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Alice Adams

by Booth Tarkington · English · Gutenberg #980 · 489,144 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Alice Adams

Author: Booth Tarkington


        
Release date: July 1, 1997 [eBook #980]
                Most recently updated: July 16, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/980

Credits: Produced by Charles Keller, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ALICE ADAMS ***




Produced by Charles Keller





ALICE ADAMS

By Booth Tarkington



CHAPTER I

The patient, an old-fashioned man, thought the nurse made a mistake in
keeping both of the windows open, and her sprightly disregard of his
protests added something to his hatred of her. Every evening he told her
that anybody with ordinary gumption ought to realize that night air was
bad for the human frame. “The human frame won't stand everything,
Miss Perry,” he warned her, resentfully. “Even a child, if it had just
ordinary gumption, ought to know enough not to let the night air blow on
sick people yes, nor well people, either! 'Keep out of the night air, no
matter how well you feel.' That's what my mother used to tell me when I
was a boy. 'Keep out of the night air, Virgil,' she'd say. 'Keep out of
the night air.'”

“I expect probably her mother told her the same thing,” the nurse
suggested.

“Of course she did. My grandmother----”

“Oh, I guess your GRANDmother thought so, Mr. Adams! That was when all
this flat central country was swampish and hadn't been drained off yet.
I guess the truth must been the swamp mosquitoes bit people and gave 'em
malaria, especially before they began to put screens in their windows.
Well, we got screens in these windows, and no mosquitoes are goin' to
bite us; so just you be a good boy and rest your mind and go to sleep
like you need to.”

“Sleep?” he said. “Likely!”

He thought the night air worst of all in April; he hadn't a doubt it
would kill him, he declared. “It's miraculous what the human frame WILL
survive,” he admitted on the last evening of that month. “But you and
the doctor ought to both be taught it won't stand too dang much! You
poison a man and poison and poison him with this April night air----”

“Can't poison you with much more of it,” Miss Perry interrupted him,
indulgently. “To-morrow it'll be May night air, and I expect that'll be
a lot better for you, don't you? Now let's just sober down and be a good
boy and get some nice sound sleep.”

She gave him his medicine, and, having set the glass upon the center
table, returned to her cot, where, after a still interval, she snored
faintly. Upon this, his expression became that of a man goaded out of
overpowering weariness into irony.

“Sleep? Oh, CERTAINLY, thank you!”

However, he did sleep intermittently, drowsed between times, and even
dreamed; but, forgetting his dreams before he opened his eyes, and
having some part of him all the while aware of his discomfort, he
believed, as usual, that he lay awake the whole night long. He was
conscious of the city as of some single great creature resting fitfully
in the dark outside his windows. It lay all round about, in the damp
cover of its night cloud of smoke, and tried to keep quiet for a few
hours after midnight, but was too powerful a growing thing ever to
lie altogether still. Even while it strove to sleep it muttered with
digestions of the day before, and these already merged with rumblings
of the morrow. “Owl” cars, bringing in last passengers over distant
trolley-lines, now and then howled on a curve; faraway metallic
stirrings could be heard from factories in the sooty suburbs on the
plain outside the city; east, west, and south, switch-engines chugged
and snorted on sidings; and everywhere in the air there seemed to be
a faint, voluminous hum as of innumerable wires trembling overhead to
vibration of machinery underground.

In his youth Adams might have been less resentful of sounds such as
these when they interfered with his night's sleep: even during
an illness he might have taken some pride in them as proof of his
citizenship in a “live town”; but at fifty-five he merely hated them
because they kept him awake. They “pressed on his nerves,” as he put it;
and so did almost everything else, for that matter.

He heard the milk-wagon drive into the cross-street beneath his windows
and stop at each house. The milkman carried his jars round to the “back
porch,” while the horse moved slowly ahead to the gate of the next
customer and waited there. “He's gone into Pollocks',” Adams thought,
following this progress. “I hope it'll sour on 'em before breakfast.
Delivered the Andersons'. Now he's getting out ours. Listen to the darn
brute! What's HE care who wants to sleep!” His complaint was of the
horse, who casually shifted weight with a clink of steel shoes on the
worn brick pavement of the street, and then heartily shook himself in
his harness, perhaps to dislodge a fly far ahead of its season. Light
had just filmed the windows; and with that the first sparrow woke,
chirped instantly, and roused neighbours in the trees of the small yard,
including a loud-voiced robin. Vociferations began irregularly, but were
soon unanimous.

“Sleep? Dang likely now, ain't it!”

Night sounds were becoming day sounds; the far-away hooting of
freight-engines seemed brisker than an hour ago in the dark. A cheerful
whistler passed the house, even more careless of sleepers than the
milkman's horse had been; then a group of coloured workmen came by, and
although it was impossible to be sure whether they were homeward bound
from night-work or on their way to day-work, at least it was certain
that they were jocose. Loose, aboriginal laughter preceded them afar,
and beat on the air long after they had gone by.

The sick-room night-light, shielded from his eyes by a newspaper propped
against a water-pitcher, still showed a thin glimmering that had grown
offensive to Adams. In his wandering and enfeebled thoughts, which
were much more often imaginings than reasonings, the attempt of the
night-light to resist the dawn reminded him of something unpleasant,
though he could not discover just what the unpleasant thing was. Here
was a puzzle that irritated him the more because he could not solve it,
yet always seemed just on the point of a solution. However, he may have
lost nothing cheerful by remaining in the dark upon the matter; for
if he had been a little sharper in this introspection he might have
concluded that the squalor of the night-light, in its seeming effort
to show against the forerunning of the sun itself, had stimulated some
half-buried perception within him to sketch the painful little synopsis
of an autobiography.

In spite of noises without, he drowsed again, not knowing that he did;
and when he opened his eyes the nurse was just rising from her cot. He
took no pleasure in the sight, it may be said. She exhibited to him a
face mismodelled by sleep, and set like a clay face left on its cheek in
a hot and dry studio. She was still only in part awake, however, and by
the time she had extinguished the night-light and given her patient his
tonic, she had recovered enough plasticity. “Well, isn't that grand!
We've had another good night,” she said as she departed to dress in the
bathroom.

“Yes, you had another!” he retorted, though not until after she had
closed the door.

Presently he heard his daughter moving about in her room across the
narrow hall, and so knew that she had risen. He hoped she would come
in to see him soon, for she was the one thing that didn't press on his
nerves, he felt; though the thought of her hurt him, as, indeed, every
thought hurt him. But it was his wife who came first.

She wore a lank cotton wrapper, and a crescent of gray hair escaped to
one temple from beneath the handkerchief she had worn upon her head for
the night and still retained; but she did everything possible to make
her expression cheering.

“Oh, you're better again! I can see that, as soon as I look at you,” she
said. “Miss Perry tells me you've had another splendid night.”

He made a sound of irony, which seemed to dispose unfavourably of Miss
Perry, and then, in order to be more certainly intelligible, he added,
“She slept well, as usual!”

But his wife's smile persisted. “It's a good sign to be cross; it means
you're practically convalescent right now.”

“Oh, I am, am I?”

“No doubt in the world!” she exclaimed. “Why, you're practically a well
man, Virgil--all except getting your strength back, of course, and that
isn't going to take long. You'll be right on your feet in a couple of
weeks from now.”

“Oh, I will?”

“Of course you will!” She laughed briskly, and, going to the table in
the center of the room, moved his glass of medicine an inch or two,
turned a book over so that it lay upon its other side, and for a few
moments occupied herself with similar futilities, having taken on the
air of a person who makes things neat, though she produced no such
actual effect upon them. “Of course you will,” she repeated, absently.
“You'll be as strong as you ever were; maybe stronger.” She paused for a
moment, not looking at him, then added, cheerfully, “So that you can fly
around and find something really good to get into.”

Something important between them came near the surface here, for though
she spoke with what seemed but a casual cheerfulness, there was a
little betraying break in her voice, a trembling just perceptible in the
utterance of the final word. And she still kept up the affectation of
being helpfully preoccupied with the table, and did not look at her
husband--perhaps because they had been married so many years that
without looking she knew just what his expression would be, and
preferred to avoid the actual sight of it as long as possible.
Meanwhile, he stared hard at her, his lips beginning to move with little
distortions not lacking in the pathos of a sick man's agitation.

“So that's it,” he said. “That's what you're hinting at.”

“'Hinting?'” Mrs. Adams looked surprised and indulgent. “Why, I'm not
doing any hinting, Virgil.”

“What did you say about my finding 'something good to get into?'” he
asked, sharply. “Don't you call that hinting?”

Mrs. Adams turned toward him now; she came to the bedside and would have
taken his hand, but he quickly moved it away from her.

“You mustn't let yourself get nervous,” she said. “But of course when
you get well there's only one thing to do. You mustn't go back to that
old hole again.”

“'Old hole?' That's what you call it, is it?” In spite of his weakness,
anger made his voice strident, and upon this stimulation she spoke more
urgently.

“You just mustn't go back to it, Virgil. It's not fair to any of us, and
you know it isn't.”

“Don't tell me what I know, please!”

She clasped her hands, suddenly carrying her urgency to plaintive
entreaty. “Virgil, you WON'T go back to that hole?”

“That's a nice word to use to me!” he said. “Call a man's business a
hole!”

“Virgil, if you don't owe it to me to look for something different,
don't you owe it to your children? Don't tell me you won't do what we
all want you to, and what you know in your heart you ought to! And if
you HAVE got into one of your stubborn fits and are bound to go back
there for no other reason except to have your own way, don't tell me so,
for I can't bear it!”

He looked up at her fiercely. “You've got a fine way to cure a sick
man!” he said; but she had concluded her appeal--for that time--and
instead of making any more words in the matter, let him see that there
were tears in her eyes, shook her head, and left the room.

Alone, he lay breathing rapidly, his emaciated chest proving itself
equal to the demands his emotion put upon it. “Fine!” he repeated, with
husky indignation. “Fine way to cure a sick man! Fine!” Then, after a
silence, he gave forth whispering sounds as of laughter, his expression
the while remaining sore and far from humour.

“And give us our daily bread!” he added, meaning that his wife's little
performance was no novelty.



CHAPTER II

In fact, the agitation of Mrs. Adams was genuine, but so well under her
control that its traces vanished during the three short steps she
took to cross the narrow hall between her husband's door and the one
opposite. Her expression was matter-of-course, rather than pathetic, as
she entered the pretty room where her daughter, half dressed, sat before
a dressing-table and played with the reflections of a three-leafed
mirror framed in blue enamel. That is, just before the moment of
her mother's entrance, Alice had been playing with the mirror's
reflections--posturing her arms and her expressions, clasping her hands
behind her neck, and tilting back her head to foreshorten the face in a
tableau conceived to represent sauciness, then one of smiling weariness,
then one of scornful toleration, and all very piquant; but as the door
opened she hurriedly resumed the practical, and occupied her hands in
the arrangement of her plentiful brownish hair.

They were pretty hands, of a shapeliness delicate and fine. “The best
things she's got!” a cold-blooded girl friend said of them, and meant
to include Alice's mind and character in the implied list of possessions
surpassed by the notable hands. However that may have been, the rest
of her was well enough. She was often called “a right pretty
girl”--temperate praise meaning a girl rather pretty than otherwise,
and this she deserved, to say the least. Even in repose she deserved
it, though repose was anything but her habit, being seldom seen upon
her except at home. On exhibition she led a life of gestures, the unkind
said to make her lovely hands more memorable; but all of her usually
accompanied the gestures of the hands, the shoulders ever giving them
their impulses first, and even her feet being called upon, at the same
time, for eloquence.

So much liveliness took proper place as only accessory to that of the
face, where her vivacity reached its climax; and it was unfortunate that
an ungifted young man, new in the town, should have attempted to define
the effect upon him of all this generosity of emphasis. He said that
“the way she used her cute hazel eyes and the wonderful glow of her
facial expression gave her a mighty spiritual quality.” His actual
rendition of the word was “spirichul”; but it was not his pronunciation
that embalmed this outburst in the perennial laughter of Alice's girl
friends; they made the misfortune far less his than hers.

Her mother comforted her too heartily, insisting that Alice had “plenty
enough spiritual qualities,” certainly more than possessed by the other
girls who flung the phrase at her, wooden things, jealous of everything
they were incapable of themselves; and then Alice, getting more
championship than she sought, grew uneasy lest Mrs. Adams should repeat
such defenses “outside the family”; and Mrs. Adams ended by weeping
because the daughter so distrusted her intelligence. Alice frequently
thought it necessary to instruct her mother.

Her morning greeting was an instruction to-day; or, rather, it was
an admonition in the style of an entreaty, the more petulant as Alice
thought that Mrs. Adams might have had a glimpse of the posturings to
the mirror. This was a needless worry; the mother had caught a thousand
such glimpses, with Alice unaware, and she thought nothing of the one
just flitted.

“For heaven's sake, mama, come clear inside the room and shut the door!
PLEASE don't leave it open for everybody to look at me!”

“There isn't anybody to see you,” Mrs. Adams explained, obeying. “Miss
Perry's gone downstairs, and----”

“Mama, I heard you in papa's room,” Alice said, not dropping the note of
complaint. “I could hear both of you, and I don't think you ought to get
poor old papa so upset--not in his present condition, anyhow.”

Mrs. Adams seated herself on the edge of the bed. “He's better all the
time,” she said, not disturbed. “He's almost well. The doctor says so
and Miss Perry says so; and if we don't get him into the right frame
of mind now we never will. The first day he's outdoors he'll go back to
that old hole--you'll see! And if he once does that, he'll settle down
there and it'll be too late and we'll never get him out.”

“Well, anyhow, I think you could use a little more tact with him.”

“I do try to,” the mother sighed. “It never was much use with him. I
don't think you understand him as well as I do, Alice.”

“There's one thing I don't understand about either of you,” Alice
returned, crisply. “Before people get married they can do anything they
want to with each other. Why can't they do the same thing after they're
married? When you and papa were young people and engaged, he'd have done
anything you wanted him to. That must have been because you knew how to
manage him then. Why can't you go at him the same way now?”

Mrs. Adams sighed again, and laughed a little, making no other response;
but Alice persisted. “Well, WHY can't you? Why can't you ask him to do
things the way you used to ask him when you were just in love with each
other? Why don't you anyhow try it, mama, instead of ding-donging at
him?”

“'Ding-donging at him,' Alice?” Mrs. Adams said, with a pathos somewhat
emphasized. “Is that how my trying to do what I can for you strikes
you?”

“Never mind that; it's nothing to hurt your feelings.” Alice disposed of
the pathos briskly. “Why don't you answer my question? What's the matter
with using a little more tact on papa? Why can't you treat him the way
you probably did when you were young people, before you were married? I
never have understood why people can't do that.”

“Perhaps you WILL understand some day,” her mother said, gently. “Maybe
you will when you've been married twenty-five years.”

“You keep evading. Why don't you answer my question right straight out?”

“There are questions you can't answer to young people, Alice.”

“You mean because we're too young to understand the answer? I don't see
that at all. At twenty-two a girl's supposed to have some intelligence,
isn't she? And intelligence is the ability to understand, isn't it?
Why do I have to wait till I've lived with a man twenty-five years to
understand why you can't be tactful with papa?”

“You may understand some things before that,” Mrs. Adams said,
tremulously. “You may understand how you hurt me sometimes. Youth
can't know everything by being intelligent, and by the time you could
understand the answer you're asking for you'd know it, and wouldn't need
to ask. You don't understand your father, Alice; you don't know what it
takes to change him when he's made up his mind to be stubborn.”

Alice rose and began to get herself into a skirt. “Well, I don't think
making scenes ever changes anybody,” she grumbled. “I think a little
jolly persuasion goes twice as far, myself.”

“'A little jolly persuasion!'” Her mother turned the echo of this phrase
into an ironic lament. “Yes, there was a time when I thought that, too!
It didn't work; that's all.”

“Perhaps you left the 'jolly' part of it out, mama.”

For the second time that morning--it was now a little after seven
o'clock--tears seemed about to offer their solace to Mrs. Adams. “I
might have expected you to say that, Alice; you never do miss a chance,”
 she said, gently. “It seems queer you don't some time miss just ONE
chance!”

But Alice, progressing with her toilet, appeared to be little concerned.
“Oh, well, I think there are better ways of managing a man than just
hammering at him.”

Mrs. Adams uttered a little cry of pain. “'Hammering,' Alice?”

“If you'd left it entirely to me,” her daughter went on, briskly, “I
believe papa'd already be willing to do anything we want him to.”

“That's it; tell me I spoil everything. Well, I won't interfere from now
on, you can be sure of it.”

“Please don't talk like that,” Alice said, quickly. “I'm old enough to
realize that papa may need pressure of all sorts; I only think it makes
him more obstinate to get him cross. You probably do understand him
better, but that's one thing I've found out and you haven't. There!”
 She gave her mother a friendly tap on the shoulder and went to the door.
“I'll hop in and say hello to him now.”

As she went, she continued the fastening of her blouse, and appeared in
her father's room with one hand still thus engaged, but she patted his
forehead with the other.

“Poor old papa-daddy!” she said, gaily. “Every time he's better somebody
talks him into getting so mad he has a relapse. It's a shame!”

Her father's eyes, beneath their melancholy brows, looked up at her
wistfully. “I suppose you heard your mother going for me,” he said.

“I heard you going for her, too!” Alice laughed. “What was it all
about?”

“Oh, the same danged old story!”

“You mean she wants you to try something new when you get well?” Alice
asked, with cheerful innocence. “So we could all have a lot more money?”

At this his sorrowful forehead was more sorrowful than ever. The deep
horizontal lines moved upward to a pattern of suffering so familiar to
his daughter that it meant nothing to her; but he spoke quietly. “Yes;
so we wouldn't have any money at all, most likely.”

“Oh, no!” she laughed, and, finishing with her blouse, patted his cheeks
with both hands. “Just think how many grand openings there must be for
a man that knows as much as you do! I always did believe you could get
rich if you only cared to, papa.”

But upon his forehead the painful pattern still deepened. “Don't you
think we've always had enough, the way things are, Alice?”

“Not the way things ARE!” She patted his cheeks again; laughed again.
“It used to be enough, maybe anyway we did skimp along on it--but the
way things are now I expect mama's really pretty practical in her ideas,
though, I think it's a shame for her to bother you about it while you're
so weak. Don't you worry about it, though; just think about other things
till you get strong.”

“You know,” he said; “you know it isn't exactly the easiest thing in the
world for a man of my age to find these grand openings you speak of. And
when you've passed half-way from fifty to sixty you're apt to see some
risk in giving up what you know how to do and trying something new.”

“My, what a frown!” she cried, blithely. “Didn't I tell you to stop
thinking about it till you get ALL well?” She bent over him, giving
him a gay little kiss on the bridge of his nose. “There! I must run to
breakfast. Cheer up now! Au 'voir!” And with her pretty hand she waved
further encouragement from the closing door as she departed.

Lightsomely descending the narrow stairway, she whistled as she went,
her fingers drumming time on the rail; and, still whistling, she came
into the dining-room, where her mother and her brother were already at
the table. The brother, a thin and sallow boy of twenty, greeted her
without much approval as she took her place.

“Nothing seems to trouble you!” he said.

“No; nothing much,” she made airy response. “What's troubling yourself,
Walter?”

“Don't let that worry you!” he returned, seeming to consider this to be
repartee of an effective sort; for he furnished a short laugh to go
with it, and turned to his coffee with the manner of one who has
satisfactorily closed an episode.

“Walter always seems to have so many secrets!” Alice said, studying
him shrewdly, but with a friendly enough amusement in her scrutiny.
“Everything he does or says seems to be acted for the benefit of some
mysterious audience inside himself, and he always gets its applause.
Take what he said just now: he seems to think it means something, but
if it does, why, that's just another secret between him and the secret
audience inside of him! We don't really know anything about Walter at
all, do we, mama?”

Walter laughed again, in a manner that sustained her theory well enough;
then after finishing his coffee, he took from his pocket a flattened
packet in glazed blue paper; extracted with stained fingers a bent and
wrinkled little cigarette, lighted it, hitched up his belted trousers
with the air of a person who turns from trifles to things better worth
his attention, and left the room.

Alice laughed as the door closed. “He's ALL secrets,” she said. “Don't
you think you really ought to know more about him, mama?”

“I'm sure he's a good boy,” Mrs. Adams returned, thoughtfully. “He's
been very brave about not being able to have the advantages that are
enjoyed by the boys he's grown up with. I've never heard a word of
complaint from him.”

“About his not being sent to college?” Alice cried. “I should think you
wouldn't! He didn't even have enough ambition to finish high school!”

Mrs. Adams sighed. “It seemed to me Walter lost his ambition when nearly
all the boys he'd grown up with went to Eastern schools to prepare for
college, and we couldn't afford to send him. If only your father would
have listened----”

Alice interrupted: “What nonsense! Walter hated books and studying, and
athletics, too, for that matter. He doesn't care for anything nice that
I ever heard of. What do you suppose he does like, mama? He must like
something or other somewhere, but what do you suppose it is? What does
he do with his time?”

“Why, the poor boy's at Lamb and Company's all day. He doesn't get
through until five in the afternoon; he doesn't HAVE much time.”

“Well, we never have dinner until about seven, and he's always late for
dinner, and goes out, heaven knows where, right afterward!” Alice shook
her head. “He used to go with our friends' boys, but I don't think he
does now.”

“Why, how could he?” Mrs. Adams protested. “That isn't his fault, poor
child! The boys he knew when he was younger are nearly all away at
college.”

“Yes, but he doesn't see anything of 'em when they're here at
holiday-time or vacation. None of 'em come to the house any more.”

“I suppose he's made other friends. It's natural for him to want
companions, at his age.”

“Yes,” Alice said, with disapproving emphasis. “But who are they? I've
got an idea he plays pool at some rough place down-town.”

“Oh, no; I'm sure he's a steady boy,” Mrs. Adams protested, but her tone
was not that of thoroughgoing conviction, and she added, “Life might
be a very different thing for him if only your father can be brought to
see----”

“Never mind, mama! It isn't me that has to be convinced, you know; and
we can do a lot more with papa if we just let him alone about it for a
day or two. Promise me you won't say any more to him until--well, until
he's able to come downstairs to table. Will you?”

Mrs. Adams bit her lip, which had begun to tremble. “I think you can
trust me to know a FEW things, Alice,” she said. “I'm a little older
than you, you know.”

“That's a good girl!” Alice jumped up, laughing. “Don't forget it's the
same as a promise, and do just cheer him up a little. I'll say good-bye
to him before I go out.”

“Where are you going?”

“Oh, I've got lots to do. I thought I'd run out to Mildred's to see what
she's going to wear to-night, and then I want to go down and buy a
yard of chiffon and some narrow ribbon to make new bows for my
slippers--you'll have to give me some money----”

“If he'll give it to me!” her mother lamented, as they went toward the
front stairs together; but an hour later she came into Alice's room with
a bill in her hand.

“He has some money in his bureau drawer,” she said. “He finally told me
where it was.”

There were traces of emotion in her voice, and Alice, looking shrewdly
at her, saw moisture in her eyes.

“Mama!” she cried. “You didn't do what you promised me you wouldn't, did
you--NOT before Miss Perry!”

“Miss Perry's getting him some broth,” Mrs. Adams returned, calmly.
“Besides, you're mistaken in saying I promised you anything; I said I
thought you could trust me to know what is right.”

“So you did bring it up again!” And Alice swung away from her, strode
to her father's door, flung it open, went to him, and put a light hand
soothingly over his unrelaxed forehead.

“Poor old papa!” she said. “It's a shame how everybody wants to trouble
him. He shan't be bothered any more at all! He doesn't need to have
everybody telling him how to get away from that old hole he's worked in
so long and begin to make us all nice and rich. HE knows how!”

Thereupon she kissed him a consoling good-bye, and made another gay
departure, the charming hand again fluttering like a white butterfly in
the shadow of the closing door.



CHAPTER III

Mrs. Adams had remained in Alice's room, but her mood seemed to have
changed, during her daughter's little more than momentary absence.

“What did he SAY?” she asked, quickly, and her tone was hopeful.

“'Say?'” Alice repeated, impatiently. “Why, nothing. I didn't let him.
Really, mama, I think the best thing for you to do would be to just keep
out of his room, because I don't believe you can go in there and not
talk to him about it, and if you do talk we'll never get him to do the
right thing. Never!”

The mother's response was a grieving silence; she turned from her
daughter and walked to the door.

“Now, for goodness' sake!” Alice cried. “Don't go making tragedy out of
my offering you a little practical advice!”

“I'm not,” Mrs. Adams gulped, halting. “I'm just--just going to dust the
downstairs, Alice.” And with her face still averted, she went out into
the little hallway, closing the door behind her. A moment later she
could be heard descending the stairs, the sound of her footsteps
carrying somehow an effect of resignation.

Alice listened, sighed, and, breathing the words, “Oh, murder!” turned
to cheerier matters. She put on a little apple-green turban with a dim
gold band round it, and then, having shrouded the turban in a white
veil, which she kept pushed up above her forehead, she got herself into
a tan coat of soft cloth fashioned with rakish severity. After that,
having studied herself gravely in a long glass, she took from one of
the drawers of her dressing-table a black leather card-case cornered in
silver filigree, but found it empty.

She opened another drawer wherein were two white pasteboard boxes of
cards, the one set showing simply “Miss Adams,” the other engraved in
Gothic characters, “Miss Alys Tuttle Adams.” The latter belonged to
Alice's “Alys” period--most girls go through it; and Alice must have
felt that she had graduated, for, after frowning thoughtfully at the
exhibit this morning, she took the box with its contents, and let the
white shower fall from her fingers into the waste-basket beside her
small desk. She replenished the card-case from the “Miss Adams”
 box; then, having found a pair of fresh white gloves, she tucked an
ivory-topped Malacca walking-stick under her arm and set forth.

She went down the stairs, buttoning her gloves and still wearing
the frown with which she had put “Alys” finally out of her life. She
descended slowly, and paused on the lowest step, looking about her with
an expression that needed but a slight deepening to betoken bitterness.
Its connection with her dropping “Alys” forever was slight, however.

The small frame house, about fifteen years old, was already inclining
to become a new Colonial relic. The Adamses had built it, moving into it
from the “Queen Anne” house they had rented until they took this step in
fashion. But fifteen years is a long time to stand still in the midland
country, even for a house, and this one was lightly made, though the
Adamses had not realized how flimsily until they had lived in it for
some time. “Solid, compact, and convenient” were the instructions to the
architect, and he had made it compact successfully. Alice, pausing
at the foot of the stairway, was at the same time fairly in the
“living-room,” for the only separation between the “living room” and the
hall was a demarcation suggested to willing imaginations by a pair of
wooden columns painted white. These columns, pine under the paint,
were bruised and chipped at the base; one of them showed a crack that
threatened to become a split; the “hard-wood” floor had become uneven;
and in a corner the walls apparently failed of solidity, where the
wall-paper had declined to accompany some staggerings of the plaster
beneath it.

The furniture was in great part an accumulation begun with the wedding
gifts; though some of it was older, two large patent rocking-chairs and
a footstool having belonged to Mrs. Adams's mother in the days of hard
brown plush and veneer. For decoration there were pictures and vases.
Mrs. Adams had always been fond of vases, she said, and every year
her husband's Christmas present to her was a vase of one sort or
another--whatever the clerk showed him, marked at about twelve or
fourteen dollars. The pictures were some of them etchings framed in
gilt: Rheims, Canterbury, schooners grouped against a wharf; and Alice
could remember how, in her childhood, her father sometimes pointed out
the watery reflections in this last as very fine. But it was a long time
since he had shown interest in such things--“or in anything much,” as
she thought.

Other pictures were two water-colours in baroque frames; one being the
Amalfi monk on a pergola wall, while the second was a yard-wide display
of iris blossoms, painted by Alice herself at fourteen, as a birthday
gift to her mother. Alice's glance paused upon it now with no great
pride, but showed more approval of an enormous photograph of the
Colosseum. This she thought of as “the only good thing in the room”;
it possessed and bestowed distinction, she felt; and she did not regret
having won her struggle to get it hung in its conspicuous place of
honour over the mantelpiece. Formerly that place had been held for
years by a steel-engraving, an accurate representation of the Suspension
Bridge at Niagara Falls. It was almost as large as its successor, the
“Colosseum,” and it had been presented to Mr. Adams by colleagues in
his department at Lamb and Company's. Adams had shown some feeling when
Alice began to urge its removal to obscurity in the “upstairs hall”; he
even resisted for several days after she had the “Colosseum” charged
to him, framed in oak, and sent to the house. She cheered him up, of
course, when he gave way; and her heart never misgave her that there
might be a doubt which of the two pictures was the more dismaying.

Over the pictures, the vases, the old brown plush rocking-chairs and
the stool, over the three gilt chairs, over the new chintz-covered easy
chair and the gray velure sofa--over everything everywhere, was the
familiar coating of smoke grime. It had worked into every fibre of
the lace curtains, dingying them to an unpleasant gray; it lay on
the window-sills and it dimmed the glass panes; it covered the walls,
covered the ceiling, and was smeared darker and thicker in all corners.
Yet here was no fault of housewifery; the curse could not be lifted, as
the ingrained smudges permanent on the once white woodwork proved. The
grime was perpetually renewed; scrubbing only ground it in.

This particular ugliness was small part of Alice's discontent, for
though the coating grew a little deeper each year she was used to it.
Moreover, she knew that she was not likely to find anything better in
a thousand miles, so long as she kept to cities, and that none of
her friends, however opulent, had any advantage of her here. Indeed,
throughout all the great soft-coal country, people who consider
themselves comparatively poor may find this consolation: cleanliness has
been added to the virtues and beatitudes that money can not buy.

Alice brightened a little as she went forward to the front door, and
she brightened more when the spring breeze met her there. Then all
depression left her as she walked down the short brick path to the
sidewalk, looked up and down the street, and saw how bravely the maple
shade-trees, in spite of the black powder they breathed, were flinging
out their thousands of young green particles overhead.

She turned north, treading the new little shadows on the pavement
briskly, and, having finished buttoning her gloves, swung down her
Malacca stick from under her arm to let it tap a more leisurely
accompaniment to her quick, short step. She had to step quickly if she
was to get anywhere; for the closeness of her skirt, in spite of its
little length, permitted no natural stride; but she was pleased to be
impeded, these brevities forming part of her show of fashion.

Other pedestrians found them not without charm, though approval may have
been lacking here and there, and at the first crossing Alice suffered
what she might have accounted an actual injury, had she allowed herself
to be so sensitive. An elderly woman in fussy black silk stood there,
waiting for a streetcar; she was all of a globular modelling, with
a face patterned like a frost-bitten peach; and that the approaching
gracefulness was uncongenial she naively made too evident. Her round,
wan eyes seemed roused to bitter life as they rose from the curved high
heels of the buckled slippers to the tight little skirt, and thence with
startled ferocity to the Malacca cane, which plainly appeared to her as
a decoration not more astounding than it was insulting.

Perceiving that the girl was bowing to her, the globular lady hurriedly
made shift to alter her injurious expression. “Good morning, Mrs.
Dowling,” Alice said, gravely. Mrs. Dowling returned the salutation with
a smile as convincingly benevolent as the ghastly smile upon a Santa
Claus face; and then, while Alice passed on, exploded toward her a
single compacted breath through tightened lips.

The sound was eloquently audible, though Mrs. Dowling remained unaware
that in this or any manner whatever she had shed a light upon her
thoughts; for it was her lifelong innocent conviction that other people
saw her only as she wished to be seen, and heard from her only what she
intended to be heard. At home it was always her husband who pulled down
the shades of their bedroom window.

Alice looked serious for a few moments after the little encounter, then
found some consolation in the behaviour of a gentleman of forty or
so who was coming toward her. Like Mrs. Dowling, he had begun to show
consciousness of Alice's approach while she was yet afar off; but his
tokens were of a kind pleasanter to her. He was like Mrs. Dowling again,
however, in his conception that Alice would not realize the significance
of what he did. He passed his hand over his neck-scarf to see that it
lay neatly to his collar, smoothed a lapel of his coat, and adjusted
his hat, seeming to be preoccupied the while with problems that kept
his eyes to the pavement; then, as he came within a few feet of her,
he looked up, as in a surprised recognition almost dramatic, smiled
winningly, lifted his hat decisively, and carried it to the full arm's
length.

Alice's response was all he could have asked. The cane in her right
hand stopped short in its swing, while her left hand moved in a pretty
gesture as if an impulse carried it toward the heart; and she smiled,
with her under lip caught suddenly between her teeth. Months ago she had
seen an actress use this smile in a play, and it came perfectly to Alice
now, without conscious direction, it had been so well acquired; but the
pretty hand's little impulse toward the heart was an original bit all
her own, on the spur of the moment.

The gentleman went on, passing from her forward vision as he replaced
his hat. Of himself he was nothing to Alice, except for the gracious
circumstance that he had shown strong consciousness of a pretty girl. He
was middle-aged, substantial, a family man, securely married; and
Alice had with him one of those long acquaintances that never become
emphasized by so much as five minutes of talk; yet for this inconsequent
meeting she had enacted a little part like a fragment in a pantomime of
Spanish wooing.

It was not for him--not even to impress him, except as a messenger.
Alice was herself almost unaware of her thought, which was one of the
running thousands of her thoughts that took no deliberate form in words.
Nevertheless, she had it, and it was the impulse of all her pretty
bits of pantomime when she met other acquaintances who made their
appreciation visible, as this substantial gentleman did. In Alice's
unworded thought, he was to be thus encouraged as in some measure a
champion to speak well of her to the world; but more than this: he was
to tell some magnificent unknown bachelor how wonderful, how mysterious,
she was.

She hastened on gravely, a little stirred reciprocally with the
supposed stirrings in the breast of that shadowy ducal mate, who must be
somewhere “waiting,” or perhaps already seeking her; for she more often
thought of herself as “waiting” while he sought her; and sometimes this
view of things became so definite that it shaped into a murmur on her
lips. “Waiting. Just waiting.” And she might add, “For him!” Then, being
twenty-two, she was apt to conclude the mystic interview by laughing at
herself, though not without a continued wistfulness.

She came to a group of small coloured children playing waywardly in a
puddle at the mouth of a muddy alley; and at sight of her they gave over
their pastime in order to stare. She smiled brilliantly upon them, but
they were too struck with wonder to comprehend that the manifestation
was friendly; and as Alice picked her way in a little detour to keep
from the mud, she heard one of them say, “Lady got cane! Jeez'!”

She knew that many coloured children use impieties familiarly, and she
was not startled. She was disturbed, however, by an unfavourable hint in
the speaker's tone. He was six, probably, but the sting of a criticism
is not necessarily allayed by knowledge of its ignoble source, and
Alice had already begun to feel a slight uneasiness about her cane. Mrs.
Dowling's stare had been strikingly projected at it; other women more
than merely glanced, their brows and lips contracting impulsively; and
Alice was aware that one or two of them frankly halted as soon as she
had passed.

She had seen in several magazines pictures of ladies with canes, and on
that account she had bought this one, never questioning that fashion is
recognized, even in the provinces, as soon as beheld. On the contrary,
these staring women obviously failed to realize that what they were
being shown was not an eccentric outburst, but the bright harbinger of
an illustrious mode. Alice had applied a bit of artificial pigment to
her lips and cheeks before she set forth this morning; she did not
need it, having a ready colour of her own, which now mounted high with
annoyance.

Then a splendidly shining closed black automobile, with windows of
polished glass, came silently down the street toward her. Within it, as
in a luxurious little apartment, three comely ladies in mourning sat
and gossiped; but when they saw Alice they clutched one another. They
instantly recovered, bowing to her solemnly as they were borne by, yet
were not gone from her sight so swiftly but the edge of her side glance
caught a flash of teeth in mouths suddenly opened, and the dark glisten
of black gloves again clutching to share mirth.

The colour that outdid the rouge on Alice's cheek extended its area and
grew warmer as she realized how all too cordial had been her nod and
smile to these humorous ladies. But in their identity lay a significance
causing her a sharper smart, for they were of the family of that Lamb,
chief of Lamb and Company, who had employed her father since before she
was born.

“And know his salary! They'd be SURE to find out about that!” was her
thought, coupled with another bitter one to the effect that they had
probably made instantaneous financial estimates of what she wore though
certainly her walking-stick had most fed their hilarity.

She tucked it under her arm, not swinging it again; and her breath
became quick and irregular as emotion beset her. She had been enjoying
her walk, but within the space of the few blocks she had gone since she
met the substantial gentleman, she found that more than the walk was
spoiled: suddenly her life seemed to be spoiled, too; though she did not
view the ruin with complaisance. These Lamb women thought her and her
cane ridiculous, did they? she said to herself. That was their parvenu
blood: to think because a girl's father worked for their grandfather
she had no right to be rather striking in style, especially when the
striking WAS her style. Probably all the other girls and women would
agree with them and would laugh at her when they got together, and,
what might be fatal, would try to make all the men think her a silly
pretender. Men were just like sheep, and nothing was easier than for
women to set up as shepherds and pen them in a fold. “To keep out
outsiders,” Alice thought. “And make 'em believe I AM an outsider.
What's the use of living?”

All seemed lost when a trim young man appeared, striding out of a
cross-street not far before her, and, turning at the corner, came
toward her. Visibly, he slackened his gait to lengthen the time of his
approach, and, as he was a stranger to her, no motive could be ascribed
to him other than a wish to have a longer time to look at her.

She lifted a pretty hand to a pin at her throat, bit her lip--not with
the smile, but mysteriously--and at the last instant before her shadow
touched the stranger, let her eyes gravely meet his. A moment later,
having arrived before the house which was her destination, she halted
at the entrance to a driveway leading through fine lawns to the
intentionally important mansion. It was a pleasant and impressive
place to be seen entering, but Alice did not enter at once. She paused,
examining a tiny bit of mortar which the masons had forgotten to scrape
from a brick in one of the massive gate-posts. She frowned at this tiny
defacement, and with an air of annoyance scraped it away, using the
ferrule of her cane an act of fastidious proprietorship. If any one had
looked back over his shoulder he would not have doubted that she lived
there.

Alice did not turn to see whether anything of the sort happened or not,
but she may have surmised that it did. At all events, it was with
an invigorated step that she left the gateway behind her and went
cheerfully up the drive to the house of her friend Mildred.



CHAPTER IV

Adams had a restless morning, and toward noon he asked Miss Perry to
call his daughter; he wished to say something to her.

“I thought I heard her leaving the house a couple of hours ago--maybe
longer,” the nurse told him. “I'll go see.” And she returned from the
brief errand, her impression confirmed by information from Mrs. Adams.
“Yes. She went up to Miss Mildred Palmer's to see what she's going to
wear to-night.”

Adams looked at Miss Perry wearily, but remained passive, making no
inquiries; for he was long accustomed to what seemed to him a kind of
jargon among ladies, which became the more incomprehensible when they
tried to explain it. A man's best course, he had found, was just to let
it go as so much sound. His sorrowful eyes followed the nurse as she
went back to her rocking-chair by the window, and her placidity showed
him that there was no mystery for her in the fact that Alice walked
two miles to ask so simple a question when there was a telephone in
the house. Obviously Miss Perry also comprehended why Alice thought it
important to know what Mildred meant to wear. Adams understood why Alice
should be concerned with what she herself wore “to look neat and tidy
and at her best, why, of course she'd want to,” he thought--but he
realized that it was forever beyond him to understand why the clothing
of other people had long since become an absorbing part of her life.

Her excursion this morning was no novelty; she was continually going to
see what Mildred meant to wear, or what some other girl meant to wear;
and when Alice came home from wherever other girls or women had been
gathered, she always hurried to her mother with earnest descriptions of
the clothing she had seen. At such times, if Adams was present, he might
recognize “organdie,” or “taffeta,” or “chiffon,” as words defining
certain textiles, but the rest was too technical for him, and he
was like a dismal boy at a sermon, just waiting for it to get itself
finished. Not the least of the mystery was his wife's interest: she was
almost indifferent about her own clothes, and when she consulted Alice
about them spoke hurriedly and with an air of apology; but when Alice
described other people's clothes, Mrs. Adams listened as eagerly as the
daughter talked.

“There they go!” he muttered to-day, a moment after he heard the front
door closing, a sound recognizable throughout most of the thinly built
house. Alice had just returned, and Mrs. Adams called to her from the
upper hallway, not far from Adams's door.

“What did she SAY?”

“She was sort of snippy about it,” Alice returned, ascending the stairs.
“She gets that way sometimes, and pretended she hadn't made up her mind,
but I'm pretty sure it'll be the maize Georgette with Malines flounces.”

“Didn't you say she wore that at the Pattersons'?” Mrs. Adams inquired,
as Alice arrived at the top of the stairs. “And didn't you tell me she
wore it again at the----”

“Certainly not,” Alice interrupted, rather petulantly. “She's never worn
it but once, and of course she wouldn't want to wear anything to-night
that people have seen her in a lot.”

Miss Perry opened the door of Adams's room and stepped out. “Your father
wants to know if you'll come and see him a minute, Miss Adams.”

“Poor old thing! Of course!” Alice exclaimed, and went quickly into the
room, Miss Perry remaining outside. “What's the matter, papa? Getting
awful sick of lying on his tired old back, I expect.”

“I've had kind of a poor morning,” Adams said, as she patted his hand
comfortingly. “I been thinking----”

“Didn't I tell you not to?” she cried, gaily. “Of course you'll have
poor times when you go and do just exactly what I say you mustn't. You
stop thinking this very minute!”

He smiled ruefully, closing his eyes; was silent for a moment, then
asked her to sit beside the bed. “I been thinking of something I wanted
to say,” he added.

“What like, papa?”

“Well, it's nothing--much,” he said, with something deprecatory in his
tone, as if he felt vague impulses toward both humour and apology. “I
just thought maybe I ought to've said more to you some time or other
about--well, about the way things ARE, down at Lamb and Company's, for
instance.”

“Now, papa!” She leaned forward in the chair she had taken, and
pretended to slap his hand crossly. “Isn't that exactly what I said you
couldn't think one single think about till you get ALL well?”

“Well----” he said, and went on slowly, not looking at her, but at the
ceiling. “I just thought maybe it wouldn't been any harm if some time or
other I told you something about the way they sort of depend on me down
there.”

“Why don't they show it, then?” she asked, quickly. “That's just what
mama and I have been feeling so much; they don't appreciate you.”

“Why, yes, they do,” he said. “Yes, they do. They began h'isting my
salary the second year I went in there, and they've h'isted it a little
every two years all the time I've worked for 'em. I've been head of the
sundries department for seven years now, and I could hardly have more
authority in that department unless I was a member of the firm itself.”

“Well, why don't they make you a member of the firm? That's what they
ought to've done! Yes, and long ago!”

Adams laughed, but sighed with more heartiness than he had laughed.
“They call me their 'oldest stand-by' down there.” He laughed again,
apologetically, as if to excuse himself for taking a little pride in
this title. “Yes, sir; they say I'm their 'oldest stand-by'; and I guess
they know they can count on my department's turning in as good a report
as they look for, at the end of every month; but they don't have to take
a man into the firm to get him to do my work, dearie.”

“But you said they depended on you, papa.”

“So they do; but of course not so's they couldn't get along without me.”
 He paused, reflecting. “I don't just seem to know how to put it--I
mean how to put what I started out to say. I kind of wanted to tell
you--well, it seems funny to me, these last few years, the way your
mother's taken to feeling about it. I'd like to see a better
established wholesale drug business than Lamb and Company this side the
Alleghanies--I don't say bigger, I say better established--and it's kind
of funny for a man that's been with a business like that as long as
I have to hear it called a 'hole.' It's kind of funny when you think,
yourself, you've done pretty fairly well in a business like that, and
the men at the head of it seem to think so, too, and put your salary
just about as high as anybody could consider customary--well, what I
mean, Alice, it's kind of funny to have your mother think it's mostly
just--mostly just a failure, so to speak.”

His voice had become tremulous in spite of him; and this sign of
weakness and emotion had sufficient effect upon Alice. She bent over him
suddenly, with her arm about him and her cheek against his. “Poor papa!”
 she murmured. “Poor papa!”

“No, no,” he said. “I didn't mean anything to trouble you. I just
thought----” He hesitated. “I just wondered--I thought maybe it wouldn't
be any harm if I said something about how things ARE down there. I
got to thinking maybe you didn't understand it's a pretty good place.
They're fine people to work for; and they've always seemed to think
something of me;--the way they took Walter on, for instance, soon as I
asked 'em, last year. Don't you think that looked a good deal as if they
thought something of me, Alice?”

“Yes, papa,” she said, not moving.

“And the work's right pleasant,” he went on. “Mighty nice boys in our
department, Alice. Well, they are in all the departments, for that
matter. We have a good deal of fun down there some days.”

She lifted her head. “More than you do at home 'some days,' I expect,
papa!” she said.

He protested feebly. “Now, I didn't mean that--I didn't want to trouble
you----”

She looked at him through winking eyelashes. “I'm sorry I called it a
'hole,' papa.”

“No, no,” he protested, gently. “It was your mother said that.”

“No. I did, too.”

“Well, if you did, it was only because you'd heard her.”

She shook her head, then kissed him. “I'm going to talk to her,” she
said, and rose decisively.

But at this, her father's troubled voice became quickly louder: “You
better let her alone. I just wanted to have a little talk with you. I
didn't mean to start any--your mother won't----”

“Now, papa!” Alice spoke cheerfully again, and smiled upon him. “I want
you to quit worrying! Everything's going to be all right and nobody's
going to bother you any more about anything. You'll see!”

She carried her smile out into the hall, but after she had closed the
door her face was all pity; and her mother, waiting for her in the
opposite room, spoke sympathetically.

“What's the matter, Alice? What did he say that's upset you?”

“Wait a minute, mama.” Alice found a handkerchief, used it for eyes and
suffused nose, gulped, then suddenly and desolately sat upon the bed.
“Poor, poor, POOR papa!” she whispered.

“Why?” Mrs. Adams inquired, mildly. “What's the matter with him?
Sometimes you act as if he weren't getting well. What's he been talking
about?”

“Mama--well, I think I'm pretty selfish. Oh, I do!”

“Did he say you were?”

“Papa? No, indeed! What I mean is, maybe we're both a little selfish to
try to make him go out and hunt around for something new.”

Mrs. Adams looked thoughtful. “Oh, that's what he was up to!”

“Mama, I think we ought to give it up. I didn't dream it had really hurt
him.”

“Well, doesn't he hurt us?”

“Never that I know of, mama.”

“I don't mean by SAYING things,” Mrs. Adams explained, impatiently.
“There are more ways than that of hurting people. When a man sticks to a
salary that doesn't provide for his family, isn't that hurting them?”

“Oh, it 'provides' for us well enough, mama. We have what we need--if I
weren't so extravagant. Oh, _I_ know I am!”

But at this admission her mother cried out sharply. “'Extravagant!'
You haven't one tenth of what the other girls you go with have. And
you CAN'T have what you ought to as long as he doesn't get out of that
horrible place. It provides bare food and shelter for us, but what's
that?”

“I don't think we ought to try any more to change him.”

“You don't?” Mrs. Adams came and stood before her. “Listen, Alice: your
father's asleep; that's his trouble, and he's got to be waked up. He
doesn't know that things have changed. When you and Walter were little
children we did have enough--at least it seemed to be about as much
as most of the people we knew. But the town isn't what it was in those
days, and times aren't what they were then, and these fearful PRICES
aren't the old prices. Everything else but your father has changed, and
all the time he's stood still. He doesn't know it; he thinks because
they've given him a hundred dollars more every two years he's quite a
prosperous man! And he thinks that because his children cost him more
than he and I cost our parents he gives them--enough!”

“But Walter----” Alice faltered. “Walter doesn't cost him anything at
all any more.” And she concluded, in a stricken voice, “It's all--me!”

“Why shouldn't it be?” her mother cried. “You're young--you're just at
the time when your life should be fullest of good things and happiness.
Yet what do you get?”

Alice's lip quivered; she was not unsusceptible to such an appeal, but
she contrived the semblance of a protest. “I don't have such a bad time
not a good DEAL of the time, anyhow. I've got a good MANY of the things
other girls have----”

“You have?” Mrs. Adams was piteously satirical. “I suppose you've got
a limousine to go to that dance to-night? I suppose you've only got
to call a florist and tell him to send you some orchids? I suppose
you've----”

But Alice interrupted this list. Apparently in a single instant all
emotion left her, and she became businesslike, as one in the midst of
trifles reminded of really serious matters. She got up from the bed
and went to the door of the closet where she kept her dresses. “Oh, see
here,” she said, briskly. “I've decided to wear my white organdie if you
could put in a new lining for me. I'm afraid it'll take you nearly all
afternoon.”

She brought forth the dress, displayed it upon the bed, and Mrs. Adams
examined it attentively.

“Do you think you could get it done, mama?”

“I don't see why not,” Mrs. Adams answered, passing a thoughtful hand
over the fabric. “It oughtn't to take more than four or five hours.”

“It's a shame to have you sit at the machine that long,” Alice said,
absently, adding, “And I'm sure we ought to let papa alone. Let's just
give it up, mama.”

Mrs. Adams continued her thoughtful examination of the dress. “Did you
buy the chiffon and ribbon, Alice?”

“Yes. I'm sure we oughtn't to talk to him about it any more, mama.”

“Well, we'll see.”

“Let's both agree that we'll NEVER say another single word to him about
it,” said Alice. “It'll be a great deal better if we just let him make
up his mind for himself.”



CHAPTER V

With this, having more immediately practical questions before them, they
dropped the subject, to bend their entire attention upon the dress; and
when the lunch-gong sounded downstairs Alice was still sketching repairs
and alterations. She continued to sketch them, not heeding the summons.

“I suppose we'd better go down to lunch,” Mrs. Adams said, absently.
“She's at the gong again.” “In a minute, mama. Now about the
sleeves----” And she went on with her planning. Unfortunately the
gong was inexpressive of the mood of the person who beat upon it. It
consisted of three little metal bowls upon a string; they were unequal
in size, and, upon being tapped with a padded stick, gave forth
vibrations almost musically pleasant. It was Alice who had substituted
this contrivance for the brass “dinner-bell” in use throughout her
childhood; and neither she nor the others of her family realized that
the substitution of sweeter sounds had made the life of that household
more difficult. In spite of dismaying increases in wages, the Adamses
still strove to keep a cook; and, as they were unable to pay the higher
rates demanded by a good one, what they usually had was a whimsical
coloured woman of nomadic impulses. In the hands of such a person the
old-fashioned “dinner-bell” was satisfying; life could instantly be
made intolerable for any one dawdling on his way to a meal; the bell was
capable of every desirable profanity and left nothing bottled up in the
breast of the ringer. But the chamois-covered stick might whack upon
Alice's little Chinese bowls for a considerable length of time and
produce no great effect of urgency upon a hearer, nor any other effect,
except fury in the cook. The ironical impossibility of expressing
indignation otherwise than by sounds of gentle harmony proved
exasperating; the cook was apt to become surcharged, so that explosive
resignations, never rare, were somewhat more frequent after the
introduction of the gong.

Mrs. Adams took this increased frequency to be only another
manifestation of the inexplicable new difficulties that beset all
housekeeping. You paid a cook double what you had paid one a few years
before; and the cook knew half as much of cookery, and had no gratitude.
The more you gave these people, it seemed, the worse they behaved--a
condition not to be remedied by simply giving them less, because you
couldn't even get the worst unless you paid her what she demanded.
Nevertheless, Mrs. Adams remained fitfully an optimist in the matter.
Brought up by her mother to speak of a female cook as “the girl,” she
had been instructed by Alice to drop that definition in favour of one
not an improvement in accuracy: “the maid.” Almost always, during
the first day or so after every cook came, Mrs. Adams would say, at
intervals, with an air of triumph: “I believe--of course it's a little
soon to be sure--but I do really believe this new maid is the treasure
we've been looking for so long!” Much in the same way that Alice dreamed
of a mysterious perfect mate for whom she “waited,” her mother had
a fairy theory that hidden somewhere in the universe there was the
treasure, the perfect “maid,” who would come and cook in the Adamses'
kitchen, not four days or four weeks, but forever.

The present incumbent was not she. Alice, profoundly interested herself,
kept her mother likewise so preoccupied with the dress that they were
but vaguely conscious of the gong's soft warnings, though these were
repeated and protracted unusually. Finally the sound of a hearty voice,
independent and enraged, reached the pair. It came from the hall below.

“I says goo'-BYE!” it called. “Da'ss all!”

Then the front door slammed.

“Why, what----” Mrs. Adams began.

They went down hurriedly to find out. Miss Perry informed them.

“I couldn't make her listen to reason,” she said. “She rang the gong
four or five times and got to talking to herself; and then she went up
to her room and packed her bag. I told her she had no business to go out
the front door, anyhow.”

Mrs. Adams took the news philosophically. “I thought she had something
like that in her eye when I paid her this morning, and I'm not
surprised. Well, we won't let Mr. Adams know anything's the matter till
I get a new one.”

They lunched upon what the late incumbent had left chilling on the
table, and then Mrs. Adams prepared to wash the dishes; she would “have
them done in a jiffy,” she said, cheerfully. But it was Alice who washed
the dishes.

“I DON'T like to have you do that, Alice,” her mother protested,
following her into the kitchen. “It roughens the hands, and when a girl
has hands like yours----”

“I know, mama.” Alice looked troubled, but shook her head. “It can't be
helped this time; you'll need every minute to get that dress done.”

Mrs. Adams went away lamenting, while Alice, no expert, began to splash
the plates and cups and saucers in the warm water. After a while, as
she worked, her eyes grew dreamy: she was making little gay-coloured
pictures of herself, unfounded prophecies of how she would look and what
would happen to her that evening. She saw herself, charming and demure,
wearing a fluffy idealization of the dress her mother now determinedly
struggled with upstairs; she saw herself framed in a garlanded archway,
the entrance to a ballroom, and saw the people on the shining floor
turning dramatically to look at her; then from all points a rush of
young men shouting for dances with her; and she constructed a superb
stranger, tall, dark, masterfully smiling, who swung her out of the
clamouring group as the music began. She saw herself dancing with him,
saw the half-troubled smile she would give him; and she accurately
smiled that smile as she rinsed the knives and forks.

These hopeful fragments of drama were not to be realized, she knew; but
she played that they were true, and went on creating them. In all of
them she wore or carried flowers--her mother's sorrow for her in this
detail but made it the more important--and she saw herself glamorous
with orchids; discarded these for an armful of long-stemmed, heavy
roses; tossed them away for a great bouquet of white camellias; and
so wandered down a lengthening hothouse gallery of floral beauty, all
costly and beyond her reach except in such a wistful day-dream. And upon
her present whole horizon, though she searched it earnestly, she could
discover no figure of a sender of flowers.

Out of her fancies the desire for flowers to wear that night emerged
definitely and became poignant; she began to feel that it might be
particularly important to have them. “This might be the night!” She was
still at the age to dream that the night of any dance may be the vital
point in destiny. No matter how commonplace or disappointing other
dance nights have been this one may bring the great meeting. The unknown
magnifico may be there.

Alice was almost unaware of her own reveries in which this being
appeared--reveries often so transitory that they developed and passed in
a few seconds. And in some of them the being was not wholly a stranger;
there were moments when he seemed to be composed of recognizable
fragments of young men she knew--a smile she had liked, from one; the
figure of another, the hair of another--and sometimes she thought
he might be concealed, so to say, within the person of an actual
acquaintance, someone she had never suspected of being the right seeker
for her, someone who had never suspected that it was she who “waited”
 for him. Anything might reveal them to each other: a look, a turn of the
head, a singular word--perhaps some flowers upon her breast or in her
hand.

She wiped the dishes slowly, concluding the operation by dropping a
saucer upon the floor and dreamily sweeping the fragments under the
stove. She sighed and replaced the broom near a window, letting her
glance wander over the small yard outside. The grass, repulsively
besooted to the colour of coal-smoke all winter, had lately come to life
again and now sparkled with green, in the midst of which a tiny shot of
blue suddenly fixed her absent eyes. They remained upon it for several
moments, becoming less absent.

It was a violet.

Alice ran upstairs, put on her hat, went outdoors and began to search
out the violets. She found twenty-two, a bright omen--since the number
was that of her years--but not enough violets. There were no more; she
had ransacked every foot of the yard.

She looked dubiously at the little bunch in her hand, glanced at
the lawn next door, which offered no favourable prospect; then went
thoughtfully into the house, left her twenty-two violets in a bowl
of water, and came quickly out again, her brow marked with a frown of
decision. She went to a trolley-line and took a car to the outskirts of
the city where a new park had been opened.

Here she resumed her search, but it was not an easily rewarded one,
and for an hour after her arrival she found no violets. She walked
conscientiously over the whole stretch of meadow, her eyes roving
discontentedly; there was never a blue dot in the groomed expanse; but
at last, as she came near the borders of an old grove of trees, left
untouched by the municipal landscapers, the little flowers appeared, and
she began to gather them. She picked them carefully, loosening the earth
round each tiny plant, so as to bring the roots up with it, that it
might live the longer; and she had brought a napkin, which she
drenched at a hydrant, and kept loosely wrapped about the stems of her
collection.

The turf was too damp for her to kneel; she worked patiently, stooping
from the waist; and when she got home in a drizzle of rain at five
o'clock her knees were tremulous with strain, her back ached, and she
was tired all over, but she had three hundred violets. Her mother moaned
when Alice showed them to her, fragrant in a basin of water.

“Oh, you POOR child! To think of your having to work so hard to get
things that other girls only need lift their little fingers for!”

“Never mind,” said Alice, huskily. “I've got 'em and I AM going to have
a good time to-night!”

“You've just got to!” Mrs. Adams agreed, intensely sympathetic. “The
Lord knows you deserve to, after picking all these violets, poor thing,
and He wouldn't be mean enough to keep you from it. I may have to get
dinner before I finish the dress, but I can get it done in a few minutes
afterward, and it's going to look right pretty. Don't you worry about
THAT! And with all these lovely violets----”

“I wonder----” Alice began, paused, then went on, fragmentarily: “I
suppose--well, I wonder--do you suppose it would have been better policy
to have told Walter before----”

“No,” said her mother. “It would only have given him longer to grumble.”

“But he might----”

“Don't worry,” Mrs. Adams reassured her. “He'll be a little cross, but
he won't be stubborn; just let me talk to him and don't you say anything
at all, no matter what HE says.”

These references to Walter concerned some necessary manoeuvres which
took place at dinner, and were conducted by the mother, Alice having
accepted her advice to sit in silence. Mrs. Adams began by laughing
cheerfully. “I wonder how much longer it took me to cook this dinner
than it does Walter to eat it?” she said. “Don't gobble, child! There's
no hurry.”

In contact with his own family Walter was no squanderer of words.

“Is for me,” he said. “Got date.”

“I know you have, but there's plenty of time.”

He smiled in benevolent pity. “YOU know, do you? If you made any
coffee--don't bother if you didn't. Get some down-town.” He seemed
about to rise and depart; whereupon Alice, biting her lip, sent a
panic-stricken glance at her mother.

But Mrs. Adams seemed not at all disturbed; and laughed again. “Why,
what nonsense, Walter! I'll bring your coffee in a few minutes, but
we're going to have dessert first.”

“What sort?”

“Some lovely peaches.”

“Doe' want 'ny canned peaches,” said the frank Walter, moving back his
chair. “G'-night.”

“Walter! It doesn't begin till about nine o'clock at the earliest.”

He paused, mystified. “What doesn't?”

“The dance.”

“What dance?”

“Why, Mildred Palmer's dance, of course.”

Walter laughed briefly. “What's that to me?”

“Why, you haven't forgotten it's TO-NIGHT, have you?” Mrs. Adams cried.
“What a boy!”

“I told you a week ago I wasn't going to that ole dance,” he returned,
frowning. “You heard me.”

“Walter!” she exclaimed. “Of COURSE you're going. I got your clothes all
out this afternoon, and brushed them for you. They'll look very nice,
and----”

“They won't look nice on ME,” he interrupted. “Got date down-town, I
tell you.”

“But of course you'll----”

“See here!” Walter said, decisively. “Don't get any wrong ideas in your
head. I'm just as liable to go up to that ole dance at the Palmers' as I
am to eat a couple of barrels of broken glass.”

“But, Walter----”

Walter was beginning to be seriously annoyed. “Don't 'Walter' me! I'm no
s'ciety snake. I wouldn't jazz with that Palmer crowd if they coaxed me
with diamonds.”

“Walter----”

“Didn't I tell you it's no use to 'Walter' me?” he demanded.

“My dear child----”

“Oh, Glory!”

At this Mrs. Adams abandoned her air of amusement, looked hurt, and
glanced at the demure Miss Perry across the table. “I'm afraid Miss
Perry won't think you have very good manners, Walter.”

“You're right she won't,” he agreed, grimly. “Not if I haf to hear any
more about me goin' to----”

But his mother interrupted him with some asperity: “It seems very
strange that you always object to going anywhere among OUR friends,
Walter.”

“YOUR friends!” he said, and, rising from his chair, gave utterance to
an ironical laugh strictly monosyllabic. “Your friends!” he repeated,
going to the door. “Oh, yes! Certainly! Good-NIGHT!”

And looking back over his shoulder to offer a final brief view of his
derisive face, he took himself out of the room.

Alice gasped: “Mama----”

“I'll stop him!” her mother responded, sharply; and hurried after the
truant, catching him at the front door with his hat and raincoat on.

“Walter----”

“Told you had a date down-town,” he said, gruffly, and would have opened
the door, but she caught his arm and detained him.

“Walter, please come back and finish your dinner. When I take all the
trouble to cook it for you, I think you might at least----”

“Now, now!” he said. “That isn't what you're up to. You don't want to
make me eat; you want to make me listen.”

“Well, you MUST listen!” She retained her grasp upon his arm, and
made it tighter. “Walter, please!” she entreated, her voice becoming
tremulous. “PLEASE don't make me so much trouble!”

He drew back from her as far as her hold upon him permitted, and looked
at her sharply. “Look here!” he said. “I get you, all right! What's the
matter of Alice GOIN' to that party by herself?”

“She just CAN'T!”

“Why not?”

“It makes things too MEAN for her, Walter. All the other girls have
somebody to depend on after they get there.”

“Well, why doesn't she have somebody?” he asked, testily. “Somebody
besides ME, I mean! Why hasn't somebody asked her to go? She ought to be
THAT popular, anyhow, I sh'd think--she TRIES enough!”

“I don't understand how you can be so hard,” his mother wailed, huskily.
“You know why they don't run after her the way they do the other girls
she goes with, Walter. It's because we're poor, and she hasn't got any
background.

“'Background?'” Walter repeated. “'Background?' What kind of talk is
that?”

“You WILL go with her to-night, Walter?” his mother pleaded, not
stopping to enlighten him. “You don't understand how hard things are for
her and how brave she is about them, or you COULDN'T be so selfish! It'd
be more than I can bear to see her disappointed to-night! She went clear
out to Belleview Park this afternoon, Walter, and spent hours and hours
picking violets to wear. You WILL----”

Walter's heart was not iron, and the episode of the violets may have
reached it. “Oh, BLUB!” he said, and flung his soft hat violently at the
wall.

His mother beamed with delight. “THAT'S a good boy, darling! You'll
never be sorry you----”

“Cut it out,” he requested. “If I take her, will you pay for a taxi?”

“Oh, Walter!” And again Mrs. Adams showed distress. “Couldn't you?”

“No, I couldn't; I'm not goin' to throw away my good money like that,
and you can't tell what time o' night it'll be before she's willin' to
come home. What's the matter you payin' for one?”

“I haven't any money.”

“Well, father----”

She shook her head dolefully. “I got some from him this morning, and
I can't bother him for any more; it upsets him. He's ALWAYS been so
terribly close with money----”

“I guess he couldn't help that,” Walter observed. “We're liable to go to
the poorhouse the way it is. Well, what's the matter our walkin' to this
rotten party?”

“In the rain, Walter?”

“Well, it's only a drizzle and we can take a streetcar to within a block
of the house.”

Again his mother shook her head. “It wouldn't do.”

“Well, darn the luck, all right!” he consented, explosively. “I'll get
her something to ride in. It means seventy-five cents.”

“Why, Walter!” Mrs. Adams cried, much pleased. “Do you know how to get a
cab for that little? How splendid!”

“Tain't a cab,” Walter informed her crossly. “It's a tin Lizzie, but you
don't haf' to tell her what it is till I get her into it, do you?”

Mrs. Adams agreed that she didn't.



CHAPTER VI

Alice was busy with herself for two hours after dinner; but a little
before nine o'clock she stood in front of her long mirror, completed,
bright-eyed and solemn. Her hair, exquisitely arranged, gave all she
asked of it; what artificialities in colour she had used upon her face
were only bits of emphasis that made her prettiness the more distinct;
and the dress, not rumpled by her mother's careful hours of work, was a
white cloud of loveliness. Finally there were two triumphant bouquets
of violets, each with the stems wrapped in tin-foil shrouded by a bow of
purple chiffon; and one bouquet she wore at her waist and the other she
carried in her hand.

Miss Perry, called in by a rapturous mother for the free treat of a look
at this radiance, insisted that Alice was a vision. “Purely and simply
a vision!” she said, meaning that no other definition whatever would
satisfy her. “I never saw anybody look a vision if she don't look one
to-night,” the admiring nurse declared. “Her papa'll think the same I do
about it. You see if he doesn't say she's purely and simply a vision.”

Adams did not fulfil the prediction quite literally when Alice paid a
brief visit to his room to “show” him and bid him good-night; but he
chuckled feebly. “Well, well, well!” he said.

“You look mighty fine--MIGHTY fine!” And he waggled a bony finger at her
two bouquets. “Why, Alice, who's your beau?”

“Never you mind!” she laughed, archly brushing his nose with the violets
in her hand. “He treats me pretty well, doesn't he?”

“Must like to throw his money around! These violets smell mighty sweet,
and they ought to, if they're going to a party with YOU. Have a good
time, dearie.”

“I mean to!” she cried; and she repeated this gaily, but with an
emphasis expressing sharp determination as she left him. “I MEAN to!”

“What was he talking about?” her mother inquired, smoothing the rather
worn and old evening wrap she had placed on Alice's bed. “What were you
telling him you 'mean to?'”

Alice went back to her triple mirror for the last time, then stood
before the long one. “That I mean to have a good time to-night,” she
said; and as she turned from her reflection to the wrap Mrs. Adams held
up for her, “It looks as though I COULD, don't you think so?”

“You'll just be a queen to-night,” her mother whispered in fond emotion.
“You mustn't doubt yourself.”

“Well, there's one thing,” said Alice. “I think I do look nice enough to
get along without having to dance with that Frank Dowling! All I ask is
for it to happen just once; and if he comes near me to-night I'm going
to treat him the way the other girls do. Do you suppose Walter's got the
taxi out in front?”

“He--he's waiting down in the hall,” Mrs. Adams answered, nervously; and
she held up another garment to go over the wrap.

Alice frowned at it. “What's that, mama?”

“It's--it's your father's raincoat. I thought you'd put it on over----”

“But I won't need it in a taxicab.”

“You will to get in and out, and you needn't take it into the Palmers'.
You can leave it in the--in the--It's drizzling, and you'll need it.”

“Oh, well,” Alice consented; and a few minutes later, as with Walter's
assistance she climbed into the vehicle he had provided, she better
understood her mother's solicitude.

“What on earth IS this, Walter?” she asked.

“Never mind; it'll keep you dry enough with the top up,” he returned,
taking his seat beside her. Then for a time, as they went rather jerkily
up the street, she was silent; but finally she repeated her question:
“What IS it, Walter?”

“What's what?”

“This--this CAR?”

“It's a ottomobile.”

“I mean--what kind is it?”

“Haven't you got eyes?”

“It's too dark.”

“It's a second-hand tin Lizzie,” said Walter. “D'you know what that
means? It means a flivver.”

“Yes, Walter.”

“Got 'ny 'bjections?”

“Why, no, dear,” she said, placatively. “Is it yours, Walter? Have you
bought it?”

“Me?” he laughed. “_I_ couldn't buy a used wheelbarrow. I rent this
sometimes when I'm goin' out among 'em. Costs me seventy-five cents and
the price o' the gas.”

“That seems very moderate.”

“I guess it is! The feller owes me some money, and this is the only way
I'd ever get it off him.”

“Is he a garage-keeper?”

“Not exactly!” Walter uttered husky sounds of amusement. “You'll be just
as happy, I guess, if you don't know who he is,” he said.

His tone misgave her; and she said truthfully that she was content not
to know who owned the car. “I joke sometimes about how you keep things
to yourself,” she added, “but I really never do pry in your affairs,
Walter.”

“Oh, no, you don't!”

“Indeed, I don't.”

“Yes, you're mighty nice and cooing when you got me where you want me,”
 he jeered. “Well, _I_ just as soon tell you where I get this car.”

“I'd just as soon you wouldn't, Walter,” she said, hurriedly. “Please
don't.”

But Walter meant to tell her. “Why, there's nothin' exactly CRIMINAL
about it,” he said. “It belongs to old J. A. Lamb himself. He keeps it
for their coon chauffeur. I rent it from him.”

“From Mr. LAMB?”

“No; from the coon chauffeur.”

“Walter!” she gasped.

“Sure I do! I can get it any night when the coon isn't goin' to use it
himself. He's drivin' their limousine to-night--that little Henrietta
Lamb's goin' to the party, no matter if her father HAS only been dead
less'n a year!” He paused, then inquired: “Well, how d'you like it?”

She did not speak, and he began to be remorseful for having imparted
so much information, though his way of expressing regret was his own.
“Well, you WILL make the folks make me take you to parties!” he said. “I
got to do it the best way I CAN, don't I?”

Then as she made no response, “Oh, the car's CLEAN enough,” he said.
“This coon, he's as particular as any white man; you needn't worry about
that.” And as she still said nothing, he added gruffly, “I'd of had a
better car if I could afforded it. You needn't get so upset about it.”

“I don't understand--” she said in a low voice--“I don't understand how
you know such people.”

“Such people as who?”

“As--coloured chauffeurs.”

“Oh, look here, now!” he protested, loudly. “Don't you know this is a
democratic country?”

“Not quite that democratic, is it, Walter?”

“The trouble with you,” he retorted, “you don't know there's anybody in
town except just this silk-shirt crowd.” He paused, seeming to await
a refutation; but as none came, he expressed himself definitely: “They
make me sick.”

They were coming near their destination, and the glow of the big,
brightly lighted house was seen before them in the wet night. Other
cars, not like theirs, were approaching this center of brilliance; long
triangles of light near the ground swept through the fine drizzle; small
red tail-lights gleamed again from the moist pavement of the street;
and, through the myriads of little glistening leaves along the curving
driveway, glimpses were caught of lively colours moving in a white glare
as the limousines released their occupants under the shelter of the
porte-cochere.

Alice clutched Walter's arm in a panic; they were just at the driveway
entrance. “Walter, we mustn't go in there.”

“What's the matter?”

“Leave this awful car outside.”

“Why, I----”

“Stop!” she insisted, vehemently. “You've got to! Go back!”

“Oh, Glory!”

The little car was between the entrance posts; but Walter backed it out,
avoiding a collision with an impressive machine which swerved away
from them and passed on toward the porte-cochere, showing a man's face
grinning at the window as it went by. “Flivver runabout got the wrong
number!” he said.

“Did he SEE us?” Alice cried.

“Did who see us?”

“Harvey Malone--in that foreign coupe.”

“No; he couldn't tell who we were under this top,” Walter assured her as
he brought the little car to a standstill beside the curbstone, out in
the street. “What's it matter if he did, the big fish?”

Alice responded with a loud sigh, and sat still.

“Well, want to go on back?” Walter inquired. “You bet I'm willing!”

“No.”

“Well, then, what's the matter our drivin' on up to the porte-cochere?
There's room for me to park just the other side of it.”

“No, NO!”

“What you expect to do? Sit HERE all night?”

“No, leave the car here.”

“_I_ don't care where we leave it,” he said. “Sit still till I lock her,
so none o' these millionaires around here'll run off with her.” He got
out with a padlock and chain; and, having put these in place, offered
Alice his hand. “Come on, if you're ready.”

“Wait,” she said, and, divesting herself of the raincoat, handed it to
Walter. “Please leave this with your things in the men's dressing-room,
as if it were an extra one of your own, Walter.”

He nodded; she jumped out; and they scurried through the drizzle.

As they reached the porte-cochere she began to laugh airily, and spoke
to the impassive man in livery who stood there. “Joke on us!” she
said, hurrying by him toward the door of the house. “Our car broke down
outside the gate.”

The man remained impassive, though he responded with a faint gleam
as Walter, looking back at him, produced for his benefit a cynical
distortion of countenance which offered little confirmation of Alice's
account of things. Then the door was swiftly opened to the brother and
sister; and they came into a marble-floored hall, where a dozen sleeked
young men lounged, smoked cigarettes and fastened their gloves, as they
waited for their ladies. Alice nodded to one or another of these, and
went quickly on, her face uplifted and smiling; but Walter detained her
at the door to which she hastened.

“Listen here,” he said. “I suppose you want me to dance the first dance
with you----”

“If you please, Walter,” she said, meekly.

“How long you goin' to hang around fixin' up in that dressin'-room?”

“I'll be out before you're ready yourself,” she promised him; and kept
her word, she was so eager for her good time to begin. When he came
for her, they went down the hall to a corridor opening upon three great
rooms which had been thrown open together, with the furniture removed
and the broad floors waxed. At one end of the corridor musicians sat in
a green grove, and Walter, with some interest, turned toward these; but
his sister, pressing his arm, impelled him in the opposite direction.

“What's the matter now?” he asked. “That's Jazz Louie and his half-breed
bunch--three white and four mulatto. Let's----?”

“No, no,” she whispered. “We must speak to Mildred and Mr. and Mrs.
Palmer.”

“'Speak' to 'em? I haven't got a thing to say to THOSE berries!”

“Walter, won't you PLEASE behave?”

He seemed to consent, for the moment, at least, and suffered her to take
him down the corridor toward a floral bower where the hostess stood with
her father and mother. Other couples and groups were moving in the
same direction, carrying with them a hubbub of laughter and fragmentary
chatterings; and Alice, smiling all the time, greeted people on
every side of her eagerly--a little more eagerly than most of them
responded--while Walter nodded in a noncommittal manner to one or two,
said nothing, and yawned audibly, the last resource of a person who
finds himself nervous in a false situation. He repeated his yawn and
was beginning another when a convulsive pressure upon his arm made him
understand that he must abandon this method of reassuring himself. They
were close upon the floral bower.

Mildred was giving her hand to one and another of her guests as rapidly
as she could, passing them on to her father and mother, and at the
same time resisting the efforts of three or four detached bachelors who
besought her to give over her duty in favour of the dance-music just
beginning to blare.

She was a large, fair girl, with a kindness of eye somewhat withheld by
an expression of fastidiousness; at first sight of her it was clear that
she would never in her life do anything “incorrect,” or wear anything
“incorrect.” But her correctness was of the finer sort, and had no air
of being studied or achieved; conduct would never offer her a problem to
be settled from a book of rules, for the rules were so deep within her
that she was unconscious of them. And behind this perfection there was
an even ampler perfection of what Mrs. Adams called “background.” The
big, rich, simple house was part of it, and Mildred's father and mother
were part of it. They stood beside her, large, serene people, murmuring
graciously and gently inclining their handsome heads as they gave their
hands to the guests; and even the youngest and most ebullient of these
took on a hushed mannerliness with a closer approach to the bower.

When the opportunity came for Alice and Walter to pass within this
precinct, Alice, going first, leaned forward and whispered in Mildred's
ear. “You DIDN'T wear the maize georgette! That's what I thought you
were going to. But you look simply DARLING! And those pearls----”

Others were crowding decorously forward, anxious to be done with
ceremony and get to the dancing; and Mildred did not prolong the
intimacy of Alice's enthusiastic whispering. With a faint accession of
colour and a smile tending somewhat in the direction of rigidity, she
carried Alice's hand immediately onward to Mrs. Palmer's. Alice's own
colour showed a little heightening as she accepted the suggestion thus
implied; nor was that emotional tint in any wise decreased, a moment
later, by an impression that Walter, in concluding the brief exchange
of courtesies between himself and the stately Mr. Palmer, had again
reassured himself with a yawn.

But she did not speak of it to Walter; she preferred not to confirm the
impression and to leave in her mind a possible doubt that he had done
it. He followed her out upon the waxed floor, said resignedly: “Well,
come on,” put his arm about her, and they began to dance.

Alice danced gracefully and well, but not so well as Walter. Of all the
steps and runs, of all the whimsical turns and twirlings, of all the
rhythmic swayings and dips commanded that season by such blarings as
were the barbaric product, loud and wild, of the Jazz Louies and their
half-breed bunches, the thin and sallow youth was a master. Upon his
face could be seen contempt of the easy marvels he performed as he
moved in swift precision from one smooth agility to another; and if some
too-dainty or jealous cavalier complained that to be so much a stylist
in dancing was “not quite like a gentleman,” at least Walter's style was
what the music called for. No other dancer in the room could be thought
comparable to him. Alice told him so.

“It's wonderful!” she said. “And the mystery is, where you ever learned
to DO it! You never went to dancing-school, but there isn't a man in the
room who can dance half so well. I don't see why, when you dance like
this, you always make such a fuss about coming to parties.”

He sounded his brief laugh, a jeering bark out of one side of the mouth,
and swung her miraculously through a closing space between two other
couples. “You know a lot about what goes on, don't you? You prob'ly
think there's no other place to dance in this town except these
frozen-face joints.”

“'Frozen face?'” she echoed, laughing. “Why, everybody's having a
splendid time. Look at them.”

“Oh, they holler loud enough,” he said. “They do it to make each other
think they're havin' a good time. You don't call that Palmer family
frozen-face berries, I s'pose. No?”

“Certainly not. They're just dignified and----”

“Yeuh!” said Walter. “They're dignified, 'specially when you tried to
whisper to Mildred to show how IN with her you were, and she moved you
on that way. SHE'S a hot friend, isn't she!”

“She didn't mean anything by it. She----”

“Ole Palmer's a hearty, slap you-on-the-back ole berry,” Walter
interrupted; adding in a casual tone, “All I'd like, I'd like to hit
him.”

“Walter! By the way, you mustn't forget to ask Mildred for a dance
before the evening is over.”

“Me?” He produced the lop-sided appearance of his laugh, but without
making it vocal. “You watch me do it!”

“She probably won't have one left, but you must ask her, anyway.”

“Why must I?”

“Because, in the first place, you're supposed to, and, in the second
place, she's my most intimate friend.”

“Yeuh? Is she? I've heard you pull that 'most-intimate-friend' stuff
often enough about her. What's SHE ever do to show she is?”

“Never mind. You really must ask her, Walter. I want you to; and I want
you to ask several other girls afterwhile; I'll tell you who.”

“Keep on wanting; it'll do you good.”

“Oh, but you really----”

“Listen!” he said. “I'm just as liable to dance with any of these
fairies as I am to buy a bucket o' rusty tacks and eat 'em. Forget it!
Soon as I get rid of you I'm goin' back to that room where I left my hat
and overcoat and smoke myself to death.”

“Well,” she said, a little ruefully, as the frenzy of Jazz Louie and his
half-breeds was suddenly abated to silence, “you mustn't--you mustn't
get rid of me TOO soon, Walter.”

They stood near one of the wide doorways, remaining where they had
stopped. Other couples, everywhere, joined one another, forming
vivacious clusters, but none of these groups adopted the brother and
sister, nor did any one appear to be hurrying in Alice's direction to
ask her for the next dance. She looked about her, still maintaining that
jubilance of look and manner she felt so necessary--for it is to the
girls who are “having a good time” that partners are attracted--and, in
order to lend greater colour to her impersonation of a lively belle,
she began to chatter loudly, bringing into play an accompaniment of
frolicsome gesture. She brushed Walter's nose saucily with the bunch
of violets in her hand, tapped him on the shoulder, shook her pretty
forefinger in his face, flourished her arms, kept her shoulders moving,
and laughed continuously as she spoke.

“You NAUGHTY old Walter!” she cried. “AREN'T you ashamed to be such a
wonderful dancer and then only dance with your own little sister! You
could dance on the stage if you wanted to. Why, you could made your
FORTUNE that way! Why don't you? Wouldn't it be just lovely to have all
the rows and rows of people clapping their hands and shouting, 'Hurrah!
Hurrah, for Walter Adams! Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!”

He stood looking at her in stolid pity.

“Cut it out,” he said. “You better be givin' some of these berries the
eye so they'll ask you to dance.”

She was not to be so easily checked, and laughed loudly, flourishing her
violets in his face again. “You WOULD like it; you know you would; you
needn't pretend! Just think! A whole big audience shouting, 'Hurrah!
HURRAH! HUR----'”

“The place'll be pulled if you get any noisier,” he interrupted, not
ungently. “Besides, I'm no muley cow.”

“A 'COW?'” she laughed. “What on earth----”

“I can't eat dead violets,” he explained. “So don't keep tryin' to make
me do it.”

This had the effect he desired, and subdued her; she abandoned her
unsisterly coquetries, and looked beamingly about her, but her smile was
more mechanical than it had been at first.

At home she had seemed beautiful; but here, where the other girls
competed, things were not as they had been there, with only her mother
and Miss Perry to give contrast. These crowds of other girls had all
done their best, also, to look beautiful, though not one of them had
worked so hard for such a consummation as Alice had. They did not need
to; they did not need to get their mothers to make old dresses over;
they did not need to hunt violets in the rain.

At home her dress had seemed beautiful; but that was different,
too, where there were dozens of brilliant fabrics, fashioned in new
ways--some of these new ways startling, which only made the wearers
centers of interest and shocked no one. And Alice remembered that she
had heard a girl say, not long before, “Oh, ORGANDIE! Nobody wears
organdie for evening gowns except in midsummer.” Alice had thought
little of this; but as she looked about her and saw no organdie except
her own, she found greater difficulty in keeping her smile as arch and
spontaneous as she wished it. In fact, it was beginning to make her face
ache a little.

Mildred came in from the corridor, heavily attended. She carried a great
bouquet of violets laced with lilies of-the-valley; and the violets were
lusty, big purple things, their stems wrapped in cloth of gold, with
silken cords dependent, ending in long tassels. She and her convoy
passed near the two young Adamses; and it appeared that one of the
convoy besought his hostess to permit “cutting in”; they were “doing it
other places” of late, he urged; but he was denied and told to console
himself by holding the bouquet, at intervals, until his third of the
sixteenth dance should come. Alice looked dubiously at her own bouquet.

Suddenly she felt that the violets betrayed her; that any one who looked
at them could see how rustic, how innocent of any florist's craft they
were “I can't eat dead violets,” Walter said. The little wild flowers,
dying indeed in the warm air, were drooping in a forlorn mass; and it
seemed to her that whoever noticed them would guess that she had picked
them herself. She decided to get rid of them.

Walter was becoming restive. “Look here!” he said. “Can't you flag one
o' these long-tailed birds to take you on for the next dance? You came
to have a good time; why don't you get busy and have it? I want to get
out and smoke.”

“You MUSTN'T leave me, Walter,” she whispered, hastily. “Somebody'll
come for me before long, but until they do----”

“Well, couldn't you sit somewhere?”

“No, no! There isn't any one I could sit with.”

“Well, why not? Look at those ole dames in the corners. What's the
matter your tyin' up with some o' them for a while?”

“PLEASE, Walter; no!”

In fact, that indomitable smile of hers was the more difficult to
maintain because of these very elders to whom Walter referred. They
were mothers of girls among the dancers, and they were there to fend and
contrive for their offspring; to keep them in countenance through any
trial; to lend them diplomacy in the carrying out of all enterprises;
to be “background” for them; and in these essentially biological
functionings to imitate their own matings and renew the excitement of
their nuptial periods. Older men, husbands of these ladies and fathers
of eligible girls, were also to be seen, most of them with Mr. Palmer
in a billiard-room across the corridor. Mr. and Mrs. Adams had not been
invited. “Of course papa and mama just barely know Mildred Palmer,”
 Alice thought, “and most of the other girls' fathers and mothers are old
friends of Mr. and Mrs. Palmer, but I do think she might have ASKED papa
and mama, anyway--she needn't have been afraid just to ask them;
she knew they couldn't come.” And her smiling lip twitched a little
threateningly, as she concluded the silent monologue. “I suppose she
thinks I ought to be glad enough she asked Walter!”

Walter was, in fact, rather noticeable. He was not Mildred's only guest
to wear a short coat and to appear without gloves; but he was singular
(at least in his present surroundings) on account of a kind of
coiffuring he favoured, his hair having been shaped after what seemed
a Mongol inspiration. Only upon the top of the head was actual hair
perceived, the rest appearing to be nudity. And even more than by any
difference in mode he was set apart by his look and manner, in which
there seemed to be a brooding, secretive and jeering superiority and
this was most vividly expressed when he felt called upon for his loud,
short, lop-sided laugh. Whenever he uttered it Alice laughed, too, as
loudly as she could, to cover it.

“Well,” he said. “How long we goin' to stand here? My feet are sproutin'
roots.”

Alice took his arm, and they began to walk aimlessly through the rooms,
though she tried to look as if they had a definite destination, keeping
her eyes eager and her lips parted;--people had called jovially to them
from the distance, she meant to imply, and they were going to join these
merry friends. She was still upon this ghostly errand when a furious
outbreak of drums and saxophones sounded a prelude for the second dance.

Walter danced with her again, but he gave her a warning. “I don't want
to leave you high and dry,” he told her, “but I can't stand it. I got to
get somewhere I don't haf' to hurt my eyes with these berries; I'll go
blind if I got to look at any more of 'em. I'm goin' out to smoke as
soon as the music begins the next time, and you better get fixed for
it.”

Alice tried to get fixed for it. As they danced she nodded sunnily to
every man whose eye she caught, smiled her smile with the under
lip caught between her teeth; but it was not until the end of the
intermission after the dance that she saw help coming.

Across the room sat the globular lady she had encountered that morning,
and beside the globular lady sat a round-headed, round-bodied girl;
her daughter, at first glance. The family contour was also as evident
a characteristic of the short young man who stood in front of Mrs.
Dowling, engaged with her in a discussion which was not without
evidences of an earnestness almost impassioned. Like Walter, he was
declining to dance a third time with sister; he wished to go elsewhere.

Alice from a sidelong eye watched the controversy: she saw the globular
young man glance toward her, over his shoulder; whereupon Mrs. Dowling,
following this glance, gave Alice a look of open fury, became much more
vehement in the argument, and even struck her knee with a round, fat
fist for emphasis.

“I'm on my way,” said Walter. “There's the music startin' up again, and
I told you----”

She nodded gratefully. “It's all right--but come back before long,
Walter.”

The globular young man, red with annoyance, had torn himself from
his family and was hastening across the room to her. “C'n I have this
dance?”

“Why, you nice Frank Dowling!” Alice cried. “How lovely!”



CHAPTER VII

They danced. Mr. Dowling should have found other forms of exercise and
pastime.

Nature has not designed everyone for dancing, though sometimes those
she has denied are the last to discover her niggardliness. But the round
young man was at least vigorous enough--too much so, when his knees
collided with Alice's--and he was too sturdy to be thrown off his feet,
himself, or to allow his partner to fall when he tripped her. He held
her up valiantly, and continued to beat a path through the crowd of
other dancers by main force.

He paid no attention to anything suggested by the efforts of the
musicians, and appeared to be unaware that there should have been some
connection between what they were doing and what he was doing; but he
may have listened to other music of his own, for his expression was of
high content; he seemed to feel no doubt whatever that he was dancing.
Alice kept as far away from him as under the circumstances she could;
and when they stopped she glanced down, and found the execution of
unseen manoeuvres, within the protection of her skirt, helpful to one of
her insteps and to the toes of both of her slippers.

Her cheery partner was paddling his rosy brows with a fine handkerchief.
“That was great!” he said. “Let's go out and sit in the corridor;
they've got some comfortable chairs out there.”

“Well--let's not,” she returned. “I believe I'd rather stay in here and
look at the crowd.”

“No; that isn't it,” he said, chiding her with a waggish forefinger.
“You think if you go out there you'll miss a chance of someone else
asking you for the next dance, and so you'll have to give it to me.”

“How absurd!” Then, after a look about her that revealed nothing
encouraging, she added graciously, “You can have the next if you want
it.”

“Great!” he exclaimed, mechanically. “Now let's get out of here--out of
THIS room, anyhow.”

“Why? What's the matter with----”

“My mother,” Mr. Dowling explained. “But don't look at her. She keeps
motioning me to come and see after Ella, and I'm simply NOT going to do
it, you see!”

Alice laughed. “I don't believe it's so much that,” she said, and
consented to walk with him to a point in the next room from which Mrs.
Dowling's continuous signalling could not be seen. “Your mother hates
me.”

“Oh, no; I wouldn't say that. No, she don't,” he protested, innocently.
“She don't know you more than just to speak to, you see. So how could
she?”

“Well, she does. I can tell.”

A frown appeared upon his rounded brow. “No; I'll tell you the way she
feels. It's like this: Ella isn't TOO popular, you know--it's hard to
see why, because she's a right nice girl, in her way--and mother thinks
I ought to look after her, you see. She thinks I ought to dance a whole
lot with her myself, and stir up other fellows to dance with her--it's
simply impossible to make mother understand you CAN'T do that, you see.
And then about me, you see, if she had her way I wouldn't get to dance
with anybody at all except girls like Mildred Palmer and Henrietta Lamb.
Mother wants to run my whole programme for me, you understand, but the
trouble of it is--about girls like that, you see well, I couldn't do
what she wants, even if I wanted to myself, because you take those
girls, and by the time I get Ella off my hands for a minute, why, their
dances are always every last one taken, and where do I come in?”

Alice nodded, her amiability undamaged. “I see. So that's why you dance
with me.”

“No, I like to,” he protested. “I rather dance with you than I do with
those girls.” And he added with a retrospective determination which
showed that he had been through quite an experience with Mrs. Dowling in
this matter. “I TOLD mother I would, too!”

“Did it take all your courage, Frank?”

He looked at her shrewdly. “Now you're trying to tease me,” he said. “I
don't care; I WOULD rather dance with you! In the first place, you're
a perfectly beautiful dancer, you see, and in the second, a man feels a
lot more comfortable with you than he does with them. Of course I know
almost all the other fellows get along with those girls all right; but
I don't waste any time on 'em I don't have to. _I_ like people that are
always cordial to everybody, you see--the way you are.”

“Thank you,” she said, thoughtfully.

“Oh, I MEAN it,” he insisted. “There goes the band again. Shall we?”

“Suppose we sit it out?” she suggested. “I believe I'd like to go out in
the corridor, after all--it's pretty warm in here.”

Assenting cheerfully, Dowling conducted her to a pair of easy-chairs
within a secluding grove of box-trees, and when they came to this
retreat they found Mildred Palmer just departing, under escort of a
well-favoured gentleman about thirty. As these two walked slowly away,
in the direction of the dancing-floor, they left it not to be doubted
that they were on excellent terms with each other; Mildred was evidently
willing to make their progress even slower, for she halted momentarily,
once or twice; and her upward glances to her tall companion's face were
of a gentle, almost blushing deference. Never before had Alice seen
anything like this in her friend's manner.

“How queer!” she murmured.

“What's queer?” Dowling inquired as they sat down.

“Who was that man?”

“Haven't you met him?”

“I never saw him before. Who is he?”

“Why, it's this Arthur Russell.”

“What Arthur Russell? I never heard of him.” Mr. Dowling was puzzled.
“Why, THAT'S funny! Only the last time I saw you, you were telling me
how awfully well you knew Mildred Palmer.”

“Why, certainly I do,” Alice informed him. “She's my most intimate
friend.”

“That's what makes it seem so funny you haven't heard anything about
this Russell, because everybody says even if she isn't engaged to him
right now, she most likely will be before very long. I must say it looks
a good deal that way to me, myself.”

“What nonsense!” Alice exclaimed. “She's never even mentioned him to
me.”

The young man glanced at her dubiously and passed a finger over the tiny
prong that dashingly composed the whole substance of his moustache.

“Well, you see, Mildred IS pretty reserved,” he remarked. “This Russell
is some kind of cousin of the Palmer family, I understand.”

“He is?”

“Yes--second or third or something, the girls say. You see, my sister
Ella hasn't got much to do at home, and don't read anything, or sew, or
play solitaire, you see; and she hears about pretty much everything that
goes on, you see. Well, Ella says a lot of the girls have been talking
about Mildred and this Arthur Russell for quite a while back, you see.
They were all wondering what he was going to look like, you see; because
he only got here yesterday; and that proves she must have been talking
to some of 'em, or else how----”

Alice laughed airily, but the pretty sound ended abruptly with an
audible intake of breath. “Of course, while Mildred IS my most intimate
friend,” she said, “I don't mean she tells me everything--and naturally
she has other friends besides. What else did your sister say she told
them about this Mr. Russell?”

“Well, it seems he's VERY well off; at least Henrietta Lamb told Ella he
was. Ella says----”

Alice interrupted again, with an increased irritability. “Oh, never
mind what Ella says! Let's find something better to talk about than Mr.
Russell!”

“Well, I'M willing,” Mr. Dowling assented, ruefully. “What you want to
talk about?”

But this liberal offer found her unresponsive; she sat leaning back,
silent, her arms along the arms of her chair, and her eyes, moist and
bright, fixed upon a wide doorway where the dancers fluctuated. She was
disquieted by more than Mildred's reserve, though reserve so marked had
certainly the significance of a warning that Alice's definition, “my
most intimate friend,” lacked sanction. Indirect notice to this effect
could not well have been more emphatic, but the sting of it was left
for a later moment. Something else preoccupied Alice: she had just
been surprised by an odd experience. At first sight of this Mr. Arthur
Russell, she had said to herself instantly, in words as definite as if
she spoke them aloud, though they seemed more like words spoken to her
by some unknown person within her: “There! That's exactly the kind of
looking man I'd like to marry!”

In the eyes of the restless and the longing, Providence often appears to
be worse than inscrutable: an unreliable Omnipotence given to haphazard
whimsies in dealing with its own creatures, choosing at random some
among them to be rent with tragic deprivations and others to be petted
with blessing upon blessing.

In Alice's eyes, Mildred had been blessed enough; something ought to
be left over, by this time, for another girl. The final touch to the
heaping perfection of Christmas-in-everything for Mildred was that this
Mr. Arthur Russell, good-looking, kind-looking, graceful, the perfect
fiance, should be also “VERY well off.” Of course! These rich always
married one another. And while the Mildreds danced with their Arthur
Russells the best an outsider could do for herself was to sit with Frank
Dowling--the one last course left her that was better than dancing with
him.

“Well, what DO you want to talk about?” he inquired.

“Nothing,” she said. “Suppose we just sit, Frank.” But a moment later
she remembered something, and, with a sudden animation, began to
prattle. She pointed to the musicians down the corridor. “Oh, look at
them! Look at the leader! Aren't they FUNNY? Someone told me they're
called 'Jazz Louie and his half-breed bunch.' Isn't that just crazy?
Don't you love it? Do watch them, Frank.”

She continued to chatter, and, while thus keeping his glance away from
herself, she detached the forlorn bouquet of dead violets from her dress
and laid it gently beside the one she had carried.

The latter already reposed in the obscurity selected for it at the base
of one of the box-trees.

Then she was abruptly silent.

“You certainly are a funny girl,” Dowling remarked. “You say you don't
want to talk about anything at all, and all of a sudden you break
out and talk a blue streak; and just about the time I begin to get
interested in what you're saying you shut off! What's the matter with
girls, anyhow, when they do things like that?”

“I don't know; we're just queer, I guess.”

“I say so! Well, what'll we do NOW? Talk, or just sit?”

“Suppose we just sit some more.”

“Anything to oblige,” he assented. “I'm willing to sit as long as you
like.”

But even as he made his amiability clear in this matter, the peace was
threatened--his mother came down the corridor like a rolling, ominous
cloud. She was looking about her on all sides, in a fidget of annoyance,
searching for him, and to his dismay she saw him. She immediately made a
horrible face at his companion, beckoned to him imperiously with a dumpy
arm, and shook her head reprovingly. The unfortunate young man tried to
repulse her with an icy stare, but this effort having obtained little to
encourage his feeble hope of driving her away, he shifted his chair
so that his back was toward her discomfiting pantomime. He should
have known better, the instant result was Mrs. Dowling in motion at an
impetuous waddle.

She entered the box-tree seclusion with the lower rotundities of her
face hastily modelled into the resemblance of an over-benevolent smile
a contortion which neglected to spread its intended geniality upward to
the exasperated eyes and anxious forehead.

“I think your mother wants to speak to you, Frank,” Alice said, upon
this advent.

Mrs. Dowling nodded to her. “Good evening, Miss Adams,” she said. “I
just thought as you and Frank weren't dancing you wouldn't mind my
disturbing you----”

“Not at all,” Alice murmured.

Mr. Dowling seemed of a different mind. “Well, what DO you want?” he
inquired, whereupon his mother struck him roguishly with her fan.

“Bad fellow!” She turned to Alice. “I'm sure you won't mind excusing him
to let him do something for his old mother, Miss Adams.”

“What DO you want?” the son repeated.

“Two very nice things,” Mrs. Dowling informed him. “Everybody is so
anxious for Henrietta Lamb to have a pleasant evening, because it's the
very first time she's been anywhere since her father's death, and of
course her dear grandfather's an old friend of ours, and----”

“Well, well!” her son interrupted. “Miss Adams isn't interested in all
this, mother.”

“But Henrietta came to speak to Ella and me, and I told her you were so
anxious to dance with her----”

“Here!” he cried. “Look here! I'd rather do my own----”

“Yes; that's just it,” Mrs. Dowling explained. “I just thought it was
such a good opportunity; and Henrietta said she had most of her dances
taken, but she'd give you one if you asked her before they were all
gone. So I thought you'd better see her as soon as possible.”

Dowling's face had become rosy. “I refuse to do anything of the kind.”

“Bad fellow!” said his mother, gaily. “I thought this would be the best
time for you to see Henrietta, because it won't be long till all her
dances are gone, and you've promised on your WORD to dance the next with
Ella, and you mightn't have a chance to do it then. I'm sure Miss Adams
won't mind if you----”

“Not at all,” Alice said.

“Well, _I_ mind!” he said. “I wish you COULD understand that when I
want to dance with any girl I don't need my mother to ask her for me. I
really AM more than six years old!”

He spoke with too much vehemence, and Mrs. Dowling at once saw how
to have her way. As with husbands and wives, so with many fathers and
daughters, and so with some sons and mothers: the man will himself be
cross in public and think nothing of it, nor will he greatly mind a
little crossness on the part of the woman; but let her show agitation
before any spectator, he is instantly reduced to a coward's slavery.
Women understand that ancient weakness, of course; for it is one of
their most important means of defense, but can be used ignobly.

Mrs. Dowling permitted a tremulousness to become audible in her voice.
“It isn't very--very pleasant--to be talked to like that by your own
son--before strangers!”

“Oh, my! Look here!” the stricken Dowling protested. “_I_ didn't
say anything, mother. I was just joking about how you never get over
thinking I'm a little boy. I only----”

Mrs. Dowling continued: “I just thought I was doing you a little favour.
I didn't think it would make you so angry.”

“Mother, for goodness' sake! Miss Adams'll think----”

“I suppose,” Mrs. Dowling interrupted, piteously, “I suppose it doesn't
matter what _I_ think!”

“Oh, gracious!”

Alice interfered; she perceived that the ruthless Mrs. Dowling meant to
have her way. “I think you'd better go, Frank. Really.”

“There!” his mother cried. “Miss Adams says so, herself! What more do
you want?”

“Oh, gracious!” he lamented again, and, with a sick look over his
shoulder at Alice, permitted his mother to take his arm and propel him
away. Mrs. Dowling's spirits had strikingly recovered even before the
pair passed from the corridor: she moved almost bouncingly beside her
embittered son, and her eyes and all the convolutions of her abundant
face were blithe.

Alice went in search of Walter, but without much hope of finding him.
What he did with himself at frozen-face dances was one of his most
successful mysteries, and her present excursion gave her no clue leading
to its solution. When the musicians again lowered their instruments
for an interval she had returned, alone, to her former seat within the
partial shelter of the box-trees.

She had now to practice an art that affords but a limited variety of
methods, even to the expert: the art of seeming to have an escort or
partner when there is none. The practitioner must imply, merely by
expression and attitude, that the supposed companion has left her for
only a few moments, that she herself has sent him upon an errand; and,
if possible, the minds of observers must be directed toward a conclusion
that this errand of her devising is an amusing one; at all events, she
is alone temporarily and of choice, not deserted. She awaits a devoted
man who may return at any instant.

Other people desired to sit in Alice's nook, but discovered her in
occupancy. She had moved the vacant chair closer to her own, and she
sat with her arm extended so that her hand, holding her lace kerchief,
rested upon the back of this second chair, claiming it. Such
a preemption, like that of a traveller's bag in the rack, was
unquestionable; and, for additional evidence, sitting with her knees
crossed, she kept one foot continuously moving a little, in cadence with
the other, which tapped the floor. Moreover, she added a fine detail:
her half-smile, with the under lip caught, seemed to struggle against
repression, as if she found the service engaging her absent companion
even more amusing than she would let him see when he returned: there was
jovial intrigue of some sort afoot, evidently. Her eyes, beaming with
secret fun, were averted from intruders, but sometimes, when couples
approached, seeking possession of the nook, her thoughts about the
absentee appeared to threaten her with outright laughter; and though
one or two girls looked at her skeptically, as they turned away, their
escorts felt no such doubts, and merely wondered what importantly funny
affair Alice Adams was engaged in. She had learned to do it perfectly.

She had learned it during the last two years; she was twenty when for
the first time she had the shock of finding herself without an applicant
for one of her dances. When she was sixteen “all the nice boys in town,”
 as her mother said, crowded the Adamses' small veranda and steps, or sat
near by, cross-legged on the lawn, on summer evenings; and at eighteen
she had replaced the boys with “the older men.” By this time most of
“the other girls,” her contemporaries, were away at school or college,
and when they came home to stay, they “came out”--that feeble revival
of an ancient custom offering the maiden to the ceremonial inspection of
the tribe. Alice neither went away nor “came out,” and, in contrast with
those who did, she may have seemed to lack freshness of lustre--jewels
are richest when revealed all new in a white velvet box. And Alice may
have been too eager to secure new retainers, too kind in her efforts to
keep the old ones. She had been a belle too soon.



CHAPTER VIII

The device of the absentee partner has the defect that it cannot be
employed for longer than ten or fifteen minutes at a time, and it may
not be repeated more than twice in one evening: a single repetition,
indeed, is weak, and may prove a betrayal. Alice knew that her present
performance could be effective during only this interval between
dances; and though her eyes were guarded, she anxiously counted over the
partnerless young men who lounged together in the doorways within her
view. Every one of them ought to have asked her for dances, she thought,
and although she might have been put to it to give a reason why any of
them “ought,” her heart was hot with resentment against them.

For a girl who has been a belle, it is harder to live through these bad
times than it is for one who has never known anything better. Like a
figure of painted and brightly varnished wood, Ella Dowling sat against
the wall through dance after dance with glassy imperturbability; it was
easier to be wooden, Alice thought, if you had your mother with you, as
Ella had. You were left with at least the shred of a pretense that you
came to sit with your mother as a spectator, and not to offer yourself
to be danced with by men who looked you over and rejected you--not for
the first time. “Not for the first time”: there lay a sting! Why had you
thought this time might be different from the other times? Why had you
broken your back picking those hundreds of violets?

Hating the fatuous young men in the doorways more bitterly for every
instant that she had to maintain her tableau, the smiling Alice knew
fierce impulses to spring to her feet and shout at them, “You IDIOTS!”
 Hands in pockets, they lounged against the pilasters, or faced one
another, laughing vaguely, each one of them seeming to Alice no more
than so much mean beef in clothes. She wanted to tell them they were no
better than that; and it seemed a cruel thing of heaven to let them go
on believing themselves young lords. They were doing nothing, killing
time. Wasn't she at her lowest value at least a means of killing time?
Evidently the mean beeves thought not. And when one of them finally
lounged across the corridor and spoke to her, he was the very one to
whom she preferred her loneliness.

“Waiting for somebody, Lady Alicia?” he asked, negligently; and his easy
burlesque of her name was like the familiarity of the rest of him. He
was one of those full-bodied, grossly handsome men who are powerful and
active, but never submit themselves to the rigour of becoming athletes,
though they shoot and fish from expensive camps. Gloss is the most
shining outward mark of the type. Nowadays these men no longer use
brilliantine on their moustaches, but they have gloss bought from
manicure-girls, from masseurs, and from automobile-makers; and their
eyes, usually large, are glossy. None of this is allowed to interfere
with business; these are “good business men,” and often make large
fortunes. They are men of imagination about two things--women and money,
and, combining their imaginings about both, usually make a wise first
marriage. Later, however, they are apt to imagine too much about some
little woman without whom life seems duller than need be. They run away,
leaving the first wife well enough dowered. They are never intentionally
unkind to women, and in the end they usually make the mistake of
thinking they have had their money's worth of life. Here was Mr. Harvey
Malone, a young specimen in an earlier stage of development, trying to
marry Henrietta Lamb, and now sauntering over to speak to Alice, as a
time-killer before his next dance with Henrietta.

Alice made no response to his question, and he dropped lazily into the
vacant chair, from which she sharply withdrew her hand. “I might as well
use his chair till he comes, don't you think? You don't MIND, do you,
old girl?”

“Oh, no,” Alice said. “It doesn't matter one way or the other. Please
don't call me that.”

“So that's how you feel?” Mr. Malone laughed indulgently, without much
interest. “I've been meaning to come to see you for a long time honestly
I have--because I wanted to have a good talk with you about old times. I
know you think it was funny, after the way I used to come to your house
two or three times a week, and sometimes oftener--well, I don't blame
you for being hurt, the way I stopped without explaining or anything.
The truth is there wasn't any reason: I just happened to have a lot of
important things to do and couldn't find the time. But I AM going to
call on you some evening--honestly I am. I don't wonder you think----”

“You're mistaken,” Alice said. “I've never thought anything about it at
all.”

“Well, well!” he said, and looked at her languidly. “What's the use of
being cross with this old man? He always means well.” And, extending his
arm, he would have given her a friendly pat upon the shoulder but she
evaded it. “Well, well!” he said. “Seems to me you're getting awful
tetchy! Don't you like your old friends any more?”

“Not all of them.”

“Who's the new one?” he asked, teasingly. “Come on and tell us, Alice.
Who is it you were holding this chair for?”

“Never mind.”

“Well, all I've got to do is to sit here till he comes back; then I'll
see who it is.”

“He may not come back before you have to go.”

“Guess you got me THAT time,” Malone admitted, laughing as he rose.
“They're tuning up, and I've got this dance. I AM coming around to
see you some evening.” He moved away, calling back over his shoulder,
“Honestly, I am!”

Alice did not look at him.

She had held her tableau as long as she could; it was time for her to
abandon the box-trees; and she stepped forth frowning, as if a little
annoyed with the absentee for being such a time upon her errand;
whereupon the two chairs were instantly seized by a coquetting pair
who intended to “sit out” the dance. She walked quickly down the broad
corridor, turned into the broader hall, and hurriedly entered the
dressing-room where she had left her wraps.

She stayed here as long as she could, pretending to arrange her hair
at a mirror, then fidgeting with one of her slipper-buckles; but the
intelligent elderly woman in charge of the room made an indefinite
sojourn impracticable. “Perhaps I could help you with that buckle,
Miss,” she suggested, approaching. “Has it come loose?” Alice wrenched
desperately; then it was loose. The competent woman, producing needle
and thread, deftly made the buckle fast; and there was nothing for Alice
to do but to express her gratitude and go.

She went to the door of the cloak-room opposite, where a coloured man
stood watchfully in the doorway. “I wonder if you know which of the
gentlemen is my brother, Mr. Walter Adams,” she said.

“Yes'm; I know him.”

“Could you tell me where he is?”

“No'm; I couldn't say.”

“Well, if you see him, would you please tell him that his sister, Miss
Adams, is looking for him and very anxious to speak to him?”

“Yes'm. Sho'ly, sho'ly!”

As she went away he stared after her and seemed to swell with some
bursting emotion. In fact, it was too much for him, and he suddenly
retired within the room, releasing strangulated laughter.

Walter remonstrated. Behind an excellent screen of coats and hats, in a
remote part of the room, he was kneeling on the floor, engaged in a game
of chance with a second coloured attendant; and the laughter became
so vehement that it not only interfered with the pastime in hand, but
threatened to attract frozen-face attention.

“I cain' he'p it, man,” the laughter explained. “I cain' he'p it! You
sut'n'y the beatin'es' white boy 'n 'is city!”

The dancers were swinging into an “encore” as Alice halted for an
irresolute moment in a doorway. Across the room, a cluster of matrons
sat chatting absently, their eyes on their dancing daughters; and Alice,
finding a refugee's courage, dodged through the scurrying couples,
seated herself in a chair on the outskirts of this colony of elders,
and began to talk eagerly to the matron nearest her. The matron seemed
unaccustomed to so much vivacity, and responded but dryly, whereupon
Alice was more vivacious than ever; for she meant now to present the
picture of a jolly girl too much interested in these wise older women to
bother about every foolish young man who asked her for a dance.

Her matron was constrained to go so far as to supply a tolerant nod, now
and then, in complement to the girl's animation, and Alice was grateful
for the nods. In this fashion she supplemented the exhausted resources
of the dressing-room and the box-tree nook; and lived through two more
dances, when again Mr. Frank Dowling presented himself as a partner.

She needed no pretense to seek the dressing-room for repairs after that
number; this time they were necessary and genuine. Dowling waited for
her, and when she came out he explained for the fourth or fifth time how
the accident had happened. “It was entirely those other people's fault,”
 he said. “They got me in a kind of a corner, because neither of those
fellows knows the least thing about guiding; they just jam ahead and
expect everybody to get out of their way. It was Charlotte Thom's
diamond crescent pin that got caught on your dress in the back and made
such a----”

“Never mind,” Alice said in a tired voice. “The maid fixed it so that
she says it isn't very noticeable.”

“Well, it isn't,” he returned. “You could hardly tell there'd been
anything the matter. Where do you want to go? Mother's been interfering
in my affairs some more and I've got the next taken.”

“I was sitting with Mrs. George Dresser. You might take me back there.”

He left her with the matron, and Alice returned to her picture-making,
so that once more, while two numbers passed, whoever cared to look was
offered the sketch of a jolly, clever girl preoccupied with her elders.
Then she found her friend Mildred standing before her, presenting Mr.
Arthur Russell, who asked her to dance with him.

Alice looked uncertain, as though not sure what her engagements were;
but her perplexity cleared; she nodded, and swung rhythmically away with
the tall applicant. She was not grateful to her hostess for this alms.
What a young hostess does with a fiance, Alice thought, is to make him
dance with the unpopular girls. She supposed that Mr. Arthur Russell had
already danced with Ella Dowling.

The loan of a lover, under these circumstances, may be painful to the
lessee, and Alice, smiling never more brightly, found nothing to say to
Mr. Russell, though she thought he might have found something to say to
her. “I wonder what Mildred told him,” she thought. “Probably she said,
'Dearest, there's one more girl you've got to help me out with. You
wouldn't like her much, but she dances well enough and she's having a
rotten time. Nobody ever goes near her any more.'”

When the music stopped, Russell added his applause to the hand-clapping
that encouraged the uproarious instruments to continue, and as they
renewed the tumult, he said heartily, “That's splendid!”

Alice gave him a glance, necessarily at short range, and found his eyes
kindly and pleased. Here was a friendly soul, it appeared, who probably
“liked everybody.” No doubt he had applauded for an “encore” when he
danced with Ella Dowling, gave Ella the same genial look, and said,
“That's splendid!”

When the “encore” was over, Alice spoke to him for the first time.

“Mildred will be looking for you,” she said. “I think you'd better take
me back to where you found me.”

He looked surprised. “Oh, if you----”

“I'm sure Mildred will be needing you,” Alice said, and as she took his
arm and they walked toward Mrs. Dresser, she thought it might be just
possible to make a further use of the loan. “Oh, I wonder if you----”
 she began.

“Yes?” he said, quickly.

“You don't know my brother, Walter Adams,” she said. “But he's somewhere
I think possibly he's in a smoking-room or some place where girls aren't
expected, and if you wouldn't think it too much trouble to inquire----”

“I'll find him,” Russell said, promptly. “Thank you so much for that
dance. I'll bring your brother in a moment.”

It was to be a long moment, Alice decided, presently. Mrs. Dresser had
grown restive; and her nods and vague responses to her young dependent's
gaieties were as meager as they could well be. Evidently the matron had
no intention of appearing to her world in the light of a chaperone for
Alice Adams; and she finally made this clear. With a word or two of
excuse, breaking into something Alice was saying, she rose and went to
sit next to Mildred's mother, who had become the nucleus of the cluster.
So Alice was left very much against the wall, with short stretches
of vacant chairs on each side of her. She had come to the end of her
picture-making, and could only pretend that there was something amusing
the matter with the arm of her chair.

She supposed that Mildred's Mr. Russell had forgotten Walter by this
time. “I'm not even an intimate enough friend of Mildred's for him to
have thought he ought to bother to tell me he couldn't find him,” she
thought. And then she saw Russell coming across the room toward her,
with Walter beside him. She jumped up gaily.

“Oh, thank you!” she cried. “I know this naughty boy must have been
terribly hard to find. Mildred'll NEVER forgive me! I've put you to so
much----”

“Not at all,” he said, amiably, and went away, leaving the brother and
sister together.

“Walter, let's dance just once more,” Alice said, touching his arm
placatively. “I thought--well, perhaps we might go home then.”

But Walter's expression was that of a person upon whom an outrage has
just been perpetrated. “No,” he said. “We've stayed THIS long, I'm goin'
to wait and see what they got to eat. And you look here!” He turned upon
her angrily. “Don't you ever do that again!”

“Do what?”

“Send somebody after me that pokes his nose into every corner of the
house till he finds me! 'Are you Mr. Walter Adams?' he says. I guess he
must asked everybody in the place if they were Mr. Walter Adams! Well,
I'll bet a few iron men you wouldn't send anybody to hunt for me again
if you knew where he found me!”

“Where was it?”

Walter decided that her fit punishment was to know. “I was shootin' dice
with those coons in the cloak-room.”

“And he saw you?”

“Unless he was blind!” said Walter. “Come on, I'll dance this one more
dance with you. Supper comes after that, and THEN we'll go home.”


Mrs. Adams heard Alice's key turning in the front door and hurried down
the stairs to meet her.

“Did you get wet coming in, darling?” she asked. “Did you have a good
time?”

“Just lovely!” Alice said, cheerily, and after she had arranged the
latch for Walter, who had gone to return the little car, she followed
her mother upstairs and hummed a dance-tune on the way.

“Oh, I'm so glad you had a nice time,” Mrs. Adams said, as they reached
the door of her daughter's room together. “You DESERVED to, and it's
lovely to think----”

But at this, without warning, Alice threw herself into her mother's
arms, sobbing so loudly that in his room, close by, her father, half
drowsing through the night, started to full wakefulness.



CHAPTER IX

On a morning, a week after this collapse of festal hopes, Mrs. Adams
and her daughter were concluding a three-days' disturbance, the “Spring
house-cleaning”--postponed until now by Adams's long illness--and Alice,
on her knees before a chest of drawers, in her mother's room, paused
thoughtfully after dusting a packet of letters wrapped in worn muslin.
She called to her mother, who was scrubbing the floor of the hallway
just beyond the open door,

“These old letters you had in the bottom drawer, weren't they some papa
wrote you before you were married?”

Mrs. Adams laughed and said, “Yes. Just put 'em back where they were--or
else up in the attic--anywhere you want to.”

“Do you mind if I read one, mama?”

Mrs. Adams laughed again. “Oh, I guess you can if you want to. I expect
they're pretty funny!”

Alice laughed in response, and chose the topmost letter of the packet.
“My dear, beautiful girl,” it began; and she stared at these singular
words. They gave her a shock like that caused by overhearing some
bewildering impropriety; and, having read them over to herself several
times, she went on to experience other shocks.


MY DEAR, BEAUTIFUL GIRL:


This time yesterday I had a mighty bad case of blues because I had not
had a word from you in two whole long days and when I do not hear from
you every day things look mighty down in the mouth to me. Now it is all
so different because your letter has arrived and besides I have got a
piece of news I believe you will think as fine as I do. Darling, you
will be surprised, so get ready to hear about a big effect on our
future. It is this way. I had sort of a suspicion the head of the firm
kind of took a fancy to me from the first when I went in there, and
liked the way I attended to my work and so when he took me on this
business trip with him I felt pretty sure of it and now it turns out
I was about right. In return I guess I have got about the best boss in
this world and I believe you will think so too. Yes, sweetheart, after
the talk I have just had with him if J. A. Lamb asked me to cut my hand
off for him I guess I would come pretty near doing it because what he
says means the end of our waiting to be together. From New Years on he
is going to put me in entire charge of the sundries dept. and what do
you think is going to be my salary? Eleven hundred cool dollars a year
($1,100.00). That's all! Just only a cool eleven hundred per annum!
Well, I guess that will show your mother whether I can take care of you
or not. And oh how I would like to see your dear, beautiful, loving face
when you get this news.

I would like to go out on the public streets and just dance and shout
and it is all I can do to help doing it, especially when I know we will
be talking it all over together this time next week, and oh my darling,
now that your folks have no excuse for putting it off any longer we
might be in our own little home before Xmas.

Would you be glad?

Well, darling, this settles everything and makes our future just about
as smooth for us as anybody could ask. I can hardly realize after all
this waiting life's troubles are over for you and me and we have nothing
to do but to enjoy the happiness granted us by this wonderful, beautiful
thing we call life. I know I am not any poet and the one I tried to
write about you the day of the picnic was fearful but the way I THINK
about you is a poem.

Write me what you think of the news. I know but write me anyhow.

I'll get it before we start home and I can be reading it over all the
time on the tram.


Your always loving

VIRGIL.



The sound of her mother's diligent scrubbing in the hall came back
slowly to Alice's hearing, as she restored the letter to the packet,
wrapped the packet in its muslin covering, and returned it to the
drawer. She had remained upon her knees while she read the letter; now
she sank backward, sitting upon the floor with her hands behind her, an
unconscious relaxing for better ease to think. Upon her face there had
fallen a look of wonder.

For the first time she was vaguely perceiving that life is everlasting
movement. Youth really believes what is running water to be a permanent
crystallization and sees time fixed to a point: some people have dark
hair, some people have blond hair, some people have gray hair. Until
this moment, Alice had no conviction that there was a universe before
she came into it. She had always thought of it as the background of
herself: the moon was something to make her prettier on a summer night.

But this old letter, through which she saw still flickering an ancient
starlight of young love, astounded her. Faintly before her it revealed
the whole lives of her father and mother, who had been young, after
all--they REALLY had--and their youth was now so utterly passed from
them that the picture of it, in the letter, was like a burlesque of
them. And so she, herself, must pass to such changes, too, and all that
now seemed vital to her would be nothing.

When her work was finished, that afternoon, she went into her father's
room. His recovery had progressed well enough to permit the departure
of Miss Perry; and Adams, wearing one of Mrs. Adams's wrappers over his
night-gown, sat in a high-backed chair by a closed window. The weather
was warm, but the closed window and the flannel wrapper had not sufficed
him: round his shoulders he had an old crocheted scarf of Alice's; his
legs were wrapped in a heavy comfort; and, with these swathings about
him, and his eyes closed, his thin and grizzled head making but a slight
indentation in the pillow supporting it, he looked old and little and
queer.

Alice would have gone out softly, but without opening his eyes, he spoke
to her: “Don't go, dearie. Come sit with the old man a little while.”

She brought a chair near his. “I thought you were napping.”

“No. I don't hardly ever do that. I just drift a little sometimes.”

“How do you mean you drift, papa?”

He looked at her vaguely. “Oh, I don't know. Kind of pictures. They get
a little mixed up--old times with times still ahead, like planning what
to do, you know. That's as near a nap as I get--when the pictures mix up
some. I suppose it's sort of drowsing.”

She took one of his hands and stroked it. “What do you mean when you say
you have pictures like 'planning what to do'?” she asked.

“I mean planning what to do when I get out and able to go to work
again.”

“But that doesn't need any planning,” Alice said, quickly. “You're going
back to your old place at Lamb's, of course.”

Adams closed his eyes again, sighing heavily, but made no other
response.

“Why, of COURSE you are!” she cried. “What are you talking about?”

His head turned slowly toward her, revealing the eyes, open in a haggard
stare. “I heard you the other night when you came from the party,” he
said. “I know what was the matter.”

“Indeed, you don't,” she assured him. “You don't know anything about it,
because there wasn't anything the matter at all.”

“Don't you suppose I heard you crying? What'd you cry for if there
wasn't anything the matter?”

“Just nerves, papa. It wasn't anything else in the world.”

“Never mind,” he said. “Your mother told me.”

“She promised me not to!”

At that Adams laughed mournfully. “It wouldn't be very likely I'd hear
you so upset and not ask about it, even if she didn't come and tell me
on her own hook. You needn't try to fool me; I tell you I know what was
the matter.”

“The only matter was I had a silly fit,” Alice protested. “It did me
good, too.”

“How's that?”

“Because I've decided to do something about it, papa.”

“That isn't the way your mother looks at it,” Adams said, ruefully. “She
thinks it's our place to do something about it. Well, I don't know--I
don't know; everything seems so changed these days. You've always been
a good daughter, Alice, and you ought to have as much as any of these
girls you go with; she's convinced me she's right about THAT. The
trouble is----” He faltered, apologetically, then went on, “I mean the
question is--how to get it for you.”

“No!” she cried. “I had no business to make such a fuss just because a
lot of idiots didn't break their necks to get dances with me and because
I got mortified about Walter--Walter WAS pretty terrible----”

“Oh, me, my!” Adams lamented. “I guess that's something we just have
to leave work out itself. What you going to do with a boy nineteen or
twenty years old that makes his own living? Can't whip him. Can't keep
him locked up in the house. Just got to hope he'll learn better, I
suppose.”

“Of course he didn't want to go to the Palmers',” Alice explained,
tolerantly--“and as mama and I made him take me, and he thought that was
pretty selfish in me, why, he felt he had a right to amuse himself any
way he could. Of course it was awful that this--that this Mr. Russell
should----” In spite of her, the recollection choked her.

“Yes, it was awful,” Adams agreed. “Just awful. Oh, me, my!”

But Alice recovered herself at once, and showed him a cheerful face.
“Well, just a few years from now I probably won't even remember it! I
believe hardly anything amounts to as much as we think it does at the
time.”

“Well--sometimes it don't.”

“What I've been thinking, papa: it seems to me I ought to DO something.”

“What like?”

She looked dreamy, but was obviously serious as she told him: “Well,
I mean I ought to be something besides just a kind of nobody. I ought
to----” She paused.

“What, dearie?”

“Well--there's one thing I'd like to do. I'm sure I COULD do it, too.”

“What?”

“I want to go on the stage: I know I could act.” At this, her father
abruptly gave utterance to a feeble cackling of laughter; and when
Alice, surprised and a little offended, pressed him for his reason, he
tried to evade, saying, “Nothing, dearie. I just thought of something.”
 But she persisted until he had to explain.

“It made me think of your mother's sister, your Aunt Flora, that died
when you were little,” he said. “She was always telling how she was
going on the stage, and talking about how she was certain she'd make a
great actress, and all so on; and one day your mother broke out and said
she ought 'a' gone on the stage, herself, because she always knew she
had the talent for it--and, well, they got into kind of a spat about
which one'd make the best actress. I had to go out in the hall to
laugh!”

“Maybe you were wrong,” Alice said, gravely. “If they both felt it, why
wouldn't that look as if there was talent in the family? I've ALWAYS
thought----”

“No, dearie,” he said, with a final chuckle. “Your mother and Flora
weren't different from a good many others. I expect ninety per cent. of
all the women I ever knew were just sure they'd be mighty fine actresses
if they ever got the chance. Well, I guess it's a good thing; they enjoy
thinking about it and it don't do anybody any harm.”

Alice was piqued. For several days she had thought almost continuously
of a career to be won by her own genius. Not that she planned details,
or concerned herself with first steps; her picturings overleaped all
that. Principally, she saw her name great on all the bill-boards of that
unkind city, and herself, unchanged in age but glamorous with fame and
Paris clothes, returning in a private car. No doubt the pleasantest
development of her vision was a dialogue with Mildred; and this became
so real that, as she projected it, Alice assumed the proper expressions
for both parties to it, formed words with her lips, and even spoke some
of them aloud. “No, I haven't forgotten you, Mrs. Russell. I remember
you quite pleasantly, in fact. You were a Miss Palmer, I recall, in
those funny old days. Very kind of you, I'm shaw. I appreciate your
eagerness to do something for me in your own little home. As you say, a
reception WOULD renew my acquaintanceship with many old friends--but I'm
shaw you won't mind my mentioning that I don't find much inspiration in
these provincials. I really must ask you not to press me. An artist's
time is not her own, though of course I could hardly expect you to
understand----”

Thus Alice illuminated the dull time; but she retired from the interview
with her father still manfully displaying an outward cheerfulness, while
depression grew heavier within, as if she had eaten soggy cake. Her
father knew nothing whatever of the stage, and she was aware of his
ignorance, yet for some reason his innocently skeptical amusement
reduced her bright project almost to nothing. Something like this always
happened, it seemed; she was continually making these illuminations, all
gay with gildings and colourings; and then as soon as anybody else so
much as glanced at them--even her father, who loved her--the pretty
designs were stricken with a desolating pallor. “Is this LIFE?” Alice
wondered, not doubting that the question was original and all her own.
“Is it life to spend your time imagining things that aren't so, and
never will be? Beautiful things happen to other people; why should I be
the only one they never CAN happen to?”

The mood lasted overnight; and was still upon her the next afternoon
when an errand for her father took her down-town. Adams had decided
to begin smoking again, and Alice felt rather degraded, as well as
embarrassed, when she went into the large shop her father had named, and
asked for the cheap tobacco he used in his pipe. She fell back upon an
air of amused indulgence, hoping thus to suggest that her purchase
was made for some faithful old retainer, now infirm; and although the
calmness of the clerk who served her called for no such elaboration of
her sketch, she ornamented it with a little laugh and with the remark,
as she dropped the package into her coat-pocket, “I'm sure it'll please
him; they tell me it's the kind he likes.”

Still playing Lady Bountiful, smiling to herself in anticipation of the
joy she was bringing to the simple old negro or Irish follower of the
family, she left the shop; but as she came out upon the crowded pavement
her smile vanished quickly.

Next to the door of the tobacco-shop, there was the open entrance to a
stairway, and, above this rather bleak and dark aperture, a sign-board
displayed in begrimed gilt letters the information that Frincke's
Business College occupied the upper floors of the building. Furthermore,
Frincke here publicly offered “personal instruction and training in
practical mathematics, bookkeeping, and all branches of the business
life, including stenography, typewriting, etc.”

Alice halted for a moment, frowning at this signboard as though it were
something surprising and distasteful which she had never seen before.
Yet it was conspicuous in a busy quarter; she almost always passed it
when she came down-town, and never without noticing it. Nor was this the
first time she had paused to lift toward it that same glance of vague
misgiving.

The building was not what the changeful city defined as a modern one,
and the dusty wooden stairway, as seen from the pavement, disappeared
upward into a smoky darkness. So would the footsteps of a girl ascending
there lead to a hideous obscurity, Alice thought; an obscurity as dreary
and as permanent as death. And like dry leaves falling about her she saw
her wintry imaginings in the May air: pretty girls turning into
withered creatures as they worked at typing-machines; old maids “taking
dictation” from men with double chins; Alice saw old maids of a dozen
different kinds “taking dictation.” Her mind's eye was crowded with
them, as it always was when she passed that stairway entrance; and
though they were all different from one another, all of them looked a
little like herself.

She hated the place, and yet she seldom hurried by it or averted
her eyes. It had an unpleasant fascination for her, and a mysterious
reproach, which she did not seek to fathom. She walked on thoughtfully
to-day; and when, at the next corner, she turned into the street that
led toward home, she was given a surprise. Arthur Russell came rapidly
from behind her, lifting his hat as she saw him.

“Are you walking north, Miss Adams?” he asked. “Do you mind if I walk
with you?”

She was not delighted, but seemed so. “How charming!” she cried, giving
him a little flourish of the shapely hands; and then, because she
wondered if he had seen her coming out of the tobacco-shop, she laughed
and added, “I've just been on the most ridiculous errand!”

“What was that?”

“To order some cigars for my father. He's been quite ill, poor man, and
he's so particular--but what in the world do _I_ know about cigars?”

Russell laughed. “Well, what DO you know about 'em? Did you select by
the price?”

“Mercy, no!” she exclaimed, and added, with an afterthought, “Of course
he wrote down the name of the kind he wanted and I gave it to the
shopman. I could never have pronounced it.”



CHAPTER X

In her pocket as she spoke her hand rested upon the little sack of
tobacco, which responded accusingly to the touch of her restless
fingers; and she found time to wonder why she was building up this
fiction for Mr. Arthur Russell. His discovery of Walter's device for
whiling away the dull evening had shamed and distressed her; but she
would have suffered no less if almost any other had been the discoverer.
In this gentleman, after hearing that he was Mildred's Mr. Arthur
Russell, Alice felt not the slightest “personal interest”; and there was
yet to develop in her life such a thing as an interest not personal. At
twenty-two this state of affairs is not unique.

So far as Alice was concerned Russell might have worn a placard,
“Engaged.” She looked upon him as diners entering a restaurant look upon
tables marked “Reserved”: the glance, slightly discontented, passes on
at once. Or so the eye of a prospector wanders querulously over staked
and established claims on the mountainside, and seeks the virgin land
beyond; unless, indeed, the prospector be dishonest. But Alice was no
claim-jumper--so long as the notice of ownership was plainly posted.

Though she was indifferent now, habit ruled her: and, at the very time
she wondered why she created fictitious cigars for her father, she
was also regretting that she had not boldly carried her Malacca stick
down-town with her. Her vivacity increased automatically.

“Perhaps the clerk thought you wanted the cigars for yourself,” Russell
suggested. “He may have taken you for a Spanish countess.”

“I'm sure he did!” Alice agreed, gaily; and she hummed a bar or two of
“LaPaloma,” snapping her fingers as castanets, and swaying her body a
little, to suggest the accepted stencil of a “Spanish Dancer.” “Would
you have taken me for one, Mr. Russell?” she asked, as she concluded the
impersonation.

“I? Why, yes,” he said. “I'D take you for anything you wanted me to.”

“Why, what a speech!” she cried, and, laughing, gave him a quick glance
in which there glimmered some real surprise. He was looking at
her quizzically, but with the liveliest appreciation. Her surprise
increased; and she was glad that he had joined her.

To be seen walking with such a companion added to her pleasure. She
would have described him as “altogether quite stunning-looking”; and she
liked his tall, dark thinness, his gray clothes, his soft hat, and his
clean brown shoes; she liked his easy swing of the stick he carried.

“Shouldn't I have said it?” he asked. “Would you rather not be taken for
a Spanish countess?”

“That isn't it,” she explained. “You said----”

“I said I'd take you for whatever you wanted me to. Isn't that all
right?”

“It would all depend, wouldn't it?”

“Of course it would depend on what you wanted.”

“Oh, no!” she laughed. “It might depend on a lot of things.”

“Such as?”

“Well----” She hesitated, having the mischievous impulse to say, “Such
as Mildred!” But she decided to omit this reference, and became serious,
remembering Russell's service to her at Mildred's house. “Speaking of
what I want to be taken for,” she said;--“I've been wondering ever since
the other night what you did take me for! You must have taken me for the
sister of a professional gambler, I'm afraid!”

Russell's look of kindness was the truth about him, she was to discover;
and he reassured her now by the promptness of his friendly chuckle.
“Then your young brother told you where I found him, did he? I kept my
face straight at the time, but I laughed afterward--to myself. It
struck me as original, to say the least: his amusing himself with those
darkies.”

“Walter IS original,” Alice said; and, having adopted this new view of
her brother's eccentricities, she impulsively went on to make it more
plausible. “He's a very odd boy, and I was afraid you'd misunderstand.
He tells wonderful 'darky stories,' and he'll do anything to draw
coloured people out and make them talk; and that's what he was doing at
Mildred's when you found him for me--he says he wins their confidence
by playing dice with them. In the family we think he'll probably write
about them some day. He's rather literary.”

“Are you?” Russell asked, smiling.

“I? Oh----” She paused, lifting both hands in a charming gesture of
helplessness. “Oh, I'm just--me!”

His glance followed the lightly waved hands with keen approval, then
rose to the lively and colourful face, with its hazel eyes, its small
and pretty nose, and the lip-caught smile which seemed the climax of
her decorative transition. Never had he seen a creature so plastic or so
wistful.

Here was a contrast to his cousin Mildred, who was not wistful, and
controlled any impulses toward plasticity, if she had them. “By George!”
 he said. “But you ARE different!”

With that, there leaped in her such an impulse of roguish gallantry
as she could never resist. She turned her head, and, laughing and
bright-eyed, looked him full in the face.

“From whom?” she cried.

“From--everybody!” he said. “Are you a mind-reader?”

“Why?”

“How did you know I was thinking you were different from my cousin,
Mildred Palmer?”

“What makes you think I DID know it?”

“Nonsense!” he said. “You knew what I was thinking and I knew you knew.”

“Yes,” she said with cool humour. “How intimate that seems to make us
all at once!”

Russell left no doubt that he was delighted with these gaieties of hers.
“By George!” he exclaimed again. “I thought you were this sort of girl
the first moment I saw you!”

“What sort of girl? Didn't Mildred tell you what sort of girl I am when
she asked you to dance with me?”

“She didn't ask me to dance with you--I'd been looking at you. You were
talking to some old ladies, and I asked Mildred who you were.”

“Oh, so Mildred DIDN'T----” Alice checked herself. “Who did she tell you
I was?”

“She just said you were a Miss Adams, so I----”

“'A' Miss Adams?” Alice interrupted.

“Yes. Then I said I'd like to meet you.”

“I see. You thought you'd save me from the old ladies.”

“No. I thought I'd save myself from some of the girls Mildred was
getting me to dance with. There was a Miss Dowling----”

“Poor man!” Alice said, gently, and her impulsive thought was that
Mildred had taken few chances, and that as a matter of self-defense her
carefulness might have been well founded. This Mr. Arthur Russell was a
much more responsive person than one had supposed.

“So, Mr. Russell, you don't know anything about me except what you
thought when you first saw me?”

“Yes, I know I was right when I thought it.”

“You haven't told me what you thought.”

“I thought you were like what you ARE like.”

“Not very definite, is it? I'm afraid you shed more light a minute or
so ago, when you said how different from Mildred you thought I was. That
WAS definite, unfortunately!”

“I didn't say it,” Russell explained. “I thought it, and you read my
mind. That's the sort of girl I thought you were--one that could read a
man's mind. Why do you say 'unfortunately' you're not like Mildred?”

Alice's smooth gesture seemed to sketch Mildred. “Because she's
perfect--why, she's PERFECTLY perfect! She never makes a mistake, and
everybody looks up to her--oh, yes, we all fairly adore her! She's like
some big, noble, cold statue--'way above the rest of us--and she hardly
ever does anything mean or treacherous. Of all the girls I know I
believe she's played the fewest really petty tricks. She's----”

Russell interrupted; he looked perplexed. “You say she's perfectly
perfect, but that she does play SOME----”

Alice laughed, as if at his sweet innocence. “Men are so funny!” she
informed him. “Of course girls ALL do mean things sometimes. My own
career's just one long brazen smirch of 'em! What I mean is, Mildred's
perfectly perfect compared to the rest of us.”

“I see,” he said, and seemed to need a moment or two of thoughtfulness.
Then he inquired, “What sort of treacherous things do YOU do?”

“I? Oh, the very worst kind! Most people bore me particularly the men in
this town--and I show it.”

“But I shouldn't call that treacherous, exactly.”

“Well, THEY do,” Alice laughed. “It's made me a terribly unpopular
character! I do a lot of things they hate. For instance, at a dance I'd
a lot rather find some clever old woman and talk to her than dance with
nine-tenths of these nonentities. I usually do it, too.”

“But you danced as if you liked it. You danced better than any other
girl I----”

“This flattery of yours doesn't quite turn my head, Mr. Russell,” Alice
interrupted. “Particularly since Mildred only gave you Ella Dowling to
compare with me!”

“Oh, no,” he insisted. “There were others--and of course Mildred,
herself.”

“Oh, of course, yes. I forgot that. Well----” She paused, then added, “I
certainly OUGHT to dance well.”

“Why is it so much a duty?”

“When I think of the dancing-teachers and the expense to papa! All sorts
of fancy instructors--I suppose that's what daughters have fathers for,
though, isn't it? To throw money away on them?”

“You don't----” Russell began, and his look was one of alarm. “You
haven't taken up----”

She understood his apprehension and responded merrily, “Oh, murder, no!
You mean you're afraid I break out sometimes in a piece of cheesecloth
and run around a fountain thirty times, and then, for an encore, show
how much like snakes I can make my arms look.”

“I SAID you were a mind-reader!” he exclaimed. “That's exactly what I
was pretending to be afraid you might do.”

“'Pretending?' That's nicer of you. No; it's not my mania.”

“What is?”

“Oh, nothing in particular that I know of just now. Of course I've had
the usual one: the one that every girl goes through.”

“What's that?”

“Good heavens, Mr. Russell, you can't expect me to believe you're really
a man of the world if you don't know that every girl has a time in her
life when she's positive she's divinely talented for the stage! It's the
only universal rule about women that hasn't got an exception. I don't
mean we all want to go on the stage, but we all think we'd be wonderful
if we did. Even Mildred. Oh, she wouldn't confess it to you: you'd have
to know her a great deal better than any man can ever know her to find
out.”

“I see,” he said. “Girls are always telling us we can't know them. I
wonder if you----”

She took up his thought before he expressed it, and again he was
fascinated by her quickness, which indeed seemed to him almost
telepathic. “Oh, but DON'T we know one another, though!” she cried.

“Such things we have to keep secret--things that go on right before YOUR
eyes!”

“Why don't some of you tell us?” he asked.

“We can't tell you.”

“Too much honour?”

“No. Not even too much honour among thieves, Mr. Russell. We don't tell
you about our tricks against one another because we know it wouldn't
make any impression on you. The tricks aren't played against you, and
you have a soft side for cats with lovely manners!”

“What about your tricks against us?”

“Oh, those!” Alice laughed. “We think they're rather cute!”

“Bravo!” he cried, and hammered the ferrule of his stick upon the
pavement.

“What's the applause for?”

“For you. What you said was like running up the black flag to the
masthead.”

“Oh, no. It was just a modest little sign in a pretty flower-bed:
'Gentlemen, beware!'”

“I see I must,” he said, gallantly.

“Thanks! But I mean, beware of the whole bloomin' garden!” Then, picking
up a thread that had almost disappeared: “You needn't think you'll ever
find out whether I'm right about Mildred's not being an exception by
asking her,” she said. “She won't tell you: she's not the sort that ever
makes a confession.”

But Russell had not followed her shift to the former topic. “'Mildred's
not being an exception?'” he said, vaguely. “I don't----”

“An exception about thinking she could be a wonderful thing on the stage
if she only cared to. If you asked her I'm pretty sure she'd say, 'What
nonsense!' Mildred's the dearest, finest thing anywhere, but you won't
find out many things about her by asking her.”

Russell's expression became more serious, as it did whenever his cousin
was made their topic. “You think not?” he said. “You think she's----”

“No. But it's not because she isn't sincere exactly. It's only because
she has such a lot to live up to. She has to live up to being a girl
on the grand style to herself, I mean, of course.” And without pausing
Alice rippled on, “You ought to have seen ME when I had the stage-fever!
I used to play 'Juliet' all alone in my room.' She lifted her arms in
graceful entreaty, pleading musically,

     “O, swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon,
     That monthly changes in her circled orb,
     Lest thy love prove----”


She broke off abruptly with a little flourish, snapping thumb and finger
of each outstretched hand, then laughed and said, “Papa used to make
such fun of me! Thank heaven, I was only fifteen; I was all over it by
the next year.”

“No wonder you had the fever,” Russell observed. “You do it beautifully.
Why didn't you finish the line?”

“Which one? 'Lest thy love prove likewise variable'? Juliet was saying
it to a MAN, you know. She seems to have been ready to worry about his
constancy pretty early in their affair!”

Her companion was again thoughtful. “Yes,” he said, seeming to be rather
irksomely impressed with Alice's suggestion. “Yes; it does appear so.”

Alice glanced at his serious face, and yielded to an audacious
temptation. “You mustn't take it so hard,” she said, flippantly.

“It isn't about you: it's only about Romeo and Juliet.”

“See here!” he exclaimed. “You aren't at your mind-reading again, are
you? There are times when it won't do, you know!”

She leaned toward him a little, as if companionably: they were walking
slowly, and this geniality of hers brought her shoulder in light contact
with his for a moment. “Do you dislike my mind-reading?” she asked, and,
across their two just touching shoulders, gave him her sudden look of
smiling wistfulness. “Do you hate it?”

He shook his head. “No, I don't,” he said, gravely. “It's quite
pleasant. But I think it says, 'Gentlemen, beware!'”

She instantly moved away from him, with the lawless and frank laugh of
one who is delighted to be caught in a piece of hypocrisy. “How lovely!”
 she cried. Then she pointed ahead. “Our walk is nearly over. We're
coming to the foolish little house where I live. It's a queer little
place, but my father's so attached to it the family have about given up
hope of getting him to build a real house farther out. He doesn't mind
our being extravagant about anything else, but he won't let us alter one
single thing about his precious little old house. Well!” She halted, and
gave him her hand. “Adieu!”

“I couldn't,” he began; hesitated, then asked: “I couldn't come in with
you for a little while?”

“Not now,” she said, quickly. “You can come----” She paused.

“When?”

“Almost any time.” She turned and walked slowly up the path, but he
waited. “You can come in the evening if you like,” she called back to
him over her shoulder.

“Soon?”

“As soon as you like!” She waved her hand; then ran indoors and watched
him from a window as he went up the street. He walked rapidly, a fine,
easy figure, swinging his stick in a way that suggested exhilaration.
Alice, staring after him through the irregular apertures of a lace
curtain, showed no similar buoyancy. Upon the instant she closed
the door all sparkle left her: she had become at once the simple and
sometimes troubled girl her family knew.

“What is going on out there?” her mother asked, approaching from the
dining-room.

“Oh, nothing,” Alice said, indifferently, as she turned away. “That Mr.
Russell met me downtown and walked up with me.”

“Mr. Russell? Oh, the one that's engaged to Mildred?”

“Well--I don't know for certain. He didn't seem so much like an engaged
man to me.” And she added, in the tone of thoughtful preoccupation:
“Anyhow--not so terribly!”

Then she ran upstairs, gave her father his tobacco, filled his pipe for
him, and petted him as he lighted it.



CHAPTER XI

After that, she went to her room and sat down before her three-leaved
mirror. There was where she nearly always sat when she came into her
room, if she had nothing in mind to do. She went to that chair as
naturally as a dog goes to his corner.

She leaned forward, observing her profile; gravity seemed to be her
mood. But after a long, almost motionless scrutiny, she began to produce
dramatic sketches upon that ever-ready stage, her countenance: she
showed gaiety, satire, doubt, gentleness, appreciation of a companion
and love-in-hiding--all studied in profile first, then repeated for a
“three-quarter view.” Subsequently she ran through them, facing herself
in full.

In this manner she outlined a playful scenario for her next interview
with Arthur Russell; but grew solemn again, thinking of the impression
she had already sought to give him. She had no twinges for any
underminings of her “most intimate friend”--in fact, she felt that her
work on a new portrait of Mildred for Mr.

Russell had been honest and accurate. But why had it been her instinct
to show him an Alice Adams who didn't exist?

Almost everything she had said to him was upon spontaneous impulse,
springing to her lips on the instant; yet it all seemed to have been
founded upon a careful design, as if some hidden self kept such designs
in stock and handed them up to her, ready-made, to be used for its own
purpose. What appeared to be the desired result was a false-coloured
image in Russell's mind; but if he liked that image he wouldn't be
liking Alice Adams; nor would anything he thought about the image be a
thought about her.

Nevertheless, she knew she would go on with her false, fancy colourings
of this nothing as soon as she saw him again; she had just been
practicing them. “What's the idea?” she wondered. “What makes me tell
such lies? Why shouldn't I be just myself?” And then she thought, “But
which one is myself?”

Her eyes dwelt on the solemn eyes in the mirror; and her lips,
disquieted by a deepening wonder, parted to whisper:

“Who in the world are you?”

The apparition before her had obeyed her like an alert slave, but now,
as she subsided to a complete stillness, that aspect changed to the
old mockery with which mirrors avenge their wrongs. The nucleus of some
queer thing seemed to gather and shape itself behind the nothingness of
the reflected eyes until it became almost an actual strange presence.
If it could be identified, perhaps the presence was that of the hidden
designer who handed up the false, ready-made pictures, and, for unknown
purposes, made Alice exhibit them; but whatever it was, she suddenly
found it monkey-like and terrifying. In a flutter she jumped up and went
to another part of the room.

A moment or two later she was whistling softly as she hung her light
coat over a wooden triangle in her closet, and her musing now was
quainter than the experience that led to it; for what she thought was
this, “I certainly am a queer girl!” She took a little pride in so much
originality, believing herself probably the only person in the world to
have such thoughts as had been hers since she entered the room, and the
first to be disturbed by a strange presence in the mirror. In fact, the
effect of the tiny episode became apparent in that look of preoccupied
complacency to be seen for a time upon any girl who has found reason to
suspect that she is a being without counterpart.

This slight glow, still faintly radiant, was observed across the
dinner-table by Walter, but he misinterpreted it. “What YOU lookin' so
self-satisfied about?” he inquired, and added in his knowing way, “I saw
you, all right, cutie!”

“Where'd you see me?”

“Down-town.”

“This afternoon, you mean, Walter?”

“Yes, 'this afternoon, I mean, Walter,'” he returned, burlesquing
her voice at least happily enough to please himself; for he laughed
applausively. “Oh, you never saw me! I passed you close enough to pull
a tooth, but you were awful busy. I never did see anybody as busy as
you get, Alice, when you're towin' a barge. My, but you keep your hands
goin'! Looked like the air was full of 'em! That's why I'm onto why you
look so tickled this evening; I saw you with that big fish.”

Mrs. Adams laughed benevolently; she was not displeased with this
rallying. “Well, what of it, Walter?” she asked. “If you happen to see
your sister on the street when some nice young man is being attentive to
her----”

Walter barked and then cackled. “Whoa, Sal!” he said. “You got the parts
mixed. It's little Alice that was 'being attentive.' I know the big fish
she was attentive to, all right, too.”

“Yes,” his sister retorted, quietly. “I should think you might have
recognized him, Walter.”

Walter looked annoyed. “Still harpin' on THAT!” he complained. “The kind
of women I like, if they get sore they just hit you somewhere on the
face and then they're through. By the way, I heard this Russell was
supposed to be your dear, old, sweet friend Mildred's steady. What you
doin' walkin' as close to him as all that?”

Mrs. Adams addressed her son in gentle reproof, “Why Walter!”

“Oh, never mind, mama,” Alice said. “To the horrid all things are
horrid.”

“Get out!” Walter protested, carelessly. “I heard all about this Russell
down at the shop. Young Joe Lamb's such a talker I wonder he don't ruin
his grandfather's business; he keeps all us cheap help standin' round
listening to him nine-tenths of our time. Well, Joe told me this
Russell's some kin or other to the Palmer family, and he's got some
little money of his own, and he's puttin' it into ole Palmer's trust
company and Palmer's goin' to make him a vice-president of the company.
Sort of a keep-the-money-in-the-family arrangement, Joe Lamb says.”

Mrs. Adams looked thoughtful. “I don't see----” she began.

“Why, this Russell's supposed to be tied up to Mildred,” her son
explained. “When ole Palmer dies this Russell will be his son-in-law,
and all he'll haf' to do'll be to barely lift his feet and step into
the ole man's shoes. It's certainly a mighty fat hand-me-out for this
Russell! You better lay off o' there, Alice. Pick somebody that's got
less to lose and you'll make better showing.”

Mrs. Adams's air of thoughtfulness had not departed. “But you say this
Mr. Russell is well off on his own account, Walter.”

“Oh, Joe Lamb says he's got some little of his own. Didn't know how
much.”

“Well, then----”

Walter laughed his laugh. “Cut it out,” he bade her. “Alice wouldn't run
in fourth place.”

Alice had been looking at him in a detached way, as though estimating
the value of a specimen in a collection not her own. “Yes,” she said,
indifferently. “You REALLY are vulgar, Walter.”

He had finished his meal; and, rising, he came round the table to her
and patted her good-naturedly on the shoulder. “Good ole Allie!” he
said. “HONEST, you wouldn't run in fourth place. If I was you I'd never
even start in the class. That frozen-face gang will rule you off the
track soon as they see your colours.”

“Walter!” his mother said again.

“Well, ain't I her brother?” he returned, seeming to be entirely serious
and direct, for the moment, at least. “_I_ like the ole girl all right.
Fact is, sometimes I'm kind of sorry for her.”

“But what's it all ABOUT?” Alice cried. “Simply because you met me
down-town with a man I never saw but once before and just barely know!
Why all this palaver?”

“'Why?'” he repeated, grinning. “Well, I've seen you start before, you
know!” He went to the door, and paused. “I got no date to-night. Take
you to the movies, you care to go.”

She declined crisply. “No, thanks!”

“Come on,” he said, as pleasantly as he knew how.

“Give me a chance to show you a better time than we had up at that
frozen-face joint. I'll get you some chop suey afterward.”

“No, thanks!”

“All right,” he responded and waved a flippant adieu. “As the barber
says, 'The better the advice, the worse it's wasted!' Good-night!”

Alice shrugged her shoulders; but a moment or two later, as the jar of
the carelessly slammed front door went through the house, she shook her
head, reconsidering. “Perhaps I ought to have gone with him. It might
have kept him away from whatever dreadful people are his friends--at
least for one night.”

“Oh, I'm sure Walter's a GOOD boy,” Mrs. Adams said, soothingly; and
this was what she almost always said when either her husband or Alice
expressed such misgivings. “He's odd, and he's picked up right queer
manners; but that's only because we haven't given him advantages like
the other young men. But I'm sure he's a GOOD boy.”

She reverted to the subject a little later, while she washed the dishes
and Alice wiped them. “Of course Walter could take his place with the
other nice boys of the town even yet,” she said. “I mean, if we could
afford to help him financially. They all belong to the country clubs and
have cars and----”

“Let's don't go into that any more, mama,” the daughter begged her.
“What's the use?”

“It COULD be of use,” Mrs. Adams insisted. “It could if your father----”

“But papa CAN'T.”

“Yes, he can.”

“But how can he? He told me a man of his age CAN'T give up a business
he's been in practically all his life, and just go groping about for
something that might never turn up at all. I think he's right about it,
too, of course!”

Mrs. Adams splashed among the plates with a new vigour heightened by an
old bitterness. “Oh, yes,” she said. “He talks that way; but he knows
better.”

“How could he 'know better,' mama?”

“HE knows how!”

“But what does he know?”

Mrs. Adams tossed her head. “You don't suppose I'm such a fool I'd
be urging him to give up something for nothing, do you, Alice? Do you
suppose I'd want him to just go 'groping around' like he was telling
you? That would be crazy, of course. Little as his work at Lamb's brings
in, I wouldn't be so silly as to ask him to give it up just on a CHANCE
he could find something else. Good gracious, Alice, you must give me
credit for a little intelligence once in a while!”

Alice was puzzled. “But what else could there be except a chance? I
don't see----”

“Well, I do,” her mother interrupted, decisively. “That man could make
us all well off right now if he wanted to. We could have been rich long
ago if he'd ever really felt as he ought to about his family.”

“What! Why, how could----”

“You know how as well as I do,” Mrs. Adams said, crossly. “I guess you
haven't forgotten how he treated me about it the Sunday before he got
sick.”

She went on with her work, putting into it a sudden violence inspired by
the recollection; but Alice, enlightened, gave utterance to a laugh
of lugubrious derision. “Oh, the GLUE factory again!” she cried. “How
silly!” And she renewed her laughter.

So often do the great projects of parents appear ignominious to their
children. Mrs. Adams's conception of a glue factory as a fairy godmother
of this family was an absurd old story which Alice had never taken
seriously. She remembered that when she was about fifteen her mother
began now and then to say something to Adams about a “glue factory,”
 rather timidly, and as a vague suggestion, but never without irritating
him. Then, for years, the preposterous subject had not been mentioned;
possibly because of some explosion on the part of Adams, when his
daughter had not been present. But during the last year Mrs. Adams had
quietly gone back to these old hints, reviving them at intervals and
also reviving her husband's irritation. Alice's bored impression was
that her mother wanted him to found, or buy, or do something, or
other, about a glue factory; and that he considered the proposal so
impracticable as to be insulting. The parental conversations took place
when neither Alice nor Walter was at hand, but sometimes Alice had come
in upon the conclusion of one, to find her father in a shouting mood,
and shocking the air behind him with profane monosyllables as he
departed. Mrs. Adams would be left quiet and troubled; and when Alice,
sympathizing with the goaded man, inquired of her mother why these
tiresome bickerings had been renewed, she always got the brooding and
cryptic answer, “He COULD do it--if he wanted to.” Alice failed to
comprehend the desirability of a glue factory--to her mind a father
engaged in a glue factory lacked impressiveness; had no advantage over
a father employed by Lamb and Company; and she supposed that Adams knew
better than her mother whether such an enterprise would be profitable
or not. Emphatically, he thought it would not, for she had heard him
shouting at the end of one of these painful interviews, “You can keep up
your dang talk till YOU die and _I_ die, but I'll never make one God's
cent that way!”

There had been a culmination. Returning from church on the Sunday
preceding the collapse with which Adams's illness had begun, Alice
found her mother downstairs, weeping and intimidated, while her father's
stamping footsteps were loudly audible as he strode up and down his room
overhead. So were his endless repetitions of invective loudly audible:
“That woman! Oh, that woman; Oh, that danged woman!”

Mrs. Adams admitted to her daughter that it was “the old glue factory”
 and that her husband's wildness had frightened her into a “solemn
promise” never to mention the subject again so long as she had breath.
Alice laughed. The “glue factory” idea was not only a bore, but
ridiculous, and her mother's evident seriousness about it one of those
inexplicable vagaries we sometimes discover in the people we know best.
But this Sunday rampage appeared to be the end of it, and when Adams
came down to dinner, an hour later, he was unusually cheerful. Alice
was glad he had gone wild enough to settle the glue factory once and for
all; and she had ceased to think of the episode long before Friday of
that week, when Adams was brought home in the middle of the afternoon by
his old employer, the “great J. A. Lamb,” in the latter's car.

During the long illness the “glue factory” was completely forgotten, by
Alice at least; and her laugh was rueful as well as derisive now, in the
kitchen, when she realized that her mother's mind again dwelt upon this
abandoned nuisance. “I thought you'd got over all that nonsense, mama,”
 she said.

Mrs. Adams smiled, pathetically. “Of course you think it's nonsense,
dearie. Young people think everything's nonsense that they don't know
anything about.”

“Good gracious!” Alice cried. “I should think I used to hear enough
about that horrible old glue factory to know something about it!”

“No,” her mother returned patiently. “You've never heard anything about
it at all.”

“I haven't?”

“No. Your father and I didn't discuss it before you children. All you
ever heard was when he'd get in such a rage, after we'd been speaking of
it, that he couldn't control himself when you came in. Wasn't _I_ always
quiet? Did _I_ ever go on talking about it?”

“No; perhaps not. But you're talking about it now, mama, after you
promised never to mention it again.”

“I promised not to mention it to your father,” said Mrs. Adams, gently.
“I haven't mentioned it to him, have I?”

“Ah, but if you mention it to me I'm afraid you WILL mention it to him.
You always do speak of things that you have on your mind, and you
might get papa all stirred up again about--” Alice paused, a light of
divination flickering in her eyes. “Oh!” she cried. “I SEE!”

“What do you see?”

“You HAVE been at him about it!”

“Not one single word!”

“No!” Alice cried. “Not a WORD, but that's what you've meant all along!
You haven't spoken the words to him, but all this urging him to change,
to 'find something better to go into'--it's all been about nothing on
earth but your foolish old glue factory that you know upsets him, and
you gave your solemn word never to speak to him about again! You didn't
say it, but you meant it--and he KNOWS that's what you meant! Oh, mama!”

Mrs. Adams, with her hands still automatically at work in the flooded
dishpan, turned to face her daughter. “Alice,” she said, tremulously,
“what do I ask for myself?”

“What?”

“I say, What do I ask for myself? Do you suppose _I_ want anything?
Don't you know I'd be perfectly content on your father's present income
if I were the only person to be considered? What do I care about any
pleasure for myself? I'd be willing never to have a maid again; _I_
don't mind doing the work. If we didn't have any children I'd be glad to
do your father's cooking and the housework and the washing and ironing,
too, for the rest of my life. I wouldn't care. I'm a poor cook and a
poor housekeeper; I don't do anything well; but it would be good enough
for just him and me. I wouldn't ever utter one word of com----”

“Oh, goodness!” Alice lamented. “What IS it all about?”

“It's about this,” said Mrs. Adams, swallowing. “You and Walter are a
new generation and you ought to have the same as the rest of the new
generation get. Poor Walter--asking you to go to the movies and a
Chinese restaurant: the best he had to offer! Don't you suppose _I_ see
how the poor boy is deteriorating? Don't you suppose I know what YOU
have to go through, Alice? And when I think of that man upstairs----”
 The agitated voice grew louder. “When I think of him and know that
nothing in the world but his STUBBORNNESS keeps my children from having
all they want and what they OUGHT to have, do you suppose I'm going to
hold myself bound to keep to the absolute letter of a silly promise he
got from me by behaving like a crazy man? I can't! I can't do it! No
mother could sit by and see him lock up a horn of plenty like that in
his closet when the children were starving!”

“Oh, goodness, goodness me!” Alice protested. “We aren't precisely
'starving,' are we?”

Mrs. Adams began to weep. “It's just the same. Didn't I see how flushed
and pretty you looked, this afternoon, after you'd been walking with
this young man that's come here? Do you suppose he'd LOOK at a girl like
Mildred Palmer if you had what you ought to have? Do you suppose he'd be
going into business with her father if YOUR father----”

“Good heavens, mama; you're worse than Walter: I just barely know the
man! DON'T be so absurd!”

“Yes, I'm always 'absurd,'” Mrs. Adams moaned. “All I can do is cry,
while your father sits upstairs, and his horn of plenty----”

But Alice interrupted with a peal of desperate laughter. “Oh, that
'horn of plenty!' Do come down to earth, mama. How can you call a GLUE
factory, that doesn't exist except in your mind, a 'horn of plenty'? Do
let's be a little rational!”

“It COULD be a horn of plenty,” the tearful Mrs. Adams insisted. “It
could! You don't understand a thing about it.”

“Well, I'm willing,” Alice said, with tired skepticism. “Make me
understand, then. Where'd you ever get the idea?”

Mrs. Adams withdrew her hands from the water, dried them on a towel,
and then wiped her eyes with a handkerchief. “Your father could make a
fortune if he wanted to,” she said, quietly. “At least, I don't say a
fortune, but anyhow a great deal more than he does make.”

“Yes, I've heard that before, mama, and you think he could make it out
of a glue factory. What I'm asking is: How?”

“How? Why, by making glue and selling it. Don't you know how bad most
glue is when you try to mend anything? A good glue is one of the rarest
things there is; and it would just sell itself, once it got started.
Well, your father knows how to make as good a glue as there is in the
world.”

Alice was not interested. “What of it? I suppose probably anybody could
make it if they wanted to.”

“I SAID you didn't know anything about it. Nobody else could make it.
Your father knows a formula for making it.”

“What of that?”

“It's a secret formula. It isn't even down on paper. It's worth any
amount of money.”

“'Any amount?'” Alice said, remaining incredulous. “Why hasn't papa sold
it then?”

“Just because he's too stubborn to do anything with it at all!”

“How did papa get it?”

“He got it before you were born, just after we were married. I didn't
think much about it then: it wasn't till you were growing up and I saw
how much we needed money that I----”

“Yes, but how did papa get it?” Alice began to feel a little more
curious about this possible buried treasure. “Did he invent it?”

“Partly,” Mrs. Adams said, looking somewhat preoccupied. “He and another
man invented it.”

“Then maybe the other man----”

“He's dead.”

“Then his family----”

“I don't think he left any family,” Mrs. Adams said. “Anyhow, it belongs
to your father. At least it belongs to him as much as it does to any one
else. He's got an absolutely perfect right to do anything he wants to
with it, and it would make us all comfortable if he'd do what I want him
to--and he KNOWS it would, too!”

Alice shook her head pityingly. “Poor mama!” she said. “Of course he
knows it wouldn't do anything of the kind, or else he'd have done it
long ago.”

“He would, you say?” her mother cried. “That only shows how little you
know him!”

“Poor mama!” Alice said again, soothingly. “If papa were like what you
say he is, he'd be--why, he'd be crazy!”

Mrs. Adams agreed with a vehemence near passion. “You're right about him
for once: that's just what he is! He sits up there in his stubbornness
and lets us slave here in the kitchen when if he wanted to--if he'd so
much as lift his little finger----”

“Oh, come, now!” Alice laughed. “You can't build even a glue factory
with just one little finger.”

Mrs. Adams seemed about to reply that finding fault with a figure
of speech was beside the point; but a ringing of the front door bell
forestalled the retort. “Now, who do you suppose that is?” she wondered
aloud, then her face brightened. “Ah--did Mr. Russell ask if he
could----”

“No, he wouldn't be coming this evening,” Alice said. “Probably it's the
great J. A. Lamb: he usually stops for a minute on Thursdays to ask how
papa's getting along. I'll go.”

She tossed her apron off, and as she went through the house her
expression was thoughtful. She was thinking vaguely about the glue
factory and wondering if there might be “something in it” after all. If
her mother was right about the rich possibilities of Adams's secret--but
that was as far as Alice's speculations upon the matter went at this
time: they were checked, partly by the thought that her father probably
hadn't enough money for such an enterprise, and partly by the fact that
she had arrived at the front door.



CHAPTER XII

The fine old gentleman revealed when she opened the door was probably
the last great merchant in America to wear the chin beard. White as
white frost, it was trimmed short with exquisite precision, while his
upper lip and the lower expanses of his cheeks were clean and rosy from
fresh shaving. With this trim white chin beard, the white waistcoat,
the white tie, the suit of fine gray cloth, the broad and brilliantly
polished black shoes, and the wide-brimmed gray felt hat, here was a
man who had found his style in the seventies of the last century, and
thenceforth kept it. Files of old magazines of that period might show
him, in woodcut, as, “Type of Boston Merchant”; Nast might have drawn
him as an honest statesman. He was eighty, hale and sturdy, not aged;
and his quick blue eyes, still unflecked, and as brisk as a boy's, saw
everything.

“Well, well, well!” he said, heartily. “You haven't lost any of your
good looks since last week, I see, Miss Alice, so I guess I'm to take
it you haven't been worrying over your daddy. The young feller's getting
along all right, is he?”

“He's much better; he's sitting up, Mr. Lamb. Won't you come in?”

“Well, I don't know but I might.” He turned to call toward twin disks of
light at the curb, “Be out in a minute, Billy”; and the silhouette of a
chauffeur standing beside a car could be seen to salute in response, as
the old gentleman stepped into the hall. “You don't suppose your daddy's
receiving callers yet, is he?”

“He's a good deal stronger than he was when you were here last week, but
I'm afraid he's not very presentable, though.”

“'Presentable?'” The old man echoed her jovially. “Pshaw! I've seen lots
of sick folks. _I_ know what they look like and how they love to kind of
nest in among a pile of old blankets and wrappers. Don't you worry about
THAT, Miss Alice, if you think he'd like to see me.”

“Of course he would--if----” Alice hesitated; then said quickly, “Of
course he'd love to see you and he's quite able to, if you care to come
up.”

She ran up the stairs ahead of him, and had time to snatch the crocheted
wrap from her father's shoulders. Swathed as usual, he was sitting
beside a table, reading the evening paper; but when his employer
appeared in the doorway he half rose as if to come forward in greeting.

“Sit still!” the old gentleman shouted. “What do you mean? Don't you
know you're weak as a cat? D'you think a man can be sick as long as you
have and NOT be weak as a cat? What you trying to do the polite with ME
for?”

Adams gratefully protracted the handshake that accompanied these
inquiries. “This is certainly mighty fine of you, Mr. Lamb,” he said.
“I guess Alice has told you how much our whole family appreciate your
coming here so regularly to see how this old bag o' bones was getting
along. Haven't you, Alice?”

“Yes, papa,” she said; and turned to go out, but Lamb checked her.

“Stay right here, Miss Alice; I'm not even going to sit down. I know
how it upsets sick folks when people outside the family come in for the
first time.”

“You don't upset me,” Adams said. “I'll feel a lot better for getting a
glimpse of you, Mr. Lamb.”

The visitor's laugh was husky, but hearty and re-assuring, like his
voice in speaking. “That's the way all my boys blarney me, Miss Alice,”
 he said. “They think I'll make the work lighter on 'em if they can
get me kind of flattered up. You just tell your daddy it's no use; he
doesn't get on MY soft side, pretending he likes to see me even when
he's sick.”

“Oh, I'm not so sick any more,” Adams said. “I expect to be back in my
place ten days from now at the longest.”

“Well, now, don't hurry it, Virgil; don't hurry it. You take your time;
take your time.”

This brought to Adams's lips a feeble smile not lacking in a kind of
vanity, as feeble. “Why?” he asked. “I suppose you think my department
runs itself down there, do you?”

His employer's response was another husky laugh. “Well, well, well!” he
cried, and patted Adams's shoulder with a strong pink hand. “Listen to
this young feller, Miss Alice, will you! He thinks we can't get along
without him a minute! Yes, sir, this daddy of yours believes the whole
works 'll just take and run down if he isn't there to keep 'em wound up.
I always suspected he thought a good deal of himself, and now I know he
does!”

Adams looked troubled. “Well, I don't like to feel that my salary's
going on with me not earning it.”

“Listen to him, Miss Alice! Wouldn't you think, now, he'd let me be the
one to worry about that? Why, on my word, if your daddy had his way, _I_
wouldn't be anywhere. He'd take all my worrying and everything else off
my shoulders and shove me right out of Lamb and Company! He would!”

“It seems to me I've been soldiering on you a pretty long while, Mr.
Lamb,” the convalescent said, querulously. “I don't feel right about it;
but I'll be back in ten days. You'll see.”

The old man took his hand in parting. “All right; we'll see, Virgil. Of
course we do need you, seriously speaking; but we don't need you so bad
we'll let you come down there before you're fully fit and able.” He went
to the door. “You hear, Miss Alice? That's what I wanted to make the old
feller understand, and what I want you to kind of enforce on him. The
old place is there waiting for him, and it'd wait ten years if it took
him that long to get good and well. You see that he remembers it, Miss
Alice!”

She went down the stairs with him, and he continued to impress this upon
her until he had gone out of the front door. And even after that, the
husky voice called back from the darkness, as he went to his car, “Don't
forget, Miss Alice; let him take his own time. We always want him, but
we want him to get good and well first. Good-night, good-night, young
lady!”

When she closed the door her mother came from the farther end of the
“living-room,” where there was no light; and Alice turned to her.

“I can't help liking that old man, mama,” she said. “He always sounds
so--well, so solid and honest and friendly! I do like him.”

But Mrs. Adams failed in sympathy upon this point. “He didn't say
anything about raising your father's salary, did he?” she asked, dryly.

“No.”

“No. I thought not.”

She would have said more, but Alice, indisposed to listen, began to
whistle, ran up the stairs, and went to sit with her father. She found
him bright-eyed with the excitement a first caller brings into a slow
convalescence: his cheeks showed actual hints of colour; and he was
smiling tremulously as he filled and lit his pipe. She brought the
crocheted scarf and put it about his shoulders again, then took a chair
near him.

“I believe seeing Mr. Lamb did do you good, papa,” she said. “I sort of
thought it might, and that's why I let him come up. You really look a
little like your old self again.”

Adams exhaled a breathy “Ha!” with the smoke from his pipe as he waved
the match to extinguish it. “That's fine,” he said. “The smoke I had
before dinner didn't taste the way it used to, and I kind of wondered if
I'd lost my liking for tobacco, but this one seems to be all right. You
bet it did me good to see J. A. Lamb! He's the biggest man that's ever
lived in this town or ever will live here; and you can take all the
Governors and Senators or anything they've raised here, and put 'em in
a pot with him, and they won't come out one-two-three alongside o' him!
And to think as big a man as that, with all his interests and everything
he's got on his mind--to think he'd never let anything prevent him from
coming here once every week to ask how I was getting along, and then
walk right upstairs and kind of CALL on me, as it were well, it makes
me sort of feel as if I wasn't so much of a nobody, so to speak, as your
mother seems to like to make out sometimes.”

“How foolish, papa! Of COURSE you're not 'a nobody.'”

Adams chuckled faintly upon his pipe-stem, what vanity he had seeming to
be further stimulated by his daughter's applause. “I guess there aren't
a whole lot of people in this town that could claim J. A. showed that
much interest in 'em,” he said. “Of course I don't set up to believe
it's all because of merit, or anything like that. He'd do the same for
anybody else that'd been with the company as long as I have, but still
it

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