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At the Age of Eve

by Kate Trimble Sharber · English · Gutenberg #40316 · 413,580 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: At the Age of Eve

Author: Kate Trimble Sharber

Illustrator: Paul Julian Meylan


        
Release date: July 24, 2012 [eBook #40316]
                Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

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AT THE AGE OF EVE

[Illustration: "I--I wondered who you were, too"]


AT THE AGE OF EVE

by

KATE TRIMBLE SHARBER

Author of The Annals of Ann

With Illustrations by Paul Meylan







Indianapolis
The Bobbs-Merrill Company
Publishers

Copyright 1911
The Bobbs-Merrill Company

Press of
Braunworth & Co.
Bookbinders and Printers
Brooklyn, N. Y.




     TO
     ANN'S GOD-PARENTS
     LILLIAN BYRN HARRISON
     AND
     JOHN TROTWOOD MOORE




CONTENTS


     CHAPTER                          PAGE

        I ANN                            1

       II THE NEW NEIGHBORS             16

      III THE BOOKWORM TURNS            35

       IV A NEW GAME                    49

        V PRINCE CHARMING               67

       VI NEVA'S BEAU BRUMMEL           97

      VII ALFRED                       123

     VIII ALFRED COLLECTS A DEBT       136

       IX A SHOPPING EXPEDITION        157

        X ANN RECEIVES A CALLER        179

       XI A DRAWN BATTLE               205

      XII SHADOWS                      225

     XIII THANKSGIVING DAY             243

      XIV SOPHIE'S STORY               262

       XV THE DOUGLAS IN HIS HALL      287

      XVI THE IDES OF MARCH            313

     XVII MAY DAY                      347




     AT THE AGE OF EVE




AT THE AGE OF EVE




CHAPTER I

ANN


In beginning this record I find that it is no easy matter to feel at
home with a clean, blank journal. The possibilities of these spotless
pages seem to oppress me, and I am weighted down with the idea that my
opening sentences ought to sound brilliant and promising.

With this thought I have started three or four entries on scraps of
paper lying here about my desk, but I find that not one of them is the
kind of thing which would make you bend over close and knit your
brows, thinking you had picked up Plato by mistake.

No matter what lofty sentiments I have in my mind you can always hear
the swish of petticoats through my paragraphs and I regret this, for
all my life I have longed to write something that would sound like
George Eliot. In the world of books she is my idol--my lady idol, I
mean, for of course the dearest idols of all are the poets, and they
are always men.

"George Eliot is my lady idol and my man one, too," some one said to
me once when I mentioned my preference, and this exactly expresses it.
When you read what she has written you never stop to think whether it
was written by a man or by a woman. Even in these days the women who
write anything worth reading do it so cleverly that you never for a
moment suspect they clean out their fountain-pen with a hair-pin.

How _do_ they manage it, I wonder, when one adjective too many would
brand them as a female?

Yet if the sex does not show in the writing, the writing always shows
in the sex. If the most masculine man on earth takes a notion to
become a writer his friends all begin strange mutterings behind his
back, and before long some one has whispered "Sissy." Ah, and if a
woman by any chance decides to use her pen a while, so her tongue can
rest, her associates are quick to pronounce that she has grown so
_masculine_ since she started this writing business! Verily the pen is
mightier than the sword if it can influence sex in a manner that
would turn a court physician green with envy.

I should be willing to cut off my hair and call myself George, Henry
or even Sam, if I thought it would help me to be a great writer, for,
in my soul, I have always longed to write something so great and
unfeminine that it would not harm a Trappist monk.

Still, the setting forth of these wishes of mine does not help me to
get started comfortably on this new record. Do you notice that I call
it a _record_, and not a diary? This is because I expect to write in
it only occasionally--skim the cream of events, as it were, instead of
boring you with the details of the daily milking.

If it were January first, now, I could think up any number of
inspiring New Year sentiments to get started off with; sermons based
on the three R's to be met with most often at this season--Regrets,
Resolves and Reforms. Sometimes there is a fourth R which follows
quickly on the heels of these--Returns, to the old habits.

Here it is, though, midsummer; and I am sure it would seem to any one
looking on that I have no visible means of support for any kind of
journal, tucked away as I am in this little town where a girl has not
inspiration enough to keep her shirt-waist pulled down in the back.

So, with this remark about my shirt-waist, I put aside my longing to
write something like George Eliot and make a frank acknowledgment of
my skirts. Right glad I ought to be that I have them, too, for I
believe that if data were plentiful on the subject we should find that
the "mantle of charity" was originally a skirt. "Just like a fool
woman," people say leniently, and are willing to let it pass.

I am a girl, then, as you will readily gather from the foregoing,
simply by putting one and one together--the shirt-waist and the skirt.
I live near a little country town, and am vastly dissatisfied with the
cramped stage and meager audience, else why should I be keeping a
journal? A journal is not nearly so much a book in which you tell what
you do as one in which you tell what you would like to do.

Pray do not imagine from the above that I am longing for a crowded,
noisy stage, with lights glittering over tinsel. No, I am not that
kind of girl. I like a play of few actors, but where the things
happening make _the veins of the neck_ stand out!

In admitting that I do not love the village near which I live I know I
run the risk of being considered ill-natured. It would be sweeter of
me to make it out a cheery little Cranford of a place, where the
tea-kettle steams cozily and drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds.
These things do happen, after a modern, American fashion; and the
people who own the tea-kettles and the folds are the same as other
people all over the world. I have no quarrel with them. Still, I am
forced to admit that time hangs so heavy on my hands I wash my hair
every other day. Have you ever noticed how often a woman, who has
nothing better to do, will wash her hair?

Here, then, is a brief description of the village, with malice toward
none, although at times it may sound malicious:

The surrounding country is so beautiful that if you are coming into
the town on the train you are ill-prepared for the hideous little
railway station, which is the first shock you receive. The floor of
this "depot" is dirtier than anything else on earth could be, save the
post-office floor, and there is a rusty little stove in the middle of
the room close to the box of sand, around which tobacco juice is
being eternally spit, spat, or whatever is the correct form of that
unlovely verb.

Close to the station are the livery stables, but we shall pass by as
quickly as possible; and farther up the street is the Racket Store.
Sometimes this place has a very handsome clerk from the city; it is
then a busy market. Across the street from the hotel is the millinery
establishment, and, if you are on good terms with the milliner, she
invites you to come and sit at her front window some mornings just
after the eleven-o'clock train has come, so you can get a good view of
the interesting drummers.

Most of the local attractions in the way of young men are sturdy
farmers, who, like June-bugs, appear for only a few months every
summer. The others, dry goods clerks, bookkeepers and professional
whittlers, usually line up on the back benches at church on Sunday
evenings and cause mild panics in the breasts of the unescorted girls
present, whose hearts palpitate painfully during the benediction.

But here I have set forth the doings of Sunday evening before
mentioning the events of the afternoon, which, while not exciting, are
in a way more characteristic than those of any other time. If the day
is fine the country roads blossom forth at irregular intervals with
young couples out driving or walking, close to Nature's heart, yet
caring far less for her beauties than for the sight of each other,
which, after all, _is_ nature. If there is any one in the town sick
enough for his neighbors to be really concerned about him, on Sunday
afternoon the sick one's house is swarming with a crowd sufficient to
furnish forth a funeral. This is not _called_ "profaning the Sabbath,"
but it ought to be.

On rainy days, or even on fine ones, the inhabitants who are too old
to be a-lovering usually sit around and go to sleep in their chairs,
with their mouths wide open. Besides being ungraceful, this is an
invitation to tonsilitis. Dear me! I have misspelled that word again,
for Doctor Osler says there are two l's in it, and I am sure there
are--in the kind I had last Christmas!

Somewhere in the early fall, about the time for green tomatoes to be
made up into pickle, there is the excitement of seeing the new public
school teachers file into town, and if you happen to be buying a hat
at the millinery store any time within the next few weeks you can hear
a complete description of each teacher. One paints her face until it's
mottled, you are told; another has blond hair and brunette eyebrows,
so she must have been on the stage; a third evidently has seen "better
days," for she wears a diamond ring on her little finger! There is
only _one_ more astonishing thing than the way the women of the
village talk about these teachers, and that is the way the men marry
them!

Again I find that I have anticipated and reached the autumn before I
have finished with the summer, in the very hottest part of which,
usually August, comes an "evangelist" to hold a protracted meeting.
The sound of words always meant so much to me when I was a child, and
when I first heard that word, evangelist, I pictured a great, radiant
figure, with spreading white wings growing out from a somber suit of
black clothes, and holding to his lips a long, graceful trumpet.
Naturally, this was some time ago, when I was quite young, and wanted
to be good, so that when I died I could go to heaven, where my chief
delight was going to be tending a garden full of silver bells and
cockle-shells and pretty maids all in a row. Oh, those silver bells!
In point of beauty they had no rivals in my childish imagination,
except Cinderella's glass slippers and Aaron's golden calf! A lovely
heaven it was going to be, of light pastel shades, and a great way
off from God! You see I was brought up in such an orthodox atmosphere
that I imagined God was like the principal of a school I once
attended, always looking out for offenders with a rod up his sleeve.

It was a distinct disappointment to me when I found that an evangelist
is like any ordinary preacher, except that he perspires more.
Sometimes he is sensational and preaches about lace yokes and dancing;
and on Sunday afternoon holds a meeting for men only, where he tells
them what a terribly bad man _he_ used to be! Again he is "burdened"
with the souls of the whole congregation and preaches hell and
damnation in a voice that sounds like pitchforks clanging against iron
chains. Now, city preachers seldom do anything like this. In the city
pulpits, of recent years, hell is like smallpox; it is still _there_,
but in a much milder form.

During the revivals there are always one or more abusive sermons
directed at the other churches of the town, and, of course, the
Episcopalians are ever in a class with "the Turk and the comet."
Catholics are unmentionable.

This usually causes much "hard feeling" among the good wives of the
town, at an inconvenient time, too, for the season for swapping sweet
peach pickle recipes is close at hand. The only people who can
maintain a placid spirit during these revivals are those who stay
away, and I usually try this plan, unless the evangelist happens to be
young and good-looking.

Young and good-looking, ay, there's the rub! Herein is my lack of
material for an interesting journal, so long as I stay here at home.
Notwithstanding these barriers, Cousin Eunice, who was the instigator
of my childhood's diary, has again suggested that I keep a book here
by me to "tell off" to occasionally when I feel the need of a mental
clearing-house. She says a journal has two points of advantage over
the bosom friend a girl of my age usually has; one is, that you can
shut it up when you want to go to sleep at night, and the other is
that you can burn it when you grow ashamed of the secrets it contains,
neither of which you can do to your bosom friend, no matter how badly
you may wish to.

The diary which I kept for several years while I was at the gawky age
was intended to be secreted between two pieces of board in the attic
and discovered by my grandchildren amid tumultuous applause, years
hence. But I am far too grown-up for these grandchildren now. The
knowledge of my years is ever with me, a sort of binding torment, like
an armhole that is too tight, so I shall have to leave the little
dears behind, with the fairies and the freckles that I have long since
outgrown. They, or the thought of them, used to make me feel that I
was on actual speaking terms with my other diary, but perhaps after a
while, I may feel on the same terms with you, even without their
presence.

In the first place, as a reason for this book's being, I have always
liked the notion of keeping a written account of my thoughts and
feelings, especially of my feelings, for they are usually all jumbled
up in my mind, like ribbons on a remnant counter, but after I have set
them down in black and white where I can stand off and look at them
they are no more complicated than sardines in a box. Another reason is
that in the diaries, correspondence and love-letters of interesting
people (great people, I mean) which I have read, I have found there is
a sort of interest which is lacking in their stiff-standing-collar and
high-heeled-shoes productions. In this class I have read Amiel and Sam
Pepys, and the love-letters of Sophie Dorothea, poor dear! How her
portrait must have lied! No woman with that much fat on her neck
could really love! I adore Amiel and am fond of Pepys, although I wish
he had left out about a ton of that venison pasty which his
"she-cozen" was usually preparing for his entertainment. It always
gets in your line of vision, somehow, whenever you are craning your
neck to catch a glimpse of that naughty but nice Charlie Stuart!

Then there was a girl in _Pendennis_ who kept a book of
heart-outpourings and called it "Mes Larmes." And my Lord Byron's dear
friend, Lady Blessington, called hers "My Night Book."

Well, mine is not going to be a night book, for that is not my
favorite time for mental surveying. I am still a regular lizard in my
love for the sunshine, and, if the prospect sounds alluring, I'll
promise that much of this book shall be written in the clear light of
day. A good part of my other diary was written up in the old pear tree
by the orchard gate, but now I am grown up, so, of course--

"Mes Larmes" would be even worse for a title than the one I have just
mentioned. Some tears will, of course, be mixed in to make the
rainbows of happiness shine through, but I fancy that mine will be
principally a record of work and play. Work that is play and play
that is work, mother says, as I sit on the shady porch in the mornings
working flowers on my shirt-waist front, and spend the afternoons
playing tennis in the hot sun. Work and play, then, for the present;
later, maybe, smiles and sighs; while a long, long way in the future,
perhaps on the last few pages, there _may_ be--shall I say it? No, I
am not well enough acquainted with you yet.

Although I have kept back this one little thought from you in the
above, I promise that in the narration of all things which have
actually happened this journal is going to be unexpurgated! First, I
love truth; and I think that a whole truth is nearly always better
than a half. For instance, d----n in print always looked worse to me
than damn. Then, in the diaries and love-letters I have mentioned
above, I have often found that at the very places where matters were
getting _so_ interesting you straighten up somewhat and begin to
breathe very softly, the narrative breaks suddenly into a row of
beastly little dots--and you are left to imagine what you will! Maybe
the truth would not have been half so bad as your imaginings--maybe it
would have been much worse. It all depends upon the condition of your
circulation!

For my part, I like a book to tell the whole truth about what it
starts out to tell; yet this does not mean that every detail is to be
described, even to setting forth whether the heroine wears
hose-supporters or round garters. Now, in case this journal _should_
be secreted in the attic and found years hence by a mixed audience
which is inclined to take offense at my mention of garters, I shall
say simply, "Evil to him who evil thinketh."

So I am going to have you for my confidential friend and adviser. I
say adviser advisedly, for I know of nothing which preaches a better
sermon sometimes than for a person to look over certain back pages of
his diary; especially _her_ diary.

When I am wicked enough to make your leaves curl up in horror, all you
can do is to listen to my story and not look at me as if you thought I
needed the prayers of the congregation. People who pray don't talk
about it anyway! And, if by chance, my right hand should do something
handsome that it is fairly itching to tell about we can recite it all
to you, knowing that you will never let it come to the ears of my left
hand.

Good I may occasionally be; wicked I shall certainly be, for are not
we all born in iniquity? But I hope that in after years when I read
over these pages I shall not discover that it takes a sextant, a
compass and an alarm clock to find out where my heart is!




CHAPTER II

THE NEW NEIGHBORS


"You mus' be mighty clean, or mighty dirty, _one_," Mammy Lou called
out to me this morning as she looked up from the kitchen door and
espied me at the bath-room window with my robe wrapped around me
toga-fashion.

"Oh, excuse _me_," she continued with exaggerated politeness after a
moment in which I did not speak. "Of course you ain't to be spoke to
when you're breathin' like a heathen!"

I finished the prescribed number of breaths laid down in the rules for
Yogi breathing, which I am trying just now because I am so tired of
breathing the same old way, then looked down at mammy.

"A girl who can take a cold bath every morning and bait a fish-hook
can take care of herself in this life!" I answered. "You ought to be
proud of my courage."

"'Tain't no Christian notion for no girl to be wantin' to take care of
herself," she began to argue, but rather than get into a debate and
be routed, as she sometimes is, she suddenly assumed an air of
excitement and cried: "Listen! Wasn't that the thing hollerin'?"

"The thing" here referred to is the new inter-urban line which now
runs past our house, much to the chagrin of Mammy Lou, who calls it
the "interruption line," because it is "always drappin' somebody off
here right in the midst o' dinner time, when there ain't nothin' lef'
but backs and wings."

This very disconcerting thing has happened so many times that mother
found she would have to carry a full line of emergency tins in her
pantry, all bearing on their labels the comforting assurance that they
could be served hot in three minutes. These were ever small
consolation to Mammy Lou, however, and she always serves them with as
much humiliation as if the "Yankee beans" and "het-over peas" were the
proverbial dinner of herbs.

This morning, though, the lid was shut fast on the tinned diet
department and there was as much beautiful fried chicken sizzling
drowsily on the back of the stove as northern people always give us
Southerners credit for having. The best white and gold china was on
the table, and a tall vase of Paul Neron roses on the mantelpiece,
hiding father's bottle of rheumatism cure.

At mammy's suggestion that she heard the "thing" hollering I had
thrown on my clothes without waiting to wipe all the water out of my
ears, and had run down-stairs to see if mother needed me to pin her
collar down in the back, for I knew she would be wanting to look her
best this morning. We were all a little excited (things so seldom
happen here) and I noticed that father was using his most rheumatic
hand and arm every few minutes to take his watch out of his pocket;
yet he forgot to frown.

The Claybornes were coming, Waterloo, Rufe and Cousin Eunice. We were
feeling particularly anxious about the outcome of their visit, for
mother and I had conspired together that a few political talks with
Rufe _had_ to cure father of his rheumatism. So we were watching every
movement on his part with eager interest.

You must not imagine that we are unsympathetic with father when he
actually has an attack. We rub him and put hot things to his shoulder,
and I have actually gone so far as to let him explain the _primary
plan_ to me in words of one syllable that a child could understand,
just to get his mind diverted.

Like most high-spirited men, when father does get down into the depths
he tries to burrow clear on through to China. I wonder why this is?
Possibly it is on the same principle that effervescent drugs are kept
in blue bottles. I do not blame him, certainly, for rheumatism is
enough to get on anybody's nerves. The poor man has to try as many
different positions to get any ease sometimes as a worn-out alarm
clock that will run only on a certain side. So the summer has been a
hard one for us all, father waxing so melancholy here lately that if
he has a gum-boil he gives us directions for his cremation.

It was during one of these outbursts of pessimism that father took it
into his head to disfigure the landscape across the road from our
house with a row of smart cottages, which were to rent for so much a
month that they would prove a get-rich-quick scheme and so save us
from the humiliation of being cared for by the Masons in our old age,
which was another one of the notions in the train of rheumatic gloom.

Fortunately the first cottage cost so much more than it was worth that
the project for the rest was abandoned; and, after it was duly
insured, mother and I were secretly burning candles to our patron
saint for its incineration when it was rented to a family named
Sullivan. This Sullivan family consists of a father who drinks, just a
little, enough to keep him jolly all the time; a mother who is of such
a despondent nature that you wish she would drink; a daughter who
wears crimson silk gowns and jeweled combs to the post-office when she
goes for her mail every morning, yet withal has more beaus than any
other girl in the village, as is attested by the candy boxes piled
piano-high in her parlor; and a maiden aunt, Miss Delia Badger, who
dyes her hair. Now, this term, "maiden aunt," is usually employed to
denote a condition of hopelessness, but you will understand from the
dyed hair that, in this case, the condition is far from being
hopeless--else why the dye?

The pristine blackness of Miss Delia's crown of glory was beginning to
wear off, and in the stress of moving had not been replaced as soon as
it should have been, so, on the day that I made her acquaintance, her
hair displayed an iridescent sheen, shading from light tan to deep
purple. This made me so angry with father for having built the cottage
that I ran past him without a word of sympathy when I reached home,
although he was sitting on the front porch reading the paper and
making horrible faces every time he had to move his arm.

The next day, which was the second after their moving, when I turned
in at our gate after my morning tramp, I found that the Sullivans were
presenting a much more homelike view from the front of their house,
elaborate curtains showing at the parlor windows, and at the front
door a white panel of lace, a most lifelike affair, representing
Andrew Jackson mounted upon his fiery steed and lifting his high white
hat to an imaginary, though evidently enthusiastic, throng.

"_Now_, I reckon you're satisfied," I exclaimed to father as I came
into the house and found him cleaning his gun, one end of it resting
on the piano, and a pile of greasy rags perilously close to my
limp-backed copy of Gray's _Elegy_.

He quickly moved the gun and rags, but seeing that this offense was
not the cause of my wrath, he meekly inquired: "What?"

Mother came in at this juncture and I explained to them my indignation
over the Andrew Jackson.

"Jumping Jerusalem!" father said, thus admitting his horrified
surprise, but after a moment he parried.

"It may be Napoleon, or Frederick the Great."

"What difference would that make?" I demanded. "A warrior has no place
on a door-panel. Besides, it's 'Old Hickory.' I'd know that high white
hat anywhere! Wasn't I born and _raised_ in the shadow of it?"

"Dear me! But maybe you are mistaken," mother interposed gently. "It
is quite a distance across the road--it may be a peculiar pattern of
Batten--"

Before she had finished I darted up the steps and scrambled around in
the bureau drawer for my opera-glasses.

"Take these out to the porch and _look_," I begged, as I came down
again and found the two still facing each other with a quizzical
smile. She carried out my suggestion and presently came back, still
smiling.

"It's Andrew," she reported, reaching out for my opera-bag and
slipping the glasses into it; "it's Andrew beyond a doubt; but,
dearie, it _can't_ outlast two washings."

This assurance comforted me somewhat every time I had to look at the
military door-panel, but on cleaning days when the parlor curtains at
the cottage were tucked up and I discerned the large, colored portrait
of Mr. Roosevelt which smiled sunnily down from the space above the
mantelpiece there was no such consoling reflection.

About this time it was that I grew to know Neva, the daughter of the
house. Her family called her "Nevar," most nasally, after the manner
of "ordinary" people in the South; but I soon found qualities in her
that made me forgive the silk gowns and jeweled combs, aye, even the
Andrew Jackson.

In the first place I discovered that she entertained a most profound
admiration for me, especially for my pronunciation and finger-nails.
Of these she at once set about a frank imitation which later extended
to things more impersonal. Once, after I had shown her my books and
she had breathed a long, ecstatic sigh over the pictures in the
library I found that the hero of San Juan was falling into disfavor as
a parlor ornament. Neva had been especially impressed with a small
oval portrait of my childhood's hero, Lord Byron, which mother had
found once in a curio-shop in New Orleans and brought home to me.

"Who is he?" she asked, her eyes fixed admiringly on the matchless
face. I explained to her.

"Is he dead?" she inquired softly.

"Alas, yes!"

"But it certainly is swell to have his picture here," she volunteered.
"I reckon it's because he's dead that it is more quiet and elegant,
somehow, than a president's picture. Now Mr. Roosevelt looks so horrid
and _lively_!"

From this I gathered that the ex-president would sooner or later be
deposed, but I was surprised to find that it had happened much sooner
than I had expected, for the next time I visited the Sullivan home I
found Mr. Roosevelt's jolly face gone; and in its stead the gentle
features of William McKinley looked down on the candy-boxes and
pink-flowered cuspidors. That he was dead was evidenced by the black
border running mournfully around the print; and Neva called my
attention to the fact as soon as I came into the room.

"You see he looks quieter than Roosevelt because he's dead," she
elucidated, "although he isn't a poet! Papa said he'd buy me a poet
the next time he went up to the city--and oh, a green leather copy of
Gray's 'Prodigy!'--like yours!"

So, in trying to teach Neva the difference between presidents and
poets, I have been able to enliven some of the dull days; and she is
such a sweet little thing at heart that, if she never gets the
difference clear, my time is not ill-spent anyway.

But ah, _this_ morning the Claybornes were coming! And we were all out
at the gate in a twinkling when we finally did hear the shrill whistle
of the car! The first sight of Waterloo's sparkling little face
rewarded me for dressing while my ears were still wet. He had on a
Buster Brown suit of white linen, with red anchors embroidered in
their usual places, and a brave red badge setting forth his political
inclinations. Father's lame hand had already reached out for him.

"Hello, Uncle Dan!" he said cordially, paying no attention to the
feminine portion of the crowd. "Are you for it or 'ginst it?"

"I'm 'ginst it, too," father answered, drawing from his pocket a
similar badge.

"That's right! Now show me the mules!"

He and father led the way up the walk, followed by the rest of us,
with Grapefruit, escorted by a hilarious Lares and Penates, bringing
up the rear.

Grapefruit, be it known, is Waterloo's nurse, or, more properly
speaking, is a kind of jester to His Majesty. Her genuine name is
Gertrude, but she came to him when he was at such a tender age that
he corrupted it to Grapefruit, and Rufe says that if he had named her
Fragrant Pomegranate Vine it would not be any too good for her. She is
an ethereal little darky with wonderful powers of diversion. Cousin
Eunice tells about how she found her out in the side yard playing with
Waterloo one May morning long ago, and how his soul so clave unto her
soul that he refused to give her up.

Automobiles, red wagons, fire-engines, boxes of candy--all were
suggested in vain. "I want my little Grapefruit," he tearfully
insisted, over and over again, until the attractive one modestly
announced that she might be engaged to stay and amuse him by the week
for "seventy-five or fifty cents, or I'll stay for nothing if you'll
let me play on the piano."

Cousin Eunice joyfully agreed to the highest figure asked, with the
use of the piano thrown in, yea and the telephone, the type-writer, in
short, everything in the house except her tooth-brush. So Grapefruit
stayed, and at this period of their lives is as necessary a part of
the Claybornes' traveling outfit as their collapsible drinking-cup.

After breakfast was over we lingered in the dining-room a while, as is
our custom when we have interesting guests; and we women rested our
elbows on the table and talked, while the men lit their cigars and
pounded the table-cloth until the spoons jumped out of the saucers, so
vehement were their expressions about "that blackguard of a governor."

We women talked about Waterloo, of course.

"He's at the loveliest age, right now, I think," mother said, as our
three pairs of eyes wandered out in his direction to the long back
porch, where Grapefruit and Lares were making him a pack-saddle, so
they could "tote 'im" down to the lot. He was entirely too good to
walk that first morning.

"Yes, I rather dislike the thought of his growing into a great, rough,
short-haired boy," Cousin Eunice assented, looking at him fondly.
"That terrible age when they always smell like their puppies! But,
that's quite a while off. He is still a baby."

"I find that they are always more or less babies," mother said,
looking toward me, "--no matter what their age may be."

"Oh, this talk about ages reminds me of a book I brought for Ann to
read," Cousin Eunice said, rising from the table and starting toward
the front hall where their bags had been hastily dropped that we might
not delay Mammy Lou's hot breakfast. "Stay here, all of you, and wait
until I get it. It contains an interesting thought."

"Then it's that much ahead of most new books," Rufe remarked, his
attention having been attracted from his own line of talk by Cousin
Eunice starting to leave the dining-room.

"It isn't strictly new," she commented, returning in a few moments
with the book in her hand. "It was written several years ago. It's
nothing out of the ordinary in plot, and the thought which impressed
some of us in the 'Scribblers' Club' was concerning the age of Eve
when she was created. The heroine of the story is named Eve and is
young and fair, so the hero, a gallant soldier, remarks to her one day
as they are walking by the river bank at a stolen tryst, that he
fancies the first mother was at his sweetheart's identical age when
she was created. You see, it is quite a poetic fancy."

"More poetic than true. Soldiers don't talk that way," father said
drily. "How old did the book say this Eve was?"

"The author was too wise to tell in plain figures," she answered, "but
it was somewhere under the twenties--in the early flush of youth."

"Well, Adam was the first man who ever had the chance of a wife made
to order," father kept on. "Surely he had more sense than to take a
seventeen-year-old girl."

"No, you're wrong," Rufe disagreed. "I believe that Adam was too much
of a gentleman to look a gift wife in the mouth."

"I'll get the Concordance and see if there's any record of her age,"
mother said, bustling off toward her bedroom and returning in a moment
with her well-worn book, but she was unable to find any definite facts
about Eve on the morning of that first surgical operation.

"What difference does it make about the actual number of years?" Rufe
inquired, with an air of dismissing the subject. "The age of Eve is
that picturesque period which comes to a girl after her elbows are
rounded out."

My bared arms happened to be resting again on the table during this
discussion, and, as Rufe spoke, Cousin Eunice's eyes wandered in their
direction. "Then Ann's at it," she concluded triumphantly, and they
all stared at me curiously, as if the age of Eve were showing on me
like pock-marks!

"Ann doesn't seem nearly so old as she really is," mother began with a
kind of uneasy look. "You see, she has never been to school very
much, so her education--"

"Now, please don't begin about my education," I begged, for it is a
mooted question in my family whether or not I have any, father and I
maintaining that I have all that is necessary, mother wishing that it
had been more carefully directed along the conventional lines. "If I
should go to school until I'm as old as Halley's comet I couldn't
learn the things I don't like. And I know all the rest without going!
Don't people call me up for miles around to ask who wrote _Prometheus
Bound_ and how to spell 'candidacy?'"

"So you're satisfied with yourself?" Rufe teased.

"Far from it," I denied, "but I am certainly satisfied with the amount
of schooling _in schools_ I've had. Ugh, I hate the thought of it!"

"But how can you ever amount to anything without an education?" mother
persisted.

"Never fear," I assured her easily. "I'll amount to my destiny, no
matter whether I've ever seen inside a school or not. When I was a
child I always imagined I was cut out to be Somebody; and even now I
occasionally have a notion that Fate is watching me through her
lorgnette!"

"You and Jean Everett used to have such queer ideas about
yourselves--with your notions of marrying dukes and living in castles,
and all that kind of thing," Cousin Eunice said, after a moment of
amused thought.

"Jean still has her notions," Rufe broke in. "Our city editor is out
of his depth in love with her and I met her on the street the other
day and tried to bespeak her pity for the poor fellow. She assured me
that the man _she_ married would be so important the papers would all
get out an extra every time his assassination was attempted!"

"Well, she'd better decide to take Guilford then," I said warmly, for
it is a source of great satisfaction to me that my old friend, Jean
(still my best friend), is half-engaged to Guilford Houghton, a grave
young lawyer who is already making people take notice. He is a very
quiet, dignified young man, so tall and thin and straight that he
reminds me of a silk umbrella carefully rolled.

For a long time Jean seemed not to care much about him, but he kept
paying his court as persistently as a fly in wet weather until she was
finally won--half-way. He has very methodical ways, and calls to see
her only on Sunday and Wednesday evenings, but she devotes so much
time and care to her toilet for hours and hours preceding these visits
that we call them her "days of purification."

"Guilford is not so showy, maybe," she said to me one time, in
explanation of her fondness for him, which she tries hard to conceal,
"but he's so _dependable_. That's worth a lot to a girl who has been
engaged to four or five Apollos, all of them about as reliable as
drop-stitch stockings!"

"For my part, I admire Jean's ambition," father spoke up, although
none of us suspected that he was listening to our rambling talk. "I'd
rather see a girl with an ambition like that than one with none at
all--one of these little empty-headed gigglers whose age of Eve
announces its arrival by all the i's in her name being changed into
y's."

Waterloo came in at this point and demanded again that the mules be
shown him, so father and Rufe set out for the stables.

"Shall we walk around and look at things, too?" I asked Cousin Eunice
as we filed out on to the back porch. It is a habit with us two to
steal away for a quiet little talk the first few hours we are together
and take stock of each other's happenings since we met last.

"No," she answered, looking at me steadily. "The orchard and vineyard
are more beautiful in the afternoon. We'll walk all over the place
then. Besides, I have a notion that you'll want to tell me things
which will sound better in the afternoon sunshine."

"Not a thing," I denied, and wondered how a discussion of poetic
fancies at the breakfast table could make her so sentimental.

"Then you are wasting some mighty valuable time," she replied. "Most
normal girls of your age are brimful of plans and ideas." She would
have said secrets, as she intended to, but Mammy Lou hove in sight
just then with a big pan of butter-beans for me to shell for dinner.

Rufe had stopped her at the kitchen door with the usual query, "Well,
Mammy, you're not married again?"

"Naw, sir," she had admitted, with a self-conscious smile, "although I
did have a _boa'der_ all the spring."

Waterloo protested against even this slight pause in their progress
toward the stables, so with an amused smile Rufe forbore to continue
the conversation, but passed on and Mammy Lou ambled in our direction
just in time to hear part of Cousin Eunice's remark to me.

"Law, Miss Eunice, you can't git nothin' out o' _her_," she said
disgustedly, as she set the pan of beans down and began to fan herself
with her apron. "She's plen'y old enough, the Lord knows, to be takin'
notice, _although_ Mis' Mary don't think so. I heerd you-all talkin'
'bout certain ages at the breakfas' table, but I can tell you _she_
ain't at it. She don't look at nary one of 'em twicet; an' when the
shore-nuff age of Eve has come to a girl she begins eyin' ever' man
she meets to see if he's got a missin' rib that'll match with hern!"




CHAPTER III

THE BOOKWORM TURNS


"'Tis ill work trying to ride Pegasus on a side-saddle," Cousin Eunice
said this morning as she hurriedly threw aside her pencil and paper
and ran to tell Dilsey about not putting any starch in the legs of
Waterloo's rompers. "He's not a lady's horse anyhow," she continued as
she came back and sat down on the grass again, "especially after a
man, a baby and a gas stove have come into the lady's life."

"Gas stove?" I questioned, looking up from my book, a heavy old French
book, it was, for mother's remark about my neglected education had
made me feel a little uneasy after all. Cousin Eunice is not the kind
of woman to fill her letters full of household matters, hence my
surprised question.

"A good cook, with me, is only a memory," she said with a sadly
reminiscent air. "I have a girl whose name is Pearl, but alas it is a
lie! Even the day I learned that my book had found a publisher I had
to get up out of my trance and peel potatoes for luncheon."

"Surely not!"

"Yes. I peeled them, but they were never cooked, for when Rufe came
home and heard the news he hustled us all off to town and we had
luncheon in Beauregard's privatest dining-room. We ordered all the
things that disagree with us most--by way of reckless indulgence."

"How did you feel when you heard that news?" I asked with interest,
for the book manuscript which Cousin Eunice had been working on since
the days of her single blessedness had grown to be like a member of
the family with us all, especially of late years, after a certain
critic had pronounced it good. It suddenly grew so valuable after that
that she kept it in a little brown leather bag all the time and would
never leave the house without telling somebody where that bag was (in
case of fire) and making them promise to play Casabianca to those
precious sheets until they should be rescued.

"Just dazed!" she answered simply. "Pretty much as I felt when I found
that Rufe was going to be mine--only a great deal less so, you know."

"I wonder if you are ever going to be really great?" I pursued, for
since I have grown so old I share all her hopes and fears, just as if
we were sisters. "With a trip around the world as a starter, and a
quiet little castle on the Italian coast as a next step. Then you can
sign checks for a thousand dollars and get your pictures taken for
nothing."

"Well, not at the rate I'm going now," she replied with a rueful smile
toward her book and pencil lying inert on the grass; yet she made no
effort to resume her work. Evidently the starch in Waterloo's rompers
had driven away romance.

"But everything has its compensation," she continued after a moment.
"If I never get my great trip around the world with a ten-days'
stop-over in Japan I can never write a book about that long-suffering
country, so I shall still have something to be thankful for."

"The public is the one to be thankful," I added.

"That's true, too," she agreed. "It may have cause to be thankful if
this second book of mine is never finished, but nevertheless you don't
know what a fever of impatience I'm in to see it all smoothly laid out
between two pieces of paste-board and ready for the express label to
be put on."

"Yes, I believe I do know, though certainly not about a _book_. I am
sure I know what fever of impatience means." But she was so absorbed
in her own troubles that she did not notice this indirect
acknowledgment of mine.

"I had imagined that I could get my mind into a state of at least
comparative tranquillity down here," she kept on. We were out in our
favorite lair, a screened-off grassy spot in the side yard, where a
double row of althea bushes furnishes a sense of security against
intrusion, yet we were close enough to Waterloo to hear him every time
he bumped his head or skinned his knee.

"This place is almost unearthly in its quiet beauty," she said after a
moment, looking up through the green vista toward the house. The
passion flowers were clambering up on the garden fence and running
riot over the yellowing cornstalks. Back of the kitchen the well-house
lay asleep in the sun, the star-like blossoms of white clematis which
covered the roof of the old building were still untouched by that
feathery change which forecasts their coming blight.

"It _is_ beautiful--and it certainly is quiet," I coincided with her
emphatically.

"Sometimes at home when the telephone bell and the door-bell and the
club meetings and the butcher boys and the laundry men have all made a
throbbing pain come in my head I steal away up-stairs to my little den
where I lock the door and lie down to try to ease that nervous pain.
Then I close my eyes and try to project my astral body down here into
all this still, summer loveliness. I come up the gravel walk and on to
the front porch--oh, those cedar porches! And I go through the shady
hall to the back gallery where I find myself face to face with a great
cold watermelon that has just been cut."

"And the library is full of roses, and there is a tray of fragrant
peaches that Dilsey gathered early in the morning."

"Ah! I see that you feel its beauty just as much as if it were not an
every-day affair to you," she said, looking at me with another one of
those searching glances which she has treated me to several times
lately. "No wonder you have grown to look like the place."

"To look like it!" I encouraged her to go on, for a compliment is more
food for my soul than all the white hyacinths in a florist's window.

"Surely you look like it," she continued. "You are as patrician
looking as the house--and as vivid as the flowers in the yard."

"Dear me!" I exclaimed. "Then I am _good-looking_?"

"Ann, don't be an idiot! If Aunt Mary had longed for a child as white
as snow and as red as blood and as black as the ebony of her
embroidery frame, she couldn't have produced anything more exotic than
you."

There was a moment of silence in which I thought of the vivid beauty
of Lady Caroline Lamb. Of course I am not anything to compare with
her! Of _course_ not! But how these vivid beauties _care_--for some
one--when the time comes! Yes; when the time comes. But, dear me, it
seems that it is never coming!

"Well, what good does it all do me?" I demanded at length, the
long-pent-up storm of restlessness thundering to make itself heard.
"Granted that I look as well as you say, and that I live in an earthly
paradise--can't you see that there is no--that it is _lonesome_?"

"You are bored?" she asked sympathetically.

"Bored! I am stifling!"

"Yet the summer here is a joy--with oceans of morning-glories and
miles of horseback riding!"

"It is a joy, I admit, and a thousand times better than being a summer
girl at a noisy watering-place."

"What is a summer girl?" she asked with a smile, but I was not
smiling. I was pessimistic.

"A sleepy-headed female with trunks full of soiled clothes! That's
what I always am when I get back from a trip."

"Of course the winters here are dull." She had picked up her tablet
and was writing her initials over and over again on the back.

"They are. Dull gray," I agreed. "The days are a weary succession of
that uninteresting color; but, dreary as they are, you want them to
last. When the daylight is fading and night coming on, but while it is
still too early to light the lamps--then is the worst time of all!
There is no sound on earth save a few lonely little calf bleats from
down in the lot, until the woodchop echoes begin--and they are
lonelier still."

"It's awful, I know!"

"Do you know what I do on such nights as this? I get out my
opera-glasses and long gloves and a lace handkerchief, and lay them on
my table as if I were about to dress for a beautiful opera. Then I
read _Aux Italiens_; think a while--and go to bed."

"Poor child!"

"I used never to feel this way," I kept on. "Always--until lately--I
have loved winter. It has meant only great roaring fires and _barrels_
of apples. Even the absorbing books which used always to accompany the
apples and big fires are not absorbing any more."

"Of course not. A girl with as much _go_ in her as you have needs to
lose herself entirely in something."

"And that something will never be bound in three-quarters morocco," I
replied, flinging away my book impatiently.

"No, indeed! The bookworm has turned. The 'something' will be bound in
an English tweed suit of clothes through the day's business hours,
and--"

"And a long gray overcoat, and a soft gray hat."

She looked at me in surprise.

"Then you've seen him?"

"I have seen--the type."

She understood, but she still looked at me wonderingly.

"Alfred?" she ventured.

"No. He is my friend, but if I were in love with Alfred I'd have
palpitations every time I passed the red cross on an ambulance. That's
the way _I'm_ going to love."

"I should think you could find an outlet for all the pent-up ambition
you complain of, if you loved Alfred," she insisted, although she
imagined that she was not insisting. "I have never met a more
ambitious man, nor one of such singleness of purpose. Naturally
success seems to gravitate toward him, as the crow flies."

"And still it seems such a short while ago that Doctor Gordon took a
liking to him, when he was a raw medical student," I said
thoughtfully, my mind going back to the day I first saw Alfred Morgan,
big, broad and bronzed, with his hair too long and his sleeves too
short. There have been many days since then; days of a delightful
comradeship when I was in the city. I would look after him with
sisterly authority, bidding him wear his rubbers on rainy mornings, or
give me his gloves to mend whenever I happened to be spending the day
at the Gordons' and we sat down for a quiet chat after luncheon. Ann
Lisbeth and Doctor Gordon still live so close to the Claybornes that
we are like one big family when I am with them. Alfred soon began to
tell me that I was his best friend, but he never called me the
"guiding star of his existence." He tried to teach me the bones of the
face, instead, and explained the barbarism of corsets.

When he was out in practice the first year, but still lived with the
Gordons, because Doctor Gordon would not let him go, I used to drive
around with him to see his patients, sitting out in the runabout,
which he had bought at half-price because it was a last year's model,
and reading a magazine while he went in to make his calls. Often these
calls were made in crowded little factory settlements, where the whirr
of the cotton-mills sounded through the long periods of waiting; and
the houses were built so close on the street that I could hear the
click of the lock as he unfastened his instrument case.

"I admit that Alfred's career generates thrills up and down the
backbones of his admiring friends," I said after the pause which had
been filled in by my busy thoughts. She was still writing her initials
over the back of her tablet. "Who knows this better than I? Haven't I
been a mother to the boy ever since that time I read surgical anatomy
to him when he had tonsillitis? One of the most dramatic moments of
my life was the night I stabbed--"

I caught myself, but not in time, for Cousin Eunice had looked up from
her book with a horrified stare. "_What?_" she demanded.

"Oh, it was only that detestable Burke's automobile tire," I had to
explain then, but I had kept the occurrence a secret hitherto, and I
was not keen on telling it now.

"It was during the year of Alfred's internship and you remember that
Burke was always doing him an ill turn? One drippy night that fall
when I was in Doctor Gordon's car in front of the hospital and they
didn't see me, I overheard Burke and another intern plotting to beat
Alfred out of a surgical case that was coming in on the train that
night and belonged, by rights, to him. They had arranged to hurry on
over to the station first, in Burke's new car that his fond mamma had
given him, but when they went back into the house to get their
raincoats I was out of that machine like a Nemesis and had stuck my
hat-pin into the two tires on Burke's car which were most in the
shadow; so, when they started off, they had gone only about a block
and were down in the mud swearing--when Alfred dashed grandly by on
the ambulance."

"You little tiger!"

"Burke ought to have had the hat-pin stuck in _him_," I added
savagely.

"Aren't we _still_ barbarians--at heart?" she demanded, throwing her
tablet aside and straightening up so suddenly that I knew her thoughts
had already strayed away from my recital. "Now, that's the way I have
always felt about Appleton since he's been governor. Lots of times
when I have been helping Rufe write those violent attacks against him
I would almost choke with rage. I actually wanted to kill him."

"You _helped_ Rufe?" I asked with envy. "He admitted that you had
sense enough to?"

"Some of the _meanest_ things the _Times_ has ever printed about him
were my thoughts," she said proudly. "But it has never printed a lie!"

"Ah, that must be something worth while," I commented admiringly, for
my ideas concerning women and their possible achievements are strictly
modern. "I should like to be the power behind the revolving-chair."

I see already that the above paragraph contradicts itself, for being
the power _behind_ things is as old as Eve; but then, the prerogative
of contradicting oneself belongs by rights to her daughters.

"Do you care for politics any more than you used to?" Cousin Eunice
asked hopefully.

"Politics and mathematics were ever of equal interest to me," I was
bound to acknowledge. "But I have been able to understand a little
about the primary plan this summer--father's taught me. And I know
that the 'machine gang' is _always_ the other fellows!"

"Well, that's a brilliant start," said a sarcastic male voice from the
other side of the hedge, and Rufe's amused face rose up to our
confusion. Without waiting for invitation he came through and sat down
on the grass beside us.

"Well, she'd enjoy some of _our_ politicians, wouldn't she?" Cousin
Eunice asked Rufe as she moved over farther to give him more room, for
the althea branches were wide and thick, and entangled themselves in
our hair persistently. "Whether she cares for politics or no, eh?"

"Oh, she'd lose her head over Chalmers," Rufe acquiesced as
indifferently as the male relative of a girl always shows in
discussing "possible" men. "Lord Byron is as a comic valentine
compared with him in looks."

"Richard Chalmers," I repeated. "I've seen his name in the paper
often, but I don't know exactly what he is."

"Neither does any one else," Rufe answered meaningly. "He's a rich
young lawyer--inherited his money--and so shrewd that he's not going
to join the Appleton forces, no matter what pretentions they make to
get him on their side." He spoke as if he were arguing the question.

"Of course he isn't," Cousin Eunice added stoutly.

"But what _is_ he?" I asked, fearful lest they get into a discussion
and forget to satisfy my curiosity, which was--strange to
say--considerably aroused.

"Well, if he would declare himself definitely upon the liquor
question," Rufe explained concisely, "he would be about the most
promising piece of gubernatorial timber that we have."




CHAPTER IV

A NEW GAME


     "If we knew when walking thoughtless
       Through some crowded, noisy way,
     That a pearl of wondrous whiteness,
       Close beside our pathway lay;
     We would pause, where now we hasten,
       We would often look around,
     Lest our careless feet should trample
       Some rare jewel in the ground."

It was like my extravagant nature to quote this verse of "speech day"
poetry while engaged in such a commonplace pursuit, but then the age
of Eve is an extravagant age.

I was in a tight little cell of a room back of the pantry, a hot
enough place on an August morning; a little den where we store old
magazines, last summer hats, pictures and bric-à-brac that we have
outgrown, and piles of newspapers.

It was the last named species of junk that was absorbing my earnest
attention, to say naught of perspiration, on the day I have in mind,
which is by no means a distant one. My forehead was wet and my hair
was sticking to it in damp little slabs, but I was unaware of this
until afterward, when my family called my attention to it, and
inquired where I had been and what I had been doing. Then I was in no
mood to tell them.

"It ought to be somewhere in the June lot," I mused, as I stretched my
arm across a bundle of worn-out bedroom curtains and dragged a batch
of dusty papers over into my lap.

I have been very idle and lonely for the last few days, else I doubt
if I should have been driven to such occupation as this. I knew it was
foolish, even as I did it, but the Claybornes have been away, staying
with the elder Claybornes a while, only returning this morning early,
and Cousin Eunice has been so busy since then repairing the damage
done Waterloo's clothes that she has been uninteresting to me. The
Sullivans spent last week down in the country at a tiny town named
Bayville, where there is no sign of a bay; and I have missed the
workings of Neva sadly.

It denoted the recent trend of my mind that, as I thought of Neva,
upon this occasion, I immediately remembered that her father is a
strict anti-Appleton man. Anti-Appleton! How much the term means to me
now! A week ago I cared no more for its sound than I cared for the
nouns of the fifth declension.

I picked up the paper lying on top and began to fan with it a while
before wading into the mazes of the stack. In the few papers which I
had already looked over I found, _not_ the object of my search, it is
true, but wood-cuts and cartoons of men whose names have been familiar
to me for months in a vague, unreal sort of way, making a sound to my
ears, but meaning nothing--like the ringing of the telephone bell in
the next room when you are fast asleep. Yet the telephone bell will
finally awaken you if you are not dead--even _so_ it might, if it is a
doctor's telephone--and with what a start do you come to your senses
as you reproach yourself for not recognizing its important voice
sooner! I have felt this way many times lately, since I have taken up
the study of politics; and have found it vastly more interesting than
geometry.

The first mighty political name which ever forced itself upon my
understanding was Cleveland, and it is not surprising to me now that I
was mixed up as to its significance and imagined that, instead of a
surname, it was a title of nobility. It sounded like such a swelling
note of praise to me, for I was only a few years old, and the
torchlight procession on the night of his election filled me with a
strange delight.

Since then I have always had a good memory for oft-repeated names,
although I have frequently held as hazy impressions concerning them as
I did of Mr. Cleveland's honored cognomen. The politicians of my
native state have all gone by names that were as sounding brass and
tinkling cymbals to my untutored ears until the last few days, when I
have turned in and studied them as most girls study new embroidery
stitches.

This is, in part, what I have learned: Appleton is our governor and is
said to be everything that Charles I. of England was beheaded
for--"tyrant, traitor, murderer, and enemy to his country." I know
this is true because the paper we take says so; and if you are going
to doubt what your favorite newspaper says, why, then, do you take it?
I believe in loyalty above everything, and I think if the paper which
supports the other side of the question should, by mistake, be thrown
into your yard, you ought to run and kick the horrid sheet over the
fence into the gutter. That is, if you are a man. If you are a lady I
advise you to use the tongs for the purpose, especially if there is
any one passing by at the time.

Personally, I do not know Mr. Appleton, but I heard one fat, motherly
woman, whose son held a job under him, say that he was such a
kind-hearted governor because he set free so many poor prisoners! This
remark impressed me, and I was beginning to think well of him, when
here came that paper again (Rufe's paper) saying that the governor was
turning them loose at so much per, a murderer being a little higher in
price than a "pistol-toter," who, in turn, is more expensive than a
boot-legger, the last really being a kind of bargain-day leader,
inasmuch as he is such a help to the administration!

Well, I dare say no governor is a hero to all the papers in his state!

This is quite enough penmanship wasted on Mr. Appleton anyway; for he
is as dead as Philadelphia on Sunday, and the public, with its
handkerchief held to its nose, is only waiting until next election,
when quicklime will be poured over the remains by the young and
gallant Richard Chalmers.

Of course, you understand the cause of the political unrest? It is the
whisky question, and everything in our state has been turned upside
down by it; that is, everything except the whisky. It is turned upside
down only when there is a glass under the bottle. Mr. Appleton favors
this phase of the whisky agitation.

Next in importance after the governor is a man named Blake, Jim Blake,
whom nobody ever calls James, and who is so much like a big fat worm
that I never pass him in the streets without wanting to mash him. He
is like one of those soft, white worms, you know, which I am sure I
have eaten dozens of on nights when I used to take a handful of
chestnuts to bed with me.

In the mountainous regions during his campaigns, they say, to make
himself solid with the boys, Jim Blake uses bad English and good
whisky; in the cities he uses good English and better whisky. All in
all, he is the most popular man in the state--a fact which makes you
wish you had anticipated Carlyle's remark about the population of his
country being mainly fools.

Major Blake was a power in politics a few years back, then he went
into obscurity for a while, on account of an ailing daughter, it was
said, who had to live in the West if she would live at all. The story
goes the rounds that at one time he gave up a senatorship for the sake
of staying with this daughter; and, if this is true, I beg his pardon
for calling him a worm!

Her name is Berenice Blake, which sounds so beautiful to me that I
feel sure her mother must have been the one who named her. I suppose
she improved somewhat in health from her outdoor life in the West, for
her father came back after a while, and at this present time she makes
frequent vibrations between her home and Denver, every one of which
causes prolonged paroxysms in the society columns.

In his political affiliations Jim Blake is like--like--my kingdom for
a simile! I might with truth say that he is like a chameleon, but I
have already likened him to a worm, and I do not care about getting
reptiles on the brain, especially this late at night. Also I might say
that he is like a lake of quicksilver, except that such a body would
resemble a stagnant, green-scummed pool compared with the surface
spring of his opinions--opinions which vary with the tinkle of silvery
sounds.

Yet the fact is there, and as immovable as a window-sash in wet
weather, that he is the most popular man in the state. And, while what
I have repeated about him is truth, or as near truth as anything is
supposed to be in politics, it is disloyal gossip coming from me
_now_, for Jim Blake is at home at present, he is unpledged, and we
are hoping high hopes that he will come out on our side. The spectacle
is pretty much like a body of priests which might be standing by
watching for the devil to shed horn, hoofs and tail and put on a clean
collar, buttoned behind.

With their zest for canonizing their leaders I wonder what the
temperance workers _will_ do with a man as handsome as Richard
Chalmers is said to be? How the "popular young ladies" of the towns
will fall over one another in trying to present him with a great sheaf
of roses at the close of his speech! I hate that bouquet-presenting
worse than anything else done by the women who mix up with candidates!
Men hate it, too, and when I sounded Rufe on the subject he just
frowned and said: "Oh, it's _awful_, but what are you going to do?" I
suggested that he have the candidate say "Please omit flowers," or "I
will not look upon the roses while they are red," or words to that
effect, at the close of his speech.

But Rufe shook his head sadly.

"There are three things in this life that a woman is a fool about," he
explained to me, "the surgeon who removes her appendix, the minister
who saves her soul, and the politician who lets her 'take on' over him
in public!"

"But the candidate _hates_ the flowers and the praying at the polls and
the general patting on the back like 'he's-mamma's-good-little-boy'
that they inflict upon him, doesn't he?"

"I should _think_ so," Rufe admitted.

I was studying over this phase of the next year's campaign when I
attacked the pile of papers in my lap and was wondering if Richard
Chalmers would hate the fuss they would inevitably make over him.

June 14, 15, 16, I glanced through without finding anything of
interest, and it was tiresome work. Oh, why did I not realize at the
time these papers were fresh and new that they held a "pearl of
wondrous whiteness?" It would have saved all this trouble. But likely
Mammy Lou had used the _very_ one to kindle the fire with. That would
be worse than tramping the rare jewel in the ground! Ah!

Was it prophetic that just as I was thinking over the words "rare
jewel" the object of my search met my eyes? Of course, you are not
stupid, my journal, and you have long ago seen that I was looking
diligently for all the news, but _mostly_ the picture of Richard
Chalmers, the good-looking young David who might slay the monster
Goliath, if he would take his smooth pebble from a _brook_ and not
from a brewery!

Well, it was the picture I found, and his name was in big letters
beneath. I looked at the face first, then quickly at the name, but I
put the two together with difficulty.

"So Richard Chalmers is _you_!" I said aloud in my surprise. Then I
stared at the picture as steadfastly as Ahmed Al Kamel must have
looked at the portrait of the princess, the first woman's face he had
ever seen. A feeling of superstition came stealing over me and daring
me to say that this was only a happen-so.

"So it's _you_," I repeated without moving my eyes from the picture,
"and that must be why I felt such a curious interest in this political
business."

The stuffy heat of the tight little room, the piles of dusty old
papers, the politics and rumors of politics were all forgotten in a
twinkling as my memory bounded back and even took in the details of
the landscape that dull day last November when I saw him first. Alfred
Morgan had asked me to drive with him out one of the pikes where he
had a call to make. I was at Cousin Eunice's and he had called me by
telephone to ask me to go; Cousin Eunice and Ann Lisbeth were
wrestling over an intricate shirt-waist pattern, but they both stopped
long enough to insist that it was too cold for me to go so far out
just for the fun of going. But I insisted equally as firmly upon
going, so Ann Lisbeth made me wear her motor bonnet and long fur coat,
which were very becoming.

Our route lay out one of the pikes which I like most, a beautiful
driveway, with a lovely little Jewish cemetery about three miles out.
I found that it _was_ cold, and when we reached the cemetery I asked
Alfred to put me out so that I could walk around a bit and try to get
warm--while he made his call just a short distance farther up the
road. He could honk-honk for me if I had wandered out of sight by the
time he came back. We frequently did that way.

Then it was that I first saw Richard Chalmers, coming out of the
little red lodge house at the gates of the cemetery. He was dressed in
gray, with a long gray overcoat and a soft gray hat; and his fairness
made no break in the dull monochrome of the surroundings. The
brilliant-hued lodge, with the Oriental dome, made the only warm spot
of color in my line of vision, but he was looking at me, too, and I am
sure he saw other spots of color, for my face flushed somewhat as I
recognized him as being the first man I had ever seen in my life whom
I cared about looking at.

He must be tall, for the coat he wore that day was quite long, but I
do not remember taking in any details except his face. This was
natural, for it appeared to me then as being a very good face to look
at, even aside from the peculiar charm which afterward made me
remember it so. Cameo-like in its distinctness, with steel-gray eyes,
it reminded me of the face I used to tell Jean about years ago when we
each had an Ideal. "Cold-blooded and lean as Dante," my description
had been in those bygone days, and Richard Chalmers' face strangely
fitted it, though by no means so cold nor so lean as I had formerly
thought necessary for perfect charm. It was only lean enough to be
intellectual-looking, and, if the keen gray eyes were cold, they were
also strong. His hair was short and of a very light-brown color; I
remembered this distinctly, for he had taken off his hat as he bade
good-by to whoever was inside the lodge, and he had stood a moment
bareheaded as he saw me, and looked at me with a degree of well-bred
surprise. There was nothing unusual in this, for, in driving out the
country roads with Alfred and Doctor Gordon, I have often observed
that when two well-dressed people pass each other they usually look.
Each one is likely wondering what the other is doing so far from the
madding crowd.

I was wondering what he was doing, Anglo-Saxon that he so evidently
was, coming from a Hebrew cemetery; then he untied the hitch-rein of a
horse that was restlessly twitching its head at a post near by, jumped
into the light buggy and drove off. Alfred and I passed him a little
later on, for he had been driving slowly, evidently to the distaste of
the horse. The creature was just the kind of animal you would expect a
man of his appearance to drive--slim and satiny and fast. Alfred
slowed up as we were passing, for the horse had drawn quickly to one
side of the road and was trembling with fright. The man in the buggy
held a tight rein and spoke a soothing word to her, then turned and
regarded us again. My heart bounded as our eyes met, and I wondered
why he had driven back to town so slowly.

The marked look of intellect which his face bore gave it an appearance
of asceticism, which his handsome clothes and general make-up belied.
He looked almost as unworldly as a monk--a monk fashionably dressed
and driving a race-horse!

We passed each other again the very next week, in the lobby of the
city hall this time, where I had gone with Ann Lisbeth to pay the
water-tax. He was talking with two men, and, as he recognized me, he
drew both of these men slightly to one side that Ann Lisbeth and I
might make our way to the elevator without being crowded. This time I
had passed so close to him that I could see the tiny lines around his
eyes, left there by the warring elements of his character, I imagined
afterward, when I was trying to recall every feature with its own
expression and thereby piece out, to my own satisfaction, a nature for
my impressive Unknown.

"He may do bad things sometimes," I finally concluded triumphantly,
"but he never enjoys doing them, because he has a conscience that
will not let him."

Once again I saw him, some time afterward, at the entrance of a
theater one crowded night when the most popular actress on the
American stage was playing. An emotional little actress she is, whose
feelings seem to be stationed largely in her finger-tips, for she uses
them as if she were talking to deaf mutes with them. I criticized the
play, pronounced the leading man a "plumber," made remarks about the
extravagant finger-play and otherwise spoiled my pleasure to such an
extent that I realized for the first time what a hold upon my
imagination the face of this Unknown had taken. He had passed quite
close, but he had not seen me!

After this I had thought about him very often, and, while he was not
exactly only a "type" to me, as I had been careful to explain to
Cousin Eunice, still, as the weeks slipped by and I had not seen him
again, his face became a kind of pleasant picture that I might draw
out sometimes and look at. A miniature, it must have been, for I
carried it with me everywhere I went; and it always seemed to bring
with it a sudden radiance, like a burst of sunshine at the close of a
dreary day.

A burst of sunshine at the close of a dreary day! The words were
lingering pleasantly in my memory when I was called back to earth by
the united voices of my family.

"Ann!" mother called. "_Ann!_"

"I've looked all over the place for her," I heard Cousin Eunice say,
and the sound of hurrying feet toward the dining-room gave me a
suggestion that it was time to eat again.

I ducked through the pantry door and made my way up-stairs without
being seen by any one. I bathed my face in cold water, which helped a
little, then I came on back down-stairs and faced them. They all
looked up at me. It was awful!

"Where you been at?" Mammy Lou inquired in a low but penetrating voice
as I passed her at the dining-room door; and the question was repeated
in other degrees of sound and grammatical precision. They were all
looking at my damp forehead.

"I tried to find you an hour ago," Cousin Eunice said, "I wanted to
tell you the news."

"And I wanted you to polish the silver on the sideboard," mother said
in an injured voice.

"Ann, we looked evvywhere fer you," Waterloo chimed in, with his mouth
so full that Cousin Eunice's attention was attracted to it and she
made him unload the portions of nourishment that were visible
externally. "Me and Grapefruit found a little _tarrypin_. Aunt Mary
said you wasn't scared of 'em!"

"Well, I'm glad it was nothing more important than a 'tarrypin' that
needed my ministrations," I began, thankful for a topic so entirely
earthly, but there was a hue and cry.

"Important!" Cousin Eunice exclaimed. "There are three mighty
politicians coming here to dinner to-night!"

"And the silver needs polishing," mother supplemented.

"Rufe was talking with them over the telephone this morning," father
explained. "They are in Bayville at a temperance rally and will have
to come here to-night to catch a car back to the city. Mother and I
thought it would be a shame to let them go to the hotel for
dinner--they're such friends of Rufe's."

"Now, you needn't lay it on Rufe," mother said, smiling at him. "You
know that if an Englishman dearly loves a lord, an American dearly
loves a lion. It's _you_ who want to hear them roar."

"Richard Chalmers is the only lion, so don't look so startled, Ann,"
Rufe said, as he began passing me things to eat; but I was not hungry.

"The other two likely eat with their knives," Cousin Eunice added
soothingly, as she still used her endeavors toward having Waterloo
feed himself like an anthropoid being.

"Oh, Ann doesn't worry over company," mother said, as she glanced at
me again. "She's been asleep. That's what makes her look--startled."




CHAPTER V

PRINCE CHARMING


I had not been asleep, but I had been in a dream; a dream from which I
had awakened to a state of greater unreality.

After the meal was over and the family had all left the dining-room I
was still in a dream as I rolled my sleeves up high and began giving
hasty dabs with the metal polish to the ancient silver on the
sideboard. How delightful it is to have heirloom silver! I failed even
to grow cross over the long, hot search for flannel cloths and the
gritty feeling which this distasteful task always leaves around my
finger-tips.

Still in a dream, I stood at the back kitchen door and watched Dilsey
decapitate the plumpest fowls the poultry yard boasted. I saw Lares
and Penates flying up and down the cellar steps, and to the garden,
orchard and vineyard--all at the same time. Later on in the afternoon
I was still dazed when I saw the ominous black signs of a
thunder-storm coming up darkly from the southwest; and I heard father
out in the hall using strong language at the telephone when he learned
that the liveryman had sent Bob Hall, the town idiot, to Bayville to
bring the lions back.

Now Bob Hall is a kind-hearted, narrow-eyed lad, whose mind has never
been right because his mother drove twenty miles to a circus just
before he was born, so the villagers explained; but, be that as it
may, Bob has never been able to learn much beyond when to say "Whoa"
and "Git up," but the joy of his life lies in saying these, so that
the liverymen of the town are glad to have him hang around the stables
and help with the horses at feeding and watering-time. Because the
regular driver was a little drunker than usual to-day Bob had been
sent to Bayville on that delicate commission!

"He's just as likely as not to dump 'em out in a mud-hole," father
said wrathfully, as he hung up the receiver when mother implored him
to leave off swearing over the telephone during an electrical storm.
"He'll make some kind of mess of it--you see if he doesn't."

I shuddered as I pictured that elegant gray overcoat all disfigured
with mud; then I shuddered again at being such an idiot as to imagine
he would have on an overcoat in August. And I wondered how he would
look without it, and decided that he would look grand, of course!

About five o'clock the storm burst in good earnest, the rain coming
down in heavy sheets at first and later settling into a lively drizzle
that promised to be good for all night.

With the rain came a noticeable effort on the part of father's
rheumatism to attract attention to itself; and Mammy Lou began
clapping her hand over her right side in an alarming manner.

Ever since an attack of gall-stones which she suffered over a year
ago, and through which she was safely steered by Alfred Morgan--which,
of course, placed him upon an Alfred-the-Great pinnacle in the
affections of the whole family--we have all turned in and helped Mammy
Lou with her work. Especially when company is coming we agitate our
minds over the actual meat and bread part of the entertainment, which
I abominate, for personally I am domesticated only so far as frothy
desserts and embroidered napkins go; and I am now able to understand
the decline of hospitality in the South.

Why, since mammy's spell I have actually learned how to "do up" my
best blouses, which is a joy so long as I am working on the front,
where the embroidery stands out in satisfying bas-relief, but I am
ready to weep and long for father's vocabulary by the time I reach the
gathers of the sleeves. I should certainly let these go unironed if
mammy did not always come to the rescue with a few deft strokes of the
Gothic-shaped end of the iron.

I must say, though, that she accepts our help with an exalted
indifference, for, since that awful pain in her side, things temporal
have been of small moment with her. She has turned to the comforts, or
discomforts, of a deeply Calvinistic religion, and is so keen-scented
after sin that when I darn stockings on Sunday morning I have to lock
my door and pull down the window-shades.

The only symptom of remaining worldliness which I have noted since her
belated conversion, besides her overwhelming desire to get me married
off to Alfred (my only rival in her affections) was exhibited early
this last spring, when her above-mentioned "boarder" was a new-comer
in our neighborhood and father had engaged his services to "break up"
the garden.

Sam, the homesick stranger, made strong appeal to mammy's hospitality,
quite aside, as we thought, from the natural susceptibility of her
affections. The man was big and _yellow_, mammy's favorite color in
husbands, and I scented danger one night soon after he came when I
happened to see her place before him on the table in the kitchen a
mighty dish of "greens" flanked on all sides with poached eggs.

He was busily plying her with questions, between mouthfuls, and when
he asked her point-blank "what aged 'oman she was" she threw her head
so coquettishly to one side that she splashed half a plateful of "pot
liquor" on the floor, as she responded airily: "Oh, I don't rickollect
exactly! I'm forty-five, or fifty-five, or sixty-five--somewhere in
the _fives_!"

We held our breath for the next few weeks, expecting at any moment to
hear that mammy had decided to out-Henry Henry Eighth, but her
religion was too fresh and too enjoyable for her to resign it and
marry the seventh time, which she realized would be a bad example for
her progeny. Still, there was Sam, in dangerous propinquity, three
times a day; and he was broad-shouldered and _enchantingly_ yellow!
She withstood, as long as it was in her poor, affectionate heart to
withstand; then she compromised and took him as a boarder! After
searching about for a means of easing her conscience for this
concession she lit upon Lares and Penates as brands to be snatched
from the burning; and she taught them such doleful facts about the
uncertainty of their salvation that the last time Alfred was down here
we persuaded him to threaten her with nervous prostration for Lares if
she persisted in her gloomy preachments.

"A boy or girl's responsible for they sins as soon as the bumps breaks
out on they faces," she was telling them this afternoon, when the
storm was at its worst, and the two sat huddled with Grapefruit behind
the stove, like poor little frightened chickens in a fence corner.

Mother, who had not seen the meaning gestures that mammy had been
making toward her volcanic right side, was inclined to make light of
the sins of the twins, and suggested that they come out from behind
the stove, so that the minute the rain held up a little they could run
on down to the ice-factory and tell the man to hurry with the ice. We
were going to have our favorite caramel cream that night.

But with mother's advent into the kitchen the pains in mammy's side
grew much worse, and she began suggestions that she didn't know but
what the Lord was going to strike her with another spell, "for the old
dominecker rooster had been crowin' sad all day!"

The rain kept on, and late in the afternoon the ice-man telephoned
that some of the machinery at the factory was broken, so there would
be no ice! Then father's rheumatism suddenly grew so bad that we had
to stop our preparations for the feast, and spent half an hour
searching for the stopper to the hot-water bag. He must have that bag
put to his shoulder, he declared, but after we gathered all the
essentials together and put it there he could not stand it on account
of the heat!

Upon going back to the kitchen to temper the water down a little I was
astounded at mammy's declaration that, if Dilsey would go down to the
cabin and bring up her easy chair, while I held an umbrella over it,
she would _try_ to stay up long enough to direct _us_ about finishing
that dinner! Did ever a girl have such dreams and such nightmares
mixed up together?

Night descended rapidly, as night has ever had a way of doing when you
are in a fearful hurry, and mother was distractedly searching through
her recipe book for a dessert that could be quickly made, yet when
finished would be grand enough to set before gubernatorial timber!

Her maternal love had caused her steadily to refuse my help with the
dessert, and she made me run on up-stairs for a final bath and a few
minutes of manicuring before time to dress. "Be sure to dress
carefully," she had bidden me, as she always does, for sometimes I am
inclined to be a little absent-minded in the matter of hooks and eyes;
but her warning was superfluous to-night.

"Make yourself beautiful--an' _skase_," is Mammy Lou's favorite slogan
in the campaign after masculine admiration, and I had prepared to
carry it out so far as nature and instinct would permit. I had
carefully pressed my prettiest white gown, a filmy, ruffled thing, and
spread it out on my bed, with a petticoat that was long enough, but
_not_ too long, lying conveniently near. Where is the woman who has
not shed tears and used feminine profanity because she could not find
exactly the right petticoat at an eleventh-hour dressing?

As I came into my room I glanced toward the bed with a feeling of
complacency, then I turned on the lights and looked more closely. My
hopes fell and I saw that the gown had shared in the general
determination of everything on the place to go wrong that afternoon
because we were so particularly anxious that all should go right. A
window near the bed had been left open, in the hurry and confusion,
and the dress had seemed to drink in every bit of dampness that it
could find lying around loose. It looked as limp and dejected as if it
had slept in an upper berth the night before. I had no other thin
dress that was available, with all its attachments, at that hour, so I
laid aside my ambition to look romantic and slipped on a
shirt-waist--with a collar so stiff that it scratched my neck until I
looked as if I bore the marks of the guillotine.

Toward eight o'clock, after it was inky dark, and mother had got her
dessert safely stored away in the refrigerator to cool, she and I were
taking a breathing spell in the dining-room, although we were holding
our breath every other minute, listening for the approach of wheels,
when the night began to be made hideous by the sounds of the most
violent calf distress down in the lot.

"Ba-a-a-h! _Ba-a-a-a-ah!_" came in hoarse, hollow bellows to our
already overstrained ears.

"It's that hateful little Jersey," mother said, starting up and going
toward the kitchen. "He has his head caught in the fence again!"

"You sit still," I said, drawing her back toward her chair, "I'll go
and send Penates to unfasten him."

There were savory odors in the kitchen, and mammy was so interested in
the final outcome of the meal that she had abandoned her temporary
throne and was stirring around the stove as usual. The three little
negroes were gathered at the window, looking out into the blackness
and listening with enjoyable horror at the turbulent sounds from the
cow-lot.

"Go and unfasten him, Penates," I said. "He'll kill himself and us,
too, with that noise!"

But Penates looked at me to see if I could be in earnest. When he saw
that I was he began to whine.

"I's a-skeered to!" he half whimpered.

"The idea! A great big boy like you! What are you afraid of?"

"Granny's done tol' us the devil's gwiner ketch us," he began, and, as
he saw mother coming in at the kitchen door, he looked appealingly
toward her; but the nerve-racking strain of the afternoon had done
its work with her--and the calf voice was something frightful!

"Your granny's an old idiot," she said forcefully, looking with wrath
toward the stove, where mammy was peering into the oven in an entirely
detached fashion. "You go straight and unfasten that calf!"

"Mis' Mary, I declare he'll ketch me ef I so much as step outside the
do' there in the dark! Granny's jus' now tol' us he's watchin' ever'
minute to ketch us--"

"Lou, you ought to be ashamed of yourself to stuff these children's
minds full of lies!" mother said, exasperated out of all semblance of
her gentle, even-tempered self by the piled-up mishaps of the
afternoon and the anguish of the present moment.

In case you have never heard a calf with his head caught in the fence
I will state, under oath, that the diabolical sounds of the Brocken
scene in Faust are dulcet music compared with the cry for help that
the terrified creature sends forth. It usually brings the neighbors
for miles around to find out the cause of the trouble, or rather _why_
the trouble is permitted to continue--for every one who has ever heard
it once knows its sound for ever. What an unlovely salute for Prince
Charming when he should drive up in the rainy, black night, I was
thinking in agony!

Mammy straightened up and looked at mother as steadfastly as she had
looked the day she announced her determination of marrying Bill
Williams, the "Yankee nigger."

"It's a _sin_ to teach children about the devil!" Mother's voice was a
challenge.

"_Sin?_ Why, Mis' Mary!" Mammy's tones were husky with horror. "An'
you been a church member for thirty years!"

"Well, the devil has never entered into my calculations in all those
thirty years," mother responded hotly, not observing that father had
slipped up close behind her and was listening to the theological
controversy with an amusement which had routed his rheumatism.

"Well--that's between you an' your Maker," mammy argued stoutly. "I'm
goin' to treat _my_ devil with some respeck, if white folks _don't_
mention theirs no mo' than if he was a po' relation that lived in
Arkansas!"

Father was smiling almost audibly, but mother was not looking in his
direction--and the little Jersey had evidently found no balm in Gilead
for his afflicted head!

"I don't believe there's any _such_ thing as a devil!" mother finally
broke out with vehemence; and she had turned quickly around as if she
would go to the cow-lot herself, when she beheld father standing
there, a look of amazement upon his face.

"_Mary!_ Have I lived to hear you deny the faith of your fathers?"

But mother was in no mood for banter.

"Don't _you_ talk to me about the devil, Dan Fielding!" she said,
facing him squarely, and reluctantly unfolding her daintiest linen
handkerchief to wipe the little beads of perspiration from across her
upper lip. "I've had enough to make me believe in him this day, with
three politicians coming, and a thunder-storm, and a broken
ice-factory, and rheumatism and gall-stones!"

"Well, you know _you_ were the one who suggested inviting them here,"
father defended himself, Adam-like.

"Well, maybe I was, but I should never have dreamed of such a thing if
you hadn't said, with that woebegone look of yours that you wished
you could see them and hear them talk about the latest phases of the
situation! Then, just to please you, I suggested that it was too bad
to let them go to that dreadful hotel for dinner, when it would be no
trouble for Mammy Lou to prepare one of her delightful meals!"

"Of course, neither one of us could know beforehand how deucedly
contrary everything was going to turn out to-day, else I should have
told you _not_ to invite them"--father was reiterating in what he
intended for a soothing tone, when all of a sudden I heard the tramp
of feet upon the front porch, for my ears all the time had been
straining in that direction, else I should never have heard them, far
away as the kitchen is, and with that hideous noise.

"_Hush!_" I implored, as the footfalls grew quite distinct and I
pulled down my cuffs, settled my belt, fluffed my hair out a little
more at the sides, and flicked a tiny feather off the toe of my shoe.
"They've come!"

"And Ann in a shirt-waist suit," mother sent after father as a final
shot when he started toward the front part of the house, "and that
bovine orchestra!"

She hurried into her bedroom and made a motion with her powder-puff
before she followed father, while I stopped in the dining-room and
gave a glance of satisfaction at the shaded lights, the old-fashioned
good taste of the furnishings, and the quantities of roses. The table
was perfect, and I knew mammy too well to doubt that the dinner, too,
would be everything that palate or eye could desire; then I glanced
into the great old gold-framed mirror hung above the mantelpiece.

"I believe he'll enjoy his dinner," I decided, nodding in a friendly
fashion toward the reflection in the glass; and, hearing the voices
still coming from the direction of the porch, I hurried on out there.

They had come! In truth they had come, but alas it was not Richard
Chalmers and satellites! It was Miss Delia Badger, Mrs. Sullivan and
Neva, drenched and bewildered, that Bob Hall, the fool, had brought
from Bayville!

"Oh, Mrs. Fielding," poor Mrs. Sullivan was saying beseechingly, as
she looked at mother's startled face, "_do_ you know what's happened
to Tim? We was to stay another week at maw's, but when Bob Hall drove
into Bayville at dinner-time to-day and said he'd come after somebody
that wanted to get took back here to Mr. Fielding's house, I knew it
must a-been Tim took sick and sent for me! So we all piled right in
without waitin' for me to belt down my Mother-Hubbard!"

"Jumping Jerusalem!" said father, and the calf bellowed dismally.

       *       *       *       *       *

Investigation had shown the Sullivan cottage to be locked and barred,
and the supposition was that Tim, although not already sick, was in a
fair way to be so in the morning, as persistent telephoning on my part
finally located him at the drug store with a crowd of friends whose
company was both cheering and inebriating.

"I better git Bob to drive down there an' git 'im," Mrs. Sullivan
suggested forlornly, looking at Bob, who was leaning against one of
the big, white columns and twirling his cap around on one finger.

"For heaven's sake, _don't_," father objected. "He'll be just as
likely to drive up with the county undertaker as with Tim Sullivan!
I'll go myself."

"But who'll get the calf out of the fence corner?" mother asked
anxiously, as father walked to the hat-rack for an umbrella.

"_Me!_" cried Bob, speaking for the first time, but to so much purpose
that we all beamed gratitude upon him.

So, after being "much tossed about by land and on the deep," the calf
was finally loosed from his pillory, the Sullivans were settled in the
sanctuary of their own home, the lovely dinner was eaten in silence,
and our family went grumpily to bed.

Then this morning early the three belated dinner guests drove in from
Bayville. The two lesser lights caught the nine-o'clock car into the
city, but Mr. Chalmers drove on to the little hotel in the village and
later presented himself, in due calling season, at our house, with
apologies for the catastrophe of last evening. Mother said he had
spoken of it as catastrophe before I came into the room, but when he
mentioned the accident to me later on in the day, as we two sat quite
apart from the others, he referred to it as _calamity_.

Father and Rufe urged him to spend the day, an invitation which mother
warmly seconded after a moment's quick recollection of how many of the
dainties left over from last night's feast could be creamed and pâted
and souffled.

He said it was rather necessary for him to be in town that day, but he
stayed; and father and Rufe both remembered during the course of the
forenoon that they had some matters to attend to which, if he would
excuse them for half an hour or so, they would despatch with all
possible haste and rejoin him before the ladies had quite had time to
talk him to death!

Rufe really did have some telephoning to the city to get through with;
it is his regular morning duty; and father had to drive across part of
our place to give directions about some fences which had been washed
away last night. Of course, mother was needed about the dining-room,
but Cousin Eunice, bless her, unselfishly betook herself off up-stairs
out of pure kindness of heart!

Even the day was one of those golden days which come at the very end
of summer, when the cool morning air mounts to the head like old wine,
and the rich afternoon sunshine seems to hover lovingly over the earth
and rejoice in having fulfilled the summer's glorious promise. All
through the morning the birds caroled as happily as if they thought it
was winter instead of summer a-dying; then later, they settled down
like the rest of the world in the hushed silence of the hot afternoon,
when the heat causes a brilliant haze over the fields around; and it
seems as if all nature rests.

All my life this hour of summer afternoons has held a strange,
undefinable sadness. When I was a little girl and used to spend long
hours out under the trees reading, my book would always drop from my
hand as this period of stillness came on, and my eyes would wander
away to the intense blue of the sky and the dazzling whiteness of the
distant clouds, while a small but persistent voice seemed to keep
mocking my memory with the query: "_Can't_ you remember what used to
happen on days like this?"

And my memory would grope longingly away after the lead of that
tormenting voice, and it would visit all the far-away lands of
Romance, summer lands of sunshine always, Italy, India, Egypt--but it
never would remember exactly. "Where Tasso's spirit soars and sings,"
I used to repeat in a mystified wonder, for the beauties of his land
were as familiar to me as my own fields and meadows.

Then I grew older and learned about reincarnation of the spirit.
"That's it!" I cried exultantly, hugging the beautiful mysticism to my
heart. "That is _bound_ to be it!"

Life took on a new significance, and then for months I felt myself one
with the initiated! I was radiantly happy and achingly miserable with
this new, intangible philosophy; then Alfred Morgan came along and
told me that my vague memories were imagination; and that my restless
longings came from a perpetual idleness. And I believed him, because I
could not hear any statement from Alfred Morgan's lips without
believing it.

"I'd rather have tuberculosis than an imagination like yours, Ann," he
had said, and he advised me to learn to cook.

Perhaps it was the extraordinary beauty of the day and the
surroundings that led our talk into unusual channels as Richard
Chalmers and I walked out together through the golden afternoon haze.
Yes, we had our hour alone again, as in the morning; but not by
accident this time. He had graciously demanded it.

"Can't you rescue me from Clayborne's relentless newspaper spirit?" he
had asked in a low tone while we were at the table. I smiled assent,
whereupon he looked at me gratefully and a few minutes later announced
that I had promised to show him the orchard where those magnificent
peaches grew.

So it happened that when the rest of the family dispersed in different
directions, early in the afternoon, I pinned on a big, flat hat--a
white embroidered affair, with a great bow of black velvet
ribbon--and walked with him out into the glow. Down the avenue of
cedars we went and up the broad road, for the orchard can be reached
through a big gate opening off the pike, and the distance is much
longer around that way. We soon gained the desired shade of its
luxuriant leafiness, and I pointed out to him our most noteworthy
trees. He admired their beauty without looking at them.

After walking around the orchard a bit we finally sat down on a
fragment of stone wall, a prehistoric structure, which still protects
a portion of the grounds; and he took off his hat and began to fan
with it. His forehead was a little damp, and, as he wiped away the
perspiration, I observed again the exceeding fairness of his skin. His
hair, too, is so nearly light that the sprinkling of gray is almost
unnoticed, save by the closest scrutiny.

My survey of him, while at close range, was quite brief, for, after a
remark or two about the heat at this time of day, he turned to me
suddenly and asked with disconcerting straightforwardness:

"What were you doing that day at the gates of the little cemetery?"

"Oh! Why, I was walking around--trying to get warm."

I longed to ask him what he was doing there.

"I figured that day that you were a faithful little soul, going out to
visit some hallowed spot. You looked so strikingly dark and _vivid_
against the colorless background of the sky that I quite thought you
were Oriental. Then the next time I saw you, in the lobby of the city
hall--do you remember?--Well, you were with a tall, foreign-looking
woman, a Russian, I imagined; so that convinced me--"

"She is a Pole," I corrected, "but she's the wife of Doctor Gordon, a
great friend of ours."

"--and that convinced me," he went on, as if Ann Lisbeth's nationality
were of no more moment to him than one of the bits of stone which I
had gathered up from fragments scattered over the top of the wall, and
was making white marks upon the solid rock sides with these tiny
splinters, "that you were foreign." Then, in a lower tone, and with
little hesitation in his delightful, drawling voice, he added: "I
called you Rebecca--because I had to call you something."

"How disappointing to find me a plain American girl!"

"When I found this morning that you are an American girl--I deny the
'plain'--I gave a start which I know was noticed by everybody in the
room! It isn't often that I lose my self-possession, but I was
_amazed_ to find you here, in this little town--and my friend,
Clayborne's, niece."

"His wife's cousin," I explained, but again he paid no attention to my
interruption.

"I had haunted the theaters and shopping districts for weeks last
winter--looking for Rebecca," he finished up. "No wonder I was
surprised to find that you are _you_!"

He paused, waiting for me to say something, and, just because it was
the last thing I wished to say, and because I would not, for the
world, have had him suspect such a thing, I stammered out the truth!

"I--I wondered who _you_ were, too," I faltered. "You are so entirely
Anglo-Saxon-looking; and the place is Hebrew! Besides, it was such a
very cold day to visit a cemetery!"

He smiled a little, but politely caught at my bait.

"I had been to see old man Cohen, the sexton. He is interested in
politics."

Then we fell to talking about foreign types of faces, a subject which
he discussed extremely well, having traveled everywhere, as I felt
sure he had when I first laid eyes on him; and from the types of
beauty, we fell to discussing the various countries. He looked
surprised at what he termed the "wistful" note in my voice when I
asked him questions about my favorite lands; and he smiled when I
explained to him that I have never been anywhere.

"So much the better for your enthusiasm," he said with the provoking
air of a person who has been everywhere and done everything--and found
it all a bore. "I judge that you are a very enthusiastic young woman."

"My daily life is punctuated with exclamation points," I admitted, but
I longed to ask him how he knew I was enthusiastic. Still, it has
always seemed in bad taste to me for a girl to try to draw a man into
a long discussion of her personality--a new acquaintance, I mean.
Mammy Lou's slogan, "Make yourself beautiful, and _skase_," can be
applied in devious ways that she wotted not of when she handed it down
to me.

"I suppose that is partly on account of your age?" he said, still
looking at me with his amused smile.

My age! His tone and smile awoke a kind of resentment. He must feel
himself infinitely older and wiser, else he would never assume that
superior air.

"Age has nothing to do with it! It is entirely a matter of
temperament," I contradicted, with a little show of feeling. He smiled
more broadly, and a hot flush of shame spread over my face as I
recalled my dreams of this man. I had thought of him for months, had
imagined him in every great and heroic rôle; had made a hero of him.
Worse still, I fancied that he--perhaps--had thought of me; had stayed
here to-day because he had found me! And here he was smiling down at
me as he made playful remarks about my age!

"Why should you look distressed over a mention of your age?" he
suddenly broke in, so gently that I looked up in surprise and found
his face grave. He had been reading my thoughts--at least in part.
"Now, if you were as old as I--that would be something worth troubling
over."

"You? Yet the papers always speak of your youth. They will call you
the 'boy governor' when you're elected."

He was pleased at my words.

"Or the boy who also ran--perhaps! But age is only a relative
condition. My political friends call me a boy because I am only
thirty-seven years old. Yet, to _you_ that age may seem patriarchal.
Doesn't it?"

I thrilled at the look of earnestness in his eyes. He was the one now
who was concerned over what I thought of his age.

"Rufe is thirty-seven," I answered, trying to make my tone
non-committal.

"And yet you call him Rufe!"

"I've known him always. He's like my brother."

"Well, if you should some day grow to know me 'always,' could
you--even if I am thirty-seven--could you call me Richard?"

I made several violent white marks upon the old rock wall with the bit
of stone in my hand before I attempted to answer this, the most
intimate question ever put to me by a man in my life. Except for
Alfred I had never known any other man well, and had certainly never
cared about sitting with one upon an old stone wall while the glorious
summer afternoon slipped by. All I knew of even incipient love-making
I had read in books, so that I could not tell whether his question
meant much or little. I had told him earlier in the afternoon that I
was booked for a long visit in the city this fall, whereon he had
congratulated himself on his friendly footing with the Claybornes. It
was possible he meant--

"Could you?" he repeated softly.

I stopped making marks and threw away the bits of stone. I had opened
my lips to reply, although I do not know what I had intended saying,
when there was an Indian yell close behind us.

"Whoopee! Here he is again!" came an exultant voice, and, glancing
around, we beheld a freshly bathed and dressed Waterloo, digging his
white linen knees and elbows into the soft black earth, as he raised a
radiant face and announced his second discovery of the "little
tarrypin." Grapefruit followed him at a respectful distance, while
Lares and Penates lingered shyly in the background when they espied
us.

"And here's _Ann_," Waterloo explained, in great triumph, waving his
hand in my direction. "We can make her tote 'im back to the house for
us. She ain't skeered of 'em!"

"Quick! Tell me!" Richard Chalmers insisted, and his seriousness made
me flippant.

"Age has nothing to do with it! It is entirely a matter of
temperament!"

He laughed, quite like a boy, as he sprang down from the wall and
extended both hands to help me. I grasped only one of his hands, and
that very lightly, as I stepped to the ground.

We joined the little band of hunters and thus formed a funny
procession home. Mr. Chalmers and I were in the lead, his right hand
gingerly clutching a most disinterested-looking mud-turtle, while,
with the left, he attempted to help me over the rough places in the
road. Waterloo was close at our heels, while the three little negroes,
struggling with their giggles, tagged along behind.

The task of "toting" a mud-turtle fitted so ill with his immaculate
clothes and intense dignity that I laughed every time I looked up at
him. And he laughed. Perhaps we should have done this, even if nothing
funny had happened, for the late afternoon was so beautiful, and
everything seemed so happy. The birds were all making a cheerful fuss
over going to bed, and the tinklings that lulled the distant folds
seemed to me, for the first time in my life, joyous.

"I shall think of this scene the day you are inaugurated," I said,
still laughing, after the mud-turtle had been deposited in an empty
lard bucket and borne away by Waterloo and his retainers. We had
found ourselves alone for a moment in the shaded, deserted library.

"You'll be there?" he asked, turning toward me as I stood on the
hearth rug and leaned my elbow against the white marble mantelpiece.
As he had carefully wiped from his finger-tips the imaginary dust from
the mud-turtle I had been studying his profile in the mirror. It was
the most perfect face I had ever seen--unless--

My eyes quickly traveled to the little oval portrait of Lord Byron,
the old-time idol of my beauty-loving soul. I used to kiss his picture
good night when I was twelve years old!

I glanced back again to the living presence of beauty equally as
perfect. His gray eyes were upon me.

"You'll be there--if I am ever inaugurated?" he asked again.

"Of course. But you'll never see _me_."

Outside there was a glorious sunset, red and yellow and orange. It was
like a sea of blood and a sea of gold, with a wonderful blending of
the two. The radiance was trying to steal in at the shaded window, and
I started across the room to open the blinds to its flood of glory.
He put out his hand and stopped me.

"If you were there," he said slowly in his deep, rich voice--which is,
in itself, attraction enough for any _one_ man--"if you were there, I
should be far more conscious of _that_ than of the inauguration."

And the quick look which followed these words made a feeling of having
been born again run in little zigzag streaks of joy to my finger-tips.




CHAPTER VI

NEVA'S BEAU BRUMMEL


Many days have passed since Neva and her mother made their dramatic
return from Bayville.

These days have seemed long to me, but short to Neva, for protracted
meeting has been in progress--and she has had a beau swarm. The swell
young clerk at the Racket Store, who says "_passé_," most Frenchily,
and manicures his nails; a fat drummer who sells lard and sings bass;
a "wild" young man who drives a fast horse, which the villagers all
discuss above their breath, and who also does some other things which
they take care to discuss--but in whispers; all these have been
Neva's, besides Hiram Ellis, a young farmer whom she cares for most,
but makes the most fun of behind his back.

I know that she cares for him, else she would never have counterfeited
a swoon one hot night in church when the service held on an
unconscionable time and she feared that Hiram would become impatient
and start on his five-mile drive to his farm, without waiting to
escort her home, as was his custom when she happened to be
unaccompanied by any of the "town fellows."

From her point of vantage in the choir she could see that Hiram was
restlessly moving his hands and feet about, although he was seated on
the back bench and there was the church full of perspiring humanity
between her and the gawky object of her secret love.

The minister continued to exhort and to perspire, as he drank glass
after glass of water; and, as the time for mourners seemed to draw no
nearer, Neva took that night's destiny into her own hands and
fainted--a stiff, peculiar faint.

Fortunately she was sitting close by a small door which opens directly
out into the cool night air, so that her carrying-out could be
accomplished without any ungraceful display of uplifted feet and
sagging petticoats. Neva's artistic temperament could never have
endured that!

The performance created small notice outside the choir.

Hiram was around at that little back entrance in a twinkling, his
good-natured, sunburnt face a picture of devoted anxiety. Neva was
sitting on the steps shaking with a considerable degree of suppressed
emotion, but not looking particularly ill, and insisting that her
mother and Aunt Delia should go on back and hear the sermon to its
end, if, indeed, it had an end. This they did, after seeing Hiram
place Neva carefully in his buggy and start off home; but they failed
to reach the choir in time to see the whisperings which had passed
between two of Neva's rivals who sat there, and who were not
unobservant of the peculiar nature of her fainting-spell.

"It wasn't like any faint _I_ ever saw before," some one openly
declared to Mrs. Sullivan after the service was over, whereupon the
whisperings between the rivals were renewed; and several days
thereafter the townspeople were frankly discussing Neva Sullivan's
"spell."

In less than a week after the incident which I have just related,
because there is absolutely nothing of my _own_ happening that is
worth relating, Neva ran over one day in a great flurry of excitement
to consult my expert judgment as to what she should wear that night,
as a young gentleman from the city had come down to see her and was
coming out that evening to call.

"A young gentleman from the city! How exciting!" I congratulated her.
"But I didn't know you knew any of the Beau Brummels up there!"

"That's the curious part of it," she explained as she sat down and
panted a little, for she had run across the road and up our long walk.
"I don't know him--never heard of him before. But he telephoned me
from the hotel this afternoon that he had heard of me and had come
down to see me on business. His name is Doctor Simmons, and he said he
was very anxious to see me at once and give me some professional
literature."

"Some professional _what_?" I asked, for she was talking very fast,
and her enunciation at best is not like a normal school teacher's.

"Professional literature," she repeated, lingering over the words this
time as if they were chocolate creams. "I told mamma maybe he is a
poet. It sounded kinder like it, you know--him saying 'literature.'"

"I don't believe that poets carry around _professional_ literature," I
said, trying to let her down easy, for she is a sad little
visionary--and somehow I have a sympathy for visionaries. But he was a
_man_, a new man, even though he might not be a poet, so Neva's
solicitude concerning him was in nowise dampened.

"Well, that's what he said--'professional literature,'" she kept on
flutteringly--inconstant little minx, when only a week ago she had
disturbed "public worship" for the sake of driving home in Hiram
Ellis' buggy!--"So mamma said I better come on over and ask you how I
ought to dress to see him; and _oh_, how I ought to have the parlor
fixed! You go up to the city so often, of course you know all the
swell ways."

"I reckon I _do_," I said confidently, for I could see the chance that
my hands had been itching for ever since I took the education of Neva
in charge. "First, you must empty the room of candy-boxes, for if he
is a prospective suitor, you see, all those boxes would frighten him
away. He would think you are entirely too popular already."

"There ain't a girl in this town got half as many," she said rather
wistfully, and I saw that the loss of the boxes meant bereavement to
her. "Mine comes up to the top of the piano on _both_ sides, while
Stella Hampton's don't more than fill in under the bottom of the
center-table!"

"But you must remember that he is a doctor," I reminded her
soothingly, "and they are awfully queer about _germs_. He might get it
into his head that those empty boxes were regular nests for them--and
they may be, for all we know."

"All right--if you say so," the poor child said sorrowfully, and I
knew that her affection for me had been put to a fiery test.

"Then the McKinley picture! It ought to come down. It is dismal,
somehow--it might cast a damper over his feelings."

"All right," she agreed again, much more willingly this time. "I know
that Mr. Roosevelt _does_ look more cheerful, so, if you say so--"

"But I _don't_," I almost shrieked. "We can put a tall vase of roses
in the space so that no picture will be needed."

"Oh, that will be lovely," she exclaimed gratefully; "and I'll wear
flowers in my hair."

"I believe black velvet ribbon will be prettier--just a band, you
understand--no combs or fancy pins. Your hair is too pretty to be
disfigured with ornaments."

Her eyes showed slow, but gratified, comprehension.

"And my dress--" she hurried on.

"A rather plain white one," I suggested fearfully, for I apprehended
trouble there as with the candy-boxes. "You see, he'll not like to
find you with a dress which has lace all twisted and _tortured_ across
the front--doctors are such humane creatures."

"I'm just dying to see what he looks like!" she exclaimed, her eyes
dancing. "And I'm so much obliged to you."

"I hope you'll have a pleasant time with him," I started, when she
looked at me in dismay.

"Oh, surely I'll see you again before he comes! Can't you come over a
little later on, or maybe after I'm dressed--to see if I am fixed all
right, and if the parlor looks swell?" Her big dark eyes held a
flattering appeal.

"Why, of course! I'll be glad to get mother to run over there with
me--just before time for him to come," and she gave my arm a gratified
little squeeze and went away filled with charming anticipations.

As the mystic hour approached, mother and I threw crocheted things
over our heads and started across the wide road which lay between the
houses.

Drawing near the cottage we noticed a dim light bobbing about queerly
just off the front porch, and mother clutched my arm in agony.

"Surely--_surely_ they're not hanging Japanese lanterns out in honor
of his coming!"

"Oh, I hope not," I responded, feeling not at all certain as to the
course which Neva's enthusiasm might take. But as we clicked the gate
and passed on into the yard we discerned the generous outlines of Mr.
Tim Sullivan rising from a rickety, three-legged chair, which he had
placed directly in front of Mrs. Sullivan's nasturtium frame. This
frame was but a poor skeleton affair, having been built in the yard
early in the summer for the flowers to clamber up on, but the fall of
the leaf was approaching, and the flowers had refused to clamber.

In one hand Mr. Sullivan held a small, smoky lamp, the flame of which
was entirely a one-sided affair; and in the other he brandished a
paint brush. We knew it was a paint brush because it out-smelt the
lamp.

"Come in! Come right in," he invited us hospitably, and as he
gallantly approached to light us on our way up the walk, we caught a
whiff of his breath; and the paint brush and the lamp faded into
insignificance in the smelling line.

"Why, what are you doing, Mr. Sullivan?" mother inquired as she
strained her eyes toward the nasturtium frame and saw big splotches
of green paint smeared about at intervals upon its wooden gauntness.

"I'm painting," he explained politely, as he held the lamp high above
his head that it might cast its doubtful rays over the dark walk.
"Just painting."

"But why paint to-night?" she persisted, doubtless wondering if this
was being done in honor of the "city beau."

"Why, there ain't no time like the present, as I've always been told,
you know, Mrs. Fielding," he further elucidated, his voice growing
louder and louder as the distance between us increased, and as we
gained the freshly-scoured front steps he moved back toward his field
of operation and resumed his work. The wild sweeps of his brush gave,
in the dim light of the unsteady lamp, the impression of some weird
acrobatic performance.

We went into the house and found the feminine portion of the family in
a state of conflicting emotions. Mrs. Sullivan was perfectly limp with
rage over the misfortune of having Tim even mildly drunk and
disorderly on the night when Neva's destiny might be hanging in the
balance. Neva herself was perturbed, but radiant, and was praying
cheerfully that something might happen to check her father's artistic
endeavors before the arrival of her beau. That Doctor Simmons was a
suitor for her hand, impressed by her beauty in some mysterious and
romantic manner, it had not entered into Neva's silly little head to
doubt; and since one of her friends had seen the young gentleman at
the hotel in the afternoon and had telephoned her that he was the
swellest-est dressed man to enter that town since Heck was a pup, her
expectations were soaring at dizzy heights.

I found that fortunately she had spent the force of her own swell
longings upon the attire of her mother this time, inasmuch as I had so
urgently recommended simplicity for herself. The glittering combs and
bandeau were adorning Mrs. Sullivan's head, rising resplendent from
divers unaccustomed puffs and braids and curls. Mrs. Sullivan's hair
ordinarily wore a look of conventual severity, as did her hat, but
there was never any congeniality between the two. In fact they were
never on speaking terms.

"I done it to please Nevar," she confessed to me, smiling wanly at her
reflection in the mirror, "but if I had a-had my way I wouldn't a-done
it. I don't like it. If I had a tubful o' wet clo'es on my head it
couldn't feel no heavier!"

We were so cordially invited to remain and view the stranger from a
speechless distance that we finally consented to do so, occupying
straight chairs that would not creak and betray our presence as we sat
at the front window of the room opposite the parlor and breathlessly
awaited his arrival.

Presently he came and we were repaid for waiting. When I had mentioned
him in the afternoon as being a possible Beau Brummel I little
realized what an inadequate term I had employed. Beau Brummel with all
his diamond-studded snuff-boxes was never rigged up to compare with
Doctor Simmons. In stature he was tall, in demeanor grave, in color
red-headed. His trousers were very light and his shirt was very pink,
while a large diamond stud gleamed from his glossy bosom. Two other
great stones were set in rings. His shoes were tan, but his hosiery
was not; and his broad straw hat had birds embroidered in the band.

Neva received him nervously, her voice high-pitched and unnatural.
Mrs. Sullivan bade us sit still while she tiptoed around through the
back hall and up close to the parlor door, where she could overhear
the announcement of his mission. Her maternal anxiety justified this.

We sat an interminable time, it seemed, listening to Miss Delia
Badger's low-toned conversation, which she felt must for politeness'
sake be kept up; but there was no light in the room, and we were thus
saved the pain of looking at her parti-colored hair, so it might have
been worse.

After a long time Mrs. Sullivan came in. We could not see her face,
but her voice had the most doleful droop I had ever detected in its
depths, and she collapsed into the nearest chair.

"He's a fit doctor," she announced briefly, after a moment's strained
silence.

"A _what_?"

"A fit doctor. He cures fits up at his hospital in the city. Somebody
from here wrote him that Nevar had done had one. He'll give a
gold-trimmed fountain pen for ever' name of a fitified person you'll
send him."

"How unkind of the one who wrote him about Neva!" mother exclaimed in
an indignant whisper, but I was unable to speak.

"'Twas some of them mean girls in the choir," Mrs. Sullivan pronounced
lifelessly. "They're always so jealous of Nevar having the most beaus
and the prettiest dresses."

"Well, it's a shame!" mother repeated wrathfully.

"What I'm worrying about _now_ is how to git 'im off without Tim
killing 'im," Neva's mother continued, still in an apathetic whisper.
"If he could catch the nine o'clock car out o' town to-night he would
be safe, but it's mighty near that time now. If he was to leave this
early and Tim out there painting he would stop 'im and ask 'im his
business. Then there would be a killing on the spot."

It was not clear whether Tim would kill Doctor Simmons for curing fits
or Doctor Simmons would kill Tim for painting the nasturtium frame.
But mother was all anxiety to avert either tragedy.

"Well, we'll run right on home this minute," she said, rising
hurriedly, and her inspiration was so sudden and so happy that she
forgot to whisper, "and ask Mr. Sullivan to go with us. Then Mr.
Fielding shall make him a mint julep--while you explain to the fit
doctor that he would better make haste back to his hospital."

There were grateful whisperings from Mrs. Sullivan and her sister.

"And you'll have to use a lantern to wave the car down," mother
turned back a moment to caution them, "for it's so dark they'll never
see you if you don't."

But Mrs. Sullivan did not wait to tamper with the chimney of a
lantern. The smoky little lamp had been placed, still lighted, upon
the edge of the porch when mother had mentioned mint julep to Mr.
Sullivan. His wife caught it up and bore it along bravely after we had
crossed the road and entered the thick shade of our walk. She was
closely followed by a very homesick physician, whose one desire was to
leave this quiet little town, and an outraged but still admiring Neva.

As we gained our front porch mother whispered a quick word into
father's ear and he hospitably bade Mr. Sullivan follow him into the
dining-room, while she and I quickly turned and fled back down the
walk to the front gate.

Yes, they had him safely down at the car track, and in a very brief
while the car came along. Mrs. Sullivan made spasmodic little signals
with the lamp, which brought the car to a standstill, and also brought
forth a thousand rainbow gleams from the jewels in her hair. Doctor
Simmons stepped upon that running-board with all the alacrity of a
newsboy with a bundle of "extras." He deposited his package of
professional literature upon the seat in front of him, then turned and
gravely lifted his hat to the ladies.

"Thank goodness!" mother said with a sigh of genuine relief as we
watched the car pull out. Then she turned to me and for the first time
that evening I could discern a smile in her voice.

"Ann," she said, trying to speak seriously, "when I see other women's
daughters I know that I have much to be thankful for. You _are_ a
star-gazer and a poor cook, but, oh dear--you don't have beaus from
the city."

"Touch wood before you boast," but she stopped and caught me by the
arm.

"What do you mean, honey?" she questioned. "Has Alfred--"

"No, indeed. I don't mean anything except that I am at the age of Eve
and--very hopeful."

"Well, you _know_ what we all think of Alfred," she said, then stopped
still at the lower step and broke off a dead twig from a rosebush near
by. A shaft of light was shining from the hall and I could see that
her face was very earnest. It was the first time in my life she had
ever spoken to me of lovers.

"And I think everything of Alfred that you do--and more," I assured
her, "but I am not in love with him. I might be--if--under other
circumstances----I might be, but not now!"

She deliberately lingered at the steps, and we heard pleasant sounds
coming from the dining-room.

"Eunice and I fancied that Mr. Chalmers looked at you--er, rather
attentively the other day," she ventured timidly, as if to try to draw
me out, yet dreading a little the answer I might make.

"That might have been imagination," I parried.

"But--we also imagined that _you_ looked at him."

"Well," I answered with a laugh which I hoped would sound light,
"haven't you just said that I am a _star_-gazer?"

With this admission I ran away up-stairs.

Yes, I had looked at him. And since then it seemed that there had been
nothing for my eyes to rest upon that did not bear the impress of his
face.

He had stayed through that long, perfect day, and had left when the
cool, white night was at the zenith of its beauty. The cool, white
night which, alas, had to be followed by a morning after! I had never,
until then, felt this way about the morning, for it has always been my
favorite time of day, my only thought upon arising being an eager
craving for the sunshine. But then, I had never known until that time
just what an exquisite thing night could be.

There is a little sepia copy of the Sistine Madonna hanging across the
room from my bed where I can see it the first thing when I awake every
morning; and, on bright days there is a golden bar of sunlight which
comes traveling in and across the ceiling until it falls upon the
picture. I lie still and watch it until it has reached the Virgin's
heart, then I get up and open all the windows to the light. It serves
me in place of a clock, and much better, for it is true as to time,
and it has no unpleasant way of striking a sudden and disenchanting
note which breaks in upon my dreams.

My warning little ray of sunshine was casting a spot of intense light
directly upon the Mother's heart as I turned and glanced toward it for
the first time on the morning after Richard Chalmers' visit, but I was
so tired that I lay still until it had traversed the entire length of
the wall and settled for a moment upon the floor. I was not enjoying
that stretching, smiling, lazy luxuriance which I sometimes indulge in
after a too brief sleep. That is a pleasant sort of lingering upon the
threshold of the day, but this other feeling of mine was the
deadening reaction which comes after a period of over-tension.

"You are a nervous freak," I said disgustedly as I finally jumped out
of bed after a soft suggestion from Dilsey that I should find my bath
prepared if I could only be induced to get up and go seek it. I
crossed the convent-like little apartment which it has pleased my
fancy to fix up as a sleeping-chamber and made for a mirror in the
adjoining room, for there is "some little luxury there"--flowered
curtains and Battenburg table-covers and punched score-cards. I wished
to see if there were outward and visible signs of the change which was
causing such inward tumult.

"You are a freak," I repeated as I looked in the mirror and noticed that
my eyes appeared heavy and tired; and my tongue felt as thick as a
Sunday morning newspaper. "It's a pity you can't keep your emotions
stopped up in a vial and portion them out with a medicine-dropper--instead
of _soaking_ yourself in them!"

Dilsey had left the water running, as she has learned to do on
mornings when I am unusually lazy, for no woman who has a domestic
heart in her bosom can lie abed and run the risk of the tub
overflowing and making a mess of the bath-room floor. I slipped my
feet into some flip-flop Turkish slippers--if Turkish women have to
wear such footgear as this I don't blame them for sitting still most
of the time; but then they have the comfort of trousers, poor
dears!--and went to turn off the water.

"Of course he thinks you are an absurd young person who openly tried
to make eyes at him," I mused, as I gave a savage twist that stopped
that provoking sound of water wasting.

When I had imagined, upon first seeing him, that Richard Chalmers had
warring elements in his character I was only saying about him the
things I knew to be true of myself. "He does bad things sometimes, but
he never enjoys doing them, because he has a conscience that will not
let him." This is my own disposition, and I fancied that it might be
his, because his eyes bear a dissatisfied look, as if he did not come
up to his own ideal of himself.

Alfred Morgan is entirely different. I do not believe that he ever had
a morbid regret in his life. In his work he is fanatically
conscientious, doing the best he can and knowing that his best is as
good as any other man's, for he does not attempt anything unless he is
sure of his qualifications. This does not imply any lack of grief and
worry when a patient "goes to the bad." He _does_ grieve, sitting with
his head between his hands, while his black hair is ruffled up like a
shoe-brush straight across his forehead. Sometimes he softly repeats,
"Well, I'll swear! Well, I'll _swear_!"--in a baffled, helpless sort
of way, but you know that he has not been helpless where any other man
would have been potent. And he never has the soul-eating remorse which
follows the knowledge that one might have done better.

As to Alfred's _life_, I imagine that it is kept in the same condition
of fitness that his body is--clean and wholesome, yet full-blooded and
entirely normal. If he should meet red-robed Folly on a pleasant
highway he would undoubtedly linger a while, taking off his hat
politely and addressing her as Human Nature. He would shake hands
good-temperedly as he left her and promise to come again some time
when his business engagements would permit. But he would never give
the matter another thought probably.

Richard Chalmers' cold face proclaims an asceticism that would call
the prettily dressed little Folly "Sin," yet I fancy that he would
linger--much longer than Alfred, no doubt--and leave the gay fairy
with a frown on his face, which would remain until the next morning,
when he would throw his bootjack at his valet.

Where was I? Oh, yes, I had just turned the water off! It's a good
thing I did, too, before this digression, or the house would have been
flooded.

Again, what I have said of Richard Chalmers is also true of myself. I
had lingered on the pleasant highways with a delightful Folly all day
yesterday, which seemed to me in the cold light of day this morning a
sort of Sin. A sin against good sense, I concluded, or against good
taste, _especially_ if he noticed.

"A horrid _young_ idiot! Of course that's what he considered you
were." I kept torturing myself with these thoughts until others more
agonizing still came to torment me. Suppose he had not thought of me
at all!

The dash of the cold water restored me to something much more nearly
like my normal self, and by the time I had combed the tangles out of
my hair and spoken to a pair of redbirds which live in a tree right by
my window I was feeling poetry again. A shower of scattered cigar
ashes, which Dilsey had not yet swept off the front porch, with two or
three red-and-gold bands which I had noticed on his cigars, set me
singing.

"You're not an idiot at all, Ann," I commented, as I looked about to
make sure that no one was near, then grabbed up one of these
red-and-gold bands. "No _wonder_ you have lost your head over him, for
he is perfectly beautiful, and you always did get intoxicated on
beautiful things.--And if _he_ wasn't impressed too, his eyes were
lying! No, they could not lie, because they are too lovely!"

I knew that the family would all be talking about him at the
breakfast-table, which I found to be true, and they were so absorbed
in their talk that they all, except mother, gave me a perfunctory
greeting as I came in. Strange to say, they were not talking about his
good looks.

"Well, he's had occasion to study the question in all its phases,"
Rufe kept on with the subject at hand as I slid into my chair and gave
myself up to the charms of a breakfast food. "He's studied it in
nearly every land. He spent a part of last year in--"

"I think one of the delights of wide travel is to be able to pronounce
names of obscure places in such a way that stay-at-homes won't know
what you're talking about," Cousin Eunice said, looking toward mother
and me. She had not intended interrupting the masculine conversation,
but Rufe stopped and listened to what she had to say, which proves
that he is a model husband, I think--"Did you notice how he called
Peru 'Payrhu' last night? Of course he's been there."

"I noticed the new-fangled way he had with several of his words,"
father said, a bit drily. "He differentiated between 'egoist' and
'egotist.' He seems to have been _there_, too."

"Surely," Rufe coincided so willingly that I was amazed. "But the
quality of egotism possessed by this fellow is not the cheap,
objectionable kind. He simply has unlimited faith in himself, and an
unlimited ability of making other people do what he wants them to do."

"A tyrant, then?" father inquired with a half-smile at Rufe's
enthusiasm.

"Not at all--a governor."

"Well, who is he and where did he come from?" mother asked, coming
into the discussion in an abstracted sort of fashion. "I never heard
of him until the last few months."

Then followed a long discourse concerning Richard Chalmers' past
life, and his qualifications for the office which he might be called
upon to fill--all of which fell like diamonds and rubies from their
lips, for it was all creditable to him.

The look of strength, which had told its own story the first time I
had ever seen him, and which had since then held me in the spell of a
fascinated memory--it was all true, then! As I listened to the story
of how the man had, by sheer strength and personality, raised himself
from being simply a well-thought-of young lawyer, with a good deal of
inherited wealth, to his present position in the minds of the state's
best politicians, I felt that he must possess that steel-clad,
relentless, yet necessary attribute--power.

Now, I revere power, whether in man, or beast, or automobile.

"Next to marrying it, the worst way on earth for a man to get money is
to inherit it," father said, apropos of the story we had just heard.
"It's bad for the man, and it's bad for the money."

We all laughed a little and agreed with father, then Rufe became aware
of my presence for the first time.

"And Mistress Ann has not had a word to say upon this interesting
subject," he said chaffingly, looking around as if he had not seen me
before, which in truth he had not, for he had been so absorbed when I
came in that he merely nodded a "good morning" without detaching his
mind from his discussion. "He was so visibly impressed, too."

"Shut up, Rufe--teasing her," Cousin Eunice commanded after she had
looked at my face.

"I swear I wasn't teasing," he insisted more soberly. "I don't believe
Chalmers looks at a woman once a year--he hasn't time for them, and
besides, he's a cold-blooded devil--but he looked at Ann many times
throughout the course of the day, to say naught of 'toting' home a
mud-turtle for her dear sake. Then when he was leaving last night he
asked me again whether the Fieldings were related to me or to my
wife."

"Did you tell him the truth or did you take the credit to yourself?" I
inquired sarcastically.

"No, I confessed that the beauteous blossom springs from the same tree
that produced that perfect flower, Mrs. Clayborne. But I told him that
the fact of my having 'raised' you invested you with a 'dearness not
your due'--from blood ties alone."

"Well, she will have the honor of being looked at by him a great many
times this fall, when she goes home with us," Cousin Eunice said, then
turning to mother she added: "And she will need a _bushel_ of pretty
clothes, Aunt Mary."

"I want one black dress, with a spangled yoke," I hastily put in, but
was interrupted by little shrieks of disapproval from the two.
"I--thought I'd have to look kind of _old_," I wound up, as they
regarded me with amused surprise.

After breakfast was over Cousin Eunice gathered up her tablet and
pencil and nodded for me to come with her.

"I want to look at your face as I write," she explained with a
sympathetic smile, "for I am hopelessly stupid and commonplace. I
can't even think of a surname for my hero that isn't already the name
of an automobile."




CHAPTER VII

ALFRED


Cousin Eunice's new house in the city, which is really a very old
house with the addition of all the wires and pipes and hardwood
trimmings which we think we can't live without these days, is a love
of a place. They bought it for the height of the ceilings and the size
of the rooms, where every member of the family can spread out like a
fried egg. But its especial glory is the drawing-room, a long, stately
apartment all tricked out in the deepest, wild-woodiest green.

The walls and hangings are of the hue that our Mother Nature loves
best, while the antique furniture is the color of chestnuts at
Hallowe'en. There are dark-toned pedestals at intervals, holding jars
of ferns, and the entire room presents such a perfect reproduction of
a shady nook in the woods that Rufe declared at first he dared not
venture into it, for fear of being snake-bitten.

There is a big leather chair over in one secluded corner, a chair
which will easily hold the entire Clayborne family, and, on nights
when there is no company and they are in a sentimental mood, the
married lovers pretend that the room is the ravine in which they did
their courting, and that the big chair is the old gray rock they were
sitting on when he proposed to her.

This is a delightful make-believe--for them. Usually Waterloo and I
are thrown upon each other for companionship, if it is late in the
evening and Grapefruit has gone home.

He often begs for music, which I am always glad to furnish, or would
be if his taste were not so very pronounced and so limited, and does
not by any means include my favorite classics.

"You play 'Ditsie,' and I'll play 'Little Ditsie,'" his baby voice
suggests, as he finds his French harp and blows a violent
accompaniment. But if I tire of this and my fingers wander off into
the mournful notes of the _Miserere_ from _Il Trovatore_ (another
love of my youth) his harp and the corners of his mouth drop
simultaneously, and he implores me not to play that "poor song."

This has not happened very many times, however, for there is nearly
always somebody here. The Gordons frequently, and sometimes Alfred.
They never come together, for whenever Doctor Gordon goes out anywhere
at night Alfred has to stay at home and attend to the calls that come
in. This is what a "cub" is for; then, too, it gives the Gordons a
better chance to talk about him, which they take as much pleasure in
doing as if he were their own dear son.

It is amazing how much they all think of Alfred. Not amazing,
certainly, in any sense that he is not worthy of all the affection
they bestow upon him, but I believe that it is seldom a girl has a
young man thrown at her head so _unanimously_ as I have Alfred thrown
at me by our loving friends.

If he threw himself I should die, but he never does.

He is frank, and loyal, and sober-sided; just a little merry with me
now and then, but for the most part going his even-tenored way and
doing his work without any more fuss and splutter than--a fireless
cooker. He never talks about what he is going to do, although his eyes
are so deep and brown that I feel sure he is a dreamer.

He is the kind of man who seems to walk, with deliberate yet sure
step, into the things he wants. This denotes, of course, that he has
sat up late many nights, smoothing out rough places in the road, so
that his course might be dignified and steady when he gets ready to
run it.

And, if Solomon--or whoever it was--told the truth about silence being
golden, then Alfred Morgan is sinfully rich. He is timid, too, around
women--_well_ women, I mean; and I don't believe he would ever have
grown so fond of me if he had not first known me at an age when I wore
such plain linen blouses and soft silk ties you couldn't tell whether
I was a boy or girl.

Even after my dresses began to sweep the ground I think he still
thought of me as a boy. "You're a good little chap," he would say to
me occasionally when I had done something for his comfort or pleasure;
and I so entirely considered _him_ a boy in spite of those six years
between us that I seldom felt to see how my hair was arranged when I
would hear his footsteps approaching.

Then, one day I had a rude shock about Alfred's degree of manhood.

Ann Lisbeth and I were in his private office waiting for Doctor Gordon
to get through with a string of patients which was overflowing the
reception-room, and write out a check for her to take on a shopping
excursion. (Things have changed with them since the days of their
early married life, when Ann Lisbeth got a new dress only once a year;
and then had to have it made by somebody who was owing her husband for
a baby or a spell of measles.)

There was plenty of space in Alfred's room, poor boy, and I was
sitting in front of his desk, idly fingering some papers and journals
lying around in scattered confusion.

My attention was arrested presently by a small, oblong blotting-pad,
with his name, Doctor Alfred Morgan, printed on the celluloid cover.
The drug firms of the city sent such things out to all the doctors
occasionally, but this was a particularly pretty one, with a little
raised medallion on it--a picture of a stately stork approaching a
cheery little cottage, with the fat, rosy, inevitable burden in his
bill. The moon and stars were shining as they never shone on sea nor
land, and there was a comfortable glow coming from the cottage
windows, a glow of welcome, it seemed.

It was a happy-looking little picture, but it brought a curious
feeling of uneasiness to my mind.

"Ann Lisbeth," I called, loud enough to cause her to look up from the
magazine she was reading, yet not so loud as to be heard by Alfred,
who was in the next room making a blood count. "Do you suppose they
let anybody as young as Alfred do _this_?" I held up the picture.

"Oh, my goodness," she laughed, looking not so much at the picture as
at my horrified face. "_Young!_ Why, he has two pairs of twins _named_
for him, besides a little girl whose happy parents are so fond of him
that they made him name her. Her name is Ann Morgan."

"The Ann is for _you_," I cried, my face flushing.

"Nay, for you," she insisted, still laughing so that Alfred heard her
and came in to see what it was that was so funny.

"Some of Ann's nonsense," she explained, and I slapped the blotter
into my purse before he turned and looked at me.

After that I naturally began to treat Alfred with a good deal more
respect, which he never seemed to notice.

It was about this time that he began finding a "good class" of
patients who were trusting enough or reckless enough to let him
operate on them; patients who remembered his work at the hospital, or
who were willing to take Doctor Gordon's word for it when he assured
them that Morgan could do the job as well as he himself. Of course
this last happened only when there was an emergency case that Doctor
Gordon could not attend to, or an out-of-town call that promised to
have so little compensation that the elder doctor felt that he would
not be justified in leaving the city for it.

And then it was that perhaps some old six-cylinder surgeon who
happened to see the operation would go away and remark that he always
knew Morgan was going to make good, for, by George! the fellow handled
the knife like a veteran!

These stories never failed to bring a thrill of satisfaction to my
breast, for Alfred is my old chum, and I have already mentioned in
here my reverence for power.

Jean Everett likes Alfred almost as much as I do, and reads me long
lectures upon the idiocy of my course. She religiously invites him out
to her house when I am spending the week-end there and makes me dress
up in absurdly coquettish things, in view of the fact that he has
possibly seen me for the past seven days in the plainest of tailored
clothes.

Jean has not grown up to be a beauty, that is, not a beauty that could
be marked off by rule, but she has that indefinable something about
her exquisite get-up which makes you suspect that all her lingerie is
stitched with thread number 120. So dainty is she in her pretty blue
frocks that a poetic he-cozen of hers calls her a Wedgwood girl, but
Guilford calls her his twenty-two carat girl, because her heart is as
golden as her hair.

I have been in the city only a little while--if I take the calendar's
word for it; but it has seemed long to me, for the season of the year
is that when everything is very dull. All the people who have country
homes are reluctantly bidding them good-by and the signs of fall
cleaning are disfiguring all the city homes. The theaters are
publishing long lists of attractions which are coming later on, but
now there is nothing.

The only politicians I have seen I have met accidentally up at the
_Times_ office--and they are all old, and wear long frock coats,--and
look as if they chewed tobacco.

So, as I promised in the first chapter that I was not going to bother
you with daily details and venison pasties, I suppose I shall have to
close this chapter without recording _one_ thing of interest. I can
assure you, however, that you do not regret the dullness of it _half_
so much as I do.

But hold! Shall I forget Neva? Self-centered thing that I am! Because
the last three weeks have been dreary and barren to me shall I not
rejoice in the happiness of some one else?

Among the other unimportant things which I have done since coming up
to the city I have helped Neva get installed in a boarding-school for
young ladies. An expensive place, it is, where for a certain
unnaturally large sum each year they teach you to broaden your a's,
sharpen your eyes, and loath your home surroundings for ever
afterward.

The matter had been under discussion for some days before I left home,
and I set forth the pros and especially the _cons_ to Mrs. Sullivan.
But the humiliation of the fit doctor's visit was fresh and galling;
and Neva's boarding-school experience would more than turn her rival's
triumph into Dead Sea fruit. She must be entered as a student at the
beautifully named college.

They came up together a week before time for the school to open, Neva
and her mother, so that they could learn their way about the city a
little and also buy Neva some new music and a supply of winter
clothes.

Now, Neva's songs, while new and silly, are sung in her buoyant young
voice with so much gusto on the caressing words that they are a kind
of actual music; a joyous sort of wholesome music, like the sound of
the postman's whistle on a sunshiny morning, when you know that he is
bringing you a love-letter! There goes my imagination again, for I
never had a love-letter in my life! Not even a post-card, and it's
been _three weeks_. Possibly dignified people do not write post-cards!
Especially gubernatorial timber!

Now, what started this digression? Oh, yes, Neva's silly songs which
she bought while she was up here those few days before school
commenced. I started out to say that they did not seem at all silly to
me this time. I actually caught myself singing them over and over
again and found considerable beauty in one that was a plea to some
hardhearted beloved to make "ev'ry dream come true."

Yes, I was delighted with Neva's new songs, and Neva was delighted
with everything she saw in the city: with the pure linen shirt-waists
marked down to one dollar; with the vast, dim cathedral which we
would drop into to enjoy its solemn beauty nearly every time we were
near it, after I found that Neva responded to its appeal; she admired
the Egyptian mummies in the museum--the terrified delight of my early
years; but she found the greatest joy in watching the fire-engines at
work.

Mrs. Sullivan remained strictly at home after her first day of
tramping the city streets, which she declared "was the death o' her
feet," so that Neva's bubbling accounts of the sights seen, when she
would return to their hotel at night and try to cheer her mother up
with her lively recitals, were by no means the least enjoyable part of
the day's program.

"Oh, mamma, the cathedral's just _grand_," she declared with
enthusiasm, after her first visit. "I told Miss Ann that I _wished_
papa had stayed a Catholic and had raised me that way."

Mrs. Sullivan's Baptist eyebrows flew up in horror, then her entire
face settled into its normal look of hopelessness.

"Maybe you won't be so glib to wish it at the Great Day of Judgment,"
she said warningly, and the capital letters I have used were all in
her voice.

"--And the mummies!" Neva hastened on, seeing that she had struck the
wrong key, and her tones were as light and frolicksome as her
mother's were lugubrious. "I just love mummies!"

Mrs. Sullivan still refused to show a smiling interest.

"Well, I reckon they're all right, if Miss Ann recommends 'em," she
said grudgingly, but with a little wonder depicted on her face;
"still, I make it a rule not to fill _my_ stomach too full of strange
vittles!"

"Oh, mamma! They ain't things to eat," Neva corrected, struggling
between her shame and amusement, then she launched forth into a brief
explanation of embalming "after the manner of the Egyptians."

At the word "Egyptians" quick comprehension dawned in Mrs. Sullivan's
disapproving eyes. Certainly she had read her Bible.

"Shucks! Is _them_ what you're talking about? Well, I can tell you,
miss, I knew all about mummies before _you_ was ever borned! But you
talked about 'em so gushing that I thought of course they was some
kind o' new-fangled ice-cream."

"When I said that I _loved_ them I meant that they are _so_
interesting, you know," Neva said, hoping to mollify her, but her
explanation proved a poor quality of oil poured upon the troubled
waters of maternal understanding.

"Them's strange things for a girl to be going to see," she commented
with pointed brevity. "--Men, women and children layin' there without
_no_ clo'es on--and nobody not knowing what they died with!"

But the fires! I don't know whether there was an unusually large
number of such calamities during this period or not, but I had never
had my attention so attracted to them before.

We happened to find ourselves almost in the thick of one the very
first day we were up in the shopping district, and the excitement so
appealed to Neva that after that no member of the fire department
could have taken a more lively interest in the clang of the bell than
she did.

On the last night of Mrs. Sullivan's stay, when she was already
weeping over having to leave her only born, there was such a sudden
and close clang of the alarm as would furnish Edgar Allan Poe with
inspiration enough for four more stanzas of "bells, bells, bells."

Neva listened, counted the strokes, then scrambled around distractedly
for the alarm card. The fire might be near enough for her to see!

"Well, Nevar," her mother said, wiping her eyes and looking at her
motions with reproach, "it is poorly worth while trying to educate
_you_! You've been here a whole week and _ain't learned the fire-alarm
card yet_!"




CHAPTER VIII

ALFRED COLLECTS A DEBT


Alfred Morgan is one of those men whose backbone is built out of
seasoned hickory.

I wish some of the poets would start the fashion of writing epics
about the hero who goes through college without getting any money from
home. To me he seems vastly greater than he who taketh a city.

Alfred did this, selling his pretty saddle mare for money enough to
start in on, then borrowing some from the banks and winning
scholarships the rest of the way. Incidentally, he has a very handsome
chin.

Now there are two things that are an abomination to me, yea
three--white eyelashes, a receding chin, and negro dialect written by
a northern writer. The white eyelashes I admit are a misfortune, not a
fault; the receding chin--well, I have wondered if that defect might
be remedied by a little crinoline infused into the character, for
without a doubt it is a visible sign of a weakness that will sooner
or later become visible. The negro dialect allusion has no business
here, but I had written it down once in a note-book in a list of my
pet abominations, and I wanted to work it in somewhere, so this seemed
as good a place as any. However, the question of chin is the only one
with which we have to deal to-night.

As I have above intimated, Alfred is dark-lashed and well-chinned,
else we could never have been the friends that we are. That we are
good friends is proved by the fact that whenever I want to go anywhere
with him I ask him to take me along, and if there is any reason why I
should not go, all he ever says by way of explanation is a brief, "No,
I can't be bothered with you to-day, my dear."

It happened pretty much after that fashion yesterday afternoon, when I
had lunched with Ann Lisbeth and he had mentioned that he had a long
country drive to take. The sun was shining alluringly, and I had been
feeling very dull.

"I believe I'll go with you," I volunteered, as we congregated around
him at the front door and he began looking about for his black leather
bag.

"I wish I could take you, for it's a beautiful drive," he responded,
looking down at me with a smile in his brown eyes, "but I couldn't be
sure of getting you home before very late."

"Is the trip such a long one?"

"No; but I have some urgent business in the city afterward. I've
brought suit for a medical bill, and am expecting at any moment to be
summoned to the magistrate's court."

"How exciting! But I could come home on the car if you are detained
very late."

"How disgusting rather!" he answered, ignoring the suggestion of mine
about the street-car, but I saw him pick up a lap-robe lying near and
brush a little dust from it. This was a sign that he expected me to
go, for he scorns the comforts of a lap-robe for himself, even on the
coldest days.

"It's hateful business," he continued, dropping the robe and searching
around for the little broom which Ann Lisbeth keeps tied to the
hat-rack, for both her doctors consider that cleanliness is godliness.
"There will be a pack of lies sworn to in heathen jargon and hours
wasted trying to make the scoundrels come to terms."

"Heathen? Literally or figuratively?"

"Both. The man who owes the money is that Hindoo I operated on last
year for appendicitis, but the circus he travels with is really
responsible for the debt; so I'm going to attach a few of their lions
and tigers and snake-charmers to make them settle up while they're in
town this time."

"Why, Alfred! I don't know of anything this side of African jungles so
thrilling. I believe I'll go with you anyway, even if I have to walk
back. If the circus men should decide to pay you in lions instead of
money you might need me to help herd them home."

He smiled as I reached for my hat.

"There's something in that," he said, "for they would willingly follow
_you_." Then, coming a step nearer so that he could not be heard by
Ann Lisbeth, who stood near by, he kept on, "I would trust you to
charm anything that has eyes."

The telephone rang just as he spoke, and Ann Lisbeth went to answer
it. I was surprised at the tone of his voice, for Alfred very rarely
pays me compliments, and never one anything like this before. I was
surprised still more at myself as I caught at this opportunity for a
sincere, _masculine_ compliment.

"Alfred," I said quickly, half afraid that Ann Lisbeth would come back
before I could make him say what I longed to hear, "Alfred, do you
think I'm good-looking?"

I had the grace to blush as I said it, but the blush was not for
Alfred. I felt that he knew the real question in my mind was, "Do you
suppose Richard Chalmers thought I was good-looking that day we sat on
the old stone wall by the orchard gate?"

But Alfred was simple and sincere always, and he saw in my question
only the query any vain girl might put to a close friend. And into his
eyes darted a quick look of pain and confusion. I wondered if my
vanity lowered his ideal of me.

"You evidently have no knowledge of what I _do_ think of you--else you
wouldn't ask such a silly question," he answered gravely.

"I beg your pardon if--if I have offended you by my foolish talk, but
I was only trying to make you say something pretty to me--you never
do, you know." I was genuinely confused, myself, now.

"I thought 'pretty things' were unnecessary between you and me, Ann,"
he answered again, more gravely still.

"Every woman likes them," I said, trying to relieve the tension by my
tone of lightness.

"Then I can gratify you--if that's what you want. I think--that is,
to me you are the most beautiful woman in the world!"

I was so stunned at his unexpected reply and the entirely _new_ look
on his face as he made it that I should have betrayed the thoughts
which came surging to my mind if Ann Lisbeth had not rejoined us then
with a commonplace remark about my taking a heavy coat along with me
if I decided to go with Alfred.

"You're going, aren't you?" he asked casually, as if the matter were
of no moment with him, but I saw how he reached for my coat as I
nodded my head, and he bade Ann Lisbeth not to take up so much of his
valuable time as she fussed a little over the careless way I fixed my
veil, and insisted on my letting her pin it on properly.

The woods were beautiful, but I saw their beauty only in a vague,
fantastic way. My thoughts were in a sad tumult, partly on my own
account, partly on Alfred's, for I felt that his strange words spoken
at the hall door would be followed up by something far more manifest.

I knew him so well that there was no need for me to agitate my mind
over whether his words and looks meant anything, as I had done in the
case of Richard Chalmers that day in the orchard when he had said
"pretty things." Ah, he had said them so prettily!

How could I let Alfred know, without wounding him and spoiling our
comradeship? Or would it be better _not_ to let him know? To ignore
his words and avoid such dangerous ground in the future--until he had
forgotten them himself. Even the strongest, staunchest lovers cease to
love after a while, when there is nothing for the flame to feed upon,
I argued, and I set about steering away from any reference that might
lead back to the perilous line of talk which had been so mercifully
interrupted.

I espied a redbird--belated little wanderer--sitting on the fence by
the side of the road, and I began telling Alfred of Mammy Lou's
superstitions concerning redbirds and other little creatures too happy
and bright to have even a tinge of superstition attached to them. But
as I laughed at the notion I made a wish, and saw with joy that the
bird flew away out of view.

There is a queer admixture of the fatalist in my make-up and, as the
redbird flew away, carrying my wish with him, I had a feeling that
that wish would come to pass. It was a very simple, fervid,
all-embracing affair--that I should see Richard Chalmers again very
soon--and that he should _love_ me.

The first time I had looked at that man's face I felt as if I had
turned a leaf in the book of my destiny. When Rufe mentioned his name
to me and I later learned that he was the same man whose face had
formed the centerpiece of all my mental pictures, I fancied that Fate
was about to keep her promise; and when he had lingered over saying
good-by that night at home I felt as if my fancies might have a chance
of coming true.

Then I had come up to the city and stayed for days and days, without
hearing one word from him. This humiliated me until I was angry with
myself for having ever given him a thought. I am of a proud nature
which would demand far more of a man than he should ever _see_ that I
gave.

I was certainly not in love with Richard Chalmers as I drove with
Alfred out that country road, but I was intensely fascinated, so much
so that my thoughts flew to him with the flight of the redbird, and
for a while I forgot that I was neglecting my task of keeping Alfred's
mind diverted.

From the country we drove back to Alfred's office and I stayed in the
reception-room and looked at magazines while he was busy with some
patients in his private office. It was getting well toward evening and
the stenographer was beginning to arrange her desk in readiness to
leave when Alfred came into the room and began to fume about the delay
in being summoned to court. He suggested that I telephone Cousin
Eunice that I would be late, which I did, but I found that my absence
was going to make small difference to them, as she and Rufe were going
out to a lecture, and I should be thrown on the society of Waterloo
for the evening.

"Make Alfred take you on to Ann Lisbeth's, and Rufe and I will come by
for you after the lecture," she suggested, which was an easy solution
and would not cause Alfred to feel that he must hurry on my account.

He smiled when I told him of this arrangement.

"So you are going to be left entirely to me this one evening, it
seems," he said. "The Gordons are dining out and bade me satisfy my
hunger before I came home. I propose that we go on up to Beauregard's
now and have dinner, then I'll take you home and let you tell tales to
Waterloo until he goes to sleep."

"I'm not dressed to go to Beauregard's," I began, looking down sadly
at my tailored clothes and linen blouse. I was very hungry, and
Beauregard's is a delicious place. But my longings were cut short by a
ring at the telephone, and I knew from the answers he made that Alfred
was at last summoned to the magistrate's court.

"Jump in and go with me," he directed, as he began giving the colored
boy and stenographer directions for closing up the office. "Likely I
sha'n't be long; and we'll go to dinner as soon as they get through
with me."

We drove to the magistrate's court and I sat in the car and waited for
him. I waited while the darkness came on and the street lights flared
up; I waited while everybody else was crowding into the homeward-bound
electric cars--and I was still waiting long after the throngs had
thinned out and the cars were carrying their scant loads, which means
that all the world is at its evening meal.

Finally he came out, looking tired and disgusted, but he told me that
the case had been adjusted satisfactorily to him, although the final
settlement was not to be made until after the circus performance that
night, when the business manager of the mighty show could be freed
from his duties and so present himself at the pleasant little affair.

"The mischief of it is that my lawyer and I have to go out to the show
grounds and keep an eye on the manager," he explained, with a slightly
worried look.

"And don't you know what to do with me?"

"Exactly! It's too late to send you home in a cab by yourself, and I
can't go and take you now. What shall I do with you?"

"Why, take me to the circus."

He looked at me a moment, then looked at his watch and hesitated. "I
hate to," he said, "but I don't see anything else to be done." So we
started off again.

Fortunately the performance was nearly over when we got there, for it
was the last night and everything was cut delightfully short, so I
decided that I would rather stay out in the machine for that length of
time, and watch the crowds swarm out to the street-cars than to be
mixed up more closely with them.

Alfred drove up under a big arc-light and halted at the end of a long
string of automobiles and carriages.

"You'll not be afraid here--and I'll be back as soon as I can," he
said as he left me.

I pulled the rug up over me and reached back for a magazine I had
brought, but the unsteady light on the printed pages soon caused my
eyes to hurt, so I laid the book down again and gave myself up to the
misery of just plain waiting.

After what seemed hours to me Alfred sent a little negro boy to the
car with the message that I was to empty out his largest instrument
case and send it to him.

"Maybe they have compromised on part money and a few baby lions," I
mused, as I leaned back and gave myself up to another period of
waiting.

I once heard Ann Lisbeth say that the only medical attention a
doctor's wife ever gets is a sample bottle of iron tonic hastily
handed her from a desk drawer once in a while, if she happens to be
sitting near by and looking pale. I should not object to this, being
healthy and seldom needing an iron tonic, but I do think the long
waiting spells which any one who goes out with a doctor has to be
subjected to would eventually make a woman so nervous that she would
have to have some kind of tonic. I have registered a vow that
hereafter, even if I start out somewhere with Alfred in August, I
shall take my furs along, not knowing but that it will be winter when
I get back.

He finally came, however, and in looking at him I forgot the
tediousness of my long wait. His eyes were flashing and his face was
flushed. He looked very angry--and very handsome. Evidently he had not
been suffering from cold as I had.

He had on his long overcoat, which seemed almost to drag him down, big
as he is, with its weight; and the pockets were bulging
dropsically--if there is such a word. His instrument case he deposited
in the car, right in the way of my feet, but when I tried to move it I
found that it would not budge.

"Are you tired?" he asked, as he began to crank the car.

"I'm tired and cold--and _hungry_."

"All of which will soon be remedied," and he smiled as he looked at
me. "Ann, you never saw a man in my condition before in your life."

"What?"

He had a hard time working his way into the car with those bulging
pockets, but he finally got fixed satisfactorily, then he moved the
heavy instrument case; and I gave my feet several relieved shakes.

"Very likely for the first time in your young life you behold a man
who has more money than he knows what to do with!"

"_Money!_" I edged away respectfully to give the pockets more room.
"Is it money?"

"Every pound of it is coin of the realm," he answered. "It is
_nickels_."

"Alfred!"

"Those low-down scoundrels paid me in nickels." And his eyes began to
flash again.

"What on earth for?"

"For pure cussedness!"

"And you had to count them all!" No wonder he had been gone a long
time.

"I sat there like a fool and counted the instrument case full; then I
dumped the rest into my pockets. The lawyer is sitting in front of his
little pile now, counting it; and there is a small bag full to be sent
to the magistrate to-morrow."

"Why, it's like a dream, isn't it? I never heard of so much money."

"And I never believed before that surgeons charge too much for their
services--but now--"

We laughed all the way back to town; we drove up to Beauregard's
laughing; we laughed as Alfred slipped off his coat and the solemn
waiter looked startled at the heaviness of the garment. Then we looked
around leisurely to select a table, for it was late and the diners
were few.

"Let's go into the booth," I suggested, nodding toward a small
mahogany partition at one side and near the front of the restaurant.
This compartment was built with some other purpose in view than acting
as a private dining-room, for the open doorway is unscreened in any
way, and the partition itself is only about seven feet high. I set
down these uninteresting figures to let you know that I am a
well-brought-up young person and don't go into private dining-rooms
unchaperoned--nor should I have been here at all with any one but
Alfred.

I had learned the comforts of this mahogany screen from having come
here often with Cousin Eunice and Waterloo. We always make a bee-line
for its shelter when we have him with us, for he fills his mouth so
full that his mother always has to make him stop and unload. This is
less embarrassing when there is a partition between her and the
public.

The place happened to be unoccupied when we came into the restaurant
that night, and Alfred and I sat down with a sigh of mingled
exhaustion and content. He began a lavish and extensive order which I
curtailed materially on account of the lateness of the hour.

"We can't spend _all_ our nickels to-night," I said, reprovingly; and
we laughed a little over the nickels, at intervals, all through the
meal.

Then we talked, or at least, I talked, which is usually the case when
Alfred and I are together. I asked him questions about the circus
people and the curious sights he had seen in the tent which was not
open to the public. And he told me about the hideous Cossacks standing
guard over their high-pommelled saddles, as the hurried process of
packing went on, the long-haired ranchmen, who were tenderly laying
away their guns; and the Hindoo woman who sat and glared at him as he
handled the nickels which would mean months of a lessened salary for
her and her husband.

"_Think_ of the balloons and pop-corn and red lemonade those nickels
represent," I said, still on the subject of the circus, as we finished
our meal and left the table.

Under the influence of the good dinner, the soft lights, with their
soothing shades on the table, and the warm air of the comfortable
room after my long wait in the autumn cold, I was beginning to feel
deliciously sleepy, and was thinking with pleasure in how short a time
Alfred could make the distance home, now that the streets were not
crowded--when we left the booth and I looked around at the people
occupying the other tables. I looked at them indifferently, as I
waited for Alfred to put on his overcoat, my eyes traveling slowly
around the room, until they stopped at a table close in front of where
I was standing.

Just outside the partition and sitting so squarely facing it that I
dropped one of my long gloves in my startled surprise when I saw him,
was Richard Chalmers, smoking a fragrant cigar, from which he had
stripped a dainty red-and-gold band, which was lying upon the
newspaper he had spread out in front of him.

But he was not reading, and I imagined from his look that he had not
been reading for some time, for he was looking straight at me with the
same half-amused smile he had worn when he had sat on the old stone
wall that day and told me that there was a vast difference in our
ages. It seemed that he was quietly waiting for me to look at him,
and, as our eyes met, he rose at once, and came over and shook hands
with me.

"I was waiting for you to come out, Miss Fielding," he said, after I
had introduced the two men and they had reached simultaneously for my
glove, which Alfred got to first--then Mr. Chalmers began to fold the
paper he had not been reading, and made preparations to leave the
place as we did. "I happened to drop in here a little while ago, and,
fortunately, chose this table. Then I heard your voice--I felt sure
that it was you--so I waited to see."

Alfred excused himself a moment and crossed the room to speak to a
white-haired old gentleman at one of the tables. I recognized this old
man as a well-known back number in the medical profession of the city,
and had heard Doctor Gordon say that he was pitiably grateful for any
attention which the younger fellows showed him. Alfred spoke a few
words of congratulation on a recent address the old doctor had made at
a medical meeting, they both laughed over a half-whispered joke, then
Alfred turned to leave. An appealing hand was laid on his coat sleeve,
as he allowed himself to be cornered by the old man, and a harangue
ensued, carried on in a quavering, high-pitched voice, with now and
then a deep-toned word from Alfred.

I stood and waited for him and Richard Chalmers came closer to me as I
glanced over into one of the mirrors on the wall and began to tie the
big veil around my hat again, and to pull up my coat-collar a bit
closer, preparatory to going out into the chilly air.

He dropped his voice and began to talk as rapidly as his lazy,
southern drawl would let him. He seemed to have a good deal to say and
he wished to say it all. I was in an agony of fear that the old
doctor's harangue might not last long enough.

"Yes, the next week after seeing you I went East and returned only
this morning," Richard's voice was saying, and, while the words made
all the difference in the world to me, still I heard them only
indistinctly. All I could take in was the fact that I was hearing his
voice again.

"I reached the city this morning, and telephoned Clayborne about noon
to ask him where you were. You remember you told me that you were
booked to come home with them? I was very glad indeed when he said
that you were at his house, and I should have gone out to see Mrs.
Clayborne to-night--I wanted to tell her about my mother and sister
coming up to town next week for some shopping. They live in
Charlotteville--eastern end of the state, you know--but Clayborne said
that there was a lecture or something on for to-night. He thought you
would all likely be at home to-morrow evening."

"Yes--I think so. We shall be very glad to see you."

"It was the merest chance that I dropped in here and heard you
talking--I understood that something very amusing had happened at a
circus."

"Yes," I said weakly.

"So I stayed to listen. You will forgive me--for I knew that it was
your voice, and"--with a _wonderful_ smile--"you see I am very fond of
music."




CHAPTER IX

A SHOPPING EXPEDITION


"_O Richard, O mon roi_," I carolled this morning, but I confess that
I carolled it as much in an undertone as the unfortunate aristocrats
had to employ when they chose to give vent to their feelings by
singing that song during the Reign of Terror.

I was up-stairs in my own room at Cousin Eunice's, brushing, shaking,
smoothing, folding, and now and then mending a little ripped place in
my clothes, for, during the last four weeks I have done nothing but
wear them. Early in the morning, all through the day, and late at
night, I have lived to maltreat those clothes. And they are showing
signs of being weary and wounded.

It is a good thing, possibly, that mother and Cousin Eunice would not
let me have the black spangled net that my soul yearned for, else
there would not have been a spangle left to tell the tale by this
time.

Cousin Eunice was in the next room throughout the time I was thus
employed--that is, she was in and out, hence the undertone in my
singing.

"Ann," she finally called in a vexed tone, after a period of silence,
"you'll live to learn, after you're married, that a man and his
poll-tax receipt are soon parted."

"It's a registration certificate," I amended softly.

"Well, what if it is? It's eternally lost when they want it."

She had spent the morning emptying bureau drawers, scratching through
piles of old papers, peering under the clock, into a cracked vase,
moving the piano and searching in the dusty lint beneath, and dazzling
her eyesight by a scramble through a five-years' accumulation of pink
electric light bills--but no sign of the registration certificate.
Toward luncheon time Rufe called her up and said he hoped she had not
put herself to any trouble, for he forgot to tell her early this
morning that he had already found the missing paper in his
pocket-book.

"They have to register before they can vote, don't they?"

I knew that they did, but I was in a mood to talk politics this
morning.

"Yes. This is just a measly little municipal election, however."

"Oh, I know that it is not gubernatorial."

"I observe that you have improved your store of knowledge
mightily--since that day we sat under the althea hedge." She came into
my room as she spoke, and sat down on the side of the bed.

"Yes, I feel that I know all about the state of affairs now."

"Then I wish you would tell me, so I can tell Rufe." She was tired out
from her strenuous morning, and her head fell over among the pillows.
I laid down the skirt I had been brushing and seated myself on the
foot of the bed.

"What's the trouble?" I asked. "I thought the matter was very simple."

"You thought the matter was simple, you dear little goose, because our
favorite piece of gubernatorial timber has showered you with devoted
attentions this past month. It seems that he has declared his
intentions toward you--so far as looks and acts go--but he is backward
about his political doings."

"Then you have just not listened to what he has said," I denied
stoutly, the spirit of the game strong within me, and the spirit of my
admiration for him much stronger. "Nobody could denounce Appleton
more entirely than he does!"

"Oh, Appleton!" There was infinite scorn in her tone. "What decent
person doesn't denounce him?"

"Then, what's the trouble?" I asked again. "Appleton stands for
whisky; we stand for water--the affair seems quite clear to me."

"And Jim Blake stands for whisky _and_ water--with a goodly dash of
sugar. He's a kind of toddy for our split Democracy."

"But what has _he_ to do with Richard Chalmers?" I asked, an uneasy
fear clutching at my gay spirits.

"That's just what we want to know--before the _Times_ can rally to the
support of Chalmers."

"The _Times_!" I was genuinely aroused now. "Why, I thought the
_Times_ had virtually _made_ Richard Chalmers."

"Well, the paper has boomed him because he has always stood for the
right principles heretofore. But there is a grave complication about
to set in now, it seems. Of course the people of this state are not
going to stand for Appleton again--we are not Hottentots, and either a
strong Democrat must come out, and stand on a strong platform, else we
are going to have a Republican for governor."

"Well?"

"Well, the law-abiding faction is ready to support Richard Chalmers,
so long as he does not compromise, but at the first evidence of
weakening on his part--the vote goes to some _clean_ Republican."

"And you are afraid that he will join Blake--in some way?"

"In a very clearly defined way. Blake is the most popular man in the
state. He could put up a good fight for anything he wanted here--and
he could throw his influence to Chalmers."

I traced the pattern of the counterpane with the end of the
clothes-brush which I was still holding in my hand.

"I don't know a thing about it," I said finally, my tone and feelings
far different from what they were but a few minutes before, when I had
declared confidently that I knew all about it. "He has never once
mentioned politics to me these last few weeks."

"Well, I dare say not," she said, straightening up and smoothing back
her hair. "Imagine a man talking politics before Mrs. Chalmers and
Evelyn! And they have been with you every minute that you and he have
been together."

It was true. These last few weeks had brought about a delightful
state of closer personal contact between Richard Chalmers and me, a
condition which he has seemed determined to make stronger and more
pronounced by every means in his power--and he has the most charming
means--but always under the supervision of his mother and sister.

Supervision? Good heavens, what an absurd word to use in connection
with either one of those women where Richard is concerned, for they
are truly as much slaves to him as if he had chains around their
wrists and ankles. A worshipping slave is his mother, while Evelyn is
so timid and fearful in his presence that she appears to be much
stupider than she really is, which is stupid enough, in all
conscience!

When I first discovered this mighty reverence in them for the man who
is so kingly to me I felt that they must recognize in him that
wonderful _regal_ attribute, which so irresistibly attracted me. But I
soon learned, for we were together constantly, that Evelyn fears and
dislikes him, and the only time during those weeks of companionship
that she displayed the slightest eagerness over anything was when she
was urging me to accompany them on some pleasure party, where, unless
I should go along with them, they would be left solely to the
companionship of her august brother.

"He's so much nicer when you're around," she explained to me one time
with a look of pleading candor, when she was insisting that I go to
dinner with them that evening. I had received pressing invitations
from the three members of the family, but was hesitating on account of
Mammy Lou's slogan.

Evelyn is an intensely inane girl, but not bad at heart, and it had
not occurred to her that she was saying the wrong thing. Her mother,
who is much more acute, came forward with a flurried palliation for
Evelyn's thoughtless words. Richard is so dignified that Evelyn has
never grown to _know_ him, she explained, with what impressed me as
undue haste; he is so much older than she, and has been away from home
so much of recent years.

"It doesn't make me think any less of him to know that you are both
deadly afraid of him," I smiled to myself as I ran up-stairs to change
my dress. "But I am not in the least afraid of him."

His women are not at all like Richard, even in so far as length,
breadth and thickness go. The quality in him which results in simply a
splendid physique, in them tends toward heaviness, and I have heard
from his own lips that he "hates dumpy women." Yet he cares extremely
for the handsome appearance which they make in their expensive
clothes, and his cold dignity finds a pleased echo in their studied
correctness.

Correct they both are, and stylish and _orthodox_, church and clothes
being the alpha and omega of their conversation.

They are conventionally polite, whereas he is always superbly
courteous; and Mrs. Chalmers can invariably be depended upon to do and
say exactly the right thing. Evelyn passes muster all right, because
she never does or says anything.

While Richard's mother can describe to the turning of a milliner's
fold the latest foibles of fashion's fancy, she is complacently
old-fashioned in her notions about other things, maintaining the faith
in which she was brought up, namely, that all children should be
whipped and all husbands watched, while women should say their prayers
regularly and see that their corsets suit their figure. She quotes the
Bible unendingly and is so morbidly "proper" and ladylike that I am
sure she thinks, if she ever thought about it at all, that being
burned at the stake was no more than Joan of Arc deserved for being
so immodest as to ride cross-saddle before all those fast and loose
Frenchmen.

It fell to Cousin Eunice's lot to go shopping with Mrs. Chalmers and
Evelyn; and to the hair-dressers, and to the thousand and one other
places that out-of-town women always feel that they must visit when
they are in a city for a little while. I usually fight shy of this
phase of getting acquainted, not because, as you may think, that
Richard was never along, for he was frequently; but simply because I
_hate_ shopping.

One morning, only a little while before they were to go back to
Charlotteville, they asked Cousin Eunice to meet them in the city as
they had some rather important purchases to make and desired her
judgment on the matter. Cousin Eunice has known Richard's family ever
since he shot up so suddenly on the political firmament, and she had
shopped with them before, so she fortified herself for this occasion
by putting on her most comfortable shoes and arranging her hair to
stand the strain of a day's long crusade away from a mirror.

I had been invited to lunch with Ann Lisbeth that day, for there had
been killed a fatted calf to glorify Alfred's birthday, and I pleaded
this engagement when I was politely urged to join, at least for a
while, the shopping expedition.

"I wish you would come on in and see that coat I'm worried over,"
Evelyn rather insisted, as I was about to make my adieus at the
entrance of one of the big shops, without even glancing at the
bewildering array of new fall goods displayed in the windows.

Clearly Evelyn considered my seeming indifference to fashionable
apparel a pose, for she continued, looking at me slightly aggrieved:
"You evidently must be interested in your own clothes. Richard said
last night that you were a feast for an artist."

My face turned a little red, but I meekly followed them on into the
place. I might have told her that, while to _her_ clothes were an end,
to me they were a means--and no one is ever deeply interested in a
mere means. Yet when the end is such a speech as _that_ from such a
man as that, it stands one in hand to take a little interest in the
means. This brought about the frenzied overhauling of raiment which I
instituted this morning.

Although it was still warm weather, the autumn stock of furs was
already on exhibition, and Evelyn's attention had been particularly
attracted by a coat of short, glossy, and very expensive fur. One
more sight of the attractive garment decided her.

"Well, I'm certainly glad you've made up your mind," Mrs. Chalmers
said, as she opened her shopping-bag and drew out her check-book. She
was busily filling out the blank after "Pay to the order of" when she
suddenly stopped and looked up at Evelyn.

"I wish I could get this cashed somewhere else," she said in a low
voice, "for Richard will criticize our taste unmercifully when he
learns that this amount of money has been paid for that coat. He
always looks over my returned checks."

"Oh, we'll just tell him that this was the entire amount of our
shopping bill at this store," Evelyn answered easily, as if such a
deception might be an every-day affair with them. "If he asks me I'll
tell him that the coat cost only half of what it did."

"That's true, we can do that," Mrs. Chalmers said, looking relieved
and going on with her writing. "But don't you forget to back me up in
whatever I tell him."

After she had handed the check to the gratified saleswoman and again
given directions about a slight alteration in the set of the collar
she turned to Cousin Eunice and said a word or two in explanation.

"Richard is such a critic," she stated rather absently, her eyes fixed
on a handsome evening wrap hanging in a case close by; "when he knows
we have paid a good deal for our clothes it seems to give him real
pleasure to criticize them. He says Evelyn and I will buy anything a
shop-girl shows us if she will only flatter us enough. So I am in for
doing anything that will keep the peace. I consider it one of the
first duties of a Christian."

Her mouth closed primly for a moment after her last sentence, but
opened again almost immediately, for her eyes were still fascinated by
the beauty of the delicate-colored wrap.

"Mrs. Clayborne, _do_ you think I am too stout for one of those loose
cloaks?"

I stood for a moment looking at the group and fingering the handle of
my shopping-bag nervously. I was glad that my opinion of the evening
wrap was not asked, for I should have given a random answer. I was
wondering so many things in so short a space of time that my brain
could not find room for words just then. Of all the different kinds of
lies that one meets up with in life it has always seemed to me that
the lies women tell about the cost of clothes are the lowest class.
What a deplorable lack of understanding must exist between members of
a family when such lying is deemed necessary! I imagined mother or me
trying to lie to father--about the cost of clothes!

The bewitching evening wrap was brought forth from its case and Mrs.
Chalmers and Evelyn trailed away after the shop-woman to the
dressing-room. Cousin Eunice and I sat down to wait for them. She
looked at her watch, stifled a yawn, and then turned to me rather
hesitatingly.

"I wonder if our friend, Mr. Chalmers, is a domestic tyrant?" she
said.

I started, for this phase of the matter had not presented itself to my
mind.

"He doesn't seem to be," I answered, with as much nonchalance as I could
muster. "Of course every one can see that they both stand in awe of him;
but I thought that must be because he is so extraordinarily--clever."

She laughed, then she looked at me more seriously.

"If it were only his cleverness they would not be hypocritical with
him. And tyrants _do_ breed hypocrites."

"Not unless there is hypocritical material--to start out with."

"I--don't know! If you loved a tyrant, and desired above everything
else to please him, it might mean the ultimate ruin of even _your_
frank character."

"I couldn't love a tyrant," I argued.

"You might not recognize the tyrant in him--until after you had
married him," she said.

The same uneasy feeling that again came over me when I discussed his
political prospects took possession of me then, and I started to ask
her frankly what she had in mind, when Evelyn came up and said that
her mother wanted Cousin Eunice to come and see her with the wrap on.
So she passed on back to the dressing-room to help decide the
momentous question, while Evelyn and I sat there and discussed the
good points of the coat she had just bought.

       *       *       *       *       *

Ann Lisbeth was sweet and wholesome when I met her an hour or two
later--an admirable antidote to the disagreeable feeling I had brought
away from the shops.

"Alfred doesn't know you're coming," she said with a bright smile,
"he'll be so pleased!"

As is usual when the fatted calf is killed for a medicine man he takes
that occasion to be an hour late--an emergency case at the last
minute, or some one at the office that it took an unreasonable time to
get through with. I hardly heard the excuse which Alfred made when he
came in, but I knew it was true, whatever it was, and, as Doctor
Gordon was not going to be able to come at all, we three went in and
gave ourselves up to the joy of the occasion.

I was absently eating everything that was brought to me, and was
thinking all the while how perfectly preposterous it was that Richard
Chalmers--a man like Richard Chalmers--should have such weak-minded
females attached to him; and I had just reached the conclusion that
there could never, _never_ be anything like friendship between us, no
matter what there might be as an occasion for friendship, when the
dessert was brought in, and with it a great, beautiful cake, iced in
forget-me-nots.

"Now, don't you think I'm sentimental?" Ann Lisbeth asked with a
smile, after we had used up all the adjectives that we had at our
command. "You see, I thought maybe Alfred's next birthday might be
spent in London, or Vienna, or somewhere far away--and I knew that I
was going to have you here to-day, Ann--so I told the woman who made
the cake to be sure and use forget-me-nots. So when he thinks of us on
his next birthday he will have to remember how much we all love him!"

All of a sudden I had that uncomfortable feeling that comes in my
throat sometimes when I don't want it to, and I realized that if
something did not happen to divert my mind I should certainly cry.
Ever since his graduation Alfred had been trying to devise means for
this course of study abroad, and I had known how much better his
practice had been lately, but somehow, I had not thought of his going
so far away so _soon_. Suppose Mammy Lou should have gall-stones
again!

I wrestled for a moment with that awful lump in my throat; then I
spoke, and my voice was natural again.

"Is this sudden 'wanderlust' the outcome of collecting all those
nickels?" I asked with a laugh.

After we left the table Alfred and I went into the library for a
while, and Ann Lisbeth stayed in the dining-room to keep her husband
company while he ate, for he had come in just as we were finishing,
and declared that he was starved.

"Ann, I have a surprise for you," Alfred said, springing up from the
big leather chair into whose depths he had lazily thrown himself a
moment before. He sometimes took a short nap after luncheon, when he
had been out all the night before, and I had picked up a magazine to
amuse myself with in case he deserted me in favor of his siesta.

"A surprise?" He had given me a surprise the last time I spent the day
at the Gordons'.

"A bully one. I found it down home the other day--last week when I was
out there--while I was rummaging in a box of ancient books and papers.
Wait, I'll run up-stairs and get it."

He returned almost immediately with a book in his hand, a ponderous
old tome it was, with yellowed edges and time-stained leather covers,
but I saw a name on the back which sent my pulses throbbing with
pleasure.

"Moore's _Life of Byron_," I said, reaching out for it eagerly. Alfred
had known that I wanted the book for years, and whenever he had been
in a big city for any length of time he had always searched about for
it, but had never come across a copy.

"It isn't Moore's _Life_," he said, sitting down beside me on the
couch, "but from what I have been able to gather, by glancing through
it, it seems to be a rather more intimate affair than even that.
Besides the poems, there are a lot of letters and extracts from his
journal; the entire correspondence for several years between him and a
fellow whom he calls his 'dear Murray.' Guess you know who his dear
Murray is--I'm sure I don't. Then there are some letters to the
Countess G-u-i-c--"

"Oh, Alfred! Guiccioli! I'm so glad to get my hands on this book. You
are a darling to think about bringing it up for me to read!"

"Oh, I brought it up for you to keep. It belonged to my grandfather,
and I can give it to any one I want to."

I laughed a little at his simplicity.

"But surely you would not be such a barbarian as to let a book like
this go to any one outside of your family. Boy, this is an heirloom! I
never heard of just this edition before. The engravings in it are
wonderful. It is a very valuable book. I couldn't think of letting you
give it to me!"

Ann Lisbeth had come into the room for a moment, but as she saw us
sitting together on the leather couch and absorbed in the book, she
had hastily left the room, closing the door behind her.

As I finished speaking Alfred glanced at the closed door then
deliberately reached over and caught both my hands as they fluttered
about over the leaves of the book. In my surprise they struggled a
moment, but he held them--he has such big, warm, _capable_ hands; no
wonder people are trusting as to their ability--and thus it was, with
our heads bent close together and our hands pressing down upon the
passionate poems of the greatest passion poet, that I received my
first declaration of love.

"Don't you know that there is nothing in the world I own or could get
too valuable for me to give to you, Ann?" he said, in low, tense tones
that I had never heard from him before. "Surely you know what you are
to me! The greatest privilege I could ask is to give you everything I
have or shall have--a life of devotion--a heart, darling, that has
always been yours! A world of _love_!--"

He came closer still, and in another moment he would have had his arms
around me, carried away as he was by the force of his own feelings,
but I drew back and he was arrested by the look on my face. His own
went white with sudden misery.

"Ann! Surely you don't mean to tell me that I am already too late?"

"Too late?"

"That you love some one else!"

His face, pale and drawn, looked strangely unlike my genial,
even-tempered Alfred. He was capable of great depth of feeling,
then--besides being so strong, so fine! I had always had an infinite
respect for him, and admiration, and affection! I had known that the
strength of his nature had been tested and found _there_; and it was
like the strength of oak, sturdy, deep-rooted, indomitable.

"I _so nearly_ love _you_, Alfred," I cried, struggling between the
pain I felt at his hurt and the bewilderment of my own confused
feelings.

For the face of Richard Chalmers was between us, and his face, too,
spoke strength. Strength of steel, cold, inflexible, even cruel,
perhaps--yet holding such a potent attraction.

"--But you _quite_ love some one else?" His voice was calm, although
his face was even whiter than a moment before.

"I don't know--I only know that I am oh, so sorry for you--and for
myself, too!"

He was still holding my hands in his strong clasp, and they felt so
wonderfully at home there that I never thought to move them--if I had
never known that other man I should have loved _him_ so!

"Ann, is it Chalmers?"

The question was frankly put, and as frankly answered.

"Yes.--But there is nothing yet--nothing has been _said_--still, I
know--"

"Ah, I was afraid of that! That was what overpowered my determination
not to speak of my love until I came back from Europe! I noticed
something that first time I met him--then the Gordons told me of his
attentions to you."

"Yes," I said. "But he has never told me that he cares."

"He will. And I congratulate him."

Alfred arose, as he spoke, and I laid my hand on his arm.

"This is not going to make any difference between us?" I asked
appealingly. I felt that I could not lose my friend.

"Not in my feeling for you," he answered, looking down at me with a
look that I hated to see in his brown eyes--they usually met the world
with such a level, untroubled glance. "If you should ever change, or
ever need me--you know that I will be there. But, dear, it will be
painful to go on meeting you. I'm going away in a few weeks, 

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