ROUGH-HEWN

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

THE SQUIRREL-CAGE
A MONTESSORI MOTHER
MOTHERS AND CHILDREN
THE BENT TWIG
THE REAL MOTIVE
FELLOW CAPTAINS
(With Sarah N. Cleghorn)
UNDERSTOOD BETSY
HOME FIRES IN FRANCE
THE DAY OF GLORY
THE BRIMMING CUP

ROUGH-HEWN

BY
DOROTHY CANFIELD

NEW YORK
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.

PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

CONTENTS

ANY LITTLE BOY

CHAPTER I

In the spring of 1893 Strindberg had just published "A Fool's Confession," D'Annunzio was employing all the multicolored glory of his style to prove "The Triumph of Death"; Hardy was somberly mixing on his palette the twilight grays and blacks and mourning purples of "Jude the Obscure"; Nordau, gnashing his teeth, was bellowing "Decadent" at his contemporaries who smirked a complacent acceptance of the epithet ... and, all unconscious of the futility and sordidness of the world, Neale Crittenden swaggered along Central Avenue, brandishing his shinny stick.

It was a new yellow shinny stick, broad and heavy and almost as long as the boy who carried it. Ever since he had seen it in the window of Schwartz's Bazar, his soul had yearned for it. For days he had hoarded his pennies, foregoing ice-cream sodas, shutting his ears to the seductive ding-dong of the waffle-man's cart, and this very afternoon the immense sum of twenty-five cents had been completed and now he owned a genuine boughten stick, varnished and shiny. What couldn't he do with such a club! He beat it on the sidewalk till the flag-stones rang; he swung it around his head. What stupendous long-distance goals he was going to make! How he would dribble the ball through the enemy!

Spring had turned the vacant lots into sticky red mud, but Central Avenue was hard if somewhat undulating macadam. It had stone curbs too, that bounced the ball back as if specially designed for side-boundaries by a philanthropic Board of Supervisors. Somewhere along it he was sure to find a game in progress. Yes, there they were in front of Number Two School. Neale broke into a run and coming up breathless plunged into the scrimmage.

Shinny as played on Union Hill in the nineties had none of the refinements of its dignified cousin, field-hockey. Roughly divided into two sides, an indeterminate number of players tried with their sticks to knock a hard rubber ball to opposite ends of a block. Team work was elementary: the slowest runner on each side lay back to "tend gool"; the rest, following the fortunes of the ball, pelted to and fro in a seething mêlée of scuffling feet and clashing sticks. After each goal the ball was brought to the middle of the block, the two captains took their stand with sticks on either side of it. "One," they rapped their sticks on the pavement; "two," they rapped them together; "one, two, one, two." Then pandemonium broke out shrilly, sticks rapping against each other or against opposing shins, yells of "shinny on your own side," a welter of little boys battling around the ball as it shot up and down, sometimes advancing rapidly, sometimes stationary among a vortex of locked sticks until finally a lucky knock drove it past one or the other side street.

Once as they were walking back after a goal, Fatty Schmidt noticed Neale's new weapon. "Oh, you gotta new shinny. Where'd you get it? Schwartz? Huh, them kind ain't no good; they split." Neale was silent as an Iroquois, but he had already begun to doubt. The heavy new stick didn't seem to be turning out what he had expected. It tripped him up occasionally and he never got it on the ball as quickly as he had his old home-made locust-shoot with the knob of root at the end. But he kept his doubts to himself, let out another notch of speed, and tried harder. It began to go better. He stopped a dangerous rush by hooking Franz Uhler's stick just as he was about to shoot for goal. Another time unaided he took the ball away from Don Roberts, lost it, but Marty Ryan retrieved it, and Neale and Marty raced down almost on top of the opposing goal keeper. Marty hit the ball a terrific crack. "Gool!" they cried exultingly, then on another note, indignantly, "Hi there, drop that!" For as the ball bounded along the street, a ragged little boy who had sprung up from nowhere grabbed it and made off. The pack gave chase. The little gamin had a good start but the bigger boys ahead of Neale were gaining on him. He turned off eastward. As Neale tore along he saw Marty and Franz catch up with the little kid, and then ... what was this? Where did all those other boys come from?

With a whoop of joyous exultation he recognized the familiar ambush, the welcome invitation to battle. "Come on, fellers!" he yelled back to his own crowd. "Hoboken micks!" And with the rest of the Union Hill crowd charged through a fire of stones at the invaders.

Then it was that the new shinny stick vindicated itself. Swinging it like a crusader's two-handed sword, Neale hacked and hewed. He landed on the funny-bone of a boy struggling with Marty for the ball. He landed on another mick's ribs. He heaved the stick up and was going to smash a hostile head when the enemy broke and ran. Triumphant, the Union Hill boys chased them to the edge of the hill, and sent a volley of stones after them as they scrambled down the steep path among the rocks, but pursued them no further. Below was the enemy's country. The Union Hill crowd never ventured down the rocks to the level cinder-filled flats beside the railroad tracks. That was Hoboken and a foreign land.

It was supper time now. The victors said "So long" to each other and dispersed. Neale, somewhat lame but elated, went up the wooden steps of the porch. He stood his stick up in the umbrella-stand, went to the bathroom, washed his hands, brushed his hair, at least the top layer of it, and went quietly down to the dining-room. There he ate his buttered toast and creamed potatoes and drank his cocoa silently, while his father and mother talked. He paid no attention to what they said. He was living over again the fight of the afternoon, and forecasting fresh conquests for the future. His mother passed him a sauce-dish of preserved cherries and a piece of cake. After he had eaten this, he got up silently and went back to his room. His mother looked after him tenderly. "Neale is a good boy," she said. Although he was no longer there, she still saw his honest round face, clear eyes, fresh color. She smiled to herself lovingly.

Her husband nodded, "Yes, he's a good boy." After a thoughtful pause, he added, "Seems an awfully quiet kid, though. I mean he keeps things to himself. You haven't any idea whether he's having a real boy's fun or not. He makes so little noise about it."

As he passed through the hall Neale lingered a moment to handle the shinny stick again. He looked at it carefully to see if perhaps there was not a little blood on it.

CHAPTER II

Union Hill had been created by two very different classes of home-makers, a fact which was obvious from its aspect. Its undistinguished frame buildings for the most part sheltered families who, having to live somewhere, had settled there where inadequate communication with the rest of the world kept rents down. Side by side with this drab majority, but mingling with it little, a few well-to-do business men had built comfortable, roomy homes in an uninspired compromise between their business connections in the city and their preference for open-air life for their families. This narrow ridge of trap rock continuing the Palisades southward between the partly reclaimed back lots of Hoboken and the immense, irreclaimable salt marshes of the Hackensack Valley, had a certain picturesqueness, had seemed to promise freedom from malaria (supposed at that time to result from the breathing the "miasma" hanging low about swamp land), and certainly offered fresher air than a flat on a New York street or a town beside a New Jersey marsh. It was a one-sided sort of compromise in which the families came out rather badly. Whatever natural beauty might be inherent in the site was largely nullified by the tawdry imaginings of small architects and building contractors, and despite popular medical theories, the malaria was about the same on the hill as on the flats. But though the advance of the suburban idea was already developing more attractive sites at no very great distance, few families moved away. With the massive immobility characteristic of humanity, the scattered well-to-do families of Union Hill stuck it out, grim and disillusioned, taking the consequences of their error of judgment rather than lose the sensation of stability, which means home.

Little Neale was quite unconscious of all this. To his ten-year-old thoughts "the Hill" was home, and where could you live except at home? It never occurred to him that there might be other or better homes—the Hill was where he lived. He accepted it as uncritically as he accepted life, school, his parents. Being, for that region where every one took quinine as a matter of course, rather a healthy boy, he accepted the initial facts of nature without criticism or much interest, working off the surplus of his young energy in baseball, shinny and guerilla skirmishes with the boys from other localities.

His unconcern with the world around him, except for the details of boy-life, was complete. Home was warm and secure; he did not inquire whether other homes might be less warm or more elegant. Food was good to eat, though meals with adult conversation between his father and mother were tedious and occupied far too much time that might have been spent in play. His father was kind and remote. Neale thought very little about his father. He went away in the morning after breakfast and came in just before supper. He was in the lumber business, and when he went away, it was to the "office." Neale never went to the office; but once in a while, on Saturdays, Father took him walking down the long flight of wooden steps, down to the enemy's country where, thanks to the size of his father's protecting figure, never a Hoboken mick dared to throw a mudball; across the railroad track and a long, long way on paved sidewalks till they came out on a wide, noisy, muddy street filled with trucks drawn by horses with gleaming round haunches. And on the other side of the street there wasn't any more land, but long sheds that stuck out into the oily, green Hudson River. These sheds had huge doors through which the big, dappled horses kept hauling trucks, in and out. Some of the wharves had ships tied beside them. Occasionally these were sailing ships with bow-sprits slanting forward over the street, but more often steamers, black except for a band of red down near the water. As Neale walked along, although he never ventured to ask his busy father to stop and let him stare his fill, he could catch glimpses through the doorways of what went on inside the sheds. There were steep gang-ways, sloping from the plank floor of the pier to the ships, and up and down these, big men in blue jumpers wheeled hand-carts, always moving at a dog-trot. Through other openings, bundles of boxes tied together with rope slid down sloping boards, and other men with sharp hooks were always loading them on trucks or unloading them from trucks; or huge bales descended from the air, dangling at the end of a clinking chain. This bustle and noise, the strange tarry smells and the clatter of steam winches exhilarated Neale, excited him, made something quiver and glow within him. He longed to go in and be part of it.

But Father never went inside, and it never occurred to Neale to explain how he felt, and to ask Father please to take him in. Silent as an Iroquois, he walked beside his father, who often glanced down, baffled, at the healthy, personable little boy beside him, looking so exactly like any other well-dressed, middle-class little boy.

And yet, often before he fell asleep at night, Neale heard again the clanking clatter of the great unloading cranes, smelled again the intoxicating tarry salty ocean smells and felt again something quiver and glow within him.

There was neither quiver nor glow about the place where Father finally stopped of his own accord. In a wide part of the street, huge piles of lumber were stacked. Father would walk slowly along these, looking at them very hard, and then he would go into a tiny, stuffy little wooden clap-boarded house—just one room, with men in shirt sleeves writing at desks—and there he would talk incomprehensible grown-up talk with one of the men, and the man would write at his desk, and Father standing up, would write in a note-book with a fountain pen ... and that was all the fun there was to the lumber business!

Left to himself, Neale sat on the door-step and watched the fascinating life on the docks. Once he slipped across the street and tried to follow a truck in, but a big man with a red face yelled at him so loudly to "get out of there" that Neale ran back again, furiously angry but not knowing how to get around the big watchman. All he could do was to sit just inside the door, hating the watchman, and stare at the tantalizing activity so far away, and wish with all his heart that Father's business were more romantic.

Mother meant more to Neale than Father did. He knew her better ... a little better. He had even some abstract ideas about her, that she was beautiful when she dressed up to go out in the afternoon. Mother fussed about his clothes more than was convenient, and insisted on baths, and washing hands before meals, but when he was sick, Mother read him stories, and let him leave the gas turned on in his room when he went to bed. Mother gave him pennies, too, and when Father was away on a business trip, he and Mother would eat alone together, and she would talk to him and ask him questions about school and play, and his boy friends. Neale didn't mind telling her things ... he liked Mother ... but he couldn't seem to manage to think of a great deal to tell her. It sounded foolish to talk about games to grown-ups.

And games were really all that Neale cared about, almost all that he ever thought about. As to telling Mother other things, the few other things he did occasionally think about, why, there didn't seem to be anywhere to start. He'd have to begin "way back at the beginning" and now that Neale was ten years old, the beginning was too far back for him to lay hold of.

As a matter of fact, she did not often ask about any of it, even in her distant careful way of asking. She just took good care of him, and had what he liked for supper, and put the kind of books he liked up in his room, and kept his buttons sewed on, and every night, till he was a big, big boy came into his room to kiss him good-night in his bed. She didn't say anything much then; just, "Have you enough covers?" maybe; or, "I believe I'd better open that window wider," and then, with the kiss, "Good-night, Neale."

"Good-night, Mother."

Then he turned over and nearly always went instantly to sleep.

When Father was at home, mostly Father and Mother talked together at table, and read together after supper in the sitting-room, while Neale "did" his lessons upstairs. Or else Mother would dress up in one of her pretty dresses and Father would put on a clean shirt and his dark suit and they would go across the river to a theater in New York, leaving Neale to Katie, the good-natured, middle-aged Irish cook who had been with them since before Neale's birth. Or sometimes they had "company"; other ladies in pretty dresses and other husbands in clean shirts and dark suits. Then they had a specially good supper, the sort of expensive things that were usually reserved for Sunday dinner, planked shad and roast chicken and ice-cream, and coffee in the little gold-lined cups that Mother always washed herself. Neale didn't mind company since nobody paid much attention to him, and he liked the extra Sunday eatables on a week-day, but one of his few impressions about his father and mother was that, although they always talked and laughed a great deal more when there was company, and seemed to have a lively time, they really liked it better when there were only the two of them talking over Neale's head at the table, and settling down afterwards to read and talk to one another around the drop-light.

Another of those impressions was the tone of his father's voice when looking up from his book, he said, "Oh, Mary!" Neale always knew just the look there would be in Mother's eyes as she laid down her own book and asked, "Yes, what is it, dear?"

CHAPTER III

Among the many things which Neale never thought of questioning was the fact that he did not go to a public school as all his play-mates did. If he had asked, he would have found that his father and mother had an answer all ready for him, the completeness and thoroughness of which might have indicated that they had perhaps silenced some questionings of their own with it. He would have heard that of course they approved of public schools, and that if they had continued to live in Massachusetts, even if they had gone to live in a nice part of New York City, they would certainly have sent their son to a public school. But here at Union Hill, with the public schools so thickly populated by foreign children, the conditions were really different. What could a little American boy learn in a class-room with forty foreign children, whose constant study must needs be English?

There was no flaw in the reasoning they were prepared to present to their son when he should ask the natural question about his schooling. But Neale never asked it. By the time he was old enough to think of it, habit had made him incapable of conceiving it. He no more wondered why he went every morning to the Taylors' house on Bower Street, instead of to Public School Number Two, than why he had two eyes instead of one. That was the way things were. Neale was slow to question the way things were.

Dr. Taylor was another transplanted New Englander like Neale's father, with another college-graduate wife (rarer in those days than now), like Neale's mother. His ideas on children and the public schools would have been exactly like those of the Crittendens, even if they had not been fortified by the lameness of his only son. Jimmy's crutches made Public School definitely out of the question, and since Jimmy must have instruction at home, why, his two sisters, Elsie and Myrtle, might as well profit by it. Dr. Taylor was glad enough to have the expense of paying Miss Vanderwater shared by Mr. Crittenden, and to let Neale share in the benefits of Miss Vanderwater's instruction.

Hence it happened that every morning Neale rang at the Taylors' front door, and when the maid let him in, went upstairs to the big front room on the top floor and there did whatever Miss Vanderwater told him to do. He was under her command from nine in the morning till noon, when he went home and had lunch with Mother, who always asked how school had gone, to which question Neale always made the same truthful answer that he guessed it was all right. At one he returned for two more hours with Miss Vanderwater. In this way he went through a series of Appleton's Readers, filled copy-books with thin Spencerian script, copied maps in colored ink with the coast-line shaded with scallops, did arithmetic on a slate and made very fair progress in learning German. German was much in the air in that locality.

Of course he did not spend all those years of his life, side by side with three other children without becoming intimately acquainted with them. But one of the instinctive watertight compartments in Neale's Anglo-Saxon mind was the one in which he kept his school separate from his life. He studied with the Taylor children, but he never dreamed of staying after hours to play with them. And yet he knew them infinitely better than any of the innumerable chance street-acquaintances with whom he flew kites or played one-old-cat. He knew instinctively, knew without thinking of it, knew to the marrow of his brutally normal bones that Jimmy Taylor was lame not only in his legs but in his character. Jimmy's delicacy, the great care taken of him, the fact that he always played in the house or back-yard with his sisters, made a sissy of him. That was the plain fact, and Neale was not one to refuse to admit plain facts. He was always kind to Jimmy, at least not unkind, but he was always secretly relieved when the front door shut behind him, hiding from him Jimmy's too-white hands, thin neck and querulous invalid's voice.

Of the two girls, Elsie was only a little kid, so much younger than Jimmy and Neale that they were barely aware of her existence. Myrtle, on the contrary, was very much there, a little girl whose comments on things never failed to arouse in Neale the profoundest astonishment. How could anybody think of such dotty things to say? You never had the least idea how anything was going to strike her, except that it was likely to strike her so hard that she made an awful fuss about it.

Myrtle lived in mortal terror of any little dirt, it seemed to Neale. One day in May, when they had had a picnic-lunch out in the back-yard of the Taylors' house, Myrtle carried on perfectly wild about a little flying white thing that had fallen into her glass of lemonade. Holy smoke! thought Neale, if she was afraid to get it out, he wasn't. So he fished it out with a spoon, and handed her back the glass. And what did she do? She made up an awful face and threw the lemonade on the ground! Neale was horrified at the waste.

And the day when Miss Vanderwater in their "natural history lesson" told them about angle-worms and how they keep the ground light and open, didn't Myrtle go off in another fit, with her eyes goggling and her fingers all stretched apart as though she felt angle-worms everywhere. She insisted that Miss Vanderwater must be wrong, that such an awful thing could not be true.

"Why, what do you mean?" asked Miss Vanderwater, for once, Neale noticed with satisfaction, as much at a loss as he.

"Ugh! Nasty!" cried Myrtle. "So all we eat has grown out of what angle-worms have vomited up! And so they're wriggling around, everywhere, touching everything that grows! I never dreamed of such a nasty thing! I'll never eat a radish again! It makes me sick to think of it—to put my mouth where a horrible old angle-worm has been rubbing all its slime off!"

"Now what do you think of that?" Neale asked himself.

Mostly, Myrtle was just the worst dead loss you ever saw; but once in a while you got some good out of her foolishness, like the time when she bit into a lovely-looking apple and laid it down, looking very white and sick at her stomach. She had bitten into a rotten place, and although Neale pointed out honestly to her that it was the only bad spot, and that the rest of the apple was a corker, she refused to touch it, or even to look at it. She said she never wanted to see another apple again as long as she lived! So Neale ate it to save it, sinking his strong teeth through the taut red skin, reveling in the craunchy, juicy white flesh, chewing away on huge crisp delicious mouthfuls. It was perhaps as well, too, that Myrtle hadn't tried to go on eating it, for Neale found another rotten spot. But he spit out the cottony-feeling, brown, bad-tasting stuff into the waste basket, and having got rid of it, went on with the apple, his zest undiminished to the last mouthful gnawed off the core. The idea of going back on apples because you struck a rotten place! Nobody asked you to eat the rotten places! It was perfectly easy to spit them out, or, if you saw them beforehand, to eat your way around them. He couldn't make anything out of Myrtle, at all.

But he didn't allow himself to be bothered by her, any more than by rotten spots in apples, and he escaped from her and from the whole genteel atmosphere of the Taylor household, the moment three o'clock came. The instant Miss Vanderwater said, "dismissed," he hurried home, left his books and hurried out again to hang around Number Two School, till four o'clock sent all its mingled conglomeration, ranging from tattered ragamuffins to little boys in white sailor-suits, yelling and whooping out to the vacant lots.

For, although the Crittendens' New England Americanism was not quite resolute enough to make them send Neale to a public school full of foreigners, it was more than enough to make them incapable of conceiving so odious an act of tyranny as forbidding a little boy to play freely with other little boys, whether any one knew their parents or not. They would have detested the idea of keeping Neale alone in their safe, sheltered back-yard, and would have been horrified to detect in him any trace of feeling himself better than the public-school children—which he certainly did not.

Sundays had a special color of their own, not at all the traditional one. The Crittendens were Unitarians, not much given to church-going anywhere, and the nearest Unitarian church was across the river in New York. Mr. Crittenden had enough of New York on week-days. So they never went. Few of the Union Hill families did. Union Hill was anything but a stronghold of Sabbatarianism. It considered Sunday rather as a heaven-sent opportunity for much comfortable beer-drinking, attendance on a Turn-verein, and for enormous family gatherings around a big dinner.

For Neale, with no other children in the family, the day was always solitary; not unpleasantly so. It was a day for long imaginings, stirring, warlike imaginings, realized through lead soldiers. Lead soldiers were a passion of his little boyhood. He had two hundred and ten, counting the ones with their legs broken, that he had mounted on half corks. He did not move them around much. He did not knock them down. When he got them set up in the order he wished, he fell into a trance, imagining stories and incidents. It took a long time to get them arranged to his satisfaction, with stiff marching columns, at shoulder-arms in the middle, some Indian sharp-shooters prone or kneeling behind painted lead shrubbery out in front, a squadron of parade cavalry on one wing, a troop of galloping Arabs on the other. Always he had a pile of blocks behind which a coal-black charger was tethered, and on top, leaning against a spool of thread, stood the general surveying his army. By uniform and whiskers the toymaker had intended the figure for Kaiser Wilhelm I; but to the boy's eyes it was no Prussian king, but Neale—Neale commanding his victorious troops. It was all arranged with a careful hand and a loving heart, and it took a long, long time.

Very often the dinner-bell rang before he had even finished setting them up. At Sunday dinner there was generally "company," men friends of Father's mostly, but sometimes husbands and wives. Neale knew all their names, and shook hands without self-consciousness. He grinned silently if they spoke to him, and retired to his shell, busying himself with his own thoughts, all concentrated on the impending battle. He liked the things you had to eat on Sunday and had found that on Sunday he could eat the soft parts out of his bread and hide the crusts under the edge of his plate. Mother always caught him if he tried that on week-days, but on Sundays, with company there, she never said a word.

But no matter how slowly he ate, he was always through, wriggling uncomfortably on his chair and horribly bored, while those tedious grown-up people were still gabbling on. Mother always saw this, took pity, and smiled a permission to him to be off. He slipped from his chair and tip-toed silently into the kitchen where Katie was dressing the salad. But she stopped long enough to open the pasteboard ice-cream box from Schlauchter's candy-store and give him a saucer-full from the soft part on top.

Then he hurried upstairs again to act out with his army the glorious scenes he had been imagining during dinner. Sometimes it was a surprise attack on the march, with cavalry sweeping down on limbered guns, sometimes it was artillery formed in triangles, a muzzle at each apex, blowing the advancing cavalry to flinders. Sometimes it was a magnificent parade of triumph through a city gate with Kaiser Wilhelm (Neale) at their head.

But at any moment, especially as he came on to be ten years old, quite suddenly and inexplicably he grew tired of it. The illusion would pass ... they would be just lifeless stupid dead soldiers, with broken legs and rifles, and the paint flaking off ... impossible to imagine anything with them. Also his arms and legs would feel numb with sitting still on the floor so long. Then Neale would slide noiselessly down the banisters, using his hands and legs as a brake to keep from crashing into the newel-post, slip by the dining-room door with its clinking coffee-cups and blue haze of cigar smoke, grab his cap and go quietly outdoors.

Nobody would have stopped him, he knew that, but it was more fun to keep it quiet. Free from the house he would act out his drama of escape by running for a block or so, and then drop into the roaming boy's slow, zig-zag ramble.

You can walk south or north on Union Hill for miles beyond a boy's endurance, without finding a single feature to quicken the imagination; but if you go east or west from anywhere on the Hill, you come at once to a jumping-off place where below you stretches the flat, marshy river or the flats. Neale preferred the western edge, even though it had no steep rocks. He was far from having any conscious love for landscape, but he found a certain satisfaction in looking over the yellow and brown expanse of the marsh-grass and cat-tails, hazy in the afternoon sun, cut with straight black lines of railroads (he named them over to himself, identifying every one, the Jersey Central, Pennsylvania, Erie, Lackawanna, and Jersey Northern), each with little toy-trains, each tiny locomotive sending up little balls of cotton-wool to hang motionless in the still afternoon air. To the southwest a hazy blur that was Newark, and right in front, like a doomed mountain, bogged and sinking into the marsh, the sinister bulk of Snake Hill. Neale used to stand and brood over it, sometimes till the sun went down, all red and orange. He did not stir till the cold roused him to think of home and supper.

But his feet did not always turn westward. Sometimes he walked to the eastern edge. The rocks were steeper here, steep enough to be the impregnable fortress he always imagined them. When he came here, after reconnoitering the ground (for his tribal enemy did not observe the Truce of God on Sundays), Neale would go out to the edge of the sheerest promontory and dangle his legs down. Under his feet were railroad tracks again, then a belt of vacant lots, some of them black with cinder-filling, others green with the scum of stagnant water, then a belt of frame houses where the enemy lived, then a zone of city brick and flat tin roofs. Beyond it all was Castle Point, high and green (healthy green this, not scum), jutting out into the Hudson. Indistinctly he could make out the other side of the river, the line of ships at the wharves and more city ... New York.

Occasionally Neale thought of New York, an almost mythical spot, though he went there once in a while with Mother on tiresome quests for clothes, as well as to matinées; sometimes he thought of the ships and the wharves, and how much he wished he could see more of them. But mostly he forgot the actual world. He was in command of the fort. All around him his brave men were working the guns. Bang! Bang! The enemy were marching along those straight paved streets. Their cannon balls were bursting all around, but the garrison did not quail. Their sharp-shooters were starting to climb the rocks. Ah, this was serious! No time for delay. The commander seized the rifle from the hand of a dying soldier ... how plainly Neale saw that dying soldier there at his feet ... bang! bang! bang! ... with every shot one of the foremost scalers dropped headlong.

The engagement was a decisive victory.

CHAPTER IV

Inevitably Saturdays were all devoted to play. Neither Neale's parents nor he himself could have conceived of any other way of spending Saturdays. What were Saturdays for?

It is true that in some of the more prosperous German-American families, Saturday was music-lesson day, just as four o'clock instead of ushering in roller-skating or marbles meant sitting in front of a piano, or stooping over a 'cello. But Neale felt for play-mates thus victimized the same slightly contemptuous pity he felt for Jimmy Taylor's lameness, and the same unsurprised acceptance of his own good luck in being free from such limitations.

Once in a while, too, Mother took him over to New York to a matinée, and that was all right, too, if it didn't happen too often. Neale liked going out with Mother pretty well, and if there was fighting in the play he liked it fine. But all that was having something done to you, a sensation of which school gave Neale more than enough, and which he didn't like half so well—oh, not a quarter as well—oh, really not at all, compared to the sensation of starting something and running it yourself. If it really came right down to a comparison, there wasn't any fun at all in seeing Irving pretend to be a crazy man, compared to the fun of starting out Saturday morning, with no idea what you were going to do, and rustling around till you got enough fellows together for the game of the season.

To stand in your old play-clothes on your front-step, of a Saturday morning, all the world before you, unfettered by obligations, a long, long, rich day of play before you that was yours ... how could anybody be expected to prefer to dress up in things you had to try to keep clean, sit in a dark, hot theater and watch painted-up men and women carry on like all possessed about things that weren't really so. But that was all right enough for a change, and was as good a way as any to spend a rainy afternoon. Also, you could occasionally get ideas about fights, out of a play.

But the real occupation of life was the playing of games. He nourished his soul and grew strong on the emotional thrills of games. They were the rich, fertile, substantial soil out of which he shot up into boyhood from childhood. They were his religion, and his business-in-life, the wide field where, unhampered, free as any naked savage, for all his decent knickerbockers and sweater, he raced to and fro, elastic, exultant, wild with the intoxication of the heady young strength poured into him by every new day.

The astounding volume of sound, bursting up like flame and lava from a volcano, which rose from every group of boys at play bore witness to the extravagant and superabundant splendor of the intensity with which they lived, a splendor not at all recognized by suffering householders near whose decent and quiet homes a gang of boys settled down to play and yell and shriek and quarrel and run and yell again.

It was the boys' world, not only untouched by grown-ups but blessedly even unsuspected by parents. Since it was theirs, since they created it anew every day, it exactly fitted their needs, and it grew and changed with their inner growth as their school never did. They were far from any self-conscious notion that they created it. Rather they seemed to themselves to accept it from the outside, as they accepted the weather. What had they to do with the succession of the seasons, either of games or temperature? In the nature of things you could no more play marbles in the autumn than pick wild strawberries in December.

In the autumn, they played football, a sort of association-football with no limit to the number on each side, played with a heavy black rubber ball, blown up with a brass tube. The tube always got lost, and the valve always leaked. After a few games it became deflated, with the resiliency of a soggy sponge. But it was kicked to and fro just the same.

When snow came, there was snow-balling, with forts of a rich, chocolate color, from the street-dirt mixed with the snow. About these raged feudal chivalry, loyalty and pride of place, one street against another. Sometimes all the district united against invading Huns from Hoboken or Jersey City Heights. Only a few boys skated, and Neale was not one of them, but everybody made slides in the slush.

With spring came roller-skates, marbles (utilizing the cracks between sidewalk slabs), tops, kites, cat (a game for two), and, ah! baseball in the vacant lots!

Neale was neither a star nor a dub at any game, but craving proficiency more than anything else in the world, he learned to do pretty well at all of them. At baseball, the major sport of the year, he toiled incessantly, and when he was ten years old, he was pretty sure of his job at second base on the Hancock Avenue Orioles. On ground balls he was erratic, but so was everybody on those rough, vacant-lot diamonds, where the ball ricocheted zig-zag from one stone to another. Long practice catching fungoes gave him a death-like certainty on pop flies. His "wing was poor," as he expressed it; strong enough in the arm, he had never mastered the wrist snap that gives velocity. As a batsman he was temperamental; one day he would feel right, and hit everything, another day his batting eye would inexplicably be gone, and he would fan at the widest dew-drops.

One Saturday afternoon they were playing the Crescent Juniors, a glorious swat-fest of a game in which Neale had run wild all the afternoon. It was in the ninth, the score was 17 to 15, with the Crescents ahead. One was down, Neale at the bat, Marty Ryan, the captain, was dancing on the base line, ready to dart in from third, Franz Uhler was taking a dangerous lead off second. Neale rapped his bat professionally on the plate and glared at the pitcher.

"Hit it out, Crit, old man!" yelled Fatty Schwartz, with a perfectly unnecessary steam-calliope volume of tone, "Hit it out! Save me a lick!"

"Much good you'd do with a lick," thought Neale to himself. "You couldn't hit a basket-ball with a telegraph pole." Yes, it was up to him, to him alone. It was like a scene from one of his favorite stories about himself, actually happening; and it went on actually happening. A wide one, another wide. They didn't call balls in Neale's league. He rapped the plate, "Aw! put it over if you know how!" he taunted. A foul tip caught, another wide one haughtily ignored, a strike. The catcher put on his mask and moved up close behind the bat. Neale felt himself nerved to great things. He glued his eyes to the pitcher. By the motion it should be a slow out. It wasn't breaking. Neale stabbed at it, sliced it and landed a Texas leaguer back of short.

He didn't see what happened. He ran. He flew. As he rounded second he caught a glimpse of the left fielder and short-stop falling over their feet, both trying to pick up the ball. As he turned the corner at third he saw the pitcher starting to run in to cover the plate and guessing that the catcher was chasing a wild throw, Neale put his head down and sprinted for dear life. Fifteen feet from the plate he dove, and shot over in a cloud of dust.

Neale, the ball, and the pitcher all arrived there at the same moment, but a partial umpire called it "safe." Don Roberts fouled to the catcher, Fatty Schwartz fanned. But the game was won.

With his chest a couple of inches bigger than normal, Neale started for home, and there on the sidewalk watching him, stood his father, looking right at him, instead of over his head as Father was apt to do. Father patted him on the shoulder. "That was a good swat, Neale," he said.

Neale wriggled. "Well, we had to have a hit," he explained, "and I knew Don and Fatty wouldn't do much."

His father found no other comment to make. Neale had said his say. Silent as Iroquois, they walked home to supper.

The next afternoon Father brought him a Louisville Slugger bat and Neale was in the seventh heaven.

And yet, at the next game, he fanned the first three times up and Marty waved him to the bench. This was terrible.

But the sting did not last because two days later Miss Vanderwater gave each of them a present of a little book in German, and said auf wiedersehn for the summer.

CHAPTER V

The end of school always meant the beginning of the yearly romance, the beginning of the two months when Neale really lived all the time, not just after four o'clock, and on Saturdays. And yet it was not all made up of games! In fact there weren't any games at all. Queer!

Neale's life was largely made up of things that happened over and over the same way, and so did this. The last day of school he always went home and found the house smelling trunky and Mother with piles of clothes folded on all the chairs, packing a Saratoga trunk. All the afternoon she would pack it, putting things in and taking things out to make room for other things, and when Father came home, things would be all unfinished. It happened just that way, always. When Father came home things were all unfinished, and Father took out his watch, and said the expressman had said he'd come at five-thirty, and Mother answered, "You know they're always two hours late."

Nevertheless she stopped taking things out, and there was a scramble and things put in any old way, with a good deal of laughing and funning from Father and Mother, and finally with Mother and Neale sitting on the lid, Father in his shirt sleeves strapped and locked it. Then while they were eating supper, the expressman drove up (only an hour late, no, not even quite an hour late, Neale thought), and took the trunk away, and now Neale felt they were going.

He lay awake that night thinking of the coming adventure, his heart beating faster, and then it was morning, and Mother was shaking him and getting him into his clothes. A hurried breakfast on lukewarm oatmeal. They went outside and got into a coupé standing there. Father and Mother sat on the back seat, and Neale on the little front seat you had to unfold. Then jog, jog, they went along Griffith Street down the curlycue road, the horse's feet going clatter on the cobblestones. Then jog, jog, jog again till at last they stopped and got out. They had come to the ferry.

After they were on the ferry-boat, Father and Mother always waited so that Neale could see the deck-hand pull down the gates that closed the end of the boat and take out the iron hooks that held her fast to the dock. Then the whistle blew, and the boat started, leaving the dock looking as though a giant had bitten a half-circle out of it. Father walked with him out to the front deck, where, holding to his wide-brimmed sailor hat, Neale watched the waves and tug boats, and the gulls flapping about. Father made him look at the city ahead, and pointing out a building with a gold dome, told him that it was the World Building, and the highest in the city. Neale looked, found it of no interest and went back to his waves and gulls, which stirred something of the quiver and wonder the wharves made him feel.

When the boat got across, it went smash into the piles and slid along into the dock, where men hitched it fast with iron hooks and pulled the hooks tight by turning a wheel around. Neale always noticed just how such things were managed, and Father always gave him plenty of time to look.

Then up went the gates and off went everybody. Outside they got into a horse-car. After a while the horse-car began to run through a long, white-washed cellar, and Father explained (just as he had last year and the year before that), that he could remember when the trains used to be pulled through that tunnel by horses. At the other end of the tunnel they all got out once more, and now, at last, you were really getting quite "warm," for this was the railway station.

After Father had bought the tickets and checked the baggage, they got on the train, and Father and Mother talked for a while, till Father said, with a long breath, "Well, it might as well be soon as late," and kissed Mother and she kissed him.

Until Neale was a pretty big boy, Father always stooped and kissed him too. But Neale felt that this was quite a different sort of kiss, and he noticed too, that after it, Father always kissed Mother again, and held his cheek for an instant close to hers. But after this he always walked right away, quietly, turning around once or twice to wave his hat at them, his face as composed as that of any man in the crowd coming and going beside the train.

Mother let Neale settle things in the train, making no comment as he fussed over it, putting the satchel up in the rack, and then deciding that it would be better to have it down where he could put his feet on it, arranging his coat and her golf-cape over the back of the seat and then remembering the hook between the windows. Then the train started. A smoky tunnel, a scraggly belt of half-city—and then the real country. Neale never called anything the real country unless there were cows in the fields.

He was always astonishingly glad to see it, and stared and stared till his eyes ached, and drooped shut, and he had a nap, hunched up with his feet on the seat. When he woke up there was more real country, and finally they got there.

There was Grandfather Crittenden waiting for them, with the team and the three-seater, only the two back seats were out to make room for the big trunk. This was something like living! Grandfather Crittenden let him hold the lines. He remembered—how he remembered—every step of the eight miles, every hill, every house and barn and big rock, till finally they drove into the yard, got out, were kissed, and went up to the same room as last year, with its rag-carpet and painted yellow bed. Mother washed his face very hard in the cold water from the big white pitcher, there was supper of fried ham and scrambled eggs and soft rolls, and cherry pie—and that was all a tired little boy could remember that night.

Next morning vacation really began with a rush outdoors to see the mill, the saw-mill, the center of Neale's life in the country. There it was, just as it ought to be, the big saw snarling its way through a pine log, and old Silas with the lever in his hand, standing as though he hadn't moved since the day Neale had gone away last September. Neale ran around to the back, climbed on the carriage and rode back and forth as Silas fed the log methodically down on the saw, and raced it back to set a fresh cut. Silas only nodded without speaking. He didn't like wasting words, and speaking was mostly wasted when the saw was screaming, the belts slapping, and down below was the pound! pound! pound! of the mill-wheel.

After a time Neale went down to the far end of the mill where the fresh sawed boards fell off from the logs. A new lad he didn't know was "taking away." He wasn't keeping up with the work very well, and to help him Neale picked up a slab and started to cut it into stove lengths on the cut-off saw.

"Hey there! Whacher doin'? You'll saw your arm off, boy!" yelled the lad. But Silas, stopping the saw so that his voice could be heard, saved Neale's face, "Let be, Nat. He won't get hurt. He knows more about the mill now than you do, or ever will."

Neale felt his heart swell with pride. He sawed pine slabs till his back ached from lifting and his shirt and hands were black from the dried resin.

There were other things to do at Grandfather Crittenden's, all the other things that boys do in the country, and Neale did them all. But none of them came up to the mill. Day in and day out it was around the mill that he spent his time, lying on the piles of fresh sawed boards in the sunlight, watching teamsters roll huge logs on the skidway with cant-hooks. Or he went below where you could look through the doorway at the flapping belts, and watch the sawdust raining down and making a great yellow pyramid. Even such an experienced millhand as Neale was not allowed to go into the cellar while the mill was running, under pain of all sorts of violent and disagreeable deaths. Getting your coat caught by the shafting and being whirled round and round and beaten to a pulp against the beams was one of the mildest.

But after supper, when the mill was shut down, he used to saunter out to it, in the long soft twilight, and then tip-toe down into the cellar and play uneasily in the sawdust, casting scared looks now and then at the shining semi-circle of the saw, with its wicked hooked teeth just over his head.

One day, as he played thus about the mill, his destiny came and tapped him on the shoulder, and he knew not that day from any other day.

As he was watching Silas take up the slack in a belt, a strange man, an elderly, powerful, bent, old countryman came into the mill, and asked, without salutations to any one, "Where's Jo?"

"Gone to town for feed," said Silas. He added with a grin, "Mr. Burton, make you acquainted with a relation of yours, Dan'el's boy." He jerked his head at Neale.

The stranger looked hard at the boy, out of sharp gray eyes, and the harder he looked the sharper grew his eyes.

"What's he doin' here?" he asked Silas.

"Oh, he's always hangin' round. He knows the trade as well as some folks twice his size," said Silas.

"Well, what do you think of the sawyer's trade?" asked the old man suddenly of Neale.

Neale could not think of anything to answer except that he guessed he liked it all right.

The stranger seemed to dismiss him from his mind, fingered his gray goatee, and looked all around as if seeing the establishment for the first time. "Mebbe. Mebbe. All right for Massachusetts pine and saft maple. But if you want to see a real mill, that'll handle tough Vermont yellow birch and rock-maple, you come back to Ashley with me."

The stranger stayed to supper, and Neale learned that he was his great-uncle Burton Crittenden. He asked many sharp-sounding questions that made his brother, Neale's grandfather, snort and say hotly, "Oh, we all know there ain't any proper mill practice outside Vermont, but the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is managing to worry along somehow, in her shiftless fashion."

But when the old man spoke to Neale there was a gentler note in his voice. He talked of sugaring-off, and twenty-two-foot snowdrifts, and asked Neale's mother if she wouldn't send the boy to Ashley some time, to visit his great-uncle.

His mother agreed to do it—"some time."

CULTURE IN THE AIR

CHAPTER VI

April 10, 1898.

Old Jeanne Amigorena was on her way to Bayonne to complain to her niece of her rheumatism and her daughter-in-law. She detested the railroad, as she did everything new and not Basque, but at her age it was not easy to foot it along the fourteen kilometres of white road between Midassoa and Bayonne. So, grimly disapproving, she hoisted her square, stalwart, black-clad body into the third-class compartment of the slow way-train which comes shuffling up from the Spanish frontier about noon.

Even for a Basque of the oldest rock, there is one satisfaction to be had out of the forty-minute trip by rail to Bayonne. This is at the station of La Negresse where your way-train meets the down express from Paris. The chic people from the first-class compartments are there summoned to get out and change to the little local line which jolts them the three kilometres to Biarritz. This change of cars is never announced at Paris, it is always furiously exasperating to tourists, and in consequence they afford an entertaining spectacle to any one with a low opinion of human nature. Jeanne, who had less than no regard for any human nature outside the Basque race, always enjoyed the contempt she felt for these fashionably-dressed, ineffectual French weaklings. She took advantage of the leisurely wait at La Negresse, while the luggage was noisily transferred from one train to the other, to lean her head and shoulders out of the window, and to indulge herself in a hearty bout of derision for the uncomely fashionable Parisians, city-pale and flabby. She drew a long breath of satisfaction in her own untrammeled ribs, to see their rigid bodies like badly carved pieces of wood in the steel armor of their corsets, their shoulders grotesquely widened by their high puffed sleeves. Used to stepping out for a daily ten-mile walk over mountain paths, free and rhythmic in her flexible cord-and-canvas sandals, she laughed inwardly at these fine ladies, tottering on their high-heeled leather shoes.

Some of them were dragging along tired, over-dressed, pasty-faced children. Jeanne had a passion for children, and she now cried to herself, for the thousandth time, "What can the Blessed Virgin be thinking of, to trust babies to such creatures!" Straight as a lance, with more vigor in her body at seventy than any of them at twenty, with more glistening black hair of her own under her close black coif than any of them could afford to buy, Jeanne who never altered her costume by a hair or a line from one year's end to another, who looked forward confidently to fifteen or twenty years of iron health, felt a cheerful glow of contempt as she watched them, running here and there, screaming nervously that one of their innumerable bags or valises was lost, their faces distorted with apprehension for some part of their superfluities.

She did not altogether approve of the hatted, conventionally dressed women she passed half an hour later in the sunny streets of the little city on her way to the home of Anna Etchergary. Anna was concierge of one of the apartment houses on the Rue Thiers, opposite the Old Castle, and to reach it, Jeanne had to pass through the new quarter of Bayonne, the big open square where the fine shops are and the Frenchified madames walking about. Bayonne was a poor enough apology for a Basque city, thought Jeanne, but its somewhat backsliding and partly Gascon and Spanish inhabitants were at least not such grimacing monkeys as those Parisians.

She strode along with the swift, sure, poised gait of sandal-wearing people, her mind full of the grievances she wanted to pour out to Anna; the disrespect of her son's wife, and the scandalous extravagances of her expenditures. "Consider, Anna," she rehearsed her story beforehand. "She uses the eggs herself, instead of sending them to market. She serves omelettes, as though Michel's house were a hotel! And she will not spin! She uses Michel's money to buy yarn! To think that money from the Amigorena farm should go to buy yarn, with a distaff hanging on the wall and ten idle, good-for-nothing fingers at the end of her arms."

On the terrible subject of lack of children in that house Jeanne could not trust herself to speak. It was too sore a spot that with all Jeanne's five grown sons, she had not a grandchild to hold in her arms. The two, Americans now, who were in the Argentine making their fortunes, were married and had families, but what were grandchildren on the other side of the globe to Jeanne? The two younger ones, who were sailors, were not married, and Michel, who had promised to be the mainstay of her life and had stayed at home to run the farm, here he had been caught by that impudent little French girl, one of the chambermaids in a Biarritz hotel, a girl who did not know how to spin, who laughed at the decent Basque ways, and who had no shame for her sterility, refusing to go to Lourdes to pray for children.

Jeanne had never had any romantic feeling for her shiftless, hard-drinking husband, whose irregular earnings as a fisher she had been forced to piece out with much domestic service in the houses of others; and now he was dead, she never thought of him. She had never been to a theater in her life, nor read a novel, for she could not read at all. None of her native capacity for emotion had been used in her youth, nor frittered away later in the second-hand make-believes of modern life. It had all been poured out upon children; on her five sons, and on the one little dark-eyed, black-haired daughter, the little Marie—who had died at eleven, so many years ago, just after her first communion—the blessed saint Marise had looked, slim and straight in her white dress! The Blessed Virgin had found her namesake too sweet to wait for, and had taken her at once.

And now those strong, yearning old arms were empty of young life, and Jeanne's heart was bitter. She might scold her loudest over the waste of butter and eggs at the farm, she might gossip her head off about the faults of the neighbors, and shriek out maledictions on the stingy bourgeoise who wanted to buy her vegetables for nothing, she could not drown out the forlorn echo of emptiness and loneliness within.

She turned up the Rue Thiers, glanced frowningly at the Paris-like department store on the other side of the street with its gaudy plate-glass show-windows, the pride of the younger generation in Bayonne, and looked up with approval at the huge, thick, battlemented walls of the Old Castle, substantial enough that, and plain enough and old enough to please even a Basque.

As she turned in at the door of Anna's apartment house, her mouth was open to begin her litany of grievances; but when she entered Anna's one-room, brick-paved lodging, she found her niece with a budget of exciting news of her own, "Oh, Tante Jeanne, what do you think...." she burst out as the old woman swung lightly in; but before she would go on, she went to close the door, bearing herself so secretly, with such self-importance that Jeanne was between exasperation and greediness to hear. Like all illiterates who cannot glut on the newspapers their appetite for gossip, she was insatiable for it in talk. She sat down on the front of her chair, her ear cocked eagerly. Anna drew her own chair up close and began to speak in Basque very rapidly. "I'm so glad you've come, Tante Jeanne, you've had so much experience in working out in families, you know about things. You know about those American farm machines, that they're beginning to use on the big farms, painted red, you know. Well, the American agent for that company, he has come here to live, here in this house, the grand second-floor apartments, the ones old Père Lapagorry rents furnished, on both sides of the landing, yes, the two of them, because his wife, a very chic madame, didn't think one was big enough, and what can one family do with two kitchens, tell me that, and they with only one child to their name, a little girl, who doesn't take up any more room than a flea, so to speak, and the lady has asked me to find her a cook and a maid, and listen, Tante, she says she will pay sixty francs a month each, and fed and lodged!"

She paused to underline this and looked triumphantly at her aunt, who for years had worked as cook in families for forty francs a month and lodged herself. Jeanne looked back at her hard, a new possibility lifting a corner of its veil in her mind.

"What are they like, these Americans?" she asked, "Spanish-Basque or French-Basque?" (To a Basque, the term "American" means one of his own race who has emigrated to South America, made his pile, and returned to his own country to spend it.)

"They're not Basques at all," said Anna.

"What, French?" said Jeanne instantly incredulous of Anna's story. There was no use trying to tell her that any French family was willing to pay twice the usual wage for servants.

"No, they don't even understand French, but the madame can read it a little."

"Oh, Spanish, then."

"No, I had Pedro Gallon go up to see them and they don't speak a word of Spanish. They're not even Catholics!"

The two women stared at each other. What could people be who were not Spanish or French or Basque, or even Catholics?

Anna went on, "Tante Jeanne, come upstairs and see for yourself what they are like. You have seen so many bourgeois families, you can tell better than I. I'll only say you have come to help me find servants for them."

Anna followed her aunt out into the hall and locked the door behind her. The key to the door hung with a dozen others, large and clanking at the belt of her blue jeans apron. Anna's philosophy of life consisted in having plenty of keys and keeping them in constant use. The only things you could be sure of were the things you yourself had locked up.

They climbed the shining, well-waxed, oaken stairway, Anna's special care and pride, turning itself around and around in the circular white-washed well, lighted by small pointed windows, which showed the three-foot thickness of the stone walls. They stood before the dark paneled door, its highly polished brass knob in the middle, and pulled hard at the thick, tasseled bell-rope. A bell jangled nervously, light uneven footsteps sounded on the bare floor inside, and a small, pretty, fair-haired woman stood before them, dressed in a pale blue house-gown elaborately trimmed with white silk. She smiled a pleasant recognition at Anna, and gave a friendly nod to the older woman.... Jeanne disliked her on sight.

The old peasant assumed a respectful, decorous, submissive attitude as became her social position, and made a quick estimate at the age of the other woman. She made it thirty-six at a guess although she reflected that probably any man would guess not more than twenty-eight. Jeanne knew by the sixth sense which comes from many years of unbiased observation of life, that the other woman was the sort who looks much younger than she is. She also was aware as by an emanation, that the other woman was not French. That was apparent from every inch of her, the way she stood and smiled and wore her gown; and yet she was dressed like any French lady, with a high, boned collar up to her ears, sleeves with a stiff puff at the shoulders, and a full, long, heavy skirt that hung in ripples and lay on the floor behind. Also her fair hair was tousled up into a pompadour, with a big, shining knot on top. Jeanne, her head a little to one side and bent forward in a patient pose of silent respect, wondered if that fair hair were her own or were false, and made a guess that a good deal of it was false.

All this Jeanne took in and pondered while Anna was trying to explain by dumb-show who her aunt was and why she had come. The foreign lady listened intently, but it was evident that she did not understand at all.

Jeanne took advantage of her absorption with Anna to look at her intently, with the ruthless peasant scrutiny, going straight through all the finer distinctions of character, deep down to the one fundamental, the one question essential to the peasant mind in all human relationships, "Is she stronger than I?"

Jeanne saw at once that the lady before her was not stronger than she, was not indeed strong at all, although she looked as though she might have an irritable temper. She was one you could always get around, thought Jeanne, her strong hands folded meekly before her, her powerful body a little stooped to make herself look politely mild. She was one who didn't know what she wanted enough to go after it and get it, thought Jeanne, casting her black eyes down, the picture of a well-trained, European servant, with a proper respect for the upper classes she served.

The lady, laughing and fluttering, now motioned them into the salon. Some of the furnishings had been taken away, thought Jeanne, looking about out of the corner of her eye—no lace over the windows! In this room sat the monsieur of the family, a large man, smoking a large cigar, and reading an enormous newspaper.

On encountering a new member of the male sex, Jeanne, although she had long passed the age when she needed personally to make the distinction, always made a first, sweeping division of them into two classes: those who were dangerous to women and those who were not. She instantly put down the monsieur of the new family among those who were not, although he was not bad looking, not more than forty-five, with all his teeth still in his mouth and all his thick, dark hair still on his head. But a woman of Jeanne's disillusioned experience of human nature knew from the expression of his listless brown eyes, from his careless attitude in his chair, from the indifferent way he looked at the three women before him, from the roughness of his hair, evidently combed but once a day, with no perfumed dressing on it, that he was not now and never had been a man who cared for conquests among women, or who had had many. She immediately felt for him a slight contempt as for somebody not all there mentally, and wondered if his wife were not occasionally unfaithful to him. She looked as though she might be that kind, a rattling, bird-headed little thing like that, reflected Jeanne behind her downcast eyes, changing imperceptibly from one humble, self-effacing pose to another.

Anna now turned to her aunt with a long breath, "I cannot make her understand," she said in Basque. "Think of a nice, pretty-looking lady like that not being able to talk! I cannot make her think anything but that you have come to be the cook yourself."

"Well, I might do worse," said Jeanne unexpectedly, her mouth watering at the chance for pickings. She spoke in Basque. Her face remained as unmoved as though it were the wood-carving it seemed.

Her niece stared for a moment, horizons opening before her. "Oh, Tante Jeanne, if you only would! With you here and me in the concierge's loge, what a chance for commissions off everybody from the grocer to the wash-woman!"

Jeanne agreed although with no enthusiasm. "But I'm not young. I don't need the money, if only Michel's wife would...." She gave a quick look at the man and woman before her, who were now exchanging some words in their queer-sounding tongue. "They seem such odd people. Who knows what they are like? Their not being able to talk, and all—and not even Catholics!" She hesitated, feeling a distaste for their foreignness, and for the fussy, effusive smilingness of the madame. Jeanne always distrusted ladies who smiled at their servants. There could only be war to the knife between servants and their employer. Why pretend anything else?

A little girl in a white dress came swiftly into the room now, a long-legged, slim child of eleven. She darted in as though she was looking for something, and in a hurry to find it. When she saw the two Basque women, she paused, suddenly motionless, and gave them a steady inquiring gaze out of clear dark eyes.

Jeanne stared at her, startled. The child had thick black hair, glossy and straight, a cream-like skin, and long eyes with arching eyebrows as black as her hair, which made a finely-drawn curving line on her forehead and ran back at the sides upon her temples.

Anna noticed the older woman's surprise and said casually, "Yes, isn't it queer how the little girl looks like one of us, a real little Basque? She seems nice enough, only with no manners. See how she comes bursting into a room and then only stares; but none of the family have any manners, if it comes to that."

The child made a quick move now and still moving swiftly stepped to Jeanne's side. To Jeanne's astonishment she put out her small white fingers and took Jeanne's gnarly old hand in a firm grip. "Bonjour, Madame," she said, smiling faintly at her attempt to speak the foreign language, although her eyes were grave.

Jeanne had for an instant a strange impression that the child seemed to think that she had found what she was looking for. At the sight of the little girl, at the living touch of that small, warm hand, Jeanne forgot the chic madame with the shallow eyes, and the dull monsieur with the tired eyes. She looked down at the child who had eyes that were looking for something. The old woman and the little girl exchanged a long serious gaze, one of those deep, inarticulate contacts of human souls which come and go like a breath taken, and leave human lives altered for always.

Jeanne drew a long breath. She said in a low tone to the child, forgetting that she could not understand, "What do you call yourself, dear?"

The child answered in French haltingly, but with a pure accent, "I call myself Mary."

"Oh, yes," explained Anna, "the little girl is picking up French fast. I can make her mother understand now, through her. She does the ordering for them at the Bouyenval pension already. They are taking their meals there, till they get servants to begin housekeeping. Madame Bouyenval was telling me this morning...."

Jeanne interrupted her niece, speaking in Basque, "Well, if you think you can make that featherhead of her mother understand anything, you can tell them that I'll come to-morrow to stay, and I'll bring a chamber-maid with me."

To the foreign lady she said respectfully in French, with a deferential inclination of her tall strong body, "A votre service, Madame."

CHAPTER VII

May 10, 1898.

Marise sat in her room, in front of her table, a copy-book opening blank pages of coarse paper before her, a thin, mean-looking, pale-blue book marked "Mots Usuels" on her lap. It was her own impression that she had stopped for a minute's rest from study (although she had not yet begun), and that she was thinking hard. But she was not thinking. She was feeling.

She sat with her elbows on the table, her chin in her two hands, braced so that she was quite motionless. Her eyes were fixed on the candle flame, burning bright, fluttering and throbbing in the draughts which came into the old room, around the decrepit window-casing, under the door, through the worm-eaten base-board. There seemed to be a thousand wandering puffs from every direction. What Marise called her "thoughts" were burning bright, fluttering and throbbing like the tiny flame at which she stared. They too were blown upon by a thousand breaths from every direction. If they would only hold still for a moment, Marise thought, and give out a steady light that she could see something by! If she only had some shade to put around those flickering thoughts so they wouldn't quiver so! It upset her, jerking around so, from one way of seeing things to another. What she wanted to know was, how did things really look?

Of course it was worse here in France, where everything was so uncertain, but it had started back home in America, it had always been going on ever since she could remember. It had always made her feel queer, as though she were holding an envelope up to a mirror to read the address and saw it wrong end to, the way everything looked different at Ashley the moment Maman came up to Vermont to take her home after vacations with Cousin Hetty. Marise loved it so there at Ashley, the dear darling old house in the mountains, with its nice atticky smell that no other house in the world had! It just fitted all around you, when you went in the door, the way Cousin Hetty's arms fitted around you, when she took you up on her lap, and rocked and sang, "We hunted and we hallooed."

At the memory, Marise's heart gave a great homesick throb. How far away she was from Cousin Hetty and Ashley now! How long since she had sat on anybody's lap.

And yet when Maman came to take you away, from the first minute she went in and looked around her, you could see right through her eyes and what you saw was something different. After all it was just a homely old house with ugly crocheted tidies on the chairs, and splashers done in outline stitch back of the wash-stands, and old red figured carpets on the floors, the way nobody did at home in Belton. And Cousin Hetty talking so queer and Vermonty, her white hair smoothed down flat over her ears instead of all roughed up, fluffy, over a rat the pretty way other ladies did, with her funny clothes, her big cameo pin holding down her little flat round collar, and all other ladies so stylish with high collars under their ears. Yes, of course, the minute Maman looked at her, you saw how ashamed you'd be of Cousin Hetty if she came to visit your school at Belton. And yet there was the other Cousin Hetty you'd been having such a good time with. You just flickered away from Maman's way of seeing it to yours and never could make up your mind which was the real way.

Marise shook her head, drew a long breath and looked down again at her spelling lesson. It was a list of the names of furniture and household utensils, all very familiar to her from old Jeanne's thinking them so terribly important. My! How much more Jeanne cared about her work than any girl they'd ever had in Belton.

"Lit ... sommier ... traversin ..." all the names of the complicated parts of a bed, a sacred French bed. As Marise looked at them on the page she could see Jeanne in the mornings, taking poor stupid little Isabelle's head right off because she didn't make the bed up smoothly enough; and all the time it was about a million times smoother than any bed ever was in America! Marise didn't believe the President of the United States had his bed-clothes pulled so tight and smooth. And she wondered if Jeanne worked in the White House, if she would let even the President's little girl sit down on the bed in the daytime. How particular they were about things in France! About everything. When you bought anything in a store how they did drive you wild with their slowness in getting it put up in the package just so, as if it mattered, when you were going to take it out of the package three minutes later, as soon as you got home. And at school how they did fuss about neatness! The lessons were easy enough to learn. Marise never had any trouble with lessons, but how could anybody ever do things as neatly as they wanted you to. And how the teacher jumped on you if you didn't, ever so much worse than if you got the answer to an arithmetic problem wrong. Mercy! How she did scold! There wasn't anybody in America knew how to scold like that even if they wanted to, and they didn't. It had scared Marise at first, and made her feel like crying, and she never had got entirely used to it although she saw how all the other girls did, just took it and didn't care and did whatever they liked behind her back.

Marise couldn't get used to Jeanne that way either, to her yelling so when she scolded. Marise hated to have people get mad and excited. And how Jeanne did carry on about the house being neat, the part that is, where company could come; (under her kitchen sink it smelled awfully and was full of greasy rags) and yet she'd shine up the salon floor over and over when it was already shiny, and never think of those rags. The least little bit of clutter left around in the dining-room, or even your own room, and how she would scold! And yet she was so awfully good to you, and was always giving you big, smacking kisses, and hugging you, and she always saved over the best things to eat when Maman had a lunch party, and you were at school. Even when Maman had said you couldn't have any of something Jeanne always brought it to your room, under her apron, after you'd gone to bed. It wasn't very nice to do things behind Maman's back, but everybody seemed to be doing things behind everybody else's back. Maman did behind Father's, lots of times, and it was perfectly understood between them that Marise was never to tell Father on her. And it would be telling on Jeanne if you told Mother. And anyhow Marise didn't see Maman so very much any more, to tell her things; it was mostly Jeanne who did things for her.

Marise laid down her book again, lost in one of her recurrent attacks of amazement at there being so many different Jeannes inside that one leathery skin. There was the Jeanne who came every morning to take orders, and folded her hands on her apron, and sort of stooped herself over and said, "Oui, Madame," to everything Maman said. You'd think she was scared to death of Maman, and yet she went away to the kitchen on the other side of the landing and became another Jeanne who never paid the least attention to what Maman had said, but ran the house just the way she thought it ought to be.

There were two Jeannes right there, and there was another one, the outdoor Jeanne, who took her to school every morning—how funny that in France a great girl of eleven had to have somebody tagging along every time she stepped outside the house! This was the most interesting Jeanne of all. She told stories every single minute. Lots of them were about when she had been a little girl—gracious! think of Jeanne ever having been a little girl! That was ever so long ago, before the Emperor and the Empress had made Biarritz the fashion. Jeanne said those were the good days, when the Basques had their country to themselves, and you never saw a hat on any woman's head; they all wore the black kerchief for everyday and mantillas on Sunday for Mass, and lived like Christians. Jeanne could remember when Biarritz was just a little fishing village, a decent place, and now look at it! She could remember just as well when Napoleon and his Spanish wife first began to come down there so the Empress could get as near to Spain as possible. Many and many's the time Jeanne had seen them in their springy barouche, driving right along this very street, he with his eyes as dead as a three-days-caught fish's, and she as handsome as any Basque girl!

They weren't all stories of Jeanne when she was a little girl. Lots of them were of what had happened hundreds and hundreds of years ago around here. There were ever so many stories of witches and ghosts and sorcerers. There were plenty of those still in the Basque country. There was a sorcerer living in that little tumble-down house near the river on the road to St. Barthélemy. Why, Jeanne's own mother, years ago, one day looked up from her spinning and saw a monstrous pig, big and black. She jumped up and ran out to try to catch it. Her grandmother went out too, and there were a lot of the neighbors who were trying to drive the pig away. But it didn't pay a bit of attention, butted at them so fierce when they came near they were afraid, for he was as tall as a calf, and whoever saw a pig as big as that? And then the grandmother made the sign of the cross, Spanish fashion ... and like snapping your fingers, didn't the pig change, right before their eyes, into a little wee woman they'd never seen, and she went up in the air as thin and light as a loose spider's thread, and drifted away and there was nothing there.

The little American girl knew enough to know that this story couldn't be true, of course. And yet Jeanne's mother and all those people had seen it. They saw a pig and it turned into a wee witch woman.

Marise stopped thinking about that, leaned forward and began kneading the softened tallow at the upper end of the candle. Father could say all he liked about candles being a bother, they were lots of fun. This part up next the flame got just right so you could poke it and it stayed put, any way you wanted it. And it was fun to lean the candle over and drop the melted tallow on your hands in little drops that got hard and you could peel them off.

As she poked at it, a dozen pictures flickered through her mind; the bridge over the Adour with the river flowing yellow and strong under it, and the bright painted vessels loading and unloading; the Sister who opened the door at school, always so calm and silent; the playground at school with the black-aproned girls, their faces twisted up with running and screaming and catching each other; and the same girls at their desks, with their faces all smoothed and empty, looking up at Mademoiselle as though they had never thought of doing anything she told them not to; the school-room itself, battered and gray with age, the old black desks with the slant lids that lifted up; Reverend Mother stopping in to hear a lesson, with her old, old quiet face; Maman so pretty and stylish, looking so sweet when she made mistakes in French that nobody minded, or thought of laughing at her.

Marise tipped the candle over carefully and let some melted tallow fall on the back of her hand. As she set it back and waited for the tallow to harden, she was thinking how very different from home Bayonne was; the Basque fish-women, with the shiny fish in the round flat baskets on their heads; the white oxen with the sheep-skin on their horns, and their red-striped white canvas covering, pulling those two-wheeled carts; everybody streaking it along in canvas sandals and bérets, talking French and Basque and Spanish and never a word of English. And yet, Marise reflected as she slowly peeled off the hardened tallow drops, none of that was the real difference. And there was a real difference. The real difference was something inside you. You felt different, as if you'd looked in the glass and seen somebody not quite you. It was....

Somebody was walking slowly down the brick-floored hall to her room. It was Father's heavy step. That was nice! She hadn't thought she would see either Father or Maman, because there had been company to dinner again. She gathered the tallow drops together and dropped them in the base of the brass candle-stick. Then she remembered that Jeanne would scold if she did that. These candle-sticks like everything else in the house had to be just so, or everybody caught it. She swept them out again with her fingers, and stood holding them in her hand, looking around her for some place to put them. The waste-paper basket was too open, they would fall right through on the floor, and what a fuss there would be over that! Oh, there was the fireplace, if you put things way back of the sticks, Jeanne didn't see them.

She was just straightening up from reaching back of the wood, when Father came in. He said, "Hello, kid," and she answered, "Hello, Poppa." They did this for a kind of a joke, to be extra American when Maman couldn't hear them.

Father sat down on the edge of the bed, making a big dent in the fluffed-up crimson, eider-down quilt, which Jeanne rounded so carefully each morning, and which she never let anybody disturb. Not, of course, that Jeanne would dare to say anything to Father, le patron. She would only grumble in Basque, under her breath, and Marise would feel her opinion of Americans going down even lower than it was. Marise could always feel everybody's opinions as they went up and down. And how she did hate to feel them going down, anybody's about anything! She always tried to fix it so they would go up. She now planned to fluff the édredon to a puff again, after Father had gone back. She didn't say anything about it to Father. You never did, about that sort of thing, even Maman didn't, although it made her awfully provoked not to have Father care, and she always said a lot afterwards. Marise didn't even say anything to him about the white down that would be sure to work through the cover of the édredon and get on his clothes. Father wouldn't care if it did. There were such lots of things Father didn't care about. But Maman would. She must remember to brush him off before he went to the salon.

"Having a good time?" asked Father slowly, the way he did, that let you see how he knew perfectly well you weren't.

"Not so very," she answered.

"Neither am I," he returned, "though you needn't mention it to Momma." There were always a great many things that were not to be mentioned to Maman, and a lot of quite other things that were not to be mentioned to Father, and Isabelle told her things she didn't want Jeanne to know, and everything that Jeanne said was not to be mentioned either to Father or Maman. Marise, coming back from school, used to feel when she opened the door of the apartment, as though she were walking into cobwebs spread around in the dark, and you mustn't on any account brush into any one of them.

Father now went on, "What are you doing with yourself?"

Marise looked down at the cahier, its pages as blank as when she had sat down. Her father looked with her. "That's lovely paper, I must say," he commented, always with his way of showing that he meant just the opposite. "Are you supposed to write on it in ink?"

"Oh, yes," cried Marise, flashing up to seize the chance of sympathy for one of her grievances, "they never let you use lead-pencils because in lead-pencil there's a chance to rub out your mistakes. You're not supposed to make any mistakes."

"Doesn't your pen get stuck in it—it must be like writing on mosquito-netting," said Father.

"Yes, it does," complained Marise, "and you spatter the ink all over and break off the tips of the pen, and everything. And the teachers just kill you if it's not perfectly neat."

Father took up the cahier and looked at the paper hard, scratching it a little with his finger-nail. "Well, there's culture in the air, anyhow," he said without smiling, although Marise knew he was quoting Maman. He looked around the room now without saying anything more. Marise followed his eyes and saw with him the dingy, high-ceilinged room, dimly lighted by the one weak candle-flame, the heavy, figured tapestry curtains drawn over the window, the draught, although the window was closed, making them suck in and out; the ugly, ugly wall-paper, dark and scriggly; the stuffed red chair, the only comfortable one, where Jeanne would never let her curl up with her feet under her, because she said the place for shoes was on the floor; the marble-topped wash-stand with its little chipped white earthen-ware basin and pitcher like the old things at Cousin Hetty's; the clock on the chimney-piece that looked as though it were carved out of greasy, dark-green soap with a greasy dark-green man in a Roman toga on top of it; the shabby, dingy, red-and-white checked curtains hanging over the hooks where Marise hung up her dresses, the tall dark armoire whose slightly greenish mirror reflected all these things as if you were looking at them through water; and finally over the bed, the big, shiny lithograph of Our Lady of Lourdes in her bright blue cloak, standing in front of her grotto.

"Well, maybe it's in the air," said Father. He spoke in his usual tired, slow voice, sagging down on the bed the way he always sat.

But then he surprised Marise very much and said something she never forgot. It gave her such a jump of astonishment to have Father say something as though he really meant it, that she sat up straight at his first words, staring at him. He said in a strong voice, "But look here, Molly, there is something in the air here, by heck, and I wish you'd get it. I mean the way every one of them in this country keeps right after what he's doing, till he's got it just right. That's the way to do, and we're all off the track with our 'that'll do,' the way we say back in America. It's the only thing in their whole darned country I can see, that don't make you sick. Now, look here, kid, you go after it and get it. Start right in now. Learn how to make that infernal note-book perfectly all right in spite of the bad paper. I wish to the Lord I had been taught that."

And then, while Marise was still staring, the words echoing loudly in her ears because of the strangeness of hearing them from Father, he went on in his usual voice, "It might be something to hold on to, and I don't see much else."

Marise had never before known Father in any way to try to "bring her up!" He made Maman so much provoked because he always said that he didn't know, any more than Marise, how she ought to be brought up, and he didn't see that it made so much difference what you did, everything turned out about the same in the long run. Now her little room seemed full of the oddness of his thinking that something did matter, of his telling her so hard that he wished she'd do something. In the loud silence which followed, she could hear his voice and what it said, sinking deeper and deeper into her mind.

After a while Father yawned very wide and rubbed his hair forward and back so that it was all rumpled up the way Maman didn't like to see it. "What did you say you were doing?" he asked again.

"I'm writing down my leçon d'orthographe," said Marise.

"Your what!" said Father.

"My spelling lesson," Marise corrected herself with a jerk. She knew how Father hated to have people mix up their languages.

"Well, I don't know that you're any worse off at that than we are in the sitting-room," said Father. He always called the salon the sitting-room. He added, glancing at her blank note-book, "You haven't got very far, I see." He paused, and smiled a little with one corner of his mouth, "But then neither have we in the sitting-room."

It came into Marise's mind that perhaps Father, seeing he was so specially serious to-night, might tell her some way to keep her thoughts from jiggling around so, from one way of feeling to another, according to what other people thought of things, instead of knowing what she thought of things. But she had no chance to ask him, for when she began, "Well, I sort of forgot about my spelling. I got to thinking," Father broke in, as he got up heavily to go, "I wouldn't advise you to do that, either. It never gets anybody anywhere."

Marise forgot till after he had got clear back to the salon that she had not brushed off the down from the édredon. Maman wouldn't like that a bit, to have him look untidy when company was there! Oh, dear!

But she forgot this as she thought again about the queerness of Father's seeming to care so much about her doing one thing rather than another. It was still there, this wonder at him, when she turned to her book finally to study that spelling lesson. "Lit ... sommier ... traversin...." She wrote the words down on the coarse paper, with infinite care, drawing on some deep, unfamiliar store of patience when the pen sputtered and caught its point and stuck. She was going to try to do as Father said. She would take as much trouble with writing those words about a bed, as old Jeanne took in making the bed every morning; and that was more trouble than anybody in America ever took about anything.

Her dark, shining hair fell forward about her cheeks as she leaned over the copy-book, writing slowly, chewing her tongue, frowning in her concentration on the formation of those letters.

She forgot all about her uncertainties as to how things really were; she forgot her loneliness. All her flickering thoughts steadied themselves and grew quiet as she worked. A stillness came over her. She felt happier than she had since they came to France to live.

Later, ever so much later, after she had undressed, washed in the cold water in the little earthen-ware basin, gone to bed and to sleep, the night-time Jeanne tip-toed in to see that she was all right. This Jeanne was very different from all the others, because she was so quiet. Marise half-waked up when she felt the energetic French kiss on her cheek (Jeanne always kissed you so hard), and as she dozed off again, she heard Jeanne saying a prayer over her, half in Basque and half in Latin. Marise couldn't understand either Latin or Basque, but she understood the intention of that nightly prayer at her bed, and she caught sleepily at old Jeanne to return her kiss. It wasn't as good as Cousin Hetty's taking you on her lap and putting her arms around you, but it was enough sight better than nothing. Also she heard Jeanne carefully close the window. Jeanne always did this every night, although Maman said to leave it open. Jeanne was the last one in there always so she had it her way. She didn't think it healthy to let night air into rooms. Marise was too sleepy to get up and open it again. Anyhow Jeanne often told her about the evil spirits, that come in through open bedroom windows, and sit on your chest and suck your life into their black bodies, as you sleep. Marise did not believe this, in the least, of course, and yet....

CHAPTER VIII

I

May 12, 1898.

Two plump ladies with large busts and very small waists were sitting in the salon of the Allen apartment, waiting for the mistress of the house. They wore very tight-fitting dresses of excellent silk, obviously not new, obviously made by the sort of "little dressmaker" who goes from house to house. Their shoes were stout and clumsy, their hats somewhat heavy in line, their gloves exquisitely fitting, perfectly fresh, made of the finest-grained leather. Although the sky was blue, each lady carried a small silk umbrella of the very best quality, tightly rolled with a masterly smoothness, as smoothly tubular as the day it was bought.

The two women held their cruelly corseted bodies very erect, and sat squarely on their chairs, both feet on the floor, their knees close together, their backbones very straight. Under the brims of their heavy, much-ornamented hats, their fresh, healthy faces wore an expression of perfect stability. They knew that they produced exactly the impression they meant to produce, and that they looked exactly like what they were. From every inch of them was proclaimed the fact that they were fine housekeepers and economical managers of their husbands' incomes, that they were of the well-to-do bourgeoisie and proud of it, as of everything else they were and did. They looked out on their lives and found them good in every detail, from their slightly and purposely behind-the-fashion dresses to their stout shoes, evidence of their respectability; from their fixed ideas to their excellent gloves.

They glanced about them now, keenly, with the penetrating survey of the professional good housekeeper, and found much to comment on.

"How strange to have no lace curtains over the windows, only the heavy ones at the side. Why, people outside must be able to look right in! Do you suppose they have taken them out to be washed? Or don't they know about curtains in America?"

They murmured their remarks in a low tone, keeping a weather-ear cocked to the hall.

"That wall-paper is disgraceful. It was on when the Charpentiers lived here."

"M. Lapagorry had expected, you know, of course, to do this apartment over after the Charpentiers moved out. But these new people never made a single comment, or complaint. Just accepted it."

"I daresay they are used to log-cabins at home, with Indians at the door."

"Oh, no, Madame Garnier, my Henri says that the Indians are quite civilized in America now."

Madame Garnier frowned slightly at the mention of Henri.

The other woman went on, "Apparently they thought it was all right to have faded paper and those awful old curtains. M. Lapagorry was so astonished he almost fell over backward. And when he saw they didn't find fault with anything, he asked a higher rent, ever so much higher than the Charpentiers had paid, and they took that too without a word. People say M. Lapagorry can't sleep nights now because he didn't ask more."

Madame Garnier observed, as one mentioning an obvious fact, "Oh, well, Madame Fortier, he will, of course, next time."

Madame Fortier saw nothing to smile at in this. "Yes, of course," she said seriously.

Madame Garnier now said, "They must be very rich. Where is it they are from, Buenos Aires?"

"Oh, no, Madame Garnier. I think it is somewhere in North America. My Henri says that...."

Madame Garnier broke in, irritated, to say with suppressed heat, "Oh, North America or South America, what's the difference? They are all foreigners, and who knows what strange, immoral ideas they have? They don't come to Mass, you know. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that the man is a Free-Mason. I wish M. Garnier had not asked me to call on them."

The other shrugged her shoulders resignedly, "Yes, it's a very strange thing to do, make the first call, and on people you know nothing about. But M. Fortier says the man, M. Allen, is very important in a business way, and he specially asked all the business men to have their wives call on his wife. He almost seemed to make it a sort of condition, so M. Fortier said, almost made them promise before he would talk business with them. It may be in America, they do. And of course anything M. Fortier thinks may be good for his business...."

Madame Garnier's nod signified that of course that principle went without saying for any good wife; the expression of her face adding that this was an application of it which might count as one of a good wife's sacrifices. But she said hopefully, "Well, they won't stay very long, foreigners never do."

Madame Fortier now murmured, "They say she's very free with the gentlemen. M. Fortier and his friends are laughing about her. They say they really don't know how much of what she says is due to her bad French; or how far she really does expect them to go."

This did not surprise Madame Garnier. "What can you expect? I shall see to it that our Jean-Pierre has nothing to do with them."

This apparently started a new train of thought for Madame Fortier, for she now said with the cheery warmth of one who brings out something which will be a bitter pill to her interlocutor. "It seems the American, M. Allen, has taken quite a fancy to our Henri. We think we can get a position for Henri, through him, in America, where Henri can learn English, and study the American market. It would be a great help in the business if Henri knew English and all about American imports. And of course the salaries paid in America are enormous."

Madame Garnier's eyes opened wide. She fell into a trance-like meditation, and presently murmured, "Our Jean-Pierre made quite a specialty of English in the lycée. I should think...."

The mother of Henri shook her head decidedly, "I don't think America would suit your Jean-Pierre's temperament," she said. "He's not at all practical. And you get skinned alive by American business men if you're not as sharp as they. No, you'd better keep Jean-Pierre away from them."

The two looked at each other hard. A brilliant light of rivalry came into their eyes. It brought an animation, a zest into their faces, which made them look years younger. A main-spring had been touched, and all their wheels began visibly to turn.

Steps were heard in the hall.

They composed their faces, and turned towards the door. The American lady now came in, and they rose to greet her. They were extremely cordial, a competitive friendliness in their manner.

They went down the well-polished oaken stairs in silence, each holding up her long heavy skirt with one gloved hand and letting the other rest on the railing. At the bottom, each with an automatic gesture like a reflex action, looked at the palm of her glove to see if it had been soiled by the railing, and with a similar mechanical action, shook their heads disapprovingly, although there was not a grain of dust on the smooth, tightly-stretched, pale kid.

They shook out the trains of their skirts and swept into the street, conscious of the pouncing inspection of Anna Etchergary, gazing at them from the loge of the concierge, and proudly aware that there was nothing to criticize in any detail of their backs or anywhere else about them. They turned to the left and began to climb the steep street which led towards the Cathedral. Madame Fortier remarked presently, "Very bad taste, that dress, like an actress. All that white silk and lace. And slippers like a dancing girl's. It must be she never puts her hand to anything in the house."

"No, she doesn't," returned the other disapprovingly. "My Marguerite meets her Jeanne every morning at market. She says that Jeanne says the American lady never does anything about the house, and doesn't even verify her accounts. You can just imagine what Jeanne is getting out of it. It quite upsets Marguerite, and I have to be specially careful with my own accounts. Everybody near them is getting a rake-off on everything." She made these revelations with a satisfied look as though the words had a pleasant taste in her mouth.

Madame Fortier's comment was made with the accent of mature, worldly experience, "Mark my words, money spent in a loose careless way like that must have been ill come by. That's the way disreputable women spend money."

"It's very hard on the rest of us, at any rate. And Jeanne tells our Margot that she is a very poor housekeeper, as heedless as a child, wears her best tailored street dress in the house as like as not, lies down on the bed when she is not sick at all, and doesn't do a thing but read novels all the time; or fool away a whole afternoon in the Museum. Very suspicious, that, too. Why should anybody go to the Museum so much? I'd just like to know whom she meets there. A regular place of rendezvous, the Museum. I wonder if her husband knows."

They were enjoying the conversation so much that their faces looked quite sunny and bright. The other shook her head forebodingly. There was a silence as they climbed steadily up the steep, narrow, stone-flagged street.

Then Madame Garnier remarked, "The little girl is quite pretty, though so mannerless."

"Her dress was covered with grease spots, and had a hook off the back," reported Madame Fortier.

"I didn't see but three grease spots," demurred Madame Garnier, "and she really has lovely eyes and hair."

"How badly that woman speaks French. Without the little girl to interpret, it would actually have been hard to know what she was saying. Strange they don't know French better. But perhaps they don't have regular schools like ours."

Madame Garnier made no answer to this conjecture, but asked, looking sideways at her neighbor, "Shall you ask them to dinner?"

Madame Fortier all but groaned, and said in a martyr's tone, "Oh, I suppose so, for Henri's sake."

The other digested this thrust in silence, and then changed the subject. "What was that she was saying about De Maupassant? Was she quoting him, to us? What did she take us for?"

"Yes, she didn't realize what we might think of her. It was that indecent Boule-de-Suif, too. But she knows so little French most likely she didn't understand what it was all about."

"Have you read that?" asked Madame Garnier.

"Yes, I thought it my duty to, as a mother, to know what it is. But I burned the book, and you may be sure I don't go around letting everybody know I've read it. Did you find her pretty?"

Madame Garnier answered obliquely, but quite understandably. "I daresay a man would think so. I couldn't think of anything but her manners. How she lolled in her chair, and crossed her legs. I wouldn't want my Gabrielle to see her. And to my eyes she had a faded look. Queer, her being so fair. I don't see any trace of Indian blood. I thought all Americans had Indian blood."

"Oh, no, Madame Garnier, my Henri says that...."

Madame Garnier made a gesture of one thoroughly out of patience with Henri, and ended the conversation abruptly, "Oh, here we are at the corner. I must turn down here. Good-day, Madame Fortier."

II

May 15, 1898.

The rosy, wrinkled face of the Sister of Charity shone out from the white quilled band over which the black veil was draped. Beside her the distinguished old lady showed, under her long crape veil, a face as quiet as that of the nun. The two elderly women sat at ease, their hands folded in their laps, chatting in a pleasant low tone.

"Yes, so every one says, a great deal of money, Madame la Marquise," said the nun in her murmuring monotone, "as all Americans have."

The other breathed out with a great wistful sigh, "Oh, Sœur Ste. Lucie, if only the good God has sent us at last the opportunity to get our chapel."

"Yes, yes indeed," assented the nun, drawing in her breath sharply between her teeth. She raised her eyes, singularly bright and personal in her professionally passive face. "They say there is a child, too. Perhaps a soul to save. Our Mother Superior always so zealous for the honor of our Order has asked us specially, specially ... the Bishop has so much to say about one of the Sisters of the St. Francis Order because of the conversion of a Swedish sailor, whom she nursed in their hospital. The Mother Superior hopes very much that some one in our Order...."

"Yes, yes, I understand," said the great lady, nodding.

The nun went on, deferentially, "Madame la Marquise is so good to be willing to come to call on the foreign lady! I shall see to it that the foreign lady understands the honor done her."

The other made a graceful deprecatory gesture with a shapely black-gloved hand, and explained with great simplicity and gentleness, "Oh, no, ma sœur, it is nothing, nothing to praise. I would make a far greater sacrifice for the sake of our beloved work. But in this case, there is no risk of being misunderstood. It is not as though they were French bourgeois, who might have their heads turned. There can be no question of social equality with transient foreigners." She smiled, bowed her head with humility and said, "So you see, dear Sœur Ste. Lucie, that I deserve no praise for making a sacrifice."

The nun nodded her understanding. It was evident that they understood each other to perfection. "Yes, yes, of course, I see. No social equality possible," she murmured, drawing in a sharply taken breath again.

They looked about them in silence now, the restrained calm of their faces uncolored by their thoughts. Hearing steps in the hall, Sœur Ste. Lucie shook out her long black sleeves to cover her hands more completely, and cast down her eyes so that her sweet, rosy, wrinkled old face was once more blank and impassive.

Anna Etchergary was waiting at the door of her loge as they descended the stairs, and she ran before them out to the old closed carriage, which stood at the curb. Bowing deferentially and murmuring under her breath, "... Madame la Marquise...." she held the door open for them. The lady smiled her thanks at her, a pre-occupied, well-modulated smile which took for granted the deference and the service.

As the nun stepped into the carriage she said with unction, "Now I see how lives in the world can be as useful to Our Lady as those of the convent. No one could have resisted Madame this afternoon. To have a great name and all worldly graces, and to use them only for the greater glory of Our Lady!"

The other sighed and said sadly, "Dear Ste. Lucie, since the death of my dear one, there is nothing for me in the life of the world, except an opportunity to serve our good work." She went on more cheerfully, with a little animation, "Yes, I must say, it seemed like fruitful ground this afternoon, fruitful ground. I think we may say we made a good beginning."

The old coachman came to the door for his orders. "To 4 rue Marengo, in the Petit Bayonne," said his mistress, and as he stepped to his seat, she explained to the nun, "I feel so much encouraged that I am going straight to an architect to have him make an estimate of what the chapel would cost."

The carriage proceeded very slowly and rackingly over the rounded boulders of the pavement. Inside it, the two women, accustomed to such joltings, thrust their arms through the broad, hanging loops, and went on talking.

"Not a disagreeable person," said the great lady in a kind tone of tolerance. "A very middle-class little woman, but no harm in her, I should say. I was afraid to find some one not quite—not quite—you know it is said that American women are not very moral—so many divorces in America."

"And still you went...!" breathed the nun, lost in admiration of the other's heroic devotion, "when you ran the risk of meeting a divorced woman!"

The Marquise made another gentle, fatigued gesture of warding off praise. It was a practised gesture as though she had occasion to make it often.

After a time she said, "Odd she should be so interested in the Cathedral here, and yet a free-thinker. What made her talk so much about the South Portal? I never heard of anything unusual about it, did you? Except that that disagreeable, anti-clerical fountain is somewhere near there, to the memory of those wicked revolutionists."

The nun shook her head, indifferently. "I always enter by the North Portal," she said. "I don't believe I ever happened to see the south one."

After reflection, the marquise said, "I don't believe I ever saw it either. Why should any one? You never enter from that side. Nobody lives on the rue d'Espagne, that anybody would ever have occasion to visit."

III

May 20, 1898.

Anna Etchergary measured accurately the social status of the two ladies who asked for Madame Allen's apartment, and without getting up, or stopping her sewing, she answered in the careless tone suitable for people who wore home-made hats and cotton gloves, that Madame Allen was at the top of the first flight. After they had passed, she thought to herself that she believed she knew them, Mlle. Hasparren, the school-teacher and her married sister. They were Basques, like Anna, but of the small government employee class, who put on airs of gentility, and wore hats and leather shoes. Mlle. Hasparren gave music lessons, as well as teaching school. Probably she had come to try to be taken on as Marise's music-teacher.

The two ladies were mounting the stairs in silence and very slowly, because the school-teacher had taken off her cotton gloves and was putting on a pair of kid ones, which she had pulled from her hand-bag. She explained half-apologetically, to her sister, who had only cotton gloves, "It's to do honor to America!" and then with a long breath, "The first American I ever saw."

"What do you care if it is, Rachel?" asked her sister languidly. She added with more animation, "Your hat is over one ear again."

The other stopped short on a stair. "America! ... free America!" she said passionately, "don't you remember what Voltaire said, 'Europe can never be wholly a prison so long as it has America for open window?'" She knocked her hat back into place with the effect of using the gesture to emphasize violently what she said.

"I wouldn't quote Voltaire, if I were you," advised her sister mildly. "You never know who may be listening. People think badly enough of you for being a school-teacher in a lay-school as it is."

"There you are!" Rachel caught this up as a point for her side. "There it is, our airless, stagnant European prison-house of prejudice!" She struck a hand, gloved in kid now, on her breast, with the gesture of one suffocating.

Her sister shrugged her shoulders resignedly and said, "Which door do you suppose it is? We forgot to ask which side."

They were now on the landing, hesitating between the two exactly similar doors. Rachel made a quick decision at random, crossed to the right-hand side, and pulled the bell-rope.

The door opened, and showed the upright frame of Jeanne Amigorena. There was a moment of mutual surprise, and exclamations of greeting and inquiry. "Why, Jeanne, you here? I thought you were on the farm at Midassoa!"

Jeanne broke out upon them with a great rush of Basque, enchanted to see familiar faces, enchanted to have a new audience. "Oh, good-day, Madame Hardoye. Good-day, Mlle. Hasparren. Who ever would think to see you here? Yes, here I am in a family of the queerest foreigners you ever saw. But they pay very well. They have both apartments on this floor. Yes, they must be made of money, and I have little Isabelle from Midassoa with me, as femme de chambre, and what do you think, we have each a room, a real furnished bedroom, just as though we were guests. The madame took one look at the maids' rooms, under the roof, on the fifth floor, you know, and when she saw they are all dark except that little sky-light, with no furniture to speak of, she said she wouldn't let a dog sleep there. The idea! It would have been plenty good enough for Isabelle and enough sight better than what she ever had at home. She is getting beyond herself all the time, Isabelle is. I have an awful time keeping her in her place. The lady hasn't the least idea of doing it. They are such queer people, I can't tell you! She knows no more about taking care of a child, our madame! She started to let our little mademoiselle go alone to school, through the streets! And the poor child was so disgraceful with spots and dirt on her dresses that I was ashamed to have people see her and had Madame buy her some aprons and now I keep her in order myself. She is a sweet child, only brought up the way you'd expect a little savage to be, puts her feet on the chairs! Or else sits on the floor! And runs on the street, or else loiters along looking at shop-windows. But she is learning fast. I don't complain, oh, no. I know well enough that when you are a servant, you must take what comes to you, and make the best of it. But I never thought I would work in a family of free-thinkers! Still, they sleep over there on that side of the landing, and Isabelle and I sleep here. I keep the holy-water shell well filled, and we brought the branch of box from home that had been blessed last Palm Sunday, and we sprinkle a few drops of Lourdes water on the table before we eat. I hope we are safe. M. le Curé says that is enough. I often think that...."

Madame Hardoye had been listening to this flood of talk, her lively interest in the matter struggling with her distaste for Jeanne's familiar manner.

She now broke in with an accent which she meant to express, "There you've talked quite enough. After all, though my sister has queer ideas, we are not in your class. We are not peasants. And it's high time you remembered that." What she actually said in a curt tone was, "Where do we ring to make a call on your mistress?"

Jeanne understood the implication perfectly. It was one quite familiar to her. With a change of manner she motioned them silently across the hall. "There," she said laconically, her face suddenly hard and somber.

Rachel Hasparren also understood the implication and flushed an even more vivid color than that habitually on her dark cheeks. She held out her hand, her kid-gloved hand, to Jeanne, with a defiant gesture of equality, "Good-by, Jeanne. I'm glad we had a glimpse of you."

Jeanne took the hand awkwardly, with a sort of rancorous reluctance to have her grievance appeased, and turning back, shut the door behind her.

"Now, Rachel!" expostulated her sister.

Rachel breathed ragingly and stared at her sister in an old resentment, which the other took calmly, looking inside her card-case.

Rachel advanced provocatively, "Did you hear what old Jeanne said, how the American lady would not put a dog to sleep in lodgings in which we French expect to house our servants?"

The married sister resented this spiritedly. "Spoiling servants for the rest of us, that's what it is!" she said impatiently. "And what good does it do? You saw how old Jeanne only thinks the less of her for it. The more you try to do for that class, the less they think of you."

"That's because Jeanne's whole nature has been degraded by our caste ideals!" shouted Rachel. "She's a poor, superstitious, medieval old thing, incapable of ordinary decent human relations. If she'd lived in America...!"

Angèle pulled the other bell-cord here with an air of cutting short another out-burst, and they both stood silently looking at the closed door, which presently was opened by little Isabelle.

As they went down the stairs, Angèle remarked, "Well, she seems to be all right. Like everybody else, as far as I can see. I expected to see her with a Liberty cap on her head and swinging a lighted bomb, to hear you going on."

Rachel was taking off her kid gloves and putting on cotton ones. She said dreamily, her black eyes deep and glowing, "When I asked her how the peasants lived in America, she said ... the dear American ... 'there aren't any peasants in America.'"

Her dark flushed face was shining as they came out on the rue Thiers and stood for an instant, glancing up at the battlemented walls of the dark old Castle.

Rachel suddenly shook her fist at it, her cotton-gloved fist, and cried out, "You needn't glower down like that, you hideous old relic of an evil past! There's a great, wide, rich country across the seas, that never heard of such as you, that never had a feudal castle in it, that isn't darkened by a single hateful shadow such as you still throw down on us here."

"Hush, Rachel," said her sister, patiently attempting to quiet her, "Anna Etchergary is looking out of the window at us."

Rachel instantly lowered her voice, with an instinctive response of caution to this warning, but she was furious that she had done so. "That's Europe, that's Europe for you!" she said hotly, under her breath. "Spied upon every minute by suspicious, mean, malicious eyes."

Angèle broke in on her to say reasonably, "Well, anyhow, your hat is on one side again."

CHAPTER IX

Round-robin Letter to Mrs. Horace Allen's Neighbors and Friends in Belton, New Jersey

Bayonne, France, May 25, 1898.

Mes Chére Amies:

Je vous demande pardon for being so late with this letter, I know I promised to write just as soon as we got here. But, chére amies, I know you would forgive me if you knew how marvelous our new life is here in this old, beautiful, civilized world. I have just been letting myself go in it, just grabbing at its charm and wonder, and all I can tell you is that Europe is even more wonderful than I thought. I just wish every one of you could persuade your husbands, as I did, to take a position that will bring you across the seas to this "fabled old land of story and art." You owe it to your children to give them the culture which they would get here.

But let me begin first with the material things. Mr. Allen, you know, felt sort of badly because the position here didn't seem to be as important and have as big a salary as the job the Company offered him in Chicago—Chicago! Well, you cannot imagine anything like the cheapness of the life here. We have two flats of six rooms each, on the same floor, just the landing between them, twelve rooms in all, furnished elaborately down to the last little things in the kitchen even, and we pay about half the rent we paid in Belton for our unfurnished house. There is perhaps a little old-world dinginess about the wall-paper and the curtains and things, but that only adds to the delightful atmosphere and makes you realize that you are really in old Europe and not raw young America.

We have two maids for less than three dollars a week each, and such maids! In America we haven't any idea what it is to have good servants. I am not expected to lift my hand or think about the housekeeping. My old cook, the most fascinating creature, in a quaint peasant's costume, takes all the responsibility on her own shoulders. She gets up frightfully early in the morning, and goes off to market with a big, flat basket, and comes bringing it in on her head all filled with the loveliest things to eat you ever saw, and bought for almost nothing! But she buys just as closely for me as she would for herself. Servants identify themselves with the family of their masters here, and are glad to! I know the word "masters" sounds very un-American; but one so soon gets used to the vocabulary of the country. Pardonnez moi!

Jeanne—that is our cook—brings our breakfast to us in bed, all except of course for Mr. Allen, who can't seem to adapt himself to other ways of living. The first morning when she started to, he just jumped out of bed as though the house were on fire, and slammed the door shut in her face. He can't get over his Anglo-Saxon prudishness. But we have separate rooms now, and I have my tray in bed, and read my mail there, and between you and me, it makes me feel just like a heroine in a novel, to lie there in my pretty negligée—you know in America we don't realize what negligées are for. When do you ever have a chance to wear one except when you are sick? And then you don't care. Marise has hers—her breakfast I mean—in her room, too, as she dresses, and Jeanne always expects to help her dress, so I don't have to think at all about getting her off to school! Oh, mes amies, what a rest to one's nerves that is! Not to have that horrid, hurried hour trying to find clothes and books and get Marise off in time. I just lie in bed reading the mail or a book and Marise comes in, all fresh and combed (Jeanne is wonderful with her hair), and kisses me and says, "Au revoir, Maman." We always try to speak French together for the practice.

Then, as I am getting dressed, Jeanne comes in, with a clean apron to "take her orders," in the good old European way. And from that minute on, I have no more bother about it. Everything is set on the table at the right time, beautifully cooked, the house is kept clean and in the most perfect order.

Perhaps you are wondering why I call Mary, "Marise?" It is a quaint nickname for her that the servants have, and I have picked it up from them. Isn't it delightful? I never liked Mary, and I detest "Molly." Both the maids are devoted to Marise, and it is the European custom for the servants to do a great deal more for the children of the house than our girls ever dream of doing. Without a word, Jeanne has simply taken over the care of Marise's clothes as a part of her regular work, and she is always ready to go out with her, for it seems that no nice children go alone on the streets here. Every morning, Jeanne takes Marise to her school, and goes for her in the afternoon and brings her back. Marise is perfectly happy here, in a splendid school, and having wonderful opportunities. I am so happy about her advantages. It is not a public school (the "lay" schools as they say, because all the others are run by Catholic nuns). It seems the public schools are something quite new in France, and nobody sends children to them except the poor, or people who are queer in some way, with unbalanced ideas. I can easily believe this, since I had a call the other day from a school-teacher in the public schools, who also gives music lessons. She is a very queer and dowdy person, with the most awful hat you ever saw. Didn't you think that all Frenchwomen wore pretty, stylish hats? Not in the least. Quite the contrary. Her sister was with her, quite middle-class, both of them, and not at all like the other ladies who have called on me.

For they have called! Do you remember that little old French teacher who came to see me about getting a job in our High School, how discouraging she was about our coming to live in France, and how she said nobody would come to see me, at all? Well, if you ever see her, just tell her she is entirely mistaken. People are just as cordial as they can be, with the most beautiful manners you ever saw.

Do you wonder how I manage about the language? It is much easier to get along than I expected. Of course my thorough reading and writing knowledge of the language is a great help. And I have been making wonderful progress in speaking it. Being right in the midst of the language all the time it just soaks into you. No one here speaks any English; not from provincial ignorance, the sort we have in America, but from choice, because of their concentration on their own perfect language. They are all deeply cultured. It is wonderful to be in the midst of cultured people, to be able in casual afternoon calls to discuss De Maupassant with one lady and Gothic architecture with another.

For we have here in Bayonne—you notice that I already say "We,"—a simply splendid Gothic cathedral, the first one of my life. It is right up the street from where we live, and it is wonderful. Chére amies, think what it means for a town to have in its midst such a marvelous thing! Think what people must be like who live right close to it, go in and out of it every day, and feel its "beauty and puissant power" (as Matthew Arnold says). The South Portal is especially fine, starred by Baedeker, which means a great deal, as you know. I make a pilgrimage there every day, to just gaze at that South Portal. I have a life-time of arrears to make up, not having lived with it from childhood, as these fortunate people have. It is no wonder that you meet here people absolutely wonderful in their polish, like a lady who called on me the other day, the Marquise de Charmières. Her husband's family dates back to the days of Louis XII. I am ashamed to say I had to go and look up who Louis XII was, after she had gone. She had with her a nun, who lives with her, by special permission, the dearest old thing with her sweeping black robes and the quaint, quilled, picturesque head-dress. I suppose they used, in the old days, the Charmières did, to live in the wonderful old castle, just across the street from us, which is another of my great admirations. Think of living across the street from a real castle! It was constructed in 1100, on the remains of the old Roman wall, if you please, for Bayonne is very, very old. And it is right there, just the way it always was, with battlements and a real drawbridge and everything, just as it was in feudal times. Many famous people have lived there, Richard Cœur de Lion, Louis Quatorze, and others. It was there that Catherine de Medicis planned the St. Bartholomew massacre, and in a house on this very street that Napoleon took the Spanish crown away from the King, and gave it to his brother. Isn't it marvelous to think of?

I have had some of the curtains taken down in our salon (the French simply swathe their windows in curtains, simply swathe them!) and I often stand at the window and just gaze out at those old castle walls and try to imagine the splendid life that went on here then, the streets full of people in costumes and knights in armor and everything. I see the modern crowds coming and going under those massive walls, and I keep thinking how proud they must be of such an inheritance from the past, and how they must often wish the good old feudal days back again, when "life had color," as a writer said in a book I was reading the other day. No such inspiriting reminders of past glories in America! No such past glories! Nothing but what Ruskin calls the drab, dead level of democracy.

There is a fine Museum here too, with perfectly splendid works of art in it, pictures by Van Dyck, Rembrandt, Raphael, Rubens, Ribera, Murillo, Poussin, Delacroix, Ingres, Troyon, Meissonier, Corot, Isabey, Bonnat, Bouguereau, Gervex, and many others. I am simply studying them, absorbing them, I go every day with a handbook on art which I bought here (in French, of course), and just gaze at them till their very spirit enters into me. I must tell you that Bouguereau is considered very much out of fashion here, and not at all admired any more. The Meissonier are simply marvelous. You could take a microscope to them, and still not see any brush-marks. Indeed it is said that he painted with a microscope. There is a perfect copy here of the Mona Lisa, which people who know say is just as good as the original. Mes chére amies, think what a privilege it is to sit there, right before her, with the book in my hand, looking up into that mysterious face, and reading those wonderful words of Pater's, which I have studied with you so often. "Here is the head upon which all the ends of the world are come, and the eyelids are a little weary. She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; and as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and as Ste. Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has molded the changing lineaments and tinged the eyelids and the hands."

Mes amies, we have often read and studied this marvelous passage together, and now I can only say to you that it is true! But every bit of culture means so much more to me than it ever did before and now that I know what European life is, I can understand why they are more cultured than we are. It is because they have leisure. Here the working classes expect to work, as our American working class does not. And the material cares are just taken right off the shoulders of the upper classes. We are expected to occupy ourselves with higher things. I am reading, reading, reading as never before, and getting a closer knowledge of French literature, even than our studies together gave me. It all means so much more to me, now that I am right among the very people who are described in it. Think of looking up from a volume of Zola, and having a caller come in, who might be a character right out of the book. I often tell Mr. Allen, that the life around me illustrates and explains the literature, and the literature illustrates and explains the life. It is a wonderful, wonderful experience!

I have just finished De Maupassant's "Notre Cœur," and I am not surprised that we found it impossible to get hold of the French edition in America. Our strait-laced, old-fashioned, Puritanic America doesn't know enough to appreciate such a picture of this free European world, where relations between men and women are different from those between high school boys and girls. At home the girls rule the roost, if you will excuse a vulgar expression. But not here. Here they are put off in a corner, till they get a husband, and then they are allowed to blossom out. A woman of my age, so a French gentleman told me the other day, is considered just at the right age for being fascinating. And he assured me he didn't say that because it might apply to me, but because it is so. The men have temperament here. They really look at you, and are just as different as can be from the American business-man who never thinks of any woman but his wife, and never pays any attention to her! Here the men positively sparkle in conversation, and they all say they would hardly know I am an American, I have acquired the French manner so entirely. Here a woman is not expected to have become a mummy, because she puts on a wedding-ring. Quite the contrary, I assure you!

But this is a terribly long letter. I have poured out my heart to you in untrammeled spontaneity, such as comes to you in the free intellectuality of this finished civilization.

May you all be able some day to enjoy it!

Your devouée friend,
Flora Allen.

P.S.—Mr. Allen says the business part seems to be all right.

CHAPTER X

As happens to us all, there were certain moments which stayed alive in Marise's memory for years; and as is always the case, those moments did not at all correspond with apparently important events. Such events come, seem of great consequence, happen, and therewith sink down into the featureless mass of things which happen only once and then are in the past forever. The other moments, those queerly, heterogeneously tumbled-together impressions, are the things which happen over again every time one thinks of them.

One of Marise's fantastic notions was that the things which had happened were piled up in a big junk-heap in your memory in front of a great black curtain. But there were pinholes in the curtain, and if you put your eye to one, there, right before you, one of the things that had happened was alive again, and your heart knocked and your throat felt queer just as it did the first time. This notion may have come to her in this form because it was generally in the night that she experienced the vivid living-over of some long past moment. Wakened from a sound sleep by the hoarse whistle of one of the steamers in the Adour, taking advantage of a favorable tide to weigh anchor and be off, she saw in the instant while she drew a long breath and turned over in bed, one of those living scenes again, as actual, as piercingly real to her as though it were happening for the first time. Some of these she greatly dreaded, some set her to ringing all through with happiness, others she never understood at all.

I

One of the very happy ones was the moment when she had first really heard music. She had been "taking lessons" of Mlle. Hasparren for weeks and months. Mlle. Hasparren taught as Marise thought all the teachers in France taught, the hardest possible way; scales, scales, scales and then thumping, monotonous exercises, played over forty, fifty, sixty times, till Marise felt as though there wasn't anything left of her except that exercise, pound, pound, pound all over her. Marise saw nothing in music except hatefully numerous little black dots on white paper, and heard nothing in it beyond a combination of sounds as interesting to hear as a problem in arithmetic is to look at.

She rather liked Mlle. Hasparren, although Maman thought she didn't have a bit of style; but she certainly did hate the three-times-a-week music lesson. She never could have kept on with it in America, but here everything was hard work, and if you weren't working at your music lesson, they'd expect you to be working at something else. And then, too, there was what Father had said about keeping at what you were doing until you got it just right. Marise's bed-room seemed to have taken up the sound of Father's voice as he said that, so that many times, as she sat there doing her lessons and not thinking of it, all of a sudden, the very curtains and walls and chairs seemed to be reminding her of it. That was really what kept her going, as day by day she sat down heavily before the piano, prodding her mind up to keep it fixed on the little black dots.

That at least was what had kept her at it till the evening which came back to Marise so clearly. Father and Maman had gone out to dinner; she had eaten alone, with Jeanne's chatter for company, and then on her way back to her room, had wandered into the salon, candle-stick in hand, sort of hoping she could think of something nice to do before she settled down to study.

But there was certainly nothing nice to do in the salon. It was awfully lonely in there, the chairs all empty and stiff, standing around heavily, the thick curtains drawn close over the tall windows, and in front of the alcove where Maman's writing-desk stood, the polished floor shining hard and bright, the stands, the table with one of Maman's yellow-covered books on it, the dark little cave of a fireplace. Marise set her candle down on a stand, and herself sank down on the piano stool, her back towards the keys, staring at the lonesome looking room. How perfectly dead it did look. Marise could hear faintly in the distance an echo of the brisk voice of Jeanne and Isabelle, laughing and carrying on over the dishes. But in here, in the empty salon, there wasn't a sound. Her ears fairly rang with the nothingness all around her. Her heart was big and heavy.

At school that day, the girls had started up a new fad, the "wishbook." You got a little blank book, and then went around asking everybody to write down in it what she most wished to be. Marise was astonished at what the other girls wrote; one, "I wish I could be a great actress," another, "I wish I could marry a millionaire," another, "I wish I could be a great and holy saint." Marise had not been able to understand why everybody did not write what she did, instantly, instantly, something she had always known she wanted. What she had written in everybody's book was, "I wish I could be happy." She thought of this now, and in the empty, cold, echoing room cried it aloud, "I wish I could be happy."

There was no answer from the stiff stuffed chairs, from the well-polished tables, from the black hole of the fireplace. Marise had expected no answer, would not have expected one if her parents had been there, never expected one. What answer could Father give, Father who apparently never thought of such a thing as being happy, and never hoped for anything more than to be a little less tired and bored. And if Maman had been there, she wouldn't even have heard what Marise said, busy as she always was with thinking something of her own. Maman wasn't nearly so cheerful as she had been. What was it Maman was thinking about when she sat so still and her face got dark and drawn? Certainly not about Marise.

The little girl sat on the piano stool, dangling her long legs and looking straight ahead into the empty room, which looked back at her, she thought, as though it had a low opinion of her and a very high opinion of its own importance and elegance. She knew she ought to get up and go into her own room and study a very long lesson on the reign of Henri IV. But she couldn't seem to get up the strength to do this, sitting fallen together on the piano stool, her heart heavier and heavier.

She looked hard at the empty chairs, and thought to herself that it wasn't any worse to see them empty, than to see the people that usually sat on them—not one who could help a little girl to be more happy. There wasn't a single person she knew, whom she'd wish sitting there now, unless it might be Cousin Hetty! Marise felt a knot come in her throat, and the corners of her mouth began to tremble. She would like to get up in Cousin Hetty's lap again.

But Cousin Hetty was not there. There was nothing there but the circle of unfriendly chairs and tables and the empty, silent room. The trembling of her lips got worse; Marise was afraid she was going to cry. She turned round on the piano stool, put one bent arm up on the music which stood there, and hid her face in it. She was not crying; though she wished she could, because the ache in her heart and the knot in her throat hurt too much.

The silent, motionless room stood aloof and meaningless about the silent, motionless child. Marise pressed her face closer against her arm. She was trembling now, all over her body.

The silence was intense.

And then it seemed to her that the silence had been broken by a voice, a beautiful, quivering voice, deep and true, which went straight to her heart, as though some one had spoken a strong, loving word. At the sound she stopped trembling and sat motionless.

Before she could draw her breath in wonder, she knew what it had been ... only a note of music. Her own hand falling on a key of the piano had struck a note, which was even then echoing in her ears.

But the first impression was ineffaceable. That, too, rang in her ears. It seemed as though it was the first time she had ever heard a note of music. Really, really that was so. She had never been still enough before to hear how a note sounded. How it rang and rang in the stillness, its deep vibration stirring echoes deep within Marise's heart! She had thought it was a voice. Why, it was like a voice, a voice speaking to her, just when she had been so sure that there wasn't any voice she could possibly expect to hear.

She sat up marveling, and struck another note. Into the dead, stagnant air of the room, and into her loneliness, it sang out bravely, the same living voice, thrilling and speaking to her. She struck a chord, astonished at what she heard in it—all those separate voices, each one rich and true and strong and different from the others, and all shouting together in glorious friendliness. "That's the way things ought to be," thought Marise, "that's the way people ought to be." But, oh, how little they were like that! But here was a world where she could always make it come true, where she could have that singing-together any time she wished to make it for herself.

She struck more chords, her fingers finding the keys with the second-nature sureness, learned in her months of dreary practice.

She listened to the sounds, shaken and transported to hear how they flooded the barren emptiness of the room with glory, how they filled her heart full, full of happiness ... only if she were happy, why was she crying, the tears running as fast as they could down her cheeks?

This was one of the remembered moments which brought nothing but a pang of joy to Marise. When it came, the world about her brightened.

II

There was another, one of those which came very seldom, which brought something deeper than pain or joy. This was the recollection of an instant, just one instant, of the day when Maman let Sœur Ste. Lucie take her to Lourdes. It was the feast of St. Louis, and Sœur Ste. Lucie always went every year then. She had been awfully nice and jolly, the way she always was with Marise, and it was fun to start off with her early in the morning, at dawn, in the special excursion train. At Lourdes it was fun, too, really exciting to be in such a monstrously big crowd, oh, what a crowd! She heard somebody tell Sœur Ste. Lucie that there were thirty thousand pilgrims there that day. It amused Marise very much to hear them called pilgrims and to think that she and Sœur Ste. Lucie were counted as pilgrims, too. She had always thought of "pilgrims" as people who landed on a stern and rock-bound coast and began to fight with Indians; and nothing could be more unlike that than the crowd at Lourdes, swimming in the dusty, yellow sunshine, everybody dressed up in his best, walking around in groups, talking and singing. Marise held on to the Sister's nice, soft, old hand and followed her around from one thing to another, taking a good big drink of the water, and kneeling down whenever Sœur Ste. Lucie stopped to pray before a shrine. Marise didn't pray much, but watched the crowd, the endless crowd shuffling slowly past. She was proud to be kneeling there beside a Sister, who had the right of entrance everywhere, who opened any gate in any railing she liked, and walked right in to say a prayer where the common run of people didn't dare go.

At noon, after three hours of this, Sœur Ste. Lucie took her charge off up along the bright, quick-flowing stream, off into the real country, till finally they came to a field that wasn't too thick with people. There they sat down on the grass, under a tree. Sœur Ste. Lucie got out the pasteboard shoe-box they had taken turns carrying around all the morning and they ate their lunch. Marise was simply starving by that time and anything would have tasted good. But that lunch would have made a stone statue eat, it was so good. Cold roast chicken, plenty of it, big slices cut recklessly right off the breast, tender and juicy and flavored; and crispy, crunchy rolls and fresh butter; and little radishes and green onions and salt, and a half bottle of the best white wine, which they watered down in their cups with Lourdes water. Sœur Ste. Lucie laughed over this as she poured it out and said they ought to be saints at least for a day or so, after drinking Lourdes water with their lunch, oughtn't they? She was as jolly as could be, anyhow, and was enjoying herself so much that she kept Marise laughing at her jokes all the time. One of those numerous friends of hers turned up here too, a stout, red-faced farmer's wife, who shouted with pleasure at seeing Sœur Ste. Lucie, and came over from the other side of the field to bring her lunch and eat with them. She and Sœur Ste. Lucie got into gales of laughter in which Marise joined with all her heart although she didn't always quite see what the joke was. Then they had their dessert, a triangle of creamy Camembert cheese, spread on the crust end of their roll, and after this a great golden pear apiece, so full of sweet juice that you couldn't take a bite of it without its running down your chin, so you had to lean way forward, to the tune of everybody laughing at you, and doing the same thing themselves.

After they had packed up what was left, and the farmer woman had gone back to her family, Sœur Ste. Lucie got very quiet and still, pulled out her rosary and began to murmur her prayers in a very fast, low tone, her eyes almost shut up. Marise sat beside her in the grass, watched the crowds beginning to turn back towards the Basilica, and a couple of little gnats dancing round and round each other in the air. The murmur of the prayers was like a bee-hum in her ears. She leaned back against the tree and drew a long breath, and the next thing she knew it was hours later, and Sœur Ste. Lucie was shaking her gently and saying she'd better wake up because it was time to go back if they were going to get a place to see the blessing of the sick.

After that ceremony was over, everybody was perfectly worn out and almost starved. Sœur Ste. Lucie went to one of the convents for supper, where the good Sisters took care of hundreds of the pilgrims, and looked as tired as Marise felt, and walked as though their feet hurt as hers did. But there was still one more Lourdes sight to see, the procession of the lights in the evening. When they came out of the convent, they found the weather changed, the wind blowing hard and a light rain falling and not a bit of light coming from the black, black sky. The damp was bad for rheumatism, and Sœur Ste. Lucie's knee began to pain her, so that she said they would not march in the procession but go up along the side of the high horse-shoe staircase, where they could see on both sides and along the esplanade. How black and empty that looked, that enormous stretch of pavement, like a great empty hole, outlined by the street lights on all four sides of it. Back of it, down towards the Grotto, there seemed to be millions of people, judging by the lights which danced around, every way at once; and through the wind and the rain and the darkness, Marise and Sœur Ste. Lucie could hear snatches of singing, the chant which fairly rings from the stones and walls of Lourdes.

[Listen]

A-ve! A-ve! A-ve Ma-ri-a! A-ve! A-ve! A-ve Ma-ri-a!

Then as Marise stuck her head through the railing to watch what went on there, far, far below them, she saw the lights begin to straighten out into two long lines and start streaming up the lower part of the horse-shoe staircase where she and Sœur Ste. Lucie stood. The procession had started; two by two they were marching up towards the blaze of light at the top where the door of the upper church stood open. The sound of their voices grew louder and louder and there they were! The first ones were a mother and her little girl; after them a couple of working men; after them a man and his wife; after them a priest and a soldier; after them—after them—Marise lost count, she felt her head whirl, she couldn't see the people any more, only the little dancing, quivering lights they were carrying, candle-flames, scarcely at all protected from the wind by a bit of card-board, or a hand curved about them.

They kept going by and going by, those little flames, until Marise's eyes ached. And yet she couldn't look at anything else, she couldn't stop staring at those flickering, swaying little flames.

After a long time she was able to pull her eyes away from them, to look past them down at the great esplanade—and oh! now it was not a black and empty hole; it was all full, full of lights, a million little marching and singing flames, in endless lines, ordered, purposeful, marching to and fro. So small, so tiny and feeble each one, but enough all together to make a great light in the blackness, to fill all the emptiness with glory.

It was then that the terrible great moment came to Marise, something that she could never think about long enough to try to understand, because when she tried to think about it, she began to shake all over just as she had then, when, across the line of chanting pilgrims, she looked down at all those little, marching, singing flames. What was it that came to her then? The most aching sorrow; and yet an exaltation as though broad wings were lifting her up in a solemn beat of power.

It was all over in an instant. Whenever it came after that, it always came and went between heart-beats. But after it had come and gone, everything looked different. It was as though, plodding along on foot, a great wind had snatched her up, and blowing mightily for an instant so that all the world was filled with it, had set her down, ever so much farther along the road she had to go. And always after this moment, she had an hour or so when she liked people better, everybody, the dirty old flower-vendor, the street-sweeper, Jeanne, the teachers at school, Father and Maman. It was as though she saw them all in a procession, each trying to keep alive a precious, flickering flame.

III

There was another, a horrid one from which Marise always looked away the instant she knew it was coming because she couldn't bear it. And yet she never could be quick enough. She always saw it, as though in her, as in a camera, a lens had whirringly clicked open and shut.

And yet there was nothing to it. She had come from school with Jeanne, who had gone to the kitchen. Marise had crossed the landing and started to pull the bell-rope, and then noticed that the door happened to be a little ajar. So she pushed it open and walked in. As she walked past the salon door she had glanced in, and saw M. Fortier there, just going away from making a call, the father of Elise Fortier, her classmate at school. He had his broad, fat back turned to her and was stooping to kiss Maman's hand. There was nothing surprising in this; everybody knew that gentlemen who kept on with the old ways of doing things, always kissed ladies' hands. She had seen the father of one of the girls kiss the bony hand of Mlle. Ballot, the head teacher at school. What was registered indelibly on Marise's mind was the expression on Maman's face. Maman was looking—oh, it was horrid to think such a thing, to say such a thing, to have looked at her and seen such a thing.... Maman was looking sort of.... Marise could never, try as she might, shut down on this moment quickly enough to shut out the ugly thought she hated so.... Maman was looking sort of foolish and silly, as though, as though.... But here Marise was always able to snap the shutter shut and put it all out of her mind, except the dull heaviness it left.

IV

But the worst, the very worst and most awful of all those remembered parts of the past, was what happened about the gray cat. No, that wasn't the way to put it, because you couldn't say that anything had happened ... and yet how sick it had made Marise, and did every time something reminded her of it!

One day when Marise came home from school, Jeanne gave her a big, pretty, gray, yellow-eyed cat and said she thought it might be company for her. Marise was awfully pleased, took the cat in her arms, bending her cheek down to rest it against the soft fur, and carried her off to her room to try to get acquainted with her.

But there seemed to be something the matter. She didn't act like Cousin Hetty's Tommy, up in Ashley, nice and cuddlesome; she seemed to have something on her mind. She wouldn't sit still on Marise's lap and be petted, she wouldn't play with a string nor drink the milk Marise put in a saucer for her, nor lie down and go to sleep the cozy way cats usually do. She tramped around and around the room, and every once in a while she'd give a loud miauw, in an anxious voice.

Marise thought it was because she was with strangers in a strange place, and that as she grew wonted, she would be happier. But she kept this up all that day, and at night when Marise shut her up in the extra kitchen they didn't use, she yowled so that Maman complained. And the next day she was even worse, acting so queer, doing such funny things, stooping her front paws down, and tramping hard with her back paws. And as she did this, she would look up at Marise and miauw in a loud, anxious way as though she were asking Marise to do something for her. At the end of that second day, Marise was too worried to keep it to herself, although she had resolved not to bother either Maman or Jeanne because they didn't like cats. She went across the landing to ask Jeanne to come. Jeanne came and Isabelle too, instantly sure of the worst as usual, and declaring that the man who had sold them the cat was a thief and a robber and had palmed off on them a sick cat that nobody wanted. They added emphatic precautions to Marise about not touching her if she was sick, because a sick cat's bite meant poison.

They went into the room. The cat got up and came towards them that same queer way, stooping and treading and switching her tail. And she gave again that strange, anxious cry.

"There, that's the way she does all the time," said Marise, troubled and concerned. She came round in front of the two women, so that she could look full up into their two faces, to see what they thought.

Not a turn, or color, or tone, or line of what they looked and said and did ever faded from her mind. Her first feeling as she looked up into their faces was of utter amazement; and after this an instant cold premonition of something evil. She stood perfectly still gazing at them.... What could it mean?... What made them look so...?

Jeanne and Isabelle looked down at the cat; the anger went out of their faces, and in its place came a singular, secret expression, half amused ... half horrid.... Marise could never think of any other name for it.

Then they looked at each other, their eyes meeting, their eyebrows arched high, and they laughed.

At the sort of laugh they gave, Marise burned hot all over, although she had no idea of what there could be to laugh at. But every line of the two women's bodies and faces, the tone of their laugh, the look of their glistening, amused eyes told her that it was something they thought shameful. And she was ashamed.

Then, as she stood there, cold and burning hot, they had both as by a common impulse glanced at her as if something about her also seemed very funny to them. That glance was the worst of all—like a smear she could never wipe off.

She felt very sick, her knees shook under her. But something furious and strong inside her told her that whatever else she did, she must not let them see how sick they made her. She stood her ground, her eyes burning, utterly at a loss. What could it be? What was this awful joke they laughed at and she couldn't see?

Jeanne said, as they looked at the cat with a greedy amusement in their eyes, "Oh, she's not sick. She's looking for a husband, that's all."

Isabelle laughed again at this, and said something to Jeanne in Basque. Marise could not understand a word of this, but her hot, straining eyes, fixed on their two faces, with a helpless fascination, received another deep and indelible impression of conscious shamefulness.

Jeanne nodded and said to Marise, "I'll take her back to M. Bergeret's brother-in-law for a few days, where there are other cats, and then she'll be all right again."

She picked the cat up by the middle and held her so, while she listened to Isabelle, who now said something else in Basque, half-grinning, her lips curled in an embarrassed, half-pleased way. Jeanne glanced sharply at Marise, as if to see whether she had understood this, in spite of its being said in Basque.

Then they both went out of the room, Jeanne carrying the cat by a hard, careless grasp about her middle. Outside the door they both burst into giggles, as though they had been restraining themselves before Marise. The little girl heard them giggling all the way down the hall, the sound broken once by the loud anxious miauw of the cat.

Marise stood perfectly still till she heard the outer door open and close. Then she looked about her wildly. She wanted to run somewhere and hide her face. She wanted to sink down on the floor; she wanted somebody to help her, to make it up to her, some one to wipe it away and put her back where she had been three minutes before, when Jeanne and Isabelle had come in the door. She couldn't go on, living the way she felt now, as though she were dirty inside and couldn't wash herself clean. What was it all about? What had it meant? What was there about having a husband that people thought was so...?

At this it came over her in a wave again, so that she started as though she had been struck a slashing blow, and ran, ran breathlessly out to get help.

In the dark hall she stood still, the thump, thump of her heart loud in her ears. A murmur of voices came from the salon. Maman had callers.... But even if she hadn't, Marise now knew she could not have spoken to Maman about it. Something came and stood between her and Maman so that she knew she could not tell her. She had a horrible fear that Maman would look that way, too, perhaps she might laugh that way ... perhaps everybody would. Perhaps that was one of the things they did. Not Father, either ... no, she'd be ashamed of ... not ... why, there was nobody she could tell; there was nowhere to run for help.

She went slowly back to her room. The sight of it brought up before her again the glistening eyes of the two women as they had looked at the cat and laughed. A terrible burning came up all over her so that she was almost suffocated. She wanted to hide her face. She found herself leaning against the dingy, checked red-and-white curtains. They smelled of dust as she buried her face in them, burrowing deeper and deeper among them as though she must hide herself, hide herself from ... but she couldn't hide herself from what was inside her own mind.

She stood there a long time, her face pressed into the dusty curtains, her body buried in them. She was sick, sick from head to foot.

And then ... nobody came to help her, since there was nobody to come; nothing happened ... nothing could happen. She had thought she couldn't live, feeling like this. But she would have to, since there wasn't anything else to do.

This came to her slowly, and slowly sank into her, like still, deep cold.

Two days after this, as Jeanne was brushing her hair, she said to Marise, "Our cat will be brought back to us to-morrow. She is all right now, M. Bergeret says."

Marise waited until the wave of sickness passed and she felt she could make her voice sound as usual. Then she said casually, "I've changed my mind. I don't want a cat now. It would bother Maman too much."

Jeanne was relieved. "Oh, very well. I don't ask anything better. I hate cats around the house anyhow." She went on brushing Marise's hair, with careful, loving skill, proud of its thickness, its sheen, its silky blackness. She thought to herself, "What a beautiful child our Marise is. And how I love her! There isn't anything I wouldn't do for her! May the Holy Virgin guard her and keep her safe always, Amen." She never thought again of the cat.

NEALE BEGINS TO BE NEALE

CHAPTER XI

On Neale's thirteenth birthday, his mother gave him a little silver watch and his father, a bicycle. In addition to the excitement of getting into his teens and of owning these visible and outward symbols of advancement, he was told that he would now be sent to a real school, with no girls in the classes, where he would really learn something; that is to say where he would be prepared for college.

Hadley Prep. was an excellent school, a sort of model school, an information factory. You fed a small boy into it and at the end of four years the school turned him out completely filled with classified information. Boys entered with all sorts of hazy disorders of learning; they were ground out, possessed of a chain of facts, every link shining, polished and joined by flawless welding to the preceding and consequent facts. The curriculum took no count of modern educational fads; "spiritual awakening, character building, intellectual growth" had no place there. What would you have? Four years is a short enough time to prepare boys for their college entrance examinations. The non-essentials had to be cut out. The great point was that when the Principal signed a certificate of graduation he knew that the boy in question could produce any piece of information required of him, from the preterit of recevoir to the formula for accelerated motion of falling bodies, at any college entrance examination in the United States.

Into the hopper of this mental polishing-machine, Neale was poured with fifty other little boys and began painfully to adapt himself to its rigorous codes. It was a process trying to the most robust among them, and devastating to the weaker ones. The devastating quality was not only recognized and admitted but sedulously fostered by the faculty and Principal. It was part of their business to see that the weaklings fell by the wayside long before the flock was led up to the narrow gate of the college entrance examinations. And as some hospitals achieve a miraculously low death-rate by the simple process of never admitting a patient whom they are not sure they can cure, so Hadley Prep. achieved the miraculously low rate of examination mortality for which it was famous the country over, by the simple process of knocking on the head and throwing out on the scrap-heap any boy whose brains seemed reluctant to admit college-entrance examination facts.

Those whose heads were hard enough to resist the knocking, found themselves completely absorbed by the mental gymnastics which filled their days. The first two years of his life at Hadley Prep. had almost nothing in them for Neale except his over-time struggle to make up for the omissions of Miss Vanderwater's haphazard tuition. Everything else, even the assuming of long trousers, even the summers in the country, even games, were banished to the fringe of consciousness, like things seen out of the corner of your eye while you are gazing with all your might at something else. The life of his personality, his inner self, during those two years, realized the ideal of the eighteenth century educator who felt that the only safe up-bringing for boys would be to shut them up in a barrel, between the ages of twelve and eighteen, and feed them through the bung-hole. The record of what was fed through the Hadley bung-hole was set down on Neale's report cards, which he dutifully brought home to his parents. They glanced up from their absorption in each other, read, and smiled over the mathematical accuracy of the Hadley information about the state of Neale's mind (the Hadley professor often marked a boy as 87.75 proficient in American history, or 90.3 learned in German). At times they wondered if Hadley were the best place for him. But they were exactly like all other parents: they really had no idea what else to do with Neale. His health continued good and he did not seem rebellious, so they confined their supervision of his education to paying his rather expensive tuition, signing his report cards, and handing them back to him.

Towards the end of the second year Neale began to master the new technique. He memorized the magic pass-words which are accepted as a proof of understanding many subjects. He began to draw breath, to tread water less frantically and still not to fear the closing over his head of smothering floods. The third year he felt earth beneath his feet again, and relaxed enough from his mental concentration to spend occasionally an hour or two on the school athletic field. He was fifteen years old now, wore long trousers and suits with vests, a stand-up collar, ties he tied himself, and carried a fountain pen. Underneath all this grown-up bravery of exterior, there was a brain that had learned to acquire and pigeon-hole information, and a perfectly dormant personality.

Life at the Crittenden home was, as far as he was concerned, exactly the same life he had always known, except that instead of playing on the streets, he went out on the school athletic-field, and instead of playing with his tin soldiers, he usually went up to his room to grind over his lessons. At breakfast and supper his father and mother talked peaceably to one another just as they always had, and although Neale was able now to understand the subjects of their chat, their talk was, as a matter of fact, often quite as incomprehensible to him as it had been when he was a small boy. They had grown so much together, had so shared life with each other and no one else, that they possessed almost a language of their own, made up of references, only half-expressed, to things they had said long ago, or to experiences they had had together, or to opinions they both knew so well there was no need to formulate them in words. Neale was not surprised at this, nor yet resentful. On his side he was absorbed in his studies and the life at school. It was true that every once in a while they talked directly to Neale; asked him questions—what studies he liked best—how the teachers treated him—what he had to eat at lunch. Whatever they asked Neale always tried to answer in accordance with the facts; that he was getting along all right he guessed, that everything was satisfactory as far as he could see, that he hadn't any idea what he should like to do later on to earn his living.

Occasionally, instead of taking the trolley cars, Father and Neale walked together down the long steps to Hoboken and along 6th Street to Hudson, where his father turned south and Neale went to the school. Then talk was harder to dodge—not that Neale ever consciously dodged. They would walk a dozen blocks. Father would ask a question, Neale would answer it. Another dozen blocks, and another question. Once Father asked if Neale wasn't sticking indoors too much. Couldn't he manage to get a little more exercise? Neale explained the seriousness of his studies and pointed out that he still rode his wheel on Saturdays. But the suggestion took root. Neale bought a pair of Indian clubs and an instruction book, and took to swinging the clubs fifteen minutes night and morning with the windows open.

Another time Father said, "Look here, Neale, haven't you any friends?"

Neale was astonished, "Why, yes, I'm friends with the whole class."

"Yes, I suppose so, but you never seem to be with them outside of school. When I went to school we were always playing around in each other's yards and barns."

"You went to school in the country," Neale reminded him. "We haven't any yards or barns here. We have the athletic field at school."

"Yes, that's so," his father admitted. After a time he made a further admission, "Athletics are all right, too." But something in his tone intimated that he was baffled rather than convinced. Since Neale considered that athletics were not only all right, but all there was to life, he found no comment to make.

A moment later, "But, great Scott," began his father with some heat as though struck afresh with some aspect of Neale's life. He seemed to hear the too-great vivacity of his accent and to wait until he could ask quite casually, "Aren't there any of your school-mates you'd like to have visit you?"

Neale considered. It hadn't struck him before, but it was a fact that after school and athletic practice, all the boys vanished to their various homes. Never having known any other than this city relation with school-mates it seemed to him obvious and natural. "Visit me?" he said, trying to imagine one of his classmates sitting at the Crittenden dinner-table, and then, "No, I don't believe I do. There wouldn't be anything special to do at home, would there?"

His father drew on his cigar thoughtfully, and walked on in silence.

But he had a long talk with Neale's mother that evening, the two country and village-bred parents putting their heads together, earnestly though helplessly. The only course which occurred to them was proposed to Neale, a week later, when Mother asked him if he would do something to please her. Incautiously Neale said, of course, yes, he would. He was always willing enough to please Mother, and he had never made the slightest objection to anything his parents planned for him. But this plan turned out to be something very alarming. It was all arranged, Mother told him, that he was to go to dancing-school in the Germania Club ball-room on Tuesday afternoons. Mother pointed out that, now he was fifteen years old, and half-way through prep.-school, he ought to learn to dance. Neale had no theoretic objections to offer and had given his word that he would not object. So hiding, except for his first wild look of dismay, the terror and repugnance which filled him, he wrapped up the newly bought patent-leather oxfords and started. There were limits even to the Iroquois stoicism of his acceptance of what Fate brought him. No power on earth could have made him walk through the streets in those patent-leather shoes. But Mother never pushed him anywhere near one of those limits. She did not even suggest that he wear his dancing shoes. She helped him find the paper and string to wrap them up. Also she did not fuss over him ... not much. She looked at him hard, picked a thread off the sleeve of the blue serge which was his dress-up costume, and called his attention to the fact that a button of his vest was unbuttoned. She did not offer to button it herself, or handle him in any way. Mother was all right, if she did want him to go to dancing-school.

So he went. And it was not so bad, not nearly so bad as he feared, the reassuring factor being that everybody else there was in the same boat. You could see how they all despised it. Except, of course, the girls. While he was changing his shoes in silent alarm and disgust in the cloak-room, who should come in but Jenkins, a "Lower Middle" at school. Neale didn't know Jenkins except by name, but at least he was some one to lean on. Neale was at once very cordial and Jenkins, surprised and flattered by this attention from an upper-class man, promised to show him how everything was done. They went into the ball-room, Neale clinging morally for dear life to Jenkins. A number of other young men of fifteen and sixteen, and girls who looked almost like young ladies, were sitting on opposite sides of the room. A bald-headed man to whom Jenkins referred as "One Lung" sat at the piano. The dancing master was young, German, energetic and thorough. He called the class to their feet, explained and illustrated the step and made them all practice it en masse, "One and two! One and two!" Then after a few minutes the music struck up and he left them to choose partners and dance. Neale, of course, did nothing of the kind, but pretended he couldn't find a partner (there were twice as many girls as boys), and went back to his seat. This was a tactical error. The Master spotted him at once. "Couldn't find a partner? Oh, dance with me, then." He whirled Neale about the room till his soul sickened, led him up to the other side of the room and sent him off with a bony, red-haired girl with freckles. Neale was caught that way twice, but no more after that. He had at least ordinary sense, he told himself. Next time the music started, he gulped down his objections to the whole proceeding and bowed to the prettiest girl in the room.

The course was very thorough, covering much that was obsolescent, and a good deal that was definitely dead. In that and succeeding lessons Neale received instruction in the steps of the Polka, the Schottische, the Varsovienne. The two-step he really learned, managing to "Yale" down the length of the hall without stepping on his partner's feet; and although he hated the waltz, he was forced by infinite repetition into mastering it. Oh, the misery of the hour-long waltz-lesson, with the Master's constant exhortation, "Don't hop! Slide!"

Neale carried into his dancing the same minute earnestness that won him success at his games and studies. He did not see the use of dancing, any more than he saw the use of learning German. But as the jobs seemed to have to be done, he tackled both of them conscientiously. He remembered to reverse in waltzing just as he remembered to put the auxiliary at the end of a sentence after "als." He came to be considered a good dancer. The girls did not claim to be tired when he asked them to dance with him. But he went no further. Even after he had mastered the steps and "leading," he did not talk as he spun methodically around. What was there to say? And even when he waltzed with Flossie Winters, the admitted belle, his heart beat no faster. It was nothing to him to put his arm around her waist. In spite of his long trousers and stick-up collar, the spirit of the thing escaped him; his time had not come.

After some months (they seemed very long months to Neale), the conscientious and thorough instructor gave him a printed testimonial of efficiency; there was no more he could teach Neale.

Over this his mother looked at him, "Wouldn't you like to go on, for the fun of it, Neale?" she asked him rather urgently. Neale's father took his cigar out of his mouth to hear Neale's answer.

"For the fun of it!" said Neale, stupefied at the idea. His parents exchanged glances and shook their heads, beaten.

"Oh, of course you don't have to!" his mother assured him hastily. His father put his cigar back in his mouth.

CHAPTER XII

In June 1899 when Hadley Prep. unlocked its grim doors and spewed forth the fifteen-year-old Neale for his third vacation, he did not as he had always done before, go at once with Mother to West Adams and the saw-mill. The invariable program of his journey there, Mother's two weeks' stay with him to get him settled, her going on to visit vague relatives of her own elsewhere in Massachusetts, and her return to spend the rest of the summer with Father, was upset by the news from the West Adams Crittendens. Jenny, the hired girl, had been to visit friends in Troy, and had fallen ill on her return. The doctor thought it might be typhoid. Certainly they did not want a boy visitor bothering around, until the matter was settled and they knew whether they were in for a long siege.

The Crittendens like all methodical people were quite at a loss when circumstances interfered with their routine. If there was one part of Neale's year the rightness of which they did not doubt, it was the summer spent in the country where his father had grown up. Now they were confronted with a perfectly new aspect of the problem of what to do with him. They solved it by not doing anything for the present. Mrs. Crittenden went off to visit the usual relatives in Massachusetts, delicate old ladies, whose nerves could not hold out against the idea of a great ramping boy; and Neale was left temporarily with his father to wait developments in West Adams.

The first days of liberty were sweet enough, after the strain of examinations. Neale loafed or rode his wheel (he had a new 24-inch frame bicycle now) at random up to Hudson Heights, and beyond on the Palisades. But less than a week of this was enough. He tried to amuse himself with baseball again, but it was not as he remembered it. The three years he had been at Hadley Prep. had separated him from his old friends. They were no longer to be found. Some were at work, some had moved away. The boys playing ball seemed absurdly young. The vacant lots themselves were absurdly small and rough. How could he have played there? He gave the thing up and moped.

What was there to do? He got on his wheel again and went out over the Plank Road as far as Passaic, swung left through Montclair, the Oranges, out to Elizabeth and home through Newark. Home was just as dull as he had left it. Neale was bored to desperation, and on a chance went into the parlor and opened the book-case. He was no great reader. In his own room there was a fair collection of Henty, G. Manville Fenn and Harry Castleman, but none of these seemed worth re-reading. He didn't suppose these grown-up books in the library could be worth anything, but he took down a volume to see.

"Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within twenty miles of the sea. My first most vivid impression of the identity of things seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening. At such a time I found out for certain that this bleak place over-grown with nettles was the churchyard ... and that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard intersected with dykes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond was the river; and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing, was the sea; and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip.

"'Hold your noise!' cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from among the graves at the side of the church porch. 'Keep still, you little devil, or I'll cut your throat!'"

Half an hour later Neale was still standing by the book-case, the book in his hand, his mouth hanging open, shivering in the clammy mist together with Pip and the man with the iron chain. An hour later he was tucked into the Morris chair, among the cushions of which he hid the book when the dinner bell made him reluctantly lay it aside.

What made him hide it? An invincible sense of moral decency made him hide it. He would have shuddered and cowered like a modest girl whose bed-room door is opened inadvertently by a stranger, at the very idea of carrying the book to the table and pouring out to his father what it made him feel. With a shy, virginal delicacy he stood guard, half-frightened, half-enchanted, over the first warm gush from the unexpected well-springs of emotion in his heart. If his father had come into the room, had seen what he was reading and asked him how he liked it, he would have answered briefly, "Oh, all right."

But for the next three days he did nothing but live with Pip, and feel intolerable sympathy, far deeper than anything he had ever felt in his own healthy life, for the convict victim of society. On the afternoon of the third day, his heart pounding hard with hope, he was in the row-boat, in the track of the steamer. The Morris-chair in which he sat, swayed up and down to the ocean rhythm of the great deeps which bore him along. He peered forward. There was the steamer at last, coming head on. He called to Provis to sit still, "she was nearing us very fast," ... "her shadow on us," ... and then, oh, gosh! ... the police-boat, the betrayal, the summons to surrender!

Neale's soul recoiled upon itself in a shudder of horrified revolt. He recognized the traitor, a white terror on his face. Grinding his teeth, Neale leaped at his throat. With a roar the water closed over their heads ... he would never let him go, never, never.... Down they went to the depths, to the black depths, fiercely locked in each other's arms. Neale smothered and strangled there ... and came up into another world, the world of books.

At the table that night, his father looked at him and asked, "You're not getting a cold, are you, Neale?"

"No, I guess not," said Neale, blinking his reddened eyelids, and eating with a ravenous appetite his large slice of rare roast beef.

After that, time did not hang heavy on his hands. The days were not long enough. The volume which stood next to "Great Expectations" was called "The Tale of Two Cities." "Which two cities?" Neale wondered. He opened it and began to read. In a moment, wrapped in a caped great-coat, shod with muddy jack-boots, he was plodding up-hill beside the Dover Mail, his hand on his horse-pistol. The panting rider on his blown horse—the message, "Wait at Dover for Mam'selle,"—the answer in capital letters, "Recalled to Life!" With a long quivering breath Neale slid back a century and a quarter, into a world vibrating with sorrow, hope, indignation, hatred, love.

He dipped his handkerchief in the muddy wine spilled in the street; he looked up, not surprised to see the squalid joker scrawl "Blood," on the wall; he climbed the filthy staircase, and averted his eyes in horrified sympathy from the ruin of humanity who sat in the dark, cobbling shoes.

And then, brushed in with great colorful strokes, the causes and authors of the filthy stairway, the squalid joker, the ruined man, the endless misery. With the four serving-men pouring out the chocolate of Monseigneur, Neale began to burn, like a carefully constructed bon-fire, alight at last. He had never in his life before, given a conscious thought to social injustice or the poor, but every instinct for fair play, sound and intact in his heart, flared up hotly and honestly, as he gave himself naïvely to the spell of the magnetic exaggeration and over-emphasis of the story. He had "had" the French Revolution in his history at Hadley Prep. and could have recited correctly almost any date in it. But, quite literally, he had no idea until after he had finished the story, that this panting, bleeding, weeping, thundering book had any connection with what he had learned at school.

"David Copperfield" was good, not so terribly exciting as the others, but solid food on which Neale, aware for the first time of his hunger, feasted with a deep content—all except the parts about Dora, who made him tired. After this for a change, he reached up to a shelf above and took down at random one of the set in green and gold binding. This was "Kidnapped." Thereafter he read nothing but green and gold, till his eyes gave out and his father drove him out to spend a whole afternoon on his wheel.

CHAPTER XIII

Although he had gone reluctantly, once he was out it seemed fine to be on his bicycle again. His forgotten body reacted with a rush to exercise and fresh air. Generally he expected to make at least fifty miles in a half-day but to-day was hot. Pedaling easily through Nutley he caught sight of a young man playing tennis against two girls and stopped in the shade of a maple to watch the game, still sitting on his wheel, his right pedal locked over the curb-stone. Tennis was not so universal then as now: Neale knew little about the game.

Presently a chance stroke sent the ball into the street. "Out!" announced the young man, and turning ran back to retrieve it. As any American would do anywhere in the world when a ball is in question, Neale stooped, picked it up and was just going to toss it back when amazement paralyzed his arm. Could this slim youth in immaculate flannels possibly be Don Roberts? Don, the big boy who had played shinny and vacant-lot baseball with him, whom he had never seen but with a dirty shirt and unkempt hair! The elegant youth cried out, "Neale Crittenden! I'll be blessed if it isn't old man Crit! That's luck! Come on and meet my friends and we'll have a set of doubles."

He ushered Neale up to the net, where laying a patronizing hand on his friend's shoulder, he presented him. "Ladies, my old friend, Crittenden. We used to be boys together long ago. Neale, the Misses Underhill, Nutley's peerless blondine duet, Polly and Natalie. Now, how about some doubles? Neale can use my old racket."

"But I don't play," said Neale, alarmed at the idea. "No, I honestly don't. I've never had a racket in my hand. I'll watch."

"Oh, fudge! That's all right. You'll learn. Nat and Neale, that's your team. Polly, my dear, come over to this court and back up your Uncle Don. No fair banging everything at Polly."

The essential rudiments were explained. Neale gripped the racket and the game began. At first his partner politely kept her own court but as the completeness of his ineptness became awfully apparent, she began covering more and more territory, running across and snatching the ball from in front of his hesitating racket. In vain, for Don continually placed his return down her undefended alley. The set was soon over, 6—love.

"Now, Crit," said Don, jumping over the net, "we'll have sex against sex."

The second set went better. Now that he was playing on Don's side, Don gave him a little coaching. Neale learned to run in to the net and found volleying much simpler than playing ground strokes. Natalie's low returns often went through him and he did nothing with her service, but not infrequently he managed to pat back Polly's gentle offerings. When points were needed Don monopolized the court. The boys won,—a love set.

Don lit a cigarette and pretended to fan himself with his racket. "How about lemonade for the victors?" he cried, but the girls demurred. It was five o'clock, they had to go home and dress. They laughed over nothing at all, shook hands with Neale, told a few friendly lies about his progress, and walked off laughing over nothing at all, swinging their rackets; white-shod, yellow-haired, pink-skinned.

"Dear little sweethearts, aren't they?" commented Don. "A little insipid like most nice girls, but you have to take what you can get. Polly's a dub at tennis, of course, uses her racket like a snow-shovel, but she's not such a worse little flirt. Look here, Crit, old boy. I've got to stay in this stinking hole all summer, cramming for deficient exams. The old man won't let me go to the Water Gap till I can answer those damn questions. And there isn't a soul to play with but those girls. It's rotten for my game. Why don't you come out here? Come to-morrow. Of course you can't play, but I'll teach you. I can teach anybody."

Neale blushed and accepted the magnificent offer.

"Well, ta, ta, old man, sorry you can't stay to supper."

Neale mounted his wheel with a very high heart. This was something like. Something was beginning to happen in his life. Wasn't Don great? As he rode home he decided that he would ask his father to let him go to Princeton. Don was at Princeton.

But he didn't. Father read him Mother's latest letter, all about the particular great-aunt she was visiting in Cambridge, and after they had commented on this, Father looked at his evening paper sideways as he ate, and Neale went over in his mind the events of the afternoon, and the wonder of Don Roberts turning out such a splendid fellow, such a good sport, such clothes, such a way with him. Neale thought about him a great deal more than about the girls, and with vastly more admiration. He was sure that David Copperfield's Steerforth was nothing to Don Roberts. Once when he glanced up, he saw Father looking at him instead of his newspaper.

"Well, Neale," he asked, "what are you up to these days?"

This was his opportunity, Neale knew it was, to introduce the subject of Princeton, but he could not think of any way to do it. Instead he said vaguely, "Oh, nothing much. Sort of hanging around." And then with a great effort, he brought out, for once, a vital piece of news, "I'm learning to play tennis."

"That's good," said Father. "It's a great game."

This seemed to be final. He looked back at his newspaper. But after a while, as though something had occurred to him he asked, "Who's teaching you? Where do you play?"

"I ran across Don Roberts, over in Nutley. They used to live here, on Central Avenue. He used to go to Number Two School." He wanted to go on and tell about Don's being in Princeton, but could not propel himself past the full-stop, where an inadvertent cadence of his voice had dropped him.

Next morning he found Don with a whitewash brush touching up the marking of the court. For three hours they practised—a most exhausting three hours! He thought he began to make a little progress. He knew he was almost all in, when noon came, worn out far more by the mental strain of struggling his way into a new technique, than by the physical effort, although that had been enough to leave him blown and panting, as they went into the house to have lunch.

The two boys were alone at the table. Don swaggered a little as he served his guest. "No one at home," he explained. "Mother and the girls are down at Asbury. The old man doesn't get back from the office till the 5.45. I can hear his train whistle from here. He finds his loving son deep in his books, you bet."

Through luncheon Don fired Neale's enthusiasm with stories of Big Bill Edwards, Arthur Poe, Lady Jayne and other heroes of his Alma Mater. Afterwards he strolled to the living-room, sat down at the piano, and sang "The Orange and the Black,"—"There's a college we call Princeton." Then lowering his voice, with many nods and knowing winks, he sang a long song with the refrain, "Keep your eye on tricky little Sarah."

Neale's play on the streets and in vacant lots with perfectly heterogeneous and casual little boys had given him quite enough of a vocabulary to understand the words of this song; and odds and ends of the older boys' talk overheard in the locker-room at Hadley made the spirit of it by no means unfamiliar. But this was the first time that either words or spirit had ever been more than one of the casual by-products of boy-life. What put it in the center of his attention now was his admiration of Don as the model of colorful, sophisticated life. Evidently this was a part of such life. Neale applied his mind therefore to the words and the spirit and learned to hum the air.

That evening Father read another uneventful letter from Mother; then they sat in silence till, as father was filling his pipe, he remarked, as if it had just come into his mind, "Oh, I thought you ought to have a racket of your own, Neale. I got one. It's in the hall on the coat-rack."

Neale bounded upstairs and carried his prize to his room. There was not only a Sears racket, but three Wright and Ditson balls, Spalding's "Tennis Guide," and a little pamphlet on "How to Play Lawn Tennis." Neale dropped into his Morris chair and devoured both books before going to bed.

The hard protective husk of his little boyhood was so newly sloughed off, that his adolescence had as yet received scarcely a mark upon its new freshness to impression. Ready now, responsive with an inward quiver to a whole range of experience to which he had been blind and deaf before, he was catching up from the chance materials about him, the stuff with which to construct his new world. And here was material ready to his hand. The editor, an enthusiast, an idealist of sportsmanship had put a great deal in his little treatise beside his copious advice as to the proper grip on the racket and the laying out of a court. Without the slightest self-consciousness (because he had the not-to-be-imitated single-heartedness of the sincere devotee) he had charged every section of his treatise with the spirit of the game, the spirit of sport, not of border warfare. So matter-of-factly was this message conveyed that even the adolescent soul, half-crusader, half-Hun, did not guess that it was being preached to. The word "honor" was never mentioned, yet Neale understood perfectly the significance of what he read, under the caption "Tournaments:" "The committee should provide adequate linesmen, for while the contestants themselves can generally tell whether a ball is good or not, yet close decisions occur in every match and it is obviously unfair to force a player to penalize himself (as he naturally would feel bound to do) by giving his opponent the benefit of the doubt on all uncertain cases." He nodded approvingly over the phrase, "as he naturally would feel bound to do." It did not strike him as a new idea, but merely a clearer statement of something he had always felt was in the air about sports. Yes, that was how a college man would act, how Don would act.

Again, among the illustrations he was struck by a photograph of the winner and runner-up shaking hands after the Newport tournament. Neale looked long at the expression of cordial congratulation and admiration on the loser's face. He moved uneasily in his chair at the recollection of a nine of disgruntled urchins muttering after a defeat, "Aw, you bunch of stiffs, wait till we get you on our own diamond." Neale had been one of those who muttered, one of those so stung by defeat that the idea of admiring the better playing which had beaten them would have been inconceivable to him. Neale knew himself well enough to know the fierceness of his lust for victory. He knew it was going to be a job to tame that lust to this civilized code. But he would try. Morally on tip-toe, he resolved to be worthy of Don's friendship.

When he turned the last page, relaxed the intense concentration with which he had been absorbing the essence and spirit of the book, and stood up to stretch and yawn before going to bed, he felt that he had learned a lot. And he had. Silently, with the incalculable silence of natural processes, an ideal had crystallized in his heart around a standard of conduct.

And yet this was all under the surface. As he dropped off to sleep, his mind retained as the chief lesson of the book a mass of stimulating suggestions about rolling strokes, the reverse twist service, and the advice for a solitary beginner to practise against a brick wall.

He knew where such a wall could be found; in a vacant lot on Poplar Street, just off Summit Avenue. He often had played hand-ball there in the old days. Next morning he went there after breakfast, postponing his ride to Nutley till after lunch. The result was so good that thereafter he spent every morning there.

The summer days went by. Neale progressed far in his imitation of Don and Don's manner and standards. He learned after practising with a box of his own, to accept the cigarettes Don constantly offered him. To be like Don, he learned to call the girls by their first names without choking, although he never could bring himself to squeeze their hands or pat their shoulders or stroke their hair as Don did so casually; and he did manage to pick up a fair game of tennis.

When he challenged Natalie to singles and beat her 7-5, Don looked at him with a new expression, and a few days later announced great news. "It's all arranged. Tournament here next Saturday, lemonade, lawn party, picnic-supper, dance. The old man's agreed not to butt in and spoil things. I've got four fellows from here, Peterson, and a friend of his from Montclair. You and I make eight. Just right for a day's tournament on one court."

"But I don't play well enough," protested Neale.

"You'll be put out in the first round of course," Don admitted, "but I need you to make the even eight, and you can chase balls and make yourself useful. Entry fee's a dollar. That'll buy a Pim racket as a prize. I need a new racket."

The great day came and Neale, flustered and tense, was put out in the first round according to schedule. It didn't surprise him, although deep in his heart he had had a fluttering hope—but no matter. What happened to him was of no consequence. Don came through easily, of course. After lunch Neale sat with Natalie and together they gasped and clapped and cried, "played!" as Don captured his match in the semi-finals.

"Isn't he splendid?" said Natalie. Neale nodded, too much moved to speak.

The finals were called. Neale focussed himself on the game, blind to anything else. Don was matched against the Peterson boy, a high-school lad from Montclair. Don got the first set. Good. The second set unexpectedly went to deuce. What had happened! Neale leaned forward, his eyes hot from staring, and tried to make out the meaning of what he saw. Peterson didn't hit the ball as hard as Don did, but his long, bony arm pulled off the most impossible of "gets." Deuce, vantage, deuce, vantage. Don put on more steam, served doubles, lost his service. Peterson won his own service, and the sets were even. Don's face was a blank. He walked to his place, hitched up his trousers, pulled the brim of his white felt sports-hat low over his eyes, set his jaw and faced his opponent. Neale's anxious eyes had not left him for a second.

The last set was astounding, paralyzing to the spectators. Don had gone to pieces and the high-school boy had pulled himself together. His gawky, graceless body and long arms seemed to cover the whole court. Don served with murderous force, his rising fury burning with a sensible heat all around him as he raced and plunged and stroked the ball. Peterson broke through his service again—four-two. Don struck out dazzling drives, but many of them landed in the net. He got by Peterson with wily stroke after stroke—only so many of them landed in the alleys; four-three; five-three. Peterson kept on steadily, with his stiff, mechanical, chopped returns, his intent eyes gleaming in his impassive face. He had Don forty-love. Neale's heart was bursting. Don rushed to the net. Peterson lobbed to the base-line, and it was all over. Don was beaten.

In a flash Neale found an excuse for his hero, "Every one has his off-days ... but...."

Though half-forewarned by the look on Don's face, he could not turn his eyes away from the dashing figure in white flannels, which stood there frozen in mid-flight as the fatal ball fell inside the back-line. Then with a furious swing of his arm Don flung his racket from him as if he wished to break it into a thousand pieces. By good luck it did not hit one of the girl spectators, but fell with a little crash of broken twigs into the midst of a lilac bush. He took a step or two after this, as if he meant to leave the court at once. With an effort, he turned about, walked up to the net where the Peterson boy stood panting, and gave him in silence, a limp hand-shake.

Then he pushed through the spectators, and went into the house calling over his shoulder that Polly was to award the prize. Neale did not dare to look at Natalie; the moment was too awful.

The Peterson boy did not stay to flaunt his triumph. Pleading an impending thunder-storm as an excuse (the sky was as a matter of fact very black and lowering), he scorched off on his wheel back to Montclair with the spoils of victory bound to his handle-bars. With his departure, the atmosphere of gloom among Don's friends began to lift. When the storm broke, as it did shortly, they all hurried indoors. The girls set about getting supper with a great clatter of chafing-dishes, and much screaming, with each clap of thunder. By the time the cheese was melted, Don reappeared in blue serge and negligee silk shirt. Coming down stairs he passed Neale standing apart with his back against the newel post.

"Oh, drop your grouch, Crit, old man," he said. "Forget it! Of course Nordhoff's a pretty rotten umpire. I suppose he thought he'd give the kid a chance, but he needn't have stung me on all the close ones."

On this, he passed lightly to the supper-table, where later, on being loudly called, Neale followed him, starting up from his moody silence as though he had forgotten where he was. It was his first supper out with young people, the first time he had eaten welsh-rabbit; the first time he had seen anything prepared over a chafing-dish; the first time he had encountered the traditional young people's menu of that date—welsh-rabbit, fruit cake, nut-fudge made on the spot, all washed down with ginger-ale. It might have been bread and milk for all Neale knew. What he saw was the photograph in the Tennis Guide of Davis shaking hands with Whitman.

Presently loyalty flared up. If Don fell short of the standard perhaps the standard was wrong.... It would not do, even as he thought of this excuse, he knew it would not do. He was aware of a streak of iron in his soul. An idol might sweep away the warmth and color of life by its fall—let them go then! No warping of standards could keep it on its pedestal. But the real sorrow in his heart drove him to try to find excuses for Don. Great Scott! it was hard to lose! How could you blame anybody for not coming up to such a terribly high standard? Anybody on earth would naturally feel sore at being beaten in such a....

Even as he tried falteringly thus to lower his ideal to fit his affection, he was aware of something stern and relentless within him. The gallant face of the defeated player in the photograph stood out beside Don's startled, angry resentment at a wound to his vanity. Nine generations of Puritan forebears would not let Neale abandon his ideal because it hurt him.

He passed into a condition of acute amazement at the others. How could they take it so light-heartedly? Perhaps they didn't care. Or perhaps they felt themselves obliged to pretend since they were still in Don's house. Yes, of course, he ought to pretend too.

Smarting, he sprang up at a new word of command. "How about a little rag-time?" Don was crying in his role of master of ceremonies. "Polly, you to the piano. Get the old banjo, Dick. Clear the floor, boys. Oh, pitch the rugs out of the window, a little rain won't hurt 'em." For through the open windows came the steady voice of a summer downpour.

The musicians struck up "Whistling Rufus," couples were formed and racketed noisily to and fro from the dining-room to the sitting-room and back, with much bumping and giggling at the congested doorway. Neale danced absent-mindedly with a girl whose name he could not remember, and whom he exchanged for a similarly anonymous girl when the tune changed to the "Georgia Camp-meeting." He went on thus, setting his body to do the decent thing, while his spirit lay prostrate within him.

They were dancing harder than ever now, racing long-leggedly from one end of the room to the other, the boys carrying the girls bodily off their feet at some of the turns, the girls abandoning themselves like romping children to the whirlwind of the insistent rhythm, which they marked by shouting out as they danced, "Oh, la la, la, la-la, la la la! There'll be a hot time in the old town to-night!" Neale danced on with the rest. Under his grimly silent exterior, something fine and high and deeply wounded, cried out silently to the others, and received no answer.

The music ended with a crash, the exhausted couples sank into chairs, gasping and fanning each other. Neale's heart leaped to see, half-way up the stairs, Natalie sitting alone as if she had not been dancing. Why, of course. There was Natalie! He had forgotten her. She had understood. The tragedy of the afternoon must have gone home to her. She was a good sport! With a warm glow he hurried up to where she sat, and sank down beside her, his stifling sense of isolation gone.

She lifted the sweet, flower-like mask of her youth to him, her eyes gleaming in the half-light of the stairs. But at the moment, Neale had forgotten whether she was a girl or a boy. She was a good sport. That was what he needed. He started to speak, but a shout of laughter burst out of the room below them. They looked down. In the center of the vociferously amused circle of spectators, Don was making fun of his late adversary's gawky manners and poor eye-sight. He had a racket in his hand, and glaring through it with a burlesque of Peterson's intent short-sighted gaze, he was mimicking the school-boy's strained awkward position at the net.

Neale fell back appalled, and looked to Natalie for sympathy and understanding.

Natalie had also leaned forward, and as they turned towards each other, her face was so close to his that he could see the peach-like bloom on her cheeks.

All the pretty face was quivering with mirth. "Isn't Don the wittiest man!"

Neale got up stiffly and walked down the stairs without a word. Nobody in the crowd of laughing boys and girls paid the least attention to his silent passage through them. He went out on the porch, the beating downpour of the rain suddenly loud in his ears. Oh, all the better! He'd like getting soaked.

He found his wheel on the side-porch, mounted it without troubling to light his lamp or turn up his coat collar, and delighting in the clammy discomfort of the streaming water, pedaled stolidly over the nine miles to his home.

Alone in his room he took off his steaming clothes, rubbed down and got into pajamas and a bath-robe.

"Crittenden," he said sternly, "the world is no place for you. You're a lone wolf. A lone wolf."

CHAPTER XIV

When Neale turned out his Welsbach burner and rolled into bed, he encountered a strange, new sensation, an immense relief just to lay himself down, and to have darkness about him. For the first time in his life he was consciously very tired, for the first time he knew the adult sensation of having lived to the point of weariness, for the first time he felt the passive sweetness of the resigned adult welcome of repose which is perhaps a premonition of our ultimate weariness and our ultimate welcome to death.

For a moment Neale lay there, drowned in astonishment at this new, unguessed-at pleasure. Then, without warning, the thick cloud of a boy's sleep dropped over him like black velvet.

The next morning, his father, passing on the way to his cold bath, looked in and saw the boy, sunk fathoms deep in sleep, the bright new sunlight of the early morning shining full on his face. Heavens! How can children sleep so soundly! His father stepped into the room, walking silently on bare feet, and drew down the shades. The shadowing of the room did not waken the sleeper. He still lay profoundly at rest and yet profoundly alive, one long, big-boned arm thrown over his head on the pillow, as he always had slept when he was a child.

"As he had when he was a child!" His father was struck by the phrase and looked again at the tall, rather gaunt young body flung on the bed. That was no child who lay there, nor was that a child's face, for all the pure, childlike curves of the young lips, firmly held together even in this utter abandon to sleep. The older man stood by the bed for a moment, looking down on his son, his own face grave and observant. He would be a fine-looking fellow, Neale, with those honest eyes, wide apart under his good, square forehead. Yes, Neale's father had always known the extreme satisfaction of being able to respect his son, there was no doubt about that. But there was something else, the something that had always baffled him, that he had never been able to penetrate, the closed look, locked tight over ... what? Was it locked tight over something, or nothing? Did Neale have a real personal life? Would he ever have? Would there ever be anything, anybody who would have the key to unlock and set free what was there, before it died of its imprisonment?

For an instant the face of Neale's father was unlocked as he stood looking down on his son. Then, with a long breath, he stepped back into the hallway, silent on his bare feet, and went on to shave, and to take his cold bath.

It was after ten when Neale awakened and the day had sunk from its first fresh hopefulness into the resigned apathy of a hot mid-morning, with the stale smell of dusty, sun-baked pavements, the slow, unimportant jog, jog, jog of the horse hauling the grocer's delivery-cart, and the distant, jingling of the scissors-grinder's bell.

Neale came slowly to himself and rolled over, a very bad taste in his mouth, both physically and mentally. He had not noticed it at the time, but he now thought, scraping his coated tongue against his teeth, that melted cheese and cake and nut-fudge and ginger-ale were a darned bad combination to be swallowing of an evening. And as for the rest ... oh, gosh! Never again!

He turned his big, strong feet out of bed and sat sunk together for a moment, recalling it all, and steeping his soul in wormwood once more. Now what?

The telephone rang; he heard Katie answer, and clump up the stairs to see if he were awake.

"Somebody to talk to you, Neale," she said, seeing him sitting up. Neale's father might note he was no longer a child, Neale's mother might keep her hands from fussing over him, but for Katie he would always be the little boy she had helped to bring up. She laid her hand on his head now, and Neale did not mind.

"You answer," he said stolidly.

"It's him that's always telephonin'," she explained. "He's after wantin' you to go and play tennis."

"You tell him I can't go," Neale repeated.

Katie retreated astonished. Neale heard the sound of her voice at the telephone two flights below. Then she shouted up, "Neale!"

He went to the stairs and answered crossly, "What?"

"He wants to know will you be goin' this afternoon?"

"No!" shouted Neale, leaning over the banisters.

In a moment she cried again, "He wants to know will you be goin' to-morrow morning?"

"NO!" shouted Neale again, and going into the bathroom locked the door behind him.

When rather damp as to hair, he came out, silence and the smell of frying bacon told him that Katie had left the telephone to get his breakfast ready. Gee Whiz! He didn't want any breakfast, not with a taste like that in his mouth.

To act the part of a lone wolf of sixteen, one must read poetry. He had never read much poetry except some of Milton's Paradise Lost, for a specially loathed English Literature course at Hadley. But there were plenty of poetry books in the library at home. After some false starts, Neale began to know his way among them, concentrating on the slim volumes with pasteboard covers and paper backs.

"Beneath the bludgeonings of chance ..."

Yes, Neale too would hold up an unbowed, bloody head.

"... without fear, without wish,
Insensate save of a dull crushed ache in my heart...."

... "Just to reach the dreaming,
And the sleep."

Sitting alone in the darkened library how Neale soaked himself in this sort of thing, hunting up one page and down another till he found the voice that spoke to him.

"The irresponsive silence of the lands
The irresponsive sounding of the sea
Breathe but one language and one voice to me
Aloof, aloof, we stand aloof!"

When Katie's carpet-sweeper and feather-duster and kind, gossiping voice sounded too close, he escaped out of doors, but not on his bicycle. That, like his tennis-racket brought up painful memories. Every evening he walked to the Boulevard, and gazed over the Hackensack meadows till the sun set.

"No sweet thing left to savor; no sad thing left to fear...."

On the evening of the third day, a letter from West Adams arrived, announcing that Jenny was up and around, and the farm-house was ready for Neale. The evening after that, Neale was undressing in the slant-ceilinged big-beamed, white-washed bedroom, as familiar to him as his room at Union Hill—but uncontaminated with any of the new, troubling sensations. The air of the hills blew in at the window. Neale felt that it was a different air. He began to feel a difference in himself, but fell asleep in the midst of this perception. The next morning, scorning the mill, the barn-yard, the brook, he climbed to the highest back-pasture where the young white birches and quivering aspens, skirmishers of the unconquered forest, were leading the way in the reconquest of the fields man had taken from them. Here he lay down and prepared to nurse his sorrow....

"Pain gnaws at my heart like a rat that gnaws in a drain...."

But what was this? What was this? As unexpectedly as the impudent little mick had sprung out of the ground to carry off his shinny ball, so did a cheerful little imp of high spirits spring up in his heart, leaping and skipping to meet the glory of the great sun pouring down its mellow gold upon him through the flickering, tricksy aspen leaves. He lay back on the soft, deep moss, his hands clasped under his head. Huge, jovial-looking clouds floated, piled up in strong, rounded masses against the summer sky. Miles off in the valley he could see the Hoosick River winding its way among the green, green hills. He was warmed, cool, alive ... and, oh, yes, there was no use in pretending otherwise, mighty well pleased to be alive.

The ten-year-old Neale when suddenly the glamor had faded from his lead soldiers, had never wasted time in pretending that it was there. He had risen at once, left the little heap of clumsily-made mannequins to lie foolish in their flaking paint, and sliding down the banisters, had gone out of doors in a great hurry. Well, he wasted no time now. He looked with an ironic eye upon the glamorless lost illusion, with the paint flaking off, and hurriedly turning his back on it all, he went, metaphorically, out of doors.

What had happened after all? He'd thought the world of Don Roberts, who had turned out a four-flusher. Well, he'd been stung. But why holler so about it? And whose fault was it? His own, for not knowing better. Don hadn't ever pretended to be any less of a four-flusher than he was. It was just that he, Neale, had been taken in by a cheap, flashy guy when any kid ought to have had enough sense to see through him, and those would-be smart college-man airs and manners.

But anyhow if that was a false scent, it had put him on a true one. There was a lot inside those slim, pasteboard covered books beside rats gnawing in drains, and twilight and all-goneness. You bet your life there was. Neale had never dreamed what was inside them, poems that stood up to a glorious day like this, and called it brother, poems of foot-free wanderings and high-hearted scorn of prosperity and conventions.

"I tell you that we,
While you are smirking
And lying and shirking
Life's duty of duties,
Honest sincerity,
We are in verity
Free!
Free as the word
Of the sun to the sea;
Free!"

Neale's voice quavered with another sort of emotion ... that was the doctrine! "Off with the fetters!" He pictured himself in a blue flannel shirt and flowing neckerchief, alone, or with some perfect comrade, knowing reality, sneering at railway trains and cities.

It was a gorgeous dream ... but of course the first Tuesday in September found him back at a desk at Hadley with all the grinding and polishing wheels of that well-appointed educational mill at work on the corners of his individuality, bent on turning out the fifty young Seniors smooth and identical, the perfection of the Hadley type. And since this was the last year, the faculty speeded up the hunt and all the pack put their noses to the ground and ran their legs off in pursuit of mathematics and science. The pace was cruelly hot, and it was specially hard for Neale because he had yielded to the captain's entreaties and had come out for the football team. He made left tackle with little competition and through October and November practised almost without coaching (Hadley permitted athletics but was too busy to encourage anything so childish), and played and was beaten with painful regularity.

Neale found himself dropping far below the rating he had maintained in the lower classes. He began to pant and strain as he had the first year. It was a gruelling race; but temperamentally he liked races and his wind got better as the months went by. He cut out all superfluities—no dancing—no reading for amusement except on Sunday mornings, and then only short poems about Vagabondia and the Open Road. Work, work, work through every waking hour. By April he had risen to sixth in his class, and felt grimly sure of holding his stride to the end.

On the night of Easter Monday, Neale was bent over his desk with a green eye-shade, trying various combinations to solve a problem in analytical geometry, when his father knocked at the door, walked in and sat down on the bed. This was so remarkable that Neale knew something was up. One of the things that Neale had always taken for granted in his home-life was that his room was practically inviolate when he was in it. His father and his mother respected his privacy in this as in other things with scrupulous exactitude. It was a little corner of the world which was his, where he could come out from his tightly-clutched shell, and move about freely with no fear of intruders spying on his nakedness. The security of this privacy had been one of the well-squared stones Neale had found ready to his hand, when slowly, rather later than most boys, he began to build. Hence it was now apparent to him that Father must have something on his chest. He looked up, nodded and greeted him with, "Hello, Dad."

"Hello, Neale," said Father quite as casually. "Don't want to interrupt your studies. How late do you expect to keep at them?"

"Sometime between eleven and twelve, I guess. His Nibs gave us some stinkers, and I haven't touched the German prose yet."

"That would be pretty late for me. We'd better take a few minutes now. The fact is, Neale, we mustn't let you slide along any more without some sort of an idea what you are going to do next."

Neale having no idea beyond that night's work, said nothing.

"The work you're doing this year has given your mother and me a great deal of pleasure," Father went on. "Your marks are getting better and better. I did think of putting you through an engineering school, but I notice you seem to do better at the liberal subjects. Have you set your heart on any college in particular?"

"I'm not sure I want to go to any college."

Oh, now for a break into the Open Road, and a flaming neckerchief and far lands!

Mr. Crittenden looked thoughtful.

"I'll admit it's a waste of time for some, but I don't think it would be for you. I understand your wish to get to work, and begin to make your own way, but it's wiser not to start with too little preparation. And there's no need for it yet. It's no hardship for me. It's a real pleasure for us to be able to help you to an education...."

Neale chewed his pen hard. How hard it was to have things out with a father! When a man takes it for granted that if you don't want to go to college you must want to be a bank-clerk or sell shoes, how are you to make him understand anything about Freedom and the Open Road and Comradeship and Vagabondia, distant countries and ships that smell of tar and salt like the wharves. How could a man in a three-button, pepper-and-salt cut-away understand? A man who wore a derby hat and went to his office in the city every day? And Father was getting fat, too, the three-button cut-away was heavily rounded. No—all that was in another world. There weren't any words to express any of it to a Father. So he said nothing, jabbing his pen into the blotting paper. Presently Father went on, "Of course, I should like to have you go to my old college, Williams, but Mother feels—we both feel—that it would be a pity to break up the family circle. What would you think of Columbia? They say since it has moved up to Morningside Heights there is more college life—and of course it's one of the leading Universities...."

Another pause, so long that Neale felt bound to say something.

"Oh, I guess I would like Columbia as well as any," he finally brought out.

Father looked at him several minutes. Then he stood up, "We needn't settle it to-night, of course. Think it over; we'll talk it over again."

But of course they never did. They never talked anything over. The subject was not raised again. Nevertheless it was somehow understood in the family that Neale was going to enter Columbia. And Neale made no protest. To tell the truth, as spring advanced and all his classmates began talking over their plans for next year, the uniformity of having a recognized respectable destination was not disagreeable. It saved talk, and useless talk about his affairs was one of the things Neale detested. Till he could be really independent and do as he liked without suffering the ignominy of having people know about it and talk him over, it might be better just to slide along the grooves provided, get the usual labels stuck on you. It couldn't do you any harm. They'd soak off easy enough, later on.

CHAPTER XV

With June came examinations at Hadley. Long, long experience and concentration on the subject had taught Hadley administrators exactly how to time their training so that when examinations came, the boys would be in the pink of condition. Two weeks later they would be stale, horribly, sickeningly stale, but nobody at Hadley cared a continental what happened two weeks after examinations. That was no business of theirs. Weary, but still docilely answering the crack of the ring-master's questions, the thoroughly disciplined Troupe of Trained Boys went through subject after subject, with the automatic rear and plunge of circus-riders breaking paper hoops. That was all right. Those were only the Hadley examinations. They expected to be able to pass those.

But now for the College Entrance examinations, the Apollyon which from afar their professors at Hadley had pointed out to them, straddling over all their roads, belching out brimstone-fire on all who tried to pass. With much trepidation hidden under his usual decent impassivity, Neale journeyed up to take his first examinations at Columbia. He was glad that the first chanced to be in history. That was one of his good subjects. He stood a better chance there. With a careful air of carelessness, he went up to the proctor's desk, took one off the pile of the printed examination sheets, and with it in his hand, not entirely steady, he went back to his seat. Safe from observation there, he laid it before him and his eyes leaping to know the worst, took in the first three questions at one glance. Holy Smoke! Was this all? Was it for this he had sweat blood! There was an outline map of the United States, with a request to mark on it the location of such idiotically well-known places as Acadia, Pittsburgh, New Orleans. There was "French and Indian Wars. State causes immediate and remote." There was, "What do you consider to be the relation between the Missouri Compromise and the Civil War? Justify your opinion in 500 words."

Neale leaned back in his chair faint with relief. Why, he could eat it up like candy. And he ate it up like candy; emerging from it, his head in the air and the world at his feet. This aspect caused him to be chastened by a gang of Sophomores who played hare and hounds with him (he was the hare), through Riverside Park from 120th to 81st Street, where his long legs finally distanced them.

The other examinations were of the same sort, exactly the same sort, of a childish facility compared to anything the Hadley professors had described. Why—it came to Neale with a shock—why, the Hadley purpose had not been to enable them to pass the exams,—it had been to use Hadley boys to exalt the name of Hadley throughout the collegiate world! He felt a deep resentment, a burning bitterness at having been taken in; and by people who had consciously intended to, who had known very well what they were about, and had taken advantage of his defenselessness. He thought of those four years of driving drudgery and causeless dread, and hated Hadley as the quintessence of cheating. The idea that the subjects of his study had any value other than as legal tender for college entrance, that he was the better off for his thorough acquaintance with them did not once cross his mind. In that respect, too, he was a product of Hadley.

He came away from the last examination, as stale and worthless as an overworked colt. The Sophomores let him alone. He looked to them as though he had not been able to pass.

A wide, green pasture with running brooks is the best place for a tired colt, and it was such a one that Neale now entered, his head hanging, his big legs like cotton twine. Oh, shucks! What was the use of anything?

Grandfather and Grandmother kept a Crittenden shut mouth about his drawn face and sallow skin, and at first were careful to keep out of the way and let him even more alone than usual. He fell into bed at eight o'clock, unable to keep his eyes open another moment, and lay as though he were dead for twelve or fourteen hours every night, awaking to see the country sun shining in on the slant, hewed beams over his head, and to hear the country sounds, as clear as crystal coming in through the open window; the mill-brook chanting, the wind in the big maple, the bright, brazen call of the rooster, the sociable grunting of the pigs.

The pigs were a great comfort to Neale at this time. After he had washed in the brown rain-water in his wash-bowl, and had gone down to the clean, sunny kitchen, always empty at this hour, and had eaten heartily of the fried potatoes, hash, and pan-cakes which he found waiting for him in the warming-oven of the kitchen stove, he sauntered out, a doughnut in his hand, to lean over the pig-pen and commune with the pigs. He stood there an hour at a time, occasionally scratching their backs as an excuse for staying so long with them, but for the most part gazing dreamily down, lost in the magnificent sensuality of their joy in life. They had always been fed an hour or so earlier, so there was no excitement in their profound beatitude, none of the homeric scramblings of meal-times. Neale was not ready for that yet. What he needed, what slowly floated him up from the depths, was their rapt ecstasy of repletion, their voluptuous pleasure in sinking thoughtfully into the cool, wet filth and the glow of their peace as they stood sunning themselves, visibly penetrated to every fleshly cell of their vast bodies, by the most perfect accord with the scheme of the universe, as they saw it. Neale gazed at them as they lay sprawled in the mud, or moved about very slowly, grunting very gently, occasionally turning upon the boy a small, wise, philosophic eye; and they did his heart good, like medicine.

When he was ashamed to stand there any longer ... although no one ever commented on it, and indeed no one was there to see it, except Grandmother and Jenny busy in the house, he loitered along the path which led to the seldom-used foot-bridge across the mill-brook. The sound of the water always threw him into another contemplative pause here. He often lay down on the rusty-colored pine-needles and lay looking up at the distant dark green branches of the forest-roof, the voice of the water rising and falling, so insistent that he could think of nothing else, so unintelligible that it made him think of nothing at all, sliding, breaking, turning, slipping down, leaping up, like an endlessly curving line drawn endlessly before his eyes. He usually shut his eyes after a little, and not infrequently added an hour or two of sleep to the fourteen he had spent in his bed; this time, sleep not black and opaque, but shot through with the gleaming pattern of the brook's song.

One morning when he woke up, while he still lay in bed staring up at the beams over his head, some chance association of ideas made him think of Hadley and he was astonished to find his resentment against Hadley had gone. Hadley seemed very remote and vague to him. He did not hate it any more. He could scarcely remember what Hadley had been like. Nor anything that he had studied there. That day for the first time he went down to the mill, walking, not sauntering, his legs solid under him again.

He found Grandfather and old Si "making out" very badly, with no boy to "take away." The last one had followed all his predecessors into the cotton-spinning mills at North Adams, and as this was haying-time no other help was to be had. The two old men had to stop the saw every few minutes till Si could run around and catch up on taking away. It was fretful work, like trying to lace up your shoes with one hand. Neale stood and watched them for a while. Then although he had not really meant to say it, he was not sorry to hear his voice suggesting, "Why don't you take me on? I haven't got anything else to do."

"What say, Si?" asked Grandfather, laughing so at the idea, that Neale was nettled and had a picture of how unutterably lazy he had looked for the last fortnight!

Si spit tobacco-juice into the mill-race and shifted his quid.

"Wa'll, I know hands is scurse these days, but land! have we got down to taking anybody?"

Neale was used to the Yankee roughness which they meant for humor, but this touched him a little closely. Didn't they think he could do any work?

Grandfather puckered his old face into a grin and nodded him into the job.

"If so be so, then so be it. Kin or no kin, I guess we can afford to pay him what we were giving Hubbard."

So Neale bought a suit of overalls at the general store and began to work. For the first three days he wished with all his heart he'd kept his mouth shut. Handling green beech for ten hours a day was very different from helping out a half-hour at a time. Besides, his muscles and above all his hands were pitifully soft after an indoor winter and his fortnight of vegetating. It didn't seem worth while to make an ox of himself for five cents an hour and board—the wage of unskilled labor in that non-unionized Arcadia—but he was ashamed to quit on a job that was always handled by boys of his age. Nobody had asked him to do it. He had offered himself, pushed himself in. It would be too worthless to back out. But, oh gee! he was tired when he got through at six o'clock, and clumped heavily up the hill after Grandfather and Si, walking, it seemed to him, with as stiff and aged a gait as theirs. He shovelled supper up, starved, starved to his toes, and staggered to bed immediately afterward. The first week he lost five pounds. Thereafter he gained steadily, and all solid muscle.

After a time he mastered the mill-hand's basic axiom, "Never lift a plank if you can slide it," his hands stopped blistering and hardened, and he grew muscles in various places up and down his back, where he had never had any before, so that the boards became singularly lighter in his hands.

And then, just when he had mastered his job, the water-god took a hand in the game. Since the spring rains, there had been nothing but the gentlest showers. The mill-pond had shrunk to a pool, and grass began to show far down its dried-up sides. The water no longer ran over the mill-dam. One day about five o'clock the mill stopped, with a log half-sawed.

"No water," said Silas, "got to shut down till the pond fills up." They sat down instantly, hanging their empty hands over their knees, in an ecstasy of idleness. They managed to finish that log by supper time, but the drought held.

Soon they could saw only by pondfuls. A couple of hours in the early morning, a scant hour after lunch, and somewhat less after supper, in the twilight. Between times Si patched belts, or hoed corn, or sat and smoked, Grandfather pottered around the garden, or sat and smoked as he waited for the pond to fill.

This was delightful—just enough work for exercise, and lots of blameless leisure. But with so many hours to read, Neale ran through at an alarming rate the books he had brought with him. Even "Vanity Fair" didn't hold out forever, and with Dobbin and Amelia finally united, Neale was at the end of his literary resources. Boredom settled down heavily. Si's reiterated anecdotes lost all savor; he had read all the books on the sitting-room book-shelves, or had given them up as hopeless. He felt bound by his contract to be on hand whenever the mill could be run, so that long walks were out of the question.

At last as he sat gloomily killing time trying to whittle a wooden chain, and making a botch of it, he seemed to remember one rainy day when he was a little boy, wandering into a room with another book-case in it. Not being a little girl, he had had small interest in exploring the inside of the house, and where that room was he had forgotten; but if there had been any books in it, they were there still; no single decade ever made any change in that house. It was worth having a look.

Anybody but a Crittenden, dealing with Crittendens, would have gone to Grandfather or Grandmother and asked where that book-case was. But it did not occur to Neale to do that, and if he had thought of the possibility, he would never have done it. That would have meant talk about his wanting to read, about what books he liked, and why he liked them ... all sorts of talk from which Neale shrank away as he did from physical pawing-over. He set off silently, with a casual air, upon his search, looking first into the darkened best-room, and going from that to the garret, the attic over the ell, and the woodshed loft. There were scattered books in all these places; in the best-room a few big, illustrated, show-off books, with gold on the bindings, like the Doré Bible he had so often looked at, and the big Pilgrim's Progress that he had opened only once. In the garret were dusty old school-books of past generations, and in the attic over the ell, piles of well-bound black books, with gold lettering, which turned out to be, desolatingly, nothing but by-gone Congressional Records and Census Reports. But he had not found the little brown book-case which he dimly remembered. Perhaps it wasn't here at all. Well, he'd try the chambers, mostly vacant now, which had been so full in the days Grandfather liked to tell about, when he was a little boy, one of fourteen children all growing up tumultuously together in this big old house.

Neale went down the attic stairs and began to open doors. Nothing doing. Everywhere the same sparsely furnished room, with painted floor, braided mat, dark old bed and battered dresser, and ladder-back, flag-bottomed chairs. Their vacancy struck cold even on Neale's not very impressionable mind. "A room that hadn't been lived in for a long time was the limit, anyhow," he thought.

But at the other end of the hall from his own low-ceilinged, little boy's room, he found one like it, rather more cheerful. The sun came in through a dormer window as it did in his own room. He remembered now that this was the room Father had always had, till he went away to college and after that to New York to live. And there, sure enough was the little book-case. Of course. He must have seen it lots of times, going by when the door was open. Now, what was in it? Maybe, after all, nothing to his purpose; probably this had been used like the shelves in the attic as a place to put volumes that nobody wanted to read.

Mather's Invisible Providence—sounded religious. Neale did not even take it out. A big, old book with the back off proved, when he opened it, to be Rollin's Ancient History. With a true Hadley horror for learning anything out of hours, he slammed it shut, and took down the next one, Butler's Analogy. Seemed as though he had heard of that one. He sat down on the edge of the little four-poster, and opened it at random, skimming the pages. Oh, awful! Fierce! Worse than religious! He put it back, discouraged, and ran over the titles on that shelf. A name struck his eye. Emerson. Wasn't there a poem by Emerson at the beginning of "The Children of the Zodiac?" Neale like every one else at that time had read a good deal of Kipling, although he was vague as to Emerson.

He took down Volume I, and opened to the first page.

"But thought is always prior to the fact; all the facts of history pre-exist in the mind as laws."

"Pretty rough sledding!" thought Neale, "bad as Butler."

He turned over a page. His eye was struck by a thick black pencil-mark along the margin; a passage that had interested somebody. Neale read, "I have no expectation that any man will read history aright, who thinks that what was done in a remote age, by men whose names have resounded far, has any deeper sense than what he is doing to-day."

An idea knocked at Neale's head. He looked up from the book to take it in. It echoed and re-echoed in his brain, the first idea about history which had ever penetrated to fertilize the facts piled up by Hadley. Gee! there was something to that! Neale began to walk around it speculatively. Wonder if that's true? Sounds good.

Were there perhaps more passages marked? He turned over the pages again and came on another of the black pencil lines in the margin.

"When a thought of Plato becomes a thought to me—when a truth that fired the soul of Pindar fires mine, time is no more."

"Time is no more...." The grandeur of those four words unrolled a great scroll from before Neale's eyes.

Say, who was it who had marked these places, anyhow? Who was it, who, before Neale, had sat in this low-ceilinged room and had caught that glimpse of timeless infinity? Neale turned back to the fly-leaf and found written in a familiar handwriting, "Daniel W. Crittenden, Williams 1876."

Why, that was Father!

Neale stared at the name. Could it be Father? Yes, he had gone to Williams and although 1876 was incredibly long ago, that might have been Father's class. And this was Father's room! He looked about him, astonished.

For the first time in his life it occurred to Neale that his father had not always been a father and a successful, conservative business man of forty-something, but that long, long ago he had also been a person.

The idea made Neale feel very shy and queer as though through the pages of this chance-found book he were spying on the privacy of that unsuspecting person. But all the same, it was too strange that Father should have ... what else had he marked? Intensely curious, Neale turned the pages over. What else had struck the fancy of that young man, so many years ago, before he dreamed that he was to be a business man and a father. It was like looking straight into some one's heart; the first time Neale had ever dreamed of such a thing.

There they were, those glimpses of what had fed his father's spirit. Neale read them because they were marked. Some he understood, others he only felt.

"In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty."

"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, one kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till."

"Life only avails, not having lived." Good enough!

"For every stoic was a stoic, but in Christendom, where is the Christian?" every word underlined in ink.

"Crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is a fruit that unsuspected ripens within the flower of pleasure which concealed it." On the margin the note was, "True, think of E. B." "Wonder who E. B. was," thought Neale, "but the old man's right."

Ah, this is bully! "Life itself is a bubble and a skepticism, and a sleep within a sleep. Grant it, and as much more as they will ... but thou, God's darling, heed thy private dream; thou wilt not be missed in the scorning and skepticism; there are enough of them...."

Why, this was not marked! The old man must have been asleep at the switch.

Neale stopped turning the pages and jumping from one marked passage to another. He began to read for himself, a deep vibration within answering the organ-note which throbbed up at him out of the page.

"This," he said to himself, after a long, absorbed silence, "this is my meat."

There was a good place on top of the plate-beam of the mill, dry and safe. One morning before Grandfather and Si came down to work, Neale climbed up to this, dusted it clean of the litter of a century or more and put the three volumes there. Whenever the water got low, and the mill shut down, and Si went off to oil the harness and Grandfather to have a visit with Grandmother in the kitchen, Neale clambered up and clinging with one hand, reached in and took out a volume ... any one of the three. From there to the top of the highest lumber-pile outside, in the clean sunlight.

The pungent smell of the newly-sawed wood, the purifying wind, wide space about him, solitude, silence, and this deep, strong voice, purifying, untroubled, speaking to him in a language which was his own, although he had not known it.

"TO-DAY SHALL BE THE SAME AS YESTERDAY"

CHAPTER XVI

March, 1902.

Flora Allen found she was not following the words on the page, and let the book slowly fall shut. As it lay there among her hair-brushes and cold-cream pots, she looked at it with a listless distaste. How sick she was of reading instructive books! She never wanted to see another! She turned sideways in her chair with the gesture of a person about to stand up, but the motive power was not enough, and she continued to sit, one arm hanging over the back of her chair. Why get up? Why do anything more than anything else?

How horribly lonely she was! How horribly empty her room was!

The emptiness echoed in her ears. It was an echo she often heard. She always heard it more or less. She told herself that it was like the emptiness of a long stone corridor along which she seemed to be always hurrying, hoping to come to a door that would let her out into life—the warm, quivering life that other people—women in books for instance—seemed to have.

Now she was tired. She had almost worn herself out in the long flight down the empty passage-way that led from birth to death. She began dreadfully to fear that she would never find a door. Wherever she thought she saw one ajar, it was slammed in her face.

Looking back, how she envied her earlier rebellious unhappy self, bright with the animation of her naïve hatred for Belton and America; quivering with her aspiring cry of "Europe" and "culture!" She had been married almost sixteen years—was it possible! A life-time! A life-time filled with nothing. A life-time spent between Belton and Bayonne! Oh, it wasn't fair! She had never had a chance—never! And soon it would be too late for her chance!

How hideously fate always discriminated against her. She was always thrown in the dreariest places with the dreariest dead-and-alive people, flat and insipid and tiresome.

Other women encountered big and moving things in their lives, knew adventure and excitement, had something to look forward to, something to look back on. But she had nothing but stagnation. And nobody to care what she had, because they all assumed that if sawdust and chips were good enough for them, that diet ought to be good enough for any one.

The days, that might be so precious, slid by, one like another, and there were not so very many days left to her, when vivid personal life might be possible. Where was she to find it, where, where? She was so tired of stagnation.

She was reduced to envying the exciting life of the women of the demi-monde of whom she was aware here as never before in her life, of whom everybody was conscious. It was indeed precisely to avoid resembling their bright colors and gaiety that all the appallingly respectable women wore such ill-fitting dark clothes and heavy shoes on the street, never broke their solemn silence in a public place, and never laughed freely anywhere except safely behind walls. The women they were so determined not to resemble seemed from a distance to Flora Allen the only people in France who openly enjoyed life as she thought people in Europe did, the only ones who bore the slightest relationship to the vivacious, animated picture of European existence as she had imagined it in Belton. Except, of course, such dusty, vulgar excursion-train crowds of common people as you saw at Lourdes. Flora hated vulgar people.

And yet—ugh!—life couldn't be all gaiety and brightness for the women of the "half-world." That evening last year, when she had tried to lighten the deadly dullness by a little, playful flirtation with M. Fortier, such as any American would have answered by half-sentimental banter—she had never forgotten how frightened she had been by his instant misunderstanding—the horrible spring he had made at her in the dusk of the carriage; his brutal hands on her shoulders, his flabby, old face suddenly inflamed; the terrifying weight of his obese body against her hands as she pushed him furiously away! For months afterwards she had been afraid to smile at any man, as she said "good-evening"; and she read in their eyes, in all their eyes, what they would think of her if she but looked squarely and frankly at them.

But wasn't there ever to be anything for her, between the deadly flat propriety of things like those awful progressive-euchre parties in Belton and that sort of thing?

Isabelle came into the room now, floor-brush and cleaning cloths in hand. She was surprised to find her mistress still before her dressing-table at half-past ten in the morning. To herself she made the comment, not by any means for the first time, "Well, the good God certainly never created a lazier good-for-nothing." Aloud she said respectfully, "I beg Madame's pardon for not knocking. I thought the room was empty. Do I disturb Madame by coming to clean?"

Madame got up hastily, murmured a "no, oh no," and disappeared down the hall. Isabelle opened the windows, fell on her knees and set to work with energy, suppressing (lest her mistress still be within earshot) the lively dance-air which came to her lips, as she rattled the brush against the furniture and base-boards. She would be nineteen at her next birthday. What a lovely spring day, how sweet the air was, Jeanne had promised to let her walk out beyond the city-walls next Sunday afternoon with Pierre, and she had a new pair of shoes, real leather shoes, to show off there. Perhaps Pierre would take her to a confiserie and buy her some candied chestnuts! Her pulse beat strong and full, the dance-tune jigged merrily inside her head, she reached far under the bed with her brush, and enjoyed so heartily the elastic stretch and recoil of the muscles in her stout shoulders, that she reached again and again, although there was no need for it. "Jig! Jig! Pr-r-rt!" went the dance tune in her head ... new shoes ... sunshine ... candied chestnuts ... Pierre ... kisses.

Her mistress, detesting the sight of Isabelle's broad, vacuous face had walked aimlessly away, anywhere to escape the slatternly flap of her heelless sandals, and the knock of her brush as she went through the never-varying routine of the morning cleaning. Around and around, every slow dawn brought exactly the same sequence of tiresome, insignificant events. Only stolid, vegetable natures like Isabelle's could endure it. Flora's small, thin, white hands fluttered piteously out into the air as though trying physically to lay hold on something else. There must be something else. The tears stood for a moment in her blue eyes, not so blue now as they had been—oh, she knew how they were fading!

She went through the corridor into the salon, and pulling the curtains aside, stepped into the alcove where her writing desk stood. But she had no intention of writing a letter. To whom? If she wrote what she really felt, there was nobody to understand her. She did not now, as had been her habit in the first days, go to the window and amuse an idle hour by looking down on the crowd below, the ox-drivers, the fish-women, the soldiers, the Spanish peddlers, all the bright-colored, foreign throng that had seemed to her like a page out of a book. Not for nothing had she lived four years in Bayonne! That first simple candor of hers was darkly dyed with new knowledge. She knew now that people talked about a woman still young enough to be desirable, who showed herself at an open window. She knew they talked, and she knew what they said. That hearsay knowledge had been sharpened by her gradual perception of the way certain men among the passers-by had looked up at her; and it had been driven deeply home one day, by one of those men. As she leaned out, her fair hair bright in the sun, a passer-by, a well-dressed man with a walking-stick in his hand, had stared hard at her, caught her eye, hesitated and looked again. Flora had not avoided his eye. Why should she? It was early in her life in the half-Spanish town. She did not fear men's eyes. When he saw this he turned and mounted the stairs to ring at the bell. Isabelle had let him in, not knowing him from any other caller. He stepped quietly to the salon, where the lady of the house, not dreaming that any one had entered, still stood before the window. When she turned in answer to a discreet little cough on his part, she had seen him standing there, hat in hand, waiting, with a singular little smile on his lips, a smile she never forgot.

Oh, he had been perfectly polite, indeed quite desolated at having made a mistake, and had speedily bowed himself out of the place, apologizing gracefully to the moment of door-closing. But that very day, Flora Allen had the swathing lace-curtains put back in their original position, covering every inch of the glass; and when dusk fell, she was always the first to think of drawing the heavy damask curtains over them, so that there seemed to be no windows at all in the room.

That seemed to her to express her life—no windows except these opening on what was physically sickening and coarse; no doors save those leading back and forth between the deadly familiarity of the imprisoning rooms.

What was it she had not done which other women did to let them into the center of life, while she was exiled to the outer fringes? How was it that while other women's arms seemed to close about warm, living substances, hers grasped at shadows. Or did other women only pretend to be satisfied, for fear of facing the emptiness which echoed in her ears more and more loudly?

Did they really and honestly find the absorbing joy in their children, which was the sentimental tradition? And if they did, how did they manage it? She loved Marise, nobody had a nicer little girl, nor a prettier. But the plain facts were that a little girl and a grown woman were very different beings, with very different needs and interests. There was nothing she would not do for Marise, she often told herself, if Marise needed it. But Marise apparently did not need a single thing her mother could do for her, any more than any healthy little girl absorbed in her school and play. There was no sense in doing uninteresting things for people when they were just as well off without them. She often looked at Marise across the dinner-table, fresh and well-groomed by Jeanne's competent hands, and wondered with a sincere bewilderment how any one could expect her to make an occupation out of loving a very busy, self-centered, much-occupied little girl, who left the house before her mother was out of bed, was gone all day, spent most of her few free hours with her music teacher, and in the nature of things went to bed just at the beginning of the evening.

From time to time, when they had first come to Bayonne, she had made various attempts to connect her life with Marise's, annoyed by the affection Marise showed to Jeanne and to that singularly unattractive Mlle. Hasparren. Breaking through the tyrannical regularity of the child's hard-working life, she had carried her off, now for a day on the beach at Guéthary, now for a day in the shops at Biarritz, once for a week-end at Saint Sauveur. But she had come home after such attempts, mortally weary and depressed. What was the use of trying to pretend that the things which delighted and amused a child were not inconceivably tiresome to a grown-up? Those endless hours while she sat in the sun on the sand (which got into her Shoes), and watched Marise inanely prance in the surf, or dig for clams which she did not care to keep after she had caught them! How could she see anything but very visible repulsiveness and dirt, and quite probably diseases in the lank stray dogs and cats which always turned up when Marise went along a street, and which Marise always felt an inexplicable and perverse desire to fondle? And those cheap bazaars, where Marise loved to linger, gazing with dazzled eyes at the trumpery, papier-maché gimcracks and playthings...! Of course, as Marise had grown less childish, walks had been free of hoop-rolling with its inevitable encounters with irascible old gentlemen's legs, but she had developed other tastes quite as bothersome. Flora's pretty, slender feet ached with fatigue at the recollection of the long hours she had stood beside Marise, who, sucking hard on a barley-sugar stick, and hooking her elbows over the parapet of the bridge over the Adour, gazed endlessly down on dirty, smelly ships being unloaded by dirty, smelly workmen.

Flora had come to the conviction that the European custom of sending a servant around with children was based on a realistic recognition of facts. It was better for both sides; for she knew that, although she tried to be patient, Marise felt her lack in interest in chatter about whether the stone would hit the tree this time, or how long Marise could walk over flagged sidewalks without once stepping on a crack. Good Heavens! What difference did it make! It was inevitable that a servant's vacant mind should be naturally more nearly on the childish level.

And yet, once in a while, when Marise came into the salon to kiss her mother good-night, Flora's arms caught her fast, wistfully, feeling an aggrieved, helpless resentment at somehow being cheated out of what seemed to mean so much more to other mothers. Marise always felt instantly this special mood in her mother and always flashed up in an ardent return, straining her mother to her in a great silent hug. It was a good moment for them both, but so quickly gone.

She looked now at her watch and remembered an engagement at her dressmaker's to try on a new house-dress. It suddenly made her sick to think of bothering with it. What was the use of a new house-dress? Who would see it except Horace, who never saw anything, or perhaps some one like Madame Fortier or Madame Garnier, who would think it unbecoming for a married woman to wear pretty, frilly things, or to think of anything but how to shove their husbands and sons and daughters ruthlessly ahead of other women's. Heavens above! How tiresome they were about their families! They never saw another thing in the world! Except scandalous suppositions about other people's actions.

She discovered that she did not feel at all well, not nearly well enough to go to have the dress tried on. She was always tired. The enervating climate certainly did not agree with her. The doctor paid no real attention to her case, and the sulphur baths at Saint Sauveur had done her no good, for all they cost so much. How she had hated the dreary little village, full of sick women, perched on the narrow ledge, from which the sanitarium and the bathing establishment looked dizzily down into the frightful gorge where the gave of Gavarnie boiled among its rocks. It had given her materials for many a nightmare, that long black cleft in the earth, so full of the wild haste of the waters that the ear was never for an instant, asleep or awake, freed from their plunging roar. It had given her nightmare; and the sulphur baths had not helped her worn feeling of prostrated weakness in the least. And now she feared there was something else—her heart was certainly not quite normal. There were times as now (she put her fingers to her wrist) when sitting perfectly still, she felt her pulse drop almost to nothing. A muffled, listless beat, like a clock that is running down....

"Running down?"—the chance phrase caught her attention. Was she running down to middle-age, without once having...? She started up, stung by the thought, frightened, angry—a way out into life—a way to escape from the stagnant pools where Fate always cast her—a way to find some vibrant stirring aim—if it were only for an hour—something to care about intensely! Other people did—women in books.

Jeanne, passing the door on her way out saw her mistress standing in the alcove, and paused to ask a question. "... if Madame wished Mademoiselle Marise to wear a white ribbon in her hair that afternoon? Because if so, a fresh one was needed." Her old voice thrilled as she pronounced the child's name.

Madame brought her thoughts back from their wanderings with an effort. "A white ribbon?" she said vaguely.

Jeanne reminded her, "The annual competition for the prize in music at Mademoiselle's school. The young ladies are to dress in white." Madame remembered, "Oh, yes, yes, yes." A pause, while she seemed to begin to drift away again, and then, with a perception that Jeanne still stood before her, waiting, "Why, yes, of course, buy a white ribbon if she needs it."

Jeanne took her tall, black-clad body off into the hall and thence into the street, her mistress instantly gone from her mind. She had no time or strength that momentous day for anything beyond her passionate absorption in her dear girl's ordeal, Marise's first step into the battle of life. Her little Marise almost a young lady, her fifteenth birthday so near, contending with rival young ladies! Jeanne ground her strong yellow teeth and prayed furiously that the other competitors might all have cramps in their fingers, that a fog might come before their eyes, that they might have blinding headaches or at least that their petticoats might hang below their skirts and disgrace them as they walked across on the platform.

She went to the best shop in town for the ribbon, the only detail lacking in the spotless costume which had been ready for days, pressed by Isabelle and pressed over again by herself. Jeanne had all the possible shades brought down; dead white—ivory white—pearl white—cream, she took them to the door to see how they looked in full daylight, and withdrawing herself by a swoop of her will power, from the clattering confusion of the street, she held up the rolls of ribbon one by one, imagining, as though Marise were there before her, each one against the gleaming dark head. Not the dead white—no, that looked like nun's stuff, and there was nothing of the nun in Marise, thank God! Not the pearl white—that bluish tinge—oh, no! that was only fit for a corpse—The cream? No, the white organdie of the dress would make it look dirty. The ivory—yes, the ivory.

She carried the others back and looked hard at the ivory on both sides, making a deft fold or two with her stiff old fingers, to see how it would tie into a bow. She held it out at arm's length, her tightly-coifed, gargoyle-head on one side. She drew a long breath, having been so absorbed in the ribbon that she had forgotten to breathe for some time. "Well, give me a mètre and a half," she said finally to the clerk, adding scornfully, "if that's the best you have!" Cloth-of-gold embroidered with pearls would not have satisfied her.

As she came out, she turned her head sideways to estimate the height of the sun, having a low opinion of the accuracy of clocks, and was startled to find it so late. If she were to get across to the river, to the Holy Ghost Church, to set a candle burning before Our Lady for Marise's success, she would need to hurry, and of late Jeanne had found hurrying not so easy a process as it had been. If Marise was older, so was she, seventy-six her last birthday. It was harder for her to stretch her long legs to the old stride. Something happened to her breathing, all the blood seemed to go to her head and a blackness came before her eyes, so that once or twice she had been obliged like any weakling Parisian to lean against a wall or table till the roaring in her ears stopped and the dull heavy fullness in her head subsided. But Jeanne despised people who gave way to little notions like that, and had no intention of putting on any such airs. Certainly not now, when Marise's welfare was at stake.

Of course she must make her prayer for her darling's success, and set a candle burning before Our Lady. The easy way to do this was to step up the street to the Cathedral but Jeanne did not care for the Cathedral, where all the heretic tourists from Biarritz went to stare, and which was as big and bare as the waiting-room of a railway station. How could Our Lady notice one little candle or one old woman there! No, Jeanne was set on lighting her candle in her own half-ruined, dark Church of the Holy Ghost, where the Basques go on pilgrimages to pray before the holy "Flight into Egypt." Our Lady of the Saint-Esprit had already performed many miracles for good Basques.... Oh, for a miracle now!

She began to pray as swiftly and violently as she walked, "Blessed Mother of God, be with her this afternoon! Holy Infant Jesus! Help her! Blessed little Saint Theresa, help my darling!"

She cast herself so vehemently into her supplications that she felt her heart blazing like a torch. She soared high out of her body. She was swinging along through space among the clouds, wrestling with the Saints, clinging to their knees, dominating them by the fury of her prayers.... No, they would not dare refuse her.... She would not give them an instant's peace...!

"Blessed St. Cecilia, stand at her side! Oh, most Holy Mother of God, guide her fingers...!"

"... a way out into life? How could she find it? Other people did ... women in books...." Flora Allen's eyes moving slowly about the room fell on a photograph of the South Portal of the Bayonne Cathedral. It was framed in dark wood with a little Gothic arch at the top. It made her sick to look at it. How much trouble she had taken to get that photograph and to find the frame that would suit it. How eagerly she had hung it on the wall; and then had turned round to find it had made no difference in her life, or in any one's life. She looked at it now, her pretty lips set bitterly. What an idiot she had been! What difference could it have made? What had she ever thought it could do for her, she and the other women of Belton, everlastingly studying something or other, going after culture with such eagerness, bringing it home, hanging it on the wall, and turning round to find it had changed nothing, nothing. How silly they were! Nobody over here cared anything for "culture" or art, or sculptures—except badly-dressed, queer people with socialistic ideas, like Marise's music-teacher.

And they were right not to care. What was there in it for any one? What could she ever have thought there was? What earthly difference did the sculptures on the South Portal make to her, Flora Allen, driven along through life, without getting out of it a single one of the things women really wanted? What good did it do any one to go and gape at the paintings in the Museum, most of them ugly, and all of them as dead as dead? When what you wanted was to be alive! To have gaiety and sparkle and cheerfulness in your life, not to vegetate and mold like the primitive lower forms of life around you, like Isabelle; not to dry and harden and become a mere block of wood like old Jeanne!

There was nothing unreasonable in not wanting to shrivel and stagnate. It was right to want to have an ardent life, full and deep, that carried you out of yourself.

But in her life, as by a fatality, there were never any occasions for emotion, for fresh, living sensations. Nothing ever happened to her that could stir her to anything but petulance and boredom—nothing! nothing! If anything seemed to promise to—why, Fate always cut it short. Those wonderful afternoons when Sister Ste. Lucie had taken her to the convent to talk to Father Elie! From the first of her Bayonne life she had felt it very romantic to know real Catholics, who used holy-water and believed in saints, and she had loved to go round with Sister Ste. Lucie in her long black gown and frilled white coif, just like a picture out of a book. But this was different. When the dark, gaunt, hollow-eyed, old missionary-priest had given her one somber look and made the sign of the cross over her, she had felt her heart begin to beat faster. And as he talked to her afterwards, in the bare, white-washed parlor of the convent, with the light filtering in through the closed shutters, he had made her tremble with excitement, as he himself had trembled throughout all his thin powerful old body. His deep-set eyes had burned into her, as he talked, his emaciated fingers, scorched brown by tropical suns, shook as he touched the Crucifix. How he had yearned over her as he told her that, never, never would she know what it really was to live, till she cast out her stubborn unbelief and threw herself into the living arms of her true Mother, the Church of God. Flora had not known that she had any belief in particular to cast out ... she had never thought anything special about religion at all, one way or the other. She only wanted him to go on making her tremble and feel half-faint, while Sister Ste. Lucie clasped her rosary beads and prayed silently, the tears on her cheeks! And then the very next day the Father Superior of his Order had sent him off to Africa. Would he ever come back?

Perhaps she could become a Catholic. Why not? If it moved you like this just to be in contact with the Church—what must it bring you to be intimately of it? She remembered that in a book Sister Ste. Lucie had given her, stories were told of women who lost consciousness from sheer emotion, when they felt the consecrated wafer of Communion on their tongues; others who were caught up among the saints for hours, hearing heavenly music and when they came to themselves, the room was all scented richly with invisible roses....

Also, without a word spoken she thought she had understood that the Marquise de Charmières and all that old aristocratic set would not be so stand-offish if she were converted.

But as this last idea slid into her mind from behind something else, there came with it as frighteningly as if she had seen the walls of her stone corridor closing in on her, a doubt that cast a stale sallow reflection on all her thoughts;—suppose she were really taken up by the Marquise and all the old aristocratic set, would things be any different then? Mightn't that, too, be just something else she had gone out after and brought home and hung on the wall, only to find that it changed nothing? She turned away from this idea, cold and frightened at all it implied ... that life was not deep at all, anywhere, but a shallow mud-hole, and that she had sunk far enough down to touch the bottom.

She heard now the uneven clattering jangle of the bell, heard Isabelle come out of the bed-room and go down the tile-paved corridor. Her sandals dragged at the heel as they always did in the morning before she put on her street shoes. That slatternly flap and drag of Isabelle's sandals made her mistress sick. She had spoken about them a thousand times. She had come to have a nervous hatred of the sound, had actually flown into rages over it, stamping and shrieking at Isabelle as she despised French housekeepers for doing. But how much impression had she made? For one morning, perhaps two, Isabelle laced up her early morning foot-gear, and after that she always forgot, slid back, flop, scuff, flop. That was the sort of sandals all the chambermaids in Bayonne wore for the first cleaning of the morning; that was the kind they always had worn; the American mistress might as well make up her mind to the fact that that was the kind they always would wear. There was about this trivial matter of the sandals, the same nightmare quality of passive, inert resistance to the idea of any change, which sagged smotheringly down on Flora Allen everywhere she turned in her French life. They called it stability. She and her friends in Belton had called it a "background of tradition."

And yet she knew herself now incapable of going back to live in Belton where she would not be able always to depend on an Isabelle, where at times she would have to sweep her own rooms, and scour her own greasy pots herself. It made her sick to think of living that way again—nobody to bring her breakfast in the morning! To get up in a cold house with all the responsibility for everything on her shoulders. She felt weak at the thought of it.

Isabelle scuffed in, the mail in one rough, strong, red hand, and flapped back to her cleaning. This time her mistress made no comment on her laceless sandals.

What might there be in the mail? Nothing interesting, that she knew beforehand. She turned the letters over, recognizing from their very aspect the flatness of their contents. A letter from America? Oh, yes, only from Horace's old Cousin Hetty, for Marise. How she did keep up that correspondence! Did she suppose for a minute that any child could go on remembering some one she hadn't seen for four years, especially a child like Marise, so self-centered and absorbed in her own life, caring really about nothing but her music.

A bill for Marise's school for the last quarter—to be put with Horace's mail; a circular from that something-or-other society Mlle. Hasparren was always fussing over, trying to raise money to keep some quartet running in Bayonne; a bill from the dressmaker; another circular—oh, as bad as Mlle. Hasparren's, that association with the long name, that took care of foundling babies—they were always wanting money too! A notice from the school, another bill? No, the announcement of the music-contest that afternoon. Heavens! Never again for her! Once was enough, to sit silently all a long afternoon on a teetering folding chair in the midst of stodgy, dowdy mothers, whose boring eyes saw right through the fabric of your dress to the safety-pin with which you had replaced a missing petticoat button, and who had no more interest in the music banged out by the schoolgirls than you had, except to wish ill to every child not their own.

There was one letter, addressed to her in the pointed, fine convent handwriting of Sœur Ste. Lucie. She opened this with more interest. Ah, Father Elie was coming back. And wished to see her to-morrow afternoon. She felt a little stir of her pulse, the first in so long. What dress would she wear to the convent? Her black voile—and the little close-fitting hat?

Still thinking of this she turned from the letters to the printed matter. There were a couple of battered, out-of-date New York newspapers, weary with their long traveling, and the deadly little Bayonne paper, with its high-flown, pious articles, and its nasty hints at scandals. She stood leaning against the table, looking down scornfully at it, till her eye caught a name, and her face changed.

Mme. Garnier's son back from his two year stay in New York, where he had been studying American business methods....

Flora Allen looked up quickly at her pretty blonde smiling reflection in the mirror, turning her head to get the three-quarter view which was her favorite. So he was back, was he? So he was back. His dear mama must have decided that he was now old enough to protect himself from golden-haired American ladies. So he was coming back to perch on the front edge of his chair and look volumes out of those great soft eyes of his that were so shy and yet could be so expressive. He was coming back to be so nervous and moved that his shaking fingers could not hold his tea-cup, and yet so persistent that he came week after week whenever she was at home to visitors; so timid that he hadn't a word to say for himself but so bold that he often spent the entire evening, romantically sitting on the bench across the way, staring up at her windows.

He was coming back after his exile in America, was he? And two years older. Well, we would see what we would see. And in the meantime Father Elie could wait.

She had a singular little smile on her lips, as she turned from this item to a card from Horace, saying that business would keep him longer in Bordeaux than he had thought and he would not be back till a week from Saturday. She tossed this card with the letters on the table, and began to turn over the canary-colored books scattered on her desk. No, the volume was not there. She must have put it back long ago in the book-case. She ran her finger along the titles on a shelf near her, found it, pulled it out. With it in her hand she sank down on the chaise-longue. But before she began to read, she sat for a moment, her lips curved, remembering what was in it, and remembering how more than two years ago she had looked up from it to see Jean-Pierre Garnier for the first time. Yes....

She opened the book, fluttered the pages, read a little here and there; and then, as if slowly drawn by an undertow, sank into the book, with a long breath.

After a time Jeanne let herself in, stood for an instant in the door, despising her mistress, and passed on to Marise's room. But the novel-reader heard nothing, drowned deep in the book, reading very slowly, her eyes dwelling long on every word. "... I wakened, thinking I heard my name called, slipped out of bed and went to the window. The moon poured liquid silver upon the garden, and there in the midst of it stood Urbain, slim and young as a lady's page, his soft eyes glittering like jewels. With a bound he leaped up towards me, and found a foot-hold on the rough stones of the old wall, so that he stood beside me with only the low window-sill between us. He took my hand in his. He was trembling like a leaf. He looked at me imploringly."

"'Go! Go! Urbain!' I whispered, trying to steel my heart against his youth and ardor, 'Go, I am like an old woman to thee, a mere child.' His answer was to put one trembling arm around my bare shoulders and gently lay his velvet cheek upon my breast. I felt myself melting, melting in a delicious languor. After all, why not? Where would the dear boy find a more devoted and delicate initiation into life.... Think into whose hands he might fall if I repulsed him!

"He raised his face adoringly to mine, drew me down to his lips ... his young, firm lips ... sweet as the petals of a rose ... perfumed with youth. I closed my eyes...."

The only break in the intense immobility of the reader was that occasionally she moistened her lips with her tongue, and once in a while she drew a long, sighing breath.

CHAPTER XVII

"There!" said Madame Garnier, scanning the chair-filled assembly-room from the back, "up there in the second row there are three seats. We can take two and hold one and perhaps after Danielle has played, she can come and sit by us."

They were in plenty of time, long before the contest began, so that she gave herself the pleasure of walking slowly down the aisle, stopping wherever she saw a familiar face to exchange greetings and to say proudly, "Yes, Jean-Pierre is returned from America. Looking very well, isn't he? Yes, that's the style in America, neither beard nor mustache. But I think after a while he'll let his mustache grow again. I tell him he looks like a priest."

But she did not think that he looked in the least like a priest. She thought him the most beautiful young man in the world, and she was so ecstatically happy to have him back again after the rending anguish of the two years' separation, that she forgave him all the anxiety he had caused them by that foolish infatuation of his. That was in the past now, she hoped. Perhaps he had outgrown his foolish idea, as they had hoped he might when they had sent him away. He had certainly said nothing about it in any of his letters. But even if he hadn't forgotten, if he but knew it, she was more than ready to yield the point to him, to yield anything that would end his alienation from her, that would bring him back to live in Bayonne. She had grown old during those two endless years. They had broken her resolution. He was too precious. She could deny him nothing. If he still wanted it, why, let him have his little American girl, as soon as she was old enough to marry. She might be made over into a passable wife for Jean-Pierre. There was no doubt she was pretty and fine, with nice hands and feet; and she seemed gentle and quiet. Once get her away from those impossible parents, into a decent home...!

Her heart was rippling full with joy to feel Jean-Pierre there beside her. At times it overflowed, and she all but opened her lips to tell him she would sacrifice anything for him, that she would put no obstacle in his way. But for the moment a prudent thought restrained her. She would wait and see whether perhaps Jean-Pierre had not forgotten that curious infatuation with a mere child. There was no use putting the idea back in his head, if his exile and two years' time had blotted it out.

They sat in a decorous silence, waiting for the beginning of the program. Madame Garnier moved nearer to Jean-Pierre, for the pleasure of feeling his arm, a man's arm now, inside a very well-cut masculine coat-sleeve. She remembered what it had been, the rosy translucent flesh of her first baby, then the little thin, white arm of his long ailing boyhood—how she had fought with ill-health to keep him—all those years, never an instant's relaxation of her care, her prayers, her piercing anxiety! Oh, well, it was all over now. There he sat, a splendid young man, still a little delicate, but sound and well. Her reward had come. How goldenly the years stretched out before her! Perhaps it was just as well to have him marry young, to have his wife come to him intact in the first bloom of her early girlhood. He himself was so unworldly, he would never be able to manage an older woman. A fleeting picture came to her of a rosy baby's face—Jean-Pierre's first child. The thought flooded over her, rich with pride and joy.

She continued to gaze at a certain spot in the curtain, her face framed in her heavy velvet hat, composed in decorous vacancy.

Beside her Jean-Pierre also fixed his eyes on a certain spot in the curtain, and composed his face to quiet. But he was afraid of the silence. He wished his mother had gone on chatting, or that they had sat down near acquaintances with whom he would have been forced to talk. Then he would not have been so conscious of the dryness of his mouth, of the roaring of his pulse in his ears. He stared hard at the curtain, trying to interest his eyes in the design of the tapestry. But they could see nothing but what they had seen for two years, liquid dark eyes looking straight into his heart, his poor heart that he could not hide from them; dark eyes that seemed to be looking wistfully for something they did not find, something that he knew he could give, something that he longed to give with such an abandon of desire that he felt now, as so many times before, the sweat start out on his forehead.

He shifted his position, folded his arms, looked away from the curtain and down at the floor. Come, come, this was becoming nothing more than a fixed idea, a mania! It was idiocy to let it master him so! Good God, what had she been but a little girl! What was she now but a little girl! A girl of fifteen was no more than a child. His heart sprang up at him with a tiger's leap—"only three more years to wait—perhaps only two more—." He frowned, cleared his throat, and taking his handkerchief out of his pocket, passed it across his lips.

And then she might be totally changed by this time; girls often did change. Suppose she had grown very stout—or were gawkily thin like his sister Danielle, or bold and forward, or dull. He rolled himself in the hair-shirt of all the possible changes for the worse, and felt his passion burn hotter. Well, he would see. In a few moments he would see. He looked at his watch.

"It must soon begin," said his mother anxiously, leaning towards him, evidently fearing that the delay might bore him.

He smiled at her reassuringly, and put his watch back. Dear Maman! How she did spoil him! How he had missed her, missed his home, those two years in America. He thought of the boarding-house on 59th Street with a qualm. How good it was to get back to a real home.

But there were fine things in America, too, even if they did not know how to create real homes, even if the men did not know how to love their mothers, or cherish their wives. He had learned a great deal there, a great deal even beyond the revelation of new business methods. What he had learned commercially was enormous! He faced his future here in France, sure of success.

But he had taken in other things too—he was thankful that he had been to Marise's native country and had learned something about the attitude towards women there—not that he would ever, ever treat Marise as American wives were treated, with that rough-and-ready, cowboy lack of ceremony, nor would he ever neglect her, leave her out of his life, as American husbands did. He would know how to combine the American honesty and sincerity with what no American ever felt or showed, with what no American woman ever experienced—tenderness, cherishing tenderness. He would be tender for Marise as no other human being could be; he would find the most exquisite ways to surround her with tenderness, to protect that sweet mouth of hers from bitterness or sorrow, or knowledge of the world's evil.

He looked down steadily at the floor, a knot in his throat, his heart aching, and swallowed hard.

Three wooden thumps sounded from the platform, and the curtain drew itself aside, showing the stage decorated with a stand, two potted palms, an armchair, and a sprawling black grand piano with two cane-bottomed chairs before it.

From the wings trudged in a red-cheeked young girl, with a large bust, and brawny rough arms, hanging down over her starched white dress. Behind her trotted a short withered elderly woman, a black silk waist crossed over her flat chest, her scanty gray hair smoothed down in thin bandeaux over her ears. They sat down before the piano, opened the music, carried by the older woman, waited till she had adjusted drooping eye-glasses on her high thin nose, and had peeringly found her place. Then the young girl began to pound out the Raindrop Prelude while the other turned over the pages.

The audience preserved a respectful silence, bestowing a minute attention on the hang of the player's skirt, the fit of her bodice, the crimped waves of her light brown hair, her over-plump hands, and the bulging patent-leather shoes, which she pressed nervously up and down on the pedals.

Something seemed to break and clear away in Jean-Pierre's head, like fumes drifting away from a shattered retort. So this was a school-girl, this solid, unformed lump of human flesh, neither child nor woman, who had lost a child's poetry and had not yet come to woman's seductiveness. He looked coolly at the girl (his mother whispered her name, the younger sister of a lycée friend of his), dissecting her with his eyes, immeasurably relieved. Was it for an amorphous creature like this, too old to kiss on the cheek, too young to kiss on the mouth, that he had suffered? Why, it was nothing; a mere morbid whim of his ignorant boyhood. How right Maman had been in making Papa send him away from it! He had grown to be a man without realizing it, a man of the world, in no danger of losing his head over chits.

The Prelude was finished. The player got to her feet, and bowed self-consciously to the muted thuddings of gloved palms on gloved palms which greeted the cessation of her activities. She got herself off the stage, walking heavily in her too-tight slippers. Jean-Pierre, who sat at one side could see a little behind the scenes and observed that as soon as she thought she was out of sight of the audience, she gave way to childish relief that the ordeal was over, and skipped forward, running. He suppressed a supercilious smile of æsthetic scorn. Her body, as large and heavy as a woman's, no longer expressed the impulses of the child she still was. She skipped clumsily, with an inelastic energy of gesture like a cow capering in a spring-time pasture. Jean-Pierre felt the keenest pleasure in his ruthless perception of her lack of grace. This was emancipation!

"She plays very nicely," murmured his mother, on the general chance that some member of her family might be sitting within earshot.

"Yes, very agreeably," he concurred.

Neither of them had heard a note of the music.

They continued to sit in decorous silence, looking with vacant faces straight before them, till the next performer appeared. This was Elise Fortier, whom they were both prepared to detest because of her father and mother and brother. They did detest her, everything about her from her thin, dry hair, frizzed out to imitate abundance, to her shifty eyes exactly like her mother's, from her stooping shoulders, to her long bony hands, which clattered out loudly the Schubert Marche Militaire. When she had finished, "Really quite a talent," observed Mme. Garnier taking pains to be audible; and, "Remarkable for her age," agreed Jean-Pierre.

He was relaxing morally, in an inexpressible ease at finding his head clear, his heart at rest. To own yourself, to look at life from behind a stout wall of critical cynicism—it was to be in safety at last! He barely glanced at the next player, a nondescript, precocious child, who murdered a Moment Musical, her short thin legs dangling from the stool. And the next, the one who played the Liebestraum, a tall young lady with the self-admiring graces and manners of an opera singer on the concert platform. He looked at his watch again and wondered how long it would be before the stupid school performance would be over, and he could get away for an apéritif at the Café du Grand Bouleau on the Place d'Armes and an evening with——

He saw that another player was coming forward, a slim tall girl with thick shining dark hair held back by a white ribbon like the others. She stood for an instant to bow to the audience before sitting down at the piano, and he could look up full into her unconscious face, gazing out over his head impersonally with shy, liquid, dark eyes. She was breathing a little rapidly, her young breast rising and falling under the filmy white of her dress. A timid propitiatory smile curved her sensitive mouth and arched her long, finely-drawn eyebrows.

Not a muscle of Jean-Pierre's face changed; every line of his careless, confident attitude froze taut as it was. And underneath this motionless exterior, he felt his heart hotly, joyfully weeping in a passion of thanksgiving, like a frightened lost child who has come into the right way. He lost all sense of connection with his body and yearning, worshipping, clamoring, imperiously calling, humbly beseeching, he gazed out from the bars of his immobile, well-dressed external self at the girl sitting before the piano. Two years, two long years of exile, how could life ever make up to him for those two lost years? How he had starved! His famished eyes fed ravenously on what they saw, the supple, elastic slimness of the young body, the fine, thin ankle and shapely foot, the creamy forearm, the agile, strong, white fingers, so bravely flinging out harmonies beyond the comprehension of the smooth broad brow, inviolate, intact, innocent, ignorant, which bent its full child's curve over the keys.

Jean-Pierre looked and looked, prostrating himself in awe before the revelation of divine, stainless youth. Never till that moment, he told himself, had he understood the meaning of the holy word, virgin.

And he had thought, those two long years, that he had always held her before his eyes! He had remembered nothing, nothing of what she was. Yet, how could he have divined what she was becoming—that mouth, her pure girl's mouth, cleanly drawn in scarlet against the flower-like flesh perfumed with youth. Would he—would he know the first cool touch of those young lips ... he found that he could see her no more, for a mist before his eyes, and yet he continued to strain his eyes through the mist towards where she sat.

Some one touched him on the arm. It was Maman—Maman who looked at him in tender sympathy. As their glance met, she smiled at him, and nodded her head once, reassuringly. She looked as she had when he was a little boy, and she had yielded at last to some desperately held whim of his. Dearest Maman! It was a promise she gave him silently, a promise to help him towards his happiness. She too had succumbed to Marise. Who would not? He pressed her hand gently, and smiled in return. A calm peace came upon him.

Madame Garnier knew very well beforehand when the little American girl was to come on the program, and after that ill-bred, over-dressed Yvonne Bredier had wriggled and grinned her way off the stage, she felt an anxious, nervous expectation. Jean-Pierre had no idea what was coming. She could feel that. Although she dared not change her position to look at him, she was acutely aware of the relaxed careless pose of his body, and of the nonchalant turn of his head as he glanced at the girl who now came forward on the stage.

And then she felt with that sixth sense of her passion for Jean-Pierre that he had been struck, had been pierced, as though a knife had thrust him through and through. Although he had not moved—because he had not moved, had not changed a line of his careless attitude, she divined that he had been stricken into immobility. What was it? Was it the shock of disillusion, of disappointment at prosaic reality after a long, romantic dream? Or did he still find in the girl whatever strange sorcery had so bewitched his boyish fancy?

She herself sat as stiffly motionless as he, suffering so exquisite a torture of suspense that she dared not bring herself to end it by a look at his face.

Some one back of her coughed, and the sound broke the spell. She drew a long breath and resolutely turned her head towards her son.

"Oh, my Jean-Pierre, oh, my little boy! is it so you feel? Oh, my darling, do you want her, do you want anything in the world like that? My little boy, a man! To think that it is my little boy, thus burning with a man's desire! Oh, yes, Jean-Pierre, you shall have her ... what is your mother for but to help you have what you want? Oh, poor boy, poor boy, to look at any woman so.... Oh, Jean-Pierre, if you knew women, how they only live to fool men ... no woman on earth is worth...."

She saw now that his flaming young eyes were veiled with tears. She touched his arm, she smiled at him, closer to him than since his early childhood. And he took her hand, he smiled back, he looked at her as he had not once since his infatuation began—like her son, her only son once more letting her into his heart. She held tightly to his hand, now happy and at peace.

Thus together, hand in hand, they were looking up at the stage when the girl struck the final chord, and rising, turned once more towards the front to make her bow in acknowledgment of the applause. The excitement, the effort, had brought a shell-like color into her subtly modeled cheeks. Once more she looked out into the audience impersonally and then, as she turned to go, unconsciously drawn by the intense gaze of the couple in the second row, her dark eyes dropped to them for an instant's glance of friendly recognition. Madame Garnier felt her son draw a sudden, gasping breath through half-open lips and tighten his hold on her hand.

During the rest of the program her thoughts and plans rose in a busy circling swarm. After all, there were advantages. It might be much worse! Impressionable, sensitive, inexperienced as Jean-Pierre was, it might very well have been some mature married woman in search of a new sensation who had thus caught his first young passion. Or even not his passion at all. Even if he himself had felt nothing, any woman could have victimized him by working on that foolish sensibility of his. If she could make him think—and his mother always had a scared sense of how easy that would be—that she was in love with him, he would never know how to retreat, as more brutal men knew so well how to do. She had always been afraid of some such entanglement as that, in which Jean-Pierre's weakness (in her heart she called it plainly that, and not chivalry or sensibility) would make him a helpless victim of a woman either an old fool herself or a calculating sensualist. Heavens! How many dangers there were in the world for one's son! And sons could not be guarded like daughters, by keeping them under your thumb. There were also, for such a romantic, unworldly boy as Jean-Pierre, all the variations on the Camille theme. How easily some shrewd woman of the demi-monde could have pulled the wool over his eyes! Madame Garnier had no doubts that Jean-Pierre knew such women. Her son was a man like all other men, for all his poetic, high-strung ideas, and had certainly had his part of an ordinary man's life, especially those last two years away from home, irresponsible and alone. Oh, yes, the more she thought shudderingly of the dangers he had escaped, the more harmless appeared this fancy for a school girl. And if his fancy was to light on a young girl, in some ways it was more convenient to have her a foreigner with no family, so to speak, rather than a girl of Bayonne society, whose family would expect to have much to say about all the arrangements of Jean-Pierre's life. Heavens! suppose it had been Elise Fortier—think of Jean-Pierre saddled with Madame Fortier as a mother-in-law! Not that that worthless idle American mother-in-law was much better; except that those people must go back to America some time! Everybody did go back to his native country ultimately. And too, she was a weak, foolish thing who would never have the force to make trouble. Look at the way she let herself be run by her servants. Also, until now, she had paid precious little attention to her daughter; there was no reason to think she would develop any more interest in her later on. And the child herself seemed malleable material. There was no doubt she would be a pretty woman, and marrying very young, she would certainly assimilate the standards of the Garnier family.

When the concert was over, she said to Jean-Pierre, "If you like, we will wait till the girls come out, and walk home with Danielle and her classmates." As she spoke she nodded to old Jeanne Amigorena, the cook in the American family, who stood there, also waiting, her young mistress' cloak and hat on her arm. It occurred to her that one of the first things to do would be to eliminate that servant. She probably knew altogether too much about Marise's family. It would not be prudent to have her around a young ménage; and anyhow, old servants were an intolerable nuisance with their airs of belonging to the family.

Behind the scenes where the girls were waiting for the concert to begin, there had been a deal of giggling and whispering and rustling. Mademoiselle Vivier, chosen to turn the pages for the players because she was so severe it was thought she could keep them in order, was "gend'arming around" as the girls called it, pouncing on one group for laughing too loud, and on another for making too much noise as they executed grotesque caricatures of the way they intended to make their entries on the stage. The moment her back was turned, they whispered and giggled and pranced more wildly than ever, turning deep bows into pirouettes, shaking out their full skirts and whirling about like dervishes. Everybody took care to lose her music and get it all mixed up with everybody's else, just to see Mlle. Vivier go into the air.

"Here's that missing sheet from your Schubert, Marguerite! Oh, no, it's Gabrielle's Chopin!"

"Oh, all the scherzo pages have gone from my Delibes!"

"Mademoiselle, Mademoiselle, I feel so faint, I don't believe I can play."

"Oh, Mademoiselle, I forgot to bring my—oh, yes, here it is, right under Danielle! Get up, Danielle! Get up! Mademoiselle! Danielle Garnier won't get off my music! Oh, Mademoiselle, can't I play my Nocturne instead of the Autumn Leaves! I feel like a nocturne; just ready to go to sleep."

Poor Mademoiselle Vivier, single-handed as she was, grew more and more frantic, rushing about, a dark red flush on her thin face, crying, "Sh, sh!" much more loudly than the girls were whispering, exhorting them angrily to have some manners, not to behave like so many barbarians, and to realize the seriousness of the occasion, the Gambert music prize at stake!

But one of those flint-like school traditions originating God only knows how, and utterly impervious to exhortations from any faculty, decreed in that school that the Gambert music prize was a joke, a scream of a joke. The girls would kill themselves with work and worry to win any other prize, for dramatic recitation, for dancing, even for French composition, much as they hated that, but care who won the music prize they would not; although, of course, it was exciting to have no classes that afternoon, to wear your best white dress and parade out on the stage. They had handed down from one school generation to another the fixed idea that M. Gambert had been short, red-faced and ridiculously fat, and they enraged their teachers by drawing on the margins of their music, impudent sketches of a paunchy, bald little man ceremoniously bestowing a huge wreath on a knock-kneed, scrawny girl. Whereas, as a matter of historic fact, M. Gambert had been a very good-looking bourgeois, who in his youth had been a dashing lieutenant under Napoleon I. Also the Gambert prize was not a wreath at all but an album of piano music, beautifully bound in bright red leather, which, because the Mother Superior feared arousing the vanity of the winner, was privately bestowed behind the scenes. But historic facts have no bearing on a cherished school joke of long standing. For the girls, the Gambert prize continued always to be one gigantic lark, one of those perennial farces, the indestructible quality of which so endears them to fourteen and fifteen year olds.

This year they had a new variation on their usual fooleries. Elise Fortier told them that her grown-up young lady cousin had discovered something as good as the rouge which was so strictly forbidden to them by the Sisters, that its very name was not allowed to be pronounced in school. If you bent over double and hung your head upside down, way over, thus, till it was on the same level with your knees, and held it there till you felt as though you'd burst, you'd have the loveliest color in your cheeks, just like an actress.

Of course they all wanted to look like actresses. What could be more delightful than to look like an actress!

In an instant the horrified Mademoiselle Vivier was treated to an appalling spectacle. All of her charges utterly forgetting their manners or even decency, were stooping double, their full starched skirts sticking out at acute angles behind, and to the tune of muffled shrieks of laughter were dangling and shaking their heads, like so many lunatics, their carefully dressed hair sweeping the floor. She rushed at the nearest one, Marise Allen, and forced her back to an upright position. But this did not improve things. When Marise caught a glimpse of the others, like great white mushrooms, stooping and shaking, she burst out into anything but a muffled shout of laughter, which brought them all up, one after another, to gaze and scream, and lean, convulsed and hysterical, against the walls.

It was a critical moment. The curtain was due to go up, and the girls were really out of hand. Mademoiselle Vivier could do nothing with them. They had lost control of themselves; her experienced eye knew the signs. In a moment more, one of the more high-strung ones would begin to cry and then.... Good God! what a mess! What diabolically infernal creatures girls were to handle! How sick she was of their imbecility!

She ran hastily around to the side door and beckoning in the Mother Superior told her what was happening. The nun nodded understandingly, meditated for an instant, casting about in her mind, and then, her aged face taking on an expression of majestic calm, she swept back to the little room behind the stage. The girls were startled to see her and alarmed by the intense gravity of her face.

"My children," she said quietly in the clear, gentle, masterful voice which had kept the Community in whole-hearted subservience to her for thirty years, "my children." She bent her wasted old face on them, raising one thin white hand, peremptorily. Her long flowing black sleeve gave a commanding amplitude to this gesture. "My little children, lift up your hearts...." She waited an instant, till she held every eye, and then she said reverently, "My children, at every important moment of our lives we must turn to Our Very Holy Mother, to bless us. Before you go on the stage to-day, to represent your school in public, and to do honor to music, which God has blessed as an instrument of good, let us pray Our Mother to be with you, and guide you."

She bowed her head. Hypnotically, all the young heads bowed with hers. She began in a low murmur, "Ave Maria, sancta tu in mulieribus...." All the young voices murmured with her, discharging in the reverenced words, the nervous tension of their excitement and frolic. When they finished, they were all quiet, with serious faces. The Mother Superior raised her hand over them, murmuring a short, inaudible prayer of her own. There was an instant's silence.

"Go tell Mathurin to raise the curtain," said the Reverend Mother hurriedly in a low tone to Mademoiselle Vivier; a command which Mademoiselle Vivier lost no time in executing.

CHAPTER XVIII

Marise had noticed as she left the stage, that Madame Garnier was there with her son,—oh, yes, Danielle had said her brother was back from America. Now he'd be tagging around everywhere, tied to his mother's apron-strings, as Papa said all young Frenchmen were. Yes, they were holding hands this minute. How Papa would laugh to see that, as much as he did when Frenchmen with beards kissed each other. And now he'd be everlastingly coming in with his tiresome mother on Maman's days at home, to fidget and stammer and drop his teaspoon. Oh, well, she thought with a superior condescension, he had been hardly more than a boy, just out of the lycée, only twenty-one. He might be better now. Perhaps he had got rid of a little of his shyness in New York; although twenty-three, for a man, was of course no age at all.

The fashion at school just then, was to look down on boys and young men as green and insipid. The ideal of all the girls was an old man of forty, with white hair, and black eyebrows, a little pointed gray beard, and such sad, sad eyes! Every girl was waiting for such a chance to devote herself to healing the wounds made by other women, faithless, heartless creatures who had ravaged his youth and destroyed his faith. To prove to him what a woman's fidelity and love could be, and then die in his remorseful arms, of slow consumption brought on by his neglect...! Or, as the pious ones had it, to bring him back to the Church, and have him become a monk after your death. Or, perhaps, as some of the more dramatic ones imagined the matter, to find a plot against his life, and to sacrifice yourself to defeat it, throwing back at the last moment the hood of your long dark cloak, and showing a beautiful white satin gown, stained with your heart's blood, as you gasped out, "For you, for you, adored Réné."

The books from which the girls got these ideas, and many others not so harmless, were kept in a hole hidden behind a big loose stone in the end wall of the school garden. Though they were religiously wrapped in oil-cloth, the damp did more or less penetrate. But spots of green mold and limp damp pages which tore unless you held your breath as you turned them, only added to their charm as you read them, two or three heads bent over the page, while a friend kept guard at the turn of the path by the magnolia tree.

Marise had read them with the others, and although neither Father nor Maman paid the slightest attention to what she read, and there were lots of places in Maman's novels ever so much worse than these, she naturally felt an agreeable thrill at the thought of what an explosion there would be if they were ever discovered, reading love-stories at school. It was the fashion with the girls to do it. So she did, and as dramatically as any of the others. But far down, deep under all this, was a hermetically sealed chamber where she kept a secret disgust for the whole subject of falling in love, a secret distaste for men, old or young, and a furiously held determination never to have anything to do with them. It was all very well to carry on against the rules and to play-act with the girls about something in a book, but the faintest approach of the same thing in reality, froze her stiff with indignation and repugnance. When, walking on the street with Jeanne, some well-dressed young man cast a glance of admiration at her, or some half-tipsy workman called out a rough compliment she shrank away from them, hating them and herself; a feeling which old Jeanne zealously fostered.

She did not often think about the gray cat now, but she had never forgotten it, and she had picked up a great deal more information than she had had, about what made people like Isabelle snigger and grin, when there was talk of getting a husband. She intensely loathed all that she had seen and learned, whether it were the shocked, nauseated expression on the face of one of the older nuns at school, when she forbade any talk among the girls over the gossip that one of the kitchen-girls had let a young man into the kitchen at midnight; or a passage in one of Maman's novels, which she had found lying open on the salon table, and read before she could stop herself. Every such experience was like a blow on a bruised spot, deep under the surface of her life, which was so sore now that it ached at the slightest touch, ached and made her sick. She had learned that she must protect it at all costs, and she fought off blindly whatever seemed to threaten it, fought it off with indignation, with brusqueness, with stiffness, with silence, using any weapon she could snatch up. At school, if she found a group of older girls with their heads together, and a certain expression on their faces, the weapon was often simply to run away into another part of the playground. "I can run away faster than they can run after me!" she told herself, fleeing away to where the little girls were playing hop-scotch and "chat-perché."

There were times of course when you couldn't run away literally, but Marise had other methods of running away, the best one being a sudden change of subject—"Oh, Isabelle, your chignon is coming untied!" or "Gabrielle, isn't Sister Ste. Marie coming down the hall?" "Jeanne, you're pulling my hair!"

And she had found, too, that to head people off from beginning on the sort of thing you had to run away from, there was no better device than lively spirits. If you kept joking and laughing and carrying on, the girls didn't have time to lower their voices, look over their shoulders and begin to talk with their faces close to yours.

She was still flushed from laughing and talking and carrying on, when she emerged from the side-stairs into the half empty assembly-room, looking for her wraps, and saw beside Jeanne, Mme. Garnier and her son evidently waiting for Danielle, for Mme. Garnier had Danielle's hat and cloak on her arm. "Oh, zut! What a bore!" She'd have to speak to them; the young man would fidget and make her nervous, and she did think Mme. Garnier the tiresomest of all the frumps who came to call on Maman. She was an old snake-in-the-grass, too,—to use one of Papa's expressions. She pretended to say such sweet things to Maman, and really they were all different ways to slight poor Maman, who didn't understand half the time. But Marise did, and resented it for her. Poor Maman!

"Good morning, Madame Garnier," she said with a little bow, coming up to them, and, "Good morning, Monsieur Jean."

She remembered to drop her eyes, following the precepts of the teacher of deportment, and profited by the gesture to despise Mme. Garnier's shoes, stuffed lumpily full, like badly made sausages.

When Mme. Garnier finished a long speech, she didn't mean a word of, about how nicely Marise had played, "Oh, thank you very much, Madame Garnier," she answered, looking up for a moment.

Jeanne put her hat and coat on now, as Danielle romped in, talking at the top of her voice. Madame Garnier, with the perfunctory air of one attending to a familiar duty, savagely reproached her for boisterousness, and general heathenishness of manners. Danielle took this as it was meant, and paying not the slightest attention to the rebuke, went on talking at the top of her voice, telling her mother and brother all about the foolishness back of the scenes. "It was simply killing!" she shouted, laughing so that no one but Marise had any idea what she was talking about, "I thought I'd die, didn't you, Marise? You never saw anything in your life so funny! All of us wrong side up, with our heads ... oh, ha! ha! ha!"

She and Marise went off into peals of laughter which they immediately suppressed to giggles and then to smothered muffled gasps, as they saw the Reverend Mother's dignified black draperies moving down the side-aisle. They'd hear from it at school if Reverend Mother caught them in such a breach of manners as laughing in a public place!

"Who won the prize, my darling?" whispered Jeanne, in Marise's ear, as she smoothed down the collar of her coat.

"Oh, I did," Marise whispered back casually. She had left the big red album of Morceaux de Salon with Mlle. Vivier, because she knew if she tried to carry it home and passed by a school-mate she would be greeted with howls of jeering laughter. She would bring some paper to-morrow, to wrap it up.

"We may as well walk along together," said Mme. Garnier now. "Our road lies your way."

Jeanne dropped respectfully behind, Mme. Garnier walked with Marise, Danielle with her brother. Marise shot one sideways glance at Mme. Garnier as they started along the sidewalks. "Sapristi," as Jeanne said, "what an ugly hat! How could anybody not just drop dead to be seen with such a horror on!" "Yes, Madame," she answered politely, at random, not paying any attention to Mme. Garnier's drone. How vulgar it was to let your dress wrinkle across the back where the top of your corset came. And it was worse to let it cave in in front, at the same place. When she was grown up, she would never let her dress do that! Marise reflected with the utmost satisfaction on the excellent cut and hang of her own dress. There hadn't been a better one there, and she had silk stockings while most of the girls had clumsy cotton ones, or at best lisle thread. Jeanne certainly did know how to buy clothes, and Papa never said a word against paying the bills. Well, she could wear them too! She had style. She cast a pleased sideways glance at her slim straight silhouette, reflected in the large window of a shop, saw in the same mirror Mme. Garnier's uninteresting middle-aged figure, and then surprisingly she also caught a glimpse of Jeanne, behind the others, her handkerchief at her eyes as if she were crying. Marise stopped short, and turned sharply to look back. For mercy's sake, what could be the matter with Jeanne? Why, yes, she was, she was actually crying, the big tears rolling down her leathery cheeks. With an unceremonious excuse to Mme. Garnier, Marise left her planted there on the sidewalk, and darted back to Jeanne, asking anxiously what had happened.

Jeanne looked at her fondly, her wrinkled old face bright with love, "I am thanking Our Holy Mother and all the Saints for your triumph, my darling!" she said, her voice trembling. "All this day I have been praying for you, all this day."

Marise's first impulse was to inquire stupidly, "What triumph?" and her next was to burst into laughter as she realized that Jeanne had worked herself up so about that old Gambert music prize, of all things! But these gusts had come and gone before the expression of her face had had time to change; and when they had gone, all she could see was the affection shining in the old woman's eyes. Dear, darling old Jeanne! Let her think it was a triumph! She should never know anything else about it, bless her!

Marise remembered Danielle, the mocking, and glanced uneasily towards where the Garniers stood, waiting for her to go on with them. No, Danielle had not heard. Jeanne was safe.

Marise had grown so that she no longer needed to reach up to put her arms around the neck of the tall old woman, and kiss her hard on both tear-wet cheeks. "I owe my victory to thee, dear Jeanne, to thy prayers," she whispered fervently. "And I shall never, never forget it."

All this was a lie, of course, but lies were easy to tell, and what harm were they, if you made somebody more comfortable by telling them?

She pirouetted about on her toes, and ran back to take her place with Mme. Garnier. "Jeanne had bad news from one of her family," she murmured pensively in answer to Mme. Garnier's look of inquiry. "Oh, bah!" she thought carelessly. "What was one more lie to head off an old cat like that?" Besides, it was amusing to see how easy it was to lie, how with one little phrase, this way or that, you could change facts.

After she had come in, and gone to her room to change to her usual dark woolen school-dress, with the long-sleeved linen apron over it, Marise happened to glance out through the lace curtain over her window and saw that Mme. Garnier's son was sitting on the bench across the street in front of the Château Vieux. "Well, that was queer, why hadn't he gone on with his mother and Danielle?" She looked again, to make sure, herself hidden at one side behind the heavy tapestry curtain, as Jeanne had taught her, lest she be seen by men on the street. "Yes, it was Danielle's brother, sure enough. Well, what could he be doing there?"

She turned back to her greenish mirror to take off the white ribbon from her hair, and found that she had a dim recollection that before he went away to America, he used to sit on that bench in the late afternoon and evening. There was something unpleasant connected with that vague memory, and after a time that came to her also. She had heard Anna Etchergary, the concierge, and Jeanne laughing about it, and had overheard them conjecture that the young man was no such innocent mother's boy as he seemed, and then they had seen that Marise was there, and stopped abruptly, looking at her with the expression that she hated.

Before she went in to dinner, she looked out once more to see if he were still there. Yes, there he was leaning forward, the light from the street-lamp full on his face. Marise could see that he was pale, but there was a smile on his lips as if his thoughts were very pleasant.

When she stepped into the salon, she did not for a moment see that Maman was already there, because she stood at one side of the window, half hidden in the thick tapestry curtain, looking out through the lace over the glass. By the expression of her back, Marise knew that she, too, was looking at Mme. Garnier's son on the bench. For an instant, as though Marise's fingers had dropped on white-hot metal, the wild idea came to her that it was at Maman that Jean-Pierre was smiling, that it was for Maman that he sat there. She jerked herself away angrily and instantaneously from this thought, ashamed of herself. She was getting like Jeanne, like the girls at school.

Maman had heard her move, and now turned sharply around from the window, with the startled look of some one into whose bed-room you've walked without knocking at the door. But Marise never knocked at the salon door before going in. Why should she have thought of it to-day? Maman drew the heavy curtain over the window with a sweep of her bare white arm. For Maman was in grande tenue with her mauve satin low-necked evening dress on, and a camellia in her hair. Marise's first thought was that she was to have another solitary dinner. "Oh, Maman, are you going out?"

"Certainly not, what makes you think I am?" asked Maman quickly. She added because it was perfectly evident what made Marise think it, "The belt on this dress has been changed and I tried it on to see if it was right. And then I saw it was dinner time."

Marise was about to say something about the flower in her hair, but her antennæ-like sensitiveness to what other people were feeling, made her shut her lips. She looked hard at her mother, who made herself opaque, looking back at Marise, her face and eyes and mouth firmly closed over what was in her mind. Being able to see only the surface, Marise took that in with a fresh impression of not having looked at Maman for some time. How pretty she was, with her hair like gold threads, catching the light, and how different from her crinkly hair like a golden mist around her head, were the thick, thick petals of the camellia, with their dense, close, fine-grained surface.

Jeanne came to the door. "Madame is served," she said in a correct tone, standing aside as they came out. She did not look at Marise at all, but Marise knew perfectly well that she too was wondering about the evening dress and the flower. Marise began to try to invent some plausible explanation for it which she could let drop in talk to-morrow as they walked to school.

Marise had lessons to get that evening, lots of them, and hard ones, as usual. After dinner, she went back to her room, opened her history and began. It was very still in the apartment. No sound at all from Maman in the salon. Of course, Jeanne and Isabelle were both across the landing in the other kitchen, doing the work as they always were unless Maman expected callers.

Marise leaned over her table and concentrated with all her might on the rôle played by Colbert in the economic organization of the seventeenth century. She was trying to memorize the outline of his introduction of sounder account-keeping in government administration, when all at once, there in her mind, instead of Louis XIV and his court, was the picture of Maman standing beside the window, looking out. If Marise were now to step quickly into the salon, would she again find Maman...?

Marise tossed her head angrily at the possibility of her doing such a sneaky thing as to go to see.... Like some nasty idea of Jeanne's that was! She drew her history closer to her, changed her position and went on studying. "Colbert a souvent répété que c'est par le commerce qu'un pays s'enrichit...."

Although she had not meant to, she started up and went to the window, opening the heavy curtains a tiny crack, to look out.

Yes, he was still there, two hours after they had left him. He had not even gone home for dinner. But old Madeleine, the flower seller must have passed by on her way home, after shutting up her flower-stand, for now he had a white rose bud in his hands, looking down at it fixedly, turning it about between his fingers, once in a while touching a petal delicately, or holding it up to draw in its fragrance.

Marise pulled the curtain shut, and hurried back to the improvement of the French army from 1680 on. She felt very miserable, as though she'd eaten something she ought not to ... was it a headache? She had heard ladies talk so much about headaches, and had never had one. Yes, it must be a headache. That was it, her first headache. By thinking about it she felt it very distinctly now in the back of her head—like a great weight there drawing her head back. She tried to think of Colbert; she looked hard at the familiar picture of Colbert rubbing his hands in glee over all the work piled up on his desk, but what she saw was Maman standing at one side of the window looking out. Was that Maman she heard moving about in the salon?

What time was it? Wasn't it time for her to go to bed? The soapy dark green clock on her mantel piece showed only half past eight. Too early. She started at a sudden sound, her hand beginning to tremble. The door-bell rang. Jeanne and Isabelle were both on the other side of the landing and would not hear. She listened, her hands and feet cold, heard Maman go to the door herself and Jean-Pierre Garnier's voice asking if Monsieur and Madame and Mademoiselle Allen were at home. Maman laughed and said that Monsieur was away on business and Mademoiselle was, of course, busy with her lessons, but Madame was there!

Marise heard Mme. Garnier's son also laugh nervously and say that he would come in for a moment to pay his respects to Madame. They both spoke English, which Jean-Pierre had learned so well in New York. Well, why not? In America anybody might happen to make an evening call at half past eight. And Mme. Garnier's son had just been in America. Heavens! How her head ached! She would go to bed anyway, whether it was time or not. She undressed rapidly and getting into bed pulled the covers over her head. It seemed to her that she lay thus for ages, her eyes pinched shut in the smothering air under the blankets. Then she pulled them down to breathe and found that she had forgotten to put out her candle, which was guttering low and showing by the clock that her "ages" had been less than an hour. It was twenty minutes past nine.

She blew out her candle, and decided that Jeanne or no Jeanne, she must have more air. She was suffocating. She drew the curtains aside and secure in the darkness of the room, opened both sides of the window wide. The fresh air came in like waking up from a nightmare.

But she had not waked up, for there on the bench across the street was Mme. Garnier's son again. Had she dreamed that he had come to the door? How strangely he sat now, flung down sideways, his face hidden on his arm. As Marise stared, understanding nothing of what she saw, he started up spasmodically as though some one had struck him from behind. Then he collapsed again, his face buried on his out-flung arm. After this he was perfectly motionless, like everything around him, the somber wall of the Château Vieux, the sickly light of the street-lamp, the bench, the rough paving-stones, the vacant, gray shutters of the department store further along the street.

As Marise stood there, shivering in her night-gown, staring, she heard Maman's quick light step at the other end of the corridor, and the sound of Maman's voice, humming a little trilling song. She turned her head, and saw the cheerful yellow flicker of a candle coming nearer her open door. Maman was going down to her dressing-room to get ready for bed. She thought of course that Marise was in bed and asleep by this time and when she came by, looking down at the lighted candle in the pretty little gilt candle-stick she did not even glance into the dark room where the child stood bewildered. For the instant she was framed in the square of the open door, she was brilliantly painted on the darkness, all the bright colors of her fair hair, her shining eyes, her red lips, softly gleaming in the warm, golden light of the little flame. The picture was printed indelibly on the child's wide eyes sensitized by the darkness; and long after the sound of the gay little song had died away, long years after the sound of the light footstep was silent, Marise could see, hung on the blackness around her bed at night, the shining picture, golden-bright in the quivering, living flame of the candle, the dense waxy petals of the camellia against the vaporous blonde hair, the smiling curved lips, the velvet white of the slender bare neck and arms, the rich sheen of the mauve satin flowing about the quick, light feet.

She got into bed warmed, comforted. Nothing could be the matter if Maman was smiling so cheerfully. She fell asleep at once, desperately tired, giving up as an unanswerable and no longer very interesting riddle, the question of what was the trouble with Mme. Garnier's son.

But in the night, without knowing how, she found herself once more by the open window—she had been dreaming, she had got up to see about something in her dream—something about ... why, there he was still on the bench, all huddled and stooped together now, his face hidden in both arms crossed on his knees. Perhaps he had dropped asleep there. Br-r-r-r! he would be cold when he woke up. How chilly it still was at night! Well, yes, it was evident that she had dreamed it about his ringing at the door. She plunged back under the covers, she heard the long sonorous hoot of a steamer going out to sea, and was asleep before it died away.

She overslept in the morning, so that Jeanne, when she came with the tray, ran to shake her and said she must hurry to dress or she would be late to school. Marise sprang up, thinking of nothing but the reprimand she risked, and flung on her clothes, stopping to bite off big mouthfuls of the buttered croissants and drink big swallows of the café-au-lait. Jeanne buttoned her behind while she brushed furiously at her hair. "Where are my books? Oh, never mind that last hook, it'll never show. Oh, just once without my gloves! No I don't need my coat, the sun is so warm." She ran out to the corridor, snatched her hat, and, her teeth set in the last morsel of her bread, darted down the hall, Jeanne galloping stiffly behind her, as anxious as she over the possibility of being late.

But at the outer door, she paused, one hand on the knob, something imperatively urging her to return. What had she seen as she passed the open door of the salon? Just the every morning scene, Isabelle with her head tied up in a cloth, a brush-broom in her hand, all the windows wide open, the rugs hanging over the sills, the sun streaming in with the particular clean fresh brilliance it always seemed to have early in the morning, while the room was still empty of life. How could there have been anything threatening about that familiar sight? It was Isabelle's face. She had been standing perfectly still, the long handle of her brush-broom held under one arm, looking down with a puzzled expression at something she held in her hand.

Marise had wheeled so instantly in answer to the vague warning of danger, that she was back at the door of the salon, before Isabelle's position had changed. She still stood there, looking down at a wilted, white rose-bud. And now her face was suspicious as well as puzzled. Glancing up she said meaningly to Jeanne, over Marise's shoulder, "Now, where do you suppose this came from? I found it on the floor by the sofa! There were no roses brought into the house by any one we saw yesterday!"

Jeanne thrust her long stringy neck forward, and passed her head over Marise's shoulder to verify the fact. Marise could see the glitter in her eye. Marise cried out instantly, "Oh, my poor rose! That's where it was! I looked for it everywhere last night to put it in water."

Jeanne and Isabelle turned their eyes on her penetratingly. She held them energetically at bay, hardening her gaze, defying them.

"I didn't see you have any rose yesterday," said Jeanne. But Marise knew by the tone of her voice that she was not sure.

"Well, I did," she repeated, "Gabrielle Meunier gave it to me out of her bouquet. Oh, I'm so sorry it's spoiled."

"I believe you, that it's spoiled," said Isabelle carelessly, dropping it into the dustpan. "Somebody must have stepped on it to crush it like that."

Her interest in it was gone. She began to hum her favorite dance-tune, "jig-jig, pr-r-rt!" and to shake out a rug.

Marise fled down the slippery waxed stairway, three steps at a time, and dashed out on the street, Jeanne, purple-faced and panting, close at her heels. How she hurried, how breathlessly she hurried that morning; but a thought inside her head doggedly kept pace with her hurry.

CHAPTER XIX

I

Now that she was in an advanced class, she stayed all day in the school and convent, taking her lunch with the "internats" in the refectory. So that it was always six o'clock before Jeanne came for her, with the first, thin twilight beginning to fall bluely in the narrow, dark streets, and sunset colors glimmering from the oily surface of the Adour. That evening when Jeanne came for her, she said that Maman had decided to go back for a day or two to Saint Sauveur for the sake of the change of air and to try the baths again. Jeanne never permitted herself the slightest overt criticism of her mistress in talking to Marise, but she had a whole gamut of intonations and inflections which Marise understood perfectly and hated—hated especially because there was nothing there to quarrel with Jeanne about. Jeanne had told her the news in the most correct and colorless words, but what she had really said was, "Just another of her idle notions, gadding off for more sulphur baths. Nothing in the world the matter with her. And it's much too early for the Saint Sauveur season."

Marise could resent such intimations, although Jeanne was too adroit to give her grounds for open reproach. She had her own gamut of expression and attitudes, with which to punish the old woman. She immediately stopped chattering, looked coldly offended, and walked beside Jeanne, her face averted from her, out towards the street, now crowded with two-wheeled ox-wagons, and donkeys, and men with push-carts starting back into the country after market day. She could feel that she was making Jeanne suffer and she was glad of it.

As she kept her eyes steadily turned through the tangle of traffic across to the sidewalk on the other side, not more than ten feet away, so narrow was the street, she caught sight of Mme. Garnier's son. He had a small valise in his hand, and was idling along as though he were waiting for something. As she looked, their eyes met. He looked at her hard, and crossed the street towards her. He came swiftly now, as if, all of a sudden, he were in a great hurry. How oddly he was staring at her! Not as though he recognized her, as though he took her for somebody else. Oh, perhaps he wasn't looking at her at all! Perhaps there was somebody behind them, at whom he was staring so hard. The tall school-girl jerked her head around for a quick glance over her shoulder. But there was nobody else on the sidewalk!

The young man had come up to them now, had taken off his hat and stood there, bowing. How white that bluish light made people look! Marise and Jeanne slackened their pace for an instant, thinking that he wished to speak to them, but all that he brought out was, "Good evening, Mademoiselle," in a low voice.

They stood for an instant, Marise feeling very awkward, as though she had misunderstood something. Then he put his hat back on, and stooping forward as though he were tired and his valise heavy, hurried on. Marise looked over her shoulder again and saw that he was almost running. But he had plenty of time to catch that train to Lourdes, which was the only one due to leave Bayonne that evening.

Jeanne's turn had come, in the little guerilla skirmish between Marise and herself. "Don't turn around in the street that way!" she cried in a shocked tone. "Haven't you any sense of what is proper? Don't you know if you turn around like that, just after a young man has passed you, he is likely to think that you are looking after him!" She had no idea that Marise was really guilty of such a heinous misdemeanor, and had only snatched the phrase up as a weapon.

II

That night Jeanne rolled the little fold-up cot-bed in across the landing and setting it up in Marise's room, slept there beside her. This was what they had done before, when Maman was at Saint Sauveur, on the nights when Father had to be away too. Isabelle hadn't the slightest intention of sleeping over on the other side by herself, and she always came too, bringing her own sheets to put on Maman's bed. She remarked that she couldn't afford to have it said of her that she had spent the night in the apartment without another woman with her. Marise did not see in the least why any one should object to having this said of her, but the tone of Isabelle's voice as she spoke, and the fact that it had something to do with passing the night warned her off from asking any explanation. She had already gleaned from many sources, in and out of books, that there was something about accounting for where you were at night, about which she didn't want to have Jeanne and Isabelle talk. So she began to sing a new satirical verse to the air of "Maman, les petits bateaux" which one of the girls had made up that day.

Everything went exactly as usual the next morning, the absence of the mistress of the house not making the faintest difference. Jeanne and Isabelle went through their usual domestic ritual in exactly the same order, whether Madame told them or not. Indeed, whatever she might tell them, they changed no slightest tittle of what they did, as she had long ago found out. Jeanne brought in the breakfast tray, and did Marise's hair as usual, and although not a soul had stepped into the salon since the day before, Isabelle was skating back and forth on the waxed floor, woolen cloths on her feet, when Marise passed the door. Outside it was a breathless still day, with a hazy sun, very hot for so early in the spring.

As they crossed the Adour, Marise caught the first whiff of its summer smell, compounded of decaying sea-weed, tar and stale fish. She and Jeanne said little, although they had wordlessly made up their tiff the evening before, and had gone to sleep after exchanging their usual hearty good-night kisses. Their quarrels although frequent never lasted long.

Everybody at school was dull, too, from the first heat. The hours seemed very long, with little in them. Marise felt listless and rather cross, and dreaded the exertion of taking her music lesson, although she usually looked forward eagerly to those hours with Mlle. Hasparren, the best and happiest of her days.

At four o'clock the music-teacher called to take her home. She also was hot and tired and fearfully nervous, she said, after a terribly trying day in her class-room, with her forty-five squirming little Basques. As a rule she and Marise had a good deal to say to each other, because Mlle. Hasparren was the only person Marise knew who had any interest in America. The rest never spoke of it, or if by chance they did, they only asked about buffaloes and Indians, and evidently didn't believe her when she said she'd never seen either. But Mlle. Hasparren knew better, and loved to talk about it, and actually knew the difference between the Civil War and the Revolution, and had heard of Abraham Lincoln and thought he was a greater man than Napoleon! Marise, who was reading a great deal of Victor Hugo, hardly knew whether to agree with this startling idea or not, but she felt when she was with Mlle. Hasparren, that it was safe to open many doors which she usually kept locked, and to talk with her about things she never dreamed of mentioning to anybody else. Which did not, of course, at all prevent her from wishing to goodness Mlle. Hasparren didn't wear such fearful hats, and that her skirts would hang better.

But this hot day of early spring, she thought neither of America or of hats, as she plodded silently beside the equally weary school-teacher, through the dusty stone streets. The depression which had hung over her all day deepened till she felt ready to cry. Wherever she looked she saw Maman standing in that stealthy attitude, looking out of the window. Mlle. Hasparren's worn, swarthy face, under her home-made hat, was plainer than usual.

Isabelle let them in to the empty salon, with her usual air of being cheered up to have something happen, and bustlingly arranged two seats before the piano. Mlle. Hasparren took off her hat and pushed her fingers through her graying hair. Marise fumbled among the music on the piano and pulled out what they were working on, the Toccata in D minor. She flattened it out with both hands on the music-rack above the keys, and sat down. She raised her fingers, made sure of the notes of the first twiddle, and began to play.

She had not wished to take this music-lesson. She had been hot and listless and tired; with a secret heartache and a dread like a black shadow on her heart. She had sat down before a great black varnished wooden box and,—detached, indifferent, pre-occupied, had set her fingers to pushing first one and then another bit of wood covered with white bone.

And what happened?

Out of the black, varnished box, like the mighty genii of the Arabian Nights, soared something beautiful and strong, something that filled the dreary, empty salon and her heavy heart with sonorous life, something which like the genii put its greatness at the service of the being who knew the charm to free it from imprisonment.

"Stronger there, as you come up from the bass," said Mlle. Hasparren, and Marise knew from her voice that she too was soaring up. And yet, although she sounded no longer dull and weary, but strong and joyful, she abated nothing of her exacting rigor. "No, don't blur it because you make it louder. Don't lean on the pedal. Clean power of stroke, that's the thing for Bach. Now try again. Roll it up from that lowest note, like a mid-ocean wave."

She listened, all her personality concentrated on her hearing, her head turned sideways, her eyes fixed on a point in the very far distance. With all her intelligence she listened, and when the immature intelligence of the pupil faltered or failed, she came swiftly to the rescue. "No, take care! you're losing yourself in that passage. You're playing each note correctly but you haven't the sense of the whole thing. There's a rhythmic progression there that starts four measures back, and doesn't end till you swing into those chords. Don't lose your way in what is only a little ornamentation of the line. See, to here—all that is half of the rhythmic figure, and here it is repeated in the bass. Now again! Read it so the meaning comes out."

The nimble flexible young fingers went flying at the passage again, guided and informed by the ripe soundness of the older mind, and from a passage which Marise had physically mastered as mechanically as she would an exercise, she heard the master-voice speak out again.

Her teacher leaned forward beside her, working as hard as Marise, although she did not touch the keys. Four years of incessant work together had made them almost like one mind. From time to time, they wiped the perspiration away from their foreheads with a hasty pass of their handkerchiefs, Mlle. Hasparren's gesture as hurried as Marise's.

"Pearly in the treble—clear, clear—try that bar of triplets again. Again! Again! Once more! There, now start at the double bar—like running water. No, not so much shading, ugh! no, that's not classic, let it speak for itself! You don't need to use those theatrical swells and die-aways here. You're not playing Gounod. Start that movement over again. Every note's a pearl, remember, string them together in a necklace. Don't jumble them in a heap."

They were still at it, laboring like slaves, putting their backs into it like ditch-diggers, exalted as young-eyed cherubim, when Jeanne came discreetly to the door to look in on them. This was her decorous method of intimating that she was about to put Marise's dinner on the table.

"Oh, là! là!" cried Mlle. Hasparren, "is it as late as that? And my sister told me to be sure to start early enough to buy some salad for our supper." She slammed on her hat, took her bag, and darted away.

Marise got up, feeling numb, flung her arms high over her head, and stretched herself like a cat, although she knew that like any other vigorous and forthright bodily gesture this would call down a reproof from Jeanne as not being "convenable." But she did not care what Jeanne said to her. She did not care about anything in the world but the deep-rolling waves of rhythm, and the clear tinkling rain of pearls which went on and on in her head as she ate her solitary dinner, and studied her lessons in her solitary room afterwards.

When Jeanne came to set up her bed for the night, she remarked "What a horrid sticky hot day it has been!"

"Has it?" asked Marise, in genuine forgetfulness of the weather. Also, caught up into another world as she was, she forgot for an hour or two all about the white rose-bud.

III

But she was reminded of it as she opened her eyes the next morning. It was her fifteenth birthday and to celebrate it, Jeanne had already been out to the market and brought home a great bouquet of white rose-buds. She was loitering around, pretending to pick up the room, but really waiting to hear what Marise would say, so of course Marise must conquer the nausea that white rose-buds gave her and exclaim that they were lovely, and kiss Jeanne and thank her and lean over them and smell them rapturously. What a lot of this sort of thing there was to do, Marise thought, if you didn't want to hurt people's feelings, or let them suspect things you didn't want them to know.

Jeanne tried to restrain herself to decorum, but her overwhelming jealousy of any one else who touched Marise's life was too much for her, "They're nicer than that one wilted old thing Gabrielle Meunier gave you, hein?" Marise understood then why Jeanne had chosen white rose-buds. Down below the surface where she kept her real feelings she heard a sick sort of laugh. What she said was, with fervor, "Oh, yes, Jeanne, a thousand times better!" (You might as well make it a thousand times while you were about it.)

"Well, I should hope so!" said Jeanne, satisfied at last.

That morning when Marise stepped into the courtyard at school a group of older girls had their heads together over a newspaper, and when they saw her, they all started. Elise Fortier rolled the paper up rapidly and put it in her leather portfolio with her school-books. They looked at her very oddly. Four years ago, Marise would have run up to them, demanding, "What's the matter? What makes you look so funny? What is it in the paper?" That was before she became aware of any mire in the world, invisible, wide-spreading, into which almost any casual inquiry seemed likely to plunge you. Marise knew what it was to have some of that indelibly staining mire splashed upon her, from a look, an intonation or a phrase that meaningly expressed much more than it said. She walked with a desperate wariness now, trying to pick her way dry-shod, in the dark. So that morning she was only afraid that the girls would tell her what it was they had found in the paper that made them look so. She pretended that she had seen nothing, ran up to them with a funny story to tell, and went at once to hang up her wraps in the hall outside the class-room door. Sister Ste. Julie passed her and said, "Good-morning, my child." It seemed to Marise that she too looked queerly at her. She reached her hand over her shoulder to make sure her dress was hooked, and felt of the ribbon in her hair. No mirrors were allowed inside the school and convent walls, or she would have stepped to look in one to see what was wrong.

At eleven o'clock while the class in advanced geography was reciting, the street bell rang. Sister Ste. Marie went to answer, and came back to say that Mlle. Allen was wanted. Her maman was ill, and the bonne had come for her. All the girls turned instantly and looked at her without surprise, as though they had been expecting this. Marise started up, suddenly very pale, put on her wraps in a great hurry and ran to where Jeanne was waiting for her. Jeanne looked just as usual, although everything else seemed to have changed in an instant and to look threateningly upon Marise.

"Your maman is home from the baths," said Jeanne, as though she were saying something she had made up to say beforehand, "and she doesn't feel very well. Since Monsieur is not here, I thought we would better come and get you."

Marise seized Jeanne's arm and dug her fingers deep into it, "Jeanne ... Jeanne ... nothing's happened ... Maman's not...."

Jeanne said with the very accent of truth, "No, no, no. Madame is not dead—never fear, my darling. She is only very ... nervous." She said it with the very accent of truth, but Marise knew perfectly well that Jeanne could say anything she pleased with that accent. She never believed a thing Jeanne said unless she knew it already.

But in spite of herself she was relieved from her first wild panic. Nothing so very bad could have happened, with Jeanne standing there, carved out of brown wood, just as usual. They began to hurry up the narrow short-cut by the market, and Jeanne told her a little more. Maman had come back by the first train. She must have taken the afternoon train down from Saint Sauveur to Lourdes, and have waited hours in the station at Lourdes, till the west-bound train from Toulouse came along. And she had come in, perfectly worn out, staggering, and pushed right by Isabelle to go to her room. And she had locked the door, and wouldn't answer when they knocked, and wouldn't open when they brought a tray with some food, only called out to them in a queer hoarse voice to go get Sœur Ste. Lucie. And they could hear her crying and sobbing, so they had sent Anna Etchergary to get the nun, and she, Jeanne, had come of her own idea to get Marise.

Marise read into this Jeanne's dislike of the nun and her usual suspicious idea about poor Maman that it was all just some new notion of hers. But she also felt that the old woman had had a real fright and she walked faster and faster.

The door on the landing was ajar, and inside the hall they saw a tall old monk, his bare feet in sandals, his bald head bowed over his clasped hands, his lips moving in prayer. When he saw the girl and the old servant, he made way for them to pass, and without interrupting his prayers, motioned them to enter. His gesture was so imperious that without a word they tip-toed in past him. Isabelle, her eyes wide, and not as red-faced as usual, was standing uncertainly in the door of the salon, her apron up to her lips, looking scared, "Sœur Ste. Lucie has gone in to Madame," she said to Jeanne in a whisper. "She said you and Mademoiselle were to go to Mademoiselle's room and wait until she came."

Jeanne inquired wildly with a silent jerk of the head who in the world was the monk who stood praying before Madame's closed door; and Isabelle answered with a desperate rolling of her eyes that she had no more idea of that than Jeanne.

They all went down the corridor on tip-toes, to Marise's room, where automatically Marise took off her hat and coat. She saw to her amazement that Jeanne had dropped down on the crimson quilt on the bed. Nothing that had happened had startled Marise so much as to see this.

Almost at once Sœur Ste. Lucie entered, and coming up to Marise put her arms around her and kissed her very tenderly. Then she turned and motioned the two servants out of the room, "I must speak to Mlle. Marise alone," she said. Isabelle was only too glad to go, but Jeanne looked furious and stood for a moment with darkened face, lowering down on the nun, as if she were on the point of defying her. But she finally thought better of it, and followed Isabelle out.

Sœur Ste. Lucie stood in the open door till they were both well down the corridor. Then she shut it carefully and came back to Marise whose heart was beating wildly and whose knees were shaking under her. Sœur Ste. Lucie sat down, and made Marise sit down, holding both the child's cold hands in her soft, kind, old fingers. "Dear child, there are times in every life when we must ask God for courage. Your mother is not sick or hurt, but she needs all your prayers. She has had a terrible shock, a dreadful tragedy that took place before her eyes, and she will need all the help our Holy Mother can give her, to recover her calm. It seems that——" Sœur Ste. Lucie stopped an instant, as if to consider how to put what she had to say, and changed the form, "Your dear mother was in Saint Sauveur, and by chance a person from Bayonne passed through, whom your dear mother knew. And it seems they went out to walk together, as any one might, and descended the paths and steps, that lead visitors down the face of the Gavarnie Gorge, towards the place arranged so that tourists can look up at the arch of the great bridge. And then—nobody knows just what happened—the water was very high and violent, the other person must have slipped and fallen in, and was instantly killed by being flung by the current against a great rock. Your dear mother saw it, and sensitive and high-strung as she is, it ... it slightly unhinged her. She said a great many wild things...." Sœur Ste. Lucie stopped, drew a long breath and began again. Nothing that she had said had made the slightest impression on Marise. It sounded far off, as though Sœur Ste. Lucie were reading something out of a book. Marise could not seem to put her mind on it, and when she did, she could not understand it.

Sœur Ste. Lucie went on, "But by the mercy of God, I had just written her that the holy Father Elie was once more here; and after they had got the body out of the water and carried it to the hotel they—your mother remembered about Father Elie and turning in her trouble to the only source of strength, she—your mother wishes to make a retreat for a few days at our convent, and I am sure that it is much the best thing for her to do. It is a shelter for her—Father Elie is with her now, I have sent for a carriage...."

"Oh, but can't I see her? Can't I kiss her good-by? How long will she be away?" cried Marise wildly, starting from the fascinated immobility in which she had gazed at the nun's face.

Sœur Ste. Lucie laid a quieting hand on her shoulder, her kind old face yearning over the child. "Dear little Marise, I think it will be better for your mother not to see you, or any one just now. She needs quiet, perfect quiet."

Marise looked at her hard. She had no idea whether she was being told the truth, or only some kind invention which they thought suitable for her to hear. "Can't I go to see her at the Convent?" she asked in a whisper, giving up the first point.

"Oh, yes, yes, my darling, any time ... only a little later, when your mother is calmer." Sœur Ste. Lucie's face shone suddenly, radiantly, "God uses all means to His great ends," she said fervently. "This may be the means of giving your dear mother in the end, the holy peace of faith."

She looked so serenely trusting and hopeful that Marise felt comforted, "I'll do just as you say, dear Sœur," she said in a trembling voice.

Sœur Ste. Lucie drew a long breath, as though she had been steering a difficult course. She kissed Marise again, told her to stay in her room for the time being, to say her prayers, not to worry, her Maman would soon be all right, and probably happier than she had ever been in her life. All this might open the door to salvation for her.

She left Marise standing in the middle of the floor, and closed the door carefully behind her. But not so carefully that Marise could not, a moment later, hear Maman crying and crying and crying as she went down the hall and out of the door. Marise began to tremble and cry at the sound. She ran to her window, and saw down below, Maman, her hands over her face, with Sœur Ste. Lucie's arm around her, the tall old monk on the other side, cross the sidewalk and get into the carriage.

As the carriage rolled away the weeping child at the window remembered that Sœur Ste. Lucie had not mentioned who the person from Bayonne was who had been killed. Well, what did Marise care who it was!

CHAPTER XX

It occurred to Marise, and the idea of a responsibility dried her tears with a start, that she ought to get word somehow to Papa. Her heart sprang up to think that perhaps if he knew Maman was so upset he would come back at once. She did want somebody so much, beside Jeanne and Isabelle.

But she never knew Papa's address when he was away on business. Perhaps there was something on Maman's writing-desk. She went quickly into the salon, drew aside the curtains which shut off the writing-desk's alcove from the salon, and began rather helplessly to fumble among Maman's papers and novels. There were very few letters of any sort. Maman didn't keep up her correspondence with America very much. Jeanne had heard Marise moving and through the alcove curtains Marise saw her now come into the salon with a basin of water in her hand, pretending that she needed to water a plant. Marise remembered that she must as usual arrange something to present to Jeanne that would not reflect on Maman's fancifulness. But perhaps Sœur Ste. Lucie had told her something. She inquired cautiously but Jeanne said stiffly, still outraged at having been shut out of the room, that she knew nothing. Everything about her except her words, said forcibly that she cared less, and that all this foolishness was a part of the usual nonsense.

"Oh, Jeanne, a terrible thing has happened to poor Maman—she saw somebody swept away in the Gavarnie and killed right before her eyes, and it's upset her fearfully."

Jeanne's sulkiness vanished in the delight of her kind at having any inside information about a violent death or a scandal. Marise remembered how absorbed and excited Jeanne had been when somebody in the apartment overhead had taken an over-dose of morphine and how proud she had been to have everybody in the market stop to ask her details.

"Killed?" said Jeanne with a greedy eagerness, her eyes shining, "how killed? Drowned? or knocked against the rocks? Man? or woman? Have they got the body out?"

Marise did not, as a rule, enjoy Jeanne's interest in murders and deaths and kidnappings, but this time she welcomed it and passed on to the old woman all she could remember of what Sœur Ste. Lucie had told her. Jeanne was much disappointed that Marise had not heard the name of the dead person, but Marise promised to tell her as soon as the paper was out, the next morning, since it would probably be printed. And with the mention, there came back to her, with one of those sickening lurches, the recollection of the girls putting their heads together over the newspaper at school, and then looking at her so oddly and hiding it away. "It was probably in this morning's paper," she said to Jeanne. "If you'll get it, I'll read it to you."

But Jeanne came back in a moment with an astonished face, saying that Isabelle reported that, of all queer things, Mlle. Hasparren, the music-teacher had stopped in that morning and asked to borrow the paper. Jeanne's astonishment never on any occasion remained more than an instant untinged with suspicion, and Marise, who knew the old face so well, saw the suspicious expression begin slowly to color the surprise. "What in the name of God did the Hasparren want with our newspaper?" she asked herself aloud, obviously snuffing around a new scent. Marise hated Jeanne's face when it looked like that,—crafty and zestful, as though she were licking her chops over a nasty smell.

They were still standing in the alcove, beside the writing-desk when the door-bell rang. Jeanne turned to go, heard Isabelle open, and standing between the half-open curtains turned her head to listen. Marise heard nothing but a man's voice, and Isabelle answering, "Oui Monsieur, oui Monsieur, oui Monsieur." But Jeanne started, stiffened, and darting on tip-toe to the door, looked around the corner. The door shut, steps were heard at the other end of the long hallway. Isabelle was evidently bringing the visitor to the salon. Jeanne looked around wildly at Marise, her face suddenly the color of lead, her eyes panic-struck. The steps were nearer, there seemed to be more than one man. Jeanne ran back, pushed Marise into the chair in the corner of the alcove, motioning her violently but without a sound, to keep perfect silence, and noiselessly drew the curtains together before the alcove. Marise heard her step quickly back to the stand where the plant stood and the click of her tin basin against the earthen-ware of the pot. And then she heard her say in exactly her usual voice, only with a little surprise, "Good-day, Messieurs, what can I do for you?"

"We have been sent," said a man's deep voice and not a "monsieur" but a common sort of man, Marise could tell by his accent and intonation, "to see and question Madame Allen." Jeanne evidently went through some pantomime of astonishment for he explained, "a part of the inquest over the death of M. Jean-Pierre Garnier, but the maid tells me she is already not here."

Jeanne answered, and if she caught her breath or flinched, there was not the smallest external sign of it, "No, M. l'Inspecteur, our poor lady was so terribly upset over seeing such an awful thing, that the doctor has just sent her for a few quiet days' retreat at the Holy Ghost Convent. What a terrible thing, to be sure, M. l'Inspecteur."

The man answered wearily, "Eh bien, we shall have to see her, retreat or no retreat. We have the blanks to fill out by all witnesses, and she is the only witness. This is the inspecteur from St. Sauveur."

"Oh, the poor lady is in no state to be questioned," said Jeanne with an affectionate warmth in her voice. "She is as tender-hearted as a child, and besides had been a great invalid. She took the whole course of baths at Saint Sauveur last season, and was starting in again."

"Oh," said the man as if surprised, "she had been at Saint Sauveur before? For the baths?" and then as if speaking to some one else, "it would be harder then, to establish that she was there to meet the young Garnier."

Jeanne seemed so astounded at this idea, that she could scarcely get her breath to protest. "Oh, M. l'Inspecteur, oh! Who ever heard of anything so wild! Is that what people are saying? Oh, why!" she laughed out in her amazement, "she hardly knew him by sight."

"Why," said the man evidently not speaking to Jeanne, "didn't you say that she ran down along the bank of the river, screaming that he had killed himself for her sake?"

"Yes, I said that," answered another man's voice, astonished and on the defense, "and she did too! and when the body was pulled out she flung herself down on it, and shrieked that she wanted to die with him."

Jeanne broke in now, at the top of her voice, calling Heaven and earth and all the saints to witness that she never heard of anything so preposterous in her life, and that anybody in Bayonne could tell them so, and what crazy stories would people be making up next out of whole cloth? "Some one is trying to play a joke on M. l'Inspecteur from Saint Sauveur. Nobody could have heard our Madame say such things, because she couldn't possibly have said them, any more than she could about a clerk who sold her a yard of cloth over the counter. For she didn't know any more about the young man than that! Why, she never knew him except as the son of one of her friends. He never came to the house, and more than that she hadn't even laid eyes on him for more than two years. He had been in America and is only just returned, day before yesterday. Anybody you ask here can tell you that."

"Nom de Dieu!" said the first man's voice in extreme surprise. "Hadn't seen him for two years!"

"No, he hasn't even been in France since he was a little young boy!" The first man laughed as though the joke were on his comrade.

The second man's voice said, still defending himself, but now uncertainly, "Very queer his following her right up there, if he scarcely knew her—what was he doing in Saint Sauveur at this season, I'd like to know, if not...."

"Oh, as to that," said Jeanne carelessly, "I happen to know why he was there. I saw the young monsieur day before yesterday, just as he was about to take the seven o'clock train, valise in hand, and I had a talk with him, our young mademoiselle and I."

"Why, I thought you hardly knew him by sight in this house and he never came here," broke in the second policeman suspiciously.

"I didn't say it was here we saw him," said Jeanne, "and I said it was Madame who hardly knew him. But he is the brother of a little girl classmate of our mademoiselle. They are all children together. Well, every evening at six, except the days when Mademoiselle takes her music lesson, I go to the school to fetch her home, and that afternoon, as we were coming up the rue Port Neuf, we met the young man going towards the station, and when he saw our mademoiselle, he stopped for a moment for a chat, as young folks will. He was in high good spirits and said he was off for a fine business trip to the mountains and expected to have a good time as well as do business, and would be in Cauterets the next morning. Well, you know Cauterets is just over a ridge of the Pyrenees from Saint Sauveur and Mlle. Marise said, 'Why, is not that queer, my maman is at Saint Sauveur just now! Why don't you take the other train at Pierrefitte-Nestalos and run up to Saint Sauveur for half a day and take Maman a message from me, something I forgot to ask her before she left,' and the young man said he had been half planning to go to Saint Sauveur on business anyhow, and to tell him the message and if he saw her maman, he'd repeat it. Only he said, 'I don't believe your maman knows me,' and Mlle. Marise said, 'Well, you tell her you are Danielle's big brother, and she'll know. She knows all about my school-mates,' and the young man asked which sanitarium it was in Luz and Mlle. Marise reminded him, 'No, it's at Saint Sauveur where Maman is,' and told him the name of the sanitarium, and then he said he hoped he'd get a little fishing in the Gavarnie, and I said the water would be too high, and he said he'd go and have a look at it anyway. And then he went along with his valise. Mlle. Marise is at school or you could ask her all about this too."

"Eh bien, my friend from Saint Sauveur!" said the first man's voice, in a rallying tone of jocularity. "This sounds as though some of you country-people must have lost your heads a bit. Come now. Did you yourself hear her, saying all that?"

"No, of course I didn't," said the other man stiffly, "I was in the office at Luz. How could I know anything was happening? But the men who got the body out said she was awful to hear."

"Oh, I don't doubt," agreed Jeanne, "that she was. Any woman would have been driven half crazy by such an awful thing, the only son of a friend, killed before your eyes. And she is terribly nervous into the bargain, the least little thing sends her off into hysteria. Some nights I have to rub her back until eleven o'clock to quiet her. And the doctor has warned her against the least excitement. Why, two days ago there was an important prize-contest at our mademoiselle's school and the poor woman, although she would have given anything to go, was forbidden by the doctor. He said the excitement would be too much for her, and she would feel it so if her daughter were defeated. You can ask any one whether she was there! And that evening, although Mlle. Marise had won the prize, she was so worked up, I had to give her a sleeping draught to get her a little rest, poor thing...."

"Were they sure of what she said?" asked the first man of the other. "Would they swear to it?"

"I don't see how anybody could hear anything!" put in Jeanne. "In ordinary weather the gave of Gavarnie makes such a noise down there in that gorge, you can't hear your own voice even if you yell. I remember last summer when Madame was taking the cure, when we went to see her ... and now in flood...."

"They'd certainly swear to her being in a terrible state of agitation," said the other in a rather nettled tone. He went on, "You saw for yourself what was put in the paper about it this morning, how they had met there by design and spent the night together at the hotel and all."

"You won't get far in an inquest, my young friend, if you take what a newspaper says. Newspapers are always wrong," said the first man pityingly, in a tone of experienced scepticism. "If this happened at ten in the morning, they can't have been together more than an hour. If he was seen here in Bayonne at six o'clock the evening before, he couldn't possibly have reached Saint Sauveur before nine the next morning. You know you wait three or four hours for the connection at Lourdes. To my mind there's nothing in it. I will take you to the convent to see her, if you insist, but I have no liking for scenes with hysteric women."

"Oh, messieurs!" said Jeanne shocked at the idea, "you couldn't possibly expect to see her now! Not for a week, at least, the doctor said."

"A week!" cried the second voice, dismayed, "sacrebleu, I can't kick my heels for a week, waiting."

"Well, suppose we go through the usual routine?" suggested the other. "Go to see the family of the young man, and if they confirm all this ... there's no use going further. There is plenty of time for you to get all the facts you need for your report, and catch the one o'clock train back to Saint Sauveur."

Jeanne said now jocularly, with a change of manner to the intimate knowing tone of a servant-girl speaking to a policeman, "If you're not in a hurry, you must stay to have a glass in honor of the house. We have an excellent white wine, and the patron never counts the bottles."

Marise heard her lead them down the hall and across the landing to the dining-room, and then in an instant heard her come back and run on tip-toe up the hall. She thrust her head through the curtains, showing a haggard gray face, glistening with sweat, and whispered, "Don't move, don't speak to a soul till I get back. I must see the Garniers before they do."

Even without this, Marise would have been incapable of moving hand or foot. Half an hour later, she was sitting in exactly the same position frozen and deathly sick, when Jeanne let herself in cautiously. From the gust of sounds that came in from across the landing, as the door was opened, the two policemen seemed to be greatly enjoying both Isabelle and the white wine.

Then Jeanne shut the door on the loud voices and laughter; and in their place Marise heard the sound of dreadful hoarse gasps as Jeanne tried to get her breath after running. It did not sound like the breathing of a human being, but like that of some large animal, like a horse or cow, exhausted and panting.

Jeanne came up the hall, fighting thus for her breath, and dragging her feet. She shuffled heavily into the salon, and across to the closed curtains, where locked in her nightmare, the child waited for some one to come to the rescue.

The old woman drew the curtain a little aside. Marise caught one glimpse of her face, now swollen and darkly congested. She saw that Jeanne was nodding reassuringly at her; she heard Jeanne say in a whisper, "They understood, it's all right, they...." Then, without the slightest warning, she turned to one side and fell headlong inside the curtains.

For an instant she lay as if dead, her ghastly face at Marise's feet. But almost at once she opened her eyes and tried to smile and to speak. Only a guttural sound came from her lips. A look of terrible anxiety came into her face. She motioned with one hand passionately, that the curtain should be drawn shut to conceal her.

Marise, frightened out of her palsy, was kneeling by her sobbing, "Jeanne, Jeanne."

She thought of what Jeanne had done for her mother, and flinging her arms around her as she lay, she kissed her furiously, the tears coming in a flood and pouring down on the dreadful face, now strangely twisted to one side. Jeanne put one arm around her, and tried again to say something. But her tongue moved senselessly in her distorted mouth; the sweat stood out on her forehead as she struggled to speak.

Finally she gave up her desperate attempt, and put her finger to her lips, exhorting Marise to silence. Such a wildness of apprehension was in her eyes, that the girl muffled her sobs, hiding her face on the inert breast, clinging with all her might to the half-dead body.

She thought that Jeanne was dying. She thought that she herself was dying. She longed to die, there, that instant, and escape the shame and sorrow and misery that buried her so deep, so much deeper even than Jeanne knew.

The sound of laughter and voices chimed out merrily again. Isabelle had opened the other door. Marise held her breath, her face buried on Jeanne's breast. The old woman tightened the clasp of her arm. They strained their ears.

Then they heard the men's feet clatter down the stairs.

CHAPTER XXI

I

It was Mlle. Hasparren who found them so, Mlle. Hasparren with her shabby coat buttoned crookedly, who ran up the stairs as the sergents de ville went down, who came in without a word of explanation to take charge of things.

She expressed no surprise at finding Marise where she was, nor at Jeanne's condition. She acted as if nothing she found could have surprised her. She lifted Marise up with strong loving arms, led her into her own room and made her lie down with a handkerchief soaked in smelling salts under her nose, and a cold bandage across her forehead, while Isabelle stayed with Jeanne. She did not pet Marise or kiss her, but from all her quiet presence breathed an assurance that she was there to take care of her, and when she said, "I'll stay right here, dear, till your father comes," Marise fell into a fit of quiet thankful weeping that washed away the nervous trembling of her hands and lips. She lay, turned on her side, sobbing, the tears running fast from her eyes, and thought of nothing, except the steady look on Mlle. Hasparren's face. "Now I must leave you here, dear child. I will send Isabelle for the doctor, and I will stay with Jeanne."

Presently Mlle. Hasparren came back and sat down again by the bed. She looked perfectly self-possessed and exactly as usual, which gave Marise the most inexpressible comfort. She said that the doctor was there, had seen Jeanne and that she was not dying at all, not likely to, but had simply had a partial stroke of paralysis, such as often happened to people of her age—nothing in the least unusual about it. Jeanne was so old, that any little thing might bring on a stroke of this sort and she had worked so valiantly all her life, she was really older than her age. She and Isabelle and the doctor had got Jeanne undressed and in her own bed, and now she would be all right, only she had made them understand that she wanted to see Marise. The doctor had told her that she mustn't see any one, but she had become so agitated that he thought it best to humor her. "Only, of course, poor thing, she can't say a word that any one can understand. It's just an old woman's whim." Marise thought to herself that it might be more than an old woman's whim, and getting up at once went with Mlle. Hasparren into the room where Jeanne lay on the bed. The doctor was on one side; on the other was Isabelle, half frightened and half delighted with the excitement; a visit from gallant sergents de ville, and from the doctor all in one day!

Jeanne motioned them all out with her one arm, and only when the door had closed after them, did she beckon Marise to her. She did not try to speak now. She only looked at the girl, with a terrible concentration, and put her finger to her lips.

"Do you mean, Jeanne?" whispered Marise, her lips trembling, "that I am not to tell any one?"

Jeanne closed her eyes rapidly in assent.

"Oh, no, no, no," cried the poor child. "Of course not, never, never, never!"

But the old woman was not satisfied. She reached out for Marise's hand and drew her close, her eyes burning in her disfigured face. She struck her lips repeatedly with her fingers, as though, try as she might, she could not express the urgency of her command.

"No one—no one at all?" asked Marise, and then with a gasp, "Not even Papa?"

At this Jeanne's eyes leaped up to a hotter flame of intensity.

"No! no! no!" they cried to Marise. "No!"

Marise thought she understood, and hanging her head she said in a low shamed voice, "Oh, no, of course, I see."

With the words and the acceptance of their meaning which Jeanne's passionate eyes thrust upon her, Marise sank for many years into another plane of feeling and saw all the world in another perspective, very ugly and grim. That was the way Jeanne saw things. With all her immature personality, with the pitiably insufficient weapons of a little girl, Marise had fought not to accept Jeanne's way of seeing things. That had been the real cause of their quarrels. But now the weapons were struck from her hands. Jeanne had been right all the time it seemed. That was the way things really were. Now she knew. With a long breath she admitted her defeat.

"No, specially not Papa," she whispered.

II

It was four o'clock that afternoon. They had had something to eat, talking quietly about indifferent things, and they had found Papa's address in Bordeaux and sent a telegram to him, before Marise thought to ask, "But, Mademoiselle, how is it you can be out of your class-room to-day?" She had often known the teacher to drag herself to work when she was scarcely able to stand, and knew how the stern discipline of her profession frowned on an absence from duty.

"Oh, I arranged this morning to have a substitute come. I heard—I heard your maman was not well, and I knew your papa was not here, and I wasn't sure that any of your maman's friends might be able to come to look out for you."

As a matter of fact, Marise never saw one of her mother's callers again.

That evening, Anna brought up a blue telegram from Papa, which since it had been sent in English, as Papa always insisted on doing, was perfectly unintelligible, reading:

"Com inga nmorninjtrain ta kigo adca rof Maman."

Papa.

Marise who had with Maman puzzled over many other similar telegrams from Papa, made out "morning-train" and that was enough.

The doctor had sent in a nursing sister to take care of Jeanne during the night, and Isabelle had gone off to a tenement near the Porte d'Espagne where some relations of hers lived and had brought back an old cousin to help her with the work and marketing and to sleep with her in the other apartment.

Mlle. Hasparren slept in the folding-bed beside Marise's so that every time Marise, with a great scared start, realized anew that what had happened was not a bad dream, she felt the other's hand reaching for hers in the dark, and holding firm. She said very little and Marise was glad of that, but the clasp of her muscular musician's hand pulled Marise out of the black pit many times that night.

Later on Marise fell into a real sleep, deep and unbroken, and when she woke up, much later than usual, to find Mlle. Hasparren all dressed, the folding-bed put away, the window open and the sunshine coming in, she found that she seemed to have grown stronger since yesterday, that the black pit was not so fathomless. She felt infinitely older and as though she would never laugh again. She lay in bed, looking up at the ceiling, thinking fixedly about what had happened, and found that she could endure it now without crying out or bursting into tears as she had done yesterday. She could stand up under her burden, because there was no other way. But she felt her shoulders bowed and aching with the weight.

Mlle. Hasparren heard her stir in bed, and sensed the awakened quality of the movement. She came to look anxiously down at her. Marise looked back and remembering that, so far as she knew, Mlle. Hasparren knew nothing beyond the surface of the happenings of yesterday and so might expect her to be able to smile, she produced a faint smile.

"I overslept," she said, in order to say something. "Has somebody brought your breakfast?"

"No, I waited for you," answered Mlle. Hasparren. "I'll ring for Isabelle now."

When Isabelle came, very self-important at taking Jeanne's place, she reported that the Sister said Jeanne had passed a very good night and was perfectly comfortable, with no complications. "She says Jeanne may get all over it and be as good as ever. All old people have these seizures, she says," chattered Isabelle, setting down the tray and pouring out Marise's café-au-lait. She was full of her new dignity, and bustled off to give orders to her assistant, leaving Marise and Mlle. Hasparren to eat their breakfast. Mlle. Hasparren did not seem to feel like talking much, and neither did Marise. She was trying to think what it was she was to tell Papa. She must remember now just what it was that everybody was to be told.

An hour later, as they went down the hall, on their way to the station to meet the morning train, they saw the salon as usual at that hour, the chairs pushed about, the rugs hanging over the window-sills, the fresh, clean, new morning sun streaming in through the wide-open windows on the familiar spectacle of Isabelle on her knees, a brush-broom in her hand reaching under the piano for dust. The alcove curtains were drawn back, the cheerful sunshine poured in, glittering on the dark polished wood of the desk, on the yellow-covered books, on the pretty little inlaid chair which stood beside the desk.

Was it only yesterday that Jeanne had flung her into that chair? She stood in the door, as she put on her hat, looking steadily at the alcove. No, that had been somebody else ... a little girl, a lucky, lucky little girl, who had no idea what things were like.

"Come, dear," said Mlle. Hasparren, looking at her watch.

It had been agreed since there were so few trains in and out of Bayonne and since as yet no news had been sent to Jeanne's family, that if Marise's father did come on the train from the north, Mlle. Hasparren would board it as he left it, and go on down to Midassoa to tell the Amigorenas about their mother's illness. "But do tell them, Mademoiselle," Marise said over and over, anxiously, "that we will take care of Jeanne, that we will do everything for her that anybody could, that they needn't worry. I know Papa will see that she's taken care of. I know he will, if I ask him." But really she was not as sure as she said. She did not know Papa so very well, after all. She had very little idea what he would feel or say about anything. And then everything depended on the way things turned out...!

They stood there in the smoky dusk of the station, a long ray of sunshine thick with golden motes striking the ground at their feet. They still said very little, Marise not daring to talk for fear of making a mistake, for fear that she would not remember just what and how much Mlle. Hasparren knew. The music-teacher held the girl's slim fingers close. Marise answered their pressure with a nervous fervor, inexpressibly grateful to the other, loving everything about her from her steady face and kind, shadowed eyes, to her heavy, badly-cut shoes, dusty now, which would be dustier later after they had trudged along the hot white road at Midassoa. Never, so long as she lived, was she able to forget how Mlle. Hasparren had looked to her, when she came quietly into the salon and lifted her up from Jeanne and said in a plain matter-of-fact way as though nothing were the matter but Jeanne's sickness, that they must get a doctor and probably Jeanne wasn't as sick as she looked. She had just taken Marise by the hand and showed her how to go on living ... when it seemed to Marise that she had come to the end.

They heard the train whistle shriekingly in the distance, and the somnolent porters roused themselves. Marise tightened her hold on the strong fingers which held hers. Her heart ached with longing, with confusion. Suppose Papa did not come ... what would she do? But suppose he did ... wouldn't it be impossible not to make mistakes, not to forget what you were to say and what you weren't?

But when the train came in, and Marise saw at the other end of the long platform her father's massive bulk heavily descending from a compartment, and saw his eyes begin to search the crowd for her face, all her confusion melted away in a great burst of relief.... Papa was there, something of her very own in the midst of all those strangers! Her heart almost broke with its release from tension.

And yet before she ran to meet him, she put her arms around the music-teacher and kissed her hard on both swarthy cheeks.

III

Then she ran with all the speed of her long legs, and flung herself upon Papa's broad chest and tried to put her arms around him, as she had around Mile. Hasparren, and began to cry on Papa's great shoulder. How good it was to feel him, to feel him so entirely as Papa always felt! It would not have seemed like Papa if there were not more of him than she could get her arms around.

Her tears, her agitation gave Papa such a turn that he set his satchels down hastily and looking alarmed, shook her a little, and asked what had happened to Maman.

In the hurry and noise and bustle of the crowd it was easier than Marise had feared to get over that first moment when Papa must be told. It all came out straight, just what she had planned to tell him, that nothing had really happened to Maman, she wasn't sick or anything only she had had a terrible nervous shock, had seen somebody killed right before her eyes, and it had pretty nearly driven her wild.

"Oh!" said Papa, evidently relieved, and caring as little as Marise had about the person who had been killed. He picked up his satchels again (by this time the porters at the Bayonne station were resigned to his strange mania for carrying his own hand-baggage), and said, "Well, yes, that's too bad! I remember I saw a brakeman killed once, and it made me pretty sick, too."

They walked out of the station together. Not two minutes had passed since his arrival, and already Marise's joy that he had come, had faded to a frightened sense that he had not come at all, that he was still very far away, that he would never really come, as he used to.

And yet Jeanne had been right of course; whatever else she did, she must not tell Papa.

"When did it happen?" asked Papa now, as they turned the corner and were finally escaped from the last of the clamorous cab-drivers, who had not yet accepted, as the porters had, the eccentricities of the American gentleman.

As they crossed the bridge, Marise told him the version she had prepared, the version Jeanne had presented. She had had a good deal of practice in saying something different from what she thought, and she got through this without any hesitation or mistake. But every word of it set her further away from Papa, raised a wall between them, the wall of things she knew and Papa must never know.

"Well, to be sure," said Papa, when she finished, "you certainly have had goings-on, for sure."

"Oh, Papa," went on Marise earnestly, "you will have Jeanne taken care of! It was when she was working for us, she got her paralysis. Don't you feel we ought to—for always, for always? It was for us...."

"Oh, as to that," said Papa, "anybody of Jeanne's age, who rustles around as Jeanne does, is apt to get a stroke, whether she was working for us or not. It might have happened just as easily in her own home."

Marise's heart went down.

Papa added, with a change of tone, "I don't like her lying very well, but the old woman has been awfully good to you, Molly, awfully good, more like your grandmother than the cook, and I guess we'll see that she's taken care of, all right."

Marise squeezed his arm hard, and said nothing. After all, wall or no wall, Papa was there, good old Papa, so broad and solid, her very own Papa; somebody who, even if he didn't understand much of what went on, would look out for them all, Maman, Jeanne, herself.

IV

Papa went in at once to see Jeanne and told her through Marise—for Jeanne had never learned to understand his brand of French—that he would see that she was well taken care of till she recovered. Jeanne contrived with her one living hand and her eyes, to convey her respectful thanks, and to conceal everything else which Marise knew she must be thinking.

Then Papa wanted to go at once to the convent, and bring Maman home. What had he come back for, if not for that? As a matter of fact, Marise was not very sure why he had come back, or why she had felt it so necessary to get word to him at once. Now that she had had time to think about it, she realized that she dreaded very much having Maman see Papa just now, right after ... after all that. It would have been better for her to have had a little time to get over it, and like Marise, to think what to say.

But, of course, this was one of the things she could not speak to Papa about. All she could do was to find out that lunch was nearly ready and they would better eat that before they went to the convent.

Isabelle, her head turned with the sudden removal of Jeanne's heavy-handed authority, had prepared a gala luncheon with the best silver and linen, and "What a pretty bunch of flowers," remarked Papa.

Marise looked silently at the white rose-buds, now opening into roses. Was it only yesterday morning that Jeanne had given her those? Was it only two days before, that she had been walking along with the Garniers, with nothing in her head but mockery of Madame Garnier's shoes and hat? No, that must have been somebody else, some one she had distantly known, that girl who had laughed with the others so, over their foolishness behind the scenes.

"Let me see," remarked Papa, "you must be almost fifteen, aren't you, Molly?"

"Yesterday was my birthday."

"Funny kind of celebration."

Marise looked at him across an immense chasm, and said nothing. She couldn't ever remember having a meal at a table alone with Papa before.

"Don't you want to go with me?" he asked later, as the dessert was served. "I don't know how to find my way around a convent—of all places! Whatever possessed your Mama to go there anyhow?"

"She and Sœur Ste. Lucie are such good friends," explained Marise. She decided not to say anything about the old monk, because she didn't know whether Papa knew about Maman's going to see him before; but after thinking for an instant she decided that it would do no harm to add, "Sœur Ste. Lucie wants Mama to be a Catholic, you know."

Papa said quickly, "What's that?"

Marise was surprised at his tone. Perhaps that was one of the things she oughtn't to tell about. "Why, would you mind if she did?" she asked.

Papa thought for a moment, and dropped back into his usual slow casual comment, "Oh, no, I guess not, if she wants to." There was a silence broken by Papa's saying something else, in an earnest tone as though this time he really wanted Marise to listen to him. "All I ever want, Molly, is for Mama to have things the way she wants them."

Marise's heart was nervously sensitive that day, in a sick responsiveness to the faintest indication of what was in other people's hearts.

She could not put another morsel of food to her lips. She sat looking down at her plate, trying to master or at least understand the surge of feeling within her. "All I ever want is for Mama to have things the way she wants them." There was so much to think of in that, that she was still lost in thinking, when Papa pushed back his chair and got up, pulling down his vest, with his usual after-dinner gesture.