Before long Mrs. Sturgis came fluttering in great agitation to her oldest daughter. By various circumlocutions, she approached the subject which was causing her so much distress. It was quite evident that Alice was not well; she was run down and getting terribly nervous. Had Jeannette noticed anything wrong with her? Jeannette didn’t suppose it could be a man, did she? The little brown bird was still her mother’s baby after all, but you never could tell about girls. Alice was,—well, Alice was nineteen! And if it was a man,—the dear child acted exactly as if there was one,—who could it possibly be? She didn’t see anybody but Roy; she didn’t go any place with anybody else. Now her mother didn’t want to say one word to distress Jeannette, or to say anything that would—would upset her.... Perhaps she was all wrong about it anyway, but—but did Jeannette think it was possible that Alice and Roy,—that Alice,—that Alice....
Amused, Jeannette watched her anxious little mother floundering on helplessly. Then she suddenly took the plump and worried figure in her arms, hugged her, and told her all about it.
Mrs. Sturgis could only stare in amazement and interject breathless exclamations of “But, dearie!” “Why, dearie!” “Well, I don’t know what to make of you!”
But the question now remaining was how to jog Roy’s consciousness awake, make him see the little brown flower at his feet that looked up at him so adoringly, only waiting to be plucked. Jeannette said nothing to her mother, but she went to Roy direct. She felt sure of her touch with him.
First she made him realize that she could never be satisfied with being his wife. She explained carefully and convincingly why it could never be, and then while he gazed tragically at the ground, twisting his lean white fingers, she spoke to him frankly of Alice.
As she talked it came over her with fresh conviction that, had she married him, she could have done as she liked with Roy; he was putty in her hands. But her husband must be a man who would mold her, make her do what he wished, bend her to his will. Only such a man would awaken her love and keep it. She despised Roy for his amiability.
He looked very boyish and silly to her now, as he rumpled his stuck-up hair, and dubiously shook his head. He was surprised to hear about Alice, and,—Jeannette could see,—at once interested. She left the thought with him and confidently waited for it to take hold. Mr. Corey, she felt, would have handled the situation in just some such fashion as she had,—direct, cutting the Gordian knot, plunging straight to the heart of the matter.
One night at dinner she casually told her mother and sister that her engagement with Roy had been broken by mutual consent. She explained they both had begun to realize they did not really love one another well enough to marry and had decided to call it off. Roy was a sweet boy, she added, and would make some girl a splendid husband. She glanced covertly at Alice. The girl was bending over her plate, pretending an interest in her food, but her face was deadly white. A rush of tenderest love flooded Jeannette’s heart. At the moment she would have given much to have been free to take her little sister in her arms and tell her everything, assure her that the man she loved was beginning to love her in return and would some day make her his wife.
And that was how it turned out. A year later Roy and Alice were married by the Reverend Doctor Fitzgibbons in the church on Eighty-ninth Street in just the way the bride’s mother had planned for her older daughter, and now they were living in a small but pretty four-room apartment out in the Bronx for which they paid twenty-five dollars a month. Happy little Mrs. Beardsley’s mother and sister were aware that very shortly those grave responsibilities at which Mrs. Sturgis had often mysteriously hinted were to come upon her. Alice was “expecting” in March.
Roy was no longer an employee of the Chandler B. Corey Company. He had found another job just before he married and was now with The Sporting Gazette, a magazine devoted to athletic interests, gaming, and fishing, where he was getting forty dollars a week as sub-editor. He had always wanted to write and this came nearer his ambition than soliciting advertisements. Moreover there was the increase in salary. Of course The Sporting Gazette was new and had nothing like the circulation of the Corey publications, but Roy considered it a step ahead. He had given Mr. Featherstone a chance to keep him, but Mr. Featherstone had rubbed his chin and wagged his head dubiously when asked for a raise. No,—there mustn’t be any more raises for awhile, no more increases in salary until the company was making larger profits; they were expanding; there was the new building with the larger rent, and all those new presses to be paid for. So Roy had gone in quest of another job, and had found it in one of three rough little rooms comprising the editorial offices of The Sporting Gazette. He considered himself extremely happy, extremely fortunate.