ONE BASKET

THIRTY-ONE SHORT STORIES

BY

EDNA FERBER

 INTRODUCTION ix THE WOMAN WHO TRIED TO BE GOOD 1 THE GAY OLD DOG 11 THAT'S MARRIAGE 29 FARMER IN THE DELL 49 UN MORSO DOO PANG 68 LONG DISTANCE 89 THE MATERNAL FEMININE 94 . . . . Remainder not included

The Woman Who Tried to Be Good [1913]

Before she tried to be a good woman she had been a very bad woman--sobad that she could trail her wonderful apparel up and down Main Street, from the Elm Tree Bakery to the railroad tracks, without once having aman doff his hat to her or a woman bow. You passed her on the streetwith a surreptitious glance, though she was well worth looking at--inher furs and laces and plumes. She had the only full-length mink coatin our town, and Ganz's shoe store sent to Chicago for her shoes. Herswere the miraculously small feet you frequently see in stout women. 

Usually she walked alone; but on rare occasions, especially roundChristmastime, she might have been seen accompanied by some silent, dull-eyed, stupid-looking girl, who would follow her dumbly in and outof stores, stopping now and then to admire a cheap comb or a chain setwith flashy imitation stones--or, queerly enough, a doll with yellowhair and blue eyes and very pink cheeks. But, alone or in company, herappearance in the stores of our town was the signal for a sudden jumpin the cost of living. The storekeepers mulcted her; and she knew itand paid in silence, for she was of the class that has no redress. Sheowned the House with the Closed Shutters, near the freight depot--didBlanche Devine. 

In a larger town than ours she would have passed unnoticed. She didnot look like a bad woman. Of course she used too much make-up, and asshe passed you caught the oversweet breath of a certain heavy scent. Then, too, her diamond eardrops would have made any woman's featureslook hard; but her plump face, in spite of its heaviness, wore anexpression of good-humored intelligence, and her eyeglasses gave hersomehow a look of respectability. We do not associate vice witheyeglasses. So in a large city she would have passed for awell-dressed, prosperous, comfortable wife and mother who was in dangerof losing her figure from an overabundance of good living; but with usshe was a town character, like Old Man Givins, the drunkard, or theweak-minded Binns girl. When she passed the drug-store corner therewould be a sniggering among the vacant-eyed loafers idling there, andthey would leer at each other and jest in undertones. 

So, knowing Blanche Devine as we did, there was something resembling ariot in one of our most respectable neighborhoods when it was learnedthat she had given up her interest in the house near the freight depotand was going to settle down in the white cottage on the corner and begood. All the husbands in the block, urged on by righteously indignantwives, dropped in on Alderman Mooney after supper to see if the thingcould not be stopped. The fourth of the protesting husbands to arrivewas the Very Young Husband who lived next door to the corner cottagethat Blanche Devine had bought. The Very Young Husband had a VeryYoung Wife, and they were the joint owners of Snooky. Snooky wasthree-going-on-four, and looked something like an angel--only healthierand with grimier hands. The whole neighborhood borrowed her and triedto spoil her; but Snooky would not spoil. 

Alderman Mooney was down in the cellar, fooling with the furnace. 

He was in his furnace overalls; a short black pipe in his mouth. Threeprotesting husbands had just left. As the Very Young Husband, following Mrs. Mooney's directions, descended the cellar stairs, Alderman Mooney looked up from his tinkering. He peered through a hazeof pipe smoke. 

"Hello!" he called, and waved the haze away with his open palm. 

"Come on down! Been tinkering with this blamed furnace since supper. She don't draw like she ought. 'Long toward spring a furnace alwaysgets balky. How many tons you used this winter?"

"Oh-five, " said the Very Young Husband shortly. Alderman Mooneyconsidered it thoughtfully. The Young Husband leaned up against theside of the water tank, his hands in his pockets. "Say, Mooney, is thatright about Blanche Devine's having bought the house on the corner?"

"You're the fourth man that's been in to ask me that this evening. I'mexpecting the rest of the block before bedtime. She bought it allright. "

The Young Husband flushed and kicked at a piece of coal with the toe ofhis boot. 

"Well, it's a darned shame!" he began hotly. "Jen was ready to cry atsupper. This'll be a fine neighborhood for Snooky to grow up in!What's a woman like that want to come into a respectable street for, anyway? I own my home and pay my taxes--"

Alderman Mooney looked up. 

"So does she, " he interrupted. "She's going to improve theplace--paint it, and put in a cellar and a furnace, and build a porch, and lay a cement walk all round. "

The Young Husband took his hands out of his pockets in order toemphasize his remarks with gestures. 

"What's that got to do with it? I don't care if she puts in diamondsfor windows and sets out Italian gardens and a terrace with peacocks onit. You're the alderman of this ward, aren't you? Well, it was up toyou to keep her out of this block! You could have fixed it with aninjunction or something. I'm going to get up a petition--that's whatI'm going----"

Alderman Mooney closed the furnace door with a bang that drowned therest of the threat. He turned the draft in a pipe overhead and brushedhis sooty palms briskly together like one who would put an end to aprofitless conversation. 

"She's bought the house, " he said mildly, "and paid for it. And it'shers. She's got a right to live in this neighborhood as long as sheacts respectable. "

The Very Young Husband laughed. 

"She won't last! They never do. "

Alderman Mooney had taken his pipe out of his mouth and was rubbing histhumb over the smooth bowl, looking down at it with unseeing eyes. Onhis face was a queer look--the look of one who is embarrassed becausehe is about to say something honest. 

"Look here! I want to tell you something: I happened to be up in themayor's office the day Blanche signed for the place. She had to gothrough a lot of red tape before she got it--had quite a time of it, she did! And say, kid, that woman ain't so--bad. "

The Very Young Husband exclaimed impatiently:

"Oh, don't give me any of that, Mooney! Blanche Devine's a towncharacter. Even the kids know what she is. If she's got religion orsomething, and wants to quit and be decent, why doesn't she go toanother town--Chicago or someplace--where nobody knows her?"

That motion of Alderman Mooney's thumb against the smooth pipe bowlstopped. He looked up slowly. 

"That's what I said--the mayor too. But Blanche Devine said she wantedto try it here. She said this was home to her. Funny--ain't it? Saidshe wouldn't be fooling anybody here. They know her. And if she movedaway, she said, it'd leak out some way sooner or later. It does, shesaid. Always! Seems she wants to live like--well, like other women. She put it like this: she says she hasn't got religion, or any of that. She says she's no different than she was when she was twenty. She saysthat for the last ten years the ambition of her life has been to beable to go into a grocery store and ask the price of, say, celery; and, if the clerk charged her ten when it ought to be seven, to be able tosass him with a regular piece of her mind--and then sail out and tradesomewhere else until he saw that she didn't have to stand anything fromstorekeepers, any more than any other woman that did her own marketing. She's a smart woman, Blanche is! God knows I ain't taking herpart--exactly; but she talked a little, and the mayor and me got alittle of her history. "

A sneer appeared on the face of the Very Young Husband. He had beenknown before he met Jen as a rather industrious sower of wild oats. Heknew a thing or two, did the Very Young Husband, in spite of his youth!He always fussed when Jen wore even a V-necked summer gown on thestreet. 

"Oh, she wasn't playing for sympathy, " went on Alderman Mooney inanswer to the sneer. "She said she'd always paid her way and alwaysexpected to. Seems her husband left her without a cent when she waseighteen--with a baby. She worked for four dollars a week in a cheapeating house. The two of 'em couldn't live on that. Then the baby----"

"Good night!" said the Very Young Husband. "I suppose Mrs. Mooney'sgoing to call?"

"Minnie! It was her scolding all through supper that drove me down tomonkey with the furnace. She's wild--Minnie is. " He peeled off hisoveralls and hung them on a nail. The Young Husband started to ascendthe cellar stairs. Alderman Mooney laid a detaining finger on hissleeve. "Don't say anything in front of Minnie! She's boiling!Minnie and the kids are going to visit her folks out West this summer;so I wouldn't so much as dare to say 'Good morning!' to the Devinewoman. Anyway, a person wouldn't talk to her, I suppose. But I kindof thought I'd tell you about her. 

"Thanks!" said the Very Young Husband dryly. 

In the early spring, before Blanche Devine moved in, there camestone-masons, who began to build something. It was a great stonefireplace that rose in massive incongruity at the side of the littlewhite cottage. Blanche Devine was trying to make a home for herself. 

Blanche Devine used to come and watch them now and then as the workprogressed. She had a way of walking round and round the house, looking up at it and poking at plaster and paint with her umbrella orfinger tip. One day she brought with her a man with a spade. Hespaded up a neat square of ground at the side of the cottage and a longridge near the fence that separated her yard from that of the VeryYoung Couple next door. The ridge spelled sweet peas and nasturtiumsto our small-town eyes. 

On the day that Blanche Devine moved in there was wild agitation amongthe white-ruffed bedroom curtains of the neighborhood. Later on certainodors, as of burning dinners, pervaded the atmosphere. Blanche Devine, flushed and excited, her hair slightly askew, her diamond eardropsflashing, directed the moving, wrapped in her great fur coat; but onthe third morning we gasped when she appeared out-of-doors, carrying alittle household ladder, a pail of steaming water, and sundryvoluminous white cloths. She reared the little ladder against the sideof the house, mounted it cautiously, and began to wash windows withhousewifely thoroughness. Her stout figure was swathed in a graysweater and on her head was a battered felt hat--the sort ofwindow--washing costume that has been worn by women from timeimmemorial. We noticed that she used plenty of hot water and cleanrags, and that she rubbed the glass until it sparkled, leaningperilously sideways on the ladder to detect elusive streaks. Ourkeenest housekeeping eye could find no fault with the way BlancheDevine washed windows. 

By May, Blanche Devine had left off her diamond eardrops--perhaps itwas their absence that gave her face a new expression. When she wentdowntown we noticed that her hats were more like the hats the otherwomen in our town wore; but she still affected extravagant footgear, asis right and proper for a stout woman who has cause to be vain of herfeet. We noticed that her trips downtown were rare that spring andsummer. She used to come home laden with little bundles; and beforesupper she would change her street clothes for a neat, washablehousedress, as is our thrifty custom. Through her bright windows wecould see her moving briskly about from kitchen to sitting room; andfrom the smells that floated out from her kitchen door, she seemed tobe preparing for her solitary supper the same homely viands that werefrying or stewing or baking in our kitchens. Sometimes you coulddetect the delectable scent of browning, hot tea biscuit. It takes adetermined woman to make tea biscuit for no one but herself. 

Blanche Devine joined the church. On the first Sunday morning she cameto the service there was a little flurry among the ushers at thevestibule door. They seated her well in the rear. The second Sundaymorning a dreadful thing happened. The woman next to whom they seatedher turned, regarded her stonily for a moment, then rose agitatedly andmoved to a pew across the aisle. 

Blanche Devine's face went a dull red beneath her white powder. Shenever came again--though we saw the minister visit her once or twice. She always accompanied him to the door pleasantly, holding it well openuntil he was down the little flight of steps and on the sidewalk. Theminister's wife did not call. 

She rose early, like the rest of us; and as summer came on we used tosee her moving about in her little garden patch in the dewy, goldenmorning. She wore absurd pale-blue negligees that made her stout figureloom immense against the greenery of garden and apple tree. Theneighborhood women viewed these negligees with Puritan disapproval asthey smoothed down their own prim, starched gingham skirts. They saidit was disgusting--and perhaps it was; but the habit of years is noteasily overcome. Blanche Devine--snipping her sweet peas, peeringanxiously at the Virginia creeper that clung with such fragile fingersto the trellis, watering the flower baskets that hung from herporch--was blissfully unconscious of the disapproving eyes. I wish oneof us had just stopped to call good morning to her over the fence, andto say in our neighborly, small-town way: "My, ain't this a scorcher!So early too! It'll be fierce by noon!"

But we did not. 

I think perhaps the evenings must have been the loneliest for her. Thesummer evenings in our little town are filled with intimate, human, neighborly sounds. After the heat of the day it is pleasant to relaxin the cool comfort of the front porch, with the life of the towneddying about us. We sew and read out there until it grows dusk. Wecall across lots to our next-door neighbor. The men water the lawnsand the flower boxes and get together in little, quiet groups todiscuss the new street paving. I have even known Mrs. Hines to bringher cherries out there when she had canning to do, and pit them thereon the front porch partially shielded by her porch vine, but not soeffectually that she was deprived of the sights and sounds about her. The kettle in her lap and the dishpan full of great ripe cherries onthe porch floor by her chair, she would pit and chat and peer outthrough the vines, the red juice staining her plump bare arms. 

I have wondered since what Blanche Devine thought of us those lonesomeevenings--those evenings filled with friendly sights and sounds. Itmust have been difficult for her, who had dwelt behind closed shuttersso long, to seat herself on the new front porch for all the world tostare at; but she did sit there--resolutely--watching us in silence. 

She seized hungrily upon the stray crumbs of conversation that fell toher. The milkman and the iceman and the butcher boy used to hold dailyconversation with her. They--sociable gentlemen--would stand on herdoor-step, one grimy hand resting against the white of her doorpost, exchanging the time of day with Blanche in the doorway--a tea towel inone hand, perhaps, and a plate in the other. Her little house was amiracle of cleanliness. It was no uncommon sight to see her down onher knees on the kitchen floor, wielding her brush and rag like therest of us. In canning and preserving time there floated out from herkitchen the pungent scent of pickled crab apples; the mouth-wateringsmell that meant sweet pickles; or the cloying, divinely sticky odorthat meant raspberry jam. Snooky, from her side of the fence, oftenused to peer through the pickets, gazing in the direction of theenticing smells next door. 

Early one September morning there floated out from Blanche Devine'skitchen that fragrant, sweet scent of fresh-baked cookies--cookies withbutter in them, and spice, and with nuts on top. Just by the smell ofthem your mind's eye pictured them coming from the oven-crisp browncirclets, crumbly, delectable. Snooky, in her scarlet sweater and cap, sniffed them from afar and straightway deserted her sand pile to takeher stand at the fence. She peered through the restraining bars, standing on tiptoe. Blanche Devine, glancing up from her board androlling pin, saw the eager golden head. And Snooky, with guile in herheart, raised one fat, dimpled hand above the fence and waved itfriendlily. Blanche Devine waved back. Thus encouraged, Snooky's twohands wigwagged frantically above the pickets. Blanche Devine hesitateda moment, her floury hand on her hip. Then she went to the pantry shelfand took out a clean white saucer. She selected from the brown jar onthe table three of the brownest, crumbliest, most perfect cookies, witha walnut meat perched atop of each, placed them temptingly on thesaucer and, descending the steps, came swiftly across the grass to thetriumphant Snooky. Blanche Devine held out the saucer, her lipssmiling, her eyes tender. Snooky reached up with one plump white arm. 

"Snooky!" shrilled a high voice. "Snooky!" A voice of horror and ofwrath. "Come here to me this minute! And don't you dare to touchthose!" Snooky hesitated rebelliously, one pink finger in her poutingmouth. 

"Snooky! Do you hear me?"

And the Very Young Wife began to descend the steps of her back porch. Snooky, regretful eyes on the toothsome dainties, turned awayaggrieved. The Very Young Wife, her lips set, her eyes flashing, advanced and seized the shrieking Snooky by one arm and dragged heraway toward home and safety. 

Blanche Devine stood there at the fence, holding the saucer in herhand. The saucer tipped slowly, and the three cookies slipped off andfell to the grass. Blanche Devine stood staring at them a moment. Then she turned quickly, went into the house, and shut the door. 

It was about this time we noticed that Blanche Devine was away much ofthe time. The little white cottage would be empty for weeks. We knewshe was out of town because the expressman would come for her trunk. Weused to lift our eyebrows significantly. The newspapers and handbillswould accumulate in a dusty little heap on the porch; but when shereturned there was always a grand cleaning, with the windows open, andBlanche--her head bound turbanwise in a towel--appearing at a windowevery few minutes to shake out a dustcloth. She seemed to put anenormous amount of energy into those cleanings--as if they were a sortof safety valve. 

As winter came on she used to sit up before her grate fire long, longafter we were asleep in our beds. When she neglected to pull down theshades we could see the flames of her cosy fire dancing gnomelike onthe wall. There came a night of sleet and snow, and wind and rattlinghail--one of those blustering, wild nights that are followed bymorning-paper reports of trains stalled in drifts, mail delayed, telephone and telegraph wires down. It must have been midnight or pastwhen there came a hammering at Blanche Devine's door--a persistent, clamorous rapping. Blanche Devine, sitting before her dying fire halfasleep, started and cringed when she heard it, then jumped to her feet, her hand at her breast--her eyes darting this way and that, as thoughseeking escape. 

She had heard a rapping like that before. It had meant bluecoatsswarming up the stairway, and frightened cries and pleadings, and wildconfusion. So she started forward now, quivering. And then sheremembered, being wholly awake now--she remembered, and threw up herhead and smiled a little bitterly and walked toward the door. Thehammering continued, louder than ever. Blanche Devine flicked on theporch light and opened the door. The half-clad figure of the VeryYoung Wife next door staggered into the room. She seized BlancheDevine's arm with both her frenzied hands and shook her, the wind andsnow beating in upon both of them. 

"The baby!" she screamed in a high, hysterical voice. "The baby! Thebaby----!"

Blanche Devine shut the door and shook the Young Wife smartly by theshoulders. 

"Stop screaming, " she said quietly. "Is she sick?"

The Young Wife told her, her teeth chattering:

"Come quick! She's dying! Will's out of town. I tried to get thedoctor. The telephone wouldn't---- I saw your light! For God'ssake----"

Blanche Devine grasped the Young Wife's arm, opened the door, andtogether they sped across the little space that separated the twohouses. Blanche Devine was a big woman, but she took the stairs like agirl and found the right bedroom by some miraculous woman instinct. Adreadful choking, rattling sound was coming from Snooky's bed. 

"Croup, " said Blanche Devine, and began her fight. 

It was a good fight. She marshaled her inadequate forces, made up ofthe half-fainting Young Wife and the terrified and awkward hired girl. 

"Get the hot water on--lots of it!" Blanche Devine pinned up hersleeves. "Hot cloths! Tear up a sheet--or anything! Got an oilstove?I want a tea-kettle boiling in the room. She's got to have the steam. If that don't do it we'll raise an umbrella over her and throw a sheetover, and hold the kettle under till the steam gets to her that way. Got any ipecac?"

The Young Wife obeyed orders, white-faced and shaking. Once BlancheDevine glanced up at her sharply. 

"Don't you dare faint!" she commanded. 

And the fight went on. Gradually the breathing that had been sofrightful became softer, easier. Blanche Devine did not relax. It wasnot until the little figure breathed gently in sleep that BlancheDevine sat back, satisfied. Then she tucked a cover at the side of thebed, took a last satisfied look at the face on the pillow, and turnedto look at the wan, disheveled Young Wife. 

"She's all right now. We can get the doctor when morning comes--thoughI don't know's you'll need him. "

The Young Wife came round to Blanche Devine's side of the bed and stoodlooking up at her. 

"My baby died, " said Blanche Devine simply. The Young Wife gave alittle inarticulate cry, put her two hands on Blanche Devine's broadshoulders, and laid her tired head on her breast. 

"I guess I'd better be going, " said Blanche Devine. 

The Young Wife raised her head. Her eyes were round with fright. 

"Going! Oh, please stay! I'm so afraid. Suppose she should take sickagain! That awful--breathing----"

"I'll stay if you want me to. "

"Oh, please! I'll make up your bed and you can rest----"

"I'm not sleepy. I'm not much of a hand to sleep anyway. I'll sit uphere in the hall, where there's a light. You get to bed. I'll watchand see that everything's all right. Have you got something I can readout here--something kind of lively--with a love story in it?"

So the night went by. Snooky slept in her white bed. The Very YoungWife half dozed in her bed, so near the little one. In the hall, herstout figure looming grotesque in wall shadows, sat Blanche Devine, pretending to read. Now and then she rose and tiptoed into the bedroomwith miraculous quiet, and stooped over the little bed and listened andlooked--and tiptoed away again, satisfied. 

The Young Husband came home from his business trip next day with talesof snowdrifts and stalled engines. Blanche Devine breathed a sigh ofrelief when she saw him from her kitchen window. She watched the housenow with a sort of proprietary eye. She wondered about Snooky; but sheknew better than to ask. So she waited. The Young Wife next door hadtold her husband all about that awful night--had told him with tearsand sobs. The Very Young Husband had been very, very angry withher--angry, he said, and astonished! Snooky could not have been sosick! Look at her now! As well as ever. And to have called such awoman! Well, he did not want to be harsh; but she must understand thatshe must never speak to the woman again. Never!

So the next day the Very Young Wife happened to go by with the YoungHusband. Blanche Devine spied them from her sitting-room window, andshe made the excuse of looking in her mailbox in order to go to thedoor. She stood in the doorway and the Very Young Wife went by on thearm of her husband. She went by--rather white-faced--without a look ora word or a sign!

And then this happened! There came into Blanche Devine's face a lookthat made slits of her eyes, and drew her mouth down into an ugly, narrow line, and that made the muscles of her jaw tense and hard. Itwas the ugliest look you can imagine. Then she smiled--if having one'slips curl away from one's teeth can be called smiling. 

Two days later there was great news of the white cottage on the corner. The curtains were down; the furniture was packed; the rugs were rolled. The wagons came and backed up to the house and took those things thathad made a home for Blanche Devine. And when we heard that she hadbought back her interest in the House with the Closed Shutters, nearthe freight depot, we sniffed. 

"I knew she wouldn't last!" we said. 

"They never do!" said we. 

The Gay Old Dog [1917]

Those of you who have dwelt--or even lingered--in Chicago, Illinois, are familiar with the region known as the Loop. For those others ofyou to whom Chicago is a transfer point between New York and Californiathere is presented this brief explanation:

The Loop is a clamorous, smoke-infested district embraced by the ironarms of the elevated tracks. In a city boasting fewer millions, itwould be known familiarly as downtown. From Congress to Lake Street, from Wabash almost to the river, those thunderous tracks make acomplete circle, or loop. Within it lie the retail shops, thecommercial hotels, the theaters, the restaurants. It is the FifthAvenue and the Broadway of Chicago. 

And he who frequents it by night in search of amusement and cheer isknown, vulgarly, as a Loop-hound. 

Jo Hertz was a Loop-hound. On the occasion of those sparse firstnights granted the metropolis of the Middle West he was always present, third row, aisle, left. When a new Loop cafe' was opened, Jo's tablealways commanded an unobstructed view of anything worth viewing. Onentering he was wont to say, "Hello, Gus, " with careless cordiality tothe headwaiter, the while his eye roved expertly from table to table ashe removed his gloves. He ordered things under glass, so that histable, at midnight or thereabouts, resembled a hotbed that favors thebell system. The waiters fought for him. He was the kind of man whomixes his own salad dressing. He liked to call for a bowl, some crackedice, lemon, garlic, paprika, salt, pepper, vinegar, and oil and make arite of it. People at near-by tables would lay down their knives andforks to watch, fascinated. The secret of it seemed to lie in usingall the oil in sight and calling for more. 

That was Jo--a plump and lonely bachelor of fifty. A plethoric, roving-eyed, and kindly man, clutching vainly at the garments of ayouth that had long slipped past him. Jo Hertz, in one of thosepinch-waist suits and a belted coat and a little green hat, walking upMichigan Avenue of a bright winter's afternoon, trying to take the curbwith a jaunty youthfulness against which every one of his fat-encasedmuscles rebelled, was a sight for mirth or pity, depending on one'svision. 

The gay-dog business was a late phase in the life of Jo Hertz. He hadbeen a quite different sort of canine. The staid and harassed brotherof three unwed and selfish sisters is an underdog. 

At twenty-seven Jo had been the dutiful, hard-working son (in thewholesale harness business) of a widowed and gummidging mother, whocalled him Joey. Now and then a double wrinkle would appear betweenJo's eyes--a wrinkle that had no business there at twenty-seven. ThenJo's mother died, leaving him handicapped by a deathbed promise, thethree sisters, and a three-story-and-basement house on Calumet Avenue. Jo's wrinkle became a fixture. 

"Joey, " his mother had said, in her high, thin voice, "take care of thegirls. "

"I will, Ma, " Jo had choked. 

"Joey, " and the voice was weaker, "promise me you won't marry till thegirls are all provided for. " Then as Jo had hesitated, appalled:"Joey, it's my dying wish. Promise!"

"I promise, Ma, " he had said. 

Whereupon his mother had died, comfortably, leaving him with acompletely ruined life. 

They were not bad-looking girls, and they had a certain style, too. That is, Stell and Eva had. Carrie, the middle one, taught school overon the West Side. In those days it took her almost two hours each way. She said the kind of costume she required should have been corrugatedsteel. But all three knew what was being worn, and they wore it--orfairly faithful copies of it. Eva, the housekeeping sister, had aneedle knack. She could skim the State Street windows and come awaywith a mental photograph of every separate tuck, hem, yoke, and ribbon. Heads of departments showed her the things they kept in drawers, andshe went home and reproduced them with the aid of a seamstress by theday. Stell, the youngest, was the beauty. They called her Babe. 

Twenty-three years ago one's sisters did not strain at the householdleash, nor crave a career. Carrie taught school, and hated it. Evakept house expertly and complainingly. Babe's profession was being thefamily beauty, and it took all her spare time. Eva always let hersleep until ten. 

This was Jo's household, and he was the nominal head of it. But it wasan empty title. The three women dominated his life. They weren'tconsciously selfish. If you had called them cruel they would have putyou down as mad. When you are the lone brother of three sisters, itmeans that you must constantly be calling for, escorting, or droppingone of them somewhere. Most men of Jo's age were standing before theirmirror of a Saturday night, whistling blithely and abstractedly whilethey discarded a blue polka-dot for a maroon tie, whipped off themaroon for a shot-silk and at the last moment decided against theshot-silk in favor of a plain black-and-white because she had once saidshe preferred quiet ties. Jo, when he should have been preening hisfeathers for conquest, was saying:

"Well, my God, I AM hurrying! Give a man time, can't you? I just gothome. You girls been laying around the house all day. No wonder you'reready. "

He took a certain pride in seeing his sisters well dressed, at a timewhen he should have been reveling in fancy waistcoats andbrilliant-hued socks, according to the style of that day and theinalienable right of any unwed male under thirty, in any day. On thoserare occasions when his business necessitated an out-of-town trip, hewould spend half a day floundering about the shops selectinghandkerchiefs, or stockings, or feathers, or gloves for the girls. They always turned out to be the wrong kind, judging by their reception. 

From Carrie, "What in the world do I want of long white gloves!"

"I thought you didn't have any, " Jo would say. 

"I haven't. I never wear evening clothes. "

Jo would pass a futile hand over the top of his head, as was his waywhen disturbed. "I just thought you'd like them. I thought every girlliked long white gloves. Just, " feebly, "just to--to have. "

"Oh, for pity's sake!"

And from Eva or Babe, "I've GOT silk stockings, Jo. " Or, "You broughtme handkerchiefs the last time. "

There was something selfish in his giving, as there always is in anygift freely and joyfully made. They never suspected the exquisitepleasure it gave him to select these things, these fine, soft, silkenthings. There were many things about this slow-going, amiable brotherof theirs that they never suspected. If you had told them he was adreamer of dreams, for example, they would have been amused. Sometimes, dead-tired by nine o'clock after a hard day downtown, hewould doze over the evening paper. At intervals he would wake, red-eyed, to a snatch of conversation such as, "Yes, but if you get ablue you can wear it anywhere. It's dressy, and at the same time it'squiet, too. " Eva, the expert, wrestling with Carrie over the problemof the new spring dress. They never guessed that the commonplace manin the frayed old smoking jacket had banished them all from the roomlong ago; had banished himself, for that matter. In his place was atall, debonair, and rather dangerously handsome man to whom six o'clockspelled evening clothes. The kind of man who can lean up against amantel, or propose a toast, or give an order to a manservant, orwhisper a gallant speech in a lady's ear with equal ease. The shabbyold house on Calumet Avenue was transformed into a brocaded andchandeliered rendezvous for the brilliance of the city. Beauty washere, and wit. But none so beautiful and witty as She. Mrs. --er--JoHertz. There was wine, of course; but no vulgar display. There wasmusic; the soft sheen of satin; laughter. And he, the gracious, tactfulhost, king of his own domain----

"Jo, for heaven's sake, if you're going to snore, go to bed!"

"Why--did I fall asleep?"

"You haven't been doing anything else all evening. A person wouldthink you were fifty instead of thirty. "

And Jo Hertz was again just the dull, gray, commonplace brother ofthree well-meaning sisters. 

Babe used to say petulantly, "Jo, why don't you ever bring home any ofyour men friends? A girl might as well not have any brother, all thegood you do. "

Jo, conscience-stricken, did his best to make amends. But a man whohas been petticoat-ridden for years loses the knack, somehow, ofcomradeship with men. 

One Sunday in May Jo came home from a late-Sunday-afternoon walk tofind company for supper. Carrie often had in one of her schoolteacherfriends, or Babe one of her frivolous intimates, or even Eva a staidguest of the old-girl type. There was always a Sunday-night supper ofpotato salad, and cold meat, and coffee, and perhaps a fresh cake. Jorather enjoyed it, being a hospitable soul. But he regarded the guestswith the undazzled eyes of a man to whom they were just so manypetticoats, timid of the night streets and requiring escort home. Ifyou had suggested to him that some of his sisters' popularity was dueto his own presence, or if you had hinted that the more kittenish ofthese visitors were probably making eyes at him, he would have staredin amazement and unbelief. 

This Sunday night it turned out to be one of Carrie's friends. 

"Emily, " said Carrie, "this is my brother, Jo. "

Jo had learned what to expect in Carrie's friends. Drab-looking womenin the late thirties, whose facial lines all slanted downward. 

"Happy to meet you, " said Jo, and looked down at a different sortaltogether. A most surprisingly different sort, for one of Carrie'sfriends. This Emily person was very small, and fluffy, and blue-eyed, and crinkly looking. The corners of her mouth when she smiled, and hereyes when she looked up at you, and her hair, which was brown, but hadthe miraculous effect, somehow, of looking golden. 

Jo shook hands with her. Her hand was incredibly small, and soft, sothat you were afraid of crushing it, until you discovered she had afirm little grip all her own. It surprised and amused you, that grip, as does a baby's unexpected clutch on your patronizing forefinger. AsJo felt it in his own big clasp, the strangest thing happened to him. Something inside Jo Hertz stopped working for a moment, then lurchedsickeningly, then thumped like mad. It was his heart. He stoodstaring down at her, and she up at him, until the others laughed. Thentheir hands fell apart, lingeringly. 

"Are you a schoolteacher, Emily?" he said. 

"Kindergarten. It's my first year. And don't call me Emily, please. "

"Why not? It's your name. I think it's the prettiest name in theworld. " Which he hadn't meant to say at all. In fact, he was perfectlyaghast to find himself saying it. But he meant it. 

At supper he passed her things, and stared, until everybody laughedagain, and Eva said acidly, "Why don't you feed her?"

It wasn't that Emily had an air of helplessness. She just made himfeel he wanted her to be helpless, so that he could help her. 

Jo took her home, and from that Sunday night he began to strain at theleash. He took his sisters out, dutifully, but he would suggest, witha carelessness that deceived no one, "Don't you want one of your girlfriends to come along? That little What's-her-name-Emily, orsomething. So long's I've got three of you, I might as well have afull squad. "

For a long time he didn't know what was the matter with him. He onlyknew he was miserable, and yet happy. Sometimes his heart seemed toache with an actual physical ache. He realized that he wanted to dothings for Emily. He wanted to buy things for Emily--useless, pretty, expensive things that he couldn't afford. 

He wanted to buy everything that Emily needed, and everything thatEmily desired. He wanted to marry Emily. That was it. He discoveredthat one day, with a shock, in the midst of a transaction in theharness business. He stared at the man with whom he was dealing untilthat startled person grew uncomfortable. "What's the matter, Hertz?""Matter?" "You look as if you'd seen a ghost or found a gold mine. Idon't know which. " "Gold mine, " said Jo. And then, "No. Ghost. " Forhe remembered that high, thin voice, and his promise. And the harnessbusiness was slithering downhill with dreadful rapidity, as theautomobile business began its amazing climb. Jo tried to stop it. Buthe was not that kind of businessman. It never occurred to him to jumpout of the down-going vehicle and catch the up-going one. He stayedon, vainly applying brakes that refused to work. "You know, Emily, Icouldn't support two households now. Not the way things are. But ifyou'll wait. If you'll only wait. The girls might--that is, Babe andCarrie--"

She was a sensible little thing, Emily. "Of course I'll wait. But wemustn't just sit back and let the years go by. We've got to help. "

She went about it as if she were already a little matchmaking matron. She corralled all the men she had ever known and introduced them toBabe, Carrie, and Eva separately, in pairs, and en masse. She got uppicnics. She stayed home while Jo took the three about. When she waspresent she tried to look as plain and obscure as possible, so that thesisters should show up to advantage. She schemed, and planned, andcontrived, and hoped; and smiled into Jo's despairing eyes. 

And three years went by. Three precious years. Carrie still taughtschool, and hated it. Eva kept house more and more complainingly asprices advanced and allowance retreated. Stell was still Babe, thefamily beauty. Emily's hair, somehow, lost its glint and began to lookjust plain brown. Her crinkliness began to iron out. 

"Now, look here!" Jo argued, desperately, one night. "We could behappy, anyway. There's plenty of room at the house. Lots of peoplebegin that way. Of course, I couldn't give you all I'd like to, atfirst. But maybe, after a while--" No dreams of salons, and brocade, and velvet-footed servitors, and satin damask now. Just two rooms, alltheir own, all alone, and Emily to work for. That was his dream. Butit seemed less possible than that other absurd one had been. 

Emily was as practical a little thing as she looked fluffy. She knewwomen. Especially did she know Eva, and Carrie, and Babe. She tried toimagine herself taking the household affairs and the housekeepingpocket-book out of Eva's expert hands. So then she tried to pictureherself allowing the reins of Jo's house to remain in Eva's hands. Andeverything feminine and normal in her rebelled. Emily knew she'd wantto put away her own freshly laundered linen, and smooth it, and pat it. She was that kind of woman. She knew she'd want to do her owndelightful haggling with butcher and grocer. She knew she'd want tomuss Jo's hair, and sit on his knee, and even quarrel with him, ifnecessary, without the awareness of three ever-present pairs of maideneyes and ears. 

"No! No! We'd only be miserable. I know. Even if they didn'tobject. And they would, Jo. Wouldn't they?"

His silence was miserable assent. Then, "But you do love me, don'tyou, Emily?"

"I do, Jo. I love you--and love you--and love you. But, Jo, I--can't. "

"I know it, dear. I knew it all the time, really. I just thought, maybe, somehow----"

The two sat staring for a moment into space, their hands clasped. 

Then they both shut their eyes with a little shudder, as though whatthey saw was terrible to look upon. Emily's hand, the tiny hand thatwas so unexpectedly firm, tightened its hold on his, and his crushedthe absurd fingers until she winced with pain. 

That was the beginning of the end, and they knew it. 

Emily wasn't the kind of girl who would be left to pine. There are toomany Jos in the world whose hearts are prone to lurch and then thump atthe feel of a soft, fluttering, incredibly small hand in their grip. One year later Emily was married to a young man whose father owned alarge, pie-shaped slice of the prosperous state of Michigan. 

That being safely accomplished, there was something grimly humorous inthe trend taken by affairs in the old house on Calumet. For Evamarried. Married well, too, though he was a great deal older than she. She went off in a hat she had copied from a French model at Field's, and a suit she had contrived with a home dressmaker, aided by pressingon the part of the little tailor in the basement over on Thirty-firstStreet. It was the last of that, though. The next time they saw her, she had on a hat that even she would have despaired of copying, and asuit that sort of melted into your gaze. She moved to the North Side(trust Eva for that), and Babe assumed the management of the householdon Calumet Avenue. It was rather a pinched little household now, forthe harness business shrank and shrank. 

"I don't see how you can expect me to keep house decently on this!"Babe would say contemptuously. Babe's nose, always a little inclinedto sharpness, had whittled down to a point of late. "If you knew whatBen gives Eva. "

"It's the best I can do, Sis. Business is something rotten. "

"Ben says if you had the least bit of----" Ben was Eva's husband, andquotable, as are all successful men. 

"I don't care what Ben says, " shouted Jo, goaded into rage. "I'm sickof your everlasting Ben. Go and get a Ben of your own, why don't you, if you're so stuck on the way he does things. "

And Babe did. She made a last desperate drive, aided by Eva, and shecaptured a rather surprised young man in the brokerage way, who hadmade up his mind not to marry for years and years. Eva wanted to giveher her wedding things, but at that Jo broke into sudden rebellion. 

"No, sir! No Ben is going to buy my sister's wedding clothes, understand? I guess I'm not broke--yet. I'll furnish the money for herthings, and there'll be enough of them, too. " Babe had as useless atrousseau, and as filled with extravagant pink-and-blue and lacy andfrilly things, as any daughter of doting parents. Jo seemed to find agrim pleasure in providing them. But it left him pretty well pinched. After Babe's marriage (she insisted that they call her Estelle now) Josold the house on Calumet. He and Carrie took one of those littleflats that were springing up, seemingly overnight, all throughChicago's South Side. 

There was nothing domestic about Carrie. She had given up teaching twoyears before, and had gone into social-service work on the West Side. She had what is known as a legal mind--hard, clear, orderly--and shemade a great success of it. Her dream was to live at the SettlementHouse and give all her time to the work. Upon the little household shebestowed a certain amount of grim, capable attention. It was the samekind of attention she would have given a piece of machinery whoseoiling and running had been entrusted to her care. She hated it, anddidn't hesitate to say so. 

Jo took to prowling about department-store basements, and householdgoods sections. He was always sending home a bargain in a ham, or asack of potatoes, or fifty pounds of sugar, or a window clamp, or a newkind of paring knife. He was forever doing odd jobs that the janitorshould have done. It was the domestic in him claiming its own. 

Then, one night, Carrie came home with a dull glow in her leatherycheeks, and her eyes alight with resolve. They had what she called aplain talk. 

"Listen, Jo. They've offered me the job of first assistant residentworker. And I'm going to take it. Take it! I know fifty other girlswho'd give their ears for it. I go in next month. "

They were at dinner. Jo looked up from his plate, dully. Then heglanced around the little dining room, with its ugly tan walls and itsheavy, dark furniture (the Calumet Avenue pieces fitted cumbersomelyinto the five-room flat). 

"Away? Away from here, you mean--to live?"

Carrie laid down her fork. "Well, really, Jo! After all thatexplanation. "

"But to go over there to live! Why, that neighborhood's full of dirt, and disease, and crime, and the Lord knows what all. I can't let youdo that, Carrie. "

Carrie's chin came up. She laughed a short little laugh. "Let me!That's eighteenth-century talk, Jo. My life's my own to live. I'mgoing. "

And she went. 

Jo stayed on in the apartment until the lease was up. Then he soldwhat furniture he could, stored or gave away the rest, and took a roomon Michigan Avenue in one of the old stone mansions whose decayedsplendor was being put to such purpose. 

Jo Hertz was his own master. Free to marry. Free to come and go. Andhe found he didn't even think of marrying. He didn't even want to comeor go, particularly. A rather frumpy old bachelor, with thinning hairand a thickening neck. 

Every Thursday evening he took dinner at Eva's, and on Sunday noon atStell's. He tucked his napkin under his chin and openly enjoyed thehomemade soup and the well-cooked meats. After dinner he tried to talkbusiness with Eva's husband, or Stell's. His business talks were theold-fashioned kind, beginning:

"Well, now, looka here. Take, f'rinstance, your raw hides andleathers. "

But Ben and George didn't want to take, f'rinstance, your raw hides andleathers. They wanted, when they took anything at all, to take golf, or politics, or stocks. They were the modern type of businessman whoprefers to leave his work out of his play. Business, with them, was aprofession--a finely graded and balanced thing, differing from Jo'sclumsy, down-hill style as completely as does the method of a greatcriminal detective differ from that of a village constable. They wouldlisten, restively, and say, "Uh-uh, " at intervals, and at the firstchance they would sort of fade out of the room, with a meaning glanceat their wives. Eva had two children now. Girls. They treated UncleJo with good-natured tolerance. Stell had no children. Uncle Jodegenerated, by almost imperceptible degrees, from the position ofhonored guest, who is served with white meat, to that of one who iscontent with a leg and one of those obscure and bony sections which, after much turning with a bewildered and investigating knife and fork, leave one baffled and unsatisfied. 

Eva and Stell got together and decided that Jo ought to marry. 

"It isn't natural, " Eva told him. "I never saw a man who took solittle interest in women. "

"Me!" protested Jo, almost shyly. "Women!"

"Yes. Of course. You act like a frightened schoolboy. "

So they had in for dinner certain friends and acquaintances of fittingage. They spoke of them as "splendid girls. " Between thirty-six andforty. They talked awfully well, in a firm, clear way, about civics, and classes, and politics, and economics, and boards. They ratherterrified Jo. He didn't understand much that they talked about, and hefelt humbly inferior, and yet a little resentful, as if something hadpassed him by. He escorted them home, dutifully, though they told himnot to bother, and they evidently meant it. They seemed capable notonly of going home quite unattended but of delivering a pointed lectureto any highwayman or brawler who might molest them. 

The following Thursday Eva would say, "How did you like her, Jo?"

"Like who?" Joe would spar feebly. 

"Miss Matthews. "

"Who's she?"

"Now, don't be funny, Jo. You know very well I mean the girl who washere for dinner. The one who talked so well on the emigrationquestion. "

"Oh, her! Why, I liked her all right. Seems to be a smart woman. "

"Smart! She's a perfectly splendid girl. "

"Sure, " Jo would agree cheerfully. 

"But didn't you like her?"

"I can't say I did, Eve. And I can't say I didn't. She made me thinka lot of a teacher I had in the fifth reader. Name of Himes. As Irecall her, she must have been a fine woman. But I never thought ofHimes as a woman at all. She was just Teacher. "

"You make me tired, " snapped Eva impatiently. "A man of your age. Youdon't expect to marry a girl, do you? A child!"

"I don't expect to marry anybody, " Jo had answered. 

And that was the truth, lonely though he often was. 

The following spring Eva moved to Winnetka. Anyone who got the meaningof the Loop knows the significance of a move to a North Shore suburb, and a house. Eva's daughter, Ethel, was growing up, and her mother hadan eye on society. 

That did away with Jo's Thursday dinners. Then Stell's husband boughta car. They went out into the country every Sunday. Stell said it wasgetting so that maids objected to Sunday dinners, anyway. Besides, they were unhealthful, old-fashioned things. They always meant to askJo to come along, but by the time their friends were placed, and thelunch, and the boxes, and sweaters, and George's camera, andeverything, there seemed to be no room for a man of Jo's bulk. So thateliminated the Sunday dinners. 

"Just drop in any time during the week, " Stell said, "for dinner. Except Wednesday--that's our bridge night--and Saturday. And, ofcourse, Thursday. Cook is out that night. Don't wait for me to phone. "

And so Jo drifted into that sad-eyed, dyspeptic family made up of thoseyou see dining in second-rate restaurants, their paper propped upagainst the bowl of oyster crackers, munching solemnly and withindifference to the stare of the passer-by surveying them through thebrazen plate-glass window. 

And then came the war. The war that spelled death and destruction tomillions. The war that brought a fortune to Jo Hertz, and transformedhim, overnight, from a baggy-kneed old bachelor whose business was afailure to a prosperous manufacturer whose only trouble was theshortage in hides for the making of his product. Leather! The armiesof Europe called for it. Harnesses! More harnesses! Straps! Millionsof straps. More! More!

The musty old harness business over on Lake Street was magicallychanged from a dust-covered, dead-alive concern to an orderly hive thathummed and glittered with success. Orders poured in. Jo Hertz hadinside information on the war. He knew about troops and horses. Hetalked with French and English and Italian buyers commissioned by theircountries to get American-made supplies. And now, when he said to Benor George, "Take, f'rinstance, your raw hides and leathers, " theylistened with respectful attention. 

And then began the gay-dog business in the life of Jo Hertz. Hedeveloped into a Loop-hound, ever keen on the scent of fresh pleasure. That side of Jo Hertz which had been repressed and crushed and ignoredbegan to bloom, unhealthily. At first he spent money on his rathercontemptuous nieces. He sent them gorgeous furs, and watch bracelets, and bags. He took two expensive rooms at a downtown hotel, and therewas something more tear-compelling than grotesque about the way hegloated over the luxury of a separate ice-water tap in the bathroom. He explained it. 

"Just turn it on. Any hour of the day or night. Ice water!"

He bought a car. Naturally. A glittering affair; in color a brightblue, with pale-blue leather straps and a great deal of gold fittings, and special tires. Eva said it was the kind of thing a chorus girlwould use, rather than an elderly businessman. You saw him drivingabout in it, red-faced and rather awkward at the wheel. You saw him, too, in the Pompeian Room at the Congress Hotel of a Saturday afternoonwhen roving-eyed matrons in mink coats are wont to congregate to sippale-amber drinks. Actors grew to recognize the semibald head and theshining, round, good-natured face looming out at them from the dim wellof the theater, and sometimes, in a musical show, they directed a quipat him, and he liked it. He could pick out the critics as they camedown the aisle, and even had a nodding acquaintance with two of them. 

"Kelly, of the Herald, " he would say carelessly. "Bean, of the Trib. They're all afraid of him. "

So he frolicked, ponderously. In New York he might have been called aMan About Town. 

And he was lonesome. He was very lonesome. So he searched about inhis mind and brought from the dim past the memory of the luxuriouslyfurnished establishment of which he used to dream in the evenings whenhe dozed over his paper in the old house on Calumet. So he rented anapartment, many-roomed and expensive, with a manservant in charge, andfurnished it in styles and periods ranging through all the Louis. Theliving room was mostly rose color. It was like an unhealthy andbloated boudoir. And yet there was nothing sybaritic or uncleanly inthe sight of this paunchy, middle-aged man sinking into therosy-cushioned luxury of his ridiculous home. It was a frank and naiveindulgence of long-starved senses, and there was in it a greatresemblance to the rolling-eyed ecstasy of a schoolboy smacking hislips over an all-day sucker. 

The war went on, and on, and on. And the money continued to roll in--aflood of it. Then, one afternoon, Eva, in town on shopping bent, entered a small, exclusive, and expensive shop on Michigan Avenue. Eva's weakness was hats. She was seeking a hat now. She describedwhat she sought with a languid conciseness, and stood looking about herafter the saleswoman had vanished in quest of it. The room wasbecomingly rose-illumined and somewhat dim, so that some minutes hadpassed before she realized that a man seated on a raspberry brocadesettee not five feet away--a man with a walking stick, and yellowgloves, and tan spats, and a check suit--was her brother Jo. From himEva's wild-eyed glance leaped to the woman who was trying on hatsbefore one of the many long mirrors. She was seated, and a saleswomanwas exclaiming discreetly at her elbow. 

Eva turned sharply and encountered her own saleswoman returninghat-laden. "Not today, " she gasped. "I'm feeling ill. Suddenly. " Andalmost ran from the room. 

That evening she told Stell, relating her news in that telephone pidginEnglish devised by every family of married sisters as protectionagainst the neighbors. Translated, it ran thus:

"He looked straight at me. My dear, I thought I'd die! But at leasthe had sense enough not to speak. She was one of those limp, willowycreatures with the greediest eyes that she tried to keep softened to ababy stare, and couldn't, she was so crazy to get her hands on thosehats. I saw it all in one awful minute. You know the way I do. Isuppose some people would call her pretty. I don't. And her color. Well! And the most expensive-looking hats. Not one of them underseventy-five. Isn't it disgusting! At his age! Suppose Ethel hadbeen with me!"

The next time it was Stell who saw them. In a restaurant. She said itspoiled her evening. And the third time it was Ethel. She was one ofthe guests at a theater party given by Nicky Overton II. The NorthShore Overtons. Lake Forest. They came in late, and occupied theentire third row at the opening performance of Believe Me! And Ethelwas Nicky's partner. She was glowing like a rose. When the lightswent up after the first act Ethel saw that her uncle Jo was seated justahead of her with what she afterward described as a blonde. Then heruncle had turned around, and seeing her, had been surprised into asmile that spread genially all over his plump and rubicund face. Thenhe had turned to face forward again, quickly. 

"Who's the old bird?" Nicky had asked. Ethel had pretended not tohear, so he had asked again. 

"My uncle, " Ethel answered, and flushed all over her delicate face, anddown to her throat. Nicky had looked at the blonde, and his eyebrowshad gone up ever so slightly. 

It spoiled Ethel's evening. More than that, as she told her mother ofit later, weeping, she declared it had spoiled her life. 

Eva talked it over with her husband in that intimate hour that precedesbedtime. She gesticulated heatedly with her hairbrush. 

"It's disgusting, that's what it is. Perfectly disgusting. There's nofool like an old fool. Imagine! A creature like that. At his time oflife. "

"Well, I don't know, " Ben said, and even grinned a little. "I supposea boy's got to sow his wild oats sometime. "

"Don't be any more vulgar than you can help, " Eva retorted. "And Ithink you know, as well as I, what it means to have that Overton boyinterested in Ethel. "

"If he's interested in her, " Ben blundered, "I guess the fact thatEthel's uncle went to the theater with someone who isn't Ethel's auntwon't cause a shudder to run up and down his frail young frame, willit?"

"All right, " Eva had retorted. "If you're not man enough to stop it, I'll have to, that's all. I'm going up there with Stell this week. "

They did not notify Jo of their coming. Eva telephoned his apartmentwhen she knew he would be out, and asked his man if he expected hismaster home to dinner that evening. The man had said yes. Evaarranged to meet Stell in town. They would drive to Jo's apartmenttogether, and wait for him there. 

When she reached the city Eva found turmoil there. The first of theAmerican troops to be sent to France were leaving. Michigan Boulevardwas a billowing, surging mass: flags, pennants, banners, crowds. Allthe elements that make for demonstration. And over the whole-quiet. Noholiday crowd, this. A solid, determined mass of people waitingpatient hours to see the khaki-clads go by. Three years had broughtthem to a clear knowledge of what these boys were going to. 

"Isn't it dreadful!" Stell gasped. 

"Nicky Overton's too young, thank goodness. "

Their car was caught in the jam. When they moved at all, it was byinches. When at last they reached Jo's apartment they were flushed, nervous, apprehensive. But he had not yet come in. So they waited. 

No, they were not staying to dinner with their brother, they told therelieved houseman. 

Stell and Eva, sunk in rose-colored cushions, viewed the place withdisgust and some mirth. They rather avoided each other's eyes. 

"Carrie ought to be here, " Eva said. They both smiled at the thoughtof the austere Carrie in the midst of those rosy cushions, andhangings, and lamps. Stell rose and began to walk about restlessly. She picked up a vase and laid it down; straightened a picture. Eva gotup, too, and wandered into the hall. She stood there a moment, listening. Then she turned and passed into Jo's bedroom, Stellfollowing. And there you knew Jo for what he was. 

This room was as bare as the other had been ornate. It was Jo, theclean-minded and simplehearted, in revolt against the cloying luxurywith which he had surrounded himself. The bedroom, of all rooms in anyhouse, reflects the personality of its occupant. True, the actualfurniture was paneled, cupid-surmounted, and ridiculous. It had beenthe fruit of Jo's first orgy of the senses. But now it stood out inthat stark little room with an air as incongruous and ashamed as thatof a pink tarlatan danseuse who finds herself in a monk's cell. Noneof those wall pictures with which bachelor bedrooms are reputed to behung. No satin slippers. No scented notes. Two plain-backed militarybrushes on the chiffonier (and he so nearly hairless!). A littleorderly stack of books on the table near the bed. Eva fingered theirtitles and gave a little gasp. One of them was on gardening. 

"Well, of all things!" exclaimed Stell. A book on the war, by anEnglishman. A detective story of the lurid type that lulls us to sleep. His shoes ranged in a careful row in the closet, with a shoe tree inevery one of them. There was something speaking about them. Theylooked so human. Eva shut the door on them quickly. Some bottles onthe dresser. A jar of pomade. An ointment such as a man uses who isgrowing bald and is panic-stricken too late. An insurance calendar onthe wall. Some rhubarb-and-soda mixture on the shelf in the bathroom, and a little box of pepsin tablets. 

"Eats all kinds of things at all hours of the night, " Eva said, andwandered out into the rose-colored front room again with the air of onewho is chagrined at her failure to find what she has sought. Stellfollowed her furtively. 

"Where do you suppose he can be?" she demanded. "It's"--she glanced ather wrist--"why, it's after six!"

And then there was a little click. The two women sat up, tense. Thedoor opened. Jo came in. He blinked a little. The two women in therosy room stood up. 

"Why--Eve! Why, Babe! Well! Why didn't you let me know?"

"We were just about to leave. We thought you weren't coming home. "

Jo came in slowly. 

"I was in the jam on Michigan, watching the boys go by. " He sat down, heavily. The light from the window fell on him. And you saw that hiseyes were red. 

He had found himself one of the thousands in the jam on MichiganAvenue, as he said. He had a place near the curb, where his big frameshut off the view of the unfortunates behind him. He waited with theplacid interest of one who has subscribed to all the funds andsocieties to which a prosperous, middle-aged businessman is called uponto subscribe in war-time. Then, just as he was about to leave, impatient at the delay, the crowd had cried, with a queer, dramatic, exultant note in its voice, "Here they come! Here come the boys!"

Just at that moment two little, futile, frenzied fists began to beat amad tattoo on Jo Hertz's broad back. Jo tried to turn in the crowd, all indignant resentment. "Say, looka here!"

The little fists kept up their frantic beating and pushing. And avoice--a choked, high little voice--cried, "Let me by! I can't see!You MAN, you! You big fat man! My boy's going by--to war--and I can'tsee! Let me by!"

Jo scrooged around, still keeping his place. He looked down. Andupturned to him in agonized appeal was the face of Emily. They staredat each other for what seemed a long, long time. It was really onlythe fraction of a second. Then Jo put one great arm firmly aroundEmily's waist and swung her around in front of him. His great bulkprotected her. Emily was clinging to his hand. She was breathingrapidly, as if she had been running. Her eyes were straining up thestreet. 

"Why, Emily, how in the world----!"

"I ran away. Fred didn't want me to come. He said it would excite metoo much. "

"Fred?"

"My husband. He made me promise to say good-by to Jo at home. "

"Jo?"

"Jo's my boy. And he's going to war. So I ran away. I had to seehim. I had to see him go. "

She was dry-eyed. Her gaze was straining up the street. 

"Why, sure, " said Jo. "Of course you want to see him. " And then thecrowd gave a great roar. There came over Jo a feeling of weakness. Hewas trembling. The boys went marching by. 

"There he is, " Emily shrilled, above the din. "There he is! There heis! There he----" And waved a futile little hand. It wasn't so much awave as a clutching. A clutching after something beyond her reach. 

"Which one? Which one, Emily?"

"The handsome one. The handsome one. " Her voice quavered and died. 

Jo put a steady hand on her shoulder. "Point him out, " he commanded"Show me. " And the next instant, "Never mind. I see him. "

Somehow, miraculously, he had picked him from among the hundreds. Hadpicked him as surely as his own father might have. It was Emily's boy. He was marching by, rather stiffly. He was nineteen, and fun-loving, and he had a girl, and he didn't particularly want to go to Franceand--to go to France. But more than he had hated going, he had hatednot to go. So he marched by, looking straight ahead, his jaw set sothat his chin stuck out just a little. Emily's boy. 

Jo looked at him, and his face flushed purple. His eyes, thehard-boiled eyes of a Loop-hound, took on the look of a sad old man. And suddenly he was no longer Jo, the sport; old J. Hertz, the gay dog. He was Jo Hertz, thirty, in love with life, in love with Emily, andwith the stinging blood of young manhood coursing through his veins. 

Another minute and the boy had passed on up the broad street--the fine, flag-bedecked street--just one of a hundred service hats bobbing inrhythmic motion like sandy waves lapping a shore and flowing on. 

Then he disappeared altogether. 

Emily was clinging to Jo. She was mumbling something, over and over. "I can't. I can't. Don't ask me to. I can't let him go. Like that. I can't. "

Jo said a queer thing. 

"Why, Emily! We wouldn't have him stay home, would we? We wouldn'twant him to do anything different, would we? Not our boy. I'm glad heenlisted. I'm proud of him. So are you glad. "

Little by little he quieted her. He took her to the car that waswaiting, a worried chauffeur in charge. They said good-by, awkwardly. Emily's face was a red, swollen mass. 

So it was that when Jo entered his own hallway half an hour later heblinked, dazedly, and when the light from the window fell on him yousaw that his eyes were red. 

Eva was not one to beat about the bush. She sat forward in her chair, clutching her bag rather nervously. 

"Now, look here, Jo. Stell and I are here for a reason. We're here totell you that this thing's going to stop. "

"Thing? Stop?"

"You know very well what I mean. You saw me at the milliner's thatday. And night before last, Ethel. We're all disgusted. If you mustgo about with people like that, please have some sense of decency. "

Something gathering in Jo's face should have warned her. But he wasslumped down in his chair in such a huddle, and he looked so old andfat that she did not heed it. She went on. "You've got us toconsider. Your sisters. And your nieces. Not to speak of yourown----"

But he got to his feet then, shaking, and at what she saw in his faceeven Eva faltered and stopped. It wasn't at all the face of a fat, middle-aged sport. It was a face Jovian, terrible. 

"You!" he began, low-voiced, ominous. "You!" He raised a great fisthigh. "You two murderers! You didn't consider me, twenty years ago. You come to me with talk like that. Where's my boy! You killed him, you two, twenty years ago. And now he belongs to somebody else. Where's my son that should have gone marching by today?" He flung hisarms out in a great gesture of longing. The red veins stood out on hisforehead. "Where's my son! Answer me that, you two selfish, miserablewomen. Where's my son!" Then, as they huddled together, frightened, wild-eyed. 

"Out of my house! Out of my house! Before I hurt you!"

They fled, terrified. The door banged behind them. 

Jo stood, shaking, in the center of the room. Then he reached for achair, gropingly, and sat down. He passed one moist, flabby hand overhis forehead and it came away wet. The telephone rang. He sat still. It sounded far away and unimportant, like something forgotten. But itrang and rang insistently. Jo liked to answer his telephone when hewas at home. 

"Hello!" He knew instantly the voice at the other end. 

"That you, Jo?" it said. 

"Yes. "

"How's my boy?"

"I'm--all right. "

"Listen, Jo. The crowd's coming over tonight. I've fixed up a littlepoker game for you. Just eight of us. "

"I can't come tonight, Gert. "

"Can't! Why not?"

"I'm not feeling so good. "

"You just said you were all right. "

"I AM all right. Just kind of tired. "

The voice took on a cooing note. "Is my Joey tired? Then he shall beall comfy on the sofa, and he doesn't need to play if he don't want to. No, sir. "

Jo stood staring at the black mouthpiece of the telephone. He wasseeing a procession go marching by. Boys, hundreds of boys, in khaki. 

"Hello! Hello!" The voice took on an anxious note. "Are you there?"

"Yes, " wearily. 

"Jo, there's something the matter. You're sick. I'm coming rightover. "

"No!" "Why not? You sound as if you'd been sleeping. Look here----"

"Leave me alone!" cried Jo, suddenly, and the receiver clacked onto thehook. "Leave me alone. Leave me alone. " Long after the connectionhad been broken. 

He stood staring at the instrument with unseeing eyes. Then he turnedand walked into the front room. All the light had gone out of it. Dusk had come on. All the light had gone out of everything. The zesthad gone out of life. The game was over--the game he had been playingagainst loneliness and disappointment. And he was just a tired oldman. A lonely, tired old man in a ridiculous rose-colored room thathad grown, all of a sudden, drab {sic}

That's Marriage [1917]

Theresa Platt (she had been Terry Sheehan) watched her husband acrossthe breakfast table with eyes that smoldered. But Orville Platt wasquite unaware of any smoldering in progress. He was occupied with hiseggs. How could he know that these very eggs were feeding the dull redmenace in Terry Platt's eyes?

When Orville Platt ate a soft-boiled egg he concentrated on it. Hetreated it as a great adventure. Which, after all, it is. Few adjunctsof our daily life contain the element of chance that is to be found ina three-minute breakfast egg. 

This was Orville Platt's method of attack: first, he chipped off thetop, neatly. Then he bent forward and subjected it to a passionate andrelentless scrutiny. Straightening--preparatory to plunging his spoontherein--he flapped his right elbow. It wasn't exactly a flap; it wasa pass between a hitch and a flap, and presented external evidence of amental state. Orville Platt always gave that little preliminary jerkwhen he was contemplating a serious step, or when he was moved, orargumentative. It was a trick as innocent as it was maddening. 

Terry Platt had learned to look for that flap--they had been marriedfour years--to look for it, and to hate it with a morbid, unreasoninghate. That flap of the elbow was tearing Terry Platt's nerves intoraw, bleeding fragments. 

Her fingers were clenched tightly under the table, now. She wasbreathing unevenly. "If he does that again, " she told herself, "if heflaps again when he opens the second egg, I'll scream. I'll scream. I'll scream! I'll sc----"

He had scooped the first egg into his cup. Now he picked up thesecond, chipped it, concentrated, straightened, then--up went theelbow, and down, with the accustomed little flap. 

The tortured nerves snapped. Through the early-morning quiet ofWetona, Wisconsin, hurtled the shrill, piercing shriek of Terry Platt'shysteria. 

"Terry! For God's sake! What's the matter!"

Orville Platt dropped the second egg, and his spoon. The egg yolktrickled down his plate. The spoon made a clatter and flung a gay spotof yellow on the cloth. He started toward her. 

Terry, wild-eyed, pointed a shaking finger at him. She was laughing, now, uncontrollably. "Your elbow! Your elbow!"

 "Elbow?" He looked down at it, bewildered, then up, fright inhis face. "What's the matter with it?"

She mopped her eyes. Sobs shook her. "You f-f-flapped it. "

"F-f-f----" The bewilderment in Orville Platt's face gave way toanger. "Do you mean to tell me that you screeched like that becausemy--because I moved my elbow?"

"Yes. "

His anger deepened and reddened to fury. He choked. He had startedfrom his chair with his napkin in his hand. He still clutched it. Nowhe crumpled it into a wad and hurled it to the center of the table, where it struck a sugar bowl, dropped back, and uncrumpled slowly, reprovingly. "You--you----" Then bewilderment closed down again like afog over his countenance. "But why? I can't see----"

"Because it--because I can't stand it any longer. Flapping. This iswhat you do. Like this. "

And she did it. Did it with insulting fidelity, being a clever mimic. 

"Well, all I can say is you're crazy, yelling like that, for nothing. "

"It isn't nothing. "

"Isn't, huh? If that isn't nothing, what is?" They were growingincoherent. "What d'you mean, screeching like a maniac? Like a wildwoman? The neighbors'll think I've killed you. What d'you mean, anyway!"

"I mean I'm tired of watching it, that's what. Sick and tired. "

"Y'are, huh? Well, young lady, just let me tell YOU something----"

He told her. There followed one of those incredible quarrels, assickening as they are human, which can take place only between twopeople who love each other; who love each other so well that each knowswith cruel certainty the surest way to wound the other; and who stab, and tear, and claw at these vulnerable spots in exact proportion totheir love. 

Ugly words. Bitter words. Words that neither knew they knew flewbetween them like sparks between steel striking steel. 

From him: "Trouble with you is you haven't got enough to do. That'sthe trouble with half you women. Just lay around the house, rotting. I'm a fool, slaving on the road to keep a good-for-nothing----"

"I suppose you call sitting around hotel lobbies slaving! I supposethe house runs itself! How about my evenings? Sitting here alone, night after night, when you're on the road. "

Finally, "Well, if you don't like it, " he snarled, and lifted his chairby the back and slammed it down, savagely, "if you don't like it, whydon't you get out, hm? Why don't you get out?"

And from her, her eyes narrowed to two slits, her cheeks scarlet:

"Why, thanks. I guess I will. "

Ten minutes later he had flung out of the house to catch the 8:19 forManitowoc. He marched down the street, his shoulders swingingrhythmically to the weight of the burden he carried--his black leatherhandbag and the shiny tan sample case, battle-scarred, both, from manyencounters with ruthless porters and busmen and bellboys. For fouryears, as he left for his semi-monthly trip, he and Terry had observeda certain little ceremony (as had the neighbors). She would stand inthe doorway, watching him down the street, the heavier sample casebanging occasionally at his shin. The depot was only three blocksaway. Terry watched him with fond but unillusioned eyes, which provesthat she really loved him. He was a dapper, well-dressed fat man, witha weakness for pronounced patterns in suitings, and addicted toderbies. One week on the road, one week at home. That was his routine. The wholesale grocery trade liked Platt, and he had for his customersthe fondness that a traveling salesman has who is successful in histerritory. Before his marriage to Terry Sheehan his little red addressbook had been overwhelming proof against the theory that nobody loves afat man. 

Terry, standing in the doorway, always knew that when he reached thecorner just where Schroeder's house threatened to hide him from view, he would stop, drop the sample case, wave his hand just once, pick upthe sample case and go on, proceeding backward for a step or two untilSchroeder's house made good its threat. It was a comic scene in theeyes of the onlooker, perhaps because a chubby Romeo offends the senseof fitness. The neighbors, lurking behind their parlor curtains, hadlaughed at first. But after a while they learned to look for thatlittle scene, and to take it unto themselves, as if it were a personalthing. Fifteen-year wives whose husbands had long since abandonedflowery farewells used to get a vicarious thrill out of it, and to eyeTerry with a sort of envy. 

This morning Orville Platt did not even falter when he reachedSchroeder's corner. He marched straight on, looking steadily ahead, the heavy bags swinging from either hand. Even if he hadstopped--though she knew he wouldn't--Terry Platt would not have seenhim. She remained seated at the disordered breakfast table, adreadfully still figure, and sinister; a figure of stone and fire, ofice and flame. Over and over in her mind she was milling the thingsshe might have said to him, and had not. She brewed a hundredvitriolic cruelties that she might have flung in his face. She wouldconcoct one biting brutality, and dismiss it for a second, and abandonthat for a third. She was too angry to cry--a dangerous state in awoman. She was what is known as cold mad, so that her mind was workingclearly and with amazing swiftness, and yet as though it were a thingdetached; a thing that was no part of her. 

She sat thus for the better part of an hour, motionless except for oneforefinger that was, quite unconsciously, tapping out a popular andcheap little air that she had been strumming at the piano the eveningbefore, having bought it downtown that same afternoon. It had struckOrville's fancy, and she had played it over and over for him. Herright forefinger was playing the entire tune, and something in the backof her head was following it accurately, though the separate thinkingprocess was going on just the same. Her eyes were bright, and wide, and hot. Suddenly she became conscious of the musical antics of herfinger. She folded it in with its mates, so that her hand became afist. She stood up and stared down at the clutter of the breakfasttable. The egg--that fateful second egg--had congealed to a mottledmess of yellow and white. The spoon lay on the cloth. His coffee, onlyhalf consumed, showed tan with a cold gray film over it. A slice oftoast at the left of his plate seemed to grin at her with thesemi-circular wedge that he had bitten out of it. 

Terry stared down at these congealing remnants. Then she laughed, ahard high little laugh, pushed a plate away contemptuously with herhand, and walked into the sitting room. On the piano was the piece ofmusic (Bennie Gottschalk's great song hit, "Hicky Boola") which she hadbeen playing the night before. She picked it up, tore it straightacross, once, placed the pieces back to back, and tore it across again. Then she dropped the pieces to the floor. 

"You bet I'm going, " she said, as though concluding a train of thought. "You just bet I'm going. Right now!" And Terry went. She went formuch the same reason as that given by the ladye of high degree in theold English song--she who had left her lord and bed and board to gowith the raggle-taggle gipsies-O! The thing that was sending TerryPlatt away was much more than a conjugal quarrel precipitated by asoft-boiled egg and a flap of the arm. It went so deep that it isnecessary to delve back to the days when Theresa Platt was TerrySheehan to get the real significance of it, and of the things she didafter she went. 

When Mrs. Orville Platt had been Terry Sheehan, she had played thepiano, afternoons and evenings, in the orchestra of the Bijou Theater, on Cass Street, Wetona, Wisconsin. Anyone with a name like TerrySheehan would, perforce, do well anything she might set out to do. There was nothing of genius in Terry, but there was something of fire, and much that was Irish. Which meant that the Watson Team, EccentricSong and Dance Artists, never needed a rehearsal when they played theBijou. Ruby Watson used merely to approach Terry before the Mondayperformance, sheet music in hand, and say, "Listen, dearie. We've gotsome new business I want to wise you to. Right here it goes 'TUMdee-dee DUM dee-dee TUM DUM DUM. ' See? Like that. And then Jimvamps. Get me?"

Terry, at the piano, would pucker her pretty brow a moment. Then, "Likethis, you mean?"

"That's it! You've got it. "

"All right. I'll tell the drum. "

She could play any tune by ear, once heard. She got the spirit of athing, and transmitted it. When Terry played a martial number youtapped the floor with your foot, and unconsciously straightened yourshoulders. When she played a home-and-mother song you hoped that theman next to you didn't know you were crying (which he probably didn't, because he was weeping, too). 

At that time motion pictures had not attained their present virulence. Vaudeville, polite or otherwise, had not yet been crowded out by theubiquitous film. The Bijou offered entertainment of thecigar-box-tramp variety, interspersed with trick bicyclists, soubrettesin slightly soiled pink, trained seals, and Family Fours with lumpylegs who tossed each other about and struck Goldbergian attitudes. 

Contact with these gave Terry Sheehan a semiprofessional tone. The moreconservative of her townspeople looked at her askance. There never hadbeen an evil thing about Terry, but Wetona considered her rather fly. Terry's hair was very black, and she had a fondness for those little, close-fitting scarlet turbans. Terry's mother had died when the girlwas eight, and Terry's father had been what is known as easygoing. Agood-natured, lovable, shiftless chap in the contracting business. Hedrove around Wetona in a sagging, one-seated cart and never made anymoney because he did honest work and charged as little for it as menwho did not. His mortar stuck, and his bricks did not crumble, and hislumber did not crack. Riches are not acquired in the contractingbusiness in that way. Ed Sheehan and his daughter were great friends. When he died (she was nineteen) they say she screamed once, like abanshee, and dropped to the floor. 

After they had straightened out the muddle of books in Ed Sheehan'sgritty, dusty little office Terry turned her piano-playing talent topractical account. At twenty-one she was still playing at the Bijou, and into her face was creeping the first hint of that look ofsophistication which comes from daily contact with the artificial worldof the footlights. 

There are, in a small Midwest town like Wetona, just two kinds ofgirls. Those who go downtown Saturday nights, and those who don't. Terry, if she had not been busy with her job at the Bijou, would havecome in the first group. She craved excitement. There was littlechance to satisfy such craving in Wetona, but she managed to findcertain means. The traveling men from the Burke House just across thestreet used to drop in at the Bijou for an evening's entertainment. They usually sat well toward the front, and Terry's expert playing, andthe gloss of her black hair, and her piquant profile as she sometimeslooked up toward the stage for a signal from one of the performerscaught their fancy, and held it. 

She found herself, at the end of a year or two, with a rather largeacquaintance among these peripatetic gentlemen. You occasionally sawone of them strolling home with her. Sometimes she went driving withone of them of a Sunday afternoon. And she rather enjoyed takingSunday dinner at the Burke Hotel with a favored friend. She thoughtthose small-town hotel Sunday dinners the last word in elegance. Theroast course was always accompanied by an aqueous, semifrozenconcoction which the bill of fare revealed as Roman Punch. It added aroyal touch to the repast, even when served with roast pork. 

Terry was twenty-two when Orville Platt, making his initial Wisconsintrip for the wholesale grocery house he represented, first beheld herpiquant Irish profile, and heard her deft manipulation of the keys. Orville had the fat man's sense of rhythm and love of music. He had abuttery tenor voice, too, of which he was rather proud. 

He spent three days in Wetona that first trip, and every evening sawhim at the Bijou, first row, center. He stayed through two shows eachtime, and before he had been there fifteen minutes Terry was consciousof him through the back of her head. Orville Platt paid no more heedto the stage, and what was occurring thereon, than if it had not been. He sat looking at Terry, and waggling his head in time to the music. Not that Terry was a beauty. But she was one of those immaculatelyclean types. That look of fragrant cleanliness was her chief charm. Her clear, smooth skin contributed to it, and the natural penciling ofher eyebrows. But the thing that accented it, and gave it a lasttouch, was the way in which her black hair came down in a little pointjust in the center of her forehead, where hair meets brow. It grew toform what is known as a cowlick. (A prettier name for it is widow'speak. ) Your eye lighted on it, pleased, and from it traveled itsgratified way down her white temples, past her little ears, to thesmooth black coil at the nape of her neck. It was a trip that restedyou. 

At the end of the last performance on the night of his second visit tothe Bijou, Orville waited until the audience had begun to file out. Then he leaned forward over the rail that separated orchestra fromaudience. 

"Could you, " he said, his tones dulcet, "could you oblige me with thename of that last piece you played?"

Terry was stacking her music. "George!" she called to the drum. "Gentleman wants to know the name of that last piece. " And prepared toleave. 

"'My Georgia Crackerjack, '" said the laconic drum. 

Orville Platt took a hasty side step in the direction of the doortoward which Terry was headed. "It's a pretty thing, " he saidfervently. "An awful pretty thing. Thanks. It's beautiful. "

Terry flung a last insult at him over her shoulder: "Don't thank MEfor it. I didn't write it. "

Orville Platt did not go across the street to the hotel. He wanderedup Cass Street, and into the ten-o'clock quiet of Main Street, and downas far as the park and back. "Pretty as a pink! And play! . . . Andgood, too. Good. "

A fat man in love. 

At the end of six months they were married. Terry was surprised intoit. Not that she was not fond of him. She was; and grateful to him, as well. For, pretty as she was, no man had ever before asked Terry tobe his wife. They had made love to her. They had paid court to her. They had sent her large boxes of stale drugstore chocolates, and calledher endearing names as they made cautious declarations such as:

"I've known a lot of girls, but you've got something different. I don'tknow. You've got so much sense. A fellow can chum around with you. Little pal. "

Wetona would be their home. They rented a comfortable, seven-roomhouse in a comfortable, middle-class neighborhood, and Terry droppedthe red velvet turbans and went in for picture hats. Orville boughther a piano whose tone was so good that to her ear, accustomed to themetallic discords of the Bijou instrument, it sounded out of tune. Sheplayed a great deal at first, but unconsciously she missed the sharpspat of applause that used to follow her public performance. She wouldplay a piece, brilliantly, and then her hands would drop to her lap. And the silence of her own sitting room would fall flat on her ears. It was better on the evenings when Orville was home. He sang, in histhroaty, fat man's tenor, to Terry's expert accompaniment. 

"This is better than playing for those ham actors, isn't it, hon?" Andhe would pinch her ear. 

"Sure"--listlessly. 

But after the first year she became accustomed to what she termedprivate life. She joined an afternoon sewing club, and was active inthe ladies' branch of the U. C. T. She developed a knack at cooking, too, and Orville, after a week or ten days of hotel fare in smallWisconsin towns, would come home to sea-foam biscuits, and real soup, and honest pies and cake. Sometimes, in the midst of an appetizingmeal he would lay down his knife and fork and lean back in his chair, and regard the cool and unruffled Terry with a sort of reverence in hiseyes. Then he would get up, and come around to the other side of thetable, and tip her pretty face up to his. 

"I'll bet I'll wake up, someday, and find out it's all a dream. Youknow this kind of thing doesn't really happen--not to a dub like me. "

One year; two; three; four. Routine. A little boredom. Someimpatience. She began to find fault with the very things she had likedin him: his superneatness; his fondness for dashing suit patterns; histhroaty tenor; his worship of her. And the flap. Oh, above all, thatflap! That little, innocent, meaningless mannerism that made hertremble with nervousness. She hated it so that she could not trustherself to speak of it to him. That was the trouble. Had she spokenof it, laughingly or in earnest, before it became an obsession withher, that hideous breakfast quarrel, with its taunts, and revilings, and open hate, might never have come to pass. 

Terry Platt herself didn't know what was the matter with her. She wouldhave denied that anything was wrong. She didn't even throw her handsabove her head and shriek: "I want to live! I want to live! I wantto live!" like a lady in a play. She only knew she was sick of sewingat the Wetona West End Red Cross shop; sick of marketing, of homecomforts, of Orville, of the flap. 

Orville, you may remember, left at 8:19. The 11:23 bore TerryChicago-ward. She had left the house as it was--beds unmade, roomsunswept, breakfast table uncleared. She intended never to come back. 

Now and then a picture of the chaos she had left behind would flashacross her order-loving mind. The spoon on the tablecloth. 

Orville's pajamas dangling over the bathroom chair. The coffeepot onthe gas stove. 

"Pooh! What do I care?"

In her pocketbook she had a tidy sum saved out of the housekeepingmoney. She was naturally thrifty, and Orville had never beenniggardly. Her meals when Orville was on the road had been thosesketchy, haphazard affairs with which women content themselves whentheir household is manless. At noon she went into the dining car andordered a flaunting little repast of chicken salad and asparagus andNeapolitan ice cream. The men in the dining car eyed her speculativelyand with appreciation. Then their glance dropped to the third finger ofher left hand, and wandered away. She had meant to remove it. Infact, she had taken it off and dropped it into her bag. But her handfelt so queer, so unaccustomed, so naked, that she had found herselfslipping the narrow band on again, and her thumb groped for it, gratefully. 

It was almost five o'clock when she reached Chicago. She felt nouncertainty or bewilderment. She had been in Chicago three or fourtimes since her marriage. She went to a downtown hotel. It was toolate, she told herself, to look for a less expensive room that night. When she had tidied herself she went out. The things she did were thechildish, aimless things that one does who finds herself in possessionof sudden liberty. She walked up State Street, and stared in thewindows; came back, turned into Madison, passed a bright little shop inthe window of which taffy-white and gold--was being wound endlessly andfascinatingly about a double-jointed machine. She went in and bought asackful, and wandered on down the street, munching. 

She had supper at one of those white-tiled sarcophagi that emblazonChicago's downtown side streets. It had been her original intention todine in state in the rose-and-gold dining room of her hotel. She hadeven thought daringly of lobster. But at the last moment she recoiledfrom the idea of dining alone in that wilderness of tables so obviouslymeant for two. 

After her supper she went to a picture show. She was amazed to findthere, instead of the accustomed orchestra, a pipe organ that pantedand throbbed and rumbled over lugubrious classics. The picture wasabout a faithless wife. Terry left in the middle of it. 

She awoke next morning at seven, as usual, started up wildly, lookedaround, and dropped back. Nothing to get up for. The knowledge didnot fill her with a rush of relief. She would have her breakfast inbed. She telephoned for it, languidly. But when it came she got upand ate it from the table, after all. 

That morning she found a fairly comfortable room, more within hermeans, on the North Side in the boardinghouse district. She unpackedand hung up her clothes and drifted downtown again, idly. It was noonwhen she came to the corner of State and Madison Streets. It was amaelstrom that caught her up, and buffeted her about, and tossed herhelplessly this way and that. 

The thousands jostled Terry, and knocked her hat awry, and dug her withunheeding elbows, and stepped on her feet. 

"Say, look here!" she said once futilely. They did not stop to listen. State and Madison has no time for Terrys from Wetona. It goes its way, pell-mell. If it saw Terry at all it saw her only as a prettyishperson, in the wrong kind of suit and hat, with a bewildered, resentfullook on her face. 

Terry drifted on down the west side of State Street, with the hurryingcrowd. State and Monroe. A sound came to Terry's ears. 

A sound familiar, beloved. To her ear, harassed with the roar andcrash, with the shrill scream of the whistle of the policeman at thecrossing, with the hiss of feet shuffling on cement, it was a celestialstrain. She looked up, toward the sound. A great second-story windowopened wide to the street. In it a girl at a piano, and a man, red-faced, singing through a megaphone. And on a flaring red and greensign:

 BERNIE GOTTSCHALK'S MUSIC HOUSE!

 COME IN! HEAR BERNIE GOTTSCHALK'S LATEST HIT! THE HEART-THROB SONG THAT HAS GOT 'EM ALL! THE SONG THAT MADE THE SQUAREHEADS CRAWL!

 "I COME FROM PARIS, ILLINOIS, BUT OH! YOU PARIS, FRANCE! I USED TO WEAR BLUE OVERALLS BUT NOW IT'S KHAKI PANTS. "

 COME IN! COME IN!

Terry accepted. 

She followed the sound of the music. Around the corner. Up a littleflight of stairs. She entered the realm of Euterpe; Euterpe with herhair frizzed; Euterpe with her flowing white robe replaced by soiledwhite shoes; Euterpe abandoning her flute for jazz. She sat at thepiano, a red-haired young lady whose familiarity with the piano hadbred contempt. Nothing else could have accounted for her treatment ofit. Her fingers, tipped with sharp-pointed and glistening nails, clawed the keys with a dreadful mechanical motion. There were stacksof music sheets on counters and shelves and dangling from overheadwires. The girl at the piano never ceased playing. She played mostlyby request. 

A prospective purchaser would mumble something in the ear of one of theclerks. The fat man with the megaphone would bawl out, "Hicky Boola, Miss Ryan!" And Miss Ryan would oblige. She made a hideous rattle andcrash and clatter of sound. 

Terry joined the crowds about the counter. The girl at the piano wasnot looking at the keys. Her head was screwed around over her leftshoulder and as she played she was holding forth animatedly to a girlfriend who had evidently dropped in from some store or office duringthe lunch hour. Now and again the fat man paused in his vocal effortsto reprimand her for her slackness. She paid no heed. There wassomething gruesome, uncanny, about the way her fingers went their ownway over the defenseless keys. Her conversation with the frowzy littlegirl went on. 

"Wha'd he say?" (Over her shoulder. )

"Oh, he laffed. "

"Well, didja go?"

"Me! Well, whutya think I yam, anyway?"

"I woulda took a chanst. "

The fat man rebelled. 

"Look here! Get busy! What are you paid for? Talkin' or playin'?Huh?"

The person at the piano, openly reproved thus before her friend, liftedher uninspired hands from the keys and spake. When she had finishedshe rose. 

"But you can't leave now, " the megaphone man argued. "Right in therush hour. "

"I'm gone, " said the girl. The fat man looked about, helplessly. Hegazed at the abandoned piano, as though it must go on of its ownaccord. Then at the crowd. 

"Where's Miss Schwimmer?" he demanded of a clerk. 

"Out to lunch. "

Terry pushed her way to the edge of the counter and leaned over. "I canplay for you, " she said. 

The man looked at her. "Sight?"

"Yes. "

"Come on. "

Terry went around to the other side of the counter, took off her hatand coat, rubbed her hands together briskly, sat down, and began toplay. The crowd edged closer. 

It is a curious study, this noonday crowd that gathers to sate itsmusic hunger on the scraps vouchsafed it by Bernie Gottschalk's MusicHouse. Loose-lipped, slope-shouldered young men with bad complexionsand slender hands. Girls whose clothes are an unconscious satire onpresent-day fashions. On their faces, as they listen to the music, isa look of peace and dreaming. They stand about, smiling a wistful halfsmile. The music seems to satisfy a something within them. Facesdull, eyes lusterless, they listen in a sort of trance. 

Terry played on. She played as Terry Sheehan used to play. She playedas no music hack at Bernie Gottschalk's had ever played before. Thecrowd swayed a little to the sound of it. Some kept time with littlejerks of the shoulder--the little hitching movement of the dancer whoseblood is filled with the fever of syncopation. Even the crowd flowingdown State Street must have caught the rhythm of it, for the room soonfilled. 

At two o'clock the crowd began to thin. Business would be slack, now, until five, when it would again pick up until closing time at six. Thefat vocalist put down his megaphone, wiped his forehead, and regardedTerry with a warm blue eye. He had just finished singing "I'veWandered Far from Dear Old Mother's Knee. " (Bernie Gottschalk Inc. Chicago. New York. You can't get bit with a Gottschalk hit. 15 centseach. )

"Girlie, " he said, emphatically, "you sure--can--play!" He came overto her at the piano and put a stubby hand on her shoulder. "Yessir!Those little fingers----"

Terry just turned her head to look down her nose at the moist handresting on her shoulder. "Those little fingers are going to meet yourface if you don't move on. "

"Who gave you your job?" demanded the fat man. 

"Nobody. I picked it myself. You can have it if you want it. "

"Can't you take a joke?"

"Label yours. "

As the crowd dwindled she played less feverishly, but there was nothingslipshod about her performance. The chubby songster found time toproffer brief explanations in asides. "They want the patriotic stuff. It used to be all that Hawaiian dope, and Wild Irish Rose stuff, andsongs about wanting to go back to every place from Dixie to Duluth. But now seems it's all these here flag wavers. Honestly, I'm so sickof 'em I got a notion to enlist to get away from it. "

Terry eyed him with withering briefness. "A little training wouldn'truin your figure. "

She had never objected to Orville's embonpoint. But then, Orville wasa different sort of fat man; pink-cheeked, springy, immaculate. 

At four o'clock, as she was in the chorus of "Isn't There Another Joanof Arc?" a melting masculine voice from the other side of the countersaid "Pardon me. What's that you're playing?"

Terry told him. She did not look up. "I wouldn't have known it. Played like that--a second 'Marseillaise. ' If the words----What arethe words? Let me see a----"

"Show the gentleman a 'Joan, '" Terry commanded briefly, over hershoulder. The fat man laughed a wheezy laugh. Terry glanced around, still playing, and encountered the gaze of two melting masculine eyesthat matched the melting masculine voice. The songster waved a handuniting Terry and the eyes in informal introduction. 

"Mr. Leon Sammett, the gentleman who sings the Gottschalk songswherever songs are heard. And Mrs. --that is--and Mrs. Sammett----"

Terry turned. A sleek, swarthy world-old young man with thefashionable concave torso, and alarmingly convex bone-rimmed glasses. Through them his darkly luminous gaze glowed upon Terry. To escapetheir warmth she sent her own gaze past him to encounter the arcticstare of the large blonde who had been included so lamely in theintroduction. And at that the frigidity of that stare softened, melted, dissolved. 

"Why, Terry Sheehan! What in the world!"

Terry's eyes bored beneath the layers of flabby fat. "It's--why, it'sRuby Watson, isn't it? Eccentric Song and Dance----"

She glanced at the concave young man and faltered. He was not Jim, ofthe Bijou days. From him her eyes leaped back to the fur-bedeckedsplendor of the woman. The plump face went so painfully red that themake-up stood out on it, a distinct layer, like thin ice coveringflowing water. As she surveyed that bulk Terry realized that whileRuby might still claim eccentricity, her song-and-dance days were over. "That's ancient history, m' dear. I haven't been working for threeyears. What're you doing in this joint? I'd heard you'd done well foryourself. That you were married. "

"I am. That is I--well, I am. I----"

At that the dark young man leaned over and patted Terry's hand that layon the counter. He smiled. His own hand was incredibly slender, long, and tapering. 

"That's all right, " he assured her, and smiled. "You two girls canhave a reunion later. What I want to know is can you play by ear?"

"Yes, but----"

He leaned far over the counter. "I knew it the minute I heard youplay. You've got the touch. Now listen. See if you can get this, andfake the bass. "

He fixed his somber and hypnotic eyes on Terry. His mouth screwed upinto a whistle. The tune--a tawdry but haunting little melody--camethrough his lips. Terry turned back to the piano. "Of course you knowyou flatted every note, " she said. 

 This time it was the blonde who laughed, and the man whoflushed. Terry cocked her head just a little to one side, like aknowing bird, looked up into space beyond the piano top, and played thelilting little melody with charm and fidelity. The dark young manfollowed her with a wagging of the head and little jerks of bothoutspread hands. His expression was beatific, enraptured. He hummed alittle under his breath and anyone who was music-wise would have knownthat he was just a half beat behind her all the way. 

When she had finished he sighed deeply, ecstatically. He bent his leanframe over the counter and, despite his swart coloring, seemed toglitter upon her--his eyes, his teeth, his very fingernails. 

"Something led me here. I never come up on Tuesdays. Butsomething----"

"You was going to complain, " put in his lady, heavily, "about thatTeddy Sykes at the Palace Gardens singing the same songs this week thatyou been boosting at the Inn. "

He put up a vibrant, peremptory hand. "Bah! What does that matternow! What does anything matter now! Listen Miss--ah--Miss----?"

"Pl--Sheehan. Terry Sheehan. "

He gazed off a moment into space. "Hm. 'Leon Sammett in Songs. MissTerry Sheehan at the Piano. ' That doesn't sound bad. Now listen, MissSheehan. I'm singing down at the University Inn. The Gottschalk songhits. I guess you know my work. But I want to talk to you, private. It's something to your interest. I go on down at the Inn at six. Willyou come and have a little something with Ruby and me? Now?"

"Now?" faltered Terry, somewhat helplessly. Things seemed to be movingrather swiftly for her, accustomed as she was to the peaceful routineof the past four years. 

"Get your hat. It's your life chance. Wait till you see your name intwo-foot electrics over the front of every big-time house in thecountry. You've got music in you. Tie to me and you're made. " Heturned to the woman beside him. "Isn't that so, Rube?"

"Sure. Look at ME!" One would not have thought there could be so muchsubtle vindictiveness in a fat blonde. 

Sammett whipped out a watch. "Just three quarters of an hour. Come on, girlie. "

His conversation had been conducted in an urgent undertone, with sideglances at the fat man with the megaphone. Terry approached him now. 

"I'm leaving now, " she said. 

"Oh, no, you're not. Six o'clock is your quitting time. "

In which he touched the Irish in Terry. "Any time I quit is myquitting time. She went in quest of hat and coat much as the girl haddone whose place she had taken early in the day. The fat man followedher, protesting. Terry, putting on her hat, tried to ignore him. Buthe laid one plump hand on her arm and kept it there, though she triedto shake him off. 

"Now, listen to me. That boy wouldn't mind grinding his heel on yourface if he thought it would bring him up a step. I know'm. See thatwalking stick he's carrying? Well, compared to the yellow stripethat's in him, that cane is a Lead pencil. He's a song tout, that'sall he is. " Then, more feverishly, as Terry tried to pull away: "Waita minute. You're a decent girl. I want to--Why, he can't even sing anote without you give it to him first. He can put a song over, yes. But how? By flashing that toothy grin of his and talking every word ofit. Don't you----"

But Terry freed herself with a final jerk and whipped around thecounter. The two, who had been talking together in an undertone, turned to welcome her. "We've got a half-hour. Come on. It's justover to Clark and up a block or so. "

The University Inn, that gloriously intercollegiate institution whichwelcomes any graduate of any school of experience, was situated in thebasement, down a flight of stairs. Into the unwonted quiet that reignsduring the hour of low potentiality, between five and six, the threewent, and seated themselves at a table in an obscure corner. A waiterbrought them things in little glasses, though no order had been given. The woman who had been Ruby Watson was so silent as to be almostwordless. But the man talked rapidly. He talked well, too. The samequality that enabled him, voiceless though he was, to boost a song tosuccess was making his plea sound plausible in Terry's ears now. 

"I've got to go and make up in a few minutes. So get this. I'm notgoing to stick down in this basement eating house forever. I've got toomuch talent. If I only had a voice--I mean a singing voice. But Ihaven't. But then, neither had Georgie Cohan, and I can't see that itwrecked his life any. Now listen. I've got a song. It's my own. Thatbit you played for me up at Gottschalk's is part of the chorus. Butit's the words that'll go big. They're great. It's an aviation song, see? Airplane stuff. They're yelling that it's the airyoplanesthat're going to win this war. Well, I'll help 'em. This song isgoing to put the aviator where he belongs. It's going to be the bigsong of the war. It's going to make 'Tipperary' sound like a Moody andSankey hymn. It's the----"

Ruby lifted her heavy-lidded eyes and sent him a meaning look. "Getdown to business, Leon. I'll tell her how good you are while you'remaking up. "

He shot her a malignant glance, but took her advice. "Now what I'vebeen looking for for years is somebody who has got the music knack togive me the accompaniment just a quarter of a jump ahead of my voice, see? I can follow like a lamb, but I've got to have that feeler first. It's more than a knack. It's a gift. And you've got it. I know itwhen I see it. I want to get away from this night-club thing. There'snothing in it for a man of my talent. I'm gunning for bigger game. But they won't sign me without a tryout. And when they hear my voicethey---- Well, if me and you work together we can fool 'em. The song'sgreat. And my make-up's one of these aviation costumes to go with thesong, see? Pants tight in the knee and baggy on the hips. And a coatwith one of those full-skirt whaddyoucall-'ems----"

 "Peplums, " put in Ruby, placidly. 

"Sure. And the girls'll be wild about it. And the words!" He beganto sing, gratingly off key:

 Put on your sky clothes, Put on your fly clothes, And take a trip with me. We'll sail so high Up in the sky We'll drop a bomb from Mercury. 

"Why, that's awfully cute!" exclaimed Terry. Until now her opinion ofMr. Sammett's talents had not been on a level with his. 

"Yeah, but wait till you hear the second verse. That's only part ofthe chorus. You see, he's supposed to be talking to a French girl. Hesays:

 'I'll parlez-vous in Francais plain You'll answer, "Cher Americain, " We'll both . . . '"

The six-o'clock lights blazed up suddenly. A sad-looking group of mentrailed in and made for a corner where certain bulky, shapeless bundleswere soon revealed as those glittering and tortuous instruments whichgo to make a jazz band. 

"You better go, Lee. The crowd comes in awful early now, with allthese buyers in town. "

Both hands on the table, he half rose, reluctantly, still talking. "I've got three other songs. They make Gottschalk's stuff look sick. All I want's a chance. What I want you to do is accompaniment. On thestage, see? Grand piano. And a swell set. I haven't quite made up mymind to it. But a kind of an army camp room, see? And maybe youdressed as Liberty. Anyway, it'll be new, and a knockout. If only wecan get away with the voice thing. Say, if Eddie Foy, all those yearsnever had a----"

The band opened with a terrifying clash of cymbal and thump of drum. "Back at the end of my first turn, " he said as he Red. Terry followedhis lithe, electric figure. She turned to meet the heavy-lidded gazeof the woman seated opposite. She relaxed, then, and sat back with alittle sigh. "Well! If he talks that way to the managers I don'tsee----"

Ruby laughed a mirthless little laugh. "Talk doesn't get it over withthe managers, honey. You've got to deliver. "

"Well, but he's--that song is a good one. I don't say it's as good ashe thinks it is, but it's good. "

"Yes, " admitted the woman, grudgingly, "it's good. "

"Well, then?"

The woman beckoned a waiter; he nodded and vanished, and reappearedwith a glass that was twin to the one she had just emptied. "Does helook like he knew French? Or could make a rhyme?"

"But didn't he? Doesn't he?"

"The words were written by a little French girl who used to skate downhere last winter, when the craze was on. She was stuck on a Chicagokid who went over to fly for the French. "

"But the music?"

"There was a Russian girl who used to dance in the cabaret and she----"

Terry's head came up with a characteristic little jerk. "I don'tbelieve it!"

"Better. " She gazed at Terry with the drowsy look that was sodifferent from the quick, clear glance of the Ruby Watson who used todance so nimbly in the old Bijou days. "What'd you and your husbandquarrel about, Terry?"

Terry was furious to feel herself flushing. "Oh, nothing. Hejust--I--it was---- Say, how did you know we'd quarreled?"

And suddenly all the fat woman's apathy dropped from her like a garmentand some of the old sparkle and animation illumined her heavy face. She pushed her glass aside and leaned forward on her folded arms, sothat her face was close to Terry's. 

"Terry Sheehan, I know you've quarreled, and I know just what it wasabout. Oh, I don't mean the very thing it was about; but the kind ofthing. I'm going to do something for you, Terry, that I wouldn't takethe trouble to do for most women. But I guess I ain't had all thesoftness knocked out of me yet, though it's a wonder. And I guess Iremember too plain the decent kid you was in the old days. What wasthe name of that little small-time house me and Jim used to play?Bijou, that's it; Bijou. "

The band struck up a new tune. Leon Sammett--slim, sleek, lithe in hisevening clothes--appeared with a little fair girl in pink chiffon. Thewoman reached across the table and put one pudgy, jeweled hand onTerry's arm. "He'll be through in ten minutes. Now listen to me. Ileft Jim four years ago, and there hasn't been a minute since then, dayor night, when I wouldn't have crawled back to him on my hands andknees if I could. But I couldn't. He wouldn't have me now. How couldhe? How do I know you've quarreled? I can see it in your eyes. Theylook just the way mine have felt for four years, that's how. I met upwith this boy, and there wasn't anybody to do the turn for me that I'mtrying to do for you. Now get this. I left Jim because when he atecorn on the cob he always closed his eyes and it drove me wild. Don'tlaugh. "

"I'm not laughing, " said Terry. 

"Women are like that. One night--we was playing Fond du Lac; Iremember just as plain--we was eating supper before the show and Jimreached for one of those big yellow ears, and buttered and salted it, and me kind of hanging on to the edge of the table with my nails. Seemed to me if he shut his eyes when he put his teeth into that ear ofcorn I'd scream. And he did. And I screamed. And that's all. "

Terry sat staring at her with a wide-eyed stare, like a sleepwalker. Then she wet her lips slowly. "But that's almost the very----"

"Kid, go on back home. I don't know whether it's too late or not, butgo anyway. If you've lost him I suppose it ain't any more than youdeserve; but I hope to God you don't get your deserts this time. He'salmost through. If he sees you going he can't quit in the middle ofhis song to stop you. He'll know I put you wise, and he'll prob'lyhalf kill me for it. But it's worth it. You get. "

And Terry--dazed, shaking, but grateful--fled. Down the noisy aisle, up the stairs, to the street. Back to her rooming house. Out again, with her suitcase, and into the right railroad station somehow, atlast. Not another Wetona train until midnight. She shrank into aremote corner of the waiting room and there she huddled until midnight, watching the entrances like a child who is fearful of ghosts in thenight. 

The hands of the station clock seemed fixed and immovable. The hourbetween eleven and twelve was endless. She was on the train. It wasalmost morning. It was morning. Dawn was breaking. She was home!She had the house key clutched tightly in her hand long before sheturned Schroeder's corner. Suppose he had come home! Suppose he hadjumped a town and come home ahead of his schedule. They had quarreledonce before, and he had done that. 

Up the front steps. Into the house. Not a sound. She stood there amoment in the early-morning half-light. She peered into the diningroom. The table, with its breakfast debris, was as she had left it. In the kitchen the coffeepot stood on the gas stove. She was home. She was safe. She ran up the stairs, got out of her clothes and intogingham morning things. She flung open windows everywhere. Downstairsonce more she plunged into an orgy of cleaning. Dishes, table, stove, floor, rugs. She washed, scoured, swabbed, polished. By eight o'clockshe had done the work that would ordinarily have taken until noon. Thehouse was shining, orderly, and redolent of soapsuds. 

During all this time she had been listening, listening, with hersubconscious ear. Listening for something she had refused to namedefinitely in her mind, but listening, just the same; waiting. 

And then, at eight o'clock, it came. The rattle of a key in the lock. The boom of the front door. Firm footsteps. 

He did not go to meet her, and she did not go to meet him. They cametogether and were in each other's arms. She was weeping. 

"Now, now, old girl. What's there to cry about? Don't, honey; don't. It's all right. " She raised her head then, to look at him. How freshand rosy and big he seemed, after that little sallow restaurant rat. 

"How did you get here? How did you happen----?"

"Jumped all the way from Ashland. Couldn't get a sleeper, so I sat upall night. I had to come back and square things with you, Terry. Mymind just wasn't on my work. I kept thinking how I'd talked--how I'dtalked----"

"Oh, Orville, don't! I can't bear---- Have you had your breakfast?"

"Why, no. The train was an hour late. You know that Ashland train. "

But she was out of his arms and making for the kitchen. "You go andclean up. I'll have hot biscuits and everything in no time. You poorboy. No breakfast!"

She made good her promise. It could not have been more than half anhour later when he was buttering his third feathery, golden-brownbiscuit. But she had eaten nothing. She watched him, and listened, and again her eyes were somber, but for a different reason. He brokeopen his egg. His elbow came up just a fraction of an inch. Then heremembered, and flushed like a schoolboy, and brought it down again, carefully. And at that she gave a tremulous cry, and rushed around thetable to him. 

"Oh, Orville!" She took the offending elbow in her two arms, and bentand kissed the rough coat sleeve. 

"Why, Terry! Don't, honey. Don't!"

"Oh, Orville, listen----"

"Yes. "

"Listen, Orville----"

"I'm listening, Terry. "

"I've got something to tell you. There's something you've got to know. "

"Yes, I know it, Terry. I knew you'd out with it, pretty soon, if Ijust waited. "

She lifted an amazed face from his shoulder then, and stared at him. "But how could you know? You couldn't! How could you?"

He patted her shoulder then, gently. "I can always tell. When youhave something on your mind you always take up a spoon of coffee, andlook at it, and kind of joggle it back and forth in the spoon, and thendribble it back into the cup again, without once tasting it. It usedto get me nervous, when we were first married, watching you. But now Iknow it just means you're worried about something, and I wait, andpretty soon----"

"Oh, Orville!" she cried then. "Oh, Orville!"

"Now, Terry. Just spill it, hon. Just spill it to Daddy. And you'llfeel better. "

Farmer in the Dell [1919]

Old Ben Westerveld was taking it easy. Every muscle taut, every nervetense, his keen eyes vainly straining to pierce the blackness of thestuffy room--there lay Ben Westerveld in bed, taking it easy. And itwas hard. Hard. He wanted to get up. He wanted so intensely to get upthat the mere effort of lying there made him ache all over. His toeswere curled with the effort. His fingers were clenched with it. Hisbreath came short, and his thighs felt cramped. Nerves. But old BenWesterveld didn't know that. What should a retired and well-to-dofarmer of fifty-eight know of nerves, especially when he has moved tothe city and is taking it easy?

If only he knew what time it was. Here in Chicago you couldn't tellwhether it was four o'clock or seven unless you looked at your watch. To do that it was necessary to turn on the light. And to turn on thelight meant that he would turn on, too, a flood of querulous protestfrom his wife, Bella, who lay asleep beside him. 

When for forty-five years of your life you have risen at four-thirtydaily, it is difficult to learn to loll. To do it successfully, youmust be a natural-born loller to begin with and revert. BellaWesterveld was and had. So there she lay, asleep. Old Ben wasn't andhadn't. So there he lay, terribly wide-awake, wondering what made hisheart thump so fast when he was lying so still. If it had been light, you could have seen the lines of strained resignation in the saggingmuscles of his patient face. 

They had lived in the city for almost a year, but it was the same everymorning. He would open his eyes, start up with one hand alreadyreaching for the limp, drab work-worn garments that used to drape thechair by his bed. Then he would remember and sink back while a greatwave of depression swept over him. Nothing to get up for. Storeclothes on the chair by the bed. He was taking it easy. 

Back home on the farm in southern Illinois he had known the hour theinstant his eyes opened. Here the flat next door was so close that thebed-room was in twilight even at midday. On the farm he could tell bythe feeling--an intangible thing, but infallible. He could gauge thevery quality of the blackness that comes just before dawn. The crowingof the cocks, the stamping of the cattle, the twittering of the birdsin the old elm whose branches were etched eerily against his window inthe ghostly light--these things he had never needed. He had known. Buthere in the un-sylvan section of Chicago which bears the bosky name ofEnglewood, the very darkness had a strange quality. 

A hundred unfamiliar noises misled him. There were no cocks, nocattle, no elm. Above all, there was no instinctive feeling. Once, when they first came to the city, he had risen at twelve-thirty, thinking it was morning, and had gone clumping about the flat, wakingup everyone and loosing from his wife's lips a stream of acidvituperation that seared even his case-hardened sensibilities. Thepeople sleeping in the bedroom of the flat next door must have heardher. 

"You big rube! Getting up in the middle of the night and stompingaround like cattle. You'd better build a shed in the back yard andsleep there if you're so dumb you can't tell night from day. "

Even after thirty-three years of marriage he had never ceased to beappalled at the coarseness of her mind and speech--she who had seemedso mild and fragile and exquisite when he married her. He had creptback to bed shamefacedly. He could hear the couple in the bedroom ofthe flat just across the little court grumbling and then laughing alittle, grudgingly, and yet with appreciation. That bedroom, too, hadstill the power to appall him. Its nearness, its forced intimacy, weredaily shocks to him whose most immediate neighbor, back on the farm, had been a quarter of a mile away. The sound of a shoe dropped on thehardwood floor, the rush of water in the bathroom, the murmur ofnocturnal confidences, the fretful cry of a child in the night, allstartled and distressed him whose ear had found music in the roar ofthe thresher and had been soothed by the rattle of the tractor and thehoarse hoot of the steamboat whistle at the landing. His farm's edgehad been marked by the Mississippi rolling grandly by. 

Since they had moved into town, he had found only one city sound thathe really welcomed--the rattle and clink that marked the milkman'smatutinal visit. The milkman came at six, and he was the good fairywho released Ben Westerveld from durance vile--or had until the wintermonths made his coming later and later, so that he became worse thanuseless as a timepiece. But now it was late March, and mild. Themilkman's coming would soon again mark old Ben's rising hour. Beforehe had begun to take it easy, six o'clock had seen the entire mechanismof his busy little world humming smoothly and sweetly, the whole set inmotion by his own big work-callused hands. Those hands puzzled himnow. He often looked at them curiously and in a detached sort of way, as if they belonged to someone else. So white they were, and smoothand soft, with long, pliant nails that never broke off from rough workas they used to. Of late there were little splotches of brown on thebacks of his hands and around the thumbs. 

"Guess it's my liver, " he decided, rubbing the spots thoughtfully. "She gets kind of sluggish from me not doing anything. Maybe a littlespring tonic wouldn't go bad. Tone me up. "

He got a little bottle of reddish-brown mixture from the druggist onHalstead Street near Sixty-third. A genial gentleman, the druggist, white-coated and dapper, stepping affably about the fragrant-smellingstore. The reddish-brown mixture had toned old Ben upsurprisingly--while it lasted. He had two bottles of it. But ondiscontinuing it he slumped back into his old apathy. 

Ben Westerveld, in his store clothes, his clean blue shirt, hisincongruous hat, ambling aimlessly about Chicago's teeming, grittystreets, was a tragedy. Those big, capable hands, now dangling solimply from inert wrists, had wrested a living from the soil; thosestrangely unfaded blue eyes had the keenness of vision which comes fromscanning great stretches of earth and sky; the stocky, square-shouldered body suggested power unutilized. All these spelledtragedy. Worse than tragedy--waste. 

For almost half a century this man had combated the elements, head set, eyes wary, shoulders squared. He had fought wind and sun, rain anddrought, scourge and flood. He had risen before dawn and slept beforesunset. In the process he had taken on something of the color and therugged immutability of the fields and hills and trees among which hetoiled. Something of their dignity, too, though your town dwellermight fail to see it beneath the drab exterior. He had about him noneof the highlights and sharp points of the city man. He seemed to blendin with the background of nature so as to be almost undistinguishablefrom it, as were the furred and feathered creatures. This farmerdiffered from the city man as a hillock differs from an artificial golfbunker, though form and substance are the same. 

Ben Westerveld didn't know he was a tragedy. Your farmer is not givento introspection. For that matter, anyone knows that a farmer in townis a comedy. Vaudeville, burlesque, the Sunday supplement, the comicpapers, have marked him a fair target for ridicule. Perhaps one shouldknow him in his overalled, stubble-bearded days, with the rich blackloam of the Mississippi bottomlands clinging to his boots. 

At twenty-five, given a tasseled cap, doublet and hose, and a long, slim pipe, Ben Westerveld would have been the prototype of one of thoserollicking, lusty young mynheers that laugh out at you from a FransHals canvas. A roguish fellow with a merry eye; red-cheeked, vigorous. A serious mouth, though, and great sweetness of expression. As he grewolder, the seriousness crept up and up and almost entirely obliteratedthe roguishness. By the time the life of ease claimed him, even theghost of that ruddy wight of boyhood had vanished. 

The Westerveld ancestry was as Dutch as the name. It had been hundredsof years since the first Westervelds came to America, and they hadmarried and intermarried until the original Holland strain had almostentirely disappeared. They had drifted to southern Illinois by one ofthose slow processes of migration and had settled in Calhoun County, then almost a wilderness, but magnificent with its rolling hills, majestic rivers, and gold-and-purple distances. But to the practicalWesterveld mind, hills and rivers and purple haze existed only in theirrelation to crops and weather. Ben, though, had a way of turning hisface up to the sky sometimes, and it was not to scan the heavens forclouds. You saw him leaning on the plow handle to watch the whirringflight of a partridge across the meadow. He liked farming. Even thedrudgery of it never made him grumble. He was a natural farmer as menare natural mechanics or musicians or salesmen. Things grew for him. He seemed instinctively to know facts about the kin ship of soil andseed that other men had to learn from books or experience. It grew tobe a saying in that section that "Ben Westerveld could grow a crop onrock. "

At picnics and neighborhood frolics Ben could throw farther and runfaster and pull harder than any of the other farmer boys who took partin the rough games. And he could pick up a girl with one hand and holdher at arm's length while she shrieked with pretended fear and realecstasy. The girls all liked Ben. There was that almost primitivestrength which appealed to the untamed in them as his gentlenessappealed to their softer side. He liked the girls, too, and could havehad his pick of them. He teased them all, took them buggy riding, beaued them about to neighbor-hood parties. But by the time he wastwenty-five the thing had narrowed down to the Byers girl on the farmadjoining Westerveld's. There was what the neighbors called anunderstanding, though perhaps he had never actually asked the Byersgirl to marry him. You saw him going down the road toward the Byersplace four nights out of the seven. He had a quick, light step atvariance with his sturdy build, and very different from the heavy, slouching gait of the work-weary farmer. He had a habit of carrying inhis hand a little twig or switch cut from a tree. This he would twirlblithely as he walked along. The switch and the twirl represented justso much energy and animal spirits. He never so much as flicked adandelion head with it. 

An inarticulate sort of thing, that courtship. 

"Hello, Emma. "

"How do, Ben. "

"Thought you might like to walk a piece down the road. They got a calfat Aug Tietjens' with five legs. "

"I heard. I'd just as lief walk a little piece. I'm kind of beat, though. We've got the threshers day after tomorrow. We've beencooking up. "

Beneath Ben's bonhomie and roguishness there was much shyness. The twowould plod along the road together in a sort of blissful agony ofembarrassment. The neighbors were right in their surmise that therewas no definite understanding between them. But the thing was settledin the minds of both. Once Ben had said: "Pop says I can have thenorth eighty on easy payments if--when----"

Emma Byers had flushed up brightly, but had answered equably: "That's afine piece. Your pop is an awful good man. "

The stolid exteriors of these two hid much that was fine and forceful. Emma Byers' thoughtful forehead and intelligent eyes would haverevealed that in her. Her mother was dead. She kept house for herfather and brother. She was known as "that smart Byers girl. " Herbutter and eggs and garden stuff brought higher prices at Commercial, twelve miles away, than did any other's in the district. She was not apretty girl, according to the local standards, but there was about her, even at twenty-two, a clear-headedness and a restful serenity thatpromised well for Ben Westerveld's future happiness. 

But Ben Westerveld's future was not to lie in Emma Byers' capablehands. He knew that as soon as he saw Bella Huckins. Bella Huckinswas the daughter of old "Red Front" Huckins, who ran the saloon of thatcheerful name in Commercial. Bella had elected to teach school, notfrom any bent toward learning but because teaching appealed to her asbeing a rather elegant occupation. The Huckins family was not elegant. In that day a year or two of teaching in a country school took theplace of the present-day normal-school diploma. Bella had an eye onSt. Louis, forty miles from the town of Commercial. So she used thecountry school as a step toward her ultimate goal, though she hated thecountry and dreaded her apprenticeship. 

"I'll get a beau, " she said, "who'll take me driving and around. AndSaturdays and Sundays I can come to town. "

The first time Ben Westerveld saw her she was coming down the roadtoward him in her tight-fitting black alpaca dress. The sunset wasbehind her. Her hair was very golden. In a day of tiny waists herscould have been spanned by Ben Westerveld's two hands. He discoveredthat later. Just now he thought he had never seen anything sofairylike and dainty, though he did not put it that way. Ben was notglib of thought or speech. 

He knew at once this was the new schoolteacher. He had heard of hercoming, though at the time the conversation had interested him not atall. Bella knew who he was, too. She had learned the name and historyof every eligible young man in the district two days after her arrival. That was due partly to her own bold curiosity and partly to the factthat she was boarding with the Widow Becker, the most notorious gossipin the county. In Bella's mental list of the neighborhood swains BenWesterveld already occupied a position at the top of the column. 

He felt his face redden as they approached each other. To hide hisembarrassment he swung his little hickory switch gaily and called tohis dog Dunder, who was nosing about by the roadside. Dunder boundedforward, spied the newcomer, and leaped toward her playfully and withnatural canine curiosity. 

Bella screamed. She screamed and ran to Ben and clung to him, claspingher hands about his arm. Ben lifted the hickory switch in his freehand and struck Dunder a sharp cut with it. It was the first time inhis life that he had done such a thing. If he had had a sane momentfrom that time until the day he married Bella Huckins, he never wouldhave forgotten the dumb hurt in Dunder's stricken eyes and shrinking, quivering body. 

Bella screamed again, still clinging to him. Ben was saying: "He won'thurt you. He won't hurt you, " meanwhile patting her shoulderreassuringly. He looked down at her pale face. She was so slight, sochildlike, so apparently different from the sturdy country girls. From--well, from the girls he knew. Her helplessness, her utterfemininity, appealed to all that was masculine in him. Bella, theexperienced, clinging to him, felt herself swept from head to foot by aqueer electric tingling that was very pleasant but that still had in itsomething of the sensation of a wholesale bumping of one's crazy bone. If she had been anything but a stupid little flirt, she would haverealized that here was a specimen of the virile male with which shecould not trifle. She glanced up at him now, smiling faintly. "My, Iwas scared!" She stepped away from him a little--very little. 

"Aw, he wouldn't hurt a flea. "

But Bella looked over her shoulder fearfully to where Dunder stood bythe roadside, regarding Ben with a look of uncertainty. He stillthought that perhaps this was a new game. Not a game that he caredfor, but still one to be played if his master fancied it. Ben stooped, picked up a stone, and threw it at Dunder, striking him in the flank. 

"Go on home!" he commanded sternly. "Go home!" He started toward thedog with a well-feigned gesture of menace. Dunder, with a low howl, put his tail between his legs and loped off home, a disillusioned dog. 

Bella stood looking up at Ben. Ben looked down at her. "You're thenew teacher, ain't you?"

"Yes. I guess you must think I'm a fool, going on like a baby aboutthat dog. "

"Most girls would be scared of him if they didn't know he wouldn't hurtnobody. He's pretty big. "

He paused a moment, awkwardly. "My name's Ben Westerveld. "

"Pleased to meet you, " said Bella. "Which way was you going? There's adog down at Tietjens' that's enough to scare anybody. He looks like apony, he's so big. "

"I forgot something at the school this afternoon, and I was walkingover to get it. " Which was a lie. "I hope it won't get dark before Iget there. You were going the other way, weren't you?"

"Oh, I wasn't going no place in particular. I'll be pleased to keepyou company down to the school and back. " He was surprised at his ownsudden masterfulness. 

They set off together, chatting as freely as if they had known oneanother for years. Ben had been on his way to the Byers farm, asusual. The Byers farm and Emma Byers passed out of his mind ascompletely as if they had been whisked away on a magic rug. 

Bella Huckins had never meant to marry him. She hated farm life. 

She was contemptuous of farmer folk. She loathed cooking and drudgery. The Huckinses lived above the saloon in Commercial and Mrs. Huckins wasalways boiling ham and tongue and cooking pigs' feet and shreddingcabbage for slaw, all these edibles being destined for the free-lunchcounter downstairs. Bella had early made up her mind that there shouldbe no boiling and stewing and frying in her life. Whenever she couldfind an excuse she loitered about the saloon. There she found life andtalk and color. Old Red Front Huckins used to chase her away, but shealways turned up again, somehow, with a dish for the lunch counter orwith an armful of clean towels. 

Ben Westerveld never said clearly to himself, "I want to marry Bella. "He never dared meet the thought. He intended honestly to marry EmmaByers. But this thing was too strong for him. As for Bella, shelaughed at him, but she was scared, too. They both fought the thing, she selfishly, he unselfishly, for the Byers girl, with her clear, calmeyes and her dependable ways, was heavy on his heart. Ben's appeal forBella was merely that of the magnetic male. She never once thought ofhis finer qualities. Her appeal for him was that of the frail andalluring woman. But in the end they married. The neighborhood wasrocked with surprise. 

Usually in a courtship it is the male who assumes the bright colors ofpretense in order to attract a mate. But Ben Westerveld had been toohonest to be anything but himself. He was so honest and fundamentallytruthful that he refused at first to allow himself to believe that thisslovenly shrew was the fragile and exquisite creature he had married. He had the habit of personal cleanliness, had Ben, in a day whentubbing was a ceremony in an environment that made bodily nicetydifficult. He discovered that Bella almost never washed and that herappearance of fragrant immaculateness, when dressed, was due to anatural clearness of skin and eye, and to the way her blond hair sweptaway in a clean line from her forehead. For the rest, she was aslattern, with a vocabulary of invective that would have been a creditto any of the habitues of old Red Front Huckins' bar. 

They had three children, a girl and two boys. Ben Westerveld prosperedin spite of his wife. As the years went on he added eighty acres here, eighty acres there, until his land swept down to the very banks of theMississippi. There is no doubt that she hindered him greatly, but hewas too expert a farmer to fail. At threshing time the crew lookedforward to working for Ben, the farmer, and dreaded the meals preparedby Bella, his wife. She was notoriously the worst cook and housekeeperin the county. And all through the years, in trouble and in happiness, her plaint was the same--"If I'd thought I was going to stick down on afarm all my life, slavin' for a pack of menfolks day and night, I'drather have died. Might as well be dead as rottin' here. "

Her schoolteacher English had early reverted. Her speech was asslovenly as her dress. She grew stout, too, and unwieldy, and her skincoarsened from lack of care and from overeating. And in her children'sears she continually dinned a hatred of farm life and farming. "Youcan get away from it, " she counseled her daughter, Minnie. "Don't yoube a rube like your pa, " she cautioned John, the older boy. And theyprofited by her advice. Minnie went to work in Commercial when she wasseventeen, an overdeveloped girl with an inordinate love of cheapfinery. At twenty, she married an artisan, a surly fellow with rovingtendencies. They moved from town to town. He never stuck long at onejob. John, the older boy, was as much his mother's son as Minnie washer mother's daughter. Restless, dissatisfied, emptyheaded, he was thedespair of his father. He drove the farm horses as if they wereracers, lashing them up hill and down dale. He was forever loungingoff to the village or wheedling his mother for money to take him toCommercial. It was before the day of the ubiquitous automobile. Givenone of those present adjuncts to farm life, John would have ended hiscareer much earlier. As it was, they found him lying by the roadsideat dawn one morning after the horses had trotted into the yard with thewreck of the buggy bumping the road behind them. He had stolen thehorses out of the barn after the help was asleep, had led themstealthily down the road, and then had whirled off to a rendezvous ofhis own in town. The fall from the buggy might not have hurt him, butevidently he had been dragged almost a mile before his battered bodybecame somehow disentangled from the splintered wood and the reins. 

That horror might have served to bring Ben Westerveld and his wifetogether, but it did not. It only increased her bitterness and herhatred of the locality and the life. 

"I hope you're good an' satisfied now, " she repeated in endlessreproach. "I hope you're good an' satisfied. You was bound you'd makea farmer out of him, an' now you finished the job. You better try yourhand at Dike now for a change. "

Dike was young Ben, sixteen; and old Ben had no need to try his hand athim. Young Ben was a born farmer, as was his father. He had comehonestly by his nickname. In face, figure, expression, and manner hewas a five-hundred-year throwback to his Holland ancestors. Apple-cheeked, stocky, merry of eye, and somewhat phlegmatic. When, atschool, they had come to the story of the Dutch boy who saved his townfrom flood by thrusting his finger into the hole in the dike andholding it there until help came, the class, after one look at theaccompanying picture in the reader, dubbed young Ben "Dike" Westerveld. And Dike he remained. 

Between Dike and his father there was a strong but unspoken feeling. The boy was cropwise, as his father had been at his age. On Sundaysyou might see the two walking about the farm, looking at thepigs--great black fellows worth almost their weight in silver; eyingthe stock; speculating on the winter wheat showing dark green in April, with rich patches that were almost black. Young Dike smoked a solemnand judicious pipe, spat expertly, and voiced the opinion that thewinter wheat was a fine prospect Ben Westerveld, listening tolerantlyto the boy's opinions, felt a great surge of joy that he did not show. Here, at last, was compensation for all the misery and sordidness andbitter disappointment of his married life. 

That married life had endured now for more than thirty years. BenWesterveld still walked with a light, quick step--for his years. Thestocky, broad-shouldered figure was a little shrunken. He was as neatand clean at fifty-five as he had been at twenty-five-a habit that, ona farm, is fraught with difficulties. The community knew and respectedhim. He was a man of standing. When he drove into town on a brightwinter morning, in his big sheepskin coat and his shaggy cap and hisgreat boots, and entered the First National Bank, even Shumway, thecashier, would look up from his desk to say:

"Hello, Westerveld! Hello! Well, how goes it?"

When Shumway greeted a farmer in that way you knew that there were nounpaid notes to his discredit. 

All about Ben Westerveld stretched the fruit of his toil; the work ofhis hands. Orchards, fields, cattle, barns, silos. All these thingswere dependent on him for their future well-being--on him and on Dikeafter him. His days were full and running over. Much of the work wasdrudgery; most of it was backbreaking and laborious. But it was hisplace. It was his reason for being. And he felt that the reason wasgood, though he never put that thought into words, mental or spoken. He only knew that he was part of the great scheme of things and that hewas functioning ably. If he had expressed himself at all, he mighthave said:

"Well, I got my work cut out for me, and I do it, and do it right. "

There was a tractor, now, of course; and a sturdy, middle-classautomobile in which Bella lolled red-faced when they drove into town. 

As Ben Westerveld had prospered, his shrewish wife had reaped herbenefits. Ben was not the selfish type of farmer who insists ontwentieth-century farm implements and medieval household equipment. Hehad added a bedroom here, a cool summer kitchen there, an icehouse, acommodious porch, a washing machine, even a bathroom. But Bellaremained unplacated. Her face was set toward the city. And slowly, surely, the effect of thirty years of nagging was beginning to tell onBen Westerveld. He was the finer metal, but she was the heavier, thecoarser. She beat him and molded him as iron beats upon gold. 

Minnie was living in Chicago now--a good-natured creature, but slacklike her mother. Her surly husband was still talking of his rights andcrying down with the rich. They had two children. 

Minnie wrote of them, and of the delights of city life. Movies everynight. Halsted Street just around the corner. The big stores. StateStreet. The el took you downtown in no time. Something going on allthe while. Bella Westerveld, after one of those letters, was more thana chronic shrew; she became a terrible termagant. 

When Ben Westerveld decided to concentrate on hogs and wheat he didn'tdream that a world would be clamoring for hogs and wheat for four longyears. When the time came, he had them, and sold them fabulously. Butwheat and hogs and markets became negligible things on the day thatDike, with seven other farm boys from the district, left for thenearest training camp that was to fit them for France and war. 

Bella made the real fuss, wailing and mouthing and going intohysterics. Old Ben took it like a stoic. He drove the boy to town thatday. When the train pulled out, you might have seen, if you had lookedclose, how the veins and cords swelled in the lean brown neck above theclean blue shirt. But that was all. As the weeks went on, the quick, light step began to lag a little. He had lost more than a son; hisright-hand helper was gone. There were no farm helpers to be had. OldBen couldn't do it all. A touch of rheumatism that winter halfcrippled him for eight weeks. Bella's voice seemed never to stop itsplaint. 

"There ain't no sense in you trying to make out alone. Next thingyou'll die on me, and then I'll have the whole shebang on my hands. "At that he eyed her dumbly from his chair by the stove. His resistancewas wearing down. He knew it. He wasn't dying. He knew that, too. But something in him was. Something that had resisted her all theseyears. Something that had made him master and superior in spite ofeverything. 

In those days of illness, as he sat by the stove, the memory of EmmaByers came to him often. She had left that district twenty-eight yearsago, and had married, and lived in Chicago somewhere, he had heard, andwas prosperous. He wasted no time in idle regrets. He had been afool, and he paid the price of fools. Bella, slamming noisily aboutthe room, never suspected the presence in the untidy place of a thirdperson--a sturdy girl of twenty-two or -three, very wholesome to lookat, and with honest, intelligent eyes and a serene brow. 

"It'll get worse an' worse all the time, " Bella's whine went on. "Everybody says the war'll last prob'ly for years an' years. You can'tmake out alone. Everything's goin' to rack and ruin. You could rentout the farm for a year, on trial. The Burdickers'd take it, and glad. They got those three strappin' louts that's all flat-footed orslab-sided or cross-eyed or somethin', and no good for the army. Letthem run it on shares. Maybe they'll even buy, if things turn out. Maybe Dike'll never come b----"

But at the look on his face then, and at the low growl of unaccustomedrage that broke from him, even she ceased her clatter. 

They moved to Chicago in the early spring. The look that had been onBen Westerveld's face when he drove Dike to the train that carried himto camp was stamped there again--indelibly this time, it seemed. Calhoun County in the spring has much the beauty of California. Thereis a peculiar golden light about it, and the hills are a purplish haze. Ben Westerveld, walking down his path to the gate, was more poignantlydramatic than any figure in a rural play. He did not turn to lookback, though, as they do in a play. He dared not. 

They rented a flat in Englewood, Chicago, a block from Minnie's. Bellawas almost amiable these days. She took to city life as though thepast thirty years had never been. White kid shoes, delicatessenstores, the movies, the haggling with peddlers, the crowds, thecrashing noise, the cramped, unnatural mode of living--necessitated bya four-room flat--all these urban adjuncts seemed as natural to her asthough she had been bred in the midst of them. 

She and Minnie used to spend whole days in useless shopping. Theirs wasa respectable neighborhood of well-paid artisans, bookkeepers, andsmall shopkeepers. The women did their own housework in drab garmentsand soiled boudoir caps that hid a multitude of unkempt heads. Theyseemed to find a great deal of time for amiable, empty gabbling Fromseven to four you might see a pair of boudoir caps leaning fromopposite bedroom windows, conversing across back porches, pausing inthe task of sweeping front steps, standing at a street corner, ladenwith grocery bundles. Minnie wasted hours in what she called "runningover to Ma's for a minute. " The two quarreled a great deal, being sonearly of a nature. But the very qualities that combated each otherseemed, by some strange chemical process, to bring them together aswell. 

"I'm going downtown today to do a little shopping, " Minnie would say. "Do you want to come along, Ma?"

"What you got to get?"

"Oh, I thought I'd look at a couple little dresses for Pearlie. "

"When I was your age I made every stitch you wore. "

"Yeh, I bet they looked like it, too. This ain't the farm. I got allI can do to tend to the house, without sewing. "

"I did it. I did the housework and the sewin' and cookin', an'besides----"

"A swell lot of housekeepin' you did. You don't need to tell me. "

The bickering grew to a quarrel. But in the end they took the downtownel together. You saw them, flushed of face, with twitching fingers, indulging in a sort of orgy of dime spending in the five-and-ten-centstore on the wrong side of State Street. 

They pawed over bolts of cheap lace and bits of stuff in the stiflingair of the crowded place. They would buy a sack of salted peanuts fromthe great mound in the glass case, or a bag of the greasy pink candypiled in profusion on the counter, and this they would munch as theywent. 

They came home late, fagged and irritable, and supplemented theirhurried dinner with hastily bought food from the near-by delicatessen. 

Thus ran the life of ease for Ben Westerveld, retired farmer. And sonow he lay impatiently in bed, rubbing a nervous forefinger over theedge of the sheet and saying to himself that, well, here was anotherday. What day was it? L'see now. Yesterday was--yesterday. A littlefeeling of panic came over him. He couldn't remember what yesterdayhad been. He counted back laboriously and decided that today must beThursday. Not that it made any difference. 

They had lived in the city almost a year now. But the city had notdigested Ben. He was a leathery morsel that could not be assimilated. There he stuck in Chicago's crop, contributing nothing, gainingnothing. A rube in a comic collar ambling aimlessly about HalstedStreet or State downtown. You saw him conversing hungrily with thegritty and taciturn Swede who was janitor for the block of red-brickflats. Ben used to follow him around pathetically, engaging him in thetalk of the day. Ben knew no men except the surly Gus, Minnie'shusband. Gus, the firebrand, thought Ben hardly worthy of hiscontempt. If Ben thought, sometimes, of the respect with which he hadalways been greeted when he clumped down the main street ofCommercial--if he thought of how the farmers for miles around had cometo him for expert advice and opinion--he said nothing. 

Sometimes the janitor graciously allowed Ben to attend to the furnaceof the building in which he lived. He took out ashes, shoveled coal. He tinkered and rattled and shook things. You heard him shoveling andscraping down there, and smelled the acrid odor of his pipe. It gavehim something to do. He would emerge sooty and almost happy. 

"You been monkeying with that furnace again!" Bella would scold. "Ifyou want something to do, why don't you plant a garden in the back yardand grow something? You was crazy about it on the farm. "

His face flushed a slow, dull red at that. He could not explain to herthat he lost no dignity in his own eyes in fussing about an inadequatelittle furnace, but that self-respect would not allow him to stoop togardening--he who had reigned over six hundred acres of bountiful soil. 

On winter afternoons you saw him sometimes at the movies, whiling awayone of his many idle hours in the dim, close-smelling atmosphere of theplace. Tokyo and Rome and Gallipoli came to him. He saw beautifultiger-women twining fair, false arms about the stalwart but yieldingforms of young men with cleft chins. He was only mildly interested. Hetalked to anyone who would talk to him, though he was naturally a shyman. He talked to the barber, the grocer, the druggist, the streetcarconductor, the milkman, the iceman. But the price of wheat did notinterest these gentlemen. They did not know that the price of wheatwas the most vital topic of conversation in the world. 

"Well, now, " he would say, "you take this year's wheat crop, with about917, 000, 000 bushels of wheat harvested, why, that's what's going to winthe war! Yes, sirree! No wheat, no winning, that's what I say. "

"Ya-as, it is!" the city men would scoff. But the queer part of it isthat Farmer Ben was right. 

Minnie got into the habit of using him as a sort of nursemaid. It gaveher many hours of freedom for gadding and gossiping. 

"Pa, will you look after Pearlie for a little while this morning? Igot to run downtown to match something and she gets so tired andmean-acting if I take her along. Ma's going with me. "

He loved the feel of Pearlie's small, velvet-soft hand in his big fist. He called her "little feller, " and fed her forbidden dainties. His bigbrown fingers were miraculously deft at buttoning and unbuttoning hertiny garments, and wiping her soft lips, and performing a hundredtender offices. He was playing a sort of game with himself, pretendingthis was Dike become a baby again. Once the pair managed to get overto Lincoln Park, where they spent a glorious day looking at theanimals, eating popcorn, and riding on the miniature railway. 

They returned, tired, dusty, and happy, to a double tirade. 

Bella engaged in a great deal of what she called worrying about Dike. Ben spoke of him seldom, but the boy was always present in histhoughts. They had written him of their move, but he had not seemed toget the impression of its permanence. His letters indicated that hethought they were visiting Minnie, or taking a vacation in the city. Dike's letters were few. Ben treasured them, and read and reread them. When the Armistice news came, and with it the possibility of Dike'sreturn, Ben tried to fancy him fitting into the life of the city. Andhis whole being revolted at the thought. 

He saw the pimply-faced, sallow youths standing at the corner ofHalsted and Sixty-third, spitting languidly and handling their limpcigarettes with an amazing labial dexterity. Their conversation waslow-voiced, sinister, and terse, and their eyes narrowed as theywatched the overdressed, scarlet-lipped girls go by. A great fearclutched at Ben Westerveld's heart. 

The lack of exercise and manual labor began to tell on Ben. He did notgrow fat from idleness. Instead his skin seemed to sag and hang on hisframe, like a garment grown too large for him. He walked a great deal. Perhaps that had something to do with it. He tramped miles of citypavements. He was a very lonely man. And then, one day, quite byaccident, he came upon South Water Street. Came upon it, stared at itas a water-crazed traveler in a desert gazes upon the spring in theoasis, and drank from it, thirstily, gratefully. 

South Water Street feeds Chicago. Into that close-packed thoroughfarecome daily the fruits and vegetables that will supply a million tables. Ben had heard of it, vaguely, but had never attempted to find it. Nowhe stumbled upon it and, standing there, felt at home in Chicago forthe first time in more than a year. He saw ruddy men walking about inoveralls and carrying whips in their hands--wagon whips, actually. Hehadn't seen men like that since he had left the farm. The sight ofthem sent a great pang of homesickness through him. His hand reachedout and he ran an accustomed finger over the potatoes in a barrel onthe walk. His fingers lingered and gripped them, and passed over themlovingly. 

At the contact something within him that had been tight and hungryseemed to relax, satisfied. It was his nerves, feeding on thosefamiliar things for which they had been starving. 

He walked up one side and down the other. Crates of lettuce, bins ofonions, barrels of apples. Such vegetables! The radishes were scarletglobes. Each carrot was a spear of pure orange. The green and purpleof fancy asparagus held his expert eye. The cauliflower was like agreat bouquet, fit for a bride; the cabbages glowed like jade. 

And the men! He hadn't dreamed there were men like that in this big, shiny-shod, stiffly laundered, white-collared city. Here were rufousmen in overalls--worn, shabby, easy-looking overalls and old blueshirts, and mashed hats worn at a careless angle. Men, jovial, good-natured, with clear eyes, and having about them some of therevivifying freshness and wholesomeness of the products they handled. 

Ben Westerveld breathed in the strong, pungent smell of onions andgarlic and of the earth that seemed to cling to the vegetables, washedclean though they were. He breathed deeply, gratefully, and feltstrangely at peace. 

It was a busy street. A hundred times he had to step quickly to avoida hand truck, or dray, or laden wagon. And yet the busy men found timeto greet him friendlily. "H'are you!" they said genially. "H'are youthis morning!"

He was marketwise enough to know that some of these busy people werecommission men, and some grocers, and some buyers, stewards, clerks. It was a womanless thoroughfare. At the busiest business corner, though, in front of the largest commission house on the street, he sawa woman. Evidently she was transacting business, too, for he saw themen bringing boxes of berries and vegetables for her inspection. Awoman in a plain blue skirt and a small black hat. 

A funny job for a woman. What weren't they mixing into nowadays!

He turned sidewise in the narrow, crowded space in order to pass herlittle group. And one of the men--a red-cheeked, merry-looking youngfellow in a white apron--laughed and said: "Well, Emma, you win. Whenit comes to driving a bargain with you, I quit. It can't be did!"

Even then he didn't know her. He did not dream that this straight, slim, tailored, white-haired woman, bargaining so shrewdly with thesemen, was the Emma Byers of the old days. But he stopped there amoment, in frank curiosity, and the woman looked up. She looked up, and he knew those intelligent eyes and that serene brow. He hadcarried the picture of them in his mind for more than thirty years, soit was not so surprising. 

He did not hesitate. He might have if he had thought a moment, but heacted automatically. He stood before her. "You're Emma Byers, ain'tyou?"

She did not know him at first. Small blame to her, so completely hadthe roguish, vigorous boy vanished in this sallow, sad-eyed old man. Then: "Why, Ben!" she said quietly. And there was pity in her voice, though she did not mean to have it there. She put out one hand--thatcapable, reassuring hand--and gripped his and held it a moment. It wasqueer and significant that it should be his hand that lay within hers. 

"Well, what in all get-out are you doing around here, Emma?" He triedto be jovial and easy. She turned to the aproned man with whom she hadbeen dealing and smiled. 

"What am I doing here, Joe?"

Joe grinned, waggishly. "Nothin'; only beatin' every man on the streetat his own game, and makin' so much money that----"

But she stopped him there. "I guess I'll do my own explaining. " Sheturned to Ben again. "And what are you doing here in Chicago?"

Ben passed a faltering hand across his chin. "Me? Well, I'm--we'reliving here, I s'pose. Livin' here. "

She glanced at him sharply. "Left the farm, Ben?"

"Yes. "

"Wait a minute. " She concluded her business with Joe; finished itbriskly and to her own satisfaction. With her bright brown eyes andher alert manner and her quick little movements she made you think of awren--a businesslike little wren--a very early wren that is highlyversed in the worm-catching way. 

At her next utterance he was startled but game. 

"Have you had your lunch?"

"Why, no; I----"

"I've been down here since seven, and I'm starved. Let's go and have abite at the little Greek restaurant around the corner. A cup of coffeeand a sandwich, anyway. "

Seated at the bare little table, she surveyed him with thoseintelligent, understanding, kindly eyes, and he felt the years slipfrom him. They were walking down the country road together, and shewas listening quietly and advising him. 

She interrogated him gently. But something of his old masterfulnesscame back to him. "No, I want to know about you first. I can't getthe rights of it, you being here on South Water, tradin' and all. "

So she told him briefly. She was in the commission business. Successful. She bought, too, for such hotels as the Blackstone and theCongress, and for half a dozen big restaurants. She gave him barefacts, but he was shrewd enough and sufficiently versed in business toknow that here was a woman of established commercial position. 

"But how does it happen you're keepin' it up, Emma, all this time?Why, you must be anyway--it ain't that you look it--but----" Hefloundered, stopped. 

She laughed. "That's all right, Ben. I couldn't fool you on that. And I'm working because it keeps me happy. I want to work till I die. My children keep telling me to stop, but I know better than that. I'mnot going to rust out. I want to wear out. " Then, at an unspokenquestion in his eyes: "He's dead. These twenty years. It was hard atfirst, when the children were small. But I knew garden stuff if Ididn't know anything else. It came natural to me. That's all. "

So then she got his story from him bit by bit. He spoke of the farmand of Dike, and there was a great pride in his voice. He spoke ofBella, and the son who had been killed, and of Minnie. And the wordscame falteringly. He was trying to hide something, and he was not madefor deception. When he had finished:

"Now, listen, Ben. You go back to your farm. "

"I can't. She--I can't. "

She leaned forward, earnestly. "You go back to the farm. "

He turned up his palms with a little gesture of defeat. "I can't. "

"You can't stay here. It's killing you. It's poisoning you. Did youever hear of toxins? That means poisons, and you're poisoningyourself. You'll die of it. You've got another twenty years of workin you. What's ailing you? You go back to your wheat and your applesand your hogs. There isn't a bigger job in the world than that. "

For a moment his face took on a glow from the warmth of her owninspiring personality. But it died again. When they rose to go, hisshoulders drooped again, his muscles sagged. At the doorway he pauseda moment, awkward in farewell. He blushed a little, stammered. 

"Emma--I always wanted to tell you. God knows it was luck for you theway it turned out--but I always wanted to----"

She took his hand again in her firm grip at that, and her kindly, bright brown eyes were on him. "I never held it against you, Ben. Ihad to live a long time to understand it. But I never held a grudge. It just wasn't to be, I suppose. But listen to me, Ben. You do as Itell you. You go back to your wheat and your apples and your hogs. There isn't a bigger man-size job in the world. It's where you belong. "

Unconsciously his shoulders straightened again. Again they sagged. And so they parted, the two. 

He must have walked almost all the long way home, through miles andmiles of city streets. He must have lost his way, too, for when helooked up at a corner street sign it was an unfamiliar one. 

So he floundered about, asked his way, was misdirected. He took theright streetcar at last and got off at his own corner at seven o'clock, or later. He was in for a scolding, he knew. 

But when he came to his own doorway he knew that even his tardinesscould not justify the bedlam of sound that came from within. High-pitched voices. Bella's above all the rest, of course, but therewas Minnie's too, and Gus's growl, and Pearlie's treble, and the boyEd's and----

At the other voice his hand trembled so that the knob rattled in thedoor, and he could not turn it. But finally he did turn it, andstumbled in, breathing hard. And that other voice was Dike's. 

He must have just arrived. The flurry of explanation was still inprogress. Dike's knapsack was still on his back, and his canteen at hiship, his helmet slung over his shoulder. A brown, hard, glowing Dike, strangely tall and handsome and older, too. Older. 

All this Ben saw in less than one electric second. Then he had theboy's two shoulders in his hands, and Dike was saying, "Hello, Pop. "

Of the roomful, Dike and old Ben were the only quiet ones. The otherswere taking up the explanation and going over it again and again, andmarveling, and asking questions. 

"He come in to--what's that place, Dike?--Hoboken--yesterday only. An'he sent a dispatch to the farm. Can't you read our letters, Dike, thatyou didn't know we was here now? And then he's only got an hour more. They got to go to Camp Grant to be, now, demobilized. He came out toMinnie's on a chance. Ain't he big!"

But Dike and his father were looking at each other quietly. Then Dikespoke. His speech was not phlegmatic, as of old. He had a new clippedway of uttering his words:

"Say, Pop, you ought to see the way the Frenchies farm! They got aboutan acre each, and, say, they use every inch of it. If they's a littledirt blows into the crotch of a tree, they plant a crop in there. Inever seen nothin' like it. Say, we waste enough stuff over here tokeep that whole country in food for a hundred years. Yessir. Andtools! Outta the ark, believe me. If they ever saw our tractor, they'dthink it was the Germans comin' back. But they're smart at that. Ipicked up a lot of new ideas over there. And you ought to see the oldbirds--womenfolks and men about eighty years old--runnin' everything onthe farm. They had to. I learned somethin' off them about farmin'. "

"Forget the farm, " said Minnie. 

"Yeh, " echoed Gus, "forget the farm stuff. I can get you a job hereout at the works for four-fifty a day, and six when you learn it right. "

Dike looked from one to the other, alarm and unbelief on his face. "What d'you mean, a job? Who wants a job! What you all----"

Bella laughed jovially. "F'r heaven's sakes, Dike, wake up! We'relivin' here. This is our place. We ain't rubes no more. "

Dike turned to his father. A little stunned look crept into his face. A stricken, pitiful look. There was something about it that suddenlymade old Ben think of Pearlie when she had been slapped by herquick-tempered mother. 

"But I been countin' on the farm, " he said miserably. "I just beenlivin' on the idea of comin' back to it. Why, I---- The streets here, they're all narrow and choked up. I been countin' on the farm. I wantto go back and be a farmer. I want----"

And then Ben Westerveld spoke. A new Ben Westerveld--the old BenWesterveld. Ben Westerveld, the farmer, the monarch over six hundredacres of bounteous bottomland. 

"That's all right, Dike, " he said. "You're going back. So'm I. I'vegot another twenty years of work in me. We're going back to the farm. "

Bella turned on him, a wildcat. "We ain't! Not me! We ain't! I'm notagoin' back to the farm. "

But Ben Westerveld was master again in his own house. "You're goin'back, Bella, " he said quietly, "an' things are goin' to be different. You're goin' to run the house the way I say, or I'll know why. If youcan't do it, I'll get them in that can. An' me and Dike, we're goin'back to our wheat and our apples and our hogs. Yessir! There ain't abigger man-size job in the world. "

Un Morso doo Pang [1919]

When you are twenty you do not patronize sunsets unless you areunhappy, in love, or both. Tessie Golden was both. Six months ago asunset had wrung from her only a casual tribute, such as: "My! Look howred the sky is!" delivered as unemotionally as a weather bulletin. 

Tessie Golden sat on the top step of the back porch now, a slim, inertheap in a cotton house coat and scuffed slippers. Her head was proppedwearily against the porch post. Her hands were limp in her lap. Herface was turned toward the west, where shone that mingling of orangeand rose known as salmon pink. But no answering radiance in the girl'sface met the glow in the Wisconsin sky. 

Saturday night, after supper in Chippewa, Wisconsin, Tessie Golden ofthe presunset era would have been calling from her bedroom to thekitchen: "Ma, what'd you do with my pink blouse?"

And from the kitchen: "It's in your second bureau drawer. The collarwas kind of mussed from Wednesday night, and I give it a littlepressing while my iron was on. "

At seven-thirty Tessie would have emerged from her bedroom in the pinkblouse that might have been considered alarmingly frank as to textureand precariously low as to neck had Tessie herself not been soreassuringly unopulent; a black taffeta skirt, very brief; a hat with agood deal of French blue about it; fragile high-heeled pumps with bows. 

As she passed through the sitting room on her way out, her mother wouldappear in the doorway, dishtowel in hand. Her pride in this slim youngthing and her love of her she concealed with a thin layer of carpingcriticism. 

"Runnin' downtown again, I s'pose. " A keen eye on the swishing skirthem. 

Tessie, the quick-tongued, would toss the wave of shining hair that layagainst either glowing cheek. "Oh, my, no! I just thought I'd dressup in case Angie Hatton drove past in her auto and picked me up for alittle ride. So's not to keep her waiting. "

Angie Hatton was Old Man Hatton's daughter. Anyone in the Fox RiverValley could have told you who Old Man Hatton was. You saw his name atthe top of every letterhead of any importance in Chippewa, from thePulp and Paper Mill to the First National Bank, and including the watchfactory, the canning works, and the Mid-Western Land Company. Knowingthis, you were able to appreciate Tessie's sarcasm. Angie Hatton wasas unaware of Tessie's existence as only a young woman could be whosefamily residence was in Chippewa, Wisconsin, but who wintered in Italy, summered in the mountains, and bought (so the town said) her veryhairpins in New York. When Angie Hatton came home from the East thetown used to stroll past on Mondays to view the washing on the Hattonline. Angie's underwear, flirting so audaciously with the sunshine andzephyrs, was of silk and crepe de Chine and satin--materials that wehad always thought of heretofore as intended exclusively for partydresses and wedding gowns. Of course, two years later they wereshowing practically the same thing at Megan's dry-goods store. Butthat was always the way with Angie Hatton. Even those of us who wentto Chicago to shop never quite caught up with her. 

Delivered of this ironic thrust, Tessie would walk toward the screendoor with a little flaunting sway of the hips. Her mother's eyes, following the slim figure, had a sort of grudging love in them. Aspare, caustic, wiry little woman, Tessie's mother. Tessie resembledher as a water color may resemble a blurred charcoal sketch. Tessie'swide mouth curved into humor lines. She was the cutup of theescapement department at the watch factory; the older woman's lipssagged at the corners. Tessie was buoyant and colorful with youth. Theother was shrunken and faded with years and labor. As the girl mincedacross the room in her absurdly high-heeled shoes, the older womanthought: My, but she's pretty! But she said aloud: "I should thinkyou'd stay home once in a while and not be runnin' the streets everynight. "

"Time enough to be sittin' home when I'm old like you. "

And yet between these two there was love, and even understanding. 

But in families such as Tessie's, demonstration is a thing to beashamed of; affection a thing to conceal. Tessie's father was janitorof the Chippewa High School. A powerful man, slightly crippled byrheumatism, loquacious, lively, fond of his family, proud of his neatgray frame house and his new cement sidewalk and his carefully tendedyard and garden patch. In all her life Tessie had never seen a caressexchanged between her parents. 

Nowadays Ma Golden had little occasion for finding fault with Tessie'sevening diversion. She no longer had cause to say, "Always gaddin'downtown, or over to Cora's or somewhere, like you didn't have a hometo stay in. You ain't been in a evening this week, only when youwashed your hair. "

Tessie had developed a fondness for sunsets viewed from the backporch--she who had thought nothing of dancing until three and rising athalf-past six to go to work. 

Stepping about in the kitchen after supper, her mother would eye thelimp, relaxed figure on the back porch with a little pang at her heart. She would come to the screen door, or even out to the porch on someerrand or other--to empty the coffee grounds, to turn the row ofhalf-ripe tomatoes reddening on the porch railing, to flap and hang upa damp tea towel. 

"Ain't you goin' out, Tess?"

"No. "

"What you want to lop around here for? Such a grant evening. Why don'tyou put on your things and run downtown, or over to Cora's orsomewhere, hm?"

"What for?"--listlessly. 

"What for! What does anybody go out for!"

"I don't know. "

If they could have talked it over together, these two, the girl mighthave found relief. But the family shyness of their class was toostrong upon them. Once Mrs. Golden had said, in an effort at sympathy, "Person'd think Chuck Mory was the only one who'd gone to war an' thelast fella left in the world. "

A grim flash of the old humor lifted the corners of the wide mouth. "He is. Who's there left? Stumpy Gans, up at the railroad crossing?Or maybe Fatty Weiman, driving the garbage. Guess I'll doll up thisevening and see if I can't make a hit with one of them. "

She relapsed into bitter silence. The bottom had dropped out of TessieGolden's world. 

In order to understand the Tessie of today one would have to know theTessie of six months ago--Tessie the impudent, the life-loving. TessieGolden could say things to the escapement-room foreman that anyone elsewould have been fired for. Her wide mouth was capable of gloriousinsolences. Whenever you heard shrieks of laughter from the girls'washroom at noon you knew that Tessie was holding forth to an admiringgroup. She was a born mimic; audacious, agile, and with the gift ofburlesque. The autumn that Angie Hatton came home from Europe wearingthe first tight skirt that Chippewa had ever seen, Tessie gave animitation of that advanced young woman's progress down Grand Avenue inthis restricting garment. The thing was cruel in its fidelity, thoughcontaining just enough exaggeration to make it artistic. She followedit up by imitating the stricken look on the face of Mattie Haynes, cloak-and-suit buyer at Megan's, who, having just returned from theEast with what she considered the most fashionable of the new fallstyles, now beheld Angie Hatton in the garb that was the last echo ofthe last cry in Paris modes--and no model in Mattie's newly selectedstock bore even the remotest resemblance to it. 

You would know from this that Tessie was not a particularly deftworker. Her big-knuckled fingers were cleverer at turning out a blouseor retrimming a hat. Hers were what are known as handy hands, but notsensitive. It takes a light and facile set of fingers to fit palletand arbor and fork together: close work and tedious. Seated on lowbenches along the tables, their chins almost level with the table top, the girls worked with pincers and flame, screwing together the threetiny parts of the watch's anatomy that were their particular specialty. Each wore a jeweler's glass in one eye. Tessie had worked at the watchfactory for three years, and the pressure of the glass on the eyesocket had given her the slightly hollow-eyed appearance peculiar toexperienced watchmakers. It was not unbecoming, though, and lent her, somehow, a spiritual look which made her impudence all the more piquant. 

Tessie wasn't always witty, really. But she had achieved a reputationfor wit which insured applause for even her feebler efforts. NapBallou, the foreman, never left the escapement room without a littleshiver of nervous apprehension--a feeling justified by the ripple ofsuppressed laughter that went up and down the long tables. He knewthat Tessie Golden, like a naughty schoolgirl when teacher's back isturned, had directed one of her sure shafts at him. 

Ballou, his face darkling, could easily have punished her. Tessie knewit. But he never did, or would. She knew that, too. Her very insolenceand audacity saved her. 

"Someday, " Ballou would warn her, "you'll get too gay, and then you'llfind yourself looking for a job. "

"Go on--fire me, " retorted Tessie, "and I'll meet you in Lancaster"--aform of wit appreciated only by watchmakers. For there is a certaintype of watch hand who is as peripatetic as the old-time printer. Restless, ne'er-do-well, spendthrift, he wanders from factory tofactory through the chain of watchmaking towns: Springfield, Trenton, Waltham, Lancaster, Waterbury, Chippewa. Usually expert, alwaysunreliable, certainly fond of drink, Nap Ballou was typical of hiskind. The steady worker had a mingled admiration and contempt for him. He, in turn, regarded the other as a stick-in-the-mud. Nap wore hiscap on one side of his curly head, and drank so evenly and steadily asnever to be quite drunk and never strictly sober. He had slender, sensitive fingers like an artist's or a woman's, and he knew the partsof that intricate mechanism known as a watch from the jewel to thefinishing room. It was said he had a wife or two. He was forty-six, good-looking in a dissolute sort of way, possessing the charm of thewanderer, generous with his money. It was known that Tessie's barbswere permitted to prick him without retaliation because Tessie herselfappealed to his errant fancy. 

When the other girls teased her about this obvious state of affairs, something fine and contemptuous welled up in her. "Him! Why, say, heought to work in a pickle factory instead of a watchworks. All heneeds is a little dill and a handful of grape leaves to make him goodeatin' as a relish. "

And she thought of Chuck Mory, perched on the high seat of the AmericanExpress truck, hatless, sunburned, stockily muscular, clattering downWinnebago Street on his way to the depot and the 7:50 train. 

Something about the clear simplicity and uprightness of the firm littlefigure appealed to Nap Ballou. He used to regard her curiously with along, hard gaze before which she would grow uncomfortable. "Thinkyou'll know me next time you see me?" But there was an uneasy feelingbeneath her flip exterior. Not that there was anything of thebeautiful, persecuted factory girl and villainous foreman about thesituation. Tessie worked at watchmaking because it was light, pleasant, and well paid. She could have found another job for theasking. Her money went for shoes and blouses and lingerie and silkstockings. She was forever buying a vivid necktie for her father anddressing up her protesting mother in gay colors that went ill with thedrab, wrinkled face. "If it wasn't for me, you'd go round looking likeone of those Polack women down by the tracks, " Tessie would scold. "It's a wonder you don't wear a shawl!"

That was the Tessie of six months ago, gay, carefree, holding the reinsof her life in her own two capable hands. Three nights a week, andSunday, she saw Chuck Mory. When she went downtown on Saturday nightit was frankly to meet Chuck, who was waiting for her on Schroeder'sdrugstore corner. He knew it, and she knew it. Yet they always wentthrough a little ceremony. She and Cora, turning into Grand fromWinnebago Street, would make for the post office. Then down the lengthof Grand with a leaping glance at Schroeder's corner before theyreached it. Yes, there they were, very clean-shaven, clean-shirted, slick-looking. Tessie would have known Chuck's blond head among athousand. An air of studied hauteur and indifference as theyapproached the corner. Heads turned the other way. A low whistle fromthe boys. 

"Oh, how do!"

"Good evening!"

Both greetings done with careful surprise. Then on down the street. On the way back you took the inside of the walk, and your hauteur wasnow stony to the point of insult. Schroeder's corner simply did notexist. On as far as Megan's, which you entered and inspected, up onebrightly lighted aisle and down the next. At the dress-goods counterthere was a neat little stack of pamphlets entitled "In the World ofFashion. " You took one and sauntered out leisurely. Down WinnebagoStreet now, homeward bound, talking animatedly and seeminglyunconscious of quick footsteps sounding nearer and nearer. Just pastthe Burke House, where the residential district began, and where thetrees cast their kindly shadows: "Can I see you home?" A hand slippedthrough her arm; a little tingling thrill. 

"Oh, why, how do, Chuck! Hello, Scotty. Sure, if you're going ourway. "

At every turn Chuck left her side and dashed around behind her in orderto place himself at her right again, according to the rigid rule ofChippewa etiquette. He took her arm only at street crossings untilthey reached the tracks, which perilous spot seemed to justify him inretaining his hold throughout the remainder of the stroll. Usuallythey lost Cora and Scotty without having been conscious of their loss. 

Their talk? The girls and boys that each knew; the day's happenings atfactory and express office; next Wednesday night's dance up in theChute; and always the possibility of Chuck's leaving the truck andassuming the managership of the office. 

"Don't let this go any further, see? But I heard it straight that oldBenke is going to be transferred to Fond du Lac. And if he is, why, Istep in, see? Benke's got a girl in Fondy, and he's been pluggin' toget there. Gee, maybe I won't be glad when he does!" A littlesilence. "Will you be glad, Tess? Hm?"

Tess felt herself glowing and shivering as the big hand closed moretightly on her arm. "Me? Why, sure I'll be pleased to see you get ajob that's coming to you by rights, and that'll get you better pay, andall. "

But she knew what he meant, and he knew she knew. 

No more of that now. Chuck--gone. Scotty--gone. All the boys at thewatchworks, all the fellows in the neighborhood--gone. At first shehadn't minded. It was exciting. You kidded them at first: "Well, believe me, Chuck, if you shoot the way you play ball, you're a gonegoon already. "

"All you got to do, Scotty, is to stick that face of yours up over thetop of the trench and the Germans'll die of fright and save you wastingbullets. "

There was a great knitting of socks and sweaters and caps. Tessie'sbig-knuckled, capable fingers made you dizzy, they flew so fast. Chuckwas outfitted as for a polar expedition. Tess took half a day off tobid him good-by. They marched down Grand Avenue, that first lot ofthem, in their everyday suits and hats, with their shiny yellowsuitcases and their pasteboard boxes in their hands, sheepish, red-faced, awkward. In their eyes, though, a certain look. And so offfor Camp Sherman, their young heads sticking out of the car windows inclusters--black, yellow, brown, red. But for each woman on the depotplatform there was just one head. Tessie saw a blurred blond one witha misty halo around it. A great shouting and waving of handkerchiefs:

"Good-by! Good-by! Write, now! Be sure! Mebbe you can get off in aweek, for a visit. Good-by! Good----"

They were gone. Their voices came back to the crowd on the depotplatform--high, clear young voices; almost like the voices of children, shouting. 

Well, you wrote letters--fat, bulging letters--and in turn you receivedequally plump envelopes with a red emblem in one corner. 

You sent boxes of homemade fudge (nut variety) and cookies and the moredurable forms of cake. 

Then, unaccountably, Chuck was whisked all the way to California. 

He was furious at parting with his mates, and his indignation wasexpressed in his letters to Tessie. She sympathized with him in herreplies. She tried to make light of it, but there was a little clutchof terror in it, too. California! Might as well send a person to theend of the world while they were about it. Two months of that. Then, inexplicably again, Chuck's letters bore the astounding postmark of NewYork. She thought, in a panic, that he was Franceward bound, but itturned out not to be so. Not yet. Chuck's letters were taking on acosmopolitan tone. "Well, " he wrote, "I guess the little old town isas dead as ever. It seems funny you being right there all this timeand I've traveled from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Everybody treatsme swell. You ought to seen some of those California houses. Theymake Hatton's place look like a dump. "

The girls, Cora and Tess and the rest, laughed and joked amongthemselves and assured one another, with a toss of the head, that theycould have a good time without the fellas. They didn't need boysaround. 

They gave parties, and they were not a success. There was one of thetype known as a stag. "Some hen party!" they all said. They danced, and sang "Over There. " They had ice cream and chocolate layer cake andwent home in great hilarity, with their hands on each other'sshoulders, still singing. 

But the thing was a failure, and they knew it. Next day, at the lunchhour and in the washroom, there was a little desultory talk about thestag. But the meat of such an aftergathering is contained in phrasessuch as "I says to him"--and "He says to me. " They wasted littleconversation on the stag. It was much more exciting to exhibit letterson blue-lined paper with the red emblem at the top. Chuck's lastletter had contained the news of his sergeancy. 

Angie Hatton, home from the East, was writing letters, too. Everyone inChippewa knew that. She wrote on that new art paper with thegnawed-looking edges and stiff as a newly laundered cuff. But theletters which she awaited so eagerly were written on the same sort ofpaper as were those Tessie had from Chuck--blue-lined, cheap inquality. A New York fellow, Chippewa learned; an aviator. They knew, too, that young Hatton was an infantry lieutenant somewhere in theEast. These letters were not from him. 

Ever since her home-coming, Angie had been sewing at the Red Cross shopon Grand Avenue. Chippewa boasted two Red Cross shops. The GrandAvenue shop was the society shop. The East End crowd sewed there, capped, veiled, aproned--and unapproachable. Were your fingers ever sodeft, your knowledge of seams and basting mathematical, your skill withthat complicated garment known as a pneumonia jacket uncanny, if youdid not belong to the East End set, you did not sew at the Grand Avenueshop. No matter how grossly red the blood which the Grand Avenuebandages and pads were ultimately to stanch, the liquid in the fingersthat rolled and folded them was pure cerulean. 

Tessie and her crowd had never thought of giving any such service totheir country. They spoke of the Grand Avenue workers as "thatstinkin' bunch. " Yet each one of the girls was capable of starting ablouse in an emergency on Saturday night and finishing it in time for aSunday picnic, buttonholes and all. Their help might have beeninvaluable. It never was asked. 

Without warning, Chuck came home on three days' furlough. It meantthat he was bound for France right enough this time. But Tessie didn'tcare. 

"I don't care where you're goin', " she said exultantly, her eyeslingering on the stocky, straight, powerful figure in its ratherill-fitting khaki. "You're here now. That's enough. Ain't you tickledto be home, Chuck? Gee!"

"I'll say, " responded Chuck. But even he seemed to detect some lack inhis tone and words. He elaborated somewhat shamefacedly:

"Sure. It's swell to be home. But I don't know. After you'vetraveled around, and come back, things look so kind of little to you. I don't know--kind of----" He floundered about, at a loss forexpression. Then tried again: "Now, take Hatton's place, for example. I always used to think it was a regular palace, but, gosh, you ought tosee places where I was asked to in San Francisco and around there. Why, they was--were--enough to make the Hatton house look like a shack. Swimmin' pools of white marble, and acres of yard like a park, and thehelp always bringing you something to eat or drink. And the folksthemselves--why, say! Here we are scraping and bowing to Hattons andthat bunch. They're pikers to what some people are that invited me totheir houses in New York and Berkeley, and treated me and the otherguys like kings or something. Take Megan's store, too"--he was warmingto his subject, so that he failed to notice the darkening of Tessie'sface--"it's a joke compared to New York and San Francisco stores. Reg'lar hick joint. "

Tessie stiffened. Her teeth were set, her eyes sparkled. She tossedher head. "Well, I'm sure, Mr. Mory, it's good enough for me. Too badyou had to come home at all now you're so elegant and swell, andeverything. You better go call on Angie Hatton instead of wasting timeon me. She'd probably be tickled to see you. "

He stumbled to his feet, then, awkwardly. "Aw, say, Tessie, I didn'tmean--why, say--you don't suppose--why, believe me, I pretty nearbusted out cryin' when I saw the Junction eatin' house when my traincame in. And I been thinking of you every minute. There wasn't aday----"

"Tell that to your swell New York friends. I may be a hick but I ain'ta fool. " She was near to tears. 

"Why, say, Tess, listen! Listen! If you knew--if you knew--A guy'sgot to--he's got no right to----"

And presently Tessie was mollified, but only on the surface. Shesmiled and glanced and teased and sparkled. And beneath was terror. He talked differently. He walked differently. It wasn't his clothesor the army. It was something else--an ease of manner, a newleisureliness of glance, an air. Once Tessie had gone to Milwaukeeover Labor Day. It was the extent of her experience as a traveler. She remembered how superior she had felt for at least two days after. But Chuck! California! New York! It wasn't the distance thatterrified her. It was his new knowledge, the broadening of his vision, though she did not know it and certainly could not have put it intowords. 

They went walking down by the river to Oneida Springs, and drank someof the sulphur water that tasted like rotten eggs. Tessie drank itwith little shrieks and shudders and puckered her face up into anexpression indicative of extreme disgust. 

"It's good for you, " Chuck said, and drank three cups of it, manfully. "That taste is the mineral qualities the water contains--sulphur andiron and so forth. "

"I don't care, " snapped Tessie irritably. "I hate it!" They had oftenwalked along the river and tasted of the spring water, but Chuck hadnever before waxed scientific. They took a boat at Baumann's boathouseand drifted down the lovely Fox River. 

"Want to row?" Chuck asked. "I'll get an extra pair of oars if you do. "

"I don't know how. Besides, it's too much work. I guess I'll let youdo it. "

Chuck was fitting his oars in the oarlocks. She stood on the landinglooking down at him. His hat was off. His hair seemed blonder thanever against the rich tan of his face. His neck muscles swelled alittle as he bent. Tessie felt a great longing to bury her face in thewarm red skin. He straightened with a sigh and smiled at her. "I'llbe ready in a minute. " He took off his coat and turned his khaki shirtin at the throat, so that you saw the white line of his untanned chestin strange contrast to his sun-burned throat. A feeling of giddyfaintness surged over Tessie. She stepped blindly into the boat andwould have fallen if Chuck's hard, firm grip had not steadied her. "Whoa, there! Don't you know how to step into a boat? There. Walkalong the middle. "

She sat down and smiled up at him. "I don't know how I come to dothat. I never did before. "

Chuck braced his feet, rolled up his sleeves, and took an oar in eachbrown hand, bending rhythmically to his task. He looked about him, then at the girl, and drew a deep breath, feathering his oars. "Iguess I must have dreamed about this more'n a million times. "

"Have you, Chuck?"

They drifted on in silence. "Say, Tess, you ought to learn to row. It's good exercise. Those girls in California and New York, they playtennis and row and swim as good as the boys. Honest, some of 'em arewonders!"

"Oh, I'm sick of your swell New York friends! Can't you talk aboutsomething else?"

He saw that he had blundered without in the least understanding how orwhy. "All right. What'll we talk about?" In itself a fatal admission. 

"About--you. " Tessie made it a caress. 

"Me? Nothin' to tell about me. I just been drillin' and studyin' andmarchin' and readin' some---- Oh, say, what d'you think?"

"What?"

"They been learnin' us--teachin' us, I mean--French. It's thedarnedest language! Bread is pain. Can you beat that? If you want toask for a piece of bread, you say like this: DONNAY MA UN MORSO DOOPANG. See?"

"My!" breathed Tessie. 

And within her something was screaming: Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Heknows French. And those girls that can row and swim and everything. And me, I don't know anything. Oh, God, what'll I do?

It was as though she could see him slipping away from her, out of hergrasp, out of her sight. She had no fear of what might come to him inFrance. Bullets and bayonets would never hurt Chuck. He'd make it, just as he always made the 7:50 when it seemed as if he was going tomiss it sure. He'd make it there and back, all right. But he'd be adifferent Chuck, while she stayed the same Tessie. Books, travel, French, girls, swell folks----

And all the while she was smiling and dimpling and trailing her hand inthe water. "Bet you can't guess what I got in that lunch box. "

"Chocolate cake. "

"Well, of course I've got chocolate cake. I baked it myself thismorning. "

"Yes, you did!" "Why, Chuck Mory, I did so! I guess you think I can'tdo anything, the way you talk. "

"Oh, don't I! I guess you know what I think. "

"Well, it isn't the cake I mean. It's something else. "

 "Fried chicken!"

"Oh, now you've gone and guessed it. " She pouted prettily. 

"You asked me to, didn't you?"

Then they laughed together, as at something exquisitely witty. Down theriver, drifting, rowing. Tessie pointed to a house half hidden amongthe trees on the farther shore: "There's Hatton's camp. They say theyhave grand times there with their swell crowd some Saturdays andSundays. If I had a house like that, I'd live in it all the time, notjust a couple of days out of the whole year. " She hesitated a moment. "I suppose it looks like a shanty to you now. "

Chuck surveyed it, patronizingly. "No, it's a nice little place. "

They beached their boat, and built a little fire, and had supper on theriverbank, and Tessie picked out the choice bits for him--the breast ofthe chicken, beautifully golden brown; the ripest tomato; the firmest, juiciest pickle; the corner of the little cake which would give him adouble share of icing. 

From Chuck, between mouthfuls: "I guess you don't know how good thistastes. Camp grub's all right, but after you've had a few months of ityou get so you don't believe there IS such a thing as real friedchicken and homemade chocolate cake. "

"I'm glad you like it, Chuck. Here, take this drumstick. You ain'teating a thing!" His fourth piece of chicken. 

Down the river as far as the danger line just above the dam, withTessie pretending fear just for the joy of having Chuck reassure her. Then back again in the dusk, Chuck bending to the task now against thecurrent. And so up the hill, homeward bound. They walked very slowly, Chuck's hand on her arm. They were dumb with the tragic, eloquentdumbness of their kind. If she could have spoken the words that werechurning in her mind, they would have been something like this:

"Oh, Chuck, I wish I was married to you. I wouldn't care if only I hadyou. I wouldn't mind babies or anything. I'd be glad. I want ourhouse, with a dining-room set, and a mahogany bed, and one of thoseoverstuffed sets in the living room, and all the housework to do. I'mscared. I'm scared I won't get it. What'll I do if I don't?"

And he, wordlessly: "Will you wait for me, Tessie, and keep onthinking about me? And will you keep yourself like you are so that ifI come back----"

Aloud, she said: "I guess you'll get stuck on one of those Frenchgirls. I should worry! They say wages at the watch factory are goingto be raised, workers are so scarce. I'll probably be as rich as AngieHatton time you get back. "

And he, miserably: "Little old Chippewa girls are good enough forChuck. I ain't counting on taking up with those Frenchies. I don'tlike their jabber, from what I know of it. I saw some pictures of 'em, last week, a fellow in camp had who'd been over there. Their hair isall funny, and fixed up with combs and stuff, and they look real darklike foreigners. "

It had been reassuring enough at the time. But that was six monthsago. And now here was the Tessie who sat on the back porch, evenings, surveying the sunset. A listless, lackadaisical, brooding Tessie. Little point to going downtown Saturday nights now. There was nofamiliar, beloved figure to follow you swiftly as you turned off ElmStreet, homeward bound. If she went downtown now, she saw only thoseSaturday-night family groups which are familiar to every small town. The husband, very damp as to hair and clean as to shirt, guarding thegocart outside while the woman accomplished her Saturday-night tradingat Ding's or Halpin's. Sometimes there were as many as half a dozengocarts outside Halpin's, each containing a sleeping burden, relaxed, chubby, fat-cheeked. The waiting men smoked their pipes and conversedlargely. "Hello, Ed. The woman's inside, buyin' the store out, Iguess. "

"That so? Mine, to. Well, how's everything?"

Tessie knew that presently the woman would come out, bundle laden, andthat she would stow these lesser bundles in every corner left availableby the more important sleeping bundle--two yards of oilcloth; a spoolof 100, white; a banana for the baby; a new stewpan at the five-and-ten. 

There had been a time when Tessie, if she thought of these women atall, felt sorry for them--worn, drab, lacking in style and figure. Nowshe envied them. 

There were weeks upon weeks when no letter came from Chuck. In hislast letter there had been some talk of his being sent to Russia. Tessie's eyes, large enough now in her thin face, distended with agreat fear. Russia! His letter spoke, too, of French villages andchateaux. He and a bunch of fellows had been introduced to a princessor a countess or something--it was all one to Tessie--and what do youthink? She had kissed them all on both cheeks! Seems that's the waythey did in France. 

The morning after the receipt of this letter the girls at the watchfactory might have remarked her pallor had they not been so occupiedwith a new and more absorbing topic. 

"Tess, did you hear about Angie Hatton?"

"What about her?"

"She's going to France. It's in the Milwaukee paper, all about herbeing Chippewa's fairest daughter, and a picture of the house, and herbeing the belle of the Fox River Valley, and she's giving up herpalatial home and all to go to work in a canteen for her country andbleeding France. "

"Ya-as she is!" sneered Tessie, and a dull red flush, so deep as to bepainful, swept over her face from throat to brow. "Ya-as she is, thedoll-faced simp! Why, say, she never wiped up a floor in her life, orbaked a cake, or stood on them feet of hers. She couldn't cut up aloaf of bread decent. Bleeding France! Ha! That's rich, that is. "She thrust her chin out brutally, and her eyes narrowed to slits. "She's going over there after that fella of hers. She's chasing him. It's now or never, and she knows it and she's scared, same's the restof us. On'y we got to set home and make the best of it. Or take what'sleft. " She turned her head slowly to where Nap Ballou stood over atable at the far end of the room. She laughed a grim, unlovely littlelaugh. "I guess when you can't go after what you want, like Angie, whyyou gotta take second choice. "

All that day, at the bench, she was the reckless, insolent, audaciousTessie of six months ago. Nap Ballou was always standing over her, pretending to inspect some bit of work or other, his shoulder brushinghers. She laughed up at him so that her face was not more than twoinches from his. He flushed, but she did not. She laughed a recklesslittle laugh. 

"Thanks for helping teach me my trade, Mr. Ballou. 'Course I only beenat it over three years now, so I ain't got the hang of it yet. "

He straightened up slowly, and as he did so he rested a hand on hershoulder for a brief moment. She did not shrug it off. 

That night, after supper, Tessie put on her hat and strolled down toPark Avenue. It wasn't for the walk. Tessie had never been told toexercise systematically for her body's good, or her mind's. She wentin a spirit of unwholesome brooding curiosity and a bitter resentment. Going to France, was she? Lots of good she'd do there. Better stayhome and--and what? Tessie cast about in her mind for a fitting jobfor Angie. Guess she might's well go, after all. Nobody'd miss her, unless it was her father, and he didn't see her but about a third ofthe time. But in Tessie's heart was a great envy of this girl whocould bridge the hideous waste of ocean that separated her from herman. Bleeding France. Yeh! Joke!

The Hatton place, built and landscaped twenty years before, occupied asquare block in solitary grandeur, the show place of Chippewa. Inarchitectural style it was an impartial mixture of Norman castle, French chateau, and Rhenish schloss, with a dash of Coney Island aboutits facade. It represented Old Man Hatton's realized dream of landedmagnificence. 

Tessie, walking slowly past it, and peering through the high ironfence, could not help noting an air of unwonted excitement about theplace, usually so aloof, so coldly serene. Automobiles standing out infront. People going up and down. They didn't look very cheerful. Just as if it mattered whether anything happened to her or not!

Tessie walked around the block and stood a moment, uncertainly. Thenshe struck off down Grand Avenue and past Donovan's pool shack. Alittle group of after-supper idlers stood outside, smoking andgossiping, as she knew there would be. As she turned the corner shesaw Nap Ballou among them. She had known that, too. As she passed shelooked straight ahead, without bowing. But just past the Burke House hecaught up with her. No half-shy "Can I walk home with you?" from NapBallou. No. Instead: "Hello, sweetheart!"

"Hello, yourself. "

"Somebody's looking mighty pretty this evening, all dolled up in pink. "

"Think so?" She tried to be pertly indifferent, but it was good tohave someone following, someone walking home with you. What if he wasold enough to be her father, with graying hair? Lots of the movieheroes had graying hair at the sides. 

They walked for an hour. Tessie left him at the corner. She had onceheard her father designate Ballou as "that drunken skunk. " When sheentered the sitting room her cheeks held an unwonted pink. Her eyeswere brighter than they had been in months. Her mother looked upquickly, peering at her over a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles, verymuch askew. 

"Where you been, Tessie?"

"Oh, walkin'. "

"Who with?"

"Cora. "

"Why, she was here, callin' for you, not more'n an hour ago. "

Tessie, taking off her hat on her way upstairs, met this coolly. "Yeh, I ran into her comin' back. "

Upstairs, lying fully dressed on her hard little bed, she stared upinto the darkness, thinking, her hands limp at her sides. Oh, well, what's the diff? You had to make the best of it. Everybody makin' afuss about the soldiers--feeding 'em, and asking 'em to their houses, and sending 'em things, and giving dances and picnics and parties sothey wouldn't be lonesome. Chuck had told her all about it. The otherboys told the same. They could just pick and choose their good times. Tessie's mind groped about, sensing a certain injustice. How about thegirls? She didn't put it thus squarely. Hers was not a logical mind. Easy enough to paw over the men-folks and get silly over brass buttonsand a uniform. She put it that way. She thought of the refrain of apopular song: "What Are You Going to Do to Help the Boys?" Tessie, smiling a crooked little smile up there in the darkness, parodied thewords deftly: "What're you going to do to help the girls?" shedemanded. "What're you going to do----" She rolled over on one sideand buried her head in her arms. 

There was news again next morning at the watch factory. Tessie of theold days had never needed to depend on the other girls for the latestbit of gossip. Her alert eye and quick ear had always caught it first. But of late she had led a cloistered existence, indifferent to theworld about her. The Chippewa Courier went into the newspaper pilebehind the kitchen door without a glance from Tessie's incurious eye. 

She was late this morning. As she sat down at the bench and fitted herglass in her eye, the chatter of the others, pitched in the high key ofunusual excitement, penetrated even her listlessness. 

"And they say she never screeched or fainted or anything. She stoodthere, kind of quiet, looking straight ahead, and then all of a suddenshe ran to her pa----"

"I feel sorry for her. She never did anything to me. She----"

Tessie spoke, her voice penetrating the staccato fragments all abouther and gathering them into a whole. "Say, who's the heroine of thispicture? I come in in the middle of the film, I guess. "

They turned on her with the unlovely eagerness of those who have uglynews to tell. They all spoke at once, in short sentences, their voiceshigh with the note of hysteria. 

"Angie Hatton's beau was killed----"

"They say his airyoplane fell ten thousand feet----"

"The news come only last evening about eight----"

"She won't see nobody but her pa----"

Eight! At eight Tessie had been standing outside Hatton's house, envying Angie and hating her. So that explained the people, and theautomobiles, and the excitement. Tessie was not receiving the newswith the dramatic reaction which its purveyors felt it deserved. Tessie, turning from one to the other quietly, had said nothing. Shewas pitying Angie. Oh, the luxury of it! Nap Ballou, coming inswiftly to still the unwonted commotion in work hours, found Tessie theonly one quietly occupied in that chatter-filled room. She was smilingas she worked. Nap Ballou, bending over her on some pretense thatdeceived no one, spoke low-voiced in her ear. But she veiled her eyesinsolently and did not glance up. She hummed contentedly all themorning at her tedious work. 

She had promised Nap Ballou to go picknicking with him Sunday. Down theriver, boating, with supper on shore. The small, still voice withinher had said, "Don't go! Don't go!" But the harsh, high-pitched, reckless overtone said, "Go on! Have a good time. Take all you canget. "

She would have to lie at home and she did it. Some fabrication aboutthe girls at the watchworks did the trick. Fried chicken, chocolatecake. She packed them deftly and daintily. High-heeled shoes, flimsyblouse, rustling skirt. Nap Ballou was waiting for her over in thecity park. She saw him before he espied her. He was leaning against atree, idly, staring straight ahead with queer, lackluster eyes. Silhouetted there against the tender green of the pretty square, helooked very old, somehow, and different--much older than he looked inhis shop clothes, issuing orders. Tessie noticed that he sagged wherehe should have stuck out, and protruded where he should have been flat. There flashed across her mind a vividly clear picture of Chuck as shehad last seen him--brown, fit, high of chest, flat of stomach, slim offlank. 

Ballou saw her. He straightened and came toward her swiftly. "Somebodylooks mighty sweet this afternoon. "

Tessie plumped the heavy lunch box into his arms. "When you get a lineyou like you stick to it, don't you?"

Down at the boathouse even Tessie, who had confessed ignorance of boatsand oars, knew that Ballou was fumbling clumsily. He stooped to adjustthe oars to the oarlocks. His hat was off. His hair looked very grayin the cruel spring sunshine. He straightened and smiled up at her. 

"Ready in a minute, sweetheart, " he said. He took off his collar andturned in the neckband of his shirt. His skin was very white. Tessiefelt a little shudder of disgust sweep over her, so that she stumbled alittle as she stepped into the boat. 

The river was very lovely. Tessie trailed her fingers in the water andtold herself that she was having a grand time. She told Nap the samewhen he asked her. 

"Having a good time, little beauty?" he said. He was puffing a littlewith the unwonted exercise. 

Tessie tried some of her old-time pertness of speech. "Oh, goodenough, considering the company. "

He laughed admiringly at that and said she was a sketch. 

When the early evening came on they made a clumsy landing and hadsupper. This time Nap fed her the tidbits, though she protested. 

"White meat for you, " he said, "with your skin like milk. "

"You must of read that in a book, " scoffed Tessie. She glanced aroundher at the deepening shadows. "We haven't got much time. It gets darkso early. "

"No hurry, " Nap assured her. He went on eating in a leisurely, finicking sort of way, though he consumed very little food, actually. 

"You're not eating much, " Tessie said once, halfheartedly. She decidedthat she wasn't having such a very grand time, after all, and that shehated his teeth, which were very bad. Now, Chuck's strong, white, double row----

"Well, " she said, "let's be going. "

"No hurry, " again. 

Tessie looked up at that with the instinctive fear of her kind. "Whatd'you mean, no hurry! 'Spect to stay here till dark?" She laughed ather own joke. 

"Yes. "

She got up then, the blood in her face. "Well, _I_ don't. "

He rose, too. "Why not?"

"Because I don't, that's why. " She stooped and began picking up theremnants of the lunch, placing spoons and glass bottles swiftly andthriftily into the lunch box. Nap stepped around behind her. 

"Let me help, " he said. And then his arm was about her and his facewas close to hers, and Tessie did not like it. He kissed her after alittle wordless struggle. And then she knew. She had been kissedbefore. But not like this. Not like this! She struck at himfuriously. Across her mind flashed the memory of a girl who had workedin the finishing room. A nice girl, too. But that hadn't helped her. Nap Ballou was laughing a little as he clasped her. 

At that she heard herself saying: "I'll get Chuck Mory after you--youdrunken bum, you! He'll lick you black and blue. He'll----"

The face, with the ugly, broken brown teeth, was coming close again. With all the young strength that was in her she freed one hand andclawed at that face from eyes to chin. A howl of pain rewarded her. His hold loosened. Like a flash she was off. She ran. It seemed toher that her feet did not touch the earth. Over brush, through bushes, crashing against trees, on and on. She heard him following her, but thebroken-down engine that was his heart refused to do the work. She ranon, though her fear was as great as before. Fear of what might havehappened--to her, Tessie Golden, that nobody could even talk fresh to. She gave a sob of fury and fatigue. She was stumbling now. It wasgrowing dark. She ran on again, in fear of the overtaking darkness. It was easier now. Not so many trees and bushes. She came to a fence, climbed over it, lurched as she landed, leaned against it weakly forsupport, one hand on her aching heart. Before her was the Hatton summercottage, dimly outlined in the twilight among the trees. 

A warm, flickering light danced in the window. Tessie stood a moment, breathing painfully, sobbingly. Then, with an instinctive gesture, shepatted her hair, tidied her blouse, and walked uncertainly toward thehouse, up the steps to the door. She stood there a moment, swayingslightly. Somebody'd be there. 

The light. The woman who cooked for them or the man who took care ofthe place. Somebody'd----

She knocked at the door feebly. She'd tell 'em she had lost her wayand got scared when it began to get dark. She knocked again, loudernow. Footsteps. She braced herself and even arranged a crooked smile. The door opened wide. Old Man Hatton!

She looked up at him, terror and relief in her face. He peered overhis glasses at her. "Who is it?" Tessie had not known, somehow, thathis face was so kindly. 

Tessie's carefully planned story crumbled into nothingness. "It's me!"she whimpered. "It's me!"

He reached out and put a hand on her arm and drew her inside. 

"Angie! Angie! Here's a poor little kid----"

Tessie clutched frantically at the last crumbs of her pride. She triedto straighten, to smile with her old bravado. What was that story shehad planned to tell?

"Who is it, Dad? Who----?" Angie Hatton came into the hallway. Shestared at Tessie. Then: "Why, my dear!" she said. "My dear! Come inhere. "

Angie Hatton! Tessie began to cry weakly, her face buried in AngieHatton's expensive shoulder. Tessie remembered later that she had feltno surprise at the act. 

"There, there!" Angie Hatton was saying. "Just poke up the fire, Dad. And get something from the dining room. Oh, I don't know. To drink, you know. Something----"

Then Old Man Hatton stood over her, holding a small glass to her lips. Tessie drank it obediently, made a wry little face, coughed, wiped hereyes, and sat up. She looked from one to the other, like a trappedlittle animal. She put a hand to her tousled head. 

"That's all right, " Angie Hatton assured her. "You can fix it after awhile. "

There they were, the three of them: Old Man Hatton with his back tothe fire, looking benignly down upon her; Angie seated, with someknitting in her hands, as if entertaining bedraggled, tear-stainedyoung ladies at dusk were an everyday occurrence; Tessie, twisting herhandkerchief in a torment of embarrassment. But they asked noquestions, these two. They evinced no curiosity about this disheveledcreature who had flung herself in upon their decent solitude. 

Tessie stared at the fire. She looked up at Old Man Hatton's face andopened her lips. She looked down and shut them again. Then she flasheda quick look at Angie, to see if she could detect there some suspicion, some disdain. None. Angie Hatton looked--well, Tessie put it toherself, thus: "She looks like she'd cried till she couldn't cry nomore--only inside. "

And then, surprisingly, Tessie began to talk. "I wouldn't never havegone with this fella, only Chuck, he was gone. All the boys're gone. It's fierce. You get scared, sitting home, waiting, and they're inFrance and everywhere, learning French and everything, and meetinggrand people and having a fuss made over 'em. So I got mad and said Ididn't care, I wasn't going to squat home all my life, waiting----"

Angie Hatton had stopped knitting now. Old Man Hatton was looking downat her very kindly. And so Tessie went on. The pent-up emotions andthoughts of these past months were finding an outlet at last. Thesethings which she had never been able to discuss with her mother she nowwas laying bare to Angie Hatton and Old Man Hatton! They asked noquestions. They seemed to understand. Once Old Man Hatton interruptedwith: "So that's the kind of fellow they've got as escapement-roomforeman, eh?"

Tessie, whose mind was working very clearly now, put out a quick hand. "Say, it wasn't his fault. He's a bum, all right, but I knew it, didn't I? It was me. I didn't care. Seemed to me it didn't make nodifference who I went with, but it does. " She looked down at her handsclasped so tightly in her lap. 

"Yes, it makes a whole lot of difference, " Angie agreed, and looked upat her father. 

At that Tessie blurted her last desperate problem: "He's learning allkind of new things. Me, I ain't learning anything. When Chuck comeshome he'll just think I'm dumb, that's all. He----"

"What kind of thing would you like to learn, Tessie, so that when Chuckcomes home----"

Tessie looked up then, her wide mouth quivering with eagerness. "I'dlike to learn to swim--and row a boat--and play tennis--like the richgirls--like the girls that's making such a fuss over the soldiers. "

Angie Hatton was not laughing. So, after a moment's hesitation, Tessiebrought out the worst of it. "And French. I'd like to learn to talkFrench. "

Old Man Hatton had been surveying his shoes, his mouth grim. He lookedat Angie now and smiled a little. "Well, Angie, it looks as if you'dfound your job right here at home, doesn't it? This young lady's justone of hundreds, I suppose. Thousands. You can have the whole housefor them, if you want it, Angie, and the grounds, and all the money youneed. I guess we've kind of overlooked the girls. Hm, Angie? Whatd'you say?"

But Tessie was not listening. She had scarcely heard. Her face waswhite with earnestness. 

"Can you speak French?"

"Yes, " Angie answered. 

"Well, " said Tessie, and gulped once, "well, how do you say in French:'Give me a piece of bread'? That's what I want to learn first. "

Angie Hatton said it correctly. 

"That's it! Wait a minute! Say it again, will you?"

Angie said it again, Tessie wet her lips. Her cheeks were smearedwith tears and dirt. Her hair was wild and her blouse awry. "DONNAY-MA-UN-MORSO-DOO-PANG, " she articulated painfully. And in thatmoment, as she put her hand in that of Chuck Mory, across the ocean, her face was very beautiful with contentment. 

Long Distance [1919]

Chet Ball was painting a wooden chicken yellow. The wooden chicken wasmounted on a six-by-twelve board. The board was mounted on four tinywheels. The whole would eventually be pulled on a string guided by theplump, moist hand of some blissful five-year-old. 

You got the incongruity of it the instant your eye fell upon Chet Ball. Chet's shoulders alone would have loomed large in contrast with anywooden toy ever devised, including the Trojan horse. Everything abouthim, from the big, blunt-fingered hands that held the ridiculous chickto the great muscular pillar of his neck, was in direct opposition tohis task, his surroundings, and his attitude. 

Chet's proper milieu was Chicago, Illinois (the West Side); his jobthat of lineman for the Gas, Light & Power Company; his normal workingposition astride the top of a telegraph pole, supported in his perilousperch by a lineman's leather belt and the kindly fates, both of whichare likely to trick you in an emergency. 

Yet now he lolled back among his pillows, dabbing complacently at theabsurd yellow toy. A description of his surroundings would sound likepages 3 to 17 of a novel by Mrs. Humphry Ward. The place was allgreensward, and terraces, and sundials, and beeches, and even thoserhododendrons without which no English novel or country estate iscomplete. The presence of Chet Ball among his pillows and somehundreds similarly disposed revealed to you at once the fact that thisparticular English estate was now transformed into ReconstructionHospital No. 9. 

The painting of the chicken quite finished (including two beady blackpaint eyes), Chet was momentarily at a loss. Miss Kate had not toldhim to stop painting when the chicken was completed. Miss Kate was atthe other end of the sunny garden walk, bending over a wheel chair. SoChet went on painting, placidly. One by one, with meticulous nicety, he painted all his fingernails a bright and cheery yellow. Then he didthe whole of his left thumb and was starting on the second joint of theindex finger when Miss Kate came up behind him and took the brushgently from his strong hands. 

"You shouldn't have painted your fingers, " she said. 

Chet surveyed them with pride. "They look swell. "

Miss Kate did not argue the point. She put the freshly painted woodenchicken on the table to dry in the sun. Her eyes fell upon a letterbearing an American postmark and addressed to Sergeant Chester Ball, with a lot of cryptic figures and letters strung out after it, such asA. E. F. And Co. 11. 

"Here's a letter for you!" She infused a lot of Glad into her voice. But Chet only cast a languid eye upon it and said, "Yeh?"

"I'll read it to you, shall I? It's a nice fat one. "

Chet sat back, indifferent, negatively acquiescent. And Miss Katebegan to read in her clear young voice, there in the sunshine and scentof the centuries-old English garden. 

It marked an epoch in Chet's life--that letter. It reached out acrossthe Atlantic Ocean from the Chester Ball of his Chicago days, before hehad even heard of English gardens. 

Your true lineman has a daredevil way with the women, as have all menwhose calling is a hazardous one. Chet was a crack workman. He couldshinny up a pole, strap his emergency belt, open his tool kit, wieldhis pliers with expert deftness, and climb down again in record time. It was his pleasure--and seemingly the pleasure and privilege of alllineman's gangs the world over--to whistle blithely and to callimpudently to any passing petticoat that caught his fancy. 

Perched three feet from the top of the high pole he would clingprotected, seemingly, by some force working in direct defiance of thelaw of gravity. And now and then, by way of brightening the tedium oftheir job, he and his gang would call to a girl passing in the streetbelow, "Hoo-hoo! Hello, sweetheart!"

There was nothing vicious in it. Chet would have come to the aid ofbeauty in distress as quickly as Don Quixote. Any man with a blueshirt as clean and a shave as smooth and a haircut as round as ChetBall's has no meanness in him. A certain daredeviltry went hand inhand with his work--a calling in which a careless load dispatcher, acut wire, or a faulty strap may mean instant death. Usually the girlslaughed and called back to them or went on more quickly, the color intheir cheeks a little higher. 

But not Anastasia Rourke. Early the first morning of a two-week job onthe new plant of the Western Castings Company, Chet Ball, glancing downfrom his dizzy perch atop an electric-light pole, espied Miss AnastasiaRourke going to work. He didn't know her name or anything about her, except that she was pretty. You could see that from a distance evenmore remote than Chet's. But you couldn't know that Stasia was a ladynot to be trifled with. We know her name was Rourke, but he didn't. 

So then: "Hoo-hoo!" he had called. "Hello, sweetheart! Wait for meand I'll be down. "

Stasia Rourke had lifted her face to where he perched so high above thestreets. Her cheeks were five shades pinker than was their wont, whichwould make them border on the red. 

"You big ape, you!" she called, in her clear, crisp voice. "If you hadyour foot on the ground you wouldn't dast call to a decent girl likethat. If you were down here I'd slap the face of you. You know you'resafe up there. "

The words were scarcely out of her mouth before Chet Ball's sturdy legswere twinkling down the pole. His spurred heels dug into the soft pineof the pole with little ripe, tearing sounds. He walked up to Stasiaand stood squarely in front of her, six feet of brawn and brazen nerve. One ruddy cheek he presented to her astonished gaze. "Hello, sweetheart, " he said. And waited. The Rourke girl hesitated just asecond. All the Irish heart in her was melting at the boyish impudenceof the man before her. Then she lifted one hand and slapped his smoothcheek. It was a ringing slap. You saw the four marks of her fingersupon his face. Chet straightened, his blue eyes bluer. Stasia lookedup at him, her eyes wide. Then down at her own hand, as if it belongedto somebody else. Her hand came up to her own face. She burst intotears, turned, and ran. And as she ran, and as she wept, she saw thatChet was still standing there, looking after her. 

Next morning, when Stasia Rourke went by to work, Chet Ball wasstanding at the foot of the pole, waiting. 

They were to have been married that next June. But that next June ChetBall, perched perilously on the branch of a tree in a small woodsy spotsomewhere in France, was one reason why the American artillery in thatsame woodsy spot was getting such a deadly range on the enemy. Chet'scostume was so devised that even through field glasses (made inGermany) you couldn't tell where tree left off and Chet began. 

Then, quite suddenly, the Germans got the range. The tree in whichChet was hidden came down with a crash, and Chet lay there, more thanever indiscernible among its tender foliage. 

Which brings us back to the English garden, the yellow chicken, MissKate, and the letter. 

His shattered leg was mended by one of those miracles of modern warsurgery, though he never again would dig his spurred heels into thepine of a G. L. & P. Company pole. But the other thing--they put itdown under the broad general head of shock. In the lovely Englishgarden they set him to weaving and painting as a means of soothing theshattered nerves. He had made everything from pottery jars to beadchains, from baskets to rugs. Slowly the tortured nerves healed. Butthe doctors, when they stopped at Chet's cot or chair, talked always of"the memory center. " Chet seemed satisfied to go on placidly paintingtoys or weaving chains with his great, square-tipped fingers--thefingers that had wielded the pliers so cleverly in his pole-climbingdays. 

"It's just something that only luck or an accident can mend, " said thenerve specialist. "Time may do it--but I doubt it. Sometimes just aword--the right word--will set the thing in motion again. Does he getany letters?"

"His girl writes to him. Fine letters. But she doesn't know yetabout--about this. I've written his letters for him. She knows nowthat his leg is healed and she wonders----"

That had been a month ago. Today Miss Kate slit the envelopepost-marked Chicago. Chet was fingering the yellow wooden chicken, pride in his eyes. In Miss Kate's eyes there was a troubled, baffledlook as she began to read:

 Chet, dear, it's raining in Chicago. And you know when it rains in Chicago it's wetter, and muddier, and rainier than any place in the world. Except maybe this Flanders we're reading so much about. They say for rain and mud that place takes the prize. 

 I don't know what I'm going on about rain and mud for, Chet darling, when it's you I'm thinking of. Nothing else and nobody else. Chet, I got a funny feeling there's something you're keeping back from me. You're hurt worse than just the leg. Boy, dear, don't you know it won't make any difference with me how you look, or feel, or anything? I don't care how bad you're smashed up. I'd rather have you without any features at all than any other man with two sets. Whatever's happened to the outside of you, they can't change your insides. And you're the same man that called out to me that day, "Hoo-hoo! Hello, sweetheart!" and when I gave you a piece of my mind, climbed down off the pole, and put your face up to be slapped, God bless the boy in you----

A sharp little sound from him. Miss Kate looked up, quickly. Chet Ballwas staring at the beady-eyed yellow chicken in his hand. 

"What's this thing?" he demanded in a strange voice. 

Miss Kate answered him very quietly, trying to keep her own voice easyand natural. "That's a toy chicken, cut out of wood. "

"What'm I doin' with it?"

"You've just finished painting it. "

Chet Ball held it in his great hand and stared at it for a briefmoment, struggling between anger and amusement. And between anger andamusement he put it down on the table none too gently and stood up, yawning a little. 

"That's a hell of a job for a he-man!" Then in utter contrition: "Oh, beggin' your pardon! That was fierce! I didn't----"

But there was nothing shocked about the expression on Miss Kate's face. She was registering joy--pure joy. 

The Maternal Feminine [1919]

Called upon to describe Aunt Sophy, you would have to coin a term orfall back on the dictionary definition of a spinster. "An unmarriedwoman, " states that worthy work, baldly, "especially when no longeryoung. " That, to the world, was Sophy Decker. Unmarried, certainly. And most certainly no longer young. In figure, she was, at fifty, whatis known in the corset ads as a "stylish stout. " Well dressed in darksuits, with broad-toed health shoes and a small, astute hat. The suitwas practical common sense. The health shoes were comfort. The hatwas strictly business. Sophy Decker made and sold hats, both astuteand ingenuous, to the female population of Chippewa, Wisconsin. Chippewa's East End set bought the knowing type of hat, and the millhands and hired girls bought the naive ones. But whether lumpy orpossessed of that thing known as line, Sophy Decker's hats were honesthats. 

The world is full of Aunt Sophys, unsung. Plump, ruddy, capable womenof middle age. Unwed, and rather looked down upon by a family ofmarried sisters and tolerant, good-humored brothers-in-law, andcareless nieces and nephews. 

"Poor Aunt Soph, " with a significant half smile. "She's such a goodold thing. And she's had so little in life, really. "

She was, undoubtedly, a good old thing--Aunt Soph. Forever sending amodel hat to this pert little niece in Seattle; or taking Adele, SisterFlora's daughter, to Chicago or New York as a treat on one of herbuying trips. 

Burdening herself, on her business visits to these cities, with a dozenfoolish shopping commissions for the idle womenfolk of her family. Hearing without partisanship her sisters' complaints about theirhusbands, and her sisters' husbands' complaints about their wives. Itwas always the same. 

"I'm telling you this, Sophy. I wouldn't breathe it to another livingsoul. But I honestly think, sometimes, that if it weren't for thechildren----"

There is no knowing why they confided these things to Sophy instead ofto each other, these wedded sisters of hers. Perhaps they held foreach other an unuttered distrust or jealousy. Perhaps, in making aconfidante of Sophy, there was something of the satisfaction that comesof dropping a surreptitious stone down a deep well and hearing itplunk, safe in the knowledge that it has struck no one and that itcannot rebound, lying there in the soft darkness. Sometimes they wouldend by saying, "But you don't know what it is, Sophy. You can't. I'msure I don't know why I'm telling you all this. "

But when Sophy answered, sagely, "I know; I know, " they paid littleheed, once having unburdened themselves. The curious part of it isthat she did know. She knew as a woman of fifty must know who, all herlife, has given and given and in return has received nothing. SophyDecker had never used the word inhibition in her life. She may nothave known what it meant. She only knew (without in the least knowingshe knew) that in giving of her goods, of her affections, of her time, of her energy, she found a certain relief. Her own people would havebeen shocked if you had told them that there was about this old-maidaunt something rather splendidly Rabelaisian. Without being what isknown as a masculine woman, she had, somehow, acquired the man'sviewpoint, his shrewd value sense. She ate a good deal, and enjoyedher food. She did not care for those queer little stories that marriedwomen sometimes tell, with narrowed eyes, but she was strangelytolerant of what is known as sin. So simple and direct she was thatyou wondered how she prospered in a line so subtle as the millinerybusiness. 

You might have got a fairly true characterization of Sophy Decker fromone of fifty people: from a salesman in a New York or Chicago wholesalemillinery house; from Otis Cowan, cashier of the First National Bank ofChippewa; from Julia Gold, her head milliner and trimmer; from almostanyone, in fact, except a member of her own family. They knew herleast of all. Her three married sisters--Grace in Seattle, Ella inChicago, and Flora in Chippewa--regarded her with a rather affectionatedisapproval from the snug safety of their own conjugal inglenooks. 

"I don't know. There's something--well--common about Sophy, " Floraconfided to Ella. Flora, on shopping bent, and Sophy, seeking hats, had made the five-hour run from Chippewa to Chicago together. "Shetalks to everybody. You should have heard her with the porter on ourtrain. Chums! And when the conductor took our tickets it was a socialoccasion. You know how packed the seven-fifty-two is. Every seat inthe parlor car taken. And Sophy asking the colored porter about howhis wife was getting along--she called him William--and if they weregoing to send her West, and all about her. I wish she wouldn't. "

Aunt Sophy undeniably had a habit of regarding people as human beings. You found her talking to chambermaids and delivery boys, and elevatorstarters, and gas collectors, and hotel clerks--all that aloof, unapproachable, superior crew. Under her benign volubility theybloomed and spread and took on color as do those tight little paperwater flowers when you cast them into a bowl. It wasn't idle curiosityin her. She was interested. You found yourself confiding to her yourinnermost longings, your secret tribulations, under the encouragementof her sympathetic, "You don't say!" Perhaps it was as well thatSister Flora was in ignorance of the fact that the millinery salesmenat Danowitz & Danowitz, Importers, always called Miss Decker Aunt Soph, as, with one arm flung about her plump shoulder, they revealed to herthe picture of their girl in the back flap of their billfold. 

Flora, with a firm grip on Chippewa society, as represented by the EastEnd set, did not find her position enhanced by a sister in themillinery business in Elm Street. 

"Of course it's wonderful that she's self-supporting and successful andall, " she told her husband. "But it's not so pleasant for Adele, nowthat she's growing up, having all the girls she knows buying their hatsof her aunt. Not that I--but you know how it is. "

H. Charnsworth Baldwin said yes, he knew. 

When the Decker girls were young, the Deckers had lived in a saggingold frame house (from which the original paint had long ago peeled ingreat scrofulous patches) on an unimportant street in Chippewa. Therewas a worm-eaten, russet-apple tree in the yard, an untidy tangle ofwild-cucumber vine over the front porch, and an uncut brush ofsunburned grass and weeds all about. 

From May until September you never passed the Decker place withouthearing the plunkety-plink of a mandolin from somewhere behind thevines, laughter, and the creak-creak of the hard-worked and protestinghammock hooks. 

Flora, Ella, and Grace Decker had had more beaux and fewer clothes thanany other girls in Chippewa. In a town full of pretty young things, they were, undoubtedly, the prettiest; and in a family of prettysisters (Sophy always excepted) Flora was the acknowledged beauty. Shewas the kind of girl whose nose never turns red on a frosty morning. Alittle, white, exquisite nose, purest example of the degree ofperfection which may be attained by that vulgarest of features. Underher great gray eyes were faint violet shadows which gave her a look ofalmost poignant wistfulness. Her slow, sweet smile give the beholderan actual physical pang. Only her family knew she was lazy as abehemoth, untidy about her person, and as sentimental as a hungryshark. The strange and cruel part of it was that, in some grotesque, exaggerated way, as a cartoon may be like a photograph, Sophy resembledFlora. It was as though nature, in prankish mood, had given a cabbagethe color and texture of a rose, with none of its fragile reticence andgrace. 

It was a manless household. Mrs. Decker, vague, garrulous, referred toher dead husband, in frequent reminiscence, as poor Mr. Decker. Mrs. Decker dragged one leg as she walked--rheumatism, or a spinalaffection. Small wonder, then, that Sophy, the plain, with a gift forhatmaking, a knack at eggless cake baking, and a genius for turning asleeve so that last year's style met this year's without a struggle, contributed nothing to the sag in the center of the old twine hammockon the front porch. 

That the three girls should marry well, and Sophy not at all, was asinevitable as the sequence of the seasons. Ella and Grace did notmanage badly, considering that they had only their girlish prettinessand the twine hammock to work with. But Flora, with her beauty, captured H. Charnsworth Baldwin. Chippewa gasped. H. CharnsworthBaldwin drove a skittish mare to a high-wheeled yellow runabout; hadhis clothes made at Proctor Brothers in Milwaukee; and talked about agame called golf. It was he who advocated laying out a section of landfor what he called links, and erecting a clubhouse thereon. 

"The section of the bluff overlooking the river, " he explained, "isfull of natural hazards, besides having a really fine view. "

Chippewa--or that comfortable, middle-class section of it which got itsexercise walking home to dinner from the store at noon, and cutting thegrass evenings after supper--laughed as it read this interview in theChippewa Eagle. 

"A golf course, " they repeated to one another, grinning. "Conklin's cowpasture, up the river. It's full of natural--wait a minute--whatwas?--oh, yeh, here it is--hazards. Full of natural hazards. Say, couldn't you die!"

For H. Charnsworth Baldwin had been little Henry Baldwin before he wentEast to college. Ten years later H. Charnsworth, in knickerbockers andgay-topped stockings, was winning the cup in the men's tournamentplayed on the Chippewa golf-club course, overlooking the river. Andhis name, in stout gold letters, blinked at you from the plate-glasswindows of the office at the corner of Elm and Winnebago:

 NORTHERN LUMBER AND LAND COMPANY H. Charnsworth Baldwin, Pres. 

Two blocks farther down Elm Street was another sign, not so glittering, which read:

 Miss Sophy Decker Millinery

Sophy's hatmaking, in the beginning, had been done at home. She hadalways made her sisters' hats, and her own, of course, and anoccasional hat for a girl friend. After her sisters had married, Sophyfound herself in possession of a rather bewildering amount of sparetime. The hat trade grew so that sometimes there were six ratherbotchy little bonnets all done up in yellow paper pyramids with a pinat the top, awaiting their future wearers. After her mother's deathSophy still stayed on in the old house. She took a course in millineryin Milwaukee, came home, stuck up a homemade sign in the parlor window(the untidy cucumber vines came down), and began her hatmaking inearnest. In five years she had opened a shop on a side street nearElm, had painted the old house, installed new plumbing, built a wartystucco porch, and transformed the weedy, grass-tangled yard into anorderly stretch of green lawn and bright flower beds. In ten years shewas in Elm Street, and the Chippewa Eagle ran a half column twice ayear describing her spring and fall openings. On these occasions AuntSophy, in black satin and marcel wave and her most relentless corsets, was, in all the superficial things, not a pleat or fold or line or wavebehind her city colleagues. She had all the catch phrases:

"This is awfully good this year. "

"Here's a sweet thing. A Mornet model. "

". . . Well, but, my dear, it's the style--the line--you're paying for, not the material. "

"No, that hat doesn't do a thing for you. "

"I've got it. I had you in mind when I bought it. Now don't say youcan't wear henna. Wait till you see it on. "

When she stood behind you as you sat, uncrowned and expectant beforethe mirror, she would poise the hat four inches above your head, holding it in the tips of her fingers, a precious, fragile thing. Yourfascinated eyes were held by it, and your breath as well. Then down itdescended, slowly, slowly. A quick pressure. 

Her fingers firm against your temples. A little sigh of relievedsuspense. 

"That's wonderful on you! . . . You don't! Oh, my dear! But that'sbecause you're not used to it. You know how you said, for years, youhad to have a brim, and couldn't possibly wear a turban, with yournose, until I proved to you that if the head size was only big . . . Well, perhaps this needs just a lit-tle lift here. Ju-u-ust a nip. There! That does it. "

And that did it. Not that Sophy Decker ever tried to sell you a hatagainst your judgment, taste, or will. She was too wise a psychologistand too shrewd a businesswoman for that. She preferred that you go outof her shop hatless rather than with an unbecoming hat. But whetheryou bought or not you took with you out of Sophy Decker's shopsomething more precious than any hatbox ever contained. Just to hearher admonishing a customer, her good-natured face all aglow:

"My dear, always put on your hat before you get into your dress. I do. You can get your arms above your head, and set it right. I put on myhat and veil as soon's I get my hair combed. "

In your mind's eye you saw her, a stout, well-stayed figure in tightbrassiere and scant slip, bare-armed and bare-bosomed, in smart hat andveil, attired as though for the street from the neck up and for thebedroom from the shoulders down. 

The East End set bought Sophy Decker's hats because they were modishand expensive hats. But she managed, miraculously, to gain a large andlucrative following among the paper-mill girls and factory hands aswell. You would have thought that any attempt to hold both theseopposites would cause her to lose one or the other. Aunt Sophy said, frankly, that of the two, she would have preferred to lose her smarttrade. 

"The mill girls come in with their money in their hands, you might say. They get good wages and they want to spend them. I wouldn't try tosell them one of those little plain model hats. They wouldn'tunderstand 'em or like them. And if I told them the price they'd thinkI was trying to cheat them. They want a hat with something good andsolid on it. Their fathers wouldn't prefer caviar to pork roast, wouldthey? It's the same idea. "

Her shopwindows reflected her business acumen. One was chastely, severely elegant, holding a single hat poised on a slender stick. 

In the other were a dozen honest arrangements of velvet and satin andplumes. 

At the spring opening she always displayed one of those little toquescompletely covered with violets. That violet-covered toque was asymbol. 

"I don't expect 'em to buy it, " Sophy Decker explained. "But everybodyfeels there should be a hat like that at a spring opening. It's like afruit centerpiece at a family dinner. Nobody ever eats it, but it hasto be there. "

The two Baldwin children--Adele and Eugene--found Aunt Sophy's shop atreasure trove. Adele, during her doll days, possessed such boxes ofsatin and velvet scraps, and bits of lace and ribbon and jet as to makeher the envy of all her playmates. She used to crawl about the floorof the shop workroom and under the table and chairs like a littlescavenger. 

"What in the world do you do with all that truck, child?" asked AuntSophy. "You must have barrels of it. "

Adele stuffed another wisp of tulle into the pocket of her pinafore. 

"I keep it, " she said. 

When she was ten Adele had said to her mother, "Why do you always say'Poor Sophy'?"

"Because--Aunt Sophy's had so little in life. She never has married, and has always worked. "

Adele considered that. "If you don't get married do they say you'repoor?"

"Well--yes----"

"Then I'll get married, " announced Adele. A small, dark, eerie child, skinny and rather foreign-looking. The boy, Eugene, had the beautywhich should have been the girl's. Very tall, very blond, with thestraight nose and wistful eyes of the Flora of twenty years ago. "Ifonly Adele could have had his looks, " his mother used to say. "They'rewasted on a man. He doesn't need them, but a girl does. Adele willhave to be well dressed and interesting. And that's such hard work. "

Flora said she worshiped her children. And she actually sometimesstill coquetted heavily with her husband. At twenty she had beenaddicted to baby talk when endeavoring to coax something out ofsomeone. Her admirers had found it irresistible. At forty it wasawful. Her selfishness was colossal. She affected a semi-invalidismand for fifteen years had spent one day a week in bed. She took noexercise and a great deal of soda bicarbonate and tried to fight herfat with baths. Fifteen or twenty years had worked a startling changein the two sisters, Flora the beautiful and Sophy the plain. It wasmore than a mere physical change. It was a spiritual thing, thoughneither knew nor marked it. Each had taken on weight, the one, solidly, comfortably; the other, flabbily, unhealthily. With theencroaching fat, Flora's small, delicate features seemed, somehow, todisappear in her face, so that you saw it as a large white surfacebearing indentations, ridges, and hollows like one of those enlargedphotographs of the moon's surface as seen through a telescope. Aself-centered face, and misleadingly placid. Aunt Sophy's large, plainfeatures, plumply padded now, impressed you as indicating strength, courage, and a great human understanding. 

From her husband and her children, Flora exacted service that wouldhave chafed a galley slave into rebellion. She loved to lie in bed, inan orchid bed jacket with ribbons, and be read to by Adele, or Eugene, or her husband. They all hated it. 

"She just wants to be waited on, and petted, and admired, " Adele hadstormed one day, in open rebellion, to her Aunt Sophy. "She uses it asan excuse for everything and has, ever since Gene and I were children. She's as strong as an ox. " Not a daughterly speech, but true. 

Years before, a generous but misguided woman friend, coming in to call, had been ushered in to where Mrs. Baldwin lay propped up in a nest ofpillows. 

"Well, I don't blame you, " the caller had gushed. "If I looked the wayyou do in bed I'd stay there forever. Don't tell me you're sick, withall that lovely color!"

Flora Baldwin had rolled her eyes ceilingward. "Nobody ever gives mecredit for all my suffering and ill-health. And just because all myblood is in my cheeks. "

Flora was ambitious, socially, but too lazy to make the effortnecessary for success in that direction. 

"I love my family, " she would say. "They fill my life. After all, that's a profession in itself--being a wife and mother. "

She showed her devotion by taking no interest whatever in her husband'sland schemes; by forbidding Eugene to play football at school for fearhe might be injured; by impressing Adele with the necessity forvivacity and modishness because of what she called her unfortunate lackof beauty. 

"I don't understand it, " she used to say in the child's presence. "Herfather's handsome enough, goodness knows; and I wasn't such a frightwhen I was a girl. And look at her! Little dark skinny thing. "

The boy, Eugene, grew up a very silent, handsome, shy young fellow. The girl, dark, voluble, and rather interesting. The husband, more andmore immersed in his business, was absent from home for long periodsirritable after some of these home-comings; boisterously high-spiritedfollowing other trips. Now growling about household expenses andunpaid bills; now urging the purchase of some almost prohibitiveluxury. Anyone but a nagging, self-absorbed, and vain woman such asFlora would have marked these unmistakable signs. But Flora was ataker, not a giver. She thought herself affectionate because shecraved affection unduly. She thought herself a fond mother because sheinsisted on having her children with her, under her thumb, markingtheir devotion as a prisoner marks time with his feet, stupidly, shufflingly, advancing not a step. 

Sometimes Sophy, the clear-eyed, seeing this state of affairs, tried tostop it. 

"You expect too much of your husband and children, " she said one day, bluntly, to her sister. 

"I!" Flora's dimpled hand had flown to her breast like a woundedthing. "I! You're crazy! There isn't a more devoted wife and motherin the world. That's the trouble. I love them too much. "

"Well, then, " grimly, "stop it for a change. That's half Eugene'snervousness--your fussing over him. He's eighteen. Give him a chance. You're weakening him. And stop dinning that society stuff into Adele'sears. She's got brains, that child. Why, just yesterday, in theworkroom, she got hold of some satin and a shape and turned out alittle turban that Angie Hatton----"

"Do you mean to tell me that Angie Hatton saw my Adele working in yourshop! Now, look here, Sophy. You're earning your living, and it's toyour credit. You're my sister. But I won't have Adele associated inthe minds of my friends with your hat store, understand? I won't haveit. That isn't what I sent her away to an expensive school for. Tohave her come back and sit around a millinery workshop with a lot oflittle, cheap, shoddy sewing girls! Now, understand, I won't have it!You don't know what it is to be a mother. You don't know what it is tohave suffered. If you had brought two children into the world----"

So, then, it had come about during the years between their childhoodand their youth that Aunt Sophy received the burden of theirconfidences, their griefs, their perplexities. She seemed, somehow, tounderstand in some miraculous way, and to make the burden a welcome one. 

"Well, now, you tell Aunt Sophy all about it. Stop crying, Della. Howcan I hear when you're crying! That's my baby. Now, then. "

This when they were children. But with the years the habit clung andbecame fixed. There was something about Aunt Sophy's house--the oldframe house with the warty stucco porch. For that matter, there wassomething about the very shop downtown, with its workroom in the rear, that had a cozy, homelike quality never possessed by the big Baldwinhouse. H. Charnsworth Baldwin had built a large brick mansion, in theTudor style, on a bluff overlooking the Fox River, in the bestresidential section of Chippewa. It was expensively furnished. Thehall console alone was enough to strike a preliminary chill to yourheart. 

The millinery workroom, winter days, was always bright and warm andsnug. The air was a little close, perhaps, and heavy, but with a notunpleasant smell of dyes and stuffs and velvet and glue and steam andflatiron and a certain racy scent that Julia Gold, the head trimmer, always used. There was a sociable cat, white with a dark-gray patch onhis throat and a swipe of it across one flank that spoiled him forstyle and beauty but made him a comfortable-looking cat to have around. Sometimes, on very cold days, or in the rush season, the girls wouldnot go home to dinner, but would bring their lunches and cook coffeeover a little gas heater in the corner. Julia Gold, especially, drankquantities of coffee. Aunt Sophy had hired her from Chicago. She hadbeen with her for five years. She said Julia was the best trimmer shehad ever had. Aunt Sophy often took her to New York or Chicago on herbuying trips. Julia had not much genius for original design, or shenever would have been content to be head milliner in a small-town shop. But she could copy a fifty-dollar model from memory down to the lastdetail of crown and brim. It was a gift that made her invaluable. 

The boy, Eugene, used to like to look at Julia Gold. Her hair was veryblack and her face was very white, and her eyebrows met in a thick darkline. Her face as she bent over her work was sullen and brooding, butwhen she lifted her head suddenly, in conversation, you were startledby a vivid flash of teeth and eyes and smile. Her voice was deep andlow. She made you a little uncomfortable. Her eyes seemed always tobe asking something. Around the worktable, mornings, she used torelate the dream she had had the night before. In these dreams she wasalways being pursued by a lover. "And then I woke up, screaming. "Neither she nor the sewing girls knew what she was revealing in theseconfidences of hers. But Aunt Sophy, the shrewd, somehow sensed it. 

"You're alone too much, evenings. That's what comes of living in aboardinghouse. You come over to me for a week. The change will do yougood, and it'll be nice for me, too, having somebody to keep mecompany. "

Julia often came for a week or ten days at a time. Julia, about thehouse after supper, was given to those vivid splashy negligees with bigflower patterns strewn over them. They made her hair look blacker andher skin whiter by contrast. Sometimes Eugene or Adele or both woulddrop in and the four would play bridge. Aunt Sophy played a shrewd andcanny game, Adele a rather brilliant one, Julia a wild and disastroushand, always, and Eugene so badly that only Julia would take him on asa partner. Mrs. Baldwin never knew about these evenings. 

It was on one of these occasions that Aunt Sophy, coming unexpectedlyinto the living room from the kitchen, where she and Adele wereforaging for refreshments after the game, beheld Julia Gold and Eugene, arms clasped about each other, cheek to cheek. They started up as shecame in and faced her, the woman defiantly, the boy bravely. JuliaGold was thirty (with reservations) at that time, and the boy not quitetwenty-one. 

"How long?" said Aunt Sophy, quietly. She had a mayonnaise spoon and aleaf of lettuce in her hand then, and still she did not look comic. 

"I'm crazy about her, " said Eugene. "We're crazy about each other. We're going to be married. "

Aunt Sophy listened for the reassuring sound of Adele's spoons andplates in the kitchen. She came forward. "Now, listen----" she began. 

"I love him, " said Julia Gold, dramatically. "I love him!"

Except that it was very white and, somehow, old-looking, Aunt Sophy'sface was as benign as always. "Now, look here, Julia, my girl. Thatisn't love, and you know it. I'm an old maid, but I know what love iswhen I see it. I'm ashamed of you, Julia. Sensible woman like you, hugging and kissing a boy like that, and old enough to be his mother. "

"Now, look here, Aunt Sophy! If you're going to talk that way---- Why, she's wonderful. She's taught me what it means to really----"

"Oh, my land!" Aunt Sophy sat down, looking suddenly very ill. 

And then, from the kitchen, Adele's clear young voice: "Heh! What'sthe idea! I'm not going to do all the work. Where's everybody?"

Aunt Sophy started up again. She came up to them and put a hand--acapable, firm, steadying hand--on the arm of each. The woman drewback, but the boy did not. 

"Will you promise me not to do anything for a week? Just a week! Willyou promise me? Will you?"

"Are you going to tell Father?"

"Not for a week, if you'll promise not to see each other in that week. No, I don't want to send you away, Julia, I don't want to. . . . You'renot a bad girl. It's just--he's never had--at home they never gave hima chance. Just a week, Julia. Just a week, Eugene. We can talkthings over then. "

Adele's footsteps coming from the kitchen. 

"Quick!"

"I promise, " said Eugene. Julia said nothing. 

"Well, really, " said Adele, from the doorway, "you're a nervy lot, sitting around while I slave in the kitchen. Gene, see if you can openthe olives with this fool can opener. I tried. "

There is no knowing what she expected to do in that week, Aunt Sophy;what miracle she meant to perform. She had no plan in her mind. Justhope. She looked strangely shrunken and old, suddenly. But when, three days later, the news came that America was to go into the war shehad her answer. 

Flora was beside herself. "Eugene won't have to go. He isn't oldenough, thank God! And by the time he is it will be over. Surely. "She was almost hysterical. 

Eugene was in the room. Aunt Sophy looked at him and he looked at AuntSophy. In her eyes was a question. In his was the answer. They saidnothing. The next day Eugene enlisted. In three days he was gone. Flora took to her bed. Next day Adele, a faint, unwonted color markingher cheeks, walked into her mother's bedroom and stood at the side ofthe recumbent figure. Her father, his hands clasped behind him, waspacing up and down, now and then kicking a cushion that had fallen tothe floor. He was chewing a dead cigar, one side of his face twistedcuriously over the cylinder in his mouth so that he had a sinister andcrafty look. 

"Charnsworth, won't you please stop ramping up and down like that! Mynerves are killing me. I can't help it if the war has done somethingor other to your business. I'm sure no wife could have been moreeconomical than I have. Nothing matters but Eugene, anyway. How couldhe do such a thing! I've given my whole life to my children----"

H. Charnsworth kicked the cushion again so that it struck the wall atthe opposite side of the room. Flora drew her breath in between herteeth as though a knife had entered her heart. 

Adele still stood at the side of the bed, looking at her mother. Herhands were clasped behind her, too. In that moment, as she stoodthere, she resembled her mother and her father so startlingly andsimultaneously that the two, had they been less absorbed in their ownaffairs, must have marked it. 

The girl's head came up stiffly. "Listen. I'm going to marry DanielOakley. "

Daniel Oakley was fifty, and a friend of her father's. For years hehad been coming to the house and for years she had ridiculed him. Sheand Eugene had called him Sturdy Oak because he was always talkingabout his strength and endurance, his walks, his rugged health;pounding his chest meanwhile and planting his feet far apart. He andBaldwin had had business relations as well as friendly ones. 

At this announcement Flora screamed and sat up in bed. H. Charnsworthstopped short in his pacing and regarded his daughter with a queerlook; a concentrated look, as though what she had said had set inmotion a whole mass of mental machinery within his brain. 

"When did he ask you?"

"He's asked me a dozen times. But it's different now. All the menwill be going to war. There won't be any left. Look at England andFrance. I'm not going to be left. " She turned squarely toward herfather, her young face set and hard. "You know what I mean. You knowwhat I mean. "

Flora, sitting up in bed, was sobbing. "I think you might have toldyour mother, Adele. What are children coming to! You stand there andsay, 'I'm going to marry Daniel Oakley. ' Oh, I am so faint . . . All ofa sudden . . . Get the spirits of ammonia. "

Adele turned and walked out of the room. She was married six weekslater. They had a regular prewar wedding--veil, flowers, dinner, andall. Aunt Sophy arranged the folds of her gown and draped her veil. The girl stood looking at herself in the mirror, a curious half smiletwisting her lips. She seemed slighter and darker than ever. 

"In all this white, and my veil, I look just like a fly in a quart ofmilk, " she said, with a laugh. Then, suddenly, she turned to her aunt, who stood behind her, and clung to her, holding her tight, tight. "Ican't!" she gasped. "I can't! I can't!"

Aunt Sophy held her off and looked at her, her eyes searching the girl. 

"What do you mean, Della? Are you just nervous or do you mean youdon't want to marry him? Do you mean that? Then what are you marryingfor? Tell me! Tell your Aunt Sophy. "

But Adele was straightening herself and pulling out the crushed foldsof her veil. "To pay the mortgage on the old homestead, of course. Just like the girl in the play. " She laughed a little. But Aunt Sophydid not. 

"Now look here, Della. If you're----"

But there was a knock at the door. Adele caught up her flowers. "It'sall right, " she said. Aunt Sophy stood with her back against the door. "If it's money, " she said. "It is! It is, isn't it! I've got moneysaved. It was for you children. I've always been afraid. I knew hewas sailing pretty close, with his speculations and all, since the war. He can have it all. It isn't too late yet. Adele! Della, my baby. "

"Don't, Aunt Sophy. It wouldn't be enough, anyway. Daniel has beenwonderful, really. Dad's been stealing money for years. Dan's. Don'tlook like that. I'd have hated being poor, anyway. Never could havegot used to it. It is ridiculous, though, isn't it? Like something inthe movies. I don't mind. I'm lucky, really, when you come to thinkof it. A plain little black thing like me. "

"But your mother----"

"Mother doesn't know a thing. "

Flora wept mistily all through the ceremony, but Adele was composedenough for two. 

When, scarcely a month later, Baldwin came to Sophy Decker, his facedrawn and queer, Sophy knew. 

"How much?" she said. 

"Thirty thousand will cover it. If you've got more than that----"

"I thought Oakley----Adele said----"

"He did, but he won't any more, and this thing's got to be met. It'sthis damned war that's done it. I'd have been all right. People gotscared. They wanted their money. They wanted it in cash. "

"Speculating with it, were you?"

"Oh, well, a woman doesn't understand these business deals. "

"No, naturally, " said Aunt Sophy, "a butterfly like me. "

"Sophy, for God's sake don't joke now. I tell you this will cover it, and everything will be all right. If I had anybody else to go to forthe money I wouldn't ask you. But you'll get it back. You know that. "

Aunt Sophy got up, heavily, and went over to her desk. "It was for thechildren, anyway. They won't need it now. "

He looked up at that. Something in her voice. "Who won't? Why won'tthey?"

"I don't know what made me say that. I had a dream. "

"Eugene?"

"Yes. "

"Oh, well, we're all nervous. Flora has dreams every night andpresentiments every fifteen minutes. Now, look here, Sophy. About thismoney. You'll never know how grateful I am. Flora doesn't understandthese things, but I can talk to you. It's like this----"

"I might as well be honest about it, " Sophy interrupted. "I'm doingit, not for you, but for Flora, and Della--and Eugene. Flora has livedsuch a sheltered life. I sometimes wonder if she ever really knew anyof you. Her husband, or her children. I sometimes have the feelingthat Della and Eugene are my children--were my children. "

When he came home that night Baldwin told his wife that old Soph wasgetting queer. "She talks about the children being hers, " he said. 

"Oh, well, she's awfully fond of them, " Flora explained. "And she'slived her little, narrow life, with nothing to bother her but her hatsand her house. She doesn't know what it means to suffer as a mothersuffers--poor Sophy. "

"Um, " Baldwin grunted. 

When the official notification of Eugene's death came from the WarDepartment, Aunt Sophy was so calm it might have appeared that Florahad been right. She took to her bed now in earnest, did Flora. Sophyneglected everything to give comfort to the stricken two. 

"How can you sit there like that!" Flora would rail. "How can you sitthere like that! Even if you weren't his mother, surely you must feelsomething. "

"It's the way he died that comforts me, " said Aunt Sophy. 

"What difference does that make!"

AMERICAN RED CROSS (Croix Rouge Americaine)

MY DEAR MRS. BALDWIN:

 I am sure you must have been officially notified by the U. S. War Dept. Of the death of your son, Lieut. Eugene H. Baldwin. But Iwant to write you what I can of his last hours. I was with him much ofthat time as his nurse. I'm sure it must mean much to a mother to hearfrom a woman who was privileged to be with her boy at the last. 

 Your son was brought to our hospital one night badly gassedfrom the fighting in the Argonne Forest. Ordinarily we do not receivegassed patients, as they are sent to a special hospital near here. Buttwo nights before, the Germans wrecked that hospital, so many gassedpatients have come to us. 

 Your son was put in the officers' ward, where the doctors whoexamined him told me there was absolutely no hope for him, as he hadinhaled so much gas that it was only a matter of a few hours. I couldscarcely believe that a man so big and strong as he was could not pullthrough. 

 The first bad attack he had, losing his breath and nearlychoking, rather frightened him, although the doctor and I were bothwith him. He held my hand tightly in his, begging me not to leave him, and repeating, over and over, that it was good to have a woman near. He was propped high in bed and put his head on my shoulder while Ifanned him until he breathed more easily. I stayed with him all thatnight, though I was not on duty. You see, his eyes also were badlyburned. But before he died he was able to see very well. I stayedwith him every minute of that night and have never seen a finercharacter than he showed during all that fight for life. 

 He had several bad attacks that night and came through each onesimply because of his great will power and fighting spirit. After eachattack he would grip my hand and say, "Well, we made it that time, didn't we, nurse?" Toward morning he asked me if he was going to die. I could not tell him the truth. He needed all his strength. I toldhim he had one chance in a thousand. He seemed to become very strongthen, and sitting bolt upright in bed, he said: "Then I'll fight forit!" We kept him alive for three days, and actually thought we had wonwhen on the third day. . . 

 But even in your sorrow you must be very proud to have been themother of such a son. . . . 

 I am a Wisconsin girl--Madison. When this is over and I comehome, will you let me see you so that I may tell you more than I canpossibly write?

 MARIAN KING

It was in March, six months later, that Marian King came. They hadhoped for it, but never expected it. And she came. Four people werewaiting in the living room of the big Baldwin house overlooking theriver. Flora and her husband, Adele and Aunt Sophy. They sat, waiting. Now and then Adele would rise, nervously, and go to thewindow that faced the street. Flora was weeping with audible sniffs. Baldwin sat in his chair, frowning a little, a dead cigar in one cornerof his mouth. Only Aunt Sophy sat quietly, waiting. 

There was little conversation. None in the last five minutes. Florabroke the silence, dabbing at her face with her handkerchief as shespoke. 

"Sophy, how can you sit there like that? Not that I don't envy you. Ido. I remember I used to feel sorry for you. I used to say 'PoorSophy. ' But you unmarried ones are the happiest, after all. It's themarried woman who drinks the cup to the last, bitter drop. There yousit, Sophy, fifty years old, and life hasn't even touched you. Youdon't know how cruel life can be to a mother. "

Suddenly, "There!" said Adele. The other three in the room stood upand faced the door. The sound of a motor stopping outside. DanielOakley's hearty voice: "Well, it only took us five minutes from thestation. Pretty good. "

Footsteps down the hall. Marian King stood in the doorway. They facedher, the four--Baldwin and Adele and Flora and Sophy. Marian King stooda moment, uncertainly, her eyes upon them. She looked at the two olderwomen with swift, appraising glances. Then she came into the room, quickly, and put her two hands on Aunt Soph's shoulders and looked intoher eyes straight and sure. 

"You must be a very proud woman, " she said. "You ought to be a veryproud woman. "