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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Undertow, by Kathleen Norris
+(#8 in our series by Kathleen Norris)
+
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+Title: Undertow
+
+Author: Kathleen Norris
+
+Release Date: January, 2004  [EBook #4916]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on March 26, 2002]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE 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'hete 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! Pm 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 Revloutionary[sic] 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
+
+
+
+
+
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