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People Like That: A Novel

by Kate Langley Bosher · English · Gutenberg #12972 · 374,896 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: People Like That: A Novel

Author: Kate Langley Bosher


        
Release date: July 20, 2004 [eBook #12972]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12972

Credits: E-text prepared by Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PEOPLE LIKE THAT: A NOVEL ***

PEOPLE LIKE THAT

A NOVEL

by

KATE LANGLEY BOSHER

Author of "Mary Cary" etc.

Illustrated

1916






BOOKS BY

KATE LANGLEY BOSHER

 PEOPLE LIKE THAT. Illustrated. Post 8vo
 HOW IT HAPPENED. Frontispiece. Post 8vo
 THE HOUSE OF HAPPINESS. Frontispiece. Post 8vo
 MARY CARY. Frontispiece. Post 8vo
 MISS GIBBIE GAULT. Frontispiece. Post 8vo
 THE MAN IN LONELY LAND. Frontispiece. Post 8vo



TO

LUCY BOSHER JANNEY




CHAPTER I

One of the advantages of being an unrequired person of twenty-six,
with an income sufficient for necessities, is the right of choice as
to a home locality.  I am that sort of person, and, having exercised
said right, I am now living in Scarborough Square.

To my friends and relatives it is amazing, inexplicable, and beyond
understanding that I should wish to live here.  I do not try to make
them understand; and therein lies grievance against me.  Because of
my failure to explain what they are pleased to call a peculiar
decision on my part, I am at present the subject of heated criticism.
It will soon stop.  What a person does or doesn't do is of little
importance to more than three or four people.  By Christmas my
foolishness will have ceased to cause comment, ceased to interest
those to whom it doesn't matter really where or how I live.

I like living in Scarborough Square very much.  After many years
spent in the homes of others I am now the head of half a house, the
whole of which is mine; and even though it is situated on the last
square of respectability in a part of the town long forgotten by the
descendants of its former residents, I am filled with a sense of
proprietorship that is warm and comforting, and already I have
learned to love it--this nice, old-fashioned house in which I live.

Until very recently Scarborough Square was only a name.  There had
been no reason to visit it, and had I ventured to it I would have
seen little save a tiny park bounded on four sides by houses of
shabby gentility, for the most part detached, and of a style of
architecture long since surrendered to more undesirable designs.  The
park is but an open space whose straggly trees and stunted shrubs and
dusty grass add dejection to the atmosphere of shrinking
respectability which the neighborhood still makes effort to maintain;
but that, too, I have learned to love, for I see in it that which I
never noticed in the large and handsome parks up-town.

As a place of residence this section of the city I am just beginning
to know has become very interesting to me.  No one of importance
lives near it, and the occupants of its houses, realizing their
social submergence and pecuniary impotence, have too long existed in
the protection of obscurity to venture into the publicity which civic
attention necessitates, and on first acquaintance it is not
attractive.  I agree with my friends in that.  I did not come here
because I thought it was an attractive place in which to live.

They cannot say, however, even my most protesting friends, that I am
not living in a perfectly proper neighborhood.  The front of my house
faces, beyond the discouraged little park, a strata of streets which
unfold from lessening degrees of dreariness and dinginess to
ever-increasing expensiveness and unashamed architectural
extravaganzas, to the summit of residential striving, called, for
impressiveness, the Avenue, but behind it is a section of the city of
which I am as ignorant as if it were in the depths of the sea or the
wilds of primeval forest.  I have traveled much, but I do not know
the city wherein I live.  I know but a part of it, the pretty part.


There was something Mrs. Mundy wanted to say to me to-night, and did
not say.  I love the dear soul.  I could not live here without her,
could not learn what I am learning without her help and sympathy and
loyalty, but at times I wish she were a bit less fond of chatting.
She is greatly puzzled.  She, too, cannot understand why I have come
to Scarborough Square to live, and I am quite certain she thinks it
strange I do not tell her.  How can I tell that of which I am not
sure myself--that is, clearly and definitely sure?

I am not trying to be sure.  It is enough that I am here, free to
come and go as I choose, to plan my day as I wish, to have time for
the things I once had no time for, and why must there always be
explanations and reasons and justifications for one's acts?  The
daily realization each morning, on awaking, that the day is mine,
that there are no customs with which to comply, no regulations to
follow, no conventions to be conformed to, at the end of two weeks
still stirs and thrills and awes me a little, and I am constantly
afraid it is not true that I am here to stay.  And then again with
something of fear and shrinking and uncertainty I realize my bridges
are burned and I must stay.

"It's pleased you are with your rooms, I hope, Miss Dandridge?"
Hands on her hips, Mrs. Mundy had looked somewhat anxiously at me
before going out.  "If it's a home-looking place you're after, you've
got it, but when you first come down to Scarborough Square it made me
feel queer inside to think of your living here, really living.  If
you think you can be satisfied--"

"I am sure I can be satisfied.  Why not?"  I smiled and, going over
to the window, straightened the curtain which had caught and twisted
a fern-leaf growing in its box.  "I am a perfectly unincumbered human
being who--"

"But an unincumbered woman ain't much of a human being."  Mrs. Mundy
dropped the afternoon paper she had brought up and stooped to get it.
"I mean a woman is made for incumbrances, and if she don't have
any--"  She hesitated, and looked around the room with its simple
furnishings, its firelight and lamplight, its many books and few
pictures, its rugs and desk and tables, the gifts of other days, and
presently she spoke again.  "Being you like so to look out the
windows, it's well this house has two front rooms opening into each
other.  If it's comfortable and convenient that you want to be,
you're certainly that, but comforts and conveniences don't keep you
company exactly."

"I don't want company yet.  You and Bettina are all I need.  I
haven't said I was to live here a thousand years, or that I wouldn't
get tired of myself in less time, but until I do--"

There was a ring at the front-door bell and Mrs. Mundy went to answer
it.  The puzzled look I often saw in her eyes when talking to me
still filled them, but she said nothing more except good night, and
when I heard her footsteps in the hall below I went to the door and
locked it.  This new privacy, this sense of freedom from unescapable
interruption, was still so precious, that though an unnecessary
precaution, I turned the key that I might feel perfectly sure of
quiet hours ahead, and at my sigh of satisfaction I laughed.

Going into my bedroom, which adjoined my sitting-room, I hung in the
closet the coat I had left on a chair, put away my hat and gloves,
and again looked around, as if they were still strange--the white bed
and bureau, the wash-rugs, the muslin curtains, the many contrasts to
former furnishings--and again I sighed contentedly.  They were mine.

The house I am now living in is indeed an old-fashioned one, but well
built and of admirable design.  The rooms are few--only eight in
all--and four of them I have taken for myself--the upper four.  The
lower floor is occupied by Mrs. Mundy and Bettina, her little
granddaughter.  When I first saw the house its condition was
discouraging.  Not for some time had it been occupied, and repairs of
all kinds were needed.  To get it in order gave me strange joy, and
the weeks in which it was being painted and papered and beautified
with modern necessities were of an interest only a person, a woman
person, can feel who has never had a home of her own before.  When
everything was finished, the furnishings in place, and I established,
I knew, what I no longer made effort to deny to myself--that I was
doing a daring thing.  I was taking chances in a venture I was still
afraid to face.




CHAPTER II

Kitty came to see me yesterday.  Her mortification at my living in
Scarborough Square is poignant.  Not since she learned of my doing so
has her amazement, her incredulity, her indignation and resentment,
lessened in the least, but her curiosity is great and her affection
sincere, and yesterday she yielded to both.

She was on her wedding journey when I left the house in which for
many years we had lived together, and, knowing it would spoil her
trip did I tell of what I had done, I did not tell.  Two days ago she
got back, and over the telephone I gave her my new address.

"But I can't understand--"  During most of her visit Kitty was
crying.  She cries easily and well.  "I can't take it in, can't even
glimpse why you want to live in such a horrid old place.  It's awful!"

"Oh no, it isn't.  It's a very nice place.  Look how the sun comes
through those little panes of glass in those deep windows and chirps
all over the floor.  I never knew before how much company sunshine
could be; how many different things it could do, until I came to
Scarborough Square.  This is a very interesting place, Kitty."

"It's fearful!"  Kitty shuddered.  "The sun shines much better on the
Avenue, and you might as well be dead as live in this part of the
town.  When people ask me where you are I'm--"

"Ashamed to tell them?"  I laughed.  "Don't tell them, if the telling
mortifies you.  Those who object to visiting me in my new home will
soon forget I'm living.  Those to whom it does not matter where I
live will find where I am without asking you.  I wouldn't bother."

"But what must I say when people ask me why you've come down here?
why you've made this awful change from living among the best people
to living among these--I don't know what they are.  Nobody knows."

"They are perfectly good people."  I took a pin out of Kitty's hat
and tried the latter at a different angle.  "The man on the corner is
named Crimm.  He's a policeman.  The girl next door makes cigarettes,
and her friend around the corner works at the Nottingham Overall
factory.  The cigarette-girl has a beau who walks home with her every
evening.  He's delicate and can't take a job indoors.  Just at
present he's an assistant to the keeper of Cherry Hill Park."

Kitty stared at me as if not sure she heard aright.  The tears in her
big blue eyes disappeared and into them came incredulity.  "Do you
know them--the cigarette-girl, and the overall-girl, and the
policeman?"  Her voice was thin with dismay and unbelief.  "Do you
really know people like that?"

"I do."  I laughed in the puzzled and protesting face, kissed it.
"To every sort of people other people not of their sort are 'people
like that.'  Our customs and characteristics and habits of thought
and manner of life separate us into our particular groups, but in
many ways all people are dreadfully alike, Kitty.  To the little
cigarette-girl you're a 'person like that.'  Did you ever wonder what
she thought of you?"

"Why should I wonder?  It doesn't matter what she thinks.  I don't
know her, never will know her.  I can't understand why you want to
know her, to know people who--"

"I want to know all sorts of people."  Again I tilted Kitty's hat,
held her off so as to get a better effect.  "You see, I've wondered
sometimes what they thought of us--these people who haven't had our
chance.  Points of view always interest me."

"What difference does it make what they think?  You're the queerest
person I've ever known!  You aren't very religious.  You never did go
to church as much as I did.  Are you going in for slums?"

"I am not.  I wouldn't be a success at slumming.  I'm not going in
for anything except--"

"Except what?"

"My dear Kitty," I picked up the handkerchief she had dropped and put
it on the table, "I wouldn't try to understand, if I were you, why
people do things.  Usually it's because they have to, or because they
want to, and occasionally there are other reasons.  I used to wonder,
for instance, why certain people married each other.  Often now, as I
watch husbands and wives together, I still wonder if, unmarried, they
would select each other again.  I suppose you went to the Bertrands'
dinner-dance last night?"

"I went, but I wish I hadn't.  Billy didn't want to go, and we came
away as soon as we could.  Everybody asked about you.  I haven't seen
any one yet who doesn't think it very strange that you won't live
with me.  That beautiful little Marie Antoinette suite on the third
floor is all fixed for you, and you could use the automobiles as much
as you choose.  It's wicked and cruel in you to do like this and not
live with me.  It looks so--"

"Peculiar."  I nodded in the eyes as blue as a baby's.  "But a person
who isn't peculiar isn't much of a person.  You see, I don't care for
things which are already fixed for me.  I like to do my own fixing.
And I don't want to live in anybody else's home, not even yours,
though you are dear to want me.  I am grateful, but I prefer to live
here.  My present income would make an undignified affair of life
among the friends of other days.  I'd feel continually as if I were
overboard and holding on to a slippery plank.  Down here I'm
independent.  I have enough for my needs and something to give--.
That's a good-looking hat you have on.  Did you get it in Paris?"

Kitty shook her head.  "New York."  Otherwise she ignored my
question.  Hats usually interested her.  She talked well concerning
them, but to-day she would not be diverted from more insistent
subjects.

"It must have cost a good deal to fix up this old house.  Anywhere
else it would look very well."  Her eyes were missing no detail.
"You'd make a pig-sty pretty, but it takes money--"

"Everything takes money.  I sold two or three pieces of Aunt
Matilda's jewelry for enough to put the house in order.  She expected
me to sell what I did not wish to keep.  In her will was a note to
that effect."

"She had more jewelry than any human being I ever saw."  Into Kitty's
face came dawning understanding.  "It was the only way she could
leave you any of--"

"Your father's money," I nodded.  "Not until after her death did I
understand why she used to take all of your father's gifts in
jewelry.  I know now."

"It was a good investment.  I wish she'd bought twice as much.  She
had so little else to leave you," Kitty was looking at me
speculatively.  "How on earth are you going to live on a thousand
dollars a year?  Our servants cost us twice that.  Billy says it's
awful, but--"

"It is if you can't afford it.  You can.  I believe all people ought
to spend every dollar they can afford, and not a cent they can't.
That's what I do.  Aunt Matilda thought I was impractical, but I'm
fearfully prudent.  I live within my income and I've deposited with a
trust company, so I can't spend it, a sum of money quite large enough
to care for me through a spell of illness in the greediest of
hospitals, if I should be ill.  And if I should die I'm prepared for
all expenses.  It's a mistake to think I don't look ahead.  I thought
once of having a stone put up in the cemetery so as to be sure I had
not forgotten anything, but I guess that can wait."

Kitty, still staring at me, got up.  "I never expect to understand
you.  Neither does father.  He's mortified to death about your coming
down here to live.  He knows people are talking; so do I; and we
don't know what to say."

"Oh, people always talk!  And don't say anything.  No one escapes
criticism.  It's human pastime to indulge in it.  To prefer
Scarborough Square to the Avenue may be queer, but at present I do
prefer it.  That's why I'm here.  You can say that if you choose."

"You've got no business preferring it."  Kitty snapped the buttons of
her glove with tearful emphasis.  "Mrs. Jamieson said last night that
a person with eyes and eyelashes like yours had no right to live as
you are living, with just an old woman to do things for you.  She
came down to see why you were here, but you wouldn't tell her.  She
can't understand any more than I can."

I kissed Kitty good-by, but I did not try to make her understand.  I
no longer try to make people understand things.  Many of them can't.
Kitty is a dear child, adorably blue-eyed and pink-cheeked, and
possessed of an amount of worldly wisdom that is always amazing and
at times distressing, but much that interests me has, so far, never
interested her.  Refusing to study, she has little education, but she
has traveled a good deal, speaks excellent French, dances perfectly,
dresses admirably, and has charming manners when she wishes.  I love
her very much, but I no longer feel it is my duty to live with her.

I am not living in Scarborough Square because I feel it is my duty to
live here.  Thank Heaven, I don't have to tell any one why I am here!




CHAPTER III

Kitty's mother had been dead only a year when Aunt Matilda, who had
adopted me several years earlier on the death of my parents, married
her father.  I was twelve and Kitty eight when the marriage took
place, and with canny care I tried to shield her from the severity of
Aunt Matilda's system in rearing a child.  I had been reared by it.

I owe much to Aunt Matilda.  She sent me to good schools, to a good
college; took me with her on most of her trips abroad, and at twenty
presented me to society, but she never knew me, never in the least
understood the hunger in my heart for what it was not in her power to
give.  I never told her there was hunger in my heart.  I rarely told
her of anything she could not see for herself.

In childhood I had learned the fixedness of her ideas, the rigidity
of her type of mind, the relentlessness of her will; and that
independence on my part survived was due to sturdy stubbornness, to a
refusal to be dominated, and an incapacity for subjection.  But this,
too, she failed to understand.

That I would not marry as she wished was a grievous blow to her.  I
had no desire to marry, and it was when refusing to do so that
certain realizations came to me sharply, and all the more acutely,
because I had so long been seemingly indifferent to them.  On the
morning following the night in which I had faced frankly undeniable
facts I went to Aunt Matilda's room and told her I could no longer be
dependent, told her of my purpose to earn my own living.  I was
strong, healthy, well educated.  There was no reason why I should not
do what other women were doing.

As I talked her amazement and indignation deepened into anger, and
had I been a child I "would undoubtedly have been punished for my
impertinence and audacity in daring to desire to go out into the
world to earn what there was no necessity for my earning.  Socially,
a woman could be autocratic, I was told, but in all things else she
should be dependent on the stronger sex.

"But there is no stronger-sex person for me to be dependent upon,
even were I willing to depend," I said, and made effort to keep back
what I must not say to her, but surely would have said to others.
For years I had been the recipient of her bounty, the object of her
care, and she still thought of me as something to be protected.  That
I should prefer to work, prefer to take my place in the world of
women-workers, was beyond her grasp.

"Mr. Chesmond understood when I married him--it is part of our
marriage contract--that you were to have the same advantages as his
daughter.  He has very willingly given you these.  If you no longer
care to accept his protection, you can marry.  Opportunities such as
come to few girls have come to you.  A home of your own is yours for
the taking.  In my day--"

"But this is not your day!"  I bit my lip.  When Aunt Matilda's face
got a certain shade of red and her breath became short and quick, I
was uneasy.  The doctor had warned us of the seriousness of her
condition.  She was pitifully afraid of death--it was the only thing
she was afraid of--and death might come at any time.  To prevent
excitement there must be with her no discussion, and, as far as
possible, no opposition to her will.

"Your day and mine are very far apart."  I made effort to speak
quietly.  "Women no longer have to be adjuncts to men because they
don't know how to be anything else.  They can stand up now by
themselves.  Conditions have forced them to face life much more--"

"Face fiddlesticks!"  Aunt Matilda's hands made an impatient gesture.
"Women have no business doing what many of them are doing today.
They are forgetting the place to which they were appointed by their
Creator.  But even if you were at liberty to carry out your silly
ideas, what could you do?  How could you earn your living?  You play
well, paint a little, read books that do you no good, and hardly
enough of the new novels to discuss them.  All this sociological
stuff, those scientific things I see in your room, are absurd for a
woman to bother with.  Men dislike women who think too much and know
too much.  You are well educated and clever enough, but what could
you do if you were suddenly left without means of support?"

"I don't know what I could do.  It's what I want to find out.  Half
of my life has been spent in school and college, and during these
years I was taught little that would be of practical service in case
of need.  I'd like to use part of my time trying to make educators
understand they don't educate.  For cultural purposes, for acquiring
knowledge of facts, their system may be admirable, but for the
pursuit of a happy livelihood--"

I stopped.  Aunt Matilda was looking at me as if I were suffering
from an attack of some kind.  Marriage to her was the divinely
arranged destiny for a woman, and she had neither patience nor
sympathy with my refusal to accept the opportunity that was mine to
fulfil the destiny of my sex and at the same time become the wife of
the man she had long wished me to marry.  The power of money was dear
to her.  She understood it well, and my failure to appreciate it
properly was peculiarly exasperating to her.  Discussion was useless.
It never got farther than where it started.  If I said that which I
wanted much to say, it would merely mean hearing again what I did not
want to hear.  Concerning the pursuit of a happy livelihood we were
not apt to agree.

For a half-minute longer I hesitated.  Should I make the issue now or
wait until there had been time for her to realize I meant what I
said?  Before I could speak she did that which I had never seen her
do before.  She burst into tears.

"You must never mention such a thing as this again."  Her words came
stumblingly and her usually firm and strong hands trembled badly.
"With my health in its present condition I couldn't get on without
you.  You are all I have to really love, and I need you.  Don't you
see what you have done?  You have made me ill.  Ill!"

She was strangely upset and in her eyes was a confused and frightened
look that was new to them, and quickly I went toward her, but she
motioned me away.

"Give me my medicine, and don't ever speak of such a thing
again--such a thing as you have just spoken of!  You have always been
beyond my comprehension."

She swallowed the medicine I brought her in nervous gulps, the tears
running down her face as they might have done down a child's, but she
would not let me do anything for her, insisting only that she wanted
to be quiet.  Seeing it was best to leave her, I went to my room and
locked the door, and for hours I fought the hardest fight of my life.

The one weapon she knew she could use effectively, she had used.  If
she needed me I could not leave her, but her complete self-reliance
made it difficult to feel that any one was necessary to her.  I was
indignant at the way she had treated me.  I was not a child to be
disposed of, and yet of my future she was disposing as though it were
a thing that could be tied to a string, and untied at will.  Were she
well and strong, I would take matters in my own hands and make the
break.  Surely I could do something!  I had no earning capacity, but
other women had made their way, and I could make mine.  If she were
perfectly well--

But she was not well.  Through those first hours, and through most of
the hours of the night that followed, the knowledge of the insidious
disease that was hers was the high, hard wall against which I struck
at every turn of thought, at every possibility at which I grasped,
and in the dawn of a new day I knew I must not go away.

It was not easy to surrender.  Always my two selves are fighting and
I wanted much to know more of life than I could know in the costly
shelter, controlled by custom and convention, wherein I lived.  I had
long been looking through stained glass.  I was restless to get out
and see clearly, to know all sorts of people, all conditions of life,
and the chance had seemed within my grasp--and now it must be given
up.

There are times when I am heedless of results, when I am daring and
audacious and count no cost, but that is only where I alone am
concerned.  When it comes to making decisions which affect others I
am a coward.  I lack the courage to have my own way at the expense of
some one else; and though through the night I protested stormily, if
inwardly, that I was not meant for gilded cages, but for contact, for
encounter, I knew I should yield in the end.

The next day I told her I would not go away.  She said nothing save
she hardly thought I had entirely lost my senses, but the thing I am
gladdest to remember since her death is the look that came into her
eyes when I told her.  For two years longer I lived with her, years
for her of practical invalidism, and for me of opportunity to do for
her what she had never permitted me to do before.  Two weeks after
Kitty's marriage she died suddenly, and at times I still shiver with
the cold clamminess that came over me as I stood by her in her last
sleep and realized my aloneness in the world.  My parents had died in
my early childhood.  I had no brothers or sisters, no near relatives,
save an uncle who lived abroad and some cousins here in town.  Mr.
Chesmond was very kind, but I could not continue to accept what he
had willingly given his wife's adopted child, and Kitty no longer
needed me.  It is a fearful feeling, this sense of belonging to no
one, of having no one belonging to you.  Lest it overwhelm me, I went
at once to work upon the house in Scarborough Square left me by Aunt
Matilda, together with an annuity of a thousand dollars.  Already it
means much to me.  For a while, at least, it is a haven, a shelter, a
home.  What it may prove--

I have been thinking much to-day of Aunt Matilda.  Perhaps it is
because Selwyn was here last night.  She was afraid I would marry him.




CHAPTER IV

I did not tell Selwyn I was coming to Scarborough Square to live.  I
told no one.  The day after I reached here I sent him a note, giving
him my new address.

His answer was short and stiff.  He was leaving town on a business
trip and would see me on his return, he wrote, and as I read what was
not written between what was I was glad he was going away.  It would
give him time to cool off.  I am beyond Selwyn's comprehension.  We
should not be friends, we are so apart in many matters.  But
compatible people must find life dull.  Selwyn and I are never dull.

When he first called I was out, and last night he called again.  As
Mrs. Mundy, with his coat and hat, closed the door behind her, he
held out his hand.

"Well?"  He looked at me, but in his eyes was no smiling.

"Well?"  I shook hands and smiled.

For a half-moment we said nothing, and frowningly he turned away.
Always he radiated the security that comes of fixed position, a past
without challenge, a future provided for; but tonight I was conscious
only of the quiet excellence of his clothes, his physical well-being,
the unescapableness of his eyes, and the cut of his chin.  He is a
most determined person.  So am I--which perhaps accounts for our
rather stormy friendship.

"Don't you think I have a very nice home?" I took my seat in a corner
of the big chintz-covered sofa in front of the fire and close to the
long table with its lighted lamp and books and magazines, and
motioned him to sit down.  "I'm entirely fixed.  I hope you like this
room.  I love it.  I've never had one of my very own before."

"It's very pretty."

Selwyn took his seat without looking around.  He did not know whether
it was pretty or not.  He was not at all interested in the room.

For a moment he looked at me with eyes narrowed and his forehead
ridged in tiny, perpendicular folds.  Presently he leaned forward,
his hands between his knees and fingers interlocked.

"How long do you propose to stay down here?" he asked.

"I really do not know.  I thought you were going to congratulate me
upon living the life I want to live."

"I do.  Until you get this thing out of your system--"

"What thing?"  I, too, leaned forward.  The tone of his voice made
something in me flare.  "What thing?" I repeated.

Selwyn's shoulders shrugged slightly.  He sat up, then leaned back,
his hands in his pockets.  "Why discuss it?  You've long wanted to do
something of this sort.  Until it was done you would never be
content.  What you want to do, I doubt if you know yourself.  Are you
slumming?  Uplifting?"

"I am not.  I'm neither a slummer nor an uplifter.  A slummer helps.
I'm just looking on."  I threw the cushion behind me to the other end
of the sofa.  "I thought it might be interesting to see for myself
some of the causes which produce conditions.  I've read a good deal,
but one doesn't exactly sense things by reading.  I want to see."

"And after you see?"  Selwyn made an impatient movement with his
hand.  "A thousand years from now humanity may get results from
scientific management in social organization, but most of your
present-day methods are about as practical as trying to empty the
ocean with a teaspoon or to pick a posy out of swamp grass."

"What do you know of present-day methods?"

"Very little.  Beating the air doesn't interest me.  Most people seem
to forget the processes of nature; seem to imagine that certain
things can be brought to pass quickly which can only be accomplished
slowly.  From the first struggle of the human race to stand upright,
to articulate, to find food, to strike fire, to paddle in water, to
wear covering, to forage, explore--  What is the matter?"

"Nothing."  I leaned back in the corner of the sofa, my hands, palms
upward, in my lap, my eyes on them that he might not see their
smiling.  "I was just wondering what that had to do with certain
present-day conditions, certain injustices and inequalities,
certain--"

"It explains them to some extent.  From the earliest days of dawning
thought, from the first efforts at self-expression, humanity has
grouped itself not only into families, tribes, communities, nations,
or what you will, but in each of these divisions there have ever been
subdivisions.  Ignorance and knowledge, strength and weakness, power
and incapacity, find their level, rise or fall according to their
proper place.  If you have any little dreams of making all human
beings after one pattern--"

"I haven't.  It would be as uninteresting as impossible.  But it is
queer--"

"What is queer?"  Selwyn stooped forward and broke a lump of coal
from which sprang blazing reds and curling blues of flame.  "Why did
you stop?"

"I was thinking it was queer you should know so much of the history
of the human race and so little of its life to-day.  As a shrugger
you stand off."

"For the love of Heaven don't let's get on that!"

With swift movement he took a cigar from one pocket, a match-case
from another.  "May I smoke?" he asked, irritably, and as I nodded he
struck a match and held it to the cigar in his mouth, then threw it
in the fire.  Presently he looked at me.

"Why didn't you tell me you were coming here--for a while?"

"It would have meant more argument.  You would not have approved."

"I most assuredly would not.  But that would have made no difference.
My disapproval would not have prevented."

"No.  I should have come, of course.  But I was tired, and useless
discussion does no good.  We would have said again the same old
things we've said so often, and I didn't want to say them or hear
them.  One of the reasons why I came down here was to talk with
people who weren't born with made-up minds, and who don't have high
walls around their homes."

"There are times when I would like to put them around you!  If you
were mine I'd do it."

"No, you wouldn't.  You know perfectly well what I would do with
walls.  That is the kind you think should be around a woman.  But we
won't get on that, either.  Were you ever in Scarborough Square
before?"

Selwyn nodded and looked, not at me, but at the spirals of smoke from
his cigar.  "My grandfather used to live on the opposite side of the
Square, and as a kid I was brought occasionally to see him.  I barely
remember him.  He died thirty years ago."

"It's difficult to imagine this was once the fashionable part of the
city, and that gorgeous parties and balls--" I sat upright and
laughed.  "I went to a party last night.  It was a wonderful party."

"You did what?"

Selwyn's cigar was held suspended on its way to his lips.  "Whose
party?  Where was it?"

"Two doors from here.  The girl who gave it, or rather, to whom it
was given, is named Bryce--Evelyn Bryce.  She is a friend of Mrs.
Mundy's and is a printer.  I never knew a girl printer until I came
down here."

Selwyn's look of amazed disapprobation had its usual effect.  I
hadn't intended to mention the party, and instantly I went into its
details.

"All kinds of people were at it and every woman had on a dress which
entirely covered her.  When I was a child I adored a person named
Wyman, who used to give performances in which all sorts of unexpected
things happened.  Last night was a sort of Wyman night."

"I did not know you were going to parties."  Selwyn's tone was curt.

"I am not--to your sort."  My face flushed.  "I said this girl was a
printer.  I should have said she used to be.  Two years ago she was
caught in some machinery at the place where she worked and has never
been able to stand up since.  On her birthday her friends give her a
party that she may have a bit of brightness.  I went over to play
that they might dance.  She is fond of music and an old piano has
recently been given her by--by some one interested in her."

For a moment there was silence, then throwing his cigar in the fire,
Selwyn got up and stood looking down at me.  In his eyes was strange
worry and unrest.

"I beg your pardon."  He bit his lips.  "I've been pretty ragged of
late and I'm always thoughtless.  For two weeks I've seen no
one--that is, no friend of yours or mine who hasn't asked me why you
have done so inexplicable a thing as to leave everybody you know and
go into a part of the town where you know nobody and where--"

"It's because I want to know all sorts of people."  Something in
Selwyn's face stopped me, and, getting up from the sofa, I went over
to the window and raised it slightly.  My heart was pounding.  I
could laugh away the questions of others and ignore their comments,
but with Selwyn this would be impossible.  An overwhelming sense of
distance and separation came over me demoralizingly as I pretended to
rearrange the curtain, and for a moment words would not come.

I knew, of course, that Selwyn had neither patience nor sympathy with
my desire to know more of life than I could learn in the particular
world into which I had been born, but the keener realization to-night
made between us a wide and separating gulf, and I felt suddenly alone
and uncertain, and dispirited and afraid.

In our love of books, of digging deep into certain subjects, of
historic questing and speculative discussions we are closely
sympathetic, but in many viewpoints we are as apart as the poles.
Perhaps we will always be.

Selwyn by heritage and training and natural inclination is
conventional and conservative.  I am not.  To walk in beaten tracks
is not easy for me.  I want to explore for myself.  He thinks a woman
has no business in by-paths.  Our opposing beliefs do not make for
placid friendship.

It is Selwyn's indifference to life, to its problems and struggles
and many-sidedness, that makes me at times impatient with him beyond
restraint.  In his profession he is successful.  His ambition makes
him work, but a weariness of things, of the unworthwhileness of human
effort, the futility of striving, the emptiness of achievement,
possesses him frequently, and in his dark days he pays the penalty of
his points of view.  If only he could see, could understand--.

I turned from the window and again sat down in my corner of the sofa
and motioned him to take his seat.

"Don't let's argue to-night.  I'm pretty tired and argument would do
no good.  We'd just say things we shouldn't.  You said just now you
doubted if you knew why I was here.  I may not be sure of all my
reasons, but one of them is, I wanted to get away from--there."  My
hand made motion in a vague direction intended for my former
neighborhood.

"Do you find this section of the city a satisfactory change?"
Selwyn's tone was ironic.  He looked for a moment into the eyes I
raised to his, then turned away and, hands in his pockets, began to
walk up and down the room.  When he spoke again his voice had changed.

"Don't mind anything I say to-night.  I shouldn't have come.  I'm a
bit raw yet that you should have done this without telling me.  You
have a right to do as you choose, of course, only--.  Besides getting
away from your old life--were there other reasons?"

"Not very definite ones."  Into my face came surge of color, and,
turning, I cut off the light in the lamp behind me.  "When one is in
a parade one can't see what it looks like, very often doesn't
understand where it is going.  I want to see the one I was in, see
from the sidewalk the kind of human beings who are in it, and what
they are doing with their time and energies and opportunities and
knowledge and preparedness and--oh, with all the things that make
their position in life a more responsible one than--than the people's
down here."

"Was it necessary to come to Scarborough Square to watch--your
parade?  One can stand off anywhere."

"But I don't want just to stand off.  I want to see with the eyes of
the people who look at us, the people who don't approve of us, though
they envy us.  We're so certain they're a hard lot to deal with, to
do for, to make anything of--these people we don't know save from
charity contact, perhaps,--that I've sometimes wondered if they ever
despair of us, think we, too, are pretty hopeless and hard to--to
wake up."

"And you imagine the opinions and conclusions of uneducated,
untrained, unthinking people will give you light concerning the
valuation of your class?  It matters little what they think.  They
don't think!"

"Do you know many of these people of whose mental machinery you are
so sure?"  I smiled in the eyes which would not smile into mine.
"Know them personally, I mean?"

"I do not."  Selwyn's tone was irritable.  "My business dealings with
them have not inspired desire for a closer acquaintance.  To get as
much money as possible from the men who employ them and give in
return as little work as they can, is the creed of most of them.  You
can do nothing with people like that.  I know them better than you
will ever know them."

"As a corporation attorney, yes.  As a division of the human race, as
working people, you know them.  As beings much more like yourself
than you imagine, you don't."

Selwyn again stopped.  "You'd hardly expect me to find them
congenial--the beings you refer to."

"I would not."  I laughed.  "They are generations removed from you in
education and culture, in many of the things essential to you, but
some of them see more clearly than you.  Both need to understand you
owe each other something.  And how are you going to find out what it
is, see from each other's point of view, unless you know each other
better?  Unless--"

"For the love of Heaven, get rid of such nonsense!  That particular
kind of sentiment has gone to seed.  Every sane man recognizes
certain obligations to his fellow-man, every normal one tries to pay
them, but all this rot about bringing better relations to pass
between masters and men through familiarity, through putting people
in places they are not fitted to fill, is idle dreaming based on
ignorance of human nature.  To give a man what he doesn't earn is to
do him an injury.  Most men win the rewards they are entitled to.
You're a visionist.  You always have been--"

"And am always going to be!  Life would hardly be endurable were it
not for dreaming, hoping, believing.  I could stand any loss better
than that of my faith in humankind."  I sat upright, my hands locked
in my lap.  "I'm not here to do things for the people you have so
little patience with.  I told you I wanted to see what sort of people
we are.  You're perfectly certain those who live in Scarborough
Squares don't make a success of life.  Do you think we do?"

Again Selwyn stopped, stared at me, but before he could answer a
queer, curdling, smothered sound reached us faintly from the street
below.  A cry low, yet clear and anguished, followed.  Then a fall
and hurrying footsteps, and then silence.  Selwyn sprang to the
window and opened it.

"My God!" he said.  His face was white.  "What was that?"




CHAPTER V

I was out of the door before Selwyn had left the window.  Quickly he
followed me, however, and on the front porch, where Mrs. Mundy was
already standing, we stood for a half-moment, looking up and down the
street.

The small arc of light made by the corner gaslamp lessened but little
the darkness of the seemingly deserted street, and for a while we
could distinguish nothing save the shadows cast by the gaunt trees of
the Square.  Then I saw Selwyn start.

"Go inside."  He was his steady self again.  "It is too cold out
here.  I think some one has been hurt.  Go in."

I ran in Mrs. Mundy's room and to her wardrobe.  Getting a coat and
an old cape, I threw the latter over my shoulders, and, coming back
to the porch, went down its steps and across the street to where Mrs.
Mundy and Selwyn were bending over a young woman who stirred as they
came up.

"Put this on."  I threw the coat to Mrs. Mundy.  "Who is it?"

"I don't know."  Mrs. Mundy knelt on the ground.  "Are you hurt?" she
asked.  "There--that's better."  With skilful movement she helped the
girl, who seemed dazed, to steady herself.  As the latter sat up she
put her hand to her face and brushed back her hair.

"Where am I?  Has he gone?"  Her face was dropped in her hands.  "If
he just would kill me and end it--end it!"

"Who hurt you?"  Selwyn's voice was the quiet one that was ever his
when something was to be done, and, leaning over her, he took the
girl by the arm and lifted her to her feet.  "Can you tell what has
happened?"  He looked at Mrs. Mundy.  "It's too cold out here for her
to stand--she's pretty faint still."

"Bring her over to me."  Mrs. Mundy put her coat around the shivering
girl, and, slipping her hand through one arm, motioned Selwyn to take
hold of the other.  "Run ahead," she nodded to me, "and fix up a dose
of that aromatic spirits of ammonia what's on the second shelf of the
closet in my bedroom.  And pull the couch up to the fire."

Dazedly, and dragging her feet as if they were powerless to move, the
girl entered the warm and cheerful room, but at her entrance
understanding seemed to give her strength.  With a shuddering,
shivering, indrawing breath she drew back and leaned against the
door-frame.

"I must go.  I--I can't come in there.  I'm better now.  I must go."

"You can't go." Selwyn's voice was decisive.  "You'll be all right
presently, but you'll have to--to rest, first."  Firmly she was led
to the couch and pushed upon it.  Taking the medicine from my hands,
he held it to her lips.  "Take this."

Hesitating, partly defiant, partly afraid, the girl raised her eyes
to his.  Then, with hand that shook badly, she took the glass and
drank part of its contents, the rest was spilled in her lap.

"If it were prussic acid I'd be glad to drink it."  The voice was
bitter, and again the eyes, pale yet burning, were raised to his, and
in them was what seemed frightened but guarded recognition.  Quickly
she dropped them and glanced around the room, as though looking for
escape, and again her hands made convulsive pressure, again she
started to get up.

"I must go.  I tell you, I must.  I--I can't stay here."

"Very well."  Mrs. Mundy looked toward Selwyn and away from me.
"When you're steady you can go.  Mr. Thorne will telephone for a cab
and I will take you--home."

"Oh no!"  The girl's face became the pallor that frightens, and on
either side of her a hand was dug in the couch on which she was
sitting.  "I'm all right now.  I don't want a cab.  I just want to
go, and by myself.  Please let me go!"

The last words were lost in a sob, and coming close to her I sat
beside her, and, putting my hand on her face, turned it slightly that
I might better see the big, black bruise on her forehead, partly
hidden by the loose, dark curls which fell across it.  Her hair was
short and thick and parted on the side, giving her a youthful, boyish
look that was in odd contrast to the sudden terror in her eyes, and
for the first time I saw how slight and frail she was, saw that about
her which baffled and puzzled me, and which I could not analyze.  She
wore no hat, and the red scarf around her neck was the only touch of
color in her otherwise dark dress.  The lips of her large, sweet,
sensuous mouth were as colorless as her face.

"You have been hurt."  I put my hand on her trembling ones.  "Did
some one strike you or did you fall?"

She shook her head and drew her hands away.  "I wasn't hurt.  I--I
slipped and fell and struck my head on the pavement.  Don't let
anybody telephone.  I can go alone.  Please--please let me go!  I
must go!  I can't stay here."

"But you mustn't go alone."  I turned to Selwyn.  "Mr. Thorne will go
with you.  Do you live far from here?"

"Not very.  It's close enough for me to go by myself.  He mustn't go
with me."  The words came stumblingly, and again I saw the quick,
frightened look she gave Selwyn, a look in which was indecision and
appeal, as well as fear, and I saw, too, that his face flushed as he
turned away.

With quick movement the girl got up.  From her throat came a sound
hysterical and choking, and, putting her hand to it, she looked first
at me and then at Mrs. Mundy, but at Selwyn she did not look again.
"I'm going.  Thank you for letting me come in."  Blindly she
staggered to the door, her hands outstretched as if to feel what she
could not see.  At it she turned and in her face was that which keeps
me awake at night, which haunts and hurts and seems to be crying to
me to do something which I know not how to do.

"You poor child!"  I started toward her.  "You must not go alone."
But before I could reach her she fell in a heap at the door, and as
one dead she lay limp and white and piteously pretty on the floor.




CHAPTER VI

I don't understand Mrs. Mundy.  She acts so queerly about the girl we
found on the street last night.  She put her to bed, after she had
recovered from her fainting spell, on a cot in the room next to her
own, but this morning she told me the girl had gone, and would tell
me nothing else.

When Selwyn, who had picked her up and laid her on the couch, asked
if he should not get a doctor, Mrs. Mundy had said no, and said it so
positively that he offered to do nothing else.  And then she thanked
him and told him good night in such a way he understood it was best
he Should go.

At the front door he called me.  With his back to it he held out his
hands, took mine in his, crushed them in clasp so close they hurt.

"Danny," he said, "why do you torment me so?  You don't know what
you're doing, living where such things are possible as have taken
place tonight; where any time you may be--"

His voice broke, and in amazement I looked at him.  Horror and fear
were in his face.

"Do you think it is so awful a thing to see a poor little creature
who has been hurt and needs help?"  I drew my hands away.  "You talk
as if I were a child, Selwyn."

"You are a child in your knowledge of--of certain phases of life.  If
I could only marry you tomorrow and take you away from here you
should never know them!"

"Well, you can't marry me to-morrow!"  I made effort to laugh, but
Selwyn's face, his manner, frightened me.  "I want to stay down here
and--and stop being as ignorant as a child of things women should
know.  Behind the shelter of ignorance most women have already
shirked too long."  I held out my hand, "If you stay a bit longer,
Selwyn, I'll say things I shouldn't.  Goodnight."

With a shrug of his shoulders he went down the steps, and as I
watched him, for a moment I felt tempted to call him back.  It was
not unusual for us to part indignant with each other.  We invariably
clashed, disagreed, and argued hotly if we got on certain subjects,
but to-night I did not want him to leave angrily.  Something had made
me afraid and uncertain and uneasy.  I could not define, could only
feel it, and if Selwyn should fail me--  Shivering, I stood in the
doorway, and as I started to go in I noticed a young fellow across
the street under a tree, who seemed to be watching the house.  He was
evidently nervous and moved restlessly in the small circle of the
shadow cast by the bare branches.  Selwyn apparently did not see him,
and, crossing the street, was close upon him before he knew he was
there.  To my astonishment I saw him start and stop, saw him take the
man by the arm.

"What in the name of Heaven--"  In the still, cold air I could hear
distinctly.  "Why are you down here this time of night?  Where are
you going?"

If there was answer I could not hear it, but I could see the movement
of the young man's shoulders, could see him draw away and turn his
back to Selwyn.  Putting his hands in his pockets, he started toward
the corner lighted by the flickering gas-jet, then turned and walked
to the one on which there was no light.  Had I known him, I could not
have recognized him in the darkness, but he was evidently well known
to Selwyn, for together they went down the street and out of sight.
I wonder who he was.

For the first time since I came to Scarborough Square, Mrs. Mundy has
not been to-day her chatty self.  She does not seem to want to
talk--that is of the girl I want to talk about.  When, in my
sitting-room this morning, I asked her the girl's name she said she
did not know it, did not know where she lived, or what had happened
to her, and at my look of incomprehension at her seeming disregard,
she had turned away and busied herself in dusting the books on the
well-filled table.

"She was pretty nervous."  Mrs. Mundy's usually cheerful voice was
troubled.  "To talk to her, ask her questions, would just have made
her more so.  They won't tell you anything if they can help it--girls
like that--and I didn't try to make her tell.  I gave her something
to quiet her and stayed with her until she was asleep, but when I
went in the room this morning she was gone.  Bettina said she heard
some one unbolt the door very softly, but she thought 'twas me."

"Do you suppose she lives in this neighborhood?  Her people must have
been very anxious."

Mrs. Mundy turned and looked at me queerly.  She has tremendous
admiration for what she calls my book-learning, and sees no
incongruity in my ignorance of many things with which she is
familiar.  My ignorance, indeed, she thinks it her duty to conserve,
and already we have had some differences of opinion as to what I
should know and not know of the life about us.  There are a good many
things I have got to make Mrs. Mundy take in more definitely.  She
thinks of me still as a girl.  I am not.  I am a woman twenty-six
years old.

"Half the girls you've seen coming home from work, half who live
around the Square, haven't any people here.  What they have is a room
in somebody's house.  Many are from the country or from small towns.
Over sixteen thousand work in the factories alone.  You don't suppose
they all have homes, do you?--have some one who waits up for them at
night, some one who cares when they come in?"

Before I could answer she stopped her dusting and, head on the side
and hands on her hips, listened.  "There's the iceman at the kitchen
door," she said, relievedly.  "I'll have to go and let him in."

It is this I cannot understand, this unusual evasiveness on Mrs.
Mundy's part.  She is the least mysterious of persons, is, indeed, as
open as the day, and it is unlike her to act as she has done.  From
childhood I have known her.  Up to the time of Aunt Matilda's
marriage to Mr. Chesmond she made my clothes, and for years, in all
times of domestic complications has been our dependence.  When I
decided to live for a while in the house once owned by my
grandfather, I turned to her in confidence that she would care not
only for my material needs, but that from her I could get what no one
else could give me--an insight into scenes and situations commonly
concealed from surface sight.

Her knowledge of life is wide and varied.  With unfailing faith and
cheerful courage and a habit of seeing the humorous side of tragic
catastrophes, she has done her work among the sick and forsaken, with
no appeal to others save a certain few; and only those who have been
steadied by her strong hands, and heartened by her buoyant spirit,
and fed from her scant store, have knowledge or understanding of what
she means to the section of the city where the poor and lowly live.
Bit by bit I am learning, but even yet it is difficult to make her
tell me all she does, or how and when she does it.

It was partly because of certain talks with her that I decided to
come to Scarborough Square.  If I could make but a few understand
what she understands--so understand that the sending of a check would
not sufficiently relieve them from obligation, from responsibility.
But how can I make clear to others what is not clear to me?

It will not be Bettina's fault if I do not become acquainted with my
new neighbors in Scarborough Square.  By the calendar's accounting
Bettina's years are only thirteen, but in shrewdness of penetration,
in swiftness of conclusion, and in acceptance of the fact that most
people are queer she is amazingly mature.  Her readiness to go with
me anywhere I wish to go is unfailing, but save on Saturdays and
Sundays we can only pay our visits in the afternoon.  It is late when
she gets from school, and dark soon after we start, but with Bettina
I am safe.

Outside and inside of the house our roles are reversed.  Concerning
my books and my pictures, concerning the people who ride in their own
automobiles, who go to the theatre whenever they wish, to the fine
churches with beautiful music and paid pews; the people who give
parties and wear gorgeous clothes and eat mushrooms and
terrapin--which she considered inexplicable taste--she will ask me
countless questions; but outside of the house she becomes the teacher
and I the taught.  Just what I am learning she hardly understands.
Much that is new to me is commonplace to her; and she does not dream
that I often cannot sleep at night for remembering what the day has
shown me.  To-morrow we are going to see a Mrs. Gibbons, whose little
boy, eleven years of age, is the head of his mother's house--the
support of her family.




CHAPTER VII

Hands in her pockets, Bettina looked at me disappointedly.  "It's
very cold," she said.  "Why don't you wear your fur coat?"

"I like this one better.  It's warm and not so heavy."

"Your fur coat is the only one in Scarborough Square.  A sure-enough
fur one, I mean.  There're plenty of imitations.  Mrs. Crimm's got an
imitation.  You look awful grand in that fur coat--look like a
princess person.  Grannie says you don't want to seem different from
the people down here.  How are you going to help it?"

"I don't know.  I mean--"  It was silly that my face should flush
before Bettina's unblinking scrutiny, but flush it did.  "I don't
want to seem different.  People are much more alike than they
imagine.  If we didn't think so much of our differences--"

"Bound to think of them when they're right in your face.  You don't
suppose you're anything like Evie May Poore, do you? or Roberta
Wicks, or Mrs. Clay Burt?  Every time I see Evie May Poore I wish I
was an Indian so I could tomahawk her hair.  Most of her money goes
in hair and chewing-gum.  Mr. Crimm says he thinks girls who dress
like Roberta Wicks ought to be run in, but there ain't any law which
lets him do it.  Mr. Crimm's going to a big wedding to-night.  Did
you know it?"

I shook my head.  In my mouth were the pins with which my veil was to
be fastened.  Hands on my hat, I straightened the latter before
putting on the veil.

"Well, he is.  Funny, ain't it, that all these swells have to have a
plain-clothes man at weddings so the people what come to 'em won't
take any of the presents?  That's Mr. Crimm's chief business
nowadays, looking out for high-class crooks.  He says you ain't as
strong-colored as some the ladies he sees up-town, but he never did
see a face with more sense and soul in it than what yours has got.
At the last wedding he went to he told grannie some the ladies didn't
have on clothes enough to wad a gun.  Are you ready?  It gets dark by
five o'clock."

"I'm ready."  Taking up my muff, I followed Bettina down the steps
and into the street to the corner, on which was the little shop
wherein were sold goldfish and canary-birds, and fox-terriers and
white rabbits; and from there we turned in the direction which led to
Mrs. Gibbons's.  The day was cold and clear, but the ground was
slippery with sleet, and, holding on to my arm, Bettina made valiant
effort to pilot me aright.

As we walked she talked, and the names of the occupants of various
houses passed were told to me, together with the particular kind of
work in which they were engaged, and the amount of wages which were
earned by different members of the household.  The information given
me had been gained from her schoolmates, and what at first had seemed
appalling frankness and freedom, I soon learned was a community
custom, and a comparison of earnings a favorite subject of discussion
among children of all ages.  Recess, it appears, is the usual time
for an exchange of facts concerning family affairs.

"Myra Blunt, who sits in front of me, says she's going in the
pickle-factory as soon as she's fourteen."  Bettina slipped, but
caught herself, and held my arm more firmly.

"She's our ashman's daughter, and she's got a mole right on the end
of her nose.  It's a little on one side, but it looks awful funny,
and Jimmie Rice says she'll stay in that pickle-factory all her life
if she don't have that mole taken off.  A boy won't have a girl for a
sweetheart if her nose has got a mole on it, will he?  Myra is afraid
it will hurt to have it come off.  She's an awful coward.  This is
the place.  This is Ninety-two."

Mrs. Gibbons's residence was one of several small and shabby houses
which huddled together as if for protection, and as we went up the
steps of the shaky porch a head from the second-story window was
thrust out--a head wrapped in a red crocheted shawl.

"You-all want to see Mrs. Gibbons?  Well, she ain't to home.  That
is, I don't think she is.  She told me this morning she was going
down to the 'firmary to get some medicine for that misery in her back
what struck her yesterday.  If she ain't to home, you-all kin come up
here and rest yourself if you want to.  It's awful cold, ain't it?"

Before we could express our appreciation of the hospitality offered,
the door at which we had knocked was opened cautiously, and at its
aperture a head was seen.  There was a moment's hesitancy and then
the door opened more widely.

"Is this Mrs. Gibbons?"

Bettina asked the question, and at its answer called to the woman
still leaning out of the upstairs window, "She's home."  Then she
introduced me.

"This is Miss Heath.  Miss Dandridge Heath, Mrs. Gibbons; and I'm
Bettina Woll.  We've come to see you.  Can we come in?"

Mrs. Gibbons, who had nodded imperceptibly in my direction as Bettina
called my name, motioned limply toward a room on my right, and as I
entered it I looked at her and saw at once that she, too, belonged to
the unqualified and unfit.  She must once have been a pretty woman,
but her hair and eyes were now a dusty black, her skin the color of
putty, and her mouth a drooping curve that gave to her face the
expression of one who was about to cry.  Life had apparently for some
time been more than she was equal to, and, incapable of battling
further with it, she radiated a helplessness that was pitiable and
yet irritating.  Thin and flat-chested, her uncorseted figure in its
rusty black dress straightened for half a minute, then again it
relaxed.

"Take a seat, won't you?"  Her voice was as listless as her eyes.
"It's warmer in the kitchen.  Maybe you'd better come back there.  My
little girl's in there.  She's sick."

As we turned to leave the room I glanced around it.  The windows were
down, the shutters closed, but by the light which came through the
broken slats and cheap lace curtains, whose ends were spread
expansively on the bare floor, I saw its furnishings.  A bed, covered
with a white spread and with pillow-shams embroidered in red cotton,
was against the side of the wall facing the windows, and close to it
was a table on which lay a switch of coarse black hair.  A
crepe-paper lambrequin decorated the mantel-shelf, whose ornaments
were a cup and saucer, a shaving-set, and a pair of conch-shells;
while between the windows was a wash-stand obviously kept for
ornamental purposes, as there was no water in the pitcher and the
basin was cracked.  Pinned on the soft plastering of the walls were
florid advertisements of various necessities and luxuries of life,
together with highly colored Scripture texts, and over the mantel
hung a crayon of the once head of the house.  The room was cold and
damp.  The air in it had not been changed for some time, and as Mrs.
Gibbons stopped and picked up the baby, who at the sound of voices
had crawled into the room, I did not wonder at its croupy cough.

Down the dark and narrow passageway Bettina and I followed our
hostess, and at its end I would have stumbled over a step had I not
been warned in time.  The noise made by a box overturned by Bettina
gave the latter opportunity to give me one more injunction.

"Don't promise to do too much right off."  The whisper was
uncomfortably clear.  "She's the kind who's like a sifter.  You have
to be right hard with people like that--  Take care!  There's another
step!"




CHAPTER VIII

As we entered the kitchen, a tiny room with one window in it, I
glanced around it as I had done at the front room, the two seeming to
complete the suite occupied by Mrs. Gibbons.  My survey was quick and
cautious, but not too much so for mental noting of the conservation
of time and space and labor represented by an arrangement of
household effects I had never seen before.  Health and comfort were
the principal omissions.

In one corner of the room was a bed covered with a calico quilt of
many colors, and under it a pallet, tucked away for convenience in
the daytime, but obviously out at night.  Close to the bed was a
large stove in which a good fire was burning, and from the
blue-and-white saucepan on the top came forth odor of a soup with
which I was not familiar.  The door of the oven was partly open, and
in the latter could be seen a pan of heavy-looking biscuits which
apparently awaited their devouring at any time that suited the desire
of the devourer.  Bettina looked at them and then at me, but she said
nothing--that is, nothing out loud.

"Set down."  Mrs. Gibbons, the baby still in her arms, made effort to
dust one of the two chairs in the room with the gingham apron she was
wearing, and, after failing, motioned me to take it.  The other one
she pushed toward Bettina with her foot.  On the bed was a little
girl of six or seven, and as we took our seats a boy, who barely
looked ten, came from behind a couple of wash-tubs in an opposite
corner of the room and wiped his hands on a towel hanging from a hook
in the wall.  To ask something concerning this boy was the purpose of
our visit.

"Speak to the lady, Jimmy.  Anybody would think you didn't have no
manners!  No, you can't have your supper yet."

Mrs. Gibbons waved her hand weakly at her son, who, smiling at us,
had gone to a corner cupboard with perforated tins of diamond pattern
in its doors, and taken therefrom a soup-plate and cup and saucer.
Paying no attention to his mother's reference to a delayed meal, he
ladled out of the big saucepan, with a cracked cup, a plate of the
steaming soup, and carried it carefully to an oilcloth-covered table,
on which was a lamp and glass pitcher, some unwashed dishes left from
the last meal, a broken doll, and a child's shoe.  Putting down the
plate of soup, he came back to the stove and poured out a cup of
feeble-looking coffee.

"Goin' to be extras out to-night and I mightn't get back till after
ten."  Again his gay little smile lighted his thin face.  "Ifen I
don't eat now I mightn't eat at all.  Have one?"

He poked a plate of the health-destroying biscuits at Bettina with a
merry little movement, and bravely she took one, bravely made effort
to eat it.  "What's your name?" I heard him ask her, and then I
turned to Mrs. Gibbons.

"It is about your little boy I've come to see you."  I moved my chair
as far as possible from the red-hot stove and opened my coat.  "He is
too young to be at work.  He isn't twelve, is he?"

The indignation I had felt on hearing of Jimmy's bondage to a bench
from seven in the morning to six in the evening, with an interval of
an hour for lunch, was unaccountably disappearing.  With helplessness
and incapacity I was not ordinarily patient, and Mrs. Gibbons was an
excellent example of both.  Still--"He isn't twelve yet, is he?" I
repeated.

Mrs. Gibbons pushed the little girl, who was trying to get out of the
bed, back in it, and shifted the whimpering baby from one arm to the
other.  For a moment she hesitated, looked at me uncertainly.

"No 'm, he ain't but eleven, but I had to tell the mayor that signed
the papers permitting of him to work, that he was twelve.  The law
don't let children work lessen they're twelve, and only then if their
mother is a widow and 'ain't got nothing and nobody to do for her.  I
don't like to tell a story if I can help it, and them what don't know
nothing 'bout how things is can't understand, and say we oughtn't to
do it.  They'd do it, too, ifen they had to.  After his father died I
had to take Jimmy out of school and put him to work.  There wasn't
nothing else to do."

"Has his father been dead long?"  I moved still further from the
stove.  My question was unthinking.  He couldn't have been dead long.

"In days and months it 'ain't been so long, but it's been awful long
to me.  'Taint been more'n a year since they brought him home to me
dead, and I been plum' no 'count ever since.  This baby," she put the
child in her arms on her lap and shook her knees in mechanical effort
to still its cries, "this baby was born while its father was being
buried, and when I took in my man was gone and wouldn't never come
home no more, never give me his wages on Saturday nights, and
wouldn't be here to do nothing for me and the children, seems like
something inside me just give out.  I reckon you 'ain't never had
nothing to happen to you like that, have you?"

"No, I've never had anything like that to happen to me."  The last
remnant of indignation was vanishing.  That is, against the helpless,
incapable, worn-out woman who was Jimmy's mother.  Against something
else, something I could not place or define or call by name, it was
rising stormily.  "I know you need Jimmy's help," I said, after a
moment, "but he is too young to work, too small."

"Came near not getting a job 'count of not being no bigger."

His mouth filled with half a biscuit, the boy nodded at me gleefully,
then putting down his spoon, he dusted his hands and wiped them on
the side of his trousers.  "The first place mother and me went to,
they wouldn't take me 'cause the table where I'd had to work struck
me right here." His hands swiped his throat just under his chin.
"But the next place was all right.  They had a boys' table and the
bench was made high on purpose."

"What is it you do?" I asked, and again my voice sounded strange.
"Is it a box-factory you're in?"

"Soap and pills."  Head thrown back, Jimmy drained the last drop of
coffee from his cup, then scraped the latter with a tin spoon for its
last bit of sugar.  "We are pasters, our gang is.  We paste the paper
on the boxes.  There's a boy sits next to me what's the fastest
paster in town, but I'm going to beat him some day.  I can paste
almost as fast as he can now."

"He could beat him now if he didn't play so much."  In his mother's
voice was neither scolding nor complaint.  "Jimmy always would play
some from the time he was born.  His boss says he's the best worker
he's got 'cepting the boy who sits next to him, and if he'd just stay
still all day--"

"Oh, can he play?"  I made no apology for the interruption.  The
child was undersized and illy-nourished, and to let him work ten
hours a day seemed a crime for which I, and all others who cared for
children, were somehow responsible.  But if he had a chance to play--

"When old Miss High-Spy goes out the room we play."  Jimmy gave his
trousers a jerk and made effort to force connection between a button
and a buttonhole belonging respectively to his upper and his lower
garments.  "She's a regular old tale-teller, but soon as she's out
the room we get down from our bench and rush around and tag each
other.  Our benches 'ain't got no backs to 'em, and if we didn't get
off sometimes we couldn't sit up all day.  The other fellows, the big
ones, don't tell on us.  They make us put the windows down from the
top when she's out."

"Do you mean you don't have any air in the room?"  My voice was
unbelieving, and at something in my face Jimmy laughed.

"Not when we're working.  The wind might blow the little pieces of
paper off the table and we'd lose time getting 'em, she says.  Some
the boys get so sick from the heat and the glue smell they heave up
their breakfast and can't eat nothing all day.  I 'ain't fainted but
twice since I been there, but Alex Hobbs keels over once a week,
anyhow.  Used to frighten me at first when I saw him getting green-y,
but I don't mind it now."

With a quick turn of his head Jimmy looked at a small clock on the
shelf above the wash-tubs, and got up with even quicker movement.  "I
forgot about the wood, and the papers will be ready 'fore I can get
there if I don't hurry.  Good-by to you all," and, slamming the door
behind him, he ran down the kitchen steps into the yard, where in a
moment we heard him whistling as he chopped the wood that must be
brought up for the morning.

It was not often Mrs. Gibbons had a listener who had never before
heard of her hardships, and after explaining to me why Jimmy was at
home at that time of the day, his presence being due not to trifling
on his part, but to the half-time the factory was running, she gave
herself up to the luxury of telling me in detail of her many
misfortunes and of her inability to get through the winter unless
additional help were given her.

"Can't you work?" I asked.  "If the children are put in a day nursery
they would be well looked after, and you would probably be more
comfortable in a good factory than here."

"A good factory!"  The inflection in her voice was one of listless
tolerance for my ignorance.  "I don't reckon you ever worked in one.
There ain't none of 'em good.  Some's better than others, but when
you get up at five o'clock on winter mornings and make the fire and
melt the water, if it's frozen, to wash your face with, and--"

"Does it freeze in here?"  Bettina, who had by effort restrained
herself from taking part in the conversation, leaned forward and dug
her hands deep in her lap.  "Does it really freeze in this hot room?"

"It ain't hot in here at night.  Last winter it froze 'most every
night for a month.  Mis' Cotter was boarding with me last winter, her
and her little girl both.  She's the lady what rents the room between
the kitchen and the front room from me.  She sews on carpets and the
place she works at is right far from here.  She warn't well last
winter--some kind of misery is always on her--and she asked me to
board her so she wouldn't have to do no cooking before she goes away
in the morning and when she comes back at night."

"With a swift movement of her hand Mrs. Gibbons caught the little
girl, who, behind her back, was making ready to slip off the bed and
on the floor, but as she swung her again in place she kept up her
talking, and by neither rise nor fall was the monotone of her voice
broken.

"I had to get up at five so as to have breakfast in time, for I can't
get the room warm and the things cooked in less'n an hour, and she
has to leave here a little after six so as to take her little girl to
the nursery before she goes to her place, and they ain't noways close
together.  The stars are shining when she goes out and they're
shining when she comes in; that is, if the weather's good.  She's
been so wore out lately she's been taking her meals again with me,
but I don't see much of her.  She goes to bed the minute she's
through supper."

Bettina twisted in her chair.  "Do you eat and sleep in here, too?"
she asked.  Her eyes were on Mrs. Gibbons.  Carefully she kept them
from mine.  "Do you always eat in here?"

"We eat in here all the time and sleep in here in winter, because
there ain't but one fire.  That goes out early, which is why the
water freezes.  Jimmy has to bring it up from the yard in buckets,
and as the nurse-lady who comes down here says we must have fresh air
in the room, being 'tis all four of us sleep in it, I keep the window
open at night.  I don't take no stock in all this fresh-air talk.
'Taint only the water what gets froze--"

"Why don't you cover a bucketful of it with one of those tubs?"
Again Bettina's forefinger pointed.  "That would keep the wind off
and the water wouldn't freeze if it was covered up."

"I never thought of that.  Get back, Rosie!" Mrs. Gibbons made effort
to catch her little daughter, but this time the child wriggled down
from the foot of the bed and came toward me, hands behind her back,
and stared up into my face.

"Whatcha name?"

I told her and asked hers, and without further preliminaries she came
close to me and hunched her shoulders to be taken in my lap.

"We've got to go--we're bound to go, Miss Dandridge!"  With a leap
Bettina was out of her chair, and, catching the little girl by the
hand, she drew her from me and dangled in front of her a
once-silvered mesh-bag, took from it a penny, and gave it to her;
then she turned to Mrs. Gibbons.

"We're awful glad we've seen you."  Bettina nodded gravely to the
woman on the bed.  "And of course we won't tell anybody about Jimmy
not being twelve yet; but Miss Heath wants him to go back to school,
and she's coming to see you soon about it.  We've got to go now."

In a manner I could not understand, Bettina, who had gotten up and
was now standing behind Mrs. Gibbons, beckoned to me mysteriously,
and, fearing the latter might become aware of her violent movements,
I, too, got up and shook hands with my hostess.

"I will see you in a few days," I said.  "There's no chance for Jimmy
if he doesn't have some education.  He ought to go back to school."

"Yes 'm, I know he ought, but he can't go." Jimmy's mother shook
hands, limply.  "The pickle-factory where I used to work is turning
off hands every week, and I can't get nothing to do there.  I don't
know how to do nothing but pickles.  Sometimes I gets a little sewing
at home, but I ain't a sewer.  The Charities sends me a basket of
keep-life-in-you groceries every now and then, and the city gives me
some coal and wood when there's enough to go round more than once,
but I need Jimmy's money for the rent."

"If the rent were paid would you let him go back to school?"

"Yes 'm."  The dull voice quickened not at all.  "I'd be glad to let
him go.  I don't want him to work, but them that don't know how it is
can't understand.  You-all must come again.  Good-by.  Come back
here, Rosie.  You'll catch your death out there.  Good-by."

In the open air, which felt good after the steaming heat of the
bedroom-kitchen, Bettina and I walked for a few moments in silence,
and then, slipping her arm in mine, she looked up at me with wise
little eyes.

"Please excuse me for telling you, Miss Dandridge, but you're new yet
in the places you've been going to since you came to Scarborough
Square, and you'll have to be careful about taking the children on
your lap and in your arms, if they're babies.  You love children, and
you just naturally hold out your hands to them, but if you don't know
them very well, you'd better not.  All of them ain't healthy, and
hardly any--"

Bettina stopped and, standing still, looked straight ahead of her at
a man and a young woman crossing the street some little distance from
us.  Then she looked up at me.  The man was Selwyn.  The girl with
him was the odd and elfish little creature who had been hurt in
Scarborough Square and whom he had helped bring in to Mrs. Mundy.




CHAPTER IX

Bettina, who had opened the door for Selwyn on his last visit, and
who had informed me the next day that she had "shivered with
trembles" because of his great difference to the men in Scarborough
Square, for the second time looked up at me.

"What is he doing down here?"  Her finger pointed in the direction of
the man and woman just ahead of us.  "What's he talking to that girl
for?"

I did not answer her at once.  Amazement and unbelief were making my
heart hot, and a flood of color burned my face.  Of all men on earth,
Selwyn was the last to find in this part of the town at this time of
the evening, and as he bent his head to speak to the girl I noticed
he was talking earnestly and using his hands in expressive gestures
as he talked.  Starting forward, I took a few steps and then stopped,
sharply.

"I don't know what he is doing down here.  Certainly he is at liberty
to come here just as we come."

Bettina's eyes strained in the darkness.  "I can't see her face.  If
we cross over we can catch up with them by the time they reach the
corner where we could see her in the light."  The grip of my hand on
her arm made her stop.  "I mean--"

"You don't know what you mean."

It was silly, childish, unreasonable, that I should speak sharply to
Bettina, and equally unreasonable that fear and horror and sickening
suspicion should possess me, but possessed I was by sensations
hitherto unexperienced, and for a moment the gaslight from the lamp
on the opposite street corner wavered and circled in a confusing,
bewildering way.  Sudden revelations, sudden realizations, were
unsteadying me.  Was Selwyn really some one I did not know?  Was his
life less single than I believed it?  Hateful, ugly, disloyal
questions surged tumultuously for a half-minute; then reason
returned, and shame that I should insult him with doubt, cooled the
flame in my face.

"It's too late to go to the Binkers.  We'd better go home.  We'll go
there some other afternoon."

I turned from Bettina's amazed eyes.  My tone of voice a moment
before was still perplexing her, and unblinkingly she was searching
my face.  Hitherto her directness, her frankness of speech and use of
words, had amused me, and I had permitted, perhaps, too great an
exercise of her gift of comment; but applied personally it was a
different matter.

"We'll go to the corner and turn there," I said.  "That will be the
nearest way home."

"But don't you want to see who she is?"  Scarborough Square customs
were those most familiar to Bettina, and they exacted understanding
of doubtful situations.  "Don't you want to see what--what she looks
like?"

"Why should I?  Mr. Thorne knows many people I do not know."  I moved
toward the corner.  "Come on.  It's getting late."

"Gentlemen like him don't know girls like her.  She lives down here
somewhere, and he lives where you used to live.  He couldn't be sweet
on her, because--because he couldn't."  She caught up with me.  "He's
yours, ain't he, Miss Danny?  You'd better tell him--"

I hated myself for looking across the street, but as I hurried on my
eyes were following Selwyn and the girl, and when I saw the latter
stop and bury her face in her hands, saw Selwyn say something to her,
saw him turn in one direction and she in another, I, too, stopped;
for a moment was unable to move.

We had reached the corner as Selwyn left the opposite one and came
toward us.  Head down, as if deeply thinking, he did not look up
until close to us.  Under the gaslight I waited, not knowing why, and
Bettina being behind me, he thought I was alone when presently he saw
me.

"Dandridge!"  He stared as if stupefied with amazement.  Lifting his
hat mechanically, he came closer.  "What in the name of Heaven are
you doing here alone this time of night?  Are you losing your mind?"

His entire absence of embarrassment, his usual disapproval of my
behavior, his impatient anger, had an unlooked-for effect, and sudden
relief and hot joy so surged over me that I laughed, a queer,
nervous, choking little laugh.

"I am not alone.  It is not yet six, and I have been to see a boy who
is what you are not--the head of a house.  I mean a house with a
family in it.  Have you, too, been visiting?"

His face flushed, and frowningly he turned away.  "I had business
down here.  I had to come to it as it could not be brought to me.
Where are you going?"

"Home."

Bettina, who in some unaccountable way had managed to stay behind me,
came forward and bowed as if to an audience.  "I've been taking her
to where she goes, Mr. Thorne, and grannie knows all the places.
There ain't one that's got a disease in it, and Mr. Crimm would tell
us if it wasn't right to go to them.  She don't ever go anywhere by
herself.  She's too new yet."

Selwyn smiled grudgingly.  Bettina's fat and short little body made
effort to stretch to protective requirements, and her keen eyes
raised to his held them for a moment.  Then she turned to me.

"Maybe he'd like to go to some of the homes we go to and see--"

"No.  He doesn't want to see."  I caught her hand and slipped it
through my arm.  "It's much more comfortable not to see.  One can
sleep so much better.  Are you going our way?"  I turned to Selwyn.
"If you are, we'd better start."

For a full block we said nothing.  Selwyn, biting the ends of his
close-cut mustache, walked beside me, hands in his pockets and eyes
straight ahead, and not until Bettina had twice asked him if he knew
where Rowland Street was did he answer her.

"Rowland Street?"  He turned abruptly, as if brought back to
something far removed in thought.  "What on earth do you know of
Rowland Street?"

"Nothing--I never knew there was a street by that name until last
week when I heard a girl talking to grannie, who said she lived on
it.  She did her hands, when she talked, just like the girl with you
did."  Bettina twisted hers in imitative movements.  "She didn't keep
her hands still a minute."

"Few girls do when they talk.  They apparently prefer to use their
hands to their brains."  Selwyn's shoulders shrugged impatiently,
then his teeth came together on his lip.  Again he stared ahead and,
save for Bettina's chatter, we walked in silence to Scarborough
Square.

There had been few times in my life in which speech was impossible,
but during the quarter of an hour it took us to reach home words
would not come, and numbness possessed my body.  A world of
possibilities, a world I did not know, seemed suddenly revealing
itself, and at its dark depths and sinister shadows I was frightened,
and more than frightened.  Conflicting and confusing emotions, a
sense of outrage and revolt, were making me first hot and then cold,
and distrust and suspicion and baffling helplessness were enveloping
me beyond resistance.  The happy ignorance and unconcern and
indifference of my girlhood, my young womanhood, were vanishing
before cruel and compelling verities, and that which, because of its
ugliness, its offensiveness, its repulsiveness, I had wanted to know
nothing about, I knew I would now be forced to face.

It was true what Mrs. Mundy and Aunt Matilda and Selwyn and even
Kitty, four years younger than myself, had often told me, that in
knowledge of certain phases of life I was unwarrantably lacking.
Subjects that had seemingly interested other girls and other women
had never interested me, and I took no part in their discussion.  And
now the protection of the past that had prevented understanding of
sordid situations and polluting possibilities was being roughly torn
away, and I was seeing that which not only stung and shocked and
sickened, but I was seeing myself as one who after selfish sleep had
been rudely waked.

Head and heart hot, I pushed back upleaping questions, forced down
surging suspicion and tormenting fears, but all the while I was
conscious that in the friendship that was mine and Selwyn's, the
something that was more than friendship, a great gap had opened that
was separating us.  If he gave no explanation of his acquaintance
with the girl he had just left, it must be because he could not.  He
knew my hatred of mystery, my insistence upon frankness between
friends.  Would he come in and talk as freely as he had ever done of
whatever concerned him?  Would he tell me--

As I opened the door with my latch-key Bettina bounded inside, and
the light falling on Selwyn's face showed it white and worn.
Something was greatly troubling him.

"Good night."  He turned toward the steps without offering his hand.
"It is useless to ask you not to go in such neighborhoods as you were
in this evening, but if you knew what you were doing you would stay
away."

"I know very well what I am doing.  I am hardly so stubborn or wilful
as you think.  But if it is unwise for me to be in the neighborhood
referred to, is it any less wise--for you?"

"Me?"  The inflection in his voice was the eternal difference in a
man's and woman's privileges.  "It was not a question of wisdom--my
being where you saw me.  It was one of necessity.  Moreover, a man
can go where he pleases.  A woman can't.  No purity of purpose can
overcome the tyranny of convention."

"Convention!"  My hands made impatient gesture.  "It's the drag-net
of human effort, the shelter within which cowards run to cover.  In
its place it has purpose, but its place, for convenience sake, has
been immensely magnified.  And why is convention limited to women?"

It was childish--my outburst--and, ashamed of it, I started to go in,
then turned and again looked at Selwyn.  Into his face had come
something I could not understand, something that involved our future
friendship, and, frightened, I leaned against the iron railing of the
little porch and gripped it with hands behind my back.

"Selwyn!"  The words came unsteadily.  "Have you nothing to say to
me, Selwyn?  Don't you know that I know the girl with you to-night
was the girl who--who we brought in here last night?  If you knew
her, why--"

Staring at me as if not understanding, Selwyn came closer.  In his
eyes was puzzled questioning, but as they held mine they filled with
something of horror, and over his face, which had been white and
worn, spread deep and crimson flush.  "You don't mean--  God in
heaven!  Do you think the girl is anything to me?"

I did not answer, and, turning, he went down the steps and I into the
house.




CHAPTER X

For the past ten days I have been a very restless person.  Mrs. Mundy
looks at me out of the corners of her kind and keen and cheery little
eyes when she does not think I am noticing, but she asks me nothing.
Mrs. Mundy is the wisest woman I know.

If only I could sleep!  During the days I am busy, but I dread the
long nights when questions crowd that, fight as I may, I cannot keep
from asking.  Selwyn is my friend.  I never doubt a friend.  But why
does he not come to me?  Why does he not make clear that which he
must know is inexplicable to me?

I may never marry Selwyn, but certainly I shall marry no one else.
How could we hope for happiness when we feel so differently toward
much that is vital, when our attitude to life is as apart as the
poles?  When each thinks the other wrong in points of view and manner
of living?  Selwyn was born in a house with high walls around it.  He
likes its walls.  He does not care for many to come in, and cares
still less to go outside to others.  Few people interest him.  All
sorts interest me.  We are both selfish and stubborn, but both hate
that which is not clean and clear, and save from his own lips I would
not believe that in his life is aught of which he could not tell me.

I have never told him I loved him, never promised to marry him.  To
live in his high-walled house with its conventional customs, its
age-dimmed portraits, its stiff furnishings, and shut-out sunshine,
would stifle every cell in brain and lungs, and to marry him would be
to marry his house.  I hate his house, hate the aloofness, the lack
of sympathy it represents.  Its proud past I can appreciate, but not
its useless present.  Save his brother Harrie, it is the one thing of
his old life left Selwyn.  At the death of his father he bought
Harrie's interest and it is all his now.  I would not ask him to live
elsewhere, but I would choke and smother did I live in his house.
And yet--

Ten days have passed and I have neither seen nor heard from Selwyn.


I have often wondered, on waking winter mornings in my very warm bed,
how it would feel to go out in the gray dawn of a new day and hurry
off to work.  Now I know.

For more than a week I have been up at five forty-five, and at
six-thirty have been hurrying with Lucy Hobbs, who lives around the
corner, to the overalls-factory, where she is a forewoman.  It is
dark and cold and raw at half-past six on a winter morning, and the
sunrise is very different from what it is in summer.

Each morning as I started out with Lucy, and hurried down street
after street, I watched the opening doors of the shabby, dull-looking
houses we passed with keen interest.  Ash-cans and garbage-pails were
in front of many of them, and through unshuttered windows a child
could occasionally be seen with its face pressed against the pane,
waiting to wave good-by to some one who was leaving.  Out of the
doors of these houses came men and women and boys and girls, who
hurried as we hurried, and with a word to some, a wave of her
uplifted hand to others, a blank stare at others again, Lucy seemed
leading a long procession.  Around each corner and from every car
that passed came more "Hands," and each morning when the factory was
reached a crowd that jammed its entrance and extended half a block up
and down the street was waiting for the opening of the door, out of
which it would not come until darkness fell again.

For the first day or two I was noticed with indifference on the part
of some, resentment on the part of others, but on the third day, as I
took my place in the pushing, laughing, growling crowd that made its
way up several flights of stairs to the big room where shabby clothes
are changed for yet shabbier working ones, my good-mornings were
greeted with less grudging acknowledgments, and now we are quite
friendly, these "Hands" and I, and through their eyes I am seeing
myself and others like me--seeing much and many things from an angle
never used before.

They nodded to me less hesitatingly as the days went by, and at the
noon hour, when I have my lunch with first one group and then
another, I find them, on the whole, frank and outspoken, find they
have as decided opinions concerning what they term people like
that--which term is usually accompanied by a gesture in the direction
where I once lived--as said people have concerning them, to whom, as
a rule, they also refer in much the same manner and with the same
words.  With each group on either side of its separating gulf the
conviction is firm that little is to be hoped for or expected from
the other, and common qualities are forgotten in the realization of
distinctive differences.

"What's the most you ever made a week?" The girl who asked the
question moved up for me to sit on the bench beside her, and,
unwrapping a newspaper parcel, took from it a large cucumber pickle,
a piece of cheese, a couple of biscuits, and half of a cocoanut pie,
and laid them on a table in front of her.  "Help yourself."  She
pushed the paper serving as tray and cloth toward me.  "I ain't had
much appetite lately.  Hello, Mamie!  Come over here and sit on our
bench.  What you got good for lunch?  My stomach's turned back on
pie.  I'd give ten cents for a cup of coffee."

"Everywhere else but this old hothouse sells it for two cents a cup
without, and three cents with." The girl called Mamie nodded to me
and took her seat on the bench.  "I don't like milk nohow, and I'd
give the money glad for something hot in the middle of the day.
Don't nothing do your insides as much good as something piping hot.
Say--I saw Barker last night."  Her voice lowered but little.  "He
and I are going to see 'Some Girl' at the Bijou next week.  It's all
make-up--his being sweet on Ceeley Bayne!  That knock-kneed,
slew-footed, pop-eyed Gracie Jones got that off.  I'm going to get
one them lace-and-chiffon waists at Plum's for $2.98 if don't nobody
get sick and need medicine between now and Wednesday.  Seems like
somebody's always sick at our house."

The question asked me had been forgotten, and, glad to escape the
acknowledgment that I had never earned a dollar in my life, I got up
on the plea that I must see a girl at the other end of the room, and
walked across it.  As I went I scanned each face I saw.  Consciously
or subconsciously I had been hoping for days that I would see a face
which ever haunts me, a face I wanted to forget and could not forget.
Everywhere I go, in factories or mills or shops or homes; in the
streets, and at my windows, I am always wondering if I shall see her.
She was very unhappy.  Who is she?  Why was Selwyn with her?  It is
my last thought at night, my first in the morning.

Yesterday I was at the box-factory where Jimmy Gibbons works.  It is
his last week there.  On the fifteenth he starts again to school.
Knowing the president of the company well, I asked that Jimmy should
be my guide through the various departments, and permission was
given.  I wish Jimmy were mine.

"Miss High-Spy 'ain't got any love for on-lookers, and we'd better
not stay in here long."  Jimmy's voice was cautious, but his eyes
merry, and, glancing in the direction of the sour and snappy person
watching each movement of each worker, I agreed with him that it was
not well to linger.  The room was big and bare, its benches filled
with white-faced workers, and the autocrat who presided over it
seemed unconscious of its stifling, steamy heat and sickening smells
of glue and paste.  Going out into the hall, Jimmy and I went to a
window, opened it, and gave our lungs a bath.

"What does she do it for?  Is she crazy?"

"Not asylum-crazy--mean-crazy."  Jimmy's head nodded first
negatively, then with affirmation.  "She's come up from the beginning
place, and used to be a fire-eater before she got to be boss of our
bunch, and the men say people like that, people who ain't used to
driving, drive harder than any other kind when they get the chance.
She's a bully to the under ones, but the uppers--" Jimmy's eyes were
lifted to mine and his lips made a whistling sound.  "If Mr.
Pritchard kicked her in the face, she'd lick the soles of his shoes
when he was doing it, if she could.  She wants to be boss of the room
up-stairs and Mr. Pritchard can put her where he pleases.  If he
don't do it, he'd better, the women say, 'count of her knowing more
about him than he knows she knows.  I don't know what 'tis, but I
hate her.  All of us hate her."

"Why doesn't some one speak to Mr. Johns?  Certainly he can't know--"

"Yes 'm, he does.  Joe Dickson and Bob Beazley told him once, and the
next week they got a hand-out.  High-Spy made Mr. Pritchard do it.
Mr. Johns leaves those kinds of things to him.  Swell folks like him
'ain't got time to look after folks like us.  He's awful rich, ain't
he?"

"He isn't poor.  When are you going to have your lunch?"  I looked at
my watch.  "Can't you go out and have it with me?  I'll ask Mr.
Johns.  Come on, quick.  I'll see the other rooms when I come back."

Jimmy shook his head.  "I can't go.  I ain't being docked 'count of
being with you, because Mr. Pritchard sent me, but he wouldn't let me
come back if I went out.  I been sent down to him once to-day, and
please 'm don't ask him, please 'm don't!"

In Jimmy's voice was something of terror, and his hands slipped in
and out of his trousers' pockets with nervous, frightened movements.
His usually merry little mouth with its pale lips quivered oddly, and
in his eyes, as he turned away, were tears I could not understand.

I put my hand on his shoulder, lifted his face to mine.  "What is it,
Jimmy?  What has happened that you don't want me to ask Mr. Johns to
tell Mr. Pritchard you can go with me?  Why are you afraid?"

"I ain't afraid.  Yes 'm, I am.  I--I've been docked once to-day.
Please 'm don't ask Mr. Pritchard nothing!  High-Spy makes him punish
me whenever--"

"Punish you!"  I straightened indignantly.  "Why does he punish you?
What right--"

"I don't mean licking.  But he keeps me out of the room when I'm sent
out, and docks me at the end of the week.  Mother needs every cent.
She's back in the rent.  I was sent out to-day."

"But why?  What were you doing?"

"Nothing--leastways I didn't mean to.  There wasn't none of us sick
this morning, and Billy Coons was acting down behind High-Spy's back,
and I tried not to laugh.  She don't let us laugh.  But she said I
did.  I didn't laugh--"  Jimmy's voice was protesting.  "I just
smiled and it--it busted."

"Is that why she made you go out of the room?" I turned away and
looked out of the window lest the accident to Jimmy's smile be mine.
"Is that why she sent you out?"

He nodded.  "Mr. Pritchard kept me out an hour.  Sometimes he lets me
make it up at lunch.  I was going to ask him to let me to-day, but--"

"I'm preventing.  I'm glad of it!  When are you going to eat your
lunch?"

"I've done et it--"  Jimmy's tongue moistened his lips.  "I et it on
my way here this morning.  I got paid off last night and I took out
five cents and gave the rest to mother, and this morning I bought a
pie with it and et up every bite.  It might have been hooked when I
was out the room, so I'm glad I didn't save none.  I got it at
Heck's.  He keeps the best pies in town for five cents.  They're real
fat."

I was paying little attention to Jimmy.  At the open window I could
see a young girl across the street with a baby in her arms.  She had
brought it from a small frame house with high steps leading to a
sagging porch, in the door of which a large and kindly-faced woman
was standing, arms folded and eyes watching the movements of the
girl.  As the latter lifted her head, on which was no hat, I leaned
forward, my heart in my throat.  The odd, eager young face, the
boyish arrangement of the hair above it, the quick, bird-like
movements of the slender body, had burned for days and nights in my
brain, and I recognized her at once.

"Jimmy," I said, "come here."  I drew him to the window with nervous
haste, my fingers twitching, my breath unsteady.  "Who is that girl
with the baby?  There she is, turning the corner.  Look quick!  Do
you know her?"

Jimmy shook his head.  "Never saw her.  Can't see her now."  He
leaned far out the window, but the girl had disappeared, and the
woman in the doorway had gone in and closed the door.

I must have said something, made some sort of sound, for Jimmy,
turning from the window, looked at me uneasily, in his eyes distress
and understanding.

"What's the matter, Miss Heath?  You'd better sit down.  Did the heat
make you sick?  You're--you're whiter than that wall."




CHAPTER XI

A sickness which Jimmy could not understand was indeed upon me, and
unsteadily I leaned against the window-frame, looking at, but not
seeing, him, and not until he spoke again did I remember I was not
alone.

"Is it very bad?  You look as if it hurts so.  Wait a minute--I'll
get you some water."

I caught him as he started to run down the hall, and drew him back.
"I don't want any water.  I am not sick."  My head went up.  "The
smell of paste would make me ill if I stayed, however, and I'm not
going to stay to-day.  I'll come some other time.  Run on and join
the other boys.  Tell your mother"--I seemed groping for words--"tell
your mother I will see her before you start to school.  Run on,
Jimmy, and thank Mr. Pritchard for lending you to me.  And laugh as
much as you want to, Jimmy.  Laugh all you can before--you can't!"

Over the banister the child was leaning anxiously, watching me as I
stumbled down the steps.  At their foot I turned and waved my hand
and laughed, an odd, faint, far-away laugh that seemed to come from
some one else; and then I went into the street and found myself
crossing it, impelled by surging impulse to know--

To know what?  At the foot of the rickety stairs leading to the high
porch from which I had seen the girl come I stopped.  All I had been
repressing, fighting, resisting for days past, had in a moment
yielded to horror, and hurt that seemed past healing, and I was
surrendering to what I should know was impossible.  I must be mad!

With a shudder that was half a sob I turned away and walked down the
street and into the one which would lead to Scarborough Square.  As I
walked my shoulders straightened.  What was the matter with me?  Was
I becoming that which I loathed--a suspicious, spying person?  I was
insulting Selwyn.  He knew I hated mystery, however, knew the right
of explanation was mine, knew that I expected of any man who was my
friend that his life should be as open as my life.  If I had hurt
him, angered him by my question when I last saw him, he had hurt, had
angered me far more.  For now I was angry.  Did he imagine I was the
sort of woman who accepted reticence with resignation?  I was not.

At the corner Mr. Fogg was standing in the door of his little shop,
holding a blue bottle up to the light and examining it with critical
care.  He had on his usual clothes of many colors, shabby from much
wearing, but in his round, clean-shaven face, pink with health and
inward cheer, was smiling serenity, and in his eyes a twinkle that
yielded not to time or circumstance.  His second-hand bookshelf, his
canary-birds and white rabbits, his fox-terriers and goldfish are
friends that never fail, and in them he has found content.  His
eagerness to chat occasionally with some one who cares, as he cares,
for his beloved books, is not at times to be resisted, but I was in
no mood to talk to-day.  I wondered if I could hurry by.

"Good morning!"  The blue bottle, half filled with water, in which a
tiny bulb was floating, was waved toward me, and a shaggy white head
nodded at me.  "It's a fine day, ain't it?--a fine day for snow.
Good and gray.  I think we'll have some flakes before night.  Kinder
feel like a boy again when it's snowing.  I don't know yet which
season I like best.  Every one has got its glory.  What you been up
to to-day?  Seeing some more things?"

I nodded.  "I wish I could come in, but I can't." I shivered, though
I was not cold.  "I am going up-town."  A minute before I had no
intention of going up-town, but to go indoors was suddenly
impossible.  Whatever was possessing me must be fought off alone.  "I
will bring you my copy of Men and Nations to-morrow.  Keep it as long
as you wish."

"Thank you, ma'am.  Thank you hearty.  I'll take good care of it.  I
suppose you haven't heard of the widow Robb?  Her name's Patty, you
know, and she's got a beau.  He's named Cake.  Luck plays tricks with
love, don't it?  Don't get caught in a snow-storm.  You ain't"--his
voice was anxious--"you ain't thinking of leaving us, are you?  The
girls down here are needing of you, needing sore.  All of us are
needing of you."

I shook my head.  "Of course I'm not thinking of leaving you."  I
waved my hand in response to his wave of the bottle, and, not seeing
where I went, I turned the corner and, head bent to keep out of my
face the tiny particles of sleet and snow beginning to fall, walked
for some distance before noticing where I was.

Much of my city, unknown to me a short while ago, was now familiar,
but to much I was still a stranger, and presently I was wondering
concerning the occupants of the houses I was passing.  The shabby
gentility and dull respectability of the latter was depressing, and
to escape the radiation of their dreariness I turned into first one
street and then another, and as I walked the girl with the boyish
face walked with me, the face with its hunted fear.  She had held the
baby as if frightened, and when she turned the corner she was
running.  She was so young.  Could the baby be hers?  It must be
hers.  Nothing but a mother-face could have in it what hers had.  Why
was she afraid, and of what?

The streets were becoming rough and unpaved before I noticed I was
nearing the city limits, and, cutting across afield, I got into the
Avenue, toward the end of which was Selwyn's house.  As I neared it
my steps slowed.  For years the Thorne property had been on the
outskirts of the city, but progress had taken it in, and already
houses, flagrantly modern and architecturally shameless, offered
strong contrast to its perfect lines, its conscious dignity, its calm
aloofness, and its stone walls which shielded it from gaping gaze and
gave it privacy.  The iron gates were closed, the shutters drawn, and
from the place stillness that was oppressive radiated, a stillness
that was ominous.

Pride was undoubtedly Selwyn's dominating characteristic.  Pride in
his name, in its unstained honor, in the heritage of his fathers; and
in the presence of his house it seemed an ugly dream--the picture
ever in my mind, the picture of Selwyn walking slowly with a young
girl in the dark of a winter afternoon in a section of the city as
removed from his as sunlight is removed from shadow.  In his nature
was nothing that could make such association imaginable.  If no
higher deterrent prevented, pride would protect him from doubtful
situations.  He was sensitive to higher deterrents, however, as
sensitive as I.

Passing the gates, on the stone columns of which the quaint,
old-fashioned lamps of former days were still nightly lighted, I
glanced through them at the snow-covered lawn and the square-built,
lonely house, occupied now only by Selwyn and his younger brother
Harrie, then again hurried on.  The Avenue with its great width and
unbroken length, its crystal-coated trees and handsome houses, was
now deserted save for hurrying limousines and an occasional
pedestrian; and safe in the fierceness of the snow, from encounter
with old friends, I decided to walk home through the section of the
city which was the only part I once knew well, and just as I decided
I knocked into some one turning a corner as I approached it.

"Oh, Miss Heath!"  The woman drew back.  "The snow was so thick I
didn't see you.  Did I hurt you?"

"Not a bit."  I wiped my face, damp with melted flakes which had
brushed it.  "What are you doing up here?  You look as frozen as I
feel.  Have you got on overshoes?"

The woman shook her head.  "I haven't got any.  I wouldn't have come
out, but I had to bring some work back to Mrs. Le Moyne.  If she'd
paid me I'd have bought a pair of rubbers.  But she didn't pay me.
She said she'd let me have the money next week."

"Next week!  You need it this minute.  How much does she owe you?"

"Four seventy-five for these last things, and four twenty-five for
those I made last week.  I don't know what I'm going to do."  The
woman's hands, cold and stiff, twisted nervously.  "I don't reckon
she's ever had to think about rent, or food, or fuel, or overshoes.
People like that don't have to.  I wish they did, sometimes."

"So do I.  Come on; it's too cold to stop.  We'll go down to Benson's
and get something hot to warm us up.  I forgot about lunch.  Turn
your coat-collar up--the snow is getting down your neck--and take my
muff.  I've got pockets and you haven't."

As we started off a large limousine with violets in the glass vases
of its interior, upholstered in fawn-colored cloth, stopped just
ahead of us, and a woman I did not know got out of it, followed by
one I knew well.  Fur coats entirely covered their dresses, and
quickly the chauffeur opened an umbrella to protect their hats.  As
we passed I started to speak to Alice Herbert, but, turning her head,
she gave me not even a blink of recognition.  At first I did not
understand; then I laughed.

"Who is that?"  Mrs. Beck's voice was awed.  "Ain't they grand?  Do
you know them?"

"No."  I put my hands in the pockets of my long coat.  "I used to
know one of them, the feeble-minded one.  We'd better go over to High
Street and take a car to Benson's.  The storm's getting worse.  We'll
have to hurry."


The street lamps were being lighted as we reached Scarborough Square,
and at sight of the house, in the doorway of which Mrs. Mundy was
standing, I hurried, impelled by impulse beyond defining.  Mrs. Beck
had left me at the corner, and as Mrs. Mundy closed the door behind
me she followed me up the steps.

"I've been that worried about you I couldn't set still long at a
time, and Bettina's been up three times to see that your fire was
burning all right.  I knew you didn't have your umbrella or
overshoes.  It's a wonder you ain't froze stiff.  I'll bring your tea
right up."

"I've had tea, thank you."  I held out first one foot and then the
other to the blazing coals, and from the soles of my shoes came
curling steam.  "It's a wonderful storm.  I'd like to walk ten miles
in it.  I don't know why you were worried.  I'm all right."

"I know you are, but"--she poked the fire--"but I wish you wouldn't
go so hard.  For near two weeks you haven't stopped a minute.  You
can't stand going like that.  I wish I'd known where to find you.
Mr. Thorne was here this afternoon.  He was very anxious to see you."

"Mr. who?"  I turned sharply, then put my hands behind me to hide
their sudden twisting.  I was cold and tired, and the only human
being in all the world I wanted to see was Selwyn.  It was
intolerable, this tormenting something that was separating us.  "When
was he here?"  I asked, and leaned against the mantel.

"He came about three, but he waited half an hour.  He didn't say
much, but he was powerful put out about your not being home.  He
couldn't wait any longer, as he had to catch a train--the
four-thirty, I think."

"Where was he going?"  I sat down in the big wing-chair and the
fingers of my hands interlaced.  "Did he say where he was going?"

"He didn't mention the place, just said he had to go away and might
be gone some time.  He'll write, I reckon.  He was awful disappointed
at not seeing you.  He asked me--"  Mrs. Mundy, on her knees,
unbuttoned my shoes and drew them off.  "Your feet are near 'bout
frozen, and no wonder.  Your stockings are wet clean through, and I'm
letting you sit here in them when I promised him I'd see you didn't
kill yourself doing these very things.  You just put your feet on the
fender while I get some dry clothes.  He says to me, says he: 'Mrs.
Mundy, the one human being she gives no thought to is herself, and
will you please take care of her?  She don't understand'"--

"Oh, I do understand!"  My voice was wearily protesting.  "The one
thing men don't want women to do is to understand.  They want us to
be sweet and pretty--and not understand.  Selwyn talks as if I were a
child.  I am perfectly able to take care of myself."

"Maybe you are, but you don't do it--least-ways, not always.  I
promised him I wouldn't let you wear yourself out, and I promised
him--"

"What?"

"That I wouldn't let you go too far.  He says you've lost your
patience with people, specially women, who think it's not their
business to bother with things that--that aren't nice, and you're apt
to go to the other extreme and forget how people talk."

"About some things they don't talk enough.  Did--did he leave any
message for me?"

Again Mrs. Mundy shook her head.  "I think he wanted to talk to you
about something he couldn't send messages about."




CHAPTER XII

Selwyn has been gone two weeks.  I have heard nothing from him.  I do
not even know where he is.


Yesterday, over the telephone, Kitty reproached me indignantly for not
coming oftener to see her.  Each week I try to take lunch or dinner
with her, but there have been weeks when I could not see her, when I
could not get away.  Scarborough Square and the Avenue are not mixable,
and just now Scarborough Square is taking all my time.

Daily new demands are being made upon me, new opportunities opening,
new friendships being formed, and though my new friends are very
interesting to me, I hardly think they would be to Kitty.  I rarely
speak of them to her.

Miss Hardy, the woman labor inspector for the state, a girl who had
worked in various factories since she was twelve and who had gotten her
education at a night school, where often she fell asleep at her desk, I
find both entertaining and instructing, but Kitty would not care for
her.  She wears spectacles, and Kitty has an unyielding antipathy for
women who wear spectacles.  Neither would she care for Miss Bayne,
another state employee, a clever, capable woman who is an expert in her
line.  It is her business to discover feeble-mindedness, to test school
children, and inmates of institutions to which they have been sent, or
of places to which they have gone because of incapacity or delinquency
or sin of any sort; and nothing I have read in books has been so
revealing concerning conditions that exist as her frank statements
simply told.

In my sitting-room at Scarborough Square she comes in frequently for
tea with me, and meets there Fannie Harris, the teacher of an open-air
school for the tuberculosis children of our neighborhood; and Martha
White, the district nurse for our particular section; meets Miss Hay, a
probation officer of the Juvenile Court, and Loulie Hill, a girl from
the country who had once gone wrong, and who is now trying to keep
straight on five dollars a week made in the sewing-room of one of the
city's hospitals.  Bettie Flynn, who lives at the City Home because of
epileptic fits, also comes in occasionally.  Bettie is a friend of Mrs.
Mundy.  Owing to kinlessness and inability to care for herself, owing,
also, to there being nowhere else to which she could go, she has been
forced to enter the Home.  Her caustic comments on its management are
of a clear-cut variety.  Bettie was born for a satirist and became an
epileptic.  The result at times is speech that is not guarded, a
calling of things by names that are their own.

These and various others who are facing at short range realities of
which I have long been personally ignorant, are taking me into new
worlds, pumping streams of new understandings, new outreaches, into my
brain and heart, and life has become big and many-sided, and a thing
not to be wasted.  Myself of the old life I am seeing as I never saw
before, seeing in a perspective that does not fill with pride.

Last night I went to my first dinner-party since Aunt Matilda's death.
In Kitty's car I watched with interest, on the way to her house, the
long stretches of dingy streets, then cleaner ones, with their old and
comfortable houses; the park, with its bare trees and shrubs, and
finally the Avenue, with its smooth paving and pretentious homes, its
hurrying cars of luxurious make, its air of conscious smartness.  As
contrast to my present home it interested greatly.

Kitty's house is very beautiful.  She is that rare person who knows she
does not know, and the house, bought for her by her father as a
wedding-gift, she had put in the hands of proper authorities for its
furnishings.  It is not the sort of home I would care to have, but it
is undeniably handsome, and undoubtedly Kitty understands the art of
entertaining.

Her dinner-party was rather a large one, its honor guest an English
writer whose books are unendurably dull; but any sort of lion is
helpful in reducing social obligations, and for that purpose Kitty had
captured him.  She insisted on my coming, but begged me not to mention
horrid things, like poor people and politics and babies who died from
lack of intelligent care, but to talk books.

"So few of the others talk books, except novels, and he thinks most
modern novels rotten," she had told me over the telephone.  "So please
come and splash out something about these foreign writers whose names I
can't remember.  Bergyson is one, I believe, and Brerr another, and
France-Ana--Ana something France.  He's a man.  And there's another
one.  Mater. . .  Yes, that's it.  Maeterlinck.  And listen: Wear that
white crepe you wore at my wedding; it's frightfully plain, but all
your other things are black.  I don't see why you still wear black.
Aunt Matilda hated it."

As I went up-stairs to take off my wraps I smiled at Kitty's
instructions.  In her room she hastily kissed me.

"Do hurry and come down.  I'm so afraid he'll come before the others,
and I might have to talk to him.  Literary people are the limit, and
this one, they say, is the worst kind.  Billy refuses to leave his room
until you go down; says he'd rather be sent to jail than left alone
with him ten minutes.  He met him at the club."

Holding me off, she surveyed me critically.  "You look very well.
That's a good-looking dress.  It suits you.  I believe you wear pearls
and these untrimmed things just to bring out your hair and eyes.
Nobody but you could do it."

Stopping her short, quick sentences, she leaned forward.  "There he is,
coming up the steps with Mr. Alexander.  Come on; they're inside.  We
can go down now.   By the way"--she pinned the orchids at her waist
with unnecessary attention--"Selwyn got back yesterday.  He will be
here to-night.  Dick Moran is sick, and Selwyn is taking his place.  At
first he declined to come.  For weeks he's been going nowhere, but he
finally promised.  Are you ready?"

Without looking around she went out of the room, and without answering
her I followed.  I was conscious chiefly of a desire to get away, to do
anything but meet Selwyn where each would have to play a part; but as I
entered Kitty's drawing-room and later met her guests I crowded back
all else but what was due her, spoke in turn to each, and then to
Selwyn, as if between us there was no terrifying, unbridged gulf.

Kitty's dinners are perfect.  I am ever amazed at the care and
consideration she gives to their ordering.  In art and letters she is
not learned, but she is an expert in the management of household
affairs, and her dinner invitations are rarely declined.

At the table, with its lilacs and valley-lilies, its soft lights and
perfect appointments, were old friends of mine and new acquaintances of
hers, and with the guest of honor I shared their curiosity.  Very
skilfully Kitty led the chatter into channels where the draught was
light, and obediently I did my best to follow.  There was much talk,
but no conversation.

"Oh, Miss Heath!"  A young girl opposite me leaned forward.  "I've been
so crazy to meet you.  Some one told me that you'd gone in for slums.
It must be so entrancing!"

I looked up.  For a second Selwyn's eyes held mine and we both smiled,
but before I could speak Kitty's lion turned toward me.

"Yes--I heard that, too."  Fixing his black-rimmed glasses more firmly
on his big and bulging nose, Mr. Garrott looked at me closely.  "In my
country slumming has become a fad with a--a certain type of restless
women who have to make their living, I suppose.  But I wouldn't fancy
you were--"

"She isn't."

Jack Peebles, now happily married, blinked in my direction, signaled me
to say nothing, then turned to the Englishman.  "Miss Heath can do as
she chooses, being Miss Heath, but the Turks are right.  Women ought to
be kept behind latticed windows, given a lute, and supplied with veils,
and if they ask for anything else, they should be taken from the
window."

"I don't agree with you."  Mr. Garrott filled his fork with mushrooms
and raised it to his mouth.  "The Turks carry their restraint too far.
Women should have more liberty than is given them in Turkey.  They add
color to life, add to its--"

"Uncertainties."  Selwyn made effort to control the smile the others
found uncontrollable.  "In your country, now, the woman-question is
interesting, exciting.  There they do things, smash things, make a
noise, keep you guessing.  Over here their behavior is much less
entertaining.  Their attitude is one of investigation as well as
demand.  They have developed an unreasonable desire to know things;
know why they are as they are; why they should continue to be what they
have been.  They are preparing themselves by first-hand knowledge and
information to tell what most of us do not want to hear."

Selwyn's eyes again for a moment held mine, and in my face I felt hot
color creeping.  Never before had he defended, even with satire, what
he had told me a hundred times was folly on my part.  He turned to Mr.
Garrott.

"Why on earth perfectly comfortable, supposedly Christian human beings
should want personally to know anything about uncomfortable, unfit,
under-paid ones--"

"Oh, but I think they ought to!"  Again the pretty little creature in
green chiffon nodded toward me.  "But you won't let Miss Heath have a
chance to say anything!  Some one told me such queer people came to see
her.  Factory-girls and working-women and--oh--all sorts of people like
that.  Is it really so, Miss Heath?"

"Very interesting people come to see me.  They are undoubtedly of
different sorts, but one of the illuminating discoveries of life is
that human beings are amazingly alike.  Veneering is a great help, of
course.  If you knew my friends you would find--"

"I'd love to know them.  I always have liked queer people.  I've been
crazy to come and see you, but mother won't let--  I mean--"

"Mrs. Henderson says she met a young man when she went to see you who
was the cleverest person she ever talked, to."  Gentle Annie Gaines was
venturing to come to my help.  "He seemed to know something of
everything.  She couldn't remember his name."

"It's difficult to remember.  He's a Russian Jew.  Schrioski, is his
name."  At the head of the table I felt Kitty squirm, knew she was
twisting her feet in fear and indignation.  I turned to her English
guest.

"I have another friend who will be so glad to know I have met you, Mr.
Garrott.  He is one of your most intelligent and intense admirers.  He
has read, I think, everything you've written."

Absorbed in his salad, evidently new and to his liking, Mr. Garrott was
not impressed by, or appreciative of, my attempt to follow Kitty's
instructions.  With any reservations of my bad taste in talking shop I
would have agreed, still, something was due Kitty.  "He tells me"--I
refused to be ignored--"that he keeps an advance order for everything
you write; buys your books as soon as they are published."

"Buys them!"  With the only quick movement he had made, Mr. Garrott
turned to me.  "I'd like to meet him.  I'm glad to know there's
somebody in America who buys and reads my books.  Usually those who buy
don't read, and those who read don't buy.  But tell me--"  Again the
corners of his mouth drooped, and again his spectacles were adjusted.
"Why did you go in for--for living in a run-down place and meeting such
odds and ends as they say you meet?  You're not old enough for things
of that kind.  An ugly woman, uninteresting, unprovided for--she might
take them up."  He stared at me as if for physical explanation of
unreasonable peculiarities.  "You believe, I fancy--"

"That a woman is capable of deciding for herself what she wants to do."

Again Jack Peebles's near-sighted eyes blinked at me, but in his voice
there was no longer chaffing.  "She believes even more remarkable
things than that.  Believes if people, all sorts, knew one another
better, understood one another better, there would be less injustice,
less indifference, and greater friendship and regard.  Rather an
uncomfortable creed for those who don't want to know, who prefer--"

"But you don't expect all grades of people to be friends?  Surely you
don't expect--"

I smiled.  "No, I don't expect.  So far I'm only hoping all people may,
some day--be friendly."

Kitty was signaling frantically with her eyes, and in obedience I again
performed as requested, for the third time turned to Mr. Garrott.

"I heard a most interesting discussion the other day concerning certain
present-day French writers.  I wonder if you agree with Bernard Shaw
that Brieux is the greatest dramatist since Moliere, or if--"

"I never agree with Bernard Shaw."

Mr. Garrott frowned, and, taking up his wine-glass, drained it.
Putting it down, he again stared at me.  "I don't understand you.  You
don't look at all as I imagined you would."

At the foot of the table Billy was insisting upon the superiority of
the links of the Hawthorne to those of the Essex club, and Kitty, at
her end, was giving a lively account of a wedding-party she had come
across at the station the evening before when seeing a friend off for
her annual trip South, and at first one and then the other Mr. Garrott
looked, as if not comprehending why, when he wished to speak, there
should be chatter.  Later, when again we were in the drawing-room, he
continued to eye me speculatively, but he was permitted no opportunity
to add to his inquiries; and when at last he was gone Kitty sat down,
limp and worn at the strain she had been forced to endure.

"What business is it of his how you live and what you do?" she said,
indignantly.  "He's an old teapot, but you see now what I mean.  I'm
always having to explain you, to tell--"

"Don't do it.  I'll forgive much, but not explaining.  Your lion
doesn't roar well, still, a lion is worth seeing--once."  I turned to
Selwyn.  "I beg your pardon.  Did you speak to me?"

"I asked if I could take you to Scarborough Square.  I have a taxi
here."

"Thank you, but I am spending the night with Kitty.  I am not going
back."

In astonishment Kitty looked at me, then turned away.  I had told her I
could not stay.  I had not intended to stay, but I could not talk to
Selwyn to-night.  There would not be time and there was too much I
wanted to say.

Selwyn's shoulders made shrug that was barely perceptible, and without
offering his hand he said good night.  In the hall I heard him speak to
Kitty, then the closing of the door and the starting of the taxi, then
silence.

Dawn was breaking when at last I slept.




CHAPTER XIII

I have not seen Selwyn since the night of Kitty's dinner-party.  He
has been back three days.  If he wished to see me before he went
away, why does he not come to see me now?  Daily I determine I will
let no thought of him come into my mind.  The purposes for which I
came to Scarborough Square will be defeated if I continue to think of
this unimaginable happening that is with me day and night, this
peculiar behavior of which he makes no explanation.  I determine not
to think, and thought is ever with me.

I was silly, foolish, quixotic to hope that here, in this little
world of workaday people, he might be brought to see that personal
acquisition and advance is not enough to give life meaning, to
justify what it exacts.  I was foolish.  We are more apart than when
I came.

Mrs. Mundy, in her blue cotton dress, a band of embroidery in the
neck of its close-fitting basque, and around her waist a long, white
apron which reached beyond her ample hips to the middle of her back,
lingered this morning, dust-cloth in hand, at the door of my
sitting-room.  There was something else she wanted to say.

"I'm mighty 'fraid little Gertie Archer is going to have what we used
to call a galloping case." She went over to the window, where she
felt the earth in its flower-box to see if it were moist.  "She's a
pretty child, and she was terrible anxious to go to one of them
open-air schools on the roof, but there wasn't any room.  It's too
late now."

The upper ends of the dust-cloth were fitted together carefully, and,
leaving the window, Mrs. Mundy went over to the door.  "Do you reckon
the women know, the women where you come from?  And the other women,
the rich, and the comfortable, and the plain ones who could help,
too, if they were shown how--do you reckon they know?"

I looked up from the table where I had been straightening some
magazines.  "Know what?"

"About there not being schools enough for the children, and about
boys and girls going wrong because of not being shown how to go
right, and about--"

Mrs. Mundy sat down in a chair near the door.  "Another thing I want
to ask you is this: How did it come about that some men and women
have found out they've got to know, and they've got to care, and
they've _got_ to help with things they didn't use to help with; and
some 'ain't heard a sound, 'ain't seen a thing of what's going on
around them?

"Some people like being deaf and blind.  But most people are willing
to do their part if they only understand it.  The trouble is in
knowing how to go about things in the right way--the wise way.  Women
have had to stumble so long--

"They're natural stumblers--women are.  That is, some of 'em.
They're afraid to look where they're going.  I don't like to lose
heart in anything human, but I get low down in spirit when I see how
don't-care so many women are.  They're blind as bats when they don't
want to see, and they've got a mighty satisfying way of soothing of
themselves by saying some things ain't their business.  That's
devil's dope.  Generally women who talk that way are the ones who
call the most attention to the faults and failings of men.
Considering men are men, I think they do wonderful.  Mr. Guard says
if women keep silent much longer the very stones will cry out."

"Mr. Guard?  Is he the one you call the people's preacher?"

Mrs. Mundy nodded.  "He preaches to them what won't go in a church.
I reckon you've seen something about him in the papers.  He used to
have a church in a big city, but he gave it up.  I don't think he
thinks like the churches think, exactly, but he don't have any call
to mention creeds and doctrines down here, and he just asks people
plain out what kind of life they're living, not what they believe.
I've been wanting for a long time for you-all to know each other."

"I'd like very much to know him.  Ask him to come to see me."

"He don't go to see people unless they need him.  I've been wanting
him for weeks to come to supper with Bettina and me, but he's that
busy he hasn't had a night free to do it.  When he does have one,
would you mind coming down and taking supper with us instead of my
sending yours up as usual?  I'd be awful proud to have you."

"Of course I'll come.  I'd love to.  Can't you get him for Friday
evening?  I have no engagement for Friday--"

"It's this minute I'll try."  Mrs. Mundy got up with activity.  "You
two were meant to know each other.  Both of you have your own way of
doing things, and you'll have a lot to talk about.  You'll like him
and he'll like you.  I'll let you know if he can come as soon as I
find out."  Closing the door behind her, she left me alone.

Taking the morning paper to the window, I drew my chair close to it,
pushing back the curtains that I might have all possible light as I
read.  It was again snowing, and the grayness of the sky and
atmosphere was reflected in the room, notwithstanding the leaping
flames of the open fire, and after a while I put the paper aside and
looked out of the window.

Each twig and branch of the trees and shrubs of the snow-covered
Square was bent and twisted in fantastic shape by its coating of
sleet, and the usual shabbiness of the little park was glorified with
shining wonder; and under its spell, for the moment, I forgot all
else.  Here and there a squirrel hopped cautiously from tree to tree,
now standing on its branches and nibbling a nut dug from its
hiding-place, now scurrying off to hide it again, and as I watched
the cautious cocking of their heads I laughed aloud, and the sound
recalled me to the waste I was making of time.

"This isn't writing my letters, and they must go off on the afternoon
mail."  Getting up, I was about to turn from the window when a man
and a young woman coming across the Square caught my attention and,
hardly knowing why, I looked at them intently.  Something about the
man was familiar.  He was barely medium height, and singularly
slender, and though his head was bent that he might better hear the
girl who was talking, I was sure I had seen him before.  The girl I
had never seen.  She was dragging slowly, as if each step was forced,
and, putting her handkerchief close to her mouth, she began to cough.

For a moment they stood still and I saw the girl had on low shoes and
a shabby coat which had once been showy.  On one side of her hat was
a red bird, battered and bruised, and at this comic effort at
dressiness, which poor people cling to with such pathetic
persistence, I smiled, and then in alarm leaned closer to the window.

They had begun their walk again, and were now at the end of the path
opening on to the pavement.  I could see them clearly, and
instinctively my hands went out as if to catch her, for the girl had
fallen forward, and on the snow a tiny stream of red was dripping
from her mouth.  Quickly the man caught her and put his handkerchief
to her lips, and with equal swiftness he looked around.  He could not
lay her on the snow, but she could no longer stand.  The fear in his
face, the whiteness of hers, were plainly visible.  I raised the
window.

"Bring her over here," I called.  "I'll come down and help you."

In a flash I was out of the room and down the steps.  Mrs. Mundy, who
had heard my hurried running, followed me to the door.  "What is it?"
she asked.  "What's the matter, Miss Dandridge?"

Opening the front door, I started down the steps, but already the
man, with the girl in his arms, was coming up them.  "Go back," he
said, quietly, though his breath was quick and uneven.  "Go back.
You'll get your feet wet."

With a swift movement Mrs. Mundy pushed me aside.  "Mr. Guard?"  Her
voice was questioning, uncertain; then she held out her arms.  "The
poor child!  Give her to me.  Who is it?  Why, it's--it's Lillie
Pierce!"

"Yes."  The man's voice was low, and with a movement of his head his
hat fell on the floor.  "It's Lillie Pierce.  She has fainted.  Where
shall I take her?"

"In here."  Opening a door at the end of the hall, Mrs. Mundy
motioned Mr. Guard to enter.  From the girl's mouth the blood was
still dripping, and on the collar of her coat was a big round splotch
of red.

"No," I said.  "Bring her up-stairs.  There's a room all fixed, and
you have so much to do." I put my hand on Mrs. Mundy's arm.  "I can
take care of her.  Can't we take her up-stairs?"

A swift look passed between Mrs. Mundy and Mr. Guard.  "No."  The
latter shook his head.  "It is better for her to be down here."
Going inside of the little room, he laid the girl on a cot at the
foot of the bed, then turned to me.  "Get a doctor.  Call Chester
4273 and tell Carson, if he's there, to come at once.  If you can
find her, get Miss White also."

I turned to leave the room, but not before I saw Mrs. Mundy and Mr.
Guard at work on the girl, and already her hat and coat were off, and
warm covering was being tucked around her.  Mrs. Mundy knew what to
do, and with feet that hardly touched the steps I was at the
telephone and calling the number that had been given me.  I was
frightened and impatient at the slowness of Central.  "For Heaven's
sake, hurry!" I said.  "Some one is ill.  Ring loud!"

Dr. Carson was in.  He would come at once.  Miss White was out.

"Where is she?" I asked.  "Where can I get her?"

I was told where she might be found, and, changing my slippers for
shoes, and putting on my coat and hat, I came down ready to go out.
At the door of the room where they had taken the girl I stopped.  She
was now quite conscious, and with no pillow under her head she was
staring up at the ceiling.  Blood was no longer on her lips, but a
curious smile was on them.  It must have been this gasping, faintly
scornful smile that startled me.  It seemed mocking what had been
done too late.

"I am going for Miss White."  I looked at Mr. Guard.  "She is at the
Bostrows'.  The doctor--"

As I spoke he came in, a big man, careless in dress and caustic in
speech, but a man to be trusted.  I slipped out and in a few minutes
had found Martha White, and quickly we walked back to Scarborough
Square.

"It's well you came when you did."  She bent her head to keep the
swirling snowflakes from her face.  Martha is fat and short and rapid
walking is difficult.  "I was just about to leave for the other end
of town to see a typhoid case of Miss Wyatt's.  She's young and gets
frightened easily, and I promised I'd come some time to-day, though
it's out of my district.  Who is this girl I'm going to see?"

"I don't know.  I heard Mr. Guard and Mrs. Mundy call her Lillie
Pierce.  They seemed to know her.  I never saw her before."

"Never heard of her."  Miss White, who had been district nursing for
fourteen years, made effort to recall the name.  "She had a
hemorrhage, you say?"

She did not wait for an answer, but went up the steps ahead of me,
and envy filled me as I followed her into the room where she was to
find her patient.  Professionally Miss White was one person, socially
another.  Off duty she was slow and shy and consciously awkward.  In
the sick-room she was transformed.  Quiet, cool, steady, alert, she
knew what to do and how to do it.  With a word to the others, her
coat and hat were off and she was standing by the bed, and again I
was humiliated that I knew how to do so little, was of so little
worth.

Between the doctor and herself was some talk.  Directions were given
and statements made, and then the doctor came to the door where I was
standing.  For a half-moment he looked me over, his near-sighted eyes
almost closing in their squint.

"I knew your father.  A very unusual man." He held out his hand.
"You're like him, got his expression, and, I'm told, the same
disregard of what people think.  That"--he jerked his thumb over his
shoulder--"is a side of life you've never seen before.  It's a side
men make and women permit.  Good morning."  Before I could answer he
was gone.

Close to the cot Mrs. Mundy and Miss White were still standing.  The
latter slipped her hand under the covering and drew out the hot-water
bag.  "This has cooled," she said.  "Where can I get hot water?"

Mrs. Mundy pointed to the bath-room, then turned, and together they
left the room.  The girl on the cot was seemingly asleep.

As they went out the man, who was standing by the mantel, came toward
me.  "I am David Guard," he said.  "I have not thanked you for
letting me bring her in.  Had there been anywhere else to take her, I
would not have brought her here.  I met her at the other end of the
Square.  We had been standing for some while, talking.  There was no
place to which we could go to talk, and, fearing she would get too
cold, we had moved on.  Last month she tried to take her life.  This
morning she was telling me she could hold out no longer.  There was
no way out of it but death."

"Who is she?"

Before he could answer I understood.  Shivering, I turned away, then
I came back.

"Will you come to my sitting-room, Mr. Guard?  Can we not talk as
human beings who are trying to find the right way to--to help wrong
things?"




CHAPTER XIV

A moment later we were up-stairs.  "I don't know why I am so cold."
My hands, not yet steady, were held out to the leaping flames.
"Usually I love a snow-storm, but to-day--"

"They tell me you rarely have such weather as we have had of late.
Personally I like it, but to many it means anything but pleasure.
Is this the chair you prefer?"

At my nod he pushed a low rocker closer to the fire and placed a
foot-stool properly.  Drawing up the wing-chair he sat down and
looked around the room.  As the light fell on him I noticed the
olive, almost swarthy, coloring of his skin, his deep-sunk eyes
with their changing expressions of gravity and humor, of tolerance
and intolerance, and I knew he was the sort of man one could talk
to on any subject and not be misunderstood.  His hair was slightly
gray, and frequently his well-shaped hand would brush back a long
lock that fell across his temple.  His clothes were not of a
clerical cut, and evidently had seen good service; and that he gave
little attention to personal details was evidenced by his cravat,
which was midway of his collar, and his collar of a loose,
ill-fitting kind.

About him was something intensely earnest, intensely eager and
alert, and, watching him, I realized he belonged to that little
group which through the ages has dared to differ with accepted
order; and for his daring he had suffered, as all must suffer who
feel as well as think.

"You don't mind," the smile on his face was whimsical, "if I take a
good draught of this, do you?  It's been long since I've seen just
this sort of thing."  His eyes were on a picture between two
windows.  "Out of Denmark one rarely sees anything of Skovgaard's.
That Filipinno Lippi is excellent, also.  At the Hermitage in St.
Petersburg I tried to get a copy like that"--he nodded at
Rembrandt's picture of himself--"but there was none to be had.  Did
you get yours there?"

"Four years ago.  I also got that photograph of Houdon's Voltaire
there."

He looked in the direction to which I pointed, and, getting up,
went over to first one picture and then another, and studied them
closely.  A bit of bronze, a statuette or two, an altar-piece, a
chalice, a flagon, a paten, a censer, and an ikon held his
attention, one after the other, and again he turned to me.

"These are very interesting.  Is it as one of the faithful you
collect?" A smile which strangely lighted his face swept over it.

"Oh no!"  I shook my head.  "The faithful would find me a most
disturbing person.  I ask too many questions."  My hand made
movement in the direction of the bookshelves around the four sides
of the room, on the tops of which were oddly assorted little
remembrances of days of travel.  "A study of such things is a study
of religious expression at different periods and among different
peoples.  They've always interested me."

"They interest me, also."  Mr. Guard stood before the ikon, looked
long upon it before coming back to the fire and again sitting down.
For a moment he gazed into it as if forgetting where he was, then
he leaned back in his chair and turned to me.

"A collection of examples of ecclesiastical art, of religious
ideas embodied in objects used for purposes of worship, is
interesting--yes--but a collection of re-actions against what they
fail to represent would be more so, could they be collected."

"They have been--haven't they?  In the lives of those who dare to
differ, to break from heritage and tradition, much has been
collected and transmitted.  The effect of re-actions is what
counts, I suppose."

"Their inevitability is what people do not seem to understand."
Leaning forward, he again looked into the fire, his hands between
his knees.  "The teachings of Christ having been twisted into a
system of theology, and the Church into an organization based on
dogma and doctrine, re-action is unescapable.  However, we won't
get on that." Again he straightened.  "Was it re-action that
brought you to Scarborough Square?  I beg your pardon!  I have no
right to ask.  There was something you wished to ask me, I believe."

For a moment there was silence, broken only by the flames of the
fire, which spluttered and flared and made soft, whispering sounds,
while on the window-panes the snow, now turning into sleet, tapped
as if with tiny fingers, and my heart began to beat queerly.

I did not know how to ask him what I wanted to ask.  There was much
he could tell me, much I wished to hear from a man's standpoint,
but how to make him understand was difficult.  He had faced life
frankly, knew what was subterfuge, what sincere, and the
restrictions of custom and convention no longer handicapped him.
Between sympathy and sentimentality he had found the right
distinction, and his judgment and emotions had learned to work
together.  My judgment and emotions were yet untrained.

"The girl down-stairs," I began.  "You and Mrs. Mundy seem to know
her.  If she belongs, as I imagine, to the world down there," my
hand made motion behind me, "Mrs. Mundy will think I can do
nothing.  But cannot somebody do something?  Must things always go
on the same way?"

"No.  They will not always go on the same way.  They will continue
so to go, however, until women--good women--understand they must
chiefly bring about the change.  For centuries women have been
cowards, been ignorant of what they should know, been silent when
they should speak.  They prefer to be--"

"White roses!  But white roses do not necessarily live in
hot-houses." I pushed my chair farther from the fire.  "That is one
of the reasons I am here.  I want to know where women fail."

He looked up.  "One does not often find a woman willing to know.
Behind the confusion of such terms as ignorance and innocence most
women continue their irresponsibility in certain directions.  They
have accepted man's decree that certain evils, having always
existed, must always exist, and they have made little effort to
test the truth of the assertion.  Lillie Pierce and the women of
her world are largely the product of the attitude of good women
toward them.  To the sin of men good women shut their eyes, pretend
they do not know.  They do not want to know."

"They not only do not want to know, themselves--that is, many of
them--but they would keep others from knowing.  Perhaps it is
natural.  So many things have happened to life in the past few
years that even clever, able women are still bewildered, still
uncertain what is right to do.  Life can never be again what it
once was, and still, most of us are trying to live a new thing in
an old way.  We have so long been purposely kept ignorant, so long
not permitted to have opinions that count, so long been told our
work is elsewhere, that cowardice and indifference, the fear of
inability to deal with new conditions, new obligations, new
responsibilities, still holds us back.  I get impatient, indignant,
and then I realize--"

David Guard laughed.  "That many are still in the child class?"
His head tossed back the long lock of hair that fell over his
forehead.  "It is true, but certainly you do not think because I
see the backwardness, the blindness of some women, I do not see the
forwardness, the vision of others?  Men have hardly guessed as yet
that it is chiefly due to women that the world is now asking
questions it has never asked before, beginning to look life in the
face where once it blinked at it.  Because of what women have
suggested, urged, insisted on, and worked for, the social
conscience all over the earth has been aroused, social legislation
enacted, and social dreams stand chance of coming true.  Certain
fields they have barely entered yet, however.  It is easy to
understand why.  When they realize what is required of them, they
will not hold back.  But as yet, among the women you know, how many
give a thought to Lillie Pierce's world, to the causes and
conditions which make her and her kind?"

I shook my head.  "I do not know.  I've never heard her world
discussed."

"I suppose not.  In this entire city there are few women who think
of girls like Lillie Pierce, or care to learn the truth concerning
them; care enough to see that though they went unto dogs, unto dogs
they need not return if they wish to get away.  Most people, both
men and women, imagine such girls like their hideous life; that
they entered it from deliberate choice.  Out of a hundred there may
be a dozen who so chose, but each of the others has her story, in
many instances a story that would shame all men because of man." He
glanced at the clock and got up quickly.

"I'm sorry, but I've got to go.  I'd entirely forgotten an
engagement I'm compelled to fill.  May I come again?"  He held out
his hand.  "I've heard about you, of course.  I've wanted to know
you.  There's much I'd like to talk to you about.  When you leave
Scarborough Square and go back into your world, you can tell it
many things it should know.  Some day it will understand." Abruptly
he turned and left the room.




CHAPTER XV

The girl down-stairs, the girl named Lillie Pierce, was taken on the
back porch this morning, and for the first time Mrs. Mundy left me
alone with her.

"When the snow's gone and the sun shines, the cot can be rolled out, I
told the doctor," Mrs. Mundy tucked the covering closely around the
shrinking figure, "but chill and dampness ain't friends to feeble
folks, and there's plenty of fresh air without going outdoors.  It's
hard to make even smart folks like doctors get more 'n one idea at a
time in their heads, and in remembering benefits, they forget dangers.
Are you ready, child, for a whiff of sunshine?  It's come at last, the
sun has."

The girl nodded indifferently, but as the cot was pushed into the porch
I saw her lips quiver, saw her teeth bitten into them to hide their
quivering, and I nodded to Mrs. Mundy to go inside, and I, too, left
her for a moment and went down the steps to the little garden being
made ready for the coming of spring.  Around the high fence vines had
been planted, a trellis or two put against the porch for roses and
clematis, and close to the gate an apple-tree, twisted and gnarled,
gave promise of blossoms, if not of fruit.  Already I loved the garden
which was to be.

"Violets are to be here and tulips there," I said, under my breath, and
wondered if Lillie were herself again, if I could not go back.  "A row
of snowdrops and bleeding-hearts would look lovely there--" Something
green and growing in a sheltered corner near the house caught my eye,
and stooping, I pulled the little blossom, and went up the steps to
Lillie's cot and gave it to her.

Eagerly she held out her hands and the silence of days was broken.  The
bitterness that had filled her eyes, the scorn that had drawn her thin
lips into forbidding curves, the mask of control which had exhausted
her strength, yielded at the sight of a little brown-and-yellow flower,
and with a cry she kissed it, pressed it to her face.

"It used to grow, a long bed of it, close to the kitchen wall where it
was warm, and where it bloomed before anything else."  The words came
stumblingly.  "Mother loved it best of all her flowers; she had all
sorts in her garden."

With a quick turn of her head she looked at me, in her face horror, in
her eyes tumultuous pain, then threw the flower from her with a wild
movement, as if her touch had blighted it.  "Why don't you let me die!"
she cried.  "Oh, why don't you let me die!"

I drew a chair close to the cot and sat down by it.  For a while I said
nothing.  Things long locked within her, long held back, were
struggling for utterance.  In the days she had been with us her silence
had been unbroken, but gradually something bitter and rebellious had
died out of her face, and into it had come a haunted, hunted look, and
yet she would not talk.  Until she was ready to speak we knew it was
best to say nothing to her of days that were past, or of those that
were to come.

Mrs. Mundy had known her before she came to Scarborough Square.  In a
ward of one of the city's hospitals, where her baby was born, she had
found her alone, deserted, and waiting her time.  Two days after its
birth the baby died.

When she left the hospital there was nowhere for her to go.  She had
lived in a city but a short time and knew little of its life, and yet
she must work.  Mrs. Mundy got a room for her, then a place in a store,
and she did well, kept to herself, but somebody who knew her story saw
her, told the proprietor, and he turned her off.  He couldn't keep
girls like that, he said.  It would injure his business.  Later, she
got in an office.  She had learned at night to do typewriting, and
there one of the men was kind to her, began to give her a little
pleasure every now and then.  She was young.  It was dreary where she
lived, and she craved a bit of brightness.  One night he took her to
what she found was--oh, worse than where she has since lived, for it
pretended to be respectable.

"She was terribly afraid of men.  It wasn't put on; it was real.  I
know pretense when I see it."  Mrs. Mundy, who was telling me of the
girl, changed her position and fixed the screen so that the flames from
the fire should not burn her face.  "Ever since the father of the child
had deserted her, she had believed all men were wicked, but this man
had been so friendly, so kindly, she thought he was different from the
others.  When she found where she was, she was crazy with fear and
anger, and made a scene before she left.  The next morning when she
went to work she was told her services were no longer needed, and told
in a way that made her understand she was not fit to work in the room
with other girls.  The man who had charge of the room was the man she
had thought a friend.  He's got his job still."

The ticking of the clock on the mantel alone broke the stillness of the
room as Mrs. Mundy stopped.  I tried to say something, but words would
not come.

"For years I've heard the stories of these poor creatures."  Mrs.
Mundy's even tones steadied somewhat the protesting tumult in my heart.
"For years I've known the awful side of the lives they lead.  I didn't
have money or learning or influence, or the chance to make good people
understand, even if they'd been willing to hear, what I could tell, but
I could help one of them every now and then.  There 're few of them who
start out deliberate to live wrong.  When they take it up regular it's
'most always because they're like dogs at bay.  There's nothing else to
do."

"What became of Lillie when she lost her place?"  I got up from the
sofa and came closer to the fire.  My teeth were chattering.

"She lost her soul.  She went in a factory, but the air made her sick,
and after three faints they turned her off.  It interrupted the work
and made the girls lose time running to her, and so she had to go.
After a while--I was away at the time--the woman she lived with turned
her out.  She owed room rent, a good deal of it, and she needed food
and clothes, and there was no money with which to buy them.  It got her
crazy, the thought that because she had done wrong she was but a rag to
be kicked from place to place with only the gutter to land in at last,
and--well, she landed.  But she isn't all bad.  I used to feel about
girls like her just as most good people still feel, but I've come to
see there's many of them who are more sinned against than sinning.  The
men who make and keep them what they are go free and are let alone."

"Couldn't she have gone home?  You said she was from the country.
Wouldn't they let her come back home?"

Mrs. Mundy shook her head.  "Her own mother was dead and her stepmother
wouldn't let her come.  She had young children of her own.  Last month
she tried to end it all.  She won't be here much longer.  The doctor
says she'll hardly live six months.  If we can get her in the City
Home--"

"The City Home!"  The memory of what I had seen there came over me
protestingly.  The girl had lived in hell.  She need not die in it.
"Perhaps she can be sent somewhere in the country," I said, after a
while.  "Mr. Guard might know of some one who will take her.  Certainly
she can stay here until--until he knows what is best to do."

Mrs. Mundy got up.  For a moment she looked at me, started to say
something, then went out of the room.  She was crying.  I wonder if I
said anything I shouldn't.

"Tell me of your mother's garden."  I picked up the tiny flower and put
it on Lillie's cot, where its fragrance waked faint stirrings of other
days.  "I've always wanted a garden like my grandmother Heath used to
have.  I remember it very well, though I was only nine when she died.
There were cherry-trees and fig-trees in it, and a big arbor covered
with scuppernong grape-vines, and wonderful strawberries in one corner.
All of her flowers were the old-fashioned kind.  There was a beautiful
yellow rose that grew all over the fence which separated the flowers
from the vegetables, and close to the wood-house was a big moss-rose
bush.  There were Micrafella roses, too.  I loved them best, and
Jacqueminots, and tea-roses, and--"

"Did she have princess-feather in hers, and candytuft, and
sweet-williams?"  Lillie turned over on her side, her hand under her
cheek, and in her eyes a quick, eager glow.  "In mother's garden were
all sorts of old-fashioned flowers also.  We lived two miles from town
and father sold vegetables and chickens to the market-men, who sold
them to their customers.  But he never had as good luck with his
vegetables as mother had with her flowers.  She loved them so.  There
was a big mock-orange bush right by the well.  Did you ever shut your
eyes and see things again just as they were a long time ago?  If I were
blind-folded and my hands tied behind me I could find just where every
flower used to grow in mother's garden, if I could go in it again."

Like a flood overleaping the barrier that held it back, the words came
eagerly.  To keep her from talking would do more harm than to let her
talk.  The fever in her soul was greater, more consuming, than that in
her body.  I did not try to stop her.

"I don't remember where each thing was in grandmother's garden."  I
moved my chair a little closer to her cot.  "But I remember the
gooseberry-bushes were just behind a long bed of lilies-of-the-valley.
It seemed so queer they should be together."

"Lilies of the valley grow anywhere.  Mother's bed got bigger every
year.  There was a large circle of them around a mound in the middle of
our garden, and they were fringed with violets.  One February our
minister's wife died.  They didn't have any flowers, and it seemed so
dreadful not to have any that I went into the garden to see if I
couldn't find something.  The ground was covered with snow, but the
week before had been warm, and, going to one of the beds, I brushed the
snow away and found a lot of white violets.  They were blooming under
the snow.  I pulled them and took them to the minister, and he put them
in her hands.  They used to put flowers in people's hands when they
were dead.  I don't know whether they do it now or not."

"Sometimes it is done."  I took up the sewing an my lap and made a few
stitches.  "Tell me some more of your mother's garden.  Did she have
winter pinks and bachelor's buttons and snap-dragons and hollyhocks in
it?  I used to hate grandmother's hollyhocks.  They were so haughty."

"We did not have any, but we had bridal-wreath and spirea and a big
pomegranate-bush.  There were two large oleanders in tubs at the foot
of the front steps.  One was mine, the other was my sister's.  My
sister is married now and lives out West.  She has two children."

A bird on the bough of the apple-tree began to twitter.  For a moment
Lillie listened, then again she looked at me, in her eyes that which I
had noticed several times before, a look of torturing fear and pain and
shame.

"Do"--her voice was low--"do you know about me?"

"Yes, I know about you."

"You know--and--and still you talk to me?  I don't understand.  Why did
you come down here?  You don't belong in Scarborough Square."

"Why not?  I have no one who needs me."  I held my bit of sewing off,
looked at it carefully.  "Other women have their homes, their husbands
and children, or their families, or duties or obligations of some sort,
which they cannot leave, even if they wanted to know, to understand
better how they might--"  I leaned forward.  "I think you can help me,
Lillie, help me very much."

"Help you--"  Half lifting herself up, Lillie stared at me as if not
understanding, then the flush in her face deepened.  "I help anybody!
Oh, my God! if I only could!  If I only could!"

"I'm sure you can."  I picked up the flower, which again had fallen.
"The doctor says you can go in the country soon, but before you go--"

"I hope I won't live long enough to go anywhere, but before I go away
for good if I could tell you what you could tell to others, and make
them understand how different it is from what they think, make them
know the awfulness--awfulness--"

She turned her head away, buried it in her arms, her body shaking in
convulsive sobs.  The bird on the apple-tree had stopped its singing,
and the sun was no longer shining.  In the hall I heard Mrs. Mundy go
to the door, heard it open; then heavier footsteps came toward us, I
looked around.  Selwyn was standing in the doorway.




CHAPTER XVI

Selwyn closed the door, put his hat and overcoat on a chair beside
it, and came over to the fire.  Standing in front of it, hands in his
pockets, he looked at me.  I, also, was standing.

"Why don't you sit down?  Are you in a hurry?  Am I interrupting you?"

I shook my head.  "I am not in a hurry, and you are not interrupting.
I thought perhaps--"

"Thought what?"

"That you were in a hurry."  I sat down on a footstool near the
mantel, and leaned against the latter, my hands on my knees.  "I so
seldom have a visit from a man in the morning that I don't know how
to behave."  My head nodded toward the chair he usually preferred.

"I would not take your time now--but I must." He took a seat opposite
me, and looking at me, his face changed.  "What is the matter?  Are
you sick?  Your eyes look like holes in a blanket.  Something has
been keeping you awake.  What is it?"

"I am not at all sick, and I slept very well last night."  I drew a
little further from the flame of the fire.  "I'm sorry if my eyes--"

"Belie your bluff?  They always do.  Resist as you will, they give
you away.  You've been working yourself to death doing absurd things
for unthankful people.  Who is that sick person downstairs?  Where'd
you pick her up?"

"I didn't pick her up.  She had a hemorrhage and fainted in front of
the house.  I happened to see her and--and--"

"Had her brought in.  I understand.  In a neighborhood of this sort
you don't know who you're bringing in, but I suppose that doesn't
matter."

"No, it doesn't--when the bringing in is a matter of life and death,
perhaps!  As long as I am here and Mrs. Mundy is here, any one can
come in who for the moment has nowhere else to go.  Scarborough
Square has no walls around its houses.  Whoever needs us is a
neighbor.  The girl was ill."

My voice was indignant.  There are times when Selwyn makes me
absolutely furious.  He apparently takes pleasure in pretending to
have no heart.  Then, too, he was talking and acting in such contrast
to the way I had expected him to talk and act at our first meeting
alone after the past weeks, that in amazement I stared at him.  Of
self-consciousness or embarrassment there was no sign.  It had
obviously not occurred to him that his acquaintanceship with a girl
he had given no evidence of knowing when I was present, and three
days later had been seen walking with on the street, absorbed in deep
and earnest conversation, was a matter I would like to have
explained.  The density of men for a moment kept me dumb.

Selwyn has been reared in a school honest in its belief that a woman
is too fine and fair a thing to face life frankly; that personal
knowledge and understanding on her part of certain verities, certain
actualities, did the world no good and woman harm.  But the woman of
whom he thought was the sheltered, cultured, cared-for woman of his
world.  Protection of her was a man's privilege and obligation.  Of
the woman who has to do her own protecting, fight her way through,
meet the demands of those dependent on her, he personally knew
little.  It was what he needed much to know.

But because his handsome, haughty mother had lived in high-bred,
self-congratulatory ignorance of what she believed did not concern
her, and because he has for a sister, who's a step-sister, a silly,
snobby person, he is not justified in withholding from me what he
naturally withheld from them.  One can be a human being as well as a
lady.  It's this that is difficult to make him understand.

For a half-moment longer I looked at him, then away.  Apparently he
had not heard what I said.

"I should not trouble you.  I have no right, but I don't know what to
do.  I've so long come to you--"  He turned to me uncertainly.

"What is it?"  I got up from the footstool and took my seat in the
corner of the sofa.  "Why shouldn't you come to me?"

"You have enough on you now."  He bit his lip.  "It's about
Harrie--the boy must be crazy.  For the past few weeks he has kept me
close to hell.  I never imagined the time would come when I would
thank God my father was dead.  It's come now."

"What is it, Selwyn?  There is nothing you cannot tell me."  I leaned
forward, my hands twisting in my lap.  I knew more of Harrie than
Selwyn knew I knew, but because he was the one person I did know with
whom I had no measure of patience, I rarely mentioned his name.
Harrie is Selwyn's weakness, and to his faults and failings the
latter is, outwardly, at least, most inexplicably blind.  He is as
handsome as he is unprincipled and irresponsible, and his power to
fascinate is seemingly limited only by his desire to exercise it.
"What is it?" I repeated.  "What has he been doing?"

"Everything he shouldn't."  Selwyn leaned forward and looked in the
fire.  "I was wrong, I suppose, but something had to be done.  For
some time he's been drinking and gambling, and I told him it had to
stop.  I stood it as long as I could, but when I found he would
frequently come home too drunk to get in bed, and would have to be
put there by Wingfield, who would be listening for him, I had a talk
with him which it isn't pleasant to remember.  I'd had a good many
before.  God knows I've tried--"

Selwyn got up, went over to the window and stood for a moment at it
with his back to me.  Presently he left it and began to walk up and
down the room, hands in his pockets.

"I've doubtless made a mess of looking after him, but I did the best
I knew how.  Because of the eleven years' difference in our ages I've
shut my eyes to much I should have seen, and refused to hear what I
should have listened to, perhaps, but I was afraid of being too
severe, too lacking in sympathy with his youth, with the differences
in our natures, and, chiefly, because I knew he was largely the
product of his rearing.  He was only fourteen when father died, and
to the day of her death mother allowed no one to correct him.  She
indulged him beyond sense or reason; let him grow up with the idea
that whatever he wanted he could have.  Restraint and discipline were
never taught him.  As for direction, guidance, training--"  Selwyn's
shoulders shrugged.  "If I said anything to mother, cautioned her of
the mistake she was making, she thought me hard and cruel, and ended
by weeping.  After her death it was too late."

"Doesn't he work?  Does he do nothing at all?"

"Work!"  Selwyn stopped.  "He's never done a day's work in his life
that earned what he got for it.  When he refused to go back to
college mother bought him a place in Hoge and Howell's office.  They
kept him until he'd used up the capital put in the business, then got
rid of him.  I offered to put more in, but they wouldn't agree.
Later, I got John Moore to take him in, but John now refuses to renew
their contract.  He's absolutely no good.  That's a pretty hard thing
to say about one's brother, but it's true.  He's the only thing on
earth belonging to me that I've got to love, and now--"

Selwyn's voice was husky, and again he went to the window, looked
long upon the Square, and for a moment I said nothing.  I could think
of nothing to say.  From various friends of other days who came
occasionally to see me in my new home, I had heard of Harrie's wild
behavior of late, of Selwyn's patient shielding of him, of the
latter's love and loyalty and care of the boy to whom he had been far
more than a brother, and I wanted much to help him, to say something
that would hearten him, and there was nothing I could say.  Harrie
was selfish to the core; he was unprincipled and unscrupulous, and
for long I had feared that some day he would give Selwyn sore and
serious trouble.  That day had seemingly come.

"He is so young.  At twenty-three life isn't taken very seriously by
boys of Harrie's nature.  He'll come to himself after a while."  I
was fumbling for words.  "When his money is entirely gone he'll tire
of his--his way of living and behave himself."

"The lack of money doesn't disturb him.  I bought his interest in the
house for fear he'd sell it to some one else.  He's pretty nearly
gotten through with that, as with other things he inherited.  How in
the name of Heaven my father's son--"  Selwyn came over to the sofa
and sat down.  "I didn't mean to speak of this, however; of his past
behavior.  It's concerning his latest adventure that I want your
help, want you to tell me what to do."

"Why don't you smoke?  Haven't you a cigar?"  I reached for a box of
matches behind me.  "Begin at the beginning and tell me everything."

Selwyn lighted his cigar and for a while smoked in silence.  In his
face were deep lines that aged it strangely and for the first time I
noticed graying hair about his temples.   Suddenly something clutched
my heart queerly, something that cleared unnaming darkness, and
understanding was upon me.  Unsteadily my hand went out toward him.

"There is nothing you cannot ask me to do, Selwyn.  There is nothing
I would not do to help you."

He lifted my hand to his lips.  "There is no one but you I would talk
to of this.  You will not misunderstand.  If I could not come to
you--"

I drew my hand away.  "That's what a woman is for, to--to stand by
when a man needs her." My words came stammeringly.  "I heard Harrie
was away.  Where is he and why did he go?"

"He's in Texas.  He went, I think, because of a mix-up with a girl
here he had no business knowing.  There was a row, I believe."
Selwyn frowned, flicked the ashes from his cigar with impatient
movement.  "There's no use going into that.  I'm not excusing him;
there's no excuse, but so far as that's concerned there's nothing to
be done, so far as I can see.  He got involved with this girl, a
little cashier at some restaurant downtown who thought he was going
to marry her.  I knew nothing about this until a few weeks ago.  When
I heard it, I went to see the girl."

The tension of past weeks, not yet entirely unrelaxed, snapped with
such swiftness that I seemed suffocating, and, lest he hear the sob
in my throat, I got up and went over to the window and opened it a
little.  "Was she--"  I made effort to speak steadily.  "Was she the
girl who was brought in here?  The girl you were with some three
weeks ago?"

Selwyn, who had gotten up as I came back to the sofa, again sat down.
"Yes.  She was the girl."  His voice was indifferently even.  He had
obviously no suspicion of my unworthy wondering, had forgotten,
indeed, his indignation at the question I had asked him after seeing
him with her.  Other things more compelling had evidently crowded it
from memory.

"I had never seen her until the night I saw her here.  She, I learned
later, knew me, however, as Harrie's brother.  I had been told that
Harrie was infatuated with her, and, knowing there could only be
disaster unless the thing was stopped, I went to see the girl.  The
evening you saw me was the second time I had seen her.  I was trying
to make her promise to go away.  This isn't her home.  She came here
to get work."

Selwyn leaned back against the sofa, and his eyes looked into mine
with helpless questioning.  "I've been brought in contact
professionally with many types of human beings, but that girl is the
most baffling thing I've come across yet.  I can't make her out.  The
night after I saw her here I went to see her at what, I supposed, was
her home, just opposite the Hadley box-factory.  Later she told me
she didn't live there, and would not say where she lived.  All the
time I talked to her her eyes were on her hands in her lap and,
though occasionally her lips would twist, she would say nothing.  It
isn't a pleasant thing for a man to tell a girl his brother isn't a
safe person for her to go with, isn't one to be trusted, but I did
tell her.  She's an odd little thing, all fire and flame, and to talk
frankly was to be brutal, but some day she should thank me.  She
won't do it.  She will hate me always for warning her.  She knew as
well as I that marriage was out of the question, and yet she would
not promise to give Harrie up.  When you saw me I was on my way for a
second talk with her.  Meeting her on the street, I did not go to the
house, which she said she had just left, and as she would not tell me
where she was going, I had to do my talking as we walked."

"Did she promise to go away?"  I looked into the fire, and the odd,
elfish, frightened face of the girl with the baby in her arms looked
at me out of the bed of coals.  "Did she promise to go?" I repeated.

Selwyn shook his head.  "She would promise nothing.  I could get
nothing out of her, could not make her talk.  Harrie has been a
durned fool--perhaps worse, I don't know.  I tried to help her, and I
failed."

My fingers interlocked in nervous movements.  Why hadn't the girl
told Selwyn?  Why was she shielding Harrie?  Would she tell me or
Mrs. Mundy what she would not tell Selwyn?  I could send Mrs. Mundy
to her now--could break the silence which was mystifying to her.

Selwyn's hands moved as though to rid them of all further
responsibility.  "You can't do anything with people like that.  She'd
rather stay on here and take the chance of seeing Harrie than go away
from temptation.  I'm sorry for her, but I'm through."

"No, you're not through.  Perhaps we've just begun.  Maybe
there--there were reasons of which she couldn't tell you that kept
her here."  I looked at him, then away.  "The night we heard her
fall, heard her cry out; the night we brought her in here, you met
some one across the street when you went away.  Was it--Harrie?"

In Selwyn's face came flush that crimsoned it.  "Yes, it was Harrie.
I don't know what happened.  He had been drinking, but I can't
believe he struck her.  If he did--my God!"

With shuddering movement Selwyn's elbows were on his knees, his face
in his hands, and only the dropping of a coal upon the hearth broke
the stillness of the room.  Presently he got up and again went over
to the window.  When he next spoke his voice was quiet, but in it a
bitterness and weariness he made no effort to conceal.  "It was
Harrie, but he would tell me nothing about the girl.  From some one
else I learned where I could find her.  A few days after I saw her,
Harrie went away."

"Did you make him go?"

"No.  I had a talk with him during which he told me to mind my own
damned business and he would mind his."  Selwyn turned from the
window and came back to the sofa, on his lips a faint smile.  "When
he went off he didn't tell me he was going, left no address, and for
some time I didn't know where he was.  Less than three weeks ago I
had a telegram from him saying he was ill and to send money.  I wired
the money and left for El Paso on the first train I could make.  I
tried to see you before I went, but you were out."

"Why didn't you write?"

"I couldn't.  Once or twice I tried, but gave it up.  I found that
Harrie had undoubtedly been ill, but when I reached him he was up and
about.  Two hours before I took the train to return home he informed
me of his engagement to--"

"His what?"  For a moment I sat rigidly upright, in my eyes indignant
unbelief.  Then I sat back limp and relaxed, my hands, palms upward,
in my lap.

Selwyn's shoulders shrugged.  "Your amazement is feeble to what mine
was.  On the train going down he had renewed his acquaintance with a
girl and her mother he had met somewhere; here, I believe, and a week
after reaching her home the girl was engaged to him.  Her name is
Swink."

"Is she crazy?"

"No.  Her mother is crazy.  I don't blame the girl.  She's young,
pretty, silly, and doubtless in love.  Harrie has fatal facility in
making love.  This mamma person has a good deal of money; no sense,
and large social ambitions.  She's determined to get there.  If only
fools died as soon as they were born there would be hope for
humanity.  A fat fool is beyond the reach of endeavor."  With eyes
narrowed and his forehead ridged in tiny folds, Selwyn stared at me.
"Have women no sense, Danny?  Have they no understanding, no--"

"Some have.  But sense and understanding interfere with comfortable
ignorances that aren't pleasant to be interfered with.  Does this
female parent know anything about Harrie?  Did she let her daughter
become engaged before making inquiries about him?"

"She knows very well who he is.  She's visited here several times.
If told of Harrie's past dissipations, she'd soothe herself with the
usual dope of boys being boys, and men being men, and bygones being
bygones."  Selwyn's hands made gesture of disgust.  "It's a plain
case of damned fool.  She deserves what she'll get if she lets her
daughter marry Harrie.  But the daughter doesn't.  Somebody ought to
tell the child she mustn't marry him.  If there was a father or
brother the responsibility would be on them.  There's neither."

"But didn't you tell Harrie--that--that--"

"I did.  And the language I used was not learned in a kindergarten.
Among other things I told him was that if he--  Oh, it's no use going
into that.  It's easy to say what you'll do, but it isn't easy to
show your brother up as--as everything one's brother shouldn't be."

For a moment or two Selwyn continued his restless walking up and down
the room, in his face no masking of the pain and weariness of spirit
that were possessing him.  To no one else would he speak so frankly
of a family affair, and I wanted much to help him, but how?  What was
it he wanted me to do?  I could not see where I came in to do
anything.

"Is Harrie very much in love?"  Such questioning was consciously
silly, but something had to be said.  "Do you think he really loves
the girl?"

"No, I don't.  He says he does, of course, but he doesn't love
anything but himself.  Making love is a habit with him.  Our girls
know how to take the sort of stuff he talks; rather expect it, but
this little creature is obviously a literalist.  I imagine Harrie
hardly remembers how it happened.  He probably was surprised to find
himself engaged.  However, he's determined to go through with it.  A
million-dollar mother-in-law has a good deal in her favor.  But
something is the matter with the boy.  He's not himself."

"Didn't he go away about a year ago, and stay some time?  If he could
begin all over--"

"There's nowhere under heaven I wouldn't send him if he'd go with the
purpose of beginning all over, but he won't stay away.  About six
months ago he went to South America and stayed four months.  Since he
got home he's been worse than ever--reckless, defiant, and drinking
heavily.  His health has gone and most of his money; practically all
of it.  I don't know what to do.  I want to do what is right.  Tell
me what it is, Danny."

My breath was drawn in shiveringly and the frightened face of the
girl with the baby in her arms again seemed close to me.  Why was I
so halting, so afraid to speak?  Usually I reached decisions quickly,
but I couldn't get rid of the girl's eyes.  They seemed appealing for
protection.  Until I knew more about her I must say nothing.  Mrs.
Mundy must go to see her and then--

"I know I shouldn't bother you with all this."  Selwyn's voice
recalled me and the face in the fire vanished.  "But there is no one
else I can talk to.  I should as soon go to a patient in a nerve
sanitarium as to Mildred.  As a sister Mildred is not a success.
She'd first have hysterics and tell me I was brutal to poor Harrie,
and then declare that to marry a million dollars was the chance of a
lifetime for him.  One of the ten thousand things I can't understand
about women is their defense of men, their acceptance of
his--shortcomings, and their disregard of the woman who must pay the
price of the latter.  Mildred would probably not give Miss Swink a
thought."

"Harrie's sister and his mamma-in-law-to-be will doubtless find each
other congenial.  They believe in sweet ignorance and blind
acceptance for their sex.  But what do you want me to do, Selwyn?
What is it I can do?"

"I don't know."  Hand on the back of the sofa, he looked down at me.
"When things go wrong I always come to you.  When they go right you
are not nice to me.  To-day I had a letter from Harrie.  He's coming
back next week.  His fiancee and her mother are coming with him.  The
engagement is not to be announced just yet, however, and he asks me
to keep it on the quiet."

"And you've told me."

"Told you!"  Selwyn's voice was querulous.  "Don't I tell you
everything?  Mrs. Swink has friends here, strivers like herself--the
only kind of people you won't have anything to do with.  But I'm
going to ask you to call.  Perhaps you'll be able--"

"She won't want to know me.  I'll be no use to her.  I can't help her
in any way, and people like that are too keen to waste time on people
like me.  I don't give parties."

"But Kitty does.  I don't know how you'll go about it, but you'll
find a way to--to make the girl understand she mustn't marry Harrie,
or certainly not for some time.  I feel sorry for the child, but--"

"And the other girl--the little cashier-girl?  What about her?"

For a moment Selwyn did not seem to understand.  "Oh, that girl!  I
don't think there'll be any trouble from her.  She doesn't seem that
sort.  Forget her.  You can't do anything.  I've tried and failed."

"I may fail, but I haven't tried.  You dispose of her as if she
didn't count."

"What can I do?  I shouldn't have mentioned her."  Selwyn's forehead
ridged frowningly, and, taking out his watch, he looked at it, took
up his hat and coat, and held out his hand.

"Thank you for letting me talk to you.  And don't worry about the
other girl.  You can't do anything."

"Perhaps I can't, but you said just now one of the many things you
couldn't understand in women was their disregard of other women.
That Mildred would probably give the girl no thought.  The rich girl,
you meant."

"Well--"  Selwyn waited.  "I did say it, but I don't see what you're
getting at."

"That sometimes women do remember the woman who has to pay--the
price; do give a thought to the girl who is left to pay it alone.
Come to-morrow--no, not to-morrow.  Come next week.  It will take
Mrs. Mundy until then to--"

"Mrs. Mundy has nothing to do with Miss Swink.  The other girl, I
told you, can take care of herself.  You mustn't look into that side
of it.  I'll attend to that, do what is necessary.  It's only about
her you seem to be thinking."

"I'm thinking about both girls, the poor one and the rich one.  But
the rich girl has a million-dollar mother to look after her.
Good-by, and come Tuesday.  I forgot--What is the girl's name, the
little cashier-girl's?"

"Etta--Etta something."  Selwyn made effort to think, then took a
note-book out of his pocket and looked at it.  "Etta Blake is her
name.  I wish you'd forget her.  There are some things one can't talk
about, but certainly you know I will do what is right if Harrie--"
His face darkened.

"I know you will, but sometimes a girl needs a woman to do--what is
right.  She's such a little thing, and so young.  Come Tuesday
evening at eight o'clock."




CHAPTER XVII

Late that evening I had a talk with Mrs. Mundy.  I told her where Etta
Blake lived, that is, where she could find the house from which I had
seen her come with the baby in her arms, the house whose address had
been given me by Selwyn, and the next morning she was to go and see
her; but the next morning Mrs. Mundy was ill.  Acute indigestion was
what the doctor called it, but to Bettina and me it seemed a much more
dreadful thing, and for the time all thought of other matters was put
aside and held in abeyance.

With Bettina's help I tried to do Mrs. Mundy's work, but my first
breakfast was not an artistic product.  I shall never know how to cook.
I don't want to know how.  I don't like to cook.  There were many other
things I could do, however, and though Mrs. Mundy wept, being weak from
nausea, at my refusal to leave undone the usual cleaning, I did it with
pride and delight in the realization that, notwithstanding little
practice, I could do it very well.  I am a perfect dish-washer, and I
can make up beds as well as a trained nurse.


Mrs. Mundy is much better to-day and to-morrow she will be up.  Three
days in bed is for her an unusual and depressing experience, and her
sunny spirit drooped under the combined effects of over-indulgence in
certain delectable dishes, and inability to do her usual work.

"It don't make any difference how much character a person's got, it's
gone when sick-stomach is a-wrenching of 'em."  Mrs. Mundy groaned
feebly.  "I 'ain't had a spell like this since Bettina was a baby.  Pig
feet did it.  When they're fried in batter I'm worse than the thing I'm
eating.  I et three, and I never can eat more than two.  And to think
you had to do everything for Lillie Pierce, to get her off in time!
The doctor says she can't live many months.  Outside the doctor, and
Nurse White and Mr. Guard, don't anybody know she's been here.  I
reckon it ain't necessary to mention it.  People are so--"

"People-ish!  They love to stick pins in other people!  It's
tyranny--the fear of what people will think about us, say about us, do
about us!  I'm going to give myself a present when I get like Mr. Guard
and can tell some people to go--go anywhere they please, if it's where
I won't meet them.  Are you all right now and ready for your nap?"

Mrs. Mundy nodded, looked at me with something of anxiety in her eyes
as I straightened the counterpane of her spotless bed; but she said
nothing more, and, lowering the shades at the windows lest the sunlight
bother her, I went out of the room and left her to go asleep.

I am glad of the much work of these past few days.  It has kept me from
thinking too greatly of what Selwyn told me of Harrie, of the girl to
whom he is engaged, and of the little cashier-girl whose terror-filled
face is ever with me.  It has kept me, also, from dwelling too
constantly on the message Lillie Pierce sent by me to the women of
clean and happy worlds.  For herself there was no plea for pity or for
pardon, no effort at palliation or excuse.  But with strength born of
bitter knowledge she begged, demanded, that I do something to make good
women understand that worlds like hers will never pass away if men
alone are left to rid earth of them.  Ceaselessly I keep busy lest I
realize too clearly what such a message means.  I shrink from it,
appalled at what it may imply.  I am a coward.  As great a coward as
the women whose unconcern I have of late been so condemning.

Yesterday Lillie went away.  Mr. Guard took her to the mountains where
a woman he used to know in the days of his mission work will take care
of her.  He is coming back to-morrow.  The sense of comfort that his
coming means is beyond analysis or definition.  Only once or twice in a
lifetime does one meet a man of David Guard's sort, and whatever my
mistakes, whatever my impulses and lack of judgment may lead me to do,
he will never be impatient with me.  We have had several long and frank
and friendly talks since the day he brought Lillie in to Mrs. Mundy,
and if Scarborough Square did no more for me than to give me his
friendship I should be forever in its debt.

Early this morning I had a dream I have been trying all day to forget.
Through the first part of the night sleep had been impossible.  The
haunting memory of Lillie's eyes could not be shut out, and the sound
of her voice made the stillness of the room unendurable.  I tried to
read, to write, to do anything but think.  I fought, resisted; refused
to face what I did not want to see, to listen to what I did not want to
hear; and not until the dawn of a new day did I fall asleep.

In my dream Lillie was in front of me, the bit of wall-flower in her
hands, and gaspingly she cried out that something should be done.

"It can never be made clean, the world we women live in.  But there
should never be such worlds.  Good women pretend they do not know.
They do not want to know!"

"But, Lillie"--I tried to hold her twisting, writhing hands.  "There is
much that has been done.  Some women do know, and homes and
institutions and societies--"

"Homes and institutions and societies!"  She drew her hands away in
scornful gesture.  "They are poultice and plaster things.  They are for
surface sores, and the trouble is in the blood.  To cure, to cleanse,
undo the evil of our world is not in human power.  It's the root of the
tree that must be killed.  You can cut off its top for a thousand years
and it will come back again.  Women have got to go deeper than that and
make men know that they'll be damned the same as we if they sin the
same as we do."

She was slipping from me and I tried to hold her back.  "Tell me what
women must do!  Tell me where they fail!"  In terror I caught her
hands.  "Do not go until you tell me--"

In misty grayness she was vanishing.  "When women make their sons know
there is no less of sin and shame in sinful, shameful lives for them
than for their sisters our worlds will pass away.  You've got to stop
the evil at the source.  Men don't do what women won't stand for.  Tell
women that--"

She was gone and, waking, I found I was sitting up in bed, my hands
outstretched.


I had a note from Selwyn to-day telling me the Swinks had come and are
at the Melbourne.  Harrie is not well.


Kitty telephoned me late yesterday afternoon that Billie had an
engagement for a club dinner of some sort, and she had appendicitis, or
something that felt like it, and wouldn't I please come up and have
supper with her in her sitting-room.  There was something she wanted to
talk to me about.

Kitty has a remarkable voice.  It is capable of every variation of
appeal.  I went.  Mrs. Crimm came in to stay with Mrs. Mundy.

The appendicitis possibility was not disturbing, and in a very lovely
pink velvet negligee, with cap and slippers and stockings to match,
Kitty was waiting for me.  She is peculiarly skilful in the settings
she arranges for her pretty self, and as I looked at her they seemed
far-away things, the world of Scarborough Square, with its daily
struggle for daily bread, and the world of Lillie Pierce, with its evil
and polluting life, and the world of the little cashier-girl with its
temptations and denials.  I tried to put them from me.  The evening was
to be Kitty's.  She took her luxuries as the birds of the air take
light and sunshine.  Unearned, they seemed a right.

She did not like the dress I had on.  It's a perfectly good dress.

"I'll certainly be glad when you stop wearing black.  It's too severe
for you; that is, black crepe de chine is.  You're too tall and slender
for it, though it gives you a certain distinction.  Did Selwyn send you
those violets?"

"He did.  Where's your pain?  What did the doctor say was the matter?"

"I telephoned him not to come.  I haven't got any pain.  It's gone.  I
just wanted you by myself."  Kitty settled herself more comfortably in
her cushion-filled chair and stretched her feet on the stool in front
of her.  "Why didn't you come to Grace Peterson's luncheon yesterday?"

"I had something else more important to do.  Grace knew I wasn't coming
when she asked me.  Society and Scarborough Square can't be served at
the same time."  I smiled.  "During the days of apprenticeship only a
half-hour is allowed for lunch.  Did you have a good time?"

"Of course I didn't.  Who does with an anxious hostess?  One of the
guests was an out-of-town person who used to know you well.  She wanted
to hear all about you and everybody told her something different.  All
that's necessary is to mention your name and--"

"The play's begun.  To be an inexhaustible subject of chatter is to
serve a purpose in life.  I'd prefer a nobler one, still--  Who was my
inquiring friend?"

"I've forgotten her name.  She was the most miserable-looking woman I
ever saw.  On any one else her clothes would have been stunning.  Don't
think she and her husband hit it off very well.  There's another lady
he finds more entertaining than she is, and she hasn't the nerve to
tell him to quit it or go to Ballyhack.  Women make me tired!"

"They tire men, also.  A woman who accepts insult is hardly apt to be
interesting.  Tell me about the luncheon.  Who was at it?"

"Same old bunch.  Grace left out nothing that could be brought in.
Most of the entertaining nowadays is a game of show-down, regular
exhibitions of lace and silver and food and flowers and china and
glass, and gorgeous gowns and stupid people.  I'm getting sick of them."

"Why don't you start a new kind?  You might have your butler hand a
note to each of your guests on arriving, stating that all the things
other people had for their tables you had for yours, but only what was
necessary would be used.  Then you might have a good time.  It's
difficult to talk down to an excess of anything."

"Wish I had the nerve to do it!"  Kitty again changed her position;
fixed more comfortably the pink-lined, embroidered pillows at her back,
and looked at me uncertainly.  I waited.  Presently she leaned toward
me.

"People are talking about you, Danny.  You won't mind if I tell you?"
Her blue eyes, greatly troubled, looked into mine, then away, and her
hand slipped into my hand and held it tightly.  "Sometimes I hate
people!  They are so mean, so nasty!"

"What are they saying?"  I straightened the slender fingers curled
about mine and stroked them.  "Only dead people aren't talked about.
What is being said about me?"

"Horrid things--not to me, of course.  They'd better not be!  But--Mrs.
Herbert came to see me yesterday afternoon.  She wasn't at the luncheon
and Grace got the first rap, but most of her hatefulness she took out
on you.  She's worse than a germ disease.  I always feel I ought to be
disinfected after I see her.  If she were a leper she wouldn't be
allowed at large, and she's much more deadly.  People like that ought
to be locked up."

"What did she tell you about me?"  I smiled in Kitty's flushed face,
smiled also at the remembrance of Alice Herbert's would-be cut some
time ago, but I did not mention it.  "You oughtn't to be so hard on
her.  She's crazy."

"But crazy people are dangerous.  A mosquito can kill a king, and a
king has to be careful about mosquitoes.  I'm more afraid of people
than I am of insects.  If you could only label them--"

"People label themselves.  What did Alice Herbert say about me?"

"First, of course, how strange it was that you should care to live in
Scarborough Square, especially as you were a person who held yourself
so aloof from--"

"People like her.  I do.  What else did she say?"

"That you met all sorts of people, had all sorts to come and see you.
A trained nurse who is with a sick friend of her aunt's told her she'd
heard you let a--let a bad woman come in your house."  Kitty's voice
trailed huskily.  "She said it would ruin you if things like that got
out.  I told her it was a lie--it wasn't so."

"It was so."  I held Kitty's eyes, horror-filled and unbelieving.  "She
stayed with Mrs. Mundy a week.  Yesterday she went away to the
mountains--to die."

For a moment longer Kitty stared at me, and in her face crept deep and
crimson color.  "You mean--that you let a--a woman like that come in
your house and stay a week?  Mean--"


For a long time we sat by the fire in Kitty's sitting-room with its
rose-colored hangings, its mellow furnishings, its soft burning logs on
their brass andirons, its elusive fragrance of fresh flowers, and
unsparingly I told her what all women should know.  In the twilight
that of which I talked made pictures come and go that gave her
understanding never glimpsed before, and, slipping on her knees, she
buried her face, shudderingly, in my lap.

"Is it I, Danny?  Is it women like me who could do something and
don't?" she said, after a long, long while.  "Oh, Danny, is it I?"

[Illustration:  "Is it I, Danny?  Is it women like me who could do
something and don't?"]

"It is all of us."  My fingers smoothed the beautiful brown hair.
"Every woman of to-day who thinks there's a halo on her head ought to
take it off and look at it.  She wouldn't see much.  We like halos.  We
imagine we deserve them.  And we like the pretty speeches which have
spoiled us.  What we need is plain truth, Kitty.  We need to see
without confusion.  Sometimes I wonder if we are not the colossal
failure of life--we women who have hardly begun to use the power God
put in our hands when He made us the mothers of sons and daughters--"

"But we've only been educated such a little while--most of us aren't
educated yet.  I'm not." Her arms on my knees, Kitty looked up in my
face, in hers the dawning light of vision long delayed.  "Men haven't
wanted us to think.  They want to think for us."

"But ours is the first chance at starting men to thinking right.
Through babyhood and boyhood they are ours.  If all women could
understand--"

"All women haven't got anything to understand with even if they wanted
to understand.  Some who have sense don't want responsibility."  Kitty
bit her lip.  "I haven't wanted it.  It's so much ea

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