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Gentle Julia

by Booth Tarkington · English · Gutenberg #18259 · 436,824 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Gentle Julia

Author: Booth Tarkington

Illustrator: Worth Brehm
        C. Allan Gilbert


        
Release date: April 26, 2006 [eBook #18259]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18259

Credits: Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
        Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GENTLE JULIA ***




Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net





[Illustration: Gentle Julia]

GENTLE JULIA

BY
BOOTH TARKINGTON

AUTHOR OF PENROD, PENROD AND SAM,
THE TURMOIL, ETC.

ILLUSTRATED BY
C. ALLAN GILBERT
and
WORTH BREHM

GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK

Made in the United States of America

       *       *       *       *       *

COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY P. F. COLLIER AND SON COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY THE PICTORIAL REVIEW COMPANY

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
AT
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.

       *       *       *       *       *

TO M. L. K.

       *       *       *       *       *

GENTLE JULIA

"Rising to the point of order, this one said that since the morgue
was not yet established as the central monument and inspiration of
our settlement, and true philosophy was as well expounded in the
convivial manner as in the miserable, he claimed for himself, not
the license, but the right, to sing a ballad, if he chose, upon even
so solemn a matter as the misuse of the town pump by witches."

       *       *       *       *       *




GENTLE JULIA

CHAPTER ONE


Superciliousness is not safe after all, because a person who forms the
habit of wearing it may some day find his lower lip grown permanently
projected beyond the upper, so that he can't get it back, and must go
through life looking like the King of Spain. This was once foretold as a
probable culmination of Florence Atwater's still plastic profile, if
Florence didn't change her way of thinking; and upon Florence's
remarking dreamily that the King of Spain was an awf'ly han'some man,
her mother retorted: "But not for a girl!" She meant, of course, that a
girl who looked too much like the King of Spain would not be handsome,
but her daughter decided to misunderstand her.

"Why, mamma, he's my Very Ideal! I'd marry him to-morrow!"

Mrs. Atwater paused in her darning, and let the stocking collapse
flaccidly into the work-basket in her lap. "Not at barely thirteen,
would you?" she said. "It seems to me you're just a shade too young to
be marrying a man who's already got a wife and several children. Where
did you pick up that 'I'd-marry-him-to-morrow,' Florence?"

"Oh, I hear that everywhere!" returned the damsel, lightly. "Everybody
says things like that. I heard Aunt Julia say it. I heard Kitty Silver
say it."

"About the King of Spain?" Mrs. Atwater inquired.

"I don't know who they were saying it about," said Florence, "but they
were saying it. I don't mean they were saying it together; I heard one
say it one time and the other say it some other time. I think Kitty
Silver was saying it about some coloured man. She proba'ly wouldn't want
to marry any white man; at least I don't expect she would. She's _been_
married to a couple of coloured men, anyhow; and she was married twice
to one of 'em, and the other one died in between. Anyhow, that's what
she told me. She weighed over two hunderd pounds the first time she was
married, and she weighed over two hunderd-and-seventy the last time she
was married to the first one over again, but she says she don't know
how much she weighed when she was married to the one in between. She
says she never got weighed all the time she was married to that one. Did
Kitty Silver ever tell you that, mamma?"

"Yes, often!" Mrs. Atwater replied. "I don't think it's very
entertaining; and it's not what we were talking about. I was trying to
tell you----"

"I know," Florence interrupted. "You said I'd get my face so's my
underlip wouldn't go back where it ought to, if I didn't quit turning up
my nose at people I think are beneath contemp'. I guess the best thing
would be to just feel that way without letting on by my face, and then
there wouldn't be any danger."

"No," said Mrs. Atwater. "That's not what I meant. You mustn't let your
feelings get _their_ nose turned up, or their underlip out, either,
because feelings can grow warped just as well as----"

But her remarks had already caused her daughter to follow a trail of
thought divergent from the main road along which the mother feebly
struggled to progress. "Mamma," said Florence, "do you b'lieve it's true
if a person swallows an apple-seed or a lemon-seed or a watermelon-seed,
f'r instance, do you think they'd have a tree grow up inside of 'em?
Henry Rooter said it would, yesterday."

Mrs. Atwater looked a little anxious. "Did you swallow some sort of
seed?" she asked.

"It was only some grape-seeds, mamma; and you needn't think I got to
take anything for it, because I've swallowed a million, I guess, in my
time!"

"In your time?" her mother repeated, seemingly mystified.

"Yes, and so have you and papa," Florence went on. "I've seen you when
you ate grapes. Henry said maybe not, about grapes, because I told him
all what I've just been telling you, mamma, how I must have swallowed a
million, in my time, and he said grape-seeds weren't big enough to get a
good holt, but he said if I was to swallow an apple-seed a tree would
start up, and in a year or two, maybe, it would grow up so't I couldn't
get my mouth shut on account the branches."

"Nonsense!"

"Henry said another boy told _him_, but he said you could ask anybody
and they'd tell you it was true. Henry said this boy that told him's
uncle died of it when he was eleven years old, and this boy knew a grown
woman that was pretty sick from it right now. I expect Henry wasn't
telling such a falsehood about it, mamma, but proba'ly this boy did,
because I didn't believe it for a minute! Henry Rooter says he never
told a lie _yet_, in his whole life, mamma, and he wasn't going to begin
now." She paused for a moment, then added: "I don't believe a word he
says!"

She continued to meditate disapprovingly upon Henry Rooter. "Old thing!"
she murmured gloomily, for she had indeed known moments of apprehension
concerning the grape-seeds. "Nothing but an old thing--what he is!" she
repeated inaudibly.

"Florence," said Mrs. Atwater, "don't you want to slip over to grandpa's
and ask Aunt Julia if she has a very large darning needle? And don't
forget not to look supercilious when you meet people on the way. Even
your grandfather has been noticing it, and he was the one that spoke of
it to me. Don't forget!"

"Yes'm."

Florence went out of the house somewhat moodily, but afternoon sunshine
enlivened her; and, opening the picket gate, she stepped forth with a
fair renewal of her chosen manner toward the public, though just at that
moment no public was in sight. Miss Atwater's underlip resumed the
position for which her mother had predicted that regal Spanish fixity,
and her eyebrows and nose were all three perceptibly elevated. At the
same time, her eyelids were half lowered, while the corners of her mouth
somewhat deepened, as by a veiled mirth, so that this well-dressed child
strolled down the shady sidewalk wearing an expression not merely of
high-bred contempt but also of mysterious derision. It was an expression
that should have put any pedestrian in his place, and it seems a pity
that the long street before her appeared to be empty of human life. No
one even so much as glanced from a window of any of the comfortable
houses, set back at the end of their "front walks" and basking amid
pleasant lawns; for, naturally, this was the "best residence street" in
the town, since all the Atwaters and other relatives of Florence dwelt
there. Happily, an old gentleman turned a corner before she had gone a
hundred yards, and, as he turned in her direction, it became certain
that they would meet. He was a stranger--that is to say, he was unknown
to Florence--and he was well dressed; while his appearance of age
(proba'ly at least forty or sixty or something) indicated that he might
have sense enough to be interested in other interesting persons.

An extraordinary change took place upon the surface of Florence Atwater:
all superciliousness and derision of the world vanished; her eyes opened
wide, and into them came a look at once far-away and intently fixed.
Also, a frown of concentration appeared upon her brow, and her lips
moved silently, but with rapidity, as if she repeated to herself
something of almost tragic import. Florence had recently read a
newspaper account of the earlier struggles of a now successful actress:
As a girl, this determined genius went about the streets repeating the
lines of various roles to herself--constantly rehearsing, in fact, upon
the public thoroughfares, so carried away was she by her intended
profession and so set upon becoming famous. This was what Florence was
doing now, except that she rehearsed no rôle in particular, and the
words formed by her lips were neither sequential nor consequential,
being, in fact, the following: "Oh, the darkness ... never, never,
never! ... you couldn't ... he wouldn't ... Ah, mother! ... Where the
river swings so slowly ... Ah, _no_!" Nevertheless, she was doing all
she could for the elderly stranger, and as they came closer,
encountered, and passed on, she had the definite impression that he did
indeed take her to be a struggling young actress who would some day be
famous--and then he might see her on a night of triumph and recognize
her as the girl he had passed on the street, that day, so long ago! But
by this time, the episode was concluded; the footsteps of him for whom
she was performing had become inaudible behind her, and she began to
forget him; which was as well, since he went out of her life then, and
the two never met again. The struggling young actress disappeared, and
the previous superiority was resumed. It became elaborately emphasized
as a boy of her own age emerged from the "side yard" of a house at the
next corner and came into her view.

The boy caught sight of Florence in plenty of time to observe this
emphasis, which was all too obviously produced by her sensations at
sight of himself; and, after staring at her for a moment, he allowed his
own expression to become one of painful fatigue. Then he slowly swung
about, as if to return into that side-yard obscurity whence he had come;
making clear by this pantomime that he reciprocally found the sight of
her insufferable. In truth, he did; for he was not only her neighbour
but her first-cousin as well, and a short month older, though taller
than she--tall beyond his years, taller than need be, in fact, and still
in knickerbockers. However, his parents may not have been mistaken in
the matter, for it was plain that he looked as well in knickerbockers as
he could have looked in anything. He had no visible beauty, though it
was possible to hope for him that by the time he reached manhood he
would be more tightly put together than he seemed at present; and indeed
he himself appeared to have some consciousness of insecurity in the
fastenings of his members, for it was his habit (observable even now as
he turned to avoid Miss Atwater) to haul at himself, to sag and hitch
about inside his clothes, and to corkscrew his neck against the swathing
of his collar. And yet there were times, as the most affectionate of his
aunts had remarked, when, for a moment or so, he appeared to be almost
knowing; and, seeing him walking before her, she had almost taken him
for a young man; and sometimes he said something in a settled kind of
way that was almost adult. This fondest aunt went on to add, however,
that of course, the next minute after one of these fleeting spells, he
was sure to be overtaken by his more accustomed moods, when his eye
would again fix itself with fundamental aimlessness upon nothing. In
brief, he was at the age when he spent most of his time changing his
mind about things, or, rather, when his mind spent most of its time
changing him about things; and this was what happened now.

After turning his back on the hateful sight well known to him as his
cousin Florence at her freshest, he turned again, came forth from his
place of residence, and joining her upon the pavement, walked beside
her, accompanying her without greeting or inquiry. His expression of
fatigue, indicating her insufferableness, had not abated; neither had
her air of being a duchess looking at bugs.

"You _are_ a pretty one!" he said; but his intention was perceived to be
far indeed from his words.

"Oh, _am_ I, Mister Herbert Atwater?" Florence responded. "I'm _awf'ly_
glad _you_ think so!"

"I mean about what Henry Rooter said," her cousin explained. "Henry
Rooter told me he made you believe you were goin' to have a grapevine
climbin' up from inside of you because you ate some grapes with the
seeds in 'em. He says you thought you'd haf to get a carpenter to build
a little arbour so you could swallow it for the grapevine to grow on. He
says----"

Florence had become an angry pink. "That little Henry Rooter is the
worst falsehooder in this town; and I never believed a word he said in
his life! Anyway, what affairs is it of yours, I'd like you to please be
so kind and obliging for to tell me, Mister Herbert Illingsworth
Atwater, Exquire!"

"What affairs?" Herbert echoed in plaintive satire. "What affairs is it
of mine? That's just the trouble! It's _got_ to be my affairs because
you're my first-cousin. My goodness _I_ didn't have anything to do with
you being my cousin, did I?"

"Well, _I_ didn't!"

"That's neither here nor there," said Herbert. "What _I_ want to know
is, how long you goin' to keep this up?"

"Keep what up?"

"I mean, how do you think I like havin' somebody like Henry Rooter
comin' round me tellin' what they made a cousin of mine believe, and
more than thirteen years old, goin' on fourteen ever since about a month
ago!"

Florence shouted: "Oh, for goodness' _sakes_!" then moderated the volume
but not the intensity of her tone. "Kindly reply to _this_. Whoever
asked you to come and take a walk with me to-day?"

Herbert protested to heaven. "Why, I wouldn't take a walk with you if
every policeman in this town tried to make me! I wouldn't take a walk
with you if they brought a million horses and--"

"I wouldn't take a walk with _you_," Florence interrupted, "if they
brought a million million horses and cows and camels and--"

"No, you wouldn't," Herbert said. "Not if _I_ could help it!"

But by this time Florence had regained her derisive superciliousness.
"There's a few things you _could_ help," she said; and the incautious
Herbert challenged her with the inquiry she desired.

"What could I help?"

"I should think you could help bumpin' into me every second when I'm
takin' a walk on my own affairs, and walk along on your own side of the
sidewalk, anyway, and not be so awkward a person has to keep trippin'
over you about every time I try to take a step!"

Herbert withdrew temporarily to his own side of the pavement. "Who?" he
demanded hotly. "_Who_ says I'm awkward?"

"All the fam'ly," Miss Atwater returned, with a light but infuriating
laugh. "You bump into 'em sideways and keep gettin' half in front of
'em whenever they try to take a step, and then when it looks as if
they'd pretty near fall over you--"

"You look here!"

"And besides all that," Florence went on, undisturbed, "why, you
generally keep kind of snorting, or somep'n, and then making all those
noises in your neck. You were doin' it at grandpa's last Sunday dinner
because every time there wasn't anybody talking, why, everybody could
hear you plain as everything, and you ought to've seen grandpa look at
you! He looked as if you'd set him crazy if you didn't quit that
chuttering and cluckling!"

Herbert's expression partook of a furious astonishment. "I don't any
such thing!" he burst out. "I guess I wouldn't talk much about last
Sunday dinner, if I was _you_ neither. Who got caught eatin' off the ice
cream freezer spoon out on the back porch, if you please? Yes, and I
guess you better study a little grammar, while you're about it. There's
no such words in the English language as 'cluckling' and 'chuttering.'"

"I don't care what language they're in," the stubborn Florence insisted.
"It's what you do, just the same: cluckling and chuttering!"

Herbert's manners went to pieces. "Oh, dry up!" he bellowed.

"That's a _nice_ way to talk! So gentlemanly----"

"Well, you try be a lady, then!"

"'Try!'" Florence echoed. "Well, after that, I'll just politely thank you
to dry up, yourself, Mister Herbert Atwater!"

At this Herbert became moody. "Oh, pfuff!" he said; and for some moments
walked in silence. Then he asked: "Where you goin', Florence?"

The damsel paused at a gate opening upon a broad lawn evenly divided by
a brick walk that led to the white-painted wooden veranda of an ample
and honest old brick house. "Righ' there to grandpa's, since you haf to
know!" she said. "And thank you for your delightful comp'ny which I
never asked for, if you care to hear the truth for once in your life!"

Herbert meditated. "Well, I got nothin' else to do, as I know of," he
said. "Let's go around to the back door so's to see if Kitty Silver's
got anything."

Then, not amiably, but at least inconsequently, they passed inside the
gate together. Their brows were fairly unclouded; no special marks of
conflict remained; for they had met and conversed in a manner customary
rather than unusual.

They followed a branch of the brick walk and passed round the south side
of the house, where a small orchard of apple-trees showed generous
promise. Hundreds of gay little round apples among the leaves glanced
the high lights to and fro on their polished green cheeks as a breeze
hopped through the yard, while the shade beneath trembled with
coquettishly moving disks of sunshine like golden plates. A pattern of
orange light and blue shadow was laid like a fanciful plaid over the
lattice and the wide, slightly sagging steps of the elderly "back
porch"; and here, taking her ease upon these steps, sat a middle-aged
coloured woman of continental proportions. Beyond all contest, she was
the largest coloured woman in that town, though her height was not
unusual, and she had a rather small face. That is to say, as Florence
had once explained to her, her face was small but the other parts of her
head were terribly wide. Beside her was a circular brown basket, of a
type suggesting arts-and-crafts; it was made with a cover, and there was
a bow of brown silk upon the handle.

"What you been up to to-day, Kitty Silver?" Herbert asked genially.
"Any thing special?" For this was the sequel to his "so's we can see if
Kitty Silver's got anything." But Mrs. Silver discouraged him.

"No, I ain't," she replied. "I ain't, an' I ain't goin' to."

"I thought you pretty near always made cookies on Tuesday," he said.

"Well, I ain't _this_ Tuesday," said Kitty Silver. "I ain't, and I ain't
goin' to. You might dess well g'on home ri' now. I ain't, an' I ain't
goin' to."

Docility was no element of Mrs. Silver's present mood, and Herbert's
hopeful eyes became blank, as his gaze wandered from her head to the
brown basket beside her. The basket did not interest him; the ribbon
gave it a quality almost at once excluding it from his consciousness. On
the contrary, the ribbon had drawn Florence's attention, and she stared
at the basket eagerly.

"What you got there, Kitty Silver?" she asked.

"What I got where?"

"In that basket."

"Nemmine what I got 'n 'at basket," said Mrs. Silver crossly, but added
inconsistently: "I dess _wish_ somebody ast me what I got 'n 'at basket!
_I_ ain't no cat-washwoman fer _no_body!"

"Cats!" Florence cried. "Are there cats in that basket, Kitty Silver?
Let's look at 'em!"

The lid of the basket, lifted by the eager, slim hand of Miss Atwater,
rose to disclose two cats of an age slightly beyond kittenhood. They
were of a breed unfamiliar to Florence, and she did not obey the impulse
that usually makes a girl seize upon any young cat at sight and caress
it. Instead, she looked at them with some perplexity, and after a moment
inquired: "Are they really cats, Kitty Silver, do you b'lieve?"

"Cats what she done tole _me_," the coloured woman replied. "You betta
shet lid down, you don' wan' 'em run away, 'cause they ain't yoosta
livin' 'n 'at basket yit; an' no matter whut kine o' cats they is or
they isn't, _one_ thing true: they _wile_ cats!"

"But what makes their hair so long?" Florence asked. "I never saw cats
with hair a couple inches long like that."

"Miss Julia say they Berjum cats."

"What?"

"I ain't tellin' no mo'n she tole me. You' aunt say they Berjum cats."

"Persian," said Herbert. "That's nothing. I've seen plenty Persian cats.
My goodness, I should think you'd seen a Persian cat at yow age.
Thirteen goin' on fourteen!"

"Well, I _have_ seen Persian cats plenty times, I guess," Florence said.
"I thought Persian cats were white, and these are kind of gray."

At this Kitty Silver permitted herself to utter an embittered laugh.
"You wrong!" she said. "These cats, they white; yes'm!"

"Why, they aren't either! They're gray as----"

"No'm," said Mrs. Silver. "They plum spang white, else you' Aunt Julia
gone out her mind; me or her, one. I say: 'Miss Julia, them gray cats.'
'White,' she say. 'Them two cats is white cats,' she say. 'Them cats
been crated,' she say. 'They been livin' in a crate on a dirty express
train fer th'ee fo' days,' she say. 'Them cats gone got all smoke' up
thataway,' she say. 'No'm, Miss Julia,' I say, 'No'm, Miss Julia, they
ain't _no_ train,' I say, 'they ain't _no_ train kin take an' smoke two
white cats up like these cats so's they hair is gray clean plum up to
they hide.' You betta put the lid down, I tell you!"

Florence complied, just in time to prevent one of the young cats from
leaping out of the basket, but she did not fasten the cover. Instead,
she knelt, and, allowing a space of half an inch to intervene between
the basket and the rim of the cover, peered within at the occupants. "I
believe the one to this side's a he," she said. "It's got greenisher
eyes than the other one; that's the way you can always tell. I b'lieve
this one's a he and the other one's a she."

"I ain't stedyin' about no he an' she!"

"What did Aunt Julia say?" Florence asked.

"Whut you' Aunt Julia say when?"

"When you told her these were gray cats and not white cats?"

"She tole me take an' clean 'em," said Kitty Silver. "She say, she say
she want 'em clean' up spick an' spang befo' Mista Sammerses git here to
call an' see 'em." And she added morosely: "I ain't no cat-washwoman!"

"She wants you to bathe 'em?" Florence inquired, but Kitty Silver did
not reply immediately. She breathed audibly, with a strange effect upon
vasty outward portions of her, and then gave an incomparably dulcet
imitation of her own voice, as she interpreted her use of it during the
recent interview.

'Miss Julia, ma'am,' I say--'Miss Julia, ma'am, my bizniss cookin'
vittles,' I say. 'Miss Julia, ma'am,' I tole her, 'Miss Julia, ma'am, I
cook fer you' pa, an' cook fer you' fam'ly year in, year out, an' I hope
an' pursue, whiles some might make complaint, I take whatever I find,
an' I leave whatever I find. No'm, Miss Julia, ma'am,' I say--'no'm,
Miss Julia, ma'am, I ain't no cat-washwoman!'"

"What did Aunt Julia say then?"

"She say, she say: 'Di'n I tell you take them cats downstairs an' clean
'em?' she say. I ain't _no_body's cat-washwoman!"

Florence was becoming more and more interested. "I should think that
would be kind of fun," she said. "To be a cat-washwoman. _I_ wouldn't
mind that at all: I'd kind of like it. I expect if you was a
cat-washwoman, Kitty Silver, you'd be pretty near the only one was in
the world. I wonder if they do have 'em any place, cat-washwomen."

"I don' know if they got 'em some place," said Kitty Silver, "an' I
don't know if they ain't got 'em no place; but I bet if they do got 'em
any place, it's some place else from here!"

Florence looked thoughtful. "Who was it you said is going to call this
evening and see 'em?"

"Mista Sammerses."

"She means Newland Sanders," Herbert explained. "Aunt Julia says all her
callers that ever came to this house in their lives, Kitty Silver never
got the name right of a single one of 'em!"

"Newland Sanders is the one with the little moustache," Florence said.
"Is that the one you mean by 'Sammerses,' Kitty Silver?"

"Mista Sammerses who you' Aunt Julia tole _me_," Mrs. Silver responded
stubbornly. "He ain't got no moustache whut you kin look at--dess some
blackish whut don' reach out mo'n halfway todes the bofe ends of his
mouf."

"Well," said Florence, "was Mr. Sanders the one gave her these Persian
cats, Kitty Silver?"

"I reckon." Mrs. Silver breathed audibly again, and her expression was
strongly resentful. "When she go fer a walk 'long with any them callers
she stop an' make a big fuss over any li'l ole dog or cat an' I don't
know whut all, an' after they done buy her all the candy from all the
candy sto's in the livin' worl', an' all the flowers from all the
greenhouses they is, it's a wonder some of 'em ain't sen' her a mule fer
a present, 'cause seem like to me they done sen' her mos' every kine of
animal they is! Firs' come Airydale dog you' grampaw tuck an' give away
to the milkman; 'n'en come two mo' pups; I don't know whut they is,
'cause they bofe had dess sense enough to run away after you' grampaw
try learn 'em how much he ain't like no pups; an' nex' come them two
canaries hangin' in the dinin'-room now, an' nex'--di'n' I holler so's
they could a-hear me all way down town? Di'n' I walk in my kitchen one
mawnin' right slam in the face of ole warty allagatuh three foot long
a-lookin' at me over the aidge o' my kitchen sink?"

"It was Mr. Clairdyce gave her that," said Florence. "He'd been to
Florida; but she didn't care for it very much, and she didn't make any
fuss at all when grandpa got the florist to take it. Grandpa hates
animals."

"He don' hate 'em no wuss'n whut I do," said Kitty Silver. "An' he ain't
got to ketch 'em lookin' at him outen of his kitchen sink--an' he ain't
fixin' to be no cat-washwoman neither!"

"_Are_ you fixing to?" Florence asked quickly. "You don't need to do it,
Kitty Silver. I'd be willing to, and so'd Herbert. Wouldn't you,
Herbert?"

Herbert deliberated within himself, then brightened. "I'd just as soon,"
he said. "I'd kind of like to see how a cat acts when it's getting
bathed."

"I think it would be spesh'ly inter'sting to wash Persian cats,"
Florence added, with increasing enthusiasm. "I never washed a cat in my
life."

"Neither have I," said Herbert. "I always thought they did it
themselves."

Kitty Silver sniffed. "Ain't I says so to you' Aunt Julia? She done tole
me, 'No,' she say. She say, she say Berjum cats ain't wash they self;
they got to take an' git somebody else to wash 'em!"

"If we're goin' to bathe 'em," said Florence, "we ought to know their
names, so's we can tell 'em to hold still and everything. You can't do
much with an animal unless you know their name. Did Aunt Julia tell you
these cats' names, Kitty Silver?"

"She say they name Feef an' Meemuh. Yes'm! Feef an' Meemuh! Whut kine o'
name is Feef an' Meemuh fer cat name!"

"Oh, those are lovely names!" Florence assured her, and, turning to
Herbert, explained: "She means Fifi and Mimi."

"Feef an' Meemuh," said Kitty Silver. "Them name don' suit me, an' them
long-hair cats don' suit me neither." Here she lifted the cover of the
basket a little, and gazed nervously within. "Look at there!" she said.
"Look at the way they lookin' at me! Don't you look at _me_ thataway,
you Feef an' Meemuh!" She clapped the lid down and fastened it. "Fixin'
to jump out an' grab me, was you?"

"I guess, maybe," said Florence, "maybe I better go ask Aunt Julia if I
and Herbert can't wash 'em. I guess I better go _ask_ her anyhow." And
she ran up the steps and skipped into the house by way of the kitchen. A
moment later she appeared in the open doorway of a room upstairs.




CHAPTER TWO


It was a pretty room, lightly scented with the pink geraniums and blue
lobelia and coral fuchsias that poised, urgent with colour, in the
window-boxes at the open windows. Sunshine paused delicately just
inside, where forms of pale-blue birds and lavender flowers curled up
and down the cretonne curtains; and a tempered, respectful light fell
upon a cushioned _chaise longue_; for there fluffily reclined, in
garments of tender fabric and gentle colours, the prettiest
twenty-year-old girl in that creditably supplied town.

It must be said that no stranger would have taken Florence at first
glance to be her niece, though everybody admitted that Florence's hair
was pretty. ("I'll say _that_ for her," was the family way of putting
it.). Florence did not care for her hair herself; it was dark and thick
and long, like her Aunt Julia's; but Florence--even in the realistic
presence of a mirror--preferred to think of herself as an ashen blonde,
and also as about a foot taller than she was. Persistence kept this
picture habitually in her mind, which, of course, helps to explain her
feeling that she was justified in wearing that manner of
superciliousness deplored by her mother. More middle-aged gentlemen than
are suspected believe that they look like the waspen youths in the
magazine advertisements of clothes; and this impression of theirs
accounts (as with Florence) for much that is seemingly inexplicable in
their behaviour.

Florence's Aunt Julia was reading an exquisitely made little book, which
bore her initials stamped in gold upon the cover; and it had evidently
reached her by a recent delivery of the mail, for wrappings bearing
cancelled stamps lay upon the floor beside the _chaise longue_. It was a
special sort of book, since its interior was not printed, but all
laboriously written with pen and ink--poems, in truth, containing more
references to a lady named Julia than have appeared in any other poems
since Herrick's. So warmly interested in the reading as to be rather
pink, though not always with entire approval, this Julia nevertheless,
at the sound of footsteps, closed the book and placed it beneath one of
the cushions assisting the _chaise longue_ to make her position a
comfortable one. Her greeting was not enthusiastic.

"What do you want, Florence?"

"I was going to ask you if Herbert and me--I mean: Was it Noble Dill
gave you Fifi and Mimi, Aunt Julia?"

"Noble Dill? No."

"I wish it was," Florence said. "I'd like these cats better if they were
from Noble Dill."

"Why?" Julia inquired. "Why are you so partial to Mr. Noble Dill?"

"I think he's _so_ much the most inter'sting looking of all that come to
see you. Are you _sure_ it wasn't Noble Dill gave you these cats, Aunt
Julia?"

A look of weariness became plainly visible upon Miss Julia Atwater's
charming face. "I do wish you'd hurry and grow up, Florence," she said.

"I do, too! What for, Aunt Julia?"

"So there'd be somebody else in the family of an eligible age. I really
think it's an outrageous position to be in," Julia continued, with
languid vehemence--"to be the only girl between thirteen and forty-one
in a large connection of near relatives, including children, who all
seem to think they haven't anything to think of but Who comes to see
her, and Who came to see her yesterday, and Who was here the day before,
and Who's coming to-morrow, and Who's she going to marry! You really
ought to grow up and help me out, because I'm getting tired of it. No.
It wasn't Noble Dill but Mr. Newland Sanders that sent me Fifi and
Mimi--and I want you to keep away from 'em."

"Why?" asked Florence.

"Because they're very rare cats, and you aren't ordinarily a very
careful sort of person, Florence, if you don't mind my saying so.
Besides, if I let you go near them, the next thing Herbert would be over
here mussing around, and he can't go near _anything_ without ruining it!
It's just in him; he can't help it."

Florence looked thoughtful for a brief moment; then she asked: "Did
Newland Sanders send 'em with the names already to them?"

"No," said Julia, emphasizing the patience of her tone somewhat. "I
named them after they got here. Mr. Sanders hasn't seen them yet. He had
them shipped to me. He's coming this evening. Anything more to-day,
Florence?"

"Well, I was thinking," said Florence. "What do you think grandpa'll
think about these cats?"

"I don't believe there'll be any more outrages," Julia returned, and her
dark eyes showed a moment's animation. "I told him at breakfast that
the Reign of Terror was ended, and he and everybody else had to keep
away from Fifi and Mimi. Is that about all, Florence?"

"You let Kitty Silver go near 'em, though. She says she's fixing to wash
'em."

Julia smiled faintly. "I thought she would! I had to go so far as to
tell her that as long as I'm housekeeper in my father's house she'd do
what I say or find some other place. She behaved outrageously and
pretended to believe the natural colour of Fifi and Mimi is gray!"

"I expect," said Florence, after pondering seriously for a little
while--"I expect it would take quite some time to dry them."

"No doubt. But I'd rather you didn't assist. I'd rather you weren't even
around looking on, Florence."

A shade fell upon her niece's face at this. "Why, Aunt Julia, I couldn't
do any harm to Fifi and Mimi just _lookin'_ at 'em, could I?"

Julia laughed. "That's the trouble; you never do 'just look' at anything
you're interested in, and, if you don't mind my saying so, you've got
rather a record, dear! Now, don't you care: you can find lots of other
pleasant things to do at home--or over at Herbert's, or Aunt Fanny's.
You run along now and----"

"Well----" Florence said, moving as if to depart.

"You might as well go out by the front door, child," Julia suggested,
with a little watchful urgency. "You come over some day when Fifi and
Mimi have got used to the place, and you can look at them all you want
to."

"Well, I just----"

But as Florence seemed disposed still to linger, her aunt's manner
became more severe, and she half rose from her reclining position.

"No, I really mean it! Fifi and Mimi are royal-bred Persian cats with a
wonderful pedigree, and I don't know how much trouble and expense it
cost Mr. Sanders to get them for me. They're entirely different from
ordinary cats; they're very fine and queer, and if anything happens to
them, after all the trouble papa's made over other presents I've had,
I'll go straight to a sanitarium! No, Florence, you keep away from the
kitchen to-day, and I'd like to hear the front door as you go out."

"Well," said Florence; "I do wish if these cats are as fine as all that,
it was Noble Dill that gave 'em to you. I'd like these cats lots better
if _he_ gave 'em to you, wouldn't you?"

"No, I wouldn't."

"Well----" Florence said again, and departed.

Twenty is an unsuspicious age, except when it fears that its dignity or
grace may be threatened from without; and it might have been a "bad
sign" in revelation of Julia Atwater's character if she had failed to
accept the muffled metallic clash of the front door's closing as a token
that her niece had taken a complete departure for home. A supplemental
confirmation came a moment later, fainter but no less conclusive: the
distant slamming of the front gate; and it made a clear picture of an
obedient Florence on her homeward way. Peace came upon Julia: she read
in her book, while at times she dropped a languid, graceful arm, and,
with the pretty hand at the slimmer end of it, groped in a dark shelter
beneath her couch to make a selection, merely by her well-experienced
sense of touch, from a frilled white box that lay in concealment there.
Then, bringing forth a crystalline violet become scented sugar, or a bit
of fruit translucent in hardened sirup, she would delicately set it on
the way to that attractive dissolution hoped for it by the wistful
donor--and all without removing her shadowy eyes from the little volume
and its patient struggle for dignified rhymes with "Julia." Florence
was no longer in her beautiful relative's thoughts.

Florence was idly in the thoughts, however, of Mrs. Balche, the
next-door neighbour to the south. Happening to glance from a bay-window,
she negligently marked how the child walked to the front gate, opened
it, paused for a moment's meditation, then hurled the gate to a vigorous
closure, herself remaining within its protection. "Odd!" Mrs. Balche
murmured.

Having thus eloquently closed the gate, Florence slowly turned and moved
toward the rear of the house, quickening her steps as she went, until at
a run she disappeared from the scope of Mrs. Balche's gaze, cut off by
the intervening foliage of Mr. Atwater's small orchard. Mrs. Balche felt
no great interest; nevertheless, she paused at the sound of a boy's
voice, half husky, half shrill, in an early stage of change. "What she
say, Flor'nce? D'she say we could?" But there came a warning "_Hush
up_!" from Florence, and then, in a lowered tone, the boy's voice said:
"Look here; these are mighty funny-actin' cats. I think they're kind of
crazy or somep'n. Kitty Silver's fixed a washtub full o' suds for us."

Mrs. Balche was reminded of her own cat, and went to give it a little
cream. Mrs. Balche was a retired widow, without children, and too timid
to like dogs; but after a suitable interval, following the loss of her
husband, she accepted from a friend the gift of a white kitten, and
named it Violet. It may be said that Mrs. Balche, having few interests
in life, and being of a sequestering nature, lived for Violet, and that
so much devotion was not good for the latter's health. In his youth,
after having shown sufficient spirit to lose an eye during a sporting
absence of three nights and days, Violet was not again permitted enough
freedom of action to repeat this disloyalty; though, now, in his
advanced middle-age, he had been fed to such a state that he seldom
cared to move, other than by a slow, sneering wavement of the tail when
friendly words were addressed to him; and consequently, as he seemed
beyond all capacity or desire to run away, or to run at all, Mrs. Balche
allowed him complete liberty of action.

She found him asleep upon her "back porch," and placed beside him a
saucer of cream, the second since his luncheon. Then she watched him
affectionately as he opened his eye, turned toward the saucer his noble
Henry-the-Eighth head with its great furred jowls, and began the process
of rising for more food, which was all that ever seemed even feebly to
rouse his mind. When he had risen, there was little space between him
anywhere and the floor.

Violet took his cream without enthusiasm, pausing at times and turning
his head away. In fact, he persisted only out of an incorrigible
sensuality, and finally withdrew a pace or two, leaving creamy traces
still upon the saucer. With a multitude of fond words his kind mistress
drew his attention to these, whereupon, making a visible effort, he
returned and disposed of them.

"Dat's de 'itty darlin'," she said, stooping to stroke him. "Eat um all
up nice clean. Dood for ole sweet sin!" She continued to stroke him, and
Violet half closed his eye, but not with love or serenity, for he
simultaneously gestured with his tail, meaning to say: "Oh, do take your
hands off o' me!" Then he opened the eye and paid a little attention to
sounds from the neighbouring yard. A high fence, shrubberies, and
foliage concealed that yard from the view of Violet, but the sounds were
eloquent to him, since they were those made by members of his own
general species when threatening atrocities. The accent may have been
foreign, but Violet caught perfectly the sense of what was being said,
and instinctively he muttered reciprocal curses within himself.

"What a matta, honey?" his companion inquired sympathetically. "Ess, bad
people f'ighten poor Violet!"

From beyond the fence came the murmurings of a boy and a girl in hushed
but urgent conversation; and with these sounds there mingled watery
agitations, splashings and the like, as well as those low vocalizings
that Violet had recognized; but suddenly there were muffled explosions,
like fireworks choked in feather beds; and the human voices grew
uncontrollably somewhat louder, so that their import was
distinguishable. "_Ow!_" "Hush up, can't you? You want to bring the
whole town to--_ow!_" "Hush up yourself!" "Oh, _goodness_!" "Look out!
Don't let her----" "Well, look what she's _doin'_ to me, can't you?"
"For Heavenses' sakes, catch holt and----_Ow!_"

Then came a husky voice, inevitably that of a horrified coloured person
hastening from a distance: "Oh, my soul!" There was a scurrying, and the
girl was heard in furious yet hoarsely guarded vehemence: "Bring the
clo'es prop! Bring the clo'es prop! We can poke that one down from the
garage, anyway. _Oh, my goodness, look at 'er go!_"

Mrs. Balche shook her head. "Naughty children!" she said, as she picked
up the saucer and went to the kitchen door, which she held open for
Violet to enter. "Want to come with mamma?"

But Violet had lost even the faint interest in life he had shown a few
moments earlier. He settled himself to another stupor in the sun.

"Well, well," Mrs. Balche said indulgently. "Afterwhile shall have some
more nice keem."

       *       *       *       *       *

Sunset was beginning to be hinted, two hours later, when, in another
quarter of the town, a little girl of seven or eight, at play on the
domestic side of an alley gate, became aware of an older girl regarding
her fixedly over the top of the gate. The little girl felt embarrassed
and paused in her gayeties, enfolding in her arms her pet and playmate.
"Howdy' do," said the stranger, in a serious tone. "What'll you take for
that cat?"

The little girl made no reply, and the stranger, opening the gate, came
into the yard. She looked weary, rather bedraggled, yet hurried: her air
was predominantly one of anxiety. "I'll give you a quarter for that
cat," she said. "I want an all-white cat, but this one's only got that
one gray spot over its eye, and I don't believe there's an all-white
cat left in town, leastways that anybody's willing to part with. I'll
give you twenty-five cents for it. I haven't got it with me, but I'll
promise to give it to you day after to-morrow."

The little girl still made no reply, but continued to stare, her eyes
widening, and the caller spoke with desperation.

"See here," she said, "I _got_ to have a whitish cat! That'n isn't worth
more'n a quarter, but I'll give you thirty-five cents for her, money
down, day after to-morrow."

At this, the frightened child set the cat upon the ground and fled into
the house. Florence Atwater was left alone; that is to say, she was the
only human being in the yard, or in sight. Nevertheless, a human voice
spoke, not far behind her. It came through a knot-hole in the fence, and
it was a voice almost of passion.

"_You grab it!_"

Florence stood in silence, motionless; there was a solemnity about her.
The voice exhorted. "My goodness!" it said. "She didn't say she
_wouldn't_ sell it, did she? You can bring her the money like you said
you would, can't you? I got _mine_, didn't I, almost without any
trouble at all! My Heavens! Ain't Kitty Silver pretty near crazy? Just
think of the position we've put her into! I tell you, you _got_ to!"

But now Florence moved. She moved slowly at first: then with more
decision and rapidity.

       *       *       *       *       *

That evening's dusk had deepened into blue night when the two cousins,
each with a scant, uneasy dinner eaten, met by appointment in the alley
behind their mutual grandfather's place of residence, and, having
climbed the back fence, approached the kitchen. Suddenly Florence lifted
her right hand, and took between thumb and forefinger a lock of hair
upon the back of Herbert's head.

"Well, for Heavenses' sakes!" he burst out, justifiably protesting.

"Hush!" Florence warned him. "Kitty Silver's talkin' to somebody in
there. It might be Aunt Julia! C'm'ere!"

She led him to a position beneath an open window of the kitchen. Here
they sat upon the ground, with their backs against the stone foundation
of the house, and listened to voices and the clink of dishes being
washed.

"She's got another ole coloured darky woman in there with her," said
Florence. "It's a woman belongs to her church and comes to see her 'most
every evening. Listen; she's telling her about it. I bet we could get
the real truth of it maybe better this way than if we went in and asked
her right out. Anyway, it isn't eavesdropping if you listen when people
are talkin' about you, yourself. It's only wrong when it isn't any of
your own bus--"

"For Heavenses' sakes hush _up_!" her cousin remonstrated. "Listen!"

"'No'm, Miss Julia, ma'am,' I say"--thus came the voice of Mrs.
Silver--"'no'm, Miss Julia, ma'am. Them the same two cats you han' me,
Miss Julia, ma'am,' I say. 'Leas'wise,' I say, 'them the two same cats
whut was in nat closed-up brown basket when I open it up an' take an'
fix to wash 'em. Somebody might 'a' took an' change 'em 'fo' they got to
_me_,' I say, 'Miss Julia, ma'am, but all the change happen to 'em sence
they been in charge of _me_, that's the gray whut come off 'em whiles I
washin' 'em an' dryin' 'em in corn meal and flannel. I dunno how much
_washin'_ 'em change 'em, Miss Julia, ma'am,' I say, ''cause how much
they change or ain't change, that's fer you to say and me not to jedge,'
I say."

"Lan' o' misery!" cried the visitor, chuckling delightedly. "I wonder
how you done kep' you face, Miss Kitty. What Miss Julia say?"

A loud, irresponsible outburst of mirth on the part of Mrs. Silver
followed. When she could again control herself, she replied more
definitely. "Miss Julia say, she say she ain't never hear no sech
outragelous sto'y in her life! She _tuck_ on! Hallelujah! An' all time,
Miz Johnson, I give you my word, I stannin' there holdin' nat basket,
carryin' on up hill an' down dale how them the same two Berjum cats
Mista Sammerses sen' her: an' trouble enough dess ten'in' to that
basket, lemme say to you, Miz Johnson, as anybody kin tell you whutever
tried to take care o' two cats whut ain't yoosta each other in the same
basket. An' every blessed minute I stannin' there, can't I hear that ole
Miz Blatch nex' do', out in her back yod an' her front yod, an' plum out
in the street, hollerin': 'Kitty? Kitty? Kitty?' '_Yes!_' Miss Julia
say, she say, 'Fine sto'y!' she say. 'Them two cats you claim my Berjum
cats, they got short hair, an' they ain't the same age an' they ain't
even nowheres near the same _size_,' she say. 'One of 'em's as fat as
_bofe_ them Berjum cats,' she say: 'an' it's on'y got one eye,' she say.
'Well, Miss Julia, ma'am,' I say--'_one_ thing; they come out white,
all 'cept dess around that there skinnier one's eye,' I say: 'dess the
same you tell me they goin' to,' I say. 'You right about _that_ much,
ma'am!' I say."

"Oh, me!" Mrs. Johnson moaned, worn with applausive laughter. "What she
respon' then?"

"I set that basket down," said Kitty Silver, "an' I start fer the do',
whiles she unfasten the lid fer to take one mo' look at 'em, I reckon:
but open window mighty close by, an' nat skinny white cat make one jump,
an' after li'l while I lookin' out thishere window an' see that ole fat
Miz Blatch's tom, waddlin' crost the yod todes home."

"What she doin' now?" Mrs. Johnson inquired.

"Who? Miss Julia? She settin' out on the front po'che talkin' to Mista
Sammerses."

"My name! How she goin' fix it with _him_, after all thishere
dishcumaraddle?"

"Who? Miss Julia? Leave her alone, honey! She take an' begin talk so
fas' an' talk so sweet, no young man ain't goin' to ricklect he ever
give her no cats, not till he's gone an' halfway home! But I ain't tole
you the en' of it, Miz Johnson, an' the en' of it's the bes' part whut
happen."

"What's that, Miss Kitty?"

"Look!" said Mrs. Silver. "Mista Atwater gone in yonder, after I come
out, an' ast whut all them goin's-on about. Well suh, an' di'n' he come
walkin' out in my kitchen an' slip me two bright spang new silbuh
dolluhs right in my han'?"

"My name!"

"Yessuh!" said Mrs. Silver triumphantly. And in the darkness outside the
window Florence drew a deep breath. "I'd of felt just awful about this,"
she said, "if Noble Dill had given Aunt Julia those Persian cats."

"Why?" Herbert inquired, puzzled by her way of looking at things. "I
don't see why it would make it any worse _who_ gave 'em to her."

"Well, it would," Florence said. "But anyway, I think we did rather
wrong. Did you notice what Kitty Silver said about what grandpa did?"

"Well?"

"I think we ought to tell him our share of it," Florence returned
thoughtfully. "I don't want to go to bed to-night with all this on my
mind, and I'm going to find grandpa right now and confess every bit of
it to him."

Herbert hopefully decided to go with her.




CHAPTER THREE


Julia, like Herbert, had been a little puzzled by Florence's expression
of a partiality for the young man, Noble Dill; it was not customary for
anybody to confess a weakness for him. However, the aunt dismissed the
subject from her mind, as other matters pressed sharply upon her
attention; she had more worries than most people guessed.

The responsibilities of a lady who is almost officially the prettiest
person in a town persistently claiming sixty-five thousand inhabitants
are often heavier than the world suspects, and there were moments when
Julia found the position so trying that she would have preferred to
resign. She was a warm-hearted, appreciative girl, naturally unable to
close her eyes to sterling merit wherever it appeared: and it was not
without warrant that she complained of her relatives. The whole family,
including the children, she said, regaled themselves with her private
affairs as a substitute for theatre-going. But one day, a week after the
irretrievable disappearance of Fifi and Mimi, she went so far as to
admit a note of unconscious confession into her protest that she was
getting pretty tired of being mistaken for a three-ring circus! Such was
her despairing expression, and the confession lies in her use of the
word "three."

The misleading moderation of "three" was pointed out to her by her
niece, whose mind at once violently seized upon the word and divested it
of context--a process both feminine and instinctive, for this child was
already beginning to be feminine. "Three!" she said. "Why, Aunt Julia,
you must be crazy! There's Newland Sanders and Noble Dill and that old
widower, Ridgley, that grandpa hates so, and Mister Clairdyce and George
Plum and the two new ones from out of town that Aunt Fanny Patterson
said you had at church Sunday morning--Herbert said he didn't like one
of 'em's looks much, Aunt Julia. And there's Parker Kent Usher and that
funny-lookin' one with the little piece of whiskers under his underlip
that Noble Dill got so mad at when they were calling, and Uncle Joe
laughed about, and I don't know who all! Anyhow, there's an awful lot
more than three, Aunt Julia."

Julia looked down with little favour upon the talkative caller. Florence
was seated upon the shady steps of the veranda, and Julia, dressed for a
walk, occupied a wicker chair above her. "Julia, dressed for a
walk"--how scant the words! It was a summer walk that Julia had dressed
for: and she was all too dashingly a picture of coolness on a hot day: a
brunette in murmurous white, though her little hat was a film of
blackest blue, and thus also in belt and parasol she had almost matched
the colour of her eyes. Probably no human-made fabric could have come
nearer to matching them, though she had once met a great traveller--at
least he went far enough in his search for comparisons--who told her
that the Czarina of Russia had owned a deep sapphire of precisely the
colour, but the Czarina's was the only sapphire yet discovered that had
it. One of Newland Sanders's longest Poems-to-Julia was entitled "Black
Sapphires."

Julia's harmonies in black sapphire were uncalled for. If she really had
been as kind as she was too often capable of looking, she would have
fastened patches over both eyes--one patch would have been useless--and
she would have worn flat shoes and patronized a dressmaker with genius
enough to misrepresent her. But Julia was not great enough for such
generosities: she should have been locked up till she passed sixty; her
sufferings deserve no pity.

And yet an attack of the mumps during the winter had brought Julia more
sympathy than the epidemic of typhoid fever in the Old Ladies' Infirmary
brought all of the nine old ladies who were under treatment there. Julia
was confined to her room for almost a month, during which a florist's
wagon seemed permanent before the house: and a confectioner's frequently
stood beside the florist's. Young Florence, an immune who had known the
mumps in infancy, became an almost constant attendant upon the patient,
with the result that the niece contracted an illness briefer than the
aunt's, but more than equalling it in poignancy, caused by the poor
child's economic struggle against waste. Florence's convalescence took
place in her own home without any inquiries whatever from the outer
world, but Julia's was spent in great part at the telephone. Even a poem
was repeated to her by the instrument:

    How the world blooms anew
    To think that you
    Can speak again,
    Can hear
    The words of men
    And the dear
    Own voice of you.

This was Newland Sanders. He was just out of college, a reviewer, a
poet, and once, momentarily, an atheist. It was Newland who was present
and said such a remarkable thing when Julia had the accident to her
thumb-nail in closing the double doors between the living-room and the
library, where her peculiar old father sat reading. "To see you suffer,"
Newland said passionately as she nursed her injury:--"to see you in
pain, that is the one thing in the universe which I feel beyond all my
capacities. Do you know, when you are made to suffer pain, then I feel
that there is no God!"

This strong declaration struck Herbert as one of the most impressive
things he had ever heard, though he could not account for its being said
to any aunt of his. Herbert had just dropped in without the formality of
ringing the bell, and had paused in the hall, outside the open door of
the living-room. He considered the matter, after Newland had spoken, and
concluded to return to his own place of residence without disturbing
anybody at his grandfather's. At home he found his mother and father
entertaining one of his uncles, one of his aunts, two of his
great-uncles, one of his great-aunts, and one of his grown-up cousins,
at cards: and he proved to be warranted in believing that they would all
like to know what he had heard. Newland's statement became quite
celebrated throughout the family: and Julia, who had perceived almost a
sacred something in his original fervour, changed her mind after hearing
the words musingly repeated, over and over, by her fat old Uncle Joe.

Florence thought proper to remind her of this to-day, after Julia's
protest containing the too moderately confessional word "three."

"If you don't want to be such a circus," the niece continued, reasoning
perfectly, "I don't see what you always keep leadin' all of 'em on all
the time just the same for."

"Who've you heard saying that, Florence?" her aunt demanded.

"Aunt Fanny Patterson," Florence replied absently. "F'r instance, Aunt
Julia, I don't see what you want to go walking with Newland Sanders for,
when you said yourself you wished he was dead, or somep'n, after there
got to be so muck talk in the family and everywhere about his sayin' all
that about the Bible when you hurt your thumb. All the family----"

Julia sighed profoundly. "I wish 'all the family' would try to think
about themselves for just a little while! There's entirely too little
self-centredness among my relatives to suit me!"

"Why, it's only because you're related to me that _I_ pay the very
_slightest_ attention to what goes on here," Florence protested. "It's
my own grandfather's house, isn't it? Well, if you didn't live here, and
if you wasn't my own grandfather's daughter, Aunt Julia, I wouldn't ever
pay the _very_ slightest attention to you! Anyway, I don't _much_
criticize all these people that keep calling on you--anyway not half as
much as Herbert does. Herbert thinks he always hass to act so critical,
now his voice is changing."

"At your age," said Julia, "my mind was on my schoolbooks."

"Why, Aunt Julia!" Florence exclaimed in frank surprise. "Grandpa says
just the opposite from that. I've heard him say, time and time and time
again, you always _were_ this way, ever since you were four years old."

"What way?" asked her aunt.

"Like you are now, Aunt Julia. Grandpa says by the time you were
fourteen it got so bad he had to get a new front gate, the way they
leaned on it. He says he hoped when you grew up he'd get a little peace
in his own house, but he says it's worse, and never for one minute the
livelong day can he----"

"I know," Julia interrupted. "He talks like a Christian Martyr and
behaves like Nero. I might warn you to keep away from him, by the way,
Florence. He says that either you or Herbert was over here yesterday and
used his spectacles to cut a magazine with, and broke them. I wouldn't
be around here much if I were you until he's got over it."

"It must have been Herbert broke 'em," said Florence promptly.

"Papa thinks it was you. Kitty Silver told him it was."

"Mean ole reptile!" said Florence, alluding to Mrs. Silver; then she
added serenely, "Well, grandpa don't get home till five o'clock, and
it's only about a quarter of two now. Aunt Julia, what are you waitin'
around here for?"

"I told you; I'm going walking."

"I mean: Who with?"

Miss Atwater permitted herself a light moan. "With Mr. Sanders and Mr.
Ridgely, Florence."

Florence's eyes grew large and eager. "Why, Aunt Julia, I thought those
two didn't speak to each other any more!"

"They don't," Julia assented in a lifeless voice. "It just happened that
Mr. Sanders and Mr. Ridgley and Mr. Dill, all three, asked me to take a
walk this afternoon at two o'clock."

"But Noble Dill isn't going?"

"No," said Julia. "I was fortunate enough to remember that I'd already
promised someone else when he asked me. That's what I didn't remember
when Mr. Ridgely asked me."

"I'd have gone with Noble Dill," Florence said firmly. "Noble Dill is my
Very Ideal! I'd marry him to-morrow."

"It seems to me," her aunt remarked, "I heard your mother telling
somebody the other day that you had said the same thing about the King
of Spain."

Florence laughed. "Oh, that was only a passing fancy," she said lightly.
"Aunt Julia, what's Newland Sanders supposed to do?"

"I think he hasn't entered any business or profession yet."

"I bet he couldn't," her niece declared. "What's that old Ridgely
supposed to be? Just a widower?"

"Never mind!"

"And that George Plum's supposed to do something or other around Uncle
Joe's ole bank, isn't he?" Florence continued.

"'Supposed'!" Julia protested. "What is all this 'supposed to be'? Where
did you catch that horrible habit? You know the whole family worries
over your superciliousness, Florence; but until now I've always thought
it was just the way your face felt easiest. If it's going to break out
in your talk, too, it's time you began to cure yourself of it."

"Oh, it doesn't hurt anything!" Florence made careless response, and, as
she saw the thin figure of young Mr. Sanders approaching in the
distance, "Look!" she cried, pointing. "Why, he doesn't even _compare_
to Noble Dill!"

"Don't point at people!"

"Well, he's nothing much to point at!" She lowered her finger. "It's no
depredation to me, Aunt Julia, to give up pointing at Newland Sanders.
Atch'ly, I wouldn't give Noble Dill's little finger for a hunderd and
fifty Newland Sanderses!"

Julia smiled faintly as she watched Mr. Sanders, who seemed not yet to
be aware of her, because he thought it would be better to reach the gate
and lift his hat just there. "What _has_ brought on all this tenderness
in favour of Mr. Dill, Florence?"

Her niece's eyes, concentrated in thought, then became dreamy. "I like
him because he's so uncouth," she said. "I think he's the uncouthest of
any person I ever saw."

"'Uncouth'?"

"Yes," said Florence. "Herbert said I was uncouth, and I looked it up in
the ditchanary. It said, 'Rare, exquisite, elegant, unknown, obs,
unfamiliar, strange,' and a whole lot else. I never did know a word that
means so much, I guess. What's 'obs' mean, Aunt Julia?"

"Hush!" said Julia, rising, for Mr. Sanders had made a little startled
movement as he reached the gate and caught sight of her; and now, straw
hat in hand, he was coming up the brick walk that led to the veranda.
His eyes were fixed upon Julia with an intensity that seemed to affect
his breathing; there was a hushedness about him. And Florence, in
fascination, watched Julia's expression and posture take on those little
changes that always seemed demanded of her by the approach of a young or
youngish man, or a nicely dressed old one. By almost imperceptible
processes the commonplace moment became dramatic at once.

"You!" said Newland in a low voice.

And Julia, with an implication as flattering as the gesture was
graceful, did not wait till he was within reach, but suddenly extended
her welcoming hand at arm's length. He sprang forward convulsively and
grasped it, as if forever.

"You see my little niece?" Julia said. "I think you know her."

"Know her?" Mr. Sanders repeated; then roused his faculties and gave
Florence a few fingers dangling coldly after their recent emotion.
"Florence. Oh, yes, Florence."

Florence had not risen, but remained seated upon the steps, her look and
air committed to that mood of which so much complaint had been made.
"How do you do," she said. "There's Mr. Ridgely."

"Where?" Newland asked loudly.

"Comin' in at the gate," said Florence. "He's goin' walkin' with you,
too."

In this crisis, Mr. Sanders's feeling was obviously one of startled
anguish. He turned to Julia.

"Why, this is terrible!" he said. "You told me----"

"Sh!" she warned him; and whispered hastily, all in a breath:
"_Couldn't-be-helped-explain-next-time-I-see-you._" Then she advanced a
gracious step to meet the newcomer.

But the superciliousness of Florence visibly increased with this advent:
Mr. Ridgely was easily old enough to be her grandfather, yet she seemed
to wish it evident that she would not have cared for him even in that
capacity. He was, in truth, one of those widowers who feel younger than
ever, and behave as they feel. Since his loss he had shown the greatest
willingness to forego whatever advantages age and experience had given
him over the descendants of his old friends and colleagues, and his
cheerfulness as well as his susceptibility to all that was charming had
begun to make him so famous in the town that some of his contemporaries
seemed to know scarce another topic. And Julia had a kinder heart, as
her father bitterly complained, than most girls.

The widower came, holding out to her a votive cluster of violets, a
pink rose among them, their stems wrapped in purple; and upon the lapel
of his jovial flannel coat were other violets about a pink rosebud.

"How pretty of you!" said Julia, taking the offering; and as she pinned
it at her waist, she added rather nervously, "I believe you know Mr.
Sanders; he is going with us."

She was warranted in believing the gentlemen to be acquainted, because
no longer ago than the previous week they both had stated, in her
presence and simultaneously, that any further communication between them
would be omitted for life. Julia realized, of course, that Mr. Ridgely
must find the present meeting as trying as Newland did, and, to help him
bear it, she contrived to make him hear the hurried whisper:
"_Couldn't-be-helped-explain-some-day._"

Then with a laugh not altogether assured, she took up her parasol.
"Shall we be starting?" she inquired.

"Here's Noble Dill," said Florence, "I guess he's goin' to try to go
walkin' with you, too, Aunt Julia."

Julia turned, for in fact the gate at that moment clicked behind the
nervously advancing form of Noble Dill. He came with, a bravado that
was merely pitiable and he tried to snap his Orduma cigarette away with
thumb and forefinger in a careless fashion, only to see it publicly
disappear through an open cellar window of the house.

"I hope there's no excelsior down there," said Newland Sanders. "A good
many houses have burned to the ground just that way."

"It fell on the cement floor," Florence reported, peering into the
window. "It'll go out pretty soon."

"Then I suppose we might as well do the same thing," said Newland,
addressing Julia first and Mr. Dill second. "Miss Atwater and I are just
starting for a walk."

Mr. Ridgely also addressed the new arrival. "Miss Atwater and I are just
starting for a walk."

"You see, Noble," said the kind-hearted Julia, "I did tell you I had
another engagement."

"I came by here," Mr. Dill began in a tone commingling timidity, love,
and a fatal stubbornness; "I came by here--I mean I just happened to be
passing--and I thought if it was a walking-_party_, well, why not go
along? That's the way it struck me." He paused, coughing for courage and
trying to look easily genial, but not succeeding; then he added, "Well,
as I say, that's the way it struck me--as it were. I suppose we might as
well be starting."

"Yes, we might," Newland Sanders said quickly; and he placed himself at
Julia's left, seizing upon her parasol and opening it with
determination.

Mr. Ridgely had kept himself closely at the lady's right. "You were
mistaken, my boy," he said, falsely benevolent. "It isn't a
party--though there's Miss Florence, Noble. Nobody's asked her to go
walking to-day!"

Now, Florence took this satire literally. She jumped up and said
brightly: "I just as soon! Let's _do_ have a walking-party. I just as
soon walk with Mr. Dill as anybody, and we can all keep together, kind
of." With that, she stepped confidently to the side of her selected
escort, who appeared to be at a loss how to avert her kindness.

There was a moment of hesitation, during which a malevolent pleasure
slightly disfigured the countenances of the two gentlemen with Julia;
but when Florence pointed to a house across the street and remarked,
"There's Great-Uncle Milford and Aunt C'nelia; they been lookin' out of
their second guestroom window about half an hour," Julia uttered an
exclamation.

"Murder!" she said, and moved with decision toward the gate. "Let's go!"

Thus the little procession started, Mr. Sanders and the sprightly
widower at Beauty's side, with Florence and Mr. Dill so close behind
that, before they had gone a block, Newland found it necessary to warn
this rear rank that the heels of his new shoes were not part of the
pavement. After that the rear rank, a little abashed, consented to fall
back some paces. Julia's heightened colour, meanwhile, was little abated
by some slight episodes attending the progress of the walking-party. Her
Aunt Fanny Patterson, rocking upon a veranda, rose and evidently called
to someone within the house, whereupon she was joined by her invalid
sister, Aunt Harriet, with a trained nurse and two elderly domestics, a
solemnly whispering audience. And in the front yard of "the Henry
Atwater house," at the next corner, Herbert underwent a genuine
bedazzlement, but he affected more. His violent gaze dwelt upon
Florence, and he permitted his legs slowly to crumple under him, until,
just as the party came nearest him, he lay prostrate upon his back in a
swoon. Afterward he rose and for a time followed in a burlesque manner;
then decided to return home.

"Old heathen!" said Florence, glancing back over her shoulder as he
disappeared from view.

Mr. Dill was startled from a reverie inspired by the back of Julia's
head. "'Heathen'?" he said, in plaintive inquiry.

"I meant Herbert," Florence informed him. "Cousin Herbert Atwater. He
was following us, walking Dutch."

"'Cousin Herbert Atwater'?" said Noble dreamily. "'Dutch'?"

"He won't any more," said Florence. "He always hass to show off, now his
voice is changing." She spoke, and she also walked, with dignity--a
rather dashing kind of dignity, which was what Herbert's eccentricity of
gait intended to point out injuriously. In fact, never before had
Florence been so impressed with herself; never before, indeed, had she
been a member of a grown-up non-family party; never before had she gone
walking with an actual adult young man for her escort; and she felt that
she owed it to her position to appear in as brilliant an aspect as
possible. She managed to give herself a rhythmical, switching motion,
causing her kneelength skirt to swing from side to side--a pomp that
brought her a great deal of satisfaction as she now and then caught the
effect by twisting her neck enough to see down behind, over her
shoulder.

But her poise was temporarily threatened when the walking-party passed
her own house. Her mother happened to be sitting near an open window
upstairs, and, after gazing forth with warm interest at Julia and her
two outwalkers, Mrs. Atwater's astonished eyes fell upon Florence taking
care of the overflow. Florence bowed graciously.

"Florence!" her mother called down from the window: whereupon both
Florence and her Aunt Julia were instantly apprehensive, for Mrs. George
Atwater's lack of tact was a legend in the family. "Florence! Where on
earth are you going?"

"Never mind!" Florence thought best to respond. "Never mind!"

"You'd better come _in_," Mrs. Atwater called, her voice necessarily
louder as the party moved onward.

"Never mind!" Florence called back.

Mrs. Atwater leaned out of the window. "Where are you going? Come back
and get your _hat_. You'll get a _sunstroke_!"

Florence was able to conceal her indignation, and merely waved a hand
in airy dismissal as they passed from Mrs. Atwater's sight, leaving her
still shouting.

The daughter smiled negligently and shrugged her shoulders. "She'll get
over it!" she said.

"Who?"

"My mother. She was the one makin' all that noise," said Florence.
"Sometimes I do what she says: sometimes I don't. It's all accordings to
the way I feel." She looked up in her companion's face, and her
expression became politely fond as she thought how uncouth he was, for
in Florence's eye Noble Dill was truly rare, exquisite, and unfamiliar;
and she believed that he was obs, too, whatever that meant. She often
thought about him, and no longer ago than yesterday she had told Kitty
Silver that she couldn't see "how Aunt Julia could _look_ at anybody
else!"

Florence's selection of Noble Dill for the bright favourite of her
dreams was one of her own mysteries. Noble was not beautiful, neither
did he present to the ordinary eye of man anything especially rare,
exquisite, unfamiliar, or even so distinguished as to be obsolete. He
was about twenty-two, but not one of those book-read sportsmen of that
age, confident in clothes and manner, easy travellers and debonair;
that is to say, Noble was not of the worldly type twenty-two. True, he
had graduated from the High-school before entering his father's Real
Estate and Insurance office, but his geographical experiences (in
particular) had been limited to three or four railway excursions, at
special rates, to such points of interest as Mammoth Cave and Petoskey,
Michigan. His other experiences were not more sparkling, and except for
the emotions within him, he was in all the qualities of his mind as well
as in his bodily contours and the apparel sheltering the latter, the
most commonplace person in Florence's visible world. The inner areas of
the first and second fingers of his left hand bore cigarette stains,
seemingly indelible: the first and second fingers of his right hand were
strongly ornamented in a like manner; tokens proving him ambidextrous to
but a limited extent, however. Moreover, his garments and garnitures
were not comparable to those of either Newland Sanders or that dapper
antique, Mr. Ridgely. Noble's straw hat might have brightened under the
treatment of lemon juice or other restorative; his scarf was folded to
hide a spot that worked steadily toward a complete visibility, and some
recent efforts upon his trousers with a tepid iron, in his bedchamber
at home, counteracted but feebly that tendency of cloth to sculpture
itself in hummocks upon repeated pressure of the human knee.

All in all, nothing except the expression of Noble's face and the
somewhat ill-chosen pansy in his buttonhole hinted of the remarkable.
Yet even here was a thing for which he was not responsible himself; it
was altogether the work of Julia. What her work was, in the case of
Noble Dill, may be expressed in a word--a word used not only by the
whole Atwater family connection, in completely expressing Noble's
condition, but by Noble's own family connection as well. This complete
word was "awful."

Florence was the one exception on the Atwater side: she was far, far
from thinking or speaking of Noble Dill in that way, although, until she
looked up "uncouth" in Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, she had not
found suitable means to describe him. And now, as she walked at his
side, she found her sensations to be nothing short of thrilling. For it
must be borne in mind that this was her first and wholly unexpected
outburst into society; the experience was that of an obscure aerolite
suddenly become a noble meteor. She longed to say or do something
magnificent--something strange and exhilarating, in keeping with her new
station in life.

It was this longing, and by no means a confirmed unveracity, that
prompted her to amplify her comments upon her own filial independence.
"Oh, I guess I pretty near never do anything I don't want to," she said.
"I kind of run the house to suit myself. I guess if the truth had to be
told, I just about run the whole Atwater family, when it comes to that!"

The statement was so noticeable that it succeeded in turning Noble's
attention from the back of Julia's head. "You do?" he said. "Well, that
seems queer," he added absently.

"Oh, I don't know!" she laughed. In her increasing exaltation things
appeared actually to be as she wished them to be; an atmosphere both
queenly and adventurous seemed to invest her, and any remnants of human
caution in her were assuaged by the circumstance that her Aunt Julia's
attention was subject to the strong demands necessarily imposed upon
anybody taking a walk between two gentlemen who do not "speak" to each
other. "Oh, I don't know," said Florence. "The family's used to it by
this time, I guess. The way I do things, they haf to be, I guess. When
they don't like it I don't say much for a while, then I just----" She
paused, waiting for her imagination to supply a sequel to the drama just
sketched. "Well, I guess they kind of find out they better step around
pretty lively," she concluded darkly. "They don't bother around _too_
much!"

"I suppose not," said Noble, his vacancy and credulity continuing to
dovetail perfectly.

"You bet not!" the exuberant Florence thought proper to suggest as a
preferable expression. And then she had an inspiration to enliven his
dreamy interest in her conversation. "Grandpa, he's the one I kind of
run most of all of 'em. He's about fifty or sixty, and so he hasn't got
too much sense. What I mean, he hasn't got too much sense _left_, you
know. So I haf to sort of take holt every now and then." She lowered her
voice a little, some faint whisper of discretion reaching her inward
ear. "Aunt Julia can't do a thing with him. I guess that's maybe the
reason she kind of depen's on me so much; or anyway somep'n like that.
You know, f'r instance, I had to help talk grandpa into lettin' her send
to New York for her things. Aunt Julia gets all her things in New York."

Undeniably, Mr. Dill's interest flickered up. "_Things_?" he repeated
inquiringly. "Her things?"

"Yes. Everything she wears, you know."

"Oh, yes."

"What I was goin' to tell you," Florence continued, "you know grandpa
just about hates everybody. Anyhow, he'd like to have some peace and
quiet once in a while in his own house, he says, instead of all this
moil and turmoil, and because the doctor said all the matter with her
was she eats too much candy, and they keep sendin' more all the
time--and there's somep'n the trouble with grandpa: it makes him sick to
smell violets: he had it ever since he was a little boy, and he can't
help it; and he hates animals, and they keep sendin' her Airedales and
Persian kittens, and then there was that alligator came from Florida and
upset Kitty Silver terribly--and so, you see, grandpa just hates the
whole everlasting business."

Mr. Dill nodded and spoke with conviction: "He's absolutely right;
absolutely!"

"Well, some ways he is," said Florence; and she added confidentially:
"The trouble is, he seems to think you're about as bad as any of 'em."

"What?"

"_Well_!" Florence exclaimed, with upward gestures both of eye and of
hand, to signify what she left untold of Mr. Atwater's orations upon
his favourite subject: Noble Dill. "It's torrable!" she added.

Noble breathed heavily, but a thought struggled in him and a brightening
appeared upon him. "You mean----" he began. "Do you mean it's terrible
for your Aunt Julia? Do you mean his injustice about me makes her feel
terribly?"

"No," said Florence. "No: I mean the way he goes on about everybody. But
Aunt Julia's kind of used to it. And anyhow you needn't worry about him
'long as I'm on your side. He won't do anything much to you if I say not
to. Hardly anything at all." And then, with almost a tenderness, as she
marked the visibly insufficient reassurance of her companion, she said
handsomely: "He won't say a word. I'll tell him not to."

Noble was dazed; no novelty, for he had been dazed almost continually
during the past seven months, since a night when dancing with Julia,
whom he had known all his life, he "noticed for the first time what she
looked like." (This was his mother's description.) Somewhere, he vaguely
recalled, he had read of the extraordinary influence possessed by
certain angelic kinds of children; he knew, too, what favourite
grandchildren can do with grandfathers. The effect upon him was
altogether base; he immediately sought by flattery to increase and
retain Florence's kindness. "I always _thought_ you seemed to know more
than most girls of your age," he began.

It was a great afternoon for Florence. From time to time she glanced
over her shoulder at the switching skirt, and increased its radius of
action, though this probably required more exercise, compared to the
extent of ground covered, than any lady member of a walking-party had
ever before taken, merely as a pedestrian. Meanwhile, she chattered on,
but found time to listen to the pleasant things said to her by her
companion; and though most of these were, in truth, rather vague, she
was won to him more than he knew. Henceforth she was to be his champion
indeed, sometimes with greater energy than he would need.

... The two were left alone together by Julia's gate when the walk (as
short as Julia dared to make it) was over.

"Well," Florence said, "I've had quite a nice time. I hope you enjoyed
yourself nicely, too, Mr. Dill." Then her eye rose to the overhanging
branch of a shade-tree near them. "Would you like to see me chin
myself?" she asked, stepping beneath the branch. "I bet I could
skin-the-cat on that limb! Would you like to see me do it?"

"I would _so_!" the flatterer enthused.

She became thoughtful, remembering that she was now a lady who took
walks with grown gentlemen. "I can, but I won't," she said. "I used to
do lots of things like that. I used to whenever I felt like it. I could
chin myself four times and Herbert only three. I was lots better than
Herbert when I used to do all kinds of things like that."

"Were you?"

She laughed as in a musing retrospect of times gone by. "I guess I used
to be a pretty queer kind of a girl in those days," she said. "Well--I
s'pose we ought to say good-bye for the present, so to speak, Mr. Dill."

"I'm afraid so."

"Well----" She stood looking at him expectantly, but he said nothing
more. "Well, good-bye for the present, Mr. Dill," she said again, and,
turning, walked away with dignity. But a moment later she forgot all
about her skirt and scampered.




CHAPTER FOUR


Mrs. Dill, Noble's mother, talked of organizing a Young Men's Mothers'
Club against Julia, nevertheless she acknowledged that in one solitary
way Noble was being improved by the experience. His two previous attacks
of love (one at twelve, and the other at eighteen) had been incomparably
lighter, and the changes in him, noted at home, merely a slight general
irritability and a lack of domestic punctuality due to too much
punctuality elsewhere. But, when his Julia Atwater trouble came, the
very first symptom he manifested was a strange new effort to become
beautiful; his mother even discovered that he sometimes worked with
pumice stone upon the cigarette stains on his fingers.

The most curious thing about his condition was that for a long time he
took it for granted that his family did not know what was the matter
with him; and this shows as nothing else could the meekness and tact of
the Dills; for, excluding bad cooks and the dangerously insane, the
persons most disturbing to the serenity of households are young lovers.
But the world has had to accommodate itself to them because young lovers
cannot possibly accommodate themselves to the world. For the young lover
there is no general life of the species; for him the universe is a
delicate blush under a single bonnet. He has but an irritated perception
of every vital thing in nature except the vital thing under this bonnet;
all else is trivial intrusion. But whatever does concern the centrifugal
bonnet, whatever concerns it in the remotest--ah, _then_ he springs to
life! So Noble Dill sat through a Sunday dinner at home, seemingly
drugged to a torpor, while the family talk went on about him; but when
his father, in the course of some remarks upon politics, happened to
mention the name of the county-treasurer, Charles J. Patterson, Noble's
startled attention to the conversation was so conspicuous as to be
disconcerting. Mrs. Dill signalled with her head that comment should be
omitted, and Mr. Dill became, for the moment, one factor in a fairly
clear example of telepathic communication, for it is impossible to
believe that his wife's almost imperceptible gesture was what caused
him to remember that Charles J. Patterson was Julia Atwater's uncle.

That name, Charles J. Patterson, coming thus upon Noble's ear, was like
an unexpected shrine on the wayside where plods the fanatic pilgrim; and
yet Mr. Patterson was the most casual of Julia's uncles-by-marriage: he
neither had nor desired any effect upon her destiny. To Noble he seemed
a being ineffably privileged and fateful, and something of the same
quality invested the wooden gateposts in front of Julia's house;
invested everything that had to do with her. What he felt about her
father, that august old danger, himself, was not only the uncalled-for
affection inevitable toward Julia's next of kin, but also a kind of
horror due to the irresponsible and awful power possessed by a sacred
girl's parent. Florence's offer of protection had not entirely reassured
the young lover, and, in sum, Noble loved Mr. Atwater, but often, in his
reveries, when he had rescued him from drowning or being burned to
death, he preferred to picture the peculiar old man's injuries as
ultimately fatal.

For the other Atwaters his feeling held less of apprehension, more of
tenderness; and whenever he saw one of them he became deferential and a
little short of breath. Thus, on a sunny afternoon, having been home to
lunch after his morning labour downtown, he paused in passing young
Herbert's place of residence and timidly began a conversation with this
glamoured nephew. It happened that during the course of the morning
Herbert had chosen a life career for himself; he had decided to become a
scientific specialist, an entomologist; and he was now on his knees
studying the manners and customs of the bug inhabitants of the lawn
before the house, employing for his purpose a large magnifying lens, or
"reading glass." (His discovery of this implement in the attic,
coincidentally with his reading a recent "Sunday Supplement" article on
bugs, had led to his sudden choice of a vocation.)

"Did somebody--ah, have any of the family lost anything, Herbert?" Noble
asked in a gentle voice, speaking across the fence.

Herbert did not look up, nor did he relax the scientific frown upon his
brow. "No," he said. "They always _are_ losin' things, espesh'ly Aunt
Julia, when she comes over here, or anywheres else; but I wouldn't waste
_my_ time lookin' for any old earrings or such. I got more important
things to do on my hands."

"_Has_ your Aunt Julia lost an earring, Herbert?"

"Her? Well, she nearly always _has_ lost somep'n or other, but that
isn't bother'n' _me_ any. I got better things to do with my time."
Herbert spoke without interrupting his occupation or relaxing his
forehead. "Nacher'l history is a _little_ more important to the
inhabitants of our universe than a lot o' worthless jew'lry, I guess,"
he continued; and his pride in discovering that he could say things like
this was so great that his frown gave way temporarily to a look of
pleased surprise, then came back again to express an importance much
increased. He rose, approached the fence, and condescended to lean upon
it. "I don't guess there's one person in a thousand," he said, "that
knows what they _ought_ to know about our inseck friends."

"No," Mr. Dill agreed readily. "I guess that's so. I guess you're right
about that, Herbert. When did your Aunt Julia lose the earring,
Herbert?"

"I d' know," said Herbert. "Now, you take my own father and mother: What
do they know? Well, mighty little. They may have had to learn a little
teeny bit about insecks when they were in school, but whatever little it
was they went and forgot it proba'ly long before they were married.
Well, that's no way. F'r instance, you take a pinchin' bug: What do you
suppose my father and mother know about its position in the inseck
world?"

"Well----" said Noble uneasily. "Well----" He coughed, and hastened to
add: "But as I was saying, if she lost her earring somewhere in your
yard, or----"

The scientific boy evidently did not follow this line of thought, for he
interrupted: "Why, they wouldn't know a thing about it, and a pinchin'
bug isn't one of the highest insecks at all. Ants are way up compared to
most pinchin' bugs. Ants are way up anyway. Now, you take an ant----" He
paused. "Well, everybody ought to know a lot more'n they do about ants.
It takes time, and you got to study 'em the right way, and of course
there's lots of people wouldn't know how to do it. I'm goin' to get a
book I been readin' about. It's called 'The Ant.'"

For a moment Noble was confused; he followed his young friend's
discourse but hazily, and Herbert pronounced the word "ant" precisely as
he pronounced the word "aunt." The result was that Noble began to say
something rather dreamy concerning the book just mentioned, but,
realizing that he was being misunderstood, he changed his murmur into a
cough, and inquired:

"When was she over here, Herbert?"

"Who?"

"Your Aunt Julia."

"Yesterday evening," said Herbert. "Now, f'r instance, you take a common
lightning-bug----"

"Did she lose it, then?"

"Lose what?"

"Her earring."

"I d' know," said Herbert. "You take the common lightning-bug or, as
it's called in some countries, the firefly----"

He continued, quoting and misquoting the entomological authority of the
recent "Sunday Supplement"; but his friend on the other side of the
fence was inattentive to the lecture. Noble's mind was occupied with a
wonder; he had realized, though dimly, that here was he, trying to make
starry Julia the subject of a conversation with a person who had the
dear privilege of being closely related to her--and preferred to talk
about bugs.

Herbert talked at considerable length about lightning-bugs, but as his
voice happened rather precociously to be already in a state of
adolescent change, the sound was not soothing; yet Noble lingered.
Nephews were queer, but this one was Julia's, and he finally mentioned
her again, as incidental to lightning-bugs; whereupon the mere hearer of
sounds became instantly a listener to words.

"Well, and then I says," Herbert continued;--"I says: 'It's phosphorus,
Aunt Julia.' I guess there's hardly anybody in the world doesn't know
more than Aunt Julia, except about dresses and parasols and every other
useless thing under the sun. She says: 'My! I always thought it was
sulphur!' Said nobody ever _told_ her it wasn't sulphur! I asked her: I
said: 'You mean to sit there and tell me you don't know the difference?'
And she says: 'I don't care one way or the other,' she says. She said
she just as soon a lightning-bug made his light with sulphur as with
phosphorus; it didn't make any difference to her, she says, and they
could go ahead and make their light any way they wanted, _she_ wouldn't
interfere! I had a whole hatful of 'em, and she told me not to take 'em
into their house, because grandpa hates insecks as much as he does
animals and violets, and she said they never owned a microscope or a
magnifying-glass in their lives, and wouldn't let me hunt for one. All
in the world she knows is how to sit on the front porch and say: 'Oh
you don't mean _that!_' to somebody like Newland Sanders or that ole
widower!"

"When?" Noble asked impulsively. "When did she say that?"

"Oh, I d' know," said Herbert. "I expect she proba'ly says it to
somebody or other about every evening there is."

"She does?"

"Florence says so," Herbert informed him carelessly. "Florence goes over
to grandpa's after dark and sits on the ground up against the porch and
listens."

Noble first looked startled then uneasily reminiscent. "I don't believe
Florence ought to do that," he said gravely.

"_I_ wouldn't do it!" Herbert was emphatic.

"That's right, Herbert. I'm glad you wouldn't."

"No, sir," the manly boy declared. "You wouldn't never catch _me_ takin'
my death o' cold sittin' on the damp grass in the night air just to
listen to a lot o' tooty-tooty about 'I've named a star for you,' and
all such. You wouldn't catch me----"

Noble partly concealed a sudden anguish. "Who?" he interrupted. "Who did
she say _that_ to?"

"She didn't. They say it to her, and she says? 'Oh, you don't mean
that!' and of course then they haf to go on and say some more. Florence
says----" He checked himself. "Oh, I forgot! I promised Florence I
wouldn't tell anything about all this."

"It's safe," Noble assured him quickly. "I'm quite a friend of
Florence's and it's absolutely safe with me. I won't speak of it to
anybody, Herbert. Who was it told her he'd named a star for her?"

"It was the way some ole poem began. Newland Sanders wrote it. Florence
found it under Aunt Julia's sofa-cushions and read it all through, but
_I_ wouldn't wade through all that tooty-tooty for a million dollars,
and I told her to put it back before Aunt Julia noticed. Well, about
every day he writes her a fresh one, and then in the evening he stays
later than the rest, and reads 'em to her--and you ought to hear grandpa
when _he_ gets to talkin' about it!"

"He's perfectly right," said Noble. "Perfectly! What does he say when he
talks about it, Herbert?"

"Oh, he says all this and that; and then he kind of mutters around, and
you can't tell just what all the words are exactly, so't he can deny it
if any o' the family accuses him of swearing or anything." And Herbert
added casually: "He was kind of goin' on like that about you, night
before last."

"About _me_! Why, what could he say about _me_?"

"Oh, all this and that."

"But what did he find to say?"

"Well, he heard her tellin' you how you oughtn't to smoke so many
cigarettes and all about how it was killin' you, and you sayin' you
guessed it wouldn't matter if you _did_ die, and Aunt Julia sayin' 'Oh,
you don't mean that,' and all this and such and so on, you know. He can
hear anything on the porch pretty good from the lib'ary; and Florence
told me about that, besides, because she was sittin' in the grass and
all. She told Great-Uncle Joe and Aunt Hattie about it, too."

"My heavens!" Noble gasped, as for the first time he realized to what
trumpeting publicity that seemingly hushed and moonlit bower, sacred to
Julia, had been given over. He gulped, flushed, repeated "My heavens!"
and then was able to add, with a feeble suggestion of lightness: "I
suppose your grandfather understood it was just a sort of joke, didn't
he?"

"No," said Herbert, and continued in a friendly way, for he was
flattered by Noble's interest in his remarks, and began to feel a
liking for him. "No. He said Aunt Julia only talked like that because
she couldn't think of anything else to say, and it was wearin' him out.
He said all the good it did was to make you smoke more to make her think
how reckless you were; but the worst part of it was, he'd be the only
one to suffer, because it blows all through the house and he's got to
sit in it. He said he just could stand the smell of _some_ cigarettes,
but if you burned any more o' yours on his porch he was goin' to ask
your father to raise your salary for collectin' real-estate rents, so't
you'd feel able to buy some real tobacco. He----"

But the flushed listener felt that he had heard as much as he was called
upon to bear; and he interrupted, in a voice almost out of control, to
say that he must be "getting on downtown." His young friend, diverted
from bugs, showed the greatest willingness to continue the narrative
indefinitely, evidently being in possession of copious material; but
Noble turned to depart. An afterthought detained him. "Where was it she
lost her earring?"

"Who?"

"Your Aunt Julia."

"Why, _I_ didn't say she lost any earring," Herbert returned. "I said
she always _was_ losin' 'em: I didn't say she did."

"Then you didn't mean----"

"No," said Herbert, "_I_ haven't heard of her losin' anything at all,
lately." Here he added: "Well, grandpa kept goin' on about you, and he
told her----Well, so long!" And gazed after the departing Mr. Dill in
some surprise at the abruptness of the latter's leave-taking. Then,
wondering how the back of Noble's neck could have got itself so fiery
sunburnt, Herbert returned to his researches in the grass.

       *       *       *       *       *

The peaceful street, shady and fragrant with summer, was so quiet that
the footfalls of the striding Noble were like an interruption of
coughing in a silent church. As he seethed adown the warm sidewalk the
soles of his shoes smote the pavement, for mentally he was walking not
upon cement but upon Mr. Atwater.

Unconsciously his pace presently became slower for a more concentrated
brooding upon this slanderous old man who took advantage of his position
to poison his daughter's mind against the only one of her suitors who
cared in the highest way. And upon this there came an infinitesimal
consolation in the midst of anguish, for he thought of what Herbert had
told him about Mr. Newland Sanders's poems to Julia, and he had a strong
conviction that one time or another Mr. Atwater must have spoken even
more disparagingly of these poems and their author than he had of Orduma
cigarettes and their smoker. Perhaps the old man was not altogether
vile.

This charitable moment passed. He recalled the little moonlit drama on
the embowered veranda, when Julia, in her voice of plucked harp strings,
told him that he smoked too much, and he had said it didn't matter;
nobody would care much if he died--and Julia said gently that his mother
would, and other people, too; he mustn't talk so recklessly. Out of this
the old eavesdropper had viciously represented him to be a poser, not
really reckless at all; had insulted his cigarettes and his salary.
Well, Noble would show him! He had doubts about being able to show Mr.
Atwater anything important connected with the cigarettes or the salary,
but he _could_ prove how reckless he was. With that, a vision formed
before him: he saw Julia and her father standing spellbound at a
crossing while a smiling youth stood directly between the rails in the
middle of the street and let a charging trolley-car destroy him--not
instantly, for he would live long enough to whisper, as the stricken
pair bent over him: "Now, Julia, which do you believe: your father, or
me?" And then with a slight, dying sneer: "Well, Mr. Atwater, is _this_
reckless enough to suit you?"

       *       *       *       *       *

Town squirrels flitted along their high paths in the shade-tree branches
above the embittered young lover, and he noticed them not at all, which
was but little less than he noticed the elderly human couple who
observed him from a side-yard as he passed by. Mr. and Mrs. Burgess had
been happily married for fifty-three years and four months. Mr. Burgess
lay in a hammock between two maple trees, and was soothingly swung by
means of a string connecting the hammock and the rocking-chair in which
sat Mrs Burgess, acting as a mild motor for both the chair and the
hammock. "That's Noble Dill walking along the sidewalk," Mrs. Burgess
said, interpreting for her husband's failing eyes. "I bowed to him, but
he hardly seemed to see us and just barely lifted his hat. He needn't be
cross with _us_ because some other young man's probably taking Julia
Atwater out driving!"

"Yes, he need!" Mr. Burgess declared. "A boy in his condition needs to
be cross with everything. Sometimes they get so cross they go and drink
liquor. Don't you remember?"

She laughed. "I remember once!" she assented, and laughed again.

"Why, it's a terrible time of life," her husband went on. "Poets and
suchlike always take on about young love as if it were a charming and
romantic experience, but really it's just a series of mortifications.
The young lover is always wanting to do something dashing and romantic
and Sir Walter Raleigh-like, but in ordinary times about the wildest
thing he can do, if he can afford it, is to learn to run a Ford. And he
can't stand a word of criticism; he can't stand being made the least
little bit of fun of; and yet all the while his state of mind lays him
particularly open to all the things he can't stand. He can't stand
anything, and he has to stand everything. Why, it's a _horrible_ time of
life, mamma!"

"Yes, it is," she assented placidly. "I'm glad we don't have to go
through it again, Freddie; though you're only eighty-two, and with a
girl like Julia Atwater around nobody ought to be sure."




CHAPTER FIVE


Although Noble had saluted the old couple so crossly, thus unconsciously
making them, as he made the sidewalk, proxy for Mr. Atwater, so to
speak, yet the sight of them penetrated his outer layers of
preoccupation and had an effect upon him. In the midst of his suffering
his imagination paused for a shudder: What miserable old gray shadows
those two were! Thank Heaven he and Julia could never be like that! And
in the haze that rose before his mind's eye he saw himself leading Julia
through years of adventure in far parts of the world: there were
glimpses of himself fighting grotesque figures on the edge of Himalayan
precipices at dawn, while Julia knelt by the tent on the glacier and
prayed for him. He saw head-waiters bowing him and Julia to tables in
"strange, foreign cafés," and when they were seated, and he had ordered
dishes that amazed her, he would say in a low voice: "Don't look now,
but do you see that heavy-shouldered man with the insignia, sitting
with that adventuress and those eight officers who are really his
guards? Don't be alarmed, Julia, but I am here to _get_ that man!
Perhaps you remember what your father once said of me? Now, when what I
have to do here is done, perhaps you may wish to write home and mention
a few things to that old man!" And then a boy's changing voice seemed to
sound again close by: "He said he just could stand the smell of _some_
cigarettes, but if you burned any more o' yours on his porch----" And
Noble came back miserably to town again.

From an upper window of a new stucco house two maidens of nineteen
peered down at him. The shade of a striped awning protected the window
from the strong sun and the maidens from the sight of man--the latter
protection being especially fortunate, since they were preparing to take
a conversational afternoon nap, were robed with little substance, and
their heads appeared to be antlered; for they caught sight of Noble just
as they were preparing to put silk-and-lace things they called "caps" on
their heads.

"Who's that?" the visiting one asked.

"It's Noble Dill; he's kind of one of the crowd."

"Is he nice?"

"Oh, sort of. Kind of shambles around."

"Looks like last year's straw hat to me," the visiting one giggled.

"Oh, he tries to dress--lately, that is--but he never did know how."

"Looks mad about something."

"Yes. He's one of the ones in love with that Julia Atwater I told you
about."

"Has he got any chance with her?"

"Noble Dill? Mercy!"

"Is he much in love with her?"

"'Much'? _Murder!_"

The visiting one turned from the window and yawned. "Come on: let's lie
down and talk about some of the nice ones!"

The second house beyond this was--it was the house of Julia!

And what a glamour of summer light lay upon it because it was the house
of Julia! The texture of the sunshine came under a spell here; glowing
flakes of amber were afloat; a powder of opals and rubies fell silently
adrizzle through the trees. The very air changed, beating faintly with a
fairy music, for breathing it was breathing sorcery: elfin symphonies
went tinkling through it. The grass in the next yard to Julia's was
just grass, but every blade of grass in her yard was cut of jewels.

Julia's house was also the house of that person who through some
ungovernable horseplay of destiny happened to be her father: and this
gave the enchanted spot a background of lurking cyclone--no one could
tell at what instant there might rise above the roseate pleasance a
funnel-shaped cloud. With young Herbert's injurious narrative fresh in
his mind, Noble quickened his steps; but as he reached the farther fence
post, marking the southward limit of Mr. Atwater's property, he halted
short, startled beautifully. Through the open front door, just passed, a
voice had called his name; a voice of such arresting sweetness that his
breath stopped, like his feet.

"Oh, Noble!" it called again.

He turned back, and any one who might have seen his face then would have
known what was the matter with him, and must have been only the more
sure of it because his mouth was open. The next instant the adequate
reason for his disorder came lightly through the open door and down to
the gate.

Julia was kind, much too kind! She had heard that her Aunt Harriet and
her Uncle Joe were frequently describing Mr. Atwater's most recent
explosion to other members of the extensive Atwater family league; and
though she had not discovered how Aunt Harriet and Uncle Joe had
obtained their material, yet, in Julia's way of wording her thoughts, an
account of the episode was "all over town," and she was almost certain
that by this time Noble Dill had heard it. And so, lest he should
suffer, the too-gentle creature seized the first opportunity to cheer
him up. That was the most harmful thing about Julia; when anybody liked
her--even Noble Dill--she couldn't bear to have him worried. She was the
sympathetic princess who wouldn't have her puppy's tail chopped off all
at once, but only a little at a time.

"I just happened to see you going by," she said, and then, with an
astounding perfection of seriousness, she added the question: "Did you
_mind_ my calling to you and stopping you, Noble?"

He leaned, drooping, upon the gatepost, seeming to yearn toward it; his
expression was such that this gatepost need not have been surprised if
Noble had knelt to it.

"Why, no," he said hoarsely. "No, I don't have to be back at the office
any particular time. No."

"I just wanted to ask you----" She hesitated. "Well, it really doesn't
amount to anything--it's nothing so important I couldn't have spoken to
you about it some other time."

"Well," said Noble, and then on the spur of the moment he continued
darkly: "There might not be any other time."

"How do you mean, Noble?"

He smiled faintly. "I'm thinking of going away." This was true;
nevertheless, it was the first time he had thought of it. "Going away,"
he repeated in a murmur. "From this old town."

A shadowy, sweet reproach came upon Julia's eyes. "You mean--for good,
Noble?" she asked in a low voice, although no one knew better than she
what trouble such performances often cost her, later. "Noble, you don't
mean----"

He made a vocal sound conveying recklessness, something resembling a
reckless laugh. "I might go--any day! Just as it happens to strike me."

"But where to, Noble?"

"I don't----Well, maybe to China."

"China!" she cried in amazement. "Why, Noble Dill!"

"There's lots of openings in China," he said. "A white man can get a
commission in the Chinese army any day."

"And so," she said, "you mean you'd rather be an officer in the Chinese
army than stay--here?" With that, she bit her lip and averted her face
for an instant, then turned to him again, quite calm. Julia could not
help doing these things; she was born that way, and no punishment
changed her.

"Julia----" the dazzled Noble began, but he stopped with this beginning,
his voice seeming to have exhausted itself upon the name.

"When do you think you'll start?" she asked.

His voice returned. "I don't know _just_ when," he said; and he began to
feel a little too much committed to this sudden plan of departure, and
to wonder how it had come about. "I--I haven't set any day--exactly."

"Have you talked it over with your mother yet, Noble?"

"Not yet--exactly," he said, and was conscious of a distaste for China
as something unpleasant and imminent. "I thought I'd wait till--till it
was certain I _would_ go."

"When will that be, Noble?" And in spite of herself, Julia spoke in the
tone of one who controls herself to ask in calmness: "Is my name on the
list for the guillotine?"

"Well," he said, "it'll be as soon as I've made up my mind to go. I
probably won't go before then; not till I've made up my mind to."

"But you might do that any day, mightn't you?"

Noble began to feel relieved; he seemed to have hit upon a way out.
"Yes; and then I'd be gone," he said firmly. "But probably I wouldn't go
at all unless I decided to." This seemed to save him from China, and he
added recklessly: "I guess I wouldn't be missed much around this old
town if I did go."

"Yes, you would," Julia said quickly. "Your family'd miss you--and so
would everybody."

"Julia, _you_ wouldn't----"

She laughed lightly. "Of course I should, and so would papa."

Noble released the gatepost and appeared to slant backward. "What?"

"Papa was talking about you this very morning at breakfast," she said;
and she spoke the truth. "He said he _dreamed_ about you last night."

"He did?"

Julia nodded sunnily. "He dreamed that you and he were the very greatest
friends!" This also was true, so far as it went; she only omitted to
state that Mr. Atwater had gone on to classify his dream as a nightmare.
"There!" she cried. "Why, of course he'd miss you--he'd miss you as much
as he'd miss any friend of mine that comes here."

Noble felt a sudden rush of tenderness toward Mr. Atwater; it is always
possible to misjudge a man for a few hasty words. And Julia went on
quickly:

"I never saw anybody like you, Noble Dill!" she exclaimed. "I don't
suppose there's anybody in the United States except you that would be
capable of doing things like going off to be an officer in the Chinese
army--all just any minute like this. I've always declared you were about
the most reckless man I know!"

Noble shook his head. "No," he said judicially. "I'm not reckless; it's
just that I don't care what happens."

Julia became grave. "Don't you?"

"To me," he said hurriedly. "I mean I don't care what happens to myself.
I mean that's more the way I am than just reckless."

She was content to let his analysis stand, though she shook her head, as
if knowing herself to be wiser than he about his recklessness. A
cheerfulness came upon them; and the Chinese question seemed to have
been settled by these indirect processes;--in fact, neither of them ever
mentioned it again. "I mustn't keep you," she said, "especially when you
ought to be getting on downtown to business, but----Oh!" She gave the
little cry of a forgetful person reminded. "I almost forgot what I ran
out to ask you!"

"What was it, Julia?" Noble spoke huskily, in a low voice. "What is it
you want me to do, Julia?"

She gave a little fluttering laugh, half timid, half confiding. "You
know how funny papa is about tobacco smoke?" (But she hurried on without
waiting for an answer.) "Well, he is. He's the funniest old thing; he
doesn't like _any_ kind very much except his own special cheroot things.
He growls about every other kind, but the cigars Mr. _Ridgely_ smokes
when he comes here, papa really _does_ make a fuss over! And, you see, I
don't like to say 'No' when Mr. Ridgely asks if he can smoke, because it
always makes men so uncomfortable if they can't when they're sitting on
a veranda, so I wondered if I could just tactfully get him to buy
something different from his cigars?--and I thought the best thing would
be to suggest those cigarettes you always have, Noble. They're the ones
papa makes the _least_ fuss about and seems to stand the best--next to
his own, he seems to like them the most, I mean--but I'd forgotten the
name of them. That's what I ran out to ask you."

"Orduma," said Noble. "Orduma Egyptian Cigarettes."

"Would you mind giving me one--just to show Mr. Ridgely?"

Noble gave her an Orduma cigarette.

"Oh, thank you!" she said gratefully. "I mustn't keep you another
minute, because I know your father wouldn't know _what_ to do at the
office without you! Thank you so much for this!" She turned and walked
quickly halfway up the path, then paused, looking back over her
shoulder. "I'll only show it to him, Noble," she said. "I won't give it
to him!"

She bit her lip as if she had said more than she should have; shook her
head as in self-chiding; then laughed, and in a flash touched the tiny
white cylinder to her lips, waved it to him;--then ran to the veranda
and up the steps and into the house. She felt satisfied that she had set
matters right, this kind Julia!




CHAPTER SIX


Before she thus set matters right with Noble he had been unhappy and his
condition had been bad; now he was happy, but his condition was worse.
In truth, he was much, much too happy; nothing rational remained in his
mind. No elfin orchestra seemed to buzz in his ears as he went down the
street, but a loud, triumphing brass band. His unathletic chest was
inflated; he heaved up with joy; and a little child, playing on the next
corner, turned and followed him for some distance, trying to imitate his
proud, singular walk. Restored to too much pride, Noble became also much
too humane; he thought of Mr. Atwater's dream, and felt almost a
motherly need to cherish and protect him, to be indeed his friend. There
was a warm spot in Noble's chest, produced in part by a yearning toward
that splendid old man. Noble had a good home, sixty-six dollars in the
bank and a dollar and forty cents in his pockets; he would have given
all for a chance to show Mr. Atwater how well he understood him now, at
last, and how deeply he appreciated his favour.

Students of alcoholic intoxication have observed that in their cups
commonplace people, and not geniuses, do the most unusual things. So
with all other intoxications. Noble Dill was indeed no genius, and some
friend should have kept an eye upon him to-day; he was not himself. All
afternoon in a mood of tropic sunrise he collected rents, or with glad
vagueness consented instantly to their postponement. "I've come about
the rent again," he said beamingly to one delinquent tenant of his
father's best client; and turned and walked away, humming a waltz-song,
while the man was still coughing as a preliminary to argument.

Late in the afternoon, as the entranced collector sat musing alone near
a window in his father's office, his exalted mood was not affected by
the falling of a preternatural darkness over the town, nor was he roused
to action by any perception of the fact that the other clerks and the
members of the firm had gone home an hour ago; that the clock showed him
his own duty to lock up the office and not keep his mother "waiting
dinner"; and that he would be caught in a most outrageous thunderstorm
if he didn't hurry. No; he sat, smiling fondly, by the open window, and
at times made a fragmentary gesture as of some heroic or benevolent
impulse in rehearsal.

Meanwhile, paunchy with wind and wetness, unmannerly clouds came smoking
out of the blackened west. Rumbling, they drew on. Then from cloud to
cloud dizzy amazements of white fire staggered, crackled and boomed on
to the assault; the doors of the winds were opened; the tanks of deluge
were unbottomed; and the storm took the town. So, presently, Noble
noticed that it was raining and decided to go home.

With an idea that he was fulfilling his customary duties, he locked the
doors of the two inner rooms, dropped the keys gently into a
wastebasket, and passing by an umbrella which stood in a corner, went
out to the corridor, and thence stepped into the street of whooping
rain.

Here he became so practical as to turn up his collar; and, substantially
aided by the wind at his back, he was not long in leaving the purlieus
of commerce behind him for Julia's Street. Other people lived on this
street--he did, himself, for that matter; and, in fact, it was the
longest street in the town; moreover, it had an official name with
which the word "Julia" was entirely unconnected; but for Noble Dill (and
probably for Newland Sanders and for some others in age from nineteen to
sixty) it was "Julia's Street" and no other.

It was a tumultuous street as Noble splashed along the sidewalk.
Incredibly elastic, the shade-trees were practising calisthenics, though
now and then one outdid itself and lost a branch; thunder and lightning
romped like loosed scandal; rain hissed upon the pavement and capered
ankle-high. It was a storm that asked to be left to itself for a time,
after giving fair warning that the request would be made; and Noble and
the only other pedestrian in sight had themselves to blame for getting
caught.

This other pedestrian was some forty or fifty yards in advance of Noble
and moved in the same direction at about the same gait. He wore an old
overcoat, running with water; the brim of his straw hat sagged about his
head, so that he appeared to be wearing a bucket; he was a sodden and
pathetic figure. Noble himself was as sodden; his hands were wet in his
very pockets; his elbows seemed to spout; yet he spared a generous pity
for the desolate figure struggling on before him.

All at once Noble's heart did something queer within his wet bosom. He
recognized that figure, and he was not mistaken. Except the One figure,
and those of his own father and mother and three sisters, this was the
shape that Noble would most infallibly recognize anywhere in the world
and under any conditions. In spite of the dusk and the riot of the
storm, Noble knew that none other than Mr. Atwater splashed before him.

He dismissed a project for seizing upon a fallen branch and running
forward to walk beside Mr. Atwater and hold the branch over his
venerated head. All the branches were too wet; and Noble feared that Mr.
Atwater might think the picture odd and decline to be thus protected.
Yet he felt that something ought to be done to shelter Julia's father
and perhaps save him from pneumonia; surely there was some simple,
helpful, dashing thing that ordinary people couldn't think of, but that
Noble could. He would do it and not stay to be thanked. And then,
to-morrow evening, not sooner, he would go to Julia and smile and say;
"Your father didn't get too wet, I hope, after all?" And Julia: "Oh,
Noble, he's talked of you all day long as his 'new Sir Walter
Raleigh'!"

Suddenly will-o'-the-wisp opportunity flickered before him, and in his
high mood he paused not at all to consider it, but insanely chased it.
He had just reached a crossing, and down the cross street, walking away
from Noble, was the dim figure of a man carrying an umbrella. It was
just perceptible that he was a fat man, struggling with seeming
feebleness in the wind and making poor progress. Mr. Atwater, moving up
Julia's Street, was out of sight from the cross street where struggled
the fat man.

Noble ran swiftly down the cross street, jerked the umbrella from the
fat man's grasp; ran back, with hoarse sounds dying out behind him in
the riotous dusk; turned the corner, sped after Mr. Atwater, overtook
him, and thrust the umbrella upon him. Then, not pausing the shortest
instant for thanks or even recognition, the impulsive boy sped onward,
proud and joyous in the storm, leaving his beneficiary far behind him.

In his young enthusiasm he had indeed done something for Mr. Atwater. In
fact, Noble's kindness had done as much for Mr. Atwater as Julia's
gentleness had done for Noble, but how much both Julia and Noble had
done was not revealed in full until the next evening.

That was a warm and moonshiny night of air unusually dry, and yet
Florence sneezed frequently as she sat upon the "side porch" at the
house of her Great-Aunt Carrie and her Great-Uncle Joseph. Florence had
a cold in the head, though how it got to her head was a process involved
in the mysterious ways of colds, since Florence's was easily to be
connected with Herbert's remark that he wouldn't ever be caught takin'
his death o' cold sittin' on the damp grass in the night air just to
listen to a lot o' tooty-tooty. It appeared from Florence's narrative to
those interested listeners, Aunt Carrie and Uncle Joseph, that she had
been sitting on the grass in the night air when both air and grass were
extraordinarily damp. In brief, she had been at her post soon after the
storm cleared on the preceding evening, but she had heard no
tooty-tooty; her overhearings were of sterner stuff.

"Well, what did Julia say _then_?" Aunt Carrie asked eagerly.

"She said she'd go up and lock herself in her room and stuff cushions
over her ears if grandpa didn't quit makin' such a fuss."

"And what did he say?"

"He made more rumpus than ever," said Florence. "He went on and on, and
told the whole thing over and over again; he seemed like he couldn't
tell it enough, and every time he told it his voice got higher and
higher till it was kind of squealy. He said he'd had his raincoat on and
he didn't want an umberella anyhow, and hadn't ever carried one a single
time in fourteen years! And he took on about Noble Dill and all this and
that about how you _bet_ he knew who it was! He said he could tell Noble
Dill in the dark any time by his cigarette smell, and, anyway, it wasn't
too dark so's he couldn't see his skimpy little shoulders, and anyway he
saw his face. And he said Noble didn't _hand_ him the umberella; he
stuck it all down over him like he was somep'n on fire he wanted to put
out; and before he could get out of it and throw it away this ole fat
man that it belonged to and was chasin' Noble, he ran up to grandpa from
behind and took hold of him, or somep'n, and they slipped, and got to
fussin' against each other; and then after a while they got up and
grandpa saw it was somebody he knew and told him for Heaven's sake why
didn't he take his ole umberella and go on home; and so he did, because
it was raining, and I guess he proba'ly had to give up; he couldn't
out-talk grandpa."

"No," said Uncle Joe. "He couldn't, whoever he was. But what happened
about Noble Dill?"

Florence paused to accumulate and explode a sneeze, then responded
pleasantly: "He said he was goin' to kill him. He said he often and
often wanted to, and now he _was_. That's the reason I guess Aunt Julia
wrote that note this morning."

"What note?" Aunt Carrie inquired. "You haven't told us of that."

"I was over there before noon," said Florence, "and Aunt Julia gave me a
quarter and said she'd write a note for me to take to Noble Dill's house
when he came home for lunch, and give it to him. She kind of slipped it
to me, because grandpa came in there, pokin' around, while she was just
finishin' writin' it. She didn't put any envelope on it even, and she
never said a single thing to _me_ about its bein' private or my not
readin' it if I wanted to, or anything."

"Of course you didn't," said Aunt Carrie. "You didn't, did you,
Florence?"

"Why, she didn't _say_ not to," Florence protested, surprised. "It
wasn't even in an envelope."

Mr. Joseph Atwater coughed. "I hardly think we ought to ask what the
note said, even if Florence was--well, indiscreet enough to read it."

"No," said his wife. "I hardly think so either. It didn't say anything
important anyhow, probably."

"It began, 'Dear Noble,'" said Florence promptly. "Dear Noble'; that's
the way it began. It said how grandpa was just all upset to think he'd
accepted an umberella from him when Noble didn't have another one for
himself like that, and grandpa was so embarrassed to think he'd let
Noble do so much for him, and everything, he just didn't know _what_ to
do, and proba'ly it would be tactful if he wouldn't come to the house
till grandpa got over being embarrassed and everything. She said not to
come till she let him know."

"Did you notice Noble when he read it?" asked Aunt Carrie.

"Yessir! And would you believe it; he just looked _too_ happy!" Florence
made answer, not wholly comprehending with what truth.

"I'll bet," said Uncle Joseph;--"I'll bet a thousand dollars that if
Julia told Noble Dill he was six feet tall, Noble would go and order his
next suit of clothes to fit a six-foot man."

And his wife complemented this with a generalization, simple, yet of a
significance too little recognized. "They don't see a thing!" she said.
"The young men that buzz around a girl's house don't see a _thing_ of
what goes on there! Inside, I mean."

Yet at that very moment a young man was seeing something inside a girl's
house a little way down that same street. That same street was Julia's
Street and the house was Julia's. Inside the house, in the library, sat
Mr. Atwater, trying to read a work by Thomas Carlyle, while a rhythmic
murmur came annoyingly from the veranda. The young man, watching him
attentively, saw him lift his head and sniff the air with suspicion, but
the watcher took this pantomime to be an expression of distaste for
certain versifyings, and sharing that distaste, approved. Mr. Atwater
sniffed again, threw down his book and strode out to the veranda. There
sat dark-haired Julia in a silver dress, and near by, Newland Sanders
read a long young poem from the manuscript.

"Who is smoking out here?" Mr. Atwater inquired in a dead voice.

"Nobody, sir," said Newland with eagerness. "_I_ don't smoke. I have
never touched tobacco in any form in my life."

Mr. Atwater sniffed once more, found purity; and returned to the
library. But here the air seemed faintly impregnated with Orduma
cigarettes. "Curious!" he said as he composed himself once more to
read--and presently the odour seemed to wear away and vanish. Mr.
Atwater was relieved; the last thing he could have wished was to be
haunted by Noble Dill.

Yet for that while he was. Too honourable to follow such an example as
Florence's, Noble, of course, would not spy or eavesdrop near the
veranda where Julia sat, but he thought there could be no harm in
watching Mr. Atwater read. Looking at Mr. Atwater was at least the next
thing to looking at Julia. And so, out in the night, Noble was seated
upon the top of the side fence, looking through the library window at
Mr. Atwater.

After a while Noble lit another Orduma cigarette and puffed strongly to
start it. The smoke was almost invisible in the moonlight, but the night
breeze, stirring gently, wafted it toward the house, where the open
window made an inward draft and carried it heartily about the library.

Noble was surprised to see Mr. Atwater rise suddenly to his feet. He
smote his brow, put out the light, and stamped upstairs to his own room.

His purpose to retire was understood when the watcher saw a light in the
bedroom window overhead. Noble thought of the good, peculiar old man
now disrobing there, and he smiled to himself at a whimsical thought:
What form would Mr. Atwater's embarrassment take, what would be his
feeling, and what would he do, if he knew that Noble was there now,
beneath his window and thinking of him?

In the moonlight Noble sat upon the fence, and smoked Orduma cigarettes,
and looked up with affection at the bright window of Mr. Atwater's
bedchamber. Abruptly the light in that window went out.

"Saying his prayers now," said Noble. "I wonder if----" But, not to be
vain, he laughed at himself and left the thought unfinished.




CHAPTER SEVEN


A week later, on a hot July afternoon, Miss Florence Atwater, recovered
from her cold, stood in the shady back yard of her place of residence
and yawned more extensively than any one would have believed possible,
judging by her face in repose. Three of her friends, congenial in age
and sex, were out of town for the summer; two had been ascertained, by
telephonic inquiries, to be taking commanded siestas; and neither the
other one nor Florence had yet forgotten that yesterday, although they
were too religious to commit themselves to a refusal to meet as sisters
in the Great Beyond, they had taken the expurgated oath that by
Everything they would never speak to each other again so long as they
both should live.

Florence was at the end of her resources. She had sought distraction in
experimental cookery; but, having scorched a finger, and having been
told by the cook that a person's own kitchen wasn't worth the price at
eleven dollars a week if it had to git all smelled up with broiled
rubber when the femometer stood at ninety-sevvum degrees in the shade,
the experimenter abusedly turned her back on the morose woman and went
out to the back yard for a little peace.

After an interval of torpor, she decided to go and see what Herbert was
doing--a move not short of desperation, on account of Herbert's new
manner toward her. For a week Herbert had steadily pursued his
scientific career, and he seemed to feel that in it he had attained a
distinction beyond the reach of Florence. What made it ridiculous for
her to hope was, of course, the fact that she was a girl, and Herbert
had explained this to her in a cold, unpleasant way; for it is true that
what is called "feminism" must be acquired by men, and is not a
condition, or taste, natural to them. At thirteen it has not been
acquired.

She found him at home. He was importantly engaged in a room in the
cellar, where were loosely stored all manner of incapacitated household
devices; two broken clothes-wringers, a crippled and rusted
sewing-machine, an ice-cream freezer in like condition, a cracked and
discarded marble mantelpiece, chipped porcelain and chinaware of all
sorts, rusted stove lids and flatirons, half a dozen dead mops and
brooms. This was the laboratory, and here, in congenial solitude,
Herbert conducted his investigations. That is to say, until Florence
arrived he was undisturbed by human intrusion, but he was not alone--far
from it! There was, in fact, almost too much life in the place.

Where the light fell clearest from the cobwebby windows at the ground
level overhead, he had placed a long deal table, once a helpmate in the
kitchen, but now a colourless antique on three legs and two starch
boxes. Upon the table were seven or eight glass jars, formerly used for
preserves and pickles, and a dozen jelly glasses (with only streaks and
bits of jelly in them now) and five or six small round pasteboard
pill-boxes. The jars were covered, some with their own patent tops,
others with shingles or bits of board, and one with a brick. The jelly
glasses stood inverted, and were inhabited; so were the preserve jars
and pickle jars; and so were the pill-boxes, which evidently contained
star boarders, for they were pierced with "breathing holes," and one of
them, standing upon its side like a little wheel, now and then moved in
a faint, ghostly manner as if about to start rolling on its own
account--whereupon Herbert glanced up and addressed it sternly, though
somewhat inconsistently: "You shut up!"

In the display of so much experimental paraphernalia, there may have
been a hint that Herbert's was a scientific nature craving rather
quantity than quality; his collection certainly possessed the virtue of
multitudinousness, if that be a virtue; and the birds in the
neighbourhood must have been undergoing a great deal of disappointment.
In brief, as many bugs as Herbert now owned have seldom been seen in the
custody of any private individual. And nearly all of them were alive,
energetic and swearing, though several of the preserve jars had been
imperfectly drained of their heavy syrups, and in one of them a great
many spiders seemed to be having, of the whole collection, the poorest
time; being pretty well mired down and yet still subject to
disagreements among themselves. The habits of this group, under such
unusual surroundings, formed the subject of Herbert's special study at
the moment of Florence's arrival. He was seated at the table and
frowning with science as he observed the unfortunates through that
magnifying-glass, his discovery of which was responsible for their
present condition and his own choice of a career.

Florence paused in the doorway, but he gave no sign of recognition,
unless his intensified preoccupation was a sign, and Florence,
perceiving what line of conduct he meant to adopt, instinctively
selected a reciprocal one for herself. "Herbert Atwater, you ought to be
punished! I'm goin' to tell your father and mother."

"You g'way," Herbert returned, unmoved; and, without condescending to
give her a glance, he set down the magnifying-glass, and with a pencil
wrote something profoundly entomological in a soiled memorandum book
upon the table. "Run away, Flor'nce. Run away somewheres and play."

Florence approached. "'Play'!" she echoed tartly. "I should think _you_
wouldn't talk much about 'playin',' the way you're teasing those poor,
poor little bugs!"

"'Teasing'!" Herbert exclaimed: "That shows! That shows!"

"Shows what?"

"How much you know!" He became despondent about her. "See here,
Florence; it does look to me as though at your age a person ought to
know anyway enough not to disturb me when I'm expairamenting, and
everything. I should think----"

But she did not prove so meek as to await the conclusion of his
remonstrance. "I never saw anything as wicked in my whole born days!
What did any of those poor, poor little bugs ever do to _you_, I'd like
to know, you got to go and confine 'em like this! And look how dirty
your hands are!"

This final charge, wandering so far from her previous specifications of
his guilt, was purely automatic and conventional; Florence often
interjected it during the course of any cousinly discussion, whatever
the subject in dispute, and she had not even glanced at Herbert's hands
to assure herself that the accusation was warranted. But, as usual, the
facts supported her; and they also supported Herbert in his immediate
mechanical retort: "So're yours!"

"Not either!" But here Florence, after instinctively placing her hands
behind her, brought forth the right one to point, and simultaneously
uttered a loud cry: "Oh, _look_ at your hands!" For now she did look at
Herbert's hands, and was amazed.

"Well, what of it?"

"They're all lumpy!" she cried, and, as her gaze rose to his cheek, her
finger followed her eyes and pointed to strange appearances there. "Look
at your _face_!"

"Well, what of it?" he demanded, his tone not entirely free from
braggadocio. "A girl can't make expairaments the way I do, because if
one of these good ole bumblebees or hornets of mine was to give 'em a
little sting, once in a while, while they was catchin' 'em and puttin'
'em in a jar, all they'd know how to do'd be to holler and run home to
their mamma. Nobody with any gumption minds a few little stings after
you put mud on 'em."

"I guess it serves you right," Florence said, "for persecutin' these
poor, poor little bugs."

Herbert became plaintive. "Look here, Florence; I do wish you'd go on
back home where you belong."

But Florence did not reply; instead she picked up the magnifying-glass,
and, gazing through it at a pickle jar of mixed beetles, caterpillars,
angleworms, and potato bugs, permitted herself to shudder. "Vile
things!" she said.

"They are not, either!" Herbert retorted hotly. "They're about the
finest insecks that you or anybody else ever saw, and you ought to be
ashamed----"

"I ought?" his cousin cried. "Well, I should think you're the one ought
to be ashamed, if anybody ought! Down here in the cellar playin' with
all these vile bugs that ought to be given their liberty, or thrown
down the sewer, or somep'n!" Again, as she peered through the lens, she
shuddered. "Vile----"

"Florence," he said sternly, "you lay down that magnifying-glass."

"Why?"

"Because you don't know how to handle it. A magnifying-glass has got to
be handled in just the right way, and you couldn't learn if you tried a
thousand years. That's a mighty fine magnifying-glass, and I don't
intend to have it ruined."

"Why, just lookin' through it can't spoil it, can it?" she inquired,
surprised.

"You lay it down," said Herbert darkly. "Lookin' through it the wrong
way isn't going to do it any _good_."

"Why, how could just _lookin'_ through it----"

"Lookin' through it the wrong way isn't goin' to _help_ it any, I tell
you!" he insisted. "You're old enough to know that, and I'm not goin' to
have my magnifying-glass spoiled and all my insecks wasted just because
of a mere whin of yours!"

"A what?"

"A mere whin, I said!"

"What's a whin?"

"Never you mind," said Herbert ominously. "You'll proba'ly find out some
day when you aren't expectin' to!"

Undeniably, Florence was somewhat impressed: she replaced the
magnifying-glass upon the table and picked up the notebook.

"You lay that down, too," said Herbert instantly.

"Oh, maybe it's somep'n you're _'shamed_ to----"

"Go on and read it, then," he said, suddenly changing his mind, for he
was confident that she would find matter here that might cause her to
appreciate at least a little of her own inferiority.

"'Nots'," Florence began. "'Nots'----"

"Notes!" he corrected her fiercely.

"'Notes'," she read. "'Notes on our inseck friends. The spidder----'"

"_Spider!_"

"'The spider spends his time mostly in cobwebs which he digilently spins
between posts and catches flies to eat them. They are different coloured
and sizes and have legs in pairs. Spiders also spin their webs in
corners or in weeds or on a fence and sometimes in the grass. They are
more able to get about quicker than catapillars or fishing worms, but
cannot fly such as pinching bugs, lightning bugs, and birds because
having no wings, nor jump as far as the grass hoper----'"

"Grasshopper!" Herbert shouted.

"I'm readin' it the way it's spelled," Florence explained. "Anyway, it
don't make much sense."

Herbert was at least enough of an author to be furious. "Lay it down!"
he said bitterly. "And go on back home to your dolls."

"Dolls certainly would be _cleaner_ than vile bugs," Florence retorted,
tossing the book upon the table. "But in regards to that, I haven't had
any," she went on, airily--"not for years and years and years and----"

He interrupted her, his voice again plaintive. "See here, Florence, how
do you expect me to get my _work_ done, with you everlastin'ly talkin'
and goin' on around here like this? Can't you see I've got somep'n
pretty important on my hands?"

Florence became thoughtful. "I never did see as many bugs before, all
together this way," she said. "What you goin' to do with 'em, Herbert?"

"I'm makin' my expairaments."

But her thoughtfulness increased. "It seems to me," she said
slowly:--"Herbert, it seems to me there must be some awful inter'sting
thing we could do with so many bugs all together like this."

"'We'!" he cried. "My goodness, whose insecks do you think these insecks
are?"

"I just know there's somep'n," she went on, following her own line of
thought, and indifferent to his outburst. "There's somep'n we could do
with 'em that we'd never forget, if we could only think of it."

In spite of himself, Herbert was interested. "Well, what?" he asked.
"What could we do with 'em we'd never forget?"

In her eyes there was a far-away light as of a seeress groping. "I don't
just know exackly, but I know there's _somep'n_--if we could only think
of it--if we could just----" And her voice became inaudible, as in
dreamy concentration she seated herself upon the discarded ice-cream
freezer, and rested her elbows upon her knees and her chin upon the
palms of her hands.

In silence then, she thought and thought. Herbert also was silent, for
he, too, was trying to think, not knowing that already he had proved
himself to be wax in her hands, and that he was destined further to show
himself thus malleable. Like many and many another of his sex, he never
for an instant suspected that he spent the greater part of his time
carrying out ideas implanted within him by a lady-friend. Florence was
ever the imaginative one of those two, a maiden of unexpected fancies
and inexplicable conceptions, a mind of quicksilver and mist. There was
within her the seedling of a creative artist, and as she sat there, on
the ice-cream freezer in Herbert's cellar, with the slowly growing
roseate glow of deep preoccupation upon her, she looked strangely sweet
and good, and even almost pretty.




CHAPTER EIGHT


"Do you s'pose," she said, at last, in a musing voice: "Herbert, do you
s'pose maybe there's some poor family's children somewheres that haven't
got any playthings or anything and we could take all these----"

But here Herbert proved unsympathetic. "I'm not goin' to give my insecks
to any poor people's children," he said emphatically. "I don't care how
poor they are!"

"Well, I thought maybe just as a surprise----"

"I won't do it. I had mighty hard work to catch this c'lection, and I'm
not goin' to give it away to anybody, I don't care how surprised they'd
be! Anyway, I'd never get any thanks for it; they wouldn't know how to
handle 'em, and they'd get all stung up: and what'd be the use, anyhow?
I don't see how _that's_ goin' to be somep'n so interesting we'd never
forget it."

"No," she said. "I guess it wouldn't. I just thought it would be kind of
a bellnevolent thing to do."

This word disturbed Herbert, but he did not feel altogether secure in
his own impression that "benovvalent" was the proper rendition of what
she meant, and so refrained from criticism. Their musing was resumed.

"There's one thing I do wish," Florence said suddenly, after a time. "I
wish we could find some way to use the c'lection that would be useful
for Noble Dill."

Now, at this, her cousin's face showed simple amazement. "What on earth
you talkin' about?"

"Noble Dill," she said dreamily. "He's the only one I like that comes to
see Aunt Julia. Anyway, I like him the most."

"I bet Aunt Julia don't!"

"I don't care: he's the one _I_ wish she'd get married to."

Herbert was astounded. "Noble Dill? Why, I heard mamma and Aunt Hattie
and Uncle Joe talkin' about him yesterday."

"What'd they say?"

"Most of the time," said Herbert, "they just laughed. They said Noble
Dill was the very last person in this town Aunt Julia'd ever dream o'
marryin'. They said he wasn't anything: they said he wasn't handsome
and he wasn't distingrished-looking----"

"I think he is," Florence interposed. "I think he's _very_
distingrished-looking."

"Well, they said he wasn't, and they know more'n you do. Why, Noble Dill
isn't hardly any taller'n I am myself, and he hasn't got any muscle
partickyourly. Aunt Julia wouldn't look at him!"

"She does, too! My goodness, how could he sit on the porch, right in
front of her, for two or three hours at a time, without her lookin' at
him?"

"I don't care," Herbert insisted stubbornly. "_They_ said Aunt Julia
wouldn't. They said she was the worst flirt had ever been in the whole
family and Noble Dill had the worst case they ever saw, but she wouldn't
ever look at him, and if she did she'd be crazy."

"Well, anyway," said Florence, "I think he's the nicest of all that goes
to see her, and I wish we could use this c'lection some way that would
be nice for him."

Herbert renewed his protest. "How many times I got to tell you I had a
hard enough time catchin' this c'lection, day in and day out, from
before daylight till after dark, and then fixin' 'em all up like this
and everything! I don't prapose to waste 'em just to suit Noble Dill,
and I'm not goin' to give 'em away either. If anybody wanted to buy 'em
and offered a good fair price, money down, why, I----"

"_That's_ it, Herbert!" his lady-cousin exclaimed with sudden
excitement. "Let's sell 'em!" She jumped up, her eyes bright. "I bet we
could get maybe five dollars for 'em. We can pour the ones that are in
the jars that haven't got tops and the ones in the jelly glasses and
pill-boxes--we can pour all those into the jars that have got tops, and
put the tops on again, and that'd just about fill those jars--and then
we could put 'em in a basket and take 'em out and sell 'em!"

"Where could we sell 'em?" Herbert inquired, not convinced.

"At the fish store!" she cried. "Everybody uses bugs and worms for bait
when they go fishing, don't they? I bet the fish man'll buy all the
worms we got, even if he wouldn't buy anything else. I bet he'll buy all
the others, too! I bet he never saw as much good bait as this all at one
time in his whole life! I bet he'll give us five dollars--maybe more!"

Herbert was dazzled; the thought of this market was a
revelation--nothing could have been more plausible. Considered as bait,
the c'lection at once seemed to acquire a practical and financial value
which it lacked, purely as a c'lection. And with that the amateur and
scientist disappeared, giving way to the person of affairs. "'Give _us_
five dollars'?" he said, in this capacity, and for deeper effect he used
a rhetorical expression: "Who do you think is the owner of all this fish
bait, may I ask you, pray?"

"Yes, you _may_, pray!" was his cousin's instant and supercilious
retort. "Pray where would you ever of got any five dollars from any fish
man, if it hadn't been for me, pray? Pray, didn't I first sajest our
doing somep'n with the bugs we'd never forget, and if the fish man gives
us five dollars for 'em won't we remember it all our lives, pray? And,
pray, what part did you think up of all this, pray? Not one single
thing, and if you don't divide even with me, I'll run ahead and tell the
fish man the whole c'lection has been in bottles that had old medicine
and poison in 'em--and then where'll _you_ be, pray?"

It is to be doubted that Florence possessed the cold-blooded capacities
with which this impromptu in diplomacy seemed to invest her: probably
she would never have gone so far. But the words sufficed; and Herbert
was so perfectly intimidated that he was even unresentful. "Well, you
can have your ole two dollars and a half, whether you got a right to it
or not," he said. "But you got to carry the basket."

"No," said Florence. "This has got to be done right, Herbert. We're
partners now and everything's got to be divided just exackly even. I'll
carry the basket half the way and you carry it the other half."

"Well----" he grumbled, consenting.

"That's the only right way," she said sunnily. "You carry it till we get
to the fish man's, and I'll carry it all the way back."

But even Herbert could perceive the inequality here. "It'll be empty
then," he protested.

"Fair's fair and wrong's wrong," she returned firmly. "I spoke first to
carry it on the way home, and the one that speaks first gets it!"

"Look here!"

"Herbert, we got to get all these bugs fixed up and ready," she urged.
"We don't want to waste the whole afternoon just talkin' about it, do
we? Besides, Herbert, on the way home you'll have two dollars and a half
in your pocket, or anyway as much as you have left, if you buy some
soda and candy and things, and you'll feel so fine then you won't mind
whether you're carrying the basket or not."

The picture she now suggested to Herbert's mind was of himself carrying
the basket both to the fish man and from the fish man: and he found
himself anxious to protest, yet helpless in a maze of perplexity. "But
wait a minute," he began. "You said----"

"Let's don't waste another minute," she interrupted briskly. "I
shouldn't wonder it was after four o'clock by this time, and we both
need money. Hurry, Herbert!"

"But didn't you say----" He paused to rub his head. "You said I'd feel
so good I wouldn't mind if I--if----"

"No. I said, 'Hurry'!"

"Well----" And though he felt that a subtle injustice lurked somewhere,
he was unable to think the matter out clearly into its composing
elements, and gave up trying. Nevertheless, as he obeyed her, and began
to "hurry," there remained with him an impression that by some foggy and
underhand process he had been committed to acquiescence in an unfair
division of labour.

In this he was not mistaken. An hour later he and Florence were on their
way home from the fish man's place of business, and Herbert, having
carried the basket thither, was now carrying it thence. Moreover, his
burden was precisely as heavy on this homeward leg of the course as it
had been on that terminating at the fish store, for, covered by a
discreet newspaper, the preserve and pickle jars still remained within
the basket, their crowding and indignant contents intact. The fish man
had explained in terms derisive, but plain, the difference between a
fish man and a fisherman. He had maintained his definitions of the two
economic functions in spite of persistent arguments on the part of the
bait-dealers, and in the face of reductions that finally removed ninety
per cent. of their asking price. He wouldn't give fifty cents, or ten
cents, or one cent, he said: and he couldn't furnish the address of
anybody else that would. His fish came by express, he declared, again
and again: and the only people he knew that did any fishing were mainly
coloured, and dug their own bait; and though these might possibly be
willing to accept the angle worms as a gift, they would probably incline
to resent a generosity including so many spiders, not to speak of the
dangerous winged members of the c'lection. On account of these latter,
he jocosely professed himself to be anxious lest the tops of some of the
jars might work loose--and altogether he was the most disheartening man
they had ever met.

Anticlimax was never the stimulant of amiability, and, after an
altercation on the pavement just outside of the store, during which the
derisive fish man continually called to them to go on and take that
there basket out of the neighbourhood, the cousins moved morbidly away,
and walked for a time in silence.

They brooded. Herbert was even more embittered with Florence than he was
with the fish man, and Florence found life full of unexpectedness; it
had been so clear to her that the fish man would say: "Why, certainly.
Here's five dollars; two dollars and a half for each of you. Would you
care to have the jars back?" The facts, so contrary, seemed to wear the
aspect of deliberate malice, and she felt ill-used, especially as she
had several physical grievances, due to her assistance in pouring part
of the c'lection into the jars with tops. In spite of every precaution
three or four of the liveliest items had made their escape, during this
pouring, and had behaved resentfully. Florence bore one result on the
back of her left hand, two others on the thumb and second finger of her
right hand, and another, naturally the most conspicuous, on the point of
her chin. These had all been painful, in spite of mud poultices, but,
excited by the anticipation of a kindly smiling fish man, and occupied
with plans for getting Herbert to spend part of his two dollars and a
half for mutual refreshment, she had borne up cheerfully. Now,
comprehending that she had suffered in vain, she suffered anew, and
hated bugs, all fish men, and the world.

It was Herbert who broke the silence and renewed the altercation. "How
far you expeck me to go on luggin' this ole basket?" he demanded
bitterly. "All the way home?"

"I don't care how far," she informed him. "You can throw it away if you
want to. It's certainly no propaty of mine, thank you!"

"Look here, didn't you promise you'd carry it home?"

"I said I _spoke_ to. I didn't say I _would_ carry it."

"Well, I'd like to know the dif----"

But Florence cut him off. "I'll tell you the difference, since you're so
anxious to know the truth, Mister Herbert Atwater! The difference is
just this: you had no biznuss to meddle with those vile ole bugs in the
first place, and get me all stung up so't I shouldn't wonder I'd haf to
have the doctor, time I get home, and if I do I'm goin' to tell mamma
all about it and make her send the bill to your father. I want you to
know I _hurt_!"

"My goodness!" Herbert burst out. "Don't you s'pose _I_ hurt any? I
guess you don't hurt any worse than----"

She stopped him: "Listen!"

From down the street there came a brazen clamouring for the right of
way; it grew imperiously louder, and there were clatterings and
whizzings of metallic bodies at speed, while little blurs and
glistenings in the distance grew swiftly larger, taking shape as a fire
engine and a hose-cart. Then, round the near-by corner, came perilously
steering the long "hook-and-ladder wagon"; it made the turn and went by,
with its firemen imperturbable on the running boards.

"Fire!" Florence cried joyfully. "Let's go!" And, pausing no instant,
she made off up the street, shouting at the top of her voice: "_Fire!
Fire! Fire! Fire!_"

Herbert followed. He was not so swift a runner as she, though this he
never submitted to a test admitted to be fair and conclusive; and he
found her demonstration of superiority particularly offensive now, as
she called back over her shoulder: "Why don't you keep up with me? Can't
you keep up?"

"I'd _show_ you!" he panted. "If I didn't haf to lug this ole basket,
I'd leave you a mile behind mighty quick."

"Well, why'n't you drop it, then?"

"You s'pose I'm goin' to throw my c'lection away after all the trouble I
been _through_ with it?"

She slackened her gait, dropping back beside him. "Well, then, if you
think you could keep up with me if you didn't have it, why'n't you leave
it somewhere, and come back and get it after the fire's over?"

"No place to leave it."

She laughed, and pointed. "Why'n't you leave it at grandpa's?"

"Will you wait for me and start fair?"

"Come on!" They obliqued across the street, still running forward, and
at their grandfather's gate Herbert turned in and sped toward the house.

"Take it around to the kitchen and give it to Kitty Silver," Florence
called. "Tell Kitty Silver to take care of it for you."

But Herbert was in no mind to follow her advice; a glance over his
shoulder showed that Florence was taking another unfair advantage of
him. "You wait!" he shouted. "You stand still till I get back there! You
got half a mile start a'ready! You wait till we can start even!"

But Florence was skipping lightly away and she caroled over her
shoulder, waving her hand in mocking farewell as she began to run:

    "Ole Mister Slowpoke can't catch me!
    Ole Mister Slowpoke couldn't catch a flea!"

"I'll show you!" he bellowed, and, not to lose more time, he dashed up
the steps of the deserted veranda, thrust his basket deep underneath a
wicker settee, and ran violently after his elusive cousin.

She kept a tantalizing distance between them, but when they reached the
fire it was such a grand one they forgot all their differences--and also
all about the basket.




CHAPTER NINE


Noble Dill came from his father's house, after dinner that evening, a
youth in blossom, like the shrubberies and garden beds in the dim yards
up and down Julia's Street. All cooled and bathed and in new clothes of
white, he took his thrilled walk through the deep summer twilight, on
his way to that ineffable Front Porch where sat Julia, misty in the
dusk. The girlish little new moon had perished naïvely out of the sky;
the final pinkness of the west was gone; blue evening held the quiet
world; and overhead, between the branches of the maple trees, were
powdered all those bright pin points of light that were to twinkle on
generations of young lovers after Noble Dill, each one, like Noble,
walking the same fragrant path in summer twilights to see the Prettiest
Girl of All.

Now and then there came to the faintly throbbing ears of the pedestrian
a murmur of voices from lawns where citizens sat cooling after the day's
labour, or a tinkle of laughter from where maidens dull (not being
Julia) sat on verandas vacant of beauty and glamour. For these poor
things, Noble felt a wondering and disdainful pity; he pitied everything
in the world that was not on the way to starry Julia.

Eight nights had passed since he, himself, had seen her, but to-day she
had replied (over the telephone) that Mr. Atwater seemed to have settled
down again, and she believed it might be no breach of tact for Noble to
call that evening--especially as she would be on the veranda, and he
needn't ring the bell. Would she be alone--for once? It was improbable,
yet it could be hoped.

But as he came hoping up the street, another already sat beside Julia,
sharing with her the wicker settee on the dim porch, and this was the
horn-rimmed young poet. Newland had, as usual, a new poem with him; and
as others had proved of late that they could sit on Julia's veranda as
long as he could, he had seized the first opportunity to familiarize her
with this latest work.

The veranda was dark, and to go indoors to the light might have involved
too close a juxtaposition to peculiar old Mr. Atwater who was in the
library; but the resourceful Newland, foreseeing everything, had
brought with him a small pocket flashlight to illumine his manuscript.
"It's _vers libre_, of course," he said as he moved the flashlight over
the sheets of scribbled paper. "I think I told you I was beginning to
give all the old forms up. It's the one new movement, and I felt I ought
to master it."

"Of course," she said sympathetically, though with a little nervousness.
"Be just a wee bit careful with the flashlight--about turning it toward
the window, I mean--and read in your nice low voice. I always like
poetry best when it's almost whispered. I think it sounds more musical
that way, I mean."

Newland obeyed. His voice was hushed and profoundly appreciative of the
music in itself and in his poem, as he read:

          "I--And Love!
    Lush white lilies line the pool
    Like laces limned on looking-glasses!
    I tread the lilies underfoot,
    Careless how they love me!
      Still white maidens woo me,
      Win me not!
        But thou!
        Thou art a cornflower
    Sapphire-eyed!
          I bend!
        Cornflower, I ask a question.
    O flower, speak----"

Julia spoke. "I'm afraid," she said, while Newland's spirit filled with
a bitterness extraordinary even in an interrupted poet;--"I'm afraid
it's Mr. Dill coming up the walk. We'll have to postpone----" She rose
and went to the steps to greet the approaching guest. "How nice of you
to come!"

Noble, remaining on the lowest step, clung to her hand in a fever. "Nice
to come!" he said hoarsely. "It's eight days--eight days--eight days
since----"

"Mr. Sanders is here," she said. "It's so dark on this big veranda
people can hardly see each other. Come up and sit with us. I don't have
to introduce you two men to each other."

She did not, indeed. They said "H'lo, Dill" and "H'lo Sanders" in a
manner of such slighting superiority that only the utmost familiarity
could have bred a contempt so magnificent. Then, when the three were
seated, Mr. Sanders thought well to add: "How's rent collecting these
days, Dill? Still hustling around among those darky shanties over in
Bucktown?"

In the dark Noble moved convulsively, but contrived to affect a light
laugh, or a sound meant for one, as he replied, in a voice not entirely
under control: "How's the ole poetry, Sanders?"

"What?" Newland demanded sharply. "What did you say?"

"I said: 'How's the ole poetry?' Do you read it to all your relations
the way you used to?"

"See here, Dill!"

"Well, what you want, Sanders?"

"You try to talk about things you understand," said Newland. "You better
keep your mind on collecting four dollars a week from some poor coloured
widow, and don't----"

"I'd _rather_ keep my mind on that!" Noble was inspired to retort. "Your
Aunt Georgina told my mother that ever since you began thinkin' you
could write poetry the life your family led was just----"

Newland interrupted. He knew the improper thing his Aunt Georgina had
said, and he was again, and doubly, infuriated by the prospect of its
repetition here. He began fiercely:

"Dill, you see here----"

"Your Aunt Georgina said----"

Both voices had risen. Plainly it was time for someone to say:
"Gentlemen! Gentlemen!" Julia glanced anxiously through the darkness of
the room beyond the open window beside her, to where the light of the
library lamp shone upon a door ajar; and she was the more nervous
because Noble, to give the effect of coolness, had lit an Orduma
cigarette.

She laughed amiably, as if the two young gentlemen were as amiable as
she. "I've thought of something," she said. "Let's take the settee and
some chairs down on the lawn where we can sit and see the moon."

"There isn't any," Noble remarked vacantly.

"Let's go, anyhow," she said cheerily. "Come on."

Her purpose was effected; the belligerents were diverted, and Noble
lifted the light wicker settee. "I'll carry this," he said. "It's no
trouble. Sanders can carry a chair--I guess he'd be equal to that much."
He stumbled, dropped the settee, and lifted a basket, its contents
covered with a newspaper. "Somebody must have----"

"What is it?"

"It's a basket," said Noble.

"How curious!"

Julia peered through the darkness. "I wonder who could have left that
market basket out _here_. I suppose----" She paused. "Our cook does do
more idiotic things than--I'll go ask her if it's ours."

She stepped quickly into the house, leaving two concentrations of
inimical silence behind her, but she returned almost immediately,
followed by Kitty Silver.

"It's no use to argue," Julia was saying as they came. "You did your
marketing and simply and plainly left it out there because you were too
shiftless to----"

"No'm," Mrs. Silver protested in a high voice of defensive complaint.
"No'm, Miss Julia, I ain' lef no baskit on _no_ front po'che! I got jus'
th'ee markit baskits in the livin' worl' an' they ev'y las' one an' all
sittin' right where I kin lay my han's on 'em behime my back do'. No'm,
Miss Julia, I take my solemn oaf I ain' lef no----" But here she
debouched upon the porch, and in spite of the darkness perceived herself
to be in the presence of distinguished callers. "Pahdon me," she said
loftily, her tone altering at once, "I beg leaf to insis' I better take
thishere baskit back to my kitchen an' see whut-all's insiden of it."

With an elegant gesture she received the basket from Noble Dill and took
the handle over her ample forearm. "Hum!" she said. "Thishere ole basket
kine o' heavy, too. I wunner whut-all she _is_ got in her!" And she
groped within the basket, beneath the newspaper.

Now, it was the breath of Kitty Silver's life to linger, when she could,
in a high atmosphere; and she was a powerful gossip, exorbitantly
interested in her young mistress's affairs and all callers. Therefore it
was beyond her not to seize upon any excuse that might detain her for
any time whatever in her present surroundings.

"Pusserve jugs," she said. "Pusserve or pickle. Cain't tell which."

"You can in the kitchen," Julia said, with pointed suggestion. "Of
course you can't in the dark."

But still Mrs. Silver snatched at the fleeting moment and did not go.
"Tell by smellin' 'em," she murmured, seemingly to herself.

With ease she unscrewed the top of one of the jars; then held the open
jar to her nose. "Don't smell to me exackly like no pusserves," she
said. "Nor yit like no pickles. Don't smell to me----" She hesitated,
sniffed the jar again, and then inquired in a voice quickly grown
anxious: "Whut _is_ all thishere in thishere jug? Seem like to _me_----"

But here she interrupted herself to utter a muffled exclamation, not
coherent. Instantly she added some words suitable to religious
observances, but in a voice of passion. At the same time, with a fine
gesture, she hurled the jar and the basket from her, and both came in
contact with the wall, not far away, with a sound of breakage.

"Why, what----" Julia began. "Kitty Silver, are you crazy?"

But Kitty Silver was moving hurriedly toward the open front door, where
appeared, at that moment, Mr. Atwater in his most irascible state of
peculiarity.

He began: "What was that heathenish----"

Shouting, Mrs. Silver jostled by him, and, though she disappeared into
the house, a trail of calamitous uproar marked her passage to the
kitchen.

"What thing has happened?" Mr. Atwater demanded. "Is she----?"

His daughter interrupted him.

"_Oh_!" was all she said, and sped by him like a bit of blown
thistledown, into the house. He grasped at her as she passed him; then
suddenly he made other gestures, and, like Kitty Silver, used Jacobean
phrases. But now there were no auditors, for Noble Dill and Newland
Sanders, after thoughtlessly following a mutual and natural impulse to
step over and examine the fallen basket, had both gone out to the
street, where they lingered a while, then decided to go home.

... Later, that evening, Florence and Herbert remembered the c'lection;
so they came for it, a mistake. Discovering the fragments upon the
veranda, they made the much more important mistake of entering the house
to demand an explanation, which they received immediately. It was
delivered with so much vigour, indeed, that Florence was surprised and
hurt. And yet, the most important of her dreamy wishes of the afternoon
had been fulfilled: the c'lection had been useful to Noble Dill, for Mr.
Atwater had smelled the smell of an Orduma cigarette and was just on the
point of coming out to say some harsh things, when the c'lection
interfered. And as Florence was really responsible for its having been
in a position to interfere, so to say, she had actually in a manner
protected her protégé and also shown some of that power of which she had
boasted when she told him that sometimes she made members of her family
"step around pretty lively."

Another of her wishes appeared to be on the way to fulfilment, too. She
had hoped that something memorable might be done with the c'lection, and
the interview with her grandfather, her Aunt Julia, and Kitty Silver
seemed to leave this beyond doubt.




CHAPTER TEN


Now August came, that florid lazy month when mid-summer dawdles along in
trailing greeneries, and the day is like some jocund pagan, all flushed
and asleep, with dripping beard rosy in a wine bowl of fat vine leaves.
Yet, in this languorous time there may befall a brisker night, cool and
lively as an intrusive boy--a night made for dancing. On such a night a
hasty thought might put it as desirable that all the world should be
twenty-two years old and in love, like Noble Dill.

Upon the white bed in his room, as he dressed, lay the flat black
silhouettes of his short evening coat and trousers, side by side, trim
from new pressing; and whenever he looked at them Noble felt rich, tall,
distinguished, and dramatic. It is a mistake, as most literary legends
are mistakes, to assume that girls are the only people subject to
before-the-party exhilaration. At such times a girl is often in the
anxious yet determined mood of a runner before a foot race, or she may
be merely hopeful; some are merry and some are grim, but arithmetical
calculation of some sort, whether glorious or uneasy, is busy in their
eyes as they pin and pat before their mirrors. To behold romance gone
light-headed, turn to the humbler sort of man-creature under
twenty-three. Alone in his room, he may enact for you scenes of flowery
grace and most capricious gallantry, rehearsals as unconscious as the
curtsies of field daisies in a breeze. He has neither doubt nor
certainty of his charm; he has no arithmetic at all, and is often so
free of calculation that he does not even pull down the shades at his
windows.

Unfortunately for the neighbours, and even for passers-by, since Noble's
room had a window visible from the street, his prophetic mother had
closed his shutters before he began to dress. Thus she deprived honest
folk of what surely must have been to them the innocent pleasure of
seeing a very young man in light but complete underwear, lifting from
his head a Panama hat, new that day, in a series of courteous
salutations. At times, during this same stage of his toilet, they might
have had even more entertainment:--before putting on his socks Noble
"one-stepped" for several minutes, still retaining upon his head the
new hat. This was a hat of double value to him; not only was it pleasant
to behold in his mirror, but it was engaged in solidifying for the
evening the arrangement of his hair.

It may be admitted that he was a little giddy, for the dance was
Julia's. Mr. Atwater had been summoned to New York on a blessed business
that would keep him a fortnight, and his daughter, alert to the first
flash of opportunity, had almost instantly summoned musicians, florists,
a caterer, and set plans before them. Coincidentally, Noble had chanced
to see Mr. Atwater driving down Julia's Street that morning, a
travelling bag beside him, and, immediately putting aside for the day
all business cares, hurried to the traveller's house. Thus he
forestalled, for the time being, that competition which helped to make
caring for Julia so continuous a strain upon whatever organ is the seat
of the anxieties. Kind Julia, busy as she was, agreed to dance the first
dance with him, and the last--those being considered of such
significance that he would be entitled to the perquisites of a special
cavalier; for instance, a seat beside her during the serving of the
customary light repast. In such high fortune, no wonder he was a little
giddy as he dressed!

The process of clothing himself was disconnected, being broken by
various enacted fancies and interludes. Having approached the length of
one sock toward the completion of his toilet, he absently dropped the
other upon the floor, and danced again; his expression and attitude
signifying that he clasped a revered partner. Releasing her from this
respectful confinement, he offered the invisible lady a gracious arm and
walked up and down the room with a stateliness tempered to rhythm, a
cakewalk of strange refinement. Phrases seemed to be running in his
head, impromptus symbolic of the touching and romantic, for he spoke
them half aloud hi a wistful yet uplifted manner. "Oh, years!" he said.
"Oh, years so fair; oh, night so rare!" Then he added, in a deeper
voice:

"For life is but a golden dream so sweetly."

Other whimsies came forth from him as the dressing slowly continued,
though one might easily be at fault in attempting to fathom what was his
thought when, during the passage of his right foot through the
corresponding leg of his trousers, he exclaimed commandingly:

"Now, Jocko, for the stirrup cup!"

Jack boots and a faithful squire, probably.

During the long and dreamy session with his neck gear he went back to
the softer _motif_:

    "Oh, years so fair; oh, night so rare!
    For life is but a golden dream so sweetly."

Then, pausing abruptly to look at his coat, so smoothly folded upon the
bed, he addressed it: "O noblest sample of the tailor's dext'rous art!"

This was too much courtesy, for the coat was "ready-made," and looked
nobler upon the bed than upon its owner. In fact, it was by no means a
dext'rous sample; but evidently Noble believed in it with a high and
satisfying faith; and he repeated his compliment to it as he put it on:

"Come, noblest sample of the tailor's art; I'll don thee!"

During these processes he had been repeatedly summoned to descend to the
family dinner, and finally his mother came lamenting and called up from
the front hall that "everything" was "all getting cold!"

But by this time he was on his way, and though he went back to leave his
hat in his room, unwilling to confide it to the hat-rack below, he
presently made his appearance in the dining-room and took his seat at
the table. This mere sitting, however, appeared to be his whole
conception of dining; he seemed as unaware of his mother's urging food
upon him as if he had been a Noble Dill of waxwork. Several tunes he
lifted a fork and set it down without guiding it to its accustomed
destination. Food was far from his thoughts or desires, and if he really
perceived its presence at all, it appeared to him as something vaguely
ignoble upon the horizon.

But he was able to partake of coffee; drank two cups feverishly, his
hand visibly unsteady; and when his mother pointed out this confirmation
of many prophecies that cigarettes would ruin him, he asked if anybody
had noticed whether or not it was cloudy outdoors. At that his father
looked despondent, for the open windows of the dining-room revealed an
evening of fragrant clarity.

"I see, I see," Noble returned pettishly when the fine state of this
closely adjacent weather was pointed out to him by his old-maid sister.
"It wouldn't be raining, of course. Not on a night like this." He jumped
up. "It's time for me to go."

Mrs. Dill laughed. "It's only a little after seven. Julia won't be
through her own dinner yet. You mustn't----"

But with a tremulous smile, Noble shook his head and hurriedly left the
room. He went upstairs for his hat, and while there pinned a geranium
blossom upon his lapel, for it may be admitted that in boutonnières his
taste was as yet unformed.

Coming down again, he took a stick under his arm and was about to set
forth when he noticed a little drift of talcum powder upon one of his
patent leather shoes. After carefully removing this accretion and adding
a brighter lustre to the shoe by means of friction against the back of
his ankle, he decided to return to his room and brush the affected
portion of his trousers. Here a new reverie arrested him; he stood with
the brush in his hand for some time; then, not having used it, he
dropped it gently upon the bed, lit an Orduma cigarette, descended, and
went forth to the quiet street.

As he walked along Julia's Street toward Julia's Party, there was
something in his mien and look more dramatic than mere sprightliness;
and when he came within sight of the ineffable house and saw its many
lights shining before him, he breathed with profundity, half halting.
Again he murmured:

    "Oh, years so fair; oh, night so rare!
    For life is but a golden dream so sweetly."

At the gate he hesitated. Perhaps--perhaps he was a little early. It
might be better to walk round the block.

He executed this parade, and again hesitated at the gate. He could see
into the brightly lighted hall, beyond the open double doors; and it
contained nothing except its usual furniture. Once more he walked round
the block. The hall was again in the same condition. Again he went on.

When he had been thrice round the block after that, he discovered human
beings in the hall; they were Florence, in a gala costume, and
Florence's mother, evidently arrived to be assistants at the party, for,
with the helpful advice of a coloured manservant, they were arranging
some bunches of flowers on two hall tables. Their leisurely manner
somewhat emphasized the air of earliness that hung about the place, and
Noble thought it better to continue to walk round the block. The third
time after that, when he completed his circuit, the musicians were just
arriving, and their silhouettes, headed by that of the burdened bass
fiddler, staggered against the light of the glowing doorway like a
fantasia of giant beetles. Noble felt that it would be better to let
them get settled, and therefore walked round the block again.

Not far from the corner above Julia's, as he passed, a hoarse and
unctuous voice, issuing out of an undistinguishable lawn, called his
name: "Noble! Noble Dill!" And when Noble paused, Julia's Uncle Joseph
came waddling forth from the dimness and rested his monstrous arms upon
the top of the fence, where a street light revealed them as
shirt-sleeved and equipped with a palm-leaf fan.

"What _is_ the matter, Noble?" Mr. Atwater inquired earnestly.

"Matter?" Noble repeated. "Matter?"

"We're kind of upset," said Mr. Atwater. "My wife and I been just
sittin' out here in our front yard, not doing any harm to anybody, and
here it's nine times we've counted you passing the place--always going
the same way!" He spoke as with complaint, a man with a grievance. "It's
kind of ghostlike," he added. "We'd give a good deal to know what _you_
make of it."

Noble was nonplussed. "Why----" he said. "Why----"

"How do you get _back_? That's the mystery!" said Mr. Atwater. "You're
always walkin' down street and never up. You know my wife's never been
too strong a woman, Noble, and all this isn't doing her any good.
Besides, we sort of figured out that you ought really to be at Julia's
dance this evening."

"I am," said Noble nervously. "I mean that's where I'm going. I'm going
there. I'm going there."

"That's what's upsetting us so!" the fat man exclaimed. "You keep on
going there! Just when we've decided you must _be_ there, at last, here
you come, going there again. Well, don't let me detain you. But if you
do decide to go in, some time, Noble, I'm afraid you aren't going to be
able to do much dancing."

Noble, who had begun to walk on, halted in sudden panic. Did this
sinister fear of Mr. Atwater's mean that, as an uncle, he had heard
Julia was suddenly ill?

"Why won't I?" he asked quickly. "Is anything----"

"Your poor feet!" said Mr. Atwater, withdrawing. "Good-night, Noble."

The youth went on, somewhat disturbed; it seemed to him that this uncle,
though Julia's, was either going queer in the head or had chosen a poor
occasion to be facetious. Next time, probably, it would be better to
walk round the block below this. But it was no longer advisable to walk
round any block. When he came to the happy gateway, the tuning of
instruments and a fanfare of voices sounded from within the house; girls
in light wraps were fluttering through the hall with young men; it was
"time for the party!" And Noble went in.

Throughout the accomplishment of the entrance he made, his outside and
his inside were directly contradictory. His inside was almost
fluttering: there might have been a nest of nervous young birds in his
chest; but as he went upstairs to the "gentlemen's dressing-room," to
leave his hat and stick, this flopping and scrambling within him was
never to be guessed from his outside. His outside was unsympathetic,
even stately; he greeted his fellow guests with negligent hauteur, while
his glance seemed to say: "Only peasantry here!"




CHAPTER ELEVEN


The stairway was crowded as he descended; and as he looked down upon the
heads and shoulders of the throng below, in Julia's hall, the thought
came to him that since he had the first and last dances and supper
engaged with Julia, the hostess, this was almost the next thing to being
the host. It was a pleasing thought, and a slight graciousness now
flavoured his salutations.

At the foot of the stairs he became part of the file of young people who
were moving into one of the large rooms where Julia stood to "receive."
And then, between two heads before him, he caught a first glimpse of
her;--and all the young birds fluttering in his chest burst into song;
his heart fainted, his head ballooned, his feet seemed to dangle from
him at the ends of two strings.

There glowed sapphire-eyed Julia; never had she been prettier.

The group closed, shutting out the vision, and he found himself able to
dry his brow and get back his breath before moving forward in a cold
and aristocratic attitude. Then he became incapable of any attitude--he
was before her, and she greeted him. A buzzing of the universe confused
him: he would have stood forever, but pressure from behind pushed him
on; and so, enveloped in a scented cloud, he passed into a corner. He
tried to remember what he had said to her, but could not; perhaps it
would have discouraged him to know that all he had said was, "Well!"

Now there rattled out a challenge of drums; loud music struck upon the
air. Starting instantly to go to Julia, Noble's left leg first received
the electric impulse and crossed his laggard right; but he was no pacer,
and thus stumbled upon himself and plunged. Still convulsive, he came
headlong before her, and was the only person near who remained unaware
that his dispersal of an intervening group had the appearance of extreme
unconventionality. Noble knew nothing except that this was his dance
with Her.

Then heaven played with him. She came close and touched him exquisitely.
She placed a lovely hand upon his shoulder, her other lovely cool hand
in one of his. The air filled with bursting stars.

They danced.

Noble was conscious of her within his clasping arm, but conscious of her
as nothing human. The fluffy white bodice pressed by his hand seemed to
be that of some angel doll; the charming shoulder that sometimes touched
his was made of a divine mist. Only the pretty head, close to his, was
actual; the black-sapphire eyes gave him a little blue-black glance, now
and then, and seemed to laugh.

In truth, they did, though Julia's lips remained demure. So far as Noble
was able to comprehend what he was doing, he was floating rhythmically
to a faint, far music; but he was almost unconscious, especially from
the knees down. But to the eye of observers incapable of perceiving that
Noble was floating, it appeared that he was out of step most of the
time, and danced rather hoppingly. However, these mannerisms were no
novelty with him, and it cannot be denied that girls at dances usually
hurried impulsively away to speak to somebody when they saw him coming.
One such creature even went so far as to whisper to Julia now, during a
collision: "How'd you get caught?"

Julia was loyal; she gave no sign of comprehension, but valiantly swung
onward with Noble, bumped and bumping everywhere, in spite of the most
extraordinary and graceful dexterity on her part.

"That's one reason she's such a terrible belle," a damsel whispered to
another.

"What is?"

"The way she'll be just as nice to anybody like Noble Dill as she is to
anybody," said the first. "Look at her now: she won't laugh at him a
bit, though everybody else is."

"Well, I wouldn't laugh either," said the other. "Not in Julia's
position. I'd be too busy being afraid."

"What of?"

"Of getting a sprained ankle!"

It is well that telepathy remains, as a science, lethargic. Speculation
sets before us the prospect of a Life Beyond in which every thought is
communicated without the intervention of speech: a state wherein all
neighbours and neighbourhoods would promptly be dispersed and few
friendships long endure, one fears. If to Noble Dill's active
consciousness had penetrated merely the things thought about him and his
dancing, in this one short period of time before the music for that
dance stopped, he might easily have been understood if he had hurried
forth, obtained explosives, and blown up the place, himself indeed
included. As matters providentially were in reality, when the music
stopped he stood confounded: he thought the dance had just begun.

His mouth remained open until the necessary gestures of articulation
intermittently closed it as he said: "_Oh!_ That was _divine_!"

Too-gentle Julia agreed.

"You said I could have part of some in between the first and last," he
reminded her. "Can I have the first part of the next?"

She laughed. "I'm afraid not. The next is Mr. Clairdyce's and I really
_promised_ him I wouldn't give _any_ of his away or let anybody cut in."

"Well, then," said Noble, frowning a little, "would you be willing for
me to cut in on the third?"

"I'm afraid not. That's Newland Sanders', and I promised him the same
thing."

"Well, the one after that?"

"No, that one's Mr. Clairdyce's, too."

"It _is_?" Noble was greatly disturbed.

"Yes."

"Two that quick with old Baldy Clairdyce!" he exclaimed, raising his
voice, but unaware of the fervour with which he spoke. "Two with that
old----"

"_Sh_, Noble," she said, though she laughed. "He isn't really old; he's
just middle-aged, and only the least bit bald, just enough to be
distinguished-looking."

"Well, you know what _I_ think of him!" he returned with a vehemence not
moderated. "_I_ don't think he's distinguished-looking; I think he's
simply and plainly a regular old----"

"_Sh!_" Julia warned him again. "He's standing with some people just
behind us," she added.

"Well, then," said Noble, "can I cut in on the next one after that?"

She consulted a surreptitious little card. "I'm afraid you'll have to
wait till quite a little later on, Noble. That one is poor Mr.
Ridgely's. I promised him I wouldn't----"

"Then can I cut in on the next one after that?"

"It's Mr. Clairdyce's," said Julia--and she blushed.

"My goodness!" said Noble. "Oh, my goodness!"

"_Sh!_ I'm afraid people----"

"Let's go out on the porch," said Noble, whose manner had suddenly
become desperate. "Let's go out and get some air where we can talk this
thing over."

"I'm afraid I'd better not just now," she returned, glancing over her
shoulder. "You see, all the people aren't here yet."

"You've got an aunt here," said Noble, "and a sister-in-law and a little
niece: I saw 'em. They can----"

"I'm afraid I'd better stay indoors just now," she said persuasively.
"We can talk here just as well."

"We can't!" he insisted feverishly. "We can't, Julia! I've got something
to say, Julia. Julia, you gave me the first dance and the last dance,
and of course sitting together at supper, or whatever there is, and you
know as well as I do that means it's just the same as if you weren't
giving this party but it was somewhere else and I took you to it, and
it's always understood you _never_ dance more with anybody else than the
one you went with, when you go with that person to a place, because
that's the rights of it; and other towns it's just the same way; they do
that way there, just the same as here; they do that way everywhere,
because nobody else has got a right to cut in and dance more with you
than the one you go with, when you goes to a place with that one. Julia,
don't you see that's the regular way it is, and the only fair way it
ought to be?"

"What?"

"Weren't you even _listening_?" he cried.

"Yes, indeed, but----"

"Julia," he said desperately, "let's go out on the porch. I want to
explain just the way I feel. Let's go out on the porch, Julia. If we
stay here, somebody's just bound to interrupt us any minute before I can
explain the way I----"

But the prophecy was fulfilled even before it was concluded. A group of
loudly chattering girls and their escorts of the moment bore down upon
Julia, and shattered the tête-à-tête. Dislodged from Julia's side by a
large and eager girl, whom he had hated ever since she was six years old
and he five, Noble found himself staggering in a kind of suburb; for the
large girl's disregard of him, as she shouldered in, was actually
physical, and too powerful for him to resist. She wished to put her
coarse arm round Julia's waist, it appeared, and the whole group burbled
and clamoured: the party was _perfictly_ glorious; so was the waxed
floor; so was Julia, my _dear_, so was the music, the weather, and the
din they made!

Noble felt that his rights were being outraged. Until the next dance
began, every moment of her time was legally his--yet all he could even
see of her was the top of her head. And the minutes were flying.

He stood on tiptoe, thrust his head forward over the large girl's odious
shoulder, and shouted: "Julia! Let's go out on the porch!"

No one seemed to hear him.

"Julia----"

_Boom!_ Rackety-_Boom_! The drummer walloped his drums; a saxophone
squawked, and fiddles squealed. Hereupon appeared a tall authoritative
man, at least thirty-two years old, and all swelled up with himself, as
interpreted by Noble and several other friends of Julia's--though this,
according to quite a number of people (all feminine) was only another
way of saying that he was a person of commanding presence. He wore a
fully developed moustache, an easy smile, clothes offensively knowing;
and his hair began to show that scarcity which Julia felt gave him
distinction--a curious theory, but natural to her age. What really did
give this Clairdyce some air of distinction, however, was the calmness
with which he walked through the group that had dislodged Noble Dill,
and the assurance with which he put his arm about Julia and swept her
away in the dance.

Noble was left alone in the middle of the floor, but not for long.
Couples charged him, and he betook himself to the wall. The party, for
him, was already ruined.

Sometimes, as he stood against the wall, there would be swirled to him,
out of all the comminglements of other scents, a faint, faint hint of
heliotrope and then Julia would be borne masterfully by, her flying
skirts just touching him. And sometimes, out of the medley of all other
sounds, there would reach his ear a little laugh like a run of lightly
plucked harp strings, and he would see her shining dark hair above her
partner's shoulder as they swept again near him for an instant. And
always, though she herself might be concealed from him, he could only
too painfully mark where she danced: the overtopping head of the tall
Clairdyce was never lost to view. The face on the front part of that
disliked head wore continuously a confident smile, which had a bad
effect on Noble. It seemed to him desecration that a man with so gross a
smile should be allowed to dance with Julia. And that she should smile
back at her partner, and with such terrible kindness--as Noble twice saw
her smile--this was like a calamity happening to her white soul without
her knowing it. If she should ever marry that man--well, it would be
the old story: May and December! Noble shuddered, and the drums, the
fiddles, the bass fiddle, and the saxophone seemed to have an evil
sound.

When the music stopped he caromed hastily through the room toward Julia,
but she was in a thicket of her guests when he arrived, and for several
moments Mr. Clairdyce's broad back kept intervening--almost
intentionally, it seemed. When Noble tried to place himself in a
position to attract Julia's attention, this back moved, too, and Noble's
nose but pressed black cloth. And the noise everybody made was so
baffling that, in order to be heard, Julia herself was shouting. Finally
Noble contrived to squirm round the obtrusive back, and protruded his
strained face among all the flushed and laughing ones.

"Julia, I got to----" he began.

But this was just at the climax of a story that three people were
telling at the same time, Julia being one of them, and he received
little attention.

"Julia," he said hoarsely; "I got something I want to _tell_ you
about----"

He raised his voice: "Julia, come on! Let's go out on the _porch_!"

Nobody even knew that he was there. Nevertheless, the tall and solid
Clairdyce was conscious of him, but only, it proved, as one is conscious
of something to rest upon. His elbow, a little elevated, was at the
height of Noble's shoulder, and this heavy elbow, without its owner's
direct or active cognizance, found for itself a comfortable support.
Then, as the story reached its conclusion, this old Clairdyce joined the
general mirth so heartily as to find himself quite overcome, and he
allowed most of his weight to depend upon the supported elbow. Noble
sank like feathers.

"Here! What you doin'?" he said hotly. "I'll thank you to keep off o'
me!"

Old Baldy recovered his balance without being aware what had threatened
it, while his elbow, apparently of its own volition, groped for its
former pedestal. Noble evaded it, and pushed forward.

"Julia," he said. "I _got_ to say some----"

But the accursed music began again, and horn-rimmed Newland Sanders
already had his arm about her waist. They disappeared into the ruck of
dancers.

"Well, by George!" said Noble. "By George, I'm goin' to _do_
something!"




CHAPTER TWELVE


He went outdoors and smoked Orduma cigarettes, one after the other.
Dances and intermissions succeeded each other but Noble had "enough of
_that_, for one while!" So he muttered.

And remembering how Julia had told him that he was killing himself with
cigarettes, "All right," he said now, as he bitterly lighted his fifth
at the spark of the fourth;--"I hope I will!"

"Lot o' difference it'd make!" he said, as he lighted the eighth of a
series that must, all told, have contained nearly as much tobacco as a
cigar. And, leaning back against the trunk of one of the big old walnut
trees in the yard, he gazed toward the house, where the open window
nearest him splashed with colour like a bright and crowded aquarium. "To
_her_, anyway!" he added, with a slight remorse, remembering that his
mother had frequently shown him evidences of affection.

Yes, his mother would care, and his father and sisters would be upset,
but Julia--when the friends of the family were asked to walk by for a
last look, would she be one? What optimism remained to him presented a
sketch of Julia, in black, borne from the room in the arms of girl
friends who tried in vain to hush her; but he was unable to give this
more hopeful fragment an air of great reality. Much more probably, when
word came to her that he had smoked himself to death, she would be a
bride, dancing at Niagara Falls with her bald old husband--and she would
only laugh and pause to toss a faded rose out of the window, and then go
right on dancing. But perhaps, some day, when tears had taught her the
real meaning of life with such a man----

"You--_wow_!"

Noble jumped. From the darkness of the yard beside the house there came
a grievous howl, distressful to the spinal marrow, a sound of animal
pain. It was repeated even more passionately, and another voice was also
heard, one both hoarsely bass and falsetto in the articulation of a
single syllable. "_Ouch!_" There were sounds of violent scuffing, and
the bass-falsetto voice cried: "What's that you _stuck_ me with?" and
another: "Drag her! Drag her back by her feet!"

These alarms came from the almost impenetrable shadows of the small
orchard beside the house; and from the same quarter was heard the
repeated contact of a heavy body, seemingly wooden or metallic, with the
ground; but high over this there rose a shrieking: "Help! Help! Oh,
_hay_-yulp!" This voice was girlish. "Hay-_yulp_!"

Noble dashed into the orchard, and at once fell prostrate upon what
seemed a log, but proved to be a large and solidly packed ice-cream
freezer lying on its side.

Dark forms scrambled over the fence and vanished, but as Noble got to
his feet he was joined by a dim and smallish figure in white--though
more light would have disclosed a pink sash girdling its middle. It was
the figure of Miss Florence Atwater, seething with furious agitations.

"Vile thieves!" she panted.

"Who?" Noble asked, brushing at his knees, while Florence made some
really necessary adjustments of her own attire. "Who were they?"

"It was my own cousin, Herbert, and that nasty little Henry Rooter and
their gang. Herbert thinks he hass to act perfectly horrable all the
time, now his voice is changing!" said Florence, her emotion not abated.
"Tried to steal this whole ice-cream freezer off the back porch and
sneak it over the fence and eat it! I stuck a pretty long pin in Herbert
and two more of 'em, every bit as far as it would go." And in the
extremity of her indignation, she added: "The dirty robbers!"

"Did they hurt you?"

"You bet your life they didn't!" the child responded. "Tried to drag me
back to the house! By the feet! I guess I gave 'em enough o' _that_!"

Then, tugging the prostrate freezer into an upright position, she
exclaimed darkly: "I expect I gave ole Mister Herbert and some of the
others of 'em just a few kicks they won't be in such a hurry to forget!"
And in spite of his own gloomy condition, Noble was able, upon thinking
over matters, to spare some commiseration for Herbert and his friend,
that nasty little Henry Rooter and their gang. They seemed to have been
at a disadvantage.

"I suppose I'd better carry the freezer back to the kitchen porch," he
said. "Somebody may want it."

"'Somebody'!" Florence exclaimed. "Why, there's only two of these big
freezers, and if I hadn't happened to suspeck somep'n and be layin' for
those vile thieves, half the party wouldn't get _any_!" And as an
afterthought, when Noble had pantingly restored the heavy freezer to its
place by the kitchen door, she said: "Or else they'd had to have such
little saucers of it nobody would of been any way _like_ satisfied, and
prob'ly all the fam'ly that's here assisting would of had to go without
any at all. That'd 'a' been the worst of it!"

She opened the kitchen door, and to those within explained loudly what
dangers had been averted, directing that both freezers be placed indoors
under guard; then she rejoined Noble, who was walking slowly back to the
front yard.

"I guess it's pretty lucky you happened to be hangin' around out here,"
she said. "I guess that's about the luckiest thing ever happened to me.
The way it looks to me, I guess you saved my life. If you hadn't chased
'em away, I wouldn't been a bit surprised if that gang would killed me!"

"Oh, no!" said Noble. "They wouldn't----"

"You don't know 'em like I do," the romantic child assured him. "I know
that gang pretty well, and I wouldn't been a bit surprised. I wouldn't
been!"

"But----"

She tossed her head, signifying recklessness.

"Guess 'twouldn't make much difference to anybody particular, whether
they did or not," said this strange Florence.

Noble regarded her with astonishment; they had reached the front yard,
and paused under the trees where the darkness was mitigated by the light
from the shining windows. "Why, you oughtn't to talk that way,
Florence," he said. "Think of your mamma and papa and your--and your
Aunt Julia."

She tossed her head again. "Pooh! They'd all of 'em just say: 'Good
ribbons to bad rubbish,' I guess!" However, she seemed far from
despondent about this; in fact, she was naturally pleased with her
position as a young girl saved from the power of ruffians by a rescuer
who was her Very Ideal. "I bet if I died, they wouldn't even have a
funeral," she said cheerfully. "They'd proba'ly just leave me lay."

The curiosities of the human mind are found not in high adventure: they
are everywhere in the commonplace. Never for a moment did it strike
Noble Dill that Florence's turn to the morbid bore any resemblance to
his recent visions of his own funeral. He failed to perceive that the
two phenomena were produced out of the same laboratory jar and were
probably largely chemical, at that.

"Why, Florence!" he exclaimed. "That's a dreadful way to feel. I'm sure
your--your Aunt Julia loves you."

"Oh, well," Florence returned lightly;--"maybe she does. I don't care
whether she does or not." And now she made a deduction, the profundity
of which his condition made him unable to perceive. "It makes less
difference to anybody whether their aunts love 'em or not than whether
pretty near anybody else at all does."

"But not your Aunt _Julia_" he urged. "Your Aunt _Julia_----"

"I don't care whether she does than any other aunt I got," said
Florence. "All of 'em's just aunts, and that's all there is to it."

"But, Florence, your Aunt _Julia_----"

"She's nothin' in the world but my _aunt_," Florence insisted, and her
emphasis showed that she was trying hard to make him understand. "She's
just the same as all of 'em. I don't get anything more from her than I
do from any the rest of 'em."

Her auditor was dumfounded, but not by Florence's morals. The
cold-blooded calculation upon which her family affections seemed to be
founded, this aboriginal straightforwardness of hers, passed over him.
What shocked him was her appearing to see Julia as all of a piece with a
general lot of ordinary aunts. Helplessly, he muttered again:

"But your Aunt _Julia_----"

"There she is now," said Florence, pointing to the window nearest them.
"They've stopped dancing for a while so's that ole Mister Clairdyce can
get a chance to sing somep'n. Mamma told me he was goin' to."

Dashing chords sounded from a piano invisible to Noble and his
companion; the windows exhibited groups of deferentially expectant young
people; and then a powerful barytone began a love song. From the yard
the singer could not be seen, but Julia could be: she stood in the
demurest attitude; and no one needed to behold the vocalist to know that
the scoundrel was looking pointedly and romantically at her.

    "Dee-urra-face that holds soswee tasmile for me,
    Wairyew nah tmine how darrrk the worrrl dwooed be!"

To Noble, suffering at every pore, this was less a song than a
bellowing; and in truth the confident Mr. Clairdyce did "let his voice
out," for he was seldom more exhilarated than when he shook the ceiling.
The volume of sound he released upon his climaxes was impressive, and
the way he slid up to them had a great effect, not indoors alone, but
upon Florence, enraptured out under the trees.

"Oh, isn't it be-_you_-tiful!" she murmured.

Her humid eyes were fixed upon Noble, who was unconscious of

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