste might not be able to keep pace
+with it. Henry warmed his back at the gas log and wished to know how
+things went with me.
+
+"As well as I could expect them _here_. I've made up my mind to try for
+New York as soon as I can manage it."
+
+"What's the matter with Chicago?" Henry's manner implied that whatever
+you believed about it, you'd have to show him.
+
+"Well, I'd have to be capitalized to do anything here the same as in New
+York, and the field there is larger." I went on to explain something of
+what the metropolis had to offer.
+
+"I guess the worst thing about Chicago is that you're out of a job.
+People don't get sore on a place where they are doing well."
+
+"No. They generally light out for a place where there are more jobs." I
+thought I should get on better if I took Henry in his own key, but he
+forged ahead of me.
+
+"If there's anything the matter with your acting, why don't you ask
+somebody?"
+
+"There's nobody to ask. Besides, there isn't anything the matter with
+it; the matter is with me."
+
+"Well, I must say I don't see the difference."
+
+"Oh!" I cried. I hadn't realized that they wouldn't just take my word
+for it. "It is because I am empty--empty!" I trailed off, seeing how
+wide I was of his understanding. I shouldn't have questioned Henry
+Mills's word about the capitalization of a joint stock company; and I
+resented their discounting my own statement of my difficulties. Pauline
+got hold of my hand and patted it. I wondered if it was because all her
+own crises were complicated with Henry Mills that she always thought
+that affectionateness was part of the answer.
+
+"It is only that, with all your Gift, Henry can't understand how you
+need anything else," she extenuated.
+
+"I need food and clothes," I blurted out; "pretty soon I shall need a
+lodging."
+
+"Oh, my dear!" Pauline was shocked at the indelicacy. I don't know if
+she didn't understand how poor I was, or if it was only the general
+notion of the sheltered woman, to find in complaint a kind of heresy
+against the institution by which they are maintained. "After all," she
+caught up with her accustomed moral attitude, "there's a kind of
+nobility in suffering for your art. It's what gives you your spiritual
+quality." I thought I recognized the phrase as one that was current in
+the women's clubs of that period. I took hold of my courage desperately.
+
+"Well, I'm offering you a chance to suffer two thousand dollars' worth."
+Pauline's tact was proof even against that.
+
+"You Comedy Child!" she laughed indulgently.
+
+"You're getting ideas," Henry burbled on cheerfully; "all these
+long-hairs and high-brows you've been associating with, they've filled
+you up. That friend of yours, McDermott, somebody had him to the club
+the other day, talking about the conservation of Genius. Nothing in it.
+Let them work for their money the same as other people, I say."
+
+"You know you didn't have any money to begin with," Pauline reminded me.
+I was made to feel it a consideration that she hadn't pressed the point
+that if I couldn't do again what I had done then, there was something
+lacking in the application. They must have taken my gesture of despair
+for surrender.
+
+"I guess you were just getting it out of your system," Henry surmised
+comfortably.
+
+It was not the first nor the last time that I was to come squarely up
+against the lay conviction that whatever might be known about the
+processes of art, it wasn't the artist that knew it. Later, when Henry
+took me out to the car, he came round to what had been back of the whole
+conversation.
+
+"I suppose you could use more money in your business; most of us could,"
+he advised me, "but you don't want to let people find it out. There's
+nothing turns men against a woman so much as to have her always thinking
+about money."
+
+It was a very cold night as I came down the side street to my door,
+deserted as a country road. The narrow footpath trodden in the pavement
+looked like the track of desolation, the cold flare of the lamps was
+smothered in sodden splashes of snow. There had been the feeling of
+uneasiness in the air that goes before a storm all that forenoon, and in
+the interval that I had been revaluing a lifelong friendship in terms of
+what it wouldn't do for me, it had settled down to a heavy clogging
+snow. I was startled as I turned in at the entry to find a man behind
+me. He had come up unsuspected in the soft shuffle and turned in with
+me.
+
+By the light that filtered through the weather-fogged transom I saw that
+he was Griffin of the Varieté. Now as I fumbled blindly at the latch he
+came close to me.
+
+"Beg pardon!" He had put out his hand over mine and turned the key for
+me.
+
+"My fingers are so cold," I apologized. I turned my face toward him with
+the stiffness of cold and tears upon it and there was an answering
+commiseration in his eyes. I reached out for the key and he took my hand
+in his, holding it to his breast with a movement of excluding human
+kindness. If the gesture was at all theatrical I did not feel it. I let
+him hold it there for a moment before I went in and shut the door.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+Depression, as well as the storm which held on heavily all night and the
+next day, kept me close, and the state of my coal bin kept me in bed
+most of the next day. Along late in the afternoon I was aroused from a
+lethargy of cold and crying, by Leon Griffin tapping at the door to know
+how I did. The snow by this time had settled down to a blinding drift,
+and the thermometer had fallen into an incalculable void of cold.
+Griffin was in his overcoat as though he had just come in or was just
+going out, though I learned later he had been sitting in it all day in
+his room. The impression it created of his being in the act of passing,
+led me to open my door to him, as I otherwise might not have done. A
+terrible, cold blast came in with him and a clattering of the shutters
+on the windward wall of the house. Outside, the day was falling dusk;
+there was no light in the room but the square blank of the window
+curtained by the sliding screen of snow, and my little stove which
+glowed like a carbuncle in its corner.
+
+"You're cozy here"--he put it as an excuse for lingering, for I hadn't
+asked him to have a chair--"you hardly feel the wind. On my side there's
+a trail of snow half across the room where the wind whips it in between
+the casings."
+
+Though he had come ostensibly to offer me a neighbourly attention, he
+was plainly in need of it himself; it was his last night at the Varieté
+and, between the storm and the depression of having nothing to turn to,
+he was coming down with a cold. I had him into my one easy chair and
+suggested tea.
+
+"I hardly slept any last night," he apologized over his second cup, "the
+shutter clacks so." I could hear it now like the stroke of desolation.
+
+That night when I heard him stamping off the snow in the hall, I had a
+hot drink for him, but when I saw him, by the rakish light of the hall
+lamp, wringing his hands with the cold before taking it, I insisted he
+should come on into my still warm room. I had to turn back first to
+light my own lamp and, in respect to my being in my dressing gown with
+my hair in two braids, to slip into my bedroom and experience, as I
+looked back at him through the crack in the door, the kind of softening
+a woman has toward a man she has made comfortable. The light of my lamp,
+which was shaded for reading, like a miniature calcium, brought out for
+me the frayed edge of his overcoat and all the waste and misuse of him,
+the kind of faded appeal that sort of man has for a woman; forlorn as he
+was, as he put the bowl back on the table, I was so much more forlorn
+myself that I was glad to have been femininely of use to him.
+
+Pauline wrote me to come out and stay with her during the protracted
+cold spell, but owing to the difficulty in delivery, the invitation
+failed to reach me until the severity of the weather was abated. In any
+case I was still too sore at what seemed to me the betrayal of my long
+confidence, to have been willing to have subjected myself to any
+reminders of it. And whatever kindness Pauline meant, it could hardly
+have done so much for me as Leon Griffin did by just needing me. It
+transpired that he had no stove in his room, and the heat from the
+register for which we were definitely charged in the rent, scarcely
+modified the edge of the cold. For the next two or three days we spent
+much of the time huddled over my stove. Snow ceased to fall on the
+second day, and nothing moved in our view except now and then the
+surface of it was flung up by the wind, falling again fountain-wise
+into the waste of the untrampled housetops that stretched from my window
+to the icy flat of the lake darkening under a dour horizon. Somehow,
+though I had never been willing to confess to my friends how poor I was,
+I made no bones of it with Griff, as I had heard Cecelia call him, a
+name that seemed somehow to suit the inconsequential nature of our
+relation better than his proper title. We frankly pooled our funds in
+the matter of food, which one or another of us slipped out to buy, and
+cooked on my stove. I took an interest in preparing it, such as I
+hadn't since the times when I imagined I was helping Tommy on the way to
+growing rich, and when the room was full of a warm savoury smell and the
+table pulled out from the wall to make it serve for two, we felt, for
+the time, restored to the graciousness of living. We fell back on the
+uses of domesticity, by association providing us with a sense of life
+going on in orderliness and stability. It came out for me in these
+moments that it is after all life, that Art needs rather than feeling,
+and that, to a woman of my capacity, was to be supplied not by innocuous
+intrigues like Jerry's but by the normal procedure of living. I believe
+I felt myself rather of a better stripe, to find it so in the domestic
+proceeding, though I do not really know that my necessity was any whit
+superior to Miss Filette's, except in offering the minimum possibility
+of making anybody unhappy by it. But because I knew my friends would
+think it ridiculous that I could lay hold of power again by so
+inconsiderable a handle as Leon Griffin, I suffered a corroding
+resentment. Griffin was getting up a new act for himself, and evenings
+as I helped him with it, I felt a faint stirring of creative power. When
+he had finished, I would take the shade off the lamp and render scenes
+for him from my favourite Elizabethan drama; and in the face of his
+unqualified admiration for me, I could almost act.
+
+Toward the end of the week as the cold abated, Mr. Griffin asked me to
+see a play in which some of his friends were playing; and Jerry being
+prodigal of favours, I responded with an invitation to "The Futurist." I
+hadn't mentioned Griff to Sarah, I never more than mentioned him to any
+of my friends, but I saw no reason why I should not speak of them to
+him, especially when they were so much upon the public tongue as Sarah
+was just then.
+
+"Croyden?" he said; "isn't that an unusual name?" He appeared to be
+puzzling over it. "I seem to remember a town somewhere by that name."
+
+"In New York," I told him. I was on the point of telling him how Sarah
+came by it, but an impulse of discretion saved me. I had seen "The
+Futurist" so many times now, that, once at the theatre, I occupied
+myself with looking at the audience and took no sort of notice of my
+escort until after Sarah's entrance near the close of the first act.
+
+"Well?" I laid myself open to compliments for my friend. I was startled
+by what I saw when I looked at him. He had shrunk away into the corner
+of his seat farthest from me, like a man whose garment had fallen from
+him unawares. The stark naked soul of him fed visibly upon her bodily
+perfection; Sarah's beauty took men like that sometimes when they were
+able to see it--there were those who thought her merely nice-looking. I
+could see his tongue moving about stealthily to wet his dry lips. I
+couldn't bear to look at him like that; it seemed a pitiful thing for a
+man to ache so with the beauty of a woman he had long ceased to deserve;
+it was as though he had laid bare some secret ache in me.
+
+Coming out of the theatre he surprised me with a knowledge of Sarah's
+affairs. He knew that she had begun with O'Farrell.
+
+"I played with him myself," he admitted; "that was before
+Miss--Miss----"
+
+"Croyden," I supplied; "that was the town she came from; I shouldn't
+have told you except that you seem to know."
+
+"I was expecting another name. Wasn't she--wasn't she married once? A
+fellow by the name of Lawrence."
+
+"Oh, well, you may call it married. He was a cur."
+
+"You can't tell me anything about him worse than I know myself." From
+the earnestness of his tone I judged that he had suffered something at
+the hands of Lawrence. "But I'll say this for him, he didn't stay with
+the other woman; she followed him and found him, but he wouldn't stay
+with her."
+
+"I don't see that that proves anything except that he was the greater
+scoundrel. The other woman was his wife."
+
+"It proves that he loved Miss Croyden best--that he couldn't bear the
+other woman after her." I thought it was no use matching ethical ideals
+with him and I let the matter drop. It came back to me next day that if
+he had been with O'Farrell in Lawrence's time, he might have known
+something of the other Shamrocks. I meant to ask him about it in the
+morning, but put it off as I observed that the recollection of it seemed
+to have stirred him past the point of being able to sleep. He was pale
+in the morning, and the rings under his eyes stood out plainly; he had
+the whipped look of a man who has been so long accused of misdemeanour
+that he comes at last to believe he has done it. I could see the impulse
+to confess hovering over him, and the hope that I might find in his
+misbehaviours the excusing clue which he was vaguely aware must be
+there, but couldn't himself lay hands on. I suppose souls in the Pit
+must have movements like that--seeking in one another the extenuations
+they can't admit to themselves.
+
+We didn't, however, strike the note of confidence until it was evening.
+Griffin kept up the form of looking for an engagement, which occupied
+his morning hours, and in the afternoon Jerry came in to see how I had
+come through the cold spell, and to win my interest with his wife to
+consent to his going as far as St. Louis with "The Futurist." I forget
+what reasons he had for thinking it advisable, except that they were all
+more or less complicated with Miss Filette.
+
+"But, heavens, Jerry, haven't you ever heard of the freemasonry of
+women? How can you think my sympathies wouldn't be with your wife?
+Especially in her condition."
+
+"It's only for a week; and, you know, except for her fussing, she is
+perfectly well. And look here, Olivia, you know exactly why I have to
+have--other things; why I can't just settle down to being--the plain
+head of the family." His tone was accusing.
+
+"I know why you _think_ you have to. Honest, Jerry, is it so imperative
+as all that?"
+
+"Honest to God, Olivia, unless I'm ... interested ... I can't write a
+word." His glance travelling over my dull little room and makeshift
+furniture, the cheap kerosene lamp, the broken hinge of the stove. "You
+ought to know," he drove it home to me. I felt myself involved by my
+toleration of Griffin in a queer kind of complicity.
+
+"What do you want me to do?"
+
+"Tell her you think it is to the advantage of the play for me to be
+there in St. Louis for the opening. It's always good for an interview,
+and that's advertising." After all I suppose I wouldn't have done it if
+I hadn't found his wife in a wrapper at four o'clock in the afternoon,
+when I went out there. If she wouldn't make any better fight for
+herself, who was I to fight for her? And as Jerry said, for him to be
+with the play, meant advertising.
+
+I talked it over with Griffin that evening, as we sat humped over my
+tiny stove before the lamps were lighted. Outside we could see the roofs
+huddling together with the cold, and far beyond, the thin line of the
+lake beaten white with the wind in a fury of self-tormenting. It made me
+think of poor little Mrs. Gerald under the lash of her husband's
+vagaries.
+
+"I can't help think that she'd feel it less if she made less fuss about
+it," I protested. Griffin shook his head.
+
+"It's a mercy she can do that; it's when you can't do anything it eats
+into you."
+
+I reflected. "There was a woman I knew who looked like that. O'Farrell's
+leading lady; she was jealous and there was nothing she could do. She
+looked gnawed upon!"
+
+"Miss Dean, you mean?"
+
+"I forgot you said that you knew her." I wanted immensely to know how he
+came to be mixed up with her. "She was jealous of me, but there was no
+cause. How well did you know her?"
+
+"I ... she ... I was married to her." His face was mottled with
+embarrassment; it occurred to me that his confusion must have been for
+his complicity in the fact of their not being married now, but he set me
+right. "I oughtn't to have told it on her, I suppose. She married me to
+go on the stage. I was boarding at her mother's and I couldn't have
+afforded to marry unless she had. You don't know how handsome she was. I
+knew she couldn't act.... I can't myself, but I know it when I see it.
+Her father had been an actor of a sort; he had taught her things, and I
+thought I could pull her along."
+
+"She _has_ got on." I let the fact stand for all it was worth.
+
+"Yes, she had something almost as good as acting ... she could get hold
+of people."
+
+"She had O'Farrell. Was it on his account you separated?"
+
+"Long before that. You see she could handle the managers in her own
+interest, but she didn't know what to do with me. So I--I got out of her
+way." Griffin's clothes were too loose for him, and his hair, which
+wanted trimming, disposed itself in what came perilously near to being
+ringlets, accentuating the effect of his having been shrivelled, and
+shrunk within the mark of his capacity. There was a certain shame about
+him as he made this admission, that made me feel that though to leave
+his wife free to seek her own sort of success had been a generous thing
+to do, it was all he could do; his moral nature had suffered an
+incurable strain.
+
+"Griff, did they tell you when you were young, that love was all bound
+up with what you should do in the world and what you could get for it?"
+
+"They never told me anything; I had to find it out."
+
+"Jerry too; he thought he was going to have a graceful, docile creature
+to keep him in a perpetual state of maleness. I should have thought
+you'd have left the stage after that," I said, reverting to the personal
+instance.
+
+"I ought to have, but somehow I kept feeling her; even when I wasn't
+thinking of her I could feel her somewhere pulling me. It was like
+living in the house where some one has died, and you keep thinking
+they're just in the next room and you don't want to go away for fear
+you'll lose them altogether."
+
+"I understand."
+
+The afternoon light had withdrawn into the bleak sky without
+illuminating it. I threw open the stove for the sake of the ruddy light,
+and the intimacy of our sitting there drew me on to counter confession.
+
+"It's like that with me all the time," I said, "only there hasn't really
+been anybody. Sarah says there doesn't have to be anybody; that we only
+think so because we have felt it that way once. She thinks it is
+just ... Personality ... whatever there is that we act to."
+
+"Well, I know you have to have it, anyway you can get it."
+
+"O'Farrell used to call it feeling your job. I wonder where he is now."
+So the talk drifted off to the perpetual professionalism of the
+unsuccessful, to incidents of rehearsals and engagements. I believe it
+would have been good for me to have run my mind in new pastures, but
+there was nobody to open the gates for me.
+
+I said as much to Sarah the very next time I saw her; it seemed a way of
+getting at what I hadn't yet told her, that I was within a week or two
+of the end of my means. I had the best of reasons for not calling my
+case to her attention, in the readiness with which she offered herself
+to my necessity.
+
+"You must go to New York of course; I've three hundred dollars, and I
+could send you something every month----" I cut her off absolutely.
+
+"I'd rather try Cecelia Brune's plan first," I assured her.
+
+"Not while you have me;" she was firm with me. "Besides, you don't
+really know that Cecelia----"
+
+"Didn't buy her diamond sunburst on thirty-five a week!" I told her all
+that Griffin had said. Sarah looked worried.
+
+"I'll tell you about the diamonds. About a year ago, while you were with
+the Hardings, she got into trouble. Oh, she loved him as much as she was
+able! He gave her the diamonds; but Cecelia cared. And then when the
+trouble came, he deserted her. That's what Cecelia couldn't understand.
+She had never given anything before, and she didn't realize that that
+had been her chief advantage. It gave her a scare."
+
+But in spite of Sarah's confidence in Cecelia's bitter experience
+keeping her straight, I could see that she had taken what Griffin had
+told me to heart. A day or two later she referred to the matter again.
+
+"If she goes over the line once, and doesn't have to pay for it, she is
+lost." She was standing at my window looking out over the roofs and
+chimneys cased in ice, and she might, for all the mark her profession
+has left on her, been looking across the pasture bars. I was irritated
+at her detachment, and her interest, in the face of my own problem, in
+an affair so unrelated as Cecelia Brune's.
+
+"Why do you care so much?"
+
+"You'd care too, if you had seen as much of her; it's like watching a
+drowning man: you don't stop to ask if he's worth it before you plunge
+in!"
+
+"I can't swim myself," I protested.
+
+I didn't want to be dragged in, rescuing Cecelia; I had myself to save
+and wasn't sure I could do it. It was after this talk, however, that
+Griff, who still hung about the Varieté from habit, told me that Sarah
+had fallen into the way of stopping to pick up Cecelia on her way home
+from her own theatre. He thought it a futile performance.
+
+"Nothing can stop that kind; they don't always know it, but that's what
+draws them to the stage in the first place. It's a kind of
+what-do-you-call-it, going back to the thing they were a long time ago."
+
+"Atavism," I supplied; I thought it very likely. All the centuries of
+bringing women up to be toys must have had its fruit somehow. Cecelia
+was made to be played with; she wasn't serviceable for anything else.
+And what was more, I didn't care to be identified with her even in the
+Christian attitude of a rescuer. I said as much to Sarah one evening
+about a week later, when I had gone with Jerry to give my opinion of
+some changes in the cast, preparatory to going on the road with his
+play, and in the overflow of his satisfaction at the way the audience
+rose to them, he had asked me to go to supper with him. Then as Sarah
+joined us and the spirit of the crowd caught him, pouring along the
+street, bright almost as by day and with the added brightness of evening
+garments, Jerry, always open to the infection of the holiday mood,
+proposed that for once we stretch a point by going to supper at
+Reeves's. Sarah and I demurred as women will at such a proposal from a
+man whose family exigencies are known to them, but Sarah found a
+prohibitory objection in a promise she professed to have made, to go
+around for Cecelia on her way home, which Jerry promptly quashed by
+including her in the invitation. I protested.
+
+"Supper at Reeves's is quite enough of an adventure for one time.
+Cecelia paints."
+
+"Not really," Sarah protested. "It's only that she uses so little
+make-up that she doesn't think it necessary to take it off."
+
+"All the better," insisted Jerry. "I never did take supper at Reeves's
+with a painted lady, and I'm told it is quite one of the things to do."
+
+I let it pass rather than spoil his high mood. It was not more than
+three blocks to the Varieté, and at the stage door Sarah insisted on
+getting out herself.
+
+"Why did you let her?" I protested to Jerry.
+
+"Because it will please her, and Miss Brune will be gone; Sarah doesn't
+realize how late we are." I could see her returning through the fogged
+glass of the stage door.
+
+"Cecelia's gone! The man said she was going to Reeves's too; we can pick
+her up there."
+
+"Oh," I objected, "I can stand Cecelia, but I draw the line at her
+gentleman friends. She didn't go there alone, I fancy."
+
+"We'll have a look at him, anyway, before we give him the glad hand,"
+Jerry temporized.
+
+The cab discharged us into the press of black-coated men and
+bright-gowned women that at that hour poured steadily into the anteroom
+of Reeves's, which was level with the pavement, divided from it by a
+screen of plate glass and palms. Beyond that and raised by a few steps,
+was the palm room, flanked on either side by dressing rooms; and opening
+out back, the great revolving doors, muffled with crimson curtains, that
+received the guests and sorted them like a hopper, according to the
+degree of their resistance to the particular allurements of Reeves's.
+There was a sleek, satin-suited attendant who swung the leaves of the
+door at just the right angle that inducted you to the public café, or to
+the corridor that led to private rooms, and was famed never to have made
+a mistake. Jerry dared us hilariously as we went up the steps, to put
+his discrimination to the test.
+
+"You and I alone then; Olivia's black dress would give us away," Sarah
+insisted.
+
+"I want you to stay here and watch for Cecelia," she whispered to me; "I
+must see her; I _must_."
+
+Her going on with Jerry would give her an opportunity to look through
+the café; if Cecelia hadn't already arrived, I would be sure to see her
+come in with the crowd that broke against the bank of palms into two
+streams of bright and dark, proceeding to the dressing rooms, and
+returning by twos and threes to be swallowed up by the hopper turning
+half unseen behind its velvet curtains. I slipped behind a group of
+bright-gowned women waiting for their escorts under the palms. I was
+hypnotized by the movement and the glitter; I believe I forgot what I
+was looking for; and all at once she was before me.
+
+The theatrical quality of Cecelia's prettiness and the length of her
+plumes would have picked her out anywhere even without the blackened rim
+of the eyelids and the air she had always of having just stepped into
+the spot light.
+
+She had stationed herself, with her professional instinct for effect,
+just under the Australian fern tree, waiting for her escort, and in the
+moment it took me to gather myself together he joined her. I had come up
+behind Cecelia and was brought face to face with him; it wasn't until he
+had wheeled into step with her that he saw me and his face went mottled
+all at once and settled to a slow purple. Cecelia was magnificent.
+
+"Oh, you here! How de do!" She slipped her hand under her escort's arm
+and sailed out with him. I caught the glint of the brass-bound door
+under the curtains. I don't know how long I stood staring before I
+started after her, to be met by the leaves of the revolving door which,
+reversing its motion, projected Sarah and Jerry into the palm room
+beside me.
+
+"I have been all over the café----" Sarah began.
+
+"Didn't you meet her?"
+
+"In the café? I was just telling you ..."
+
+"No, no. In the corridor, just now; they went through."
+
+"But they couldn't," urged Sarah. "I was standing at the door of the
+café with Jerry ..." The truth of the situation began to dawn on her.
+
+"There's such a crowd, of course you missed her." Jerry began to build
+up a probability by which we could sustain Sarah through the supper
+which followed. We all of us talked a great deal as people will when
+they are anxious not to talk of a particular thing. When we were in the
+dressing room again, putting on our wraps, Sarah turned on me.
+
+"She wasn't in the café at all," she declared.
+
+"I never said she was. I said she went through into the corridor." In
+the silence I could feel Cecelia dropping into the pit.
+
+"Did you know the man?"
+
+I nodded. "It was Henry Mills!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+Before I had an opportunity to talk the incident over with Sarah, she
+had seen Cecelia.
+
+"She is perfectly furious with you," she reported. "She hasn't heard
+from Mr. Mills since, and she thinks it is on your account; that you
+have taken steps for breaking it off."
+
+"Well, if she admits there was something to break off ... I tell you,
+Sarah, you are fretting yourself to no purpose, the girl had been there
+before."
+
+"I'm afraid so." Sarah's taking it so much to heart was a credit to her,
+but I was more curious than commiserating.
+
+"Tell me, what is in the mind of a girl when she does things like that?
+What does she get out of it?"
+
+"Excitement, of course; the sense of being in the stir, and the feeling
+of being protected. She says Mr. Mills has been kind to her. It is odd,
+but she seems to think it is all right so long as it is going on; it is
+only when it is broken off she can't bear it. That is why she is so
+angry at you."
+
+"There might be something in that," I conceded. "When it is broken off
+she is able to realize how cheap and temporary it has been; while it is
+going on she can justify it on the ground that it is going on forever.
+That _would_ justify it, I suppose." I did not know how I knew this, but
+lately I had discovered in myself capacities for understanding a great
+many things of which I had had no experience. What concerned me was not
+Cecelia's relation to the incident.
+
+"Whatever am I going to do about going there again, to Pauline's, I
+mean?"
+
+"You can't tell!"
+
+"And I can't go there and not tell. I've got to choose between deceiving
+Pauline and condoning Henry, and I've no disposition to do either."
+Sarah thought it over.
+
+"There is only one thing you can do. You'll simply have to go to New
+York."
+
+"For a great many reasons besides. You needn't tell me that. But how?
+How?"
+
+"You know what I offered----"
+
+"What I refused. It is out of the question. Don't speak of it."
+
+"I suppose after this you couldn't ask the Millses?"
+
+"Sarah ... I did ask."
+
+"Well?" All her interest hung upon the interrogation.
+
+"They told me it was good for my spiritual development to suffer these
+things." We faced one another in deep, unsmiling irony. "Sarah, what do
+you suppose it costs a man for supper and a private room at Reeves's?"
+
+"Don't!" she begged. "It's only a step from that to Cecelia."
+
+"Yes; I remember she said that men never afforded protection to women
+except for value received."
+
+"You must go to New York," Sarah reiterated. "You must!"
+
+The truth was I had never told Sarah exactly how poor I was.
+
+In the end I let her go away without telling; at the worst I thought I
+might borrow from Jerry, who had given up the notion of going to St.
+Louis, largely no doubt because I had failed to back him up in it
+completely, and then just at the end changed his mind and went anyway. I
+knew nothing about it until Jerry wrote me from Springfield, for I had
+grown shy of going there where all Mrs. McDermott's conversation was set
+like a trap to catch me in something that would convict Jerry of
+misdemeanour. Jerry asked me to visit her in his absence, but I put it
+off as long as possible. I had to settle first about going to Pauline's.
+I arranged to spend the afternoon there, meaning to come away before
+dinner and so by leaving Henry to discover my attitude in the
+circumstance of my having been there without destroying his home, open
+the way to my meeting him again without embarrassment. To do that I
+should have left the house before the persuasive smell of the dinner
+began to creep up the stairs into the warm, softly lighted rooms, but
+from the beginning of my visit, Pauline, in order that I might not feel
+her failure to put her affection more cogently, had wound me about as
+with a cocoon of feminine devices, from which I hadn't been able to
+extricate myself earlier. I am not blaming her, I am not sure, indeed,
+seeing how completely she justified herself to Henry Mills by what she
+had to offer, that I had any right to expect her to understand how
+completely her playful and charming affectionateness failed of any
+possible use to me. But I felt myself so far helpless in the presence of
+it, that I stayed on until the smell of the roast unloosened all the
+joints of my resolution. I hadn't realized how hungry I was until I
+found myself at a point where what Henry might think of me became
+inconsiderable before the possibility of my being put out of the house
+before dinner was served.
+
+At the same time I could have wept at the indignity of wanting food so
+much. I remember to this day the wasteful heaping of the children's
+plates, and my struggle with the oblique desire to smuggle portions of
+my helping home to Griff, who looked even more of a stranger than I to
+soup and fish and roast, to say nothing of dessert.
+
+It wasn't until we had got as far as the salad that I had leisure to
+observe Henry grow rather red about the gills as he fed, and speculate
+as to how far it was due to his consciousness that I could bring down
+the pillars of his home with a word, and didn't intend to.
+
+There was nothing said during dinner about my prospects or the stage in
+general, but when Henry took me out to the car about nine o'clock, he
+cleared his throat several times as though to drag the subject up from
+the pit of his stomach, where it must have lain very uneasily.
+
+"You know," he began, "I've been thinking about that scheme of yours of
+going to New York. I am inclined to think there is something in it."
+
+"I haven't thought about it for a long time," I told him, which was only
+true in so far as I thought of it as a possibility.
+
+"It would freshen you up a whole lot," Henry insisted. "Everybody needs
+freshening. I have been taking a little stir about myself." So that was
+the way he wished me to think of his relation to Cecelia!
+
+"I've given it up," I insisted.
+
+We were standing under the swinging arc light in a bare patch the wind
+had cleared of the fine, white February grit. Little trails of it blew
+up under foot and were lost among the wind-shaken shadows. I could see
+Henry's purpose bearing down on me like the far spark of the approaching
+trolley.
+
+"I wouldn't do that," he advised. "It looks like pretty good business to
+me. You'd have to stay there some time to learn the ropes and if a few
+hundred dollars----"
+
+"I've given it up," I said again. The car came alongside and Henry
+helped me on to it.
+
+"If you were at any time to reconsider it, I hope you will let me
+know----" The roar of the trolley cut him off.
+
+I knew I was a fool not to have accepted the sop to my discretion; I
+don't know for what the Powers had delivered Henry Mills into my hands,
+if it wasn't to get out of his folly what his sober sense refused me.
+Without doubt there are some forms of integrity that, persisted in,
+cease to be a virtue and become merely a habit; I could no more have
+taken Henry Mills's money than I could have gone to New York without it.
+I went home shivering to my fireless little room. I put on my nightgown
+over my underwear and my dressing gown over that, and cried myself to
+sleep.
+
+It was a day or two later that I recalled that Jerry had asked me to go
+out and see his wife, and I thought if I must ask Jerry for help, it
+would be no more than prudent for me to do so, but I wasn't in the least
+prepared as I went up the path, from which the snow of the week before
+had never been cleared, to find the house shut and barred, and no smoke
+issuing from it. I made my way around to the kitchen door to try to
+discover some sign which would give me a clue to the length of time it
+had been deserted, if not the reason for it.
+
+While I was puzzling about among the empty milk bottles and garbage
+cans, a neighbour woman put her head out of a nearby window and
+announced the obvious fact that Mrs. McDermott wasn't in.
+
+"But in her condition----" I protested as though my informant had been
+in some way responsible for it.
+
+"Well, if her own mother's isn't the best place for a woman in her
+condition!... Three days ago," she answered to my second question. Mrs.
+McDermott's mother lived in Peoria, and I knew that when Jerry left
+there had been no such understanding, but as lingering there ankle deep
+in the dry snow didn't seem to clear the affair, I undertook to rid
+myself of a sense of blame by writing all that I knew of it to Jerry
+within the hour. It was the third day after that he came storming in on
+me like a man demented. He had been to Peoria immediately on receipt of
+my letter and his wife had refused to see him. It hardly seemed a time
+for indirection.
+
+"Jerry, what have you done?" I demanded.
+
+"Nothing--not a thing." I waited. "There was a fool skit in one of the
+St. Louis papers," he admitted. "The fool reporter didn't know I was
+married."
+
+"It was about you and Miss Filette?" He nodded.
+
+"She had bought all the St. Louis papers," he said, meaning his wife.
+
+"Well, that was natural; she wanted to read the notices; she was always
+proud of you."
+
+"She believed them too," he groaned. "And she's talked her mother over.
+They wouldn't even let me see the children." He put his head down on my
+table and sobbed aloud. I thought it might be good for him, but by and
+by my sensibilities got the better of me.
+
+"Would it do any good if I were to write?"
+
+"You? Oh, they think you're in it ... a kind of general conspiracy. You
+know you said that--that one of the things nobody had a right to deny an
+artist was the source of his inspiration."
+
+"Jerry! I said what you asked me." I was properly indignant too, when I
+had been so right on the whole matter. Besides, as Jerry had written
+little that winter except some inconsiderable additions to his play, I
+was rather of the opinion that he measured the validity of his passion
+by its importunity, rather than its effect on the sum of his production.
+"Besides, I told you you would never get your wife to understand."
+
+"If she would only be sensible," he groaned.
+
+"She isn't," I reminded him; "you didn't marry her to be sensible, but
+for her imagined capacity to go on repeating the tricks by which Miss
+Filette keeps you complacent with yourself. The trouble is, marriage and
+having children take that out of a woman."
+
+"An artist ought never to marry. I will always say that."
+
+I began to wonder if that were true, if Cecelia Brune were not after
+all the wiser. We beat back and forth on the subject for the time that I
+kept Jerry with me. The evening of the second day came a telegram.
+Jealousy tearing at the heart of poor little Mrs. McDermott had torn
+away the young life that nestled there.
+
+Jerry wrote me later that the baby had breathed and died and that his
+wife was likely to be ill a long time. In view of the extra expense
+incurred, I didn't feel that I ought to ask him for the loan I was now
+so desperately in need of.
+
+It was about this time that Griffin and I began to avoid one another
+about meal time. I have read how wild animals in sickness turn their
+backs on one another; one must in unrelievable misery ... we dodged in
+and out of our hall rooms like rabbits in a warren. And then suddenly we
+would meet and walk along the streets together, mostly at night when the
+alternate flare of the lamps and the darkness and the hurrying half-seen
+forms, numb the sense like the flicker of light on a hypnotist's screen,
+and we moved in a strange, incommunicable world out of which no help
+reached us. We saw women go by with the price of our redemption flashing
+at their breasts or in their hair. We saw men hurried, overburdened with
+work, and there was no work for us. In our own land we were exiled from
+the community of labour and we sighed for it more than the meanest
+Siberian prisoner for home. And then suddenly communication seemed to
+be reëstablished. Effie for no reason sent me half of the rent money. "I
+don't need it here, and I think maybe I shall get more out of it by
+investing it in you," she wrote. She had always such a way of making the
+thing she did seem the choice of her soul. I bought meat and vegetables
+and invited Griff to dinner. He took me that night to that sort of
+dreary entertainment known as musical comedy. He could often get tickets
+and it was a way of spending the evening that saved fuel. As we tramped
+back through the chill, trying for an effect of jocularity in his voice,
+so that he might seem to have made a joke in case I shouldn't like,
+Griff said to me.
+
+"I suppose you wouldn't go with a musical comedy?"
+
+"My dear Griff," I answered him in the same tone, "I'd go with a flying
+trapeze if only it paid enough."
+
+"I'm acquainted with Lowe, the tenor. I've been thinking I'd ask
+him----" We were as shy of speaking of an engagement as though it were
+wild game to be scared away by the mere mention of it.
+
+There was no reason why Griffin shouldn't have succeeded in musical
+comedy, he had a fairish voice and had turned his gift as many times as
+the minister's wife in Higgleston used to turn her black silk. It was
+not more than two days or three after that, as I was coming back to my
+cold room in the twilight--I had spent the day in the public library on
+account of the heat--and as I was fumbling at the lock as I had been
+that first evening he had spoken to me, I heard Leon Griffin come up the
+stair three steps at a time, and I knew before I heard it in his voice,
+that the times had turned for him. I struck out fiercely against a
+sudden blankness that seemed to swim up to the eyes and throat of me.
+
+He was trembling too as he came into the room.
+
+"Olive," he cried, "Olive, I've turned the trick. I'm going with the
+'Flim-Flams.'" That was the wretched piece we had seen together. He had
+never called me by my name before, and I had no mind to correct him. In
+the dusk he ran on about his engagement; they would go on the road
+presently and settle for the summer in some city. I heard him speak far
+from me. I was down, down in the pit of the cold room with the shabby
+furniture and the bleak light that disdained it from the one high
+window.
+
+"Don't take off your things," I heard him say. "I came to get you. We'll
+have a blow-out somewhere. Olive, Olive!" His quick sympathy came out,
+and the excusing charm. "Oh, my dear, you're crying!"
+
+"Griff, you're leaving me." It was as if I had accused him. I sank down
+in a chair; I was dabbling at my eyes and trying to get my veil off with
+cold fingers.
+
+"Not if you feel that way about it." He came and put his arms about me
+and constrained me until I leaned against his body. I knew what he was,
+what a man of that stamp must be feeling and thinking, and, knowing, I
+permitted it. I was crying still, I think ... his hands came fumbling
+under my veil ... presently he kissed me.
+
+"Olivia?"
+
+"Well, Griff!"
+
+"You know--it is for you to say if I shall leave you."
+
+"You mean that you will give up ... but how can you, Griff; it is the
+only thing that's been offered." We were sitting still on the low cot in
+my room and there was no light but the dull glow of the stove and the
+last trace of the day that came in at the window. We had not been out to
+dinner yet, and Griffin's arm was around me. I could feel it slack a
+little now as if he definitely forebore to constrain me.
+
+"I mean, Lowe could get you a place in the chorus."
+
+"But, Griff, I can't sing."
+
+"You can sing enough for that, and Lowe would get you the place if--if
+you belonged to me." I knew exactly what this implied, but no start
+responded to it. The nerve of propriety was ached out.
+
+"Of course I know I'm not in your class," Griff was going on. "I
+wouldn't do such a thing as ask you to marry me. But I'm awfully fond
+of you ... and you're up against it."
+
+"Yes, Griff, I'm up against it."
+
+"Your fine friends ... what would they do for you?"
+
+"Nothing whatever."
+
+"Well, then ... you needn't go under your own name, and this is a
+chance; you could live and maybe get somewhere. Lowe told me he meant to
+strike for Broadway. You aren't insulted, are you?"
+
+"No, I'm not insulted." Curiously that was true. I was drunk and shaking
+inside of me; I seemed to be poised upon the dizzying edge, but I was
+neither angry nor insulted.
+
+"And I'd never come back on you if you got your chance for yourself ...
+honest to God, Olive. I've had my lesson at that. You believe me, don't
+you?"
+
+I believed him. I hadn't any sense whatever of the moral values of the
+situation. It was too desperate for that.
+
+"I guess I ought to tell you ... I'm a bad sort ... bad with women.
+After I knew that my--that Miss Dean didn't want me, I didn't care what
+became of me. There was a woman in the company ... she liked me, and I
+thought it would give Laura a chance. That was what the divorce was
+about. I thought I could make it up to the other woman by marrying her.
+But that didn't work either." He was silent a while, forgetting perhaps
+that he had begun to explain himself to me. "There's a way you've got to
+like a person to live with them ... and, anyway, I'm not asking you to
+marry me." He got as much satisfaction out of that as if it were a
+superior abnegation.
+
+"You've got to decide, right away," Griffin urged me.
+
+"I must have a day to think," I insisted, not because I hoped that
+anything would interfere between me and disaster, but I wanted to be
+able to throw it up to the Powers that I had given them an opportunity.
+
+I knew what he was. I had always known. When he put his cheek against
+mine to kiss me I had felt the marks there of waste and looseness, just
+as I felt now that native trick he had for extenuation, for putting
+himself on the pathetic, the excusing side of things. But I did not
+shrink from him. I suppose it was because just then he was a symbol of
+the protection which I had so signally gone without. The need of
+trusting is stronger in women than experience. Nothing saved me but the
+persistent monitor of my art. Here, when all else was numbed by
+loneliness and hunger and unsuccess, it waked and warned me. I had not
+drawn back from Griffin nor the relation he proposed to me; but I
+couldn't stand for _Flim-Flam_. I think just at first, though, I made
+myself believe I was considering it.
+
+I went out to see Pauline the next afternoon. Not that I expected
+anything from her. It was merely that she represented all that stood
+opposed to what I was being coerced into, and I meant to give it a
+chance.
+
+"I am thinking of going with 'Flim-Flam'," I told her.
+
+"Oh, but my dear--surely not with that!"
+
+"I'll get eighteen dollars a week and my expenses."
+
+"Well, of course, if you want to sell yourself just for a salary!"
+Pauline's attitude could not have been improved on if she had known all
+that the engagement implied, but it wasn't in her to be ungracious for
+long. "I suppose you'll get experience?"
+
+"I'll get my board and clothes out of it," I told her bluntly. "And
+whether I like it or not, it is the only thing offered."
+
+"And you are just taking it on trust? I suppose that is the right way;
+you can never tell how things will be brought about." I don't know how
+much of this was honest, and how much derived from the capacity for
+self-deception which grows on women whose sole business in life is
+getting on with a man. At any rate, having shaken my situation around to
+the shape of a moral attitude, as a robin does a worm, nothing would
+have prevented her from swallowing it whole.
+
+Faint as I was I refused her invitation to dinner. With what I had in
+mind to do I didn't care to meet Henry Mills again. I was fiercer in my
+detestation of him and Cecelia than I had been before I had thought of
+being in the same case myself. I resented them as a ribald commentary on
+my necessity.
+
+As I rode home on the car, all my outer self was in a tumult, dazed and
+buzzing like a hive. I was dimly aware of moving, sitting upright, of
+paying my fare, and of great staring red posters that flashed upon me
+from the billboards. I remember that it occurred to me several times
+that if I could only understand what I read on them, it might be greatly
+to my profit. Somewhere deep under my confusion I was aware of being
+plucked by the fringes of my consciousness. Something was trying to get
+through to me.
+
+I refused to see Griffin at all that evening, and got into bed early,
+staring into the dark and seeing nothing but fragments of red letters
+that seemed about to shape themselves into the saving word, and then
+dissolved and left me blank. I tried to pray and realized that I had no
+connecting wires over which help might come.
+
+Belief in the God I had been brought up to, had been beaten out of me at
+Higgleston, very largely by the conviction of those who professed to
+know Him best, that He couldn't in any case be the God of my Gift. And
+I hadn't been thinking since then of the Something Without Us to which I
+acted, as Deity. Now it occurred to me, lying there in the dark, that if
+the God of the Church had cast me off, there must still be something
+which artists everywhere prayed to, a Distributer of Gifts who might be
+concerned about the conduct of His worshippers.
+
+I reached out for Him--and I did not know His name. I must pray though,
+I must pray to something which stood for Help. Slowly, as I cast back in
+my mind to find the name for it, I remembered Eversley. Eversley was
+everything which any player might wish to be, and Eversley had been
+kind. I would pray to Eversley. All at once there flashed across the
+blank of my mind, his name in letters of red. That was it! That was the
+name on the billboards! Eversley was in town. I recalled that Griff had
+spoken of it. I hadn't been able to spare a penny for a paper for a long
+time, or I should have known it. I would see Eversley. I got up and
+groped around in the cupboard for a piece of dry bread and ate it. Then
+I went back to bed and dropped asleep suddenly with the release of
+tension. To-morrow I would see Eversley.
+
+Griffin failed to understand my change of mood in the morning.
+
+"You aren't afraid that I shall try to hold you?"
+
+"No I'm not afraid."
+
+"Or that anybody will find it out?"
+
+"I shouldn't care if they did," I told him. "I'm going to see Eversley.
+I suppose it's fair to tell you, you'll be the last resort, Griff."
+
+"I'll be the foundation of your fortune, if Eversley will let me, but he
+won't." I think there was regret in his voice, but it was never in
+anything he said to me.
+
+"I know you're not mean, Griff; that's why I told you."
+
+"Oh, I'll tell you, too. I was mean once; I didn't mean to be, but it
+turned out that way." He was on the point of admitting something to me
+that I felt if I was to depend upon him I shouldn't hear.
+
+I got out as early as possible and walked until I found a billboard.
+Eversley was at the Playhouse; he had been playing here for three days.
+I walked past it several times considering the possibility of getting
+his address from the stage doorman, though I knew I couldn't.
+
+It was clear and bright, few people moved in the street. I walked
+between the alleyways and a row of ash-cans waiting for the belated
+carts of the cleaners. "Eversley, Eversley!" I called over and over as
+if it had been a charm. Suddenly in the still cold brightness, a torn
+fragment of newspaper flapped in the ash-can, it lifted and made a
+clumsy flight like a half-fledged bird and dropped beside me. Its one
+torn wing flapped gently as I passed it, and showed me part of a
+pictured face. I said to myself that I was in a pretty state when even
+a torn face in a paper looked like Eversley. I had gone on three steps,
+and suddenly I stopped. It was Eversley, of course; his picture would be
+in the papers. I went back and lifted the printed scrap. It was part of
+an interview with the great tragedian, three days old, and it told me
+the address of his hotel.
+
+It was nearly eleven when I arrived there. The foyer was crowded with
+people among whom I fancied I recognized several of my profession. They
+had the same desperate air that I knew must stand out on me. I thought
+the clerk recognized it.
+
+"Mr. Eversley is not in this morning," I was told. They pretended, too,
+not to know when he would be in. I understood that this meant that he
+was in, but probably asleep or breakfasting. I found a chair close to
+one of the elevators and waited. The room was warm and I was faint. I do
+not know how long I sat there; I must have been almost unconscious.
+Suddenly I snapped alert. There was Eversley and two or three others
+stepping into the elevator on the opposite side of the room. I was too
+late of course to catch them.
+
+"Mr. Eversley's apartments," I said to the elevator boy.
+
+"First turn to the left," he told me when he had let me out on the
+fourth floor. I was afraid to ask the number of the room lest he should
+suspect me of intruding. There were five or six doors down the left
+corridor. I knocked at one at a hazard, and was rejected by a large
+woman in deshabille. I was discouraged; somehow the prospect of knocking
+at every one of those doors and inquiring for Mr. Eversley daunted me. I
+was dividing between my dread of that and a still greater dread, if I
+should be found loitering too long in the corridor, of being taken for a
+suspicious person. In a few moments, however, a woman came out of one of
+the doors farthest down and moved toward me. I thought it was she I had
+seen getting into the elevator with Mr. Eversley; she had the gracious
+air of women who know themselves relied upon. She stopped, hypnotized by
+my evident wish to speak to her.
+
+"Mrs. Eversley?" She acknowledged it. "I am trying to find your husband;
+I have his permission," I interpolated as I saw her pleasant, open
+countenance close upon me. I learned afterward how much of her life went
+to saving him the strain of publicity, and I did not blame her.
+
+"My husband never sees visitors in the morning."
+
+"If you would show him this card," I begged. "Perhaps he would make an
+appointment." She recognized the writing on the card, and I saw her
+relenting. Mr. Eversley, it proved, would see me.
+
+He pretended kindly to have recognized me at once, but he didn't ask
+after the Hardings. He saw that it was the last lap with me.
+
+"My dear Miss Lattimore, sit here. Now, tell me."
+
+"So," I concluded at the end of half an hour, "I thought you could tell
+me if it is all gone. If I am never to have it back again, I can go with
+a musical comedy." I hadn't told him, of course, what the conditions
+were of my having even that, "but if you think it could be brought back
+again ..." I could hardly formulate a hope beyond that.
+
+"Never in the old way," he answered promptly. "_You_ wouldn't wish that.
+What you did at twenty you must not wish to do at thirty, for then there
+is no growth. What do you really feel about it?"
+
+"I feel," I said, "as if I could do something--something pressing to be
+done, but somehow different, so different that I do not know how to
+describe it to anybody nor to get them to believe in it."
+
+"And so you have begun to doubt it yourself?"
+
+"I shall believe you," I said.
+
+He sat still after that for a while, staring into the open fire and
+rubbing his fine expressive hands together in a meditative way. It was
+good to me to see him, just touched mellowly with age, the delicate
+carving in his face of nobility and gentleness. There were men like that
+then, men who made by their mere being, something more than a shibboleth
+of the traditional dependability. He seemed to be far away from me,
+groping around the root of truth in respect to that gift with which he
+was so richly endowed. He rose presently and took a play-book which lay
+face downward on the table.
+
+"Could you do a bit of this with me?" he suggested. "It will help me get
+my lines." The play was "Magda," new then on the American stage.
+Eversley was getting up the part of Colonel Schwartz. He explained the
+story to me a little and I began reading and prompting him. Presently I
+felt the familiar click of myself sliding into the part. All my winter
+in Chicago rose up in the part of _Magda_ to protest against the
+judgment of Taylorville.
+
+I knew better too than to attempt any sort of staginess with Eversley; I
+said the words, trying to understand them, and let the part have its way
+with me. It was not until we had laid down the book that I remembered I
+was still waiting judgment, and did not feel to want it.
+
+"I won't take up any more of your time," I suggested. "You have been
+very good to me." I got up to go. After all what was there that Eversley
+could do for me.
+
+"Well," he said, "and is it to be musical comedy?"
+
+"No," I told him, "no, it may be starvation or the lake, but I'll not
+let myself down like that.... Was that why you asked me to do the part?"
+I said after a while, in which he had sat gazing into the fire without
+taking any note of my standing.
+
+"Sit down," he said. "Have you ever heard of Polatkin?"
+
+I shook my head and sat provisionally on the edge of my chair.
+
+"Polatkin is a speculator; he speculates in ability. I think on the
+whole the best thing I can do for you is to introduce you to Polatkin."
+
+Mr. Eversley thought of Morris Polatkin because he had met him the day
+before in Chicago. Before I left the hotel it was arranged that I was to
+see him the next day, and if he liked me--by the tone in which Mark
+Eversley spoke of him I knew that was foregone--he would take me on to
+New York with him and put my gift on a paying basis.
+
+So suddenly had the release from strain come that I found myself
+toppling over my own resistance. I went out in the street and walked
+about until reminded by the gnawing in my stomach, that I had had
+nothing but the brewing of my twice-boiled coffee grounds for breakfast,
+I turned into the first attractive café and paid out almost my last cent
+for a comforting luncheon. It would have gone farther if I had bought
+food and cooked it at home, but I was past that. I had pinched and
+endured to the last pitch; I could no more. And besides the assurance of
+Mark Eversley, which as yet I could scarcely believe in, there had come
+a strange new courage upon me. For as I had suffered and struggled with
+_Magda_, suddenly from some high unknowable source, power descended. I
+had felt it fluttering low like a dove, hovering over me; it had perched
+on my spirit. I could feel it there now brooding about me with singing
+noises. It had come back! I rushed to meet it as to a lover.
+
+As I walked back to my lodging, a flood of hopes, half shapes of
+conquests and surmises, bore me like a widening flood apart from all
+that the last few months stood for. Suddenly at the door I realized how
+far it had carried me from Griffin; the figure of him was faint in my
+mind as one seen from the farther shore. I considered a little and then
+I wrote him a note and slipped it under the door. I went out again, and
+walked aimlessly all the rest of the afternoon, and when it was dark I
+stole softly up to my room again, but he heard me. He came knocking
+almost immediately, full of the appearance of rejoicing, but even the
+dusk didn't conceal from me that embarrassment was on him. He looked
+checked and confounded as when he had told me about his relation to Miss
+Dean, like a man caught in an unwarrantable assumption. Whatever Dean
+had done to him, it had broken the back of his egotism completely. He
+knew well enough he had no business with a woman like me, a friend of
+Mark Eversley's, and he was ashamed to have been caught thinking he had.
+He sidled and fluttered for an interval, making up his mind to a
+resumption of affectionateness, and finally making it up that he
+couldn't, and remembering an engagement somewhere for the evening.
+
+It was about eleven of the next day that I had a note from Eversley to
+come to his rooms to meet Mr. Polatkin. I went in a kind of haze of
+excitement, numb as to my feet and finger-tips, moving about by reflexes
+merely and with a vague doubt as each new point of the way presented
+itself, the car I took, the hotel stair, the length of the corridor, if
+I should be equal to any one of them, so far was my consciousness
+removed from the means of communication.
+
+Eversley shook hands with me out of a cloud, moving in an orbit miles
+outside of my own, and when he left me, saying that Polatkin would come
+up the next moment, it was as if he had withdrawn into the vastness of
+outer space. In the interval before I heard Mr. Polatkin's knock I
+rehearsed a great many ways of meeting him, none of which were from the
+right cue.
+
+I do not know why I hadn't been prepared by the name for his being a
+Jew, nor for the sudden shifting of the ground of our meeting which that
+fact made for me. So far as I had thought of him at all, it was in a
+kind of nebulosity of the high disinterestedness that was responsible
+for Mark Eversley's interest in me. It had been, his generous succour,
+all of a piece of that traditional protectiveness, the expectation of
+which is so drilled into women that it rose promptly in advance of any
+occasion for it. The mere supposition that he was to provide for me,
+had tinged my mind, unaware, with the natural response of a docility
+made ridiculous by the figure of Polatkin edging himself in through a
+door that an arrangement of furniture made impossible completely to
+open. His height did not bring him above the level of my eyes, and as
+much of him as was visible above his theatrical-looking, furred coat,
+was chiefly nose and pallid forehead disdained by tight, black, curly
+hair, and extraordinarily black eyes which seemed to have retreated
+under the brows for the purpose of taking council with the intelligence
+that informed them.
+
+I had put on my best to meet him, and though my husband had been dead
+more than two years, my best was still tinged with widowhood, for the
+chief reason that once having got into black I had not been able to
+afford to put it off for anything more suitable. I had put a good deal
+of white about the neck trying for an effect which I knew, as Polatkin's
+eyes travelled over me, had been feminine rather than professional. Now
+as I realized how I had unconsciously responded to the suggestion of
+preciousness in the fact of his coming to take care of me, I felt myself
+grow from head to foot one deep suffusing red. It comes out for me in
+retrospect how near I was to the situation which had intrigued Cecelia
+Brune and her kind, put at disadvantage, not by a monetary obligation so
+much as by the inevitable feminine reaction toward the source of care
+and protection. At the time, however, I was concerned to keep the
+stodgy little Jew, who stood hat in hand taking stock of me, from
+discovering that I had come to this meeting with a degree of personal
+expectation which I should have resented in him. I hoped indeed that my
+blush might pass with him for a denial of the very thing it confessed,
+or at least for mere shyness and gaucherie. I was helped from my
+confusion by the realization that Mr. Polatkin was not so much looking
+at me or speaking to me, as projecting me into the future and gauging me
+against a background of his own creation.
+
+I was standing still, after we had got through some perfunctory
+civilities, for I thought he would want me to act for him--but I found
+afterward that he had trusted Mr. Eversley for my capacity--and I had a
+feeling of being able to meet the situation better on my feet. I caught
+him looking at me with an irritating impersonality.
+
+"Jalowaski shall make your corsets," he affirmed; "he makes 'em for
+Eames and Gadski--a little more off there, a little longer here ...
+so...." He did not touch me, he was not even within touching distance,
+but he followed the outline of my figure with his thumb, flourishing out
+the alterations which made it more to his mind. "Jalowaski would fix you
+so you wouldn't believe it was you," he concluded.
+
+He appeared so well satisfied with his inspection that he expanded
+graciously. "And there is one thing you have which there is lots of
+actresses would give half they got for it. You have got imagination in
+the way you dress your hair. It is a wonder how some of them can act and
+yet ain't got no imagination at all about the way they look, only so it
+is stylish. For an actress it is all right for her to look stylish on
+the street, but there are times when she has to look otherways on the
+stage; y'understand me."
+
+I slid somehow into a chair; I don't know exactly what I expected, but
+it certainly hadn't been this appraisement, which I had the sense to see
+was favourable and yet resented.
+
+"The first thing we will see to yet, is some clothes; for you will
+excuse me, Miss Lattimore, but what you are wearing don't show you off
+at all. You don't need to wear black. Of course I know you are a widow,
+Mr. Eversley was telling me, but there are some actresses what make out
+like they was, because they think it becomes them, y' understand, but
+there is no need for you to wear it, for Mr. Eversley is telling me that
+your husband is dead more than two years already." He had loosened his
+coat to display an appropriate amount of gold fob dependent over a small
+balloon in the process of being inflated; now from somewhere in his
+inner recess he produced a folded paper.
+
+"It is better we have a contract from the start. Though of course it is
+all right if Mr. Eversley recommends you, but it is better we don't
+have misunderstandings." He spread the paper out and weighted it with
+one of his pudgy hands.
+
+"So you are going to take me ... you haven't seen me act yet."
+
+"Eversley has."
+
+"Well ... if you want to take his judgment ... but he hasn't told me
+anything about _you_ yet. What do you want of me; what are you going to
+do for me?"
+
+If Eversley had told him how desperate my situation was, it wasn't a
+good move to try to hold out against him now, it might have given him
+the idea that I was ungrateful, but I couldn't stand for being handed
+about this way like a female chattel. That Eversley had told him, I saw
+by the expression of astonishment on his face which slowly changed to
+one of amusement.
+
+"I'm going to save you from starving to death," he began, and then as
+the sense of my courage in the face of such an alternative grew upon
+him, "I'm going to make you one of the leading tragic actresses of
+America."
+
+"And what am I to do?"
+
+"Whatever I tell you. Eversley thinks you could study a while with Mrs.
+Delamater. She is wonderful, wonderful!" He described with his arms a
+circle scarcely larger than the arc of his cherubic contour, to show how
+wonderful she was.
+
+"I should like some dancing lessons, too," I submitted.
+
+"Do you dance? Ah, no, it is too much to expect; but if I could find me
+a dancer, Miss Lattimore, a born dancer!" He brought his arms into play
+again to describe a felicity which transcended expression. "But they are
+not so easy to find," he sighed audibly. "We must do what we can
+already."
+
+Eversley told me afterward that Polatkin had the soul of an actor, but
+the only part which he had ever been able to play without being
+ridiculous, was Fagin, and now he was too fat even for that, so that he
+took it out vicariously in the success of those whose opportunity he
+made. It was the dream of his life to find a real genius, a dancer or a
+prima donna; I believe I was the nearest he ever came to it; and I owe
+it to him to say that I couldn't have arrived at more than the faintest
+approach to it without him.
+
+It was that contract I signed with him there in Eversley's room which
+brought him in the end about three hundred per cent. on the money he
+advanced me, but I never begrudged it. He gave me a check then and
+there, and an address of a hotel in New York where I was to meet him
+within five days. He looked me well over as he shook hands with me.
+
+"You would be better if you would weigh about ten pounds more," he
+assured me, and I was mixed between resentment at his personality and
+thankfulness to have even that sort of interest taken in me. I had
+lunch with Mr. and Mrs. Eversley afterward; there was not time for half
+the things I wished to hear from him, but this sticks in my memory. I
+had put it to him that the meagreness of my personal experiences had, so
+far, tended to the skimping of my art.
+
+"There's no question as to that," he told me, "but it is nothing
+compared to the effect that your art will have on your experience. It's
+a mistake to let it set up in you an appetite for particular kinds of
+it. There's the experience of having done without experience, you can
+put that into your acting as well as the other, and you'll find it is
+often the most valuable." I was later to find the worth of that, but
+like most advice, it only proved itself in the event of my not taking
+it.
+
+There was not much to be done about my leaving Chicago; I had rooted
+there shallowly. I went out that afternoon to tell Pauline good-bye, for
+I wished to avoid Henry. It seemed a great step, my going away. There
+was a kind of finality about it. The casual character of my relation to
+the stage had disappeared; I was about to be married to it. Pauline
+cried a little; in spite of there being so much in my life that I
+couldn't tell her, I remembered how long we had been friends and that we
+were very fond of one another. She couldn't, of course, quite abandon
+her favourite moral attitude.
+
+"You have a great work, Olivia, a great responsibility. You must
+remember that you are the trustee of a rare gift."
+
+"I'll take as good care of it," I assured her, "as those who sent it
+take of me." At the time I believe I felt that the Powers _had_ taken
+notice of me at last.
+
+I got away as soon as possible; it seemed kinder to Griffin. We had been
+divided as by a sword; he knew now there was nothing between us and he
+was abashed at the memory of having touched me. All that time we had
+lurked behind the pressure of packing and settling my affairs; we never
+came out squarely and faced one another. I think some latent manhood
+that had risen to my need of him, slunk back with the certainty that I
+could do very well without him.
+
+"You'll be sure and hunt me up if you come to New York?" I urged; I
+wasn't going to be accused of disloyalty because of the rise in my
+fortunes. He shook his head.
+
+"You'll be up among the nobs then." He looked at me for a moment
+wistfully, "You'll remember that I said I wouldn't try to hold you?" I
+let him get what comfort he could out of the generosity he imagined in
+himself at that. Seen against the shining background which Polatkin's
+money had made for me, he looked almost weazened. "Good-bye," I said,
+with another handshake, and I set my face steadily toward New York.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK IV
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+The third season in New York found me in a very gratifying situation. I
+had made a public for myself, and friends, not only new friends but old
+ones drawn there by good fortune of their own. I had worked out my
+obligation to Polatkin, though I was still on such terms with him as
+allowed him to give me a good deal of advice, and for me to call him
+Poly in his more human moments. I used even to go out to his house at
+One Hundred and Twenty-Seventh Street to spend an hour with Mrs.
+Polatkin and the several little replicas of himself, of whom, in spite
+of their tendency to run mostly to nose and forehead, he was exceedingly
+proud. The help he had afforded me had uncovered new layers of capacity,
+to fill out satisfyingly the opportunities he created. I was a
+successful actress, there was no doubt whatever that I was a success; I
+would have been able to prove it by the figure of my salary. And often
+when the house rocked with applause, and I was called time after time
+before the curtain, I would question the high, half-lighted void. I
+would look and ache and cry out inwardly. For what? Well, I suppose I
+knew pretty well what I was looking for by the end of that year, though
+it wasn't a thing I could say much about, even to Sarah.
+
+Sarah and I had a flat together on Thirty-first Street. The second
+winter we had played together, in a comedy Jerry had written for us,
+with so much success that it was impossible that we should remain
+together long. To have kept together two players of such distinguished
+and equal quality would have been to miss the lustre of achievement
+which they might each shed on a lesser group, wholly without any other
+excuse for coherence. Our managers, too, contrived to get us not a
+little advertisement out of the circumstance of our being friends and
+undivided by success. There was, however, one fact known to us both,
+though without any conscious communication, which we would not for
+worlds have made known to an unsuspecting public; and that was that
+while I was still on the hither side of my full power, Sarah had come to
+the level of hers.
+
+Sarah was always wonderful in what I call static parts, parts all of one
+mood and consistency. She was notable as Portia; as Hermione, absolute.
+Perhaps the greatest favourite with her public was Galatea, which,
+besides being well within the average taste, allowed the greatest
+display of her bodily perfection. Yet with all this, Sarah knew that she
+was nearing the end of her contribution; knew it perhaps with that
+prescience of the Gift itself, folding up its wings for withdrawal. I
+have never been able to make up my mind whether she abandoned her
+talent because she had no more use for it, or if it left her because its
+time was served.
+
+I think we arrived at this certainty about our powers, night by night,
+that year as we came together after the performance, Sarah as though she
+had come back from a full meal, with a sense of things accomplished, but
+I--I came hungry--_always_! Sometimes it was merely with the feeling of
+interrupted capacity, as when one has left off in the middle of the
+course; when I would continue acting in my room, going over my part,
+recalling others, trying experiments with them, pouring myself out until
+Sarah, poor dear, fell asleep in the midst of her effort to be
+interested. Other times I would rage up and down, all my soul baffled
+and aching with incompletion.
+
+I do not mean to say I hadn't taken a healthy satisfaction in what had
+come to me, the knowledge of being worth while, of contributing
+something; not less in sheer bodily well-being, leisure, beautiful
+clothes, conscious harmony with my background. I had more feeling of
+home for that little flat of ours than I had ever known in my mother's
+house, or my husband's, for the plain reason that its lines and colours
+and adjustments were in tune with my temperament, as nothing I had had
+before had been. It wasn't until I had the means to give my personal
+preference full scope, that I discovered how much of gracelessness in
+myself had been but the unconscious reaction to inharmonies of colour
+and line. I had developed, in response to my environment, the quality
+called charm.
+
+And I was a successful actress. I have to go back to that to get
+anything like the effect of solidity which my world took on with that
+certainty. I was developing too, as my critics allowed, and gave promise
+of steady growth. I was well paid and well friended. I don't mean to
+say, either, that I did not get something out of being a part of the
+dramatic movement of my time, knowing and known of the best it afforded.
+I was integrally a part of that half-careless, hard-working, well-living
+crowd so envied of the street: I knew a great many notables by their
+first names. And all the time I wanted something! At last I knew what I
+wanted.
+
+"It will come," Sarah had faith for me. "Everything comes if it is
+called hard enough. But you mustn't allow yourself to be persuaded by
+your wanting it so much, to take any sort of substitute."
+
+That was on an occasion when my Taylorville training had revolted
+against some of the things that, though they passed current in my world,
+wore to me the indelible stamp of cheapness. Every now and then some
+aspect of it struck across my hereditary prejudices, and gave me a
+feeling of isolation, of separateness which drove me back in time, to
+condone the offences which set me apart in an inviolable loneliness. It
+was something my manager had said in my hearing about liking his leading
+woman to have a liaison with the leading man because "it kept her
+limbered up."
+
+"I might as well," I said to Sarah. "I could have my leading man any
+minute." This was true, though it was by no means the inevitable
+situation, and Sarah in acknowledging it had not spared to point out to
+me the probable outcome of such a relation.
+
+"This is the way we all end, isn't it?" I demanded. "Why should I go
+looking for an exceptional experience. We both of us know that I shall
+never come to my full power without passion and I have a notion that
+with experiences as with everything else, we have to eat as we are
+helped. And my leading man is the only thing on the plate." And then
+Sarah had replied to me with the advice I set down a moment ago.
+
+It wasn't, however, that I hadn't seen clearly and enough of the
+cheapness and betrayal that comes of such irregular relations, to be
+warned; if only it were possible for women to be warned against
+trusting. What I wanted, of course, was some such sane and open passion
+as I appreciated between the Hardings and Mark Eversley and his wife,
+noble, extenuating, without a shadow of wavering. How, when I was able
+to conceive such a relation and to discriminate it so readily from the
+ruck of affairs like Jerry's and my leading man's, I came finally to
+miss it, is one of the things that must have been written in my destiny.
+Perhaps the Distributers of the Gift were jealous.
+
+The beginning of the new coil of my affairs was in Sarah's going on the
+road early in January and my finding myself rather lonely in
+consequence, and going out rather too often to the McDermotts'. Jerry
+had settled his family at Sixty-seventh Street, then in that
+intermediate region which was at that time neither city nor suburb. Mrs.
+Jerry insisted that it was for the sake of the park for the children,
+though most of Jerry's friends were of the opinion that it was rather
+for the very thing for which they made use of it, an excuse for calling
+infrequently.
+
+No one could be on a footing of any intimacy with Mrs. Jerry without
+being set upon by the little foxes of suspicion and jealousy which
+gnawed upon the bosom that nursed them. Connubial misery was a kind of
+drug with her, the habit of which she could no more leave off than any
+drunkard, or than Jerry could his sentimentalized, innocuous
+infatuations. All this comes into my story, for slight as my connection
+was with Jerry's affairs, in my capacity as confidante, it served to set
+in motion the profound, confirming experience of my art. Or perhaps I
+merely seized on it objectively to excuse what was really the compulsion
+of the gods. I could have gone anywhere out of New York to separate
+myself from Jerry's affair; that I should have chosen to go to London is
+the best evidence perhaps, that I was not really choosing at all.
+
+It began with my spending mornings in the park with Jerry's children,
+who were nice children except for the way in which they continually
+reflected in their attitude toward their father, a growing consciousness
+of slighting and bitterness at home. Mrs. Jerry made a point of her
+generosity in rather forcing him on me on these occasions, and on the
+long walks which I fell in the habit of taking very early, or in the
+pale twilight whenever affairs at the theatre would permit me.
+
+I remember how the spring came on in the city that year. I saw it go
+with the children to school in a single treasured blossom, or trailing
+the Sunday trippers in dropped sprays of hepatica and potentilla back
+from the Jersey shore. Soft airs and scents of the field invaded the
+town and played in the streets in the hours when men were not using
+them. A spirit out of Hadley's pasture came and walked beside me. But it
+was not due to any suggestion of what there was in the invading season
+for me, that Jerry occasionally walked along with me, for the chief use
+Jerry had of the earth was to build cities upon.
+
+Jerry drew the sap of his being out of asphalt pavements, and the light
+that fanned out from the theatre entrances on Broadway was his natural
+aura. He had developed, he had branched and blossomed in the degree to
+which the inspiration of his work had been squeezed and strained through
+layers and layers of close-packed humanity; and the more he was played
+upon by the cross-bred, striped and ring-streaked passions and
+affections of society, the more delicate and fanciful and human his work
+became. His lean figure, now that it had filled out a little, was built
+to be the absolute excuse for evening clothes, and never showed to such
+an advantage as in their sleek, satiny blackness, with a good deal of
+white front, and the rather wide black ribbon to his glasses which
+brought out the natural pallor of his skin. His hair, which he wore
+parted very far at one side, and made to curve glossily to the contour
+of his head, was more like a raven's wing than ever, and had still its
+little trick of erecting slightly and spreading in excitement,
+especially when he was up for a curtain speech, and was, in the way he
+looked the part of the successful dramatist, a good half of the
+entertainment. His contribution to the occasion on which I was good
+enough to take his children for an outing to the Bronx or Van Cortlandt
+Park, was made by lying flat on his back with his hands clasped under
+his head waiting until I had exhausted myself with games before he was
+able to take any interest in me. I would come back to him after a while
+and sit on the grass beside him. Jerry's way of acknowledging the pains
+I had been at to amuse his offspring, was to pat one of my elbows with a
+hand which he immediately restored to its business of propping his head.
+
+"Jerry," I said, "I am convinced that something very nice is about to
+happen to me. Run your hands over the tops of the grass here and you can
+feel news of it coming up through the stems."
+
+"Well, at any rate you can take it when it comes," he reminded me.
+"There won't be anybody to be hurt by your good times but yourself."
+
+"Jerry, is it as bad as ever?"
+
+"So bad that if she doesn't let up on it soon I shall do something to
+bring on a crisis."
+
+"And spend the rest of your life regretting it. Besides there is Miss
+Doran; you'd have to think of her." Miss Doran was a dancer with a
+spirit in her feet and a South Jersey accent, whose effect on him Jerry
+was translating into quite the best thing he had done. It wasn't,
+however, that I cared in the least what became of her that I had thrown
+out that saving suggestion, but because it had been little more than a
+year since Jerry had disturbed the peace and broken the----not
+heart----let us say the organ of her literary ineptitudes--of Mineola
+Maxon Freear who had interviewed him once, and taken him with the snare
+of a superior comprehension. Mineola had advanced ideas as to the
+relation of the sexes, and a conviction that she was fitted to be the
+mentor of a literary career, and had missed the point of Jerry's
+philanderings quite as much as his wife missed them. With Mineola in
+mind and the tragedy she came near making out of it for herself, I
+ventured on a word of caution.
+
+"You don't want to forget, Jerry, that there's one good thing about your
+marriage; it keeps you from making another one just like it."
+
+"You think I'd do that?"
+
+"It is written in your forehead, Jerry, that you are to be attracted to
+the sort of woman whom you have the least use for. The kind that would
+make you a good wife, you couldn't possibly love well enough to live
+with her."
+
+"I could live with you," he affirmed.
+
+"Then it would be because you have never been in love with me. Look
+here, Jerry, what does the other all amount to? If you didn't have any
+one ... like Miss Doran, I mean ... do you mean that you wouldn't write
+plays at all?"
+
+"I'd write them harder and I'd write them different. How can a man tell?
+This thing _is_. Once you know it is to be had, you just can't hold back
+from it."
+
+"Not even if somebody else has to pay?"
+
+"Why should they?" Jerry sat up and began to pull up the grass by the
+roots and throw it about. "Why can't they see that all a man wants is to
+do his work?" I could see at any rate that he was near the breaking
+point, and I knew that if the break came from Jerry himself, it would
+be irrevocable. That was what put me in the notion of going away
+immediately. I had barely saved my face with Mrs. Jerry in the Mineola
+affair, and I thought if there was to be another crisis I had better
+clear out before it.
+
+I had put off deciding about my vacation until I could hear from Sarah,
+who was playing in the West and rather expected to go on to the coast,
+but now the idea of getting off quite by myself began to appeal to me.
+It was about a week after that at Rector's, where I had gone with a
+party of players on the spur of the moment, we saw Jerry come in with
+the dancer, and an air that said plainly that he knew very well what a
+married man laid himself open to when he came into a place like that
+with Clare Doran. I watched them by snatches all through the supper
+before I made up my mind to send the waiter to touch him on the sleeve
+and apprise him that I was there. What deterred me was the reflection
+that if it came into Mrs. Jerry's poor, befuddled head to make a case of
+his being seen there, the fact that I had stood her friend wouldn't in
+the least prevent her from having me up as a witness to her husband's
+private entertainments. I seemed to see in the set of Jerry's shoulders
+that he expected that his wife would do something, and that it would be
+unpleasant. The necessity of taking some stand myself, of living myself
+for or against Jerry's connubial independence, had cleared my soul of
+sundry vagrant impulses and left the call of destiny sounding plain
+above the din of supper and the gurgle of soft, sophisticated laughter.
+The authority of that call, coupled no doubt with some annoyance at
+Jerry for putting me in a place where I had to decide against him, led
+me to break it to him there that I was about to leave him with his
+situation on his hands, rather than at a less public occasion.
+
+He came at once with his napkin trailing from his hand and his raven's
+wing falling forward over his pale forehead, as he stooped to me.
+
+"I was wanting to see you," I said, as I put up my hand to him over the
+back of the chair. "I shall be leaving the next day after we close."
+
+"For where?"
+
+"London," I told him. "I shall be in time for the best of the theatrical
+season there." I hadn't thought of that as a reason until that moment.
+"Besides I am crazy to go; I smell primroses."
+
+"Nonsense, that's Moet '85. Besides, you've never smelled them, so how
+should you know?" That was true enough; Sarah and I had had six weeks of
+Paris the summer before and a week in London in August, where it rained
+most of the hours of every day, but as I said the word I realized that
+what had been pulling at my heart was the feel of the London pavements
+with the smell of the dust in the hot intervals between the showers,
+and the deep red of the roses the boys cried in the street.
+
+Jerry stood looking down on me, and his face was troubled.
+
+"I don't blame you for going."
+
+"Come too, Jerry; bring the wife and babies," Miss Doran was tired of
+sitting alone so long, she stood up as if for going. A flicker of
+consternation passed in his face between his divided interest and a
+suspicion of the reason for my desertion.
+
+"Look here, Olivia--oh, impossible!" It was plain that the dancer was
+going to make it uncomfortable for him for taking so much time to his
+good-bye. "I'll see you at your steamer." He clasped my hand with a
+detaining gesture. I could see him looking back at me from the doorway
+as though for the moment he had seen my destiny hovering over me. I have
+often wondered if Jerry hadn't provided me with an excuse, what the
+Powers would have done about getting me to London on this occasion.
+
+I had almost a mind the next day to go out to his house and persuade him
+to drop everything here and take his family abroad with me. That I did
+not was, I think, not so much due to what I thought such a plan might
+contribute toward the saving of Jerry's situation, as the conviction as
+soon as I had decided, that whatever it was that lay at the end of my
+journey, I was called to it. I was as certain that in London I would
+find what I went to seek as though it had been printed in my steamer
+ticket. I shut up the house and left the key of the flat at the bank. A
+letter I wrote to Sarah crossed hers to me saying that she thought she
+would stay on in the West for her vacation. Two days after the theatre
+closed for the season I sailed for London.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+For a week, perhaps, I was content merely with being there, simply happy
+and human. I had brought letters and addresses which I neglected. In
+spite of the excuse I had made to Jerry about it, I did not even go to
+the theatres. I turned aside from the traditional goals, to ride on the
+top of omnibuses and walk miles down the Strand and Piccadilly, touching
+shoulders with the crowd. The thing that I had striven for in my art,
+what men paint and write and act for, was upon me. Answers to all the
+questions about it that I had not the skill to put to myself, lurked for
+me behind the next one of the Greek marbles and the next. The pictures
+were luminous with it. In the soft spring nights it took the streets and
+turned the voices happy. It danced with the maids in the alleyways to
+the tune of the barrel organs. Then all at once I had a scare.
+That-Which-Walked-Beside-Me seemed about to take flight. I would be
+smiling at it secretly. I would catch myself in the motion of saluting
+it, and suddenly it would be gone. Mornings I would wake up in Chicago
+to the old struggle and depression; I would have to go out in the
+streets and court back my joy; it fled from me and concealed itself in
+the crowd. I followed it by the trail of the first name I lighted on in
+my address-book. It happened to be Mrs. Franklin Shane; I wrote her a
+note and then walked out in Hyde Park to see the last of the
+rhododendrons, and regretted it. Mrs. Franklin Shane was Pauline Mills
+raised to the _n_th power, which I did not fail to perceive was due to
+Franklin Shane being Henry multiplied by a million. The acute sense of
+values, which had established Pauline at the centre of Evanston, had
+landed Mrs. Shane at the outer rim of English exclusiveness. What she
+would do with her time and energy when she had penetrated to its royal
+core, interested me immensely.
+
+I had been entertained at her house the previous winter when I had been
+studying a play that made me perfectly willing to be exploited by Mrs.
+Franklin Shane, for the sake of what I got out of it to fatten my part.
+There in London she called for me in her car the afternoon of the day
+that brought her my note. I don't remember that anything was expressly
+said about it, but it was in the air that Mrs. Franklin Shane had
+arrived, in her study of Exclusiveness, at knowing that the younger
+members of it were addicted to the society of ladies of my profession,
+and meant to make the most of me. I thought it might be amusing to see
+what, supposing with me as a tolerable bait, she could catch a younger
+son, she would do with him. She was clever enough not to put the use she
+was to make of me, too obviously. I was invited to an informal
+reception the next afternoon in which she found herself involved by her
+husband's business exigencies; I gathered from her way of speaking of it
+that the guests were chiefly Americans and that she had made the best of
+the situation, extracting from it for herself a kernel of credit by not
+turning down her compatriots, now that she was assured of having the
+English aristocracy to play with.
+
+The house in front of which a hansom deposited me the next day, was
+notable; one could guess that the Franklin Shanes had been made to pay a
+pretty penny for the privilege of occupying it. It was stuffed full of
+the treasures of four hundred years of the selective instinct.
+
+"You must really see the Velasquez," my hostess had confided to me as
+soon as I had shaken hands with her, and I judged from the fact of her
+not mentioning my name to any other of her guests, that she was saving
+me for a special introduction.
+
+The Velasquez was very wonderful; there was also an early Holbein and a
+Titian so black with time that there was only one point in the room from
+which you could make out what it was about. I was slowly making my way
+to that point. I had been in the house half an hour and had met but one
+or two people whom I slightly knew, when I was aware of my hostess
+piloting toward me through the press, a black-coated male in whom I
+suspected one of the pegs upon which her social venture hung. It
+occurred to me that she had sent me to look at the pictures so that she
+might know where to find me. The room was packed with Americans,
+satisfying in the only way open to them, a natural curiosity as to the
+shell in which the only kind of society which wasn't open to them,
+lived, and the man blocking out a passage through it with his shoulders,
+was so tall that it brought my eyes on a level with his necktie. There
+was an odd freedom about it that set me at once to correct my impression
+of him by his face, and the moment I raised my eyes to him I knew him.
+
+I could hear Mrs. Franklin Shane mumbling the phrases of introduction,
+rendered unimportant by the radiant recognition that for the moment
+enveloped us, that burst around us as a flame in which our hostess
+seemed to shrivel and go out in a thin haze of silk and chiffon. I
+remember looking around for her presently, and wondering how she had got
+away from us. We began again at the point where we had left off.
+
+"So you did go on the stage then, in spite of Taylorville?"
+
+"And you," I pressed my foot into the velvet pile of the carpet to make
+sure that I stood. "You are an engineer, I suppose?"
+
+"In spite of my uncle!"
+
+Somewhere in the next room some one began to sing. I did not hear the
+song nor see the Titian. I was back in Willesden pasture and the soft
+rain of dying leaves was on my face. I was conscious of nothing but his
+hand which he had laid upon my arm to steady me against the pressure of
+the crowd which swayed and turned upon itself to let Mrs. Shane through,
+to drag me to be presented to the singer who was even more of a
+notability than I was.
+
+There was an interval then in which I appeared to be going through the
+forms of society, and going through them under an intolerable sense of
+injustice in the fact that having found Helmeth Garrett at last, now I
+had lost him. It was one of those occasions when the inward monitor is
+so bent on its own affairs that the habit of living goes on
+automatically, or does not go on at all. It went on so with me for half
+an hour. By degrees, what seemed an immense unbearable throbbing of the
+universe, resolved itself at the renewal of that electrifying touch on
+my arm, to the thrum of an orchestra in the refreshment room. I felt
+myself carried along by the pressure of the crowd in that direction, but
+just at the turn of the stair that went down to it I was drawn
+peremptorily aside.
+
+"Come," Mr. Garrett insisted, "come out of this. I want to talk to you."
+There was the old imperiousness in his manner, exclusive of all other
+considerations. He seemed to know the house. We took a turn through the
+hall came out presently at the _porte cochère_ where a line of carriages
+waited, supported by a line of skirt-coated figures like little wooden
+Noahs before an ark. I let him put me into a closed carriage without a
+word of protest. I had not taken leave of my hostess; I had not so much
+as thought of her. I suppose he had been arranging this in the interval
+in which I had not seen him. The moment the door of the carriage was
+shut, we clasped hands and laughed shamelessly.
+
+"You had three little freckles high up on your cheek, what became of
+them?" he demanded. All at once his mood changed again. "All the years
+I've been without you!... I saw a picture of you in a magazine three
+years ago in Alaska. I came near writing."
+
+"You should have. What were you doing there?"
+
+"Promoting Engineer, Alaska, Russia, Mexico." He began a gesture to
+include the whole round of the mining world, but left off to take my
+hand again. "The world _is_ round," he declared, as though he had
+somewhat doubted it. "It brings us back again to the old starting
+points."
+
+"They're always the same, I suppose, the places we set out from; but
+we ... we are never the same."
+
+"Is that a warning?" He looked at me, checked for a moment.
+
+"Only a platitude." I had thrown it out instinctively against his
+engulfing manner, against everything that rose up in me to assure me
+that nothing whatever had changed, that it would never change. The life
+of the London streets streamed around us; crossing Piccadilly Circus we
+were held up with the traffic; the roar of the city islanded us like a
+sea.
+
+"I suppose you know where we are going?" I suggested in one of the
+checked intervals.
+
+"To your hotel; Mrs. Shane gave me the address. I told her we were old
+friends. You mustn't be surprised if you find she expects us to have
+gone to school together. I wanted to get away where we could talk." I
+gave him an assenting smile. Still neither of us showed any disposition
+to begin. He took off his hat in the carriage and ran his fingers
+through his hair. About the temples it had gone gray a little. Now and
+then he gave a short contented laugh as a man will, put suddenly at
+ease.
+
+"I'm glad you kept the old name, Olivia Lattimore ... Olivia. I
+shouldn't have found you without."
+
+"You knew I had lost my husband."
+
+"I read that in the magazine. There's where I have the advantage of
+you." He dropped his light banter for a soberer tone. "My wife died two
+years ago." We were silent after that until the fact had been put behind
+us by a space of time.
+
+I don't know why London seems a more homey place than New York. It has
+been going on so long, perhaps, is so steeped in the essential essence
+of human living, and the buildings there are smaller, more personal, the
+mind is able to grasp them to the uttermost. I remember as we stopped at
+my hotel, being taken suddenly with a tremendous awareness of it all,
+the noble river flowing by, the human stream, miles on miles of homes,
+and the green countryside. I was aware of a city set in an island and an
+island in the sea, the wide immortal sea going around and around it, the
+coursing waves--I checked myself in an upward gesture of the arms, as
+though I had pulsed and surged with it. I caught in my companion's smile
+a delighted recognition.
+
+"Sh--" he said, "what'll Flora Haines think of you!"
+
+"Flora! Oh, Flora wouldn't even _think_ about a play-actor. What would
+your uncle----"
+
+"He's dead now." He stopped me.
+
+"They are all dead," I told him, "all those that mattered to us."
+
+We had another mood when we came to my rooms. I perceived suddenly what
+there was in him more than I had known. It was in his manner that he had
+commanded men. I was pierced through with a sense of his virility, the
+quality that goes to make a male. I was glad of an excuse to put away my
+hat and wrap, to escape for a moment from the effect he produced on
+me ... from inordinate pride in him that he could so produce it. The room
+was full of the tumult we created for one another.
+
+"Will you sit here?" I said at last. I believe I pushed a chair toward
+him.
+
+"No, you." He must have turned it back toward me, otherwise I do not
+know how I came to be so near him.
+
+"You know," I said, ... "I never got your letter."
+
+"I guessed as much when it came back to me. I should have come to you
+the next day, but I quarrelled with my uncle. I walked all the way to
+the railway station before I remembered. But what had I to offer you?"
+
+"It was so long ago ..."
+
+"No, no, yesterday." His arms were around me. "Olivia ... yesterday and
+to-day!"
+
+I think I moved a little to be the more completely engulfed by him, to
+lay against his the ache of my empty breast; all these years I had not
+known how empty. We kissed at last and Joy came upon us. We loved; we
+kissed again between laughter. I remember little snatches of explanation
+in the intervals of kissing.
+
+"All this time, Helmeth, I have wanted you so."
+
+"I was on my way to you. All last winter in Alaska ... in the long
+night, Olivia. I should have come soon."
+
+"Oh," I cried, "I have been drawn across the sea to you. All the way I
+felt you calling!"
+
+"We had to meet again; had to!"
+
+After a time I insisted that he should sit down. "You haven't had any
+tea." I tried to get control of myself. I was crossing the room to ring
+when he swept me up again.
+
+"Look here, Olivia, I don't want any tea. I want you. God!" he said, "do
+you know how I want you?" All at once I was crying on his breast.
+
+"Oh, Helmeth, Helmeth, do you know you have only seen me twice in your
+life."
+
+"And both times," he insisted, "I've wanted to marry you."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was two or three days before we spoke of marriage again. I believe I
+scarcely thought of it; we had all the past to account for, and the
+present. We had moments of strangeness, and then we would kiss, and all
+the years would seem to each of us as full of the other as the very
+hour.
+
+"Where were you, Helmeth, the second summer after we met?" I had told
+him of my visit to Chicago and the dream of him I had had there.
+
+"Out in Arizona, carrying a surveyor's chain, dreaming of _you_! Often
+when the moonlight was all over that country like a lake, I would walk
+and walk. I had long talks with you; they were the only improving
+conversation I had."
+
+"For years," I said, "that dream of you was the only thing that kept my
+Gift awake. Times I would lose it, and then I would dream again and it
+would come back. I know now when I lost it completely, it was about a
+year before I saw you that time in Chicago." I had told him of that,
+too.
+
+"That year I married." I could see that there was something in the
+recollection always that weighed upon him.
+
+"I didn't," he said, "until after my aunt had told me about you. I went
+back there when she died; she was always good to me. You know, don't
+you, Olive, that in spite of everything ... everything ... there is only
+you."
+
+"Let us not talk of it." I do not know how it is proper to feel on such
+occasions, but I supposed that he must have had as I had, stinging tears
+to think of the dead and how their love was overmatched by this present
+wonder. I would have had, somehow, Tommy and my boy to share in it.
+
+I went rather tardily to make my apologies to Mrs. Franklin Shane. I
+hope they sounded natural.
+
+"My _dear_! you needn't expect me to be surprised at _anything_ Helmeth
+Garrett does." She talked habitually in italics. "My husband says that
+it is only because he so generally does right, that it is at all
+possible to get along with him." I snapped up crumbs like this with
+avidity.
+
+"His wife, too, you must have known her." I hinted. This was at the end
+of a rather complete account of Helmeth's business relations with Mr.
+Shane.
+
+"Oh, well," I could see Christian charity struggling with Mrs. Shane's
+profound conviction of the rectitude of her own way of life. "She was a
+_good_ woman, but no--imagination." She was so pleased to have hit upon
+a word which carried no intrinsic condemnation that she repeated it.
+"No imagination whatever. One feels," she modified the edge of her
+judgment still further, "that so much might have been made out of Mr.
+Garrett. These self-made men are so difficult."
+
+"Are you difficult?" I demanded when I had retailed the conversation to
+him that evening.
+
+"I suppose so; anyway I am self-made. She is right so far; I dare say it
+is badly done. You'll have to take a few tucks in me."
+
+"Not a tuck. I like you the way you are. Oh, I like you ... I like you
+_so_!" There was an interval after this before we could go on again.
+
+"Tell me how you made yourself, Helmeth. Don't leave anything out, not a
+single thing."
+
+"By mistakes mostly. Every time I had made one I knew it was a mistake
+and I didn't do it again. I don't know that I'm much of a success
+anyway, but I've got a large assortment of things not to do."
+
+"That was the way I learned how to act; filling in behind!"
+
+"I thought that came by instinct. What counts with a man, is not so much
+getting to know how to do it, but getting a chance to prove to other
+people that he knows how."
+
+"I've been through that too," I told him, but he was bent on making
+himself clear.
+
+"I suppose I ought to tell you, Olivia, I'm only a sort of scab
+engineer. I haven't any papers."
+
+"But if you can do the work? Mrs. Shane said----"
+
+"Oh, Shane will trust me; he's learned. What hurts is to have worked up
+a scheme to the point where it is necessary to have outside capital, and
+then have one of the outsiders stick out for a certificated engineer.
+That's what comes of my uncle's notion that a man should 'pick up' his
+professional training." There was the core of that old bitterness
+rankling in him still; he could not yield himself quite to consolation.
+
+"But you have got on, Helmeth, you got _here_." What "here" meant to me
+exactly, was more than my lover, more than the pleasant room behind us,
+the obsequious servitors, more even than the sleek, silvered river and
+the towered banks that took on shapes of romance under the London gray.
+There was something in the word to me of fulfilment, the knowledge of
+things done, the certainty of an unassailed capacity for doing. We were
+sitting with the broad window flung open, the top of a lime tree tapping
+the sill of it with soft shouldering touches, as of some wild creature
+against its mate, creaking a little in somnolent content. I put out my
+hand to touch his knee--oh, as I might have done it if the "here" had
+been the point toward which we had travelled together all these years.
+He laughed then as he often did when I touched him, a man's short full
+laugh of repletion. He thrust out his knee quite frankly till it
+touched mine, and closed his hand over my fingers; he returned to what
+had been in the air the previous moment with an effort. The suspicion
+that it was an effort, was all I had to prepare me for what was about to
+leap upon me.
+
+"Oh, I've pulled through, I've pulled through. But I'm not where I might
+have been. And I'm not rich, Olivia. Not what is called rich."
+
+"Is being called rich one of the things that goes with--what was it you
+called yourself--a promoting engineer?"
+
+"It goes with it if you are any good at it. Not that I care about money
+except for what it stands for ... and then there are the girls."
+
+"You have--girls." It struck me as absurd that I hadn't thought of it
+until that moment.
+
+"I thought Mrs. Shane would have told you. I have two. It isn't going to
+make any difference with you, Olivia?"
+
+"Ah, what difference should it make!" I was apprised within me by the
+haste I made to cover my consternation, that there was more difference
+in it than my words allowed. "Children of yours?" I said. "So much more
+of you for me to love." The apprehension was whelmed in the possessing
+movement with which he drew me to his breast.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+We Had to go back to the subject of course, it couldn't be left hanging
+in the air like that. It was a day or two later at Hampton Court, where
+we had gone for no reason really, except that it seemed a more
+commensurate background for what was going on in us, the identification
+in each by the other, of the springs of immortal passion. We had roved
+through all the rooms, recharged for us with the exceptional experience,
+and come out at last on the river bank where there was quite a holiday
+air among the houseboats.
+
+Behind us we could hear the soft slither of the fountain in the sunk
+garden; the warm sun streaming on us through the filmy air, the flutter
+of curtains in the houseboats above the little pots of geraniums, the
+voices of young people laughing and calling across, began to steal
+across my mind with a sense of the extraordinary richness of life. Here
+was all the stuff of which I had built up my earliest dreams of the
+Shining Destiny ... young people growing up about me ... room to stretch
+my capacity to the uttermost ... the orderly social procedure. For the
+moment I believed that I might turn back on that path my feet had failed
+in, and find in it all that I had missed. I recalled that there were
+always children in my dream. For the instant they were back ... little
+heads and faces ... all the eyes on me ... soft curls, like wisps of
+gossamer. I suppose there must be such little unclaimed souls forever
+hovering and flitting, little winged things, to love's mighty candle.
+What should there be in the touch of a man's hand on a woman's that they
+should come crowding to it like homing doves?
+
+There was a maid going by with her charge, one of those glowing
+fair-haired English children who supply us with the images by which we
+prefigure the angelic choirs. Helmeth held out his hand to the boy, and
+with that swift spark that passes between the young and those by whom
+they are beloved, he toddled forward and laid hold of the inviting
+finger.
+
+If I had had more experience of the pang that shot through me then, I
+should have known it for jealousy. It drove me on toward what, until
+now, I had avoided.
+
+"Tell me about your girls, Helmeth." He felt in the pocket of his coat.
+
+"If you would care to see them----" He was so pleased and shy, I suppose
+he must have understood better than I how it was with me. "They are with
+an aunt in Los Angeles; it was handier for me to see them when I ran up
+from Mexico. They are rather decent kiddies. You'll see them when they
+come to New York this winter."
+
+"Shall you be in New York?" It struck coldly on me that he should speak
+of plans that seemed to be going on regardless of the extraordinary
+interruption of our love.
+
+"Until I get this Mexican scheme on its feet I shall be going back and
+forth."
+
+"They look like their mother," I suggested. I was looking still at the
+small, rather pale photographs he had handed me.
+
+"Because they look so little like me?"
+
+"You forget I saw her once, in Chicago."
+
+"I remember. You know, I think I went there that time because I heard
+you were playing there." He was silent a moment, pitching bits of sod
+into the river. "There is something that manages these things. If I had
+met you then we couldn't have been like this. And we might never have
+met again."
+
+When he said "like this," he had touched my knee with his hand with that
+possessive intimacy with which a man may touch his own woman. I had to
+go back to the photographs of the children to save myself from the
+blinding lightning of his eyes.
+
+"_Are_ they like their mother?"
+
+"I suppose so. I hope so--she was a good woman."
+
+"I'm sure of that." He sat up with intention.
+
+"Ah, it isn't just a sense of what is due her that makes me say that.
+She was thoroughly good. When I met her out in Idaho she was my chief's
+daughter and the only nice girl in the place. She wasn't what you
+are--no other woman is--but she was one of those plain, quiet women that
+have a kind of a grip on rightness. There was nothing could make her let
+go."
+
+"My mother was like that. I think I can understand."
+
+"Well, it was mighty good for me. I'm a bad lot, I suppose. I always
+want things harder than most, and I think the wanting justifies me in
+getting them, but she taught me better. She did things to me that made
+me fit for you, and I don't want us to forget that."
+
+"Oh, my dear, it is I who am not fit."
+
+But I could see he did not believe that. He had come upon me that day in
+the woods when happily the mood of Perdita had shut round the odd,
+blundering Olivia like an enchanter's bubble, through which iridescent
+surfaces he was always to see me; and by the mere act of loving he had
+fixed me in my happiest moment. He was the only man I ever knew, whom I
+could handle like an audience, perhaps he was the only man who never
+knew me in any other character than the lady of romance.
+
+We went that evening to see Beerbohm Tree in a Shakespearian piece,
+always so much more worth while in London than anything the same people
+can do on any other soil, as if the play had mellowed there by all the
+rich life it tapped with its four-hundred-year roots. Borne up by my
+mood and the beauty of the production, so much greater than anything we
+could manage in New York at that time, I was chanting bits of it all the
+way home, and when we came to my room again I moved before him in the
+part of Egypt's queen.
+
+          "Who's born the day
+    When I forget to send to Antony
+    Shall die a beggar----"
+
+"Oh, Helmeth, if you could just see me do it!" I was aching to lay up my
+gift before him as on an altar.
+
+"You shall do them all for me when we are out in the shack in Mexico."
+
+"Mexico!" I was blank for the moment.
+
+"We'll have to live there for a few years, until I get this scheme on
+its legs. Look here, Olivia, you haven't said yet when you are going to
+marry me."
+
+"I've only known you four days!" I tried for the note of feminine
+evasion.
+
+"Four days and an afternoon, to be exact. What's that got to do with it,
+when you are made for me?"
+
+"Don't you like this, Helmeth?"
+
+He caught me to him with that frank delight in the pressure of his arm
+about my body, the feel of his cheek against mine that was as fresh to
+me as water in a wilderness. "It's not this I'm objecting to, but the
+trouble I shall have doing without you." He let me go at that, as
+though he would not add the persuasion of his touch to what he had to
+say.
+
+"The truth is I've no business to ask a woman to marry me for the next
+two years. I'm pledged to this Mexican proposition. I've staked all I
+have on it, and I've asked other men to put their money in, and I can't
+go back on it. I shall have to be back and forth between London and New
+York and the mines, for at least a couple of years. If it wasn't for
+wanting you so ... but now that I've found you again, I know there's no
+going on without you!"
+
+He turned his face toward me that I might see the lines of anxious
+thought there, the buffetings and disappointings, and through it all,
+the plain hunger of the man for his natural mate.
+
+I saw that and I didn't flinch from it. I took his face between my hands
+and drew it down to my breast.
+
+"I'm under contract for the next year," I told him. "I signed just
+before I left ... what does it all matter? Can't we be just ...
+engaged."
+
+"We'd be engaged to be married. And I couldn't take you to Mexico on an
+engagement."
+
+"I'm under contract," I told him again.
+
+"You mean to say that you'd go on acting after we were married?"
+
+It isn't worth while retailing what we said after that. It has been said
+so many times. It was the same thing that Tommy said, better put, more
+fully. He was ready, you understand, to make concession to my liking
+for the stage, to feel himself sincerely a poor substitute for what I
+had got for myself out of living, but there it was at the end, that he
+couldn't make for his own work the concessions he demanded of mine.
+
+"We would have to live in Mexico," he said at last. "That's
+incontrovertible. And besides there are the kiddies to think of. Their
+mother wouldn't want them brought up in the atmosphere of the stage." He
+had me there. I thought of Miss Dean and Griffin, of the Cecelia Brunes
+I had known, and Polatkin tracing the outline of my figure with his fat
+forefinger.
+
+"I wouldn't either," and my frank admission of it brought us out of the
+atmosphere of controversy to the community of our love again.
+
+"You understand, don't you, that I feel even more obligation to her
+_now_." I nodded. I understood fully that obstinate trace of disloyalty
+that came of his having given himself to what she wouldn't approve of,
+to what he couldn't for decency's sake admit of giving her daughters.
+
+"I know what people think of the life of the stage," I agreed; "and I
+know what's worse, that most of it is true. Not that it need to be; but
+it has got in the habit of being so."
+
+"Well, then, if you feel that way----" The inference was plain that he
+didn't know in that case why I held on to it.
+
+"It has got into my blood, Helmeth. I can't explain, and I didn't
+realize until we got to talking of it, but I don't believe I could live
+away from it. It is with me as it is with you about your engineering."
+If I had a momentary qualm lest that last should be not quite
+disingenuous, it passed in the realization that the comparison hadn't
+come home to him. I remembered how Forester would have accepted the
+abnegation of my gift to his necessity of being important, and I didn't
+hold it out against Helmeth that he failed to realize at all the place
+that my work occupied, just as work, in the scheme of my existence.
+
+We came back to it the next day and the next. It would have been
+simpler, of course, if it hadn't been for the children, and for my being
+at one with him in the opinion that the stage wasn't the proper
+atmosphere for the rearing of young ladies. I was still of the opinion
+which was exemplified in so far as I knew it, by Pauline and Mrs.
+Franklin Shane, that the function of mothering could not go on except by
+complete separateness from the business of making a living. All my
+training and heredity had fostered an ideal of family life which
+rendered obligatory a proper house and servants, in the neighbourhood of
+good schools, and the exclusion from it of everybody but those who found
+themselves in an identical situation. And if we had been able to imagine
+a compromise, Helmeth and I would have been hindered by the defrauded
+capacity for loving, from working it out logically. At the mere
+suggestion of anything to drive us apart, the mating instinct set us
+toward one another irresistibly. We would leave off any argument and
+fall to kissing. We were pierced through and through with loving.
+
+"Let us not think of it any more; something will work out for us. Let us
+just be happy the way we are," I would protest.
+
+"Oh, child, child, will you never understand that the way we are is what
+is so hard to bear!" Then he would snatch me up until the suffusing fire
+of his caress would steal through all my body and sing in me like
+bacchic sap of vineyards in the spring.
+
+"You oughtn't to marry me unless you can't help yourself," he would
+laugh shamelessly. So we fell deeper in love and not out of our
+difficulties.
+
+Toward the end of that week, the weather which had been thickening to a
+storm, brought us to one of those thunderous London days, full of a
+stifling murk that might have been breathed out by the nostrils of the
+greasy, hurrying snake that went by in the bed of the river.
+Inconsequential lightnings flashed in the smoky vault, from every
+quarter of which rolled unrelated thunder.
+
+Helmeth came over from Mr. Shane's office in London Wall; the need we
+had of being together was oppressive like the day which, when we had
+sought it in the Park, we could hear like some great monster bellowing
+for its mate. We went out and walked about for a time under the trees,
+fancying the relief of freshness in the green obscurity that under the
+ranked trunks, thickened to blackness. No one was about but a few
+belated nursery maids, scurrying in silhouette against the pale glow of
+the light pinned down and imprisoned under the thick cloud of foliage.
+We were on the Broad Walk, when suddenly a wind tore loose in the
+firmament. It made a whirling chaos of the murk, it wrung the treetops,
+but the air along the ground was stagnant as a cistern. Now and then a
+few great drops spattered on the leaves of the limes. Over a quarter of
+a mile from us, near the Alexandria gate, the tension of the day snapped
+suddenly in flame, a bolt had shattered one of the great trees. Straight
+across the grass toward us the bolt sped like a ball of light. It
+skimmed the ground knee high, flame points on its edges, flickered
+viciously as it drove at us.
+
+There was no time for anything. Helmeth cried out to me once and I
+stepped within the circle of his arms; we could hear the fire ball
+sizzling as it cleared the grass; within a yard of us it went out in a
+flare of gas and a crack like thunder. Suddenly buckets of rain were
+precipitated on us, we could hear the slap of them on the pavement as we
+ran.
+
+I was crying hysterically by the time we came to my room in a cab. I
+remember Helmeth trying to rid me of my wet things and my clinging to
+him crying.
+
+"Oh, my dear, my dear, it was so near, so near, I thought I was to lose
+you before I had had you--before I had had you at all!"
+
+"No, no ... not that, Olivia, not that!" His arms were around me and all
+my life up to that moment was no more to me than a path which led up to
+those arms. I remember that ... and the world dissolving in the wash of
+the rain outside ... and the lift of his breast; and deep under all,
+old, unimagined instincts reared their heads and bayed at the voice of
+their master....
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+After the evening of the storm we talked no more of marriage for a
+while, and about a week later I went over to Paris ostensibly to shop,
+and was joined there by Mr. Garrett on the way to Italy. I suppose that
+Italy must always lie like some lovely sunken island at the bottom of
+all passionate dreams, from which at the flood it may arise; the air of
+it is charged with subtle essences of romance. One supposes Italy must
+be organized for the need of lovers. Nothing occurred there to break the
+film of our enchanted bubble. For a month we kept to the hill towns and
+to Venice, where we could go about in the conspicuous privacy of a
+gondola, and all that time we met nobody we had ever known.
+
+It was all so easily managed--we had to think of the girls, of
+course--no one seeing our registered names side by side, Mrs. Thomas
+Bettersworth, New York, and Helmeth Garrett, Chilicojote, Mexico, would
+have thought of connecting them. Helmeth attended to all his business
+correspondence as though he were still in London, and nobody expected to
+hear from me in any case.
+
+It is strange how little history there is to happiness. We had come
+together past incredible struggles, anxieties, triumphs, defeats; we
+had been buffeted and stricken, and now suddenly we were stilled. If at
+any time the ghosts of the uneasy past rose upon us, we kissed and they
+were laid. So long as we kept in touch, there ran a river of fire
+between our blessed isolation and the world. And for the first time we
+looked upon the world free of the obligations of our being in it. We
+looked, and exchanged our separate knowledges as precious treasure. My
+exploration of life had been from within--I knew what Raphael was
+thinking about when he painted that fine blue vein on his Madonna's
+wrist. But Helmeth had looked on the movement of history; what he saw in
+Italy was the path of armies, lines of aqueducts, old Roman roads to and
+from mines. Everything began or ended for him in a mine, in Gaul or
+Austria or Ophir; dynasties were marked for him by change in the
+ownership of mines. So he drew me the white roads out of Italy as one
+draws fibre from a palm, and strung on them the world's great
+adventures. There were hours also when we let all this great fabric of
+art and history float from us, sure that by the vitalizing thread of
+understanding which ran between us like a new, live sense, we could pull
+it back again ... but we loved ... we loved.
+
+Nothing that happened to us there, came with a more revealing touch than
+the attitude in which I caught myself, looking out for and being
+surprised at not discovering in myself any qualms of conscience. All
+that I had known of such relations in other people, had made itself
+known by a subtle, penetrating, fetid savour, against which some
+instinct, as sure as a hound, threw up its head and bayed the tainted
+air.
+
+But in my own affair, the first compulsion that irked me was the
+necessity I was under of not telling anybody. I wasn't conscious at any
+time of any feeling that wouldn't have gone suitably with the outward
+form of marriage; there were times even when I failed to see why one
+should take exception to the neglect of such form. I was remade every
+pulse and fibre of me, my beloved's ... and so obviously, that the
+necessity of tagging my estate with a ceremony struck me as an
+impertinence. Marriage I think must be a fact, capable of going on
+independently of the prayer book and the county clerk. Whatever _you_
+may think, no god could have escaped the certainty of my being duly
+married.
+
+There were days though, just at first, when I suffered the need of
+completing my condition by an outward bond. I knew very well where the
+custom of wedding rings came from; I should have worn anklets and
+armlets as well, if only they could have been taken as the advertisement
+of my belonging wholly to my man. Depend upon it, the subjugation of
+woman will be found finally to rest in the attempt visibly to
+establish, what the woman herself concurs in, the inward conviction of
+possession.
+
+How much of what was in my own mind, was also in Helmeth's, I do not
+know, but because I had brought upon myself the condition of not being
+married, I failed to speak of what I found regrettable in it. What did
+come out for me satisfyingly, was the man's sheer content in his mate,
+the response, and our pride in it, of his blood and body to my presence,
+and the new relish it created in him for the processes of living, for
+his pipe and his meals, and his work. He had brought some estimates to
+figure out; evenings at work on these, he would call me to him and sit
+with his left arm thrown lightly about my chair, the pencil going as
+though my presence were an added fillip to activity. He took on weight
+in that holiday, and his mouth relaxed to a more youthful curve.
+
+We spent the last three weeks of it at a quiet hotel on the point of
+land that divides Lake Como from Lecco, opposite Cadenabbia. Times yet I
+will wake out of dreaming, to find the pulse of the city transmuted into
+the steady lisping of that silver fretted lake. We had come to a phase
+like that in our relation, deep and full and shining. We spent hours
+sitting on the parapet in the sun, looking at it. I would sit on the
+stone ledge and Helmeth would stretch himself, with his pipe, along the
+ground.
+
+"Helmeth," I said on such a morning, "do you know this is the first time
+I ever rested?" He gave a little gurgle of content; the sun turned on
+the sails of the fishing-boats and flashed us sympathy. "I'm afraid," I
+admitted, "I'm never going to want to do anything else."
+
+"Oh, I'm going to want to. This is good enough, but it wouldn't be half
+so good if I couldn't take it along with me and do things with it--great
+things." He threw his arm across my knees with one of those quick,
+intimate caresses, flooding me full of the delighted sense of how
+completely I belonged to him. "I feel," he said, "as if I had been going
+about with one arm or one hand, and now I've got a full set of them.
+Wait until I show you!"
+
+"When you talk of doing, Helmeth--that means leaving me."
+
+"That's for you to say, Olive." That was as near as he had come yet to
+reminding me that it was I who had chosen this instead of a relation
+which would have implied my going with him wherever his work led him,
+and that the choice was still open to me. The night after the storm he
+had written me:
+
+     "There is nothing that troubles me about to-night except the fear
+     that you may regret it, that you might ever come to have a doubt of
+     how I feel about it. I want you to feel that whatever you choose is
+     right to me, and though I hope for nothing so much as to make you
+     my wife, I shall not urge you beyond what you feel that you can do
+     without urging."
+
+It was a generous letter, and no doubt it had its weight in persuading
+me to trust the situation, in the face of that instinct which saves
+women, even from passions that seem their own justification. If he had
+counted on the naturalness of love to set up its own public obligation,
+he had not been far wrong with me. If it had been practicable, I should
+have walked out with him any day those first weeks to be married. But
+marriage is a very complicated business in Italy. In a measure I had
+satisfied my fret for the visible tie, with a ring which he had bought
+me in Florence, which, as the stones flashed in the sun, turned me back
+on the thought I had when first he set it on my hand.
+
+"Helmeth, do you suppose that we are pushed on to make laws and
+observances about marriage because the bond that comes into being then
+has a consistency and validity beyond what we feel about it?"
+
+"Oh, beyond what we feel about it, yes." He sat up then a little away
+from me, as he often did when he drew upon experiences lying beyond the
+points at which his life had been touched by mine, and began skipping
+little stones into the water. "Yes, I'm sure that what you feel about a
+thing that happens to you is not always the test of what it does to you.
+Sometimes I think feelings haven't much to do with our experiences
+except to get us into them." He left off skipping stones and began to
+pile them into a little heap. "I was thinking of Laura," he concluded.
+It was not often that he spoke to me of his wife.
+
+"I can't remember that I had a great deal of feeling about her; I was
+too busy, I suppose, getting on with my engineering; but she had a grip
+on me. She had a grip. Look here, my dear, I ought to tell you this,
+you're the wonder of the earth for me, and I know very well that my
+wife's world was a very little one; it was bounded by the church on one
+side and by conventions on all the others. But somehow I don't want to
+get too far away from it, and I don't want the girls to get too far." He
+swung about to look squarely up at me. "This that you've given me, it's
+heaven; it's a thing for a man to die for and die happy; but there's the
+other too." He laughed a little awkwardly; he caught my feet in one of
+his strong hands. "Have I made you understand?"
+
+"I understand that kind of life. It's like a clean, scrubbed room. I
+_know_. I was brought up in it. There have been times when I have been
+desperate because I couldn't go back and live there. But I ought to tell
+you, Helmeth, I can't find my way back."
+
+"You! Why should you? You were made to live in Kings' houses. But I
+wanted to be sure you weren't going to be disappointed if I haven't the
+manners that always belong to palaces. I've been in camps where a
+scrubbed room looked mighty good to me." He stretched himself and rolled
+over on the ground, lying with his back to the sun, soaking in it in
+simple, animal content. Little white flecks showed on the lake, the
+sails of the fisher-boats tilted slowly and composed themselves anew
+with the line of the shore and the flowing hills. Directly opposite, the
+walls of Cadenabbia showed white amid the green, like a little streak of
+Arcady.
+
+"We've never been," I reminded him.
+
+"I thought you wanted to leave it so you could always think of its being
+as romantic as it looks, without making sure that it isn't." That was
+the reason I had given him, but the truth was that Cadenabbia was on one
+of those tourist routes where, supposing anybody we knew to be wandering
+about Europe, we would be sure to run into them. This morning, however,
+I was seized with an irresistible desire to visit it.
+
+"But supposing it isn't as interesting as it looks," I submitted, "if I
+go there with you I shall never know it. And think how disappointed I
+should be if I should ever come there without you and find that it is
+the one place we ought to have seen."
+
+There was a little motor launch plying between the shores of the lake,
+and an hour before tea time we crossed in it. We spent the hour in the
+garden of the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen, and then along the parapet we
+strolled in search of tea. It was the height of the tourist season and
+the gay groups moving in the streets between the quaint low houses, gave
+it a holiday air. We heard them calling one to the other, exchanging
+appreciations and information. All at once we heard them calling us.
+
+"Garrett, Garrett!" a party in the act of settling at a tea table in the
+garden of one of the hotels, dissolved and reorganized about us as the
+centre. There was laughter and garbled greetings and handshaking.
+Presently Helmeth began to introduce me. They were a party of
+Californians, all more or less acquainted and importunate; we were swept
+back by them to the table and tea. There were two married couples and
+one unmarried woman of about my age, and a boy of sixteen. I could see
+by the way she appropriated him, that his acquaintance with Miss Stanley
+had been of the degree that might have ripened into marriage, and that
+Miss Stanley had not wholly made up her mind that it wouldn't. She was
+one of those unmarried women who contrive by a multiplicity and vivacity
+of interests to deny what is explicitly advertised by their anxiety to
+have you understand that they consider themselves much better off just
+as they are. I could see her taking in all the details of my appearance,
+to find the key to what Mr. Garrett might presumably like in me, and
+striking out in her manner to him a quick sketch of me, bettered in the
+direction of what she believed it most to be. The other women, if they
+had been brought up in Taylorville, would have resembled Pauline Mills;
+that they didn't I could see was difference of geography. They were all
+full of gay talk and reminiscence of a mutual life in the West, on a
+footing that left me rather more than room to play the part, which I had
+cast for myself with celerity, of being a casual acquaintance of his,
+picked up at a hotel. He had introduced me to them as Mrs. Bettersworth,
+and whether they would have known me or not by my stage name, I took
+care they shouldn't have the opportunity.
+
+Nothing would do but he must stay to dinner; I guessed that there was
+that degree of acquaintance between them which would have made it
+unfriendly of him to refuse. I could see Miss Stanley prick up at his
+manner of leaving the decision to me, and realized that whatever we
+might have agreed upon, there would be no keeping our relation from
+being at least a matter of curiosity to the women, the elder of whom had
+promptly included me in the invitation.
+
+I invented a mythical travelling companion across the lake whom I must
+join, and managed to make my being in Mr. Garrett's company appear so
+casual that I came near to overdoing it by exciting his concern.
+
+"What's the matter; don't you like them?" He wished to know as he saw me
+to the landing.
+
+"Ever so," I insisted promptly, "but they wouldn't like me after a
+while. You behave as if we had been married five years."
+
+"Oh, well, haven't we?" He looked back and his brow gathered a little.
+"For two cents I'd tell them." But after all there was nothing he could
+do but see me comfortably off and go back to them. He told me afterward
+that Mr. Harwood, the elder of the two gentlemen, had been useful to him
+in business.
+
+It must have been close on to midnight when he waked me, sitting on the
+edge of my bed. He must have gone to his own room very softly, meaning
+not to disturb me; now I heard him calling my name in a whisper and his
+hand seeking for my face.
+
+I reached up and drew his down to me.
+
+"Oh, my dear----" I was startled at what I found there. "Beloved, why
+are you crying?" I could feel him shake with sudden uncontrollable
+emotion. I kept his head on my breast and comforted him.
+
+"When did you come in?"
+
+"An hour ago--you were asleep." The commonplace question seemed to quiet
+him.
+
+"Was it something went wrong at the dinner?"
+
+"Wrong, yes ... but not there, not there. It's all wrong, it has been
+wrong from the beginning."
+
+"Dear heart, tell me."
+
+"Olive, marry me; say you'll marry me!" There was urgency in his
+whisper, there was pain in it. "Say it; say it!"
+
+"I'll marry you. I've been waiting for you to ask."
+
+"Oh, my dear, when I have begged you so...."
+
+"Tell me," I urged....
+
+"There isn't anything to tell, only ... we walked along the parapet and
+were very happy together. They're a good sort. I've known them for
+years. And we found a peasant woman selling lace, good lace, the women
+said, and cheap ... Harwood bought some for his wife ... and Stanley
+bought his sister some. Harwood went back, pretending he'd forgotten
+something, and bought a piece his wife wanted and thought she couldn't
+afford. And I couldn't buy you any ... not openly. I wanted Miss Stanley
+to select some handkerchiefs that I said were for the girls and she said
+girls shouldn't wear that kind. Oh, Olive, don't you understand?"
+
+"I understand; you shall go back to-morrow and buy me some."
+
+"But it won't be the same ... and afterward ... after dinner we sat in
+the garden and Harwood sat with his arm round his wife's chair. And you
+were over here ... _hiding_! Oh, Olive, I want my wife, I want her ...
+in the light, before everybody. I want her." I was crying now.
+
+"It's all wrong," he insisted, "it's been wrong from the beginning. We
+belong together, before everybody." He kept repeating that phrase over
+and over. "All the years that we've been apart ... and now just to have
+it in a hole in a corner!"
+
+"No, no, my dear!" I protested. "Before God ... it's been before God!"
+We sobbed together. By and by Love came and comforted us.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I suppose if it had been possible to go out and be married immediately
+we should have married the next morning; but in Italy there are
+observances--it would have taken three weeks at least and hardly less in
+Switzerland. In two weeks our vacation came to an end. Helmeth set out
+by the shortest route for Mexico and I interposed a week's shopping
+between me and Mrs. Franklin Shane to whom I had pledged myself for a
+week at her country house. In November I was to meet Helmeth Garrett in
+New York, "and settle things" he had stipulated. Somehow I could not
+bring myself to think of my relation to him as involving cataclysmal
+changes. I wouldn't say to myself that I intended to marry him, and I
+couldn't say that I wouldn't.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+Within a week after my return, Polatkin came to see me about a project
+of a theatre of my own, which had been on the horizon since the year
+before. Polatkin himself was to furnish the money, which, considering
+what he had made out of me under our earlier contract, he was not in the
+least loath to do. He couldn't understand why I hesitated.
+
+"Is it that you think you are getting along without Polatkin? Well, you
+can try." I hastened to reassure him. "Well then--are you getting cold
+feet about that Ravenscroft woman? Understand me, she can't act at all.
+It's something scandalous the way she tries to act like you do, and she
+can't. If I was her manager I would introduce a tight rope into the
+third act and have her walk it, but what I would have something that
+wasn't copied from somebody else."
+
+"I wasn't thinking of Miss Ravenscroft," I confessed. "I'm thinking of
+getting married."
+
+"Married! Married! And leave the stage? My God--it is a sin----!" He
+clutched the air and shook handfuls of it in my face. "What do you want
+to get married for?" he demanded. "Ain't you getting on like anything?
+Ain't you popular? Ain't you making money?"
+
+"All of those," I admitted.
+
+"Well, then?" His wrath which had frothed white for a moment, cooled
+down into a fluid sort of bewilderment which seemed about to set and
+harden in a smile of disbelief.
+
+"The man I am going to marry lives in Mexico."
+
+"Mexico! Mexico!" he bubbled again. "I ask you is that any sort of a
+place for a man to live what marries the greatest tragic actress ever
+was going to be?
+
+"Ach, my Gott," in moments of great excitement he reverted to the trick
+of the tongue to which he was born. "All these years I have waited for
+this, I have said Miss Lattimore is a great actress, she has talent, she
+has brains, and when she will have passion--Pouff!" He blew out his
+loose lips and made a balloon with his hands to express the rate at
+which I would rise in the scale of tragic actresses. "And now that it
+has happened, she wants to live in Mexico." He deflated himself
+suddenly, folded his hands over what he believed to be his bosom, and
+looked at me reproachfully. This being the first time he had studied my
+face directly since I came home, I suppose he must have seen there my
+doubt and indecision.
+
+"Understand me," he said soberly, "I have known a lot of actresses, and
+I want to tell you that this marrying business don't pay. They got to
+come back to the stage; they got to. You ain't going to be any
+different down there in Mexico to what you are in New York, understand
+me. _Yah!_ Mexico!" The word seemed to inflame him. But he had the sense
+to let me alone for a while.
+
+A few days later I saw in the paper that he had taken the lease of the
+theatre he had mentioned to me, and I knew that he wasn't counting on my
+going to Mexico.
+
+I suppose if I had had the courage to look into my own mind to find out
+what I wished to do, I might have surmised what was going on there from
+the fact that I didn't mention the idea of marriage to Sarah. I have
+tried--all this book has had no other purpose in fact, than to try to
+tell how I came to be in the relation I was to Helmeth Garrett, came
+into it as to a room long prepared for me, without any struggles or
+tormenting, and without thinking much about the effect that his presence
+in my life would have upon my work. I suppose that in as much as I had a
+man's attitude toward work, I had come unconsciously to the man's habit
+of keeping love and my career, in two watertight compartments. I found I
+was not able to think of them as having much to do with one another.
+Still less had I the traditional shames of my situation.
+
+I remember the first time I went to rehearsal, groping about in my
+consciousness for the source of what I felt suddenly divide me from the
+rest of my company, and finding it in the knowledge of myself as a
+woman acquainted with passion, with a secret, delicious life. And far
+from identifying me with the cheapness and betrayal which until now I
+had supposed inseparable from the uncertified union, it set me apart in
+the aloofness of the exclusive, the distinguishing experience. It
+remained for Sarah to pierce me, in spite of all I intrinsically felt my
+relation to Helmeth Garrett to be, with the knowledge of where I stood
+in the world which I still believed had the last word about human
+conduct.
+
+It was not altogether the intent to deceive, that kept me from opening
+the matter to her in the beginning, but a feeling that the less advice I
+had about it the better. And if I did tell her, I wished first to
+arrange that I need not feel any constraint upon me of our habit of
+living together. I was anxious to have Helmeth find me when he came,
+free to be all to him that our love demanded, and in view of all the
+years in which Sarah and I had lived together, I did not know how to go
+about it. I began to think that I should have to tell her after all,
+when the Powers, who must have known very well what was going on, took
+that into account also.
+
+Sarah's season began a week before mine, and I remember her saying that
+she would be glad when we could come home together, as she had had an
+uneasy sensation for the last night or two, of some one following her.
+Sarah had any number of admirers, but the sort of men who were attracted
+to her still splendour, were not the kind to follow her home at night.
+
+"Turn them over to the police," I suggested. I had had to try that once
+or twice.
+
+"Oh, I couldn't!" She turned scarlet. Even after all those years I had
+not realized how all her life was timed to catch the slightest
+approaching footfall of what, to her simple faith, must inevitably come.
+I found her waiting for me at the stage door on my first night--no
+matter how many of them you have, first nights are always in the
+balance--and we were so taken up with discussing how I had got on with
+it, that it wasn't until I was fitting the key in the lock that I was
+recalled to the occasion of her annoyance. Just below us there seemed to
+be a man dodging in and out of the blocks of shadow made by the
+high-railed stairways that led up to the first floor of the row of flats
+in which our rooms were located. Something in the figure, or in our
+standing there before the shadowed door with the dull light of the
+transom over us, brushed me with a light wing of memory; I seemed to
+recall some such conjunction before, but it was gone before I could
+connote the suggestion with time or place. All I said to Sarah was that
+if we saw anything more of that we would certainly speak to the police.
+
+The next night we went to supper with friends, and it was after midnight
+when my cab--Sarah didn't afford cabs for herself--drew up at the door.
+The approach to it was by way of a handsome pair of stairs with an
+ornamental iron railing of so close a pattern that any one sitting on
+the steps in the dark, would be pretty well concealed by it. That there
+was some one so sitting, dropped there in a stupour of fatigue or
+drunkenness, we did not discover until we stumbled fairly on to him.
+
+The exclamation we raised, awoke him; it arrested the attention of the
+cab driver just turning from the curb, he raised his lamp and sent the
+rays of it streaming over us. The man I could see, was shabby, ill and
+embarrassed, he ducked his head from the light, but his hat had fallen
+off on the step and as he threw up his arm to protect himself from
+recognition I knew him by the gesture.
+
+"Griff," I cried. "Griffin! You!" I caught him by the arm. He let it
+fall at his side and stood looking at us pitifully, like a trapped
+animal.
+
+"I wasn't doing any harm," he mumbled. The cab driver seeing that we
+knew him, let down his lights and clattered away. I thought quickly; he
+must have been in want, he had looked for me and at the last was ashamed
+to claim me.
+
+"But, Griffin," I insisted, "you don't know how glad I am to see
+you--you must come in." He wasn't looking at me; he hadn't heard me.
+
+"Look out," he said, "she's going to faint!" He brushed past me to
+Sarah. She leaned limp against the railing; he steadied her as a man
+might a sacred vessel in jeopardy. But Sarah didn't faint so easily as
+that, she gathered herself away from his hand.
+
+"Come upstairs," she commanded. It was only one flight up. I don't know
+how we managed to get a light and to find ourselves in its pale flare,
+confronting one another. I could see then that my first surmise had been
+correct about Griffin, to the extent that he looked ill and in want. He
+was holding his hat, which he had picked up from the stairs, and fumbled
+it steadily in his hands. His hair, which wanted trimming more even than
+when I had last seen him, had still its romantic curl; he looked
+steadily out from under it at Sarah. I had an idea, though I think it
+must have been derived from my own dizziness at what rushed in upon me,
+that Sarah was floating in air, that she hung there swaying with the
+breeze from the open window, as a spirit. She was spirit white and her
+voice seemed to come from far.
+
+"Leon! Leon!" How he knew what she demanded of him only the God who
+makes men and women to love one another, knows.
+
+"She died," he said to the unspoken question. "She died two years ago.
+I've been all this time finding you." Suddenly a quick flame burst over
+Sarah.
+
+"You came--you came to me!" I could see that she moved toward him, all
+her magnificent body alight, her arms, her bosom. I turned quickly
+through the door into the room beyond. I couldn't stay to see that. I
+went on into my bedroom and knelt down, hiding my face in the
+bedclothes. I think I meant to pray, but no words came. I rose presently
+and went into the kitchen. The maid did not sleep in the flat but came
+every morning at nine; on the table there was a tray as she left it
+always, with everything laid out in case we should be hungry coming late
+from the theatre. I moved about softly and made chocolate and sandwiches
+and arranged them on the tray; I knew Sarah would understand. About half
+an hour after I had gone to my room again, I heard her go out to find
+it.
+
+From time to time I could catch a faint murmur from the front room. I
+put the pillow over my head and cried softly. I remembered how Griffin
+had looked at her that time in Chicago when I had taken him to "The
+Futurist," and how I had been ashamed ever to introduce him. I wondered
+whether his real name were Lawrence or Griffin. I had fallen asleep at
+last, and I was awakened by Sarah standing beside me in her white gown.
+
+"May I sleep with you, Olivia? I've put ... Mr. Lawrence ... in my
+room." I drew her under the cover with me; she was cold and now and then
+a shudder passed through her from head to foot.
+
+"You guessed, didn't you?" she whispered. "He said you knew him in
+Chicago. His ... Mrs. Lawrence is dead ... you heard him say that?" I
+understood she meant by that to extenuate his coming back to her. It was
+right for him to come if no other woman stood in the way; what there was
+in himself that stood in the way didn't seem to matter.
+
+"He's been ill," she said. "I hope you didn't mind my keeping him in the
+house, Olive.... We can be married to-morrow."
+
+I sat straight up in bed in my amazement.
+
+"Sarah! You don't mean that you are going to marry him!"
+
+"Why, what else is there to do?"
+
+"But, Sarah ..." I lay down again. After all what else was there to do?
+
+"You know, Olivia, you have never really loved anybody." I had no answer
+to that; suddenly she broke out shaking the bed with her sobs. "Oh, my
+dear, my dear, it is true that he loved me. It is true. He came back to
+me as soon as he was free. Oh, Olive, if you had known what it is all
+these years not to know if it was _true_! If he hadn't only taken me
+just as a stop-gap ... a fancy ... how was I to know?"
+
+I didn't think very much of the proof that he loved her now. Sarah,
+beautiful, prosperous, was a goal for any man to strive toward, even
+without the necessity which was written in every line of Leon Griffin
+Lawrence.
+
+"Sarah," I questioned gently, "do you mean to say you've loved him all
+this time, that you love him now?" She left off sobbing to answer me
+with that steady, patient truth with which she met any issue of life.
+
+"I loved him ... all the love I had I gave him. It's not the same now,
+of course; its wings are broken, but it is his. Once you've given you
+can't take it back again."
+
+"But he--he has no claim on you now. Sarah, do you need to marry him?"
+
+"I am married to him."
+
+"But, Sarah ... look here, Sarah, it isn't true that I have never loved.
+I didn't love the man I was married to, but I have learned something
+about love; I've learned that marriage without it is a thing no
+self-respecting woman should go into."
+
+"Love," said Sarah, "is a thing that once you've gone into, binds you by
+something that grows out of it that is stronger than love itself.
+Olivia, I am bound ... if you want to know, I'd rather be bound to--to
+Leon Lawrence by that tie than to the dearest love without it. Oh,
+Olivia, can't you see, can't you understand that I have to do
+_right_ ... that the way I see things there's a law ... not a civil law
+but a law of loving that goes on by itself; and being faithful to it is
+better to me than loving. You must see that, Olivia."
+
+"I see that this is the happiest thing for you and I'll not put anything
+in your way, Sarah." I kissed her. What, after all, does one soul know
+of another.
+
+It came to me as an extenuating circumstance when I looked him over the
+next morning, that Mr. Lawrence wouldn't live long enough to do her any
+particular harm. He had been so little of a man always to me, so much
+less so now, eaten through as he was by poverty and sickness, that I
+could never understand how he happened to be the vehicle of that
+appealing charm which even as I looked, drew me over to his side in
+something like a sympathetic frame.
+
+I could see that he regarded me anxiously, and I thought it to his
+credit to be able to realize that there might be somebody not absolutely
+delighted at his marrying Sarah. But it wasn't, as I learned later, any
+sense of his shortcomings that waked in his eye toward me.
+
+He was lying on the sofa in our little parlour, for the shock of the
+encounter had been too much for the abused and broken thing he was.
+Sarah had gone out, to consult Jerry, I believed about their
+marriage;--she wouldn't have asked me knowing how I felt about it.
+Griffin looked up at me with the old formless demand on my
+consideration.
+
+"You've never told her, have you?"
+
+"Told what?" On my part it was genuine amazement.
+
+"About us, you know ... there in Chicago." He dropped his eyes;
+something almost like a blush of shame overcame him. I stared.
+
+"Good heavens, Griff, I'd forgotten it."
+
+"Oh, well, I didn't know--some women----" He stopped, embarrassed by my
+sheer credulity of its having anything to do with his relation to Sarah.
+"I told you I was a bad lot," he protested, "but I swear that since my
+wife died and I could come back to her, I've been straight. You believe
+that, don't you?"
+
+"Oh, I'll believe it if it's any comfort to you." When I talked it over
+with Jerry afterward I could see the queer, twisted kind of moral
+standard by which he made it appear that any irregularity of his during
+his wife's life, was unfaithfulness to her, and not Sarah.
+
+She had come back with Jerry and I was walking with him to the City Hall
+for the license; he had begun by protesting just as I had, and had
+surrendered to his conviction that nothing less would satisfy Sarah.
+
+"After all," I said, "it shows that there is some sort of harmony
+between them, that he should realize that the only reparation he could
+make would be to come back to her."
+
+"Cur!" Jerry kicked at the pavement, "to pollute the life of a woman
+like Sarah with his wretched existence."
+
+"That's how you feel," I reminded him, "but remember how all these
+years Sarah has felt polluted by the thought that she wasn't married to
+him."
+
+"Oh, _damn_!"
+
+"Sarah thinks, and I'm beginning to think so too, that there is
+something to marriage that binds besides the ceremony."
+
+"I know." Jerry's wife had left him that summer and though he knew it
+was the best thing for both of them, he was trying to get her back
+again: "It binds of itself. If only they would tell us that in the
+beginning instead of putting up all this stuff about its being the law
+and religion. We think we can get out of it just by getting out of the
+law, and none of us know better until it is too late."
+
+"People like Sarah know. They know just the way swallows know to go
+south in winter. You'll see; she will be happier married, not because it
+is pleasant but because it is right."
+
+They were married that afternoon in our apartment, and it was not until
+I was settled in the hotel where I had elected to stay until I could
+find suitable quarters, that I realized that the chance of this marriage
+had accomplished for me the freedom that I had not known how to obtain
+for myself.
+
+I lay awake a long time after I came from the theatre, and the mere
+circumstance of my being alone and in a hotel, as well as the events
+that led up to it, brought back to me the sense of my lover, of his
+being just in the next room and presently to come in to me. I felt near
+and warm toward him. And then I thought of Sarah and Griffin and how
+almost I had become the stop-gap to his affections that she dreaded most
+to find herself to have been. It didn't seem very real in retrospect. I
+shuddered away from it. Then I began to think how I had first been
+kindly disposed toward him, and that brought up an image of the dim
+corridor of the hotel where I had come to my first knowledge of such
+relations, and my abhorrence and terror of it. I thought of O'Farrell
+and of Miss Dean, and that suspicion of sickliness which her personality
+had for me, and saw how it must have arisen from her consciousness of
+what she had done to Griffin rather than her relation to Manager
+O'Farrell. Then I thought of Helmeth Garrett and one night in Sienna
+when the moonlight poured white over the cathedral ... and a linden tree
+in bloom outside the window ... and a nightingale singing in it ...
+Suddenly it was mixed up in my mind with the slanting chandelier and the
+tin-faced clock, and slowly a sense of unutterable stain and shame began
+to percolate through and through me.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+It is a great mistake to suppose that assertiveness is the only mannish
+trait taken on by successful women, nor is pliability the only feminine
+mark they lose. By what insensible degrees it came about I do not know,
+but I found myself on the peak of popularity, very much of the male
+propensity to be beguiled. I was willing to be played upon, and so it
+was skilfully done, to concede to it more than the situation had a right
+to claim for itself. I pulled myself up afterward, or was pulled up by
+the sharp rein of destiny, but for the time, while my success was new, I
+was aware not only of the possibility of my being handled, but of my
+luxuriating in it, of demanding it as the price of my favour, and in
+particular, of valuing Polatkin for the way in which, by my own moods,
+my drops and exaltations he brought me to his hand.
+
+How much of the fact of my private life he was really acquainted with, I
+never knew, but he understood enough of its reaction to make even my
+resistences serve to push me on to the assured position of a theatre and
+a clientele of my own. It stood out for me as he described it, not so
+much as a means of dividing me from my beloved, but as a new and
+completer way of loving. I wanted more ways for that, space and
+opportunity. I wished to lay my gift down, a royal carpet for Helmeth
+Garrett to walk on; I would have done anything for him with it except
+surrender it. Not the least thing that came of my condition was the
+extraordinary florescence of my art.
+
+Every night as I drew its rich and shining fabric about me I was aware
+of all forms and passions, the mere masquerade of our delight in one
+another. Every night I embroidered it anew, I adored and caressed him
+with my skill. Polatkin went about wringing his hands over it.
+
+"You are a Wonder, a Wonder! And you are wasting it on them swine." That
+was his opinion of my support. "And to think you could have a theatre of
+your own, and what you like----"
+
+"A theatre like me--_Me_ spread over it, expressed, exemplified, carried
+out to the least detail?"
+
+"You shall have it even in the box office!" he responded magnificently.
+
+"How soon?"
+
+"I will bring the plans this afternoon; I got 'em ready in case you came
+around." But he was much too intelligent to undertake to bind me to them
+at that juncture.
+
+Things went on like this until the last week in November, then I had a
+telegram from Helmeth saying that he would be detained still longer.
+Every pulse of me had so been set to his coming on the twenty-seventh
+that I thought I should not be able to go on after that, I should go out
+like a light when the current is stopped. I had so little of him, not
+even a photograph, nothing but my ring and a few trinkets he had bought
+me in Italy. If I could have had a garment he had worn, a chair in which
+he had sat ... I went round and looked at the Astor House, because he
+told me that he had stopped there once, years ago.
+
+I stood that for three days and then I went down to New Rochelle where
+he had written me earlier, his girls were at school; not on my own
+account, you understand, but as a possible patron of the school on
+behalf of my niece, who was, if the truth must be told, less than two
+years old. While I was being shown about, I had Helmeth's children
+pointed out to me. They looked, as I had surmised, like their mother. If
+they had in the least resembled their father I should have snatched them
+to me. Everything might have turned out quite differently. They were,
+the principal said, nice girls and studious, but they did not look in
+the least like their father.
+
+It was one of those dark, gusty days that come at the end of November,
+damp without rain, and of a penetrating cold. There had been a great
+storm at sea lately and you could hear the wash of its disturbances all
+along the Sound. There was no steady wind, but now and then the damp air
+gave a flap like an idle wing. It was like the stir in me of a
+formless, cold desire, not equal to the demand Life was about to make on
+it. As I turned into the station road after a formal inspection of the
+premises, I met the girls coming back from their afternoon walk with the
+teachers, two and two. The Garrett girls were next to the last, they
+were very near of an age; I waited half hidden by a tree to watch them
+as they passed.
+
+They were well covered up from the weather in large blue coats with
+capes, and blue felt hats with butterfly bows to match at the ends of
+their flaxen braids. They looked like their mother ... I couldn't see
+them growing up to anything that would fit with Sarah and Jerry and
+Polatkin. The wing of the wind shook out some gathered drops of moisture
+as they passed, the branches of the trees clashed softly together, and
+as they turned into the grounds I noticed that the older one had
+something in her walk that reminded me of her father.
+
+I was pierced through with a formless jealousy of the woman who had
+borne them in her body. I was moved, but not with the impulse to draw
+them to my bosom. I felt back in the place where my boy had been, for
+the connecting link of motherliness and failed to find it. I had had it
+once, that knowledge of what is good to be done for small children and
+the wish to do it, but it was gone from me. It was as though I might
+have had a hand or a claw, any prehensile organ by which such things are
+apprehended, and when I reached it out after Helmeth's children it was
+withered.
+
+What I found in myself was the familiar attitude of the stage. I could
+have acted what swept through me then, I could have brought you to tears
+by it, but there was nothing I could do about it _but_ act. I wrote
+Helmeth that night that I had seen the children and then I burned the
+letter.
+
+He came at last. He was greatly concerned about his enterprise which was
+not yet established on that footing which he would like to have for it,
+and I think it was a relief to him to have me without the conventions
+and readjustments of marriage. It was tacitly understood between us that
+things were better as they were until that business was settled. I think
+he could not have had a great deal of money at the time; all that racing
+to and fro between London and Mexico must have cost something. His
+anxiety about the girls, which occasioned his sending them to the most
+expensive schools, and his affection for them, which led to their being
+carted about by their aunt to meet him occasionally at far-called
+places, was an additional drain.
+
+We were very happy; there is nothing whatever to tell about it. We met
+in brief intervals snatched from our work and did as other lovers do.
+Sometimes he would come for me at the theatre--the freshness of my
+acting never palled on him. Other times I would find him waiting for me
+in the little flat I had expressly chosen and furnished to be loved in.
+The pricking warmth of his presence would meet me as I came up the
+stair. Not long ago I found myself unexpectedly in a part of the city
+where we used to walk because we were certain not to meet any of our
+friends there. There was a tiny café where we used often to dine, and
+the memory of it swept over me terrifyingly fresh and strong.
+
+With all this, it was plain that we got on best when we were most alone.
+It was not that I did not every way like and was interested in the
+friends he introduced to me, outdoor men most of them, and their
+large-minded, capable wives. I got on with them tremendously, and found
+them as good for me as green food in the spring, sated as I was on the
+combined product of professionalism and temperament. It was chiefly that
+the simplicity and openness of their lives brought out for him the
+duplicity that lay at the bottom of ours. For it was plain that they
+wouldn't have understood, wouldn't have thought it necessary. They could
+have faced, those women, strange lands and untoward happenings, had many
+of them faced sterner things for the sake of their husbands, with the
+same courage and selflessness with which they would in my circumstances,
+have faced renunciation.
+
+It was the realization of this, so much sharper in him who had seen and
+known, that checked and harassed Helmeth; he wished to be at one with
+them, to be felicitated on my success and my charm, to include me if
+only by implication, in that community of adventure with which these
+mining and engineering folk had ringed the earth. And the necessity of
+holding our relation down to the outward forms of friendship established
+on the supposition of our having grown up together, fretted him.
+
+"It isn't honest," he broke out once after he had tried to persuade me
+to let him tell his friends that we were engaged. "It's all right
+between us; you are my wife in the sight of whatever gods there are, but
+that isn't what other people would call you."
+
+"Somehow, Helmeth, so long as it is with you, I don't care much what
+they call me."
+
+"Well, I care; I care a lot. You don't seem to remember you are going to
+be my girls' mother--sons' too, I hope. We ought to have some more
+children; Sanderson's got four." Sanderson had been our host at luncheon
+that day.
+
+Helmeth was knocking out the ashes of his pipe on my hearthstone; he
+paused in the occupation of refilling it to look down at me in a moody
+kind of impatience that was the worst I knew of him. There was the
+suggestion of a cleft in his strong, square chin which came out whenever
+he bit hard on a difficult proposition. The play of it now was like the
+tiny shadow of disaster.
+
+"I was down in old Brownlow's office the other day," he went on,
+"talking this Mexican scheme to him, and he had to break off in the
+middle of it to telephone to some chorus girl he had a date with. God!
+it made me hot to think of it!"
+
+"Because I'm in the same----" He cut me off with a sound of vexation.
+
+"Don't say it; don't even think of it! How long does this contract of
+yours last?"
+
+"To the end of the season," I told him.
+
+"Well, you chuck it just as soon as you can. I'll put this thing through
+somehow. We'll clear out of here." He had his pipe alight by now and
+began puffing more contentedly. "I don't think much of this burg
+anyway," he laughed as he settled himself in one of my chairs. "A man
+doesn't have a chance to get his feet on the ground."
+
+There were times when he almost made me share in his distaste for it.
+That was when I had drawn him into the circle of my professional
+acquaintances which somehow shrivelled at his touch like spiders in the
+heat. Understand that I hold by my art, that I have poured myself a
+libation on that altar, that I value it above all other means of
+expressing the drama of man's relation to the Invisible, and that I do
+not think you do enough for it, prize it enough, or use it rightly. But
+I suppose there is a yellow streak in me, or I wouldn't sicken so as I
+do at what it brings to pass in the personalities by which it is most
+forwarded. For since it must be that art cannot be served to the world,
+except by a cup emptied of much that is most desirable in the
+recipients, it ill becomes them as long as they fatten their souls at
+it, to take exception to the vessel from which it is drunk. Nevertheless
+I used to find myself, when Helmeth was with me, sniffing at the
+spiritual garments of my friends for the smell of burning. I resented
+Mr. Lawrence the most; it was not altogether for the incongruity of his
+possessing Sarah, her fine smudgeless personality and her lovely body,
+delicate and shapely as a pearl, but for the incontestable evidence he
+offered me of how low I had stooped. From the peak of my present
+prosperity, my troubles in Chicago, showed the merest accident, and the
+distance I had sprung away from them seemed somehow expressive of the
+strength with which I had sprung from all that Lawrence represented. Not
+all the care Sarah bestowed on him--and I think the best he could do for
+her was to provide her in his impaired health with an occasion for
+mothering--could quite distract the attention from the ineradicable mark
+of his cheapness.
+
+He was as much out of key with the society in which Sarah's success and
+mine had placed him, as he was flattered to find himself there. It had
+brought out in him in the way privation had not, that touch of
+theatricality which intrigued Sarah's unsophisticated fancy in the first
+place. He let his hair grow into curls and made a mysterious and
+incurable pain of his broken health. And though he offered it as the
+best he had to offer, with humility, he suffered an accession of that
+devoted manner which had won his way among women of his own class, but
+which among the sort he met at my rooms was ridiculous. Jerry too, with
+his married life in dissolution, for what looked to Helmeth, and in the
+light of his strong sense, was beginning to look to me like an aimless
+folly; out of all these blew a wind witheringly on the fine bloom of my
+happiness. We did best when we shut it out in a profound, exalted
+intimacy of passion.
+
+What leads me to think that Polatkin must have watched me rather closely
+all this time, is the fact that he waited until Mr. Garrett was gone to
+London again in the latter part of February, to put it to me that if I
+really meant to leave the stage permanently, and it was a contingency
+which, in speaking to me of it, he had the wit to speak seriously, I
+could do no better for myself than to take flight from it from the roof
+of my own theatre. He put it to me in his own dialect, mixed of the
+green room and Jewry, that I had torn a large hole in the surrounding
+professional atmosphere by the vitality of my acting that winter, and
+that it would be a great shame to go out into the obscurity of marriage
+without this final pyrotechnic burst.
+
+I could have, by his calculation, a short season to open with, and a
+whole year of brilliant success before--well before anything happened. I
+think by this time I must have known subconsciously that nothing would
+happen. It must be because no man naturally can imagine any more
+compelling business for a woman than being interested in him, that
+Helmeth failed to understand that he could as well have torn himself
+from the enterprise for which he had starved and sweated, as separate me
+from the final banquet of success. I had paid for it and I must eat.
+
+We opened in May, not the best time of year for such an adventure; but I
+suppose Polatkin was afraid to trust me to the distractions of another
+vacation. It occurs to me now, though at the time I didn't suspect him,
+that we couldn't have opened even then if he had not been much more
+forward with the plan than at any time he had permitted me to guess. At
+the last I came near, in his estimation, to jeopardizing the whole
+business by opening with "The Winter's Tale" with Sarah in the part of
+_Hermione_ and myself as _Perdita_. Jerry was writing me a new play, but
+in the process of breaking off a marriage that ought never to have been
+begun, he had found no time to complete it; but why, urged Polatkin, if
+we must fall back on Shakespeare, choose a part that did not introduce
+me to the audience until the play was half done? He stood out at least
+for _Juliet_ or _Cleopatra_. "Why, indeed," I retorted, "have a theatre
+of my own if it is not to do as I please in it?" I knew however that
+what I could put into _Perdita_ of Willesden Lake and the woods aflame,
+would have sustained even a more inconsiderable part.
+
+Effie and her husband came on to my opening night. I want to say here,
+if I have not explicitly said it, that my sister is a wonderful, an
+indispensable woman. When I think of her, the mystery of how she came
+out of Taylorville, full-fledged to her time, is greater than the
+mystery of how I came to be at all. For Effie is absolutely
+contemporaneous. She lives squarely not only in her century, but in the
+particular quarter of it now going. No clutch of tradition topples her
+toward the generation of women past. Most women of my acquaintance are
+either sodden with left-over conventions, or blowsy with racing after
+the to-be, but Effie is compacted, tucked in, detached from but
+distinctly related to her background of Montecito. She was president of
+the Woman's Club, chairman of the book committee of the circulating
+library, and though she had a letter every morning and a telegram every
+night from the woman with whom she had left her two babies, it didn't
+prevent her in the week she spent with me, from getting into touch with
+more Forward Movements than I was aware were in operation in New York.
+
+"But, good heavens, Effie, how can you find time for them? It's as much
+as I can do to attend to my own job."
+
+"Oh, you! You're a forward movement yourself. All I am doing is herding
+the others up to keep step with you. You know, Olivia, I've wondered if
+you didn't feel lonely at times, so far ahead that you don't find
+anybody to line up _with_. Every time I see a woman step out of the
+ranks in some achievement of her own, I think, 'Now, Olivia will have
+company.'"
+
+"But, heavens!" I said again. "I'm not thinking of the others at all. I
+don't even know that there are others, or at least who they are. I'm a
+squirrel in a cage. I go round because I must. I don't know what comes
+of it."
+
+"I'll tell you what comes--women everywhere getting courage to live
+lives of their own. Do you remember what you went through in Higgleston?
+Well, the more women there are like you, the less there will be of that
+for any of them. It is the conscious movement of us all toward liberty
+that's going round with you." I was dashed by the breadth and brightness
+of her view.
+
+"Effie," I said, "is this a new kind of toy to dangle before your
+intelligence to keep it from realizing it isn't getting anywhere?"
+
+"Like the love affairs of your friends?" she came back at me promptly.
+"No, it isn't; it's--well, I guess it's a religion."
+
+I believed as I dressed at the theatre that night, that it was the
+contagion of Effie's enthusiasm that keyed me up to a pitch that I
+thought I shouldn't have reached without Helmeth. I had counted so on
+his being there for the first night, but he was still in London, and for
+a week I hadn't heard from him.
+
+I needed something then to account, as I proceeded with my part, for the
+extraordinary richness of power, the delicacy and precision with which I
+put it over line by line to my audience. I played, oh, I played! I felt
+the audience breathing in the pauses like the silent wood; the lights
+went gold and crimson and the young dreams were singing. So vivid was
+the mood that, when from time to time I was swept out on billows of
+applause before the curtain, I fancied I saw him there, leaning to me,
+now from a balcony, or standing unobserved in a box behind the
+Sandersons' and some friends of his who had pleased, on his
+introduction, to take a great interest in me. It was a wonderful night,
+flooded with the certainty of success as by a full moon; we danced under
+it in spirit--I believe that Polatkin kissed me; two of my young men I
+saw with their hands on one another's shoulders, capering in the wings
+as I was being drawn before the curtain again and again to bob and smile
+like a cuckoo out of a clock, striking the perfect hour. And through it
+all was the sense of my beloved, the leaf-light touch of his kiss on my
+cheek, the pressure of his arm, so poignant that as I came out of the
+theatre late with Effie and her husband, I thought I could not bear it
+to go back to my room and find it empty.
+
+"Willis," I said to my brother-in-law, "you must lend me my sister
+to-night." I was sitting between them in the carriage, each of them
+holding a hand. I do not know what they were able to get of my acting,
+but nothing could have kept from them the knowledge of my tremendous
+success. I could see though, that in his excited state it wasn't going
+to be easy for him to spare his young wife, and that made it easier for
+me as we drew up in front of my door to change my mind suddenly and send
+her back with him. What really influenced me was the certainty that I
+could not bear even for Effie to disturb the sense of my lover's
+presence which I seemed to feel brooding over the room. I went up the
+steps warm with it.
+
+I had a moment of thinking as I opened the door and found the lights
+turned on, that my maid had left them so in anticipation of my return,
+and then I saw him. He was sitting by the dying fire; he had not heard
+me come up the stair, for his head was in his hands. He turned then at
+my exclamation, and I had time, before we crossed the width of the room
+to one another, to think that the attitude in which I had found him and
+the new writing of anxiety in his face, as he turned it to me, had its
+source in his finding me in what looked like a permanent relation to a
+theatre of my own. For a moment I thought that, and then my apprehension
+was buried on his breast.
+
+"Oh, my love, my love!" He held me off from him to let his eyes rove
+tenderly over my face, my breast, my hair. I do not know if he
+remembered the words he had spoken to me so long ago, or if they came
+spontaneously to the command of the old desire: "Oh, you beauty--you
+wonder...."
+
+Presently we moved to sit down, and stumbled over his bag upon the floor
+beside his chair. It brought me back to the miracle of his being there
+and to the certainty that he must have come to me direct from the
+steamer.
+
+"On the _Cunarder_," he admitted, "six days and a half. O Lord!" His
+gesture was expressive of the extreme weariness of impatience. "I came
+ashore with the quarantine officers. I couldn't cable. I left at two
+hours' notice."
+
+It occurred to me that he must have at least come ashore before sunset,
+and in that case he couldn't have come straight to me. I began to feel
+something ominous in the presence there of his bag. His overcoat, though
+the evening was so warm, lay beyond him on another chair. It flashed
+over me in a wild way that he had come to some sudden determination--he
+had been at the theatre that night--he had taken my being there in that
+circumstance as final--perhaps he meant to abandon me to my art, to
+surrender me at least to its more importunate claim. He followed my
+thought dully from far off.
+
+"I was at the theatre in time for your part," he said. "There wasn't a
+seat, but they knew me at the box office and let me in."
+
+"Then it _was_ you that I saw in the balcony, and in Sanderson's box? I
+thought it was a vision."
+
+"I had business with Sanderson." He turned back to what was beginning to
+make itself felt through his profound preoccupation, the charm of my
+presence. "There was that in your acting to-night that would have evoked
+visions," he smiled. "I had them myself." I knelt down on the floor
+beside his knees.
+
+"Helmeth, tell me," I begged. He began to stroke my face with his hand.
+
+"It doesn't seem so bad as it did a few moments ago, and yet it is bad
+enough. I must leave for Mexico in an hour."
+
+"Leave me?" I was still, in my mind, occupied with what now began to
+seem a monstrous disloyalty to him, my obligation to Polatkin. There had
+been a great deal about our new venture on the programme, even if he
+hadn't seen the papers, he must have learned it as soon as he came into
+the theatre.
+
+"Unless you can go with me in an hour ... yes, my dear, I know it is
+impossible...." He was silent a while, clasping and unclasping my hand
+on his knee, knitting his brows and staring into the fire with the
+expression of a man so long occupied with anxiety that his mind, in any
+moment of release, goes back to it automatically. I stirred presently
+when I saw that his perplexity had nothing to do with me. "I had a
+cable in London," he said. "Heaven only knows how long they were getting
+it down to the coast where they could send it; they have struck water in
+the mines." I failed to get the force of the announcement except that
+from the manner of his telling it, it was a great disaster. "I must
+leave on the twelve twenty-three," he warned me. I did understand that.
+
+"Oh, no, _no_! Helmeth!" I cried out. "Not now ... not so soon!" I clung
+to him crying. "Stay with me to-night ... just for to-night!" We rocked
+in one another's arms. I remember little broken snatches of explanation.
+
+"I've worked _so_, Olivia ... I've worked and sweated ... and now...."
+Presently he broke out again. "To have worked, and know that your work
+is sound, and to be played a trick, to lose by a ghastly trick! If there
+is a God, Olivia, why does He play tricks on a man like that?"
+
+"Hush, my dear! Oh, my dear ..."
+
+"Do you know what I've been doing since I came ashore? I've been buying
+pumps, Olivia, pumps, and machinery to work them. Think of the delay;
+and I'll have to ask Shane for more money ... more ... and I meant to be
+paying dividends." He held me off from him fiercely with both hands.
+"Olivia, suppose to-night instead of applause you had heard hisses,
+and people going out, turning their backs on you in your best
+lines ... oh ..." He broke off and covered his face with his hands.
+I crept up to him.
+
+"If they had, I should have come back to you, beloved. And I shouldn't
+have remembered it. Oh, beloved, what are all things worth except that
+they give us this?" I was on his knee now, and my hair was still in its
+maiden snood as it had been in the play. I drew it softly about his
+face.
+
+"Oh, my dear, to be _this_ to me, what does it matter about the mines?
+They will come straight again in a little time. But this ... this is
+_now_." I could feel the yielding in his frame. He was my man and I did
+what I would with him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+Among all the devices with which we confound the Powers forever fumbling
+at our lives, none must puzzle them more than the set of obligations and
+interactions that go by the name of business. Unless, indeed, there is a
+god of business, which I doubt.
+
+Past all misguiding of our youth, past all time and distance and
+unlikelihood, the god who would be worshipped most by the welding of
+spirit into spirit, had brought us two together only to be rived apart
+by the necessity which tied us each, not only to our own, but to other
+people's means of making a living. The two or three hours following on
+Helmeth's announcement of the accident which had, who knows but at the
+instance of the Powers which was bent upon uniting us, shattered the
+point of his attachment to the Mexican scheme, we spent in that drowning
+realization of the source of being and delight for each in the other,
+which is the process and the end of loving. And then the withdrawing of
+whole electric constellations from the city skyline and the clatter of
+the morning traffic in the street, and the dispersing blueness, let in
+with them the considerations which whipped us apart.
+
+If there is a god of business he is of a superior subtlety, for even
+then we proposed to one another that the best way of being quit of the
+obligation was to serve our time to it; and it was in pursuance of some
+such idea that I found myself, toward the latter part of June, going out
+to Los Angeles to meet Mr. Garrett who would by that time, have come up
+the coast from Mazatplan to make purchases of supplies. I should have
+gone much farther than that merely to have touch with him, the warm
+pressure of his hand, his voice at my ear; all my dreams even, were
+tinged by the loss out of my life of his bodily presence. It was a
+singular flame-touched circumstance that the assured success of my new
+venture set up in me a fiercer need.
+
+There had not been time for much in his letters but accounts of his
+struggle with conditions at the mine and his slow conquest of the water
+that flooded all the lower levels, of disheartening, incompetent labour
+and the multiplied difficulty of distance from any base of supplies. But
+that little was all timed to our meeting again. "I will explain all that
+when I see you," "We will talk of that later," were phrases that cropped
+out in his letters many times. I did not know, even in the act of going
+there, just what he expected to bring to pass in our affairs by my being
+in Los Angeles. I only know that I wanted desperately to see him.
+
+One thing I gathered from his letters, that in the preoccupation and
+haste of his stay in New York he had wholly missed the significance of
+my new entanglement with Morris Polatkin. I have to suppose, to account
+for his never having any other conception of what my work was to me,
+that he had never known a professional woman or one who worked at
+anything except as a stop-gap between the inconsequence of youth and
+marriage. He felt himself, humbly, rather a poor substitute for the
+colour, the excitement and gayety of my career--why should so many
+people suppose that an actress's life is gay--but he balanced that with
+what he meant to purchase for me by his own achievement. He had, without
+thinking it necessary to account for it, the idea that is so generally
+and unexcusedly entertained that I am sometimes hypnotized into thinking
+it must be the right one, that a woman in becoming a man's wife ceases
+to be her own and becomes somehow mysteriously and inevitably his. It
+was not that in all our talk about it, he had any conclusions about the
+stage as an unsuitable profession for women, but that he was inherently
+unable to think of it as possible for his wife. We were saved from
+dispute by the proof I had had in Italy that his inability to think of
+me as having a life apart, arose chiefly in his need of me, which had in
+it something of the absolute quality of a child's need of its mother. I
+am glad now, in view of all that came of it, that I was spared the
+bitterness of not seeing, in his inability to accept the finality of my
+relation to my work, anything nobler than an insufferable male egotism.
+
+I have thought since, that we might have made more of our love, if we
+had but seen somewhere in the world the process of its being so made; if
+we could have moved for a time in a footing of intimacy among other
+pairs who had produced out of as unlikely material, a competent and
+satisfying frame of life. We did not know any but theatrical people
+among whom the wife had interests apart from her husband. That is where
+Taylorville betrayed us. And now you know what I meant when I said in
+the beginning that the social ideal, in which I was bred, is the villain
+of my plot; for we wished sincerely for the best, and the best that we
+knew was cast only in one mould. I have begun to think indeed, that
+this, more than anything else, accounts for the personal disaster which
+waits so often on the heels of genius, that we assume it to be the
+inalienable condition. For genius tends to spring from that stratum of
+society for which, when it has come to its full flower, it is most
+unfit, and it comes up slanting and aside like a blade of grass under a
+potsherd of the broken mould of unrelated ideals. Somewhere there must
+have been men and women working out our situation and working it out
+successfully, but the only example life afforded us was not of the
+acceptable pattern. Still my agreement with Mr. Garrett, that it was
+after all _the_ pattern, saved us from mutual accusation and
+recrimination.
+
+Concerned as I was to make the most and the best of him, I kept looking
+out all the way after the train struck into the southwest, for every
+intimation of the life there which would have helped me to get at the
+springs of his behaviour, and was by turns shocked away from its
+bleakness and drawn with a rush of sympathy toward what a man must
+endure to live in it. If I saw myself as he had sometimes sketched me,
+filling its bleak and unprofitable reaches with my gift as with flame
+and flower, I was as many times shudderingly brought face to face with
+the question as to where, in the wilderness, I was to find wherewithal
+to go on burning. At Los Angeles, a town of which I had heard him speak
+as a place with a spirit with which he was in sympathy, I had nothing to
+look at for a week but a great deal of rather formless, wooden
+architecture expressing nothing so much as the attempt to reconcile
+Taylorvillian tastes and perceptions with a subtropical opportunity.
+
+I do not know what that city may have become since I visited it, but at
+the time it was notable for a disposition to take the amplitude of its
+pretension for performance. Its theatrical season, if it had any, had
+dwindled to that execrable sort of entertainment which comes up in any
+community like a weed when the women are out of town; and if there had
+been anybody I knew there, I should have been debarred from making
+myself known to them until I had seen Mr. Garrett and learned his plans.
+I took to spending my time as far out of town as I could manage, and by
+degrees a strange, seductive beauty began to make itself felt with me, a
+large, unabashed kind of beauty that disdained prettiness and dared to
+dispense with charm. It was a land ribbed and sinewed with all I had set
+my hand to, making free with it as kings do with their dignity, and the
+moment Helmeth came, before the warmth of renewal had its way with us, I
+saw that the land had set its mark on him.
+
+He was thinner, his manner hurried, obsessed. There are times, no doubt,
+when loving must be set aside for the sterner business of living, but it
+wasn't what I had come to Los Angeles for. I was flushed with success, I
+had spread the crest of my femininity, I was prepared to be adorable,
+enchanting; and I found that what was expected of me, was to sit by in
+my room in the hotel on the chance of his having time for me between the
+exigencies of buying cog-wheels and iron piping. He was so tired at
+times that I was made to feel that my demand upon him for the lover's
+attitude was an additional harassment. And there was so little else I
+could do for him! Not that I wouldn't have been glad to have done him a
+wifely service, laid out his clothes and seen to it that he had his
+meals regularly, but what I could do was subservient to the necessity of
+keeping our relation secret. It struck witheringly on all my sweet
+illusion of what I could be to him, to have it so brought home to me
+that the uses of affection are largely dependent on the habit of living
+together.
+
+"At any rate," I said, consoling myself for his scant hours with me, "we
+shall have all day Sunday together. Helmeth, you don't mean to say----"
+something curiously like embarrassment suffused him.
+
+"I shall have to spend most of Sunday at Pasadena ... at the
+Howards' ... the girls are there, you know." I didn't know, and the
+circumstance of its having been kept from me smacked of offence. Why,
+since I had been good enough to come all this distance to comfort him
+with loving, had he not explained to me that I must share him with the
+children; ... why not have at least included me in a community of
+interest with them?
+
+"I thought," he extenuated, "that the girls were the chief obstacle to
+your marrying me; that you might get to feel differently about them if
+you didn't have them thrust too much upon you."
+
+"Oh, Helmeth!" I began to imagine a perversity in his avoidance of the
+main issue. "It isn't the girls--it isn't anything of yours, it is
+something of mine. It is my art you aren't willing for me to bring into
+the family with me."
+
+"It is because, then, I'm not accustomed to think of the stage as being
+the sort of thing that belongs in a family. I thought you agreed with me
+about that?"
+
+He had me there; if I had seen a way to separate all that I loved in my
+art, from all that was most objectionable in the practice of it, I
+should have married him and trusted to carrying my point afterward. I
+had a vision of Helmeth's girls overhearing Polatkin advising me about
+the fit of my corsets, and me calling him Poly. I came back on another
+path to my recently awakened resentment.
+
+"Just the same you ought to have told me. Mrs. Howard is Miss Stanley's
+sister, isn't she?"
+
+"They don't live together." He had answered my unspoken question, as
+though the ideas that were forming in my head had been in juxtaposition
+in his own before. "Miss Stanley and the young brother--you remember him
+at Cadenabbia?--live at the old place. She has been a mother to him."
+
+"Ah," I couldn't forbear to suggest, "and she's mothering your children
+now."
+
+"Good heavens, Olivia! you are not jealous, are you?"
+
+"Yes, I am," I told him. "I'm jealous of every minute you spend away
+from me. I'm jealous of the men you do business with, men who can talk
+with you, hear your voice. Oh, my dear, my dear----" I put my hands up
+to his shoulders and cried a little upon his breast; his arms were about
+me; for me all time and place dissolved only to keep them there.
+
+"Look here, Olivia, if you feel this way, let us go and be married
+to-day and then we can spend Sunday all together. I did not mean to
+urge you just now; things are pretty rough with me; it will be a year or
+two before I can straighten them out, but, after all, I guess our
+feelings count for something."
+
+"I couldn't," I protested, "you don't understand; there's Polatkin and
+Jerry; he has written this play for me, we are all tied up together; you
+know how it would be if any of your partners should withdraw."
+
+"A woman has no business to be tied up to any man but her husband--" he
+broke out, "think of any other man being able to tell my wife what she
+should or shouldn't do!" We went over that ground again until we ceased
+from sheer exhaustion.
+
+It came to this at last, that he proposed that I should marry him at
+once; I could go back to Mexico with him. I hadn't to begin rehearsals
+until September; we could have the summer together and then I could go
+back to my work until he could claim me.
+
+For a wild moment I yielded to the suggestion ... if I could have him
+and my art ... but I hope I am not altogether a cad. I saw what all his
+efforts could not keep me from seeing, that even to do that for me, to
+get me into his place in Mexico and back again would be a tax on him,
+and to ask him to do it with a reservation in my mind would be more than
+I would stand for.
+
+"It isn't fair, Helmeth, my letting you think that anything could pull
+me away from the stage. It isn't that I don't agree with you about how a
+husband and wife ought to be with one another, nor that I am not
+entirely of the opinion that the atmosphere of the stage is not the
+place to bring up children the way you want yours brought up; it is
+because not even the kind of marriage you offer me would hold me."
+
+"You mean that you'd leave me? That you'd go back to it?"
+
+"Well, why not? I left my first husband. I know that wasn't the way it
+seemed to me then, but that's what it amounted to ... and he fell in
+love with the village dressmaker." I had never told him that part of my
+life; I had never thought of it in the terms in which I had just stated
+it, I saw him grow slowly white under the sun-brown of his skin.
+
+"I see ... if your only idea in staying with me is that I might----Good
+God, Olivia, do you know what you've said to me?"
+
+"Nothing except what is right for you to know. Do you remember, Helmeth,
+what I told you Mark Eversley called me?"
+
+"A Woman of Genius; I remember." He was looking at me now as though the
+phrase were a sort of acid test which brought out in me traits
+unsuspected before.
+
+"Well, then, I'm those two things, a woman and a genius, and the woman
+was meant for you; don't think I don't know that and am not proud of it
+with every fibre of my brain and body. I should have been glad once; if
+it were possible I'd be glad now to have kept your house and borne your
+children, and see to it that they brushed their teeth and had hair
+ribbons to match their clothes."
+
+"Their mother thought that was important." He snatched at this as at an
+incontestable evidence of my being all that I was trying to show him
+that I was not.
+
+"It _is_ important.... I remember to this day the effect on me of my
+hair ribbons----" He broke in eagerly.
+
+"If you can see that ... if you understand what their mother wanted ...
+things I missed out of my life through having no mother, that I've heard
+you say you missed partly out of yours ... birthdays and Christmas and
+good chances to marry when they grow up----"
+
+"I do understand, Helmeth, but what I'm trying to tell you is that I
+can't go through with it. Those are the things that belong to the woman,
+that it takes all the woman's time to do the way their mother would have
+them done, and for me the woman has been swamped in the genius. Oh, I
+don't say that I'm not a better actress for having tried so long to be
+merely a woman, for being able even now, to know all that you mean when
+you say 'woman'; but there it is. I am an actress and I can't leave off
+being one just by saying so."
+
+"And I can't leave off being a proper father to my girls. I owe them
+the things we've been talking about just as I owe them a living. I
+suppose I should have married for their sakes, supposing I could get
+anybody to have me, even if I hadn't found you. And I don't want finding
+you to mean anything but the best to them." I had nothing to say to
+that, and he went back to a thought that had often been between us. "We
+ought to have married when we were young," he insisted as though somehow
+that made a better case of it, "if you hadn't begun you wouldn't have
+been called on to leave it off."
+
+"The point is that it won't leave _me_. Genius--I don't know what it is
+except that it is nothing to be conceited about because you can't help
+it--isn't a thing you can pick up or lay down at your pleasure; it's a
+possession."
+
+I could see that he didn't altogether follow me, that he was not very
+far removed, and that only by his admiration for me, from the
+Taylorvillian idea that to speak of yourself as a genius was to pay
+yourself an unwarrantable compliment, and that the most I could get him
+to understand of the meaning of my work, was what grew out of his being
+a most competent workman himself. He went back to the original
+proposition.
+
+"Does that mean, then, that you are not going to marry me?"
+
+"It means that I'm not going to leave the stage to do it."
+
+"It seems to me to mean that you don't love me as you have professed to.
+Oh, I know how women love ... good women."
+
+"Helmeth!"
+
+"I beg your pardon, Olivia." We stood aghast at what we had brought upon
+ourselves; across the breach of dissension we rushed together with
+effacing passion. After all, I believe I should have gone with him if he
+had had the wit to know that the point at which a woman is most prepared
+for yielding is the next instant after she has just stated the
+insuperable objection. Whether he knew or not, the whole of his outer
+attention was taken up with the purchase of pump fittings.
+
+Understand that I didn't for a moment suppose that I had lost him, that
+I didn't believe anything but that I could go to him at any moment if
+the whim seized me, that I couldn't in reason pull him back if the need
+of him arose. I finished out my vacation at resorts up and down the
+California coast, warm with the certainty that I should see him in New
+York the next winter.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+The next season was a brilliant one, made so by the strength of my
+wanting him, and by the sense of completeness and finality which came to
+me out of the faith that we had been ordained to be lovers from the
+beginning. It began to seem, in the fashion in which we had been brought
+together as boy and girl and then mated in ways which, creditable as
+they had been, yet offered no obstacle to the freshness and vitality of
+our passion, that we had been guided by that intelligence which in any
+emergency of my gift, I felt rush to save it. That I had been prevented
+from any absorbing interest until it had grown and flowered in me,
+appeared now to have come about by direct manipulation of the Powers. I
+had curious and interesting adventures that winter in the farthest
+unexplored territory of the artistic consciousness, which tempt me at
+every turn to put by my story for the purpose of making them plain to
+you, and I am only deterred from it by the certainty that you couldn't
+get it plain in any case.
+
+A few days ago I picked up a copy of Dante and found myself convicted of
+shallowness in never having taken his passion for the cold-blooded
+Beatrice seriously, by finding the evidence of its absolute quality in
+the circle within circle of his hells and paradisos, the rhythm of aches
+and exaltations. And if you couldn't get that from Dante, how much less
+from anything I might have to say to you. After all these years I do not
+know what is the relation of Art to Passion, but I have experienced it.
+If I said anything it would be by way of persuading you that loving is
+not an end in itself, but the pull upward to our native heaven, which is
+no hymn-book heaven, but a world of the Spirit wherein things are made
+and remade and called good.
+
+What I made out of it at that time was the material of a satisfying
+success, and though I got on without him much better than I could have
+expected, the fact that after all, he did not get any nearer to me than
+the Pacific coast, had its effect in the year's adventures.
+
+That I missed my lover infinitely, that I was thinned in the body by the
+sheer want of him, that I had moments of mad resolve, of passionate
+self-abandoning cry to him, goes without saying. One need not in a
+certain society, say more of love than that one has it, to be understood
+as well as if one displayed a yellow ribbon in the company of Orangemen,
+but since I couldn't say it, an opinion passed current among my friends
+that I was working too hard and in need of a holiday. It came around at
+last to Polatkin himself noticing it, though I believe with a better
+understanding of the reason why I should be restless and sleepless
+eyed. It was just after I had heard from Helmeth that he couldn't
+possibly hope to be in New York for another year, that my manager
+suggested that it might be good business policy for me to play a short
+tour in three or four of the leading cities, a strictly limited season
+which would be enough to whet the public appetite without satisfying it.
+
+"What cities?"
+
+I believe that I jumped at it in the hope somehow that it might be
+stretched to include Los Angeles, where Helmeth was at that moment, and
+where I felt sure he would come to me. When I learned, however, that
+nothing was contemplated farther west than Chicago, I lost interest.
+That very day I had a telegram:
+
+     "Will you marry me?
+
+     "Signed: GARRETT."
+
+It was dated at Los Angeles, and as I could think of no reason for this
+urgency, I concluded that it must be because the association there with
+the idea of me, had been too much for him, and in that new yielding of
+mine to the beguiling circumstance, I was disposed to interpret it as
+evidence that he was coming round. I wired back:
+
+     "If you marry my work.
+
+     "OLIVIA."
+
+and prepared myself for the renewal of that dear struggle which, if it
+got us no further, at least involved us in coil upon coil of emotion,
+making him by the very force he spent on it, more completely mine. I
+expected him in every knock on the door, every foot on the stair, and
+had he come to me then, would no doubt have provoked him to that
+traditional conquest which, as it has its root in a situation made,
+affected for the express purpose of provocation, is the worst possible
+basis for a successful marriage.
+
+On the day on which at the earliest, I could have expected him from Los
+Angeles, I sent my maid away in order that, if I should find him there
+in the old place waiting for me, there should be no constraint on the
+drama of assault and surrender for which I found myself primed.
+
+Then by degrees it began to grow plain to me that he did not mean to
+come, that the question and my answer to it, had carried some sort of
+finality to his mind that was not apparent to mine. By the time I had a
+letter from him, written at the mine, with no reference in it to what
+had passed so recently between us, I understood that he would not ask me
+to marry him again. He had accepted the situation of being my lover
+merely, and I was not any more to be vexed by the alternative. I said to
+myself that it was better to have it resolved with so little pain, and
+that it should be my part to see that what we were to one another was to
+yield its proper fruit of happiness. I found myself at a loss, however,
+in the application; for though you may have satisfied yourself of the
+moral propriety of dispensing with the convention of publicity, you
+cannot very well, with a week's journey between you, get forward in the
+business of making a man happy. About this time Jerry began to be
+anxious about what I couldn't prevent showing in my face, the wasting
+evidence of love divided from its natural use of loving.
+
+"You'll break down altogether," he expostulated, "and then where will I
+be?" He was tremendously interested in his new play, which was by far
+the best thing he had done, and in the process of getting it to the
+public he had so identified it with my interpretation that he was no
+longer able to think of the one without the other. There had come into
+his manner a new solicitude very pleasing to me, born of his sense of
+possession in me, in as much as I was the lovely lady of his play, and a
+sort of awe of all that I put into it that transcended his own notion
+and yet was so integral a part of it. It had brought him out of his old
+acceptance of me as a foil and relief for the shallow iridescence that
+other women produced in him. He had begun to have for me a little of
+that calculating tenderness with which a man might regard the mother of
+his nursing child. Night by night then as he came hovering about me he
+could not fail to observe, though he could hardly have understood it,
+the wearing hunger with which I came from my work, pushed on by it to
+more and more desperate need of loving, and drawn back by its
+unrelenting grip from the artistic ruin in which the satisfaction of
+that hunger would involve me. Now at his very natural expression of
+concern, I felt myself unaccountably irritated.
+
+"Jerry," I demanded of him, "would it matter so much if we left off
+altogether writing plays and playing them? _What_ would it matter?"
+
+"You are in a bad way if you've begun to question that? What does living
+matter? We are here and we have to go on."
+
+"Yes, but when we go on at such pains? Is there any more behind us than
+there is behind a ball when it is set rolling? Are we aimed at
+anything?"
+
+"Oh, Lord, Olivia, what has that got to do with it?" He was sitting in
+my most commodious chair with his long knees crossed to prop up a
+manuscript from which he was reading me the notes of a tragedy he was
+about to undertake, and his quills were almost erect with the tweaking
+he had given them in the process of arriving at his climax. It was a
+curious fact that the breaking off of his marriage, which in the nature
+of the case could not be broken off sharp but had writhed and frayed him
+like the twisting of a green stick, by setting Jerry free for those
+light adventures of the affections which had been so largely responsible
+for the rupture of his domestic relations, instead of multiplying his
+propensity by his opportunity, had landed him on a plane of
+self-realization in which they were no longer needful. The poet in Jerry
+would never be able to resist the attraction of youth and freshness, but
+the man in him was forever and unassailably beyond their reach. I was
+never more convinced of this than when he turned on this occasion from
+the preoccupation of his creative mood, to offer whatever his point of
+attachment life had provided him, to bridge across the chasm of my
+spirit.
+
+"I don't see why it is important that we should know what we are working
+for; we might, in our confounded egotism, not approve of it, we might
+even think we could improve on the pattern. I write plays and you act
+them and a bee makes honey. I suppose there's a beekeeper about, but
+that's none of our business."
+
+"Ah, if we could only be sure of that--if He would only make himself
+manifest; that's what I'm looking for, just a hint of what He's trying
+to do with us."
+
+"Well, I can tell you: He'll smoke you out of New York and into a
+sanitarium, if you don't know enough to take a change and a rest."
+
+"Poly wants me to go on the road for a while; sort of triumphal
+progress. He thinks applause will cure me."
+
+"You're getting that now. What would bring you around would be a good
+frost."
+
+"You wouldn't want that in Chicago?" Jerry disentangled his limbs and
+sat up sniffing the wind of success.
+
+"If I could have you to open with my play in Chicago," he averred
+solemnly, "I'd be ready to sing the Lord Dismiss Us." He really thought
+so. To go back to the scene of his early struggle with his laurels fresh
+on him, to satisfy the predictions of his earliest friends and confound
+his detractors, above all to be received in his own country with that
+honour which is denied to prophets, seemed to him then almost as
+desirable in prospect as it proved in fact not to be. I found another
+advantage in the confusion and excitement of touring, in being able to
+conceal from myself that I hadn't had a satisfactory letter from Helmeth
+since the pair of telegrams that passed between us, and no letter at all
+for a long time. It was always possible to pretend to myself that the
+letters had been written but were delayed in forwarding.
+
+It was a raw spring day when we came to Chicago, the promise of the
+season in the sun, denied and flouted by the wind. It slanted the tails
+of the labouring teams and cast over the clean furrow, handfuls of the
+winter rubbish from the stubble yet unturned, and between field and
+field it wrung the tops of the leafless wood. Now and then it parted
+them on white painted spires without disturbing them or the rows of thin
+white gravestones. It laid bare the roots of my life to the cold blasts
+of memory, it rendered me again the pagan touch, the undivided part that
+the earth had in me. My dead were in its sod, in me the sap of its
+spiritual fervours and renunciations. What was I, what was my art but
+the flower, the bright, exotic blossom borne upon its topmost bough, its
+dying top; here in its abounding villages, in the deep-rutted county
+roads was the root and trunk. Outside, the wind flicked the landscape
+like the screen of the moving picture that the swift roll of the train
+made of it, and I felt again the pressure of my small son upon my arm,
+and the pleasant stir of domesticity and the return of my man. For the
+last hour Jerry had come to sit in my compartment, opposite me, and
+stare stonily out of the window; now and then his jaws relaxed and set
+again as he bit hard upon the bitter end of experience. No one, I
+suppose, can go through that country so teeming with the evidences of
+the common life, the common labour, the common hope of immortality, and
+not feel bereft in as much as the circumstances of his destiny divide
+him from it. We passed Higgleston; beyond the roofs of it the elms that
+marked the cemetery road, gathered green. The roofs of the town were
+steeped in windy light. I had no impulse to stop there. I withdrew from
+it as one does from a private affair upon which he has stumbled unaware.
+Rather it was not I who withdrew, but Life as it was lived there, turned
+its back upon me.
+
+Getting in to Chicago through that smoky wooden wilderness, within which
+the city obscures itself as a cuttlefish in its own inky cloud, I felt
+again the wounding and affront, the cold shoulder lifted on my needs,
+the eager hand stretched out to catch my contribution. Chicago received
+me with its hat off, bowing to meet me, and when I remembered how nearly
+it had let me fall into the pit prepared for me by Griffin and the
+"Flim-Flams," I burned with resentment.
+
+It was seven years now since I had seen the city or Pauline, the only
+friend I had made there who could be supposed to take an interest in my
+coming again. I meant of course to see Pauline; we had kept up a
+correspondence which with the years had shown a disposition to confine
+itself to a Christmas reminder, and an occasional marked copy of a
+magazine, but I meant, of course, to see her. I had trusted to her
+finding out through the newspapers that I would be there and on such a
+date. It fell in quite naturally with my inclination, to have her card
+sent up to me the next morning a little after eleven. I was needing to
+be distracted. On my way up from breakfast I had met Jerry going down
+with his suit case.
+
+"Back to New York," he admitted to my question, "as quick as I can get
+there."
+
+"But with all this success ... why, they fairly stood on their feet last
+night."
+
+"I know, I know," he looked unendurably harassed. "I can't stand it,
+Olivia, I can't stand it. This place is full of ghosts." I remembered
+that both his children had been born there and that he had not seem them
+for more than a year, and I did not press him.
+
+"I'll keep your end up for a week if I can," I assured him as he wrung
+my hand. He turned back when he was a step or two down the stair.
+
+"Don't stay too long yourself," he admonished. "New York's the place."
+
+I was feeling that when Pauline came to me. It wasn't until I saw her
+that I realized what a distance there was--in spite of our common youth,
+had always been--between us. It started out for us both in the first
+glimpse we had of one another, in the witness in all the inconsiderable
+elements of line and colour which go to make up a woman's appearance, of
+growth and amplitude in me and fulfilment in hers. Pauline had been in
+her girlhood, if not pretty, at least what is known as an attractive
+girl, and though there was only a matter of months between us, it came
+to me with a shock that she was now, not only not particularly
+attractive, but middle-aged. It was not so much in the fulness under her
+chin which apparently caused her no uneasiness, nor in the thickness of
+her waist, of which I was sure she made a virtue, but in the certainty
+that all that was ever to happen to her in the way of illuminating and
+self-forgetting passion, had already happened.
+
+She had reached, she must have reached about the time I was taking my
+flight upward by the help of Morris Polatkin, the full level of her
+capacity to experience. She was living still, as I saw by the card which
+I still held in my hand, in Evanston, and she was living there because
+it was no longer within the scope of her possibility to live anywhere
+else. All this flashed through me in the moment in which Pauline,
+checked by what she was able to guess of unfamiliar elements in me, was
+crossing the room and taking me by the hands in the old womanly way,
+keyed down to the certainty of not requiring it in her business any
+more. It was so patent that Pauline was now in the position of having
+done her duty toward life and Henry Mills, and was accepting all that
+came to her from it as her due, that it almost seemed for a moment that
+she had said something of the kind. What did pass between us besides a
+kiss of greeting, were some commonplaces about my being there and how
+pleased Henry and the children would be to see me. We sat down on a sofa
+together and for a moment the old girlish confidence put forth a tender
+sprig of renewal.
+
+"So many years since we were at school together! You've gone a long way
+since then, Olivia."
+
+"A long way," I admitted, but she didn't catch the double meaning the
+phrase had for me.
+
+"Henry and I were talking about it this morning. And the times you had
+here in Chicago, you poor dear; you had to make a good many starts
+before you got on the right road at last."
+
+"A great many."
+
+"But you found out that it all came right in the end, didn't you? That
+it was best just for you to trust ... you used to be bitter about it ...
+but trusting is always best."
+
+"Oh, if you think I've been trusting all these years ... I've been
+working."
+
+"Of course, _of_ course." Much of her old manner came back with the
+occasion for moralizing. "But you were too amusing, you were quite
+fierce with Henry because he wouldn't do anything about it." She laughed
+reminiscently. "And now, you see...." Her look travelled about the
+rose-coloured room, full of the evidence of prosperity.
+
+"Pauline," I said, "if you are thinking that I could have gone to New
+York and become the success I am, _without_ the help that you and Henry
+might have given me, you are making a great mistake. What did happen was
+that I had to accept it from a quarter where it wasn't so much to be
+expected, and was not nearly so agreeable."
+
+"That man Mark Eversley found for you, you mean. Well, I suppose you did
+get on better for a little start."
+
+"Start!" I cried. "Start! I had to have everything--food and clothes."
+A sudden recollection flashed upon me of those first days in New York,
+of myself become merely a dummy on which to hang a fat little Jew's
+notions of acceptable contours; the offence of it; the greater offence
+from which by the opportune appearance of the Jew I had so hardly
+escaped.
+
+"Have you any idea, Pauline, what it means to have a man invest money in
+you?... a man like Polatkin. I was his property, a horse he had entered
+for the race. He had a stake on me...."
+
+Pauline looked aghast; vague recollections of the actress heroines of
+fiction shaped her thought.
+
+"You don't mean to say, Olivia, that you--that you were----"
+
+"His mistress," I finished for her bluntly. "Is that the only thing your
+imagination takes offence at? Isn't it enough for me to tell you that he
+orders my corsets for me?" That did reach her. I could see her struggle
+with the habitual effort to put the unwelcome fact down, anywhere out of
+sight and knowledge, under the cotton wool of a moral sentiment. Even
+now if she could escape being implicated in my predicament by avoiding
+the knowledge of it, she would not only do that but convict herself of
+superiority as well. My gorge rose against it.
+
+"But if I didn't sell myself to the Jew," I drove it home to her, "it
+was chiefly because he was decenter to me than the circumstance gave me
+a right to expect. I came near doing it for a cheaper man and for a
+cheaper price, a man who had deserted one wife, and ... a bigamist in
+fact. If you don't know that there were days when I would have sold
+myself for something to eat, it was because you didn't take the pains
+to."
+
+"But you never said a word. Of course if you had told me the truth ..."
+she floundered and saved herself on what she believed to be a just
+resentment, but I had no notion of letting her off so easily. I did not
+know exactly how we had got launched on the subject, it had not been in
+my mind to do so when she came in, but all the events of the past year
+seemed to lead up to it, to come somehow to the point of rupture against
+her smooth acceptance of my success as being derived from the same
+process as her own.
+
+"I did tell you that I was in need of money to put me in the way of
+earning a living," I insisted. "I did not ask you for charity; what I
+offered you was the chance of a business investment, one that rendered
+the investor its due return. The fact that you did not know enough about
+the business to know how good it was"--I forestalled what I saw rising
+to her lips--"had nothing to do with it. You were my friend and
+professed to admire my talent; I had a right to have what I said about
+it heard respectfully." I had got up from the pink and white sofa where
+our talk had begun, and was trailing about the room in my breakfast
+gown, and the suggestion of staginess in the way the folds of it
+followed my movements, irritated me with the certainty that the effect
+of it on Pauline would be to mitigate the sincerity of what I said.
+
+"You'd known me long enough," I accused her, "to know that I wouldn't
+have asked for money until I was in the last extremity, and then I
+wouldn't have asked it for myself. I don't know that it would have
+mattered if I had starved, but my Gift was worth saving."
+
+"I didn't dream ..." she began. "I hadn't any idea ..."
+
+"Well, why didn't you ask Henry, then? Henry knows what becomes of women
+on the stage when they can't make a living." This was nearer to the mark
+than I had meant to let myself go, but I could see that it carried no
+illumination. She drew up her wrap and braced herself for one more
+gallant effort.
+
+"The things you've been through, my dear ... I don't wonder you feel
+bitter. But when it has all come out right, why not forget it?"
+
+"Oh, right! Right!"
+
+The room was full of vases and floral tokens of the triumph of the night
+before, and as I swung about with my arms out, disdaining her judgment
+of rightness for me, I knocked over a great basket of roses and orchids
+which had come from Cline and Erskine. I don't suppose Pauline had ever
+knocked over anything in her life, and the violence of my gesture must
+have stood for some unloosening of the bonds of convention, with an
+implication which only now began to work through to her.
+
+"You don't mean to say, Olivia, that you ... that you are not ... not a
+good woman?"
+
+"Oh," I said again, "good ... good ... what does it all mean? I'm a
+successful actress."
+
+"Olivia!"
+
+"Well, no, if you insist on knowing, I'm not what you would call a good
+woman." I threw it at her as though it had been a peculiar kind of scorn
+heaped up on her for being what I had just denied myself to be. I saw
+myself for once with all my thwarted and misspent instincts toward the
+proper destiny of women, enmeshed and crippled, not by any propensity
+for sinning, but by the conditions of loving which women like Pauline
+set up for me. "And if you want to know," I said, "why I'm not a good
+woman, it is because women like you don't make it seem particularly
+worth while."
+
+"Oh," she gasped, "this is horrible ... horrible!" The word came out in
+a whisper. I saw at last that she was done with me, that the only
+thought that was left to her was to get away, to put as much space as
+possible between us. I got around with my hand on the door to prevent
+her.
+
+"Pauline, Pauline!" I cried almost wildly, as if even at the last she
+could have helped me from myself. "Can't you remember that we grew up
+together, that we had the same training, the same ideals? Can't you
+remember that when we began I thought that the life you had chosen for
+yourself was the best, that I thought I had chosen it for myself too?
+Only--for heaven's sake, Pauline, try to understand me--there is
+something that chooses for us. Don't you know that I wouldn't have been
+any different from what you are if I hadn't been forced? Haven't you
+seen how I've been beaten back from all that I tried to be? All this"--I
+threw out my arms, as I stood against the door, to include all that had
+entered by implication in our conversation--"it had to come, and it came
+wrong because you won't understand that a Gift has its own way with us."
+
+I could see, though, that she wasn't understanding in the least, that
+she was badly scared and even indignant at being forced to listen to a
+justification of what, by her code, could have no justification. She was
+standing not far from me, crushed against the wall, as though by the
+weight of opprobriousness that I heaped upon her, and her whole
+attention was centred on the door and the chance of getting out of it
+and away from what, in the mere despair of reaching her intelligence
+with it, I flung out from me now wildly.
+
+"I suppose," I scoffed, "that it never occurs to you that a gifted woman
+could be as delicate and feminine as anybody, if only you didn't make
+her right to fostering care and protection conditional on her giving up
+her gift altogether. You," I demanded, "who tie up all the moral values
+of living to your own little set of behaviours, what right have you to
+deny us the opportunity to be loved honestly because you can't at the
+same time make us over into replicas of yourselves?"
+
+I was sick with all the shames and struggles of the women I had known. I
+forgot the door and went over to her.
+
+"You," I said, "who fatten your moral superiority on the best of all we
+produce, how do you suppose you are going to make us value the standards
+you set up, when the price you despise us for paying, nine times out of
+ten we pay to the men who belong to you? What right have you to judge
+what we have done when you've neither help nor understanding to offer us
+in the doing? What right ... what right?" For the moment I had turned
+away in the vehemence of my indignation; I was pacing up and down. In
+the instant when my attention was distracted from the door, Pauline made
+a dart for it. I could hear her scurrying down the hall, but I went on
+walking up and down in my room and talking aloud to her. I was beside
+myself with the sum of all indignities. Was it not this set of
+prejudices which for the moment had presented itself in the person of
+Pauline Mills, which at every turn of my life had been erected against
+the bourgeoning of my gift? Was it not in the process of combating the
+tradition of the preciousness of women as inherent in particular
+occupations, that I had lost the inestimable preciousness of myself? Was
+it for what came out of Pauline's frame of life--I thought of Cecelia
+Brune here--that I had sacrificed my public possession of the man I
+loved. And what came out of it that was more to the world than what I
+had to offer? Had I cut myself off from the comfort and stability of a
+home, simply because in my situation as famous tragedienne I didn't see
+my way to bring up Helmeth's children so as to make little Pauline
+Millses of them? I was still raging formlessly in this fashion when Miss
+Summers, our ingénue, came to tell me that the cab waited to take us to
+the theatre for the matinée.
+
+All through the performance, which I was told went remarkably well, I
+was conscious of nothing but the seismic shudders and upheavals of my
+world too long subjected to strain. It came back on me in intervals
+through the evening performance; I was physically sick with it. But by
+degrees through its subsidence, new worlds began to rise. By the time I
+left the theatre that night I knew what I would do.
+
+It had been a mistake, a natural but cruel mistake, for Helmeth and me
+to suppose that a way of living could at any time be worth the very sap
+and source of life. Love was the central fact around which all modes
+and occupations should arrange themselves. Let us but love then, and
+live as we may. In all the world there was no need like the need I had
+for his breast, his arm.
+
+Always the point of our conclusions had been that I agreed with him,
+that I _had_ thought that failing to repeat the pattern of their mother
+in his children, I had failed in all, that I didn't any more than he see
+my way to keeping on with my work and meeting him at the door every
+night when he came home, in the sort of garment that, in the ladies'
+journals, went by the name of house gown. I laughed to think that we had
+not seen before that it was ridiculous. I had no more doubt now, no more
+trepidation. What burned in me was so clear a flame that he could not
+but be illuminated. Only let me find him, let me go to him again. At the
+hotel desk where I paused for my key I asked them to send up telegraph
+blanks to my room. With them came letters forwarded from New York. I
+started, as one does at an unexpected presence, to find an envelope
+among them with his familiar superscription. For the first time I would
+rather not have had a letter from him; it would be interposing a fresher
+picture between me and my new resolution, to put him for the moment
+farther from me.
+
+I saw then that the letter in my hand had been posted at Los Angeles; it
+was as though he had leaped suddenly all that distance nearer than his
+Chilicojote, Mexico. I noticed that it was a very thin letter. A
+thousand conjectures rushed upon me, not one of them with any relativity
+to what I would find, for when I tore it open there floated out a
+printed slip. It was a clipping from a Pasadena newspaper and announced
+his engagement to Edith Stanley.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+There is very little more to write. I held myself together until I had
+written to Helmeth to say that I understood why he had done what he had
+done, and that I hoped he would be happy. The letter was not written to
+invite an answer; there was nothing he could say to please me that would
+not have been disloyal to Miss Stanley. Accordingly no answer came,
+though it was a long time before I gave over the unconscious start at
+the sight of letters, the hope that somehow against all reason ...
+sometimes even yet....
+
+For I did not understand. I was married to him, much, much more married
+than I had ever been to Tommy Bettersworth, and it wasn't in me to
+understand how any man can take a woman as he had taken me, and not feel
+himself more bound than ever church and state could bind him. It was ten
+months since I had seen him, but that while my body still ached with the
+memory of him, he could have given himself to another woman, was an
+unbelievable offence. There are days yet when I do not believe it.
+
+There was nothing any of my friends could do for me. I had the sense to
+see that and did not trouble them. Sarah, who was the only one who
+might have comforted me out of her own experience, was all taken up with
+her husband's declining health. Mr. Lawrence died the next winter, and
+by that time my wound had got past the imperative need of speech. Effie
+was expecting another baby and wasn't to be thought of, so I turned at
+last, when the first sharp anguish was past, to Mark Eversley. He in all
+America stood for that high identification of his work with the source
+of power, that it is the private study of all my days to reach. I
+repaired to him as did Christians of old to favoured altars. That I did
+so return for comfort to that Distributer of Gifts by whose very mark on
+me I was set apart from the happier destiny, was evidence to me, the
+only evidence I could have at the time, that I had not been utterly
+mistaken in the choice I had made before I I knew all that the choice
+involved. Eversley and his wife were Christian Scientists, and, though
+they did not make me of their opinion, I owe them much in the way of
+practice and example that keeps me still within the circle of
+communicating fire. I re-established, never to be broken off again,
+practical intercourse with the Friends of the Soul of Man. I learned to
+apply directly for the things I had supposed came only by loving, and I
+found that they came abundantly. I grew in time even, to think of
+Helmeth without bitterness. What I was brought to see, over and above
+the wish to provide a home for his children, must have been at work in
+him, was much the same thing that had driven me to my work; the very
+need of me must have hurried him into the relief of being loved. It was
+the only way which his purblind male instinct pointed him, to find an
+outlet for what goes from me over the footlights night by night. For a
+man, to be loved is of the greatest importance, but with women it is
+loving that is the fructifying act.
+
+That I was able to go on loving him was, I suppose, the reason why the
+shock I had sustained left no regrettable mark upon my career. The mark
+it left on me was none other than work is supposed to leave on every
+woman. What I am sure of now is that it is not work, but the loss of
+love that leaves her impoverished of feminine graces. I grew barren of
+manner and was reputed to be entirely absorbed in my profession. It was
+not however, that I had excluded the more human interests, but they had
+taken flight. All the forces of my being had been by the shock of loss,
+dropped into some subterranean pit, where they ran on underground and
+watered the choicest product of my art. If I had married Helmeth
+Garrett, I might have grown insensible to him, as it was I seemed to
+have been fixed, though by pain, in the fruitful relation. The loss of
+him, the desperate ache, the start of memory, are just as good materials
+to build an artistic success upon as the joy of having. And I did build.
+I gathered up and wrought into the structure of my life the pain of
+loving as well as its delight. I am a successful actress. Whatever else
+has happened to me, I am at least a success.
+
+I never saw him again. I never saw Henry and Pauline Mills but once, and
+some bitterness in the occasion, came near to driving me toward that pit
+into which Pauline was willing to believe I had already descended. It
+was the second season after I had parted from her in Chicago, that some
+sort of brokers' convention had brought Henry on to New York and Pauline
+with him, and to the same hotel where Mark Eversley was shut up with an
+attack of bronchitis. Jerry and I, going up to call on him, came face to
+face with them.
+
+They were walking in the lobby. Pauline was in what for her, was evening
+dress, her manner a little daunted, not quite carrying it off with the
+air of being established at the pivot of existence which she could
+manage so well at Evanston. They were walking up and down, waiting, it
+seemed, for friends to join them, and they wheeled under the great
+chandelier just in time to come squarely across us. I could see Pauline
+clutch at her husband's arm, and the catch in her breath with which she
+jerked herself back from the impulse to nod, and looked deliberately
+away from me. For her, the evidence of my misdoing hung about me like an
+exhalation. She was afraid I should insist on speaking to her and some
+of her friends would come up and see me doing it. I didn't, however,
+offer to speak to her, I looked instead at Henry. I stood still in my
+tracks and looked at him steadily and curiously. I wished very much to
+know what he meant to do about it. He turned slowly as I looked, from
+deep red to mottled purple, and very much against his will his head
+bowed to me; his body, to which Pauline clung, dared not move lest she
+detect it, but quite above and independent of his smooth-vested,
+self-indulgent front, his head bowed to me. So went out of my life
+thirty years of intimacy which never succeeded in being intimate.
+
+But though one may excise thirty years of one's past without a tremor,
+one may not do it without a scar. To allay the irritation of Pauline's
+slight, I came near to being as abandoned as she believed, as I had
+moments of believing myself. For the possibility that Helmeth Garrett
+had found in our relation of setting it aside, made it at times of a
+cheapness which seemed to extend to me who had entertained it. I should
+have been happier, I thought, to have taken it lightly as he did. If so
+many women who had begun as I had begun, had gone on repeating the
+particular instance, wasn't it because they found that that was the
+easiest, the only possible way to bear it? How else could one ease the
+pain of loving except by being loved again? And if I was to lose the
+Pauline Millses of the world by what had been entered upon so
+sincerely, why, then, what more had I to risk on the light adventure?
+All this time I was sick with the need of being confirmed in my faith in
+myself as a person worthy to be loved, to feel sure that since my love
+had missed its mark, it wasn't I at least that had fallen short of it.
+
+It was that summer Jerry had been driven by some such need I imagined,
+as I admitted in myself, to put his future in jeopardy by another
+marriage which on the face of it, offered even a more immediate occasion
+for shipwreck than the first, and I hadn't scrupled to put forth to save
+him, the new capacity to charm which had come upon me with the
+experience of not caring any more myself to be charmed. I knew; it would
+have been a poor tribute to my skill as an actress if I hadn't by this
+time known, the moves by which a man who is susceptible of being played
+upon at all, can be drawn into a personal interest; and though I didn't
+then, and do not now believe that a love serviceable for the uses of
+living together, can be built up out of "made" love, I was willing for
+the time to pit myself against the game that was played by Miss
+Chichester for Jerry's peace of mind. I played it all the better for not
+being, as the young lady was, personally involved in the stake. That I
+thought afterward of doing anything for myself with what I had got, when
+at last I had by this means brought Jerry down from Newport to my place
+on the Hudson for a week end, was in part due to the extraordinary
+charm that Jerry displayed under the stimulus of a male interest in me,
+of whom for years he had thought of as being quite outside such
+consideration. There was a kind of wistfulness about Jerry when he was a
+little in love, that made him irresistible; no doubt I was also a little
+warmed by the fire which I had blown up.
+
+He was to come from Saturday to Monday, and the moment I saw him getting
+down from the dog-cart I had sent to the station for him, I knew that I
+had only to let that interest take its course, to find myself provided
+with a lover, whether or no I could command my heart to loving. I do not
+remember that I came to any conscious decision about it, but I know that
+I yielded myself to the growing sense of intimacy, that I consciously
+drew, as one draws perfume from a flower, all that came to me from him:
+his new loverliness, touched still with the old solicitous sense of the
+preciousness of my gift. I dramatized to the full the possibility of
+what hung in the air between us, I dressed myself, I set the stage
+accordingly.
+
+It was Saturday evening after dinner that I sent him to the garden to
+smoke, keeping the house long enough to fix his attention on my joining
+him, by wondering what kept me, and so overdid my part by just so much
+as I made myself conscious of the taint of theatricality. For as I went
+down the veranda steps to meet him in the rose walk, the response of
+the actress in me to the perfectness of the setting and my fitness for
+the part of the great lady of romance, drew up out of my past a faint
+reminder of myself going up another pair of stairs so many years ago in
+the figure of an orphan child toiling through the world. Out of that
+memory there distilled presently a cold dew over all my purpose.
+
+It was a perfect night, warm emanations from the earth shut in the smell
+of the garden, and light airs from the river stirred the full-leafed
+trees. At the bottom of the lawn the soft, full rush, of the Hudson made
+a stir like the hurrying pulse. Beyond the silver gleam of its waters,
+lay the farther bank strewn with primrose-coloured lights, and above
+that the moon, low and full-orbed and golden. Its diffusing light mixed
+and mingled with the shadow of the moving boughs. I was wearing about my
+shoulders a light scarf that from time to time blew out with the wind,
+and as we paced in the garden strayed across Jerry's breast and was
+caught back by me, but not before on its communicating thread, ran an
+electric spark. It must have been a good two hours after moonrise before
+we turned to go in, where the great hall lamp burned with a steady
+rose-red glow.
+
+At the foot of the veranda a breeze sprang up fresher than before, that
+caught my scarf from me and wrapped us both in it as in a warm,
+suffusing mood. We were so close that I had instinctively to put up my
+hand as a barricade against what was about to come from him to me, and
+as I did so I was aware of something that rose up from some subterranean
+crypt in me ... that old romance of my mother's ... women like her,
+worlds of patient, overworking, women who could do without happiness if
+only they found themselves doing right. Somehow they had laid on me, the
+necessity of being true to the best I had known, because it was the best
+and had been founded in integrity and stayed on renunciations. I knew
+what I had come into the garden to do. I had planned for it. I thought
+myself prepared to take up, as many women of my profession did, the next
+best in place of the best which life had denied me, but my past was too
+strong for me. The unslumbering instinct that saves wild creatures
+before they are well awake, had whipped me out of the soft entanglement,
+and before Jerry could grasp the change of mood in me, I was halfway up
+the stair.
+
+"This wind," I said, "I think it will blow up a rain before morning." I
+went on up before him. "You can see the river darkling below its
+surface, it does that before a change." I went on drawing the chairs
+back from the edge of the veranda, I called Elsa to fasten all the
+windows. When at last we came into the glow of the hall lamp, I could
+see his face white yet with what he had missed; he thought he had
+blundered. He caught at my hand as I gave him his bedroom candle in an
+effort to recapture what had just trembled in the air between us.
+
+"Olivia! I say ... Olivia!"
+
+"Your train leaves at nine-thirty," I reminded him. "I'll be up to pour
+your coffee."
+
+I went into my room and blew out my candle. The warm summer air came in
+between the white curtains. I knelt down beside my bed; an old habit,
+long discontinued. I was too much moved to pray, but I continued to
+kneel there a long time listening to the soft shouldering of the maples
+against the wall outside the window. Far within me there was something
+which inarticulately knew that whatever the world might think of me, in
+spite of what I had confessed to Pauline, I was a good woman; I had
+loved Helmeth Garrett with the kind of love by which the world is saved.
+Past all loss and forsaking, past loneliness and longing, there was
+something which had stirred in me which would never waken to a lighter
+occasion; and whether great love like that is the best thing that can
+happen to us or the most unusual, it had placed me forever beyond the
+reach of futility and cheapness.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+All this was several years ago. Jerry and I are the best of friends and
+I am far too busy a woman to miss out of my life anything Pauline Mills
+could have contributed to it. Besides, I am very much taken up with my
+nieces and nephews. Forester's oldest boy shows a creditable talent for
+the stage, and I have him at school here where I can watch him. I shall
+try him out on the road next summer. Effie's husband is in the
+legislature now, and Effie looks to see him governor. I am very fond of
+my sister; we grow together. I owe it to her to have found ways of
+making things easier for women who must tread my path of work and
+loneliness. It is partly at her suggestion that I have written this
+book, for Effie is very much of the opinion that the world would like to
+go right if somebody would only show it how. Sarah also added her word.
+
+"It is the fact of your telling, whether they believe you or not, of
+your not being ashamed to tell, that is going to help them," she
+insists. "At any rate it will help other women to speak out what they
+think, unashamed. Most women are not thinking at all what they are very
+willing to be thought of as thinking."
+
+I am the more disposed to take their word for it, since as they are both
+happy, they cannot be supposed to have the fillip of discontent. Sarah
+left the stage a year after Mr. Lawrence's death, to marry a banker from
+Troy, and she has never regretted it. She calls her oldest girl Olivia.
+It is the sane and sympathetic contact with the common destiny, which I
+get at her house and my sister's that keeps me from the resort of
+successive and inconsequent passions, such as fill the void in the
+lives of too many women who are under the necessity of producing daily
+the materials of fire. But you must not understand me to blame women for
+taking that path when so many are closed to them. Haven't they been told
+immemorially that loving is their proper function, their only one?
+
+Last year I walked in a suffrage parade because Effie wrote me that it
+was my duty, and the swing of it, the banners flying, the proud music,
+set gates wide for me on fields of new, inspiring experience ... all the
+paths that lead to the Shining Destiny ... why shouldn't women walk in
+them? I should think some of them might lead less frequently to bramble
+and morass.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"And after all," said Jerry, a day or two ago when I had read him some
+pages of my book, "you have only told your own story, you haven't found
+out why all the rest of us run so afoul of personal disaster. We, I
+mean, who as you say, nourish the world toward the larger expectation."
+
+"And after all," said I, "what is an artist but a specialist in human
+experience, and how can we find out how the world is made except by
+falling afoul of it?"
+
+"If when we fall we didn't pull the others down with us! I'm willing to
+learn, but why should others have to pay so heavily for my schooling?
+Where's the justice in making us so that we can't do without loving and
+then not let us be happy in it?"
+
+"I don't believe it is the loving that is wrong; it is the other things
+that are tied up with it and taken for granted must go with loving, that
+we can get on with."
+
+"Marriage, you mean?"
+
+"Not exactly ... living in one place and by a particular pattern ...
+thinking that _because_ you are married you have to leave off this and
+take up that which you wouldn't think of doing for any other reason."
+
+"You mean ... I know," he nodded; "my wife was always wanting me to do
+this and that, on the ground that it was what married people ought, and
+I couldn't see where it led or why it was important. But what if it
+should turn out that the others are wrong and we are right about it?"
+
+"Oh, I think we are _all_ wrong. People like us are after the truth of
+life, and marriage is the one thing that society won't take the trouble
+to learn the truth about. My baby, you know, I lost him because I didn't
+know how to take care of him, and there was nobody at hand who knew much
+more than I. But Effie's last baby came before its time and they saved
+it by science, by knowing what and how. Why can't there be a right way
+like that about marriage, and somebody to discover it?"
+
+"Then where would we come in--after it was all found out--if we are the
+experimentors?"
+
+"Oh, there'd be other fields. Why shouldn't it be that when we have
+found out our relation to the physical world--we are finding it, you
+know, radioactivity and laws of falling bodies--go on finding out the
+law of our relations to one another? And, when we've found that out,
+then there's all the Heavenly Host. We'd have to find out how to get on
+with Them."
+
+"And in the meantime we are spoiling a lot of people's lives because we
+can't get on with one another----" He broke off suddenly. "My wife is
+married again. I don't know if I told you."
+
+"Ah, then, you haven't quite spoiled her life; she has another chance.
+And the children?" He had been very fond of them, I knew.
+
+"I haven't done so much with my own life that I'd insist on controlling
+theirs."
+
+"You've done wonders," I assured him. "Jerry, honest, do you mind it so
+much, not having a wife and family?"
+
+"Oh, Lord, yes, Olivia; I need a wife the same as a man needs a watch,
+to keep the time of life for me." He faced me with a swift, sharp
+scrutiny. "Honest, do you mind?"
+
+"Sometimes," I admitted, "when I think of what's coming ... when I can't
+act any more."
+
+"You'll be leading them all still when you are seventy. You do better
+every season." He threw away his cigar and came and stood before me,
+preening his raven's wing which now had a little streak of white in it.
+"Olivia, what's the matter with you and me being married? We get on like
+everything."
+
+"There's more to it than that, Jerry."
+
+"Being in love, you mean? Well, I don't know that I would stick at a
+little thing like that." He was looking down at me with an effect of
+humour which I was glad to see covered a real anxiety about my answer.
+"I've been in love lots of times; I've been mad about several women. I
+don't feel that way about you, and I don't know that I care to. But if
+wanting you is loving, if worrying about you when you aren't quite up to
+yourself, and being proud of you when you are, if liking to be with you
+and wanting to read my manuscripts to you the minute I've written them,
+if owing you more than I owe any other woman and being glad to owe it,
+is loving you, why, I guess I love you enough for all practical
+purposes."
+
+"What would Tottie Lockwood say--or is it Dottie?" Miss Lockwood was
+Jerry's latest interest at the Winter Garden.
+
+"Oh, _she_? She isn't in a position to say anything. It's only vanity on
+her part and the lack of anything to do on mine. There'd be no time for
+Totties if you married me."
+
+"Jerry ... since you've asked me ... I suppose you know that I ... that
+I...." He put up an arresting hand.
+
+"I've guessed. There isn't anything you need to tell me. And I haven't
+an altogether clean record myself. But, I want you to know, Olivia, that
+there was never anything in my case that you could take exception, to so
+long as my wife was with me. I couldn't make her believe it but it's
+true. Except, of course, that I was a fool. I hope I'm done with that."
+
+"I'd want you to be a bit foolish about me, Jerry,--that is, if I make
+up my mind to it." I had to defend myself against the encouragement he
+got out of my admission. "But, Jerry, when did you begin to think
+about--what you've just said?"
+
+"About marrying you? Ever since that time I went down to your place ...
+when that Chichester girl...."
+
+"When I wouldn't take her place, a _pis aller_ merely. Well, suppose I
+had; suppose I had been ... what the Chichester girl wouldn't ... would
+you still have wanted to marry me?" I would not admit to myself why I
+had asked that question.
+
+"I don't know, Olivia ... men, don't you know, not often ... but I want
+to marry you now. I want it greatly." I held him off still, trying to
+get my own experience in shape where I could leave it behind me.
+
+"Such affairs never turn out well, do they?"
+
+"Hardly ever, I believe."
+
+"Unless you turn them into marriage," I hazarded.
+
+"You know," he conjectured, "I've a notion that the kind of loving that
+goes to making such affairs, can't be turned into marriage very easily.
+It's a kind of subconscious knowledge of their unfitness that keeps us
+from turning them into marriage in the first place."
+
+"I wonder."
+
+He let me be for the moment revolving many things in my mind.
+
+"It wouldn't be the vision and the dream, Jerry. You and I----"
+
+"Well, what of it? It might be something better. Something neither of us
+ever had, really. It would be company."
+
+"No, I've never had it." I remembered how blank the issue of my work had
+been to Helmeth Garrett.
+
+"Well, then, ... we have years of work in us yet. I'll buy Polatkin out
+of the theatre." He was going off at a tangent of what we might do
+together, but I had thought of something more pertinent.
+
+"We might solve the problem of how to keep our art and still be happy."
+
+"We might." He was looking down on me with great content, but quite
+soberly. "Tell me, Olivia, suppose we shouldn't, even with the
+unhappiness, with all you have been through, would you rather be what
+you are, or like the others?" We were silent as we thought back across
+the years together; there was very little by this time that we did not
+know of one another.
+
+"No," I said at last, "if being different meant being like the others,
+I'd not choose to have it any different."
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+    THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS
+    GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 38592 ***