ANGELA PEEPED OVER INTO WASHINGTON STREET
It was the slack hour again, it seemed, leaving home-makers with idle hands. Even that subtle business to which but one modern authority gave a scientific rating, the Business of Supplying Beauty and Supplying Charm, was here at a complete standstill. The men of Angela's family, who must be refreshed and made joyful for their battlings in the world without, were at this hour out, battling. Mrs. Flower was lying down in her room, doing her own refreshing. As for the cook downstairs, she had her orders, and recked not of Charm. Angela, thus, had her strictly earned leisure; and, on the other hand, she had not those intenser occupations for leisure, reforms, fights, and attacks on Morals, such as engrossed the mind of her advanced Cousin Mary. As a womanly woman, she naturally thought a great deal about people, her friends, and as an unassisted stranger in the city, she really had very few friends to think about. Hence, it was the most natural thing imaginable if she was now wondering, for the thousandth time, what in the world had become of Mr. Garrott.
Angela could not understand about Mr. Garrott. He simply never seemed to walk any more. That she had hurt his feelings very badly that night after the bridge-party she had understood, from the start. But perhaps she had never meant to hurt them so badly as this; and that Mr. Garrott could vanish utterly from Washington Street had, indeed, not entered her thoughts. This, however, was precisely what Mr. Garrott had done, from the very day following the misunderstanding.
For so, in the lapse of days, had Angela generously come to think of the occurrence on the sofa. She and Mr. Garrott had had a terrible misunderstanding.
It was half-past four o'clock; the dreary day was shutting in. Angela looked down into her own back yard, which was small, mean-looking, not devoid of tin cans, and now running with dirty water. A dingy old shed or outhouse, where some previous tenant had thriftily stabled a horse, contributed not a little to the wintry desolateness of the scene. Beneath the window the cook, Luemma, emerged, a ragged print-skirt turned over her head, and emptied ashes into a broken wooden barrel. Angela yawned, and picked up a hand-glass.
The girl's more kindly view of Mr. Garrott's demeanor had been, of course, a gradual growth. Her mortification and rage against the young tribute-payer had lasted two days, at least, and chancing to see her poor Cousin Mary at this time,—who was now being talked about from one end of the town to the other,—she had taken occasion to speak most disparagingly of Mr. Garrott, though, of course, in an indirect manner. She had described him as a person of the lowest ideals. At this Cousin Mary had protested, quite indignantly; and, though Angela well knew there were phases of Mr. Garrott which her mannish cousin was not likely ever to see, that stout championship had doubtless done much to check her first resentment and make her see things in a truer light. Moreover, she was naturally a sweet-tempered creature, and the long days following, and the long empty walks, may have been just the things needed to appeal most subtly to her higher nature. After all, Mr. Garrott had been remarkably nice to her, paying her every attention from the beginning. And even if he had been carried away, for once—what did that show ...
A ring at the doorbell made Angela jump a little. While the Flowers had a small house, they had a loud bell. Though its clanging nowadays rarely meant anything exciting, the diversion, on the whole, was not unwelcome. The young housekeeper rose, went out into the hall, and listened down over the banisters.
Below, there was nothing to listen to. Receiving only twelve dollars a month, Luemma seemed to think she must take out the residue of her wages in inefficience and impudence, and did; sometimes she answered the bell, sometimes she "had her hands in the lightbread," etc. The present seemed to be one of the latter times. The bell pealed again; a voice from the front called, "Angela!—are you dressed?"—and Angela, replying to her mother, went down to the door herself, smoothing her hair and trimming her waist as she went.
The caller proved to be none other than her disgraced cousin, Mary Wing.
"Well, Angela, how are you?" said she, entering confidently, and kissed Angela's cheek. "I hope I didn't break into your nap, or anything unforgivable like that?"
"Oh, no, indeed, Cousin Mary. How d' you do? I wasn't asleep."
Cousin Mary was enveloped from neck to heels in a becoming gray raincoat. Beneath that were seen glimpses of a costume rather elaborate for bad weather and a workaday world. Nor did Cousin Mary's manner seem in the least crushed or subdued, as morals demanded that the manner of a disgraced person should be.
All the same, Angela greeted her cordially enough, with only a faint conscientious stiffness traceable to her mother. For one thing, she was really sorry for Mary now; right or wrong, she genuinely wished they hadn't expelled her from the High School, and sent her off to a Grammar School, in a low quarter of the city. And then besides that, whatever Cousin Mary's strange ideas and behavior, the fact remained that she happened still to be one of her, Angela's, particular little coterie—that small group of friends and relatives with whom she herself seemed to be sadly out of touch just now.
Mary entered with the air of being in a hurry. In the car-shaped parlor she unbuttoned her coat, nevertheless, the Latrobe heater being, like the doorbell, small but powerful. Angela, seated on the famous sofa, said:—
"Cousin Mary, you're all dressed up! I believe you're going to a party!"
Mary glanced down at herself with indifference.
"No," said she, "but I've been to a little sort of one, a luncheon. And we didn't leave the hotel till half an hour ago, either—"
"Oh, a luncheon! They're fun, I think. Where was it?"
"At the Arlington—very fine and beautiful, but it took hours! That's why I'm so late getting around here. I've wanted specially to see you for several days, Angela, but I haven't seemed to find a minute, and this was my last chance. I wondered if you had any engagement for to-morrow afternoon?"
"No, indeed, Cousin Mary, I haven't any engagement."
"Then I want you to come with me to a lecture," said Cousin Mary, "at four o'clock."
The young girl's face, which had become brightly expectant at the mention of engagements, fell perceptibly. She covered her disappointment with a little laugh.
"Well,—thank you, very much, Cousin Mary,—but you know I don't appreciate lectures very much. I'm not clever enough—"
"But this isn't an ordinary lecture. In fact, I shouldn't have used that word at all. It's a talk, a personal talk to women by a woman, and a wonderful one—Dr. Jane Rainey. You may have heard of her?"
"Well, I'm not sure. What is she going to talk about?" asked Angela politely.
"The subject that means most to every woman, no matter what she thinks or says! And Dr. Rainey, I do believe, knows more about it than anybody else living. Jane Clemm she was—but that was years ago, before you could remember. I got her to come here to speak, myself,—and expect to lose some money on the transaction, too,—heigho! But I don't mind really, it's such a privilege to have the whole subject lit up, from the modern point of view, by a speaker like this. Jane Rainey's a practicing physician, a fine human being, the mother of four children herself, and she—"
"But what is her subject, Cousin Mary?"
"That's it!—marriage and motherhood."
Angela stared at her cousin, and then looked rather shocked. Next, faint color appeared in her smooth cheeks. It really seemed that Mary had learned nothing, from the painful lesson she had just received. Why did she have this persistent interest in the unpleasant side of life?
She said more decisively than was her wont: "No, Cousin Mary, I really don't think I'd care to go—thank you."
Mary Wing, checked in her forensic by Angela's expression, looked surprised, though, perhaps, not taken aback, and certainly not rebuked.
"Now, why not? I honestly hoped the subject would have a special interest for you. You—"
"For me!—Oh, no! I—"
"My dear, you know you told me once what your ambition was—to be a good wife some day, when the right man came for you. And that's the ambition of every normal woman, I believe,—or one of them,—no matter what else she may have in her head! Well, you see, that's exactly what this brilliant student—and woman—wants to advise us about—how to fulfill this ambition; how to prepare ourselves to be good wives and—"
"But I don't think of it that way at all, Cousin Mary. I hope," said Angela, pink-cheeked, but once more standing firm for propriety against all the astonishing Newness—"I hope I'll know how to be a good wife—to the man I love—without going to any lectures—"
"Do you think anybody on earth knows as much as that, just by intuition? It seems to me ... But perhaps your feeling is—you don't like the idea of a public talk on the subject?"
"I don't, Cousin Mary—frankly. I know I seem to you dreadfully behind the times—and all. But that's the way I was brought up to feel, and it's the way I do feel. I'm not advanced at all, I thought you knew."
There was a silence in the dingy little parlor, during which the pouring rain became audible.
"Of course I don't want to press you against your will, Angela," said Mary slowly. "You know that? But—I can't get away from feeling that being a good wife—and mother—in this awfully upset, transitional age, when men's ideals are changing step for step with women's—and perhaps a little in advance of them, who knows?—I believe it's the most complicated and difficult vocation in the world. Compared with it, any ordinary man's profession—like engineering, for instance—looks to me like simplicity itself. And, Angela, I can't believe that every woman is born with all this understanding, all this difficult expert knowledge in her head, any more than I believe that every man is born knowing by intuition how to be a good engineer. Of course we'd think it quite strange—shouldn't we?—if Donald, as a boy wanting to be an engineer, had thought he mustn't read any books that mentioned engineering, and must stop his ears if—"
Angela, feeling almost ready to stop her ears herself, interrupted with some warmth:—
"Cousin Mary, we simply don't understand each other! I don't think of—of romance—and marriage—as anything in the least like engineering—not in the least! I don't think of them as subjects for lectures by experts! And I was brought up to feel there were some things not very—suitable to talk about. I was brought up not to think about them at all."
"Of course, my dear!—I understand. But every woman thinks about marriage—doesn't she? She can't help it. Take me," said Mary, good-humoredly—"a confirmed old maid school-teacher who's just scandalized half the city, and been publicly dismissed from her job. I haven't the slightest idea of marrying, ever, and yet I think about it often, and would like to feel—"
"You do? Well, I am different. I don't think about it."
"You don't think about marriage?"
"I never think of it at all," said Angela.
That settled Cousin Mary. After a brief pause she said, in the nicest way: "Well, then, forgive me, Angela, and forget everything I've said."
Angela forgave her readily enough. Shut your eyes to the horrid, unwomanly streak in her, and Mary Wing was really a very pleasant person. She had always said that, to her mother and others. So talk flowed easily into other channels, and the air of cousinly amity was soon restored. But just when that was accomplished, Mary rose unexpectedly to go, and Angela found herself left with several topics not yet mentioned at all.
"Oh, don't go yet!" said she. "I want to—"
"I must! I really had no time at all to-day, but came anyway, whether or no. How pretty you look, Angela," said Mary, and kissed the now unblushing cheek again.
"I wish the lunch-party hadn't kept you so long! I haven't—"
"I do, too! A whole good afternoon! And the worst of it was," said Mary, eyeing her with a sort of speculative archness, "I stayed after everybody was gone just to talk to Charles Garrott, whom you dislike so much! Still," she added, with a fading of archness, "I had something to tell him for his own good, at least."
Cousin Mary's changes of expression were lost upon Angela. "Mr. Garrott! Was he at the lunch party?"
"He gave it—didn't I say? It was just a little bon voyage party for Donald—and Helen Carson! Donald's leaving to-morrow for Wyoming, you know, to be gone a month—"
"No—you hadn't told me.... Who else was at the lunch, Cousin Mary?"
"Oh, just those I've mentioned, and Fanny for chaperon, and Talbott Maxon."
Angela, naturally, felt more lonely and out of things than ever. In fact, she felt blankly depressed. Mr. Garrott's luncheon had included exactly her coterie, only she herself being omitted.
"Why do you say I dislike Mr. Garrott, Cousin Mary? Of course I like him very much. You know I told you long ago he was much the most attractive man I've met here."
"Well, but I thought you must have changed your opinion, when you told me the other day that his ideals were so low."
"Why, of course I didn't mean it, Cousin Mary! I thought you knew I was angry when I spoke."
The two cousins regarded each other, in the dark little hall by the hatstand. Angela felt her position to be annoying. But she explained with that complete lack of embarrassment characteristic only of women conscious of rectitude:—
"I can't tell you all about it, even now. But what happened was that Mr. Garrott and I had a terrible misunderstanding, and at first I put all the blame on him, and was awfully mad with him, I admit. But since then, the more I've thought of it, the more I've seen that I was very unjust to him—in what I thought and said, too. He really has much more cause to be mad with me—now—than I have with him."
"Well, I'm glad to hear it. Don't quarrel—that's my motto," said the stormy Miss Wing. "And Mr. Garrott thinks you are charming!—I know, for he told me so. Well—"
"Yes—that's what has changed my feeling about it all, you see. Cousin Mary—when you see him again, you might just say—"
"My dear, I never see Mr. Garrott!" said Mary, rather hastily.
"Why, you've just seen him!"
"The first time for a week, and probably the last time for a month. He's going down to his mother's in the country on Saturday, to stay over Christmas and New Year's. Angela, I must run!"
Left alone, Angela remained standing in the hall for a moment, gazing into space, of which the hall really afforded little. Her despondency now had a certain edge; it did seem hard that, while her friends and relatives—and Cousin Mary, of all people—were going to jolly lunches of the younger set, her invitations should be only to New-Woman lectures. And still, the girl's feeling had no bitterness, even now. Of course she understood that she would have been at Mr. Garrott's luncheon, too, but for the misunderstanding....
As she went upstairs, her mother called out to her, and Angela pursued her way to the front bedroom, as she had meant to do anyway. Here, her mother was discovered prone upon a pillowless lounge, dangerously facing a gaslight and reading a magazine which had no covers. Having laid the magazine, broken open, on her lap, Mrs. Flower listened attentively to her daughter's report of Mary's call, and at the end said:—
"I must say I think it's very kind of Mr. Garrott to stand by her in that way. Men secretly can never admire that sort of woman, whatever their theories may be. And that's just it—that explains Mary's whole lurid course. If she had ever had a ray of attention, of course she would never have dreamed of these wild goings on."
Angela's mother was still a pretty woman, and long habit, it seemed, had impressed her voice with a permanent plaintiveness. She had kicked off her slippers for comfort; her high-bred feet were clad in faded cotton stockings; she herself looked high-bred and faded. Her air and tone were those of one to whom life had brought rude shocks—such as, that lovely woman's portion was sacrifice ever, and that men cared only for the first bloom of girlish beauty—and who found her only consolations in her religion, and in the noble words, My Duty.
"You must see her when she calls, I suppose, but that is all. Until she completely changes her ideas on all subjects, I cannot allow any intimacy. I cannot."
"She means to be nice to me, mother. And besides—that's the sort of connections you and father have given us, you know."
Mrs. Flower denied any responsibility whatever for the advanced Mary. She continued her remarks with interest, the theme being one of her favorites. Angela, having moved restlessly about the room for a time, had halted at the window. Hence, she gazed out at a board fence billed all over with advertisements of a celebrated spring tonic. A trolley-car went rumbling by, its wheels throwing off jets of icy rain-water. It had been a long, long day.
"The things women will do when they discover they're not attractive to men! They simply get defiant. They get all reckless and bitter!"
Into the narrow walkway below turned a very tall man, under a small greenish umbrella. In the silence of the house, the front door was heard to open and shut. Then there were footsteps along the hall below, and another door shut quietly, toward the back.
"Anything, anything to distract their minds!"
"Mother!—where on earth do you suppose father goes! His lecture was over at half-past three. If only, only, he'd try to get some patients! But he's not even in for his office hour half the time!"
"I'm sure I do not know," replied her mother, generally, and picked up her coverless magazine.
Angela fidgeted at the window, drumming on the dripping pane. Presently she said:—
"Oh, mother! Why couldn't you or father have some relations that would help us! We're the only family I ever heard of that hasn't a single rich relation!"
Her mother, not looking up, mentioned complainingly the branch of her family to which she always referred in such discussions.
"Much good the Ashburtons have done us!" said Angela truly, and also as usual. "When they think we're not good enough to speak to. I have nobody to help me but myself."
It was as if the girl was herself struck with the truth of her own observation. Her gaze out the window became thoughtful, and then intent. Suddenly, without more speech, she left the window and the room.
In the hall there came an interruption. An untutored voice bawled up, without the slightest preamble:—
"Sugar hasn't came!"
"All right," responded the young housekeeper, after a short annoyed pause.
And then, returning to her own room, she thought: "If I telephone from Mrs. Doremus's now, it'll be too late for supper. I'll have to ask Wallie—just to step around ..."
Angela shut the door behind her and lighted a flaring gasjet. Then she stood still, knitting her brows slightly, glancing about. She wanted writing-paper, and didn't know where to put her hands on any, exactly.
In the sharp light of the gas it was now seen that Angela's little bedroom lacked Beauty, of the purely objective sort: Beauty of that kind depending, as all know, on fathers being good providers, which was not the case here, alas. Everything in Angela's room was cheap when it was new, and everything was far from new now. A very large old walnut wardrobe occupied all one side of the room, awkwardly substituting for a clothes-closet. The bed was of yellow imitation-oak, and sagged considerably in the middle from worn-out springs. The bureau was to match; its somewhat wavy mirror was the nearest Angela came to a dressing-table; its three drawers would never quite shut, and frequently wouldn't quite open. There were also two chairs in the bedroom, one straight, one a re-seated rocker, and a small walnut work-table, which trembled dangerously if you brushed against it.
Nor was the room specially spruce, at the moment at least, people's tastes differing in these matters, even in the same family. Angela's young brother, for example, kept his small room shining like a new pin, and let himself personally go till he was a disgrace to the family. Angela, on the other hand, whose exquisite personal neatness had attracted the notice of Charles Garrott himself, was more or less indifferent about a room which nobody but the family ever saw. The door of the wardrobe stood open now, with one of the yellow bureau-drawers; a pair of shoes rested on the straight chair, with a pair of stockings curled on the rag-carpet below. On the sway-backed bed were strewn various things—a towel, two old summer dresses that she had been trying on a little earlier in the afternoon, a pair of soiled white gloves, a paper of pins and two new dress-shields.
In the drawer of the wardrobe, Angela presently found several sheets of note-paper, and, after a longer search, a single envelope. The envelope was not what it had been once. It had knocked about the world a bit in its time; its bright youth was gone. Upon its face was a dusky smudge, souvenir of some forgotten encounter, and, near the smudge, some hand had once written the word "Mrs.," and then lost heart and abandoned the whole enterprise. Still, it was possibly the only envelope in the house. Angela found, after due trial, that the smudge yielded, quite satisfactorily, to the eraser on the end of a pencil. As for the reminiscent "Mrs.," that was easily enough worked over into a "Mr.," though not, to be sure, without a slight blot.
Angela sat on the edge of the bed. She pulled the rickety work-table into position before her. Having addressed the remainder of the envelope, after the "Mr.," she sat biting the penholder for a space. But when the business end of the pen was put into action, it went ahead quite steadily:—
Dear Mr. Garrott [wrote Angela from the bedside]:—
When you left here the other night, I did not think it would be so long before I would see you again!
I have been very sorry about our misunderstanding—and I have felt that I should not have said what I did. I have thought it all over, and I understand better now.
When you are not so busy, you must come in to see me—and I will explain just what I mean. I couldn't that night.
Yours most cordially,
Angela Flower.
She had hardly written the final letter of her pretty name when the front door was heard to open again, this time with a bang. Having hastily tucked the note into the experienced envelope, Angela got downstairs before her little brother, Wallie, had finished taking off his dripping overcoat.
Wallie was quite the queerest, gravest boy Angela had ever known. In her whole life, she had never seen him laugh but once. That was one summer day in Mitchellton, when she, having undertaken to paper the walls of her room, had fallen backward off the stepladder into a bucket of paste. Wallie was an eccentric, undoubtedly. Still, he was admitted to be obliging enough about little things. Now he made no special objections to going for the sugar; and when Angela then asked him please to step by at the same time, and give the note to Mr. Garrott, he only said, with one of his absent stares: "Step by? That's six blocks further."
"Well, I haven't anybody else to take it for me, Wallie," said Angela, in a voice rather like her mother's.
"And, Wallie," she added, presently, "I'm not sure whether there'll be an answer or not. You'd better just ask him, that's the best way. Just say, after he's read it, 'Is there any answer?'"
XI
To the host, the luncheon party at the Arlington had not once presented itself as a jolly gathering of any set, young or old. He had conceived it as a duty, and an expensive one; he approached it, truth to tell, with a certain secret complacence as to Mary Wing uppermost in his mind; and he left it (after Mary's private talk with him) with chastened reflections and a group of new reactions on the subject of Egoettes.
For two weeks, Charles had been very busy in the Studio. The luncheon stood as his first whirl in Society since Angela Flower's bridge-party. Donald Manford, departing to seek his biggest commission, seemed to need a friendly send-off. Miss Carson seemed to be indicated as the logical co-sharer of the same. At the Redmantle Club, as he had never forgotten, Charles had taken Donald bodily away from the firm beautiful girl Mary had selected to be his wife. Now, as it were, he was handing Donald back to her again—loyal Moderns all. Beyond the match-making, however, this function was intended to cheer up Mary, and to indicate to the Public that Charles Garrott was her supporter in adversity as in success. Thus, from every point of view, the "demoted" school-teacher was the real guest of honor, and the host, when not fomenting conversation of a matrimonial nature between the two young persons on his right, found a peculiar pleasure in conversing with her. Indeed, he could hardly look at Mary to-day without a lurking smile.
Later, as noted, Charles sobered. What Mary lingered to tell him, "for his own good," was that Flora Trevenna had gone away. As it was the one thing he had supposed Miss Trevenna incapable of doing, he was proportionately taken by surprise. But, for a moment, he saw in the tidings only that the great obstacle in his and Mary's way back to the High School, their common Old Man of the Sea, had been amazingly removed.
Endeavoring to conceal his immense relief, he said: "Gone away! Why, where'd she go to?"
Mary's reply was meant to shake him, and it did.
"Oh—anywhere! She went, not because she had anywhere to go, but just because she wouldn't stay here."
"But—I don't understand you! I thought this was where she wanted to stay."
"More than anything else in the world. And that was why she went—don't you see? She went because of her mother and father and sisters—whom you supposed she never gave a thought to. She went because of Mysinger and me."
The two advanced friends stood among the shrubs of the Arlington winter garden, beside a little tinkling grotto. In silence, Charles dropped a pebble down among the dusky forms of fish.
"Of course," said Mary, slowly, "I told her a story about—my trouble at the High School. But I could see that she knew all the time. I'm sure now that was what decided her to go—by herself. Some friend or other got her some sort of position—in Philadelphia. Of course she went without saying anything to me...."
Her voice, which could be so annoyingly calm at times, was deeply troubled. Charles expressed sympathies, with haste; and, indeed, he felt them now, oddly and disturbingly. It was as if Miss Trevenna, by that simple act of getting down off other people's backs, had too suddenly upset his whole opinion of her.
"Don't you think, after all," he said presently, "it may be easier for her somewhere else for a while, than—"
"Oh, easier in a way, yes! But I know she felt, and I think, too, that her only hope of really putting her life together again, ever, was here—where she broke it in two. To go and bury herself among strangers won't ever settle anything. Oh," exclaimed Mary, "if she could only, only marry now! I suppose people might stop thinking of her as a pariah then, I suppose she might come back! But what's the use of hoping? She's still crazily in love with that man, you see."
"What!—she is! Why'd she leave him then—?"
The former principal regarded him, drawing on her gloves. She had dark eyebrows, well-marked and unusually arched; they gave a peculiar intentness to her blue gaze, and a faint habitual interrogativeness. Now, perhaps at the young man's expression, she laughed, suddenly and naturally. Her spirit was not broken certainly.
"And women are really so awfully simple, too! Of course she left him, Mr. Garrott, because she didn't think he cared enough for her any longer to—justify her."
And, grave again, she asked, directly: "Have you really doubted that she has a higher ideal of love than half the good people who've wanted to run her out of the city and stone her?"
This, indeed, Charles had had no reason to doubt. He, of course, had never shared the low opinion of a woman, that she had but one virtue, and that one too crudely appraised. His complaint against this girl had been upon a wholly different ground—now abruptly fallen beneath his feet. He was troubled with the sense that this young figure, in vanishing, had suddenly touched the dignity of tragedy. He had remembered, with a little shock, that Miss Trevenna was not yet twenty-five years of age.
And still, he, the authority, knew that having a high ideal was not enough.
As the two moderns left the hotel, he said in a grave manner: "Let me take you home."
"No, don't think of it! I'm only going to the car-line," said Mary; and added absently: "I've been trying all week to go to see Angela, and now I must."
"Ah, yes!—certainly!" said the luncheon host hastily, and a look that could only be described as guilty flitted visibly over his face.
But this disappeared; the somewhat chastened authoritative look returned at once. Pursuing his tutorial round, Charles seemed able to think of nothing else but Mary's ill-starred friend, who had so damaged Mary, who had so staked and smashed her own life, on a sentence in a book.
And who put that sentence into a book, and who was going to wipe it out with another, if not he, Charles? Here, it might be, he had a pointer or two to give to that great compeer of his, the lady in Sweden.
He had done Miss Trevenna a serious wrong, of course; he had judged her by the company she kept. It was an age when cheeky "prophets" were shouting from every bush a New philosophy which amounted to this: that civilized society must be made accommodating to self-indulgent people. They did not mention, very probably they did not know, that it had not been easy to civilize society, and that self-indulgent people had not done the job. With such shallow egoists he had classed Miss Trevenna; and now, silent still, she had finely refuted him. There was, indeed, a quality not for little folk in this girl's fierce imprudences. At the test, she had repudiated the Ego, kicked off all the meanness and flabbiness of her teachings. But in the meantime, unfortunately, these teachings had done for her.
And it seemed to Charles Garrott, tramping intently along (for the downpour gave him the freedom of the streets to-day) that it would be a sweet and glorious thing if, say, a dozen of these leathern-lunged professors of a new chaos could be gathered up, from the studies and libraries where they sat so snug around the world, and brought here to share this girl's catastrophe and go with her in her exile. And by George!—they shouldn't squirm out by trying to blame it all on a mere ignorant Public Opinion either! No, he, Charles, having a lot of them together thus, would improve the occasion to explain, once and for all, that freedom was not a thing that any chance passer could pick up and use, like a cane; but, rather, the last difficult conquest of a unified race. He would inform them that it was only too fatally easy to act "free," at others' expense, the difficult and important thing being, precisely, not so to act. And as to love, he would hammer into their thick heads that the way to freedom was NOT through the delightfully easy course of "demonstrating experiment" by self-elected Exceptional People, but by the far more difficult demonstration that men and women could be strong and constant in their affections, and trustworthy in their passions.
There, indeed, was a demonstration for Exceptional People to get to work on at once. Why write large books to declare that "the great love" was its own justification. Why waste good ink upon an ideal truism? On what day would a New book-writer teach men and women how to love greatly, or how to tell even a little love from love's baser counterfeit? So long as every schoolboy, drawn by a brief spark, will swear that his is the great love; so long as men greatly love one person this year, and next year quite another; so long as they will gladly deceive themselves, or ape emotions above them, lest they must deny themselves a passing indulgence: thus long would untrustworthy mortals need the hard restraint of Law.
"Why, if men and women had the quality of love needed to make 'freedom' work," thought the tutor suddenly, sloshing along toward the Choristers', "they wouldn't need the freedom! No, then they'd be perfectly satisfied with monogamous marriage."
Decidedly impressed with this epigram, Charles thought at once of "Notes on Women." To draw the ruined life of Miss Trevenna across the line of his new novel had, of course, come into his mind while he yet talked with Mary. But he was fully aware that not one novel, or five, would ever plumb bottom here.
Nevertheless, these thoughts pursued the young man through his lesson with Miss Grace Chorister, and up to the very door of the Studio. There, he suddenly became a working author again.
It was now five-thirty o'clock in the rainy afternoon. The demands of hospitality had forced the postponement of Miss Grace a full hour, and the cutting altogether of the old lady who was studying French. Entering his retreat thus belatedly, Charles shot a look ahead at the writing-table, according to his habit. A letter lay on the table, wearing a distinctly business air; and when the young man was still several paces off, he saw that the envelope bore the name of "Willcox's Weekly."
For the most part, Charles's communications from editors had come to him in long envelopes of an ominous, a rejectional, fatness. Now it was his hour to see other samples from the editorial envelope supply, square envelopes, gratifyingly thin. Breaking the square thin envelope of "Willcox's Weekly" with nervous hurry, Charles read:—
Dear Mr. Garrott:—
We have pleasure in accepting your interesting sketch of Miss Wing, for early publication in the Weekly. Our "Persons in the Foreground" department is always in the market for entertaining material of this character.
Check for $20 will follow in due course. We are, with thanks,
Yours sincerely,
Willcox's Weekly.
Having read these few lines once, the author, still standing, read them again, and yet again. Upon his lip was the faint smile it had worn when he looked at Mary at the luncheon—before she began telling him things for his good. He was fairly entitled to wear this smile; but now it seemed in danger of becoming fixed for life.
He was selling write-ups of Mary like hot cakes; there was no other word for it. He had written and sent out three write-ups—an unprecedented number about a single person—and now he had sold two of them already. He had hoped to plant, say, one write-up among the weeklies—to get quick results—and now he had planted two in the weeklies. Moreover, the third write-up had been in the hands of a famous weekly for ten days now.
That he had managed it all with remarkable adroitness, the young man could not conceal from himself. Cunningly enough, he had based all the write-ups on the fact that Mary Wing, at thirty, had risen almost to the top of a large city school system, where no woman had ever risen before. For that made Mary a public figure; that justified the write-ups. But, the bait thus thrown, he had given to each eulogy a special character and thesis of its own, always with an eye to local effects. This piece here, for example, which "Willcox's Weekly" found so extremely interesting and entertaining, concerned Mary the Freewoman, and touched delicately yet with vigor upon her late persecution for righteousness' sake. And this piece, the most personal and the best of the lot, alone bore the signature of Charles King Garrott. He had got Hartwell to sign one, Elsie White Story, President of the State Equal Suffrage League, to sign another. And only yesterday, Mrs. Story had telephoned that her piece (Mary the "Feminist"—only you may be sure Charles had not used that horrible word) had been gobbled up by the "Saturday Review," and sent around the "Review's" delightful letter.
So Charles could recall Mary's hard saying, that day at the High School, with a sense of triumph now. She, who had said he couldn't help her, had rather overlooked this gift he had, his power and his art. Unquestionably, the thing was going to break big: she would have the surprise of her life....
"Great heavens! How I can write!" suddenly exulted the young man, throwing out his arms. "I'll beat 'em all some day!"
Upon which, exactly as at a cue in a play, the door from the bedroom opened, slowly and quietly. And there stood Judge Blenso in the crack, a flat package in his hand.
Between uncle and nephew there passed a long stare. The uncle began to turn a little pale. But it was the nephew who spoke first, nervously and yet expectantly too:—
"Prepare yourself, Charles, my dear fellow! I much fear it's 'Bandwomen'!"
It was a long time before he was alone again.
There were moments in every writer's life, of course, when he was obliged to wish frankly that he didn't have to have a secretary. What a writer most wanted at times was solitude, just a chance to sit quietly and think things over.
A great while Judge Blenso had pottered about under his little red "Nothing But Business, Please" sign. Now he was posting elaborate entries in his secretary's book, now he sang sweetly to himself over wrapping-paper, paste, and twine. For if his sedentary employer's failure to blow up, this time, had momentarily nonplussed the Judge, the sight of the letter from "Willcox's Weekly" had raised him to the highest spirits again at once. That distant people, entire strangers, were actually proving willing to exchange real money for words written by Charles there, and typed by him, Judge Blenso,—here was a delightful thing, full of novelty and promise. And nothing would do, of course, but that he must start the rejected novel out upon another journey to New York without loss of a moment's time. Business before pleasure, rain or shine. That was his way.
But he went at last, to make his toilet for the express-office. And Charles, alone, sat taking stock, with no more exultation.
Blank and Finney's letter had proved to be twin-sister to the remembered letter from Willcox Brothers Company. That is to say, it was rejection, flat and unqualified. But this time, after the first shock, Charles had perceived that he did not seem to be much surprised. It appeared that his expectation of the old novel had, after all, died violently on that other day. It was almost as if he himself had come to despise the old novel, because the publishers despised it—as if that were any reason...
From the mantel he had plucked a thick ledger entitled (on a neatly typed label), THE RECORD. This ledger was the great work of Judge Blenso's life, and large enough for twenty authors. Here the Judge set down, with much pains and a striking assortment of colored inks, the detailed progress of each of Charles's manuscripts: "When Finished," "When Sent Out," "Where Sent," "Editor's Decision," "Editor's Comments if Any," "Remarks," etc. On these pages, the essential part of "Bondwomen's" career (officially known as Entry 2) was thus recorded:—
| Decision. | Comments if Any. | |
| 1. Willcox Brothers Company | Adverse. | Declined for financial reasons. |
| 2. Blank and Finney | do. | do. |
The Record now showed nine entries, including the novel. Entry I was "The Truth About Jennie," which the Judge had insisted on posting in, to give a tone of success to his work at the outset. Entries 3, 4, 5, and 6 were short stories; Entries 7, 8, and 9, the write-ups of Mary. The pages devoted to the write-ups made, as we know, stimulating reading, but with the fiction entries the case was otherwise. Here under "Comments if Any," the words "See printed form, on file," appeared with monotonous, indeed sickening, regularity. The Record did show, indeed, that the "Universal," in rejecting Entry 5,—"When Amy Left Home,"—had written a personal letter furnishing the Judge with this "Comment": "Excellently written, but claimed unsuited to his present needs. Let him hear from us again." Otherwise, rejection was unmitigated.
A scant showing for the work of four years, look at it how you would. One examining these coldly dispassionate annals would probably say, offhand, that there was but one form of writing Charles King Garrott was qualified to do: that was the write-up form. He had just read his two letters again, his acceptance and his rejection, side by side. Unusual and peculiar it seemed that the only writing he had sold for money, since "Jennie," was this series of articles designed to bring fame to Mary Wing. Of course, as far as that went, a man would like a little fame for himself, now and then....
"Why, I'm a fool to think I can write!" groaned the young man, suddenly. "I'm wasting my life! I ought to be carrying bricks up a ladder."
His fall from complacence was, indeed, complete. However, every writer knows these little ups and downs. It may be, that Charles did not believe his bitter words, even then. And now his secretary reëntered, checking thought.
"Well! Now for the express!"
Judge Blenso wore a new English mackintosh and an olive felt hat, rakishly turned up in front. No board of social investigators could have commended him for spending virtually all his wage upon his back; but the results seemed always to justify him none the less.
"And, my dear fellow!—you shouldn't worry, as the expression goes! Bandwomen's a charmin' novel, a charmin' sweet love-story, and James Potter Sons'll be sure to take it—gad, by the first mail!"
Having seen it with his own eyes in Willcoxes' famous letter, the Judge was now finally convinced that "Bandwomen" was the correct title of Entry 2, just as he had said in the beginning. Further argument being useless, the young man returned a vague reply.
"And there's that other idea of mine, too," said the Judge genially, halting with his package under his arm—"bringing your sketches of Miss Wing out in book form! Put in Entry 1, too 'Jennie's Truth,' if we liked—make a regular holiday giftbook! Gad, you know, Miss Wing's little pupils at the school would give us a whackin' sale!"
He went out blithe upon his duty. After an interval, the adoring voice of Mrs. Herman floated up, beseeching him to put on his ar'tics.
At the Studio table Charles sat, struggling to get down to work. He had put away The Record, put away embittered thoughts. But he did not get down to work with much success all the same, the reason being that his great Subject, unluckily, was no longer clear in his mind.
From the table-drawer he had produced a stack of manuscript, an inch high; and now he sat, not reading it, but merely disapproving it en masse. The stack was his premature effort to begin, really to begin his new novel—six chapters of the new novel written, fifteen thousand words. Launching upon this draft an hour after he finished Mary the Freewoman, he had pushed on, night after night, at first with confident rapidity. Latterly, he had become conscious of an increasing sense of resistance. And now he knew that all this was mere waste stuff, accomplishing nothing but to show him what not to write.
Well, but what to write then? What did he really want to say? It was absurd; but he did not know. It really seemed that he saw too much to settle, with enthusiasm, upon anything. By constant accessions of fresh understanding, his centre of balance, his novel's chief prerequisite, was kept in a continuous state of flux....
Of "material" on the Unrest, Charles possessed a superfluity; of "plots," of "significant characters" and "illustrative incidents," his head was fuller than his pencil would ever write. His problem, of course, had always been for the fixed point of view and the moral "line." No longer could he be satisfied with that crude, simple line which had contented him in his first book, which still contented the other fellows: the line which "proved," as Lily Stender proved, that economic independence was the automatic salvation of women. He knew that wasn't the whole story now. As for writing a book to show that Woman's Place was the Home, of course that had never crossed his mind, even when most strongly gripped by conservative reactions. His quest was for a framework which should develop conflicting values on a far finer scale.
Of course, what he should have liked to show was a wholly admirable woman: one who combined all the sane competence and human worth of the best new women, with the soft faculty for supplying beauty and charm of her old-fashioned sister. But that day in Mary's office had left him with the honest suspicion that such a goddess did not exist, and couldn't. From the other direction also, as noted, his delicate scales had been joggled, with unsettling literary effects. The too hasty manuscript on the writing-table by no means followed the "line" the author had first plotted, prior to his meditations in the Green Park, after the bridge-party. No, in this draft the Home-Maker was married and had three children in Chapter One. Through all, the desire to rebuke the egoism of the day had persisted, as clearly the point of view most inviting to him, fullest of possibilities. And now Miss Trevenna, in some way, had disturbed and unsettled him there too....
The rain beat against the Studio windows. The green-shaded lamp burned dully on the author's table. Big Bill, without surcease, ticked off the author's minutes. Charles rubbed the bridge of his nose, pondering deeply. Just now, as he turned the pages of his private book—where the essay form had long since been abandoned, where appeared the most surprising vacillations of authoritative opinion—he had made a somewhat striking discovery. It had suddenly come upon him that "Notes on Women" had, gradually but distinctly, dwindled down into "Notes on Mary," "Notes on Angela Flower," and "Notes on Flora Trevenna." In short, it appeared that, in the most unconscious way, he had been seeking to extract his "line" from his own story, as it were, from "life."
The discovery came upon the young man as most arresting and significant.
"And I don't know where I stand, that's just the trouble! I ought to wait awhile," he thought, aloud. "See how it all works out.... Things'll be turning up...."
On which—once more—Judge Blenso's picturesque head came sticking through the Studio door, and Judge Blenso's rich voice said, officially:—
"Young gentleman here with a letter, Mr. Garrott. Admit him?"
Returning to actuality with a slight start, Charles replied, "Admit him—certainly!" A day for letters, indeed!
Forthwith, the Judge standing aside, the young gentleman stepped into the Studio. A grave-looking young gentleman he proved to be, of some sixteen years, perhaps, with a dome-like forehead, a resolute mouth, and thick spectacles. He entered in silence, in silence held out the missive referred to.
"Good-evening," said Charles. "Thank you. This comes from—?"
"My sister, Angela Flower."
The young man's heart seemed to drop a little.
"Ah, yes! And—ah—is there—an answer?—"
"I'll wait and see," said Wallie Flower, following instructions, in a deep, calm voice.
"Ah, yes. Sit down a moment, won't you?"
He essayed a bright negligence which he was far from feeling: this thing had come suddenly. No amount of scientific argument, no recollection of sharp rebukes received, had ever convinced Charles that he had cut a fine figure in the affair on the sofa. Indeed, the very ease with which he had avoided all further consequences of his Rash Act, by the purely mechanical device of street-cars, had deepened, rather than diminished his consciousness of obligations unfulfilled, of caddishness, in short. To salute a girl tenderly after her bridge-party, and then never go within a mile of her again—well, that was a little crude, say what you would.
Hence Mr. Garrott, opening Angela's envelope with the blurred "Mr.," anticipated bitter reproaches, anticipated being termed a brute again, and called on to be honorable without further delay. Hence again, as his eye leapt over the neat lines, and found only sweet forgiveness and generous friendliness, he felt a sudden upstarting of relief and gratitude. A more perfect note had never been written! Why, the charming girl wasn't expecting anything of him at all!
Or, rather, nothing at all worth mentioning. On a second glance through the perfect note, the hypercritical young man did observe an expression or two not up to the general standard, perhaps. "I did not think it would be so long before I would see you again." "When you are not so busy, you must come in to see me." On the whole, it could be argued that it was rather a mistake to put those sentences in. Fine as the note was, it would have been a little finer still without them. Yet, under the circumstances, what more natural? And of course, as far as that went, he and the city traction system had the issue in their hands.
So Charles looked up buoyantly at the bearer of good tidings, to speak.
The bearer, however, had clearly forgotten his presence. He had remained standing, three feet from the table-end, and was found to be gazing, in the most pointed manner, at the old Studio lamp. The grave face of Miss Angela's brother plainly expressed amusement, and a certain good-natured contempt.
"Hello!" said Charles, diverted. "Anything wrong there?"
Without turning, the boy answered with a small dry chuckle: "Yes. Pretty near everything."
"Well! I've noticed it hasn't been burning well. Need a new mantel, I suppose—"
"New mantel won't do you any good long's your air-draft's choked that way."
"Oh! So that's the trouble, is it?"
"That's one of them. P'r'aps you like it that way?"
The proprietor of the lamp having disclaimed such a fancy, the strange lad said: "Well, I'll fix it for you, then. Sit steady."
He reached up an arm long as a monkey's, which shed drops of water on the writing-table, and the green glow suddenly faded out, leaving the Studio in total darkness.
Out of the Stygian gloom Charles said: "There's another light there. I'll—"
"I know. Thought I might as well look into that one, too, while I'm at it. Just give your globe and chimney a minute to cool."
"Oh, of course!—certainly."
"Don't s'pose you want to stand a new mantel for the lamp?"
"I'm enough of a sport, but I fear there's not a new one in the house."
"Hold it for me, please," said the boy.
A pinpoint of light had appeared in the blackness; it moved toward Charles's hand. He received the little searchlight, let it go out, hastily found and pushed the button again. And then Miss Angela's brother began to take his lamp all apart, cleaning it, blowing through it at unexpected places, and wiping the parts with a dark oily rag, which, luckily enough, he seemed to have in his coat-pocket.
The lad's single-mindedness, his un-selfconscious matter-of-factness had attracted Charles at sight. He recalled what Mary Wing had told him of Wallie Flower's struggles to get an education. Thus, as the light-repairing proceeded in the almost total darkness, a conversation grew up, at first largely question and answer. And the upshot of it was that Charles, as a tutor, offered to instruct Wallie Flower, free gratis, in German and English, the two college entrance subjects in which he was still somewhat deficient.
This odd development came at the end of the talk, when the illuminating power of both Charles's and the Judge's lights had been notably improved. When the brother understood that further education was being offered him for nothing, a gleam came suddenly into his oddly mature gaze.
He almost exclaimed: "Do you know German?"
"You might say I wrote it."
He pondered. "That means you do know it?"
"Like a member of the family."
"Do you teach nights?"
"I'm going to teach you nights."
And it was so arranged, the lessons to begin directly after Christmas. The boy became briefly embarrassed, boggling over his thanks. But Charles cut him short. "I'm doing it because I want to. That's the only reason I ever do anything."
Relieved, Miss Angela's brother turned to the door, for all the world like one who had come to mend the lamps, and nothing else.
"By the way," said Charles, casually. "Thank your sister for her note, and say that I'll send an answer by mail."
He was left pleased with the interview, and with himself. In the generous gift of three hours a week to Angela's brother, he perceived something fitting and compensatory. If obligation existed—and it did, in a way—did not this discharge it, subtly and modernly? Kiss the sister on the sofa, tutor the brother in the Studio—what more fair or honorable than that?
One thing had rather struck him, of course—Wallie Flower's saying that he had hated to come away from Mitchellton. This, it seemed, had been chiefly due to Mr. Bush, the boy's science teacher at the Mitchellton Academy, whom Wallie clearly adored, whose eyebrows he had blown off in an experiment only last summer. As he had previously understood that both the Doctor and Mrs. Flower had also been attached to Mitchellton, it really appeared that Miss Angela was the only member of the family who had actually desired to make the move. And she had moved.
But this thought—like the hypercriticisms on the note—merely knocked at the door of the young man's mind and passed on. He felt himself warming anew toward this simple Type, with its charming friendly instincts and its sweet forgiveness of the stormy ways of men. On his return from his holiday, he resolved that he would give Angela some token of his regard more substantial than a note by mail: send her, say, with that book of hers, a costly box of appreciative blossoms.
XII
Unlike the ladies in the books, Angela, regrettably enough, did not get a "sheaf of letters" every morning. Mr. Garrott's answer to her note, which lay beside her breakfast-plate on the second day following, was, indeed, her only mail that week. Hence it was with feelings of excitement that she seized a table-fork and hastily slit the envelope.
Angela read:—
Dear Miss Flower:
May I say how deeply I appreciate your note? And will you please believe that I have blamed myself entirely for what you so generously call our misunderstanding? While, of course, I must continue to blame myself, you cannot know how pleasant it is to be permitted to feel that you have forgiven me.
With the deepest appreciation, and all the good wishes of the season, believe me,
Yours sincerely,
Charles King Garrott.
It must be said of this note that it was the sort that puts its best foot foremost. First impressions of it were agreeable, but it did not wear. On the second reading, Angela perceived that, though as nice as possible, Mr. Garrott's reply said nothing about calling, which, in a manner of speaking, was the true subject of the correspondence. By the time she had read the reply half a dozen times, she found it flatly disappointing. Two days later, when she heard through Cousin Mary Wing that Mr. Garrott had gone to the country, not to return till after the New Year, she was conscious of a sudden and pervading hopelessness.
The feeling applied, not to her principal friend alone, but to all the conditions of her life.
Angela understood, of course, that Mr. Garrott's remarkable offer to tutor Wallie for nothing was an attention to her, and a very handsome one. Still, it was not just the sort of attention that a young girl prizes most, perhaps; and in especial it did not meet the needs of this particular situation. To have a busy man-friend teaching German to your little brother on your account is very flattering, indeed; but it does not necessarily lead to the early clearing-up of a personal misunderstanding. That Mr. Garrott had been much worried by their misunderstanding, all along, Angela had known, by means of that womanly intuition of which we read so much; now his note said so, in so many words. But, manlike, he still did not see that, at heart, she was the same girl that had attracted him so in the beginning, and that if he would but call, she would make everything as it had been before.
How was she ever to see him again now?
At nineteen, youth accepts life's vicissitudes unquestioningly, but at twenty-five, a womanly woman (if still without a home, a husband and three curly-headed little children) has had time to whittle a number of observations to a fairly sharp point. Angela thought her situation a hard one, and it was. Wealth, influence, valuable connections—these aids were not for her. All the ordinary opportunities enjoyed by girls "in society," she lacked—in chief, opportunities of meeting people casually, as at parties, of seeing the same people again and again, under the most agreeable auspices. Her family simply failed to put her in a party position, as it might be called; in consequence of which, it came to this, that really her only meeting-place for the few people she knew was on the street, walking. And even at the best, of course, that method (by the mere laws of choice and chance) was most unsatisfactory.
Suppose that Mr. Garrott had been taking walks all the time, for instance, but, by reason of her having called him a brute, was choosing other streets—how was she to know? A city is a big place, and one young girl in a tight skirt cannot walk very fast or far, or cover a large amount of space in a given time.
"Marna" alone was outstanding; and it carried but the slenderest anticipations. Moreover, that question, all these depressing questions, were academic now, and would be for weeks to come. The little coterie had scattered far, and she had no means of filling the empty places.
There followed the dreariest days Angela had known since winter before last in Mitchellton.
"How can you expect anybody to notice us, mother?" she exclaimed, one day. "The family of a poor, obscure doctor, living in a hut on a back street, with not a living soul to help us! I think it's remarkable I accomplish as much as I do."
It was on this day, a cold Sunday afternoon shortly before Christmas, that the lonely girl carried out a good intention she had had in mind for some time. She wrote a long, intimate, sisterly letter to her favorite brother Tommy, who had got so far away since he married money in Pittsburg.
Angela had just come in from a freezing, eventless walk with Fanny Warder. (Fanny, who as Mrs. Flower said, had made a great success of her life, marrying at twenty, seemed to be on an indefinite "visit"; there was talk, of course.) Having first thawed her hands at her register, which was supposed to waft up heat from the stove in the dining-room below, but didn't particularly, Angela drew up her rocking-chair into the zone of ostensible warmth. She sat with one slender foot curled under her, by a trick that no man has ever mastered. And this time she had not searched for the formal tools of a note-writer, but employed a stub of a pencil and a pad upon her lifted knee.
"Dearest Tommy," wrote Angela, and followed with a solid paragraph of very affectionate greeting. She went on:—
Well, Tommy, I promised to write you how things were, after we got settled down. I must say the outlook is rather discouraging at times—and home isn't what it was as you remember it! Do you remember what fun we used to have even in Hunter's Run—driving in to "the balls"—and how fine it was in Mitchellton as long as you were there? Well, everything is sadly changed now! Wallie, I'm afraid, hasn't improved as he gets older, he seems to rarely or never think of anybody but himself—and, of course, having fun is simply something he doesn't care for! He shuts himself up in his room every night, making horrible mixtures in a "sink" he's put in—that smell up the whole house, and never dreams of contributing to the housekeeping expenses—though he's been raised now to ten dollars a week! Father is sadly changed, he gets quieter and quieter all the time.
Sometimes I'm really worried about him, he's so indifferent! He never jokes any more, and doesn't try to get any patients, though I know he could get lots with his reputation. He seems despondent, Tommy, and sometimes doesn't even come in for his office-hour—and the other day he lost a patient that way that the Finchmans sent, she waited half an hour and then went! But though he may have liked the country life better; and let us all vegetate; that can't be it—for he certainly made no objection when the family consensus seemed to be that we should move here! Of course, we have to face the fact that he and mother aren't very congenial, it is her problem, and while I wouldn't criticize mother for worlds and she certainly does her duty as wife and mother—I do think it's a great mistake for her to always make her attitude a sort of reproach, saying how "she's sacrificed herself to him" and all—you know what I mean—
Mother really gets along better than any of us—especially as I now do all the work of the entire house!
The young writer paused, staring chillily at the register. She rarely looked out the window now, hers being the blank certainty that there would be nothing to see. Moreover, it was dusk. So, rising presently, she lighted the gas, and resumed her sad sisterly letter.
Of her mother she wrote in some detail: of the various friends of her girlhood she had renewed acquaintance with, and how she was always exchanging calls with Cousin This or Martha That, who was So-and-So before she married. To Angela, it had really seemed funny how all these connections of her mother's, whose social possibilities they had so often discussed before they left Mitchellton, had resolved themselves into dejected old ladies who had had unhappy marriages, and whose children had also had unhappy marriages, as a rule, or were in some other way unavailable as friends. Out of five families thus exhumed by Mrs. Flower, positively only one unattached young person had emerged, and this one, named Jennie Finchman (!), while certainly well-meaning, was a shy, anxious, painfully homely little thing who had never had a good time in her life, and gave all her pocket-money to a mission in the Dutch East Indies.
Well, Tommy [continued Angela], I've tried to give you a picture of the new home like I promised—and I only wish it was more encouraging! As for myself—the only outside person I had to help me was Cousin Mary Wing, and she is a "New Woman," as I wrote you in my Thanksgiving Day letter, and doesn't go with anybody but advanced older people!—and, besides, she got into a terrible scrape, poor dear, and was dismissed from the school! Cousin Mary, it's only fair to say, has done more for me than anybody else, introducing me to her older woman friends—who have called on me, and several have invited me to teas, lectures, and etc.! But, of course, none of them were social people really, or at least of the younger set—and I practically haven't been invited to a single party, except "dove ones"! The one exception was a meeting of an "advanced club," where I met several attractive men, who have been as nice to me as you could possibly expect.
But the truth is, Tommy, money counts a great deal more here than it did in Mitchellton; all the girls who are prominent socially have wealthy families behind them! I think I would hold up the family end quite well on very little—but I have hardly a decent "rag to my back," my clothes let everybody know I am a person of no importance, so the little inner circle sees no reason to take me up,—mother and I have figured that with only fifty dollars I could get a really nice new suit, and a simple evening dress as well,—and perhaps hat and shoes, all of which I sorely need! But, of course, poor father simply hasn't got such a sum, and Wallie puts all his in the bank—for college next year, he has $240 there now! Tommy, you know I don't mean to accuse the family of being selfish,—father told us in advance that we would be poorer here,—but besides that—nobody in the family but you ever seemed to understand that a girl can't accomplish anything unless she is given some sort of a chance. Even mother doesn't understand, she just thinks "things happen"! She is always telling how in her day men would work hard all day "superintending the farms"—and then at night ride twenty miles on horseback, to just talk for an hour to some girl of no special attractions! I can't make her see that men simply aren't like that any more.
The concluding paragraph of the letter merely described the writer's own daily round, especially touching on the dull walks, so rarely broken by a familiar face, which remained almost her only form of recreation. Here Angela decided to put in one sentence in a less reserved vein, which she did: "Well, Tommy, if you mean to make any thank-offerings to 'the poor' this Christmas, you know where they will be most appreciated!" But, as she loved her brother devotedly, it was also natural for her to return to a sweet and generous note in farewell: "For your sake, Tommy, I am glad you aren't here, with all the trials and hardships, but out in the world having a happy life of your own!"
The completion, stamping, and sending-off of the letter to Tommy left Angela with a sense of definite accomplishment. It was as if something pleasant had happened in the family at last, or at least was going to happen very soon. Unfortunately, however, this agreeable feeling, having such small relation to reality, was born but to sicken and die. Time proceeded with no pleasanter happenings than before, and a letter from Daniel Jenney, of Mitchellton—whose ring had caused the trouble—became a positive event.
By now, no doubt, the first natural excitement of "going to the city" to live had subsided. Enthusiastic anticipations had been rubbed bare by hard actuality, poverty, Finchmans, and so on. By this time also the young home-maker had systematized her housekeeping, as she herself said, and commonly ordered from butcher and grocer by means of Mrs. Doremus's telephone, three doors away. With experience, too, Angela had cut down the daily area of cleaning and polishing, from her first youthful excesses. Small incentive there was to rub your fingers to the bone on a house which was hopeless from the start, and which practically nobody but her mother's sad friends ever set foot in. Thus—and also through the all but eccentric indifference of the men of her family to beauty and charm—Angela had more time than ever for thinking. And the more she thought, the more clearly she saw that social progress in a strange city was solely a matter of what might be called favorable self-advertisement, and that this sort of advertisement, in her case at least, was solely a matter of just a little money.
But where was money to come from? Little could be expected from Tommy, even at the best. As for the housekeeping allowance (on which home-makers properly rely for some personal "pickings"), that held out, alas, yet frailer hopes. So closely had her father and mother calculated the budget, indeed, that in three months she had squeezed but five dollars and a half out of it: this, though she had early investigated the cheaper cuts of meat and learned the desirability of never paying cash.
"Oh," thought the girl, again and again,—"if father'd only get some patients!"
Mary Wing's pretty sitting-room had, indeed, established definitely in Angela's mind the close connection between money and work in an office. But, for the sound reasons explained by her to Cousin Mary, Angela could never consider work in an office as a possibility for herself. What, really, would become of the Home, while she went rushing daily to an office, to make money for her personal adornment? Besides, she could not but see that Cousin Mary was herself proof of the fact that going to an office had a very unfortunate effect upon a girl. Argue as you liked, the fact remained that, even in this so-called advanced age, the normal, sweet, attractive girls, the girls who were prominent socially, were never office-girls.
In short, how to get money without working for it? That, truly, was the great question confronting every nice girl, every womanly woman....
To Angela, it gradually came to seem that nothing pleasant was ever to happen to her again. Not only that, but the pleasantest sort of things seemed to be happening all the time to everybody else.
Returning Mary Wing's call one day, in the hope of news (Cousin Mary's disgrace was being generously forgiven, now that the Badwoman had gone away), Angela picked up two items that depressed her curiously. One was that Donald Manford had got that position he was trying for in Wyoming: that meant that one member of the coterie would vanish for good within three months' time. The other item concerned a remarkable series of articles about Cousin Mary that were coming out in the magazines all of a sudden, and which Cousin Mary said were written by Mr. Garrott, though admitting that his name wasn't signed to them. The Finchmans, whom Angela had met on the street, said, "How do you like having a celebrity for a cousin?" Cousin Mary, for her part, seemed to like being a celebrity immensely. Angela had never seen her in such high spirits; it really seemed in bad taste, considering the recent past. And, of course, Angela wondered a little if Mr. Garrott, the departed, wouldn't have written something about her, too, but for the misunderstanding.
A chance meeting with Mr. Tilletts, on the way home from this visit, hardly helped much. The seeking widower, afoot for once, had seemed hurried; he merely paused for a hasty word or two, and then was on his way again.
"Considering I haven't a soul to help me, I think I've done remarkably well," the girl protested once more, as if answering an inner voice, to her mother next day. "We've been here only a little while, and I have three men-friends already."
"Who is the third?" inquired Mrs. Flower.
When Angela mentioned Mr. Tilletts, her mother said, laconically: "He has never called."
"Men don't call any more, mother, I've said again and again! It's practically gone out."
Not feeling very well to-day, she lay in an old wrapper atop the sway-backed bed. Mrs. Flower sat, for company, by the outlooking window, dutifully stitching at a frilly "waist" which Angela had begun, but not finished. But her mother was a beautiful seamstress and really enjoyed an occasional task.
"Besides," said Angela, listlessly making a dimple in her pretty cheek with the end of a bone-handled button-hook, "I think Mr. Tilletts will call. He specially asked to—only a little while ago."
Mrs. Flower, after a speaking silence, observed: "Donald Manford never sent you the post-card from Wyoming."
"Well—all the time in the world hasn't passed yet, mother!"
"Your Cousin Ellie Finchman says he is deeply interested in this Miss Carson. She hears he has made her an offer."
"How could Mrs. Finchman possibly know that, mother? Besides, I don't care! I like Mr. Tilletts better than Mr. Manford!"
Coming to bloom in the age of Chivalry, Angela's mother had enjoyed a great deal of "attention" before she decided to bestow herself upon the worthy Doctor. Hence it was constitutional with her to take a belittling position toward less successful young women, including even her own daughter. Equally natural was it for Angela, with no such opportunities as her mother had had, to hold fast to what successes she had, and even, it may be, for memory to magnify them somewhat. And yet, in the freemasonry of women, she never resented her mother's coolly judicial summaries, and in this case, frankly felt the maternal slap to be justified. Really, Mr. Manford had never paid her any direct attentions, which perhaps had something or other to do with her admiring him so little as yet.
On this day, the lonely young girl's spirits seemed to touch their nadir. How could anything pleasant happen? There was no imaginable way.
"Oh, mother!" she exclaimed, with an exasperation rare to her. "Why, why, couldn't you and father give us one relation that would help us? Did you ever hear of any poor people before that didn't have a single rich relation?"
Then she cried out: "Oh, please don't mention Mrs. Ashburton!"
It was surely the most natural, reasonable, and human complaint in the world. In family talk, it had an established standing, too, having first been formulated far back at Hunter's Run. But now it was as if Angela had flung her challenge in the teeth of fate once oftener than fate could stand.
On the very next day, in brief, the fairy godmother came rolling up to the door.
We read how it is always darkest just before the dawn. Angela, who knew that pleasant things rarely just happened, indoors, had gone out, so it was that she missed the direct distribution of gifts. But, as it chanced, she had been having her first really good time, since the earlier part of the bridge-party. In fact, on Washington Street, at about the same time and place, she had met Mr. Tilletts again; and now he was not hurried at all. It pleasantly developed that Mr. Tilletts's doctor had ordered him to stop riding around in his great car, and that henceforth he would be walking constantly. Moreover, the genial gallant, after a considerable promenade, had taken Angela to tea at Mrs. Hasseltine's famous shop, and, at parting—sure enough—made a provisional engagement to call "one evening this week." Altogether, the coterie seemed in a fair way to pick up a new member, after all.
Whether fascinating or overplump, Widower Tilletts unquestionably possessed the magic power, wielded by man alone, to restore the self-esteem of a neglected young girl. Angela opened the front door of home in a livelier humor than had been hers for weeks. And so entering, she found her mother standing in the hall, and heard at once tidings which, though not for her exactly, yet made her forget herself altogether.
Mrs. Ashburton had been, and gone. Mrs. Ashburton was going to send Wallie to college, at once. Mrs. Ashburton was going to give Wallie five hundred dollars a year, till he had got his education.
This oft-cited lady, at last the waver of the magic wand, was Mrs. Flower's first cousin. Close friends in their girlhood, their ways had long ago parted; and, since Dr. and Mrs. Flower's visit to New York in 1896, amenities between them had hardly gone beyond an exchange of cards at Christmas. But now it happened that Mrs. Ashburton, en route to a balmier clime than hers, had "broken her trip" here, after the frequent way of tourists, and, having duly viewed the sights of the city from a cab window through the morning, had bethought her to look up her resident kin. So the rich relation came to the little house on Center Street.
By chance, it was Saturday afternoon, and Wallie was alone in the house. It seemed that an experiment he had been working on for days had just turned out a failure, and he had opened all the windows and the front door by way of letting out the smell. But even then he did not see the lady standing on the steps, so intent was he on the large glass retort in his hand. His face was quite white, and beaded with perspiration. So Mrs. Ashburton had described it to Mrs. Flower, who came in to find her just leaving for hotel and train. She had asked: "What are you looking at that brown liquid so hard for?" "That's it; it's brown," Wallie had muttered, still without looking at her. "You mean it ought to have turned out white?" said she. "No, green," said Wallie, frowning and squinting. "Where'd the chlorine go to?" "Why do you care so much?" Mrs. Ashburton asked, more and more interested. "Why do I care?" he said, scornfully; and then, as if becoming conscious of her, personally, for the first time, he turned his spectacles on her and said calmly: "You wouldn't understand, ma'am. A—a problem here.... Well, I don't understand it myself." And then, losing her again, as it were, he actually endeavored to shut the door, with the lady outside. Mrs. Ashburton had had to push against it, she said, and put her foot in the crack, to attract his notice. "I'm your cousin—your cousin!—Mrs. Ashburton!" she cried. "And I want to come in and talk to you, please." And this she had done, with the amazing result mentioned above.
Angela felt that the family tide had turned at last. She would scarcely have been human if it had not occurred to her how easily she might have been the one to be struck by the golden lightning; but such passing notions in no sense marred her sincere, though vicarious, joy over this great news. Moreover, it did seem, of course, that such a sum as five hundred dollars could not percolate into a family at any point without raising the whole level of prosperity very appreciably; and it was with whole-hearted happiness that she skipped upstairs to congratulate her lucky brother in the little bedroom she would not have to clean or "make" any more.
"Something very nice is going to happen to me soon, too!" she thought gayly, as she undressed that night. "I feel it in my bones!"
Her mind naturally slanted toward her favorite brother, with an intuitive increase of hopefulness. And, true enough, it was from generous Tommy that the more personal blessings presently came, though in a form that had not entered Angela's dreams.
Tommy's reply to her sisterly letter promised at first, indeed, to be as disappointing as Mr. Garrott's had been, and for the same reason: it omitted the essential thing. Angela, having shaken the letter, and then shuffled the pages, early discovered that there was no thank-offering in it. Similarly, Tommy's sentences seemed to contain nothing more substantial than affectionate regrets: setting forth what a struggle he had trying to keep up with the set that Nina had always moved in; how he was five thousand dollars in debt now, getting deeper, and never had a nickel to jingle for himself, and that was the God's truth; how it had always been his dream to do something big for his sister, and certainly would do the same when old Mottesheard (Nina's father) died; how the old chap hung on in a way you wouldn't believe....
Angela read with a certain sense of chill. Truly womanly, she, of course, never questioned the superior claims of wives. And yet it did seem a little hard that Tommy (who made a large salary as a bond salesman, or something like that) should lavish everything on a girl he had never heard of three years ago, while she, his own sister—
And then, turning into the fourth page, she came on a passage which checked all minor-key reflections instantly. In their place, rose and grew a startled astonishment. Tommy, noting what she had written about her long, dull walks, was offering to give her an automobile.
At first, Angela simply could not take in this offer as a solid reality. It sprang upon her like some wild, exciting joke. She read, with her breath coming faster and faster, and her soft eyes as big as saucers:—
Now, Sis, I know a car may strike you offhand as a good deal of an undertaking for a poor family, but you'd find it wouldn't prove so at all. The car I have in mind for you is a little simple one, that you could easily run and manage yourself. A man from the nearest garage will teach you how to drive it in an hour. There'd be no upkeep at all, with the easy city use you'd give it—practically no expense of any kind but gasoline. The little car is old, of course, but still sound as a trivet, and it'll run till you wouldn't believe it on a gallon or so of juice....
For a space the letter faded from the young girl's vision. Before her mind's eye flashed a series of entrancing pictures: pictures of herself, no longer the lone, slow pedestrian in a too large city....
And don't think you would be depriving us [Tommy went on]. Nina will have a new car every year, and we've really had no use for this one for some time. By the by, didn't you tell me there was an old barn in your back-yard, or an alley? Why wouldn't that do for your garage? Then you would have your car ready at hand, without storage cost, and could take it out at a moment's notice and go for a spin with your friends.
Now think it over, Sis, and let me know if you want it. I can ship it at once, by prepaid express. Nina has a frank....
"Oh, mother!" cried Angela excitedly. "Tommy wants to give me an automobile!"
The heads of the Flowers lifted from their breakfasts as if jerked by a common string.
When the breath-taking letter had been read again, aloud this time, there followed a family symposium, the question being whether or not Angela could have the automobile. To her surprise and delight, it appeared that there was really no question; all the family wanted her to take the automobile; all agreed with Tommy that it would not be a prohibitive undertaking. Mrs. Flower, an habitual conservative, pointed out that there would be nothing to lose in any case: if having the automobile proved impracticable, Angela could simply sell it. Wallie said that, if the automobile came before he left for college, he would teach Angela how to run it himself, thus eliminating the expense of a man from the garage. And, finally, her father astonished her by saying that he would find the necessary funds—estimated at ten dollars—for repairing the abandoned shed, which now leaked dangerously, into a serviceable little garage.
At nine-thirty o'clock that morning Angela rushed out of the house to the nearest telegraph office, to dispatch her happy reply. Excited though she was, however, she did not forget to count the words:—
Crazy about it Tommy. Arrangements made. What kind is car?
A. F.
Tommy's response came at bedtime:—
Car started to you this afternoon. It is a Fordette. Happy New Year.
Tommy.
The night before Wallie started North for college Angela went to him in his little bed-and-workroom and asked the temporary loan of seventy-five dollars. In the interval, she had learned that her father had a patient; it seemed, indeed, that he had had her for some time, only she was not an office patient, so nobody had known about her. Also, Angela anticipated that the housekeeping allowance would prove rather more squeezable now, with Wallie gone. Still, one cannot pass into the motor-car classes on a shoestring, of course; and Wallie, with his prodigal allowance and his handsome store in the bank, now literally rolled in wealth.
Brilliant prosperity, however, did not seem to have improved her little brother's character; he proved to be as reluctant as ever to "part." After a good deal of unworthy haggling, he agreed to lend Angela but fifty dollars, and actually entered the amount in a ridiculous little black book he kept for such things.
The joke of it was that fifty dollars was really more than Angela had expected. She went out from the interview well pleased. Her resolve was to spend thirty dollars of Wallie's loan on a new suit, and keep all the rest for gasoline.
XIII
They had all cautioned her, her father, her brother, the nice man who sold the gasoline, to pick the quietest streets, and to go very slowly. So, from the alley-mouth, her safe progress had been by Gresham Street straight to peaceful Mason, where the traffic was so reassuringly light; and now, as she rolled securely out Mason Street, there began to dawn within her a first shy confidence. She went as slowly as her well-wishers had meant, at least; prudently close to the known haven of the sidewalk she kept at all times; now and then she stopped short, just to see if she could, and always she could. Through all, was the indescribable thrill of really doing it for herself now; lingering incredulity but gave a sharper savor to delight. And she was continually excited with the consciousness of large new possibilities here, of personal power in quite a new dimension.
It was possible to go on indefinitely out Mason Street, but at Olive (always a quiet thoroughfare) she was seized with a sudden adventurousness. She decided to turn up Olive, in short; not meaning to stop at the Wings', of course, but just thinking that if the Wings were looking out the window as she went by, it would be quite a pleasant thing. The enterprise, once conceived, was carried out with perfect technical success; but at the moment of passing the Wings', unluckily, an enormous ice-wagon came lumbering close by, riveting her attention, leaving her not so much as an eyelid to wink toward people's windows. Hence, she never knew whether the Wings were looking out or not. But her confidence waxed. At Center Street the rumble of a street-car warned her to stop a moment—just in time, too, for the car was hardly two blocks away—and when the car had passed, what must she do but roll boldly across the tracks and into the altogether unexplored regions beyond!
What prompted her to do this? Of course, the natural thing was to turn down Center Street a block and get straight back to quiet Mason, which had been duly tried and not found wanting. Afterward, she remembered distinctly that she had been on the point of doing just that. Was it the new adventurousness that beckoned her on, instead? Was it something yet subtler and more mysterious? At any rate, here she was pushing into a quarter of the city where she had never set foot in her life, where, in all human probability, her foot alone would never have brought her. And lo, she had not gone a block into the undiscovered country when a wonder befell, and with a little jump, all but a little cry, she saw the lost member of her coterie rise suddenly before her.
He had come round the unknown corner just ahead, and was walking straight toward her. She became aware of the beating of her heart. All this, it must be understood, was the very first time that Angela had taken out her Fordette alone.
Mr. Garrott was just off the train. Two hours in a day coach might have cramped his long legs; there might have been cinders down the back of his neck. Nevertheless, he advanced with an unmistakably lively tread, continually slapping his leg with a folded periodical of a size and shape like "Willcox's Weekly."
Nor was the coterie member's presence on the Wings' street mere blind chance, either. Those remarkable articles in the magazines about Cousin Mary, which had but popped as a rumor into one of Angela's ears and out the other, had naturally occupied a somewhat more prominent place in the thought of their creator. He remained, indeed, dazzled by the completeness of the write-ups' triumph.
Charles had stayed in the country four days longer than he had intended. And in his extended absence his whole mine of publicity had gone off with a brilliant suddenness that had startled him. The successful sale of the third write-up before he left town had assured a decisive coup, but the quick action the weeklies had given him went beyond all reason. He had not hoped that even the first of the write-ups could see print before the middle of the month, say; on the contrary, he had discovered the last and best of them—the one signed Charles King Garrott—on the train just now, in "Willcox's," for January 10th. In short, in the space of a Christmas holiday he, Charles, had spread the vindicating feats and features of his "demoted" friend to the four corners of the globe. Literally that, for did not the combined circulation of "Willcox's," the "Saturday Review," and "Hervey's National" exceed two million copies weekly (this on the word of the circulation managers themselves, a class of men whose consecration to the austerest veracity has passed into proverb)? Surely there remained few literate persons in the world to-day who could plausibly pretend that they had never heard of Mary Wing.
And Mary (as Angela had noted) had appreciated these extraordinary services to the full. The letter she had written him in the country, after the appearance of the "Saturday Review" article, was uniquely grateful. A beautiful letter Charles had thought it; he had it in his inside pocket now. And the interesting thought it had raised was this: If his usually independent friend could be as grateful as that for the write-ups, what would she say when his whole plan worked out, and his Public Opinion had overwhelmed the School Board for her? Thus, on the train, after reading "Willcox's" piece three times, and now as he strode up the quiet back-street from the station, the author was intently plotting out the next, or practical, stage of his campaign, still unsuspected by her: the stage of the reprinting of the write-ups in the local papers, in fine, of repeated editorial endorsement of the same, of the outburst of letters from "Indignant Taxpayers," "High School Graduates," and "Old Subscribers"—practically all, of course, written by Uncle George Blenso and himself.
His thoughts proved increasingly stimulating to the home-come Charles. And when he came to Olive Street, he suddenly bethought him to turn up that way; not expecting to stop at the Wings', of course (for he had an engagement to call there this evening, much as if he hadn't been a modern at all), but merely thinking that if he should happen to meet Mary it would be quite a pleasant thing....
Having turned, the buoyant young man presently sent, as it were, a scouting eye on ahead. And it fell, not upon the friend he had made famous in a night, but upon an Object approaching.
The object was a conveyance, a little vehicle of the self-propelling type. It was an automobile, clearly; a runabout, you would have to term it, though certainly of a pattern adopted in no recent year. So steep and bobbed was this runabout's little body, so quaintly archaic its contour, that it stirred in the beholder dim recollections of the early days of the horseless age, of strange pictures seen in scientific magazines back in the nineties. Very slowly the little vehicle approached, but very loudly, too, with an increasing bias toward the sidewalk, with queer rumblings and groanings, with the oddest snorts.
Charles's puzzled eye lifted. And so it was that it encountered again the soft gaze that he had last seen misted in tears, upon a sofa. And so he heard the pretty voice, that had once referred to him as a brute, saying:—
"How do you do, Mr. Garrott!... I—I'm very glad to see you back!"
"Why—Miss Flower!"
Sheer surprise had halted him in his tracks, and the self-propelling runabout, which had been almost stationary all along, became entirely so, right at the curb.
"When did you get home?" Miss Flower was finishing, laughing, a becoming color in her cheeks.
"I'm just in—this minute! How are you? I—ah—didn't realize at all that it was you." He had taken the small hand she offered, momentarily flustered, despite all effort, by the utterly sudden re-meeting. He was aware that the girl looked a little conscious, too. But something in her gaze seemed to be trying to tell him that bygones were bygones now; and she went on with reassuring naturalness:—
"I hope you had a nice holiday? I've wanted very much to see you, and thank you myself. About Wallie, I mean—your offering to teach him—"
"Oh!—Why, that!"
"It was really the nicest thing. I—haven't seen you since, but you don't know how much I—we all appreciated—"
With recovered poise the young man easily brushed aside these thanks. "But I'm awfully glad," he added, "that he didn't wait for me, after all."
"Oh!" she exclaimed. "You heard, then?"
He mentioned his letter from Mary Wing, causing her to say, "Oh," again.—"Wasn't it wonderful! I knew you'd be interested...."
She was prettier than he remembered—or was it merely that the new hat (trimmed but yesterday) was more becoming than the old?—and her gaze, though not reproachful a bit, had for him a quality subtly appealing. Of the lives and loneliness of young womanly women—of that forced waiting which dams up all energies unused, and hangs the spirit to thrash about in a void, working over each small event to a towering importance—of such matters, a man, even Charles, the authority, knew only through the powers of his imagination. Charles did observe, however, that this girl seemed very glad to see him. And he felt that he now reciprocated these feelings.
"But," said he, with a hypocritically pleasant look at the vehicle, "Santa Claus seems to have remembered you, too! This is something new, isn't it?" said Charles, though feeling that new was hardly the word.
"Yes,—aren't you surprised? My brother in Pittsburg gave it to me. I've just learned to run it! It was so exciting!"
And then, in a pretty, hesitating way, she said: "Won't you let me drive you—home, or wherever you're going? I'd like to, so much. I—want so to tell you all the news."
He protested that he could not think of using Miss Flower as a taxicab. But when she urged it, in pleasing, ingenuous sentences, and explained that she was out only to drive about anywhere, for practice, it did not occur to him to maintain the churlish negative. And, indeed, this was exactly what he had desired from the moment of reading her perfect note last month—sweet reconciliation in just such a casual way, admitting or entailing next to nothing.
So the returning author of the write-ups was to be seen carefully squeezing himself, and "Willcox's," into the seat of Tommy's delightful gift.
"Let's see—the engine's still going—isn't it?" said she, rather superfluously, it seemed, in view of the uproar. "Then I have to kick that and push this over...."
As the girl said, so she did, her look a little anxious, her young face flushed with excitement. And, sure enough, the vehicle, of a self-propelling type, suddenly shook itself with a few loud snorts, and jumped forward with a jar.
"And what sort of car is this?" resumed Charles, dissembling intense curiosity as mere sympathetic interest.
"It is a Fordette," replied Angela, not without pride.
As they wobbled round the corner, narrowly missing the sidewalk, she added in the same proud manner: "And this is my very first drive by myself."
The taking of the corner (she explained that she could not turn round alone yet) meant that he was not going to pass the Wings', after all; but Charles hardly noticed that. He had himself to look to, in his somewhat unusual position. However, the drive to the Studio, though noisy, was very short; her completely feminine inefficience as a driver, their snail's progress, could not extend it over many minutes; and the whole thing proved as easy and reproachless as could possibly have been wished. Light friendly talk was the note, flowing without embarrassment now. Angela told of the two great happenings in her family, seeming to count upon his interest, and getting it genuinely enough, too. He was glad, sincerely, that Luck had smiled on this girl, who had seemed to him not to be having much of a chance. But she was not one, even so, to take all the conversation to herself; it was a trait that he had noted, and liked, in her from the beginning.
"Mr. Garrott," she said, at the first little pause, "aren't you going to have some stories out pretty soon now? You know you told me you were writing some—before you began your book?"
How gladly Mr. Garrott would have reported a little luck, too! But no, he was still known to Tables of Contents only as the author of write-ups. Somewhat ruefully, he explained to Angela his position about the editors; namely, that the sooner the lot of them came under the eye of a lunacy commission, the better for all concerned.
She became the comforter: "But perhaps they've accepted some of your stories while you were away so long!" He, however, knew that there was nothing in that.
"Well, no—no. You see, my—my relative who lives with me, Judge Blenso, looks after my mail when I'm away. And he's been sending me the casualty lists from time to time."
"But that story I liked so much—you told me a little about it one day—about Helena and her husband, don't you remember, who went off to the desert island—"
"Oh, that? That's been declined—yes, declined three times, if I remember rightly—"
"Really! But how could they! I should think they would have jumped at it! Why, I thought it was just wonderful...."
Her instinct for supplying charm was not amiss, it seemed.
"By the way," said the young author carelessly, as they curved into his own street, "have you happened to see this?"
And he not only showed Angela his "Willcox's," with the write-up in it, but bestowed it upon her, for her own. It developed that he had extra copies in his pocket.
Angela was very grateful for the magazine. Everything was as pleasant and friendly as possible. And at parting, she said, with only the slightest return of self-consciousness:—
"This has been a very short drive, Mr. Garrott! I hope we can have a real one some day soon."
To that the young man, standing on the sidewalk before his own door, replied with a courteous generalization. Wariness was reflexive with him, so to say. But then, as he looked at the soft young face, he seemed to become suddenly conscious of the essential caddishness of his past behavior, and of yet another feeling, too, less coolly judicial. Had not the Kiss, in fact, set this girl somehow apart from others, remaining as a subtle bond after all?
Pressing her slender hand, he added: "Meanwhile, I've enjoyed this one very much! You've been—extremely good to me."
"Willcox's" had given Mary the Freewoman a fine spread. The write-up occupied all of one of its large pages, with three paragraphs "Continued on Page 49," among the Men's Ready to Wear Clothing. Out of the middle of the text, the best of the portraits supplied by Fanny Warder gazed back steadily at the two relatives in the Studio. The famous Mary was seated in a flowered armchair, and seemed just to have looked round over her shoulder. Her delicate, quite girlish, face wore her characteristic look of faint, grave interrogation; her eyes were intent and fine.
"Gad, you know!" said Judge Blenso, who had seen Charles's name in print for the first time with an exclamation of pride and pleasure. "Why, it's stunnin', my dear fellow! Simply stunnin'!"
But the mind's eye of Charles, looking down at the life-like presentment, was seeing that confident gaze averted; the ear of his fancy was hearing the low sounds of womanly emotion in this quarter at last. That, of course, was just after he had gently said to her—why, it might be next week!—"Do you remember telling me one day that I couldn't help you at all? Why, Miss Mary, did you really suppose I'd let you go on as a Grammar School teacher till May!...."
"Bring 'em out as a holiday book—that's what I say! Why, good gad, Charles!—we only got twenty dollars for that piece there!"
The young man laughed absently, and removed his overcoat. A glance at Big Bill showed that it was just four o'clock. He had examined the mail, heard the secretary's unfavorable reports. The Studio, after nearly three weeks' holiday, suggested the necessity of work undoubtedly; he was as far from settling upon his Line as ever. But it seemed that he didn't feel like plotting scenarios to-day.
The "Post," the "State," the "Chronicle"—why shouldn't he go down there now, get the thing started at once?...
"Oh, Judge, by the way! Do you know whether Miss McGee ever brought back that book I lent her?—fat red book, called 'Marna'?"
"'Marna,' 'Marna'? Never heard of it. Yes, that's so, she did! Here it is!" said the Judge, and forthwith plucked Miss Angela's long-kept loan from the bookcase close by.
"That's it! Let's lay it here on the mantel. Then maybe I'll remember—"
"And borrowed a lot more, too!" exclaimed the Judge, suddenly laughing loud and long. "Gad, I lent her an armful, fact!—night we had the sleet-storm!"
"You did?—good! We'll convince her we're her true friends yet."
His secretary, having gazed at him a moment with brilliant blankness, suddenly exclaimed: "Why, Charles, my dear fellow, you're looking like a fighting-cock! You must have put on a stone—fine! Here, let me feel your muscle!"
Charles tried to evade that ceremony, but it was, of course, no use. Having caught him going through certain setting-up exercises one night, and being misled by the light remark he let fall, Judge Blenso was irrevocably convinced that the sedentary Charles had an affair of honor on his hands. The night he made this discovery—the very night Charles secretly began the exercises, of course, the night of the day he had seen Mysinger on the street—the Judge had become almost dangerously excited, springing from bed and walking about a long time in his pajamas, saying over and over: "The old blood'll tell! Gad, you know! It's the old blood!" All attempts to explain, then and since, had been utterly without effect.
However, a knock on the door interrupted the proceedings, and Mrs. Herman came walking into the Studio—a dark, round, rosy little body, beetle-browed but beaming.
"Such a popular man I never saw!" said she, roguishly. "One lady meeting him and driving him up from the station, another calling him up before he's hardly arrived, and goodness knows who'll be next!"
"Why, who's calling me, Mrs. Herman?"
"It's Miss Wing!—waiting at the phone! And no wonder, with all you and the Judge have done for her, I'm sure! Judge, I hope you find your new chair comfortable?"
Having received the unexpected summons with a peculiar start of gladness, the young man descended the stairs with the most agreeable anticipations. To do a valuable service for a friend is, with some natures, to become fonder than ever of that friend; and Charles, from the moment of reading her unprecedented letter, was aware that his original services to Mary had distinctly had these sentimental reactions. (For of course such natures are sentimental, disgustingly so, and real Men—not to say realistic men—invariably hate and despise their friends, and speak to said friends at all only with a view to taking away their money or their wives.)
So, sitting down at the little telephone-table in the dark rear-hall, Charles smiled to himself and said, in a false voice:—
"Pardon me, but is this the famous Miss Wing, who—"
And Mary's voice seemed to spring toward him through the receiver, like an embrace: "Oh, King Charles!"
It was a little name she had made long ago by turning his first two names about, but reserved for rare occasions only. Rare also was it to hear this commonly contained voice so deeply stirred.
"Welcome home! I hope I didn't interrupt your work, but it seemed I couldn't wait! And, of course, I haven't half thanked you yet, haven't begun to tell you how much—how much—I appreciate all you've done for me...."
Once more, the fortunate Charles was brushing aside a lady's gratitude—rather generously, considering the infrequency of grounds of gratitude here. He laughed gaily into the receiver.
"The real point is, why under the sun did you connect me right away with the remarkable outburst of popular admiration? Hartwell went gossiping about, I suppose?"
"I didn't need Mr. Hartwell to tell me anything about that! But—"
"Aha! So Fanny told you about the photographs—"
"She never breathed a word—"
"Good-evening, Miss Holmes!—old Watson speaking! Will you kindly explain your—!"
"Why, of course there wasn't but one person on earth who could have done such a beautiful thing for me!"
All alone in the hall, Charles felt himself coloring with pleasure. However, the unwonted flush was not for long.
"I have to pinch myself," the girl's eager voice rushed on (did it sound just a thought more triumphant than even the author of the write-ups could have expected?),—"for every magazine I pick up is full of nothing but Me! I've just seen 'Willcox's'—oh, you don't know how much I liked that! You've simply taken my breath away! And then to come in and find this!—everything beautiful happening to me at once! I—"
"What? More honors, celebrity?"
"The greatest!—the most wonderful! Mr. Garrott, what DO you suppose?"
Mr. Garrott hardly liked the slant the conversation was taking. The understanding was that whatever beautiful things happened to the Career were to happen exclusively through him now.
"Why!—I can't guess! Not—Has the School Board—"
"Pish for the School Board," cried the voice that was wont to be so calm. "You're talking to the new Secretary of the League!"
"I'm.... What?"
"The person you're conversing with, if you please, is the General Secretary of the National League for Education Reform!" Her happy laugh rang on the wire: "Are you staggered? Well, I am, too! I simply can't begin to take it in...."
Had Mrs. Herman's house fallen about his ears, the young man at the telephone-table could, indeed, scarcely have been staggered more. His sense was of one falling headlong through space. He gripped the edge of the table with a large left hand, and for the instant there was no speech in him.
"I found the letter from Dr. Ames when I got in just now—oh, the nicest letter, explaining everything! And of course I wanted to tell you right away—you've been so good about wanting to help! Don't you remember, it was you who spoke of this as my brilliant revenge? We little thought then ..."
Wanting to help! Doubt not, that was the body blow. "No—no! And I—I really don't take it in—even now," he was saying, struggling desperately for his mask. "I—ah—I'd given up all—idea, you see! Why, I understood that was all off! I—"
"Of course—so had I! That's what makes it such a wonderful bolt from the blue! There was another candidate, you see—a college president, imagine!—and Dr. Ames says he felt he ought to be very discreet and reticent till it was all settled. But I was elected unanimously, and must be in New York to take charge of the office on March 1st...."
It was the complete collapse of his triumph and his hope: he would not be going to the newspaper-offices now. But that sentence, that concrete date, took the whole matter deeper still. Charles Garrott took a firmer grip on Mrs. Herman's little table. Now his voice came firmer, too:—
"The first woman secretary they ever had!... Why—it's immense!"
In the ensuing dialogue, in which, for pride's sake, he sought to strike just the right felicitatory note, there was an instant when the possibility flashed upon him that the stunning event was itself but the unimagined by-product of the write-ups. The directors had decided not to give the distinguished post to an obscure provincial teacher, when all of a sudden his great broadside of fame for Mary had come roaring in among them. The thought, in this moment of utter frustration, seemed actually welcome to him. But it had hardly fluttered before Mary struck it dead, in the most incidental manner: incidental—since, to be just, she, having no knowledge whatever of his secret plans, could hardly guess what annihilation she was dealing out to them. It developed, in short, that her election, though held back a few days to be ratified by the trustees of the League's endowment fund, had actually taken place on December 27th. And it was too readily recalled that the first of the write-ups had not appeared till the following day.
"Yes—yes!... Fine holiday, thank you!—fine! But of course—no triumphs like this to report!..."
"Well!—I mustn't keep you now, of course!" said the victorious voice. "I'm looking forward to seeing you ..."
No, it was sufficiently clear that he had but labored to heap coals in Newcastle. It was just the case of the old write-up, last year; only now a thousand times worse. Often before, this desire in him to help, this spontaneous protecting instinct which seemed to be always flowing out here, had been rebuffed and defeated. But this time, his defeat seemed to be final. And, hanging up the receiver at last, the young man sat silent with the feeling that something valuable and important had suddenly departed from his life.
He felt that he had been rather imposed upon, but that didn't matter particularly. He felt beaten, as he had never been beaten before, and that seemed to matter a good deal. With an odd and profound sense of blank chagrin, he recognized, at last, that when Mary Wing had said that she didn't need his help, she had been merely stating a literal and obvious truth. How he had been such a fool as ever to think otherwise?
But deeper than all this, it seemed clear from the beginning that he was disappointed in his friend, personally. Had he not read into her all along, and put into the write-ups, a rather finer quality than she, in fact, possessed? Spinsters were entitled to a man's freedom to follow away their work—of course. But it seemed that he had never been able to imagine Mary as actually seizing this Right. And now, here she was doing it, with joy—the end of next month. Now behold her, whose praises he had so superfluously sung round the world—just an ordinary Redmantler after all, it seemed, exultantly striking off mother, home, friends; a female Egoist, no more, visibly engaged in "fiercely hacking away"....
He could, indeed, scarcely take it in. And stoutly he assured himself that his whole feeling about the matter would have been different—if only she had showed, at once, that this would be a wrench for her, that her thought was colored by a sense of values not connected with her Self. But no; it seemed that the new General Secretary had no thought to spare for the immaterial business of being a sister and being a daughter.
So Charles's call at the Wings' on the evening of his homecoming wore a complexion not contemplated by him when he had arranged the matter.
He had made this engagement, under the general misapprehension, in his reply to Mary's grateful letter last week. And now he had to keep it, however malapropos, resolved as he was that she should never sense any criticism or disapprobation in him. To seek to "influence" her, naturally never entered his mind. No, he was her casual spectator now and henceforward; he had dipped his oar in her affairs for the last time.
But the call was hardly much of a success, despite all efforts. Mary, having now had time to recapture her usual poise, no longer impressed one as being so unreservedly overjoyed with herself. It was noted that she kept referring to the write-ups, kept assuring him how delightful she found it to be a celebrity as well as a Secretary, etc., etc. The caller's intellect coldly gave her credit for "being very nice." However, no niceness could help much to drape the stark obtruding facts; no civilities seemed fitted to cope with the intangible wall suddenly sprung up in the old friendship. And if there had lingered in Charles's mind some revolting incredulity, some reactionary insistence that Mary could never really carry out the typical exploit of the Egoette, the talk this evening finally killed it. The famous educator's sentences made it clear, once and for all, that she was Leaving Home for good—for her own good, of course—on the 1st day of March succeeding.
Charles was determinedly "sincere" throughout the brief call, continuously and spuriously hearty. Inwardly, his resolve grew more and more fixed that this young woman, who was so rarely competent to Lead Her Own Life, should be permitted to lead it quite unassisted henceforth. For himself, he decided that his life should go to the unremitting service of pure Letters. But of such matters, of course, he permitted his agreeable chatter to yield no hint. Taking his departure upon a new wave of felicitations, he could but congratulate himself upon the trained adeptness of his mask.
And Mary, having shut the door upon her caller, stood leaning against it, her arched brows drawn together in a faint frown, her fine eyes faintly bewildered.
"Now what," she said, half aloud, "have I said or done, or left unsaid or undone, this time?"
And then she went slowly back to her mother's bedroom, where she found her mother with stockings to darn, and (taken unawares) her eyes a little red.
XIV
In the Home on Center Street, the shrunken curtain was rarely hooked back on the nail now. And on the ledge of the little window that gazed toward the Blest, the shabby opera-glasses gathered dust.
As is perfectly understood, Careers in the making are the stuff to make conservatives of others. Observing Egoettes, an authority, if male, inevitably reacts, thinking better and better of the gentle business of supplying beauty and supplying charm. Charles Garrott, in short, having repudiated all connection with the life of Mary Wing, was in just the proper frame of mind to applaud the life of Mary's so different cousin. And Charles did applaud it—certainly. But, of course, such purely scientific endorsement did not controvert another established known truth, namely, that, under certain circumstances and as applied to certain individuals, the supply of the soft commodities referred to may very well prove a little in excess of the demand.
The well-known thought first flickered back into Charles's mind on the third day of his homecoming. At the moment, he stood on the corner nearest Berringer's, having just dismounted there from Miss Angela's conveyance. On the fifth day of his homecoming, at the same corner, his reflections on supply and demand were assuming an increasing definiteness.
"Well, then—good-bye!" he was saying, with his fatal pleasantness. "And thank you very much for the lift."
From the seat of Tommy's valuable donation, Angela was gazing up at him. And he saw that her face, which had been smiling, was touched with a brief seriousness.
"Oh, you know I've enjoyed it—so much! But—we never seem to have anything but these little bits of talks. I'm sorry.... Perhaps I'll see you to-morrow?"
"Ha!—quite likely!—yes! Thank you! Well!—good-bye!"
And he turned away toward luncheon and the good man-talk with a crescent uneasiness, having failed to point out—possibly failing to remember—that to-morrow was Saturday, and he would be off to the country again.
Day before yesterday, he had encountered the conveyance as he left the Demings' at one o'clock. To-day, he had overtaken it on his walk downtown—literally that, for he was a fast walker and a little absent-minded besides. Thus he had now enjoyed three peace-making drives with the girl he had once parted from forever, all in the course of his first five days at home. And now at the end of their third pleasant talk, particularly after these last prospective remarks of hers, Charles could not but feel that the true object of these re-meetings had been satisfactorily accomplished. Now the reconciliation was complete; now he felt no lingering shadow of doubt of his forgiveness for having once been a brute.
He did not regret the drives; he was very glad, indeed, to be good friends again; but his subtle instinct seemed to warn him that he and Angela would do best, would get along with the fewest misunderstandings, without a rapidly developing intimacy. And, taking the higher view, it clearly was not right, it was not moral, that a confirmed bachelor like himself should go on indefinitely monopolizing a nice young Spinster Home-Maker's time.
Returning to town on Monday, Charles, though in the kindest way, went to Berringer's by the Center Street car-line. He felt, indeed, that he was really looking out for the girl's higher good more than for his own: she lacked that competence to manage her own life, so harshly flaunted by others. All passed off well. On Tuesday he utilized the traction system again, with equally satisfying results. And then, on Tuesday afternoon, as he trod professionally from the old lady's who was studying French to Miss Grace Chorister's, he suddenly ran upon the Fordette again.
By an odd chance, the quaint little vehicle was standing still, directly in front of the Choristers'. His reconciled friend was out of it, standing by, bending well over the car, peering into it. Nevertheless, by some sixth sense, she saw him at once and, straightening up with a pleased smile, she waved and called:—
"Oh, Mr. Garrott!—how glad I am to see you! Do you know how to crank?"
He approached with the gallantest air, the most civil speeches. All the same, as he bent to his hard labor—for the Fordette proved dangerously stiff in the crank—and politely sought to explain how to avoid killing the engine for the future, he was conscious of a certain sense of rebellion.... Excellent, laudable, justifying things, beauty and charm; but the plain fact was that he, Charles, was simply not in the market for them at present, that was all.
The friendship, indeed, was well cemented now; the talk characterized with a growing confidence.
"Oh, how strong you are!" said Angela admiringly, as he finally got the old engine to spinning. "I do wish I could do it like that! Now you must let me pay you for your trouble!—won't you? I'm just driving around, really, so don't think—"
"Oh, thank you, but I go in here. Business hours, you know! Well! Now you're—"
"Oh, is this where you teach every afternoon?" asked Angela, with interest, gazing past him at the handsome stone "front" of the Choristers'. "Oh, yes, Miss Chorister.... How long does the lesson last?"
"Oh, an hour—usually. But, of course," added the young man, his eye wavering slightly, "that depends somewhat—on circumstances—"
"You don't get out till about half-past four, then? I do wish you weren't so awfully busy! Mr. Garrott, have you been away again? I don't seem to have seen you at all for a good many days now."
"Yes! That's it!—been away again! I go away all the time—practically. And when I'm here, why, it's nothing but work, work, work, from morning to night, for me! It's a wonder to me I have a friend left, I have to be so horribly unsociable—always. But," continued Charles, "I'm glad I happened by in time to be of some help. By the by, hadn't you better get in and try her out? I don't like to rush on to my lesson till I know you're all right."
"Yes, I suppose I had. I oughtn't to stop you now."
His suggestion, indeed, had a striking reasonableness. Fortunately, the try-out proved quite successful, after only a little pushing and kicking. But the Fordette snorted from before the Choristers' very slowly, Angela looking back over her shoulder, smiling at him, a pretty and appealing look on her entirely feminine face.
Charles went up to his daily hour with Miss Grace, in a brown study.
Miss Grace, it must be known, was a Temporary Spinster, verging toward Permanence; she was round, gentle, blonde, by no means displeasing or ill-looking. Had the world been the normal place Old Tories took it to be, Miss Grace would undoubtedly have been one of those happy women who find themselves, at twenty-five, with a home, a husband, and three darling little curly-headed children; and there were a hundred signs that so she would have found full happiness indeed. But the world being not normal now, but, on the contrary, in Unrest, something remote had gone wrong with Miss Grace, parting her from her manifest destiny. Perhaps the panic of 1907 was to blame, or a decrease in the visible gold supply; perhaps the trouble was in that hard saying of the Redmantlers, that Love was going out. At any rate, here hung Miss Grace on the parent stem in Washington Street, a Waiting Woman: the non-understanding and unaccounted-for Anomaly in a disordered social system; an adult human being thirty-two years old, with nothing upon earth to do.
Miss Grace's subjects were Sociology and the History of the World. An agreeable soul herself, she noted that her tutor's manner this afternoon was taciturn and distrait. As he was concluding his remarks upon the thirty pages of Lester Ward that made her lesson, she noted that he lost his thread suddenly, and left a sentence permanently hanging in mid-air. Back into the tutor's head, in fact, the artless questionings of another had popped with arresting force: "Is this where you teach every afternoon? You get out about half-past four?" From taciturn, Mr. Garrott's manner became restless and rather irritable. And when the hour of four-thirty arrived, he did not snap his watch at Miss Grace and depart at once, according to his almost invariable habit. No, he moved in a novel manner, to the drawing-room window. And he stood there, oddly and irresolutely, gazing out, first up the street and then down.
Why had he mentioned that the lesson lasted an hour usually? Why hadn't he said, frankly, that it lasted till five or six o'clock, and often later?
Slowly but surely the idea was being established that it was the natural and usual thing for him and Angela to drive in the old Fordette every day. It was time for him definitely to break up this idea. Otherwise, what was to be the end of it all?—that was what he wanted to know. More and more he seemed to become aware of a gentle claim, an indescribable pressure, very soft, yet rather alarmingly sure. Why on earth couldn't she be satisfied just to be pleasant friends once more? Why all this talk of future meetings, of seeing you again all the time?
Miss Grace stood some distance behind her tutor, observing his strange behavior. Somehow her attitude wore the air of a typical expression of character. Miss Grace had flutterings, as witness her growing knowledge of the Merovingians; she even pretended to nibble fearfully at her tutor's occasional exhortations, that she cease her parasiting and go to work. But beneath such vague symptoms of Unrest, it was clear that she remained as her tradition and environment had fixed her, a Woman of Romance: that is to say, a being gladly content to serve as the spectator and audience of Man.
"Mr. Garrott," she said suddenly, in her rather childlike voice, "I don't believe you are a bit busy this afternoon. You really must stay for tea. Nobody's coming in, sister's out, and you know you haven't stayed for perfect ages."
To her surprise, the unsocial tutor accepted at once. He remained with his pupil till quarter past five. Thereupon, he reached his Studio without interruption, entirely on foot.
Charles (thinking for the young girl's highest good) was rather pleased with this development. By accident, he seemed to have hit upon quite a satisfactory sort of modus vivendi: street-cars to Berringer's, and tea at Miss Grace's till dark. Next day he tried the programme again.
This time, it did not work out quite so well: the secret truth of the matter being that, at bottom, all Spinsters have certain well-defined points in common. That, in fact, is what makes them a class. And, speaking in the large, you may say that there is no such thing as a Permanent Spinster.
Lessons at the Choristers' took place in the library, a stately room, yet charming, too. Into it, a dusky maid wheeled a double-tiered tea-table, all mahogany and glass, silver and china atop, little cakes and small enticements on the deck below. Talk of historical matters ceased. There sprang up light prattle of the little things Miss Grace knew and liked best.
The tutor, basking by the fireside and waiting for night, was not unhappy. Though he frequently lectured Miss Grace, through long use he really liked her. Now, he was also consciously grateful for her haven from the too social life of Washington Street. That he could not go on taking tea with Miss Grace every day for the rest of his life he, of course, knew well; but he would just take each day's problems as he came to them. Meanwhile, this Spinster supplied a quiet charm. Her hands hovered ministeringly over the tea-table. For a plumpish woman, she had noticeably small hands, graceful and white. When the tutor made her a civil compliment, she colored like a school-girl.
