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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Undertow, by Kathleen Norris
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Undertow
+
+Author: Kathleen Norris
+
+Posting Date: June 4, 2012 [EBook #4916]
+Release Date: January, 2004
+First Posted: March 26, 2002
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK UNDERTOW ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE WORKS OF KATHLEEN NORRIS
+
+
+UNDERTOW
+
+
+VOLUME VII
+
+
+
+
+
+
+To
+
+MARGARET THOMAS
+
+We need no gifts, whose thoughts and prayers maintain Through all the
+years a strong and stronger chain, Yet take the little gift, the
+visible sign Of the deep love between your heart and mine.
+
+
+
+
+
+UNDERTOW
+
+
+
+Chapter One
+
+
+The marriage of Albert Bradley and Anne Polk Barrett was as close as
+anything comes, in these prosaic days, to a high adventure. Nancy's
+Uncle Thomas, a quiet, gentle old Southerner who wore tan linen suits
+when he came to New York, which was not often, and Bert's mother, a
+tiny Boston woman who had lived in a diminutive Brookline apartment
+since her three sons had struck out into the world for themselves,
+respectively assured the young persons that they were taking a grave
+chance. However different their viewpoint of life, old Mrs. Bradley and
+old Mr. Polk could agree heartily in that.
+
+Of course there was much to commend the union. Nancy was beautiful, she
+came of gentlefolk, and she liked to assert that she was practical, she
+"had been a workin' woman for yeahs." This statement had reference to a
+comfortable and informal position she held with a private association
+for the relief of the poor. Nancy was paid fifteen dollars a week,
+seven of which she in turn paid to the pretty young widow, an old
+family friend only a few years older than herself, with whom she
+boarded. Mrs. Terhune was rich, in a modest way, and frequently refused
+the money entirely. But she took it often enough to make the blooming
+Nancy feel quite self-supporting, and as Nancy duly reported at the
+sunshiny office of the Southern Ladies' Helping Hand every morning, or
+almost every morning, the girl had some reason to feel that she had
+solved her financial and domestic problem.
+
+Bert was handsome, too, and his mother knew everybody who was any body
+in Boston. If Nancy's grandfather Polk had been Chief Justice of the
+Supreme Court of Maryland, why, Bert was the seventh of his name in
+direct descent, and it was in Bert's great-great-grandfather's home
+that several prominent citizens of Boston had assumed feathers and
+warpaint for a celebrated tea-party a great many years ago.
+
+More than that, Bert was at a sensible age for matrimony, twenty-five,
+and Nancy, like all southern girls, had ripened early, and at
+twenty-two had several years of dancing and flirting behind her. There
+was nothing impulsive about the affair. The two had trotted about their
+adopted city for perhaps two years before Bert brought Nancy the
+enormous diamond that his mother had given him years ago for just this
+wonderful time. Circumstances had helped them to know each other well.
+Nancy knew the sort of play that made Bert stutter with enthusiasm as
+they walked home, and Bert knew that Nancy made adorable little faces
+when she tried on hats, and that her salary was fifteen dollars a week.
+At this time, and for some years later, Bert was only one of several
+renting agents employed by the firm of Pearsall and Pearsall, City Real
+Estate. He moved his office from one new office-building downtown to
+another, sometimes warmed by clanking new radiators, sometimes carrying
+a gasoline stove with him into the region of new plaster and paint. His
+name was not important enough to be included in the list of tenants in
+the vestibule, he was merely "Renting Office, Tenth Floor." And Nancy
+knew that when he had been a few months longer with Pearsall and
+Pearsall, they would pay him exactly thirteen hundred dollars a year.
+
+That was the objection, money. Mother and Uncle Tom thought that that
+was not enough; Nancy and Bert worked it all out on paper, and thought
+it more than sufficient. They always had a splendid balance, on paper.
+Meanwhile, Mrs. Terhune went on refusing Nancy's board now and then,
+and slipping bank-notes into Nancy's purse now and then, and Bert
+continued to board with the southern gentlewomen to whom he had paid
+ten dollars a week for three years. He felt like a son in the Venables'
+house, by this time.
+
+It was at the Venables' boarding-house, indeed, that he first had met
+the dark-eyed and vivacious Nancy, who was intimate with the faded
+daughters of the family, Miss Augusta and Miss Sally Anne. When Nancy's
+Uncle Thomas came to the city for one of his infrequent visits, she
+always placed him in Mrs. Venable's care.
+
+Bert's first impression of her was of a supernaturally clever person,
+hopelessly surrounded by "beaux." She had so many admirers that even
+Miss Augusta, who had had a disappointment, warmed into half-forgotten
+coquetries while she amused Bert, for whom Miss Nancy had no time. They
+seemed to Bert, whose youth had known responsibility and hardship, a
+marvellously happy and light-hearted crowd. They laughed continuously,
+and they extracted from the chameleon city pleasures that were
+wonderfully innocent and fresh. It was as if these young exiles had
+brought from their southern homes something of leisure, something of
+spaciousness and pure sweetness that the more sophisticated youth of
+the city lacked. Their very speech, softly slurred and lazy, held a
+charm for Bert, used to his mother's and his aunts' crisp consonants.
+He called Nancy "my little southern girl" in his heart, from the hour
+he met her, and long afterward he told her that he had loved her all
+that time.
+
+He could not free the cramped muscles of his spirit to meet her quite
+on her own ground; it was his fate sometimes to reach the laugh just as
+all the others grew suddenly serious, and as often he took their airy
+interest heavily, and chained them with facts, from which they
+fluttered like a flight of butterflies. But he had his own claim, and
+it warmed the very fibres of his lonely heart when he saw that Nancy
+was beginning to recognize that claim.
+
+When they all went out to the theatre and supper, it was his
+pocket-book that never failed them. And what a night that was when,
+eagerly proffering the fresh bills to Lee Porter, who was giving the
+party, he looked up to catch a look of protest, and shame, and
+gratitude, in Nancy's lovely eyes!
+
+"No, now, Lee, you shall not take it!" she laughed richly. Bert thought
+for a second that this was more than mere persiflage, for the
+expression on the girl's face was new. Later he reminded himself that
+they all used curious forms of speech. "I just was too tired to get up
+this morning," a girl who had actually gotten up would say, or someone
+would comment upon a late train: "The old train actually never did get
+here!"
+
+After a while he took Nancy to lunch once or twice, and one day took
+her to the Plaza, where his mother happened to be staying with Cousin
+Mary Winthrop and Cousin Anna Baldwin, and his mother said that Nancy
+was a sweet, lovely girl. Bert had quite a thrill when he saw the
+familiar, beautiful face turned seriously and with pretty concern
+toward his mother, and he liked Nancy's composure among the rather
+formal older women. She managed her tea and her gloves and her
+attentions prettily, thought Bert. When he took her home at six o'clock
+he was conscious that he had passed an invisible barrier in their
+relationship; she knew his mother. They were of one breed.
+
+But that night, when he went back to the hotel to dine, his mother drew
+him aside.
+
+"Not serious, dear--between you and Miss Barrett, I mean?"
+
+Bert laughed in pleasant confusion.
+
+"Well, I--of course I admire her awfully. Everyone does. But I don't
+know that I'd have a chance with her." Suddenly and unbidden there
+leaped into his heart the glorious thought of possessing Nancy.
+Nancy--his wife, making a home and a life for unworthy him! He flushed
+deeply. His mother caught the abashed murmur, "...thirteen hundred a
+year!"
+
+"Exactly!" she said incisively, almost triumphantly. But her eyes,
+closely watching his expression, were anxious. "I don't believe in
+having things made too easy for young persons," she added, smiling.
+"But that--that really is too hard."
+
+"Yep. That's too hard," Bert agreed.
+
+"It isn't fair to the girl to ask it," added his mother gently.
+
+"That's true," Bert said a little heavily, after a pause. "It isn't
+fair--to Nancy."
+
+The next night Nancy wondered why his manner was so changed, and why he
+spoke so bitterly of his work, and what was the matter with him anyway.
+She reflected that perhaps he was sorry his mother's visit was over.
+For two or three weeks he seemed restless and discontented, and equally
+unwilling to be included in the "Dutch treats," or to be left out of
+them. And then suddenly the bad mood passed, and Bert was his kind and
+appreciative and generous self again. Clark Belknap, also of Maryland,
+who had plenty of money and a charming personality and manner as well,
+began to show the familiar symptoms toward Nancy, and Bert told himself
+that Clark would be an admirable match for her. Also his Cousin Mary
+wrote him that his second cousin Dorothy Hayes Hamilton was going to be
+in New York for a few weeks, and asked him to take her about a little,
+and see that she had a nice time. Cousin Mary, as was usual, enclosed a
+generous check to insure the nice time, and little Dorothy proved to be
+a very rose of a girl, just as unspoiled as if her fortune had been
+half a dollar instead of half a million and full of pride in her big
+cousin, whose Harvard record she evidently knew by heart.
+
+Bert willingly took her about, and they became good friends. He did not
+see much of Nancy now, and one of the times he did see her was
+unfortunate. He and Dorothy had been having tea at a roof-garden, after
+a long delightful day in Dorothy's car, and now he was to take her to
+her hotel. Just as he was holding the little pongee wrap, and Dorothy
+was laughing up at him from under the roses on her hat, he saw Nancy,
+going out between two older women. His look just missed hers; he knew
+she had seen him; had perhaps been watching him, but he could not catch
+her eye again.
+
+It was a hot night, and Nancy looked a little pale and, although as
+trim and neat as usual, a little shabby. Her pretty hands in old gloves
+she had washed herself, her pretty eyes patiently fixed upon the faces
+of the women who were boring her in her youth and freshness with the
+business of sickness and poverty, her whole gentle, rather weary
+aspect, smote Bert's heart with a pain that was half a fierce joy.
+Never had he loved her in her gaiety and her indifference as he loved
+her now, when she looked so sweetly, so almost sorrowfully.
+
+A week later he went to see her.
+
+"Well, Mister Bert Bradley," she smiled at him, unfastening the string
+from the great box of roses that had simultaneously arrived from some
+other admirer, "I didn't know what to make of you! And who was the
+more-than-pretty little girl that you were squiring on the Waldorf roof
+last week?"
+
+"Just my cousin, Dorothy Hamilton. She went back to Boston to-day.
+She's finished school, and had a year abroad, and now she isn't quite
+sure what she wants to do. How's Mr. Belknap?"
+
+She narrowed her eyes at him mischievously.
+
+"Don't you think you're smart! These are from him. He's very well. He
+took me to the theatre last night, and we had a wonderful time. Come
+with me into the kitchen, while I put these in water."
+
+"Take good care of them!" Bert said witheringly. But she only laughed
+at him from the sink. He followed her into the small, hot, neat
+kitchen, with the clean empty pint bottle and the quarter-pint bottle
+turned upside down near the bright faucets, and the enamel handles of
+the gas stove all turned out in an even row. Bert remembered that the
+last time he had been here was a cold May morning, when he and Nancy
+had made countless hot cakes. He had met her at church, and walked home
+with her, and while they were luxuriously finishing the last of the hot
+cakes the others had burst in, with the usual harum-scarum plans for
+the day. But that was May, and now it was July, and somehow the bloom
+seemed to be gone from their relationship.
+
+They talked pleasantly, and after awhile Mrs. Terhune came in and
+talked, too. She was distressed about some shares she held in a
+traction company and Bert was able to be of real service to her, taking
+a careful memorandum, and promising to see her about it in a day. "For
+I expect we'll see you round here in a day or two," she said with
+simple archness. She was well used to the demands of Nancy's beaux.
+Nancy looked particularly innocent and expectant at this, "Perhaps Mr.
+Bradley might come in and cheer you up, if I go off with Mrs.
+Featherstone for the week-end?" she suggested pleasantly. Mrs.
+Featherstone had been Virginia Belknap.
+
+Bert presently bade her a cold good-bye. His reassurance to Mrs.
+Terhune was made the next day by telephone, and life became dark and
+dull to him. Certain things hurt him strangely--the sight of places
+where she had taken off the shabby gloves; and had seated herself
+happily opposite him for luncheon or tea; the sound of music she had
+hummed. He wanted to see her--not feverishly, nothing extreme, except
+that he wanted it every second of the time. A mild current of wanting
+to see Nancy underran all his days; he could control it, he decided,
+and to an extent he did. He ate and worked and even slept in spite of
+it. But it was always there, and it tired him, and made him feel old
+and sad.
+
+And then they met; Bert idling through the September sweetness and
+softness and goldness of the park, Nancy briskly taking her
+business-like way from West Eightieth to East Seventy-second Street.
+What Nancy experienced in the next hour Bert could only guess, he knew
+that she was glad to see him, and that for some reason she was entirely
+off guard. For himself, he was like a thirsty animal that reaches
+trees, and shade, and the wide dimpling surface of clear waters. He had
+so often imagined meeting her, and had so longed to meet her, that he
+was actually a little confused, and wanted shakily to laugh, and to
+cling to her.
+
+He walked to Seventy-second Street, with her and then to tea at a tiny
+place in Madison Avenue called the Prince Royal. And she settled
+herself opposite him, just as in his dreams--only so much more
+sweetly--and smiled at him from her dear faithful blue eyes, as she
+laid aside her gloves.
+
+She was wearing a large diamond, surrounded by topazes. Bert knew that
+he had never seen this ring before, although it did not look like a new
+one. However, the age of the ring signified nothing. He wondered if
+Clark Belknap's mother had ever worn it, and if Clark had just given it
+to Nancy...
+
+She was full of heavenly interest and friendliness. But when they were
+walking home she told him that she was so sorry--she couldn't ask him
+to dine, because she was going out. She asked him for the next day, but
+his board of directors was having a monthly meeting that night, and he
+had to be there. How about Saturday?
+
+Saturday she was going out of town, a special meeting of the Red Cross.
+They hung there. Nancy was perhaps ashamed to go on through the list of
+days, Bert would not ungenerously force her. He left her, thrilled and
+yet dissatisfied. He looked back almost with envy to his state of a few
+hours earlier, when he had been hoping that he might meet her.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Two
+
+
+The week dragged by. The undercurrent of longing to see Nancy flowed on
+and on. Bert wanted nothing else--just Nancy. He had been spending the
+summer with a friend, at the friend's uptown house, but now he thought
+he would go out to the Venables, and show some interest in his
+newly-papered room and hear them speak of her.
+
+He rang their bell with a thumping heart. It was four o'clock in the
+afternoon. She might even be here! Or they might tell him she was
+engaged to Clark Belknap of Maryland. ... Bert felt so sick at the
+thought that it seemed a fact. He wanted to run away.
+
+Miss Augusta, red-eyed, opened the door. Beyond her he was somehow
+vaguely aware of darkness, and weeping, and the subdued rustling of
+gowns. Po' Nancy Barrett was here--he knew that? Well, didn't he know
+that the dea' old Colonel had passed away suddenly--Miss Augusta's
+tears flowed afresh. Nancy had come in unexpectedly to lunch, and the
+telegram from her aunt had come while she was there. "Tell Nancy
+Brother Edward passed on at five o'clock. Come home at once."
+
+Bert listened dazedly, in the shabby old parlour with the scrolled
+flowery carpet, and the statues, and the square piano. He comforted
+Miss Augusta, he even put one arm about her. Was there something he
+could do?--he asked the forlorn, empty question merely as a matter of
+course.
+
+"I don't suppose yo' could send some telegrams..." Miss Augusta said,
+blowing her nose damply. "Po' child, she hasn't got a brother, nor
+anyone to depend on now in the hour of her bitteh need!"
+
+Bert's heart leaped.
+
+"Just tell me!" he begged. "And what about trains, and arrangements?
+Will she go down? And clothes?--would she need something--"
+
+This last item had been attended. Mama and Sis' Sally Anne had gone
+down town, po' child, she didn't want much. And yes, she was going
+down, to-morrow--that night, if it could be managed.
+
+"But Nancy herself had better see yo'," Miss Augusta said disappearing.
+Bert waited, his heart thundering. Murmuring and tears came from some
+remote region. Then quietly and slowly Nancy, in new black, came in.
+And Bert knew that to the end of the world, as long as he should
+breathe, life would mean Nancy's life to him; and the world was only
+Nancy.
+
+They sat down on the slippery horsehair, and talked softly and quickly.
+Ticket--train--telegrams--the little money that was necessary--he
+advised her about them all. He called her "Nancy" to-day, for the first
+time. He remembered afterward that she had called him nothing. She went
+to get Mrs. Venable, after a while, and later Sis' Sally Anne drew him
+aside and told him to make Nancy drink her good hot tea. She drank it,
+at his command. Clark Belknap came that evening; others came--all too
+late. Before the first of them, Bert had taken her to the train, had
+made her as comfortable as he could, had sat beside her, with her soft
+gloved hand tight in his, murmuring to her that she had so much to be
+thankful for--no pain, no illness, no real age. But she had left him,
+she said, her lip trembling and her eyes brimming again. He reminded
+her of her pretty, dependent step-mother, of the two little
+half-brothers who were just waiting for Nancy to come and straighten
+everything out.
+
+"Yes--I've got to keep up for them!" she said, smiling bravely. And in
+a tense undertone she added, "You're wonderful to me!"
+
+"And will you have some supper--just to break the evening?"
+
+"I had tea." She leaned back, and shut her eyes. "I couldn't--eat!" she
+whispered pitifully. His response was to put his clean, folded
+handkerchief into her hand, and at that she opened the wet eyes, and
+smiled at him shakily.
+
+"Just some soup--or a salad," he urged. "Will you promise me, Nancy?"
+
+"I promise you I'll try," she said in parting.
+
+Walking home with his head in a whirl, Bert said to himself: "This is
+the second of October. I'll give her six months. On the second of April
+I'll ask her."
+
+However, he asked her on Christmas night, after the Venables' wonderful
+Christmas dinner, when they all talked of the Civil War as if it were
+yesterday, and when old laces, old jet and coral jewelry, and frail old
+silk gowns were much in evidence. They were sitting about the coal fire
+in the back drawing-room, when Nancy and Bert chanced to be alone. Mrs.
+Venables had gone to brew some punch, with Sis' Sally Anne's help. The
+other young men of the party were assisting them, Augusta had gone to
+the telephone.
+
+Bert always remembered the hour. The room was warm, fragrant of spicy
+evergreen. There was a Rogers group on the marble mantle, and two
+Dresden china candlesticks that reflected themselves in the watery
+dimness of the mirror above. Nancy, slender and exquisite, was in
+unrelieved, lacy black; her hair was as softly black as her gown. Her
+white hands were locked in her lap. Something had reminded her of old
+Christmases, and she had told Bert of running in to her mother's room,
+early in the chilly morning, to shout "Christmas Gift!"
+
+Not moving his sympathetic eyes from her Checking Page back In, Please
+Wait ... to town again, and his own pleasure in their visit was talking
+of Nancy; how wise, how sweet, how infinitely desirable she was.
+Dorothy had wanted Cousin Albert to come to her for Thanksgiving. No, a
+thousand thanks--but Miss Barrett was so much alone now. He must be
+near her. Dorothy kept her thoughts on the subject to herself, but he
+so far impressed his mother that her own hopes came to be his, she
+dreaded the thought of what might happen to her boy if that southern
+girl did not chance to care for him.
+
+But the southern girl cared. She locked the lace-clad arms about his
+neck, on this memorable Christmas night and laid her cheek against his.
+"Are you sure you want me, Bert?" she whispered.
+
+They had not much altered their positions when Mrs. Venables came back
+half an hour later, and a general time of kissing, crying and laughing
+began.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Three
+
+
+It was a happy time, untroubled by the thought of money that was soon
+to be so important. Bert's various aunts and cousins sent him checks,
+and Nancy's stepmother sent her all her own mother's linen and silver,
+and odd pieces of mahogany on which the freight charges were frightful,
+and laces and an oil portrait or two. The trousseau was helped from all
+sides, every week had its miracle; and the hats, and the embroidered
+whiteness, and the smart street suit and the adorable kitchen ginghams
+accumulated as if by magic. Bert's mother sent delightfully monogrammed
+bed and table-linen, almost weekly. Nancy said it was preposterous for
+poor people to start in with such priceless possessions!
+
+Among the happy necessities of the time was the finding of a proper
+apartment. Nancy and Bert spent delightful Saturdays and Sundays
+wandering in quest of it; beginning half-seriously in February, when it
+seemed far too early to consider this detail, and continuing with
+augmented earnestness through the three succeeding months. Eventually
+they got both tired and discouraged, and felt dashed in the very
+opening of their new life, but finally the place was found, and they
+loved it instantly, and leased it without delay. It was in a new
+apartment house, in East Eleventh Street, four shiny and tiny rooms, on
+a fourth floor. Everything was almost too compact and convenient, Nancy
+thought; the ice box, gas stove, dumb-waiter, hanging light over the
+dining table, clothes line, and garbage chute, were already in place.
+It left an ambitious housekeeper small margin for original arrangement,
+but of course it did save money and time. The building was of pretty
+cream brick, clean and fresh, the street wide, and lined with dignified
+old brownstone houses, and the location perfect. She smothered a dream
+of wide old-fashioned rooms, quaintly furnished in chintzes and white
+paint. They had found no such enchanting places, except at exorbitant
+rents. Seventy-five dollars, or one hundred dollars, were asked for the
+simplest of them, and the plumbing facilities, and often the janitor
+service, were of the poorest. So Nancy abandoned the dream, and
+enthusiastically accepted the East Eleventh Street substitute, Bert
+becoming a tenant in the "George Eliot," at a rental of thirty-five
+dollars a month. Some of the old Barrett furniture was too large for
+the place, but what she could use Nancy arranged with exquisite taste:
+fairly dancing with pleasure over the sitting room, where her chair and
+Bert's were in place, and the little droplight lighted on the little
+table. In this room they were going to read Dickens out loud, on winter
+nights.
+
+They were married on a hot April morning, a morning whose every second
+seemed to Nancy flooded with strange perfumes, and lighted with
+unearthly light. The sky was cloudless; the park bowered in fresh
+green; the streets, under new shadows, clean-swept and warm. Her gown
+was perfection, her new wide hat the most becoming she had ever worn;
+the girls, in their new gowns and hats, seemed so near and dear to her
+to-day. She was hardly conscious of Bert, but she remembered liking his
+big brother, who kissed her in so brotherly a fashion. Winter was over,
+the snow was gone at last, the trying and depressing rains and the cold
+were gone, too, and she and Bert were man and wife, and off to Boston
+for their honeymoon.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Four
+
+
+They had been married eleven days, and were loitering over a Sunday
+luncheon in their tiny home, when they first seriously discussed
+finances; not theoretical finances, but finances as bounded on one side
+by Bert's worn, brown leather pocket-book, and on the other by his
+bank-book, with its confusing entries in black and red ink.
+
+Here on the table were seventeen dollars and eighty cents. Nancy had
+flattened the bills, and arranged the silver in piles, as they talked.
+This was Sunday; Bert would be paid on Saturday next. Could Nancy
+manage on that?
+
+Nancy felt a vague alarm. But she had been a wage earner herself. She
+rose to the situation at once.
+
+"Manage what, Bert? If you mean just meals, of course I can! But I
+won't have this much every week for meals ...?"
+
+Bert took out a fountain pen, and reached for a blank envelope.
+
+"Do you mind working it out?--I think it's such fun!"
+
+"I love it!" Nancy brought her brightest face to the problem. "Now
+let's see--what have we? Exactly one hundred a month."
+
+"Thirteen hundred a year," he corrected.
+
+"Yes, but let's not count that extra hundred, Bee!" Nancy, like all
+women, had given her new husband a new name. "Let's save that and have
+it to blow in, all in a heap, for something special?"
+
+"All right." Bert digressed long enough to catch the white hand and
+kiss it, and say: "Isn't it wonderful--our sitting here planning things
+together? Aren't we going to have FUN!"
+
+"Rent, thirty-five," Nancy began, after an interlude. Bert, who had
+secured a large sheet of clean paper, made a neat entry, "Rent, $35."
+
+"You make such nice, firm figures, mine are always wavy!" observed
+Nancy irrelevantly, at this. This led nowhere.
+
+"Now one quarter of that rent ought to come out every week," Bert
+submitted presently. "Eight dollars and a half must be put aside every
+week."
+
+"Out of this, too?" Nancy asked, touching the money on the table.
+
+"Well, that's all that's left of half my salary, drawn in advance,"
+Bert said, pondering. "Yes, you see--we pay a month in advance on the
+first!"
+
+"And what have we besides this, Bee? Your Aunt Mary's check, and--and
+what else?"
+
+"Aunt Mary's hundred, which will certainly take care of the freight
+bills," Bert calculated, "and that's all, except this."
+
+"But, Bert--but, Bert--all that money we had in Boston?"
+
+Bert pointed to the table.
+
+"You behold the remainder."
+
+"Weren't we the extravagant wretches!" mused Nancy.
+"Taxis--tea-parties--breakfast upstairs--silly pink silk stockings for
+Nancy, a silly pongee vest for Bert--"
+
+"But oh, what a grand time!" her husband finished unrepentantly.
+
+"Wasn't it!" Nancy agreed dreamily. But immediately she was
+businesslike again. "However, the lean years have set in," she
+announced. "I'll have to count on a dollar a week laundry--laundry and
+rent nine dollars and a half; piano and telephone at the rate of three
+dollars a month--that's a dollar and a half more; milk, a quart of milk
+and half a pint of cream a day, a dollar and seventy-five cents more;
+what does that leave, Bert?"
+
+"It leaves twelve dollars and twenty-five cents," said Bert.
+
+"But what about your lunches, dearest?"
+
+"Gosh! I forgot them," Bert stated frankly. "I'll keep 'em under
+fifteen cents a day," he added, "call it a dollar a week!"
+
+"You can't!" protested Nancy, with a look of despair.
+
+"I can if I've got to. Besides, we'll be off places, Sundays, and I'll
+come home for lunch Saturday, and you'll feed me up."
+
+"But, Bert," she began again presently, "I'll have to get ice, and car
+fares, and drugs, and soap, and thread, and butter, and bread, and
+meat, and salad-oil, and everything else in the world out of that
+eleven-fifty!" Bert was frowning hard.
+
+"You can't have the whole eleven-fifty," he told her reluctantly, "I
+can walk one way, to Forty-Eighth Street, but I can't walk both. I'll
+have to have some car fare. And my office suit has got to be pressed
+about once every two weeks--"
+
+"And newspapers!" added Nancy, dolefully. "Seven cents more!" And they
+both burst into laughter. "But, Bee," she said presently, ruffling his
+hair, as she sat on the arm of his chair, "really I do not know what we
+will do in case of dentist's bills, or illness, or when our clothes
+wear out. What do people do? Is thirty-five too much rent, or what?"
+
+"I'm darned if I know what they do!" Bert mused.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Five
+
+
+They both were destined to learn how it was managed, and being young
+and healthy and in love, they learned easily, and with much laughter
+and delight. Bert's share was perhaps the easier, for although he
+manfully walked to his office, polished his own shoes, and ate a
+tiresome and unsatisfying lunch five days a week, he had his reward on
+the sixth and seventh days, when Nancy petted and praised him.
+
+Her part was harder. She never knew what it was to be free from
+financial concern. She fretted and contrived until the misspending of
+five cents seemed a genuine calamity to her, She walked to cheap
+markets, and endured the casual scorn of cheap clerks. She ironed
+Bert's ties and pressed his trousers, saving car fares by walking,
+saving hospitality by letting her old friends see how busy and absorbed
+she was, saving food by her native skill and ingenuity.
+
+But they lived royally, every meal was a triumph, every hour strangely
+bright. Of cooking meat, especially the more choice cuts, Nancy did
+little this year, but there was no appetizing combination of
+vegetables, soups, salads, hot breads, and iced drinks that she did not
+try. Bert said, and he meant it, that he had never lived so well in his
+life, and certainly the walls of the little apartment in the "George
+Eliot" were packed with joy. When their microscopic accounts balanced
+at the end of the week, they celebrated with a table-d'hote dinner down
+town--dinners from which they walked home gloriously happy, Nancy
+wondering over and over again HOW the restaurateurs could manage it,
+Bert, over his cigar, estimating carefully: "Well, Sweet, there wasn't
+much cost to that soup, delicious as it was, and I suppose they buy
+that sole down at the docks, in the early morning..."
+
+When Nancy had learned that she could live without a telephone, and had
+cut down the milk bill, and limited Bert to one butter ball per meal,
+she found she could manage easily. In August they gave two or three
+dinners, and Nancy displayed her pretty table furnishings to "the
+girls," and gave them the secret of her iced tea. She told her husband
+that they got along because he was "so wonderful"; she felt that no
+financial tangle could resist Bert's neatly pencilled little
+calculations, but Bert praised only her--what credit to him that he did
+not complain, when he was the most fortunate man in the world?
+
+They came to be proud of their achievement. Nancy had Buckley Pearsall,
+Bert's chief, and his wife, to dinner, and kindly Mrs. Pearsall could
+not enough praise the bride and her management. Later the Pearsalls
+asked the young Bradleys down to their Staten Island home for a
+week-end. "And think of the pure gain of not buying a thing for three
+days!" exulted Nancy, thereby convulsing her lord. She brought back
+late corn, two jars of Mrs. Pearsall's preserved peaches, a great box
+of grapes to be made into jelly, and a basket of tomatoes. Bert said
+that she was a grafter, but he knew as well as she that Nancy's
+pleasure in taking the gifts had given Mrs. Pearsall a genuine joy.
+
+With none of the emergencies they had dreaded, and with many and
+unexpected pleasures, the first winter went by. Sometimes Bert got a
+theatre pass, sometimes old friends or kinspeople came to town, and
+Bert and Nancy went to one of the big hotels to dinner, and stared
+radiantly about at the bright lights, and listened to music again, and
+were whirled home in a taxicab.
+
+"That party cost your Cousin Edith about twenty-five dollars," Nancy,
+rolling up her hair-net thoughtfully, would say late at night, with a
+suppressed yawn. "The dinner check was fourteen, and the tickets
+eight--it cost her more than twenty-five dollars! Doesn't that seem
+wicked, Bert? And all that delicious chicken that we hardly
+touched--dear me, what fun I could have with twenty-five dollars! There
+are so many things I'd like to buy that I never do; just silly things,
+you know--nice soaps and powders, and fancy cheeses and an alligator
+pear, and the kind of toilet water you love so--don't you remember you
+bought it in Boston when we honeymooned?"
+
+Perhaps a shadow would touch Bert's watching face, and he would come to
+put an arm about her and her loosened cloud of hair.
+
+"Poor old girl, it isn't much fun for you! Do you get tired of it,
+Nancy?"
+
+"Bert," she said, one night in a mood of gravity and confidence that he
+loved, and had learned to watch for, "I never get tired. And sometimes
+I feel sure that the most wonderful happiness that ever is felt in this
+world comes to two people who love each other, and who have to make
+sacrifices for each other! I mean that. I mean that I don't think
+riches, or travel, or great gifts and achievements bring a greater
+happiness than ours. I think a king, dying," smiled Nancy, trying not
+to be too serious, "might wish that, for a while at least, he had been
+able to wear shabby shoes for the woman he loved, and had had years of
+poking about a great city with her, and talking and laughing and
+experimenting and working over their problem together!"
+
+Bert kissed the thoughtful eyes, but did not speak.
+
+"But just the same," Nancy presently went on, "sometimes I do get--just
+a little frightened. I feel as if perhaps we had been a little too
+brave. When your cousins, and mine, ask us how we do it, and make so
+much of it, it makes me feel a little uneasy. Suppose we really aren't
+able to swing it ...?"
+
+Bert knew how to meet this mood, and he never failed her. He put his
+arm about her, tonight, and gave her his sunniest smile.
+
+"We could pay less rent, dear."
+
+This fired Nancy. Of course they could. She had seen really possible
+places, in inaccessible neighbourhoods, which rented far more
+reasonably. She had seen quite sunny and clean flats for as little as
+fourteen and sixteen dollars a month. Her housekeeping abilities
+awakened to the demand. What did she and Bert care about neighbourhoods
+and the casual dictates of fashion? They were a world in themselves,
+and they needed no other company.
+
+"Everyone said that we'd never get this far," Bert reminded her
+hearteningly. She was immediately reassured, and fell to enthusiastic
+planning for Christmas.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Six
+
+
+It was their first Christmas, and they spent it alone together. Bert
+and Nancy knew that they would not spend another Christmas alone, and
+the shadowy hope for April lent a new tone even to their gayety, and
+deepened the exquisite happiness of the dark, snowbound day. The tiny
+house was full of laughter, for Bert had given his wife all the little
+things she had from time to time whimsically desired. The fancy
+cheeses, and the perfumes and soaps, made her laugh and laugh as she
+unwrapped them. There were fuzzy wash-cloths--a particular fancy of
+hers--and new library paste and new hair-pins, and a can-opener that
+made her exclaim: "Bert, that was cute of you!" and even an alligator
+pear. A bewildered look came into Nancy's eyes as she went on
+investigating her bulging stocking--gloves, and silk hosiery, and new
+little enamelled pins for her collars, and the piano score of the opera
+she so loved--where had the money come from?
+
+"My firm gave us each ten," Bert explained, grinning.
+
+"And you spent it ALL on me!" Nancy said, stricken. "You poked about
+and got me every blessed thing I ever wanted in this world--you
+darling!"
+
+"Why not?" he asked. "You're the only thing I have, Nance! And such
+LITTLE things, dear."
+
+"It isn't the things--it's your thinking of them," Nancy said. "And
+eating wretched lunches while you planned them! You make me cry--and
+meanwhile, my beloved little chicken will roast himself dry!"
+
+She rushed into her kitchen. Bert rushed after her; his days at home
+were a succession of interruptions for Nancy, no topic was too
+insignificant for their earnest discussion, and no pleasure too small
+to share. To-day the chief object of their interest was his mother's
+Christmas present to him, a check for fifty dollars, "for my boy's
+winter coat."
+
+They looked at the slip of paper at regular intervals. To Bert it
+brought a pleasant thought of the thin, veiny hand that had penned it,
+the little silk-clad form and trimly netted gray hair. He remembered
+his mother's tiny sitting room, full of begonias and winter sunshine
+and photographs of the family, with a feeling that while mother could
+never again know rapturous happiness like his own, yet it was good to
+think of her as content and comfortable, with her tissue-wrapped
+presents from the three daughters-in-law lying on her table.
+
+But to Nancy the check meant the future only: it meant her handsome
+Bert dressed at last in suitable fashion, in a "big, fuzzy, hairy
+coat." She pointed out various men's coats in the windows they passed
+that afternoon, and on the other young men who were walking with wives
+and babies.
+
+But Bert had his own ideas. When Nancy met him down town a day or two
+later, to go pick the coat, she found him quite unmanageable. He said
+that there was no hurry about the coat--they were right here in the
+housekeeping things, why not look at fireless cookers? In the end they
+bought an ice-cream freezer, and a fireless cooker, and two pairs of
+arctic overshoes, and an enormous oval-shaped basket upon which the
+blushing Nancy dropped a surreptitious kiss when the saleswoman was not
+looking, and a warm blue sweater for Nancy, and, quite incidentally, an
+eighteen-dollar overcoat for Bert.
+
+Nancy's lip trembled over this last purchase. They were nice overcoats,
+remarkable for the price, indeed--"marked down from twenty-five."
+But--but she had wanted him to spend every cent of the fifty dollars
+for a STUNNING coat! Bert laughed at her April face. He took her
+triumphantly to the fifty-cent luncheon and they talked over it for a
+blissful hour. And when she left him at the office door, Nancy consoled
+herself by drifting into one of the near-by second-hand bookshops, and
+buying him a tiny Keats, "Pepy's Diary" somewhat shabby as to cover,
+and George's "Progress and Poverty," at ten cents apiece. These books
+were piled at Bert's place that night, and gave him almost as much
+pleasure as the overcoat did.
+
+And even Nancy had to confess that the disputed garment looked warm and
+thick, when it came home in its green box, and that it was "fun" to
+open the other packages, and find the sweater, looking so wooly and
+comfortable, and the big basket destined for so precious a freight! She
+and Bert laughed and chattered over the thick papers and strings that
+bound the freezer and the cooker, and made chocolate ice-cream for
+dinner on Sunday, and never ate their breakfast oatmeal without a
+rapturous appreciation of the cooker.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Seven
+
+
+She was still the centre of his universe and her own when she walked
+with her hand on his arm, to the little hospital around the corner, on
+a sweet April morning. The slow coming of spring had brought her a new
+tenderness and a new dependence, and instinctively she felt that, when
+she came home again, she would be a new Nancy. The wistfulness that
+marks any conscious human change had been hers for many days now; she
+was not distrustful, she was not unhappy, but she was sobered and
+thoughtful.
+
+"We HAVE been happy, haven't we, Bert?" she said, more than once.
+
+"We always will be, my darling! You know that."
+
+But she would only smile at him wisely, for reply. She was still happy,
+happier perhaps than ever. But she knew that she was no longer the
+mistress of her own happiness--it lay in other hands now.
+
+So the universe was turned upside down for Nancy, and she lost, once
+and for all her position as its centre. The world, instead of a safe
+and cheerful place, became full of possible dangers for the baby,
+Albert the eighth. Nancy, instead of a self-reliant, optimistic woman,
+was only a weary, feeble, ignorant person who doubted her own power to
+protect this priceless treasure.
+
+He was a splendid baby--that was part of the trouble. He was too
+splendid, he had never been equalled, and could never be replaced, and
+she would go stark, staring mad if anything happened to him! Nancy
+almost went mad, as it was. If the Cullinan Diamond had been placed in
+Nancy's keeping, rather than worry about it as she worried about
+Junior, she would have flung it gaily into the East River. But she
+could not dispose of the baby; her greatest horror was the thought of
+ever separating from him, the fear that some day Bert might want to
+send him, the darling, innocent thing, at fourteen, to boarding-school,
+or that there might be a war, and Junior might enlist!
+
+She showed him to visiting friends in silence. When Nancy had led them
+in to the bedroom, and raised a shade so that the tempered sun light
+revealed the fuzzy head and shut eyes and rotund linen-swathed form of
+Junior, she felt that words were unnecessary. She never really saw the
+baby's face, she saw something idealized, haloed, angelic. In later
+year she used to say that none of the hundreds of snapshots Bert took
+of him really did the child justice. Junior had been the most
+exquisitely beautiful baby that any one ever saw, everyone said so.
+
+When Bert got home at night, she usually had a request to make of him.
+Would he just LOOK at Junior? No, he was all RIGHT, only he had hardly
+wanted his three o'clock nursing, and he was sleeping so HARD--
+
+And at this point, if she was tired--and she was always tired!--Nancy
+would break into tears. "Bert--hadn't we better ask Colver to come and
+see him?" she would stammer, eagerly.
+
+Ten minutes later she would be laughing, as she served Bert his dinner.
+Of course he was all right, only, being alone with him all day, she got
+to worrying. And she was tired.
+
+Poor Nancy, she was not to know rest or leisure for many years to come.
+She was clever, and as resolutely as she had solved their first, simple
+problem, she set about solving this new one. They had forty dollars a
+week with which to manage now, but the extra money seemed only a
+special dispensation to provide for the growing demands of Junior.
+
+Junior needed a coach, a crib, new shirts--"he is getting immense, the
+darling!" was Nancy's one rapturous comment, when four of these were
+bought at sixty cents each. In November he needed two quarts of milk
+daily, and what his mother called "an ouncer" to take the top-milk
+safely from the bottle, and a small ice box for the carefully prepared
+bottles, and the bottles themselves. He always needed powder and
+safety-pins and new socks, and presently he had to have a coloured
+woman to do his washing, for Nancy was growing stronger and more
+interested in life in general, and came to the conclusion that he might
+safely be left for a few moments with Esmeralda, now and then.
+
+He paid for these favours in his own way, and neither Bert nor Nancy
+ever felt that it was inadequate. When his sober fat face wrinkled into
+a smile of welcome to his father, Bert was moved almost to tears. When
+she wheeled him through the streets, royally benign after a full
+bottle, rosy-cheeked in his wooly white cap, Nancy felt almost too
+rich. Junior filled all the gaps in her life, it mattered not what she
+lacked while she had Junior.
+
+The forty dollar income melted as quickly as the twenty-five dollar
+one, and far more mysteriously. Nancy would have felt once that forty
+dollars every week was riches, but between Junior's demands, and the
+little leakage of Esmeralda's wages, and her hearty lunch twice a week,
+and the milk, and the necessarily less-careful marketing, they seemed
+to be just where they were before.
+
+"There must be some way of living that we can afford!" mused Nancy, one
+March morning at the breakfast table, when the world looked
+particularly bright to the young Bradleys. Junior, curly-headed,
+white-clad, and excited over a hard crust of toast, sat between his
+parents, who interrupted their meal to kiss his fat fists, the dewy
+back of his neck under the silky curls, and even the bare toes that
+occasionally appeared on the board.
+
+This was Sunday, and for months it had been the custom to weigh Junior
+on Sunday, a process that either put Nancy and Bert into a boastful
+mood for the day, or reduced the one to tearful silence, and the other
+to apprehensive bravado. But now the baby was approaching his first
+anniversary, and it was perfectly obvious that his weight was no longer
+a matter of concern. He was so large, so tall, and so fat that one of
+Nancy's daily satisfactions was to have other mothers, in the park, ask
+her his age. She looked at him with fond complacency rather than
+apprehension now, feeling that every month and week of his life made
+him a little more sure of protracted existence, and herself a little
+more safe as his mother.
+
+"How do you mean--afford?" Bert asked. "We pay our bills, and we're not
+in debt."
+
+"When I say 'afford,'" Nancy answered, "I mean that we do not live
+without a frightful amount of worry and fuss about money. To just keep
+out of debt, and make ends meet, is not my idea of life!"
+
+"It's the way lots of people live--if they're lucky," Bert submitted,
+picking Junior's damp crust from the floor, eyeing it dubiously, and
+substituting another crust in its place.
+
+"Well, it's all wrong!" Nancy stated positively. "There should be a
+comfortable living for everyone in this world who works even half as
+hard as you do--and if any one wants to work harder, let him have the
+luxuries!"
+
+"That's socialism, Nance."
+
+She raised her pretty brows innocently.
+
+"Is it? Well, I'm not a socialist. I guess I just don't understand."
+
+She knew, as the weeks went by, that there were other things she could
+not understand. Toil as she might, from morning until night, there was
+always something undone. It puzzled her strangely.
+
+Other women had even harder problems, what did THEY do? Few women had
+steady, clever husbands like Bert. Few had energy and enthusiasm like
+hers. But she was so tired, all the time, that even when the daily
+routine ran smoothly, and the marketing and Junior's naps and meals
+occurred on schedule time, the result hardly seemed worth while. She
+whisked through breakfast and breakfast dishes, whisked through the
+baby's bath, had her house in order when he awakened from his nap,
+wheeled him to market, wheeled him home for another bottle and another
+nap. Then it was time for her own meal, and there were a few more
+dishes, and some simple laundry work to do, and then again the boy was
+dressed, and the perambulator was bumped out of the niche below the
+stairs, and they went out again. The hardest hour of all, in the warm
+lengthening days of spring, was between five and six. Junior was tired
+and cross, dinner preparations were under way, the table must be set,
+one more last bottle warmed. When Bert came in, Nancy, flushed and
+tired, was ready, and he might play for a few minutes with Junior
+before he was tucked up. But the relaxation of the meal was trying to
+Nancy, and the last dishes a weary drag. She would go to her chair,
+when they were done, and sit stupidly staring ahead of her. Sometimes,
+in this daze, she would reach for the fallen sheets of the evening
+paper, and read them indifferently. Sometimes she merely battled with
+yawns, before taking herself wearily to bed.
+
+"Can I get you your book, dear?" Bert might ask.
+
+"No-o-o! I'm too sleepy. I put my head down on the bed beside Junior
+to-day, and I've been as heavy as lead ever since! Besides, I forgot to
+wash my hands, and they're dishwatery."
+
+"What tires you so, do you suppose?"
+
+"Oh, nothing special, and everything! I think watching the baby is very
+tiring. He never uses all my time, and yet I can't do anything else
+while I have him. And then he's getting so mischievous--he makes work!"
+
+"What'll you do next year?" Bert questioned sometimes dubiously.
+
+"Oh, we'll manage!" And with a sleepy smile, and a sleepy kiss, Nancy
+would trail away, only too grateful to reach her bed after the hard
+hours.
+
+Bert had carefully calculated upon her spring wardrobe, and she became
+quite her animated self over the excitement of selecting new clothes.
+They left Esmeralda in charge of Junior, and made an afternoon of it,
+and dined down town in the old way. Over the meal Bert told her that he
+had made exactly three hundred dollars at a blow, in a commission, and
+that she and the boy were going to the country for six weeks.
+
+This led to a wonderful hour, when they compared feelings, and reviewed
+their adventure. Nancy marvelled at the good fortune that followed
+them, "we are marvellously lucky, aren't we, Bert?" she asked,
+appreciatively. She had just spent almost a hundred dollars for her
+summer clothes and the boy's! And now they were really going to the
+blessed country, to be free for six weeks from planning meals and
+scraping vegetables and stirring cereals. Radiantly, they discussed
+mountains and beaches, even buying a newspaper, on the hot walk home,
+to pore over in search of the right place.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Eight
+
+
+"The Old Hill House," on the north Connecticut line, seemed almost too
+good to be true. It was an unpretentious country hotel, and Nancy and
+Junior settled themselves in one of its hot, second-story rooms feeling
+almost guiltily happy. Nancy kissed Bert good-bye on the first Monday
+morning assuring him that she had NOTHING to do! To go down to meals,
+and they were good meals, without the slightest share in the work of
+preparing them, and to be able to wear dainty clothes without the
+ruinous contact with the kitchen, seemed too luxurious.
+
+But she was not quite idle, none-the-less. Junior had to have his
+morning bath, after breakfast, and while he was in the tub, his mother
+washed six bottles in the hand-basin. Then, on a tiltish alcohol stove,
+Nancy had to boil his barley for twenty endless minutes. When the stove
+upset there was an additional half-hour's hard work, but even when it
+did not, it was usually ten o'clock before she went down to the kitchen
+for his two quarts of milk. Then came the usual careful work with the
+"ouncer," and the six filled bottles were put into Nancy's own small
+ice-box, to which one of the maids was then supposed to bring a small
+piece of ice. The left-over milk was taken back to the kitchen, and
+Nancy washed the little saucepan in her hand-basin, and put away stove
+and barley. By this time Junior was ready for another bottle, and when
+he went to sleep his mother went down to the laundry with an arm-full
+of small garments.
+
+There was no other way. Labour was scarce in the village, and Nancy
+could get no one of the housemaids to take upon herself this daily
+task. Women from the outside were not allowed in the hotel laundry, and
+so the task fell naturally to the baby's mother. She assumed it gladly,
+but when the line of snowy linen was blowing free in the summer wind,
+and the cake of soap had been put on its special rafter, and the tubs
+were draining, Nancy usually went up to her bedroom, tiptoeing in
+because of the sleeper, and flung herself down for a heavy nap.
+
+After luncheon she gathered in her linen and watched by the wideawake
+baby. Then they went down to the cool shade by the creek, and Junior
+threw stones, and splashed fat hands in the shallows, and his mother
+watched him adoringly. It never entered her head that she was anything
+but privileged to be able to slave for him. He was always and supremely
+worth while. Nancy's only terrors were that something would happen to
+rob her of the honour. She wanted no other company; Junior was her
+world, except when Saturday's noon train brought Bert. She told her
+husband, and meant it, that she was too happy; they did not need the
+world.
+
+But sometimes the world intruded, and turned Nancy's hard-won
+philosophy to ashes. She did not want to be idle, and she did not want
+to be rich, but when she saw women younger than herself, in no visible
+way inferior, who were both, her calm was shattered for a time.
+
+One day she and Bert wheeled the boy, in his small cart, down a
+pleasant unfamiliar roadway, and across a rustic bridge, and, smiling
+over their adventure, found themselves close to a low, wide-spreading
+Colonial house, with striped awnings shading its wide porches, and
+girls and men in white grouped about a dozen tea-tables. Tennis courts
+were near by, and several motor-cars stood beside the pebbled drive.
+
+A gray-uniformed attendant came to them, civilly. Did they wish to see
+some member of the club! "Oh, it is a club then," Bert asked, a little
+too carelessly. "It is the Silver River Country Club, sir."
+
+"Oh, well, we'll get out of here, then," Bert said good naturedly, as
+he turned the perambulator on the gravel under a hundred casual eyes.
+He and Nancy chatted quite naturally about their mistake, as they
+re-crossed the rustic bridge, and went up the unfamiliar roadway again.
+But a cloud lay over them for the rest of that day, and that night
+Nancy said:
+
+"What must one have--or be--to belong to a thing like that, Bert?"
+
+"To--oh, that club?" Bert answered, "Oh, it isn't so much. A hundred
+initiation, and a hundred a year, I suppose."
+
+"We could do that--some year," Nancy predicted.
+
+"Well, it isn't only that. There's no use joining a country club," Bert
+said musingly, "unless you can do the thing decently. It means signing
+checks for tea, and cocktails, and keeping a car, and the Lord knows
+what! It means tennis rackets and golf sticks and tips and playing
+bridge for a stake. It all counts up!"
+
+"Where do all those people get the money?" Nancy asked resentfully.
+"They looked common, to me!"
+
+"We'll get there, never you fret!" Bert answered vaguely. But long
+after he was asleep his wife lay awake in the hot hotel bedroom, and
+thought darkly of fate. She came of gentle stock, and she would meet
+her lot bravely, but oh, how she longed for ease, for a little luxury,
+for coolness and darkness and silence and service, for frothy laces and
+the touch of silk!
+
+Lights came up from the lawn before the hotel. It was Sunday night, and
+the young people were making the most of the precious week-end. Nancy
+heard a clock somewhere strike ten, and then the single stroke for the
+half-hour. She got up and sat beside the window; the night was
+insufferably close, with not a breath of air.
+
+Junior sighed; his mother arose, stricken, and lighted a shaded lamp.
+Half-past-ten and she had forgotten his bottle!
+
+When she carried it over to him, he was wide awake, his face sober, his
+aureole of bright hair damp with the heat. But at the sight of his
+playfellow his four new teeth came suddenly into sight. Here was
+"Mugger," the unfailing solace and cheer of his life. He gave her a
+beatific smile, and seized the bottle with a rapturous "glug." Bert was
+roused by her laughter, and the soft sound of kisses.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Nine
+
+
+When the second boy came, in early December the Bradleys decided to
+move. They moved into a plain, old-fashioned flat, with two enormous
+rooms, two medium-sized, and two small ones, in an unfashionable
+street, and in a rather inaccessible block. There was a drug store at
+the corner opposite them, but the park was only a long block away, and
+the back rooms were flooded with sunshine. Nancy had only two flights
+of stairs to climb, instead of four, and plenty of room for the two
+cribs and the high chair. Also she had room for Elite, the coloured
+girl who put herself at the Bradleys' disposal for three dollars a
+week. Elite knew nothing whatever, but she had willing hands and
+willing feet. She had the sudden laugh of a maniac, but she held some
+strange power over the Bradley babies and they obeyed her lightest word.
+
+They moved on the day after Christmas, when Edward Barrett Bradley was
+only three weeks old. Elite and Bert did the moving, and Nancy only
+laughed weakly at their experiences. Junior contracted chicken-pox
+during this time, and the family was quarantined on New Year's Eve.
+
+Bert and his wife celebrated the occasion with a quart of oysters,
+eaten with hat-pins from a quart measure. The invalid slumbered in the
+same room, behind a screen. He was having a very light attack, and
+Nancy, who had been hanging over him all day, was reassured to-night,
+and in wild spirits. She laughed the tears into her eyes when Albert
+Senior, hearing the tentative horns at nine o'clock, telephoned the
+fish market for the wherewithal to celebrate. Bert had been hanging
+pictures, and was dirty and tired, but they got quite hysterical with
+merriment over their feast. The "new boy," as they called the baby,
+presently was brought in, and had his own meal, before the
+old-fashioned coal fire. Nancy sat dreaming over the small curved form.
+
+"We'll think this is very funny, some day!" she said, dauntlessly.
+
+Bert merely looked at her. But after a while he tried to tell her what
+he thought about it, and so made their third New Year memorable to her
+forever.
+
+She settled down quickly, in the new quarters; some visionary,
+romancing phase of Nancy's character and Nancy's roses disappeared for
+a time. She baked and boiled, sewed on buttons, bandaged fingers, rose
+gallantly to the days' demands. She learned the economical value of
+soups and salads, and schooled herself, at least every other day, to
+leave the boys for an hour or two with Elite, and walk out for a little
+bracing solitude. Bert watched her in admiring amazement. His wife was
+a wonder!
+
+Sometimes, on a cold afternoon, she walked down to meet Bert, and they
+went together to dinner. Their talk was practical now, of suits and
+rubber overshoes and milk bills. And Nancy was too tired to walk home;
+they went home in the rubber-scented dampness of a surface car.
+
+Sometimes, as she went through the morning routine, the baths, bottles,
+dishes, the picking up, the disheartening conferences over the ice box,
+she wondered what had become of the old southern belle, Nancy Barrett,
+who had laughed and flirted and only a few years ago, who had been such
+a strong and pretty and confident egotist? There was no egotism left in
+Nancy now, she was only a busy woman in a world of busy women. She knew
+backache and headache, and moods of weary irritation. The cut of her
+gowns, the little niceties of table-service or of children's clothing
+no longer concerned her. She merely wanted her family comfortable, fed
+and housed and clothed, and well. Nancy could advise other women about
+the capable handling of children, before her firstborn was three years
+old.
+
+They never went to "The Old Hill House" again, but they found a
+primitive but comfortable hotel in the Maine woods, for Ned's second
+summer, and for several summers after that. Here Nancy slept and
+tramped and rested happily, welcoming Bert rapturously every week-end.
+In near-by cabins, young matrons like herself were likewise solving the
+children's summer problem, she was never lonely, and the eight free,
+pine-scented weeks were cloudlessly happy. She told Bert that it was
+the only sensible solution for persons in moderate circumstances; old
+clothes, simple food, utter solitude.
+
+"There are no comparisons to spoil things," Nancy said, contentedly. "I
+know I'm small-minded, Bert. But seeing things I can't have does upset
+me, somehow!"
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Ten
+
+
+Nevertheless, she accepted the invitation that came from Bert's cousin
+Dorothy, one autumn, for a week-end visit. Dorothy had married now, and
+had a baby. She was living in a rented "place," up near Rhinecliff, she
+wrote, and she wanted to see something of Cousin Bert.
+
+Neither Bert nor Nancy could afterward remember exactly why they went.
+It was partly curiosity, perhaps; partly the strong lure exerted by
+Dorothy's casual intimation that "the car" would come for them, and
+that this particular week-end was "the big dance, at the club." Bert
+chanced to have a new suit, and Nancy had a charming blue taffeta that
+seemed to her good enough for any place or anybody.
+
+The boys were asked, but they did not take them. Ned was almost two
+now, and Junior past three, and they behaved beautifully with Hannah,
+the quiet old Danish woman who had been with them since they came back
+from the woods, the year before. Nancy, full of excited anticipation,
+packed her suit-case daintily, and fluttered downstairs as happily as a
+girl, when a hundredth glance at the street showed the waiting motor at
+last.
+
+Hawkes was the chauffeur. "To Mr. Bradley's office please, Hawkes,"
+said Nancy. She could not think of anything friendly to say to him, as
+they wheeled through the streets. Bert kept them waiting, and once or
+twice she said "I can't think what's delaying Mr. Bradley." But Hawkes
+did not answer.
+
+Presently Bert came out and greeted Nancy and Hawkes.
+
+"But I thought Mrs. Benchley was coming into town to-day," Bert said.
+Dorothy was now Mrs. George Benchley. Hawkes spoke at last. "An old
+friend of Mrs. Benchley has unexpectedly arrived this morning, sir, and
+she has changed her mind." "Oh, all right," said Bert, grinning at
+Nancy as the pleasant drive began.
+
+It was all wonderful; the bright autumn sunshine, the sense of freedom
+and leisure in the early afternoon, and the lovely roads they followed.
+Bert however, seemed to be thinking of his sons, and asked of them more
+than once. And Nancy could not rid herself of an uncomfortable
+suspicion that whoever Dorothy's old friend was, she had changed
+Dorothy's plans, and perhaps made the coming of the Bradleys untimely.
+Now and then husband and wife smiled at each other and said "This is
+fun!"
+
+Dorothy's "place" was a beautiful estate, heavily wooded, wound with
+white driveways, and equipped with its own tennis courts, and its
+boathouse on the river. The house was enormous, and naturally had
+assumed none of the personality of its occupants, in this casual summer
+tenancy. There were countless rooms, all filled with tables and chairs
+and rugs and desks and bowls of flowers; and several maids came and
+went in the interest of the comfort of the house. There were seven or
+eight other guests besides the Bradleys, and they all seemed to know
+each other well. The unexpected guest was a young Mrs. Catlin
+affectionately mentioned by Dorothy in every other breath as "Elaine";
+she and Dorothy had been taken to Europe together, after their
+schooldays, and had formed an intimacy then.
+
+Dorothy came into the big hall to meet her cousin and his wife, and,
+with a little laugh, kissed Bert. She looked particularly young and
+lovely in what Nancy supposed to be a carefully-selected costume; later
+she realized that all Dorothy's clothes gave this impression. She said
+that the baby was out, when Nancy asked for him, and that Katharine
+would take care of them.
+
+Katharine, an impassive maid, led them upstairs, and to the large room
+in which their suit cases already stood. Dorothy had said, "After you
+change, come down and have something to drink!" but Nancy had nothing
+prettier than the taffeta, except her evening gown, and as the sunshine
+was streaming into the room, she could not change to that. So she
+merely freshened her appearance, and wasted fifteen or twenty minutes
+in a close inspection of the room, before they went down. To her
+somewhat shy question Bert responded enthusiastically, "You look
+lovely!"
+
+They went through empty open rooms, talking as naturally as they could,
+and smilingly joined the others on the porch. Tea and other drinks were
+being dispensed by Elaine, whose attention was meanwhile absorbed by
+two young men. Dorothy, lying almost flat in a wicker chair, with her
+small silk-shod ankles crossed, was lazily arguing some question of
+golf scores.
+
+She introduced the new-comers, and as Bert, somewhat more at home in
+his cousin's house than his wife was, fell into conversation with the
+middle-aged man nearest him, Dorothy dutifully addressed herself to
+Nancy. They spoke of Bert's mother, and of Boston, and Dorothy asked
+Nancy if she liked tennis--or golfing--or yachting? There was to be
+quite a large dance at the club to-night, and an entertainment before
+it.
+
+"Isn't Dorothy a wonder, Mrs. Bradley?" asked Elaine. "She's going to
+have twenty people to dinner, she runs this big house, she's got a baby
+not yet six months old, and she looks about sixteen!"
+
+"You must have wonderful maids," suggested Nancy, smiling.
+
+"I have!" said Dorothy amusedly, "They're crazy about me--I don't know
+why, because I work them like dogs. But of course we're away a lot, and
+then they always have parties," she added, "and they run things pretty
+much to suit themselves. But we have good meals, don't we, Elaine?" she
+asked, childishly.
+
+"Heavenly!" said Elaine. Nancy, trying to appear brightly sympathetic,
+smiled again.
+
+But she and Bert dressed for dinner almost silently, an hour later. It
+was all delightful and luxurious, truly, and they were most
+considerately and hospitably accepted by the entire establishment. But
+something was wrong. Nancy did not know what it was, and she did not
+want to risk a mere childish outburst, so easily construed into
+jealousy. Perhaps it WAS jealousy.
+
+She found herself arguing, as she dressed. This sort of thing was not
+LIFE, after all. The quiet wife of an obscure man, rejoicing in her
+home and her children, had a thousand times more real pleasure. These
+well-dressed idle people didn't count, after all. ...
+
+"Sort of nice of Dorothy to send Hawkes in for us," Bert said; "Did you
+hear her explain that she thought we'd be more comfortable with Hawkes,
+so she and Mrs. Catlin kept the younger man?"
+
+"Considerate!" Nancy said, lifelessly.
+
+"Isn't it a wonder she isn't spoiled?" Bert pursued.
+
+"Really it is!"
+
+"Benchley looks like an ass," Bert conceded. "But he's not so bad. He's
+in the firm now, you know, and Dorothy was just telling me that he's
+taken hold wonderfully."
+
+"Isn't that nice?" Nancy said, mildly. She was struggling with her
+hair, which entirely refused to frame her face in its usual rich waves,
+and lay flat or split into unexpected partings despite her repeated
+efforts. "How's that now, Bert?" she asked, turning toward him with an
+arrangement half-completed.
+
+"Well--that's all RIGHT--" he began uncertainly. Nancy, dropping the
+brown strands, and tossing the whole hot mass free, felt that she could
+burst into tears.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Eleven
+
+
+The dinner was an ordeal; her partner was unfortunately interested only
+in motor-cars, of which Nancy could find little that was intelligent to
+say. She felt like what she was, a humble relative out of her element.
+After dinner they were all packed into cars, and swept to the club.
+
+Darkness and the sound of a comedian's voice in monologue warned them
+as they entered that the entertainment was begun; after much
+whispering, laughing and stumbling however, they were piloted to
+chairs, and for perhaps an hour and a half Nancy was quite alone, and
+much entertained. Then the lights went up, and the crowd surged noisily
+to and fro.
+
+She lost sight of Bert, but was duly introduced to new people; and they
+spoke of the successful entertainment, and of the club-house. Nancy
+danced only once or twice, and until almost two o'clock sat talking,
+principally with a pleasant old lady, who had a daughter to chaperon.
+
+Then the first departures began, and Nancy had a merry good-night from
+Dorothy, called over the latter's powdered shoulder as she danced, and
+went home. She was silent, as she undressed, but Bert, yawning, said
+that he had had a good time. He said that Dorothy had urged them to
+stay until Monday morning, but he did not see how he could make it. He
+hated to get started late at the office Monday morning. Nancy eagerly
+agreed.
+
+"You do feel so?" he asked, in satisfaction. "Well, that settles it,
+then! We'll go home to-morrow."
+
+And home they did go, on the following afternoon. Nancy, counting the
+hours, nevertheless enjoyed the delicious breakfast, when she had quite
+a spirited chat with one or two of the men guests, who were the only
+ones to appear. Then she and Bert walked into the village to church,
+and wandering happily home, were met by Dorothy in the car, and whirled
+to the club. Here the pleasant morning air was perfumed with strong
+cigars already, and while Bert played nine holes of golf, and covered
+himself with glory, Nancy won five rubbers of bridge, and gained the
+respect of Dorothy and Elaine at the same time. She was more like her
+spontaneous self at luncheon than at any other time during the visit,
+and driving home, agreed with Bert that, when you got to know them,
+Dorothy's set was not so bad!
+
+"Her baby is frightfully ugly, but that doesn't matter so much, with a
+boy," said Nancy. "And I don't think that a woman like Elaine is so
+rude as she is stupid. They simply can't see anything else but their
+way of thinking, and dressing, and talking, and so they stare at you as
+if you were a Hottentot! I had a nice time, especially to-day--but
+never again!"
+
+"Dorothy never did have any particular beau," Bert observed, "She just
+likes to dress in those little silky, stripy things, and have everyone
+praising her, all the time. She'll ask us again, sometime, when she
+remembers us."
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Twelve
+
+
+But it was almost a year before Dorothy thought of her cousins again,
+and then the proud Nancy wrote her that the arrival of Anne Bradley was
+daily expected, and no plans could be made at present. Anne duly came,
+a rose of a baby, and Nancy said that luck came with her.
+
+Certainly Anne was less than a week old when Bert told his wife that
+old Souchard, whose annoying personality had darkened all Bert's office
+days, had retired, gone back to Paris! And Bert was head man, "in the
+field." His salary was not what Souchard's had been, naturally, but the
+sixty dollars would be doubled, some weeks, by commissions; there would
+be lots of commissions, now! Now they could save, announced Nancy.
+
+But they did not save. They moved again, to a pleasanter apartment, and
+Hannah did washing and cooking, and Grace came, to help with the
+children. Nancy began to make calls again, and had the children's
+pictures taken, for Grandmother Bradley, and sometimes gave luncheons,
+with cards to follow. She and Bert could go to the theatre again, and,
+if it was raining, could come home in a taxicab.
+
+It was a modest life, even with all this prosperity. Nancy had still
+enough to do, mending piled up, marketing grew more complicated, and on
+alternate Thursdays and Sundays she herself had to fill Hannah's place,
+or Grace's place. They began to think that life would be simpler in the
+country, and instead of taking the children to the parks, as was their
+happy Sunday custom, they went now to Jersey, to Westchester, and to
+Staten Island.
+
+The houses they passed, hundreds and hundreds of them, filled them with
+enthusiasm. Sunday was a pleasant day, in the suburbs. The youngsters,
+everywhere, were in white--frolicking about open garage doors,
+bareheaded on their bicycles, barefooted beside beaches or streams.
+Their mothers, also white-clad, were busy with agreeable
+pursuits--gathering roses, or settling babies for naps in shaded
+hammocks. Lawn mowers clicked in the hands of the white-clad men, or a
+group of young householders gathered for tennis, or for consultation
+about a motor-car.
+
+Nancy and Bert began to tentatively ask about rents, to calculate coal
+and commutation tickets. The humblest little country house, with rank
+neglected grass about it, and a kitchen odorous of new paint and old
+drains, held a strange charm for them.
+
+"They could LIVE out-of-doors!" said Nancy, of the children. "And I
+want their memories to be sweet, to be homelike and natural. The city
+really isn't the place for children!"
+
+"I'd like it!" Bert said, for like most men he was simple in his
+tastes, and a vision of himself and his sons cutting grass, picking
+tomatoes and watering gooseberry bushes had a certain appeal. "I'd like
+to have the Cutters out for a week-end!" he suggested. Nancy smiled a
+little mechanically. She did not like Amy Cutter.
+
+"And we could ask the Featherstones!" she remembered suddenly.
+
+"Gosh! Joe Featherstone is the limit!" Bert said, mildly.
+
+"Well, however!" Nancy concluded, hastily, "We COULD have people out,
+that's the main thing!"
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Thirteen
+
+
+For a year or two the Bradleys kept up these Sunday expeditions without
+accomplishing anything definite. But they accomplished a great amount
+of indirect happiness, ate a hundred picnic lunches, and accumulated
+ten times that many amusing, and inspiring, and pleasant,
+recollections. Bert carried the lovely Anne; Nancy had the thermos
+bottle and Anne's requirements in a small suit-case; and the boys had a
+neat cardboard box of lunch apiece.
+
+And then some months after their seventh anniversary, Bert sold the
+Witcher Place.
+
+This was the most important financial event of their lives. The Witcher
+Place had been so long in the hands of Bert's firm for sale that it had
+become a household word in the Bradley family, and in other families.
+Nobody ever expected to pocket the handsome commission that the owner
+and the firm between them had placed upon the deal, and to Nancy the
+thing was only a myth until a certain autumn Sunday, when she and Bert
+and the children were roaming about the Jersey hills, and stumbled upon
+the place.
+
+There it was; the decaying mansion, the neglected avenue and garden,
+the acres and acres of idle orchard and field. The faded signposts
+identified it, "Apply to the Estate of Eliot Witcher."
+
+"Bert, this isn't the Witcher Place!" exclaimed his wife.
+
+Bert was as interested as she. They pushed open the old gate, and ate
+their luncheon that day sitting on the lawn, under the elms that the
+first Eliot Witcher had planted a hundred years ago. The children ran
+wild over the garden, Anne took her nap on the leaf-strewn side porch.
+
+"Bert--they never want two hundred thousand dollars for just this!"
+
+Bert threw away his cigar, and flung himself luxuriously down for a nap.
+
+"They'll get it, Nance. Somebody'll develop a real estate deal here
+some day. They must have a hundred acres here. You'll see it--'Witcher
+Park' or 'Witcher Manor.' The old chap who inherited it is as rich as
+Croesus, he was in the office the other day, he wants to sell.--Hello!
+I was in the office--garden--and so I said--if you please--"
+
+Bert was going to sleep. His wife laughed sympathetically as the
+staggering words stopped, and deep and regular breathing took their
+place. She sat on in the afternoon sunlight, looking dreamily about
+her, and trying to picture life here a hundred years ago; the gracious
+young mistress of the new mansion, the ringlets and pantalettes, the
+Revolutionary War still well remembered, and the last George on the
+throne. And now the house was cold and dead, and strange little boys,
+in sandals and sturdy galatea, were shouting in the stable.
+
+Perhaps she was drowsy herself; she started awake, and touched Bert. An
+old man and a young man had come in the opened gate, and were speaking
+to her.
+
+"I beg your pardon!" It was the young man. "But--but do you own this
+place?"
+
+"No--just picnicking!" said Bert, wide awake.
+
+"But it is for sale?" asked the old man. Bert got up, and brushed the
+leaves from his clothes, and the three men walked down the drive
+together. Nancy, half-comprehending, all-hoping looked after them. She
+saw Bert give the young man his card, and glance at the same time at
+the faded sign, as if he appealed to it to confirm his claim.
+
+She hardly dared speak when he came back. Anne awoke, and the boys must
+be summoned for the home trip. Bert moved dreamily, he seemed dazed.
+Only once did he speak of the Witcher Place that night, and then it was
+to say:
+
+"Perry--that's that old chap's name--said that he would be in this
+week, at the office. I'll bet he doesn't come."
+
+"No, I don't suppose he will," Nancy said.
+
+"I impressed it on his son that it meant--something, to me, to have him
+ask for me, if he DID come," said Bert, then.
+
+"Bert, you'd better skip lunches, this week," Nancy suggested
+thoughtfully.
+
+"I will--that's a good idea," he said. She noticed that he was more
+than usually gentle and helpful with the children, that night. Nancy
+felt his strain, and her own, and went through Monday sick with
+suspense.
+
+"Nothing doing!" said Bert cheerfully, coming in on Monday evening.
+Tuesday went by--Wednesday went by. On Thursday Nancy had an especially
+nice dinner, because Bert's mother had come down, for a few days'
+visit. The two women were good friends, and Nancy was never so capable,
+brisk, and busy as when these sharp but approving eyes were upon her.
+
+The elder Mrs. Bradley approved of the children heartily, and boasted
+about them and their clever mother when she went home. Bert's wife was
+so careful as to manners, so sensible about food and clothes, such a
+wonderful manager.
+
+To-night Anne was in her grandmother's lap, commandingly directing the
+reading of a fairy-story. Whenever the plot seemed thin to Anne she
+threw in a casual demand for additional lions, dragons or giants, as
+her fancy dictated. Mrs. Bradley giving Nancy a tremendously amused and
+sympathetic smile, supplied these horrors duly, and the boys,
+supposedly eating their suppers at one end of the dining-room table,
+alternately laughed at Anne and agonized with her.
+
+Nancy was superintending the boys, the elderly woman had a comfortable
+chair by the fire, and Hannah was slowly and ponderously setting the
+table. It was a pretty scene for Bert's eyes to find, as he came in,
+and he gave his mother and his wife a more than usually affectionate
+greeting.
+
+Nancy followed him into their room, taking Anne. She was pleased that
+the children had been so sweet with their grandmother, pleased that her
+deep dish pie had come out so well, happy to be cosy and safe at home
+while the last heavy rains of October battened at the windows.
+
+She had lowered Anne, already undressed, into her crib when Bert
+suddenly drew her away, and tipped up her face with his hand under her
+chin, and stared into her surprised eyes.
+
+"Well, old girl, I got it! It was all settled inside of twenty minutes,
+at five o'clock!"
+
+"The--? But Bert---I don't understand--" Nancy stammered. And then
+suddenly, with a rush of awed delight, "Bert Bradley! Not the Witcher
+Place!"
+
+"Yep!" Bert answered briefly. "He took it. It's all settled."
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Fourteen
+
+
+So the Bradleys had a bank account. And even before the precious money
+was actually paid them, and deposited in the bank, Nancy knew what they
+were going to do with it. There was only one sensible thing for young
+persons who were raising a family on a small salary to do. They must
+buy a country home.
+
+No more city, no more rent-paying for Nancy and Bert. The bank account
+had just five figures. Nancy and Bert said that they could buy a lovely
+home anywhere for nine thousand, and have a whole thousand left for
+furniture and incidentals. They could begin to live!
+
+A week later they began their hunt, and all through the white winter
+and the lovely spring they hunted. They asked friends about it, and
+read magazines, and the advertisements in the Sunday papers.
+
+Unfortunately, however, in all the Saturdays and the Sundays they spent
+hunting for their home, they never saw anything that cost just nine
+thousand dollars. There were hundreds of places that cost sixty-five
+hundred or seven thousand. After that prices made a clean leap to ten
+thousand, to twelve thousand, to fourteen--"No, it's no use our looking
+at those!" said the young Bradleys, sighing.
+
+They learned a great deal about houses, and some of their dreams died
+young. It was no use, the agents told Nancy, to think about a pretty,
+shabby, old farm-house, for those had been snapped up. If she found
+one, it would be a foolish investment, because it probably would be
+surrounded by unrestricted property. Restrictions were great things,
+and all developments had them in large or small degree. There were
+developments that obliged the purchaser of land to submit his building
+plans to a committee, before he could build.
+
+Nancy laughed that she shouldn't care for THAT. And when restrictions
+interfered with her plans she very vigorously opposed them. She told
+Bert that she would not consider places that did not allow fences, and
+chickens, and dogs, and all the other pleasant country things.
+
+Sometimes, in an economical mood, the Bradleys looked at the six and
+seven thousand dollar bargains. It had to be admitted that some of them
+were extremely nice. Nice neighbourhoods, young trees set out along the
+street--trees about the size of carriage whips--nice sunny bathroom,
+nice bedrooms--"we could change these papers," Nancy always said--good
+kitchen and closets, gas all ready to connect, and an open fireplace in
+the dining room. And so back to the front hall again, and to a rather
+blank moment when the agent obviously expected a definite decision, and
+the Bradleys felt unable to make it.
+
+"What don't you like about the place?" the agent would ask.
+
+"Well--" Bert would flounder. "I don't know. I'll talk it over with my
+wife!"
+
+"Better decide to take it, Mr. Bradley," the agent, whoever he was,
+would urge seriously, "We're selling these places awfully fast, and
+when they're gone you won't find anything else like them. It's only
+because this chap that's been holding this property suddenly--"
+
+"Yes, I know, you told me about his dropping dead," Bert would hastily
+remind him. "Well--I'll see. I'll let you know. Come on, kids!"
+
+And the Bradley family would walk away, not too hastily, but without
+looking back.
+
+"I don't know--but it was so like all the others," Nancy would
+complain, "It was so utterly commonplace! Now there, Bert, right in the
+village street, with the trees, is a lovely place, marked 'For Sale.'
+Do let's just pass it!"
+
+"Darling girl, you couldn't touch that for twenty thousand. Right there
+by the track, too!"
+
+"But it looks so homelike!"
+
+"That old barn in the back looks sort of odd to me; they've got a sort
+of livery stable there in the back, Nance, you couldn't stand that!"
+
+"No." Nancy's tone and manner would droop, she would go slowly by,
+discouraged and tired until another week end.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Fifteen
+
+
+One day Bert told Nancy that a man named Rogers had been in the office,
+and had been telling him about a place called Marlborough Gardens.
+Usually Bert's firm did not touch anything small enough to interest him
+as a home, but in this case the whole development was involved, and the
+obliging Mr. Rogers chanced to mention to Bert that he had some
+bargains down there at the Gardens.
+
+"There's nothing in it for him, you understand?" said Bert to his wife,
+"But he's an awfully decent fellow, and he got interested. I told him
+about what we'd been doing, and he roared. He says that we're to come
+down Sunday, and see what he's got, and if we don't like it he can at
+any rate give us some dope about the rest of the places."
+
+"And where is it, Bert?"
+
+"It's down on the Sound side of Long Island, thirty-seven minutes out
+of town, right on the water."
+
+"Oh, Bert, it sounds wonderful?"
+
+"He says that it's the most amazing thing that ever has been put on the
+market. He says that Morgan and Rockefeller both have put money into
+it, on the quiet."
+
+"Well, if they can risk their little all, we can take a chance!"
+giggled Nancy.
+
+"Of course that isn't generally known," Bert warned her, "but it just
+goes to show you that it's a BIG THING. He was telling me about this
+feller that had a gorgeous home just built there, and his wife's mother
+gets ill, and they all move to California. He said I could look at it,
+and that it would speak for itself."
+
+"Did he say whether there were any trees?"
+
+"He said this particular place had wonderful trees."
+
+"And what's the price, Bee?"
+
+Bert knew that this was his weak point.
+
+"He didn't say, old girl."
+
+Nancy looked rueful, her castle in the dust.
+
+"Oh, BERT! It may be something awful!"
+
+"No, it won't, for I'd just been telling him what we were looking at,
+don't you see!"
+
+"Oh, that so?" Nancy was relieved. "But it will be the first thing _I_
+ask him," she predicted.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Sixteen
+
+
+However, on Sunday she forgot to ask him. The circumstances were so
+unexpectedly pleasant as to banish from her head any pre-arranged plan
+of procedure. It was a glowing June day, soft, perfumed, and breezy.
+The Bradleys went to Butler's Hill, which was "our station," as Nancy
+said, and there the agent met them, with a car. He drove them himself
+the short mile from the railroad to Marlborough Gardens.
+
+"Isn't it one of those frightfully smart developments?" Nancy asked,
+smiling uneasily.
+
+"It's considered the finest home development on Long Island," the agent
+admitted readily, "The place I'm going to show you--I'm going to show
+you two or three--but the special place I want to show you, was built
+for a HOME. There isn't a finer building anywhere. Lansing, the man who
+built it, was a splendid fellow, with a lovely wife--lovely woman. But
+her mother lives in California, and she got to worrying--"
+
+"Mr. Bradley told me," Nancy said sympathetically.
+
+"Homes, and home-makers," pursued the agent, "That's what we need. The
+people we have here are all quiet, home-loving folks, we don't want
+show, we don't want display--"
+
+"Well, that's our idea!" Bert approved. And he rather vexed his
+inconsistent wife by adding hardily, "Remember that my top figure is
+ten thousand, Rogers, will you?"
+
+"Now, you wait and see what I have to show you, and then we'll talk
+turkey," the other man said goodnaturedly. Anne, sitting on her
+mother's lap beside him, gave him a sudden smile at the word she
+recognized.
+
+He wheeled the car smoothly through the great gates of cement, looped
+with iron chains, that shut off the village herd from the sacred
+ground. Nancy gave Bert an ecstatic glance; this was wonderful! The
+scattered homes were all beautiful, all different. Some were actual
+mansions, with wide-spreading wings and half a dozen chimneys, but some
+were small and homelike, etched with the stretching fingers of new
+vines, and surrounded by park-like gardens. Even about the empty plots
+hedges had been planted, and underbrush raked away, and the effect was
+indescribably trim and orderly, "like England," said Nancy, who had
+never seen England.
+
+As they slowly circled about, they caught glimpses of tennis courts,
+beyond the lawns and trees, glimpses of the blue water of the bay,
+glimpses of white, curving driveways. Here a shining motor-car stood
+purring, there men in white paused with arrested rackets, to glance up
+at the strangers from their tennis. Nancy looked at Bert and Bert at
+Nancy, and their eyes confessed that never in all the months of hunting
+had they seen anything like THIS!
+
+Presently they came to the end of the road, and to a richly wooded plot
+that formed a corner to the whole tract. A garden had been planted, but
+it was neglected now, and weeds had pushed up here and there between
+the bricks of the path. The house was low and spreading, under great
+locust and elm trees, a shingled brown house, with two red chimneys and
+cottage casements. Over one hedge the Bradleys looked down at the
+pebbled beach that belonged to all the residents of Marlborough Gardens.
+
+"Lansing called this place 'Holly Court,'" said the agent, leading them
+to the front porch door, to which he skillfully fitted a key, "That big
+holly bush there gave it its name; the bush is probably fifty years
+old. Step in, Mrs. Bradley!"
+
+"But notice the lovely Dutch door first, Bert," Nancy said eagerly.
+"See, Anne! On a hot day you can have it half open and half shut, isn't
+that cunning?"
+
+"The house is full of charming touches," Mr. Rogers said, "And you may
+always trust a woman's eye to find them, Mr. Bradley! Women are natural
+home-makers. My wife'll often surprise me; 'Why, you've not got half
+enough closets, Paul,' she'll say. There's one open fire-place, Mrs.
+Bradley, in your reception hall. You see the whole plan of the house is
+informal. You've got another fire-place in the dining room, and one in
+the master bedroom upstairs. Here's a room they used as a
+den--bookshelves, and so on, and then beyond is another tiled
+porch--very convenient for breakfast, or tea. You see Lansing lived
+here; never has been rented, or anything like that. He's selling it for
+practically what it cost him!"
+
+"And what's that?" asked Bert, smiling, but not quite at his ease.
+
+"Now, you wait a few minutes, Mr. Business Man!" Mr. Rogers said, "What
+you think, and what I think, doesn't count much beside what this little
+lady thinks. She's got to live in the house, and if SHE likes it, why I
+guess you and I can come to terms!"
+
+Nancy threw her husband a glance full of all amused tolerance at this,
+but in her secret soul she rather liked it.
+
+They went upstairs, where there were hardwood floors, and two
+bathrooms, and mirrors in the bathroom doors. There was another
+bathroom in the attic, and a fourth upstairs in the garage, with two
+small bedrooms in each place. They must expect us to keep four maids,
+Nancy hastily computed.
+
+There was an upstair porch; "To shake a rug, Mrs. Bradley, or to dry
+your hair, or for this young lady's supper," said the delightful Mr.
+Rogers. A back stairway led down to tempting culinary regions; a sharp
+exclamation burst from Nancy at the sight of the great ice box, and the
+tiled sinks.
+
+They walked about the plot, a large one. At the back, beside the
+garage, they could look over a small but healthy hedge to more beach,
+clustered with unusual shells at low tide, and the straggling outskirts
+of the village. From the front, they looked straight down a wide
+tree-shaded street, that lost itself in a peaceful vista of great trees
+and vine-smothered stone walls. "Holly Court" was quiet, it was
+naturally isolated, it seemed to Nancy already like home.
+
+Even now, however, Mr. Rogers would not talk terms. He drove them about
+again, passing other houses, all happily and prosperously occupied. He
+told Nancy about this family and that.
+
+"What'd that house cost?" Bert would demand.
+
+"Ah well, THAT. That belongs to Ingram, of the Ingram Thorn Coal
+people, you know. I suppose Mr. Ingram has invested forty or fifty
+thousand dollars in that place, in one way and another. The tennis
+court--"
+
+And so on and on. Presently they passed the pretty, unpretentious
+club-house, built close to the water. A few light sails were dipping
+and shaking on the bay, children were gathered in a little knot beside
+an upturned canoe, on the shore. Several cars were parked on the drive
+outside the club, and Nancy felt decidedly self-conscious as she and
+Bert and the children walked onto the awninged porch that was the tea
+room.
+
+"Now this club belongs to the place," Mr. Rogers said, "You're buying
+here--and I don't mind telling you, Mr. Bradley, that I want you to buy
+here," he broke off to admit persuasively--"because you and your wife
+are the sort of people we need here. You won't find anything anywhere
+that is backed by the same interest, you won't. However, about the
+club. Your buying here makes you a member of this club----"
+
+"Oh, is that SO!" Nancy exclaimed, in delighted surprise.
+
+"Oh, yes," said the agent. "The dues are merely nominal--for the upkeep
+of the place."
+
+"Of course!" said the Bradleys.
+
+"Your dues entitle you to all the privileges of the club--I believe the
+bathhouses are a little extra, but everything else is yours. You can
+bring a friend here to tea, give a card party here--there are dances
+and dinners all winter long."
+
+"Mother, are we coming here to live?" asked Junior, over his chocolate.
+
+"I don't know," Nancy answered, feeling that she could cry with
+nervousness. She hardly tasted her tea, she hardly saw the men and
+women that drifted to and fro. Her heart was choking her with hope and
+fear, and she knew that Bert was nervous, too.
+
+At last Mr. Rogers returned to the subject of "Holly Court," he wanted
+to know first what they thought of it. Oh, it was perfect, said Nancy
+and Bert together. It was just what they wanted, only-- Good, the agent
+said. He went on to say that he would have bought the house himself,
+but that his wife's father had an old home in Flushing, and while the
+old gentleman lived, he wanted them there. But he belonged to the
+Marlborough Gardens Club, and kept a boat there. Now, he had been
+authorized to put a special price on this place of Lansings, and he was
+going to tell them frankly why. They knew as well as he did that a
+hundred foot square plot, and trees like that, so near the water, COST
+MONEY. He digressed to tell them just how property had soared in price,
+during even his own time.
+
+"The truth is," he said, "that Lansing, when he picked that site,
+picked it for trees, and quiet, and view--it didn't make any difference
+to him that it was a corner site, and a little out of the main
+traffic----"
+
+"But I LIKE that about it!" Nancy said eagerly. "I love the isolation
+and the quiet. Nobody will bother us there----"
+
+Bert saw that she was already moving in. He turned a rather anxious
+look from her to the agent.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Seventeen
+
+
+Twenty-five thousand. It was out at last, falling like a stone on the
+Bradleys' hearts. Nancy could hardly keep the bitter tears from her
+eyes. Bert, more hardy, barked out a short laugh. "I'm a fool to let it
+go," said the agent frankly; "I'm all tied up with other things. But I
+have no hesitation in saying this; you buy it, put the garden in shape,
+sit tight for a few years, and I'll turn it over for you for forty
+thousand, and throw in my commission!"
+
+"Nix!" said Bert, honestly, "Nothing stirring! It's too big a
+proposition for us, we couldn't swing it. It may be all you say, but
+I'm raising a family; I can't go into twenty-five-thousand-dollar
+deals--"
+
+"I don't see why--" began the agent, unruffled.
+
+"I do!" Bert interrupted him, cheerfully.
+
+"Now look here, Mr. Bradley," said Mr. Rogers, patiently. "Let's get
+the real dope on this thing. You want a home. You don't want a
+contract-made, cheaply constructed place in some community that your
+wife and children will outgrow before they're five years older! Now,
+here you get a place that every year is going to improve. There isn't
+so much of this Sound shore that is lying around waiting to be bought.
+I can show you----"
+
+"Nothing stirring, I tell you!" Bert repeated, "Don't hand me out a lot
+of dope about it. I can see for myself what it is, I like it, the
+Missus likes it, it's a dandy proposition--for a millionaire. But I
+couldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole!"
+
+Nancy's lip began to tremble. She was tired, and somehow--somehow it
+all seemed such a waste, if they weren't to have it! She busied herself
+untying Anne's napkin, and sent the three children on a gingerly tour
+of inspection down to the beach.
+
+"Now listen a moment!" Mr. Rogers said. And Nancy added gently, almost
+tremulously:
+
+"Do just LISTEN to him, Bert!"
+
+"You pay rent, don't you?" began Mr. Rogers, "Sixty, you said? That's
+seven hundred and twenty dollars a year, and you have nothing to show
+for it! But you'd consider seventy-five or a hundred cheap enough for a
+place like this wouldn't you?"
+
+"I could go--a hundred, yes," Bert admitted, clearing his throat.
+
+"You don't HAVE to go any hundred," the agent said, triumphantly. "And
+besides that, isn't it to your advantage to live in your own house, and
+have a home that you can be proud of, and pay everything over your
+interest toward your mortgage? We have people here who only paid two or
+three thousand down, we don't push you--that isn't our idea. If you
+can't meet our terms, we'll meet yours. You've got your nest-egg,
+whatever it is----"
+
+"As a matter of fact, I've got ten thousand to start with," Bert said
+slowly. "But that's all I have got, Rogers," he added firmly, "And I
+don't propose----"
+
+"You've GOT ten thousand?" asked the agent, with a kindly smile. And
+immediately his vehemence gave way to a sort of benign amusement. "Why,
+my dear boy," he said genially, "What's the matter with you? There's a
+mortgage of twelve thousand on that place now; you pay your ten, and 6
+per cent, on the rest--that's something a little more than sixty
+dollars a month--and then you clear off your loan, or not, as suits
+you! I don't have to tell you that that's good business. How much of
+the holdings of Pearsall and Pearsall are clear of mortgages! We carry
+'em on every inch of our land, right to the hilt too. If you're getting
+the equivalent of 8 or 9 per cent, on your money, you should worry
+about the man that carries the loan. You're paying 6 per cent, on
+somebody's twelve thousand now, don't forget that..."
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Eighteen
+
+
+An hour later they went to see Holly Court again. It was even lovelier
+than ever in the sweet spring twilight. Triangles of soft light lay
+upon its dusty, yet polished, floors. Bert said that the place
+certainly needed precious little furniture; Nancy added eagerly that
+one maid could do all the work. She drew a happy sketch of Bert and his
+friends, arriving hot and weary from the city, on summer afternoons,
+going down to the bay for a plunge, and coming back to find supper
+spread on the red-tiled porch. Bert liked the idea of winter fires,
+with snow and darkness outside and firelight and warmth within, and the
+Bradleys' friends driving up jolly and cold for an hour's talk, and a
+cup of tea.
+
+"What do you think, dear?" said Bert to his wife, very low, when the
+agent had considerately withdrawn for a few minutes, and they could
+confer. "Think!" repeated Nancy, in delicate reproach, "Why, I suppose
+there is only one thing to think, Bert!"
+
+"You--you like it, then?" he asked, a little nervously. "Of course,
+it's a corking place, and all that. And, as Rogers says, with what we
+have we could swing it easily. You see dear, I pay ten thousand, and
+take up twelve thousand more as a mortgage. Even then there's three
+thousand--"
+
+Nancy looked despair.
+
+"But that could be covered by a second mortgage," he reminded her,
+quickly. "That's a very ordinary thing. Everyone does that. Rogers will
+fix it up for me."
+
+"Really, Bert?" she asked doubtfully.
+
+"Oh, certainly! We do it every day, in the office. However, we've got
+to think this thing over seriously. It's twice--in fact, it's more than
+twice what we said. There's the interest on the mortgage, and the cost
+of the move, and my commutation, and club dues. Then of course,
+living's a little higher--there are no shops, just telephone service,
+the shops are in the village."
+
+"But think of car fares--and how simply the children can dress," Nancy
+countered quickly. "And if they have all outdoors to play in, why, I
+could let Anna go, and just send out the laundry!"
+
+"Well, we could think it over----" Bert began uncomfortably, but she
+cut him short. They had been standing beside one of the windows, and
+looking out at the soft twilight under the trees; now Nancy turned to
+her husband a pale, tense face, and rather bright eyes.
+
+"Albert," said she, quickly and breathlessly, "if I could have a home
+like this I'd manage somehow! You've been saying we could have a nurse
+to help with the children--but I'd have one servant all my life--I'd do
+my own work! To have our friends down here--to have the children grow
+up in these surroundings--to have that club to go to--! We're not
+building for this year, or next year, dear. We've got the children's
+future to think of. Mind, I'm not trying to influence you, Bert," said
+Nancy, her eager tone changing suddenly to a flat, repressed voice,
+"You are the best judge, of course, and whatever you decide will be
+right. But I merely think that this is the loveliest place I ever saw
+in my life, and exactly what we've been hunting for--only far, far
+nicer!--and that if we can't have it we'd simply better give up
+house-hunting, because it's a mere waste of time, and resign ourselves
+to living in that detestable city for ever and ever! Of course to go on
+as we are going on, means no friends and no real home life for the
+children, everyone admits that the city is NO PLACE FOR CHILDREN, and
+another thing, we'll never find anything like this again! But you do as
+you think best. Only I--that's what I feel, if you ask me."
+
+And having talked the colour into her cheeks, and the tears into her
+eyes, Nancy turned her back upon her husband, and looked out into the
+garden again.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Nineteen
+
+
+That same week Bert brought home the deeds, and put them down on the
+dinner table before her. Nancy usually started the meal promptly at
+half past six, so that the children's first raging appetites might be
+partly assuaged; bread was buttered, milk poured, bibs tied, and all
+the excitement of commencing the meal abated when Bert came in. It was
+far from being the ideal arrangement, both parents admitted that, but
+like a great many other abridgements and changes in the domestic
+routine, it worked. The rule was that no one was to interrupt Dad until
+he had talked a little to Mother, and had his soup, and this worked
+well, too. It was while the soup-plates were going out that Bert
+usually lifted his daughter bodily into his arms, and paid some little
+attention to his sons.
+
+But to-night he came rushing in like a boy, and the instant Nancy saw
+the cause of his excitement, she was up from her place, and as wild
+with pleasure as a girl. The deeds! The actual title to Holly Court!
+Then it was all right? It was all right! It was theirs. Nancy showed
+the stamped and ruled and folded paper to the children. Oh, she had
+been so much afraid that something would go wrong. She had been so
+worried.
+
+Nothing else was talked of that night, or for many days and nights.
+Bert said that they might as well move at once, no use paying rent when
+you owned a place, and he and Nancy entered into delightful
+calculations as to the placing of rugs and tables and chairs. The
+things might come out of storage now--wouldn't the banjo clock and the
+pineapple bed look wonderful in Holly Court! The children rejoiced in
+the parental decision to go and see it again next Sunday, and take
+lunch this time, and be all by themselves, and really get to know the
+place.
+
+Curiously, neither Nancy nor Bert could distinctly remember anything
+but its most obvious features, now. Just how the stairs came down into
+the pantry, and how the doors into the bedrooms opened, they were
+unable to remember. But it was perfection, they remembered that.
+
+And on Sunday, as eager as the children, they went down to Marlborough
+Gardens again, to find it all lovelier and better than their memory of
+it. After that they went every Sunday until they moved, and Holly Court
+seemed to grow better and better. The school and county taxes were
+already paid, and the receipts given him, and there was no rent!
+Husband and wife, eyeing the dignified disposition of the furniture,
+the white crib in the big dressing room next to their own, the boys'
+narrow beds separated by strips of rug and neat little dressers, the
+spare room with the pineapple bed, and the blue scarfs lettered
+"Perugia--Perugia--Perugia"--looked into each other's eyes and said
+that they had done well.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Twenty
+
+
+The rest of that summer, and the fall, were like an exquisite dream.
+All the Bradleys were well, and happier than their happiest dream.
+Nancy took the children swimming daily on the quiet, deserted beach
+just above the club grounds; on Saturdays and Sundays they all went
+swimming. She made her own bed every morning, and the children's beds,
+and she dusted the beautiful drawing room, and set the upper half of
+the Dutch door at a dozen angles, trying to decide which was the
+prettiest. She and Anne made a little ceremony of filling the vases
+with flowers, and the boys were obliged to keep the brick paths and the
+lawn clear of toys.
+
+Nancy made a quiet boast in those days that they let the neighbours
+alone, and the neighbours let them alone. But she did meet one or two
+of the Marlborough Beach women, and liked them. And three times during
+the summer she and Bert asked city friends to visit them; times of
+pride and pleasure for the Bradleys. Their obvious prosperity, their
+handsome children, and the ideal home could not but send everyone away
+admiring. It was after the last of these visits that Bert told his wife
+that they ought to join the club.
+
+"I don't quite understand that--don't we belong?" Nancy asked.
+
+"The Club belongs to all the owners of Marlborough Beach," Bert
+explained. "But--but I feel a little awkward about butting in there.
+However, now that this fellow Biggerstaff, that I meet so much in the
+train, seems to be so well inclined, suppose you and I dress up and
+wander over there for tea, on Sunday? We'll leave the kids here, and
+just try it."
+
+Nancy somewhat reluctantly consented to the plan, observing that she
+didn't want to do the wrong thing. But it proved the right thing, for
+not only did the friendly Biggerstaff come over to the Bradleys
+tea-table, but he brought pretty Mrs. Biggerstaff, and left her with
+the new-comers while he went off to find other men and women to
+introduce. The Bradleys met the Roses, and the Seward Smiths and
+gray-haired Mrs. Underhill, with her son, and his motherless boys--the
+hour was confused, but heart-warming. When the Bradleys went home in
+the Roses' car, they felt that they had been honestly welcomed to
+Marlborough Gardens. Nancy was so excited that she did not want any
+supper; she sat with Anne in her lap chattering about the social
+possibilities opening before her.
+
+"Rose tells me that the club dues are fifty a year," Bert said, "and
+some of the bathhouses are five, and the others twenty each. The
+twenties are dandies--twelve feet square, with gratings, and wooden
+hooks, and lots of space. However, we don't have to decide that until
+next year. Of course you sign for teas and all that but the cards and
+card-tables and so on, are supplied by the club, and the tennis courts
+and lockers and so on, are absolutely free."
+
+"Isn't that wonderful?" Nancy said.
+
+"Well, Rose said they weren't trying to make anything out of it--it's a
+family club, and it's here for the general convenience of the Gardens.
+Now, for instance, if a fellow from outside joins, he pays one hundred
+and fifty initiation fee, and seventy-five a year."
+
+"H'm!" said Nancy, in satisfaction. The Marlborough Gardens Yacht Club
+was not for the masses. "All we need for the children is a five-dollar
+bath house," she added presently, "For we're so near that it's really
+easier for you and me to walk over in our bathing suits."
+
+"Oh, sure!" Bert agreed easily. "Unless, of course," he added after a
+pause, "all the other fellows do something else."
+
+"Oh of course!" agreed Nancy, little dreaming that she and her husband
+were in these words voicing the new creed that was to be theirs.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Twenty-one
+
+
+Up to this time it might have been said that the Bradleys had grasped
+their destiny, and controlled it with a high hand. Now their destiny
+grasped them, and they became its helpless prey. Neither Nancy nor Bert
+was at all conscious of this; in deciding to do just what all the other
+persons at the Gardens did, they merely felt that they were accepted,
+that they were a part at last of this wholly fascinating and desirable
+group.
+
+At first it meant only that they went to the fortnightly dinner at the
+club, and danced, on alternate Saturday nights. Nancy danced
+exquisitely, even after her ten busy and tiring years, and Bert was
+always proud of her when he saw her dancing. The dances broke up very
+late; the Bradleys were reproached for going home at two o'clock. They
+both usually felt a little tired and jaded the next day, and not quite
+so ready to tramp with the children, or superintend brush fires or
+snow-shovelling as had once been their happy fashion.
+
+But they were fresh and eager at four o'clock when Marlborough Gardens
+came in for tea by the fire, or when the telephone summoned them to
+some other fireside for tea. It rarely was tea; Nancy wondered that
+even the women did not care for tea. They sometimes drank it, and
+crunched cinnamon toast, after card parties, but on Saturdays and
+Sundays, when men were in the group, stronger drinks were the fashion,
+cocktails and highballs, or a bowl of punch. The Bradleys were charming
+people, Marlborough Gardens decided warm-heartedly; they had watched
+the pretty new-comer and her splashing, sturdy children, all through
+the first quiet summer--the children indeed, were all good friends
+already. The grown-ups followed suit.
+
+Motor-cars began to come down the short lane that ended at the gate of
+Holly Court, and joyous and chattering men and women to come in to tea.
+Nancy loved this, and to see a group of men standing about his blazing
+logs filled Bert's heart with pride. It was rather demoralizing in a
+domestic sense, dinner was delayed, and their bedtime consequently
+delayed, and Dora, the cook was disgruntled at seven o'clock, when it
+was still impossible to set the dinner table. But Nancy, rather than
+disturb her guests, got a second servant, an enormous Irishwoman named
+Agnes, who carried the children off quietly for a supper in the
+kitchen, when tea-time callers came, and managed them far more easily
+than their mother could.
+
+Before the second summer came Nancy had come to be ashamed of some of
+her economies that first summer. Taking the children informally across
+the back of the empty Somers' place, and letting them bathe on the
+deserted beach next to the club, wearing faded cottons, and picknicking
+as near as the Half Mile Light, seemed rather shabby performances.
+These things had seemed luxury a year ago, but she wondered now how she
+could have done them. Sometimes she reminded Bert of the much older
+times, of the oyster party and the hat-pins, or the terrible summer at
+The Old Hill House, but she never spoke of them above her breath.
+
+On the contrary, she had to watch carefully not to inadvertently admit
+to Marlborough Gardens that the financial standing of the Bradleys was
+not quite all the heart might have desired. Nancy had no particular
+sense of shame in the matter, she would have really enjoyed discussing
+finances with these new friends. But money, as money, was never
+mentioned. It flowed in a mysterious, and apparently inexhaustible
+stream through the hands of these young men and women, and while many
+of them knew acute anxiety concerning it, it was not the correct thing
+to speak of it. They had various reasons for doing, or not doing,
+various things. But money never influenced them. Oliver Rose kept a
+boat, kept a car and gave up his boat, took to golf and said he might
+sell his big car--but he seemed to be wasting, rather than saving,
+money, by these casual transfers. Mrs. Seward Smith said that her
+husband wanted her to go into town for the winter, but that it was a
+bore, and she hated big hotels. Mrs. Biggerstaff suggested lazily that
+they all wait until February and then go to Bermuda, and although they
+did not go, Nancy never heard anyone say that the holiday was too
+expensive. Everybody always had gowns and maids and dinners enough;
+there was no particular display. Old Mrs. Underhill indeed dressed with
+the quaint simplicity of a Quaker, and even gay little Mrs. Fielding,
+who had been divorced, and was a daughter of the railroad king, Lowell
+Lang, said that she hated Newport and Easthampton because the women
+dressed so much. She dressed more beautifully than any other women at
+Marlborough Gardens, but was quite unostentatious and informal.
+
+Nancy's cheeks burned when she remembered something she had innocently
+said to Mrs. Fielding, in the early days of their acquaintance. The
+fare to the city was seventy cents, and Nancy commented with a sort of
+laughing protest upon the quickness with which her mileage books were
+exhausted, between the boys' dentist appointments, shopping trips, the
+trips twice a month that helped to keep Agnes and Dora happy, and the
+occasional dinner and theatre party she herself had with Bert.
+
+"Besides that," she smiled ruefully, "There's the cab fare to the
+station, that wretched Kilroy charges fifty cents each way, even for
+Anne, and double after ten o'clock at night, so that it almost pays Mr.
+Bradley and myself to stay in town!"
+
+"I never go in the train, I don't believe I've ever made the trip that
+way," said Mrs. Fielding pleasantly. And immediately she added, "Thorn
+has nothing to do, and it saves me any amount of fatigue, having him
+follow me about!"
+
+"But what do you do with the car, if you stay in for the theatre?"
+Nancy asked, a day or two later, after she and Bert had made some
+calculations as to the expense of this.
+
+"Oh, Thorn leaves it in some garage, there are lots of them. And he
+gets his dinner somewhere, and goes to a show himself, I suppose!" Mrs.
+Fielding said. Nancy made no answer, but when she and Bert were next
+held on a Fifth Avenue crossing, she spoke of it again. Hundreds of men
+and women younger than Nancy and Bert were sitting in that river of
+motor-cars--how easily for granted they seemed to feel them!
+
+"Just as I am beginning to take my lovely husband and children, and my
+beautiful home for granted," Nancy said sensibly, giving herself a
+little shake. "We have too much now, and here I am wondering what it
+would be like to have a motor-car!"
+
+And the next day she spoke carelessly at the club of the smaller
+bathhouses.
+
+"This is a wonderful bath house of yours, Mrs. Ingram; but aren't there
+smaller ones?"
+
+Mrs. Ingram, a distinguished-looking, plain woman of forty, with the
+pleasantest smile in the world, turned quickly from the big dressing
+room she had just engaged, and was inspecting.
+
+"Yes, there are, Mrs. Bradley, they're in that little green row, right
+against the wall of the garages. We had to have them, you know, for the
+children, and a bachelor or two, who couldn't use a big one, and then
+of course the maids love to go in, in the mornings--my boys used one
+until last year, preferred it!"
+
+And she smiled at the two tall boys in crumpled linen, who were testing
+the pegs and investigating the advantages of the room. Nancy had meant
+to be firm about that bathhouse, but she did not feel quite equal to it
+at this moment. She allowed her fancy to play for one delightful minute
+with the thought of a big dressing room; the one right next to Mrs.
+Ingram's, with the green awning!
+
+"But twenty dollars a season is an outrageous rent for a bathhouse!"
+she said to Bert that night.
+
+"Oh, I don't know," he said comfortably, "We've got the money. It
+amounts only to about five dollars a month, after all. I vote for the
+big one."
+
+"Well, of course it'll be just the most glorious luxury that ever WAS,"
+Nancy agreed happily. She loved the water, and Bert enjoyed nothing so
+much in the world as an hour's swimming with the children, but before
+that second summer was over they could not but see that their
+enthusiasm was unshared by the majority of their neighbours. The
+children all went in daily, at the stillwater, and the few young girls
+Marlborough Gardens boasted also went in, on Sundays, in marvellous
+costumes. At these times there was much picturesque grouping on the
+pier, and the float, and much low conversation between isolated
+couples, while flying soft hair was drying. Also the men of all ages
+went in, for perhaps ten minutes brisk overhand exercise, and came
+gasping out for showers and rough towelling.
+
+But Nancy's women friends did not care for sea-bathing, and she came to
+feel that there was something just a trifle provincial in the open
+joyousness with which the five Bradleys gathered for their Sunday riot.
+If there was a morning tide they were comparatively unnoticed, although
+there were always a few boats going out, and few men on the tennis
+courts. But when the tide was high in the afternoon, even Bert admitted
+that it was "darned conspicuous" for the family to file across the
+vision of the women who were playing bridge on the porch, and for Anne
+to shriek over her water-wings and the boys to yell, as they inevitably
+did yell, "Gee--it's cold!"
+
+Their real reason for more or less abandoning the habit was that there
+was so much else to do. Bert played golf, Nancy learned to score tennis
+as she watched it, and to avoid applause for errors, and to play
+excellent bridge for quarter-cent points. She went to two or three
+luncheons sometimes in a single week; and cold Sunday lunches, with
+much passing of beer and sharing of plates, were popular at Marlborough
+Gardens. Holly Court was especially suited to this sort of hospitality,
+and it was an easy sort to extend. Nancy sent the children off with
+Agnes, bribed her cook, bribed the laundress to wash all the table
+linen twice weekly, and on special occasions employed a large,
+efficient Swedish woman from the village for a day, or a week-end.
+"I'll get Christiana," was one of the phrases that fell frequently from
+Nancy's lips.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Twenty-two
+
+
+Miraculously, finances stood the strain. Bert was doing well, and
+sometimes made several good commissions together--not as large as the
+famous commission, but still important. Neither he nor Nancy kept
+accounts any more, bills were paid as they came in, and money was put
+into the bank as it came in. Nancy had a check book, but she rarely
+used it. Sometimes, when Mrs. Biggerstaff or Mrs. Underhill asked her
+to join a Girls' Home Society or demanded a prize for the Charity
+Bridge, Nancy liked to show herself ready to help, but for other
+purposes she needed no money. She ordered all household goods by
+telephone, signed "chits" at the club, kept her bridge winnings loose
+in a small enamelled box, ready for losing, and, when she went into
+town, charged on her accounts right and left, and met Bert for
+luncheon. So that, when they really had their first serious talk about
+money, Nancy was able to say with a quite plausible air of innocence,
+"Well, Bert, I haven't asked you for one cent since the day I needed
+mileage. I don't WASTE money! I never DID."
+
+"Well, we've got it!" Bert said uncomfortably, on the day of this talk.
+He had vaguely hoped, as the month went by, that it was going to show
+him well ahead financially. However, if things "broke even," he might
+well congratulate himself. Certainly they were having a glorious time,
+there was no denying that.
+
+"Do you recognize us, Bert?" Nancy sometimes asked him exultingly, as
+she tucked herself joyously into somebody's big tonneau, or snatched
+open a bureau drawer to find fresh prettiness for some unexpected
+outing. "Do you remember our wanting to join the Silver River Country
+Club! That little club!"
+
+"Gosh, it's queer!" Bert would agree, grinning. And late in the second
+summer he said, "If I put the Buller deal over, I think I'll get a car!"
+
+"Well, honestly, I think we ought to have a car," Nancy said seriously,
+after a flashing look of delight, "It isn't an extravagance at all,
+Bert, if you really figure it out. The man does errands for you, saves
+you I don't know how much cab fare, takes care of the place, and Mary
+Ingram's man has a garbage incinerator--and saves that expense! Then,
+it's one of the things you truly ought to have, down here. You have
+friends down Saturday, you play golf, you play bridge after
+dinner--well and good. Sunday morning we swim, and come home to lunch,
+and then what? You can't ask other friends in to lunch and then propose
+that they take us in their cars down the island somewhere? And yet
+that's what they do; and I assure you it embarrasses me, over and over
+again."
+
+"Oh, we'll have to have a car--I'm glad you see it," said Bert.
+
+The Buller deal being duly completed, they got their car. The
+picturesque garage was no longer useless. A silent, wizened little
+Frenchman and his wife took possession of the big room over the
+kitchen, Pierre to manage the garden and the car, Pauline to cook--she
+was a marvellous cook. Nancy kept Agnes, and got a little maid besides,
+who was to make herself generally useful in dining room and bedrooms.
+
+The new arrangement worked like a charm. There was no woman in the
+Gardens who did not envy the Bradleys their cook, and Nancy felt the
+possession of Pauline a real feather in her cap. Pauline exulted in
+emergencies, and Nancy and Bert experienced a fearful delight when they
+put her to the test, and sat bewildered at their own table, while the
+dainty courses followed one another from some mysterious source to
+which Pauline alone held the clue.
+
+The children were somewhat in the background now, but they seemed well
+cared for, and contented enough when they made their occasional
+appearances before their mother's friends. There was a fine private
+school in the Gardens, and although the fees for the two boys, with
+music lessons twice weekly, came to thirty dollars a month, Nancy paid
+it without self-reproach. The alternative was to send them into the
+village public school, which was attended by not one single child from
+the Gardens. The Ingram boys went away to boarding school at Pomfret,
+Dorothy Rose boarded in New York, and the Underbill boys had a tutor,
+who also had charge of one or two other boys preparing for college
+preparatory schools. While the boys were away Anne drifted about with
+her mother, or more often with Agnes, or was allowed to go to play with
+Cynthia Biggerstaff or Harriett Fielding.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Twenty-three
+
+
+Life spun on. The Bradleys felt that they had never really lived
+before. They rushed, laughed, played cards, dressed, danced, and sat at
+delicious meals from morning until night. There were so many delightful
+plans continually waiting, that sometimes it was hard to choose between
+them. The Fieldings wanted them to dine, to meet friends from
+Chicago--but that was the same night that the Roses and Joe Underhill
+were going in to see the new musical comedy--
+
+"This is Bert--" a voice at Nancy's telephone would say, in the middle
+of a sweet October morning, "Nance...Tom Ingram picked me up, and
+brought me in...and he was saying that Mrs. Ingram has to come into
+town this afternoon...and that, since you do, why don't you have Pierre
+bring you both in in the car, and meet us after your shopping, and have
+a little dinner somewhere and take in a show? You can let Pierre go
+back, do you see? ... and the Ingrams will bring us back in their car.
+Now, can you get hold of Mrs. Ingram, and fix it up, and telephone me
+later? ..."
+
+Nancy's first thought, so strong is habit, might be that she had just
+secured ducks for dinner, Bert's favourite dinner, and that she had
+promised Anne to take her with her brothers to see the big cows and
+prize sheep at the Mineola Fair. But that could wait, and if Anne and
+the boys were promised a little party, and ice cream--and if Pauline
+had no dinner to get she would readily make the ice cream--
+
+"Ingram is here... he wants to know what you think..." Bert's impatient
+voice might say. And Nancy felt that she had no choice but to respond:
+
+"That will be lovely, Bert! I'll get hold of Mrs. Ingram right away.
+And I'll positively telephone you in fifteen minutes."
+
+The rest of the day would be rush and excitement, Nancy felt that she
+never would grow used to the delicious idleness of it all. During the
+week there were evenings that might have been as quiet as the old
+evenings, nothing happened, and if anybody came in it was only the
+Fieldings, or Mrs. Underhill and her son, for a game of bridge. But
+domestic peace is a habit, after all, and the Bradleys had lost the
+habit. Nancy was restless, beside her own hearth, even while she
+spangled a gown for the Hallowe'en ball, and discussed with Bert the
+details of the paper chase at the club, and the hunt breakfast to
+follow. She would ask Bert what the others were doing to-night, and
+would spring up full of eager anticipation when the inevitable rap of
+the brass knocker came.
+
+Saturdays and Sundays were almost always a time of complete absorption.
+Everyone had company to entertain, everyone had plans. Nancy and Bert
+would come gaily into their home, on a Saturday afternoon, flushed from
+a luncheon party, and would entertain the noisy crowd in the dining
+room. After that the chugging of motors began again on the drive, and
+the watching children saw their parents depart in a trail of gay
+laughter.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Twenty-four
+
+
+There was a brief halt when a fourth child, Priscilla, was born. It was
+in the quiet days that followed Priscilla's birth, that the Bradleys
+began to look certain unpleasant facts squarely in the face. They were
+running steadily deeper and deeper into debt. There were no sensational
+expenditures, but there were odd bills left unpaid, from midsummer,
+from early fall, from Christmas.
+
+"And I don't see where we can cut down," said Bert, gloomily.
+
+It was dusk of a bitter winter day. Nancy was lying on a wide couch
+beside her bedroom fire, Priscilla snuffled in a bassinet near by. In a
+lighted room adjoining, a nurse was washing bottles. The coming of the
+second daughter had somehow brought husband and wife nearer together
+than they had been for a long time, even now Nancy had been wrapped in
+peaceful thought; this was like the old times, when she had been tired
+and weak, and Bert had sat and talked about things, beside her! She
+brought her mind resolutely to bear upon all the distasteful
+suggestions contained in his involuntary remark.
+
+"What specially worries you, Bert?" she asked.
+
+He turned to her in quick gratitude for her sympathy.
+
+"Nothing special, dear. We just get in deeper and deeper, that's all.
+The table, and the servants, and the car, and your bill at
+Landmann's--nothing stays within any limit any more! I don't know where
+we stand, half the time. It's not that!" He pulled at his pipe for a
+moment in silence. "It's not that!" he burst out, "but I don't think we
+get much out of it!"
+
+Nancy glanced at him quickly, and then stared into the fire for a
+moment of silence. Then she said in a low tone:
+
+"I don't believe we do!"
+
+"I like Biggerstaff--and I like Rose and Fielding well enough!" Bert
+added presently, after profound thought, "but I don't like 'em all day
+and all night! I don't like this business of framing something up every
+Sunday--a lot of fur coats and robes, and all of us getting out
+half-frozen to eat dinners we don't want, all over the place--"
+
+"And hours and hours of making talk with women I really don't care
+about, for me!" Nancy said. "I love Mary Ingram," she said presently,
+"and the Biggerstaffs. But that's about all."
+
+"Exactly," said her husband grimly. "But it's not the Ingrams nor the
+Biggerstaffs who made our club bill sixty dollars this month," he added.
+
+"Bert! It wasn't!"
+
+"Oh, yes it was. Everyone of us had to take four tickets to the dance,
+you know, and we had two bottles of wine New Year's Eve; it all counts
+up. But part of it was for Atherton, that cousin of Collins, he asked
+me to sign for him because he had more than the regulation number of
+guests!"
+
+"But Bert, he'll surely pay you?"
+
+"Maybe he will, maybe he won't; it's just one of those things you can't
+mention."
+
+"I could let Hannah go," mused Nancy, "but in the rush last summer I
+let her help Pauline--waiting on table. Now Pauline won't set her foot
+out of the kitchen for love or money."
+
+"And Pauline is wished on us as long as we keep Pierre," Bert said,
+"No, you'll need 'em all now, with the baby to run. But we'll try to
+pull in a little where we can. My bills for the car are pretty heavy,
+and we've got a Tiffany bill for the Fielding kid's present, and the
+prizes for the card party. That school of the boys--it's worth all
+this, is it?"
+
+Nancy did not answer; her brow was clouded with thought. Doctor,
+school, maids, car, table--it was all legitimate expense. Where might
+it be cut? For a few minutes they sat in silence, thinking. Then Bert
+sighed, shrugged his shoulders, and walked over to look down at
+Priscilla.
+
+"Hello, Goo-goo!" said he: "You're having a grand little time with your
+blanket, aren't you?"
+
+"I'll truly take the whole thing in hand," Nancy said, noticing with a
+little pang that dear old Bert was looking older, and grayer, than he
+had a few years ago. "When I come downstairs, self-denial week will set
+in!"
+
+Her tone brought him to her side; he stooped to kiss the smiling face
+between the thick braids.
+
+"You always stand by me, Nance!" he said gratefully.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Twenty-five
+
+
+There was no stopping half way, however. The current had caught the
+Bradleys and it carried them on. There was no expense that could be
+lessened without weakening the whole structure. Nancy grew sick of
+bills, bills that came in the mail, that were delivered, and that piled
+up on her desk. She honestly racked her brain to discover the
+honourable solution; there was no solution. Even while she pondered,
+Priscilla in her arms, the machinery that she and Bert had so eagerly
+constructed went on of its own power.
+
+"The cleaner's man, Hannah?" Nancy would ask, sighing. "You'll have to
+give him all those things; the boys' white coats are absolutely no good
+to them until they're cleaned, and Mr. Bradley really needs the vests.
+And put in my blue waist, and all those gloves, and the lace waist,
+too--no use letting it wait!"
+
+"The things to-day came collect, Mrs. Bradley," Hannah might
+respectfully remind her.
+
+"Oh, of course! And how much was it?--eleven-forty? Heavens! What made
+it so big?"
+
+"Two suits, and your velvet dress, and one of Anne's dresses. And the
+man came for your furs this morning, and the awning place telephoned
+that they would send a man out to measure the porches. Mr. Bradley sent
+a man back from the station to ask you about plants; but you were
+asleep, and I didn't like to wake you!"
+
+It was always something. Just as Nancy thought that the household
+expenses had been put behind her for a few days at least, a fresh crop
+sprang up. A room must be papered, the spare room needed curtains,
+Bert's racket was broken, the children clamoured for new bathing-suits.
+Nancy knew two moods in the matter. There was the mood in which she
+simply refused to spend money, and talked darkly to the children of
+changes, and a life devoid of all this ridiculous waste; and there was
+the mood in which she told herself desperately that they would get
+through somehow, everyone else did, one had to live, after all. In the
+latter mood she ordered new glasses and new towels, and white shoes for
+all four children, and bottles of maraschino cherries, and tins of
+caviar and the latest novel, and four veils at a time.
+
+"Mrs. Albert Bradley, Marlborough Gardens--by self," Nancy said
+smoothly, swimming through the great city shops. Sometimes she was a
+little scared when the boxes and boxes and boxes came home, but after
+all, they really needed the things, she told herself. But needed or
+not, she and Bert began to quarrel about money, and to resent each
+other's extravagances. The sense of an underlying financial distress
+permeated everything they did; Nancy's face developed new expressions,
+she had a sharp look for the moment in which Bert told her that he was
+going to take their boys and the Underhill boys to the Hippodrome, or
+that he was going to play poker again. Bert rarely commented upon her
+own recklessness, further than to patiently ejaculate, "Lord!"
+
+"Why do you say that, Bert?" she might ask, with violent self-control.
+
+"Nothing, my dear, nothing!" Bert would return to his newspaper, or his
+razor. "I was just thinking. No matter!"
+
+Nancy would stand, eyeing him sulphurously.
+
+"But just what do you mean, Bert?" she would pursue. "Do you mean that
+you don't think I should have gotten the suit? I can't wear that
+fur-trimmed suit into the summer, you know. The hat was eighteen
+dollars--do you think there's another woman in the Gardens who pays no
+more than that? Lots of men haven't four lovely children and a home to
+support, they haven't wives who make all their friends welcome, as I
+do. Perhaps you feel that they are better off? If you don't--I don't
+see what you have to complain about. ..." And she would take her own
+way of punishing him for his air of detachment and superiority. Bert
+was not blameless, himself. It was all very well for Bert to talk of
+economy and self-denial, but Bert himself paid twelve dollars a pair
+for his golf-shoes, and was the first man at the club to order
+champagne at the dance suppers.
+
+Smouldering with indignation, Nancy would shrug off her misgivings. Why
+should she hesitate over furs and new hangings for the study and the
+present for the Appletons, when Bert was so reckless? It would all be
+paid for, somehow.
+
+"And why should I worry," Nancy asked herself, "and try to save a few
+cents here and there, when Bert is simply flinging money right and
+left?"
+
+But for all her ready argument, Nancy was sometimes wretchedly unhappy.
+She had many a bitter cry about it all--tears interrupted by the
+honking of motors in the road, and ended with a dash of powder, a cold
+towel pressed to hot eyes, and the cheerful fiction of a headache. It
+was all very well to laugh and chat over the tea-cups, to accept
+compliments upon her lovely home and her lovely children, but she knew
+herself a hypocrite even while she did so. She could not say what was
+wrong, but something was wrong.
+
+Even the children seemed changed to her in these days. The boys were
+nice-looking, grinning little lads, in their linen suits and white
+canvas hats, but somehow they did not seem to belong to her any more.
+Her own boys, whose high chairs had stood in her kitchen a few years
+ago, while she cut cookies for them and their father, seemed to have no
+confidences to unfold, and no hopes to share with their mother, now.
+Sometimes they quite obviously avoided the society of the person who
+must eternally send them to wash their hands, and exclaim at the
+condition of their knees. Sometimes they whined and teased to go with
+her in the motor, and had to be sternly asked by their father if they
+wished to be punished. Pierre took them about with him on week days,
+and they played with the other boys of the Gardens, eating too much and
+staying up too late, but rarely in the way.
+
+Anne was a shy, inarticulate little blonde now, thin, sensitive, and
+plain. Her hair was straight, and she had lost her baby curls. Nancy
+did what she could for her, with severe little smocks of blue and lemon
+colour, and duly started her to school with the boys. But Anne cried
+herself into being sick, at school, and it was decided to keep her at
+home for a while. So Anne followed Agnes about, Agnes and the radiant
+Priscilla, who was giggling her way through a dimpled, rose-pink
+babyhood; the best of the four, and the easiest to manage. Priscilla
+chewed her blue ribbons peacefully, through all domestic ups and downs,
+and never cried when the grown-ups went away, and left her with Agnes.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Twenty-six
+
+
+Worse than any real or fancied change in the children, however, was the
+unmistakable change in Bert. Heartsick, Nancy saw it. It was not that
+he failed as a husband, Bert would never do that; but the bloom seemed
+gone from their relationship, and Nancy felt sometimes that he was
+almost a stranger. He never looked at her any more, really looked at
+her, in the old way. He hardly listened to her, when she tried to
+engage him in casual talk; to hold him she must speak of the immediate
+event--the message Joe had left for him, the plan for to-morrow's
+luncheon. He was popular with the men, and his wife would hear him
+chucklingly completing arrangements with them for this affair or that,
+even while she was frantically indicating, with everything short of
+actual speech, that she did not want to go to Little Mateo's to dinner;
+she did not want to be put into the Fieldings' car, while he went off
+with Oliver Rose in his roadster.
+
+"Are you crazy!" she would exclaim, in a fierce undertone when they
+were upstairs dressing, "Didn't you see that I don't want to go
+to-night? I can't understand you sometimes. Bert, you'll fall in with a
+plan that I absolutely--"
+
+"Now, look here, Nancy, look here! Weren't you and Mrs. Rose the two
+that cooked this whole scheme up last night--"
+
+"She suggested it, and I merely said that I thought SOMETIME it would
+be fun--"
+
+"Oh, well, if you plan a thing and then go back on it--"
+
+This led nowhere. In silence the Bradleys would finish their dressing,
+in silence descend to the joyous uproar of the cars. But Nancy
+despaired of the possibility of ever impressing Bert, through a
+dignified silence, with a sense of her displeasure. How could she
+possibly be silent under these circumstances? What was the use, anyway?
+Bert was tired, irritable, he had not meant to annoy her. It was just
+that they both were nervously tense; presently they would find some way
+of lessening the strain.
+
+But--she began to wish that he would not drink quite so much. The other
+men did, of course, but then they were more used to it than Bert.
+Perhaps this constant stimulation accounted for Bert's nervous
+irritability, for the indefinable hardening and estranging. Nancy was
+not prudish, she had seen wine on her father's table since she was a
+baby, she enjoyed it herself, now and then. But to have cocktails
+served even at the women's luncheons; to have every host, whatever the
+meal, preface it with the slishing of chopped ice and the clink of tiny
+glasses, worried her. Bert even mixed a cocktail when he and she dined
+alone now, and she knew that when he had had two or three, he would
+want something more, would eagerly ask her if she would like to "stir
+up something" for the evening--how about a run over to the Ocean House,
+with the Fieldings? And wherever they went, there was more drinking.
+
+"Let's make a rule," she proposed one day. "Let's confine our
+hospitality to persons we really and truly like. Nobody shall come here
+without express invitation!"
+
+"You're on!" Bert agreed enthusiastically.
+
+Ten minutes later it chanced that two motor-loads of persons they both
+thoroughly disliked poured into Holly Court, and Nancy rushed out to
+scramble some sandwiches together in the frigid atmosphere of the
+kitchen, where Pauline and Hannah were sourly attacking the ruins of a
+company lunch.
+
+"It's maddening," she said to Bert, later, when the intruders had
+honked away into the late summer afternoon, "But what can we do? Such a
+sweet day, and we have that noisy crowd to lunch, and then this!"
+
+"Well, we're having a lot of fun out of it, anyway!" Bert said,
+half-heartedly. Nancy did not answer.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Twenty-seven
+
+
+But Nancy began to ask herself seriously; was it such fun? When house
+and maids and children, garden, car, table-linen and clothes had all
+been brought to the standard of Marlborough Gardens, was the result
+worth while? Who enjoyed them, who praised them? It was all taken for
+granted here; the other women were too deep in their own problems to
+note more than the satisfactory fact; the Bradleys kept the social law.
+
+It was a terrible law. It meant that Nancy must spend every waking
+moment of her life in thought about constantly changing trifles--about
+the strip of embroidered linen that curtained the door, about the
+spoons that were placed on the table, about a hundred details of her
+dress, about every towel and plate, every stocking and hat-pin she
+possessed. She must watch the other women, and see how salad-dressing
+must be served, and what was the correct disposition of grapefruit. And
+more than that she must be reasonably conversant with the books and
+poetry of the day, the plays and the political atmosphere. She must
+always have the right clothing to wear, and be ready to change her
+plans at any time. She must be ready to run gaily down to the door at
+the most casual interruption; leaving Agnes to finish Priscilla's bath
+just because Seward Smith felt in a mood to come and discuss the
+fairness of golf handicaps with his pretty, sensible neighbour.
+
+She did not realize that she had been happier years ago, when every
+step Junior and Ned and Anne took was with Mother's hand for guide, but
+she often found herself thinking of those days with a sort of wistful
+pain at her heart. Life had had a flavour then that it somehow lacked
+now. She had been tired, she had been too busy. But what richness the
+memories had; memories of three small heads about a kitchen table,
+memories of limp little socks and crumpled little garments left like
+dropped petals in Mother's lap, at the end of the long day.
+
+"Are we the same people?" mused Nancy. "Have I really my car and my
+man; is it the same old Bert whose buckskin pumps and whose silk
+handkerchiefs are imitated by all these rich men? No wonder we've lost
+our bearings a little, we've gone ahead--if it IS ahead--too fast!"
+
+They were getting from life, she mused, just what everyone wanted to
+get from life; home, friends, children, amusement. They lived near the
+greatest city, they could have anything that art and science provided,
+for the mere buying, no king could sleep in a softer bed, or eat more
+delicious fare. When Mary Ingram asked Nancy to go to the opera matinee
+with her, Nancy met women whose names had been only a joke to her, a
+few years ago. She found them rather like other persons, simple,
+friendly, interested in their nurseries and their gardens and anxious
+to reach their own firesides for tea. When Nancy and Bert went out with
+the Fieldings they had a different experience; they had dinners that
+were works of art, the finest box in the theatre, and wines that came
+cobwebbed and dusty to the table.
+
+So that there was no height left to scale; "if we could only afford
+it," mused Nancy. Belle Fielding could afford it, of course; her
+trouble was that the Fielding name was perhaps a trifle too surely
+connected with fabulous sums of money. And Mary Ingram could afford
+anything, despite her simple clothes and her fancy for long tramps and
+quiet evenings with her delicate husband and two big boys. Nancy
+sometimes wondered that with the Ingram income anyone could be
+satisfied with Marlborough Gardens, but after all, what was there
+better in all the world? Europe?--but that meant hotel cooking for the
+man. Nancy visualized an apartment in a big city hotel, a bungalow in
+California, a villa in Italy, and came back to the Gardens. Nothing was
+finer than this.
+
+"If we could only appreciate it!" she said again, sighing. "And if we
+need only see the people we like--and if time didn't fly so!" And of
+course if there were more money! She reflected that if she might go
+back a few years, to the time of their arrival at the Gardens, she
+might build far more wisely for her own happiness and Bert's. They had
+been drawn in, they had followed the crowd, it was impossible to
+withdraw now. Nancy knew that something was troubling Bert in these
+days, she guessed it to be the one real cause for worry. She began
+almost to hope that he felt financial trouble near, it would be a
+relief to fling aside, the whole pretence to say openly and boldly, "we
+must economize," and to go back to honest, simple living again. They
+could rent Holly Court--
+
+Fired with enthusiasm, she looked for her check book, and for Bert's,
+and with the counterfoils before her made some long calculations. The
+result horrified her. She and Bert between them had spent ten thousand
+dollars in twelve months. Nearly ten times the sum upon which they had
+been so happy, years ago! The loans upon the property still stood,
+twelve thousand dollars, and the additional three, they had never
+touched it. There was a bank balance, of course, but as Nancy
+courageously opened and read bill after bill, and flattened the whole
+into orderly pile under a paper weight, she saw their total far
+exceeded the money on hand to meet them. They could wait of course, but
+meanwhile debts were not standing still.
+
+It was a quiet August afternoon; the house was still, but from the
+shady lawn on the water side, Nancy could hear Priscilla crooning like
+a dove, and hear Agnes's low voice, and Anne's high-pitched little
+treble. For a long while she sat staring into space, her brows knit.
+Ten thousand dollars--when they could have lived luxuriously for five!
+The figures actually frightened her. Why, they should have cleared off
+half the mortgage now, they might easily have cleared it all. And if
+anything happened to Bert, what of herself and the four children left
+absolutely penniless, with a mortgaged home?
+
+"This is wicked," Nancy decided soberly. "It isn't conscientious. We
+both must be going crazy, to go on as we do. I am going to have a long
+talk with Bert to-night. This can't go on!"
+
+"Interrupting?" smiled pretty Mrs. Seward Smith, from the Dutch doorway.
+
+Nancy jumped up, full of hospitality.
+
+"Oh, come in, Mrs. Smith. I was just going over my accounts--"
+
+"You are the cleverest creature; fancy doing that with everything else
+you do!" the caller said, dropping into a chair. "I'm only here for one
+second--and I'm bringing two messages from my husband. The first is,
+that he has your tickets for the tennis tournament with ours, we'll all
+be together; so tell Mr. Bradley that he mustn't get them. And then,
+what did you decide about the hospital? You see Mr. Ingram promised
+fifty dollars if we could find nine other men to promise that, and make
+it an even thousand from the Gardens, and Mr. Bradley said that even if
+he only gave twenty-five himself he would find someone else to give the
+other twenty-five. Tell him there's no hurry, but Ward wants to know
+sometime before the first. I didn't know whether he remembered it or
+not."
+
+"I'll remind him!" Nancy promised brightly. She walked with her guest
+to the car, and stood in the bright warm clear sunlight smiling
+good-byes. "So many thanks for the tickets--and I'll tell Bert about
+the hospital to-night!"
+
+But when the car was gone she went slowly back. She eyed the cool
+porchway sombrely, the opened casement windows, the blazing geraniums
+in their boxes. Pauline was hanging checked glass towels on the line,
+Nancy caught a glimpse of her big bare arms, over the brick wall that
+shielded the kitchen yard. It was a lovely home, it was a most
+successful establishment; surely, surely, things would improve, it
+would never be necessary to go away from Holly Court.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Twenty-eight
+
+
+Bert was very late, that night. The children were all asleep, and Nancy
+had dined, and was dreaming over her black coffee when, at nine
+o'clock, he came in. He was not hungry--just hot and tired--he wanted
+something cool. He had lunched late, in town, with both the Pearsalls,
+had not left the table until four o'clock. And he had news for her. He
+was leaving Pearsall and Pearsall.
+
+Nancy looked at him stupefied. What did he mean? Panic seized her, and
+under her panic something rose and exulted. Perhaps it was
+trouble--perhaps Bert needed his wife again!
+
+"I'm going in for myself," said Bert. "Now, don't look so scared; it
+may be slow for a while, but there's big money in it, for me. I'm going
+to be Albert Bradley, Real Estate. You see, I've been advising Fred to
+handle this new proposition, down the Island, but he's young, and he's
+rich, and his father's an old man. Fred won't keep up the business when
+old Buck retires. He didn't want to handle it and they both asked me
+why I didn't go into it for myself. There's a pot of money in it,
+Nance, if I can swing it. However, I never thought of it until
+Biggerstaff asked me if I knew about anything of that kind--he's got
+some money to put in, and so has Ingram. This was last week. Well, I
+went to see. ..."
+
+Nancy listened, frightened and thrilled. Fear was uppermost; before
+this she had seen something of daring business ventures in her southern
+childhood. But on the other hand, there was the possibility of "big
+money," and they needed money! They needed, as Bert said, to get out of
+the ranks, to push in before the next fellow pushed in. She had a
+vision of herself telling the other women of the Gardens that Mr.
+Bradley had gone into business for himself; that the Pearsalls were
+going to throw anything they could his way. It sounded dignified--Bert
+with a letter head, and an office in Broadway!
+
+She was lost in a complacent dream when Bert's voice awakened her.
+
+"So that, if Buck does lend it, that means the interest on fifty
+thousand. ..."
+
+"Fifty thousand?" Nancy repeated, alarmed.
+
+"Well, perhaps not quite that. I've got to figure it as closely as I
+can. ..." Nancy's colour had faded a trifle.
+
+"Bert, you would be MAD to get into it, or into anything, as deep as
+that!" she said breathlessly. Bert, dashed in the midst of his
+confident calculations, turned something like a snarl upon her.
+
+"Well, what am I going to do?" he asked angrily. "It's all very well
+for you to sit there and advise me to keep out of it, but what am I
+going to do? It's a chance, and I believe in taking it. I know my
+market, I know how these things are handled. If I can swing this in the
+next three or four years, I can swing other things. It means that we
+step right into the rich class--"
+
+"But if you fail--?" Nancy suggested, impressed in spite of herself.
+
+"You keep your end of things going," he urged her, in a sombre voice,
+"and I'll take care of mine!"
+
+"I'll try, Bert, I'll do the best I can." With something of her old,
+comradely spirit, she laid her hand on his arm. "I'll let Hannah go--at
+least I will as soon as the Berrys' visit is over. And what about our
+going to the Sewalls', Bert, that's going to be an expensive trip.
+Shall I get out of that?"
+
+"No," Bert decided thoughtfully. "I may want to get Sewall into this
+thing. We'll have to go there--I wish to the deuce we could get rid of
+Pauline and Pierre; but I don't see myself taking care of the car,
+somehow!"
+
+"Everyone envies us Pauline," Nancy observed. And seeing that he was
+still scowling thoughtfully at his black-coffee cup, she touched his
+hand affectionately again, and set herself seriously to soothe him.
+"But we'll find ways of economizing, dear. I'll watch the bills, and
+I'll scold Pauline again about the butter and eggs and meat that she
+wastes. You must remember that you have a big family, Bert. You're
+raising four healthy children, and you have a car, and a man, and a
+beautiful home, and a delightful group of friends, and two or three
+fine clubs--"
+
+But for once Bert was not easily quieted. He put his head in his hands
+and gave a sort of groan.
+
+"Don't tell me what I've got--I know it all! Lord, I lie awake nights
+wondering what would happen to the crowd of you--However!" And
+dismissing the topic, he glanced at his watch. "I think I'll turn in
+before anybody comes in, Nance. I need sleep." With a long tired yawn,
+he started for the big square stairway; paused at her desk. "What're
+all those?"
+
+"Bills, Bert. I'm sorry to have you see them now. But we ought to pay
+some of them--I've been going over things, this afternoon. Now,
+especially if you're going to make a fresh start, we ought to
+straighten things out. We ought to plan that we can spend so much
+money, and stick to that."
+
+Bert flipped the pile with a careless finger.
+
+"We never will!" he said morosely. "We never HAVE."
+
+"Oh, Bert--we used to clear everything off on the first of the month,
+and then celebrate, don't you remember?"
+
+He jerked his head impatiently.
+
+"What's the use of harking back to that? That was years ago, and things
+are different now. We'll pull out of it, I'm not worried. Only, where
+we can, I think we ought to cut down."
+
+"Dentist--" Nancy said musingly. She had come over to stand beside him,
+and now glanced at one of the topmost bills. "You HAVE to have a
+dentist," she argued.
+
+"Well, I'm too tired to go over 'em now!" Bert said, unsympathetically.
+"Leave 'em there--I'll take them all up in a day or two!"
+
+"But I was thinking," Nancy said, following him upstairs, "That while
+you are about it, borrowing money for the new venture, you know--why
+not borrow an extra thousand or two, and clear this all up, and then we
+can really start fresh. You see interest on a thousand is only fifty
+dollars a year, and that--"
+
+"That's nonsense!" Bert answered, harshly, "Borrowing money for a
+business is one thing, and borrowing money to pay for household bills
+is another! I don't propose to shame myself before men like Biggerstaff
+and Ingram by telling them that I can't pay my butcher's bill!"
+
+"I wish you wouldn't take that tone with me," Nancy said, sharply, "I
+merely meant to make a suggestion that might be helpful--"
+
+A bitter quarrel followed, the bitterest they had ever known. Bert left
+the house without speaking to his wife the next morning, and Nancy
+looked out into the still August sunshine with a heavy weight on her
+heart, as, scowling, he wheeled the car under the maples, and swept
+away. She went about all day long silent and brooding, answering the
+children vaguely, and with occasional deep sighs. She told Mrs. Smith
+that Mr. Bradley would let her know about the hospital money right
+away, and planned a day at the tennis tournament, and a dinner after
+it, between periods of actual pain. It was all so stupid--it was all so
+sad and hopeless and unnecessary!
+
+Bert had not meant what he said to her; she had not meant what she said
+to him, and they both knew it. But an ugly silence lasted between them
+for several days. They spoke to each other civilly, before other
+people; they dressed and went about with an outward semblance of
+pleasantness, and at home they spoke to the servants and the children.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Twenty-nine
+
+
+No formal reconciliation ended this time of discomfort. Guests came to
+the house, and Bert addressed his wife with some faint spontaneity, and
+Nancy eagerly answered him. They never alluded to the quarrel; it might
+have been better if they had argued and cried and laughed away the
+pain, in the old way.
+
+But they needed each other less now, and life was too full to be
+checked by a few moments of misunderstanding. Nancy learned to keep
+absolutely silent when Bert was launched upon one of his favourite
+tirades against her extravagance; perhaps the most maddening attitude
+she could have assumed. She would listen politely, her eyes wandering,
+her thoughts quite as obviously astray.
+
+"But a lot you care!" Bert would finish angrily, "You go on and on,
+it's charge and charge and charge--SOMEBODY'LL pay for it all! You've
+got to do as the other women do, no matter how crazy it is! I ask
+you--I ask you honestly, do you know what our Landmann bill was last
+month?"
+
+"I've told you I didn't know, Bert," Nancy might answer patiently.
+
+"Well, you ought to know!"
+
+"I know this," Nancy sometimes said gently, "that you are not yourself
+to-day; you've been eating too much, drinking too much, and going too
+hard. You can't do it, Bert, you aren't made that way. ..."
+
+Then it was Bert's turn to be icily silent, under the pleasant, even
+tones of his wife's voice. Sometimes he desperately planned to break
+the rule of hospitality, to frighten Nancy by letting guests and
+neighbours see that something was wrong with the Bradleys. But he never
+had courage enough, it always seemed simpler and wiser to keep the
+surface smooth. Nancy, on her part, saw that there was nothing to gain
+by a break of any sort. Bert was not the type to be intimidated by
+sulks and silences, and more definite steps might quickly carry the
+situation out of her hands. The present with Bert was difficult, but a
+future that did not include him was simply unthinkable. No, a woman who
+had four young children to consider had no redress; she could only
+endure. Nancy liked the martyr role, and frequently had cause, or
+imagined she had cause, for assuming it.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Thirty
+
+
+"The whole trouble is that Bert loves neither the children nor myself
+any more!" she decided bitterly, on a certain August afternoon, when,
+with three other young wives and mothers, she was playing bridge at the
+club. It was a Saturday, and Bert was on the tennis courts, where the
+semi-finals in the tournament were being played. Nancy had watched all
+morning, and had lunched with the other women; the men merely snatched
+lunch, still talking of the play. Nancy had noticed disapprovingly that
+Bert was flushed and excited, her asides to him seemed to fall upon
+unhearing ears. He seemed entirely absorbed in what Oliver Rose and Joe
+Underhill were saying; he had lost his own chance for the cup, but was
+in high spirits, and was to umpire the afternoon games.
+
+After luncheon Nancy rather discontentedly settled down to bridge, with
+Elsie Fielding, Ruth Biggerstaff and a young Mrs. Billings who had only
+recently come back to her home in the Gardens, after some years of
+travel. They were all pretty and gracious women, and just such a group
+as the Nancy of a few years ago would have envied heartily.
+
+But to-day she felt deeply depressed, she knew not why. Perhaps
+watching the tennis had given her a slight headache; perhaps Bert's
+cavalier treatment of her latest idea of economizing, submitted to him
+only a few hours ago, still rankled in her breast.
+
+"Bert," she had said to him suddenly, during a breakfast-table
+dissertation in which he had dwelt upon the business capability of some
+women, and the utter lack of it in others, "Why not rent Holly Court
+and go somewhere else for a year or two?"
+
+Even as she spoke she had been smitten with a sudden dread of all this
+must entail for herself. But before she could qualify it, Bert's angry
+and impatient answer had come:
+
+"Don't talk nonsense! Do you want everyone to think that, now I'm out
+for myself, I can't make a go of it? What would Ingram and Biggerstaff
+think, if I began to talk money tightness? I didn't leave the firm, and
+strike out for myself to give in this soon!"
+
+Nancy had shrunk back, instantly silenced. She had not spoken to him
+again until Oliver Rose called, to remind them of the tennis, and then,
+hating herself while she did it, Nancy had forced herself to speak to
+Bert, and Bert had somewhat gruffly replied. Once at the club, all
+signs of the storm must be quickly brushed aside, but the lingering
+clouds lay over her heart now, and she felt desolate and troubled. She
+did not want to excuse herself and go home, she did not want to go out
+and watch more tennis, but she felt vaguely that she did not want to
+play bridge, either. The other women bored her.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Thirty-one
+
+
+Dummy again. She seemed to be dummy often, this afternoon. They were
+playing for quarter cents, but even that low stake, Nancy thought
+irritably, ran up into a considerable sum, when one's partner bid as
+madly as young Mrs. Billings bid. She was doubled, and redoubled, and
+she lost and lost; Nancy saw Elsie's white hand, with its gold pencil,
+daintily scoring four hundred--two hundred--three hundred.
+
+"I thought I might as well try it," said Mrs. Billings blithely, "but
+you didn't give me much help, partner!"
+
+"I didn't bid, you know," Nancy reminded her.
+
+"Oh, I know you didn't--it was entirely my own fault! Well, now, let's
+try again. ..."
+
+Suddenly it seemed to Nancy all wrong--her sitting here in the tempered
+summer light, playing cards throughout the afternoon. Inherited from
+some conscientious ancestor, shame stirred for a few minutes in her
+blood and she hated herself, and the club, and the women she played
+with. This was not a woman's work in the world. Her children scattered
+about their own affairs, her household in the hands of strange women,
+her husband playing another game, with other idle men, and she, the
+wife and mother and manager, sitting idle, with bits of pasteboard in
+her hands. She was not even at home, she was in a public club--
+
+She laughed out, as the primitive wave of feeling brought her to the
+crude analysis. It was funny--life was funny. For a few strange minutes
+she felt as curiously alien to the Marlborough Gardens Yacht Club as if
+she had been dropped from another world on to its porch. She had been a
+tired, busy woman, a few years ago; by what witchcraft had she been
+brought to this? Mrs. Billings was playing four hearts, doubled. Nancy
+was too deep in uneasy thought to care much what befell the hand. She
+began to plan changes, always her panacea in a dark mood. She would
+give up daytime playing, like Mary Ingram. And she would never play
+except at home, or in some other woman's home. Nancy was no prude, but
+she was suddenly ashamed. She was ashamed to have new-comers at the
+club pass by, and see that she had nothing else to do, this afternoon,
+but watch a card game.
+
+Sam Biggerstaff came to the door, and nodded to his wife. Nancy smiled
+at him; "Will I do?" No, he wanted Ruth.
+
+So his wife put her cards in Nancy's hand, and went out to talk to him.
+Nancy laughed, when she came back.
+
+"You score two tricks doubled, Ruth. I think that's too hard, after I
+played them!"
+
+"Shameful!" said Mrs. Biggerstaff, in her breathless way, slipping into
+her seat. Two or three more hands were played, then Mrs. Fielding said
+suddenly:
+
+"Is the tennis finished? Who won? Aren't they all quiet--all of a
+sudden?"
+
+The other two women glanced up idly, but Mrs. Biggerstaff said quietly:
+
+"I dealt. No trumps."
+
+"Right off, like that!" Nancy laughed. But Mrs. Billings said:
+
+"No--but AREN'T they quiet? And they were making such a noise! You know
+they were clapping and laughing so, a few minutes ago!"
+
+"They must have finished," Mrs. Fielding said, looking at her hand
+quizzically. "You said no trump. Partner, let's try two spades!"
+
+"Billy was going to come in to tell me," persisted Mrs. Billings, "Just
+wait a minute--!" And leaning back in her chair, she called toward the
+tea-room. "Steward; will you send one of the boys down to ask how the
+tennis went? Tell Mr. Billings I want to know how it went!"
+
+The steward came deferentially forward.
+
+"I believe they didn't finish their game, Mrs. Billings. The fire--you
+know. I think all the gentlemen went to the fire--"
+
+"Where is there a fire!" demanded two or three voices. Nancy's
+surprised eyes went from the steward's face to Mrs. Biggerstaff's, and
+some instinct acted long before her fear could act, and she felt her
+soul grow sick within her.
+
+"Where is it?" she asked, with a thickening throat, and then
+suspiciously and fearfully. "Ruth, WHERE WAS IT?" And even while she
+asked, she said to herself, with a wild hurry and flutter of mind and
+heart, "It's our house--that's what Sam stopped to tell Ruth--it's
+Holly Court--but I don't care--I don't care, as long as Agnes was
+there, to get the children out--"
+
+It was all instantaneous, the steward's stammering explanation, Ruth
+Biggerstaff's terrified eyes, the little whimper of fear and sympathy
+from the other women. Nancy felt that there was more--more--
+
+"What'd Sam tell you, Ruth? For God's sake--"
+
+"Now, Nancy--now, Nancy--" said the Mrs. Biggerstaff, panting like a
+frightened child, "Sam said you weren't to be frightened--we don't know
+a thing--listen, dear, we'll telephone! That's what we'll do--it was
+silly of me, but I thought perhaps we could keep you from being
+scared--from just this--"
+
+"But--but what did you hear, Ruth? Who sent in the alarm?" Nancy asked,
+with dry lips. She was at the club, and Holly Court seemed a thousand
+impassable miles away. To get home--to get home--
+
+"Your Pauline telephoned! Nancy, wait! And she distinctly said--Sam
+told this of his own accord--" Mrs. Biggerstaff had her arms tight
+about Nancy, who was trembling very much. Nancy's agonized look was
+fixed with pathetic childish faith upon the other woman's eyes. "Sam
+told me that she distinctly said that the children were all out with
+Agnes! She asked to speak to Bert, but Bert was watching a side-line,
+so Sam came--"
+
+Nancy's gaze flashed to the clock that ticked placidly over the wide
+doorway. Three o'clock. And three o'clock said, as clearly as words
+"Priscilla's nap." Agnes had tucked her in her crib, with a
+"cacker"--and had taken the other children for their promised walk with
+the new puppy. Pauline had rushed out of the house at the first alarm--
+
+And Priscilla's mother was here at the club. Nancy felt that she was
+going to get dizzy, she turned an ashen face to Mrs. Biggerstaff.
+
+"The baby--Priscilla!" she said, in a sharp whisper. "Oh, Ruth--did
+they remember her! Oh, God, did they remember her! Oh, baby--baby!"
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Thirty-two
+
+
+The last words were no more than a breath of utter agony. A second
+later Nancy turned, and ran. She did not hear the protest that followed
+her, nor realize that, as she had taken off her wide-brimmed hat for
+the card-game, she was bare-headed under the burning August sun. She
+choked back the scream that seemed her only possible utterance, and
+fought the deadly faintness that assailed her. Unhearing, unseeing,
+unthinking, she ran across the porch, and down the steps to the drive.
+
+Here she paused, checkmated. For every one of the motor-sheds was
+empty, and not a car was in sight on the lawns or driveway, where
+usually a score of them stood. The green, clipped grass, and the
+blossoming shrubs, baking in the afternoon heat, were silent and
+deserted. The flame of geraniums, and the dazzle of the empty white
+courts, smote her eyes. She heard Mrs. Fielding's feet flying down the
+steps, and turned a bewildered, white face toward her.
+
+"Elsie--there's not a car! What shall I do?"
+
+"Listen, dear," said the new-comer, breathlessly, "Ruth is telephoning
+for a car--"
+
+But Nancy's breath caught on a short, dry sob, and she shook her head.
+
+"All the way to the village--it can't be here for half an hour! Oh, no,
+I can't wait--I can't wait--"
+
+And quite without knowing what she did, or hoped to do, she began to
+run. The crunched gravel beneath her flying feet was hot, and the mile
+of road between her and Holly Court lay partly in the white sunlight,
+but she thought only of Priscilla--the happy, good, inexacting little
+baby, who had been put in her crib--with her "cacker"--and left
+there--and left there--
+
+"My baby!" she said out loud, in a voice of agony. "You were having
+your nap--and mother a mile away!"
+
+She passed the big stone gateway of the club, and the road--endless it
+looked--lay before her. Nancy felt as helpless as one bound in a
+malignant dream. She could make no progress, her most frantic efforts
+seemed hardly more than standing still. A sharp pain sprang to her
+side, she pressed her hand over it. No use; she would only kill herself
+that way, she must get her breath.
+
+Oh, why had she left her--even for a single second! So small, so gay,
+so helpless; how could any mother leave her. She had been so merry, in
+her high chair at breakfast, she had toddled off so dutifully with
+Agnes, when Nancy had left the doleful boys and the whimpering Anne, to
+go to the club. The little gold crown of hair--the small buckskin
+slippers--Nancy could see them now. They were the real things, and it
+was only a terrible dream that she was running here through the
+merciless heat--
+
+"Get in here, Mrs. Bradley!" said a voice. One of the Ingram boys had
+brought his roadster to a stop beside her. She turned upon him her
+tear-streaked face.
+
+"Oh, Bob, tell me--what's happened?"
+
+"I don't know," he said, in deep concern. "I just happened to go into
+the club, and Mrs. Biggerstaff sent me after you! I don't know--I guess
+it's not much of a fire!"
+
+Nancy did not answer. She shut her lips tight, and turned her eyes
+toward the curve in the road. Even while they rushed toward it, a great
+mushroom of smoke rose and flattened itself against the deep blue
+summer sky, widening and sinking over the tops of the trees. Presently
+they could hear the confused shouts and groans that always surround
+such a scene, and the hiss of water.
+
+A turn of the road; Holly Court at last. Her escort murmured something,
+but Nancy did not answer. She had only one sick glance for the scene
+before them; the fringe of watchers about the house, the village
+fire-company struggling and shouting over the pitifully inadequate
+hose, the shining singed timbers of Holly Court. A great funnel of heat
+swept up above the house, and the green under-leaves on the trees
+crackled and crisped. From the casement windows smoke trickled or
+puffed, the roof was falling, in sections, and at every crash and every
+uprush of sparks the crowd uttered a sympathetic gasp.
+
+The motor, curving up on the lawn, passed the various other vehicles
+that obstructed the drive. As the mistress of the house arrived, and
+was recognized, there was a little pitiful stir in the crowd. Nancy
+remembered some of this long afterward, remembered seeing various
+household goods--the piano, and some rugs, and some loose
+books--carefully ranged at one side, remembered a glimpse of Pauline
+crying, and chattering French, and Pierre patting his wife's shoulder.
+She saw familiar faces, and unfamiliar faces, as in a dream.
+
+But under her dream hammered the one agonized question: The
+children--the children--ah, where were they? Nancy stumbled from the
+car, asked a sharp question. The villager who heard it presented her a
+blank and yet not unkindly face. He didn't know, ma'am, he didn't know
+anything--he had just come.
+
+She knew now that she was losing her reason, that she would never be
+sane again if anything--anything had happened--
+
+The crowd parted as she ran forward. And she saw, with a lightning look
+that burned the picture on her brain for all her life, the boys blessed
+little figures--and Anne leaning on her father's knee, as he sat on an
+overturned bookcase--and against Bert's shoulder the little fat, soft
+brown hand, and the sunny crown of hair that were Priscilla's--
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Thirty-three
+
+
+Blinded with an exquisite rush of tears, somehow Nancy reached them,
+and fell on her knees at her husband's side, and caught her baby to her
+heart. Three hundred persons heard the sobbing cry she gave, and the
+flames flung off stars and arrows for more than one pair of sympathetic
+eyes. But she neither knew nor cared. She knew only that Bert's arms
+and the boys' arms were about her, and that Anne's thin little cheek
+was against her hair, and that her hungry lips were devouring the
+baby's sweet, bewildered face. She was crying as if there could be no
+end to her tears, crying happily and trying to laugh as she cried, and
+as she let the waves of relief and joy sweep over her in a reviving
+flood.
+
+Bert was in his shirt sleeves, and Priscilla still had on only the
+short embroidered petticoat that she wore while she slept; her small
+feet were bare. The boys were grimed with ashes and soot, and Anne was
+pale and speechless with fright. But they were all together, father,
+mother, and children, and that was all that mattered in the world--all
+that would ever count, for Nancy, again.
+
+"Don't cry, dearest!" said Bert, the tears streaming down his own
+blackened face. "She's all right, dear! We're all here, safe and sound,
+we're all right!"
+
+But Nancy cried on, her arms strained about them all, her wet face
+against her husband's, and his arm tight across her shoulder.
+
+"Oh, Bert--I ran so! And I didn't know--I didn't know what to be afraid
+of--what to think! And I RAN so--!"
+
+"You poor girl--you shouldn't have done it. But dearest, we're all
+right now. What a scare you got--and my God, what a scare _I_ got! But
+I got to her, Nance--don't look so, dear. I was in plenty of time, and
+even if I hadn't been, Agnes would have got her out. She ran all the
+way from Ingrams' and she was only a few minutes after me! It's all
+right now, Nance."
+
+Nancy dried her eyes, swaying back on her knees to face him.
+
+"I was playing cards--Bert, if anything had happened I think I should
+never have been sane again--"
+
+"I was on the court, you know," Bert said. "Underhill's kid came up, on
+his bicycle. He shouted at me, and I ran, and jumped into the car, Rose
+following. I met Agnes, running back to the house, with the children--I
+called out 'Where's Priscilla?' and she shouted back--she shouted
+back:' Oh, Mr. Bradley--oh, Mr. Bradley--'" And overcome by the hideous
+recollection, Bert choked, and began to unbutton and button the top of
+his daughter's little petticoat.
+
+"We were all out walkin'," Ned volunteered eagerly. "And Joe Underbill
+went by on his bike. And he yelled at us, 'You'd better go home, your
+house is on fire!' and Anne began to cry, didn't you, Anne? So Agnes
+said a prayer, right out loud, didn't she, Junior? And then Dad and Mr.
+Rose went by us in the car on a run--we were way up by Ingrams'--and
+then Anne and Agnes cried, and I guess we all cried some--"
+
+"And mother, lissun," Junior added. "They didn't get the baby out until
+after they got out the piano! They got the piano out before they got
+Priscilla! Because Pauline ran over to Wallaces', and Hannah was
+walking into the village for the mail, and when Dad got here and yelled
+to the men, they said they hadn't seen any baby--they thought the house
+was empty--"
+
+Nancy turned deathly pale, her eyes reaching Bert's, her lips moving
+without a sound.
+
+"I tried the front stairway, but it was--well, I couldn't," Bert said.
+"I kept thinking that she must have been got out, by somebody--but I
+knew it was only a question of minutes--if she wasn't! All the time I
+kept saying 'You're a fool--they couldn't have forgotten her--!' and
+Rose kept yelling that she must be somewhere, with someone, but I
+didn't--somehow I didn't dare let the few minutes we had go by without
+making sure! So I ran round to the side, and got in that window, and
+unlocked that door; Hannah must have locked it. I ran upstairs--she was
+just waking up. She was sitting up in her crib, rubbing her eyes, and a
+little bit scared and puzzled--smoke was in there, then--but she held
+out her little arms to me--I was in time, thank God--I thought we'd
+never get here--but we were in time!"
+
+And again overcome by the memory of that moment, he brushed his
+brimming eyes against Priscilla's bright little head, and his voice
+failed.
+
+"But Baby couldn't have burned--Baby couldn't have burned, could she,
+Mother?" Anne asked, bursting suddenly into bitter crying. Her anxious
+look had been going from one face to another, and now she was half
+frantic with fright.
+
+Nancy sat down on a box, and lifted her elder daughter into her lap.
+
+"No, my precious, Daddy was in time," she said, in her old firm
+motherly voice, with her comforting arms about the small and tearful
+girl. "Daddy and Mother were both rushing home as fast as they could
+come, that's what mothers and fathers are for. And now we're all safe
+and sound together, and you mustn't cry any more!"
+
+"But our house is burned down!" said Junior dolefully. "And you're
+crying, Mother!" he added accusingly.
+
+Nancy smiled as she dried her eyes, and dried Anne's, and the children
+laughed shakily as she exhibited the sooty handkerchief.
+
+"Mother's crying for joy and gratitude and relief, Junior!" she said.
+"Why," and her reassuring voice was a tonic to the children, "Why, what
+do Dad and I care about an old house!" she said cheerfully. "We'd
+rather have ten houses burn down than have one of you children sick,
+even for a day!"
+
+"Don't you care?" exulted Anne between two violent kisses, her lips
+close to her mother's, her thin arms tight about her mother's neck.
+
+"We care about you, and the boys, and the baby, Anne," said Bert, "but
+that's all. Why, I sort of think I'm glad to see that house burn down!
+It used to worry Mother and me a good deal, and now it won't worry us
+any more! How about that, Mother?"
+
+And his reddened eyes, in his soot--and perspiration-streaked face, met
+Nancy's with the old smile of fun and courage, and her eyes met his.
+Something the children missed passed between them; hours of
+conciliatory talk could not have accomplished what that look did, years
+of tears and regret would not so thoroughly have washed away the
+accumulated burden of heartache and resentment and misunderstanding.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Thirty-four
+
+
+"Then we're going to be gipsies, aren't we?" exulted Junior.
+
+His mother had straightened her hair, and turned the box upon which she
+sat for the better accommodation of Anne and herself. Now she was
+placidly watching the flames devour Holly Court; the pink banners that
+blew loose in the upswirling gray fumes, and the little busy sucking
+tongues that wrapped themselves about an odd cornice or window frame
+and devoured it industriously. She saw her bedroom paper, the green
+paper with the white daisies--Bert had thought that a too-expensive
+paper--scarred with great gouts of smoke, and she saw the tangled pipes
+of her own bathroom curve and drop down in a blackened mass, and all
+the time her arm encircled Anne, and the child's heart beat less and
+less fitfully, and Nancy's soul was steeped in peace.
+
+"You'll get some insurance, Bert?" asked one of the many neighbours who
+were hovering about the family group, waiting for a suitable moment in
+which to offer sympathy. The first excitement of the reunion over, they
+gathered nearer; Fielding and Oliver Rose coatless and perspiring from
+their struggles with the furniture, a dozen others equally concerned
+and friendly.
+
+"Fourteen thousand," grinned Bert, "and I carry a thirteen-thousand
+loan on her!"
+
+"Gosh, that is tough luck, Brad! She's a dead loss then, for she's gone
+like paper, and there won't be ten dollars' worth of salvage. You had
+some furniture insurance?"
+
+"Not a cent!" Bert said cheerfully. He glanced about at his excited
+sons; his wife, bareheaded, and still pale, if smiling; his daughter
+just over her tears; and his baby, plump and happy in her little white
+petticoat. "I guess we got most everything out of the house that I care
+much about!" smiled Bert.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Thirty-five
+
+
+For two hours more the Bradleys sat as they were, and watched the swift
+ruin of their home. Nancy's hot face cooled by degrees, and she showed
+an occasional faint interest in the details of the calamity; this chair
+was saved, that was good; this clock was in ruins, no matter. She did
+not loosen her hold on Anne, and the little girl sat contentedly in her
+mother's lap, but the boys foraged, and shouted as they dashed to and
+fro. Over and over again she reassured them; it was too bad, of course,
+but Mother and Dad did not mind very much. She thanked the neighbours
+who brought chairs and pillows and odd plates, and piled them near her.
+
+She and Bert were wrapped in a sort of stupor, after the events of the
+hot afternoon. Bert seemed to forget that a meal and a sleeping place
+must be provided for his tribe, and that his face was shockingly dirty,
+and he wore no coat. He found it delicious to have the placid Priscilla
+finish her interrupted nap in his arms, and enjoyed his sons' comments
+as they came and went. Neither husband nor wife spoke much of the fire,
+but a rather gay conversation was carried on and there was much
+philosophical laughter of the sort that such an occasion always breeds.
+
+"I might know that you would save that statue, Jack," said Bert to one
+of the young Underhills. "We've been trying to break that for eleven
+years!"
+
+"If that's the case," the youth said solemnly, and Nancy's old happy
+laugh rang out as he flung the plaster Psyche in a smother of white
+fragments against the chimney.
+
+"I suppose it would be only decent for me to get started at something,"
+she said, after a while. "It seems senseless to sit here and merely
+watch--"
+
+"For pity's sake sit still if you can," old Mrs. Underbill said
+affectionately. "The fire company's going, and people are all leaving
+now, anyway. And we've got to go, too, but Joe will be over again
+later--to bring you back with us. Just try to keep calm, Nancy, and
+don't worry!"
+
+Worry? Nancy knew that she had not been so free from actual worry for a
+long, long time. She remembered a dinner engagement with a pleasant
+reflection that it could not be kept. To-morrow, too, with its
+engagement to play cards and dine and dance, was now freed. And
+Monday--when she had promised to go to town and look for hats with
+Dorothy, and Tuesday, when those women were coming for lunch--it was
+all miraculously cancelled. A mere chance had loosed the bonds that
+neither her own desperate resolution nor Bert's could break. She was
+Nancy Bradley again, a wife and mother and housekeeper first, and
+everything else afterward.
+
+What would they do now--where would they go? She did not care. She had
+been afraid of a hundred contingencies only this morning, fretted with
+tiny necessities, annoyed by inessential details. Now a real event had
+come along, and she could breathe again.
+
+"I wonder what I've been afraid of, all this time?" mused Nancy. And
+she smiled over a sudden, mutinous thought. How many of the women she
+knew would be glad to have their houses burned down between luncheon
+and dinner on a summer Saturday? She turned to Bert. "Pierre and
+Pauline may now consider themselves as automatically dismissed," she
+said.
+
+"They have already come to that conclusion," Bert said, with some
+relish. "I am to figure out what I owe them, and mail them a check.
+Some of their things they got out--most of them, I guess. I saw someone
+putting their trunk on a wagon, awhile back, and I imagine that we have
+parted forever."
+
+"Hannah transfers herself this night to the Fielding menage," Nancy
+added after a while. "Which reduces our staff to Agnes. I never want to
+part with Agnes. You can't buy tears and loyalty like that; they're a
+gift from God, Where do we spend the night, by the way?"
+
+Bert gazed at her calmly.
+
+"I have not the faintest idea, my dear woman!" Then they laughed in the
+old fashion, together.
+
+"But do look at the sunlight coming down through the trees, and the
+water beyond there," Nancy presently said. "Isn't it a lovely
+place--Holly Court? Really this is a wonderful garden."
+
+"That's what I was thinking," Bert agreed. It had been many months,
+perhaps years, since the Bradleys had commented upon the sunlight, as
+it fell all summer long through the boughs of their own trees.
+
+Gradually the crowd melted away, and the acrid odour of wet wood
+mingled with the smell of burning. And gradually that second odour gave
+way to the persuasive sweetness of the summer evening, the sharp,
+delicate fragrance that is loosed when the first dew falls, and the
+perfumes of reviving flowers. Holly Court still smoked sulkily, and
+here and there in its black ruins some special object flamed brightly:
+Nancy's linen chest and the pineapple bed went on burning when the
+other things were done. It was nearly sunset when the Bradleys walked
+slowly about the wreck, and laughed or bemoaned themselves as they
+recognized what was gone, or what was left.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Thirty-six
+
+
+That night they slept in the garage. With a flash of her old
+independence, Nancy so decided it. She was firm in declining the
+hospitable offers that would have scattered the Bradleys among the
+neighbouring homes for the night.
+
+"No, no--we're all together," Nancy said, smiling. "I don't want to
+separate again, for a while." She calmly estimated the salvage--beds
+and bedding, some chairs, rugs, and small tables, tumbled heaps of the
+children's clothes, and odd lots of china and glass.
+
+Priscilla was presently set to amuse herself, on a rug on the lawn, and
+the enraptured children and Agnes and the new puppy bustled joyfully
+about among the heterogeneous possessions of the evicted family, under
+Nancy's direction. There was much hilarity, as the new settling began,
+the boys were miracles of obedience and intelligence, and Anne laughed
+some colour into her face for the first time in weeks. Nancy was in her
+element, there was much to do, and she was the only person who knew how
+it should be done. Even Bert stood amazed at her efficiency, and
+accepted her orders admiringly.
+
+In the exquisite summer twilight she sent him to the Biggerstaffs'.
+Nobody had yet found sleeping wear for the man of the family, that was
+message one. And message two was the grateful acceptance of the fresh
+milk that had been offered. Everybody he met wanted to add something to
+these modest demands. Bert had not felt himself so surrounded with
+affection and sympathy for many years. At seven o'clock he was back at
+the garage, heavily laden, but cheerful.
+
+Nancy leaned out of the upper window, where geraniums in boxes bloomed
+as they had bloomed when first the Bradleys came to Holly Court and
+called out joyfully, "See how nice we are!" The children, laughing and
+stumbling over each other, were carrying miscellaneous loads of
+clothing and bedding upstairs. Bert picked up two pillows and an odd
+bureau drawer full of garments, and followed them. His wife, busy and
+smiling, greeted him.
+
+"That's lovely, dear--and that just about finishes us, up here. You see
+we've cleared out these two big rooms, and the Ingrams' man came just
+in time to set up the beds. This is our room, and Agnes and the girls
+will have the other. The boys will have to sleep on the double couch
+downstairs, to-morrow they can have a tent on the lawn right back of
+us. Bring that drawer here, it goes in this chest. I thought it was
+missing, but we'll straighten everything out to-morrow, and see where
+we stand. The piano's out there on the lawn, and I wish you'd cover it
+with something, unless you get some one after supper to help you move
+it in. It goes in the corner where the boys' sleds were, downstairs.
+Supper's ready, Bert, if you are!"
+
+"Perhaps you'd like me to dress?" Bert said, deeply amused. Anne and
+her brothers laughed uproariously, as they all went down the narrow
+stairs.
+
+"No, but do come down and see how nice it is!" his wife said eagerly.
+Hanging on his arm, she showed him the comfort downstairs. The big room
+that had been large enough to house two cars had been swept, and the
+rugs laid over the concrete floor. Through a westerly window crossed by
+rose-vines the last light of the long day fell softly upon a small
+table set for supper. Priscilla was already in her high chair demanding
+food. At the back of the room, on the long table once used for tools
+and tubes, Agnes was busy with a coal-oil stove and Nancy's copper
+blazer. A heartening aroma of fresh coffee was mingling with other good
+odours from that region.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Thirty-seven
+
+
+Contentedly, the Bradleys dined. Bert served scrambled eggs and canned
+macaroni to the ravenous children--a meal that was supplemented by a
+cold roast fowl from the Rose's, a sheet of rolls brought at the last
+moment by the Fieldings' man, sweet butter and peach ice-cream from the
+Seward Smiths, and a tray of various delicacies from the concerned and
+sympathetic Ingrams. Every one was hungry and excited, and more than
+once the boys made their father shout with laughter. They were amusing
+kids, his indulgent look said to his wife.
+
+At the conclusion of the meal little Anne went around the table, and
+got into her father's lap.
+
+"'Member I used to do this when I was just a little girl?" Anne asked,
+happily. Nancy and Bert looked for a second at each other over the
+relaxed little head. It was almost dark now, Priscilla was silent in
+her mother's arms, even the boys were quiet. Bert smoked, and Nancy
+spoke now and then to the sleepy baby.
+
+It was with an effort that she roused herself, to lead the little
+quartette upstairs. And even as she did so she remembered this old
+sensation, the old reluctance to leave after-dinner quiet and
+relaxation for the riot of the nursery. Smiling, she carried the baby
+upstairs, and settled the chattering children in all the novelty of the
+bare wide rooms.
+
+Bert could hear the diminishing trills of talk and laughter, the
+repeated good-nights. The oblong of light from the upper window faded
+suddenly from the lawn. Somewhere from the big closet at the back,
+lately filled with slip-covers and new tires, Agnes hummed over the
+subdued click and tinkle of dishes and silver, and he could hear
+Nancy's feet coming carefully down the steep, unfamiliar stairway.
+Presently she joined him in the soft early darkness of the doorway,
+silently took the wide arm of his porch-chair, and leaned against his
+shoulder. Bert put his arm about her.
+
+It was a heavenly summer evening, luminous even before the moon-rising.
+The last drift of smoke was gone, and the garden drenched with scent.
+Under the first stars the shrubs and trees stood in panoramic
+perspective; the lawns looked wide and smooth. Down the street, under a
+dark arch of elms, the lights of other houses showed yellow and warm;
+now and then a motor-car swept by, sending a circle of white light for
+a few moments against the gloom.
+
+"Dead, dear?" Bert asked, after awhile. Nancy sighed contentedly before
+she answered:
+
+"Tired, of course--a little!"
+
+"Well," summarized Bert, after another pause, "we have now reduced our
+problem somewhat. A man, his wife, his children. There we are!"
+
+"A roof above his head, a maid-servant, and all the Sunday meals in the
+house!" Nancy added optimistically.
+
+"A barn roof," amended Bert.
+
+"Barns have sheltered babies before this," Nancy reflected whimsically.
+Again she sighed. "I suppose babies do burn to death, sometimes, Bert?
+One sees it in the paper; just a line or two. I remember--"
+
+"Don't let your mind dwell on that side of it, Nance. For that matter a
+brick might fall off the roof on our heads now."
+
+"Yes, I know. But Priscilla was my responsibility, and I was a mile
+away."
+
+"You'll be a mile away from her many a time and oft," Bert reminded her
+wholesomely.
+
+"When I have to be," she conceded, slowly. "But to-day--" Her voice
+sank, and Bert, glancing sidewise at her, saw that her face was very
+thoughtful. "Bert," she said, "we have a good deal to be thankful for."
+
+"Everything in the world!"
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Thirty-eight
+
+
+Another silence. Then Nancy said briskly:
+
+"Well! Listen to what I've planned, Bert, and tell me what you think.
+Item one: this is vacation, but when it's over I want to start Anne and
+the boys in at the village school. They can cut right across the field
+at the back here, it's just a good walk for them. They're frantic to
+go, instead of to Fraulein, and I'm perfectly satisfied to have them!"
+
+"Sure you are?" the man asked, a little touched, for this had been a
+long-disputed point.
+
+"Oh, quite! Just as you and I did. And then, item two: Agnes is a good
+plain cook, and Priscilla is an angel. I'll walk to market every day,
+and send out the laundry, and keep Priscilla with me. So that makes
+Agnes our entire domestic staff--she's enthusiastic, so don't begin to
+curl your lips over it. Then we'll have to have a floor in here, and
+cut a window in the closet back there, and put in a little gas stove,
+and before winter we'll put on a little addition--a kitchen in back,
+with a room for the boys above. And we'll shut the big double doors,
+and I'll have another window box right across their windows, and
+curtain the whole place in plain net. The boys can sleep in the tent
+for the time being. There's a furnace, but we'll have to make some
+provision for coal--"
+
+"But, my good woman, you don't propose to make this arrangement
+permanent, I suppose?" Bert said, bewilderedly. "Why, I meant to spend
+to-morrow looking about--"
+
+"Why shouldn't it be permanent?" Nancy demanded. "We can kitch and dine
+and sit in the big room, we'll have all the room we want, upstairs.
+It's the only place in the world where we don't have to pay rent. It's
+quiet, it's off the main road, nobody will see what we are doing here,
+and nobody'll care!"
+
+"They'll see us fast enough," Bert said doubtfully. "I never heard of
+any one doing it--I don't know what people would say!"
+
+"Bert," Nancy assured him seriously, "I don't care what they say. I've
+been thinking it all over, and I believe I can risk the opinion of
+Marlborough Gardens! Some of them will drop us, and you and I know who
+they are. How much do we care? And the others will realize that we are
+hard hit financially, and trying to catch up. Mary Ingram came over
+while you were away, perfectly aghast. She had just heard of it. I told
+her what we were trying to do, and she said--well, she said just the
+one thing that really could have helped me. She said: 'You'll have
+great fun--we lived in our garage while the house was being built, and
+it was quite the happiest summer we ever had down here!'" Nancy had
+squared herself on the arm of his chair so that Bert could see her
+bright eyes in the dark. "It was just like Mary, to put it that way,"
+she went on. "For of course even Holly Court was never as large as the
+Ingrams' garage, and all those brick arches and things join it to the
+house anyway, but it made me think how much wiser it is to do things
+your own way, instead of some other people's way! And, Bert, we're
+going to have such fun! We'll keep the car, and you can run it on
+Sundays, and perhaps I will a little, during the week, and at night or
+when it rains we can cover it with a tarpaulin, and we'll have picnics
+with the children all summer long! And I'll make you 'chicken Nancy'
+again, and popovers, on Sunday mornings! I love to cook. I love to tell
+stories to children. I love to pack mashy suppers and get all dirty and
+hot dragging them to the beach, and I love to stuff my own Thanksgiving
+turkey, in my own way! We haven't had a real Thanksgiving turkey for
+four or five years! We'll have no rent--Agnes gets thirty--light will
+be almost nothing, and coal about a tenth of what it was--Bert, we'll
+spend about two hundred a month, all told!"
+
+"I don't say yet that you ought to try it," Bert said suddenly, in his
+old, excited, earnest way. "But of course that would--well, it would
+just about make me. I could plunge into the other thing, I wouldn't
+have this place on my mind!"
+
+"There are some bills, you know, Bert."
+
+"The extra thousand will take care of those!"
+
+"So that we start in with a clean slate. Oh, Bert!" Nancy's voice was
+as exultant as a child's. "Bert--my fur coat, and your coat! I've just
+remembered they're in storage! Isn't that luck!"
+
+Bert laughed at her face.
+
+"Funny how your viewpoint on luck changes. This morning you had the
+coat and the Lord knows how much silver and glass and lace besides--"
+
+"Oh, I know. But that's the kind of a woman I am, Bert. I don't like
+things to come to me so fast that I can't taste them. I don't like
+having four servants, I get more satisfaction out of one. And if I am
+hospitable, I'd rather give meals and rooms to persons who really need
+them, than to others who have left better meals and better rooms to
+come and share mine!
+
+"Why, Bert dear," Nancy's cheek was against his now, "the thought of
+waking up in the morning and realizing that nobody expects anything of
+me makes me feel young again! It makes me feel as if I was breathing
+fresh air deep down into my lungs. We haven't room for servants, we
+have no guest room, I simply can't do anything but amuse Priscilla and
+make desserts. We'll have the children at the dinner table every night,
+and nights that Agnes is off, I'll have a dotted black and white
+percale apron for you--"
+
+This was old history, there had been a dotted percale apron years ago,
+and Nancy was joking, but Bert did not laugh. He made a gruff sound,
+and tightened his arm.
+
+"Bert," said his wife, seriously, "Bert, when I kissed you this
+afternoon, dirty and hot and sooty as you were, I knew that I'd been
+missing something for a long time!"
+
+Again Bert made a gruff sound, and this time he kissed his wife, but he
+did not speak for a moment. When he did, it was with a long, deep
+breath.
+
+"Lord--Lord--Lord!" said he.
+
+"Why do you say that?" asked Nancy.
+
+"Oh, I was just thinking!" Bert stretched in his chair, to the infinite
+peril of his equilibrium and hers. "I was just thinking what a
+wonderful thing it is to be married, and to climb and fall, and succeed
+and fail, and all the rest of it!" he said contentedly. "I'll bet you
+there are lots of rich men who would like to try it again! I was just
+thinking what corking times we're going to have this year, what it's
+going to be like to have my little commutation punched like the rest of
+'em, and come home in the dark, winter nights, to just my own wife and
+my own kids! I like company now and then--the Biggerstaffs and the
+Ingrams--but I like you all the year round. We'll--we'll read Dickens
+this winter!"
+
+Nancy gave a laugh that was half a sob.
+
+"Bert--we were always going to read Dickens! Do you remember?"
+
+"Do I remember!" He smoked for a while in silence. Then he chuckled.
+"Do you remember the Sunday breakfasts in the East Eleventh Street
+flat? With real cream and corn bread? Do you remember wheeling Junior
+through the park?"
+
+Nancy cleared her throat.
+
+"I remember it all!"
+
+There was another silence. Then Bert straightened suddenly, and asked
+with concern:
+
+"Nancy--what is it? You're all tired out, you poor little girl. Don't,
+dear--don't cry, Nancy!"
+
+Nancy, groping for his handkerchief, battling with tears, feeling his
+kiss on her wet cheek, laughed shakily in the dark.
+
+"I--I can't help it, Bert!" said she. "I'm--I'm so happy!"
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Undertow, by Kathleen Norris
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