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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 56455 ***
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Frontispiece: "Peccavi."]
+
+
+
+
+  Rebellion
+
+  By
+
+  Joseph Medill Patterson
+
+  _Author of "A Little Brother of the Rich," etc._
+
+
+
+  _Illustrated by
+  Walter Dean Goldbeck_
+
+
+
+  Publishers
+  The Reilly & Britton Co.
+  Chicago
+
+
+
+
+  Copyright, 1911
+  by
+  The Reilly & Britton Co.
+
+  All rights reserved
+
+  Entered At Stationers' Hall
+
+  First Printing, September 1911
+
+  _REBELLION_
+
+  Published October 2, 1911
+
+
+
+
+Illustrations
+
+"Peccavi" . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Frontispiece
+
+"He Doesn't Live Here Any More"
+
+"Georgia Laughed"
+
+Rebellion
+
+
+
+
+  List of Chapters
+
+  CHAPTER
+
+  I Jim Connor
+  II One Flesh
+  III An Economic Unit
+  IV The Head of the House
+  V For Idle Hands to Do
+  VI Triangulation
+  VII A Sentimental Journey
+  VIII The Life Force
+  IX The Pretenders
+  X Moxey
+  XI Fusion
+  XII Moxey's Sister
+  XIII Reenter Jim
+  XIV The Palace of the Unborn
+  XV Mr. Silverman
+  XVI Georgia Leaves Home
+  XVII The Light Flickers
+  XVIII The Priest
+  XIX Sacred Heart
+  XX Surrender
+  XXI Worship
+  XXII Kansas City
+  XXIII The Last of the Old Man
+  XXIV The New King
+  XXV Jim Reenlists
+  XXVI Eve
+  XXVII The Naphthaline River
+  XXVIII Albert Talbot Connor
+  XXIX The Doctor Talks
+  XXX Frankland & Connor
+  XXXI The Stodgy Man
+  XXXII Rebellion
+  XXXIII The Ape
+  XXXIV Which Begins Another Story
+
+
+
+
+  _NOTE_
+
+  _I wish to thank Mr. Francis
+  Hackett for reading the unrevised
+  proofs of this story._
+
+  _J. M. Patterson._
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+JIM CONNOR
+
+"Nope, promised to be home on time for supper."
+
+"Get panned last night!"
+
+"Yep."
+
+The group of men turned to the clock which was ticking high up on the
+wall between the smudgy painting of Leda and The Swan and the framed
+group photograph of famous pugilists from Paddy Ryan to the present day.
+
+"It's only nineteen past; plenty time for just one more."
+
+Jim Connor compared his watch with the clock and found they tallied.
+The grave bartender took the dice and box from behind the cigar counter
+and courteously placed them upon the bar.
+
+"Well," bargained Jim, "if it _is_ just one more."
+
+"J.O.M." they chorused, and the dice rolled upon the polished oak.
+
+"What'll it be, gents?"
+
+"Beer."
+
+"Scotch high."
+
+"Bourbon."
+
+"A small beer, Jack."
+
+"Beer."
+
+"Yours, Jim?" prompted the watchful bartender.
+
+"Well--I guess you can give me a cigar this time, Jack."
+
+The practiced bartender, standing by his beer pump, slid the whisky
+glasses along the slippery counter with a delicate touch, as a skillful
+dealer distributes cards.  He set out the red and smoky whiskies, the
+charged water, the tumbler, with its cube of ice; drew two glasses of
+beer, scraped the top foam into the copper runway, and almost
+simultaneously, as if he had four hands, laid three open cigar boxes
+before Jim, who selected a dark "Joe Tinker."
+
+"Join us, Jack," invited the loser of the dice game, hospitably waving
+his hand.  The efficient bartender drew a small half-glass of lithia
+for himself.  Five feet rested upon the comfortable rail before the
+bar, there was the little pause imposed by etiquette, six glasses were
+raised to eye-level.
+
+"Here's whatever."
+
+"Happy days."
+
+"S'looking at you," ran the murmur.
+
+"The big fellow!" exclaimed one.
+
+Chorus: "Yes, the big fellow!"
+
+"I'll sure have to come in on that," said Jim, pressing between two
+shoulders to the bar.  "A little bourbon, Jack," he asked briskly.
+
+The other glasses were lowered until Jim also received his.
+
+Then all were again raised to eye-level.  Unanimously, "The big fellow!"
+
+Heads were thrown back and each ego there, except the bartender,
+received a charming little thrill.
+
+The beer men wandered to the back of the saloon and dipped into a large
+pink hemisphere of cheese.  The whisky men suppressed coughs.  Jim
+tipped his head back about five degrees and inquired, "Is the big
+fellow coming 'round to-night?"
+
+"He's due," replied Jack, wiping his bar dry again.
+
+"How's things looking to you?"
+
+"We--ell, there's always a lot of knockers about."
+
+"Yes, 'pikers' like Ben Birch and Coffey Neal, that line up with the
+big fellow for ten years and then throw him overnight because he won't
+let 'em name the alderman this time.  And he always treated 'em right.
+Better than me.  An' jou ever hear me kicking?"
+
+"Nary once, Jim."
+
+"That's because I am a white man with my friends.  But these other
+Indians--well," said Jim earnestly, "God knows ingratitude gets my
+goat."
+
+Jim Connor was a ward heeler and the big fellow was his ward boss.  Jim
+was allowed to handle some of the money in his precinct at primaries
+and elections; he landed on the public pay-roll now and then; he was
+expected to attend funerals, bowling matches, saloons, picnics, cigar
+shops and secret society meetings throughout the year; his influence
+lay in his strength with the big fellow.  Did a storekeeper want an
+awning over the sidewalk, or did he not want vigorous building
+inspection, if he lived in Jim's precinct, he told Jim, and Jim told
+the big fellow, and the big fellow told the alderman, and the alderman
+arranged it with his colleagues on a basis of friendship.  In return,
+the storekeeper voted with the organization, which was the big fellow,
+who was thus enabled always to nominate and usually to elect candidates
+who would do what he told them.  He told them to line up with the
+interests who had subscribed to the campaign fund--and he was the
+campaign fund.  The entire process is pretty well known nowadays
+through the efforts of Mr. Lincoln Steffens and his associate
+muckrakers.
+
+But there is no immediate cause for alarm; this is not a political
+novel.
+
+The clock pointed nearly to seven and Jim, when he saw it, sighed.
+That meant unpleasantness.  His supper certainly would be cold, but he
+wasn't thinking of that.  He was thinking of his wife.  She was sure to
+make him uncomfortable in some way or other, because he had broken his
+promise about being home on time.  Probably she would be silent.  If
+there was anything he hated, it was one of her silent spells.  Just
+"No" and "Yes," and when he asked her what in hell was the matter, she
+would say "Nothing."
+
+The trouble was, though, that he always knew what the matter was, even
+when she said "Nothing."  What devil's power was there in wives,
+anyway, that enabled them to hurt by merely not speaking?  He had tried
+silences on her a lot of times, but they never worked, not once.  He
+liked the old days better, when she used to scold and plead and weep.
+
+He remembered the first time he had come home drunk, half a dozen years
+ago, when he had barely turned from bridegroom to husband.  She helped
+him that night to undress and to go to bed.  And she had done other
+things for him, too, that even now he was ashamed to remember.  And the
+next day she hadn't scolded once, but had fetched him a cup of coffee
+in bed as soon as he woke up.  It surprised him; overwhelmed him.  It
+had made him very humble.  He had never been so repentant before or
+since.
+
+She didn't reproach him that time--not a word.  He didn't mean she had
+one of her silences--those didn't begin until much later; but she tried
+to talk about their usual affairs, as if nothing had happened.  And
+everything had happened.  They both knew that.
+
+It wasn't until the next evening, thirty-six hours later, that he came
+home to find her a miserable heap upon the front room sofa, her face
+buried.  He stood in the middle of the room looking at her helplessly,
+his words of greeting cut short.  Every now and then her small
+shoulders heaved up and he heard her sob.  She must have been crying a
+long time.  He implored her, "Oh, don't, Georgia, don't; please don't;
+won't you please not?"
+
+After a little while she stood up and put her arms about him and kissed
+him.  He had never had such a feeling for her, it seemed to him, not
+even when they walked down the aisle together and she leaned on him so
+heavily.  And then he kissed her solemnly, in a different way than ever
+before.  He took the pledge that night, and he kept it, too, for a long
+time, nearly a year.  That was the happy time of his life.
+
+When he did begin again, it was gradually.  She knew, after a time, he
+wasn't teetotal any more, and she didn't seem to mind so much.  He
+remembered they talked about it.  He explained that he could drink
+moderately, that she could trust him now, and mustn't ever be afraid of
+any more--accidents.  And that very same night he came home drunk.
+
+She cried again, but it wasn't as solemn and as terrible for either of
+them as the time before.
+
+There had been other times since, many of them.  And she had grown so
+cursedly contemptuous and cold.  Well--he didn't know that it was
+altogether his fault.  He had heard that alcoholism was a disease.  But
+she had said it was a curable disease, and if he couldn't cure it, he
+had better die.  His own wife had told him that.  God knows he had
+tried to cure it.  He had put every pound he had into the fight; not
+once, but a hundred times.  He had gone to Father Hervey and taken the
+pledge last Easter Day, and--here he was with a whiskey glass in his
+hand.
+
+He looked across into the high bar mirror.  His eyes were yellow and
+his cheeks seemed to sag down.  He put his hand to them to touch their
+flaccidity.  His hair was thinning, there were red patches about his
+jaws where veins had broken, and his mouth seemed loose and ill-defined
+under the mustache which he wore to conceal it.  He frowned fiercely,
+thrust his chin forward and gritted his teeth tightly to make of
+himself the reflection of a strong man--one who could domineer, like
+the big fellow.  But it was no use--the mirror gave him back his lie.
+
+The afternoon rush was over, the evening trade had not begun, and the
+saloon was empty, save for a group of scat-players at the farther end.
+
+Jim's friends had gone, but he remained behind, in gloomy
+self-commiseration, his shoulders propped against the partition which
+marked off the cigar stand.  He was thinking over his troubles, which
+was his commonest way of handling them.
+
+Whoever it was that invented the saying, "Life is just one damned thing
+after another"--he knew, he knew.  Jim had bought three or four
+post-cards variously framing the sentiment and placed them upon his
+bureau, side by side, for Georgia to see.  It was his criticism of life.
+
+You politicians and publicists, if you want to know what the public
+wants, linger at the rack in your corner drug store and look over the
+saws and sayings on the post-cards.
+
+Jim hoped that the ones he had picked out would subtly convey to his
+wife that all were adrift together upon a most perplexing journey and
+that it ill-behooved any of them to--well there was a post-card poem
+that just about hit it off--and he put it on the bureau with the others:
+
+  "THERE IS SO MUCH BAD IN THE BEST OF US
+  AND SO MUCH GOOD IN THE WORST OF US,
+  THAT IT HARDLY BEHOOVES ANY OF US
+  TO TALK ABOUT THE REST OF US."
+
+
+But she hadn't taken the least notice.  She didn't seem to understand
+him at all.  Oh, well--women were light creatures of clothes and moods
+and two-edged swords for tongues--or deadly silence.  What could they
+know about the deep springs of life--about how a man felt when in
+trouble?
+
+Jim shifted his position slightly, for the hinge was beginning to
+trouble his shoulder blade, and fetched a sigh that was almost a moan.
+Such had been his life, merely that, and the future looked as bad or
+worse.  The shilling bar grew a bit misty before him and he knew it
+wouldn't take much to make his eyes run over.
+
+"Anything wrong, Jim?" inquired the sympathetic bartender.
+
+"Just a little blue to-night, Jack, that's all."
+
+"Sometimes I get into those spells myself.  Hell, ain't they?"
+
+Jim nodded.  "I suppose they come from nervousness."
+
+The bartender nodded back.  "Or liver," said he, setting out the red
+bottle.  "Have a smile."
+
+"No, I don't want any more of that damned stuff.  A man's a fool to let
+it get away with him, and sometimes I figure I better watch out--not
+but what I can't control myself, y'understand."  There was the
+slightest interrogation in his tone.
+
+"Sure y'can, Jim; I know that.  Still," dubiously, "like you say, a
+fellow ought to watch out.  It'll land the K.O. on the stoutest lad in
+shoes, if he keeps a-fightin' it."
+
+"It's for use and not abuse.  Ain't I right?"
+
+The bartender conspicuously helped himself to a swallow of lithia.
+"Yep, sure," he said.  "D'you know, Jim, I'm kind of sorry you didn't
+go home to supper to-night."
+
+"So'm I, but I got to talking----"
+
+"Why don't you go now?"
+
+"Too blue, Jack, and home is fierce when I get there with a breath."
+
+"Remember the time the little woman come here after you?"
+
+"Oh, it's no use bringing that up now," said Jim sadly.  "She liked me
+then.  Give me a ginger ale."
+
+Jim took his glass and sat alone at a round table by the wall, under
+the painting of Pasiphae and The Shower of Gold.  This saloon, like
+many others, in Chicago, ran to classical subjects.
+
+Jim relit his cigar and slowly turned the pages of a Fliegende Blätter,
+looking at the pictures and habitually picking out those letters in the
+text which resembled English letters.  It was a frayed copy which had
+inhabited the saloon for many months, and showed it.  Jim had thumbed
+it twenty times before, but he was doing it again to appease his
+subconsciousness, to give himself the appearance of activity of some
+sort.
+
+But he was looking through the German pages to the years behind him.
+Politics--maybe that was the trouble.  Politicians, at least little
+fellows like him, got more feathers than chicken out of it.  If he
+hadn't quit that job with the railroad--but no, they were drivers, and
+there was no future in the railroad business for a fellow like him, a
+bookkeeper.  He might have stayed there all his life and not thirty men
+in the entire offices have been the wiser, or have ever heard of him.
+
+In fact, he had bettered himself by going with the publishing firm.  He
+seemed to have prospects there.  It wasn't his fault they blew up and
+he was out on the street again.  That was how he got into
+politics--sort of drifted in after meeting the big fellow canvassing
+the saloons one night, when he, Jim, had nothing else to do.
+
+The big fellow was so attractive, so sure of himself, and Jim would
+have seemed a fool if he had refused the offer to clerk in an election
+precinct that fall.  There was a little money in it, and a little
+importance.
+
+The big fellow had asked him to please see what he could do for the
+ticket that fall, and of course he had.  It was agreeable to be
+consulted by the famous Ed Miles about plans and all that.  He had
+never been consulted in the railroad office, or even by those
+publishers.
+
+After election, without solicitation, Miles had Jim appointed a deputy
+sheriff for the State of Illinois, County of Cook, ss.  Of course, he
+took it.  There was nothing else in sight just then.  The pay was fair,
+the hours good, and besides, there was no time-clock to punch and no
+superintendent always hovering about.
+
+After a time the big fellow told Jim pleasantly, but firmly, that his
+job had to be passed around to some of the other boys, and Jim
+resigned.  But the big fellow let it be known that Jim was still a
+trusted scout.  That was an asset.  The landlord knocked something off
+the rent of his flat, the street car company gave him a book of
+tickets, one of the bill-board companies sent him a nice check for
+Christmas; but he had done some rather particular work for them.  He
+had respectable charge accounts in several places and wasn't pressed.
+
+But, after all, one cannot get rich on that sort of thing; so when the
+child died, his wife went back downtown as a stenographer in a life
+insurance office.  She had been a stenographer before their marriage.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+ONE FLESH
+
+The short swinging doors opened briskly and five tall men entered
+quietly.  Jim tipped his chair forward upon its four legs.  The scat
+game delayed itself.
+
+The five lined up at the bar.  "Beer," said the one with the boiled
+shirt.  The skillful bartender drew five glasses of foam.
+
+Jim sat still in his chair, hesitating to glance even obliquely toward
+the proceedings.  What was one against five?
+
+The tall man with the boiled shirt pointed to his glass, but did not
+touch it.  Nor did any of his companions touch theirs.  The saloon
+knighthood has not abandoned symbolism.
+
+"Does that go?"
+
+"It goes, Coffey Neal."
+
+"And we don't get a lithograph in the front window?"
+
+"You don't."
+
+The five men withdrew a little for conference.  Then Coffey Neal paid
+his reckoning with a quarter and a nickel.
+
+The bartender rang up twenty-five cents on the register.  Neal pointed
+to the five-cent piece upon the bar.
+
+"That's for yourself, Jack."
+
+The sardonic bartender placed it between his teeth.  "It's phony," said
+he.  "Take it back and put it in your campaign fund."  He smiled,
+keeping his right hand below the bar.
+
+"After election," Coffey Neal remarked through his nose, "your old man
+(he meant Jack's father-in-law) can't sell this place for the fixtures
+in it."
+
+Jack concealed a yawn with his left hand.
+
+"You're the twenty-second wop since the first of the year was going to
+put us out of business, and we're signing a lease for our new place
+next Monday.  It's where your brother used to be located."
+
+One of the enemy, a stocky fellow with a brakeman's black shirt, was
+constructing sandwiches of sliced bologna and rye at the lunch counter.
+
+"I know you're not eating much lately, old boy, since you begun
+stringing with Coffey," smiled Jack from the corner of his mouth, "but
+those is for our customers."
+
+Blackshirt turned quickly about, sweeping the pink hemisphere of cheese
+upon the floor and shivering it.
+
+"Oh, dreadful!" he protested, falsetto.  "My word, how sad!"
+
+He trod some of the cheese into the sawdust.  "Mr. Barman, ah, Mr.
+Barman, you may charge the damages to me--at the Blackstone."
+
+There was a roar of laughter from the others.  It looked like
+rough-housing, and damage to fixtures.  The scat players had vanished,
+in their naïve Teutonic way, through the side door.  Jack began to hope
+he wouldn't have to draw, for a shooting always black-eyes a saloon's
+good name and quiet scat custom shies at it.
+
+Neal delivered Jim a tremendous thump on the shoulder.  "Why, if it
+isn't my dear old college chump."  Another thump.  "Maybe you can buy
+us a drink with the collar off."  A third thump.
+
+"Now, can the comedy stuff, Coffey," Jim snarled, smilingly.  If only
+he could steer Coffey away from the fight he seemed bent on picking.
+"I'll buy--sure.  Why not?"
+
+"Then you'll go across the street to do it," Jack inserted.  "This
+ain't a barrel house."
+
+Neal seized Jim's ear and lifted him to his feet.  "You'll buy here,
+and now."  Three of the men gathered about Jim.  The other two,
+standing well apart, were watching Jack.  There would be three pistols
+out, or none.
+
+Jim was being slowly propelled to the bar, when the straw doors swung
+briskly and the big fellow entered.  His shoulders, hands, legs and jaw
+were thick, and his eyes were amazingly alert.
+
+Unspeakable peace spread through Jim.  He knew that somehow or other
+the big fellow was going to get him out of this.
+
+Indeed, that was what the boss had come for.  News of the foray on this
+citadel of his had been grapevined to him up the block and around a
+corner.
+
+He sized up the situation very quickly.  There was Coffey Neal, the
+trouble-maker, the Judas who had refused to take his orders any longer.
+He was the one to be done for.  The other four were merely Hessians,
+torsos, not headpieces.  They slugged for a living, on either side of
+industrial disputes, according to the price--sometimes on both sides in
+the same strike.
+
+"Have a drink, boys," said the great Ed Miles.
+
+It surprised every man in the room.  Jim's heart sank down again.
+Could it be that the big fellow was going to take water?  Then it was
+the end of his reign and the end of Jim's days at court.  There was a
+pause, a whispering.  Ed, standing sidewise to the bar, held his open
+right hand, palm upwards, behind his coat so that only Jack could see
+it.
+
+"And what if we wouldn't!"  Coffey spoke with slow bravado.
+
+"This."  The big fellow flashed at him, and dropped the bung-starter
+heavily behind his ear.  Coffey crumpled upon the floor.  The sluggers
+hesitated half a second, then piled on Ed so quickly that Jack didn't
+dare use his gun.  Instead, he ran around the bar and twisted his arm
+under the chin of blackshirt, pulling him away from the heap.  He
+thrust him up in the air, using his own knee for a lever, then dropped
+him heavily on his back on the floor and kicked his head.  There was no
+time for niceties.
+
+Meanwhile, Jim had taken futile hold of another slugger's foot, who
+easily shook him off.  He was cautiously planning for another
+hold--very cautiously indeed, not being anxious to become too
+completely immersed in the proceedings, when all at once the place
+became full of people.
+
+Strong and willing arms eagerly and quickly unraveled the tangle.
+
+"This is a hell of a game for eight o'clock in the evenin'."  It was
+the bass voice of public peace.  "Oh!" concernedly, "is it you, Mr.
+Miles?  Are you hurted?"
+
+The big fellow felt his shaven skull where, in the melee, a brass
+knuckle had struck him a glancing blow.  He looked at his red fingers.
+"Just a scrape, Sarje, not cracked," he laughed.
+
+"What's the charge?" asked the detective sergeant, solicitously.
+
+"Tell 'em the facts," enjoined the big fellow.
+
+"Well," began the efficient bartender, "Mr. Miles and me was talking
+quietly together here; he was standing just there with his back to the
+door, and I heard an awful yelling going up and down in the street.  I
+knew it was Coffey Neal, hunting trouble, and drunk.  They come in the
+cigar stand, swearing and cursing, saying they were looking for Ed
+Miles--to cut his heart out.  But Ed says to me he didn't want any
+trouble in the place, so's he'd walk out, and he started out the side
+door, when Coffey and this blackshirt fellow come running in and threw
+that bowl of cheese at him--see it there--and jumped him.  Then these
+other bad actors began kicking him, too, and I went in to separate
+'em--and I guess that's all.  Lucky you came in or there might have
+been trouble."
+
+"What charge will I put agin 'em?"
+
+"Drunk and disorderly; assault; assault and battery; assault with
+intent to kill; unprovoked assault; mayhem; assault with a deadly
+weapon--and I guess they ain't got no visible means of support,"
+suggested the big fellow.  "Oh! yes, and conspiracy."
+
+"Let it go at that," said Jack.
+
+The sergeant wrote it down.  The sluggers were silent.  The case had
+become one for lawyers' fees.  Their own talking couldn't do any good.
+
+"Any witnesses?" asked the sergeant.
+
+"Me," said Jim.  "It was the way Jack says."
+
+"Put 'em in the wagon," commanded law and order.
+
+Coffey Neal was picking up his threads again at the place he had
+dropped them.
+
+"And what if we won't drink with you, Ed Miles!" he muttered, somewhat
+scattered.
+
+"Likely the Bridewell, Coffey," laughed the big fellow.
+
+The vanquished were escorted out into the night.
+
+The victor and his vassals, perhaps a dozen of them by this time,
+remained in possession of the field.
+
+"Good thing I had those coppers planted before I started anything,"
+commented the big fellow.  "Those strong-arm guys like to got me going
+at the end."
+
+"They certainly handled themselves very useful," Jack acknowledged.
+
+"They gotta be with us after this, or get out of town."  The big fellow
+turned suddenly on Jim.  "And you, you yellow pup," he roared, seizing
+him by the collar, "what were you doing while they was pounding me up?
+D'you think you were at a ball game, hey?"  He shook him back and forth
+until his jaws cracked.
+
+"I--I was trying--I got one of 'em by the leg, and he----"
+
+"Yes, like you'd pick flowers in the spring--sweet and pretty--that's
+the way you grabbed his leg."  He lifted Jim from the ground and flung
+him on the floor.  "Yellow pup!" he repeated passionately, over and
+over again.
+
+Jim raised himself to his elbow, but did not dare to go further.  The
+big fellow's eyes were still blazing.
+
+"Honest, Ed, I was trying to help."
+
+Miles took a step toward him.  "You're a G--d d--d liar!" he shouted.
+
+Jim tried to meet his look.  It was a wretched business to be called
+that name before a dozen others--it had happened to him before, but he
+always hated it.  Still the big fellow seemed especially vicious and
+dangerous just now; Jim knew how senseless it was to cross him when he
+was having one of his spells, and besides, they never lasted long,
+anyway.  Jim dropped his eyes again, acknowledging the justice of the
+discipline.
+
+Miles threw a ten-dollar bill on the bar and broke the tension with a
+jolly laugh.  "Well, I guess we've put Coffey Neal out o' this
+primary," said he.  "Plunge in, lads."  Jack served each man, but
+nothing for Jim.  The code provided for a final display of magnanimity
+by the fountainhead.  "Come ahead, Jim," he growled, kindly.
+
+Serenity unfolded again her frightened wings and the smoke of peace
+increased and multiplied over a leader fitted to lead and followers
+fitted to follow.
+
+The ensuing celebration spread itself over many hours and into many
+taverns.  There was some agreeable close harmony, to which Jim joined a
+pleasant baritone, and much revilement of all double-crossers, from
+Judas and Benedict Arnold down to Coffey Neal, and a certain Irish
+party whose name now escapes me, but who grievously misbehaved himself
+during a Fenian incident.
+
+Very frequently they reached the shank of the evening--as often,
+indeed, as anybody wanted to go home.  And in the big fellow's mouth
+the shank was ever a cogent argument.
+
+Eventually the ultimate question as to their further destination was
+put, and here the big fellow stood aside, permitting perfect latitude
+of decision.  He was a politician and he knew that he could not
+possibly afford to have it said by the wives of the ward that he
+influenced their husbands toward sin.  He could afford to have almost
+everything else said about him, but not that.
+
+Jim wavered, then resisted temptation.  His record in that particular
+respect had been almost absolutely clean.
+
+He walked home stiffly, fighting with the skill of the practiced
+alcoholic for the upright position and the shortest distance between
+two points.
+
+His early morbidity had vanished.  If he had done one thing badly that
+evening, he had done another thing well.  Whatever his wife, Georgia,
+might urge against him in regard to his conviviality, wasn't he, after
+all, one of the most faithful husbands he knew?  For all her superior
+airs, she had much to be grateful for in him.
+
+He entered his flat with little scraping of the keyhole, and cautiously
+undressed in the front room.  It was late--much later than he had hoped
+for.  He could just make out the hands of the clock on the mantelpiece
+by the light from the street lamp.
+
+He opened the door to their bedroom so slowly, so slowly and steadily,
+and then--as usual, that cursed hinge betrayed him.  The number of
+times he had determined to oil it--yet he always forgot to.  To-morrow
+he wouldn't forget--that was his flaming purpose.
+
+Psychological flux and flow may be deduced from door hinges as well as
+from the second cup of coffee for breakfast or the plaintive lady
+standing immediately before your hard-won seat in the street car.  Jim
+would never oil the hinge in the morning, because that would somehow
+imply he expected to come in very late again at night, and he never
+expected to--in the morning.
+
+But her breathing remained regular, absolutely regular; he had this
+time escaped the snare of the hinge.
+
+The gas jet burned in a tiny flame.  She had fallen into the habit of
+keeping a night-light during the past three or four years.  At first he
+had objected that it interfered with his sleep, but she had been
+singularly persistent about it.  She hadn't given him her reasons;
+indeed, she had never analyzed them.  It was nothing but a bit of
+preposterous feminism, which she kept to herself, that the light made a
+third in their room.
+
+She lay with her back to him, far over on her side of the bed.  He
+could see where her hip rose, and vaguely through the covering the
+outline of her limbs.  Her shoulders were crumpled forward, and the
+upper one responded to her breathing, and marked it.  Under her arm,
+crossed in front of her, he knew was the swelling of her breast.
+
+And then at the neck was the place where the hair was parted and
+braided, the braids wound forward about her eyes--a very peculiar way
+to treat one's hair.
+
+What a different thing a woman was!  He had seen her lying so countless
+times, and yet the strangeness had never worn off.  Indeed, curiously
+enough, there seemed even more of it now than when they had just
+married, and she was entirely new.
+
+He often thought a woman didn't seem exactly a person--that is, not
+like him, and he was certainly a person--but something else; just as
+good, perhaps, but quite other.  Her body, of course--well, agreeable
+as it might be, still he was glad he wasn't made that way, for it
+seemed so ineffective.
+
+And one of them could stand a good man on his head.  He simply couldn't
+get the hang of that.  If a man was angry and sulked, he didn't mind.
+In fact, he preferred it to being knocked about as the big fellow
+sometimes did to him.  He had never cared what man sulked, his brother
+or father or any of them.
+
+And yet this woman, she----he looked at her intently, earnestly, as if
+finally to solve her--she was very beautiful.  And she was his wife.
+
+He crept into bed, very softly, for she might wake up.  But then, it
+briefly occurred to him, what if she did!  He was perfectly sober--at
+least to all intents and purposes.  He could talk perfectly straight;
+he felt sure of that.
+
+Perhaps she would now wake of her own accord.  That would be the best
+solution, and then he could appear drowsy, as if he, too, had just been
+aroused from sleep.
+
+He sighed loudly and turned himself over in the bed, but she gave no
+sign.
+
+"Georgia," he whispered very low.
+
+Pause.
+
+"Georgia," a little louder, "are you awake?"
+
+No answer.
+
+He touched her, as if carelessly.  She stirred.  Ah, she would--no, her
+breathing was markedly the breathing of slumber.  Perhaps she was
+pretending.  Oh, well, what was the use of his trying, if she was going
+to act so?
+
+He turned noisily back to his side of the bed.  He was disappointed in
+her.  Was it fair of her to pretend--if she was pretending?  After all,
+she was his wife.
+
+A husband has his rights.  That was what the church said.  Otherwise,
+what was the use of getting married and supporting a woman--well, most
+men supported their wives, and he intended to do so again soon, very
+soon.
+
+Yes, he had the teachings on his side.  He wanted nothing beyond the
+bond.  It was holy wedlock, wasn't it?
+
+He placed his hand upon her waist.  And yet she would give no sign.
+More resolutely than before she counterfeited the presentment of sleep.
+
+"Georgia!" he spoke aloud.
+
+"What is it!" she said, quickly, sitting up, her black braids falling
+back on her slim shoulders.
+
+"I just wanted to say good night," he muttered, huskily.
+
+"Good night," she answered, curtly.  "Please don't disturb me again.  I
+am very tired."
+
+She was turning from him, when he placed his hand on her shoulder.
+
+"Georgia, I love you.  You know I do."
+
+The foulness of his poisoned breath filled her with loathing.
+
+"No, Jim," she gasped, afraid.  "Oh, no!"
+
+"Georgia, you dunno how I love you," he pleaded, almost tearfully,
+taking her in his arms.
+
+Quickly she jumped from the bed.  "Where are you going?" asked the
+annoyed husband.
+
+"I can't sleep here, Jim; I can't."  She took up her underskirt and her
+thin flannel dressing sack and passed from the room.  She made her
+couch on the lounge in the front room and after a time fell asleep.
+
+Jim twitched with nightmare throughout the night, and long after she
+had gone downtown in the morning.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+AN ECONOMIC UNIT
+
+Georgia's desk was in a rectangular room which was over one hundred
+feet long and half as wide.  There was light on three sides.  Near the
+ceiling was a series of little gratings, each with a small silkoline
+American flag in front of it.  These flags were constantly fluttering,
+indicating forced ventilation; so that although the desks were near
+together and the place contained its full complement of busy people,
+there was plenty of oxygen for them.
+
+This arrangement was designed primarily for economic rather than
+philanthropic purposes.  The increased average output of work due to
+the fresh air yielded a satisfactory interest on the cost of the
+ventilating apparatus; and, besides, it impressed customers favorably
+and had a tendency to hold employes.  The office dealt in life
+insurance.
+
+The desks were mounted on castors so that they could be wheeled out of
+the way at night while the tiled floor was being washed down with hose
+and long-handled mops and brooms and sometimes sand, as sailors
+holystone a deck.  Much of the hands-and-knees scrubbing was in this
+way done away with.
+
+Rubber disks hinged against the desks and set to the floor held them in
+place during working hours.  Narrow black right-angular marks showed
+where each desk belonged and to what point, exactly, it must be moved
+back when the nightly cleaning was finished.
+
+These details were all of profound interest to Georgia, for her desk
+was the most important thing in the world to her at this time in her
+life.
+
+She delighted in neatness, order, precision, in the adjustment of the
+means to the end.  Every morning just before nine, she punched the
+clock, which gave her a professional feeling; and hung her hat and
+jacket in locker 31, which seemed to her a better, a more
+self-respecting place for them to be than her small, untidy bedroom
+closet, all littered up with so many things--hers and Jim's.
+
+Her mother, who kept house for them, was a good deal at loose ends, in
+Georgia's opinion.  And it didn't seem quite the decent thing that a
+woman who had nothing else in the world to do should fail to keep a
+six-room flat in order.  Of course her mother was getting a little old,
+but hardly too old to do that.
+
+Georgia had lately had a trial promotion to "take" the general agent's
+letters--the previous functionary, a tall blonde girl, having married
+very well.
+
+It was the first stenographic position in the office and carried the
+best salary, so there was a good deal of human jealousy about it--much
+the same sort as freshmen feel who are out for the class eleven.
+
+Georgia had tried her hardest for five days.  She had stayed overtime
+to rewrite whole pages for the sake of a single omitted letter; she had
+bought half a dozen severely plain shirt waists, and yielded up her
+puffs.  Everyone knew how the old man hated the first sign of nonsense.
+
+But in spite of all that the day before he had called in Miss Gerson to
+take his dictation.
+
+Well--it was pretty hard, but she had done her best.  And she was a
+better workman than Miss Gerson, she would stick to that.  Only
+yesterday she had seen Miss G. twice hunting in a pocket dictionary
+hidden in her lap--and she never had to do that, practically.
+
+Life was just one damn thing after another, as Jim was always
+complaining--only he could never possibly have apprehended the full
+truth and implication of that saying--in spite of its rather common way
+of putting it.  She knew that he never saw deeply, really fundamentally
+into the dreadful mystery of being here; he couldn't for he was coarse
+and masculine and he drank.
+
+Her fingers were working rapidly casting up purple letter after purple
+letter before her eyes, but the physiologists tell us that she was
+using only the front part of her brain for it.  The rest of it was free
+to contemplate the Ultimate Purpose, or gross favoritism in the office
+especially in relation to Miss Gerson, or whether an ice cream soda was
+a silly thing to have before lunch, as she knew it was, but then one
+had to have some pleasure.
+
+Rat-tat-tat-tat went the keys; ding, there was her bell.  Ten letters
+more on this line said the front part of her brain.  One thing she was
+sure of, said the back, she devoutly hoped her young brother Al
+wouldn't develop into a mere white-collared clerk--though of course she
+certainly wanted him to be always a gentleman.  She slid her carriage
+for the new line.
+
+Rat-tat-tat-tat--and again, ding.  There, the end of the page.  Single
+space and not an error.  She would like to see Miss Gerson do that at
+her speed.
+
+The shuffle of the old man's office boy sounded behind her.  Now,
+wait--what would to-day's verdict be?  Would he pass or stop?
+
+"Miss Connor," a-a-ah--"the old man wants you to take some letters."
+(Georgia had let them suppose she was unmarried.)
+
+The benison of perfect peace now enfolded her.
+
+Poor little Miss Gerson--well, after all, life is a game, the loser
+pays, and the winner can be perfectly philosophical about it.
+
+Georgia went to the old man's private office and closed the door behind
+her.
+
+"Yes, sir."  She stood at attention, pad and pencil ready.
+
+"Will you take these please, Miss Connor?  Mr. James Serviss--here's
+his address," the old man tossed the letter he was answering over to
+her.  "Dear Sir: Replying to yours of the 16th inst, we regret
+that----.  Well, tell him it's impossible.  Write the letter yourself.
+You understand!"  He was observing her as if to probe her
+resourcefulness.
+
+"Perfectly, sir."
+
+"Miss Belmont saved me a great deal of trouble in that way.  She could
+tell what I would want to say."  Miss Belmont was the blonde girl who
+had married and left a vacancy.
+
+"I can do the same, sir."
+
+"Well, here are some more," continued the old man.  "This--No."  He
+tossed another letter to her.  She made a shorthand notation in the
+corner of it.  "This--By all means,--and be polite about it.  This--An
+appointment to-morrow afternoon."
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"This--Routine.  And these--Send them to the proper departments."  More
+notations.
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"You can start on those.  Bring them in when they're ready."
+
+"Yes, sir."  Exit Georgia.
+
+She summoned the deeper layers of her vitality, settled to her work and
+her fingers flew.  She knew the joy--if joy it be--of creation.
+
+Quietly she slipped back into the old man's office, without knocking.
+His secretary had entrance except at such times as he shut his
+telephone off.
+
+She seemed very slim and neat, and calm and steady--almost prim,
+perhaps, as she stood with pen and blotter in her hand to take the old
+man's signatures.
+
+But her being surged within her like that of a mother who waits to hear
+if her boy is to be expelled from school or forgiven.
+
+The old man had been going over a campaign plan for business with one
+of his quickest witted solicitors, and after Georgia had waited
+standing for a few moments, dismissed him with, "Yes, that's the right
+line, Stevens.  Just keep plugging along it."
+
+As Stevens passed her on his way out he bowed slightly.  He had been
+doing that for some time now, though he had not yet spoken to her.
+
+Stevens was still under thirty, she concluded, though she had heard he
+had been with the company for ten years.  A silent, sharp-featured,
+tall young fellow with chilly blue eyes, who had the name in the office
+of keeping himself to himself and being all business.
+
+The old man, having glanced over and signed the letters, passed his
+verdict on her work--"Hmm, hmm, Miss Connor, you may move your things
+to Miss Belmont's desk.  And here's a note----"
+
+When an author conquers a stage manager; or Atchison rises 4% the very
+next day; or the Cubs bat it out in the tenth on a darkening September
+afternoon; when on the third and last trial, it's a boy; or when
+Handsome Harry Matinee returns you his curled likeness _signed_; or you
+first sip Mai Wein, you know what it is to move your things to Miss
+Belmont's desk.
+
+"And here's a note," continued the old man, without the gap which we
+have made to put in analogues, "to Mr. Edward Miles--I'd better dictate
+this one myself--'Dear Mr. Miles: I should be happy to have you call--'
+No, strike that out.  'In response to your letter of even date, I
+should be glad to see you at any time that suits you, here in my
+office--' no, make it three o'clock to-morrow afternoon--'to confer
+over the subject of the Senatorial campaign in your district.'  Read
+what you've got."
+
+Georgia did so.
+
+The old man changed his eyeglasses.  "Maybe you'd better telephone him
+instead," he said.  "It's Ed Miles, the politician.  You can probably
+locate him at----"
+
+"Yes, sir, I know," suggested Georgia.
+
+"And get Mr. Somers on the phone--Mr. Somers does some of our legal
+work----"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"And ask him to be here at the same time.  Make a note of it on my list
+of appointments."
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"Tell him Miles is coming, and to get up a little résumé for me of the
+situation in those districts over there, and ah--perhaps an estimate in
+a general way of what we ought to do for, ah--Mr. Miles.  You will
+indicate that to him."
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"Well, telephone him that."  Georgia rose and went to the door.
+"Ah--Miss Connor----"  She turned and looked at her employer, her head
+tilted forward, with a peculiar open-eyed, steady little stare, which
+was a trick of hers when wholly interested.
+
+"Did I indicate to you," said he, "that you are my _private_ secretary
+now?"
+
+"I understand, sir.  Thank you."
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+THE HEAD OF THE HOUSE
+
+Each morning as Georgia entered the elevated train and spread open her
+paper, she cast off the centuries, being transformed from a housewife
+to a "modern economic unit."
+
+She smiled at the morning cartoon or perhaps, in the celebrated phrase
+of Dr. Hackett, she sighed softly for the sake of its meticulous
+futility.  Her penny to the news stand gave her full and free franchise
+upon the ever anxious question of the popularity of popular art.  Other
+Georgias of Chicago were simultaneously passing like judgments in like
+elevated cars and the sum of their verdicts would ultimately readjust
+social distinctions in Cook and Lake counties, Illinois.
+
+She always turned to the Insurance Notes next.  It was her Duty to be
+Well-informed and Interested in the Success of Her Employer, for His
+Success was Hers.  She hadn't been to business college for eight weeks
+not to know that.
+
+Next a peek at Marion Jean Delorme's column of heart throbs, which she
+frankly regarded as dissipation, because she enjoyed it, and everybody
+who read it called it common.
+
+By this time, home and its squabbling; its everlasting question of how
+far a pay envelope can stretch; her sullen contemplation of Jim's
+alcoholism; and irritability at her mother's pottering way had vanished
+into the background of her mind, where they slept through her working
+day.
+
+She engaged herself with more appealing problems and a larger world.
+She deplored the litter of torn-up streets and the thunder of the loop,
+instead of the litter of the breakfast dishes and the squeak of the
+hinge.  Not that clean dishes are less meritorious than clean streets,
+but, to such minds as hers had grown to be, less captivating.  To
+change desks downtown was more fun than to change chairs at home.
+
+She felt her solidarity with the other people who streamed into the
+business district at eight forty-five, to get money by writing or
+talking.  It was the master's end of the game and she belonged to it.
+Outside-the-loop worked with its arms and hands--she worked merely with
+her fingers.  The time might come when she would need to work only with
+her tongue--and triple her income.  She was in line for that.
+
+She was no mean citizen of no mean city throughout the day: at the
+lunch club where she coöperated; in the big white-tiled vestibule of
+her building where she exchanged ten words of weather prophecy with the
+elevator starter between clicks; in the rest room where they talked
+office politics, and shows, and woman suffrage, as well as beaux and
+hats; behind her machine which rattled "twenty dollars a week by your
+own ten fingers and no man's gratuity."
+
+There were no oaths, no bonds unbreakable, no church to tell her she
+couldn't change her job, as it tells the housed and covered women who
+get their bread by wifehood.
+
+If she didn't like the temperature of the room, or the size of her
+employer's ears, she could walk across the street and do as
+well--perhaps better.
+
+If he had sworn at her, or come ugly drunk into her presence--but that
+was inconceivable.  Employers didn't do that, only husbands, because
+they knew they had you.
+
+It was the full life and the free life which she lived, she and her
+sisters of the skyscrapers.  It was the emancipation of woman, and the
+curse of Eve was lifted from them.
+
+But the tide of her being which flowed regularly each work-morning,
+ebbed regularly each night.  Her horizon became smaller and less bold
+after she had slid her nickel over the glass to the spectacled cashier
+in the L cage and was herded for home on the jammed platform.  Her
+boldness continuously diminished as station after station was called
+and she stood to her strap, glancing from the direct imperatives,
+"Uneeda Union Suit and We Can Prove It," "Hasten to the House of
+Hoopelheimer," "Smart Set Collars for Swell Spenders," "Blemishes
+Blasted by Blackfeeto," to the limp, sallow people who, like herself,
+had left their vitality downtown.
+
+When she pushed away from the light of her home station into the gloom
+and up the ineffectually lighted street between rows upon rows of three
+and four story flats, her head slightly bent, scurrying along with the
+working woman's nightfall pace, like Lucifer, she felt the mighty
+distance.  She had shrunk into a middle-class wife who had been a poor
+picker.
+
+So it usually happened.  But the day of her triumph over Miss Gerson
+was an exception, and the corona of the office extended and enveloped
+her through the rows of flat buildings and up two flights of stairs to
+the door of her own apartment.
+
+She entered happily, gaily.  And there was Jim sprawled in one chair,
+his dusty boots in another, without a coat to hide his soiled shirt
+sleeves, without a collar to apologize for his unshaven chin, a
+frazzled cigar between his fingers and a heap of ashes beside him where
+he had let them fall upon the carpet--her carpet that she had earned
+and paid for.
+
+Ashes had fallen, too, upon his protruding abdomen.  He breathed very
+heavily, almost wheezed.  He looked up to speak.  His eyes were rather
+swinish in recovery from debauch.  His teeth were bad and the gap which
+had come under the cut lip was not a scar of honor.  She hoped he
+wouldn't speak--but of course he did.
+
+"Hello, Georgia."
+
+"Hello," she answered mechanically.
+
+"What you been doing?"
+
+What a stupid question.  What did he suppose she had been doing?  For
+when a husband doesn't suit, he doesn't suit at all--his very attempts
+at peacemaking become an offense in him.
+
+"Working," she said curtly and passed on to their bedroom.
+
+"Oh, hell! cut out the everlasting grouch," he called after her, and
+went to the window and looked out, kneeling moodily on the window seat.
+He was Henpecko the Monk, all right.  What she needed was a firm hand.
+Women took all the rope you gave them--they took advantage of you.  He
+ought to have begun long ago to shut down on her nonsense.  Other
+husbands did, and by God, he would begin.  Then he rubbed his prickly
+chin and smiled ruefully.  For hadn't he begun a great many times and
+had he ever been able to finish?
+
+Besides, he was broke, and it was strictly necessary, most
+unfortunately in view of his present disfavor, for him to obtain a loan.
+
+Maybe Al would help him out and he wouldn't have to ask Georgia.  There
+was an idea.  It was more dignified, too.
+
+He didn't know whether Al had come in yet.
+
+He himself had occupied a twenty-five cent seat that afternoon near Mr.
+Frank Schulte, most graceful of Cubs, to get a little fresh air.  It
+did a fellow good and took his mind off home, which a fellow had to do
+now and then if he was going to stand it at all.
+
+On the return trip, to be sure, he had suffered from a twinge of fans'
+conscience as he realized that his activities of the day had taken
+about fifty cents out instead of putting any cents in.  A rather keen
+twinge, too, inasmuch as Matty had been strictly "right."  There is no
+fun in giving up half a dollar to see the Cubs vivisected.
+
+"Oh, Al," he called to the back of the flat.
+
+"What?" came the call back.
+
+"Hear about the game?"
+
+"Nope."
+
+"I was out," said Jim.
+
+That ought to fetch him--and it did.
+
+Al entered expectant.  He was an extremely good-looking boy of sixteen,
+with pink cheeks, clear blue eyes, and a kink to his hair.  He might
+have been called pretty if his shoulders were not quite so broad.
+
+"Who win?  I was north on an errand late and couldn't get a peek at an
+extra after the fifth."  So Al apologized to his brother-in-law for his
+ignorance.  "It was one and one then."
+
+"The Giants win, three to two, and believe me there was a rank decision
+at the plate against Johnny Evers.  He beefed on it proper and got
+chased.  That's what smeared us."
+
+"Johnny ought to learn to control himself," said Al pathetically.
+
+"Yep.  He's got too much pep--that's what's the matter with that lad."
+
+"And all the umpires in the league have banded together against him.  I
+heard it straight to-day.  And believe me"--there was an element of
+mystery in the boy's voice, "there's something in it."
+
+Jim clenched his fist and brought it down hard.  "If the Cubs win out
+against the empires this year," he stated his proposition with a
+vehement brandish of his fist, "they'll be going some," but his
+peroration rather flattened out--"believe me."
+
+"Yes, sir, Jim.  That's no damn lie."
+
+"Say, Al, loan me a quarter?"
+
+Unhappy pause.
+
+All sportsmen, from polo players and tarpon fishers to Kaffirs in their
+kraals, like to talk it over afterwards.  Al didn't want to interrupt
+his baseball palaver with Jim.  It might last right through supper and
+until bedtime, as it often did when Jim stayed home.
+
+He had a vast fund of hypotheses to tell Jim again, and some new ones.
+If he refused Jim the loan their interesting talk would stop.  But if
+he granted it he would be a boob.  It was certainly one dilemma.
+
+Jim smiled and repeated his thought.  "I'll do as much for you some
+time.  Go on now."
+
+Georgia came in quickly and angrily.  "I should think you'd be ashamed,
+Jim Connor, trying to do a boy."
+
+"Oh, so you've been rubbering, eh?" Jim sneered.
+
+She had; but this, her weakness, was one she shared with many other
+women--likewise men.  In petty lives are petty deeds.  Downtown she did
+not listen, or tattle, or read other people's letters.  There were more
+important matters to attend to.
+
+"I got to have a little loan," said Jim--now was his time for
+boldness--"to tide me over till Monday."
+
+She was obstinately mute.
+
+"Let me have a two-dollar bill till then?"
+
+"No."
+
+"One?"
+
+"No."
+
+"What then?"
+
+"Nothing."
+
+"You didn't use to be such a tightwad."
+
+"You taught me that, too, Jim.  I'll never give you another cent to
+drink.  It isn't fair to the rest of us."
+
+Mrs. Talbot, Georgia's mother, the homebody of the household, came in
+from the kitchen to say that supper was now ready and she was sick and
+tired of the irregularity of the family meals, which she had never been
+accustomed to as a girl.
+
+"Oh, cheer up, mother.  I've good news to-day--a raise."
+
+Georgia took her pay envelope from her handbag.  "See!"
+
+Mrs. Talbot flattened out the creases in it and read it aloud.
+"Georgia Connor--weekly--twenty dollars."  And drew forth a wonderful,
+round, golden double eagle.  Whereupon Jim let his angry passions rise.
+
+His wife--this cold-blooded, high-and-mighty creature, with her chin in
+the air, refused him a loan on the very same day she was raised.  It
+was plain viciousness.  It was almost a form of perversion.
+Forbearance, even his, had its limits.
+
+"Why, Georgia," continued the mother, reading the inscription from the
+envelope in her hand, "how's this, they call you 'Miss,' Miss Georgia
+Connor--weekly--twenty dollars."
+
+"Oh--ho," exclaimed Jim roughly, for now he felt that it was his turn.
+"Passing yourself off as unmarried, eh?  A little fly work--hey?  If I
+am easy, I draw the line somewhere."
+
+"I was ashamed to let them know I was married and still had to work
+out," she responded evenly.
+
+That was just the way it always happened.  Georgia invariably ended up
+with the best of it.
+
+"Well, well, let it pass, though it's not right.  But you ought to let
+me have a dollar or two, considering.  Why, I've got a right to some of
+your money.  You've had plenty of mine in your time."
+
+"For value received."
+
+"You talk of marriage as if it was bargain and sale."
+
+Georgia's voice, which had been thin and colorless, grew suddenly thick
+with the bitter memories of seven years.  "It is oftentimes," she said.
+"Bad bargain and cheap sale."
+
+"And now and then it's a damned high buy, too, when a man gives up his
+liberty for a daily panning from his wife, and his mother-in-law, and
+kid brother."
+
+"If I am a kid," the boy interrupted passionately, "I've brought in
+more and taken out less than you the last year."
+
+Blood called to blood, and the clan of Talbot closed around the lone
+Connor.
+
+"When he had to come out of school and go to work because you couldn't
+keep a job!" screamed the elder lady.
+
+"You big stiff," Al brought up the reënforcement half-crying with rage.
+
+"You shut up or I'll--" Jim answered hoarsely, drawing back his fist in
+menace.
+
+Al jumped for a light chair and swung it just off the ground, meeting
+the challenge.  So standing, the two glowered at each other--Jim
+wishing that he was twenty years younger, Al that he was three years
+older.
+
+As Georgia stood back from them hoping that she would not have to
+interpose physically between the two, as had happened once or twice in
+the past year, she felt more intensely than she ever had before that
+her home life was very sordid and degrading to her.  This eternal
+jangling which seemed to run on just the same whether she took part in
+it or not, was the life for snarling hyenas, not for a young woman with
+an ambition for "getting on," for rising in the social scale.
+
+The two males, finally impelled by a common doubt of the outcome,
+tacitly agreed upon verbal rather than physical violence.  The raucous
+quarrel broke out anew.  Mrs. Talbot--but you, gentle reader,
+undoubtedly can surmise substantially what followed.  You must have
+friends who have family quarrels.
+
+Finally there was a lull, after all three had had their says several
+times over, and were trying to think up new ones.
+
+"Jim," said Georgia slowly and deliberately, for she felt that the hour
+had come, "why not make this our last quarrel?"
+
+"That's up to you," he returned belligerently.
+
+"By making it permanent."
+
+"What do you mean!" answered Jim, now a trifle alarmed.
+
+"I mean that the time has come for us to separate, for the good of all
+of us."
+
+She looked straight at him, until he dropped his red and watery eyes
+before her strong gray ones.  There was a pause, a solemn pause in that
+poor family.
+
+"Children," said the older woman softly and timidly, "there is such a
+thing as carrying bitter words too far."
+
+"Mother, when two people come to the situation we're in, Jim and I,"
+for the first time there was a semblance of sympathy for the man in her
+voice, "then I believe the only thing they can do, and stay decent, is
+to separate.  To go on living together when they neither like nor love
+each other----"
+
+"How do you know?  I never said that," Jim said humbly.
+
+"It is not what you say that counts.  We don't love each other any
+more; that was over long ago; that's the whole trouble; that's why we
+quarrel; that's why you drink and I'm hateful to you--and it'll get
+worse and worse and more degrading if we keep on.  Oh, I feel no better
+than a woman of the streets when I----"
+
+"Georgia," Mrs. Talbot raised her eyes significantly, glancing at Al,
+to warn her daughter against letting her son know a truth.
+
+"Oh, I have been thinking this over and over--for months," continued
+the wife, "and I kept putting it off.  But now I'm glad I said it and
+it's done."
+
+"The church admits of only one ground for this," said Mrs. Talbot
+desperately, fighting for respectability; "do you mean that Jim has----"
+
+"I don't know----"
+
+"No," Jim denied indignantly, "you can't accuse me of that anyway."
+
+"And I don't care."
+
+"You don't care?"  That was a most astounding remark, clear outside his
+calculations.  Why--wives always cared tremendously.  Every man knew
+that.
+
+"No, if need be I could forgive an act, but not a state of mind."
+
+Mrs. Talbot found herself literally forced to take sides with Jim.
+This was an attack on all tradition, on everything that she had been
+taught.  "Why, I never heard of such talk in my life."
+
+But Georgia would not qualify.  "Well, I think that's all."  She walked
+to the door.  "I suppose I have seemed very hard, but it was best to
+make the cut sharp and clean."  There was no sign of relenting in the
+set of her mouth or in her narrowed eyes; and Jim knew it was nearly
+impossible to do anything with her when her nostrils grew wide like
+that.
+
+"All right," he mumbled, "have it your own way."
+
+"Try to brace up for your own sake, if you wouldn't for mine."  That
+was her good-bye.  She went from the room with Al.
+
+The mother waited behind.  "She'll think better of this by and by, Jim.
+I'll speak to her about it now and then," she said, "and keep you in
+her mind.  And I'm going to the priest about it, too.  It's sin she's
+doing.  And Jim----"
+
+"Yes?" he grieved humbly, almost crying.
+
+"You better go over to Father Hervey and tell him all about it."
+
+"Yes, I'll do that same."
+
+"Well, good-bye for now--you better go to some hotel to-night," she
+gave him a dollar from the purse in her bosom, "and try and get work.
+It'll make your coming back easier."
+
+"Thanks, mother, I'll do that same.  Er--I guess I'll go in and change
+my collar.  That'll be all right, won't it?"
+
+"Yes, Georgia's in the dining room."
+
+Mrs. Talbot left him.  He rubbed his knuckles slowly across his eye,
+his breath catching quickly.  Then he spied Georgia's hand bag.  There
+was the trouble-money--twenty dollars, a round, golden double eagle.
+He opened the handbag to--well, to look at it.  He spun it; he palmed
+it; he tossed it in the air, calling heads.  It came tails.  He tried
+it again and it came heads.  That settled it.  He slipped the coin into
+his pocket, and went out of the room.  At least there was salvage in
+leaving one's wife.
+
+After supper Georgia packed up his things, every stick and stitch of
+them, and with the aid of Al drew them out into the hallway.
+
+Later in the evening a politician, one of Ed Miles', knocked at the
+door.
+
+"Good evening, ma'am, I'm from the Fortieth Ward Club.  I have a
+message for Mr. Connor.  He's wanted at headquarters right away."
+
+"He doesn't live here any more."
+
+[Illustration: "He doesn't live here any more."]
+
+The politician was perplexed.
+
+"Where does he live?"
+
+"I don't know," answered Georgia, shutting the door.
+
+It was not until the next morning that she discovered the loss of her
+money.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+FOR IDLE HANDS TO DO
+
+The old man had gone to Europe for his summer vacation, leaving Georgia
+secure in her place with nothing to worry about.  She had no more than
+half work to do.  Business had slackened and the whole office was in
+the doldrums.  Life's fitful fever had abated to subnormal placidity.
+Even her mother's chronic indignation over trifles had been quieted by
+the summer's drowse.
+
+The only interesting moments in Georgia's day were nine o'clock when
+she came and five o'clock when she left--noon on Saturdays.  The
+Sundays were amazingly dull.
+
+So was her home.  Al stayed away from it from breakfast unto bedtime,
+with a brief interval for supper.  He was engrossed in prairie league
+baseball for one thing.  That occupied him all day Sunday and half of
+Saturday.  Of course he couldn't play after dark, but whenever Georgia
+asked him where he was going as he bolted from the table with his cap,
+he answered, "Out to see some fellahs."
+
+If she hoped that he would stay at home to-night, for he was out last
+night and the one before, he would explain, with as much conviction as
+if he offered a clinching argument, that "the fellahs" were a-calling
+and he must go.
+
+She was rather put out to find herself unable to speak with the same
+vehemence and authority to him as she had been able to use with Jim
+concerning the folly and wickedness of going out after supper.  For
+when it comes to putting fingers on a man's destiny, a wife is a more
+effective agency than a sister.  Even in unhappy marriages husband and
+wife are as two circles which intersect.  They have common, identical
+ground between them.  It may not be large, but such as it is it
+inevitably gives them moments of oneness.  Brother and sister are as
+two circles, whose rims just touch.  They may be very near each other,
+but at no time are they each other.
+
+Georgia's restlessness and discontent increased as the summer went on,
+probably because she was affecting nobody else's destiny to any
+calculable extent.  Her young brother Al kept away, perhaps warned by a
+deep race instinct that sisters are not meant to affect destinies.  Her
+old mother was a settled case already.  She wouldn't change; she
+couldn't change; she could hardly be modified, except by the weather or
+the rheumatism; she would merely grow old and die.  No satisfaction for
+a young adventurous woman in experimenting on such a soul.
+
+It has been said that neither the woman nor the man alone is the
+complete human being, but the man and the woman together.  This woman,
+Georgia, who for seven years had been completed by the addition of the
+masculine element, was now made incomplete.  She struggled in vain to
+find contentment in regular hours, regular sleep, regular work and
+regular pay.
+
+She had supposed for years that peace and quiet, and enough money, and
+never the smell of whiskey were all she wanted.  And here was her
+subconsciousness, which she couldn't understand, making her perfectly
+wretched, though she couldn't tell why; calling insistently for another
+man, though she didn't in the least realize it.  She only knew she was
+tired of being cooped up in the house evenings; she wanted to get out
+now and then for a change and to see people who had some ideas.
+
+She went for a Saturday evening supper to the Kaiser Wilhelm Zweite
+Beer and Music Garden with a school-girl friend and her husband.  This
+pleasure-ground was well north, out of the smoke.  The night was soft
+and the music lovely.  She was much entertained by the husband's talk,
+and considered that she held up her end with him very well.
+
+The next time they invited her she spent some little time before hand,
+"fixing-up" for the occasion.  Ribbons were put back where they used to
+be long ago when she first met Jim.  Her hat underwent revolutionary
+readjustment, as the school friend made plain by heated compliments on
+Georgia's millinery skill.
+
+However, the husband seemed absolutely content with its effect and
+Georgia's animation increased throughout the evening, calling back a
+long neglected flush to her cheeks and a gay pace to her bearing.  She
+was not asked a third time, however, which did not unflatter her.  It
+was evidence that she had not slowed down completely--that she was not
+finished.
+
+Meanwhile Jim, after spreeing away his twenty dollars, had gone West.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+TRIANGULATION
+
+Mason Stevens, Sr., was a horse doctor in Rogersville, Peoria County,
+Illinois.  He wore a gray mustache and imperial beard in tribute to
+that famous Chicago veterinarian who has made more race horses stand on
+four legs than any other man in the Mississippi Valley.
+
+Besides horses, Mr. Stevens knew cattle, hogs, sheep, tumbler and
+carrier pigeons, bred-to-type poultry, and whiskey.  If he hadn't
+carried a bottle about with him in his buggy he might be alive now.
+
+Mason Stevens, Jr., wanted to be a real doctor, so he came up to
+Chicago to the Rush Medical College.  After his first year, whiskey
+took his father, the funeral took the rest, and the young man after a
+brief fight gave up the vision of some day substituting "M.D." in place
+of "Jr." after his name.
+
+He had been a respected boy at school, green but positive.  To help him
+out, some of his friends persuaded their fathers, uncles or other
+sources of supply to give "Old Mase" a chance to write their fire
+insurance.  He took the opening.  Presently his acquaintance was wide
+enough for him to branch out into life as well as fire.  After ten
+years in the city he was able to go to the general agent of his company
+and ask for a regular salary, in addition to his commissions, on the
+ground that there wasn't another solicitor in the state he had to take
+his hat off to.
+
+He was a highly concentrated product, like most successful countrymen
+in the city.  He hadn't been scattered in culture.  He knew no foreign
+languages, no art save that on calendars, no music he could not hum, no
+drama save very occasionally a burlesque show when he felt that he
+needs must see women.
+
+He knew, if he hadn't forgotten, how to find a kingfisher's nest up a
+small tunnel in the river bank, or a red-winged blackbird's pendant
+above the swamp waters, or a butcher-bird's in a thornbush with
+beheaded field mice hanging from its spears.  Even now, with farmer's
+instinct, he looked up quickly through the skyscrapers at a sudden
+shift in wind.
+
+He lived in a rooming house and ate where he happened to be.  His
+bureau was bare of everything save the towel across the top, his derby
+hat, when he was in bed, and a handful of matches.  His upper drawer,
+usually half-pulled out, was filled not with collars and ties, but with
+papers relating to his business; actuaries' figures; reports from all
+companies, his own and his rivals'; records of "prospects" that he had
+brought home for evening study; rough drafts of solicitation
+"literature" he was getting up for the company.  He usually worked at
+night in his shirt sleeves, his hat cocked on the back of his head, his
+chair tilted back against the wall under a single gas jet with a ground
+glass globe that diverted most of the light upward toward the ceiling.
+
+Even after he reached the point where he could afford more expensive
+living, he did not change.  He wore better clothes because a "front"
+was mere business intelligence, but otherwise his habits were within a
+hundred and fifty dollars of his first year.
+
+Pleasure he regarded as the enemy, not so much because of its
+money-cost, as because it was diverting.  He didn't wish to be
+diverted; he wished to sell life insurance and more and more.  That was
+as far as he went with his plans.  He didn't want to get rich so as to
+gratify dreams, to have a beautiful wife and buy her a big house and
+motors.  He simply wanted to get rich.
+
+He had had no romance since he left the Rogersville High School.  That
+one had been sweet enough for awhile, but nothing came of it.  And he
+remembered that on account of it he had neglected his studies senior
+year and not graduated at the top of the class.  Indeed, the object of
+his affection, with fitting irony, had herself achieved that
+distinction, which cooled his fever for her.
+
+Mason was a great believer in the value of "bumps."  When he made a
+failure in any enterprise, he was wont to analyze why, in order to
+double-guard himself against a repetition of it.  None but a fool
+repeats a mistake.  He drummed that into himself.  Thus in the long run
+he was ready to turn every "bump" into an asset instead of a liability.
+It is a system of philosophy widespread in this nation, especially
+among country-bred people of Puritan tradition, strong, rugged people
+who believe in the supreme power of the individual will, who minimize
+luck and take no stock in fatalism.  These are usually termed "the
+backbone of the American people," and though of course they know that
+God is everywhere and omnipotent, they likewise believe that He has
+appointed them His deputies, with a pretty free hand to act, in the
+conduct of the earth.
+
+Mason Stevens came of this stock.  And though his father was a
+backslider, his mother was not, and she brought him up on the saying,
+"Maybe this will teach you a lesson, my son, next time you think of
+doing so-and-so."
+
+This shows why Mason Stevens did not fall in love with any woman, after
+the high school girl, until he fell most desperately in love with
+Georgia Connor.
+
+He resisted love from conviction.  One female ten years before had
+defeated his brains and his purpose by her charm.  He wanted no more of
+that.
+
+But he had to fight.  Often enough as he walked through the long office
+through the double row of shirt-waisted figures bending over
+typewriters and desks, it seemed imperative for him to know them
+better, to wait for one of them after office hours and ride home with
+her on the car.
+
+Everything else was wiped out of him for the moment but just the
+question of riding home with a twelve-dollar-a-week girl.  Then he
+would walk quickly on past the girl who absorbed his imagination, his
+mouth set and his brows scowling.  And she would confide in her
+neighbor that he was crazy about himself.
+
+Sometimes when he was at home under the gas jet with his business
+papers on his knee, the vision of fair women would float before him,
+all the most beautiful in his imaginings as he had seen them in
+pictures or on the stage.  He might dream for an hour before
+remembering that he was in the world to sell life insurance and that
+women would hamper his single-mindedness as surely as whiskey.
+
+Who was the man he was surest of making sign an application blank when
+he set out after him?  The man who had a woman in his head, every time;
+the man with the wife, and children, which are the consequences of a
+wife; or one who was gibbering in a fool's heaven because a young girl
+had graciously promised to allow him to support her for the rest of her
+days.
+
+So he kept away from bad women as much as he could, and from good women
+always.
+
+Especially from those in the office.  Their constant propinquity was a
+constant menace and he had known a lot of fellows to get tangled up
+that way, and he wouldn't--if he could help it.
+
+But he couldn't help it after he knew Georgia.  She was so useful
+mentally and physically, and that was what he first noticed about her.
+He hated slackness of any sort, especially in women, because he had
+trained himself to dwell on women's faults rather than on men's.
+
+Her manners, he thought, were precisely perfect.  She seemed to hit a
+happy medium between gushing and shyness, and to hit it in the dead
+center.  Her teeth were white and good, and she smiled often, but not
+too often.  She never overdid anything, and her voice was low and full.
+She knew what you were driving at before you half started telling her;
+also she could make a fresh clerk feel foolish in one minute by the
+clock.
+
+She had the charm of perfect health.  About her dark irises the whites
+of her eyes were very white, touched with the faintest bluish tinge
+from the arterial blood beneath.  There was a natural lustre in her
+hair, uncommon among indoor people.  Her steps took her straight to
+where she wanted to go.  She made no false motions.  When she looked
+for something in her desk, she opened the drawer where it was, not the
+one above or below.  Her muscles, nerves and proportions were so
+balanced that it was difficult for her to fall into an ungraceful
+posture.
+
+Considering these manifold excellent qualities, the most remarkable
+thing about her, he thought, was that she had not long before been
+invited to embellish the mansion and the motors of a millionaire.  He
+wrote enthusiastically to his mother suggesting that it would be nice
+to invite her to Rogersville for a portion at least of her coming
+summer vacation, which brought a most unhappy smile to his mother's
+lips.  But since he did not repeat his request, the invitation was not
+extended.
+
+The first time that he knew he regarded her as a woman rather than as a
+workwoman was one afternoon when the declining sun threw its light
+higher and higher into the big office.  A ray shone on and from her
+patent leather belt and into his eyes.  He looked up annoyed from his
+work.  She was sitting a few desks ahead by the window, her back toward
+him.  Before very long the thing had fascinated him and he found
+himself immensely concerned with the climb of the sun up her shirt
+waist.
+
+It reached her collar in a manner entirely marvelous and then precisely
+at the moment when he was finally to know its effect upon her hair, she
+lowered the shade.  What luck!
+
+The next day was cloudy.  The next was Saturday and she quit at twelve,
+before the sun got around to her window.  Monday she lowered the shade
+before the light got even to her shoulder.  Little did she know of the
+repressed anguish she was so bringing to the gloomy young hustler
+behind her.  But on Tuesday the sunlight reached her hair momentarily
+as she leaned back in her chair and gleamed and glittered there, a
+coruscation of glory for fully thirty seconds--long enough to overturn
+in catastrophe his thirty years and their slowly built purposes.
+
+He resolved hereafter to deal primarily not in life insurance, but in
+life, which meant Georgia.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+A SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY
+
+During the ensuing days Mason was hopeless for work.
+
+From the office books he found out where she lived, slyly as he
+supposed, but not so slyly that the information clerk didn't tell
+someone, who told someone who teased Georgia at the luncheon club, not
+thereby displeasing her.  For he was a good-looking fellow and capable;
+furthermore, he had always kept himself to himself, so putting several
+noses out of joint, it was said.
+
+He had moments of anguished self-reproach as he sat in his room in his
+boarding house, his chair tilted against the wall under the gas jet,
+his coat on his bed, his derby hat tilted back on his head.
+
+He knew that his life had been utterly unworthy.  He had drunk it to
+the lees, pretty near.  But now he was through with all that.
+Hereafter, for her sake, he would conquer himself and others.
+
+His sense of beauty was limited by inheritance and by disuse, but now
+he began to draw upon all the poetry in his soul--not to write to her,
+but to think of her.
+
+His imagination, naturally fertile and strengthened by the practice of
+his profession, centered itself on the question of his first kiss from
+her--where, when and how should it happen?  He called all great lovers
+from Romeo to Robert W. Chambers to his aid--it must be under the moon,
+the fragrance about them.  And a lake, a little lake, for the moon to
+shine upon and magically increase its magic.  He remembered the moon on
+the river back in Rogersville, with the other girl--the first one.
+What mere children they were.  That was puppy love, but this was love;
+love such as no man ever felt before for a woman.
+
+He was hard hit.
+
+The lake suggested a train of thought, so he packed his bag on Saturday
+and went to southern Wisconsin.  The resort dining room was full of
+noisy youths and maidens who, in his decided opinion had no proper
+reverence for love, though they seemed perfectly amorous whenever he
+suddenly came upon a pair of them as much as one hundred yards from the
+hotel.
+
+He chartered a flatbottom after supper to row out alone and contemplate
+the moon and her, but the voices of the night and the frogs were
+overwhelmed by the detestable mandolins tinkling "My Wife's Gone to the
+Country, Hurray."
+
+When finally he turned in he discovered there was a drummers' poker
+party on the other side of the pine partition, so it wasn't until
+nearly daylight he dozed off, to wake a couple of hours later when the
+dishes began to rattle.
+
+The boat concessionaire reported pickerel in the lake and he joined the
+Sunday piscatorial posse.  He returned with two croppies and the record
+of many bites, mostly on himself.
+
+He concluded he wasn't interested in fishing anyway.  It was just a
+device to cheat himself and make himself suppose he was having a good
+time.  He couldn't have a good time and wouldn't if he could, until he
+knew her, until at least he knew her.  Why he had never said ten words
+to her more than "Good morning" and "Good evening."  He would call on
+her; he had her address.  He would go to her apartment and ring the
+bell and say, "Miss Connor, I have come to call on you.  Do you mind?"
+
+No, that would hardly do.  It was too bold.  He mustn't seem at all
+crude to her, but mannerly and suave and self-possessed.  A girl, and
+especially one of her sort, would object to crudeness.  He must be very
+courtly, knightly.  Flowers on her desk every morning, perhaps, not a
+card, not a word.  A handful of sweet blossoms each day to greet her
+and bear her silent testimony that there was one who----  She would
+know, of course, in due time whence they came.  Not that he would ever
+so much as hint at his gifts, but her woman's intuition would tell her.
+And when she did realize in this way his silent though passionate
+devotion, she would thank him, gently and sadly, and a bond would be
+made between them.
+
+But then, what if the other people in the office had intuition, too, or
+saw him bringing in flowers!  No, decidedly that wouldn't do.
+
+And then--just in time for him to catch the 3:40--a blinding flash of
+warning illumined his whole being.  What if, while he was there
+shilly-shallying at a summer resort, some other fellow was with her in
+Chicago at that very moment!
+
+"What if"--a ridiculous way to put it.  Wasn't it sure in the nature of
+things, that at that very moment some other man was with her?
+
+He caught the 3:40.  He would call on her that very evening and if
+indeed he didn't declare himself bluntly in so many words--hadn't he
+heard of numberless women who had been won at first sight!--he would at
+least intimate to her strongly, unmistakably, that she was the object
+of his respectful consideration and attention.
+
+There were others in the field.  It was time he declared himself in,
+too.
+
+It wasn't until 5:37, when the train reached Clybourn Junction, that he
+began to repent his precipitancy.  He was going to see her again in the
+office to-morrow, wasn't he?  Wouldn't it look queer if he went out to
+call on her to-night without warning?  She might be wholly unprepared
+for callers and annoyed.
+
+But his presumable rival bobbed up again and spoiled his supper, so
+after dropping his bag at home, he walked presently into the entry way
+of 2667 Pearl Avenue.  Her name was not on the left side; perhaps she
+had moved.  No, here on the right, floor 3, in letters of
+glory--"Connor." Above it, "Talbot."
+
+Who was Talbot?  Married sister, roommate or landlady from whom she
+sublet?  He raised his thumb to the bell.  He had never before
+experienced a moment of such acute consciousness.
+
+Wait a second--she might not be in.  He walked out and looked up at the
+third floor right.  There was certainly a light, a bright one, and the
+window was open and the curtain fluttering out.
+
+Somebody was in.  It might be Talbot.  In that case he wouldn't go up
+or leave his name either.  It certainly was none of Talbot's business,
+whoever Talbot was.
+
+He pressed the button under her name.  "Yes?"  Heavens above, it was
+she, Georgia, the woman herself.
+
+"Yes, who is it!" came the voice once more.
+
+"Stevens."
+
+"Mr. Stevens?" with a decided tone of interrogation.  Evidently she did
+not place him at all.  Probably not, with so many other men about her.
+It would be absurd to suppose anything else.  She didn't place
+him--might not even recognize him out of the office.
+
+"Mason Stevens of the office."
+
+"Oh, Mr. Stevens of the office.  How do you do?" and she spoke with a
+delightful access of cordiality.  "Will you come up?"
+
+"Just for a minute, if I may.  I won't keep you long."
+
+"Wait, I'll let you in."  The click-click-click sounded and he was on
+his way upstairs.  She opened the door for him.
+
+A quick glance.  There was no other man in the room, anyway.
+
+"Good evening," she said.  "Won't you come in?"
+
+"Why, yes," then very apologetically; "that is, if I'm not putting you
+out."
+
+"No, indeed."  He sat and paused.  She smiled and did not help him.
+
+"You're nicely located here, Miss Connor."
+
+"Oh, yes, we like it."
+
+"Near the express station?"
+
+"Yes.  I usually get a seat in the morning, but not coming back, of
+course."
+
+"About three blocks, isn't it?"
+
+"Three long ones."
+
+"A nice walk."
+
+"Yes, this time of year, but not so nice in winter when they don't
+clean the snow off the sidewalks."
+
+He felt that it was a bit jerky.  Perhaps he should first have asked
+her permission to call.  What a goat he was not to think of that
+beforehand instead of now.  He paused until the pause grew
+uncomfortable.
+
+She tried to help him out, "We're out of the smoke belt, that's one
+thing."
+
+He was seated in a rocking chair and began to rock violently, then
+suddenly he stopped and leaned toward her, his elbows on his knees.
+
+"I've been slow getting to the point," he remarked abruptly, "but I
+came here on business."
+
+"Oh, I wasn't just sure what."
+
+Stevens took half a dozen life insurance advertising folders from his
+pocket.  "You know this literature we're using," he said, running two
+or three through his fingers and indicating them by their titles, "'Do
+You Want Your Wife to Want When She's a Widow?' 'Friendship for the
+Fatherless,' 'Death's Dice Are Loaded.'"
+
+"Oh, yes."  She took them from him and read aloud.  "'Over the Hills to
+the Poorhouse,' with a photograph of it, 'Will Your Little Girl Have to
+Scrub?' with thumbnail pictures of scrub ladies.  Ugh, what a gloomy
+trade we're in, aren't we, Mr. Stevens?"
+
+"This is the line of talk that gets the business."  He spoke earnestly,
+tapping the folders.  "You can't make papa dig up premiums for forty or
+fifty years unless you first scare him and scare him blue about his
+family."
+
+"Yes, I suppose so."
+
+"And what I came for is--well, will you--would you just as soon help me
+get up some more of these?"
+
+"You mean work with you on them?"  She was truly surprised.
+
+"Exactly."
+
+She hesitated and then she said it was impossible, but that she
+appreciated his kind compliment, was flattered by it and thanked him
+deeply, deeply.  For, of course, she realized that Mr. Stevens was one
+of the very best men in town at that sort of work and she was afraid
+she couldn't possibly be of any real use to him.
+
+"Not at all, not at all;" he was talking business now and waved aside
+her objections with his customary confidence.  Everybody always
+objected to his plans for them when he began talking, but in the end he
+was apt to change their minds.  That was why he was considered a
+premier solicitor.  "You've a clear head and a good ear for words,
+that's what's needed, and----"
+
+"But--" she tried to interrupt.
+
+"And ideas, that's the point, ideas.  You're clever."
+
+"What makes you think so?"
+
+"I don't think so; I know."
+
+"I'm flattered," she said firmly.  "But no--really."
+
+"Well, I won't take that for a definite answer yet." Of course not.  He
+never did.  "I want you to think it over.  I have the utmost confidence
+in the scheme and your ability to carry it out.  You can tell me Monday
+in the office what you decide."
+
+"I can tell you now, Mr. Stevens."
+
+He rose.  "Think it over anyway.  You may change your mind."
+
+She rose, too, not encouraging him to stay.
+
+"Miss Connor," he spoke gravely, "there was something else I came to
+ask you.  I'd like to know you personally as well as in a business way,
+if you'd just as soon.  May I come to see you now and then?"
+
+She did not answer.  She saw that it counted with him.  He seemed
+really to care.  She must not be brusque with him.  He must not think
+her merely light-minded, unappreciative of the compliment of his
+interest.  She must tell him of her marriage.
+
+"Of course, if you'd rather not for any reason, why, that settles it,"
+there was a check in his voice, "and we'll say no more about it." Still
+she did not answer.  He held out his hand.  "Well, good-bye, then."
+
+"Good-bye."
+
+He went to the door and opened it.
+
+"Mr. Stevens."
+
+"Yes, Miss Connor."
+
+"I think you ought to know that isn't my name."
+
+"What is it, then?"
+
+"Mrs. Connor."
+
+"Mrs. Connor?  Missis Connor?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+He came down into the room.  His glance traveled rapidly to the four
+corners, like a wild animal dodging men and dogs.  He had one question
+left, one chance of escape.
+
+"Are you a widow?" he said.
+
+"No, a married woman."
+
+Stevens went slowly out of the door without replying.  The woman whom
+he loved belonged to another man.  It was like the end of the world.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+THE LIFE FORCE
+
+If Mason had been in the _jeunesse dorée_ he must now have gone to
+Monte Carlo to buck the tiger or to India to shoot him.
+
+As it was, he smoked all night and turned up at the office half an hour
+ahead of time in a voluble, erratic mood, brought about by suppressing
+so much excitement within himself.  If he had known how to tell his
+troubles to a friend over a glass of beer he might have had an easier
+time of it in his life.  But he wasn't that sort.  He took things hard
+and kept them in.
+
+He decided that the best thing to do with his sentiment for Georgia was
+to strangle it.  Whenever he caught himself thinking of her, which
+would certainly be often at first, he must turn his mind away.  He must
+avoid seeing her; if they met accidentally he would give no further
+sign than a curt nod.
+
+He remembered the farmers used to say that there was one thing to do
+with Canada thistles--keep them under, never let the sun shine on them.
+His love for this other man's wife was like a thistle.  He must keep it
+under, never let the sun shine on it.
+
+He did it thoroughly.  He nodded to her in the most indifferent way in
+the world when they happened to meet, but he found no occasion to stop
+at her desk to chat an instant.  Two weeks of his change of manner
+began to pique her.  He was acting in a rather absurd way, she thought.
+After all they weren't lovers who had quarreled, but simply
+acquaintances, friends after a fashion, fellow workers.  Why shouldn't
+they continue to be friends?  It would be amusing to have some one
+besides the family and the girls to talk to.
+
+She would not let him treat her in this stiff way any longer, just
+because she had had the bad luck to marry a bad man years before.  What
+rubbish that was.  And what self-consciousness on his part.  Men had a
+very guilty way of looking at things.
+
+They met quite or almost quite by accident in front of the office
+building during the noon hour of the following day.  He was about to
+pass without stopping.
+
+"How do you do, Mr. Stevens?"  Her voice was quite distinct.
+
+So he turned and lifted his hat.  "How do you do!"
+
+She did not precisely move toward him, but she did so contrive the
+pause that it was up to him, if he weren't to be boorish, to stop for a
+moment and speak with her.
+
+She threw a disarming candor into her first question.  "Is there any
+particular reason," said she, "why we are no longer friends?"
+
+"Friends?"
+
+"Yes.  You've been frowning at me for about three weeks and I haven't
+the least idea how I've offended you."
+
+He did not answer immediately and his expression hardened.
+
+"There, you're doing it now," said she with apparent perplexity.  "Why?"
+
+"You know," he spoke doggedly.
+
+"No, I don't."
+
+"Yes you do, too," he answered curtly and roughly.  "You do."
+
+"Just as you please."  She turned from him, apparently offended by his
+tone, slightly nodded and walked slowly away.  She was of medium
+height, no more than that, and slender.  A brute of a man bumped her
+with his shoulder as he passed her.
+
+Stevens waited for the brute of a man, dug his elbow into his ribs and
+overtook her at the Madison Street corner.
+
+"Miss--Mrs. Connor, I didn't mean to be rude."
+
+"You were a little, you know."
+
+"Will you excuse me?"
+
+"Why, of course."
+
+He didn't quite know what to do next, so he awkwardly extended his
+hand.  She took it with a man-to-man shake of wiping out the score,
+which completely demolished his cynical attitude in reference to
+platonic friendship.
+
+"Where were you bound for?" he asked.
+
+"Nowhere, just strolling.  Over to the lake front for a breath of air."
+
+"May I walk along?"
+
+"Surely."
+
+On their way back they reflected that they had been without lunch, so
+they stopped at a drug store for a malted milk with egg, chocolate
+flavor, nutmeg on top.
+
+They touched their glasses together.
+
+"It's very nourishing," said he with wonderment.
+
+"Very," she replied, delightedly; "very."
+
+They returned to their work in that state of high elation induced by
+interviews such as theirs, wherein the spoken words mean twenty times
+what they say--and more.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+THE PRETENDERS
+
+Georgia and Mason did not overpass the outward signs and boundaries of
+platonism, learning to avoid not merely evil, but the appearance of
+evil.  When they met in the hundred-eyed office they were casual.
+
+During the autumn they took long walks together every Sunday.  There
+had been a dry spell that year, lasting with hardly a break from the
+fore part of June, which baked the land and sucked out the wells and
+put the Northern woods in danger of their lives.  The broad corn leaves
+withered yellow and the husbandmen of the great valley protested that
+the ears were but "lil' nubbins with three inches of nuthin' at the
+tips, taperin' down to a point, and where'll we get our seed next
+spring?"
+
+When the huge downpour came at last and by its miracle saved the crop
+which had been given up for lost a fortnight since, Mason cursed the
+day, for it fell on the first day of the week and cost him, item, one
+walk and talk with Georgia Connor.  She stood so near his eyes as to
+hide from his sight a billion bushels parching in the valley--though he
+was country bred.
+
+To her their Sundays together brought not a joy as definite as his, but
+rather a sense of contentment, of relief from the precision of the
+other days of her week.  It pleased her to wander to the big aviary and
+look at the condors and cockatoos and wonder about South America where
+they came from, then to stroll slowly over to the animals and have a
+vague difference of opinion with him about whether a lion could whip a
+tiger.
+
+She thought so because the lion was the king of beasts, but Mason
+didn't, because he'd read of a fight where it had been tried.  Once he
+even grew a trifle heated because she wouldn't listen to reason and
+fact and stuck to the lion because he'd been called the king of beasts,
+whereas all naturalists knew the elephant and the gorilla and the
+rhinoc----  There she interrupted him with a laugh and called him a boy
+and too literal.
+
+Every Sunday they had this same dispute until finally they both learned
+to laugh about it and made it a joke between them, and she told him he
+was doing much better.  They walked by the inside lake and wondered if
+the wild ducks and geese on the wooded isle liked to have to stay
+there, and they took lunch when they got good and ready, perhaps not
+until two or three or even four o'clock in the afternoon.
+
+She always went home for supper, but often she came out again
+afterwards, and took the car down town to a Sunday Evening Ethical
+Society which foregathered in an old-fashioned theatre building.
+
+There was almost always some well-known speaker whose name was often in
+the papers, perhaps a professor or a radical Ohio Mayor or a labor
+lawyer, to address them on up-to-date topics like Municipal Ownership
+in Europe or the Russian Revolution or the Androcentric World, which
+showed women had as much right to vote as men, or non-resistance, a
+kind of Christianity that wasn't practical.  Stevens didn't like that
+lecture much.
+
+Jane Addams spoke once about the children that lived in her
+neighborhood.  He thought her talk the best of all; so did Georgia.  He
+said to her that Jane Addams was as much of a saint as any of those
+old-timers that were burnt and pulled to pieces and fed to lions, and a
+useful kind of a saint as well, because she helped children instead of
+just believing in something or other.  Georgia didn't answer his remark
+at the time, but nearly half an hour later as she was bidding him good
+night she had him repeat it to her, and the next day she told him that
+what he had said about Miss Addams was very interesting.
+
+They had organ music at these meetings and a collection, so that he
+felt it was the next thing to going to church.  But Georgia in arguing
+out the matter with herself concluded that there was so little religion
+in the services that in attending them she violated the Church's law
+against worshiping with heretics hardly more than if she went to a
+political meeting.  She would never go to a regular Protestant service
+with Mason, even if he asked her.  She made up her mind firmly on that
+point.  So perhaps it was as well he didn't ask her.
+
+Her waking memories of Jim were now much fainter and dimmer.  She tried
+not to think of him at all.  She refused to let her mother or Al speak
+his name or make allusion to him.  At the beginning, just after his
+departure, mama had harped on the subject until she thought it would
+drive her crazy.
+
+Over and over and over again she traversed the same ground--about his
+being her husband, and Christian charity, and one more trial, and the
+disgrace of it, and that it was the first time such a thing ever
+happened in the family.
+
+Finally in self-defense and to save herself from being upset every
+night when she was tired and worn out anyway, she told her mother that
+the next time she mentioned Jim's name she would leave the room.  And
+she only had actually to do this three times before poor mama
+succumbed, as she always did when she was met firmly.  However, she
+still managed to say a volume in Jim's favor with her deep sighs and
+her "Oh, Georgia's," but Georgia always pretended she didn't know the
+meaning of such signs and manifestations.  Of course, especially at the
+beginning, her husband's face often came unbidden between her and her
+page, but she gathered up her will each time to banish it again, and
+it's surprising what a woman can do if she only makes up her mind and
+_sticks to it_.
+
+But her dreams were the trouble.  Jim would enter them.  She didn't
+know how to keep him out.  And he always came, sometimes two or three
+nights in succession, to bring her pain.
+
+She usually appointed her Sunday rendezvous for an hour before noon at
+Shakespeare's statue in the Park, and sailed off cheerily in her best
+bib and tucker to meet Mason, leaving behind her a fine trail of
+excuses, a complete new set each week, to explain to mama why she
+couldn't go to mass.  On this particular morning she said she had a
+date with a girl-friend from the office.
+
+With the best intention in the world she was never on time and always
+kept him waiting.  She was so unalterably punctual for six days a week
+that the seventh day it was simply impossible.
+
+Stevens usually became slightly irritated during these few
+minutes--what business man wouldn't?--and referred to his watch at
+hundred-second intervals, determined to ask her once and for all why
+she wasted so much time in tardiness.  But when finally he
+distinguished her slim little figure in the Sunday throng that was
+streaming toward him, his impatience left not a wrack behind.
+
+They started gayly northward, bantering each other in urban repartee.
+As they passed gray Columbus Hospital their mood swerved suddenly and
+they talked of sickness and death and immortality.
+
+Her belief was orthodox, but it did not hold her as vividly as it held
+the old folk in the old days.  Had she lived nearer to the miracles of
+the sun going down in darkness and coming up in light; or thunderstorms
+and young oats springing green out of black, with wild mustard
+interspersed among them like deeds of sin; of the frost coming out of
+the ground; and the leaves dying and the trees sleeping; she would
+perhaps have lived nearer to the miracles of bread and wine, of Christ
+sleeping that the world may wake.
+
+But she lived in a place of obvious cause and effect.  When the sun
+went down, the footlights came up for you if you had a ticket, and
+man's miracle banished God's even though you might be in the flying
+balcony and the tenor almost a block away.  Thunderstorms meant that it
+was reckless to telephone; oats, wheat and corn, something they
+controlled on the board of trade; the melting of the snows showed the
+city hall was weak on the sewer side--what else could you expect of
+politicians?--the dying leaves presaged the end of the Riverview season
+and young Al's excitement over the world's series.
+
+Living in the country puts a God in one's thoughts, for man did not
+make the country and its changes, yet they are there.  Farmers pray for
+rain or its cessation according to their needs.  To live in the city is
+to diminish God and the seeming daily want of Him, for man built his
+own city of steel and steam and stone, unhelped, did he not?
+
+God may have made the pansies, but He did not make "the loop."  His
+majesty is hidden from its people by their self-sufficing skill, and
+they turn their faces from Him.  West-siders do not pray for universal
+transfers.
+
+Never had Georgia questioned her faith.  Its extent remained as great
+as ever.  She had consciously yielded no part of her creed.  But its
+living quality was infected by the daily realism of her life, as spring
+ice is honeycombed throughout with tiny fissures before its final
+sudden disappearance.
+
+So she talked to Stevens of her convictions, but in a calm
+dispassionate way, without emotional fervor.
+
+Stevens' great-grandparents whenever they referred to the Romanist
+Church, which was often, spoke of "the scarlet woman" or "the whore of
+Babylon."  His grandparents, products of a softer, weaker generation,
+stopped at adjectives, "papist," "Jesuitical," "idolatrous."
+
+His parents receded still further from the traditions of the Pilgrims.
+Indeed his father, being a popular horse doctor, kept his mouth shut
+altogether on the subject, and his mother seldom went beyond remarking
+that there was considerable superstition in the Catholic service and
+too much form to suit her.
+
+As for the son himself, he could as soon have quarreled about the
+rights and wrongs of the Mexican war as he would about religion.  He
+wasn't especially interested in either.  He thought there was a lot of
+flim-flam for women in all religion, especially in Catholicism.  But it
+was an amiable weakness of the sex, like corsets.  So he let Georgia
+run on, explaining her faith, without interruption.
+
+Then most wretched luck befell them.  Georgia looked up from the tips
+of her toes, being vaguely engaged, as she talked, in stepping on each
+large pebble in the gravel path and her eyes rested squarely upon her
+mother.  Mrs. Talbot mottled; Georgia blushed.
+
+All progress was temporarily arrested; then the older woman puffed out
+her chest and waddled away with all the dignity at her summons.  But
+she could not resist the Parthian shot--what Celt can!--and she turned
+to throw back over her shoulder, "Who's your girl-friend, Georgia?"
+Her teeth clicked and she continued her departure.
+
+Stevens realized that there had been a contretemps of some sort and
+that it was his place, as a man of the world, to laugh it off.
+
+"Who's the old pouter pigeon?" he inquired.
+
+"Mama."
+
+"Oh!"
+
+Feeling that candor was now thrust upon her, Georgia proceeded to
+explain to Stevens that she had never explained about him to her
+mother, for mama couldn't possibly understand, being old-fashioned and
+prejudiced in some regards.
+
+"So you've made me fib for you," she finished.  "Aren't you ashamed!"
+
+"Yes," said he, in truth much gratified by her clandestineness.
+
+"But what I don't see is----," he began, then broke off.
+
+"Is what?"
+
+"Is why you should be so disturbed about your _mother's_ knowing."
+
+"I've told you--for the sake of peace and a quiet life."
+
+"But what about your husband?"  He blurted it out suddenly, the word
+which had crucified him since his one and only visit to her home; the
+word which he had kept dumb between them until now.  "What about him?
+Doesn't he mind?"
+
+"He left me six months ago.  You never supposed I would take a man's
+bread and--fool him, did you, Mason?"  She called him by his name for
+the first time.
+
+"I didn't know," he muttered, "I've been to hell and back thinking of
+it."
+
+"How did you suppose it would come out?" she asked, fascinated
+objectively by the drama of her life.
+
+"I felt we were playing bean-bag with dynamite--and we ought to
+quit--made up my mind--while I was waiting for you this morning to tell
+you this must be the last time, because we were drifting straight
+into----"  He paused.
+
+"Into what?"  There was a touch of gentlest irony in her tone.
+
+"Into trouble, lots of it."  There was a touch of apology in his.
+
+"And you didn't want trouble, lots of it?"  Her irony was not less.
+"At least not on my account?"
+
+"I was thinking of what would be best for all of us.  I was trying to
+do the square thing--the greatest happiness for the greatest number."
+There was a pause, unsympathetic.  "Wasn't that right?" he ended with
+no great confidence.
+
+"Why, of course, perfectly right," she assented heartily.  "It shows
+consideration.  You considered the case systematically from all sides.
+Yours, and mine, and my husband's, and the rest of the family's, and
+the rest of yours, too, I suppose, didn't you?"  She looked extremely
+efficient and spoke in her business voice with a little snap to her
+words.
+
+She was quite unfair in taking this tack with unhappy Stevens, who,
+however often he thought of his duty in these twisted premises, would
+surely not have done it if she beckoned him away.  For she owned the
+only two hands in the world which he wanted to hold.
+
+A woman, however, prefers to be the custodian of her own morals and it
+gratifies her at most no more than slightly to find that her lover has
+been plotting with himself to preserve her virtue.  It is for the man
+to ask and for her to deny, sadly but sweetly--and she doesn't care to
+be anticipated.  Especially when she is self-perceptibly interested.
+
+"But since you are already separated from----"
+
+"Yes, that makes it pleasanter all around, doesn't it?" she led him on
+most treacherously.
+
+"Why, of course--that's what I was saying," he blundered.  "Now I can
+ask you to----"
+
+"Mason, I've a frightful headache, the sun perhaps--and I think I will
+go home and lie down, if you don't mind."
+
+He looked up in some amazement at the lord of day half hidden by the
+haze in his November station, and it suddenly occurred to him that
+woman is a various and mutable proposition always.
+
+"What's the matter with you, anyway?"
+
+"Nothing," she responded with deliberate unconvincingness, "nothing in
+the world, but a headache."  She held out her hand.  "Don't bother to
+come with me.  We might be seen.  Good-bye."  And she was off.
+
+It was a winding gravel path and she was lost behind a curving hedge
+before he started in pursuit.  She quickened her pace when she heard
+his step behind and it was almost a walking race before he overtook her.
+
+"Georgia," he exclaimed, somewhat ruffled by her unreasonableness.  She
+neither turned her head nor answered.
+
+"Georgia!" he repeated more loudly.  Then he took her wrist and
+forcibly arrested her.
+
+"Please let me go," she requested with supreme dignity, "you are
+hurting me."
+
+"Not until you hear what I have to say.  Will you marry me?"
+
+"Marry you?"  She dropped her eyes before his frowning ones.  The
+shoulders which had been thrown so squarely back seemed to yield like
+her will and drooped forward into softer lines.
+
+"Yes," he tightened his hold on her wrist, "will you?"
+
+"I am a Catholic."
+
+"But isn't there some way around that?"  Your man of business believes
+there is some way around everything.
+
+"No.  Divorce and remarriage aren't permitted to us."
+
+"Don't they ever annul a marriage?"
+
+"Not if it has been marriage."  A look of misery came over his face.
+She perceived it and went steadily on.  "I had a child once--that died."
+
+He dropped her hand, unconsciously to himself, but she felt it as a
+clear signal between them.
+
+"You see how little you have known me," she said softly.  "Poor old
+fellow, I'm sorry.  Too bad it had to end like this."  Her eyes were
+now swimming in tears which she did not try to conceal.  "Don't you
+see, dear, that is why I kept putting off telling you things about my
+affairs, and why I had tried to keep it--friendship, because I knew
+when we came as far as this we would have to stop."
+
+"It will never stop," he said tensely, "never."
+
+Response seemed to sweep through her suddenly, bewildering her by its
+unexpected strength.
+
+"Perhaps not," she assented slowly, "if--if we--dare."
+
+"Georgia," he pleaded, "you know that I----"
+
+"Yes," in a whisper, "I know."
+
+"And do you care, too?"
+
+She looked up, and her answer was plain for him to read.
+
+"More than you will ever know, Mason," she said.
+
+"Georgia, are you a devout Catholic?  Does it mean all of life to you
+here and hereafter?"
+
+"No, not very devout.  Nothing like mother, for instance.  I have grown
+very careless about some things."
+
+"Would you always be governed by the teaching of the Church in this
+matter--always--never decide for yourself?"
+
+"When it came to such a big thing," she said slowly, "I don't think I'd
+dare disobey."
+
+"What are you afraid of--future punishment?"
+
+"Why, yes, partly that," she smiled; "it isn't a very jolly prospect,
+you know."
+
+He was truly astonished.  He supposed that everybody nowadays, even
+Catholics, had tacitly agreed to give up hell.  Hell was too
+ridiculously unreasonable to be believed in any more.
+
+"Georgia," he asked, "have you ever looked much at the stars?"
+
+"Why, yes; once in awhile.  Last Sunday evening at Bismarck Garden Al
+and I found the dipper--it was just as plain--is that what you mean?
+Of course I don't pretend to be much of an astronomer."
+
+"Some nights," he said, "when it's clear I go up on the roof and lie on
+my back, and, well, it's a great course in personal modesty.  Some of
+those stars, those little points of light, are as much bigger than our
+whole world as an elephant is bigger than a mosquito, and live as much
+longer."
+
+"Of course," she answered, "we know that everything is bigger than
+people used to think, but still couldn't God have made it all, just the
+same?"
+
+"Do you honestly believe," he rejoined, speaking very earnestly, intent
+on shaking her faith, if that were possible, "that Whoever or Whatever
+was big enough to put the stars in the sky is small enough to take
+revenge forever on a tiny little molecule like you--or me?  Do you
+honestly suppose that after you are dead, perhaps a long time dead,
+this mighty God will hunt for you through all the heavens, and when he
+has found you, you poor little atom of a dead dot, that he will torment
+and pester you forever and ever because you had once for a space no
+longer than the wink of an eye acted according to the nature he gave
+you?  If that is your God, he has put nothing in his universe as cruel
+as Himself."
+
+She frowned in a puzzled way for a few seconds, looking at him with an
+odd little wide-eyed stare, then shook her head slowly.
+
+"Yes," said he in answer.  "Some day you will take your life in your
+own hands and use it.  You're not the stuff they make nuns out of.
+There's too much vitality in you.
+
+"How old are you?" he asked suddenly.
+
+"Twenty-six."
+
+"Twenty-six and ready to quit?  I don't believe it."
+
+"You don't understand, Mason," she answered, "you can't.  You're not a
+Catholic.  Catholicism is different from all other creeds.  It is not
+just something you think and argue about, but it has you--you belong to
+it; it is as much a part of you as your blood and bones."  There was a
+finality in her voice, a resignation of self, which bespoke the vast
+accumulated will of the Church operating upon and through her.
+
+Stevens knew suddenly that she was not an individualized woman in the
+same sense that he was an individualized man, with the private
+possibility of doing what he pleased so long as he did not interfere
+with the private possibilities of others; he realized that in certain
+important intimate matters such as the one which had arisen between
+them she was without power of decision, the decision having been made
+for her many centuries ago; and he felt the awe which comes to every
+man when first he is confronted by the Roman Catholic Church.
+
+"You mean there is no way out of it--but death?--your husband's death?"
+His self-confidence seemed to have departed as if he, too, had met fate
+in the road.
+
+"Yes," she answered gently, "that is the only way."  And then she
+smiled with some little effort, but still she smiled, for she detested
+gloom on her day off.  "Oh, Mason," said she, "why wasn't grandpa a
+Swede?"
+
+He looked at her with amazement and not without a trace of
+disapprobation, for her eyes were dancing.  Was she actually making
+jokes about his misery--to say nothing of hers--if indeed she felt any?
+He was learning more about women every minute.
+
+Now she was practically giggling.  He frowned deeper and sighed.
+Perhaps, perhaps everything was for the best, after all.  He might as
+well tell her so, too.  No reason to make himself wretched for
+something she seemed to think hilariously humorous.
+
+"Well, Georgia, I must say," he began portentously--'twas the voice of
+the husband--almost.  She could hear him complain.  Whereat she simply
+threw back her head and laughed again.
+
+He noticed, as he had often noticed, that her strong little teeth were
+white and regular, that her positive little nose was straight and
+slender, and the laughter creases about her eyes reminded him of the
+time she thought it such fun to be caught in Ravinia Park in the rain
+without an umbrella.
+
+So presently he tempered his frown, then put it away altogether, and
+his eyes twinkled and he turned the corners of his mouth up instead of
+down.
+
+"Oh, dear me," he mocked, half in fun and half not, "as the fellow
+says, 'we can't live with 'em and we can't live without 'em.'"
+
+But she, who had been reading him like a book in plain print, asked,
+"Come, tell aunty your idea of a jolly Sunday in the park with your
+best girl.  To sit her on a bench and make her listen while you mourn
+for the universe?"
+
+"But what are we going to do about it?" he asked solemnly, "that's what
+I want to know."
+
+"Do?" she responded with a certain gay definiteness, "do nothing."
+
+"You mean not see each other any more at all?" he asked desperately.
+"I absolutely refuse."
+
+"No, silly, of course I don't mean that.  We'll go on just as before,
+friends, comrades, pals."
+
+"When we love each other--when we've told each other we love each
+other?"
+
+"Certainly.  What's that got to do with it?"
+
+"It would be the merest pretense," he declared solemnly.
+
+"Then let's begin the pretense now, and go up and throw a peanut at the
+elephant.  Come along."  She hooked her arm into his.  Her levity of
+behavior undoubtedly got past him at times.
+
+"Georgia"--he was once more on the verge of remonstrance--"if you cared
+as you say you do, if you _loved_ me as I l----"
+
+She unhooked her arm and now she was serious enough.
+
+"Don't you understand," she said, "what I mean?  We can't talk about
+that any more."
+
+"You mean not at all?"
+
+"Precisely."
+
+"But what if I can't conceal the most important thing in my whole life?
+What if I can't smirk and smile about it?  What if I am not as good an
+actor as you?  What if I can't pretend?  What then?"  He was very, very
+fierce with her.
+
+"Then I suppose I'll have to go home."  They stood irresolute, facing
+each other, neither wishing to carry it too far.
+
+"Not that that would be much fun----  Oh, come, don't be silly--let's
+go attack the elephant.  What must be, must be, you know."
+
+She paused to allow him time to yield with grieved dignity, then she
+headed for the animal house; he trailed in silence about half a step
+behind her during the first hundred yards, but finally sighed and
+surrendered and then fell into step and pretended during the rest of
+the afternoon with quite decent success.
+
+So his education began.  And though he was by no means pliable
+material, she managed, being vastly the more expert, to keep him
+pretending with hardly a lapse throughout the winter.
+
+She found it more difficult, however, to keep herself pretending.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+MOXEY
+
+Moxey was a Jew boy and a catcher.  His last name ended in sky, and he
+came from the West-side ghetto.  His father and mother came from the
+pale in Russia when Moxey's elder brother Steve was in arms and before
+Moxey himself appeared.
+
+Moxey would have been captain of the Prairie View Semi-Pro. B. B. Club,
+if merit ruled the world.  But there was the crime of nineteen
+centuries ago against him, so they made McClaughrey captain; Georgia's
+sixteen-year-old brother Al played third base.
+
+The Prairie Views had one triumph in the morning, it being Sunday, the
+day for two and sometimes three games.  They had the use of one of the
+diamonds on a public playground from Donovan, the wise cop.
+
+I have seen Donovan keep peace and order among eighteen warring lads
+from sixteen to twenty years old by a couple of looks, a smile and a
+silence.  When there was money on the game, too.
+
+There has been good material wasted in Donovan.  Properly environed and
+taught the language, though he doesn't depend on language very much, he
+could have been presiding officer of the French Chamber of
+Deputies--and presided.
+
+It was the ninth inning, last half, tie score, two out, three on, with
+two and three on the batter.  In other words, the precise moment when
+the fictionist is allowed to step in.  Moxey up.
+
+He fouled off a couple, the coachers screeched; the umpire, who was
+also stakeholder, dripped a bit freer and hoped Donovan would stick
+around for a few seconds longer.
+
+The pitcher took a short wind-up and the ball, which seemed to start
+for the platter, reached Moxey in the neighborhood of the heart.  He
+collapsed.  They rallied round the umpire.
+
+"He done it on purpose--the sheeny--he done it on purpose, I tell
+you--he run into it----"
+
+"Naw, ye're a liar!"
+
+"Prove it."
+
+"It's a dead ball--take your base--come in there, youse," waving to the
+man on third.
+
+"We win.  Give us our money."
+
+All participated but Moxey, who lay moaning on the ground by the home
+plate.
+
+Donovan strolled out to the debate and smiled his magic smile.  "Take
+yer base," bawled the emboldened ump, and waved the run in.  Al got
+five dollars for the day's playing and three dollars for the day's
+betting, and the Prairie Views walked off, bats conspicuous on
+shoulders, yelling, "Yah!" at the enemy.
+
+"Chee," said Moxey to his playmates when they reached the family
+entrance, "me for the big irrigation."  And it was so.
+
+Moxey shifted his foot, called his little circle around him close and
+then inserted his dark, fleshless talon into his baseball shirt.  "That
+gave me an awful wallop what win the game," he said; "if I hadn't
+slipped me little pad in after the eight', it might a' put me away,
+understand."  He took out his protection against dead balls, an
+ingenious and inconspicuous felt arrangement to be worn under the left
+arm by right-handed batters.  And all present felt again that there had
+been injustice in the preference of McClaughrey.
+
+Whenever they asked Moxey where he lived, he answered, "West," and let
+it go at that.  He always turned up for the next game, no matter how
+often plans had been changed since he had last seen any of them.  That
+was all they knew about him.  He caught for them, often won for them,
+drank beer with them and then disappeared completely until the next
+half-holiday.
+
+Perhaps Al was his most intimate friend, and Al was the only one who
+learned his secret.  "Say, Al," he blurted out almost fiercely one
+evening, "your folks is Irish, ain't they?"
+
+"Irish-American," corrected Al.
+
+"Well, mine's Yiddishers, and the most Yiddish Yiddishers y'ever see."
+
+Moxey seemed very bitter about it and Al waited for more.
+
+"My old man, well----"  Moxey swallowed.  It seemed to Al as if he
+would not go on, but finally it came out with a rush.  "He pushes a
+cart--yes, sir--honest to God, he pushes a cart--I thought maybe I
+ought to tell you, Al."
+
+"He does?"  It was a shock to the Irish-American, which showed in his
+tone.
+
+"Yes, sir, he does," Moxey answered defiantly, "and if you don't like
+it--why--well, I won't say nuthin' ugly to you, Al--you're only like
+the rest.  S'long."
+
+Al threw his arm around the other's shoulder.  "Forget it, Moxey."
+Which was the only oath ever taken in this particular David and
+Jonathan affair.
+
+Not long afterwards, Moxey proposed to Al attendance at a prizefight
+just across the State line, the Illinois laws being unfavorable to such
+exhibitions of manly skill or brutality, whichever it is.  It was Al's
+first fight.
+
+They boarded a special train, filled with coarse men bent upon coarse
+pleasure.  But then, if they had been bent upon refined pleasure they
+wouldn't have been coarse or it wouldn't have been pleasure.
+
+The prizefighting question illustrates well the gulf between the social
+and the individual conscience and demonstrates that the whole is
+sometimes considerably greater than the sum of its parts.  Probably
+eight out of ten men in this country enjoy seeing two hearty young
+micks belt each other around a padded ring with padded gloves.  But
+they hesitate to come out in the open and proclaim their enjoyment, for
+fear of writing themselves down brutes, and the deepest yearning of the
+American people at the present day is to be gentlemanly and ladylike.
+
+So whenever sparring matches are proposed the community works itself up
+into a state of fake indignation.  All the softer and sweeter elements
+telegraph the Governor and if that isn't enough, pray for him; and
+inasmuch as the Governor gets no immoral support on the other side from
+those who are afraid of jeopardizing their gentlemanliness, he yields,
+and appears in the newspapers as a strong man who dared beard the
+sports, whereas, he was really a frightened politician who didn't dare
+beard the Christian Endeavorers.
+
+One of the most illuminating essays of the late and great William James
+concerned Chautauqua Lake.  He spent a week at that beautiful camp,
+where sobriety and industry, intelligence and goodness, orderliness and
+ideality, prosperity and cheerfulness pervade the air.
+
+There were popular lectures by popular lecturers, a chorus of seven
+hundred voices, kindergartens, secondary schools, every sort of refined
+athletics, and perpetually running soda fountains.
+
+There was neither zymotic disease, poverty, drunkenness, crime or
+police.
+
+There was culture, kindness, cheapness, equality, in short what mankind
+has been striving for under the name of civilization, a foretaste of
+what human society might be, were it all in the light, with no
+suffering and no dark corners.
+
+And yet when he left the camp he quotes himself as saying to himself:
+"Ouf!  What a relief.  Now for something primordial to set the balance
+straight again.  This order is too tame, this culture too second-rate,
+this goodness too uninteresting.  This human drama without a villain or
+a pang; this community so refined that ice cream soda is the utmost
+offering it can make to the brute animal in man; this city simmering in
+the tepid lakeside sun; this atrocious harmlessness of all things--I
+cannot abide with them."
+
+But whether he could or not, the rest of us have to, and the country
+moves Chautauqua-ward with decorous haste.  From anti-canteen and
+anti-racing to anti-fights and anti-tights, the aunties seem to have
+it, the aunties have it, and the bill is passed.
+
+Al viewed this national tendency with mixed feelings; with joy when he
+tasted forbidden fruit and sneaked off across the state line with Moxey
+in a special train full of bartenders and policemen off duty and gay
+brokers and butchers to see more than the law allowed; with sorrow when
+he considered the future of his country, as a gray, flat and feminine
+plain.
+
+The preliminaries had been fought off; there was the customary nervous
+pause before the wind-up.  Young men with official caps forced their
+ways between the packed crowds with "peanuts, ham sandwiches and cold
+bottled beer."  The announcer, a tall young man in shirt sleeves, who
+looked as if he might be a fairly useful citizen himself in case of a
+difference, made the customary appeal.
+
+"Gen-tul-men, on account of the smoke in the at-mos-phere, I am
+requested to request you to quit smoking."  (Pause.)  "The boxers find
+it difficult to box in this at-mos-phere, and you will wit-ness a
+better encounter if you do."  (Applause, but no snuffing of torches.)
+
+"The final contest of this evening's proceedings," called the
+announcer, first to one side of the ring, then to the other, "will be
+between Johnny Fiteon and Kid O'Mara, both of Chicago, _fer th'
+bantamweight champ'nship o' th' world_."
+
+Handclappings and whistlings.  But the announcer, being gifted with the
+dramatic instinct, knew how to work up his climaxes, which, so far as
+he personally was concerned, would culminate with the tap of the gong
+for the first round.  It was his affair to have the house seething with
+excitement when that gong tapped.
+
+"Gen-tul-men," continued the announcer; then he spied two plumes waving
+in the middle distance and made the amend, to delighted sniggers:
+"Ladees and gen-tul-men, I take pleasure in in-ter-ducing Runt Keough
+of Phil-ur-del-fy-a."  A diminutive youth with a wise face stepped in
+the ring and bobbed his head to the cheers, and muttered something to
+the announcer.  "Runt Keough hereby challenges the winner of this bout,
+for the championship of th' world in the 115-poung class, _to a
+finish_."  A tumult ensued.  The Runt backed out of the ring to hoots
+of "fourflusher" and howls of approbation.
+
+"Ladees and gen-tul-men, I now take pleasure in in-ter-ducing to you
+Mr. Ed Fiteon, father and handler of Johnny Fiteon, who wears th'
+bantamweight crown _o' th' world_."
+
+The crowd made evident its vehement gratitude for Ed's share in
+Johnny's creation.
+
+"Chee," whispered Moxey to Al, as they sat close and rapt, with shining
+eyes, on the dollar seats high up and far away, "they'd tear up the
+chairs for Johnny's mother if they'd perduce her."
+
+But now something was happening by the east entrance.  The cheering
+suddenly ceased, A low anxious buzzing whisper ran over the entire
+assemblage.  Men stood up to look eastward regardless of monitions from
+behind to sit down.  Something was cutting through the crowd from the
+east entrance to the ring.  It was Kid O'Mara in his cotton bathrobe
+preceded by a gigantic mulatto and followed by two smaller Caucasians.
+
+Moxey's bony fingers dug suddenly into Al's biceps.  "Kid, you gotta do
+it, Kid, you gotta," he whispered.  "O, fer God's sake, Kid."
+
+Al was surprised.  "Are you with O'Mara?" he asked.
+
+"Am I with him?" answered Moxey with a sob in his voice; "am I with
+him--he's me cousin."
+
+"O'Mara _your_ cousin?"
+
+"Lipkowsky's his right name--same as mine.  Look at his beak and see."
+
+There was no doubt of it.  "Kid O'Mara's" proboscis corroborated
+Moxey's claim.
+
+Johnny's entrance a few minutes later was still more effective and his
+reception warmer.  Fight fans are courtiers, always with the king.
+
+When the two boys stripped, Johnny showed short and stocky, the Kid
+lank and lithe.  Johnny depended on his punch, the Kid on his reach.
+
+They fought ten rounds and it was called a draw, probably a just
+decision inasmuch as the adherents of each contestant proclaimed that
+the referee had been corrupted against their man.
+
+Besides, a draw meant another fight between them with plenty of money
+in the house.
+
+This evening in fistiana was perhaps the most powerful single
+experience which influenced Al at this period of his life.  For a long
+time he sat silent beside Moxey on the return trip, pondering the
+physical beauty of Johnny and the Kid and ruefully comparing their
+bodies with his own.
+
+He sighed, "And now I s'pose your cousin'll go out and kill it
+to-night!"
+
+"Not him," Moxey reassured; "he never touches it in any form or shape,
+understand."
+
+"He's training all the time?" continued Al, bent on deciphering the
+secret ways of greatness.
+
+"Yep.  So you might say."
+
+"Oh," then Al relapsed into silence to wrestle with the angel of
+training all the time.
+
+Like most young fellows, Al regarded his body as the source of all the
+happiness that amounted to anything.  The brain was merely its adjunct,
+its money maker and guide.  Its operations might lead to life, but they
+were not life like the body's.
+
+It flashed upon him in the train bound home from the fight that he
+might achieve joy in either of two ways, by going in for sports or
+"sporting," by perfecting the animal in him or by abusing it, by
+getting into as good shape as Kid O'Mara or into as bad shape as the
+pale waster crumpled in the seat across the aisle.
+
+So began a struggle in him, not yet ended, between the Ormuzd and
+Ahriman of physical condition.  His high achievement thus far has been
+sixth place in a river Marathon swimming race, his completest failure
+thirty-six successive drunken hours in the restricted district.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+FUSION
+
+Al wasn't much of a head at books.  Georgia persuaded him to start in
+high school, but he soon came out, for he found that it interfered with
+the free expression of his personality.  There were too many girls
+about one and he became extremely apprehensive lest he develop into a
+regular lah-de-dah.
+
+Georgia was more afraid of his developing into a regular rough and
+tough, so they had a very intense time of it in the flat while the
+question was under discussion.
+
+Mother Talbot sided with neither of them.  She wanted Al to continue
+his instructions, but in the institutions under the direction of the
+Church.  She couldn't reconcile herself to Al's getting his learning in
+a place where the very name of God was banned, as it was in the public
+schools.
+
+Indeed in her opinion, and you couldn't change it, no, not if you
+argued from now until the clap of doom, the main trouble with
+everything nowdays was impiety and weakening of faith, brought about
+how?  Why, by these public schools, these atheist factories that were
+ashamed of the Saviour.
+
+For her part, she couldn't see her son going to one of them with any
+peace of mind, and she wanted them both to remember, that he would go
+against her consent and in spite of her prayers.  What's more, if he
+was undutiful in this matter he'd probably find himself sitting between
+a Jew and a nigger, which she must say would serve him right.
+
+Did Georgia think, she inquired on another occasion, that the priests
+weren't up to teaching Al, or what?  To be sure, learning was a fine
+thing for a boy starting out in the world and she approved of it as
+much as any one, but who ever heard of an ordinary priest who hadn't
+more wisdom in his little finger than a public school teacher had in
+her whole silly head!
+
+In a church school he would receive instructions not only in temporal,
+but also in divine learning.  He would be taught not merely history and
+mathematics and such like, but also goodness and pure living, which
+were far more important for any young fellow.
+
+But Georgia could not be convinced.  She said she had been to a convent
+and if she had it to do over again she would go to public high
+school--just as Al, who not only was a considerate and loving brother,
+but also could see clearly how sorry he would be in after life if he
+didn't, was about to decide to do.
+
+She finally had her way and Al picked up his burden--and found it not
+so difficult to carry after all.  For he joined the Alpha Beta Gammas
+and rose rapidly in that order, becoming its most expert and weariless
+initiator, a very terror to novitiates.  But precisely at the moment
+when the Alpha Bets reached the zenith of their glory, the skies fell
+upon them--the edict coming from above that all fraternities must go.
+
+Al went too.  The place was indubitably fit for nothing but girls now.
+And whatever Georgia might say, this time he was going to stick, for in
+the last analysis she was a female and her words subject to discount.
+
+He stuck, discounting the female; and she was distressed like a mother
+robin in the tree, whose youngling, that has just fluttered down,
+persists in hopping out of the long grass upon the shaven lawn, when,
+as all robinhood knew, there were cats in the kitchen around the corner
+of the house.
+
+It is the impulse of youth to travel far in search of marvels, a
+vestige, so it is said, of the nomadic stage of human development, when
+the race itself was young.  It was as member of a demonstration crew
+for a vacuum cleaning machine that Al enjoyed his _wanderjahre_.  He
+went among strange people and heard the babbling of many tongues
+without passing out of Chicago.
+
+Like a reporter, or a mendicant friar of old, he knocked on all doors.
+The slouch, the slattern, the miser and the saint opened to him; the
+pale young mother with a child at her breast and another at her skirts
+and both her eyes black and blue; or the gray old sewing woman who for
+her plainness had known neither the bliss nor the horror of a man.  One
+rolling-mill husky in South Chicago chased him down stairs with a stick
+of wood, and another heaved his big arm around him and made him come in
+and wait while little Jerry took the pail to the corner.
+
+He came upon a household where one life was coming as another was
+going, and a little girl of twelve who could no longer contain the
+excitement of the day beneath her small bosom followed him into the
+entry way as he hastily backed out, and whispered between gasps to
+catch her breath her version of family history in the making.
+
+He learned early the value of the smooth tongue, the timely bluff and
+the signed contract; and grew rapidly from boy to man in the
+forcing-bed of the city.
+
+Meanwhile Moxey, not yet twenty, was swimming in a sea of sentiment.
+There was a young Italian girl who worked in the paper-box factory.
+
+"Angelica," said he, "come to the dance to-night."
+
+"Nit," she responded.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Oh, they'd give me the laugh, if I----"  She paused tactfully.
+
+"Account of----," he drew a semi-circle about his nose and laughed
+unhappily.
+
+"We-ell."  It was explicit enough.
+
+"Can't see a guinea has anything on a Yiddisher."  Tit for tat in
+love's badinage.
+
+"I'm no guinea, I'm not," she exclaimed passionately.  "I'm Amurrican."
+
+"So'm I," he answered briskly.  "I'm Amurrican--and I don't wear no
+hoops in my ears."  Perhaps that would hold her for a while.  It did.
+She retreated in tears, thinking of her sire's shame.
+
+But her bosom was deep and her lips were as red as an anarchist flag,
+and her little nose tilted the other way.  So why stay mad with her?
+Her eyebrows nearly met in the center, though she was only sixteen.
+
+And as for dancing--well, he'd looked 'em all over in vaudeville and he
+couldn't see where they had anything on her.  More steps perhaps, but
+no more looks--or class.
+
+And Angelica went to dances with Irishers, loafers who'd never take
+care of her, and she wouldn't go with him.  Well, he'd see if she
+wouldn't.  He'd own that little nose of hers some day or know why.
+He'd make money, he'd be rich, he'd woo her with rings and pins and
+tickets of admission.  He would be irresistible in his lavishness.
+
+Johnny Fiteon, bantamweight champion of the world, contributed to the
+discomforture of those members of his race who liked to dance with
+Angelica, for on his second time out with Moxey's cousin he lost the
+decision by a shade.
+
+Moxey knew he would beforehand.  Johnny redeemed himself in their next
+encounter, however, and put the cousin away, so there could be no
+question about it.
+
+And again Moxey, knowing beforehand that he would, prospered and
+showered Angelica with brooches.  Also he purchased an equity in a
+two-story frame cottage with Greeks in the basement and Hunkies above.
+One shouldn't, he reflected, depend too much on sports to keep up the
+supply of brooches.
+
+"Aggie," said he, as they returned from a dance together, "take a peep
+at this."  He extracted a diamond solitaire pin from his tie and
+stopping under an arc light gave it to her to examine.
+
+"I seen it," she snapped.  "You been flashing it at me all evening.
+Think I'm blind?"
+
+"Make up into a nice ring, wouldn't it?"
+
+Angelica was wise.  She knew what men were after.  She didn't work in a
+paper-box factory for nothing.  She would let them go just so far, to
+be sure, if they were good fellows, but she could draw the line.
+Indeed she had already drawn it once or twice with five thick little
+fingers on astonished cheeks.  She measured her distance from the
+ardent Hebrew unconscious of his danger, but still she paused for
+greater certainty.  Did the diamond mean another proposition--or was it
+maybe a proposal this time?
+
+"I got my uncle in jail in Napoli," she said very quietly.
+
+"I'm sorry," he answered simply.  "But what of it?  They had my brother
+Steve in Pontiac once."
+
+"My uncle he killed the man that spoilt his daughter."
+
+"That ain't nothing to be ashamed of, Aggie," he spoke kindly, seeking
+to console her, and took her small and stubby hand gently in his long
+sinewy ones; "he done right."
+
+She never let him know, for her dignity, how low she once had feared he
+held her, and she kissed him goodnight many times.
+
+"They say you people are good to their women, Moxey," she whispered.
+"Ours ain't, always."  She paused.  "Gee, my pa'll have a fit."
+
+Moxey laughed.  "Mine too, I guess," said he, "but we won't have to ask
+them for nothing, understand."
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+MOXEY'S SISTER
+
+"You'll stand up with me, won't you?" Moxey asked, a bit anxiously.
+
+"Sure, of course," said Al.
+
+"It's at night, and"--here was to be at least one wedding where the
+groom was no lay figure--"dress suits de rigger, understand."
+
+"Sure, of course," Al assented impatiently.  Did Moxey think he didn't
+know anything?
+
+"We ain't going to tell the old folks for a couple of weeks to save
+hard feelings on both sides, that's our motto.  And the kids is to be
+Catholics, she stood pat on that."
+
+"Sure, of course, what did you expect 'em to be, kikes?"  Perhaps Al
+spoke a trifle too explicitly, for Moxey flushed as he frequently did.
+It was his last remaining signal to the world that his hide wasn't as
+tough as he pretended.
+
+"I ain't marr'in' her just because she's a peach," Moxey rhapsodized,
+"but she is.  Wait till you see her and I'll leave it to you.  But
+she's got principle, too.  Her uncle killed a fellow for wronging his
+daughter and Aggie says he done right, if he is still doing time in the
+old country.  Oh, there's plenty of principle in dagoes, you can say
+what you like.  When you go foolin' around their women you gotta take a
+chance."
+
+It was as if Moxey had pressed a bell in his friend's mind and opened a
+chamber there, where vague shapes appeared and suspicion had been
+gathering.  For Al had observed Georgia's mysteries and evasions, her
+care before her mirror, her new hats and pretty ribbons, her day-long
+Sunday absences.  Twice he had met her on the street, walking and
+chatting most gayly with some strange man.  Besides his mother had
+plainly hinted that all might not be right.
+
+"What do you think a fellow ought to do if a man's after his sister?"
+Al asked slowly.  "This unwritten law thing don't seem to work any more
+except down South."
+
+"You can't lay down no rule," said Moxey.  "Depends on if you like your
+sister."
+
+"If you do?"
+
+"Then go the limit and take a chance with your jury."  He paused and
+great shame came to his cheeks again.  "I had a sister, oncet ... and
+she, well y' understand....  I sometimes thought I oughta of killed him
+... but I never did ... I kept askin' myself 'what's the good of
+killing him now?  Becky's done for anyhow, and it'd just do for me,
+too.' ... The time to look out for a girl is beforehand, not
+afterwards."
+
+There was no doubt about that, especially in theory.  But Al
+contemplated somewhat dubiously the task of safeguarding Georgia.  She
+was so blamed independent.  She might say he was impertinent, or she
+might just laugh at him.  She was fairly certain, at all events, not to
+acquiesce readily in any watch and ward policy which he might seek to
+institute for her benefit.  Still--in a well conducted family the men
+were supposed to look out for the women and keep the breath of dishonor
+from them.  He was the man of the family now, if he was only eighteen,
+and so it was up to him to find out if Georgia was in danger, and if
+she was, to get her out of it _beforehand_.
+
+"I seen your sister once," remarked Moxey, guessing his thoughts.
+
+Al was silent.
+
+"Looked like she could take care of herself."
+
+"Oh, she's got good sense," said Al, "but you know the riddle, 'Why's a
+woman like a ship?  Because it takes a man to manage her.'"
+
+"Yes," assented Moxey, "and they have more respect, understand, for the
+fellow who can say no to 'em when it's right."
+
+So after supper that evening, instead of going over to the pool parlor,
+Al stayed at home waiting for his mother to go to bed, when he could
+have a talk with Georgia and pump her and find out about this strange
+man she knew, and if necessary say _no_.
+
+His mother drew up to the lamp and darned his socks and talked and
+talked on endlessly it seemed to him.  He felt a little abused when
+nine o'clock came, which was her bed time, and still she made no move
+to go.
+
+She did get a little tiresome at times.  He would acknowledge that
+frankly to himself, though he would not let her see it for
+worlds--except by staying away from her most of the time, and not
+paying attention to her when he was with her.
+
+If his most affectionate greeting of the day came as a rule when he
+said "Good night, mother dear," he didn't realize it; and it would have
+amazed him to know that sometimes she sniffled for as much as half an
+hour after she went to bed, because he had shown so plainly that he was
+glad to be rid of her.  She supposed in her sadness that he was an
+unnatural, almost unparalleled example of unfilial ingratitude; not
+suspecting he was only a rear rank file in the Ever Victorious Army of
+Youth.
+
+Al wound his watch.  "Gee, quarter of ten," he remarked, through a
+yawn.  He stretched himself elaborately.  Mother was certainly delaying
+the game.  Until she went he couldn't have his round-up with Georgia,
+who was in one of her after-supper reading spells and had hardly said a
+word all evening.
+
+She now had a fad for those little books bound in imitation green
+leather that constituted the World's Epitome of Culture series and cost
+thirty-five cents apiece, or two magazines and an extra Sunday paper,
+as she put it.
+
+She had been through twenty of them already and was now on her
+twenty-first.  He didn't deny that it was creditable to go in for
+culture.  If that was the sort of thing she liked, why, as the fellow
+says, he supposed she liked that sort of thing.  It's a free country.
+But as for him, when he was tired with the day's work, he thought he
+was entitled to a little recreation--a game of pool, a couple of
+glasses of beer, maybe a swim in a "nat"--he wasn't bad at the middle
+distances--and he couldn't see drawing up a chair under a lamp and
+going to work again, for that was what it amounted to, on a little
+green Epitome that you had to study over to get the meaning, or maybe
+look in the dictionary, as she was doing now.  She had told him that
+they were more interesting than the other kind of books and had even
+got him to start on a couple she said he was sure to like, because they
+were so exciting--Marco Polo's Travels and Froissart's Chronicles--but
+they didn't excite him any, and he made only about thirty pages in each
+of them.
+
+Indeed, it was his private opinion that Georgia was more or less
+bunking herself with this upward and onward stuff.  She fell for it
+because it helped her feel superior.  And then she worked herself up to
+believing she really liked it because people were surprised she knew so
+much and said she had a naturally fine mind.  A vicious circle.
+
+In all of which cogitations he was perhaps not entirely astray; though
+her chief incitement was more concrete than he supposed.  She wanted to
+impress Stevens in particular, rather than people in general--she was
+determined to keep even with him so that he could never talk down to
+her as to a mere "womanly woman" who held him by sex and nothing more.
+
+When at last Mrs. Talbot arose, Al hastened to her, kissed her
+affectionately, slipped his arm around her, impelled her towards the
+door, opened it rapidly, kissed her again, closed it firmly behind her,
+lit a cigarette, and began: "Georgia, I want to have a heart to heart
+with you."
+
+"In a second."  She read the last half page of her chapter so rapidly
+that she was compelled to read it over again for conscience' sake, then
+inserted her book-mark and turned to him: "Fire away."
+
+"Who's the mysterious stranger!"
+
+She had known it was coming for the last half hour.  From the corner of
+her eye, she had spied the importance of the occasion actually oozing
+out of young Al.  At first she thought of side-stepping the interview,
+but eventually decided not to, partly to please the lad and more still
+to hear how her case would stand when discussed aloud.  She had been in
+a most chaotic state of mind ever since the agreement with Stevens to
+pretend; that which wasn't clear then was hazier now; she was of ten
+minds a day whether to give in to her lover or to give in to the
+Church.  Now she would listen to Georgia and Al talk about the case as
+if they were two other people, in the hope of finding guidance in her
+eavesdropping.
+
+"He is a man in the office whom I like," she answered.
+
+"How much?"
+
+"A lot."
+
+"And he does, too?"
+
+"Yes, a lot."
+
+"Hmm--you know I hate to preach, but--"  Hesitation.
+
+"You think you will, all the same.  Go on, I'm listening."
+
+"You know I'm liberal.  If you were just fooling with this fellow, I'd
+never peep, honest, I wouldn't."
+
+She smiled, "I'll promise to only fool with my next beau."
+
+"Now, this is no laughing matter," he rebuked her levity.  "If you're
+really--stuck on each other--it may bust you all to pieces before
+you're done with it--unless you quit in time."
+
+"What do you mean by 'quit'?"
+
+"Give up seeing him altogether.  It would be safer."
+
+"Yes, so it would.  But what's that got to do with it?"
+
+"A woman can't afford to take chances," he retorted impressively.
+
+"It seems to me the people who get the most fun out of life are the
+ones who do take chances.  Your little tin hero, Roosevelt, for
+instance--you like him because he'd rather hunt a lion or a trust than
+a sure thing.  Jim Horan didn't eat smoke for the money in it, but
+because he thought a wall might fall on him some day--or might not.
+That's what he wanted to find out.  Well, perhaps I want to find out if
+a wall will fall on me some day--or not."
+
+Al was astounded.  There was something more than bold, something hardly
+decent in the comparison of her own dubious flirtation to a great
+fireman's martyrdom or a soldier-statesman-sportsman's courage and
+career.
+
+"But, Georgia," he expostulated, "you speak like a man in a manhole.
+Horan and Roosevelt did their duty taking chances."
+
+"Rubbish," she said.  "They acted according to their natures and I will
+act according to mine--some day."
+
+He looked unutterably distressed, for he loved her, and foresaw ruin
+enfolding her.  He knew that women aren't allowed to act according to
+their natures, if their natures are as natural as all that.
+
+"I haven't seen Jim for over a year," she went on, "nor heard of him
+for ten months.  He may be dead.  He is the same as dead to me.  My
+heart is the heart of a widow--grateful for her weeds.  The Church may
+say otherwise--and I might obey unwillingly--but my own being tells me
+that there is nothing wrong in my love for Mason Stevens--any more than
+it's sin to breathe air or drink water.  That's how we're made.  When I
+lived with Jim, I played no tricks.  But that's over now, it's over for
+good.  What's the difference whether he's under the sod or above it, so
+far as I'm concerned?"  Her eyes were alight and she walked back and
+forth, gesticulating like a Beveridge, persuading herself that what she
+wished was just because she wished it.  "I've got a few good years of
+youth left.  I'll not throw them away for a religious quibble."
+
+"You mean divorce and marry again--openly!"
+
+"What does the ceremony matter?  I'm not sure we'd take the trouble of
+going through it," she shrugged her shoulders, "the Church says that it
+means nothing anyway; that it makes the sin no less."
+
+"But, Georgia," he was beginning now to fear for her common sense, "for
+God's sake, if you do such a thing, first go through the civil form
+anyway."
+
+She laughed triumphantly.  She had caught him.  "There spoke your
+heart.  Of course, we'll have a legal marriage.  You see the Church
+hasn't convinced you, either, that divorce and remarriage is the same
+as adultery."
+
+She had crystallized her vague desires into positive determination by
+the daring sound of her own words.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+REËNTER JIM
+
+Al reflected moodily that arguing with a woman never gets you anything.
+If he had been trying to interest Georgia in a vacuum cleaner, he would
+have known better than to start in by arousing her to a fervor for
+brooms.  Now he would have to wait a few days until she had cooled out,
+and then try her on a different tack, appealing to her affection and
+begging her not to bring disgrace upon the whole family.
+
+She was half-sitting, half-kneeling on the window seat, her elbows on
+the sill, her cheeks in her hands, looking out into the dim urban
+night.  Directly to the south, over the loop, where Chicago was wide
+awake and playing, the diffused electric radiance was brightest and
+highest--a man-made borealis.
+
+She took pride in her big city.  It was unafraid.  It followed no rules
+but its own, and didn't always follow them.  It owned the future in fee
+and pitied the past.  It said, not "Ought I?" but "I will."  It was
+modern, just as she was modern.  She was more characteristically the
+offspring of her city than of her mother.  For she was new, like
+Chicago; and her mother was old, like the Church.
+
+So she pondered in the pleasant after-glow of decision, buttressing her
+resolve.
+
+The bell rang from the vestibule below and she went to the speaking
+tube to find out what was wanted.  "Yes?" she inquired, then without
+saying anything more she walked slowly to her room.
+
+"Who was it!" asked Al, but she closed the door behind her without
+answering.  Funny things, women.  He went to the tube himself.
+
+"What you want?"
+
+"It's Jim."
+
+"Jim?--well, for the love of goodness godness Agnes--d'you want to come
+up?"
+
+"Yes, if it's all right."
+
+Al pressed the door-opener, but before climbing the stairs Jim shouted
+another question through the tube: "Wasn't that Georgia who spoke
+first?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well, why did she--how is she, anyway!"
+
+"Fine.  Come along."
+
+There was a great change in Jim.  He must have taken off forty or fifty
+pounds.  His eyes were clear, his skin healthily brown, and he had
+hardened up all over.  He looked a good ten years younger than the last
+time Al saw him, except for one thing, that his hair had thinned out a
+great deal.  He was almost bald on top.
+
+They shook hands and Jim gave him a solid grip.  "Cheese," said the
+younger fellow heartily, "you look good--primed for a battle, almost."
+He put his fingers on the other's biceps.
+
+Jim drew up his clenched fist, showing a very respectable bunch of
+muscle.  "More than there ever used to be, eh?" he asked, smiling
+broadly.
+
+Al whistled, stepped back for a better look at the miracle, and
+whistled.  "And yet they say they never come back.  Hm-m-m--how'd you
+do it?"
+
+"Working.  Rousty on a dredge in Oklahoma."
+
+"Rousty?"
+
+"Toted coal to the firemen, later got to firing myself--on the night
+shift.  We kept her going steady.  Funny thing, irrigating way out
+there, t'hell an' gone, in the middle of the frogs barking and the
+cattle bawling feeding your old thirty-horse and watching the old scoop
+lifting out her yard of sludge every six minutes.  You got so it seemed
+the most natural thing in the world, but it ain't, is it!"
+
+"What'd they pay!"
+
+"Fifty and board.  But the money's being in the business.  Me and our
+day trainman was talking of getting shares in a dredge.  There's work
+there for a thousand years.  Where's Georgia?"
+
+Al nodded his head toward her door.
+
+"So's not to see me!"
+
+Al nodded.
+
+"I came clear from there in the busy season for the sight of her and I
+didn't come alone.  I've three hundred here," said Jim, taking a roll
+of bills from his pocket.  "And to be turned down this way, with my
+heart full of love----"  He was greatly moved and he showed it, for his
+lip trembled and his voice shook.
+
+Al was sorry for him.  "Aw, she'll come around.  She's got a stubborn
+streak, you know that, but she does right in the end.  Give her time.
+I'll talk to her."
+
+Jim felt sure that she must have heard their conversation, especially
+the last part of it, for he had talked quite distinctly and he
+remembered from the old days how readily all the sounds in the flat
+penetrated into that room.  He got on his hands and knees and looked at
+the crack beneath her door to see if her room was lighted.
+
+"She's sitting in the dark," he whispered, "Would it be all right to
+knock!"
+
+"I don't know," said Al uncertainly.
+
+Jim knocked softly, then a little more loudly, but there was no answer.
+He put his ear to the door to listen, then tip-toed away.
+
+"She's crying," he whispered to Al, "crying to beat the band.  Those
+heavy deep kind of sobs.  I could barely hear her.  Must have her face
+in the pillow.  Now what do you know about that!"
+
+"That's a good sign," said Al, "means she's coming around.  When she
+just turns white and don't speak----"
+
+Jim privately opined that he understood Georgia's moods vastly better
+than Al ever would, and was in no need of instruction on this subject.
+
+"You mean when she has one of her silences," he said, giving the thing
+its proper name.
+
+"Yes, that's when you can't handle her.  But now, she's begun to melt
+already.  So to-morrow evening come for supper, and I bet my shirt you
+are all made up in thirty minutes."
+
+Jim wrung his hand.  "You're a thoroughbred, Al--and take this from me
+now, I've learned sense.  If I get her back, I'll keep her.  No more
+booze, never one drop."
+
+He counted out four five-dollar bills upon the center table.  "That's
+what I borrowed, when I quit," he explained.  As he reached the door he
+turned to confirm his happy appointment.  "Six thirty to-morrow
+evening?"
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+THE PALACE OF THE UNBORN
+
+The following morning brother and sister rode down-town together in the
+cars.  "Don't you think you might have consulted me before asking Jim
+to supper?" she inquired.
+
+"Don't be foolish," he replied cheerfully, "you were locked in your
+room."
+
+She worked all day in that state of suppressed excitement which
+presages great events, from the first ride on the lodge goat to the
+codicil part of uncle's will.  Everything she saw or touched was more
+vivid than usual to her senses.  Her typewriter keys seemed picked out
+in the air against a deep perspective, their lettering very heavy,
+their clicking singularly loud.  One of the little flags caught in a
+ventilation grill, and instead of fluttering out freely, flapped and
+bellied, making a small snapping noise.  A flag wasn't meant to do
+that, so she crossed the big room, pulled up a chair and released it,
+somewhat to the surprise of the youth sitting directly beneath it.
+
+The old man, usually rapid enough with his letters, seemed hopelessly
+slow and awkward this morning, and she had to bite her tongue to keep
+from helping him out with the proper word when he got stuck.  He was
+leaning back in his swivel chair, wasting interminable time with pauses
+and laryngeal interjections, the tips of his fingers together, his eyes
+half closed, droning out his sentences.  He wore a little butterfly
+tie, to-day, blue spots on brown, just below his active Adam's apple
+and thin, corded neck.  Under the point of his chin was a little patch
+which his razor had skipped, hopelessly white.  She wondered what could
+be in it for him any more, and why he didn't retire.
+
+She rattled off her letters, then added a note for Stevens, "Dinner
+to-night?" and left it in the S compartment of the _Letters Received_
+box.
+
+When he came in later for his afternoon mail he caught her eye and
+nodded, and on the way out of the old man's office stopped at her desk
+for a few hasty words: "What time, and where?"
+
+"Wherever you like--at six thirty."
+
+"Max's?" he suggested, "we'll have snails."
+
+"Oh, what a perfectly dear place--in every sense of the word."
+
+"My treat," he said.
+
+"No."
+
+"You never dined with me before; you might let me celebrate.
+
+"We'll celebrate anyway, Dutch.  Make it Max's."
+
+He didn't prolong the argument.  They had long before made a compact
+that the expenses of their expeditions should be shared.
+
+"I suppose," he inquired, "your six thirty really means seven.  I've an
+appointment, might keep me till then, unless----"
+
+"I'll meet you on the stroke of half-past," she said, and was as good
+as her word.
+
+They had snails _à la Max_, whereof the frame is finer than the
+picture, as well as Maxian frogs' legs, boned and wrapped in lettuce
+leaves, and, not without misgivings, a bottle of claret.
+
+Stevens, unaware that it was their last time of pretending, abided by
+the rules.  They talked shop and shows and vacations.  Georgia slipped
+in a few appropriate words concerning her cultural progress.  They were
+both somewhat severe upon the orchestra, because there was too much
+noise to the music, so Mason beckoned the head waiter and "requested"
+the barcarole from _Tales of Hoffman_, and they floated off in it
+toward the edge of what they knew.
+
+It is said that most people have at least two personalities.  In this
+respect Georgia was like them.  One side of her was the woman of 1850,
+and the times previous; whether mother, wife, daughter, maiden or
+mistress, primarily something in relation to man, her individuality
+submerged in this relationship, as a soldier's individuality is
+submerged in his uniform.
+
+The other aspect of Georgia's nature was that of the "new woman," the
+women hoped for in 1950.  Bold, determined, taught to think, relentless
+in defense of her own personality, insistent that men shall have less
+and she shall have more sexual freedom, she is first of all herself and
+only next to that, something to a man.
+
+When the woman of 1850 managed to get in a word about Jim and his
+fruitless wait at home, the woman of 1950 answered, "Shall you now be
+absurd enough to leave the man you love for one you hate?"
+
+"Shall we take in a show?" he suggested when they had finished their
+coffee.
+
+"I believe I'd rather walk home."
+
+"Why, it's five miles."  He was somewhat disconcerted by her energy,
+for he was distinctly let down, in reaction from his day's work, and
+his afternoon's excitement of looking forward to an unusual meeting
+with her, which had turned out after all to be more than commonly
+placid.
+
+"Five miles--and a heavenly night.  The first of spring.  Come, brace
+up."
+
+"You must be feeling pretty strong."
+
+"No," she said, "I am getting a bit headachy, I want some air, to get
+out of four walls and merge into the darkness--if you know what I mean."
+
+"You're not going to be sick?" he asked concernedly.
+
+"O, no--it's just a touch of spring fever, I imagine."
+
+There is a cement path with a sloping concrete breakwater which winds
+between Lake Michigan on one side and Lincoln Park on the other for a
+distance of several miles.  Here come the people in endless procession
+from morning until midnight, two by two, male and female, walking slow
+and talking low, permeated by the souls of children begging life.
+
+It is a chamber of Maeterlinck's azure palace of the unborn.
+
+Presently, by good luck, Georgia and her lover came upon a bench just
+as another couple was quitting it--the supply of benches being
+inadequate to the demands of pleasant evenings in spring.  The
+departing two passed, one around each end of the seat, and walked
+rapidly, several feet apart, across the strip of lawn and bridal path
+beyond.  They were delayed at the curb by the stream of automobiles and
+stood out in clear relief against the passing headlights.
+
+It was evident they had been quarreling, for the man looked sullen and
+the woman, half turned away, shrugged her shoulders to what he was
+saying.
+
+Georgia had been watching them.  "Too bad," said she, "they're having a
+row."
+
+"Perhaps they're not meant for each other."
+
+"Everyone quarrels sometimes," she answered, "meant or not."
+
+"Do you think we would, if----"
+
+"I'm sure of it," she replied sharply.  "We're human beings, not
+angels."
+
+There was doubtless common sense in what she said, but nevertheless it
+delighted him not.  He wished that she could in such moments as these,
+yield herself fully to the illusion which possessed him that their life
+together would be one sempiternal climax of joy.
+
+"I honestly believe," he asserted solemnly, "that sometimes two natures
+are so perfectly adjusted that there is no friction between them."
+
+"Rubbish," she replied, quoting a newly read Shaw preface, "people
+aren't meant to stew in love from the cradle to the grave."
+
+She couldn't understand her own mood.  She had arranged this evening
+with Stevens to tell him that she was ready to marry him, and she found
+herself unable to.  Her conscious purpose was the same as ever.
+
+Yet as often as she summoned herself to look the look or keep the
+silence which would put in train his declaration, it seemed as if she
+received from her depths a sudden and imperative mandate against it.
+
+It was her long silence while she was pondering over these strange
+things which gave him a false cue and he entered to the center of her
+consciousness.
+
+"This wasting of ourselves must go on until he dies?"
+
+"The only way out is death," she said slowly, "or apostasy."
+
+"Apostasy!"  The word had an ugly sound even for him.
+
+"I know one woman who did it for love of a man."
+
+"And she is happy?"
+
+Georgia did not answer at once.
+
+"And she is happy," he repeated seriously, as if much depended on the
+question, "or not?"
+
+"She says she is," she answered, "but I don't think so.  She doesn't
+look happy--about the eyes--one notices those things.  She seems
+changed--and--reckless and--and she's not always been faithful to her
+husband.  I found it out."
+
+"You found it out!"
+
+"Yes, she asked me to go to a dinner party.  Her husband was away from
+town--there were four of us--and I could tell what it meant.  She
+wanted me to do what she was doing--and we had been friends so long--we
+took our first communion together."
+
+"Georgia," he asked, chilled through with fright, "do you often have
+that sort of thing put in your way?"
+
+"I have plenty of chances to make a mess of life," she replied, "every
+woman does, who's passable looking, especially downtown women."
+
+"Dearest heart," he begged, "I can't go on thinking of that the rest of
+my life.  Marry me and let me shield and shelter you from all this----"
+
+"This what?"
+
+"Temptation," he blurted, "and rotten, unwomanly down-town life.  A
+woman ought to be taken care of, in her own home, by the man who loves
+her and respects and honors her."
+
+Georgia smiled.  "Do you know," she asked, "that's almost exactly word
+for word the way he talked to this friend of mine and persuaded her to
+get her divorce and leave the Church and marry him--almost word for
+word--she told me about it at the time.  And now she's--fooling him.
+It didn't shield her from temptation."
+
+"But I have known people to be divorced and marry again and live
+perfectly happy and respectable lives."
+
+"Protestants--weren't they?" she asked.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Ah, that's the point.  They do what they think is right, but a
+Catholic does what she knows is wrong, and begins her new marriage in a
+wilful sin, so what can grow from it but more sin?"
+
+Her voice, naturally full and resonant like a trained speaker's, was
+thin and uncertain as she told of the apostate.  Her other self, the
+woman of the past, was ascendant, but she fought against what she
+conceived to be a momentary weakness, and forced her resolution as a
+skillful rider forces an unwilling horse over a jump.  "But if you want
+me," she said in words that trembled, "you can have me."
+
+"If I want you----"  He took her in his arms and kissed her.
+
+It seemed to her definitely in that instant that nothing could ever be
+quite the same with her again, that a certain fine purity had passed
+from her forever and she must live thereafter on a lower plane.
+
+All the modernistic teachings, books, lectures, pamphlets with which
+she had in recent years packed her head, on woman's right to selfhood,
+parasitic females, prostitution in marriage, endowed motherhood, sexual
+slavery; and all the practical philosophy of the success school which
+she had learned from years of contact with money-makers, that life is
+more for the daring than for the good, were washed away by the
+earlier-formed and deeper-lying impressions of her youth.
+
+She was aware of a fleeting return of her virginal feeling that to give
+herself to one man was humbleness sufficient for a lifetime; but to
+give herself to two would be the permanent lowering of pride.
+
+But she felt that for her the moving finger had writ and passed.  There
+could be no more going back or shadow of turning.  Henceforth, for good
+or evil, she belonged to this man.
+
+She yielded to his kisses, as many as he wished, in passive submission.
+
+"You will always be good to me--promise that, promise me, dear," she
+begged, "because if you're not I'll----"  Her voice choked and two
+tears rolled down her cheeks.  Gone was her freedom and her pride.  She
+spoke, not as her ideal had been, partner speaking to partner on even
+terms, but as a servant to her master, asking not justice but mercy.
+
+Her solitary happiness in this hour was the feeling that the man was
+the stronger, that despite his greenness and awkwardness and the ease
+with which she had hitherto controlled him, fundamentally his nature
+was bigger than hers and that she was compelled to follow him.  In her
+new feebleness she rejoiced that she sinned not boldly and resolutely,
+but because she had been taken in the traditional manner by the
+overpowering male.
+
+"I have been looking forward to this for longer than you suspect," said
+she, "and now that it's come, I feel as if I were at a play watching it
+happen to some one else."
+
+He put his hand on her shoulder, then quickly turned her white face to
+his.  "Why, what is the matter?" he asked.  "You are shaking like a
+leaf."
+
+"I think I'd better go home.  It is damp and cold sitting here."  After
+they had gone a few steps, she said, with a weak little laugh, "I've
+lost my enthusiasm for walking.  Put me on the car."
+
+He began to be thoroughly frightened.  "Don't worry, dear," she
+reassured him.  "Nothing can change us now.  We belong to each
+other--for keeps."
+
+They said little to each other in the brightly lighted street car.  She
+sat slightly crumpled, her shoulders rounded, swaying to the stops and
+starts.  She breathed slowly through her lips, and her eyes had the
+strange wide-open look of a young bird's, when you hold it in your
+hands.  And he, but partly understanding, yearned for her helplessly,
+and covenanted with his nameless gods that no sorrow should ever come
+to her from him.
+
+She hung to his arm as they walked up the half-lighted street where she
+lived, between rows of three, four and five story flat buildings full
+of drama.  Outside her own she stopped and looked up to her windows.
+They were brightly lighted.
+
+Instead of using her key, she rang the bell to her apartment.  She
+heard Al's voice in answer.
+
+"Is Jim there?" she asked.
+
+"Yes."
+
+She turned to Stevens with a flash of her old positiveness.
+
+"I must go somewhere else.  And I don't feel like telling my troubles
+to any friend to-night.  So will you take me to a hotel?"
+
+They returned to the car line by an unusual street, lest Al should come
+looking after her, she driving her sick frame along by sheer will, her
+lover resolved that if need be he would save her from herself.
+
+She waited while he engaged her room, and when he came bringing her
+key, he said, "I have put you down as Miss Talbot."
+
+"Oh, you were nice to think of that.  I like to imagine sometimes it
+still is so." She took his hand.  "Good night, dear," she whispered.
+"I will be a true wife to you."
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+MR. SILVERMAN
+
+Stevens called up Georgia's room in the morning to ask how she had
+slept and she reported, "Well--that is, pretty well," which wasn't
+true, for she had tossed wretchedly through the night.  By careful
+brushing and buying a shirtwaist she managed to measurably freshen her
+appearance, though she reached the office with tired eyes and hectic
+splotches beneath her eyes.  Al was there before her waiting with white
+face.
+
+"Georgia," he began miserably, "I've been hunting the town for you.
+Where have you been?"
+
+"Alone."
+
+"You've frightened us half to death.  Mother's sick over it."
+
+"You can have Jim in the house, or me, but not both of us."
+
+She would give him no more satisfaction, and he was turning away angry
+at her obstinacy, when Mason came up to greet her.
+
+"Good morning."
+
+"Good morning."
+
+Al quickly divined that here was the man.  It was written in the way he
+looked at her, and in Georgia's sudden sidelong glance at Al to see if
+he saw.
+
+"I'd like a word with you," said the brother to the lover, tapping him
+on the shoulder with studied rudeness, "now."
+
+Stevens didn't understand the situation, but he was properly resentful,
+and lowered at the stranger.  In these subtle days of commerce,
+finger-tips on collar bones may convey all that was once meant by a
+glove in the face.
+
+"My brother, Mr. Stevens," she explained.  They did not shake hands.
+Mason was not quite sure from the young fellow's expression just what
+might happen, but he was sure it had better not happen right there.
+"Let's get out of the office--and you can have as many words as you
+want," said he.  Georgia arose to go with them.
+
+"No, don't you come," said Stevens.
+
+"I think perhaps it would be better."
+
+"But it wouldn't.  You stay here," the man answered with great
+positiveness.  She sank obediently in the chair, to the disgusted
+amazement of her brother, and let them go alone.
+
+"Were you out with her last night?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+The lad sunk his hand to his coat pocket, his wild young brain aflame
+with violence and romance and vengeance and the memory of Moxey's
+sweetheart's uncle who had slain the despoiler of his home.  Stevens
+was near death and he knew it, but he never batted an eye as Al
+reported later to Moxey.
+
+"I knew it damned well.  She said she was alone."  His hand tightened
+on the automatic, pressing down the safety lock, and he pointed the
+gun, so that he could shoot through his pocket and kill.
+
+"She was, after eleven.  I left her then."
+
+"Prove it.  You've got to," insultingly.
+
+"Go look at the hotel register, for the name of Miss Georgia Talbot."
+
+Al grunted.  Here was a concrete fact--subject to verification, yes or
+no.  "All right," he vouchsafed curtly, "if it turns out that way--but
+one more thing--keep away from her after this altogether--understand."
+Al shot out his jaw and swung around his pocket with the barrel
+pointing straight at Stevens' middle.  He looked just then a good deal
+like a young tough delivering a serious threat, which he was.
+
+Stevens shoved his derby hat back and laughed.  "If you think you can
+run me around with the pop-gun, guess again.  I'm going to marry
+Georgia and you're coming to the wedding," he stepped right up to the
+gun and tapped Al sharply on the shoulder, "understand."
+
+It was perhaps a chancy thing to do, for the lad had worked himself
+into a state of self-righteous anger, and his vanity was savagely
+exulted by the sensation of putting it over on a full-grown man to his
+face.  But Stevens had acted instinctively as he frequently did in
+stressful moment and his instinct played him true this time.
+
+"She ain't allowed to marry again, so you keep off the grass," he
+answered loudly, but his voice broke and shot up an octave as he took
+his hand from his pocket to clench his fist and shake it in the other's
+face.
+
+Whereat Stevens knew he had him and answered quietly in his most
+matter-of-fact business tones, "That's for her to say--and she's said
+it."  He smiled.  "You know she's free, white, and twenty-one."
+
+Al, not sure just what his next step ought to be, walked away, probably
+to consult with Moxey, muttering as he went, "Well, remember I warned
+you."
+
+Stevens returned to the office and explained the incident briefly to
+Georgia, "Oh, the kid was excited at first, but I reassured him."
+While they were talking the old man rang her buzzer and asked her to
+have Mr. Stevens come in.
+
+A dark, beaked, heavy-browed, much-dressed gentleman was in the old
+man's office, introduced to Mason as Mr. Silverman.
+
+Mr. Silverman deserves a paragraph or two.  He was said to be a Polish,
+a Russian or a Spanish Jew, but nobody knew for sure or dared ask him,
+for he didn't like it.  At sixteen or thereabouts, he came to the
+company as an office boy, and in two months was indispensable.  At
+thirty-seven, owing partly to the conscientious performance of his
+duties and more to his earnestness in pulling feet from the rungs above
+him, and stamping fingers from the rungs below, he was elected to a
+position especially created for him, to-wit, Executive Secretary to the
+President of The Eastern Life Insurance Company of New York, which gave
+him everything to say about the running of it except the very last word.
+
+Perhaps once a quarter he was reversed, and always on some extremely
+important matter involving the investment of funds.  This galled him
+beyond measure, but he kept it to himself.
+
+At the last annual election, he would have presented himself as a
+candidate for president, or at least for first vice-president with
+power to act, but after sizing up the way the proxies were running for
+the new directorate, he knew that crowd would never stand for him, so
+he squelched his own boom for the time being, and waited.  The title
+was re-conferred for the fifteenth time upon a charming but delicate
+plutocrat of the fourth generation of New Yorkers, who was compelled to
+spend his term health-hunting in European spas, where Mr. Silverman
+took delight in sending him for decision a copious stream of
+unimportant but vexatiously technical questions, which much disturbed
+the invalid's serenity, for he had entered the company at the top, and
+didn't know detail.  Mr. Silverman himself settled the more important
+matters, inasmuch as there wasn't time to send to Europe and wait for
+an answer.  Whenever he reached for a stronger hold, he had an
+incontrovertible excuse, and he got to know Mr. Morgan personally.
+
+He was stocky, with ample room for his digestion, and like most
+fighting men, he had a good thick neck that carried plenty of blood to
+his head.  His unpleasantest trait was his shame of race, and his most
+agreeable one an understanding love of music.  His only exercise was
+strong black cigars, and everyone on the company's payroll dreaded his
+seemingly preternatural knowledge of what was going on.
+
+"Mr. Stevens," said he, "sit down.  I have heard of you."  Then to
+allow that pregnant remark to sink in he turned to Georgia.  "Take
+this, please: 'Mr. W. F. Plaisted, General Agent in charge S. W.
+Division, Eastern Life Insurance Company, Kansas City, Mo.  Dear Sir:
+Please furnish the bearer, Mr. Mason Stevens, with whatever information
+he desires.  He is my personal representative.  With kind regards,
+Yours truly, Executive Secretary to the President.'
+
+"That is all."  He nodded to Georgia, and she departed.  The old man
+pussy-footed after her, leaving the other two together in his private
+office.
+
+"You are to take the nine o'clock train to-night for Kansas City to
+prepare a report for me on why we aren't getting more business in the
+town and our competitors less.  Here are some letters from New York to
+certain banks there which will admit you to their confidence.  Find out
+all you can about Plaisted and his office before you go to him.  Send
+me a night letter to my hotel every night as to your progress.  Use
+this code."  He took a typewritten sheet of synonyms from his pocket.
+"Should you cross the trail of another investigator for the Eastern,
+you are not to reveal yourself to him.  This point you are to bear in
+mind."  He paused for an answer.
+
+"Yes, sir," said Stevens.
+
+"Your expense money will be liberal; and mind, no talk--not even a hint
+to your best girl.  I suppose, of course, there is one."  Mason smiled,
+but did not answer.  "I am told you are not married."
+
+"No, sir."
+
+"Perhaps it is just as well.  Women are to live with, not to travel
+with, and you're still traveling."  Mr. Silverman lit a fifty-center,
+and then, being a natural-born commander, topped off his instructions
+with hopes of loot.  "Good luck, young man.  You're shaking hands with
+your future on this trip."
+
+Mason came from the interview consecrated to the task of getting the
+goods on Plaisted.  Going after him was like going after ivory in
+Africa.  Landing a prospect was as tame relatively as plugging ducks on
+the Illinois River.  For Plaisted had been a big man in the company in
+his day, though getting a little old now.  With solid connections
+through Missouri, Kansas and the Southwest, if he fell, he'd fall with
+a smash.
+
+Mason rather fancied that in company politics he could see as far
+through a grindstone as his neighbor, if it had a hole in it.  He knew
+that there was a hidden but bitter fight for control of the business
+between the old New York society crowd who had inherited it, and the
+younger abler men, under the leadership of Silverman, who had grown up
+from the ranks.  He knew that his own boss, the old man, lined up with
+Silverman, but that Plaisted had delivered the south-western proxies in
+a solid block, for the New York ticket.  He therefore inferred that
+Silverman didn't feel strong enough to remove Plaisted without a pretty
+plausible reason and that he was being sent to Kansas City to find the
+reason; and failing that, to make one, which, as it turned out, was
+precisely what he did.
+
+He set out on his mission with as little compunction as a soldier who
+had received orders to shoot to kill.  For, as he told himself, surely
+Plaisted had also pulled down men in his time.  Life is a battle.
+Therefore is it not well to be with the conqueror and share in the cut?
+
+If he could now make good with Silverman, and, more especially,
+convince him that he was a live one who would keep on making good, the
+Jew would certainly recognize him in the reorganization.  He had
+visions of tooling along the macadam in his Panno Six to a vined house
+in the suburbs, hidden by tall trees, where, in a trailing gown,
+Georgia would walk through her flowers to meet him, with a small hand
+clinging to each of hers.
+
+Plaisted had now become, to all intents and purposes, his competitor;
+and going after your competitors is the life of trade.  As for Mrs.
+Plaisted--if there was one--who was she against Georgia?
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+GEORGIA LEAVES HOME
+
+He expected to be gone several weeks, so Georgia telephoned the janitor
+to tell mama that she would stay down for dinner, again, but would be
+home soon afterwards.  Mason took her to the top of a tall building,
+where there was a sixty cent table d'hote.  The topic, of course, was
+his forthcoming trip from routine to adventure and its probable effect
+upon their fortunes.
+
+For all the wise saws about not talking to women, one may hardly dine
+with his fiancée of a day without mention of the marvelous opportunity
+which dropped before one that morning as from the skies.  Especially if
+she is in the same business and heard it drop.
+
+So, little by little, one thing leading to another, he told her
+everything he knew or guessed or hoped.  He did not once forget
+Silverman's injunction to silence, as he babbled on.  It stuck in his
+mind like a thorn in the foot; and, telling himself he was a fool to
+talk, he talked.  The precise moment didn't seem to come when he could
+frankly say, without offense, "Georgia, that part of it is a secret."
+And he didn't see how to temporize widely, for it had become physically
+impossible for him to lie to her, though, of course, he retained the
+use of his faculties for commerce with others.
+
+So he passed on the ever heavy load of silence, hoping that she could
+hold her tongue if he couldn't.  It was as much her affair as his
+anyway, so he felt, and if by her indiscretion she should cut him out
+of Silverman's confidence and future big things, she would in the same
+motion cut herself out of a Panno Six and a house in the trees and a
+richer circle of friends.
+
+But, inasmuch as she was a case-hardened private secretary, she kept
+her faith with him in this thing at least.  If he never has a Panno Six
+it wasn't her fault.
+
+The most surprising thing to her in his narrative was that it did not
+more greatly interest her.  It seemed to her a far-off affair,
+impersonal, like something she was reading in the papers.  Stevens
+seemed to stand outside her area of life, which had become narrow and
+curiously uneasy, heavy with a future in which he was not concerned.
+
+At first he attributed the listlessness, which she tried to conceal but
+could not, to one of the widely advertised feminine moods, and he tried
+his best to divert her not merely with pictures of their future,
+blissful and automobileful, but also with quips and cranks and wanton
+wiles.  No go.
+
+So when course VI of the table d'hote--nuts and pecans, three of each
+to the order--was ended, he suggested that perhaps she would better go
+directly home instead of waiting downtown with him until his train
+went.  She acquiesced.  They walked to the "L" in silence.
+
+Imagine the chagrin of a knight riding off to the bloody wars from a
+ladye who didn't care if he never came back.  That was how it struck
+him.  She took his arm to climb the steep iron stairs, and at the top
+stopped a moment to get her breath.
+
+"Dear heart," she said, "don't have all those awful thoughts about
+me--don't you suppose I know what you're thinking?  I've been dull
+to-night, but my head is simply splitting.  I believe I'm in for the
+grip."
+
+He looked at his watch.  "I'm sure I can take you home and get back in
+time."
+
+"Bather than have you risk it, I'll stay down until your train goes."
+
+"Promise me then to get a doctor and go right to bed."
+
+"I'll go right to bed--I can barely hold my head up, and I'll get a
+doctor in the morning if I'm not better."
+
+There were only two or three other people on the long platform, so he
+kissed her good-bye.  Then the screened iron gate was slapped to behind
+her, the guard jerked his cord, she smiled weakly and waved her hand
+back at him, and it was all over for a much longer time than he had any
+idea of.
+
+He watched her train until the tail lights turned the loop, then said
+"Hell," lit a cigar, pushed his hat back, sighed and went to check his
+trunk.
+
+He sat up in the smoking compartment gassing with drummers until the
+last of them turned in, sympathized for awhile with the Pullman porter,
+who suffered volubly as soon as Mason gave him permission to.  He had
+been married that very afternoon and now he was off to Los Angeles and
+back, a ten-day journey, leaving behind him as a dark and shining mark
+for those who realized the devilishness of his itinerary an
+unprotected, young, gay-hearted bride.  He appreciated the snares that
+would be set for her by his brothers of brush and berth.  He'd been a
+bachelor himself.  "Yas, sah, railroadin' is sure one yalla dawg's life
+for a fambly man."
+
+Stevens lay awake a long time that night thinking of the future, and
+Georgia lay awake a long time considering the past.  She felt hot and
+thirsty; three or four times she got out of bed and ran the faucet
+until the water was cold and bathed her face and drank.
+
+After she had left Stevens she had taken a cross seat in the car facing
+homeward, and, placing her burning cheek against the window for
+coolness, had dozed off for many stations.  When she awoke with a start
+at the one beyond her own, her personality had slipped to its earlier
+center as definitely as when a clutch slips from high to second speed.
+
+It is said that the last step gained by the individual or the race is
+the first step lost, in sickness, age and fear.  So Georgia's illness
+began its attack on the topmost layer of her character, that part of it
+which had been built in the recent years.  She was driven, as it were,
+to a lower floor of her own edifice and no longed saw so wide a view.
+
+Her pride and self-will crumbled--for the sick aren't proud--and her
+modernity trickled away.  After all, was it not more peaceful to do
+what people thought you ought to, than to fight them constantly for
+your own way?  Life was too short and human nature too weak for the
+stress and strain of such ceaseless resistance as she had made in the
+past few years against her family, the friends of her family, and the
+Church.  For God's sake let her now have peace.
+
+Yes, for God's sake.  The words had come irreverently to her mind.  But
+after all, could she or anyone else have peace except from God? and was
+there any other gift as sweet?
+
+She knew there was one sure anodyne for her troubled spirit, and only
+one--the confessional.  She had kept away too long already, for more
+than two years.  She would go to-morrow, or perhaps the next day, and
+wash her soul clean.  Father Hervey would talk to her as if to rip her
+heart strings out, but in the end he would leave her with peace, after
+she had promised and vowed to give up her mortal sin.  Poor Mason, that
+meant him.  She wept a few weak tears, then dried her eyes on the
+corner of the sheet.
+
+So this was to be the end of her spiritual adventuring, the end of the
+free expression of her free being, and selfhood, and all those other
+valorous things she had rejoiced in.
+
+She wasn't able any longer to go on with it.  She must desert the army
+of women in the day of battle, the army led by Curie, Key, Pankhurst,
+Schreiner, Addams, Gilman, and cross over to the adversary, the
+encompassing Church.  It would absorb her into its vast unity as a drop
+disappears in the sea.  It would think for her and will for her.  She
+would be animated with its life, not her own; but it would suffuse her
+with the comfort that is past understanding.  She would eat the lotus
+and submit.  She was not strong, like great people.
+
+Perhaps the priest would suggest her return to Jim.  But that wasn't in
+the law.  He could only suggest and urge it.  He could not insist on
+it.  She couldn't go back to Jim, she couldn't, she couldn't.  She
+sobbed as if there were a presence in the room which she hoped to move
+by her tears.
+
+A clear vision of her husband came before her, as she had often seen
+him, sitting on the edge of this very bed, in undershirt and trousers,
+leaning forward, breathing abominably loud, his paunch sagging,
+unlacing his shoes.  Right or wrong, good or bad, heaven or hell, that
+was one sight the priest should never make her see again.  She hated
+Jim and loathed him forever.
+
+As she was dressing next morning she called to Al to please go down and
+telephone for the doctor, for she knew she could never go through the
+day's work without medicine.
+
+Presently Dr. Randall bowled up, a jolly stout man, smiling gayly and
+crinkling up the corners of his eyes, though he had slept just eight
+hours in the last seventy-two.  The family was glumly finishing
+breakfast when he came.  Throughout the meal Mrs. Talbot had been
+burningly aware of the contrast between decent, self-respecting women
+with a thought to themselves, and brazen young fly-by-nights in thin
+waists, who run after men and make themselves free; but she threw only
+a few pertinent remarks into the atmosphere, because the poor girl was
+so evidently out of sorts, with her high color and not touching a bite
+of food.  Indeed, a body could hardly help feeling sorry for her, for
+all her wicked pride of will; very likely this sickness was a judgment
+on her for it.
+
+When Dr. Randall had considered her pulse, her temperature and her
+tongue, and asked half a dozen questions, he told Al to send for a
+carriage and take her immediately to Columbus Hospital.
+
+"Why, doctor," exclaimed Mrs. Talbot, terrorized, "is it anything
+serious?"
+
+"Typhoid--I'll go telephone to let 'em know you're coming."
+
+The doctor departed and Mrs. Talbot took Georgia on her lap and crooned
+over her until the carriage came.
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+THE LIGHT FLICKERS
+
+It was decided that Georgia was to have a bed in a ward at eight
+dollars a week.  Private rooms were twenty-five and they couldn't
+afford that during the month she would be laid up, particularly since
+her pay would stop automatically after her third day of absence.  The
+office rule was very strict on that point.
+
+She sat limply in the waiting room while Al was attending to her
+registration and her mother was upstairs with the nurse unpacking her
+things.  On the opposite wall were a couple of windows, sharply framing
+vistas into the park across the street, and she saw two fragments of
+the path where she had often walked on Sunday mornings with Stevens.
+
+It was this same wall in front of her which had seemed so sullen gray
+and prison-color from the other side and which had sometimes turned
+their talk to sombre things--death and immortality.  From the inside,
+as she now saw it, the wall was not gray but cheerfully reddish brown,
+patterned vertically like a thrasher's wing.
+
+Two pictures hung by the window, of the pope and of Frances Xavier
+Cabrini, founder of the order of nuns that conducted the hospital.
+They were photographs, she thought, or reproductions from photographs.
+
+She looked closely at them, first at the old man, then at the old
+woman.  She saw in them more than she had ever seen in such pictures
+before.  They offered at least one positive answer to the riddle,
+perhaps the safest answer for such as she--to submit oneself through
+one's lifetime so as to attain at the end of it the matchless serenity
+of those two untroubled faces.
+
+It came to her then in a moment of more than natural revelation, as it
+seemed, that she must seek the peace which these two had found.
+
+She crossed slowly to the desk in the corner, to write what she knew
+might be the last of the thousands of letters she had written.
+
+_My dear_, she began on the hospital paper, _I am here with_, not to
+cause him anxiety in the beginning of his great enterprise, _a touch of
+the grip.  Nothing serious.  In haste and headache.  Georgia._
+
+She paused.  Even if it must end by her giving him up, she loved him.
+Should she, by an omission so significant, upset and distress him and
+perhaps hinder him in a task which, well performed, would bring great
+things to him, if never now to her!  _I love you_, she added, _always_.
+
+A second note she dated a week forward.  _My dear, I haven't pulled
+around again as soon as I expected, but the rest has done me a world of
+good.  Don't worry about me--they say I've a constitution like a horse.
+For my sake, make good, Mason--you've got to.  With love, lots of it,
+always, G._
+
+A third she put two weeks ahead.  _Dearest, I'm doing fine and will be
+out soon now.  Your letters have been such a comfort.  It's almost two
+thousand years since we've seen each other, isn't it?  I love you,
+dear.  Georgia._
+
+She put them in their envelopes, addressed them, and wrote 1, 2 and 3
+respectively in the upper right hand corners in such a way that the
+stamps would conceal them.  Al came in as she was finishing, and she
+explained how she wanted them mailed a week apart.  At first he
+refused, but at last was over-persuaded by her misery.  He promised to
+do her errand as she asked, and kept his promise faithfully.
+
+A page boy chanting "Mis-ter Stev-uns, Mis-ter Riggle-hei-murr, Mis-ter
+An-droo Brown, Mis-ter Noise, Mis-ter Stevuns," caught Mason in the
+grill paying a lot of attention to a first vice-president over a
+planked tenderloin, German fried and large coffee.  Accordingly he made
+his first report not to Silverman, but to the old man, thus:
+
+
+  Night Letter
+
+  548 ch jf 63
+
+  Kansas City Mo 10/17
+  Fredk. Tatton,
+  Eastern Life Insurance Co.  60 Monroe st., Chicago.
+
+Strict confidence am engaged marry your secretary Georgia Connor who
+now sick columbus hospital please arrange hospital authorities give her
+best care private room special trained nurse my expense don't let her
+know my participation say attention comes from company gratitude her
+fidelity ability also keep her name payroll until return duty charge my
+account confidential my progress here satisfactory wire answer collect.
+Stevens 814 AM
+
+
+The old man himself had not been entirely immune to Georgia's charm,
+although in the office and before him she had steadily veiled her
+personality behind her status as a precise, prompt and well-lubricated
+appanage of a Standard Typewriter No. 4.  So it was only a well subdued
+charm that the old man sensed in her, stimulating as a small glass of
+syrupy liqueur.
+
+It seemed to him pathetic that the silent, presentable, self-respecting
+young woman, to whom for over a year now he had been revealing his most
+private, money-making thoughts almost as fast as they came to him,
+might never smile him another "good morning," agree with him pleasantly
+that it was hot or cold or wet, and get rapidly to work on his business.
+
+She was so accustomed to his ways, and he hated the thought of breaking
+in another one--but, damn it, that wasn't all by any means, he liked
+the girl on her own account--she was such a little lady.
+
+The old man did some rapid telephoning and was able to answer Stevens'
+wire half an hour after he got it.
+
+
+  Chicago Ills.  Oct. 18
+
+  Mr. Mason Stevens,
+      Hotel Boston, K C Mo
+
+Best accommodations provided as stipulated salary continues your
+expense diagnosis simple case typical convalescense anticipated will
+wire promptly new developments regarding patient warm congratulations
+
+  Fredk. Tatton 949 AM
+
+
+The old man naturally supposed that Mason knew the nature of Georgia's
+illness and was trying to reassure him, in a kindly way, that as
+typhoid cases go it was only a very little one.
+
+Indeed, the old man, if he was a little lax later on in wiring all the
+developments in the case--because he didn't want to frighten the young
+man into throwing up his investigation in the very middle of it--was
+more valuably helpful in another way.
+
+When the fever reached its crisis he got a great specialist out of bed
+for a three o'clock in the morning consultation over the little
+stenographer, and charged his costly loss of sleep to the company
+instead of to Mason Stevens, Mr. Silverman cordially approving.
+
+They said afterwards that Georgia could not have taken another small
+step toward death, without dying.  She flickered and guttered like a
+lamp whose oil has been used up.  For a few moments it seemed that her
+light had been put out altogether, but there must have been a tiny
+spark hidden somewhere in the charred wick, for the doctors brought her
+back by artificial stimulation, and you can not stimulate the dead.
+
+If specialists and private rooms and nurses give sick people more
+chance of getting well, then Stevens and the old man and Mr. Silverman
+saved Georgia by their care of her, for she could not have had less
+chance to live and lived.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+THE PRIEST
+
+The crisis of the fever came upon Georgia so suddenly that she had
+lapsed into semi-consciousness before the arrival of Father Hervey.
+She was able, in making her confession to him, barely to gasp out a few
+broken sentences of contrition.
+
+He anointed with holy oil her eyes, ears, nostrils, lips, hands and
+feet, absolving her in the name of the Trinity from those sins which
+she truly repented.
+
+When at last she came out of the shadow, her mother believed that it
+was the priest even more than the doctors who had saved her, for it is
+taught that the reception of Extreme Unction may restore health to the
+body when the same is beneficial to the soul.
+
+A few days later the priest came again to see her and was amazed at the
+rapidity of her convalescence.
+
+"You're out of the woods this time, Georgia," he said, "sure enough.
+But I can tell you you had us frightened."  He spoke with just the
+barest shade of a tip of a brogue, too slight to indicate in print.
+
+His coat was shiny, his trousers slightly frayed at the bottom, and his
+shoes had been several times half-soled.  A parish priest, throughout
+his life he had kept to the vow of personal poverty as faithfully as a
+Jesuit.
+
+He stayed for half an hour and made himself charming.  He asked the
+nurse not to leave the room, saying that he needed an audience.  He had
+some new stories, he said, and he wanted to test them, which he
+couldn't do on Georgia alone, she was so solemn.  Besides, she was
+almost sure to hash them up in repeating them, and he had a reputation
+to preserve.  There was a shepherd in County Clare whose wife was from
+County Mayo, with the head of the color of a fox, inside and out.  And
+so forth.
+
+First the women smiled with him, then laughed, then roared.  His touch
+was sure, his shading delicate, his technique perfected.  He had them
+and he held them.  It was excellent medicine for the sick he gave them.
+
+Then he told them a little parish gossip of wedding banns he thought he
+would shortly be requested to publish.  His eyes twinkled at Georgia's
+astonished "You don't say--well, what she sees in him----"  And he
+finished his pleasant visit with a couple of little anecdotes, each
+with a moral subtly introduced; simple tales of heroism and
+self-sacrifice that had lately come under his notice.
+
+When he arose to go Georgia and the nurse bent their heads.  He offered
+a short little prayer, gave them his blessing and departed.
+
+He had not said a word in a serious way to Georgia of her affairs.  But
+she knew that he was merely postponing.
+
+Before his decisive interview with her he prayed earnestly for
+strength; for strength rather than guidance, for he felt no shade of
+doubt that the path which he would urge her to take was the right one.
+The Church had pointed it out long ago, and that settled it.  He never
+questioned the wisdom or the inspiration of the great policies of the
+Church.  He was none of your modernists, questioners and babblers; he
+was a veteran soldier, a fighting private in the army which will make
+no peace but a victor's.
+
+"Georgia," he began, "do you feel strong enough for a serious talk?
+For if you don't I will come later."
+
+She was sitting up in bed.  Her skin had the translucent pallor of one
+whose life has hung in the balance.  Her hair, braided and coiled about
+her head, had lost its peculiar gloss and become dry and brittle.
+
+"Yes, Father; I am strong enough.  As well have it over with now as any
+time."
+
+There was more of defiance in her words than in her heart, for she
+could not help being a little afraid of this gentle, gray old man with
+the Roman collar.  Since her childhood he had stood in her mind for
+strange power and mystery.  Even in her most rebellious days before her
+sickness she had not been willing to confront him.  She had evaded him,
+run away from him.  Now she could not run away.
+
+"I have seen Jim since I was here last," said he, "and----"
+
+"Father, I know what you're going to say--and a reconciliation is
+impossible.
+
+"You know that he has stopped drinking?"
+
+"Yes, I heard so."
+
+"It is true.  He looks fine, fine.  Brown and strong."
+
+"I didn't think he ever could do it," said she, shaking her head.  "He
+is fighting a battle he has lost so often."
+
+"There is none who could help him so much in his struggle as you."
+
+"Oh, there," she answered quickly and bitterly, "I think you are
+mistaken.  He has paid very little attention to me or my wishes for
+four or five years past."
+
+"Then," said the priest, "he has learned his lesson, for now he depends
+on you more than on any other person."
+
+She did not answer, but closed her eyes and clenched her fists as
+tightly as she could, summoning her will to resist.  But she realized
+that her will, like her body, was not in health.  The sick bed is the
+priest's harvest time.
+
+"My child," he said gently, "there is a human soul struggling for its
+salvation.  Will you help or hinder it?"
+
+"I do not think that is quite a fair way to put it."
+
+"Not fair?  With all my soul I believe it to be true.  And, remember,
+in helping him to his salvation you are bringing your own nearer."
+
+"But must we consider everything, everything from the standpoint of
+salvation?  Of course, I want to go to Heaven when I die, but I want to
+be as happy as I can here on earth, too.  And that's impossible if I
+live with Jim."
+
+"If you had a child," he asked patiently, as if going clear back to the
+beginning again with a pupil that could not learn easily, "and he said
+to you, 'Mother, I don't want to go to school, for it makes me unhappy
+and I want to be as happy as I can,' would you let him have his way?"
+He paused, but she did not answer, so he went on to make his point
+clearer.  "Of course you wouldn't if you loved your child.  You would
+make him undergo discipline and accept instruction, if you wanted him
+to be a fine, strong, brave man.  Our life on earth is but our school
+days--our preparation for the greater life to come.  And we are not
+always allowed to seek immediate happiness any more than little
+children are."
+
+She felt that she was being overcome in argument by the priest, as
+everyone must be who accepts his fundamental premise, namely, that he
+is more intimately acquainted with the secrets of life and death than
+laymen are.
+
+But far below the reach of argument and theological dialectics, which
+are surface things, from the deep springs of her life the increasing
+warning flowed up to her consciousness that it was the abomination of a
+slave to embrace where she did not love.
+
+"Father," she said, not trying to argue any longer, but just to make
+him see, "Oh, don't you understand?  Man and wife are so close
+together--like that."  She placed her two palms together before her in
+the attitude of prayer.
+
+He raised his hand solemnly, to pronounce that phrase which perhaps
+more than any other has influenced human destinies, "_And they shall be
+two in one flesh_."
+
+"But to live so close with a man you don't love or care for, oh, that
+is vile, utterly, utterly vile."
+
+He could not entirely sympathize with the intensity of her point of
+view.  If one's earthly love did not turn out as well as the dreams of
+it, in that it merely resembled other phases of mortal existence, to be
+submitted to.  He knew many married couples that fell out at times, but
+if they tried to make the best of things as they were, on the whole
+they got along pretty well.  He was inclined to deprecate the modern
+tendency to invest with too much dignity the varying shades of erotic
+emotion.  It was one of the things which led to divorce--this
+beatification of earthly, fleshly love.
+
+Had not the highest and holiest lives been led in the entire absence of
+it, by its ruthless extirpation?  Not merely saints, martyrs and great
+popes, but ordinary priests like himself, ordinary nuns like the
+hospital sisters, had yielded up that side of life freely and been the
+better for it, more single-minded in the service of the Lord.
+
+He did not believe that a woman who had met with disappointment in this
+regard should make of it such a monument of woe.  Let her contemplate
+her position with a little more courage and resignation; let her not
+exaggerate the importance of her own personal feelings; let her yield
+up her pride and stubbornness and essay to do her duty in that
+relationship which she had chosen for herself, with the sanction of the
+Church.
+
+Father Hervey had sat in a confessional box for nearly fifty years.  He
+knew a very great deal about marriage from without.  He had seen its
+glories and its shames reflected in the hearts of thousands.  But he
+never felt its meanings in his own heart, at first hand.
+
+Perhaps if its priesthood were not celibate, the Roman Church would not
+so unyieldingly insist upon the indissolubility of marriage.  But if
+its priesthood were not celibate, the Roman Church would almost surely
+lose much of its grip upon the imagination.  The mind of the average
+laymen, Catholic or not, cannot but be powerfully moved by the
+spectacle of a body of educated men, leaders in their communities,
+voluntarily renouncing the most appealing of human relationships for
+the sake of a supernatural ideal.
+
+It is because the average man does not and cannot live without women
+which causes him to regard a priest with a species of awe.  Reason as
+you will about it, justify the married clergy with the words of St.
+Paul and God's promptings within us, the fact remains that the Roman
+priest alone does what we can't do, lives as we couldn't live; he alone
+demonstrates that he is of somewhat different clay; he alone mystifies
+us; and mystery is the essence of sacerdotalism and authority.
+
+"Georgia," resumed Father Hervey, "if all your pretty dreams have not
+come true, remember they never do in this life.  You must learn to
+compromise."
+
+"I will compromise, Father--that I will do, but I won't surrender
+utterly."  She drew herself straighter up in bed, leaning forward
+without the prop of the pillow.  Her excitement seemed to invigorate
+her.  "There is another man----"
+
+"Another man?" he asked sternly.
+
+"Yes, but I will give him up.  I love him, but I will give him up.  On
+the other side, I will never take Jim back.  That is my compromise."
+
+"Is that not something like saying you would not commit murder, but
+would compromise on stealing?"
+
+"Father, that is the best I can do."
+
+"If he continued in his former evil ways," and there was an unusual
+tone of pleading rather than command in Father Hervey's voice, "I would
+not urge you to return to him.  It is recognized that there are cases
+where living apart is advisable.  But here is poor Jim, doing his best
+and needing every helping hand, and you won't extend yours.  It is not
+fair, Georgia, and it is not kind--to him or to yourself."
+
+"I can't go back to him, Father.  It is impossible.  I hate him when I
+think of it.  I can't live with him again.  It is inconceivable.  It is
+a horror to imagine."  She averted her head and put her hands before
+her as if pushing away the image of her husband.
+
+"In the top drawer of the bureau," she said, "you will find some
+letters--one for every day I have been here.  They are from the other
+man.  You may take them if you wish--and I will give you my promise to
+receive no more from him."
+
+The priest felt as if he were touching unclean things when he took up
+Stevens' letters.  There were more than twenty of them, and most of
+them were very thick.
+
+"You have read them all?" he asked.
+
+"Yes."
+
+Father Hervey wrapped and tied the letters in a newspaper and rang for
+an attendant.
+
+"Kindly put this package in the furnace," he directed, "just as it is,
+without undoing it."
+
+"You have wandered far," he said quietly, then took up his soft black
+hat and departed without prayer or blessing.
+
+She sank back among her pillows, exhausted from the conflict.  She had
+won, she told herself, she had won, but it was without joy.
+
+She had definitely given up Mason, as she knew she must from the
+beginning of her sickness, from the day that she entered the hospital.
+Perhaps that had been part of the price of her getting well.
+
+But she had also stuck to her purpose about Jim.  She had refused to
+violate her natural feelings to the extent of entering into life's
+deepest intimacies with the one person in all the world whom she most
+disliked.  She had put her will against the priest, the holy man, and
+she had not given in.  She knew that not many women could have done
+that so openly and so successfully.
+
+He had left her without prayer or blessing.  She was not at peace with
+the Church which meant--her eyes fell upon the sacred picture on the
+wall opposite--which meant that she was not at peace with The Man whose
+mournful sufferings and woe had been for her.
+
+Fear slowly came over her.
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+SACRED HEART
+
+The picture which she saw on the wall opposite, across the foot of the
+bed, was of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
+
+It was the thing which she had seen oftenest and looked at longest
+since she had been in the hospital.  It hung directly before her eyes
+as she lay in bed with her head on the pillow.  She saw it first on
+waking and last before sleeping.  Sometimes when she awoke suddenly in
+the middle of the night she could feel the picture still there,
+watching her in the darkness with mournful eyes.
+
+When first she looked at it she realized how crude it was in execution.
+Its colors were glaring.  The Man wore a shining white cloak which he
+drew back to show underneath a blue garment.  On this, placed
+apparently on the outside of it, was a Sacred Heart of red, girt in
+thorns.  Holy flames proceeded from it, and there was a nimbus of
+encircling light.
+
+She saw that it would have been better if the Sacred Heart had seemed
+to glow through His garment, instead of being obviously superposed upon
+it; that softer blue and grayer white and less scarlet red would have
+been truer tones for a religious picture.  She took not a little pride
+in her critical perceptiveness.
+
+But as she lay watching the picture day after day, she appreciated the
+superficiality of her first judgment of it.  She had been looking at
+colored inks and the marks made by copper plates, not at a symbol of
+eternity.
+
+Does one estimate a put-by baby's slipper, or a lock of someone's hair,
+or a wedding ring by its intrinsic worth?  If the west side print shop
+which made the picture before her had failed, it could have done
+nothing else with that subject to portray.  All attempts to represent
+Christ must fail.  Rafael had failed.  Everyone would fail.
+
+Even the Church had failed.  There had been bad popes, had there not?
+But the Church had tried to represent Him.  The Church had come nearer
+to doing so than any other enginery or person.  The saintliest persons
+had belonged to her and died for her and in her.
+
+One Church, she knew, He had founded, and left behind Him.  One and but
+one.  "Thou art Peter and on this rock I will build my church."  It was
+unequivocal.  Christ did not say "churches," He said "church."  There
+was but one which He had built.
+
+And she had defied it; she had hardened her heart against it; she had
+sent away its appointed minister in order to exalt herself.
+
+Her eyes were drawn again to the Sacred Heart, bound in the thorns
+which she and hers had placed there.  So it had been, so it would be.
+Christ was crucified again each day, in the hearts of the people whom
+He loved.  Had she not herself also given Him vinegar upon a sponge?
+
+She felt the tears trickling down her cheeks as she thought of her own
+supreme selfishness, and she looked through blurred eyes at the
+representation of the most supremely unselfish face that mankind has
+been able to conceive.
+
+Then suddenly divine forgiveness seemed to descend upon her and level
+the bounds and limits of her ego; the barriers of her nature gave way
+and she found herself at one with all creation; she, and humanity, and
+nature, and God were together.  Her soul seemed to quicken itself
+within her and ineffable light shone about her.
+
+She fell on her knees at her bedside, her adoring eyes upon the
+pictured countenance of her Savior.  Over and over again she repeated
+that wonderful word learned at the convent, which expresses all prayer
+in itself.  "Peccavi," she prayed, "peccavi, peccavi."
+
+It seemed to her at last, when she arose from her knees that she had
+washed all her sins away with the passion of her contrition; that she
+had been born again in the spirit and become pure.  In her ecstasy she
+thought that the face of her dear Lord regarded her now less
+mournfully, and that there was joy in His smile where there had been
+only sorrow.
+
+She knew for the first time in her self-willed life the peace
+unspeakable of entire self-surrender.  Her tears continued, but they
+were tears of joy, and she sobbed as sometimes prisoners sob when
+pardoned unexpectedly.  The miracle of deliverance rolled over her soul
+like a flood, washing away the barriers of self-control.
+
+During her weeks in the hospital she had lived in an atmosphere of
+perfect faith, as intense and vital, almost, as that of the middle
+ages.  Those who had carried and comforted her through her sickness,
+nurses and gentle nuns, could not doubt that Christ had died to save
+them and to save her.
+
+She was environed with Catholicism.  Sometimes she could see through
+her partly opened door a black-coated priest passing in the hall to
+shrive a dying sinner.  The chimes and chants from the chapel came
+faintly to her ears with benediction.  The picture of the Sacred Heart
+hung before her eyes in unceasing reminder of the whole marvelous
+fabric of the Church.
+
+Because of her lowered vitality and her days of idleness in bed, her
+receptivity to exterior impressions was greatly increased.  The steady
+stream of suggestions of her ancient religion which had flowed in upon
+her welled higher and higher in her subconsciousness until they crossed
+the line of consciousness and took sudden and complete possession of
+her mind.
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+SURRENDER
+
+The next morning Georgia sent for Jim.
+
+Before he came she wrote to Stevens:
+
+_Dear Mason--I am going to take my husband back.  I have been here now
+for nearly a month, and I have had plenty of time to think things over,
+you may be sure.  What I am going to do is best for both of us--for all
+three of us.  There is no doubt of that in my mind.  I know it._
+
+_Please don't answer or try to see me.  That would simply make things
+harder for us, but not change my plans._
+
+_It is my religion that has done it, Mason.  Do you remember that I
+once told you, when it came to the big things I didn't believe I would
+dare disobey?  I was right in this respect that I can't bring myself to
+disobey, but it is not so much from fear as I thought it would be.  It
+is a sense of "ought."  That is the only way I can put it.  I have a
+feeling, tremendously strong, but hard to define in words, that I ought
+not, that I must not go on with what we planned._
+
+_This feeling is stronger than I am, Mason.  That is all I can say
+about it._
+
+_So good-bye.  May God bless you and make you prosperous and happy in
+this life and the next one.  This is my prayer, my dear._
+
+_Georgia._
+
+
+The nurse took the letter to the mail box in the office and when she
+returned, looked at her patient curiously, saying, "Your husband is
+waiting downstairs to see you."
+
+"Do you mind asking him to come up, nurse?"
+
+Jim, who had now been in the city for a month, had lost some of his
+open-air tan and regained a portion of his banished poundage, but still
+he looked far better than Georgia had seen him for years.  He made a
+favorable impression upon her from the instant he crossed the
+threshold.  He was the Jim of the earlier rather than of the later
+years of their married life.  His aspect seemed to confirm the truth of
+the revelation which she had received concerning him.
+
+"How do you do," she asked formally.
+
+"Very well, thank you," he replied.  "How do you do?"
+
+"Much better--won't you be seated?"
+
+Jim, first carefully placing his brown derby hat under the chair, sat
+where the priest had been the day before.
+
+She felt a certain numbness of emotion as she looked at him, but none
+of that loathing and disgust without which, as she had come to believe,
+he could not be in her presence.  Doubtless, she reflected, she had
+exaggerated her dislike for Jim, to justify herself for Stevens.
+
+"Georgia," said Jim slowly, "I didn't act right before.  I know it and
+I'm sorry and ashamed.  It was drink that put the devil in me, same as
+it will for any man that goes against it hard enough........  Some
+people can drink in moderation--it doesn't seem to hurt them.  But I
+can't.  When I got started I tried to drink up all the whiskey in North
+Clark Street.  Well, it can't be done.  I'm onto that now.  No more
+moderate drinking for me.  From now on I'm going to chop it out
+altogether."
+
+He paused for a word of encouragement, but she remained silent.  A
+little nodule of memory, which had been lying dormant in her brain,
+awoke at his words, "from now on I'm going to chop it out altogether."
+How many times she had heard him say that before--and every time he had
+thumped his right fist into his left palm, just as he was doing now.
+
+"All I ask from you is another chance," he continued.  "You know about
+the prodigal son.  That's me.  I've come back repentant.  I know I've
+brought you misery in my time--and plenty of it.  So if you stick on
+your rights and never forgive me, you don't have to.  What do you say,
+Georgia?"
+
+Again he paused, but she did not speak, sitting with her head bent,
+picking with her fingers at the coverlet.
+
+"It wasn't me that did you the harm," he pleaded, "it was the whiskey
+in me, and if I keep away from that why the rest of me isn't so bad.
+You used to think that yourself once, Georgia."
+
+She waited for him to continue, fearing what he would say next, and he
+said it.  "But if you're through with me, I guess the only friend I've
+got left after all is whiskey.  He put me to the bad all right, but he
+won't go back on me now I'm there.  Whatever else you can say about
+him, he's faithful.  He's always got a smile for you when you're blue,
+and he'll stick to you clear through to the finish."
+
+Yes, that was Jim of old, word for word and motive for motive, who
+thought the proper remedy for disappointment was drunkenness.
+
+"Oh, Jim," she cried, "why did you say that?"
+
+He misunderstood her completely.  He felt that he was making a most
+effective threat.  "I said it because it's true," he answered roughly,
+"that's why.  You've showed me where I stand--you've given me my answer
+just as loud as if you'd been shouting it.  Good-bye.  Likely I'll be
+laying up in a barrel house on the river front pretty soon, and pretty
+soon after that they'll be taking me out to Dunning and planting me in
+the ground with just a little stick and a number on it, or else--" a
+catch came into his voice as the pathetic picture swam vividly before
+his eyes, for like most drunkards he possessed something of the
+artistic temperament, "or else maybe they'll cut me up to show the
+young internes and the trained nurses which side the heart's on."
+
+Yes, he was doing the baby act again, making excuses and threatening
+suicide.  He might have deceived Al and Father Hervey for a month or
+more with his "reform," but he couldn't deceive her for ten consecutive
+minutes.  She had seen into the core of his nature, that it was weak
+and unstable as ever.  Sooner or later he would relapse.  What had been
+would be again.
+
+He arose as if to leave, then hesitated to give her one last chance to
+relent.
+
+"S'long," he said, slowly opening the door.
+
+"You can come home, Jim--if you want."
+
+"If I want!"  He went to her quickly and took her in his arms and
+pressed his lips to her cold ones until she shuddered in his embrace.
+
+When at last he left her she looked to the picture of the Sacred Heart
+as if for approval, and whispered, "Not my will, but Thine, be done."
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+WORSHIP
+
+A few days later Georgia was discharged from the hospital with the
+warning that she was convalescent, but not cured.  She might by
+indiscretion in the ensuing weeks make herself a semi-invalid for the
+rest of her life; she might even bring about an acute relapse, in which
+case she would be likely to die.
+
+She telephoned the old man that she was ready to report the following
+Monday, but he ordered her to stay away for at least another week,
+saying that her place was absolutely safe and her salary running on.
+She thanked him so earnestly for his kindness that he was minded to
+break into her secret, congratulate her on her engagement, tell her it
+was Stevens who had been kind and generous, but according to his
+promise he refrained.  He supposed she would quickly discover the facts
+after their marriage anyway.
+
+Jim was rodman with the surveying department of an important landscape
+gardening firm.  Sometimes his employment kept him out in the country
+for two or three days at a time, but he turned in ten or twelve dollars
+every Saturday night and the family was more comfortable than it had
+ever been.
+
+Georgia had in fairness to acknowledge that Jim had shown unexpectedly
+decent feeling.  During her fortnight of convalescence he had assumed
+no right of proprietorship, made no demands.  He slept on a lounge in
+the front room and never went to her room without first knocking.  She
+wished that things might go on so indefinitely, but she knew that it
+was now a question of days, perhaps of hours, before she must reassume
+all the obligations of wifehood.  She was getting well so rapidly and
+so evidently that soon she would have no excuse for not meeting them.
+
+She was grateful to Jim for his courtesy; and they spoke to each other
+more kindly than ever before.  They had ceased to act upon the theory
+that it did not much matter what one said to the other since the other
+had to stand it anyway.  She had already taken over a year out of their
+lives together to show that she did not have to stand it.
+
+Their example was not without its influence upon the other members of
+the family, Al and Mrs. Talbot, and there was far less wrangling and
+friction in the household.
+
+Not without hesitating dread Georgia brought herself to the grilled
+shutter of Father Hervey's Gothic confessional box.  She had been
+derelict in this as in other obligations; except for her brief and half
+delirious words of general contrition in the hospital, it was her first
+confession for three years.
+
+Sinking to her knees she whispered, "Bless me, Father, for I have
+sinned."
+
+She began the prayer of the penitent.  "I confess to Almighty God, to
+blessed Mary, ever Virgin, to blessed Michael, the archangel, to
+blessed John the Baptist, to the holy apostles Peter and Paul, and to
+all the saints, that I have sinned exceedingly in thought, word and
+deed, through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous
+fault."
+
+As she told her secret sins and pettiness to the priest, it seemed that
+the poison of them was being drained from her memory where they had
+become encysted.  Her heart was cleaned and purified and lightened by
+the process of the confessional.
+
+It is indeed doubtful whether any other ecclesiastical instrument since
+the world began has lifted so much sorrow from mankind.
+
+Georgia's conspicuous and mortal sins were two--Doubt and her continued
+entertainment of that feeling for Mason Stevens which, since it was
+unlawful, the Church denominated Lust.
+
+Doubt had followed naturally on absorption in worldly affairs,
+dangerous associations and reading, and neglect of her obligations to
+the Church.  Especially reprehensible had been her frequent attendance
+at the Sunday Evening Ethical Club, where the very air was impregnated
+with dilute agnosticism.
+
+In future she must be more careful in her choice of reading.
+Materialism and atheism were skillfully concealed in many a so-called
+sociological treatise.  Not that sociology lacked certain elements of
+truth, but the danger for untrained minds lay in exaggerating their
+importance until they overshadowed greater truths.  She would do well
+hereafter to leave sociology to sociologists.
+
+The Sunday Evening Ethical Club was anathema.  She must not go there
+again nor to any similar place where veiled socialism and anarchy were
+preached.
+
+The confessor was rejoiced that her duty toward her husband and toward
+herself, for the two duties were one, had been so unmistakably revealed
+to her.  Did the image of the other man ever trouble her mind?
+
+Yes, Georgia acknowledged it did.
+
+That was to be expected, in the beginning.  But it would cease to
+trouble her before long.  Did this image occur to her often?
+
+Yes, she said, it did--very often, almost continually.  It was not
+always actively before her, she explained, but it seemed never far
+away, as if it were just beneath the surface of her ordinary thoughts.
+
+In that case it would be impossible to absolve her and she would remain
+in a state of mortal sin unless she would promise solemnly to refrain
+from all further thoughts of that man, and if ever they arose unbidden
+to banish them immediately, as an evil spirit is cast out from one
+possessed.
+
+The priest waited, but the woman remained silent.
+
+Did she remember, he asked severely, the words of our Savior, that "he
+who looketh in lust, committeth adultery."  If she kept this idol in
+her heart, no priest had power to forgive her sins in His name.  Her
+choice was before her, her Lord or her flesh.
+
+Her head was bowed, her hands clasped before her, and she felt tears
+trickle slowly upon her knuckles.
+
+"Oh, I promise, Father," she whispered, "to try never to think of him
+any more, and to put him out of my mind--when--the thought
+comes--unbidden."
+
+The sincerity of her intention was evident in the tones of her voice
+and she was offered her penance; to be hereafter scrupulous in her
+religious observances; to hear one mass a week besides the Sunday mass
+for two months; to say her prayers night and morning always reverently
+on her knees, not standing or in bed; with the addition of five Our
+Fathers and Hail Marys night and morning until her penance was
+completed; to endeavor to influence her family to go with her to Sunday
+mass each week; and to examine her conscience daily.
+
+The wise and gentle old priest had not been harsh with her, and she
+accepted humbly and gratefully the penance he imposed.
+
+He prayed to God to regard her mercifully and to lead her to eternal
+life, then raising his right hand he recited over her the consecrated
+syllables of the sacrament, ending with the solemn words of peace, _Ego
+te absolvo a peccatis in nomine Patris_, here he made the sign of the
+cross, _et Filii et Spiritus Sancti.  Amen_.  (I absolve thee from thy
+sins in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.
+Amen.)
+
+Georgia left the confessional and went to the other part of the church
+to pray for a clean and strengthened spirit.
+
+The Sunday following she went with Jim, Al and Mrs. Talbot to the
+cathedral where pontifical mass was celebrated.  Encrusted with the
+accumulated observances of centuries of faith, it is, perhaps, the most
+intricate, aesthetic and impressive religious rite ever practiced by
+mankind.
+
+From the archbishop seated on his throne, wearing his two-horned mitre
+in sign of the two testaments, his emerald ring as spouse of the
+Church, his silken tunic and dalmatic, his gloves of purity; with his
+shepherd's crosier in his hand, his woolen pallium over his shoulders,
+bound with three golden pins in memory of the three nails which
+fastened Him; from the archbishop crowned with gold to the least
+acolyte in surplice of white to recall His life, and cassock of black
+to recall His sorrow, the hierarchical symbolism is complex,
+mysterious, complete, beautiful.
+
+When Georgia, genuflecting and signing herself with holy water, passed
+through the cathedral's double doors which prefigure the two sides of
+His being, she felt as if she were coming home again after a long,
+unhappy journey.  The clustered shafts of the columns carried her eyes
+up to the high, darkened groins of the roof.  The south sun streamed in
+colors through the saints of the windows.  In the east, on the altar,
+the tall slender candles burned purely.
+
+The incense puffed from the swinging censer, like smoke, familiar and
+pleasing to her.  When the priest nine times uttered Kyrie eleison, the
+prayer of fallen humanity, she felt as if a friend were interceding for
+her before a great judge.
+
+It made her proud to see the slow evolutions of the choir, regular and
+disciplined, to hear as if far away their solemn chants in stately
+Latin, to feel that she belonged to the same fabric of which they were
+a part.
+
+As the service proceeded, the priests passing back and forth before the
+altar making obeisance and kissing its holy stone in ancient and
+regular form, the world outside receded continuously further from the
+people in the church, and they became increasingly merged into one
+single, splendid act of worship.
+
+Holding the jewelled paten with its bread, above the jewelled chalice
+with its wine, the archbishop made three signs of the cross to
+commemorate the living hours of the crucifixion; then moving the paten
+he made two signs to signify the separation of His soul and body.  The
+altar bell tinkled, a symbol of the convulsion of nature in that
+supreme hour.  A great sigh went through the Church.
+
+XXII
+
+KANSAS CITY
+
+Kansas City is growing vain and beautiful.  She has, within recent
+years, spent ten million dollars on her looks--not to increase her
+terminal facilities or make her transit rapider--but simply and solely
+on her looks, to clear up her complexion and improve her figure.
+
+Beauty pays dividends to towns, as to women and gardeners.  Since
+Kansas City put in its park and boulevard system for ten million,
+adjoining real estate has advanced twelve, or according to the
+inhabitants, fifteen million.
+
+Mason Stevens decided he would like to get transferred to Kansas City,
+with a raise of salary.  Then he could pick out a small house in the
+trees at the end of one of the new macadam roads, and eventually go
+back and forth in a Panno Six just as he had planned.  He put in a good
+many odd hours with the maps and prospectuses of proposed, suggested or
+hoped for subdivisions.
+
+If he could arrange with Mr. Silverman to shift him, he would send for
+Georgia and they would scout for a lot near a boulevard end.  The land
+out there was bound to appreciate in value as the town built up and the
+parkways were still further extended.  He would like to buy one lot for
+himself and another for investment.  He would have to buy on time, but
+that's an incentive to a young business man.
+
+He felt confident of Georgia's enchantment with the project.  The view
+from the bluffs was finer than anything one could get in Chicago for
+the same money.  Besides the process of social stratification was not
+so far along.  Kansas City was to Chicago as Chicago to New York, and
+New York to London.  Comers-up, like himself and Georgia, would be more
+important more quickly in the smaller city.
+
+Mason soon found out that there was not much to be said against Mr.
+Plaisted, the local agent in chief, except that he was getting old.  In
+routine matters and methods he was excellent, but had ceased to be
+creative.  In the terminology of a great art, he had lost his wallop.
+
+It was the time when the big life companies were beginning their drive
+to get business in block; to insure for one large premium paid in a
+lump sum, the entire working force of a bank or business house.  When
+the employe was honorably retired, say at sixty or sixty-five, after a
+stipulated number of years of steady work, he would be pensioned until
+he died, which pension might in whole or in part be continued to his
+wife if she survived him.  Or he might receive, upon superannuation, an
+endowment equaling three years' salary.  If he died before retirement
+his relict might become the beneficiary of an ordinary life policy.
+There were still other plans and combinations and permutations thereof,
+whose details were more or less veiled in a haze of actuarial figures,
+but whose broad effects were alike calculated to incite fidelity in the
+employe by holding out to him the prospect of a comfortable decline if
+he stuck to his employer through youth and middle age.
+
+Mason quickly reported to Mr. Silverman that within six months the New
+England Life had written two such block policies for corporations and
+that three other rival companies had secured one each, while the
+Eastern had obtained none.
+
+Silverman telegraphed sharply to Plaisted, "Why don't you get any
+corporation business in bulk!  Our competitors do."
+
+Mr. Plaisted responded with a laborious letter of explanation.
+
+Then it developed that the New England Life had things already in shape
+for a third big deal--the Phosphate National Bank.  Mason got the first
+wind of it, not in Kansas City, but by a direct tip from Mr. Silverman
+in New York, with instructions to investigate promptly.  Within six
+hours he was able to report back that the proposed premium would exceed
+five thousand dollars a year, and furthermore that the Phosphate Trust
+& Savings, being controlled by the same parties as the Phosphate
+National, was preparing to follow its lead.  That would make four banks
+for the New England in half a year and greatly increase its already
+disturbing prestige.
+
+Silverman answered, "Immediately use all proper methods secure
+Phosphate business for us.  We must maintain prestige.  Authorize you
+act independently Plaisted your discretion.  Draw on me in reason."
+
+Mason drew on him for one thousand dollars, and obtained two five
+hundred dollar bills, one of which, after duly cautious preliminaries,
+he handed to the cashier, the other to the auditor of the Phosphate
+National.  Again, after duly cautious preliminaries, they accepted.
+These two gentlemen had been detailed a committee to draw up for the
+convenience of the bank's Board of Directors an analytical syllabus of
+the differing propositions offered by the competing insurance
+companies.  The Eastern Life got the Phosphate National's business,
+followed by that of its subsidiary, the Trust & Savings Bank, and Mason
+got Mr. Silverman's congratulations.
+
+Two days later Silverman walked unexpectedly into Plaisted's office.
+Plaisted, who had just that instant signed his name to a letter
+addressed to his visitor in New York, was rattled.
+
+"Mr. Plaisted," said Mr. Silverman, biting off the end of a
+three-for-a-dollar, "I have found out what is the trouble, that is, the
+main trouble with your agency here."
+
+Plaisted winced.  He hadn't realized that there was any trouble, and
+certainly not any main trouble with his agency.  "Yes, Mr. Silverman."
+
+"You're undermanned."
+
+"Why, yes--perhaps.  I've thought of breaking in a few new agents this
+winter."
+
+"No," said Silverman, "I mean you're undermanned at the top.  Weak on
+the executive side."
+
+"Oh," said Plaisted.
+
+"You need new blood, new ideas, new life, hustle," he snapped his
+fingers with each successive word--"speed--force--energy--vigor--
+enterprise--vitality--dynamics--do you get me?"
+
+"I--yes--I'm sure I do," answered Plaisted, in considerable
+apprehension.
+
+"I suggest therefore that you appoint young Stevens--you have met him?"
+
+"Yes," answered Plaisted, who detested the ground Mason walked on, "I
+have met him."
+
+"I suggest you appoint him as your first assistant," remarked Mr.
+Silverman, calmly eyeing Plaisted.  "He will take the burden of details
+off your shoulders."
+
+"I--ah--don't know, Mr. Silverman, if that would be entirely wise.  You
+see our methods--his and mine--"
+
+"I have made my suggestion, Mr. Plaisted," answered Silverman slowly.
+"In my judgment that would be the best thing to do."
+
+The two men looked at each other until at last Plaisted dropped his
+eyes murmuring, "I will think it over."
+
+"I leave at two.  I should like to know your decision before then."
+
+Plaisted yielded by telephone within half an hour.
+
+He wasn't deprived of the corner room; he would continue to sign
+_General Agent_ after his name.  But he realized bitterly that he had
+left to him only the shadow of his long authority.  The substance had
+passed to the young stranger.
+
+At the beginning of the following year Plaisted was granted a six
+months' leave of absence with pay, and soon after his return resigned.
+He now travels peevishly from Palm Beach to Paris and back again in
+company with a valet-nurse.
+
+Georgia's letter of farewell came in the afternoon mail, just after Mr.
+Silverman's departure.  Mason read it over every night for a month and
+found it bad medicine for sleep.  The lines in his shrewd face deepened
+perceptibly.  Finally he locked the letter up in his safe deposit
+vault, and seemed to rest better afterwards.
+
+He dickered with the hotel for room and bath by the year and got
+thirty-three per cent off.  He was known by his office force as a hard
+man to please.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+THE LAST OF THE OLD MAN
+
+Georgia pressed the knob of the time clock at fifteen minutes to nine
+the next morning.  When she opened her locker to hang up her hat and
+jacket she discovered a novel which she had drawn from a circulating
+library six weeks before and which had been costing her two cents a day
+ever since, a box of linen collars, an umbrella she thought she had
+lost, and a shirt waist done up in paper.
+
+She went from the locker hall into the room of the office, half
+expecting to find it changed in some way, but everything was the same.
+The same clerks were stoop-shouldered over the same desks, the same
+young auditor was lolling back in his swivel chair, pulling his stubby
+mustache, his elbow on the low mahogany railing that marked him off
+from his assistants.  That was how he always began the day.  At nine
+precisely he would ring for a stenographer and dictate from notes.  He
+never dictated straight from his head, probably because his work was so
+full of figures.
+
+Georgia was taken back by the casual way in which she was greeted.
+Several arose and shook hands and were briefly glad to see her again;
+others simply nodded a good morning.  An oldish bookkeeper asked, "Been
+away, haven't you?"
+
+The girls of the lunch club, however, welcomed her warmly as they came
+in one after the other and found her seated at her old desk, just
+outside the old man's door.  But even they, she felt with a twinge of
+bitterness, failed to grasp the stupendousness of her experience.
+
+Since last she had been in the office she had knocked at the gate of
+death and lost her lover and found her faith, yet the people of the
+office seemingly perceived no change in her except that she was pale.
+
+All that they knew of her was the surface and that, she reflected, was
+all she knew of them.  Perhaps during her absence the oldest bookkeeper
+had received notice to quit at the end of the year and dreaded to tell
+his invalid wife; perhaps he had had a daughter die, not recover, from
+typhoid; or his son had gone to prison or received a hero medal or
+become a licensed aviator.
+
+The young auditor might be frowning and pulling his mustache because he
+had recently acquired a chorus lady for a stepmother.  The tall,
+red-puffed girl with the open-work waist and abrupt curves might, as
+had been suspected, be no better than she should be.  It wouldn't
+surprise Georgia greatly if that was so.
+
+But, she reflected, what of it?  None of them mattered to her, just as
+she mattered to none of them.
+
+For everyone she supposed it was much the same; four or five people one
+knew and the rest strangers.
+
+She slipped some paper into the machine to try her fingers.  She wrote
+hadn't, "hand't" and stenographer, "stonegrapher."  She was not pleased
+to find whoever had been subbing for her had put a black ribbon on her
+machine.  She liked purple better.
+
+Mechanically she pulled at the upper left-hand drawer where she had
+kept her note books and pencils, but it was locked.  And she didn't
+have the key.  She had sent it by Al from the hospital.
+
+Miss Gerson walked briskly to the desk.  "Oh," she said, "Miss Connor,
+you're back."
+
+"Yes.  How do you do!"  They shook hands.
+
+"That's fine--you do look a little pale--we were all so sorry to hear
+of your illness.  I've been your understudy," she gave a little sigh,
+"using your desk.  I'm afraid its cluttered up with my things.  If I'd
+only known you were returning to-day I'd have left it spick and span
+for you."  She took out the key and unlocked the master drawer, which
+released the others, and removed her notebook, pencils, erasers, some
+picture postal cards, a broken-crystalled lady's watch, an apple and a
+book on etiquette.
+
+"I think the old man's just fine to work for, don't you!" she asked as
+she collected her belongings.
+
+"Indeed I do," said Georgia jealously.  "Will you be at the club for
+lunch to-day?"
+
+"Indeed I will," responded Miss Gerson, departing.
+
+The telephone tinkled on Georgia's desk.
+
+"Hello," came the voice, "is this Miss Gerson?"
+
+"Did you wish to speak to her personally?"
+
+"I wish to speak with Miss Gerson, Mr. Tatton's secretary."
+
+"This is his secretary," said Georgia.
+
+"This is St. Luke's hospital," said the voice.  "Mr. Tatton wants you
+to take a cab and come right down here to see him, and say--hello--I'm
+not through--bring your typewriter.  Right away."
+
+The old man was propped up in a chair, fully dressed, when Georgia
+arrived.  "Oh, Miss Connor," he said when he saw her, "I wasn't
+expecting you.  All the better, though.  Glad you're well again.  I'm
+not."  He held his hand to his side and seemed to have difficulty with
+his breathing.
+
+"Take this," he said.  "Date it and write: Codicil.  And I hereby
+declare and publish, being of sound mind and body, and in the presence
+of witnesses, that I do now revoke and cancel and make of no effect and
+void, in whole and in part, the clause numbered seven--then put also
+figure seven in parenthesis--in the foregoing instrument, will and
+testament of date July second, nineteen hundred and five.  I expressly
+withdraw and withhold all the bequests therein made, named and
+stipulated."
+
+Georgia took his words directly on the machine.  A nurse and an interne
+witnessed his signature.
+
+"Now," said the old man, "take this in shorthand, to my wife, care
+Platz & Company, Bankers, 18 Rue Scribe, Paris, France.
+
+"Dear Marion: Except for those three pleasant days last summer we
+haven't seen each other for six years, and as you will know long before
+you read this, we shan't see each other alive again.
+
+"I deeply regret that, especially of later years, our marriage has been
+so unsuccessful.  I apprehend clearly that the fault lay with me
+insofar as I--quote--had grown so very prosy--end quote--as you
+remarked last summer.
+
+"My last wish is that you will bring Elsie home and keep her here until
+she marries some decent American with an occupation.  Underline those
+last three words, Miss Connor.  She is now a young woman of seventeen,
+and it was evident to me last summer that her head is fast becoming
+stuffed with nonsense.  She is learning to look down on her country and
+her countrymen and mark my words--underline mark my words, Miss
+Connor--if you encourage her to marry some foreign scamp she will be
+very unhappy.  I know you don't agree with these views, but I know they
+are sound, and if you keep Elsie over there you will live to see that
+proved; although I hope not.
+
+"Give my love to Elsie and remind her of her old dad now and then.
+
+"Good-bye, Marion.  You and Elsie are the only women I ever loved.
+
+"That's all, Miss Connor.  Now what I want you to do is this: If I
+don't come out of this operation--appendicitis--please write that up
+and mail it.  Just sign it Fred.  If I do get well, destroy your notes
+and don't send the letter.
+
+"Oh, you better add a postscript--P.S. I am dictating this because I
+have neither the time nor the strength to write myself.  I was attacked
+suddenly."
+
+Two nurses and a doctor who had been waiting now gathered about the old
+man, lifted him gently to the bed and began to undress him.  He held
+out his hand.  "Good-bye, Miss Connor," he said.
+
+He died, and Georgia sent the letter to his wife.
+
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+THE NEW KING
+
+Samuel Cleever, a tall, thin dyspeptic with a pince-nez and English
+intonation, was moved from Newark, N.J., to succeed the old man.
+
+His first conference with Georgia was brief.  "Good morning, Miss
+Ah-ah-"
+
+"Connor."
+
+"Quite so.  Do you understand the Singer cross-filing reference system?"
+
+"I understand cross-indexing and card-catalogues."
+
+"The Singer system specifically, do you know that?"
+
+"No, sir."
+
+"So I feared."
+
+"But I could learn quickly."
+
+"Quite so.  But to be frank," said Mr. Cleever, "I have brought my
+private secretary with me from Newark."  New kings make new courts.
+
+"Yes, sir," said Georgia in a low voice.
+
+"I will assign you to the auditing department for the present."
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+She felt many eyes upon her and her cheeks were burning as she walked
+down the long room carrying her business belongings to a narrow
+flat-top which the young auditor pointed out to her.  It was next the
+inside wall.
+
+The color came to her face in waves as she passed Miss Gerson's desk
+and she had a furious sensation that her habit of blushing was
+damnable.  Why, she asked herself angrily, couldn't she at least appear
+calm in unpleasant situations!
+
+Her new work was less interesting, more mechanical.  There were rows on
+rows of figures in it, and much technical accounting jargon.  She
+ceased to throw in overtime to the company, quitting sharply each night
+on the dot of five thirty.  On pay night she found, as she had feared,
+that her salary had been standardized.  She received the regular class
+A stenographer's $15 instead of the private secretary's $20.
+
+On Tuesday of her second week in the auditing department, Mr. Cleever
+sent for her.  Hoping devoutly that the new secretary had sprained his
+wrist (Mr. Cleever's secretary was a young man, Mrs. Cleever having
+been a stenographer herself), Georgia took her notebook.
+
+But Mr. Cleever wanted instead to inform her that the system of
+bookkeeping whereof she was the apparent beneficiary disaccorded with
+his notions of system.
+
+Since that remark seemed to leave her in the dark, he tossed across his
+table to her a report from the auditor's department which showed that
+in the past seven weeks she had been credited with $140 which had been
+debited to Mason Stevens, also that Columbus Hospital bills for $129.60
+(including extras) had been paid by the company and charged to Stevens,
+and that a doctor's statement for $300 had been settled by the company
+and charged to Mr. Silverman's private fund.  As to the last item, Mr.
+Cleever explained he, of course, had nothing to say, but as to the
+other two, although he had neither the desire nor the right to inquire
+into her personal affairs or her conduct out of the office, he must
+henceforth make it an undeviating rule not to permit the use of the
+company's books to facilitate private financial transactions between
+employes.
+
+As Mr. Cleever's precise syllables clicked on, she looked from him to
+the two page report in her hand, and back again to him.  Her lips were
+partly open and she breathed through them.
+
+When he spoke of his desire not to inquire into her conduct out of the
+office, she thought she distinguished a discreet sneer in his modulated
+voice.
+
+She knew instantly that it was out of the question for her to remain in
+the place.  The report she held had been typewritten by a woman in her
+own department.  It would spread from her to the other women and then
+to the men.  Her engagement to marry Stevens could never now be
+announced in explanation.  She would be construed as she herself had
+construed the tall, red-headed girl with the abundant figure.
+
+She felt a flood rush over her face, suffusing it to the roots of her
+hair.  She saw that Cleever saw it, and that he took it for
+confirmation of his suspicions.
+
+"Mr. Cleever, I assure you I never knew anything of this until this
+moment."
+
+"Of course, Miss Connor," he responded drily.  "Please understand I
+make no criticism of the method of my predecessor.  But in future--"
+
+"It will stop, Mr. Cleever.  I wish to hand in my resignation."
+
+"We are sorry to lose you, Miss Connor, but of course if that is your
+decision--"
+
+"Yes, sir, it is."
+
+He bowed slightly.  "Then at the end of the week, Saturday?"
+
+"Yes, sir, Saturday night."
+
+He again bowed slightly to signify that it was understood and that
+their talk was ended.
+
+She took her lunch hour to write to Mason.  She put many sheets in the
+machine and crumpled them into the waste basket in accomplishing this:
+
+
+_Dear Mason: I have just learned of your kindness to me at the
+hospital.  Thank you for the thought._
+
+_I find that I owe you $269.60, which I will repay in installments.  I
+enclose $12 for first installment.  I regret that I am unable to pay it
+all at once.  I am leaving the office.  Please don't write._
+
+_Congratulations on your success._
+
+  _Sincerely,
+      Georgia Connor._
+
+
+She felt as she dropped the note in the mail chute that Mason was a man
+to love.  Imagine Jim doing her a great service and keeping it quiet.
+Jim took his affections out in words and physical embrace.  Jim--she
+caught herself up suddenly.  This wasn't being resigned, as she had
+prayed God she might be.
+
+She answered half a dozen want ads before she could get the upset price
+she had determined on--eighteen dollars.  She covenanted for this
+finally with a frowsy looking, bald little lawyer, in an old-fashioned
+five-story, pile-foundationed, gray stone building on Clark street, put
+up soon after the fire.  The windows were seldom washed and there were
+two obsolete rope elevators.
+
+The little lawyer, Mr. Matthews, had a large single room in which he
+sublet desk-room to a pair of young real-estaters.  Georgia didn't like
+the looks of the place, but inasmuch as Mr. Matthews didn't haggle an
+instant about her salary, she took it.
+
+She had nothing important to do.  Mr. Matthews' mind was fussy and
+unsystematic.  He had little business and set her to copying over his
+briefs of bygone years.  "Codifying," he called it; why she never knew.
+
+She shrewdly suspected she was engaged rather as a "front" to impress
+clients than to work at her trade.
+
+Whenever a visitor, whether collector or suspender peddler, came to see
+Mr. Matthews, that attorney bade him sit a few minutes while he
+finished up a letter that had to catch the Twentieth Century or the
+five thirty Pennsylvania Limited, as the case might be.  Then he would
+fake a letter and Georgia would help him at the end by inquiring,
+"Special delivery, I suppose, sir?"
+
+It answered her purpose for the time being, but she hadn't the vaguest
+intention of staying.  She saw there was no future.
+
+Mr. Matthews each morning requested her to oblige the young
+real-estaters by "helping them out" with their correspondence.
+
+"Helping them out" meant doing it all.  Mr. Matthews was brimming with
+euphemisms.  Likewise they, the real estaters, got to asking her to
+"help out" their friends, which she good-naturedly did--in hours.
+
+Saturday Mr. Matthews didn't turn up, nor yet Monday.  Tuesday when
+Georgia suggested her payment, he said he was expecting a check that
+afternoon.  Thursday, when she insisted on it, he told her to collect
+half from the real-estaters, since she had been working for them as
+much as for him.
+
+She couldn't see it that way at all.  He had engaged her.
+
+He fell into legal phraseology.  "Qui facit per alium," or something of
+the sort; and she told him nettly she wasn't a fool and that if he
+didn't pay her immediately she would attach his furniture.
+
+He turned his pockets inside out, showing a ten-dollar bill and
+eighty-five cents.  She took the bill and walked out.  But it wasn't
+much of a triumph.  Her wages during her employment by Mr. Matthews had
+averaged six dollars a week.
+
+She was therefore unable to send Mason another installment; and
+couldn't help being relieved because, despite her injunction, he had
+written her.
+
+
+"_Dear Mrs. Connor: Please do not hurry at all in that matter.  Indeed,
+I would be pleased to consider it an investment bringing in 5%, or if
+you prefer, 6% a year.  If you pay me $16.18 annually (or $4.18 more
+during the balance of the current year), that would be an advantageous
+business arrangement for me.  I hope you may see your way clear to
+agreeing to this._
+
+_"With kind regards,_
+
+  "_Very truly,
+      "Mason Stevens._"
+
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+JIM REËNLISTS
+
+Georgia smiled a little woefully over the transparent intention of
+Stevens' letter.  He was so obviously trying to do her a great kindness
+and disguise it as business by his talk of six per cent.
+
+She knew that with young men and small sums interest rates lose their
+meaning.  Everybody would rather have a quarter down than a cent a year
+forever.  Any young hustler on a salary would rather have $270 cash
+than an unsecured promise of $16 annually.
+
+Oh, he was naïve and boyish as ever to think she wouldn't promptly
+penetrate his little plan.  She had always seen through his various
+tricks and stratagems in regard to her from the very beginning.  She
+didn't remember one time when he had fooled her successfully.  It was
+like having a young son who hardly needs to talk to you at all, you can
+read his mind so easily as it runs along from thing to thing.
+
+She went to a newspaper office to answer one advertisement and insert
+another.  The one she answered was for "A rapid typist--beginners not
+wanted.  State name, experience, age, education."  A blind address was
+given.  "Y 672," care of the paper.  She wrote an appreciative account
+of her talents, but was grieved to discover that Y 672 was none other
+than the Eastern Life Assurance Company.  Evidently Mr. Cleever was
+going in for many changes.
+
+Ten days later she was with a mail order house, in a huge reënforced
+concrete block-like building, just across the river on the west side.
+The roof of this enormous edifice, according to advertisement, covered
+99 acres of floor space, or some such dimension.  The firm didn't do a
+retail business in Chicago, so everything was rough and ready.  The
+clerks worked in their shirt sleeves, usually blue ones.  They were a
+bigger, thicker-necked lot than the downtowners, and freer-tongued
+before the women.  She wasn't at all disconcerted, however, by any
+amount of the "damns" and "hells."
+
+She was described on the books of the company as "Stenographer; Class
+A; Female; First six months' of employment; salary $12."  The
+understanding was that if she made good she would be promoted, and this
+she promised herself to do, but didn't.
+
+The advertisement which Georgia put in the paper was:
+
+
+TO RENT--2667 Pearl Ave., beautiful double front room, near lake and
+park; single gentleman; breakfast if desired; reasonable.  Connor,
+third flat.
+
+
+Mrs. Talbot could not be brought to lowering caste by taking a roomer
+until Georgia explained about her debt to Mason.  This veered the older
+woman's mind violently about, and she began immediately to figure if it
+wouldn't be possible to squeeze in two persons instead of one--which
+proposition Georgia promptly vetoed.
+
+Jim acquiesced gloomily in the loss of the front room.  He didn't see
+why paying Stevens' interest at six per cent wouldn't satisfy the
+nicest sense of honor.  Six per cent was a good investment for anybody.
+Lord knows he wished someone was paying it to him.  He would feel
+ashamed to have a visitor shown back to the dining room instead of
+forward to the parlor.
+
+Al alone contemplated the subject with equanimity.  He dismissed it by
+saying that it wouldn't get him anything one way or the other.  To him
+the parlor meant the place where the family gathered together after
+supper to bore him.  He'd rather sit in a back room and chin with the
+crowd across a round, yellow, slippery table, or go across to Jonas'
+and try to win a little beer money at Kelly pool.  He seldom analyzed
+his emotions; he simply knew it was fun to squat down by the
+rectangular green cloth table, squint his eye, and sight his shot,
+while the crowd watched him through the cigarette smoke, then to
+straighten up decisively as if he had solved the problem, tip his hat
+back, whistle through his teeth, chalk his cue and put the ball in.
+Contrariwise it was darned little fun in the front room after supper.
+
+The applicant for lodging with whom Georgia finally agreed on terms was
+Mr. Cyrus Kane, copy reader on an afternoon newspaper.  He was a
+widower of forty-five, quiet, neat and regular pay.  He never once had
+a visitor to see him.  He didn't kick.
+
+But to balance all these excellent qualities was one major drawback:
+his unalterable condition was that he should be served in bed with a
+pot of black coffee at five o'clock each morning.  He explained he had
+to be at the office at six, and that he couldn't stir without coffee;
+in fact, he said he was a regular caffein fiend.  Georgia hesitated,
+then added a dollar and a half to her price, which he accepted,
+agreeing to pay $5.50 a week.
+
+Mrs. Talbot paled a trifle when informed that she had been elected to
+arise at 4:45 A.M. every day and set Mr. Kane's coffee on the gas ring
+until it was hot enough to take in to him.  But she agreed because she
+felt that so she was helping to clear Georgia's honor.  On the first
+Sunday morning of this stay Mrs. Talbot missed the coffee because she
+knew that Mr. Kane's paper didn't publish that day and supposed, or
+anyway hoped, that he would sleep late.  At six the whole family was
+awakened by his loud mutterings to himself which percolated through the
+flat.
+
+"They agreed to bring my coffee at five; they _agreed_; and here it is
+near seven and not a sign of it.  _Not_ a _sign_ of it. ---- it.  I'll
+leave, yes by ---- I'll leave!"  He thrashed about furiously in his
+bed, turning over and over, and striking the pillow with clenched fists
+in his rage.
+
+Mrs. Talbot, in sack and skirt over her nightgown, stockingless, her
+gray hair loose, went running in to him with his pot of steaming black
+dope.  He smiled cherubically when he saw her.  It was the only trouble
+they ever had with him.
+
+On Mr. Kane's coming Jim had to clear out of the front room, so he went
+to Georgia's.
+
+That evening as she undressed rapidly in the light before his approving
+eyes she had a sudden strange relieved feeling that after what she had
+been through in the past few months a little more wouldn't greatly
+matter one way or the other.
+
+It would certainly be unpleasant to have Jim pawing her again, but she
+had successfully postponed it much longer than she expected, so now she
+had better be philosophical about it.  As far as she could gather most
+women obliged their husbands and not themselves in the frequency of
+their embraces.
+
+Why, therefore, excite her imagination and her sense of horror, and try
+to make a tremendous hard luck story out of what after all was a
+perfectly common and commonplace situation?  Let her avoid it whenever
+possible and accept it with calm equanimity when necessary.
+
+It was rather ridiculous to think herself a shrinking victim of
+masculine passion.  She had borne this man a child, she was scarred
+with life, a matron of nearly ten years standing.
+
+"And I look every bit of it," she commented half aloud, as she stood
+before the mirror slipping off her corset cover.
+
+"What'd you say?" he asked, turning his eyes toward her.  He was seated
+on the bed stooping over, trying to undo a hard knotted shoe lace with
+his blunt finger nails.
+
+"I said hurry up--I'm sleepy."
+
+"You just bet I will," he answered eagerly.
+
+Not long after this domestic readjustment Jim was smoking, his wife
+reading and his mother-in-law sewing in the dining room after supper
+when the doorbell rang from the vestibule below.  Georgia pressed the
+opener and admitted Ed Miles, the boss of the ward, "the big fellow."
+She wasn't a bit glad to see him.  She thought that to keep Jim away
+from politics and politicians was the only way to keep him away from
+drinking.
+
+The big fellow made a formal call.  He sat on the edge of his chair,
+his gray derby hat pushed under it, and constantly addressed Georgia as
+ma'am.  Although she mistrusted him every moment of his visit, she felt
+the power of him, the brusque charm of his vitality, the humor of his
+laugh.
+
+When he rose to go he said good-bye politely to the women and then to
+Jim, who could tell by the pressure of the big fellow's hand that he
+wanted a word alone with him.
+
+"I'll see you to the door, Ed," said Jim, and they walked out together.
+
+Georgia noticed thankfully that her husband did not take his hat and
+that he was wearing slippers.
+
+"I want you to do me a little favor, Jim.  You know we have our ward
+club election the first Monday of the new year.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Come around."
+
+"I ain't a member of the club any more."
+
+"I'll fix that--and your back dues, too."
+
+"I promised my wife to keep out of politics."
+
+"I don't blame her either.  You were going some for a married man.  But
+the fact is, they're trying under cover to take the organization away
+from us."
+
+"I heard there was a little battle on."
+
+"It's more than that.  It goes deep.  They've got backing.  Now if my
+friends throw me down--"
+
+"You know damn well I wouldn't throw you down, Ed."
+
+"If you don't come to the front when I need you, it's the same thing.
+And I need you now.  This is confidential, y'understand?"
+
+"Sure."
+
+"Because I wouldn't let it get out I was worried."
+
+The two men were standing side by side on the front stoop in a stream
+of arc light from the street lamp.
+
+"I want your vote," said Miles, "for old sake's sake."
+
+"I dassen't go into politics regular, Ed."
+
+"I don't ask you to."
+
+"But I might slip up to the ward meeting one night, just doing my duty
+as a citizen."
+
+"You're a good fellow, Jim."  There was a trace of huskiness in the big
+fellow's bass voice and Jim felt himself again moved by his old loyalty
+to his leader.  The two shook hands warmly, fervently, with the facile
+emotions of politicians.
+
+"One thing about me--I never quit on my friends when they need me."
+There was a perceptible huskiness in Jim's voice also.
+
+"I know it damn well," said the big fellow, throwing his arm about the
+other's shoulder, "because you're a thoroughbred."  He thrust his hand
+into his side pocket and brought forth several dozen large glazed white
+cards bearing the legend, "For President Fortieth Ward Club, Carl
+Schroeder," with an oval half-tone of the fat-faced candidate.
+
+"I don't know's I've got time to make any canvass, Ed," said Jim,
+slipping the cards back and forth through his fingers.  "So you're
+running Carl, eh?"
+
+The big fellow boomed a laugh.  "You didn't know it--Reuben come to
+town.  Sure we're running Carl, and he said only this morning if he
+could get you with him he'd walk in."
+
+Jim was pleased.  "Did Carl say that, honest?"
+
+"Come on up to the corner and he'll tell you himself."
+
+"I haven't got my hat."
+
+"Take mine."  The boss slipped his gray derby on Jim's head.  It
+descended to his ears.  "You're a regular pinhead," exclaimed the big
+fellow loudly, and they both laughed.
+
+They walked up to the saloon, Connor's slippers flapping against the
+pavement flags with every step.
+
+The saloon welcomed Jim as if he had been a conquering hero.  It was
+light and warm and gay and full of men.
+
+Carl Schroeder and Jim went into the private office and whispered
+importantly together for half an hour.  When they came out, Carl was
+smiling and announced, clapping Jim on the back, "This old scout's
+brought be the best news in a week.  What'll you have, boys?"
+
+Jim took lithia, explaining he was wagoning, and they congratulated him
+and took whiskey themselves.  He left reasonably early, half a dozen
+rounds of lithia having given him a rather sloppy-weather sensation
+within.  Besides, the other fellows had got to feeling good and were
+talking to beat the band, and he just sat there like a bump on a log
+without a thing to say.
+
+Not that the drinkers seemed particularly wise or witty, for some of
+them began to sound increasingly foolish as he listened to them, cold
+sober.  But the liquor put them on a different plane from him, lower
+perhaps, but also wilder, freer, less deliberate and restrained.  Their
+thoughts didn't follow the same sequence as his and he couldn't meet
+their minds as they seemed able to meet each others.  He was
+self-conscious and glum and awkward, like a new millionaire in the
+hands of his first valet.  And he knew that one drink of whiskey would
+alter all that and put him in right.  But he didn't take it.
+
+The big fellow saw him to the door, giving him a cap that he picked up
+in the private office to go home in.
+
+"You'll do what you can for the organization in your precinct?"
+
+"Sure."
+
+"And we won't forget you."
+
+"Thanks, Ed, that's mighty fine of you."
+
+They shook hands; then Jim felt his fingers closing over a ten-dollar
+bill which had been pressed into his palm.  It was easy money, he
+thought, as he paddled home in his cap and slippers.  All he'd have to
+do to earn it would be to get around among the neighbors evenings for a
+couple or three weeks.
+
+When Georgia, who had been waiting up for him with a peculiar
+fluttering of the heart each time that she heard a step on the stairs,
+found that he was entirely sober, she kissed him of her own accord.
+
+
+
+
+XXVI
+
+EVE
+
+Some six months later, on a hot, sticky afternoon in July, Georgia came
+away from a State Street department store carrying a paper-wrapped
+parcel under her arm.  She had come down town to take advantage of an
+odds and ends sale of white goods advertised that morning.
+
+In spite of the heat which beat down from a cloudless, windless sky and
+radiated up from the stone pavements where it had stored itself, she
+wore a long bluish-gray pongee coat.  There were dark rings under her
+eyes and she felt ill and dispirited as she waited at Dearborn and
+Randolph for a North Clark Street car, which would drop her a block
+nearer her flat than the L would.
+
+The car was slow in coming and a crowd of fifteen or twenty gathered to
+wait for it.  Most of them were women homeward bound after the
+morning's shopping excitement.  One of them also wore a long
+bluish-gray coat and Georgia remembered having seen her at the white
+goods remnant counter.  They caught each other's eyes and smiled
+faintly but did not speak.
+
+When the car stopped there was the customary rush for seats and Georgia
+had to content herself with a strap.  She balanced her bundle against
+her hip and shifted her weight uncomfortably from foot to foot swaying
+to the motion of the car, envying men.
+
+A passenger who looked like an oldish maid, with gold-rimmed spectacles
+and tightly drawn thin hair, half rose and beckoned to Georgia.
+
+"I'm getting out at the next corner," she said, and sliding across the
+knees of the person next to her, gave Georgia a seat next the window on
+the shady side.
+
+"Thank you, thank you very much indeed," said Georgia gratefully.
+Several blocks later she turned and saw the maiden lady still standing
+on the back platform leaning against the controller-box and trying to
+write something on the back of a paper novel with a fountain pen.  She
+had a sudden warm feeling for this unknown friend who had done her a
+small kindness with delicacy.
+
+Then, for she was nervously unstable and the hues and tinges of her
+emotions followed each other very rapidly like magic lantern slides,
+she became suddenly and deeply humiliated.  Was she already so
+noticeable that strange women, much older than she, would offer her
+their seats!  From day to day she had gone on, still hoping that she
+was able to deceive the casual eye.  Henceforth she felt that she could
+not by any stretch of will bring herself to go out of the house except
+at night.
+
+The car made moving pictures for her as she looked through the heavy
+wire grill which kept people from putting their heads out of the
+windows, at the men slowly walking up and down the hot sidewalk in
+their shirt sleeves or stopping to talk under the projecting awnings of
+saloons and fruit stores, at the wrappered women sitting stupidly in
+the upper windows of run-down brick buildings devoted to light
+housekeeping, at children sucking hokey-pokey cones or playing ball in
+a side street.
+
+The children seemed to her the only ones with joy.  Perhaps that was
+because they didn't know what they were up against.
+
+The motorman clanged his gong angrily twenty times, then had to slow
+down and stop behind a lumbering coal wagon while the driver, a much
+blackened and begrimed Irishman, climbed leisurely from his seat and
+fussed with the neck yokes of his team, swearing sulkily at the
+motorman the while.  A messenger boy got back at him, in the opinion of
+the front platform, by hailing him as Jack Johnson, the hope of the
+dark race.  The teamster responded with some dirty language.  It was a
+bad, hot day for tempers.
+
+Georgia had time during the delay to become interested in a little
+drama which was then being enacted directly across the street from her.
+Its impelling power seemed to be a dead white horse which lay on the
+soft sticky asphalt, surrounded by a fringe of men and boys who stared
+quietly at a little pool of blood that came from a round hole above the
+animal's eye.
+
+The horse's mate stood stolidly in harness, hitched still to his wagon.
+She wondered if now he would have to pull it home alone.  A man with a
+note book pushed through the crowd.  He was evidently in authority of
+some sort.  He asked a little boy something and the boy turned and
+pointed toward an alley entrance cat-a-corner from where he stood.
+
+Then a big man with a whip in his hand, a leather strap around his
+waist and a union button in his cap, probably the driver of the dead
+horse, threw his cap on the ground and stamped his foot, shook his fist
+at the boy and turned his back on the man with the note book and
+refused to answer his questions.  She couldn't understand it at all.
+It seemed very unreasonable.
+
+Then a street car bound the other way rolled up and came to a stop
+between her and the white horse.  Mason Stevens sat on the seat
+precisely opposite hers, so near that they could have shaken hands if
+the two grilled iron screens had not been in the way.  She noticed that
+his jaw fell open, like a dead person's.
+
+She heard her conductor and the other conductor jerk simultaneously the
+go-ahead signals and the cars, quickly getting up speed, went in
+different directions.  She did not turn her head, but she could feel
+the moment when he flipped onto the back platform.  Then she heard him
+come up the aisle, breathing heavily from his run.
+
+The seat beside her had become vacant and she had placed her paper
+package of white goods on it.  Now she took it into her lap and crossed
+her arms over it.  He sat down.
+
+"How do you do!" he said.
+
+"How do you do?"
+
+They both stared straight ahead, not daring at first to look at each
+other.
+
+"It's--quite a while since we--saw each other," she ventured after a
+long pause.
+
+"Yes, quite a while, but--" he stopped.
+
+"But what!"
+
+"I don't know."
+
+Then Georgia, first to regain control of herself, laughed, breaking the
+tension.  "What are you doing here!" she asked.  "Where have you come
+from and where are you going!"
+
+"I got in from New York this morning and I'm going home--that is, to
+Kansas City, this evening.  Had to see Cleever here."
+
+"Is everything going well with you!"
+
+"Yes, that is--yes."
+
+"Business good!"
+
+"Fine."
+
+"Happy!"
+
+"Oh, yes--are you!"
+
+"Oh, yes," she said, then added "very."
+
+They paused.  "Don't let me keep you if you have business," she
+suggested.
+
+"I haven't," he answered.
+
+He thought that never in his life had he seen her look so ill, but
+doubted how to speak of it.
+
+"You got all over your typhoid, of course," was the way he put it.
+
+"Oh, yes, completely."  She read him as usual, and saw what was in his
+mind, that her appearance had shocked him.
+
+"Oh, don't look at me that way, Mason," she exclaimed suddenly; "I know
+I've gone off a lot, but don't rub it in."
+
+"You're nothing of the sort.  You are a bit fagged out, that's all."
+
+"Yes," she said, "a bit fagged.  Besides, I'm a staid, settled-down old
+thing--and you, perhaps you're married by this time.  Are you?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Engaged, then!"  She spoke casually, but there was a beating at her
+heart.
+
+"Not even that."
+
+She pressed the button for the car to stop.  She had a morbid hope that
+she might still keep her secret from him.  But when he helped her off
+the car and they started to walk toward her home, she saw it in his
+eyes.
+
+"You understand now?" she faltered.
+
+"Yes."
+
+They walked a hundred steps in silence.  "Tell me one thing, Georgia,"
+he said, "you _are happy_?"
+
+"Yes," she answered firmly.
+
+"That's all I care about."
+
+When they reached her door he gave her the package of white goods which
+he had been carrying.
+
+"Georgia," he said, as they shook hands good-bye, "remember this--if
+you ever need me, I'll come."
+
+"What do you mean by that?"
+
+"I mean if you ever need me I'll come--from anywhere."
+
+She looked down at her ungainly figure in wonderment.  "Surely you
+don't mean that now.  I'm--I'm so ridiculous."
+
+His voice choked.  "God bless and keep you.  God bless and keep you
+always, my dearest," he said, then went away.
+
+She walked slowly and heavily up to the third flight, carrying her
+burden.  When she opened the door with her latchkey she found her
+mother in blue gingham apron, cleaning Mr. Kane's room.
+
+Mrs. Talbot paused in her operations.  "Well," she vouchsafed, "Jim has
+turned up--just after you left.  He's asleep in your room."
+
+"Drunk?" asked Georgia.
+
+"Of course," said Mrs. Talbot, emptying her carpet sweeper.
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+THE NAPHTHALINE RIVER
+
+    And oh, of all tortures
+    That torture the worst,
+  The terrible, terrible torture of thirst
+    For the naphthaline river
+    Of Passion accurst.
+                          --Poe.
+
+
+Jim was a dipsomaniac, not a villain.  His vice made no one else so
+abysmally wretched as it made himself.
+
+After each spree he descended into the deep hell of remorse.  He
+thought of pistols, razors and the lake.  Would not everyone he cared
+for be the better for his disappearance?  Was it not decenter to die
+than to live on, a reeking beast, a stenchful sewer for whiskey?
+
+Then as his long enduring body began once more patiently to expel the
+poison he had thrust into it, he slowly cheered up.  He wouldn't kill
+himself, he would swear off forever and ever, so help him God, amen.
+
+In a few days he was completely reassured, and not a little proud of
+his evident self-control.  He bragged of it casually.  He was
+Pharisaical.  He pitied drinking men.  "No," he would say, raising a
+deprecating hand when invited to smile with them, "I've cut it out for
+good.  I don't like it, and," laughing, "it don't like me.  I've had
+enough in my day to keep up my batting average for the rest of my life,
+and enough is sufficiency.  A little ginger ale for mine, thank you."
+
+And the best of it was that the whiskey didn't seem to tempt him any
+more.  It was almost too easy, this being good.  Nothing to it, if a
+fellow simply made up his mind.
+
+Old Col. E. E. Morse had certainly stampeded him the other morning when
+he was getting over his headache.  He smiled a trifle wryly.  Yes, he'd
+actually gone so far as to contemplate suicide, which was a great sin,
+to avoid getting full, which was a less one--and now here he was, never
+feeling better in his life and not touching a drop.
+
+The old colonel certainly did make a goat of a fellow.  He had acted
+more like a boy than a grown-up man.  The blood curdling oaths he'd
+taken with eyes and hands raised to heaven, by his mother's soul and
+his hope of meeting her again.  The memory of his hysterical state
+somewhat embarrassed him.
+
+Some drank and some didn't; just as some had blue eyes and some brown.
+Bismarck and Grant, for instance, drank.  It was foolish on the face of
+it to suppose that those giants among men were in the habit of lying
+awake nights, agonizing over the question of a glass of beer or two
+with their evening meal.  That wouldn't show they were strong, but weak.
+
+At this point he dropped from his vocabulary the word "drunk," with its
+essentially ugly sound, and substituted "loaded," which is pleasanter,
+then "jagged," which is pleasanter still, especially if one humorously
+places the accent on the final _ed_.  A further alteration in his
+barroom terminology made it stewed, soused, plastered, anointed, all
+lit up, sprung, ossified.
+
+When a periodical gets around again to the point of calling
+intoxication by pet names his next spiflication is not very far ahead
+of him.
+
+In gradually divesting itself of the hideous and demonic character
+which he was wont to ascribe to it in the first moments of his
+passionate remorse after a debauch, alcohol achieved the necessary
+preliminary work preparatory to his next one.  The curious thing was
+that he always realized in the heat of a new resolution precisely how
+the next attack would presently begin against him.
+
+"Never again," he would say to himself, "never again, Jim Connor, if
+you're worth the powder to blow you to hell.  _Never again_,
+understand!  Never mind about George Washington and Grover Cleveland.
+_You quit_.  Don't you care if the doctors say it's a food.  It isn't a
+food for you.  _Leave it alone or die_.  It's been your steady enemy
+since you got into long pants.  Hate it."
+
+But in spite of efforts that were sometimes gallant he could not keep
+his hate hot.  The further he got from his last spree, the less
+horrible and more amusing it seemed in retrospection.
+
+The furiously emotional character of his resolution gradually cooled
+off and lost its driving power.
+
+Only near the end of a period of abstinence did alcohol make a direct
+assault upon his body, and even then in skillful disguise.  His
+digestion went back on him.  He would conscientiously seek to fend off
+his misery by pills, powders, salts, extracts, soda and charcoal
+tablets, pepsin gum, by giving up smoking, coffee, dessert, by hot
+water before meals and brisk walks; but he adopted these measures
+dispiritedly.  A still small voice had begun to whisper that they
+wouldn't do and that only one thing would.
+
+If that one thing were taken privately just before supper, say downtown
+where the crowd wasn't around to kid him for seeming backsliding and if
+it were immediately followed by half a teaspoonful of ground coffee
+from the receptacle made and provided for such contingencies, Georgia
+would be neither the worse nor the wiser and he would get his appetite
+back.
+
+"Mind," said the small voice, "_just one_."  Why of course, he quickly
+agreed with himself, just one.  That was all he needed.  He didn't want
+the stuff for its own sake.  He got no pleasure out of it.  In fact he
+rather disliked the taste of it.  But purely and simply for medicine,
+as a last resort.  Hadn't he already tried every other damn thing on
+the market?
+
+Usually he escaped detection the first day or two and went to bed at
+night triumphant and respectable, his secret locked successfully in his
+breast, excitedly convinced that at last he had learned to drink like a
+gentleman.
+
+Presently he sensed the need of a more exact definition.  How many
+drinks did a gentleman take a day?  Two or three, or even more on
+special occasions?  Was getting wet or cold a special occasion?  What
+was a "drink" anyway--two fingers, three, or a whiskey-glassful?  How
+much beer equaled how much spirits?  Wasn't liquor mixed with seltzer
+less harmful to the lining of the stomach than the same amount taken
+straight?  It ought to be, for a highball, according to test, averaged
+no more alcohol than the light wines of France and Italy, and as was
+well known, a drunken man was seldom seen over there.  This being
+indisputable, might not one increase one's prescribed allowance of
+whiskey if one diluted it conscientiously?
+
+He never tired of these and similar questions.  They fascinated him and
+centered his consciousness.  His mind revolved around the whiskey
+proposition like a satellite around its principal.  He might hate,
+loathe, abominate whiskey, or pooh-pooh it, or compromise with it, or
+succumb to it.  But he thought of it most of the time, endlessly
+readjusting his relations with it, like an old man in the power of a
+harlot.
+
+Sometimes he would admit that there was much to be said against the
+cumulative effect of a drink every day.  Twenty-four hours was hardly
+long enough to get wholly rid of the last one before you put the next
+one in on top of it.  Would it not, possibly, be more advantageous to
+one's system, for instance, to get a slight skate on Saturday night,
+nothing serious, a mere jolly, harmless bun, and cut it out altogether
+for the rest of the week, than to go against it daily?  This suggestion
+usually presented itself early on Saturday evening, after he had got a
+good start.  After a little argument pro and con, the pros won.
+
+The pros always won without exception, yet Jim never once neglected to
+go through the form of argument.  It was astonishing with what perfect
+regularity he repeated time after time the same mental sequence in his
+circlings around whiskey.
+
+He did not necessarily lose his job at each spree.  He was not the
+explosive type of drunkard.  He managed sometimes to drag himself
+wearily through the motions of work in the day time, slipping out every
+hour or two, on some excuse, to "baby it along."  But from night to
+night his drunkenness would deepen until at last, with his nerves
+shattered and money gone, he stumbled home to his women folk to be
+nursed, to threaten suicide, while they telephoned lies to his
+employer, to take his solemn pledge, and to begin his cycle over again.
+
+Four times during his wife's second pregnancy he made the complete
+circle.
+
+She put up with his lapses more humbly than ever before in their
+married life.  Each time that he renewed his pledge her sustaining hope
+returned that he would keep it this time, until at least the baby was
+born and she was well enough to return to work.
+
+Then she wouldn't be afraid any more.  Disencumbered, her strength
+restored, she would be wholly able to take care of herself and her
+child.  She could earn two livings.  She knew precisely how to go about
+it.  There was nothing haphazard in her plans.  Either she would
+promptly find another first class secretarial position or else she
+would go into business on her own hook, get a small room about eight
+feet by eight, at $1.50 or $1.75 a square foot, in a big office
+building and put on the door
+
+  G. CONNOR
+  STENOGRAPHER--COURT REPORTER
+  NOTARY PUBLIC
+
+
+She could see it in her mind's eye.  It looked fine.  But it was
+several months off yet, slow months of discomfort, culminating in hours
+of the acutest agony a human being can suffer and live.  She knew.  She
+had been through it once already.
+
+But she would never go through it again, after this time.  Never.  They
+might say what they liked about race suicide, this was the last for her.
+
+In the meantime she must keep Jim as straight as possible and get all
+she could out of him.  For presently there would be some heavy bills to
+pay.  She kissed and flattered him, and went through his pockets at
+night, racing the bartenders for his money.  Wasn't a business woman a
+big fool, she often asked herself, to get in this fix for a man she
+didn't love?
+
+The Church--the Church took a pretty theoretical view of some things.
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII
+
+ALBERT TALBOT CONNOR
+
+When her grandson was eight days old, Mrs. Talbot took him to be
+baptized.  Georgia, not yet out of bed, protested against the
+precipitancy, but her mother was armored in shining faith and prevailed.
+
+"You know your baby's sickly," she explained, "and not doing well.  We
+cannot afford to take any chances--in case anything happened."
+
+So she dressed up the mite in his best white lace, and herself in her
+best black silk and sailed off to church in a closed carriage.  He was
+named Albert Talbot.
+
+Until he was brought back to her, Georgia felt savagely that there was
+something ridiculously primitive, something almost grotesque in the
+proceeding.  To take her baby from her, she could hear him crying all
+down stairs, to a church a mile away, to be breathed on by a priest and
+touched with spittle and anointed with oil and wetted with water--how
+could such things make her perfect babe more perfect!
+
+Why should this naïve physical rite send her son to Paradise if he
+died; and more especially why should the lack of it bar him out of
+Paradise forever?  It was not fair to put such mighty conditions upon
+him.  He was only a baby.
+
+When young Albert was returned to her arms and her breast, she forgot
+her grievance.  Anyway, he was on the safe side of baptism now.  It
+couldn't do him any harm and it might do him an eternal and supreme
+good.  It was better to take no chances with the supernatural.
+
+She asked the doctor when she could wean him.  "I am behind in my
+bills, you know," she explained, "especially yours, doctor.  I'd better
+get to work."
+
+"I can't conscientiously advise you to do anything of the sort," he
+answered.
+
+"But why not?  Most babies are put on a bottle nowadays."
+
+"This one is a delicate little fellow--not five pounds at birth.  You
+want him to get strong--mother's milk is the best medicine."
+
+"That settles it," she said slowly.  "How long will it be?  Six months?"
+
+"Yes, six months anyway, perhaps more--perhaps a year.  It depends on
+how he does.  I won't disguise it from you--he's worried me once or
+twice."
+
+A year!  She didn't know a child was ever nursed a year.  A year more
+of humbleness to Jim, of asking money from her brother, now called big
+Al, of fear that Mr. Kane might get annoyed and leave, of contriving
+and skimping and bill dodging.  Another year of "womanly" womanhood,
+clinging to males for support.
+
+The doctor saw her disappointment.  "It's your sex' share of the
+world's work, you know," he said, "your duty to society."
+
+"I have a baby and we're poor.  If I'd had none, we'd be well off this
+moment," she said sharply.  "If I really have done a duty to society
+why does society punish me for it?"
+
+"I don't know," said the doctor.
+
+He came rather frequently to the flat at this time, partly on the
+baby's account, partly on Mrs. Talbot's.
+
+The river of life in the elder woman was becoming sluggish; rheumatism
+crippled her.  The doctor veiled his explanation.  "Synovial infusion,"
+he called it, "but," he added reassuringly, "pericarditis is not in the
+least to be apprehended.  I will stake my reputation on that."  Which
+gave her new heart.
+
+The rivulet of life in the child trickled uncertainly, obstinately
+refusing to increase.  "Hmm," he muttered once, "microcephalic."
+
+"What does that mean?" Georgia asked with quick suspicion.
+
+"It means that he has a rather small head," smiled the doctor, "but
+then he is a rather small boy."
+
+"Yes, he is tiny, isn't he?" said the mother pressing him to her soft,
+distended breast.  "Little one--little one of mine."  She looked at the
+doctor proudly.  "He knows me," she said, "don't you think so?"
+
+"Of course he does," he answered, and she knew that nothing else which
+had ever been or ever would be really mattered.
+
+Whenever the doctor came to the flat he found time to tarry in the
+midst of his busy life of many patients and small fees for a chat with
+Georgia.  He was a happy, crinkled, red faced, blue-gilled little man,
+who inevitably suggested outdoors, though he wasn't there much, for he
+drove a closed electric runabout.  He always meant some day to write a
+novel, a true novel, something on the order of "The Old Wives' Tale,"
+showing people as they really were.  He thought he had the necessary
+information.  He had seen all sorts of folks come and go for thirty
+years.  But he never seemed to get around to the actual writing.  He
+was so pressed for time.
+
+Georgia Connor, nicely disguised, would be a good character for his
+book.  Change the color of her hair, for instance, put a couple of
+inches on her height, make her something else but a stenographer, say a
+cashier--and neither she nor anybody else would suspect.  So he had
+many little talks with his model, getting material.  Besides, he liked
+her.  She was intelligent, she never bored him and she always had her
+own point of view, and half the time an unexpected one.  She had been
+twice educated--first by the convent and next by the loop.  One could
+never tell which side of her was going to speak next.
+
+Eventually one side would prevail.  Which it would be depended on the
+baby question.  If she had enough of them tugging at her skirts she'd
+revert to type.  He knew.  He'd seen 'em come and go for thirty years.
+Persistent mothers don't aviate.
+
+When little Al was a month old, shortly after midnight on the
+thirteenth of November--she will never forget the day--Georgia awoke
+suddenly as if a pistol had been shot off by her ear.  The baby was
+wailing in a feeble little singsong.  She looked at the clock.  It
+wanted half an hour to his feeding time.
+
+She walked slowly up and down the room, whispering to her son.
+Sometimes she stopped at the open window to look out into the cool
+pleasant night, but nothing she knew how to do made any difference.  He
+kept steadily on with his heart-breaking little singsong wail.
+
+At one precisely, before the single stroke of the small clock had
+stopped ringing through the room, she gave him breast.  He took a
+little, then gasped and choked and "spit it up" again.  She waited ten
+minutes as she had been instructed, then gave him a very little--not
+more than three or four swallows.  He rejected it.  After twenty
+minutes she tried again.  The warm, white life-giving fluid ran over
+his lips and chin, and trickled down his neck, wetting the neckband and
+sleeve of his thin woolen garment.  But he kept a little down she
+thought.  And then after awhile a little more.  She did not wish him to
+be as far from her as his crib, so he dozed off in the crook of her
+elbow, while she took short naps a few minutes at a time until dawn.
+
+At five she took in Mr. Kane's coffee.  This duty now accrued to her,
+because the doctor had warned Mrs. Talbot not to overdo.
+
+When Georgia returned with her empty tray she dropped into a chair for
+just a moment's rest.  An hour later when she awoke she found little Al
+lying rigid on the bed, his small fists clenched, his eyes rolled up
+until only the whites could be seen through his half-closed lids, his
+under lip sucked in between his gums.  She was not sure that he
+breathed.
+
+Hastily she ran to the bathroom and turned the hot water tap on full.
+Hastily she ran back, and took the child in her arms.  She knocked at
+the door of big Al's room.
+
+"Al," she cried, "Al, Al, Al--wake up."
+
+"What--eh, oh, what?" came a sleepy voice.
+
+"Telephone the doctor, quick, quick, quick, the baby is--Oh, hurry, Al."
+
+She ran to the bathroom and put her hand in the running stream from the
+faucet.  Tepid, only tepid.  Would it never get warm?  If God ever
+wanted anything more from her--in the way of belief or devotion--let
+Him make this water hot, now, on the instant.
+
+Her wet hand and her dry one moved rapidly together at her baby's
+clothes, unpinning the safety pins.  Even in her haste she put them in
+her mouth mechanically, one after another.  Once more she plunged her
+hand into the water.  Warmer now, yes, almost warm enough.  She put the
+round rubber stopper in the escape.
+
+She lowered the stiff and naked little child into the tub, one hand
+behind his neck, the other held to shelter his face from the spray of
+the hot water which was pouring from the open tap.
+
+Al stood at the door in bare feet, his trousers slipped on over his
+nightshirt.
+
+"D'you want the doctor to come right away?" he asked.
+
+"Do you mean to say you haven't gone yet?" she said piteously without
+turning her head as she knelt by the bathtub, "of course, right
+away--now, this instant."
+
+The young fellow departed on the run for the janitor's telephone in the
+basement.
+
+The water had become quite hot, but still the child did not relax.
+Georgia tried to undo one tiny fist with her forefinger, but she felt
+with agony of heart that it would not unclench easily.  She sensed a
+touch on her shoulder, then saw another older hand put in the water
+behind the child's head.
+
+"No, mother, you shan't," she said, "it is my baby, leave him to me."
+
+"Shall I ask Father Hervey to come?" said Mrs. Talbot.
+
+Georgia was too intent to answer.
+
+Mrs. Talbot walked slowly down stairs, stiff with rheumatism.  She met
+Al coming up, four steps at a time.
+
+"How is he?" he shouted as he passed.  She turned to explain, but he
+vanished out of sight around the turn at the landing, not waiting for
+an answer.
+
+When she got Father Hervey on the telephone he asked if she was
+speaking of the young child he had baptized a month or so back.
+
+"Three weeks come Tuesday," she said.
+
+"Ah, then he has been baptized.  That, at least, is well."
+
+"But Father, if you could come, and pray, maybe it would save his life
+here, too."
+
+He hesitated but a moment.  Truly there was no priestly obligation to
+visit sick infants who had already been baptized, whenever their
+grandparents became excited.  To baptize dying babies or to administer
+the last rites to those who had reached the age of reason was his duty.
+This was not.  But if he did it, it would be an act of human kindness.
+
+"I will come," he said over the wire, "at once."
+
+
+
+
+XXIX
+
+THE DOCTOR TALKS
+
+When the doctor arrived the convulsion had passed.  Little Al was lying
+in his crib, asleep, breathing easily, the snarls in his nerves
+unravelled.  Georgia explained what had happened.
+
+"You did just the right thing," said the physician.
+
+"Doctor," she asked slowly, "will he ever be well?"
+
+"What do you mean by well?"
+
+"I mean, when he grows up will he be as strong--and--and bright as
+other men?"
+
+"That is impossible to answer, Mrs. Connor, without the gift of
+prophecy."
+
+"Don't put me off," said she staring at him, "tell me the truth.  I
+have a right to know."
+
+"I should first have to have a little more definite knowledge of his
+antecedents, his family history.  Is there anything which might
+explain--"
+
+"Not on our side of the family," Mrs. Talbot interrupted quickly,
+"they're clean people, every one."
+
+"His father," said Georgia, "is a drunkard and the son of a drunkard."
+
+"In that case it is possible, mind you I only say possible, that he has
+inherited a--a nervous tendency."
+
+"Inherited, ah, I knew.  There was something in me that warned me
+steadily not to go back to him.  Something that made me shudder to
+think of it.  But at last I gave in, because everyone in the world
+seemed in a conspiracy to make me."
+
+"Yes," the doctor answered drily, "we run into such histories
+frequently."
+
+"But," she pleaded suppliantly, as if he had the power to do or undo,
+"surely my baby can grow out of this--nervous tendency.  Tell me he can
+grow out of it.  With the right care and training, surely he can grow
+out of it."
+
+He placed his hand on her shoulder, and honesty seemed to her to be
+patent and apparent in his voice.  "Yes," he said, "it is possible, it
+is probable.  I have seen many a mother make her child over with love."
+
+"Ah, that's all I want," she gave a happy little sigh, "for I can do
+what they have done."
+
+There was a tap at the door.  Mrs. Talbot opened it and Father Hervey
+came in.  "Oh," she said, "Father, the baby's well again.  I shouldn't
+have bothered you."
+
+"I'm glad for once it's an occasion for rejoicing," he said quietly.
+"Good morning, doctor."
+
+"Good morning, Father.  Was the poor fellow long after I left?"
+
+"About half an hour."
+
+"Were you at a deathbed last night, you two?" asked Georgia.
+
+"Yes, Georgia, we were," said the priest.
+
+"It seems somehow strange," she pondered, "that you two, so different,
+should be called together at the end."
+
+"Oh, it happens often enough," explained the doctor.  "Poor people.
+They want to keep them here a little longer, and the priest to bid them
+Godspeed in case they've got to go."
+
+"It must be terrible," reflected Mrs. Talbot, "to die without a priest."
+
+"Yes," answered the doctor, "Catholics have the best of us there.  They
+always go hopefully, and they're the only ones that do.  I've sometimes
+wished that I could accept the faith, but--" he shook his head slowly.
+
+"Why can't you?" said Georgia quickly.  Father Hervey smiled.  He and
+the doctor were trusted friends.  There was no poaching on each other's
+preserves.
+
+"Do you honestly believe in a future life?" she asked again, staring at
+the man of science with her peculiar little wide-eyed stare.
+
+"Yes, I believe all of us here will probably have it--except perhaps
+Father Hervey."
+
+"Well, doctor," said Mrs. Talbot most indignantly, "I must say you've
+no call to be disrespectful.  If any of us is certain to have it, it's
+him."
+
+"Oh, that's one of his little jokes," he said, "he means the rest of
+you'll likely leave children behind you to be carrying your living eyes
+and nose and mouth about the earth long after the headstones are atop
+of you--and that's denied me."
+
+"If they'd been denied me," its chronic undertone of humor momentarily
+leaving the doctor's voice, "or were taken now--I'd just as soon quit.
+I've four; one's learning to crawl, one to walk, one to read and the
+oldest," he made a vain effort to conceal his pride in such a son,
+"Oh--he's a boy.  He can work his mother as easy as grease with a sore
+throat story whenever he wants to stay out of school.  Pretty clever,
+eh, with a doctor right in the family?  He'll be a great bunco
+steerer--or a great lawyer--some day and make his name--he's a
+junior--bristle in the headlines of 1950.  That's the real life after
+death--our blood lives on, we don't."
+
+"Yes," said Georgia tenderly glancing at the crib, "our blood lives on,
+it lives on."
+
+"When a little shop girl takes the boat over to St. Joe," said the
+medical man, folding his arms, well started on his favorite eugenics,
+"she may be preparing a blend that will endure as long as the race--ten
+thousand or one hundred thousand years, while any of the descendants
+are alive.  Marriage--true marriage, where children grow up and beget
+others--outlasts death by centuries, perhaps eons."  He paused to let
+it sink in.  "Whatever else there may be in addition," he said, bowing
+slightly in the direction of the priest, "this much is certain true--in
+our children we find immortality."
+
+"Yes," said Georgia softly, looking at the crib where lay her child,
+"in our children there is immortality.  My sweet little lamb," she
+whispered, going to her child, "my sweet--" her voice changed suddenly,
+growing very harsh.  "Doctor," she said, "come here."
+
+The doctor placed his ear to the child's heart, then took his
+stethoscope from his satchel to listen for the least fluttering.  He
+heard none.  As he straightened up again, she saw his answer in his
+face.
+
+"Is--he--dead!" she asked.
+
+"Yes."  He spoke to the priest.  "I will come this afternoon, in case I
+can be of any use," he whispered, and quietly withdrew.
+
+The priest sprinkled the small dead body with holy water.  Mrs. Talbot
+and Al fell on their knees, but Georgia stood.  She was unable to kneel
+to a God who had done that.  The priest prayed, half murmuring.  Then
+in a louder voice he said, "As for me, Thou hast received me because of
+mine innocence."
+
+"And hast set me before Thy face forever," muttered Mrs. Talbot, who
+knew the response.  Al was silent, for he was not sure of the words.
+Georgia stood dumb, watching her child with her wide-eyed little stare.
+
+"The Lord be with thee--" came the deep musical voice of the priest.
+
+"And with thy spirit," muttered Mrs. Talbot.
+
+There was a moment of silence, then came a knock at the door.  It was
+repeated twice, imperatively.
+
+Then the door was opened from outside and Carl Schroeder, president of
+the Fortieth Ward Club, entered, half carrying and half guiding Jim
+Connor, who was stupidly drunk.
+
+Schroeder placed Jim in a chair and quickly slunk out.  Jim swayed an
+instant in the chair, trying to hold his balance, then fell forward out
+of it.  His hand struck the crib as he lay inert, unknowing, obscene.
+
+Georgia looked at him for an instant, she began to giggle, to laugh.
+Her laughter grew louder and louder.  It came in waves, each wilder and
+higher than the last.
+
+[Illustration: Georgia Laughed.]
+
+It was long before they could quiet her.
+
+
+
+
+XXX
+
+FRANKLAND & CONNOR
+
+Georgia and Jim Connor parted at the cemetery gate after the burial of
+their son.  They have not, since then, seen each other.
+
+Exclusive of her debt to Stevens, Georgia owed more than two hundred
+dollars, nearly half of which was for the funeral.  Mrs. Talbot had
+ordered eight carriages.
+
+Big Al behaved very well, turning in everything beyond carfare and
+lunch money for several weeks.  Then he relaxed to the extent of five
+bright neckties and a pair of pointed patent leathers.  But on the
+whole he was a very good boy, and Georgia told him so.
+
+Her own wardrobe was in no condition for effective job-hunting.  "Old
+faithful," the tan suit, once the pride of her heart and the queen of
+her closet, had dated beyond hope.  Time had robbed the tan, not so
+much of substance as of essence, of smartness and caste.
+
+The models of Paris hadn't worn a six yard pleated skirt for three
+years.  So Georgia couldn't either, without proclaiming to her kind
+that she was either green or broke.
+
+As for the blue serge, that was out of the question too, because it was
+simply worn out.  She bought a black broadcloth coat and skirt that
+fitted wonderfully, as if they had been made for her, and a half dozen
+ruffled shirt waists.  To these she added a severe black toque and low
+laced shoes.  The total outlay ran to eighty-five dollars, but she
+considered it essentially a business investment, as no doubt it was.
+
+She was pale, and her face had grown thin, which made her big eyes seem
+bigger.  Her heavy black hair worn low on her forehead accentuated her
+pallor.  She was what is frequently termed "interesting looking."  At
+all events many people on the street were interested enough to turn and
+look again.
+
+She clung to the idea of an office of her own some day, but because of
+the impracticability of starting business with a capital of five
+hundred dollars less than nothing, concluded to begin as assistant to
+some already established stenographer.  Thus, she could learn the game,
+make acquaintances, get a following.  Then when it was time to take the
+plunge, it would be simple enough to circularize this trade and switch
+at least part of it over to herself from her former employer.
+
+She went up and down in many elevators and through many ground-glass
+doors in her hunt for work.  One prosperous-looking, buxom, extreme
+blonde of thirty-eight, dressed a coquettish twenty-five, paid her a
+compliment.
+
+"Listen," she said in a stage whisper, motioning to Georgia with a
+stubby forefinger to bend her head nearer, "listen.  I wouldn't hire
+you for a dollar a week."  She laughed merrily.  "You're too much of a
+doll-baby yourself."
+
+Georgia noted that the blonde lady's two assistants, hammering away in
+the dark inside corners of the room, were without menace, sallow and
+flat-chested.
+
+In a small suite in the newest, highest-rented building in town, she
+found three tall, thin young men, apparently brothers.  They were all
+very busy, writing by touch, their eyes fixed steadily on their notes.
+She spoke to the nearest, but his flying fingers did not even pause for
+her.  "No women," he replied succinctly.
+
+Many of the public stenographers had no employes; few more than one.
+Georgia found several places where they had just hired a girl.
+Apparently it was nowhere near so easy to find a place where they had
+just fired one.  It was getting discouraging.
+
+But her luck turned at the sign of L. Frankland, room 1241, the Sixth
+National Building.  1241 had a single narrow window which gave upon
+eight hundred others in the tall rectangular court.  The room was not
+strategically desirable because there was another stenographic office
+between it and the elevator bank.  Georgia felt sure she had seen L.
+Frankland before, but couldn't just place her.
+
+"Do you need help?  I am an expert stenographer."  That was her formula.
+
+"Yes, I do," came the wholly surprising answer.  Georgia promptly sat
+down.
+
+"But," continued L. Frankland, "I cannot afford to pay for it."
+
+Georgia rose.  "In that case," she said stiffly, "good-day."
+
+"Why not," suggested L. Frankland, "go in with me as partner?"
+
+"Partner--that would be fine--but I haven't any money."
+
+"Neither have I--and I'll be turned out of here a week from to-morrow
+if I haven't twenty-seven fifty by then.  That's how much I'm behind."
+She smiled cheerfully.  Then Georgia remembered her.  She was the nice
+old maid who had given her the seat in the car on the day she had met
+Mason.
+
+"What's your rent!"
+
+"Twenty-seven fifty."
+
+"What arrangements do you want to make?"
+
+"Fifty-fifty on everything."
+
+"I'll take a chance," said Georgia, removing her hat.  "But," she
+exclaimed, looking around, "why you've only got one machine--and a
+double keyboard at that.  I'm not used to them."
+
+"We can rent another for a dollar a week--any sort you want," L.
+Frankland suggested with ready resource.
+
+"We can't get it here to-day.  Let's see, Miss, Miss ah--what is your
+name?"  They told each other.  "Miss Frankland, are you a fast writer?"
+
+"No," she answered, composedly rattling off a few test lines--"Now is
+the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party."  It was
+true enough.  She was slow.
+
+"How much work do you get?"
+
+"Four ten-cent letters and a short brief this morning.  That's all
+to-day."
+
+"What's the idea now--wait?" asked Georgia, taking off her coat and
+leaning against the solitary desk.
+
+"Yep--like young lawyers."
+
+"No use our both waiting with one machine between us.  I tell you
+what--you go over to the Standard Company, on Wabash Avenue, and order
+a number four sent here, then traipse around to some other public
+offices--you can find plenty in the back of the telephone book--and see
+if they won't sublet us some of their work at half rates.  I'll hold
+down the place, and get the hang of this keyboard while you're gone."
+
+L. Frankland saluted.  "Aye, aye, ma'am," said she.  "I likewise do now
+promote you to be captain of this brig."
+
+When she returned she brought a sheaf, the manuscript of a drama.
+
+Georgia knocked it out in twenty-four hours, in triplicate, and took it
+back to the firm of origin in the Opera House Block.  "Z. &
+Z.--Theatrical Typists" was the sign on the door.
+
+The room was small, and thick with smoke.  There must have been a dozen
+men in it, all important-looking.  Mr. Zingmeister, the senior partner,
+a fat young Hebrew, received Georgia's work.
+
+"Rotten," he said, glancing through it.
+
+"Why?" she asked sharply.
+
+"Wrong spacing.  A script plays a minute to the page if typed right.
+How could anyone tell how long this would play?"  He held it up between
+two fingers, contemptuously.
+
+"Give me a sample act for a guide and I'll do it over for nothing."
+
+He hesitated.  "Too many novices in this profession already," he
+grumbled.
+
+"My time's up," said she, reaching for her work.  "If you don't want to
+pay me for it, I'll take it back."
+
+He laid his hand on it.
+
+"Come, come," said she, impatiently.
+
+"Oh, keep your shirt on while I think it over," he answered.  "All
+right, do it over again and do it right," he sighed plaintively, "and
+space it this way.  Speeches solid.  Drop two for character's name.
+Capitalize them--caps, understand?--with red underlines.  Also red
+underline the business, so."
+
+He demonstrated with a spoiled page from the waste basket.
+
+"That'll give you the code, understand," he concluded, shoving it in
+her hand.  "Now shake a foot."
+
+The important-looking beings in the room apparently neither saw nor
+heard.  Save for the clouds of smoke that issued from them they might
+have been graven.
+
+When she got back to 1241 she was bursting with an idea.
+
+"How long does your lease run, Miss Frankland?" she asked.
+
+"Until May first."
+
+"You can't get out of it!"
+
+"No, I signed up."
+
+"Well, if we don't pay our rent they'll put us out."  It proved to be a
+prophecy.
+
+Frankland & Connor found a bigger room for sixteen a month in the
+theatrical district, which for some unexplained reason converges from
+three sides upon the Court House.  They described themselves as
+"experts in theatrical work," and presently they were.
+
+They learned to give a dramatic criticism with each receipted bill.
+The play they had just transcribed was deeply moving, especially in the
+big scene, or one long roar, sure-fire.  Playwrights were as thick as
+July blackberries and the firm prospered.
+
+Occasionally Georgia sat up most of the night with a scared author and
+an impatient stage director, altering the script of a play after it had
+flivvered on the opening, and getting out new parts for it.
+
+At first, she and L. Frankland found themselves forced into overtime
+almost every evening, because the theatrical people were invariably in
+such a raging hurry to get their work done, vast enterprises apparently
+hanging upon the rapid, if not the immediate, completion thereof.  With
+growing experience, however, the firm learned to promise
+impossibilities for the sake of peace, but not to attempt them.
+
+When the orders came in faster than they could handle them, Frankland &
+Connor jobbed them out again at fifty per cent.  Georgia had three or
+four private stenographers on her list who were glad to pick up a
+little pin money on their employers' machines after hours.  Perhaps in
+hours, too.  She didn't know or care.
+
+At the end of a twelvemonth she had paid off her debts, except the one
+to Mason, on which she sent interest.
+
+She was also able to employ a woman to help her mother with the
+housework two afternoons a week.
+
+Early in the firm's second year of existence, L. Frankland came in one
+Monday morning with a long face, a rare thing for her.
+
+"I want to make a change," she said, "I'm not satisfied.  I've been
+thinking it over.  This isn't an impulse."
+
+"A change?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+Georgia was genuinely distressed, because she had grown very fond of
+Miss Frankland.  There was no more cheerful person in the world, she
+thought, than this dry, twinkling old maid.  And she had hoped her
+feeling was returned.  Real friendships were too rare to be tossed away
+so suddenly.
+
+"I'm not satisfied," repeated L. Frankland, "because the present deal
+between us isn't fair.  You've pulled the big half of the load ever
+since we started--so, give me a third interest instead of a half--I'd
+be better pleased, honest Injun, hope to die."
+
+"Oh, shut up, Frank, and get to work.  I've no time for foolishness,"
+responded Georgia, much relieved.  "Fifty-fifty it started and
+fifty-fifty it sticks."
+
+Which it did.
+
+
+
+
+XXXI
+
+THE STODGY MAN
+
+Mrs. Talbot was beginning to break.  Her bones ached barometrically
+before rain; she noticed that after she had been on her feet a great
+deal, on cleaning days for instance, her ankles began to puff.  Also
+she learned to avoid short breath by taking the stairs more easily.
+Sometimes she grew dizzy and little black specks floated before her
+eyes.
+
+Fortunately she regarded her symptoms as a series of disconnected,
+unrelated phenomena.  The heart was one thing, the liver another,
+rheumatism a third.  Swollen joints were still different.  That came
+from overdoing.  For different diseases different remedies.  She took
+her medicine very conscientiously, treating her symptoms, not her
+annodomini.
+
+She thought of her children as young, not of herself as old.  She
+wasn't sixty yet, just the time when people learn at last to profit by
+experience--the same age as most of the people she knew, Mrs. Conway,
+for instance, and Mrs. Schweppe, Mrs. Keough and Mrs. Cochrane.
+
+The last two had recently been the victims of a sad and striking
+coincidence.  They had lost their husbands within twenty-four hours of
+each other, in the preceding February, on the seventh and eighth of the
+month as Mrs. Talbot recalled it, anyway it was of a Tuesday and
+Wednesday.  Dan Keough, to be sure, had been ailing some time, but it
+would have been a day's journey to find a heartier looking man than
+Jerry Cochrane, up to the very day he came home coughing.  And a week
+after, they laid him out.
+
+They say a green Christmas makes a fat churchyard, and goodness knows
+last winter proved it.  It had been very wet and sloppy, hardly any
+snow at all until January, and then it didn't last long.  She had
+followed the hearse to Calvary one, two, three, four times in a
+twelvemonth.  The climate had lately changed for the worse.  She could
+remember when all the Christmases were white and didn't use to kill
+people.
+
+The first time that Georgia suggested giving up housekeeping, mama
+vehemently repudiated the idea.  The third time she agreed to it, but
+on one sole condition, namely, that the change was to be only
+temporary.  They were to take another flat as soon as she got to
+feeling more like herself again.
+
+The family moved to the parlor floor of a long and narrow gray block
+house farther north.  What had been designed, in 1880, for the front
+parlor was now the living room of the suite.  Georgia put a piano in
+it, and Al a rack of bulldog pipes and a row of steins, like college
+men.  The back parlor became Mrs. Talbot's room, the dining room
+Georgia's, and Al took the small one in the rear, overlooking the back
+yard.
+
+The meals were served, 7 to 8:30, 1 to 2, 6 to 7, in the half-basement
+immediately under the front parlor.  They were standardized--corned
+beef Thursday, fish Friday, roast beef Saturday, chicken Sunday.  Mrs.
+Talbot and her children had their own private table, and they gave her
+the best seat with her back to the window, as titular head of the
+family.  They had an arrangement that the young folks were never to be
+away from supper at the same time and leave mama alone.
+
+Georgia saw no reason why she should not now and then accept an
+invitation from some man or other to dine and go to the theatre,
+provided she had sized him up for a decent sort.  She always made the
+condition, though, that she would provide the theatre seats, which she
+usually managed to do inexpensively, owing to her acquaintance with
+advance men and agents in a rush to get their Sunday flimsies written.
+
+At intervals she received an avowal which flattered her sufficiently,
+if made well.  And she had plenty of hints that she might evoke a
+declaration without any serious difficulty.
+
+But she had very little trouble in keeping men where she wanted them,
+for she had the faculty of knowing what they were going to think before
+they thought it.
+
+A young, pink-cheeked, country lawyer lately moved in from Iowa, and
+famous there as a stump orator, gave her the biggest surprise.  She
+liked him; she appreciated he had real brains.  But on the very first
+evening that they ever went anywhere together, when he was driving her
+home from the play, he became suddenly and violently obsessed with the
+idea that a taxicab was liberty hall.  After a few seconds' struggle,
+she rapped on the window, made the chauffeur stop, and went home in the
+car after a few pat words to her host.
+
+There came from him next morning by special messenger sixteen closely
+and cleverly written pages, which started with a graceful and humble
+expression of contrition and ended with an offer of marriage.
+
+The messenger was to wait an answer.  He didn't have to wait long.  She
+at once accepted the apology and rejected the proposal.
+
+She admitted frankly that as a rule she liked men much better than
+women (except, of course, L. Frankland).  They had a bigger outlook.
+But she didn't want and wouldn't have even the mildest sort of a
+flirtation.
+
+She thought it would be cheap and cowardly and absurd, after murdering
+real love as she had done, to philander across its grave.
+
+When at last she was able to pay back Mason's loan in full, with
+accumulated interest, she was surprised to find how little happier it
+made her.  For nearly three years she had lived with her debt on the
+assumption that it was life's most insupportable burden.  Now that it
+was settled, she began to realize that she had entertained the angel of
+success in disguise.  The debt had been her most dynamic inspiration.
+
+The man she loved had borrowed to lend to her.  Quite possibly in so
+doing he had saved her life.  In return she had broken her promise to
+marry him.  Immediately he had begun to prosper and she to fall on evil
+days.  Pride could not be more humiliated.  To save her face before
+him, it was absolutely indispensable for her to prosper also in her
+turn, by her own will and skill; to pay him off to the last accumulated
+mill of interest; to prove to him that she had done as well without him
+as he had done without her; to make him know that she was very, very
+happy and content.
+
+When her hopes came true and she enlarged her quarters and took a third
+assistant and opened a checking account, and alternated Saturdays off
+with L. Frankland; when her hopes came true they weren't hopes any
+more, but history.  For anyone with the gambler's instinct, and Georgia
+had more than a little of it, yesterday is a dull affair compared with
+to-morrow.
+
+It gives one a mighty respectable feeling to have the receiving teller
+smile and say, "What--you--again?" when you come to his window.  Then
+he writes a new total in your book in purple ink and you peek at it
+once or twice on your way back to the office.
+
+Yes, success was very sweet and creditable.  It did away with a heap of
+worry around the first of the month; any woman is happier for not
+having to make last year's suit do; and people are certainly more
+polite.  Money's the oil of life.  But it isn't life.
+
+If you're only thirty, and the dollar's all you want, or get--Georgia
+leaned back in her pivot chair and stretched her arms above her head
+and yawned, ho-ho-hum, the stodgy man will get you if you don't watch
+out.
+
+"Frank," she asked, "do you ever feel like an automaton that's been
+wound up and has to keep going till it runs down!"
+
+"Sure.  Everybody does, now and then."
+
+"But what's the use? what's the answer?" continued Georgia querulously.
+
+L. Frankland looked over her spectacles and her shoulder, her hands
+still on the keyboard.  "The answer," she said vivaciously, "for a
+woman is a man; for a man the answer is a woman.  Whoever made us knew
+what he was about, and don't you forget it.  What's your idea?"
+
+"Let's hear yours out first."
+
+"Once when I was a young thing," said L. Frankland, swinging around, "I
+waited for an hour in my wedding dress, but--he never came.  He was
+killed on the way to the church by a runaway horse.  I decided to
+remain true to his memory.  I had other chances afterwards, when I was
+still a young thing," she smiled whimsically, "but I refused them.  I'm
+sorry now."
+
+"Frank, you remember my telling you about that money I owed to the man
+I--spoke about?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And how it worried me?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well, I paid it off last week, and I've been miserable ever since."
+
+"That's because you felt you were snapping the last thread.  Is he
+still in love with you?"
+
+"No.  At least I don't see how he could be.  It's been so long, and the
+last time he saw me," Georgia laughed unhappily, "I wasn't very lovely."
+
+"If he saw you now, young lady, he'd have nothing to complain of," was
+the cheerful retort.  "By the way, has he sent you a receipt for the
+money?"
+
+"No, not yet."
+
+"The best sign in the world," said L. Frankland, slapping her knee
+excitedly.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Because it shows he's thinking about it.  It's not routine to him.
+Georgia, if you have another chance given you, don't be afraid to take
+life in your own hands," the old maid said gently, "if you know that
+you love him."
+
+"I have always known that, since the beginning," the young woman
+answered slowly, "but even if by a miracle he still--does, it is too
+late now.  I've taken three of the best years of my life away from him
+and wasted them, thrown them away.  You know how it is with us women.
+We have only twenty years or so when men really want us.  More than
+half of mine are gone.  It wouldn't be fair to go to him now.  He
+should marry a young girl.  He is a young man."
+
+"You've wasted a lot of time already, and to make up for it you'll
+waste the rest.  That's supreme logic.  And yet," with heavy sarcasm,
+"man says we can't reason."
+
+Georgia smiled at her friend's earnestness.  "Oh, I'm in the rut,
+Frank.  What's the use of talking any more about me?  Come on to lunch.
+The girls," she nodded in the direction of the three employes in the
+outer office, "can hold the fort for an hour.  There isn't much doing."
+
+When their meal was finished they matched for the check, and L.
+Frankland was stuck.  "Do one thing anyway," she said as she swept up
+her change, minus a quarter, "get your divorce.  Then you can marry him
+straight off, if he asks you again--and you change your mind.  You
+wouldn't like to go through all that rigmarole under his eyes, while he
+was standing by, waiting."
+
+"No--I guess I won't bother.  What's the use?  I won't change my mind.
+Here I be and here I stay."
+
+"You're a big fool," responded L. Frankland.  "That's what I think."
+
+
+
+
+XXXII
+
+REBELLION
+
+Georgia walked home to the boarding house that evening, as was her
+custom when the weather was fair.  It was quite a tramp, three miles,
+but then the fresh air and exercise made one feel so well.  Besides, if
+one wants to be sure of staying slim--
+
+Mrs. Plew, the landlady, was standing on the front stoop when she
+arrived, talking of carving knives to an old-fashioned scissor-grinding
+man, the sort who advertise with a bell and a chant.
+
+"Good evening, Mrs. Connor."
+
+"Good evening, Mrs. Plew."
+
+"Lovely weather we're having."
+
+"Yes indeed, isn't it?  My partner--she lives in Woodlawn--saw two
+robins this morning.  The buds ought to be out pretty soon now."
+
+Mrs. Plew laughed.  "The German bands are out already.  That's the
+surest sign I know.  Oh, Mrs. Connor," Georgia, who was on the top step
+turned, "there was a young man came to see you this afternoon.  He
+waited nearly an hour.  He didn't leave his name."
+
+"Did he say anything about coming back?"
+
+"No."
+
+"And he didn't leave his name?"
+
+"No."
+
+"What did he look like?"
+
+"Well, he was tall, blue clothes, black derby hat.  He had on a blue
+tie with white dots.  I don't know as I can describe him exactly.  It
+was kind of dark in the hall and I didn't get a good look at him."
+
+Georgia paused with her hand on the knob of the living room door, as
+she heard talking within, her mother's uninflected murmuring and a
+musical masculine voice, deeper than Al's.  It must be Father Hervey,
+patient man, who came regularly once a fortnight, nominally to confer
+with Mrs. Talbot as to the activities of the ladies' advisory board of
+the children's summer-camp school.  But his visits were less for the
+summer school than for mama, to cheer her in her feeble loneliness.
+
+Georgia slipped back to her own room, by way of the hall.  An instinct
+has been growing in her of recent months to avoid falling into talk
+with the priest.  He was so sure and strong and dominating; and she
+wanted to think for herself.
+
+Al was whistling loudly in his back little cubicle, performing
+sartorial miracles before his square pine-framed mirror, with a tall
+collar that lapped in front and a very Princeton tie, orange and black,
+broad stripes.
+
+She smiled reminiscently, regretfully, as she stood in the shadow and
+watched his gay evolutions through the partly opened door.  He had so
+very much ahead of him that was behind her.  He had the spring.
+
+"Why such splendor?" she asked finally.
+
+"Oh, I didn't know you were there.  Why," he explained, amazed that
+explanation was necessary, "to-night is the big night.  Our Bachelor's
+Dance.  Don't you remember you were invited--as chaperone.  I'm on the
+committee."
+
+"Hope you have a good time.  Who are you taking?"
+
+He colored defiantly.  "Annie Traeger."
+
+"Oh-ho, I thought it was Delia Williamson that you--"
+
+"It was, but she got too gay, so I thought I'd teach her a lesson."
+
+"Poor Delia," sighed Georgia, mischievously.
+
+"Oh, I'll have a dance or two with her," Al promised, putting on his
+coat and giving his hair a last pat with the tips of his fingers.  He
+departed with the trill of a mocking bird.  He had been a famous
+whistler from childhood.
+
+Georgia tiptoed to the door of the living room.  There was no sound.
+Father Hervey must have gone.  She turned the knob and went in.
+
+"Good evening, my child," said the priest, rising courteously and
+extending his hand.  "I was resting a moment, hoping you might be home."
+
+"Good evening, Father.  Thank you so much."
+
+"Your mother," he lowered his voice, "isn't as strong as her friends
+might hope, I'm afraid.  She just had a faint spell, and she's in there
+now, lying down.  It quite worried me, Georgia."
+
+"Yes, sometimes I'm afraid she won't get better."
+
+"She has told me she wished to resign from the advisory board of our
+summer school.  That shows how she thinks she is.  You know how much
+interest she always took in the work as long as she was able."
+
+"Yes--poor mama."
+
+"It would be a great comfort to her if you would take her place."
+
+"Me!" exclaimed Georgia, startled.
+
+"Yes.  She is very anxious to keep it in the family, as it were," he
+explained, smiling.
+
+"Let's see," asked Georgia slowly, "who's on that board?"
+
+"Mrs. Conway."
+
+"Mrs. Conway," she repeated, picking up a newspaper and writing on the
+margin.
+
+"Mrs. Keough, Mrs. Schweppe, Mrs. Cochrane."
+
+Georgia wrote on the newspaper after each name.  "And mama," she added.
+She footed the total.  "Those five women aggregate more than two
+hundred and fifty years," she bitterly exclaimed.  "They're an advisory
+board, because they can only advise about life.  They're past living
+it.  And I--am just thirty.  No, Father, I won't go on the board--yet."
+
+She was curiously resentful, as if she had received an insult.  She
+walked quickly to the window and threw it open, looking out and turning
+her back to the priest until she might collect herself and control her
+strange agitation.
+
+"Very well," he answered gently, "I only hoped that it might please
+your mother."  He took his hat in his hand and stood up.  "Before I
+go," he said, "I think I should tell you that I have had news from your
+husband."  He took a letter from his pocket and held it out toward her.
+
+"No--I won't read it, thank you."
+
+"He's on a farm in Iowa," the priest said, "I managed it.  He's been
+doing hard work--and is much better."
+
+"Yes, he may raise himself up a little, and then just when people are
+beginning to hope for the hundredth time, he'll relapse and--wallow."
+
+"Yes, I am afraid sometimes he is hopeless."  The despondency was plain
+in his voice.
+
+"He's quite hopeless.  He's incurable.  It's a disease; but it works
+slowly on him, like leprosy."
+
+"Do you think a drunkard is wholly to blame--for his malady!"
+
+"Oh," said Georgia, "I'm not sure that anyone's ever to blame for
+anything.  It just happens, that's all."
+
+Mrs. Plew knocked and half opened the door.  "That young man's back,"
+she said, "shall I show him in?"  Before Georgia could answer Stevens
+came into the room.
+
+Without greeting of any kind, in rapid, mechanical words, as if he had
+learned his piece by heart, he explained his abrupt coming.
+
+"I have received a business offer," he began, "which if I accept will
+take me away from America for a term of years.  It is to superintend,
+on behalf of Mr. Silverman, the reorganization of certain life
+companies along modern American lines in South America.  Headquarters,
+Rio de Janiero, Brazil.  I have come for your advice, and your advice
+will govern.  Shall I or shall I not accept the offer?"  He stopped
+abruptly, looking at her with a harsh, almost savage expression, as he
+waited for her reply.
+
+"You know what I mean," he burst out.  "Answer me yes or no."
+
+"You know Father Hervey, Mr. Stevens," she said coolly.
+
+"I think I have heard of you before, Mr. Stevens," the priest bowed
+slightly.
+
+"And I have heard of you," answered the young man bitterly.  He turned
+to Georgia.  "Answer me," he repeated, "yes or no."
+
+"If it is an advantageous offer from a business point of view," she
+said gently, "I think you should go, Mason."
+
+"That settles it," said he between his teeth.  "You'd made it plain
+enough with your silence.  I said I'd come when you sent for me.  I
+waited and waited, but you never sent.  Every single day I've looked in
+the mail hoping, and the only thing I got from you was--money.  And
+when I found that Connor had left you, had been gone a year, I had a
+little hope again that--Oh, Georgia," he exclaimed in his wretchedness,
+"you did care for me once.  Why did you stop?"
+
+"I haven't stopped, Mason, but--" she motioned toward the priest in his
+black and solemn garments, standing beside them like a stern guardian,
+"but--" she said, and her shoulders seemed to droop forward
+irresolutely, "I'm helpless."
+
+Stevens took a step toward Father Hervey and there was almost a threat
+in his gesture.  "Don't you see," he said, his two fists clenched,
+"that if someone in the barroom had cracked Jim Connor over the head
+with a whiskey bottle during his last spree or if DTs had hit him five
+per cent harder afterwards--I could have her with your blessing--and
+we'd be happy--oh, so happy as we'd be, Georgia!  It isn't as if I
+wanted to break up a home.  The home's broken up already.  Don't you
+see?  And you're telling her she can't move out of the wreck.  She's
+got to sit in the rubbish as long as the man who made it is able to
+make more."
+
+"Young man," the priest answered not unkindly, "will you listen for a
+moment to an old man?  I believe that you are a decent sort--that your
+love for Georgia is honest--"
+
+"If there is any honesty in me," and Stevens' voice caught and broke.
+
+"Yours, I am afraid," Father Hervey went on, including them both in his
+words, "is an example of those rare and exceptional cases where at the
+first sight marriage and divorce would seem almost permissible--"
+
+"Yes," Stevens interrupted eagerly.
+
+"But those cases, too," continued the priest in his melodious,
+resonant, trained voice, "have been thoroughly contemplated and
+considered by the deep wisdom of the Church."  He waited an instant,
+then pronounced sentence.
+
+"They must be sacrificed for the rest.  For if a single exception were
+once made, others would inevitably follow; and just as a trickle
+through a dike becomes a stream, and the stream a torrent, so whole
+people would be inundated in a flood of bestiality.  If Georgia is, as
+you say--in any sense deprived of her womanhood, it is for the sake of
+millions on millions of others, who while the Church can raise her
+voice--and that, my friend, will be while the world lasts--shall not be
+abandoned in their helplessness."
+
+But Stevens, who had not been listening to the priest's words as soon
+as he saw what conclusion they were coming to, clapped his hands softly
+together and smiled.
+
+"I have it," he said, "I have it at last.  I will give Jim Connor a job
+in the Rio branch--with good pay, too--to drink himself to death on.
+Why not," he asked himself vehemently, as if he would convince himself,
+"that's practical."
+
+"It would be murder," the priest spoke in a voice of horror.
+
+"Not by the letter of the law--and that's what you're enforcing."
+
+"Of course I shall warn him."
+
+"My pay will talk louder," said Stevens, knowing that the drunkard is
+always on ticket-of-leave, "and he'll have all the time off he wants
+for aguardiente, stronger than whiskey, and cheaper.  No white man can
+go against it for long in that climate."
+
+Georgia stood back, fascinated by the duel of the two men.
+
+"You must be mad, Stevens," said the priest with a note of fear in his
+voice, as if he realized that for the first time he was losing control
+of the situation.
+
+"I'm a grown man.  No other man can say 'No' to me forever.  If
+Connor's the one obstacle to our marriage--I'll remove it."
+
+The two men looked at each other with steady and increasing anger.
+
+The woman laid her hand upon her lover's shoulder.  "I will get an
+absolute divorce, Mason," she said.
+
+"What is the meaning of that?" the priest asked, and his deep voice
+shook.
+
+"I could give you my soul, Father, but not his, too."
+
+Stevens took her hands in his and they stood together, separated by
+nearly the width of the room from the old priest.  He turned his eyes
+from them as from an impious spectacle, and looked upward, his lips
+moving silently as if in prayer.  When he spoke, there was new force in
+his voice, as if he had received help and strength.
+
+"Georgia," he spoke with conscious dignity, in the full authority of
+his office, "for fifteen hundred years your people whoever they were,
+artisans, farmers, lords and beggars, have belonged to our faith.  The
+tradition is in your blood.  You cannot cast it out.  And as you grow
+older, and your blood cools, the fifteen hundred years will speak to
+you; you will regret your sin bitterly; and in the end you will leave
+him or you will die in fear."
+
+"No, Father," she said, slowly as if feeling for her words.  "It is all
+much plainer now.  God is not a secret from the common people.  He
+talks to each of us direct, not roundabout through priests and books
+and churches.  He has put His purpose straight into our natures.  He
+doesn't deal with us at second hand.  And I begin to see His
+meaning--He gave us life to live--and to make again."
+
+"According to His ordinance."
+
+"Yes," her answer came quickly and boldly, "according to his ordinance,
+written in the heart of every woman--that the sin of sins for her is to
+live with a man in hate.  When she does that--street girl or
+wife--she's much the same.  Oh, there's many and many a degradation
+blessed by the wedding ring.  That's against His plan, or why should He
+warn us so!  Women--at least common, average women like me--were put
+here to love, not just to submit.  If you forbid us to love in honor,
+you forbid us to live in honor.  And the life God gave me, I will use
+and not refuse."
+
+"My child!  If you do not repent in time--" the suffering was plain in
+the old man's voice.
+
+[Illustration: Rebellion.]
+
+"I cannot repent that I have become myself."
+
+"Then," he slowly uttered the inexorable words, "you cannot receive
+absolution."
+
+"Father," she answered, "the only thing I am sorry about, and I am
+sorrier than you know, is that it will make you, personally so unhappy!"
+
+For a few seconds there was neither movement nor sound in the room.
+Then the old priest, with trembling hands and bent shoulders, passed
+from the room, and forever from Georgia's sight.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIII
+
+THE APE
+
+Father Hervey went slowly and cautiously down the front steps, holding
+to the rail with his right hand and putting his left foot forward for
+each separate step.  He did not remember being so weary and discouraged
+for many years.  He walked back to the parish house, his head slightly
+bowed, his hands clasped behind him, unnoting, or nodding slightly and
+in silence to those who greeted him.
+
+Among all the backslidings that he could remember in his long pastorate
+there had been few, perhaps none, that had saddened him more than this
+one.  He had grieved for many a vain and foolish sheep that had strayed
+away into the briers of sin, not to be found again, until, wounded and
+wasted, it stumbled home to die.  For such is the nature of sheep and
+poor souls.
+
+But Georgia's case was not within that parable.  She was not weak or
+will-less.  Her sin had been with cold deliberation, in open, defiant
+rebellion against the Church, knowing the price of what she did.  Very
+well, let her pay it.  His old lips drew together in a thin bloodless
+line, as in his mind he condemned her in reprisal for her few years of
+rebellious happiness to eternal and infinite woe.  God was merciful,
+but also he was just, and that was justice.  Yet the priest could not
+persist in the mood.  Presently, in spite of himself he softened toward
+her.  That she--the little child whom he had held in his arms and
+breathed upon at the baptismal font, had come at last to this--
+
+It was the age, this wicked age of atheism, he told himself fiercely,
+that had corrupted her.  She could not be altogether, altogether to
+blame that the current had been too swift for her to swim against.
+Perhaps the gentle Savior would yet touch her spirit with His mercy and
+guide her at last to the foot of His throne.
+
+Doubt poisoned the very air she breathed; it broke out like boils and
+deep sores in the newspapers and books, symptoms of the corruption
+beneath; it was strident in the crass levity of the talk and slang of
+the street.  It could not be escaped.
+
+America, save for the Catholic fifteen million, doubted.  The faithful
+stood like an island rising out of the waters of agnosticism.  Was it
+strange that where the waves beat hardest, some of the sand was washed
+away?
+
+Fifty years ago when he was a young man there had arisen in the world
+the great anti-Christ, who had been more harmful than Luther--Darwin,
+the monkey man.  The Protestant churches, as ever uninspired, had first
+fought, then compromised with him.  They tried to swallow and digest
+Darwinism.  But Darwinism had digested them.  The anthropoid ape had
+shaken the throne of Luther's Jehovan God.  The greater anti-Christ had
+consumed the lesser.
+
+The Church alone stood firm.  She had admitted no orang-outangs to her
+communion table, and now her policy was justified by its fruits.  Her
+faithful remained the only Christians in Christendom.
+
+_Ecclesia Depopulata_, ran the old prophecy, the Church deserted.  And
+the time was near upon them for the fulfillment of the words.  France,
+Italy, Portugal, and even Spain, were in revolution against the Keys of
+Peter.  The evil days were coming, _Ecclesia Depopulata_.
+
+But a new age of faith was to follow, so also it was prophesied.  The
+deathless Church could not die.  Once again she was to rule a pious
+world in might, majesty, dominion and power--and her sway would endure
+until the last day.
+
+He fell upon his knees in his bare ascetic study and presently arose
+refreshed, a fighting veteran in the army that will make no peace but a
+victor's.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIV
+
+WHICH BEGINS ANOTHER STORY
+
+
+  MAKES DIVORCE SPEED RECORD
+
+  Judge Peebles Sets New Pace for
+  Untying Nuptial Knots.
+
+Cupid went down for the count in the courtroom of Circuit Judge James
+M. Peebles when five couples were legally separated yesterday afternoon
+between 3 and 4 o'clock--about ten minutes for each case.  This is said
+to establish a new record in Cook county for rapid-fire divorce.  The
+cases, which were uncontested, were as follows:
+
+Rachel Sieglinde vs. Max Sieglinde; abandonment.
+
+Harmon A. Darroch vs. Lottie Darroch; infidelity.
+
+Mary Stiles vs. Jonathan Stiles; drunkenness.
+
+Georgia Connor vs. James Connor; drunkenness.
+
+Sarah Bush vs. Oscar Bush; drunkenness and cruelty.
+
+None of the defendants appearing, the decrees were entered by default.
+
+
+Georgia read the item twice and smiled bitterly.  So her divorce was
+one of the "rapid fire" variety!  They said it had taken ten minutes.
+She knew it had taken ten years.
+
+And Bush, Darroch, those other people--might they not also have walked
+in Gethsemane?  Was this what the papers meant by their humorous
+accounts of "divorce mills"?  She had received an especially vivid
+impression of Mr. Darroch and never would forget him.  His case had
+come just before her own.  He had spoken in a nasal, penetrating voice
+and she heard plainly every word when he testified.  He was a short
+middle-aged man whose young wife, after ruining him by her
+extravagance, had run away with a tall traveling salesman.  Even after
+that Mr. Darroch had offered to forgive her and take her back.  But she
+wouldn't come.  Then finally he divorced her, as the reporter put it,
+with record-breaking speed.
+
+The day after her decree was granted Georgia Talbot Connor and Mason
+Stevens went by automobile to Crown Point, Indiana, where, with Albert
+Talbot and Leila Frankland as witnesses, they were presently assured by
+a justice of the peace that they now were man and wife.
+
+She was compelled to cross the state line for the ceremony because the
+laws of Illinois forbade her remarriage within a year; and she thought
+that she had waited long enough, the state legislature to the contrary
+notwithstanding.
+
+The party of four, when they returned to Chicago had a bridal dinner in
+a private room, with white ribbons and cake.  When it was finished
+Georgia kissed L. Frankland for the second time in their lives.  The
+first time was in the automobile on the way back from Crown Point.
+
+"Good-bye, Al," she said to her brother.  "You must come to see us in
+Kansas City soon."
+
+"Yes, indeed," said Stevens.
+
+"I certainly will," promised Al.
+
+"And mama," she spoke a little wistfully, "tell her we'd like her to
+come too if she would.  Tell her, Al."
+
+"Yes, all right."
+
+"I'll send you something every week for her.  Maybe, I'm not sure,
+maybe I'll keep on working."
+
+"Maybe you won't," Mason interjected with conjugal promptitude.
+
+"Don't be too sure," she laughed, "and anyway, if you don't behave
+nicely I can always go back to L. Frankland."
+
+When the man and his wife were alone in their room he returned to the
+moment of their betrothal.
+
+"Dearest," he said, "when the priest went out and left us--"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I felt almost as if he were trying to lay a curse on us."
+
+"Yes, that was the meaning of it."
+
+"When he said you couldn't receive absolution."
+
+"Yes, our--their teaching is that without absolution a soul in sin is
+damned eternally."
+
+"And you will never be afraid?" he asked, almost fearful of his
+wonderful new happiness.
+
+She pressed her husband's hand against her breast, so that he felt the
+strong and steady beating of her heart.
+
+"No," she answered him, "I will never be afraid.  For I believe that
+God will understand everything."
+
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Rebellion, by Joseph Medill Patterson
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 56455 ***