This is not a baseball story. The grandstand does not rise as one
man and shout itself hoarse with joy. There isn’t a three-bagger
in the entire three thousand words, and nobody is carried home on
the shoulders of the crowd. For that sort of thing you need not
squander fifteen cents on your favorite magazine. The modest sum
of one cent will make you the possessor of a Pink ‘Un. There you
will find the season’s games handled in masterly fashion by a
six-best-seller artist, an expert mathematician, and an
original-slang humorist. No mere short story dub may hope to
compete with these.

In the old days, before the gentry of the ring had learned the
wisdom of investing their winnings in solids instead of liquids,
this used to be a favorite conundrum: When is a prize-fighter not
a prize-fighter?

Chorus: When he is tending bar.

I rise to ask you Brothah Fan, when is a ball player not a
ball player? Above the storm of facetious replies I shout the
answer:

When he’s a shoe clerk.

Any man who can look handsome in a dirty baseball suit is an
Adonis. There is something about the baggy pants, and the
Micawber-shaped collar, and the skull-fitting cap, and the foot or
so of tan, or blue, or pink undershirt sleeve sticking out at the
arms, that just naturally kills a man’s best points. Then too, a
baseball suit requires so much in the matter of leg. Therefore,
when I say that Rudie Schlachweiler was a dream even in his
baseball uniform, with a dirty brown streak right up the side of
his pants where he had slid for base, you may know that the girls
camped on the grounds during the season.

During the summer months our ball park is to us what the Grand
Prix is to Paris, or Ascot is to London. What care we that Evers
gets seven thousand a year (or is it a month?); or that Chicago’s
new South-side ball park seats thirty-five thousand (or is it
million?). Of what interest are such meager items compared with
the knowledge that “Pug” Coulan, who plays short, goes with Undine
Meyers, the girl up there in the eighth row, with the pink dress
and the red roses on her hat? When “Pug” snatches a high one out
of the firmament we yell with delight, and even as we yell we turn
sideways to look up and see how Undine is taking it. Undine’s
shining eyes are fixed on “Pug,” and he knows it, stoops to brush
the dust off his dirt-begrimed baseball pants, takes an attitude of
careless grace and misses the next play.

Our grand-stand seats almost two thousand, counting the boxes.
But only the snobs, and the girls with new hats, sit in the boxes.
Box seats are comfortable, it is true, and they cost only an
additional ten cents, but we have come to consider them
undemocratic, and unworthy of true fans. Mrs. Freddy Van Dyne, who
spends her winters in Egypt and her summers at the ball park, comes
out to the game every afternoon in her automobile, but she never
occupies a box seat; so why should we? She perches up in the
grand-stand with the rest of the enthusiasts, and when Kelly puts
one over she stands up and clinches her fists, and waves her arms
and shouts with the best of ‘em. She has even been known to cry,
“Good eye! Good eye!” when things were at fever heat. The only
really blase individual in the ball park is Willie Grimes, who
peddles ice-cream cones. For that matter, I once saw Willie turn
a languid head to pipe, in his thin voice, “Give ‘em a dark one,
Dutch! Give ‘em a dark one!”

Well, that will do for the firsh dash of local color. Now for
the story.

Ivy Keller came home June nineteenth from Miss Shont’s select
school for young ladies. By June twenty-first she was bored limp.
You could hardly see the plaits of her white tailored shirtwaist
for fraternity pins and secret society emblems, and her bedroom was
ablaze with college banners and pennants to such an extent that the
maid gave notice every Thursday–which was upstairs cleaning day.

For two weeks after her return Ivy spent most of her time
writing letters and waiting for them, and reading the classics on
the front porch, dressed in a middy blouse and a blue skirt, with
her hair done in a curly Greek effect like the girls on the covers
of the Ladies’ Magazine. She posed against the canvas bosom of the
porch chair with one foot under her, the other swinging free,
showing a tempting thing in beaded slipper, silk stocking, and what
the story writers call “slim ankle.”

On the second Saturday after her return her father came home
for dinner at noon, found her deep in Volume Two of “Les
Miserables.”

“Whew! This is a scorcher!” he exclaimed, and dropped down on
a wicker chair next to Ivy. Ivy looked at her father with languid
interest, and smiled a daughterly smile. Ivy’s father was an
insurance man, alderman of his ward, president of the Civic
Improvement club, member of five lodges, and an habitual delegate.
It generally was he who introduced distinguished guests who spoke
at the opera house on Decoration Day. He called Mrs. Keller
“Mother,” and he wasn’t above noticing the fit of a gown on a
pretty feminine figure. He thought Ivy was an expurgated edition
of Lillian Russell, Madame De Stael, and Mrs. Pankburst.

“Aren’t you feeling well, Ivy?” he asked. “Looking a little
pale. It’s the heat, I suppose. Gosh! Something smells good.
Run in and tell Mother I’m here.”

Ivy kept one slender finger between the leaves of her book.
“I’m perfectly well,” she replied. “That must be beefsteak and
onions. Ugh!” And she shuddered, and went indoors.

Dad Keller looked after her thoughtfully. Then he went in,
washed his hands, and sat down at table with Ivy and her mother.

“Just a sliver for me,” said Ivy, “and no onions.”

Her father put down his knife and fork, cleared his throat,
and spake, thus:

“You get on your hat and meet me at the 2:45 inter-urban.
You’re going to the ball game with me.”

“Ball game!” repeated Ivy. “I? But I’d—-”

“Yes, you do,” interrupted her father. “You’ve been moping
around here looking a cross between Saint Cecilia and Little Eva
long enough. I don’t care if you don’t know a spitball from a
fadeaway when you see it. You’ll be out in the air all afternoon,
and there’ll be some excitement. All the girls go. You’ll like
it. They’re playing Marshalltown.”

Ivy went, looking the sacrificial lamb. Five minutes after
the game was called she pointed one tapering white finger in the
direction of the pitcher’s mound.

“Who’s that?” she asked.

“Pitcher,” explained Papa Keller, laconically. Then,
patiently: “He throws the ball.”

“Oh,” said Ivy. “What did you say his name was?”

“I didn’t say. But it’s Rudie Schlachweiler. The boys call
him Dutch. Kind of a pet, Dutch is.”

“Rudie Schlachweiler!” murmured Ivy, dreamily. “What a strong
name!”

“Want some peanuts?” inquired her father.

“Does one eat peanuts at a ball game?”

“It ain’t hardly legal if you don’t,” Pa Keller assured her.

“Two sacks,” said Ivy. “Papa, why do they call it a diamond,
and what are those brown bags at the corners, and what does it
count if you hit the ball, and why do they rub their hands in the
dust and then–er–spit on them, and what salary does a pitcher
get, and why does the red-haired man on the other side dance around
like that between the second and third brown bag, and doesn’t a
pitcher do anything but pitch, and wh—-?”

“You’re on,” said papa.

After that Ivy didn’t miss a game during all the time that the
team played in the home town. She went without a new hat, and
didn’t care whether Jean Valjean got away with the goods or not,
and forgot whether you played third hand high or low in bridge.
She even became chummy with Undine Meyers, who wasn’t her kind of
a girl at all. Undine was thin in a voluptuous kind of way, if
such a paradox can be, and she had red lips, and a roving eye, and
she ran around downtown without a hat more than was strictly
necessary. But Undine and Ivy had two subjects in common. They
were baseball and love. It is queer how the limelight will make
heroes of us all.

Now “Pug” Coulan, who was red-haired, and had shoulders like
an ox, and arms that hung down to his knees, like those of an
orang-outang, slaughtered beeves at the Chicago stockyards in
winter. In the summer he slaughtered hearts. He wore mustard
colored shirts that matched his hair, and his baseball stockings
generally had a rip in them somewhere, but when he was on the
diamond we were almost ashamed to look at Undine, so wholly did her
heart shine in her eyes.

Now, we’ll have just another dash or two of local color. In
a small town the chances for hero worship are few. If it weren’t
for the traveling men our girls wouldn’t know whether stripes or
checks were the thing in gents’ suitings. When the baseball season
opened the girls swarmed on it. Those that didn’t understand
baseball pretended they did. When the team was out of town our
form of greeting was changed from, “Good-morning!” or “Howdy-do!”
to “What’s the score?” Every night the results of the games
throughout the league were posted up on the blackboard in front of
Schlager’s hardware store, and to see the way in which the crowd
stood around it, and streamed across the street toward it, you’d
have thought they were giving away gas stoves and hammock couches.

Going home in the street car after the game the girls used to
gaze adoringly at the dirty faces of their sweat-begrimed heroes,
and then they’d rush home, have supper, change their dresses, do
their hair, and rush downtown past the Parker Hotel to mail their
letters. The baseball boys boarded over at the Griggs House, which
is third-class, but they used their tooth-picks, and held the
postmortem of the day’s game out in front of the Parker Hotel,
which is our leading hostelry. The postoffice receipts record for
our town was broken during the months of June, July, and August.

Mrs. Freddy Van Dyne started the trouble by having the team
over to dinner, “Pug” Coulan and all. After all, why not? No
foreign and impecunious princes penetrate as far inland as our
town. They get only as far as New York, or Newport, where they are
gobbled up by many-moneyed matrons. If Mrs. Freddy Van Dyne found
the supply of available lions limited, why should she not try to
content herself with a jackal or so?

Ivy was asked. Until then she had contented herself with
gazing at her hero. She had become such a hardened baseball fan
that she followed the game with a score card, accurately jotting
down every play, and keeping her watch open on her knee.

She sat next to Rudie at dinner. Before she had nibbled her
second salted almond, Ivy Keller and Rudie Schlachweiler understood
each other. Rudie illustrated certain plays by drawing lines on
the table-cloth with his knife and Ivy gazed, wide-eyed, and
allowed her soup to grow cold.

The first night that Rudie called, Pa Keller thought it a
great joke. He sat out on the porch with Rudie and Ivy and talked
baseball, and got up to show Rudie how he could have got the goat
of that Keokuk catcher if only he had tried one of his famous
open-faced throws. Rudie looked politely interested, and laughed
in all the right places. But Ivy didn’t need to pretend. Rudie
Schlachweiler spelled baseball to her. She did not think of her
caller as a good-looking young man in a blue serge suit and a white
shirtwaist. Even as he sat there she saw him as a blonde god
standing on the pitcher’s mound, with the scars of battle on his
baseball pants, his left foot placed in front of him at right
angles with his right foot, his gaze fixed on first base in a
cunning effort to deceive the man at bat, in that favorite attitude
of pitchers just before they get ready to swing their left leg and
h’ist one over.

The second time that Rudie called, Ma Keller said:

“Ivy, I don’t like that ball player coming here to see you.
The neighbors’ll talk.”

The third time Rudie called, Pa Keller said: “What’s that guy
doing here again?”

The fourth time Rudie called, Pa Keller and Ma Keller said, in
unison: “This thing has got to stop.”

But it didn’t. It had had too good a start. For the rest of
the season Ivy met her knight of the sphere around the corner.
Theirs was a walking courtship. They used to roam up as far as the
State road, and down as far as the river, and Rudie would fain have
talked of love, but Ivy talked of baseball.

“Darling,” Rudie would murmur, pressing Ivy’s arm closer,
“when did you first begin to care?”

“Why I liked the very first game I saw when Dad—-”

“I mean, when did you first begin to care for me?”

“Oh! When you put three men out in that game with
Marshalltown when the teams were tied in the eighth inning.
Remember? Say, Rudie dear, what was the matter with your arm
to-day? You let three men walk, and Albia’s weakest hitter got a
home run out of you.”

“Oh, forget baseball for a minute, Ivy! Let’s talk about
something else. Let’s talk about–us.”

“Us? Well, you’re baseball, aren’t you?” retorted Ivy. “And
if you are, I am. Did you notice the way that Ottumwa man pitched
yesterday? He didn’t do any acting for the grandstand. He didn’t
reach up above his head, and wrap his right shoulder with his left
toe, and swing his arm three times and then throw seven inches
outside the plate. He just took the ball in his hand, looked at it
curiously for a moment, and fired it–zing!–like that, over the
plate. I’d get that ball if I were you.”

“Isn’t this a grand night?” murmured Rudie.

“But they didn’t have a hitter in the bunch,” went on Ivy.
“And not a man in the team could run. That’s why they’re
tail-enders. Just the same, that man on the mound was a wizard,
and if he had one decent player to give him some support—-”

Well, the thing came to a climax. One evening, two weeks
before the close of the season, Ivy put on her hat and announced
that she was going downtown to mail her letters.

“Mail your letters in the daytime,” growled Papa Keller.

“I didn’t have time to-day,” answered Ivy. “It was a thirteen
inning game, and it lasted until six o’clock.”

It was then that Papa Keller banged the heavy fist of decision
down on the library table.

“This thing’s got to stop!” he thundered. “I won’t have any
girl of mine running the streets with a ball player, understand?
Now you quit seeing this seventy-five-dollars-a-month bush leaguer
or leave this house. I mean it.”

“All right,” said Ivy, with a white-hot calm. “I’ll leave.
I can make the grandest kind of angel-food with marshmallow icing,
and you know yourself my fudges can’t be equaled. He’ll be playing
in the major leagues in three years. Why just yesterday there was
a strange man at the game–a city man, you could tell by his
hat-band, and the way his clothes were cut. He stayed through the
whole game, and never took his eyes off Rudie. I just know he was
a scout for the Cubs.”

“Probably a hardware drummer, or a fellow that Schlachweiler
owes money to.”

Ivy began to pin on her hat. A scared look leaped into Papa
Keller’s eyes. He looked a little old, too, and drawn, at that
minute. He stretched forth a rather tremulous hand.

“Ivy-girl,” he said.

“What?” snapped Ivy.

“Your old father’s just talking for your own good. You’re
breaking your ma’s heart. You and me have been good pals, haven’t
we?”

“Yes,” said Ivy, grudgingly, and without looking up.

“Well now, look here. I’ve got a proposition to make to you.
The season’s over in two more weeks. The last week they play out
of town. Then the boys’ll come back for a week or so, just to hang
around town and try to get used to the idea of leaving us. Then
they’ll scatter to take up their winter jobs-cutting ice, most of
‘em,” he added, grimly.

“Mr. Schlachweiler is employed in a large establishment in
Slatersville, Ohio,” said Ivy, with dignity. “He regards baseball
as his profession, and he cannot do anything that would affect his
pitching arm.”

Pa Keller put on the tremolo stop and brought a misty look
into his eyes.

“Ivy, you’ll do one last thing for your old father, won’t
you?”

“Maybe,” answered Ivy, coolly.

“Don’t make that fellow any promises. Now wait a minute! Let
me get through. I won’t put any crimp in your plans. I won’t
speak to Schlachweiler. Promise you won’t do anything rash until
the ball season’s over. Then we’ll wait just one month, see? Till
along about November. Then if you feel like you want to see
him—-”

“But how—-”

“Hold on. You mustn’t write to him, or see him, or let him
write to you during that time, see? Then, if you feel the way you
do now, I’ll take you to Slatersville to see him. Now that’s fair,
ain’t it? Only don’t let him know you’re coming.”

“ M-m-m-yes,” said Ivy.

“Shake hands on it.” She did. Then she left the room with a
rush, headed in the direction of her own bedroom. Pa Keller
treated himself to a prodigious wink and went out to the vegetable
garden in search of Mother.

The team went out on the road, lost five games, won two, and
came home in fourth place. For a week they lounged around the
Parker Hotel and held up the street corners downtown, took many
farewell drinks, then, slowly, by ones and twos, they left for the
packing houses, freight depots, and gents’ furnishing stores from
whence they came.

October came in with a blaze of sumac and oak leaves. Ivy
stayed home and learned to make veal loaf and apple pies. The
worry lines around Pa Keller’s face began to deepen. Ivy said that
she didn’t believe that she cared to go back to Miss Shont’s select
school for young ladies.

October thirty-first came.

“We’ll take the eight-fifteen to-morrow,” said her father to
Ivy.

“All right,” said Ivy.

“Do you know where he works?” asked he.

“No,” answered Ivy.

“That’ll be all right. I took the trouble to look him up last
August.”

The short November afternoon was drawing to its close (as our
best talent would put it) when Ivy and her father walked along the
streets of Slatersville. (I can’t tell you what streets, because
I don’t know.) Pa Keller brought up before a narrow little shoe
shop.

“Here we are,” he said, and ushered Ivy in. A short, stout,
proprietary figure approached them smiling a mercantile smile.

“What can I do for you?” he inquired.

Ivy’s eyes searched the shop for a tall, golden-haired form in
a soiled baseball suit.

“We’d like to see a gentleman named Schlachweiler–Rudolph
Schlachweiler,” said Pa Keller.

“Anything very special?” inquired the proprietor.
“He’s–rather busy just now. Wouldn’t anybody else do? Of course,
if—-”

“No,” growled Keller.

The boss turned. “Hi! Schlachweiler!” he bawled toward the
rear of the dim little shop.

“Yessir,” answered a muffled voice.

“Front!” yelled the boss, and withdrew to a safe listening
distance.

A vaguely troubled look lurked in the depths of Ivy’s eyes.
From behind the partition of the rear of the shop emerged a tall
figure. It was none other than our hero. He was in his shirt-
sleeves, and he struggled into his coat as he came forward, wiping
his mouth with the back of his hand, hurriedly, and swallowing.

I have said that the shop was dim. Ivy and her father stood
at one side, their backs to the light. Rudie came forward, rubbing
his hands together in the manner of clerks.

“Something in shoes?” he politely inquired. Then he saw.

“Ivy!–ah–Miss Keller!” he exclaimed. Then, awkwardly:
“Well, how-do, Mr. Keller. I certainly am glad to see you both.
How’s the old town? What are you doing in Slatersville?”

“Why–Ivy—-” began Pa Keller, blunderingly.

But Ivy clutched his arm with a warning hand. The vaguely
troubled look in her eyes had become wildly so.

“Schlachweiler!” shouted the voice of the boss. “Customers!”
and he waved a hand in the direction of the fitting benches.

“All right, sir,” answered Rudie. “Just a minute.”

“Dad had to come on business,” said Ivy, hurriedly. “And he
brought me with him. I’m–I’m on my way to school in Cleveland,
you know. Awfully glad to have seen you again. We must go. That
lady wants her shoes, I’m sure, and your employer is glaring at us.
Come, dad.”

At the door she turned just in time to see Rudie removing the
shoe from the pudgy foot of the fat lady customer.

We’ll take a jump of six months. That brings us into the lap
of April.

Pa Keller looked up from his evening paper. Ivy, home for the
Easter vacation, was at the piano. Ma Keller was sewing.

Pa Keller cleared his throat. “I see by the paper,” he
announced, “that Schlachweiler’s been sold to Des Moines. Too bad
we lost him. He was a great little pitcher, but he played in bad
luck. Whenever he was on the slab the boys seemed to give him poor
support.”

“Fudge!” exclaimed Ivy, continuing to play, but turning a
spirited face toward her father. “What piffle! Whenever a player
pitches rotten ball you’ll always hear him howling about the
support he didn’t get. Schlachweiler was a bum pitcher. Anybody
could hit him with a willow wand, on a windy day, with the sun in
his eyes.”

Old Ben Westerveld was taking it easy. Every muscle taut, every
nerve tense, his keen eyes vainly straining to pierce the
blackness of the stuffy room–there lay Ben Westerveld in bed,
taking it easy. And it was hard. Hard. He wanted to get up.
He wanted so intensely to get up that the mere effort of lying
there made him ache all over. His toes were curled with the
effort. His fingers were clenched with it. His breath came
short, and his thighs felt cramped. Nerves. But old Ben
Westerveld didn’t know that. What should a retired and
well-to-do farmer of fifty-eight know of nerves, especially when
he has moved to the city and is taking it easy?

If only he knew what time it was. Here in Chicago you couldn’t
tell whether it was four o’clock or seven unless you looked at
your watch. To do that it was necessary to turn on the light.
And to turn on the light meant that he would turn on, too, a
flood of querulous protest from his wife, Bella, who lay asleep
beside him.

When for forty-five years of your life you have risen at
four-thirty daily, it is difficult to learn to loll. To do it
successfully, you must be a natural- born loller to begin with
and revert. Bella Westerveld was and had. So there she lay,
asleep. Old Ben wasn’t and hadn’t. So there he lay, terribly
wide- awake, wondering what made his heart thump so fast when he
was lying so still. If it had been light, you could have seen
the lines of strained resignation in the sagging muscles of his
patient face.

They had lived in the city for almost a year, but it was the same
every morning. He would open his eyes, start up with one hand
already reaching for the limp, drab work-worn garments that used
to drape the chair by his bed. Then he would remember and sink
back while a great wave of depression swept over him. Nothing to
get up for. Store clothes on the chair by the bed. He was
taking it easy.

Back home on the farm in southern Illinois he had known the hour
the instant his eyes opened. Here the flat next door was so
close that the bed- room was in twilight even at midday. On the
farm he could tell by the feeling–an intangible thing, but
infallible. He could gauge the very quality of the blackness
that comes just before dawn. The crowing of the cocks, the
stamping of the cattle, the twittering of the birds in the old
elm whose branches were etched eerily against his window in the
ghostly light –these things he had never needed. He had known.
But here in the un- sylvan section of Chicago which bears the
bosky name of Englewood, the very darkness had a strange quality.

A hundred unfamiliar noises misled him. There were no cocks, no
cattle, no elm. Above all, there was no instinctive feeling.
Once, when they first came to the city, he had risen at
twelve-thirty, thinking it was morning, and had gone clumping
about the flat, waking up everyone and loosing from his wife’s
lips a stream of acid vituperation that seared even his
case-hardened sensibilities. The people sleeping in the bedroom
of the flat next door must have heard her.

“You big rube! Getting up in the middle of the night and
stomping around like cattle. You’d better build a shed in the
back yard and sleep there if you’re so dumb you can’t tell night
from day.”

Even after thirty-three years of marriage he had never ceased to
be appalled at the coarseness of her mind and speech–she who had
seemed so mild and fragile and exquisite when he married her. He
had crept back to bed shamefacedly. He could hear the couple in
the bedroom of the flat just across the little court grumbling
and then laughing a little, grudgingly, and yet with
appreciation. That bedroom, too, had still the power to appall
him. Its nearness, its forced intimacy, were daily shocks to him
whose most immediate neighbor, back on the farm, had been a
quarter of a mile away. The sound of a shoe dropped on the
hardwood floor, the rush of water in the bathroom, the murmur of
nocturnal confidences, the fretful cry of a child in the night,
all startled and distressed him whose ear had found music in the
roar of the thresher and had been soothed by the rattle of the
tractor and the hoarse hoot of the steamboat whistle at the
landing. His farm’s edge had been marked by the Mississippi
rolling grandly by.

Since they had moved into town, he had found only one city sound
that he really welcomed–the rattle and clink that marked the
milkman’s matutinal visit. The milkman came at six, and he was
the good fairy who released Ben Westerveld from durance vile–or
had until the winter months made his coming later and later, so
that he became worse than useless as a timepiece. But now it was
late March, and mild. The milkman’s coming would soon again mark
old Ben’s rising hour. Before he had begun to take it easy, six
o’clock had seen the entire mechanism of his busy little world
humming smoothly and sweetly, the whole set in motion by his own
big work-callused hands. Those hands puzzled him now. He often
looked at them curiously and in a detached sort of way, as if
they belonged to someone else. So white they were, and smooth
and soft, with long, pliant nails that never broke off from rough
work as they used to. Of late there were little splotches of
brown on the backs of his hands and around the thumbs.

“Guess it’s my liver,” he decided, rubbing the spots
thoughtfully. “She gets kind of sluggish from me not doing
anything. Maybe a little spring tonic wouldn’t go bad. Tone me
up.”

He got a little bottle of reddish-brown mixture from the druggist
on Halstead Street near Sixty-third. A genial gendeman, the
druggist, white- coated and dapper, stepping affably about the
fragrant-smelling store. The reddish-brown mixture had toned old
Ben up surprisingly–while it lasted. He had two bottles of it.
But on discontinuing it he slumped back into his old apathy.

Ben Westerveld, in his store clothes, his clean blue shirt, his
incongruous hat, ambling aimlessly about Chicago’s teeming,
gritty streets, was a tragedy. Those big, capable hands, now
dangling so limply from inert wrists, had wrested a living from
the soil; those strangely unfaded blue eyes had the keenness of
vision which comes from scanning great stretches of earth and
sky; the stocky, square-shouldered body suggested power
unutilized. All these spelled tragedy. Worse than
tragedy–waste.

For almost half a century this man had combated the elements,
head set, eyes wary, shoulders squared. He had fought wind and
sun, rain and drought, scourge and flood. He had risen before
dawn and slept before sunset. In the process he had taken on
something of the color and the rugged immutability of the fields
and hills and trees among which he toiled. Something of their
dignity, too, though your town dweller might fail to see it
beneath the drab exterior. He had about him none of the
highlights and sharp points of the city man. He seemed to blend
in with the background of nature so as to be almost
undistinguishable from it, as were the furred and feathered
creatures. This farmer differed from the city man as a hillock
differs from an artificial golf bunker, though form and substance
are the same.

Ben Westerveld didn’t know he was a tragedy. Your farmer is not
given to introspection. For that matter, anyone knows that a
farmer in town is a comedy. Vaudeville, burlesque, the Sunday
supplement, the comic papers, have marked him a fair target for
ridicule. Perhaps one should know him in his overalled,
stubble-bearded days, with the rich black loam of the Mississippi
bottomlands clinging to his boots.

At twenty-five, given a tasseled cap, doublet and hose, and a
long, slim pipe, Ben Westerveld would have been the prototype of
one of those rollicking, lusty young mynheers that laugh out at
you from a Frans Hals canvas. A roguish fellow with a merry eye;
red-cheeked, vigorous. A serious mouth, though, and great
sweetness of expression. As he grew older, the seriousness crept
up and up and almost entirely obliterated the roguishness. By
the time the life of ease claimed him, even the ghost of that
ruddy wight of boyhood had vanished.

The Westerveld ancestry was as Dutch as the name. It had been
hundreds of years since the first Westervelds came to America,
and they had married and intermarried until the original Holland
strain had almost entirely disappeared. They had drifted to
southern Illinois by one of those slow processes of migration and
had settled in Calhoun County, then almost a wilderness, but
magnificent with its rolling hills, majestic rivers, and
gold-and-purple distances. But to the practical Westerveld mind,
hills and rivers and purple haze existed only in their relation
to crops and weather. Ben, though, had a way of turning his face
up to the sky sometimes, and it was not to scan the heavens for
clouds. You saw him leaning on the plow handle to watch the
whirring flight of a partridge across the meadow. He liked
farming. Even the drudgery of it never made him grumble. He was
a natural farmer as men are natural mechanics or musicians or
salesmen. Things grew for him. He seemed instinctively to know
facts about the kin ship of soil and seed that other men had to
learn from books or experience. It grew to be a saying in that
section that “Ben Westerveld could grow a crop on rock.”

At picnics and neighborhood frolics Ben could throw farther and
run faster and pull harder than any of the other farmer boys who
took part in the rough games. And he could pick up a girl with
one hand and hold her at arm’s length while she shrieked with
pretended fear and real ecstasy. The girls all liked Ben. There
was that almost primitive strength which appealed to the untamed
in them as his gentleness appealed to their softer side. He
liked the girls, too, and could have had his pick of them. He
teased them all, took them buggy riding, beaued them about to
neighbor- hood parties. But by the time he was twenty-five the
thing had narrowed down to the Byers girl on the farm adjoining
Westerveld’s. There was what the neighbors called an
understanding, though perhaps he had never actually asked the
Byers girl to marry him. You saw him going down the road toward
the Byers place four nights out of the seven. He had a quick,
light step at variance with his sturdy build, and very different
from the heavy, slouching gait of the work-weary farmer. He had
a habit of carrying in his hand a little twig or switch cut from
a tree. This he would twirl blithely as he walked along. The
switch and the twirl represented just so much energy and animal
spirits. He never so much as flicked a dandelion head with it.

An inarticulate sort of thing, that courtship.

“Hello, Emma.”

“How do, Ben.”

“Thought you might like to walk a piece down the road. They got
a calf at Aug Tietjens’ with five legs.”

“I heard. I’d just as lief walk a little piece. I’m kind of
beat, though. We’ve got the threshers day after tomorrow. We’ve
been cooking up.”

Beneath Ben’s bonhomie and roguishness there was much shyness.
The two would plod along the road together in a sort of blissful
agony of embarrassment. The neighbors were right in their
surmise that there was no definite understanding between them.
But the thing was settled in the minds of both. Once Ben had
said: “Pop says I can have the north eighty on easy payments
if–when—-”

Emma Byers had flushed up brightly, but had answered equably:
“That’s a fine piece. Your pop is an awful good man.”

The stolid exteriors of these two hid much that was fine and
forceful. Emma Byers’ thoughtful forehead and intelligent eyes
would have revealed that in her. Her mother was dead. She kept
house for her father and brother. She was known as “that smart
Byers girl.” Her butter and eggs and garden stuff brought
higher prices at Commercial, twelve miles away, than did any
other’s in the district. She was not a pretty girl, according to
the local standards, but there was about her, even at twenty-two,
a clear- headedness and a restful serenity that promised well for
Ben Westerveld’s future happiness.

But Ben Westerveld’s future was not to lie in Emma Byers’ capable
hands. He knew that as soon as he saw Bella Huckins. Bella
Huckins was the daughter of old “Red Front” Huckins, who ran
the saloon of that cheerful name in Commercial. Bella had
elected to teach school, not from any bent toward learning but
because teaching appealed to her as being a rather elegant
occupation. The Huckins family was not elegant. In that day a
year or two of teaching in a country school took the place of the
present-day normal-school diploma. Bella had an eye on St.
Louis, forty miles from the town of Commercial. So she used the
country school as a step toward her ultimate goal, though she
hated the country and dreaded her apprenticeship.

“I’ll get a beau,” she said, “who’ll take me driving and
around. And Saturdays and Sundays I can come to town.”

The first time Ben Westerveld saw her she was coming down the
road toward him in her tight-fitting black alpaca dress. The
sunset was behind her. Her hair was very golden. In a day of
tiny waists hers could have been spanned by Ben Westerveld’s two
hands. He discovered that later. Just now he thought he had
never seen anything so fairylike and dainty, though he did not
put it that way. Ben was not glib of thought or speech.

He knew at once this was the new schoolteacher. He had heard of
her coming, though at the time the conversation had interested
him not at all. Bella knew who he was, too. She had learned the
name and history of every eligible young man in the district two
days after her arrival. That was due partly to her own bold
curiosity and partly to the fact that she was boarding with the
Widow Becker, the most notorious gossip in the county. In
Bella’s mental list of the neighborhood swains Ben Westerveld
already occupied a position at the top of the column.

He felt his face redden as they approached each other. To hide
his embarrassment he swung his little hickory switch gaily and
called to his dog Dunder, who was nosing about by the roadside.
Dunder bounded forward, spied the newcomer, and leaped toward her
playfully and with natural canine curiosity.

Bella screamed. She screamed and ran to Ben and clung to him,
clasping her hands about his arm. Ben lifted the hickory switch
in his free hand and struck Dunder a sharp cut with it. It was
the first time in his life that he had done such a thing. If he
had had a sane moment from that time until the day he married
Bella Huckins, he never would have forgotten the dumb hurt in
Dunder’s stricken eyes and shrinking, quivering body.

Bella screamed again, still clinging to him. Ben was saying:
“He won’t hurt you. He won’t hurt you,” meanwhile patting her
shoulder reassuringly. He looked down at her pale face. She was
so slight, so childlike, so apparently different from the sturdy
country girls. From–well, from the girls he knew. Her
helplessness, her utter femininity, appealed to all that was
masculine in him. Bella, the experienced, clinging to him, felt
herself swept from head to foot by a queer electric tingling that
was very pleasant but that still had in it something of the
sensation of a wholesale bumping of one’s crazy bone. If she had
been anything but a stupid little flirt, she would have realized
that here was a specimen of the virile male with which she could
not trifle. She glanced up at him now, smiling faintly. “My, I
was scared!” She stepped away from him a little–very little.

“Aw, he wouldn’t hurt a flea.”

But Bella looked over her shoulder fearfully to where Dunder
stood by the roadside, regarding Ben with a look of uncertainty.
He still thought that perhaps this was a new game. Not a game
that he cared for, but still one to be played if his master
fancied it. Ben stooped, picked up a stone, and threw it at
Dunder, striking him in the flank.

“Go on home!” he commanded sternly. “Go home!” He started
toward the dog with a well-feigned gesture of menace. Dunder,
with a low howl, put his tail between his legs and loped off
home, a disillusioned dog.

Bella stood looking up at Ben. Ben looked down at her. “You’re
the new teacher, ain’t you?”

“Yes. I guess you must think I’m a fool, going on like a baby
about that dog.”

“Most girls would be scared of him if they didn’t know he
wouldn’t hurt nobody. He’s pretty big.”

He paused a moment, awkwardly. “My name’s Ben Westerveld.”

“Pleased to meet you,” said Bella. “Which way was you going?
There’s a dog down at Tietjens’ that’s enough to scare anybody.
He looks like a pony, he’s so big.”

“I forgot something at the school this afternoon, and I was
walking over to get it.” Which was a lie. “I hope it won’t
get dark before I get there. You were going the other way,
weren’t you?”

“Oh, I wasn’t going no place in particular. I’ll be pleased to
keep you company down to the school and back.” He was surprised
at his own sudden masterfulness.

They set off together, chatting as freely as if they had known
one another for years. Ben had been on his way to the Byers
farm, as usual. The Byers farm and Emma Byers passed out of his
mind as completely as if they had been whisked away on a magic
rug.

Bella Huckins had never meant to marry him. She hated farm life.

She was contemptuous of farmer folk. She loathed cooking and
drudgery. The Huckinses lived above the saloon in Commercial and
Mrs. Huckins was always boiling ham and tongue and cooking pigs’
feet and shredding cabbage for slaw, all these edibles being
destined for the free-lunch counter downstairs. Bella had early
made up her mind that there should be no boiling and stewing and
frying in her life. Whenever she could find an excuse she
loitered about the saloon. There she found life and talk and
color. Old Red Front Huckins used to chase her away, but she
always turned up again, somehow, with a dish for the lunch
counter or with an armful of clean towels.

Ben Westerveld never said clearly to himself, “I want to marry
Bella.” He never dared meet the thought. He intended honestly
to marry Emma Byers. But this thing was too strong for him. As
for Bella, she laughed at him, but she was scared, too. They
both fought the thing, she selfishly, he unselfishly, for the
Byers girl, with her clear, calm eyes and her dependable ways,
was heavy on his heart. Ben’s appeal for Bella was merely that
of the magnetic male. She never once thought of his finer
qualities. Her appeal for him was that of the frail and alluring
woman. But in the end they married. The neighborhood was rocked
with surprise.

Usually in a courtship it is the male who assumes the bright
colors of pretense in order to attract a mate. But Ben
Westerveld had been too honest to be anything but himself. He
was so honest and fundamentally truthful that he refused at first
to allow himself to believe that this slovenly shrew was the
fragile and exquisite creature he had married. He had the habit
of personal cleanliness, had Ben, in a day when tubbing was a
ceremony in an environment that made bodily nicety difficult. He
discovered that Bella almost never washed and that her appearance
of fragrant immaculateness, when dressed, was due to a natural
clearness of skin and eye, and to the way her blond hair swept
away in a clean line from her forehead. For the rest, she was a
slattern, with a vocabulary of invective that would have been a
credit to any of the habitues of old Red Front Huckins’ bar.

They had three children, a girl and two boys. Ben Westerveld
prospered in spite of his wife. As the years went on he added
eighty acres here, eighty acres there, until his land swept down
to the very banks of the Mississippi. There is no doubt that she
hindered him greatly, but he was too expert a farmer to fail. At
threshing time the crew looked forward to working for Ben, the
farmer, and dreaded the meals prepared by Bella, his wife. She
was notoriously the worst cook and housekeeper in the county.
And all through the years, in trouble and in happiness, her
plaint was the same– “If I’d thought I was going to stick down
on a farm all my life, slavin’ for a pack of menfolks day and
night, I’d rather have died. Might as well be dead as rottin’
here.”

Her schoolteacher English had early reverted. Her speech was as
slovenly as her dress. She grew stout, too, and unwieldy, and
her skin coarsened from lack of care and from overeating. And in
her children’s ears she continually dinned a hatred of farm life
and farming. “You can get away from it,” she counseled her
daughter, Minnie. “Don’t you be a rube like your pa,” she
cautioned John, the older boy. And they profited by her ad-
vice. Minnie went to work in Commercial when she was seventeen,
an overdeveloped girl with an inordinate love of cheap finery.
At twenty, she married an artisan, a surly fellow with roving
tendencies. They moved from town to town. He never stuck long
at one job. John, the older boy, was as much his mother’s son as
Minnie was her mother’s daughter. Restless, dissatisfied,
emptyheaded, he was the despair of his father. He drove the farm
horses as if they were racers, lashing them up hill and down
dale. He was forever lounging off to the village or wheedling
his mother for money to take him to Commercial. It was before
the day of the ubiquitous automobile. Given one of those present
adjuncts to farm life, John would have ended his career much
earlier. As it was, they found him lying by the roadside at dawn
one morning after the horses had trotted into the yard with the
wreck of the buggy bumping the road behind them. He had stolen
the horses out of the barn after the help was asleep, had led
them stealthily down the road, and then had whirled off to a
rendezvous of his own in town. The fall from the buggy might not
have hurt him, but evidently he had been dragged almost a mile
before his battered body became somehow disentangled from the
splintered wood and the reins.

That horror might have served to bring Ben Westerveld and his
wife together, but it did not. It only increased her bitterness
and her hatred of the locality and the life.

“I hope you’re good an’ satisfied now,” she repeated in endless
reproach. “I hope you’re good an’ satisfied. You was bound
you’d make a farmer out of him, an’ now you finished the job.
You better try your hand at Dike now for a change.”

Dike was young Ben, sixteen; and old Ben had no need to try his
hand at him. Young Ben was a born farmer, as was his father. He
had come honestly by his nickname. In face, figure, expression,
and manner he was a five-hundred-year throwback to his Holland
ancestors. Apple-cheeked, stocky, merry of eye, and somewhat
phlegmatic. When, at school, they had come to the story of the
Dutch boy who saved his town from flood by thrusting his finger
into the hole in the dike and holding it there until help came,
the class, after one look at the accompanying picture in the
reader, dubbed young Ben “Dike” Westerveld. And Dike he
remained.

Between Dike and his father there was a strong but unspoken
feeling. The boy was cropwise, as his father had been at his
age. On Sundays you might see the two walking about the farm,
looking at the pigs–great black fellows worth almost their
weight in silver; eying the stock; speculating on the winter
wheat showing dark green in April, with rich patches that were
almost black. Young Dike smoked a solemn and judicious pipe,
spat expertly, and voiced the opinion that the winter wheat was a
fine prospect Ben Westerveld, listening tolerantly to the boy’s
opinions, felt a great surge of joy that he did not show. Here,
at last, was compensation for all the misery and sordidness and
bitter disappointment of his married life.

That married life had endured now for more than thirty years.
Ben Westerveld still walked with a light, quick step–for his
years. The stocky, broad-shouldered figure was a little
shrunken. He was as neat and clean at fifty-five as he had been
at twenty-five-a habit that, on a farm, is fraught with
difficulties. The community knew and respected him. He was a
man of standing. When he drove into town on a bright winter
morning, in his big sheepskin coat and his shaggy cap and his
great boots, and entered the First National Bank, even Shumway,
the cashier, would look up from his desk to say:

“Hello, Westerveld! Hello! Well, how goes it?”

When Shumway greeted a farmer in that way you knew that there
were no unpaid notes to his discredit.

All about Ben Westerveld stretched the fruit of his toil; the
work of his hands. Orchards, fields, cattle, barns, silos. All
these things were dependent on him for their future
well-being–on him and on Dike after him. His days were full and
running over. Much of the work was drudgery; most of it was
backbreaking and laborious. But it was his place. It was his
reason for being. And he felt that the reason was good, though
he never put that thought into words, mental or spoken. He only
knew that he was part of the great scheme of things and that he
was functioning ably. If he had expressed himself at all, he
might have said:

“Well, I got my work cut out for me, and I do it, and do it
right.”

There was a tractor, now, of course; and a sturdy, middle-class
automobile in which Bella lolled red-faced when they drove into
town.

As Ben Westerveld had prospered, his shrewish wife had reaped her
benefits. Ben was not the selfish type of farmer who insists on
twentieth- century farm implements and medieval household
equipment. He had added a bedroom here, a cool summer kitchen
there, an icehouse, a commodious porch, a washing machine, even a
bathroom. But Bella remained unplacated. Her face was set
toward the city. And slowly, surely, the effect of thirty years
of nagging was beginning to tell on Ben Westerveld. He was the
finer metal, but she was the heavier, the coarser. She beat him
and molded him as iron beats upon gold.

Minnie was living in Chicago now–a good-natured creature, but
slack like her mother. Her surly husband was still talking of
his rights and crying down with the rich. They had two children.

Minnie wrote of them, and of the delights of city life. Movies
every night. Halsted Street just around the corner. The big
stores. State Street. The el took you downtown in no time.
Something going on all the while. Bella Westerveld, after one of
those letters, was more than a chronic shrew; she became a
terrible termagant.

When Ben Westerveld decided to concentrate on hogs and wheat he
didn’t dream that a world would be clamoring for hogs and wheat
for four long years. When the time came, he had them, and sold
them fabulously. But wheat and hogs and markets became
negligible things on the day that Dike, with seven other farm
boys from the district, left for the nearest training camp that
was to fit them for France and war.

Bella made the real fuss, wailing and mouthing and going into
hysterics. Old Ben took it like a stoic. He drove the boy to
town that day. When the train pulled out, you might have seen,
if you had looked close, how the veins and cords swelled in the
lean brown neck above the clean blue shirt. But that was all. As
the weeks went on, the quick, light step began to lag a little.
He had lost more than a son; his right-hand helper was gone.
There were no farm helpers to be had. Old Ben couldn’t do it
all. A touch of rheumatism that winter half crippled him for
eight weeks. Bella’s voice seemed never to stop its plaint.

“There ain’t no sense in you trying to make out alone. Next
thing you’ll die on me, and then I’ll have the whole shebang on
my hands.” At that he eyed her dumbly from his chair by the
stove. His resistance was wearing down. He knew it. He wasn’t
dying. He knew that, too. But something in him was. Something
that had resisted her all these years. Something that had made
him master and superior in spite of everything.

In those days of illness, as he sat by the stove, the memory of
Emma Byers came to him often. She had left that district
twenty-eight years ago, and had married, and lived in Chicago
somewhere, he had heard, and was prosperous. He wasted no time
in idle regrets. He had been a fool, and he paid the price of
fools. Bella, slamming noisily about the room, never suspected
the presence in the untidy place of a third person–a sturdy girl
of twenty-two or -three, very wholesome to look at, and with
honest, intelligent eyes and a serene brow.

“It’ll get worse an’ worse all the time,” Bella’s whine went
on. “Everybody says the war’ll last prob’ly for years an’
years. You can’t make out alone. Everything’s goin’ to rack and
ruin. You could rent out the farm for a year, on trial. The
Burdickers’d take it, and glad. They got those three strappin’
louts that’s all flat-footed or slab-sided or cross-eyed or
somethin’, and no good for the army. Let them run it on shares.
Maybe they’ll even buy, if things turn out. Maybe Dike’ll never
come b—-”

But at the look on his face then, and at the low growl of
unaccustomed rage that broke from him, even she ceased her
clatter.

They moved to Chicago in the early spring. The look that had
been on Ben Westerveld’s face when he drove Dike to the train
that carried him to camp was stamped there again–indelibly this
time, it seemed. Calhoun County in the spring has much the
beauty of California. There is a peculiar golden light about it,
and the hills are a purplish haze. Ben Westerveld, walking down
his path to the gate, was more poignantly dramatic than any
figure in a rural play. He did not turn to look back, though, as
they do in a play. He dared not.

They rented a flat in Englewood, Chicago, a block from Minnie’s.
Bella was almost amiable these days. She took to city life as
though the past thirty years had never been. White kid shoes,
delicatessen stores, the movies, the haggling with peddlers, the
crowds, the crashing noise, the cramped, unnatural mode of
living–necessitated by a four-room flat–all these urban
adjuncts seemed as natural to her as though she had been bred in
the midst of them.

She and Minnie used to spend whole days in useless shopping.
Theirs was a respectable neighborhood of well-paid artisans,
bookkeepers, and small shopkeepers. The women did their own
housework in drab garments and soiled boudoir caps that hid a
multitude of unkempt heads. They seemed to find a great deal of
time for amiable, empty gabbling From seven to four you might see
a pair of boudoir caps leaning from opposite bedroom windows,
conversing across back porches, pausing in the task of sweeping
front steps, standing at a street corner, laden with grocery
bundles. Minnie wasted hours in what she called “running over
to Ma’s for a minute.” The two quarreled a great deal, being so
nearly of a nature. But the very qualities that combated each
other seemed, by some strange chemical process, to bring them
together as well.

“I’m going downtown today to do a little shopping,” Minnie
would say. “Do you want to come along, Ma?”

“What you got to get?”

“Oh, I thought I’d look at a couple little dresses for
Pearlie.”

“When I was your age I made every stitch you wore.”

“Yeh, I bet they looked like it, too. This ain’t the farm. I
got all I can do to tend to the house, without sewing.”

“I did it. I did the housework and the sewin’ and cookin’, an’
besides—-”

“A swell lot of housekeepin’ you did. You don’t need to tell
me.”

The bickering grew to a quarrel. But in the end they took the
downtown el together. You saw them, flushed of face, with
twitching fingers, indulging in a sort of orgy of dime spending
in the five-and-ten-cent store on the wrong side of State Street.

They pawed over bolts of cheap lace and bits of stuff in the
stifling air of the crowded place. They would buy a sack of
salted peanuts from the great mound in the glass case, or a bag
of the greasy pink candy piled in profusion on the counter, and
this they would munch as they went.

They came home late, fagged and irritable, and supplemented their
hurried dinner with hastily bought food from the near-by
delicatessen.

Thus ran the life of ease for Ben Westerveld, retired farmer.
And so now he lay impatiently in bed, rubbing a nervous
forefinger over the edge of the sheet and saying to himself that,
well, here was another day. What day was it? L’see now.
Yesterday was–yesterday. A little feeling of panic came over
him. He couldn’t remember what yesterday had been. He counted
back laboriously and decided that today must be Thursday. Not
that it made any difference.

They had lived in the city almost a year now. But the city had
not digested Ben. He was a leathery morsel that could not be
assimilated. There he stuck in Chicago’s crop, contributing
nothing, gaining nothing. A rube in a comic collar ambling
aimlessly about Halsted Street or State downtown. You saw him
conversing hungrily with the gritty and taciturn Swede who was
janitor for the block of red-brick flats. Ben used to follow him
around pathetically, engaging him in the talk of the day. Ben
knew no men except the surly Gus, Minnie’s husband. Gus, the
firebrand, thought Ben hardly worthy of his contempt. If Ben
thought, sometimes, of the respect with which he had always been
greeted when he clumped down the main street of Commercial–if he
thought of how the farmers for miles around had come to him for
expert advice and opinion–he said nothing.

Sometimes the janitor graciously allowed Ben to attend to the
furnace of the building in which he lived. He took out ashes,
shoveled coal. He tinkered and rattled and shook things. You
heard him shoveling and scraping down there, and smelled the
acrid odor of his pipe. It gave him something to do. He would
emerge sooty and almost happy.

“You been monkeying with that furnace again!” Bella would
scold. “If you want something to do, why don’t you plant a
garden in the back yard and grow something? You was crazy about
it on the farm.”

His face flushed a slow, dull red at that. He could not explain
to her that he lost no dignity in his own eyes in fussing about
an inadequate little furnace, but that self-respect would not
allow him to stoop to gardening– he who had reigned over six
hundred acres of bountiful soil.

On winter afternoons you saw him sometimes at the movies, whiling
away one of his many idle hours in the dim, close-smelling
atmosphere of the place. Tokyo and Rome and Gallipoli came to
him. He saw beautiful tiger-women twining fair, false arms about
the stalwart but yielding forms of young men with cleft chins.
He was only mildly interested. He talked to anyone who would
talk to him, though he was naturally a shy man. He talked to the
barber, the grocer, the druggist, the streetcar conductor, the
milkman, the iceman. But the price of wheat did not interest
these gentlemen. They did not know that the price of wheat was
the most vital topic of conversation in the world.

“Well, now,” he would say, “you take this year’s wheat crop,
with about 917,000,000 bushels of wheat harvested, why, that’s
what’s going to win the war! Yes, sirree! No wheat, no winning,
that’s what I say.”

“Ya-as, it is!” the city men would scoff. But the queer part
of it is that Farmer Ben was right.

Minnie got into the habit of using him as a sort of nursemaid.
It gave her many hours of freedom for gadding and gossiping.

“Pa, will you look after Pearlie for a little while this
morning? I got to run downtown to match something and she gets
so tired and mean-acting if I take her along. Ma’s going with
me.”

He loved the feel of Pearlie’s small, velvet-soft hand in his big
fist. He called her “little feller,” and fed her forbidden
dainties. His big brown fingers were miraculously deft at
buttoning and unbuttoning her tiny garments, and wiping her soft
lips, and performing a hundred tender offices. He was playing a
sort of game with himself, pretending this was Dike become a baby
again. Once the pair managed to get over to Lincoln Park, where
they spent a glorious day looking at the animals, eating popcorn,
and riding on the miniature railway.

They returned, tired, dusty, and happy, to a double tirade.

Bella engaged in a great deal of what she called worrying about
Dike. Ben spoke of him seldom, but the boy was always present in
his thoughts. They had written him of their move, but he had not
seemed to get the impression of its permanence. His letters
indicated that he thought they were visiting Minnie, or taking a
vacation in the city. Dike’s letters were few. Ben treasured
them, and read and reread them. When the Armistice news came,
and with it the possibility of Dike’s return, Ben tried to fancy
him fitting into the life of the city. And his whole being
revolted at the thought.

He saw the pimply-faced, sallow youths standing at the corner of
Halsted and Sixty-third, spitting languidly and handling their
limp cigarettes with an amazing labial dexterity. Their
conversation was low-voiced, sinister, and terse, and their eyes
narrowed as they watched the overdressed, scarlet-lipped girls go
by. A great fear clutched at Ben Westerveld’s heart.

The lack of exercise and manual labor began to tell on Ben. He
did not grow fat from idleness. Instead his skin seemed to sag
and hang on his frame, like a garment grown too large for him.
He walked a great deal. Perhaps that had something to do with
it. He tramped miles of city pave- ments. He was a very lonely
man. And then, one day, quite by accident, he came upon South
Water Street. Came upon it, stared at it as a water-crazed
traveler in a desert gazes upon the spring in the oasis, and
drank from it, thirstily, gratefully.

South Water Street feeds Chicago. Into that close-packed
thoroughfare come daily the fruits and vegetables that will
supply a million tables. Ben had heard of it, vaguely, but had
never attempted to find it. Now he stumbled upon it and,
standing there, felt at home in Chicago for the first time in
more than a year. He saw ruddy men walking about in overalls and
carrying whips in their hands–wagon whips, actually. He hadn’t
seen men like that since he had left the farm. The sight of them
sent a great pang of homesickness through him. His hand reached
out and he ran an accustomed finger over the potatoes in a barrel
on the walk. His fingers lingered and gripped them, and passed
over them lovingly.

At the contact something within him that had been tight and
hungry seemed to relax, satisfied. It was his nerves, feeding on
those familiar things for which they had been starving.

He walked up one side and down the other. Crates of lettuce,
bins of onions, barrels of apples. Such vegetables! The
radishes were scarlet globes. Each carrot was a spear of pure
orange. The green and purple of fancy asparagus held his expert
eye. The cauliflower was like a great bouquet, fit for a bride;
the cabbages glowed like jade.

And the men! He hadn’t dreamed there were men like that in this
big, shiny-shod, stiffly laundered, white-collared city. Here
were rufous men in overalls–worn, shabby, easy-looking overalls
and old blue shirts, and mashed hats worn at a careless angle.
Men, jovial, good-natured, with clear eyes, and having about them
some of the revivifying freshness and wholesomeness of the
products they handled.

Ben Westerveld breathed in the strong, pungent smell of onions
and garlic and of the earth that seemed to cling to the
vegetables, washed clean though they were. He breathed deeply,
gratefully, and felt strangely at peace.

It was a busy street. A hundred times he had to step quickly to
avoid a hand truck, or dray, or laden wagon. And yet the busy
men found time to greet him friendlily. “H’are you!” they said
genially. “H’are you this morning!”

He was marketwise enough to know that some of these busy people
were commission men, and some grocers, and some buyers, stewards,
clerks. It was a womanless thoroughfare. At the busiest
business corner, though, in front of the largest commission house
on the street, he saw a woman. Evidently she was transacting
business, too, for he saw the men bringing boxes of berries and
vegetables for her inspection. A woman in a plain blue skirt and
a small black hat.

A funny job for a woman. What weren’t they mixing into nowadays!

He turned sidewise in the narrow, crowded space in order to pass
her little group. And one of the men–a red-cheeked,
merry-looking young fellow in a white apron–laughed and said:
“Well, Emma, you win. When it comes to driving a bargain with
you, I quit. It can’t be did!”

Even then he didn’t know her. He did not dream that this
straight, slim, tailored, white-haired woman, bargaining so
shrewdly with these men, was the Emma Byers of the old days. But
he stopped there a moment, in frank curiosity, and the woman
looked up. She looked up, and he knew those intelligent eyes and
that serene brow. He had carried the picture of them in his mind
for more than thirty years, so it was not so surprising.

He did not hesitate. He might have if he had thought a moment,
but he acted automatically. He stood before her. “You’re Emma
Byers, ain’t you?”

She did not know him at first. Small blame to her, so completely
had the roguish, vigorous boy vanished in this sallow, sad-eyed
old man. Then: “Why, Ben!” she said quietly. And there was
pity in her voice, though she did not mean to have it there. She
put out one hand–that capable, reassuring hand–and gripped his
and held it a moment. It was queer and significant that it
should be his hand that lay within hers.

“Well, what in all get-out are you doing around here, Emma?”
He tried to be jovial and easy. She turned to the aproned man
with whom she had been dealing and smiled.

“What am I doing here, Joe?”

Joe grinned, waggishly. “Nothin’; only beatin’ every man on the
street at his own game, and makin’ so much money that—-”

But she stopped him there. “I guess I’ll do my own
explaining.” She turned to Ben again. “And what are you doing
here in Chicago?”

Ben passed a faltering hand across his chin. “Me? Well,
I’m–we’re living here, I s’pose. Livin’ here.”

She glanced at him sharply. “Left the farm, Ben?”

“Yes.”

“Wait a minute.” She concluded her business with Joe; finished
it briskly and to her own satisfaction. With her bright brown
eyes and her alert manner and her quick little movements she made
you think of a wren–a businesslike little wren–a very early
wren that is highly versed in the worm-catching way.

At her next utterance he was startled but game.

“Have you had your lunch?”

“Why, no; I—-”

“I’ve been down here since seven, and I’m starved. Let’s go and
have a bite at the little Greek restaurant around the corner. A
cup of coffee and a sandwich, anyway.”

Seated at the bare little table, she surveyed him with those
intelligent, understanding, kindly eyes, and he felt the years
slip from him. They were walking down the country road together,
and she was listening quietly and advising him.

She interrogated him gently. But something of his old
masterfulness came back to him. “No, I want to know about you
first. I can’t get the rights of it, you being here on South
Water, tradin’ and all.”

So she told him briefly. She was in the commission business.
Successful. She bought, too, for such hotels as the Blackstone
and the Congress, and for half a dozen big restaurants. She gave
him bare facts, but he was shrewd enough and sufficiently versed
in business to know that here was a woman of established
commercial position.

“But how does it happen you’re keepin’ it up, Emma, all this
time? Why, you must be anyway–it ain’t that you look
it–but—-” He floundered, stopped.

She laughed. “That’s all right, Ben. I couldn’t fool you on
that. And I’m working because it keeps me happy. I want to work
till I die. My children keep telling me to stop, but I know
better than that. I’m not going to rust out. I want to wear
out.” Then, at an unspoken question in his eyes: “He’s dead.
These twenty years. It was hard at first, when the children were
small. But I knew garden stuff if I didn’t know anything else.
It came natural to me. That’s all.”

So then she got his story from him bit by bit. He spoke of the
farm and of Dike, and there was a great pride in his voice. He
spoke of Bella, and the son who had been killed, and of Minnie.
And the words came falteringly. He was trying to hide something,
and he was not made for deception. When he had finished:

“Now, listen, Ben. You go back to your farm.”

“I can’t. She–I can’t.”

She leaned forward, earnestly. “You go back to the farm.”

He turned up his palms with a little gesture of defeat. “I
can’t.”

“You can’t stay here. It’s killing you. It’s poisoning you.
Did you ever hear of toxins? That means poisons, and you’re
poisoning yourself. You’ll die of it. You’ve got another twenty
years of work in you. What’s ailing you? You go back to your
wheat and your apples and your hogs. There isn’t a bigger job in
the world than that.”

For a moment his face took on a glow from the warmth of her own
inspiring personality. But it died again. When they rose to go,
his shoulders drooped again, his muscles sagged. At the doorway
he paused a moment, awkward in farewell. He blushed a little,
stammered.

“Emma–I always wanted to tell you. God knows it was luck for
you the way it turned out–but I always wanted to—-”

She took his hand again in her firm grip at that, and her kindly,
bright brown eyes were on him. “I never held it against you,
Ben. I had to live a long time to understand it. But I never
held a grudge. It just wasn’t to be, I suppose. But listen to
me, Ben. You do as I tell you. You go back to your wheat and
your apples and your hogs. There isn’t a bigger man-size job in
the world. It’s where you belong.”

Unconsciously his shoulders straightened again. Again they
sagged. And so they parted, the two.

He must have walked almost all the long way home, through miles
and miles of city streets. He must have lost his way, too, for
when he looked up at a corner street sign it was an unfamiliar
one.

So he floundered about, asked his way, was misdirected. He took
the right streetcar at last and got off at his own corner at
seven o’clock, or later. He was in for a scolding, he knew.

But when he came to his own doorway he knew that even his
tardiness could not justify the bedlam of sound that came from
within. High-pitched voices. Bella’s above all the rest, of
course, but there was Minnie’s too, and Gus’s growl, and
Pearlie’s treble, and the boy Ed’s and—-

At the other voice his hand trembled so that the knob rattled in
the door, and he could not turn it. But finally he did turn it,
and stumbled in, breathing hard. And that other voice was
Dike’s.

He must have just arrived. The flurry of explanation was still
in progress. Dike’s knapsack was still on his back, and his
canteen at his hip, his helmet slung over his shoulder. A brown,
hard, glowing Dike, strangely tall and handsome and older, too.
Older.

All this Ben saw in less than one electric second. Then he had
the boy’s two shoulders in his hands, and Dike was saying,
“Hello, Pop.”

Of the roomful, Dike and old Ben were the only quiet ones. The
others were taking up the explanation and going over it again and
again, and marveling, and asking questions.

“He come in to–what’s that place, Dike?–Hoboken–yesterday
only. An’ he sent a dispatch to the farm. Can’t you read our
letters, Dike, that you didn’t know we was here now? And then
he’s only got an hour more. They got to go to Camp Grant to be,
now, demobilized. He came out to Minnie’s on a chance. Ain’t he
big!”

But Dike and his father were looking at each other quietly. Then
Dike spoke. His speech was not phlegmatic, as of old. He had a
new clipped way of uttering his words:

“Say, Pop, you ought to see the way the Frenchies farm! They
got about an acre each, and, say, they use every inch of it. If
they’s a little dirt blows into the crotch of a tree, they plant
a crop in there. I never seen nothin’ like it. Say, we waste
enough stuff over here to keep that whole country in food for a
hundred years. Yessir. And tools! Outta the ark, believe me.
If they ever saw our tractor, they’d think it was the Germans
comin’ back. But they’re smart at that. I picked up a lot of
new ideas over there. And you ought to see the old
birds–womenfolks and men about eighty years old– runnin’
everything on the farm. They had to. I learned somethin’ off
them about farmin’.”

“Forget the farm,” said Minnie.

“Yeh,” echoed Gus, “forget the farm stuff. I can get you a
job here out at the works for four-fifty a day, and six when you
learn it right.”

Dike looked from one to the other, alarm and unbelief on his
face. “What d’you mean, a job? Who wants a job! What you
all—-”

Bella laughed jovially. “F’r heaven’s sakes, Dike, wake up!
We’re livin’ here. This is our place. We ain’t rubes no more.”

Dike turned to his father. A little stunned look crept into his
face. A stricken, pitiful look. There was something about it
that suddenly made old Ben think of Pearlie when she had been
slapped by her quick- tempered mother.

“But I been countin’ on the farm,” he said miserably. “I just
been livin’ on the idea of comin’ back to it. Why, I—- The
streets here, they’re all narrow and choked up. I been countin’
on the farm. I want to go back and be a farmer. I want—-”

And then Ben Westerveld spoke. A new Ben Westerveld–the old Ben
Westerveld. Ben Westerveld, the farmer, the monarch over six
hundred acres of bounteous bottomland.

“That’s all right, Dike,” he said. “You’re going back. So’m
I. I’ve got another twenty years of work in me. We’re going
back to the farm.”

Bella turned on him, a wildcat. “We ain’t! Not me! We ain’t!
I’m not agoin’ back to the farm.”

But Ben Westerveld was master again in his own house. “You’re
goin’ back, Bella,” he said quietly, “an’ things are goin’ to
be different. You’re goin’ to run the house the way I say, or
I’ll know why. If you can’t do it, I’ll get them in that can.
An’ me and Dike, we’re goin’ back to our wheat and our apples and
our hogs. Yessir! There ain’t a bigger man-size job in the
world.”

Any one who has ever written for the magazines (nobody could
devise a more sweeping opening; it includes the iceman who does a
humorous article on the subject of his troubles, and the neglected
wife next door, who journalizes) knows that a story the scene of
which is not New York is merely junk. Take Fifth Avenue as a
framework, pad it out to five thousand words, and there you have
the ideal short story.

Consequently I feel a certain timidity in confessing that I do
not know Fifth Avenue from Hester Street when I see it, because
I’ve never seen it. It has been said that from the latter to the
former is a ten-year journey, from which I have gathered that they
lie some miles apart. As for Forty-second Street, of which musical
comedians carol, I know not if it be a fashionable shopping
thoroughfare or a factory district.

A confession of this kind is not only good for the soul, but
for the editor. It saves him the trouble of turning to page two.

This is a story of Chicago, which is a first cousin of New
York, although the two are not on chummy terms. It is a story of
that part of Chicago which lies east of Dearborn Avenue and south
of Division Street, and which may be called the Nottingham curtain
district.

In the Nottingham curtain district every front parlor window
is embellished with a “Rooms With or Without Board” sign. The
curtains themselves have mellowed from their original
department-store-basement-white to a rich, deep tone of Chicago
smoke, which has the notorious London variety beaten by several
shades. Block after block the two-story-and-basement houses
stretch, all grimy and gritty and looking sadly down upon the five
square feet of mangy grass forming the pitiful front yard of each.
Now and then the monotonous line of front stoops is broken by an
outjutting basement delicatessen shop. But not often. The
Nottingham curtain district does not run heavily to delicacies. It
is stronger on creamed cabbage and bread pudding.

Up in the third floor back at Mis’ Buck’s (elegant rooms $2.50
and up a week. Gents preferred) Gertie was brushing her hair for
the night. One hundred strokes with a bristle brush. Anyone who
reads the beauty column in the newspapers knows that. There was
something heroic in the sight of Gertie brushing her hair one
hundred strokes before going to bed at night. Only a woman could
understand her doing it.

Gertie clerked downtown on State Street, in a gents’ glove
department. A gents’ glove department requires careful dressing on
the part of its clerks, and the manager, in selecting them, is
particular about choosing “lookers,” with especial attention to
figure, hair, and finger nails. Gertie was a looker. Providence
had taken care of that. But you cannot leave your hair and finger
nails to Providence. They demand coaxing with a bristle brush and
an orangewood stick.

Now clerking, as Gertie would tell you, is fierce on the feet.
And when your feet are tired you are tired all over. Gertie’s feet
were tired every night. About eight-thirty she longed to peel off
her clothes, drop them in a heap on the floor, and tumble,
unbrushed, unwashed, unmanicured, into bed. She never did it.

Things had been particularly trying to-night. After washing
out three handkerchiefs and pasting them with practised hand over
the mirror, Gertie had taken off her shoes and discovered a hole
the size of a silver quarter in the heel of her left stocking.
Gertie had a country-bred horror of holey stockings. She darned
the hole, yawning, her aching feet pressed against the smooth, cool
leg of the iron bed. That done, she had had the colossal courage
to wash her face, slap cold cream on it, and push back the cuticle
around her nails.

Seated huddled on the side of her thin little iron bed, Gertie
was brushing her hair bravely, counting the strokes somewhere in
her sub-conscious mind and thinking busily all the while of
something else. Her brush rose, fell, swept downward, rose, fell,
rhythmically.

“Ninety-six, ninety-seven, ninety-eight, ninety — Oh, darn
it! What’s the use!” cried Gertie, and hurled the brush across the
room with a crack.

She sat looking after it with wide, staring eyes until the
brush blurred in with the faded red roses on the carpet. When she
found it doing that she got up, wadded her hair viciously into a
hard bun in the back instead of braiding it carefully as usual,
crossed the room (it wasn’t much of a trip), picked up the brush,
and stood looking down at it, her under lip caught between her
teeth. That is the humiliating part of losing your temper and
throwing things. You have to come down to picking them up, anyway.

Her lip still held prisoner, Gertie tossed the brush on the
bureau, fastened her nightgown at the throat with a safety pin,
turned out the gas and crawled into bed.

Perhaps the hard bun at the back of her head kept her awake.
She lay there with her eyes wide open and sleepless, staring into
the darkness.

At midnight the Kid Next Door came in whistling, like one
unused to boarding-house rules. Gertie liked him for that. At the
head of the stairs he stopped whistling and came softly into his
own third floor back just next to Gertie’s. Gertie liked him for
that, too.

The two rooms had been one in the fashionable days of the
Nottingham curtain district, long before the advent of Mis’ Buck.
That thrifty lady, on coming into possession, had caused a flimsy
partition to be run up, slicing the room in twain and doubling its
rental.

Lying there Gertie could hear the Kid Next Door moving about
getting ready for bed and humming “Every Little Movement Has a
Meaning of Its Own” very lightly, under his breath. He polished
his shoes briskly, and Gertie smiled there in the darkness of her
own room in sympathy. Poor kid, he had his beauty struggles, too.

Gertie had never seen the Kid Next Door, although he had come
four months ago. But she knew he wasn’t a grouch, because he
alternately whistled and sang off-key tenor while dressing in the
morning. She had also discovered that his bed must run along the
same wall against which her bed was pushed. Gertie told herself
that there was something almost immodest about being able to hear
him breathing as he slept. He had tumbled into bed with a little
grunt of weariness.

Gertie lay there another hour, staring into the darkness.
Then she began to cry softly, lying on her face with her head
between her arms. The cold cream and the salt tears mingled and
formed a slippery paste. Gertie wept on because she couldn’t help
it. The longer she wept the more difficult her sobs became, until
finally they bordered on the hysterical. They filled her lungs
until they ached and reached her throat with a force that jerked
her head back.

“Rap-rap-rap!” sounded sharply from the head of her bed.

Gertie stopped sobbing, and her heart stopped ,beating. She
lay tense and still, listening. Everyone knows that spooks rap
three times at the head of one’s bed. It’s a regular high-sign
with them.

“Rap-rap-rap!”

Gertie’s skin became goose-flesh, and coldwater effects chased
up and down her spine.

“What’s your trouble in there?” demanded an unspooky voice so
near that Gertie jumped. “Sick?”

It was the Kid Next Door.

“N-no, I’m not sick,” faltered Gertie, her mouth close to the
wall. Just then a belated sob that had stopped halfway when the
raps began hustled on to join its sisters. It took Gertie by
surprise, and brought prompt response from the other side of the
wall.

“I’ll bet I scared you green. I didn’t mean to, but, on the
square, if you’re feeling sick, a little nip of brandy will set you
up. Excuse my mentioning it, girlie, but I’d do the same for my
sister. I hate like sin to hear a woman suffer like that, and,
anyway, I don’t know whether you’re fourteen or forty, so
it’s perfectly respectable. I’ll get the bottle and leave it
outside your door.”

“No you don’t!” answered Gertie in a hollow voice, praying
meanwhile that the woman in the room below might be sleeping. “I’m
not sick, honestly I’m not. I’m just as much obliged, and I’m dead
sorry I woke you up with my blubbering. I started out with the
soft pedal on, but things got away from me. Can you hear me?”

“Like a phonograph. Sure you couldn’t use a sip of brandy
where it’d do the most good?”

“Sure.”

“Well, then, cut out the weeps and get your beauty sleep, kid.
He ain’t worth sobbing over, anyway, believe me.”

“He!” snorted Gertie indignantly. “You’re cold. There never
was anything in peg-tops that could make me carry on like the
heroine of the Elsie series.”

“Lost your job?”

“No such luck.”

“Well, then, what in Sam Hill could make a woman—-”

“Lonesome!” snapped Gertie. “And the floorwalker got fresh
to-day. And I found two gray hairs to-night. And I’d give my next
week’s pay envelope to hear the double click that our front gate
gives back home.”

“Back home!” echoed the Kid Next Door in a dangerously loud
voice. “Say, I want to talk to you. If you’ll promise you won’t
get sore and think I’m fresh, I’ll ask you a favor. Slip on a
kimono and we’ll sneak down to the front stoop and talk it over.
I’m as wide awake as a chorus girl and twice as hungry. I’ve got
two apples and a box of crackers. Are you on?”

Gertie snickered. “It isn’t done in our best sets, but I’m
on. I’ve got a can of sardines and an orange. I’ll be ready in
six minutes.”

She was, too. She wiped off the cold cream and salt tears
with a dry towel, did her hair in a schoolgirl braid and tied it
with a big bow, and dressed herself in a black skirt and a baby
blue dressing sacque. The Kid Next Door was waiting outside in the
hall. His gray sweater covered a multitude of sartorial
deficiencies. Gertie stared at him, and he stared at Gertie in the
sickly blue light of the boarding-house hall, and it took her
one-half of one second to discover that she liked his mouth, and
his eyes, and the way his hair was mussed.

“Why, you’re only a kid!” whispered the Kid Next Door, in
surprise.

Gertie smothered a laugh. “You’re not the first man that’s
been deceived by a pig-tail braid and a baby blue waist. I could
locate those two gray hairs for you with my eyes shut and my feet
in a sack. Come on, boy. These Robert W. Chambers situations make
me nervous.”

Many earnest young writers with a flow of adjectives and a
passion for detail have attempted to describe the quiet of a great
city at night, when a few million people within it are sleeping, or
ought to be. They work in the clang of a distant owl car, and the
roar of an occasional “L” train, and the hollow echo of the
footsteps of the late passer-by. They go elaborately into
description, and are strong on the brooding hush, but the thing has
never been done satisfactorily.

Gertie, sitting on the front stoop at two in the morning, with
her orange in one hand and the sardine can in the other, put it
this way:

“If I was to hear a cricket chirp now, I’d screech. This
isn’t really quiet. It’s like waiting for a cannon cracker to go
off just before the fuse is burned down. The bang isn’t there yet,
but you hear it a hundred times in your mind before it happens.”

“My name’s Augustus G. Eddy,” announced the Kid Next Door,
solemnly. “Back home they always called me Gus. You peel that
orange while I unroll the top of this sardine can. I’m guilty of
having interrupted you in the middle of what the girls call a good
cry, and I know you’ll have to get it out of your system some way.
Take a bite of apple and then wade right in and tell me what you’re
doing in this burg if you don’t like it.”

“This thing ought to have slow music,” began Gertie. “It’s
pathetic. I came to Chicago from Beloit, Wisconsin, because I
thought that little town was a lonesome hole for a vivacious
creature like me. Lonesome! Listen while I laugh a low mirthless
laugh. I didn’t know anything about the three-ply,
double-barreled, extra heavy brand of lonesomeness that a big town
like this can deal out. Talk about your desert wastes! They’re
sociable and snug compared to this. I know three-fourths of the
people in Beloit, Wisconsin, by their first names. I’ve lived here
six months and I’m not on informal terms with anybody except Teddy,
the landlady’s dog, and he’s a trained rat-and-book-agent terrier,
and not inclined to overfriendliness. When I clerked at the
Enterprise Store in Beloit the women used to come in and ask for
something we didn’t carry just for an excuse to copy the way the
lace yoke effects were planned in my shirtwaists. You ought to see
the way those same shirtwaist stack up here. Why, boy, the
lingerie waists that the other girls in my department wear make my
best hand-tucked effort look like a simple English country blouse.
They’re so dripping with Irish crochet and real Val and Cluny
insertions that it’s a wonder the girls don’t get stoop-shouldered
carrying ‘em around.”

“Hold on a minute,” commanded Gus. “This thing is uncanny.
Our cases dovetail like the deductions in a detective story. Kneel
here at my feet, little daughter, and I’ll tell you the story of my
sad young life. I’m no child of the city streets, either. Say, I
came to this town because I thought there was a bigger field for me
in Gents’ Furnishings. Joke, what?”

But Gertie didn’t smile. She gazed up at Gus, and Gus gazed
down at her, and his fingers fiddled absently with the big bow at
the end of her braid.

“And isn’t there?” asked Gertie, sympathetically.

“Girlie, I haven’t saved twelve dollars since I came. I’m no
tightwad, and I don’t believe in packing everything away into a
white marble mausoleum, but still a gink kind of whispers to
himself that some day he’ll be furnishing up a kitchen pantry of
his own.”

“Oh!” said Gertie.

“And let me mention in passing,” continued Gus, winding the
ribbon bow around his finger, “that in the last hour or so that
whisper has been swelling to a shout.”

“Oh!” said Gertie again.

“You said it. But I couldn’t buy a secondhand gas stove with
what I’ve saved in the last half-year here. Back home they used to
think I was a regular little village John Drew, I was so dressy.
But here I look like a yokel on circus day compared to the other
fellows in the store. All they need is a field glass strung over
their shoulder to make them look like a clothing ad in the back of
a popular magazine. Say, girlie, you’ve got the prettiest hair
I’ve seen since I blew in here. Look at that braid! Thick as a
rope! That’s no relation to the piles of jute that the Flossies
here stack on their heads. And shines! Like satin.”

“It ought to,” said Gertrude, wearily. “I brush it a hundred
strokes every night. Sometimes I’m so beat that I fall asleep with
my brush in the air. The manager won’t stand for any romping curls
or hooks-and-eyes that don’t connect. It keeps me so busy being
beautiful, and what the society writers call `well groomed,’ that
I don’t have time to sew the buttons on my underclothes.”

“But don’t you get some amusement in the evening?” marveled
Gus. “What was the matter with you and the other girls in the
store? Can’t you hit it off?”

“Me? No. I guess I was too woodsy for them. I went out with
them a couple of times. I guess they’re nice girls all right; but
they’ve got what you call a broader way of looking at things than
I have. Living in a little town all your life makes you narrow.
These girls!–Well, maybe I’ll get educated up to their plane some
day, but—-”

“No, you don’t!” hissed Gus. “Not if I can help it.”

“But you can’t,” replied Gertie, sweetly. “My, ain’t this a
grand night! Evenings like this I used to love to putter around
the yard after supper, sprinkling the grass and weeding the
radishes. I’m the greatest kid to fool around with a hose. And
flowers! Say, they just grow for me. You ought to have seen my
pansies and nasturtiums last summer.”

The fingers of the Kid Next Door wandered until they found
Gertie’s. They clasped them.

“This thing just points one way, little one. It’s just as
plain as a path leading up to a cozy little three-room flat up
here on the North Side somewhere. See it? With me and you
married, and playing at housekeeping in a parlor and bedroom and
kitchen? And both of us going down town to work in the morning
just the same as we do now. Only not the same, either.”

“Wake up, little boy,” said Gertie, prying her fingers away
from those other detaining ones. “I’d fit into a three-room flat
like a whale in a kitchen sink. I’m going back to Beloit,
Wisconsin. I’ve learned my lesson all right. There’s a fellow
there waiting for me. I used to think he was too slow. But say,
he’s got the nicest little painting and paper-hanging business you
ever saw, and making money. He’s secretary of the K. P.’s back
home. They give some swell little dances during the winter,
especially for the married members. In five years we’ll own our
home, with a vegetable garden in the back. I’m a little frog, and
it’s me for the puddle.”

Gus stood up slowly. Gertie felt a little pang of compunction
when she saw what a boy he was.

“I don’t know when I’ve enjoyed a talk like this. I’ve heard
about these dawn teas, but I never thought I’d go to one,” she
said.

“Good-night, girlie,” interrupted Gus, abruptly. “It’s the
dreamless couch for mine. We’ve got a big sale on in tan and black
seconds to-morrow.”

Those of you who have dwelt–or even lingered–in Chicago,
Illinois, are familiar with the region known as the Loop. For
those others of you to whom Chicago is a transfer point between
New York and California there is presented this brief
explanation:

The Loop is a clamorous, smoke-infested district embraced by the
iron arms of the elevated tracks. In a city boasting fewer
millions, it would be known familiarly as downtown. From
Congress to Lake Street, from Wabash almost to the river, those
thunderous tracks make a complete circle, or loop. Within it lie
the retail shops, the commercial hotels, the theaters, the
restaurants. It is the Fifth Avenue and the Broadway of Chicago.

And he who frequents it by night in search of amusement and cheer
is known, vulgarly, as a Loop-hound.

Jo Hertz was a Loop-hound. On the occasion of those sparse first
nights granted the metropolis of the Middle West he was always
present, third row, aisle, left. When a new Loop cafe’ was
opened, Jo’s table always commanded an unobstructed view of
anything worth viewing. On entering he was wont to say, “Hello,
Gus,” with careless cordiality to the headwaiter, the while his
eye roved expertly from table to table as he removed his gloves.
He ordered things under glass, so that his table, at midnight or
thereabouts, resembled a hotbed that favors the bell system. The
waiters fought for him. He was the kind of man who mixes his own
salad dressing. He liked to call for a bowl, some cracked ice,
lemon, garlic, paprika, salt, pepper, vinegar, and oil and make a
rite of it. People at near-by tables would lay down their knives
and forks to watch, fascinated. The secret of it seemed to lie
in using all the oil in sight and calling for more.

That was Jo–a plump and lonely bachelor of fifty. A plethoric,
roving- eyed, and kindly man, clutching vainly at the garments of
a youth that had long slipped past him. Jo Hertz, in one of
those pinch-waist suits and a belted coat and a little green hat,
walking up Michigan Avenue of a bright winter’s afternoon, trying
to take the curb with a jaunty youthfulness against which every
one of his fat-encased muscles rebelled, was a sight for mirth or
pity, depending on one’s vision.

The gay-dog business was a late phase in the life of Jo Hertz.
He had been a quite different sort of canine. The staid and
harassed brother of three unwed and selfish sisters is an
underdog.

At twenty-seven Jo had been the dutiful, hard-working son (in the
wholesale harness business) of a widowed and gummidging mother,
who called him Joey. Now and then a double wrinkle would appear
between Jo’s eyes–a wrinkle that had no business there at
twenty-seven. Then Jo’s mother died, leaving him handicapped by
a deathbed promise, the three sisters, and a
three-story-and-basement house on Calumet Avenue. Jo’s wrinkle
became a fixture.

“Joey,” his mother had said, in her high, thin voice, “take
care of the girls.”

“I will, Ma,” Jo had choked.

“Joey,” and the voice was weaker, “promise me you won’t marry
till the girls are all provided for.” Then as Jo had hesitated,
appalled: “Joey, it’s my dying wish. Promise!”

“I promise, Ma,” he had said.

Whereupon his mother had died, comfortably, leaving him with a
completely ruined life.

They were not bad-looking girls, and they had a certain style,
too. That is, Stell and Eva had. Carrie, the middle one, taught
school over on the West Side. In those days it took her almost
two hours each way. She said the kind of costume she required
should have been corrugated steel. But all three knew what was
being worn, and they wore it–or fairly faithful copies of it.
Eva, the housekeeping sister, had a needle knack. She could skim
the State Street windows and come away with a mental photograph
of every separate tuck, hem, yoke, and ribbon. Heads of
departments showed her the things they kept in drawers, and she
went home and reproduced them with the aid of a seamstress by the
day. Stell, the youngest, was the beauty. They called her Babe.

Twenty-three years ago one’s sisters did not strain at the
household leash, nor crave a career. Carrie taught school, and
hated it. Eva kept house expertly and complainingly. Babe’s
profession was being the family beauty, and it took all her spare
time. Eva always let her sleep until ten.

This was Jo’s household, and he was the nominal head of it. But
it was an empty title. The three women dominated his life. They
weren’t con- sciously selfish. If you had called them cruel they
would have put you down as mad. When you are the lone brother of
three sisters, it means that you must constantly be calling for,
escorting, or dropping one of them somewhere. Most men of Jo’s
age were standing before their mirror of a Saturday night,
whistling blithely and abstractedly while they discarded a blue
polka-dot for a maroon tie, whipped off the maroon for a
shot-silk and at the last moment decided against the shot-silk in
favor of a plain black-and-white because she had once said she
preferred quiet ties. Jo, when he should have been preening his
feathers for conquest, was saying:

“Well, my God, I AM hurrying! Give a man time, can’t you? I
just got home. You girls been laying around the house all day.
No wonder you’re ready.”

He took a certain pride in seeing his sisters well dressed, at a
time when he should have been reveling in fancy waistcoats and
brilliant-hued socks, according to the style of that day and the
inalienable right of any unwed male under thirty, in any day. On
those rare occasions when his business necessitated an
out-of-town trip, he would spend half a day floundering about the
shops selecting handkerchiefs, or stockings, or feathers, or
gloves for the girls. They always turned out to be the wrong
kind, judging by their reception.

From Carrie, “What in the world do I want of long white
gloves!”

“I thought you didn’t have any,” Jo would say.

“I haven’t. I never wear evening clothes.”

Jo would pass a futile hand over the top of his head, as was his
way when disturbed. “I just thought you’d like them. I thought
every girl liked long white gloves. Just,” feebly, “just
to–to have.”

“Oh, for pity’s sake!”

And from Eva or Babe, “I’ve GOT silk stockings, Jo.” Or, “You
brought me handkerchiefs the last time.”

There was something selfish in his giving, as there always is in
any gift freely and joyfully made. They never suspected the
exquisite pleasure it gave him to select these things, these
fine, soft, silken things. There were many things about this
slow-going, amiable brother of theirs that they never suspected.
If you had told them he was a dreamer of dreams, for example,
they would have been amused. Sometimes, dead-tired by nine
o’clock after a hard day downtown, he would doze over the evening
paper. At intervals he would wake, red-eyed, to a snatch of
conversation such as, “Yes, but if you get a blue you can wear
it anywhere. It’s dressy, and at the same time it’s quiet,
too.” Eva, the expert, wrestling with Carrie over the problem
of the new spring dress. They never guessed that the com-
monplace man in the frayed old smoking jacket had banished them
all from the room long ago; had banished himself, for that
matter. In his place was a tall, debonair, and rather
dangerously handsome man to whom six o’clock spelled evening
clothes. The kind of man who can lean up against a mantel, or
propose a toast, or give an order to a manservant, or whisper a
gallant speech in a lady’s ear with equal ease. The shabby old
house on Calumet Avenue was transformed into a brocaded and
chandeliered rendezvous for the brilliance of the city. Beauty
was here, and wit. But none so beautiful and witty as She.
Mrs.–er–Jo Hertz. There was wine, of course; but no vulgar
display. There was music; the soft sheen of satin; laughter.
And he, the gracious, tactful host, king of his own domain—-

“Jo, for heaven’s sake, if you’re going to snore, go to bed!”

“Why–did I fall asleep?”

“You haven’t been doing anything else all evening. A person
would think you were fifty instead of thirty.”

And Jo Hertz was again just the dull, gray, commonplace brother
of three well-meaning sisters.

Babe used to say petulantly, “Jo, why don’t you ever bring home
any of your men friends? A girl might as well not have any
brother, all the good you do.”

Jo, conscience-stricken, did his best to make amends. But a man
who has been petticoat-ridden for years loses the knack, somehow,
of comradeship with men.

One Sunday in May Jo came home from a late-Sunday-afternoon walk
to find company for supper. Carrie often had in one of her
schoolteacher friends, or Babe one of her frivolous intimates, or
even Eva a staid guest of the old-girl type. There was always a
Sunday-night supper of potato salad, and cold meat, and coffee,
and perhaps a fresh cake. Jo rather enjoyed it, being a
hospitable soul. But he regarded the guests with the undazzled
eyes of a man to whom they were just so many petticoats, timid of
the night streets and requiring escort home. If you had
suggested to him that some of his sisters’ popularity was due to
his own presence, or if you had hinted that the more kittenish of
these visitors were probably making eyes at him, he would have
stared in amazement and unbelief.

This Sunday night it turned out to be one of Carrie’s friends.

“Emily,” said Carrie, “this is my brother, Jo.”

Jo had learned what to expect in Carrie’s friends. Drab-looking
women in the late thirties, whose facial lines all slanted
downward.

“Happy to meet you,” said Jo, and looked down at a different
sort altogether. A most surprisingly different sort, for one of
Carrie’s friends. This Emily person was very small, and fluffy,
and blue-eyed, and crinkly looking. The corners of her mouth when
she smiled, and her eyes when she looked up at you, and her hair,
which was brown, but had the miraculous effect, somehow, of
looking golden.

Jo shook hands with her. Her hand was incredibly small, and
soft, so that you were afraid of crushing it, until you
discovered she had a firm little grip all her own. It surprised
and amused you, that grip, as does a baby’s unexpected clutch on
your patronizing forefinger. As Jo felt it in his own big clasp,
the strangest thing happened to him. Something inside Jo Hertz
stopped working for a moment, then lurched sickeningly, then
thumped like mad. It was his heart. He stood staring down at
her, and she up at him, until the others laughed. Then their
hands fell apart, lingeringly.

“Are you a schoolteacher, Emily?” he said.

“Kindergarten. It’s my first year. And don’t call me Emily,
please.”

“Why not? It’s your name. I think it’s the prettiest name in
the world.” Which he hadn’t meant to say at all. In fact, he
was perfectly aghast to find himself saying it. But he meant it.

At supper he passed her things, and stared, until everybody
laughed again, and Eva said acidly, “Why don’t you feed her?”

It wasn’t that Emily had an air of helplessness. She just made
him feel he wanted her to be helpless, so that he could help her.

Jo took her home, and from that Sunday night he began to strain
at the leash. He took his sisters out, dutifully, but he would
suggest, with a carelessness that deceived no one, “Don’t you
want one of your girl friends to come along? That little
What’s-her-name-Emily, or something. So long’s I’ve got three of
you, I might as well have a full squad.”

For a long time he didn’t know what was the matter with him. He
only knew he was miserable, and yet happy. Sometimes his heart
seemed to ache with an actual physical ache. He realized that he
wanted to do things for Emily. He wanted to buy things for
Emily–useless, pretty, expensive things that he couldn’t afford.

He wanted to buy everything that Emily needed, and everything
that Emily desired. He wanted to marry Emily. That was it. He
discovered that one day, with a shock, in the midst of a
transaction in the harness business. He stared at the man with
whom he was dealing until that startled person grew
uncomfortable. “What’s the matter, Hertz?” “Matter?” “You
look as if you’d seen a ghost or found a gold mine. I don’t know
which.” “Gold mine,” said Jo. And then, “No. Ghost.” For
he remembered that high, thin voice, and his promise. And the
harness business was slithering downhill with dreadful rapidity,
as the automobile business began its amazing climb. Jo tried to
stop it. But he was not that kind of businessman. It never
occurred to him to jump out of the down-going vehicle and catch
the up-going one. He stayed on, vainly applying brakes that
refused to work. “You know, Emily, I couldn’t support two
households now. Not the way things are. But if you’ll wait. If
you’ll only wait. The girls might–that is, Babe and Carrie–”

She was a sensible little thing, Emily. “Of course I’ll wait.
But we mustn’t just sit back and let the years go by. We’ve got
to help.”

She went about it as if she were already a little matchmaking
matron. She corralled all the men she had ever known and
introduced them to Babe, Carrie, and Eva separately, in pairs,
and en masse. She got up picnics. She stayed home while Jo took
the three about. When she was present she tried to look as plain
and obscure as possible, so that the sisters should show up to
advantage. She schemed, and planned, and contrived, and hoped;
and smiled into Jo’s despairing eyes.

And three years went by. Three precious years. Carrie still
taught school, and hated it. Eva kept house more and more
complainingly as prices advanced and allowance retreated. Stell
was still Babe, the family beauty. Emily’s hair, somehow, lost
its glint and began to look just plain brown. Her crinkliness
began to iron out.

“Now, look here!” Jo argued, desperately, one night. “We
could be happy, anyway. There’s plenty of room at the house.
Lots of people begin that way. Of course, I couldn’t give you
all I’d like to, at first. But maybe, after a while–” No
dreams of salons, and brocade, and velvet-footed servitors, and
satin damask now. Just two rooms, all their own, all alone, and
Emily to work for. That was his dream. But it seemed less
possible than that other absurd one had been.

Emily was as practical a little thing as she looked fluffy. She
knew women. Especially did she know Eva, and Carrie, and Babe.
She tried to imagine herself taking the household affairs and the
housekeeping pocket- book out of Eva’s expert hands. So then she
tried to picture herself allowing the reins of Jo’s house to
remain in Eva’s hands. And everything feminine and normal in her
rebelled. Emily knew she’d want to put away her own freshly
laundered linen, and smooth it, and pat it. She was that kind of
woman. She knew she’d want to do her own delightful haggling
with butcher and grocer. She knew she’d want to muss Jo’s hair,
and sit on his knee, and even quarrel with him, if necessary,
without the awareness of three ever-present pairs of maiden eyes
and ears.

“No! No! We’d only be miserable. I know. Even if they didn’t
object. And they would, Jo. Wouldn’t they?”

His silence was miserable assent. Then, “But you do love me.
don’t you, Emily?”

“I do, Jo. I love you–and love you–and love you. But, Jo,
I–can’t.”

“I know it, dear. I knew it all the time, really. I just
thought, maybe, somehow—-”

The two sat staring for a moment into space, their hands clasped.

Then they both shut their eyes with a little shudder, as though
what they saw was terrible to look upon. Emily’s hand, the tiny
hand that was so unexpectedly firm, tightened its hold on his,
and his crushed the absurd fingers until she winced with pain.

That was the beginning of the end, and they knew it.

Emily wasn’t the kind of girl who would be left to pine. There
are too many Jos in the world whose hearts are prone to lurch and
then thump at the feel of a soft, fluttering, incredibly small
hand in their grip. One year later Emily was married to a young
man whose father owned a large, pie- shaped slice of the
prosperous state of Michigan.

That being safely accomplished, there was something grimly
humorous in the trend taken by affairs in the old house on
Calumet. For Eva married. Married well, too, though he was a
great deal older than she. She went off in a hat she had copied
from a French model at Field’s, and a suit she had contrived with
a home dressmaker, aided by pressing on the part of the little
tailor in the basement over on Thirty-first Street. It was the
last of that, though. The next time they saw her, she had on a
hat that even she would have despaired of copying, and a suit
that sort of melted into your gaze. She moved to the North Side
(trust Eva for that), and Babe assumed the management of the
household on Calumet Avenue. It was rather a pinched little
household now, for the harness business shrank and shrank.

“I don’t see how you can expect me to keep house decently on
this!” Babe would say contemptuously. Babe’s nose, always a
little inclined to sharpness, had whittled down to a point of
late. “If you knew what Ben gives Eva.”

“It’s the best I can do, Sis. Business is something rotten.”

“Ben says if you had the least bit of—-” Ben was Eva’s
husband, and quotable, as are all successful men.

“I don’t care what Ben says,” shouted Jo, goaded into rage.
“I’m sick of your everlasting Ben. Go and get a Ben of your
own, why don’t you, if you’re so stuck on the way he does
things.”

And Babe did. She made a last desperate drive, aided by Eva, and
she captured a rather surprised young man in the brokerage way,
who had made up his mind not to marry for years and years. Eva
wanted to give her her wedding things, but at that Jo broke into
sudden rebellion.

“No, sir! No Ben is going to buy my sister’s wedding clothes,
understand? I guess I’m not broke–yet. I’ll furnish the money
for her things, and there’ll be enough of them, too.” Babe had
as useless a trousseau, and as filled with extravagant pink-and-
blue and lacy and frilly things, as any daughter of doting
parents. Jo seemed to find a grim pleasure in providing them.
But it left him pretty well pinched. After Babe’s marriage (she
insisted that they call her Estelle now) Jo sold the house on
Calumet. He and Carrie took one of those little flats that were
springing up, seemingly overnight, all through Chicago’s South
Side.

There was nothing domestic about Carrie. She had given up
teaching two years before, and had gone into social-service work
on the West Side. She had what is known as a legal mind–hard,
clear, orderly–and she made a great success of it. Her dream
was to live at the Settlement House and give all her time to the
work. Upon the little household she bestowed a certain amount of
grim, capable attention. It was the same kind of attention she
would have given a piece of machinery whose oiling and running
had been entrusted to her care. She hated it, and didn’t
hesitate to say so.

Jo took to prowling about department-store basements, and
household goods sections. He was always sending home a bargain
in a ham, or a sack of potatoes, or fifty pounds of sugar, or a
window clamp, or a new kind of paring knife. He was forever
doing odd jobs that the janitor should have done. It was the
domestic in him claiming its own.

Then, one night, Carrie came home with a dull glow in her
leathery cheeks, and her eyes alight with resolve. They had what
she called a plain talk.

“Listen, Jo. They’ve offered me the job of first assistant
resident worker. And I’m going to take it. Take it! I know
fifty other girls who’d give their ears for it. I go in next
month.”

They were at dinner. Jo looked up from his plate, dully. Then
he glanced around the little dining room, with its ugly tan walls
and its heavy, dark furniture (the Calumet Avenue pieces fitted
cumbersomely into the five-room flat).

“Away? Away from here, you mean–to live?”

Carrie laid down her fork. “Well, really, Jo! After all that
explanation.”

“But to go over there to live! Why, that neighborhood’s full of
dirt, and disease, and crime, and the Lord knows what all. I
can’t let you do that, Carrie.”

Carrie’s chin came up. She laughed a short little laugh. “Let
me! That’s eighteenth-century talk, Jo. My life’s my own to
live. I’m going.”

And she went.

Jo stayed on in the apartment until the lease was up. Then he
sold what furniture he could, stored or gave away the rest, and
took a room on Michigan Avenue in one of the old stone mansions
whose decayed splendor was being put to such purpose.

Jo Hertz was his own master. Free to marry. Free to come and
go. And he found he didn’t even think of marrying. He didn’t
even want to come or go, particularly. A rather frumpy old
bachelor, with thinning hair and a thickening neck.

Every Thursday evening he took dinner at Eva’s, and on Sunday
noon at Stell’s. He tucked his napkin under his chin and openly
enjoyed the homemade soup and the well-cooked meats. After
dinner he tried to talk business with Eva’s husband, or Stell’s.
His business talks were the old- fashioned kind, beginning:

“Well, now, looka here. Take, f’rinstance, your raw hides and
leathers.”

But Ben and George didn’t want to take, f’rinstance, your raw
hides and leathers. They wanted, when they took anything at all,
to take golf, or politics, or stocks. They were the modern type
of businessman who prefers to leave his work out of his play.
Business, with them, was a profession– a finely graded and
balanced thing, differing from Jo’s clumsy, down- hill style as
completely as does the method of a great criminal detective
differ from that of a village constable. They would listen,
restively, and say, “Uh-uh,” at intervals, and at the first
chance they would sort of fade out of the room, with a meaning
glance at their wives. Eva had two children now. Girls. They
treated Uncle Jo with good-natured tolerance. Stell had no
children. Uncle Jo degenerated, by almost imperceptible degrees,
from the position of honored guest, who is served with white
meat, to that of one who is content with a leg and one of those
obscure and bony sections which, after much turning with a
bewildered and investigating knife and fork, leave one baffled
and unsatisfied.

Eva and Stell got together and decided that Jo ought to marry.

“It isn’t natural,” Eva told him. “I never saw a man who took
so little interest in women.”

“Me!” protested Jo, almost shyly. “Women!”

“Yes. Of course. You act like a frightened schoolboy.”

So they had in for dinner certain friends and acquaintances of
fitting age. They spoke of them as “splendid girls.” Between
thirty-six and forty. They talked awfully well, in a firm, clear
way, about civics, and classes, and politics, and economics, and
boards. They rather terrified Jo. He didn’t understand much
that they talked about, and he felt humbly inferior, and yet a
little resentful, as if something had passed him by. He escorted
them home, dutifully, though they told him not to bother, and
they evidently meant it. They seemed capable not only of going
home quite unattended but of delivering a pointed lecture to any
highwayman or brawler who might molest them.

The following Thursday Eva would say, “How did you like her,
Jo?”

“Like who?” Joe would spar feebly.

“Miss Matthews.”

“Who’s she?”

“Now, don’t be funny, Jo. You know very well I mean the girl who
was here for dinner. The one who talked so well on the
emigration question.”

“Oh, her! Why, I liked her all right. Seems to be a smart
woman.”

“Smart! She’s a perfectly splendid girl.”

“Sure,” Jo would agree cheerfully.

“But didn’t you like her?”

“I can’t say I did, Eve. And I can’t say I didn’t. She made me
think a lot of a teacher I had in the fifth reader. Name of
Himes. As I recall her, she must have been a fine woman. But I
never thought of Himes as a woman at all. She was just
Teacher.”

“You make me tired,” snapped Eva impatiently. “A man of your
age. You don’t expect to marry a girl, do you? A child!”

“I don’t expect to marry anybody,” Jo had answered.

And that was the truth, lonely though he often was.

The following spring Eva moved to Winnetka. Anyone who got the
meaning of the Loop knows the significance of a move to a North
Shore suburb, and a house. Eva’s daughter, Ethel, was growing
up, and her mother had an eye on society.

That did away with Jo’s Thursday dinners. Then Stell’s husband
bought a car. They went out into the country every Sunday.
Stell said it was getting so that maids objected to Sunday
dinners, anyway. Besides, they were unhealthful, old-fashioned
things. They always meant to ask Jo to come along, but by the
time their friends were placed, and the lunch, and the boxes, and
sweaters, and George’s camera, and everything, there seemed to be
no room for a man of Jo’s bulk. So that eliminated the Sunday
dinners.

“Just drop in any time during the week,” Stell said, “for
dinner. Except Wednesday–that’s our bridge night–and Saturday.

And, of course, Thursday. Cook is out that night. Don’t wait for
me to phone.”

And so Jo drifted into that sad-eyed, dyspeptic family made up of
those you see dining in second-rate restaurants, their paper
propped up against the bowl of oyster crackers, munching solemnly
and with indifference to the stare of the passer-by surveying
them through the brazen plate-glass window.

And then came the war. The war that spelled death and
destruction to millions. The war that brought a fortune to Jo
Hertz, and transformed him, overnight, from a baggy-kneed old
bachelor whose business was a failure to a prosperous
manufacturer whose only trouble was the shortage in hides for the
making of his product. Leather! The armies of Europe called for
it. Harnesses! More harnesses! Straps! Millions of straps.
More! More!

The musty old harness business over on Lake Street was magically
changed from a dust-covered, dead-alive concern to an orderly
hive that hummed and glittered with success. Orders poured in.
Jo Hertz had inside information on the war. He knew about troops
and horses. He talked with French and English and Italian buyers
commissioned by their countries to get American-made supplies.
And now, when he said to Ben or George, “Take, f’rinstance, your
raw hides and leathers,” they listened with respectful
attention.

And then began the gay-dog business in the life of Jo Hertz. He
developed into a Loop-hound, ever keen on the scent of fresh
pleasure. That side of Jo Hertz which had been repressed and
crushed and ignored began to bloom, unhealthily. At first he
spent money on his rather contemptuous nieces. He sent them
gorgeous furs, and watch bracelets, and bags. He took two
expensive rooms at a downtown hotel, and there was something more
tear-compelling than grotesque about the way he gloated over the
luxury of a separate ice-water tap in the bathroom. He explained
it.

“Just turn it on. Any hour of the day or night. Ice water!”

He bought a car. Naturally. A glittering affair; in color a
bright blue, with pale-blue leather straps and a great deal of
gold fittings, and special tires. Eva said it was the kind of
thing a chorus girl would use, rather than an elderly
businessman. You saw him driving about in it, red-faced and
rather awkward at the wheel. You saw him, too, in the Pompeian
Room at the Congress Hotel of a Saturday afternoon when
roving-eyed matrons in mink coats are wont to congregate to sip
pale-amber drinks. Actors grew to recognize the semibald head and
the shining, round, good- natured face looming out at them from
the dim well of the theater, and sometimes, in a musical show,
they directed a quip at him, and he liked it. He could pick out
the critics as they came down the aisle, and even had a nodding
acquaintance with two of them.

“Kelly, of the Herald,” he would say carelessly. “Bean. of
the Trib. They’re all afraid of him.”

So he frolicked, ponderously. In New York he might have been
called a Man About Town.

And he was lonesome. He was very lonesome. So he searched about
in his mind and brought from the dim past the memory of the
luxuriously furnished establishment of which he used to dream in
the evenings when he dozed over his paper in the old house on
Calumet. So he rented an apartment, many-roomed and expensive,
with a manservant in charge, and furnished it in styles and
periods ranging through all the Louis. The living room was
mostly rose color. It was like an unhealthy and bloated boudoir.
And yet there was nothing sybaritic or uncleanly in the sight of
this paunchy, middle-aged man sinking into the rosy-cushioned
luxury of his ridiculous home. It was a frank and naive
indulgence of long-starved senses, and there was in it a great
resemblance to the rolling-eyed ecstasy of a schoolboy smacking
his lips over an all-day sucker.

The war went on, and on, and on. And the money continued to roll
in– a flood of it. Then, one afternoon, Eva, in town on
shopping bent, entered a small, exclusive, and expensive shop on
Michigan Avenue. Eva’s weakness was hats. She was seeking a hat
now. She described what she sought with a languid conciseness,
and stood looking about her after the saleswoman had vanished in
quest of it. The room was becomingly rose-illumined and somewhat
dim, so that some minutes had passed before she realized that a
man seated on a raspberry brocade settee not five feet away– a
man with a walking stick, and yellow gloves, and tan spats, and a
check suit–was her brother Jo. From him Eva’s wild-eyed glance
leaped to the woman who was trying on hats before one of the many
long mirrors. She was seated, and a saleswoman was exclaiming
discreetly at her elbow.

Eva turned sharply and encountered her own saleswoman returning
hat-laden. “Not today,” she gasped. “I’m feeling ill.
Suddenly.” And almost ran from the room.

That evening she told Stell, relating her news in that telephone
pidgin English devised by every family of married sisters as
protection against the neighbors. Translated, it ran thus:

“He looked straight at me. My dear, I thought I’d die! But at
least he had sense enough not to speak. She was one of those
limp, willowy creatures with the greediest eyes that she tried to
keep softened to a baby stare, and couldn’t, she was so crazy to
get her hands on those hats. I saw it all in one awful minute.
You know the way I do. I suppose some people would call her
pretty. I don’t. And her color. Well! And the most expensive-
looking hats. Not one of them under seventy-five. Isn’t it
disgusting! At his age! Suppose Ethel had been with me!”

The next time it was Stell who saw them. In a restaurant. She
said it spoiled her evening. And the third time it was Ethel.
She was one of the guests at a theater party given by Nicky
Overton II. The North Shore Overtons. Lake Forest. They came
in late, and occupied the entire third row at the opening
performance of Believe Me! And Ethel was Nicky’s partner. She
was glowing like a rose. When the lights went up after the first
act Ethel saw that her uncle Jo was seated just ahead of her with
what she afterward described as a blonde. Then her uncle had
turned around, and seeing her, had been surprised into a smile
that spread genially all over his plump and rubicund face. Then
he had turned to face forward again, quickly.

“Who’s the old bird?” Nicky had asked. Ethel had pretended not
to hear, so he had asked again.

“My uncle,” Ethel answered, and flushed all over her delicate
face, and down to her throat. Nicky had looked at the blonde,
and his eyebrows had gone up ever so slightly.

It spoiled Ethel’s evening. More than that, as she told her
mother of it later, weeping, she declared it had spoiled her
life.

Eva talked it over with her husband in that intimate hour that
precedes bedtime. She gesticulated heatedly with her hairbrush.

“It’s disgusting, that’s what it is. Perfectly disgusting.
There’s no fool like an old fool. Imagine! A creature like
that. At his time of life.”

“Well, I don’t know,” Ben said, and even grinned a little. “I
suppose a boy’s got to sow his wild oats sometime.”

“Don’t be any more vulgar than you can help,” Eva retorted.
“And I think you know, as well as I, what it means to have that
Overton boy interested in Ethel.”

“If he’s interested in her,” Ben blundered, “I guess the fact
that Ethel’s uncle went to the theater with someone who isn’t
Ethel’s aunt won’t cause a shudder to run up and down his frail
young frame, will it?”

“All right,” Eva had retorted. “If you’re not man enough to
stop it, I’ll have to, that’s all. I’m going up there with Stell
this week.”

They did not notify Jo of their coming. Eva telephoned his
apartment when she knew he would be out, and asked his man if he
expected his master home to dinner that evening. The man had
said yes. Eva arranged to meet Stell in town. They would drive
to Jo’s apartment together, and wait for him there.

When she reached the city Eva found turmoil there. The first of
the American troops to be sent to France were leaving. Michigan
Boulevard was a billowing, surging mass: flags, pennants,
banners, crowds. All the elements that make for demonstration.
And over the whole-quiet. No holiday crowd, this. A solid,
determined mass of people waiting patient hours to see the
khaki-clads go by. Three years had brought them to a clear
knowledge of what these boys were going to.

“Isn’t it dreadful!” Stell gasped.

“Nicky Overton’s too young, thank goodness.”

Their car was caught in the jam. When they moved at all, it was
by inches. When at last they reached Jo’s apartment they were
flushed, nervous, apprehensive. But he had not yet come in. So
they waited.

No, they were not staying to dinner with their brother, they told
the relieved houseman.

Stell and Eva, sunk in rose-colored cushions, viewed the place
with disgust and some mirth. They rather avoided each other’s
eyes.

“Carrie ought to be here,” Eva said. They both smiled at the
thought of the austere Carrie in the midst of those rosy
cushions, and hangings, and lamps. Stell rose and began to walk
about restlessly. She picked up a vase and laid it down;
straightened a picture. Eva got up, too, and wandered into the
hall. She stood there a moment, listening. Then she turned and
passed into Jo’s bedroom, Stell following. And there you knew Jo
for what he was.

This room was as bare as the other had been ornate. It was Jo,
the clean-minded and simplehearted, in revolt against the cloying
luxury with which he had surrounded himself. The bedroom, of all
rooms in any house, reflects the personality of its occupant.
True, the actual furniture was paneled, cupid-surmounted, and
ridiculous. It had been the fruit of Jo’s first orgy of the
senses. But now it stood out in that stark little room with an
air as incongruous and ashamed as that of a pink tarlatan
danseuse who finds herself in a monk’s cell. None of those wall
pictures with which bachelor bedrooms are reputed to be hung. No
satin slippers. No scented notes. Two plain-backed military
brushes on the chiffonier (and he so nearly hairless!). A little
orderly stack of books on the table near the bed. Eva fingered
their titles and gave a little gasp. One of them was on
gardening.

“Well, of all things!” exclaimed Stell. A book on the war, by
an Englishman. A detective story of the lurid type that lulls us
to sleep. His shoes ranged in a careful row in the closet, with
a shoe tree in every one of them. There was something speaking
about them. They looked so human. Eva shut the door on them
quickly. Some bottles on the dresser. A jar of pomade. An
ointment such as a man uses who is growing bald and is panic-
stricken too late. An insurance calendar on the wall. Some
rhubarb-and- soda mixture on the shelf in the bathroom, and a
little box of pepsin tablets.

“Eats all kinds of things at all hours of the night,” Eva said,
and wandered out into the rose-colored front room again with the
air of one who is chagrined at her failure to find what she has
sought. Stell followed her furtively.

“Where do you suppose he can be?” she demanded. “It’s”–she
glanced at her wrist–”why, it’s after six!”

And then there was a little click. The two women sat up, tense.
The door opened. Jo came in. He blinked a little. The two
women in the rosy room stood up.

“Why–Eve! Why, Babe! Well! Why didn’t you let me know?”

“We were just about to leave. We thought you weren’t coming
home.”

Jo came in slowly.

“I was in the jam on Michigan, watching the boys go by.” He
sat down, heavily. The light from the window fell on him. And
you saw that his eyes were red.

He had found himself one of the thousands in the jam on Michigan
Avenue, as he said. He had a place near the curb, where his big
frame shut off the view of the unfortunates behind him. He
waited with the placid interest of one who has subscribed to all
the funds and societies to which a prosperous, middle-aged
businessman is called upon to subscribe in war-time. Then, just
as he was about to leave, impatient at the delay, the crowd had
cried, with a queer, dramatic, exultant note in its voice, “Here
they come! Here come the boys!”

Just at that moment two little, futile, frenzied fists began to
beat a mad tattoo on Jo Hertz’s broad back. Jo tried to turn in
the crowd, all indignant resentment. “Say, looka here!”

The little fists kept up their frantic beating and pushing. And
a voice–a choked, high little voice–cried, “Let me by! I
can’t see! You MAN, you! You big fat man! My boy’s going by–to
war–and I can’t see! Let me by!”

Jo scrooged around, still keeping his place. He looked down.
And upturned to him in agonized appeal was the face of Emily.
They stared at each other for what seemed a long, long time. It
was really only the fraction of a second. Then Jo put one great
arm firmly around Emily’s waist and swung her around in front of
him. His great bulk protected her. Emily was clinging to his
hand. She was breathing rapidly, as if she had been running.
Her eyes were straining up the street.

“Why, Emily, how in the world—-!”

“I ran away. Fred didn’t want me to come. He said it would
excite me too much.”

“Fred?”

“My husband. He made me promise to say good-by to Jo at home.”

“Jo?”

“Jo’s my boy. And he’s going to war. So I ran away. I had to
see him. I had to see him go.”

She was dry-eyed. Her gaze was straining up the street.

“Why, sure,” said Jo. “Of course you want to see him.” And
then the crowd gave a great roar. There came over Jo a feeling
of weakness. He was trembling. The boys went marching by.

“There he is,” Emily shrilled, above the din. “There he is!
There he is! There he—-” And waved a futile little hand. It
wasn’t so much a wave as a clutching. A clutching after
something beyond her reach.

“Which one? Which one, Emily?”

“The handsome one. The handsome one.” Her voice quavered and
died.

Jo put a steady hand on her shoulder. “Point him out,” he
commanded “Show me.” And the next instant, “Never mind. I
see him.”

Somehow, miraculously, he had picked him from among the hundreds.
Had picked him as surely as his own father might have. It was
Emily’s boy. He was marching by, rather stiffly. He was
nineteen, and fun-loving, and he had a girl, and he didn’t
particularly want to go to France and–to go to France. But more
than he had hated going, he had hated not to go. So he marched
by, looking straight ahead, his jaw set so that his chin stuck
out just a little. Emily’s boy.

Jo looked at him, and his face flushed purple. His eyes, the
hard-boiled eyes of a Loop-hound, took on the look of a sad old
man. And suddenly he was no longer Jo, the sport; old J. Hertz,
the gay dog. He was Jo Hertz, thirty, in love with life, in love
with Emily, and with the stinging blood of young manhood coursing
through his veins.

Another minute and the boy had passed on up the broad street–the
fine, flag-bedecked street–just one of a hundred service hats
bobbing in rhythmic motion like sandy waves lapping a shore and
flowing on.

Then he disappeared altogether.

Emily was clinging to Jo. She was mumbling something, over and
over. “I can’t. I can’t. Don’t ask me to. I can’t let him go.

Like that. I can’t.”

Jo said a queer thing.

“Why, Emily! We wouldn’t have him stay home, would we? We
wouldn’t want him to do anything different, would we? Not our
boy. I’m glad he enlisted. I’m proud of him. So are you
glad.”

Little by little he quieted her. He took her to the car that was
waiting, a worried chauffeur in charge. They said good-by,
awkwardly. Emily’s face was a red, swollen mass.

So it was that when Jo entered his own hallway half an hour later
he blinked, dazedly, and when the light from the window fell on
him you saw that his eyes were red.

Eva was not one to beat about the bush. She sat forward in her
chair, clutching her bag rather nervously.

“Now, look here, Jo. Stell and I are here for a reason. We’re
here to tell you that this thing’s going to stop.”

“Thing? Stop?”

“You know very well what I mean. You saw me at the milliner’s
that day. And night before last, Ethel. We’re all disgusted.
If you must go about with people like that, please have some
sense of decency.”

Something gathering in Jo’s face should have warned her. But he
was slumped down in his chair in such a huddle, and he looked so
old and fat that she did not heed it. She went on. “You’ve got
us to consider. Your sisters. And your nieces. Not to speak of
your own—-”

But he got to his feet then, shaking, and at what she saw in his
face even Eva faltered and stopped. It wasn’t at all the face of
a fat, middle-aged sport. It was a face Jovian, terrible.

“You!” he began, low-voiced, ominous. “You!” He raised a
great fist high. “You two murderers! You didn’t consider me,
twenty years ago. You come to me with talk like that. Where’s
my boy! You killed him, you two, twenty years ago. And now he
belongs to somebody else. Where’s my son that should have gone
marching by today?” He flung his arms out in a great gesture of
longing. The red veins stood out on his forehead. “Where’s my
son! Answer me that, you two selfish, miserable women. Where’s
my son!” Then, as they huddled together, frightened, wild-eyed.

“Out of my house! Out of my house! Before I hurt you!”

They fled, terrified. The door banged behind them.

Jo stood, shaking, in the center of the room. Then he reached
for a chair, gropingly, and sat down. He passed one moist,
flabby hand over his forehead and it came away wet. The
telephone rang. He sat still. It sounded far away and
unimportant, like something forgotten. But it rang and rang
insistently. Jo liked to answer his telephone when he was at
home.

“Hello!” He knew instantly the voice at the other end.

“That you, Jo?” it said.

“Yes.”

“How’s my boy?”

“I’m–all right.”

“Listen, Jo. The crowd’s coming over tonight. I’ve fixed up a
little poker game for you. Just eight of us.”

“I can’t come tonight, Gert.”

“Can’t! Why not?”

“I’m not feeling so good.”

“You just said you were all right.”

“I AM all right. Just kind of tired.”

The voice took on a cooing note. “Is my Joey tired? Then he
shall be all comfy on the sofa, and he doesn’t need to play if he
don’t want to. No, sir.”

Jo stood staring at the black mouthpiece of the telephone. He
was seeing a procession go marching by. Boys, hundreds of boys,
in khaki.

“Hello! Hello!” The voice took on an anxious note. “Are you
there?”

“Yes,” wearily.

“Jo, there’s something the matter. You’re sick. I’m coming
right over.”

“No!” “Why not? You sound as if you’d been sleeping. Look
here—-”

“Leave me alone!” cried Jo, suddenly, and the receiver clacked
onto the hook. “Leave me alone. Leave me alone.” Long after
the connection had been broken.

He stood staring at the instrument with unseeing eyes. Then he
turned and walked into the front room. All the light had gone
out of it. Dusk had come on. All the light had gone out of
everything. The zest had gone out of life. The game was
over–the game he had been playing against loneliness and
disappointment. And he was just a tired old man. A lonely,
tired old man in a ridiculous rose-colored room that had grown,
all of a sudden, drab.

Millie Whitcomb, of the fancy goods and notions, beckoned me with
her finger. I had been standing at Kate O’Malley’s counter,
pretending to admire her new basket-weave suitings, but in reality
reveling in her droll account of how, in the train coming up from
Chicago, Mrs. Judge Porterfield had worn the negro porter’s coat
over her chilly shoulders in mistake for her husband’s. Kate
O’Malley can tell a funny story in a way to make the after-dinner
pleasantries of a Washington diplomat sound like the clumsy jests
told around the village grocery stove.

“I wanted to tell you that I read that last story of yours,”
said Millie, sociably, when I had strolled over to her counter,
“and I liked it, all but the heroine. She had an `adorable throat’
and hair that `waved away from her white brow,’ and eyes that `now
were blue and now gray.’ Say, why don’t you write a story about an
ugly girl?”

“My land!” protested I. “It’s bad enough trying to make them
accept my stories as it is. That last heroine was a raving beauty,
but she came back eleven times before the editor of Blakely’s
succumbed to her charms.”

Millie’s fingers were busy straightening the contents of a
tray of combs and imitation jet barrettes. Millie’s fingers were
not intended for that task. They are slender, tapering fingers,
pink-tipped and sensitive.

“I should think,” mused she, rubbing a cloudy piece of jet
with a bit of soft cloth, “that they’d welcome a homely one with
relief. These goddesses are so cloying.”

Millie Whitcomb’s black hair is touched with soft mists of
gray, and she wears lavender shirtwaists and white stocks edged
with lavender. There is a Colonial air about her that has nothing
to do with celluloid combs and imitation jet barrettes. It
breathes of dim old rooms, rich with the tones of mahogany and old
brass, and Millie in the midst of it, gray-gowned, a soft white
fichu crossed upon her breast.

In our town the clerks are not the pert and gum-chewing young
persons that story-writers are wont to describe. The girls at
Bascom’s are institutions. They know us all by our first names,
and our lives are as an open book to them. Kate O’Malley, who has
been at Bascom’s for so many years that she is rumored to have
stock in the company, may be said to govern the fashions of our
town. She is wont to say, when we express a fancy for gray as the
color of our new spring suit:

“Oh, now, Nellie, don’t get gray again. You had it year
before last, and don’t you think it was just the least leetle bit
trying? Let me show you that green that came in yesterday. I said
the minute I clapped my eyes on it that it was just the color for
you, with your brown hair and all.”

And we end by deciding on the green.

The girls at Bascom’s are not gossips–they are too busy for
that–but they may be said to be delightfully well informed. How
could they be otherwise when we go to Bascom’s for our wedding
dresses and party favors and baby flannels? There is news at
Bascom’s that our daily paper never hears of, and wouldn’t dare
print if it did.

So when Millie Whitcomb, of the fancy goods and notions,
expressed her hunger for a homely heroine, I did not resent the
suggestion. On the contrary, it sent me home in thoughtful mood,
for Millie Whitcomb has acquired a knowledge of human nature in the
dispensing of her fancy goods and notions. It set me casting about
for a really homely heroine.

There never has been a really ugly heroine in fiction.
Authors have started bravely out to write of an unlovely woman, but
they never have had the courage to allow her to remain plain. On
Page 237 she puts on a black lace dress and red roses, and the
combination brings out unexpected tawny lights in her hair, and
olive tints in her cheeks, and there she is, the same old beautiful
heroine. Even in the “Duchess” books one finds the simple Irish
girl, on donning a green corduroy gown cut square at the neck,
transformed into a wild-rose beauty, at sight of whom a ball-room
is hushed into admiring awe. There’s the case of jane Eyre, too.
She is constantly described as plain and mouse-like, but there are
covert hints as to her gray eyes and slender figure and clear skin,
and we have a sneaking notion that she wasn’t such a fright after
all.

Therefore, when I tell you that I am choosing Pearlie Schultz
as my leading lady you are to understand that she is ugly, not only
when the story opens, but to the bitter end. In the first place,
Pearlie is fat. Not, plump, or rounded, or dimpled, or deliciously
curved, but FAT. She bulges in all the wrong places, including her
chin. (Sister, who has a way of snooping over my desk in my
absence, says that I may as well drop this now, because nobody
would ever read it, anyway, least of all any sane editor. I
protest when I discover that Sis has been over my papers. It
bothers me. But she says you have to do these things when you have
a genius in the house, and cites the case of Kipling’s
“Recessional,” which was rescued from the depths of his wastebasket
by his wife.)

Pearlie Schultz used to sit on the front porch summer evenings
and watch the couples stroll by, and weep in her heart. A fat girl
with a fat girl’s soul is a comedy. But a fat girl with a thin
girl’s soul is a tragedy. Pearlie, in spite of her two hundred
pounds, had the soul of a willow wand.

The walk in front of Pearlie’s house was guarded by a row of
big trees that cast kindly shadows. The strolling couples used to
step gratefully into the embrace of these shadows, and from them
into other embraces. Pearlie, sitting on the porch, could see them
dimly, although they could not see her. She could not help
remarking that these strolling couples were strangely lacking in
sprightly conversation. Their remarks were but fragmentary,
disjointed affairs, spoken in low tones with a queer, tremulous
note in them. When they reached the deepest, blackest, kindliest
shadow, which fell just before the end of the row of trees, the
strolling couples almost always stopped, and then there came a
quick movement, and a little smothered cry from the girl, and then
a sound, and then a silence. Pearlie, sitting alone on the porch
in the dark, listened to these things and blushed furiously.
Pearlie had never strolled into the kindly shadows with a little
beating of the heart, and she had never been surprised with a quick
arm about her and eager lips pressed warmly against her own.

In the daytime Pearlie worked as public stenographer at the
Burke Hotel. She rose at seven in the morning, and rolled for
fifteen minutes, and lay on her back and elevated her heels in the
air, and stood stiff-kneed while she touched the floor with her
finger tips one hundred times, and went without her breakfast. At
the end of each month she usually found that she weighed three
pounds more than she had the month before.

The folks at home never joked with Pearlie about her weight.
Even one’s family has some respect for a life sorrow. Whenever
Pearlie asked that inevitable question of the fat woman: “Am I as
fat as she is?” her mother always answered: “You! Well, I should
hope not! You’re looking real peaked lately, Pearlie. And your
blue skirt just ripples in the back, it’s getting so big for you.”

Of such blessed stuff are mothers made.

But if the gods had denied Pearlie all charms of face or form,
they had been decent enough to bestow on her one gift. Pearlie
could cook like an angel; no, better than an angel, for no angel
could be a really clever cook and wear those flowing kimono-like
sleeves. They’d get into the soup. Pearlie could take a piece of
rump and some suet and an onion and a cup or so of water, and
evolve a pot roast that you could cut with a fork. She could turn
out a surprisingly good cake with surprisingly few eggs, all
covered with white icing, and bearing cunning little jelly figures
on its snowy bosom. She could beat up biscuits that fell apart at
the lightest pressure, revealing little pools of golden butter
within. Oh, Pearlie could cook!

On week days Pearlie rattled the typewriter keys, but on
Sundays she shooed her mother out of the kitchen. Her mother went,
protesting faintly:

“Now, Pearlie, don’t fuss so for dinner. You ought to get
your rest on Sunday instead of stewing over a hot stove all
morning.”

“Hot fiddlesticks, ma,” Pearlie would say, cheerily. “It
ain’t hot, because it’s a gas stove. And I’ll only get fat if I
sit around. You put on your black-and-white and go to church.
Call me when you’ve got as far as your corsets, and I’ll puff your
hair for you in the back.”

In her capacity of public stenographer at the Burke Hotel, it
was Pearlie’s duty to take letters dictated by traveling men and
beginning: “Yours of the 10th at hand. In reply would say. . . .”
or: “Enclosed please find, etc.” As clinching proof of her
plainness it may be stated that none of the traveling men, not even
Max Baum, who was so fresh that the girl at the cigar counter
actually had to squelch him, ever called Pearlie “baby doll,” or
tried to make a date with her. Not that Pearlie would ever have
allowed them to. But she never had had to reprove them. During
pauses in dictation she had a way of peering near-sightedly, over
her glasses at the dapper, well-dressed traveling salesman who was
rolling off the items on his sale bill. That is a trick which
would make the prettiest kind of a girl look owlish.

On the night that Sam Miller strolled up to talk to her,
Pearlie was working late. She had promised to get out a long and
intricate bill for Max Baum, who travels for Kuhn and Klingman, so
that he might take the nine o’clock evening train. The
irrepressible Max had departed with much eclat and clatter, and
Pearlie was preparing to go home when Sam approached her.

Sam had just come in from the Gayety Theater across the
street, whither he had gone in a vain search for amusement after
supper. He had come away in disgust. A soiled soubrette with
orange-colored hair and baby socks had swept her practiced eye over
the audience, and, attracted by Sam’s good-looking blond head in
the second row, had selected him as the target of her song. She
had run up to the extreme edge of the footlights at the risk of
teetering over, and had informed Sam through the medium of song–to
the huge delight of the audience, and to Sam’s red-faced
discomfiture–that she liked his smile, and he was just her style,
and just as cute as he could be, and just the boy for her. On
reaching the chorus she had whipped out a small, round mirror and,
assisted by the calcium-light man in the rear, had thrown a
wretched little spotlight on Sam’s head.

Ordinarily, Sam would not have minded it. But that evening,
in the vest pocket just over the place where he supposed his heart
to be reposed his girl’s daily letter. They were to be married on
Sam’s return to New York from his first long trip. In the letter
near his heart she had written prettily and seriously about
traveling men, and traveling men’s wives, and her little code for
both. The fragrant, girlish, grave little letter had caused Sam to
sour on the efforts of the soiled soubrette.

As soon as possible he had fled up the aisle and across the
street to the hotel writing-room. There he had spied Pearlie’s
good-humored, homely face, and its contrast with the silly, red
and-white countenance of the unlaundered soubrette had attracted
his homesick heart.

Pearlie had taken some letters from him earlier in the day.
Now, in his hunger for companionship, he, strolled up to her desk,
just as she was putting her typewriter to bed.

“Gee I This is a lonesome town!” said Sam, smiling down at
her.

Pearlie glanced up at him, over her glasses. “I guess you
must be from New York,” she said. “I’ve heard a real New Yorker
can get bored in Paris. In New York the sky is bluer, and the
grass is greener, and the girls are prettier, and the steaks are
thicker, and the buildings are higher, and the streets are wider,
and the air is finer, than the sky, or the grass, or the girls, or
the steaks, or the air of any place else in the world. Ain’t
they?”

“Oh, now,” protested Sam, “quit kiddin’ me! You’d be lonesome
for the little old town, too, if you’d been born and dragged up in
it, and hadn’t seen it for four months.”

“New to the road, aren’t you?” asked Pearlie.

Sam blushed a little. “How did you know?”

“Well, you generally can tell. They don’t know what to do
with themselves evenings, and they look rebellious when they go
into the dining-room. The old-timers just look resigned.”

“You’ve picked up a thing or two around here, haven’t you? I
wonder if the time will ever come when I’ll look resigned to a
hotel dinner, after four months of ‘em. Why, girl, I’ve got so I
just eat the things that are covered up–like baked potatoes in the
shell, and soft boiled eggs, and baked apples, and oranges that I
can peel, and nuts.”

“Why, you poor kid,” breathed Pearlie, her pale eyes fixed on
him in motherly pity. “You oughtn’t to do that. You’ll get so
thin your girl won’t know you.”

Sam looked up quickly. “How in thunderation did you
know—-?”

Pearlie was pinning on her hat, and she spoke succinctly, her
hatpins between her teeth: “You’ve been here two days now, and I
notice you dictate all your letters except the longest one, and you
write that one off in a corner of the writing-room all by yourself,
with your cigar just glowing like a live coal, and you squint up
through the smoke, and grin to yourself.”

“Say, would you mind if I walked home with you?” asked Sam.

If Pearlie was surprised, she was woman enough not to show
it. She picked up her gloves and hand bag, locked her drawer with
a click, and smiled her acquiescence. And when Pearlie smiled she
was awful.

It was a glorious evening in the early summer, moonless,
velvety, and warm. As they strolled homeward, Sam told her all
about the Girl, as is the way of traveling men the world over. He
told her about the tiny apartment they had taken, and how he would
be on the road only a couple of years more, as this was just a
try-out that the firm always insisted on. And they stopped under
an arc light while Sam showed her the picture in his watch, as is
also the way of traveling men since time immemorial.

Pearlie made an excellent listener. He was so boyish, and so
much in love, and so pathetically eager to make good with the firm,
and so happy to have some one in whom to confide.

“But it’s a dog’s life, after all,” reflected Sam, again after
the fashion of all traveling men. “Any fellow on the road earns
his salary these days, you bet. I used to think it was all getting
up when you felt like it, and sitting in the big front window of
the hotel, smoking a cigar and watching the pretty girls go by. I
wasn’t wise to the packing, and the unpacking, and the rotten train
service, and the grouchy customers, and the canceled bills, and the
grub.”

Pearlie nodded understandingly. “A man told me once that
twice a week regularly he dreamed of the way his wife cooked
noodle-soup.”

“My folks are German,” explained Sam. “And my mother–can she
cook! Well, I just don’t seem able to get her potato pancakes out
of my mind. And her roast beef tasted and looked like roast beef,
and not like a wet red flannel rag.”

At this moment Pearlie was seized with a brilliant idea.
“To-morrow’s Sunday. You’re going to Sunday here, aren’t you?
Come over and eat your dinner with us. If you have forgotten the
taste of real food, I can give you a dinner that’ll jog your
memory.”

“Oh, really,” protested Sam. “You’re awfully good, but I
couldn’t think of it. I—-”

“You needn’t be afraid. I’m not letting you in for anything.
I may be homelier than an English suffragette, and I know my lines
are all bumps, but there’s one thing you can’t take away from me,
and that’s my cooking hand. I can cook, boy, in a way to make your
mother’s Sunday dinner, with company expected, look like Mrs.
Newlywed’s first attempt at `riz’ biscuits. And I don’t mean any
disrespect to your mother when I say it. I’m going to have
noodle-soup, and fried chicken, and hot biscuits, and creamed beans
from our own garden, and strawberry shortcake with real—-”

“Hush!” shouted Sam. “If I ain’t there, you’ll know that I
passed away during the night, and you can telephone the clerk to
break in my door.”

The Grim Reaper spared him, and Sam came, and was introduced
to the family, and ate. He put himself in a class with Dr.
Johnson, and Ben Brust, and Gargantua, only that his table manners
were better. He almost forgot to talk during the soup, and he came
back three times for chicken, and by the time the strawberry
shortcake was half consumed he was looking at Pearlie with a sort
of awe in his eyes.

That night he came over to say good-bye before taking his
train out for Ishpeming. He and Pearlie strolled down as far as
the park and back again.

“I didn’t eat any supper,” said Sam. “It would have been
sacrilege, after that dinner of yours. Honestly, I don’t know how
to thank you, being so good to a stranger like me. When I come
back next trip, I expect to have the Kid with me, and I want her to
meet you, by George! She’s a winner and a pippin, but she wouldn’t
know whether a porterhouse was stewed or frapped. I’ll tell her
about you, you bet. In the meantime, if there’s anything I can do
for you, I’m yours to command.”

Pearlie turned to him suddenly. “You see that clump of thick
shadows ahead of us, where those big trees stand in front of our
house?”

“Sure,” replied Sam.

“Well, when we step into that deepest, blackest shadow, right
in front of our porch, I want you to reach up, and put your arm
around me and kiss me on the mouth, just once. And when you get
back to New York you can tell your girl I asked you to.”

There broke from him a little involuntary exclamation. It
might have been of pity, and it might have been of surprise. It
had in it something of both, but nothing of mirth. And as they
stepped into the depths of the soft black shadows he took off his
smart straw sailor, which was so different from the sailors that
the boys in our town wear. And there was in the gesture something
of reverence.

Millie Whitcomb didn’t like the story of the homely heroine,
after all. She says that a steady diet of such literary fare would
give her blue indigestion. Also she objects on the ground that no
one got married–that is, the heroine didn’t. And she says that a
heroine who does not get married isn’t a heroine at all. She
thinks she prefers the pink-cheeked, goddess kind, in the end.

The City was celebrating New Year’s Eve.
Spelled thus, with a capital C, know it can mean but New York.
In the Pink Fountain room of the Newest Hotel all those grand old
forms and customs handed down to us for the occasion were being
rigidly observed in all their original quaintness. The Van Dyked
man who looked like a Russian Grand Duke (he really was a
chiropodist) had drunk champagne out of the pink satin slipper of
the lady who behaved like an actress (she was forelady at Schmaus’
Wholesale Millinery, eighth floor). The two respectable married
ladies there in the corner had been kissed by each other’s
husbands. The slim, Puritan-faced woman in white, with her black
hair so demurely parted and coiled in a sleek knot, had risen
suddenly from her place and walked indolently to the edge of the
plashing pink fountain in the center of the room, had stood
contemplating its shallows with a dreamy half-smile on her lips,
and then had lifted her slim legs slowly and gracefully over its
fern-fringed basin and had waded into its chilling midst, trailing
her exquisite white satin and chiffon draperies after her, and
scaring the goldfish into fits. The loudest scream of approbation
had come from the yellow-haired, loose-lipped youth who had made
the wager, and lost it. The heavy blonde in the inevitable violet
draperies showed signs of wanting to dance on the table. Her
companion–a structure made up of layer upon layer, and fold upon
fold of flabby tissue–knew all the waiters by their right names,
and insisted on singing with the orchestra and beating time with a
rye roll. The clatter of dishes was giving way to the clink of
glasses.

In the big, bright kitchen back, of the Pink Fountain room
Miss Gussie Fink sat at her desk, calm, watchful, insolent-eyed, a
goddess sitting in judgment. On the pay roll of the Newest Hotel
Miss Gussie Fink’s name appeared as kitchen checker, but her
regular job was goddessing. Her altar was a high desk in a corner
of the busy kitchen, and it was an altar of incense, of
burnt-offerings, and of showbread. Inexorable as a goddess of the
ancients was Miss Fink, and ten times as difficult to appease. For
this is the rule of the Newest Hotel, that no waiter may carry his
laden tray restaurantward until its contents have been viewed and
duly checked by the eye and hand of Miss Gussie Fink, or her
assistants. Flat upon the table must go every tray, off must go
each silver dish-cover, lifted must be each napkin to disclose its
treasure of steaming corn or hot rolls. Clouds of incense rose
before Miss Gussie Fink and she sniffed it unmoved, her eyes,
beneath level brows, regarding savory broiler or cunning ice with
equal indifference, appraising alike lobster cocktail or onion
soup, traveling from blue points to brie. Things a la and things
glace were all one to her. Gazing at food was Miss Gussie Fink’s
occupation, and just to see the way she regarded a boneless squab
made you certain that she never ate.

In spite of the I-don’t-know-how-many (see ads) New Year’s Eve
diners for whom food was provided that night, the big, busy kitchen
was the most orderly, shining, spotless place imaginable. But Miss
Gussie Fink was the neatest, most immaculate object in all that
great, clean room. There was that about her which suggested
daisies in a field, if you know what I mean. This may have been
due to the fact that her eyes were brown while her hair was gold,
or it may have been something about the way her collars fitted
high, and tight, and smooth, or the way her close white sleeves
came down to meet her pretty hands, or the way her shining hair
sprang from her forehead. Also the smooth creaminess of her clear
skin may have had something to do with it. But privately, I think
it was due to the way she wore her shirtwaists. Miss Gussie Fink
could wear a starched white shirtwaist under a close-fitting winter
coat, remove the coat, run her right forefinger along her collar’s
edge and her left thumb along the back of her belt and disclose to
the admiring world a blouse as unwrinkled and unsullied as though
it had just come from her own skilful hands at the ironing board.
Miss Gussie Fink was so innately, flagrantly, beautifully
clean-looking that–well, there must be a stop to this description.

She was the kind of girl you’d like to see behind the counter of
your favorite delicatessen, knowing that you need not shudder as
her fingers touch your Sunday night supper slices of tongue, and
Swiss cheese, and ham. No girl had ever dreamed of refusing to
allow Gussie to borrow her chamois for a second.

To-night Miss Fink had come on at 10 P.M., which was just two
hours later than usual. She knew that she was to work until 6
A.M., which may have accounted for the fact that she displayed very
little of what the fans call ginger as she removed her hat and coat
and hung them on the hook behind the desk. The prospect of that
all-night, eight-hour stretch may have accounted for it, I say.
But privately, and entre nous, it didn’t. For here you must know
of Heiny. Heiny, alas! now Henri.

Until two weeks ago Henri had been Heiny and Miss Fink had
been Kid. When Henri had been Heiny he had worked in the kitchen
at many things, but always with a loving eye on Miss Gussie Fink.
Then one wild night there had been a waiters’ strike–wages or
hours or tips or all three. In the confusion that followed Heiny
had been pressed into service and a chopped coat. He had fitted
into both with unbelievable nicety, proving that waiters are born,
not made. Those little tricks and foibles that are characteristic
of the genus waiter seemed to envelop him as though a fairy garment
had fallen upon his shoulders. The folded napkin under his left
arm seemed to have been placed there by nature, so perfectly did it
fit into place. The ghostly tread, the little whisking skip, the
half-simper, the deferential bend that had in it at the same time
something of insolence, all were there; the very “Yes, miss,” and
“Very good, sir,” rose automatically and correctly to his untrained
lips. Cinderella rising resplendent from her ash-strewn hearth was
not more completely transformed than Heiny in his role of Henri.
And with the transformation Miss Gussie Fink had been left behind
her desk disconsolate.

Kitchens are as quick to seize upon these things and gossip
about them as drawing rooms are. And because Miss Gussie Fink had
always worn a little air of aloofness to all except Heiny, the
kitchen was the more eager to make the most of its morsel. Each
turned it over under his tongue–Tony, the Crook, whom Miss Fink
had scorned; Francois, the entree cook, who often forgot he was
married; Miss Sweeney, the bar-checker, who was jealous of Miss
Fink’s complexion. Miss Fink heard, and said nothing. She only
knew that there would be no dear figure waiting for her when the
night’s work was done. For two weeks now she had put on her hat
and coat and gone her way at one o’clock alone. She discovered
that to be taken home night after night under Heiny’s tender escort
had taught her a ridiculous terror of the streets at night now that
she was without protection. Always the short walk from the car to
the flat where Miss Fink lived with her mother had been a glorious,
star-lit, all too brief moment. Now it was an endless and
terrifying trial, a thing of shivers and dread, fraught with horror
of passing the alley just back of Cassidey’s buffet. There had
even been certain little half-serious, half-jesting talks about the
future into which there had entered the subject of a little
delicatessen and restaurant in a desirable neighborhood, with Heiny
in the kitchen, and a certain blonde, neat, white-shirtwaisted
person in charge of the desk and front shop.

She and her mother had always gone through a little formula
upon Miss Fink’s return from work. They never used it now.
Gussie’s mother was a real mother–the kind that wakes up when you
come home.

“That you, Gussie?” Ma Fink would call from the bedroom, at
the sound of the key in the lock.

“It’s me, ma.”

“Heiny bring you home?”

“Sure,” happily.

“There’s a bit of sausage left, and some pie if—-”

“Oh, I ain’t hungry. We stopped at Joey’s downtown and had a
cup of coffee and a ham on rye. Did you remember to put out the
milk bottle?”

For two weeks there had been none of that. Gussie had learned
to creep silently into bed, and her mother, being a mother, feigned
sleep.

To-night at her desk Miss Gussie Fink seemed a shade cooler,
more self-contained, and daisylike than ever. From somewhere at
the back of her head she could see that Heiny was avoiding her desk
and was using the services of the checker at the other end of the
room. And even as the poison of this was eating into her heart she
was tapping her forefinger imperatively on the desk before her and
saying to Tony, the Crook:

“Down on the table with that tray, Tony–flat. This may be a
busy little New Year’s Eve, but you can’t come any of your
sleight-of-hand stuff on me.” For Tony had a little trick of
concealing a dollar-and-a-quarter sirloin by the simple method of
slapping the platter close to the underside of his tray and holding
it there with long, lean fingers outspread, the entire bit of
knavery being concealed in the folds of a flowing white napkin in
the hand that balanced the tray. Into Tony’s eyes there came a
baleful gleam. His lean jaw jutted out threateningly.

“You’re the real Weissenheimer kid, ain’t you?” he sneered.
“Never mind. I’ll get you at recess.”

“Some day,” drawled Miss Fink, checking the steak, “the
house’ll get wise to your stuff and then you’ll have to go back to
the coal wagon. I know so much about you it’s beginning to make me
uncomfortable. I hate to carry around a burden of crime.”

“You’re a sorehead because Heiny turned you down and now—-”

“Move on there!” snapped Miss Fink, “or I’ll call the steward
to settle you. Maybe he’d be interested to know that you’ve been
counting in the date and your waiter’s number, and adding ‘em in at
the bottom of your check.”

Tony, the Crook, turned and skimmed away toward the
dining-room, but the taste of victory was bitter in Miss Fink’s
mouth.

Midnight struck. There came from the direction of the Pink
Fountain Room a clamor and din which penetrated the thickness of
the padded doors that separated the dining-room from the kitchen
beyond. The sound rose and swelled above the blare of the
orchestra. Chairs scraped on the marble floor as hundreds rose to
their feet. The sound of clinking glasses became as the jangling
of a hundred bells. There came the sharp spat of hand-clapping,
then cheers, yells, huzzas. Through the swinging doors at the end
of the long passageway Miss Fink could catch glimpses of dazzling
color, of shimmering gowns, of bare arms uplifted, of flowers, and
plumes, and jewels, with the rosy light of the famed pink fountain
casting a gracious glow over all. Once she saw a tall young fellow
throw his arm about the shoulder of a glorious creature at the next
table, and though the door swung shut before she could see it, Miss
Fink knew that he had kissed her.

There were no New Year’s greetings in the kitchen back of the
Pink Fountain Room. It was the busiest moment in all that busy
night. The heat of the ovens was so intense that it could be felt
as far as Miss Fink’s remote corner. The swinging doors between
dining-room and kitchen were never still. A steady stream of
waiters made for the steam tables before which the white-clad chefs
stood ladling, carving, basting, serving, gave their orders,
received them, stopped at the checking-desk, and sped
dining-roomward again. Tony, the Crook, was cursing at one of the
little Polish vegetable girls who had not been quick enough about
the garnishing of a salad, and she was saying, over and over again,
in her thick tongue:

“Aw, shod op yur mout’!”

The thud-thud of Miss Fink’s checking-stamp kept time to
flying footsteps, but even as her practised eye swept over the tray
before her she saw the steward direct Henri toward her desk, just
as he was about to head in the direction of the minor
checking-desk. Beneath downcast lids she saw him coming. There
was about Henri to-night a certain radiance, a sort of electrical
elasticity, so nimble, so tireless, so exuberant was he. In the
eyes of Miss Gussie Fink he looked heartbreakingly handsome in his
waiter’s uniform–handsome, distinguished, remote, and infinitely
desirable. And just behind him, revenge in his eye, came Tony.

The flat surface of the desk received Henri’s tray. Miss Fink
regarded it with a cold and business-like stare. Henri whipped his
napkin from under his left arm and began to remove covers,
dexterously. Off came the first silver, dome-shaped top.

“Guinea hen,” said Henri.

“I seen her lookin’ at you when you served the little necks,”
came from Tony, as though continuing a conversation begun in some
past moment of pause, “and she’s some lovely doll, believe me.”

Miss Fink scanned the guinea hen thoroughly, but with a
detached air, and selected the proper stamp from the box at her
elbow. Thump! On the broad pasteboard sheet before her appeared
the figures $1.75 after Henri’s number.

“Think so?” grinned Henri, and removed another cover. “One
candied sweets.”

“I bet some day we’ll see you in the Sunday papers, Heiny,”
went on Tony, “with a piece about handsome waiter runnin’ away with
beautiful s’ciety girl. Say; you’re too perfect even for a
waiter.”

Thump! Thirty cents.

“Quit your kiddin’,” said the flattered Henri. “One endive,
French dressing.”

Thump!” Next!” said Miss Fink, dispassionately, yawned, and
smiled fleetingly at the entree cook who wasn’t looking her way.
Then, as Tony slid his tray toward her: “How’s business, Tony?
H’m? How many two-bit cigar bands have you slipped onto your own
private collection of nickel straights and made a twenty-cent
rake-off?”

But there was a mist in the bright brown eyes as Tony the
Crook turned away with his tray. In spite of the satisfaction of
having had the last word, Miss Fink knew in her heart that Tony had
“got her at recess,” as he had said he would.

Things were slowing up for Miss Fink. The stream of hurrying
waiters was turned in the direction of the kitchen bar now. From
now on the eating would be light, and the drinking heavy. Miss
Fink, with time hanging heavy, found herself blinking down at the
figures stamped on the pasteboard sheet before her, and in spite of
the blinking, two marks that never were intended for a checker’s
report splashed down just over the $1.75 after Henri’s number. A
lovely doll! And she had gazed at Heiny. Well, that was to be
expected. No woman could gaze unmoved upon Heiny. “A lovely
doll–”

“Hi, Miss Fink!” it was the steward’s voice. “We need you
over in the bar to help Miss Sweeney check the drinks. They’re
coming too swift for her. The eating will be light from now on;
just a little something salty now and then.”

So Miss Fink dabbed covertly at her eyes and betook herself
out of the atmosphere of roasting, and broiling, and frying, and
stewing; away from the sight of great copper kettles, and glowing
coals and hissing pans, into a little world fragrant with mint,
breathing of orange and lemon peel, perfumed with pineapple,
redolent of cinnamon and clove, reeking with things spirituous.
Here the splutter of the broiler was replaced by the hiss of the
siphon, and the pop-pop of corks, and the tinkle and clink of ice
against glass.

“Hello, dearie!” cooed Miss Sweeney, in greeting, staring hard
at the suspicious redness around Miss Fink’s eyelids. “Ain’t you
sweet to come over here in the headache department and help me out!
Here’s the wine list. You’ll prob’ly need it. Say, who do you
suppose invented New Year’s Eve? They must of had a imagination
like a Greek ‘bus boy. I’m limp as a rag now, and it’s only
two-thirty. I’ve got a regular cramp in my wrist from checkin’
quarts. Say, did you hear about Heiny’s crowd?”

“No,” said Miss Fink, evenly, and began to study the first
page of the wine list under the heading “Champagnes of Noted
Vintages.”

“Well,” went on Miss Sweeney’s little thin, malicious voice,
“he’s fell in soft. There’s a table of three, and they’re drinkin’
1874 Imperial Crown at twelve dollars per, like it was Waukesha
ale. And every time they finish a bottle one of the guys pays for
it with a brand new ten and a brand new five and tells Heiny to
keep the change. Can you beat it?”

“I hope,” said Miss Fink, pleasantly, “that the supply of 1874
will hold out till morning. I’d hate to see them have to come down
to ten dollar wine. Here you, Tony! Come back here! I may be a
new hand in this department but I’m not so green that you can put
a gold label over on me as a yellow label. Notice that I’m
checking you another fifty cents.”

“Ain’t he the grafter!” laughed Miss Sweeney. She leaned
toward Miss Fink and lowered her voice discreetly. “Though I’ll
say this for’m. If you let him get away with it now an’ then,
he’ll split even with you. H’m? O, well, now, don’t get so high
and mighty. The management expects it in this department. That’s
why they pay starvation wages.”

An unusual note of color crept into Miss Gussie Fink’s smooth
cheek. It deepened and glowed as Heiny darted around the corner
and up to the bar. There was about him an air of suppressed
excitement — suppressed, because Heiny was too perfect a waiter to
display emotion.

“Not another!” chanted the bartenders, in chorus.

“Yes,” answered Henri, solemnly, and waited while the wine
cellar was made to relinquish another rare jewel.

“O, you Heiny!” called Miss Sweeney, “tell us what she looks
like. If I had time I’d take a peek myself. From what Tony says
she must look something like Maxine Elliot, only brighter.”

Henri turned. He saw Miss Fink. A curious little expression
came into his eyes–a Heiny look, it might have been called, as he
regarded his erstwhile sweetheart’s unruffled attire, and clear
skin, and steady eye and glossy hair. She was looking past him in
that baffling, maddening way that angry women have. Some of
Henri’s poise seemed to desert him in that moment. He appeared a
shade less debonair as he received the precious bottle from the
wine man’s hands. He made for Miss Fink’s desk and stood watching
her while she checked his order. At the door he turned and looked
over his shoulder at Miss Sweeney.

“Some time,” he said, deliberately, “when there’s no ladies
around, I’ll tell you what I think she looks like.”

And the little glow of color in Miss Gussic Fink’s smooth
cheek became a crimson flood that swept from brow to throat.

“Oh, well,” snickered Miss Sweeney, to hide her own
discomfiture, “this is little Heiny’s first New Year’s Eve in the
dining-room. Honest, I b’lieve he’s shocked. He don’t realize
that celebratin’ New Year’s Eve is like eatin’ oranges. You got to
let go your dignity t’ really enjoy ‘em.”

Three times more did Henri enter and demand a bottle of the
famous vintage, and each time he seemed a shade less buoyant. His
elation diminished as his tips grew greater until, as he drew up at
the bar at six o’clock, he seemed wrapped in impenetrable gloom.

“Them hawgs sousin’ yet?” shrilled Miss Sweeney. She and Miss
Fink had climbed down from their high stools, and were preparing to
leave. Henri nodded, drearily, and disappeared in the direction of
the Pink Fountain Room.

Miss Fink walked back to her own desk in the corner near the
dining-room door. She took her hat off the hook, and stood
regarding it, thoughtfully. Then, with a little air of decision,
she turned and walked swiftly down the passageway that separated
dining-room from kitchen. Tillie, the scrub-woman, was down on her
hands and knees in one corner of the passage. She was one of a
small army of cleaners that had begun the work of clearing away the
debris of the long night’s revel. Miss Fink lifted her neat skirts
high as she tip-toed through the little soapy pool that followed in
the wake of Tillie, the scrub-woman. She opened the swinging doors
a cautious little crack and peered in. What she saw was not
pretty. If the words sordid and bacchanalian had been part of Miss
Fink’s vocabulary they would have risen to her lips then. The
crowd had gone. The great room contained not more than half a
dozen people. Confetti littered the floor. Here and there a
napkin, crushed and bedraggled into an unrecognizable ball, lay
under a table. From an overturned bottle the dregs were dripping
drearily. The air was stale, stifling, poisonous.

At a little table in the center of the room Henri’s three were
still drinking. They were doing it in a dreadful and businesslike
way. There were two men and one woman. The faces of all three
were mahogany colored and expressionless. There was about them an
awful sort of stillness. Something in the sight seemed to sicken
Gussie Fink. It came to her that the wintry air outdoors must be
gloriously sweet, and cool, and clean in contrast to this. She was
about to turn away, with a last look at Heiny yawning behind his
hand, when suddenly the woman rose unsteadily to her feet,
balancing herself with her finger tips on the table. She raised
her head and stared across the room with dull, unseeing eyes, and
licked her lips with her tongue. Then she turned and walked half
a dozen paces, screamed once with horrible shrillness, and crashed
to the floor. She lay there in a still, crumpled heap, the folds
of her exquisite gown rippling to meet a little stale pool of wine
that had splashed from some broken glass. Then this happened.
Three people ran toward the woman on the floor, and two people ran
past her and out of the room. The two who ran away were the men
with whom she had been drinking, and they were not seen again. The
three who ran toward her were Henri, the waiter, Miss Gussie Fink,
checker, and Tillie, the scrub-woman. Henri and Miss Fink reached
her first. Tillie, the scrub-woman, was a close third. Miss
Gussie Fink made as though to slip her arm under the poor bruised
head, but Henri caught her wrist fiercely (for a waiter) and pulled
her to her feet almost roughly.

“You leave her alone, Kid,” he commanded.

Miss Gussie Fink stared, indignation choking her utterance.
And as she stared the fierce light in Henri’s eyes was replaced by
the light of tenderness.

“We’ll tend to her,” said Henri; “she ain’t fit for you to
touch. I wouldn’t let you soil your hands on such truck.” And
while Gussie still stared he grasped the unconscious woman by the
shoulders, while another waiter grasped her ankles, with Tillie,
the scrub-woman, arranging her draperies pityingly around her, and
together they carried her out of the dining-room to a room beyond.

Back in the kitchen Miss Gussie Fink was preparing to don her
hat, but she was experiencing some difficulty because of the way in
which her fingers persisted in trembling. Her face was turned
away from the swinging doors, but she knew when Henri came in. He
stood just behind her, in silence. When she turned to face him she
found Henri looking at her, and as he looked all the Heiny in him
came to the surface and shone in his eyes. He looked long and
silently at Miss Gussie Fink–at the sane, simple, wholesomeness of
her, at her clear brown eyes, at her white forehead from which the
shining hair sprang away in such a delicate line, at her
immaculately white shirtwaist, and her smooth, snug-fitting collar
that came up to the lobes of her little pink ears, at her creamy
skin, at her trim belt. He looked as one who would rest his
eyes–eyes weary of gazing upon satins, and jewels, and rouge, and
carmine, and white arms, and bosoms.

“Gee, Kid! You look good to me,” he said.

“Do I–Heiny?” whispered Miss Fink.

“Believe me!” replied Heiny, fervently. “It was just a case
of swelled head. Forget it, will you? Say, that gang in there
to-night–why, say, that gang—-”

“I know,” interrupted Miss Fink.

“Going home?” asked Heiny.

“Yes.”

“Suppose we have a bite of something to eat first,” suggested
Heiny.

Miss Fink glanced round the great, deserted kitchen. As she
gazed a little expression of disgust wrinkled her pretty nose–the
nose that perforce had sniffed the scent of so many rare and
exquisite dishes.

“Sure,” she assented, joyously, “but not here. Let’s go
around the corner to Joey’s. I could get real chummy with a cup of
good hot coffee and a ham on rye.”

He helped her on with her coat, and if his hands rested a
moment on her shoulders who was there to see it? A few sleepy,
wan-eyed waiters and Tillie, the scrub-woman. Together they
started toward the door. Tillie, the scrubwoman, had worked her
wet way out of the passage and into the kitchen proper. She and
her pail blocked their way. She was sopping up a soapy pool with
an all-encompassing gray scrub-rag. Heiny and Gussie stopped a
moment perforce to watch her. It was rather fascinating to see how
that artful scrub-rag craftily closed in upon the soapy pool until
it engulfed it. Tillie sat back on her knees to wring out the
water-soaked rag. There was something pleasing in the sight.
Tillie’s blue calico was faded white in patches and at the knees it
was dark with soapy water. Her shoes were turned up ludicrously at
the toes, as scrub-women’s shoes always are. Tillie’s thin hair
was wadded back into a moist knob at the back and skewered with a
gray-black hairpin. From her parboiled, shriveled fingers to her
ruddy, perspiring face there was nothing of grace or beauty about
Tillie. And yet Heiny found something pleasing there. He could
not have told you why, so how can I, unless to say that it was,
perhaps, for much the same reason that we rejoice in the wholesome,
safe, reassuring feel of the gray woolen blanket on our bed when we
wake from a horrid dream.

“A Happy New Year to you,” said Heiny gravely, and took his
hand out of his pocket.

Tillie’s moist right hand closed over something. She smiled
so that one saw all her broken black teeth.

“The same t’ you,” said Tillie. “The same t’ you.”

The leading lady lay on her bed and wept.
Not as you have seen leading ladies weep, becomingly, with
eyebrows pathetically V-shaped, mouth quivering, sequined bosom
heaving. The leading lady lay on her bed in a red-and-blue-striped
kimono and wept as a woman weeps, her head burrowing into the
depths of the lumpy hotel pillow, her teeth biting the pillow-case
to choke back the sounds so that the grouch in the next room might
not hear.

Presently the leading lady’s right hand began to grope about
on the bedspread for her handkerchief. Failing to find it, she sat
up wearily, raising herself on one elbow and pushing her hair back
from her forehead–not as you have seen a leading lady pass a lily
hand across her alabaster brow, but as a heart-sick woman does it.
Her tears and sniffles had formed a little oasis of moisture on the
pillow’s white bosom so that the ugly stripe of the ticking showed
through. She gazed down at the damp circle with smarting, swollen
eyes, and another lump came up into her throat.

Then she sat up resolutely, and looked about her. The leading
lady had a large and saving sense of humor. But there is nothing
that blunts the sense of humor more quickly than a few months of
one-night stands. Even O. Henry could have seen nothing funny
about that room.

The bed was of green enamel, with fly-specked gold trimmings.
It looked like a huge frog. The wall-paper was a crime. It
represented an army of tan mustard plasters climbing up a
chocolate-fudge wall. The leading lady was conscious of a feeling
of nausea as she gazed at it. So she got up and walked to the
window. The room faced west, and the hot afternoon sun smote full
on her poor swollen eyes. Across the street the red brick walls of
the engine-house caught the glare and sent it back. The firemen,
in their blue shirt-sleeves, were seated in the shade before the
door, their chairs tipped at an angle of sixty. The leading lady
stared down into the sun-baked street, turned abruptly and made as
though to fall upon the bed again, with a view to forming another
little damp oasis on the pillow. But when she reached the center
of the stifling little bedroom her eye chanced on the electric
call-button near the door. Above the electric bell was tacked a
printed placard giving information on the subjects of laundry,
ice-water, bell-boys and dining-room hours.

The leading lady stood staring at it a moment thoughtfully.
Then with a sudden swift movement she applied her forefinger to the
button and held it there for a long half-minute. Then she sat down
on the edge of the bed, her kimono folded about her, and waited.

She waited until a lank bell-boy, in a brown uniform that was
some sizes too small for him, had ceased to take any interest in
the game of chess which Bauer and Merkle, the champion firemen
chess-players, were contesting on the walk before the open doorway
of the engine-house. The proprietor of the Burke House had
originally intended that the brown uniform be worn by a diminutive
bell-boy, such as one sees in musical comedies. But the available
supply of stage size bell-boys in our town is somewhat limited and
was soon exhausted. There followed a succession of lank bell-boys,
with arms and legs sticking ungracefully out of sleeves and
trousers.

“Come!” called the leading lady quickly, in answer to the lank
youth’s footsteps, and before he had had time to knock.

“Ring?” asked the boy, stepping into the torrid little room.

The leading lady did not reply immediately. She swallowed
something in her throat and pushed back the hair from her moist
forehead again. The brown uniform repeated his question, a trifle
irritably. Whereupon the leading lady spoke, desperately:

“Is there a woman around this place? I don’t mean dining-room
girls, or the person behind the cigar-counter.”

Since falling heir to the brown uniform the lank youth had
heard some strange requests. He had been interviewed by various
ladies in varicolored kimonos relative to liquid refreshment,
laundry and the cost of hiring a horse and rig for a couple of
hours. One had even summoned him to ask if there was a Bible in
the house. But this latest question was a new one. He stared,
leaning against the door and thrusting one hand into the depths of
his very tight breeches pocket.

“Why, there’s Pearlie Schultz,” he said at last, with a grin.

“Who’s she?” The leading lady sat up expectantly.

“Steno.”

The expectant figure drooped. “Blonde? And Irish crochet
collar with a black velvet bow on her chest?”

“Who? Pearlie? Naw. You mustn’t get Pearlie mixed with the
common or garden variety of stenos. Pearlie is fat, and she wears
specs and she’s got a double chin. Her hair is skimpy and she
don’t wear no rat. W’y no traveling man has ever tried to flirt
with Pearlie yet. Pearlie’s what you’d call a woman, all right.
You wouldn’t never make a mistake and think she’d escaped from the
first row in the chorus.”

The leading lady rose from the bed, reached out for her
pocket-book, extracted a dime, and held it out to the bell-boy.

“Here. Will you ask her to come up here to me? Tell her I
said please.”

After he had gone she seated herself on the edge of the bed
again, with a look in her eyes like that which you have seen in the
eyes of a dog that is waiting for a door to be opened.

Fifteen minutes passed. The look in the eyes of the leading
lady began to fade. Then a footstep sounded down the hall. The
leading lady cocked her head to catch it, and smiled blissfully.
It was a heavy, comfortable footstep, under which a board or two
creaked. There came a big, sensible thump-thump-thump at the door,
with stout knuckles. The leading lady flew to answer it. She
flung the door wide and stood there, clutching her kimono at the
throat and looking up into a red, good-natured face.

Pearlie Schultz looked down at the leading lady kindly and
benignantly, as a mastiff might look at a terrier.

“Lonesome for a bosom to cry on?” asked she, and stepped into
the room, walked to the west windows, and jerked down the shades
with a zip-zip, shutting off the yellow glare. She came back to
where the leading lady was standing and patted her on the cheek,
lightly.

“You tell me all about it,” said she, smiling.

The leading lady opened her lips, gulped, tried again, gulped
again–Pearlie Schultz shook a sympathetic head.

“Ain’t had a decent, close-to-nature powwow with a woman for
weeks and weeks, have you?”

“How did you know?” cried the leading lady.

“You’ve got that hungry look. There was a lady drummer here
last winter, and she had the same expression. She was so dead sick
of eating her supper and then going up to her ugly room and reading
and sewing all evening that it was a wonder she’d stayed good. She
said it was easy enough for the men. They could smoke, and play
pool, and go to a show, and talk to any one that looked good to
‘em. But if she tried to amuse herself everybody’d say she was
tough. She cottoned to me like a burr to a wool skirt. She
traveled for a perfumery house, and she said she hadn’t talked to
a woman, except the dry-goods clerks who were nice to her trying to
work her for her perfume samples, for weeks an’ weeks. Why, that
woman made crochet by the bolt, and mended her clothes evenings
whether they needed it or not, and read till her eyes come near
going back on her.”

The leading lady seized Pearlie’s hand and squeezed it.

“That’s it! Why, I haven’t talked–really talked–to a real
woman since the company went out on the road. I’m leading lady of
the `Second Wife’ company, you know. It’s one of those small cast
plays, with only five people in it. I play the wife, and I’m the
only woman in the cast. It’s terrible. I ought to be thankful to
get the part these days. And I was, too. But I didn’t know it
would be like this. I’m going crazy. The men in the company are
good kids, but I can’t go trailing around after them all day.
Besides, it wouldn’t be right. They’re all married, except Billy,
who plays the kid, and he’s busy writing a vawdeville skit that he
thinks the New York managers are going to fight for when he gets
back home. We were to play Athens, Wisconsin, to-night, but the
house burned down night before last, and that left us with an open
date. When I heard the news you’d have thought I had lost my
mother. It’s bad enough having a whole day to kill but when I
think of to-night,” the leading lady’s voice took on a note of
hysteria, “it seems as though I’d—-”

“Say,” Pearlie interrupted, abruptly, “you ain’t got a real
good corset-cover pattern, have you? One that fits smooth over the
bust and don’t slip off the shoulders? I don’t seem able to get my
hands on the kind I want.”

“Have I!” yelled the leading lady. And made a flying leap
from the bed to the floor.

She flapped back the cover of a big suit-case and began
burrowing into its depths, strewing the floor with lingerie,
newspaper clippings, blouses, photographs and Dutch collars.
Pearlie came over and sat down on the floor in the midst of the
litter. The leading lady dived once more, fished about in the
bottom of the suit-case and brought a crumpled piece of paper
triumphantly to the surface.

“This is it. It only takes a yard and five-eighths. And
fits! Like Anna Held’s skirts. Comes down in a V front and
back–like this. See? And no fulness. Wait a minute. I’ll show
you my princess slip. I made it all by hand, too. I’ll bet you
couldn’t buy it under fifteen dollars, and it cost me four dollars
and eighty cents, with the lace and all.”

Before an hour had passed, the leading lady had displayed all
her treasures, from the photograph of her baby that died to her new
Blanche Ring curl cluster, and was calling Pearlie by her first
name. When a bell somewhere boomed six o’clock Pearlie was being
instructed in a new exercise calculated to reduce the hips an inch
a month.

“My land!” cried Pearlie, aghast, and scrambled to her feet as
nimbly as any woman can who weighs two hundred pounds.
“Supper-time, and I’ve got a bunch of letters an inch thick to get
out! I’d better reduce that some before I begin on my hips. But
say, I’ve had a lovely time.”

The leading lady clung to her. “You’ve saved my life. Why,
I forgot all about being hot and lonely and a couple of thousand
miles from New York. Must you go?”

“Got to. But if you’ll promise you won’t laugh, I’ll make a
date for this evening that’ll give you a new sensation anyway.
There’s going to be a strawberry social on the lawn of the
parsonage of our church. I’ve got a booth. You shed that kimono,
and put on a thin dress and those curls and some powder, and I’ll
introduce you as my friend, Miss Evans. You don’t look Evans, but
this is a Methodist church strawberry festival, and if I was to
tell them that you are leading lady of the `Second Wife’ company
they’d excommunicate my booth.”

“A strawberry social!” gasped the leading lady. “Do they
still have them?” She did not laugh. “Why, I used to go to
strawberry festivals when I was a little girl in—-”

“Careful! You’ll be giving away your age, and, anyway, you
don’t look it. Fashions in strawberry socials ain’t changed much.
Better bathe your eyes in eau de cologne or whatever it is they’re
always dabbing on ‘em in books. See you at eight.”

At eight o’clock Pearlie’s thump-thump sounded again, and the
leading lady sprang to the door as before. Pearlie stared. This
was no tear-stained, heat-bedraggled creature in an unbecoming
red-striped kimono. It was a remarkably pretty woman in a white
lingerie gown over a pink slip. The leading lady knew a thing or
two about the gentle art of making-up!

“That just goes to show,” remarked Pearlie, “that you must
never judge a woman in a kimono or a bathing suit. You look
nineteen. Say, I forgot something down-stairs. Just get your
handkerchief and chamois together and meet in my cubbyhole next to
the lobby, will you? I’ll be ready for you.”

Down-stairs she summoned the lank bell-boy. “You go outside
and tell Sid Strang I want to see him, will you? He’s on the bench
with the baseball bunch.”

Pearlie had not seen Sid Strang outside. She did not need to.
She knew he was there. In our town all the young men dress up in
their pale gray suits and lavender-striped shirts after supper on
summer evenings. Then they stroll down to the Burke House, buy a
cigar and sit down on the benches in front of the hotel to talk
baseball and watch the girls go by. It is astonishing to note the
number of our girls who have letters to mail after supper. One
would think that they must drive their pens fiercely all the
afternoon in order to get out such a mass of correspondence.

The obedient Sid reached the door of Pearlie’s little office
just off the lobby as the leading lady came down the stairs with a
spangled scarf trailing over her arm. It was an effective
entrance.

“Why, hello!” said Pearlie, looking up from her typewriter as
though Sid Strang were the last person in the world she expected to
see. “What do you want here? Ethel, this is my friend, Mr. Sid
Strang, one of our rising young lawyers. His neckties always match
his socks. Sid, this is my friend, Miss Ethel Evans, of New York.
We’re going over to the strawberry social at the M. E. parsonage.
I don’t suppose you’d care about going?”

Mr. Sid Strang gazed at the leading lady in the white lingerie
dress with the pink slip, and the V-shaped neck, and the spangled
scarf, and turned to Pearlie.

“Why, Pearlie Schultz!” he said reproachfully. “How can you
ask? You know what a strawberry social means to me! I haven’t
missed one in years!”

“I know it,” replied Pearlie, with a grin. “You feel the same
way about Thursday evening prayer-meeting too, don’t you? You can
walk over with us if you want to. We’re going now. Miss Evans and
I have got a booth.”

Sid walked. Pearlie led them determinedly past the rows of
gray suits and lavender and pink shirts on the benches in front of
the hotel. And as the leading lady came into view the gray suits
stopped talking baseball and sat up and took notice. Pearlie had
known all those young men inside of the swagger suits in the days
when their summer costume consisted of a pair of dad’s pants cut
down to a doubtful fit, and a nondescript shirt damp from the
swimming-hole. So she called out, cheerily:

“We’re going over to the strawberry festival. I expect to see
all you boys there to contribute your mite to the church carpet.”

The leading lady turned to look at them, and smiled. They
were such a dapper, pink-cheeked, clean-looking lot of boys, she
thought. At that the benches rose to a man and announced that they
might as well stroll over right now. Whenever a new girl comes to
visit in our town our boys make a concerted rush at her, and
develop a “case” immediately, and the girl goes home when her visit
is over with her head swimming, and forever after bores the girls
of her home town with tales of her conquests.

The ladies of the First M. E. Church still talk of the money
they garnered at the strawberry festival. Pearlie’s out-of-town
friend was garnerer-in-chief. You take a cross-eyed, pock-marked
girl and put her in a white dress, with a pink slip, on a green
lawn under a string of rose-colored Japanese lanterns, and she’ll
develop an almost Oriental beauty. It is an ideal setting. The
leading lady was not cross-eyed or pock-marked. She stood at the
lantern-illumined booth, with Pearlie in the background, and dis-
pensed an unbelievable amount of strawberries. Sid Strang and the
hotel bench brigade assisted. They made engagements to take
Pearlie and her friend down river next day, and to the ball game,
and planned innumerable picnics, gazing meanwhile into the leading
lady’s eyes. There grew in the cheeks of the leading lady a flush
that was not brought about by the pink slip, or the Japanese
lanterns, or the skillful application of rouge.

By nine o’clock the strawberry supply was exhausted, and the
president of the Foreign Missionary Society was sending wildly
down-town for more ice-cream.

“I call it an outrage,” puffed Pearlie happily, ladling
ice-cream like mad. “Making a poor working girl like me slave all
evening! How many was that last order? Four? My land! that’s the
third dish of ice-cream Ed White’s had! You’ll have something to
tell the villagers about when you get back to New York.”

The leading lady turned a flushed face toward Pearlie. “This
is more fun than the Actors’ Fair. I had the photograph booth last
year, and I took in nearly as much as Lil Russell; and goodness
knows, all she needs to do at a fair is to wear her
diamond-and-pearl stomacher and her set-piece smile, and the men
just swarm around her like the pictures of a crowd in a McCutcheon
cartoon.”

When the last Japanese lantern had guttered out, Pearlie
Schultz and the leading lady prepared to go home. Before they
left, the M. E. ladies came over to Pearlie’s booth and personally
congratulated the leading lady, and thanked her for the interest
she had taken in the cause, and the secretary of the Epworth League
asked her to come to the tea that was to be held at her home the
following Tuesday. The leading lady thanked her and said she’d
come if she could.

Escorted by a bodyguard of gray suits and lavender-striped
shirts Pearlie and her friend, Miss Evans, walked toward the hotel.
The attentive bodyguard confessed itself puzzled.

“Aren’t you staying at Pearlie’s house?” asked Sid tenderly,
when they reached the Burke House. The leading lady glanced up at
the windows of the stifling little room that faced west.

“No,” answered she, and paused at the foot of the steps to the
ladies’ entrance. The light from the electric globe over the
doorway shone on her hair and sparkled in the folds of her spangled
scarf.

“I’m not staying at Pearlie’s because my name isn’t Ethel
Evans. It’s Aimee Fox, with a little French accent mark over the
double E. I’m leading lady of the `Second Wife’ company and old
enough to be–well, your aunty, anyway. We go out at one-thirty
to-morrow morning.”

Chet Ball was painting a wooden chicken yellow. The wooden
chicken was mounted on a six-by-twelve board. The board was
mounted on four tiny wheels. The whole would eventually be
pulled on a string guided by the plump, moist hand of some
blissful five-year-old.

You got the incongruity of it the instant your eye fell upon Chet
Ball. Chet’s shoulders alone would have loomed large in contrast
with any wooden toy ever devised, including the Trojan horse.
Everything about him, from the big, blunt-fingered hands that
held the ridiculous chick to the great muscular pillar of his
neck, was in direct opposition to his task, his surroundings, and
his attitude.

Chet’s proper milieu was Chicago, Illinois (the West Side); his
job that of lineman for the Gas, Light & Power Company; his
normal working position astride the top of a telegraph pole,
supported in his perilous perch by a lineman’s leather belt and
the kindly fates, both of which are likely to trick you in an
emergency.

Yet now he lolled back among his pillows, dabbing complacently at
the absurd yellow toy. A description of his surroundings would
sound like pages 3 to 17 of a novel by Mrs. Humphry Ward. The
place was all greensward, and terraces, and sundials, and
beeches, and even those rhododendrons without which no English
novel or country estate is complete. The presence of Chet Ball
among his pillows and some hundreds similarly disposed revealed
to you at once the fact that this particular English estate was
now transformed into Reconstruction Hospital No. 9.

The painting of the chicken quite finished (including two beady
black paint eyes), Chet was momentarily at a loss. Miss Kate had
not told him to stop painting when the chicken was completed.
Miss Kate was at the other end of the sunny garden walk, bending
over a wheel chair. So Chet went on painting, placidly. One by
one, with meticulous nicety, he painted all his fingernails a
bright and cheery yellow. Then he did the whole of his left
thumb and was starting on the second joint of the index finger
when Miss Kate came up behind him and took the brush gently from
his strong hands.

“You shouldn’t have painted your fingers,” she said.

Chet surveyed them with pride. “They look swell.”

Miss Kate did not argue the point. She put the freshly painted
wooden chicken on the table to dry in the sun. Her eyes fell
upon a letter bearing an American postmark and addressed to
Sergeant Chester Ball, with a lot of cryptic figures and letters
strung out after it, such as A.E.F. and Co. 11.

“Here’s a letter for you!” She infused a lot of Glad into her
voice. But Chet only cast a languid eye upon it and said,
“Yeh?”

“I’ll read it to you, shall I? It’s a nice fat one.”

Chet sat back, indifferent, negatively acquiescent. And Miss
Kate began to read in her clear young voice, there in the
sunshine and scent of the centuries-old English garden.

It marked an epoch in Chet’s life–that letter. It reached out
across the Atlantic Ocean from the Chester Ball of his Chicago
days, before he had even heard of English gardens.

Your true lineman has a daredevil way with the women, as have all
men whose calling is a hazardous one. Chet was a crack workman.
He could shinny up a pole, strap his emergency belt, open his
tool kit, wield his pliers with expert deftness, and climb down
again in record time. It was his pleasure–and seemingly the
pleasure and privilege of all lineman’s gangs the world over–to
whistle blithely and to call impudently to any passing petticoat
that caught his fancy.

Perched three feet from the top of the high pole he would cling
protected, seemingly, by some force working in direct defiance of
the law of gravity. And now and then, by way of brightening the
tedium of their job, he and his gang would call to a girl passing
in the street below, “Hoo-hoo! Hello, sweetheart!”

There was nothing vicious in it. Chet would have come to the aid
of beauty in distress as quickly as Don Quixote. Any man with a
blue shirt as clean and a shave as smooth and a haircut as round
as Chet Ball’s has no meanness in him. A certain daredeviltry
went hand in hand with his work–a calling in which a careless
load dispatcher, a cut wire, or a faulty strap may mean instant
death. Usually the girls laughed and called back to them or went
on more quickly, the color in their cheeks a little higher.

But not Anastasia Rourke. Early the first morning of a two-week
job on the new plant of the Western Castings Company, Chet Ball,
glancing down from his dizzy perch atop an electric-light pole,
espied Miss Anastasia Rourke going to work. He didn’t know her
name or anything about her, except that she was pretty. You
could see that from a distance even more remote than Chet’s. But
you couldn’t know that Stasia was a lady not to be trifled with.
We know her name was Rourke, but he didn’t.

So then: “Hoo-hoo!” he had called. “Hello, sweetheart! Wait
for me and I’ll be down.”

Stasia Rourke had lifted her face to where he perched so high
above the streets. Her cheeks were five shades pinker than was
their wont, which would make them border on the red.

“You big ape, you!” she called, in her clear, crisp voice.
“If you had your foot on the ground you wouldn’t dast call to a
decent girl like that. If you were down here I’d slap the face
of you. You know you’re safe up there.”

The words were scarcely out of her mouth before Chet Ball’s
sturdy legs were twinkling down the pole. His spurred heels dug
into the soft pine of the pole with little ripe, tearing sounds.
He walked up to Stasia and stood squarely in front of her, six
feet of brawn and brazen nerve. One ruddy cheek he presented to
her astonished gaze. “Hello, sweetheart,” he said. And
waited. The Rourke girl hesitated just a second. All the Irish
heart in her was melting at the boyish impudence of the man
before her. Then she lifted one hand and slapped his smooth
cheek. It was a ringing slap. You saw the four marks of her
fingers upon his face. Chet straightened, his blue eyes bluer.
Stasia looked up at him, her eyes wide. Then down at her own
hand, as if it belonged to somebody else. Her hand came up to
her own face. She burst into tears, turned, and ran. And as she
ran, and as she wept, she saw that Chet was still standing there,
looking after her.

Next morning, when Stasia Rourke went by to work, Chet Ball was
standing at the foot of the pole, waiting.

They were to have been married that next June. But that next
June Chet Ball, perched perilously on the branch of a tree in a
small woodsy spot somewhere in France, was one reason why the
American artillery in that same woodsy spot was getting such a
deadly range on the enemy. Chet’s costume was so devised that
even through field glasses (made in Germany) you couldn’t tell
where tree left off and Chet began.

Then, quite suddenly, the Germans got the range. The tree in
which Chet was hidden came down with a crash, and Chet lay there,
more than ever indiscernible among its tender foliage.

Which brings us back to the English garden, the yellow chicken,
Miss Kate, and the letter.

His shattered leg was mended by one of those miracles of modern
war surgery, though he never again would dig his spurred heels
into the pine of a G. L. & P. Company pole. But the other
thing–they put it down under the broad general head of shock.
In the lovely English garden they set him to weaving and painting
as a means of soothing the shattered nerves. He had made
everything from pottery jars to bead chains, from baskets to
rugs. Slowly the tortured nerves healed. But the doctors, when
they stopped at Chet’s cot or chair, talked always of “the
memory center.” Chet seemed satisfied to go on placidly
painting toys or weaving chains with his great, square-tipped
fingers–the fingers that had wielded the pliers so cleverly in
his pole-climbing days.

“It’s just something that only luck or an accident can mend,”
said the nerve specialist. “Time may do it–but I doubt it.
Sometimes just a word– the right word–will set the thing in
motion again. Does he get any letters?”

“His girl writes to him. Fine letters. But she doesn’t know
yet about– about this. I’ve written his letters for him. She
knows now that his leg is healed and she wonders—-”

That had been a month ago. Today Miss Kate slit the envelope
post- marked Chicago. Chet was fingering the yellow wooden
chicken, pride in his eyes. In Miss Kate’s eyes there was a
troubled, baffled look as she began to read:

Chet, dear, it’s raining in Chicago. And you know when it
rains in Chicago it’s wetter, and muddier, and rainier than any
place in the world. Except maybe this Flanders we’re reading
so much about. They say for rain and mud that place takes the
prize.

I don’t know what I’m going on about rain and mud for, Chet
darling, when it’s you I’m thinking of. Nothing else and
nobody else. Chet, I got a funny feeling there’s something
you’re keeping back from me. You’re hurt worse than just the
leg. Boy, dear, don’t you know it won’t make any difference
with me how you look, or feel, or anything? I don’t care how
bad you’re smashed up. I’d rather have you without any
features at all than any other man with two sets. Whatever’s
happened to the outside of you, they can’t change your
insides. And you’re the same man that called out to me that
day, “Hoo-hoo! Hello, sweetheart!” and when I gave you a
piece of my mind, climbed down off the pole, and put your face
up to be slapped, God bless the boy in you—-

A sharp little sound from him. Miss Kate looked up, quickly.
Chet Ball was staring at the beady-eyed yellow chicken in his
hand.

“What’s this thing?” he demanded in a strange voice.

Miss Kate answered him very quietly, trying to keep her own voice
easy and natural. “That’s a toy chicken, cut out of wood.”

“What’m I doin’ with it?”

“You’ve just finished painting it.”

Chet Ball held it in his great hand and stared at it for a brief
moment, struggling between anger and amusement. And between
anger and amusement he put it down on the table none too gently
and stood up, yawning a little.

“That’s a hell of a job for a he-man!” Then in utter
contrition: “Oh, beggin’ your pardon! That was fierce! I
didn’t—-”

But there was nothing shocked about the expression on Miss Kate’s
face. She was registering joy–pure joy.

There are two ways of doing battle against Disgrace. You may live
it down; or you may run away from it and hide. The first method is
heart-breaking, but sure. The second cannot be relied upon because
of the uncomfortable way Disgrace has of turning up at your heels
just when you think you have eluded her in the last town but one.

Ted Terrill did not choose the first method. He had it thrust
upon him. After Ted had served his term he came back home to visit
his mother’s grave, intending to take the next train out. He wore
none of the prison pallor that you read about in books, because he
had been shortstop on the penitentiary all-star baseball team, and
famed for the dexterity with which he could grab up red-hot
grounders. The storied lock step and the clipped hair effect also
were missing. The superintendent of Ted’s prison had been one of
the reform kind.

You never would have picked Ted for a criminal. He had none
of those interesting phrenological bumps and depressions that
usually are shown to such frank advantage in the Bertillon
photographs. Ted had been assistant cashier in the Citizens’
National Bank. In a mad moment he had attempted a little
sleight-of-hand act in which certain Citizens’ National funds were
to be transformed into certain glittering shares and back again so
quickly that the examiners couldn’t follow it with their eyes. But
Ted was unaccustomed to these now-you-see-it-and-now-you-don’t
feats and his hand slipped. The trick dropped to the floor with an
awful clatter.

Ted had been a lovable young kid, six feet high, and blonde,
with a great reputation as a dresser. He had the first yellow
plush hat in our town. It sat on his golden head like a halo. The
women all liked Ted. Mrs. Dankworth, the dashing widow (why will
widows persist in being dashing?), said that he was the only man in
our town who knew how to wear a dress suit. The men were forever
slapping him on the back and asking him to have a little something.

Ted’s good looks and his clever tongue and a certain charming Irish
way he had with him caused him to be taken up by the smart set.
Now, if you’ve never lived in a small town you will be much amused
at the idea of its boasting a smart set. Which proves your
ignorance. The small town smart set is deadly serious about its
smartness. It likes to take six-hour runs down to the city to fit
a pair of shoes and hear Caruso. Its clothes are as well made, and
its scandals as crisp, and its pace as hasty, and its golf club as
dull as the clothes, and scandals, and pace, and golf club of its
city cousins.

The hasty pace killed Ted. He tried to keep step in a set of
young folks whose fathers had made our town. And all the time his
pocketbook was yelling, “Whoa!” The young people ran largely to
scarlet-upholstered touring cars, and country-club doings, and
house parties, as small town younger generations are apt to. When
Ted went to high school half the boys in his little clique spent
their after-school hours dashing up and down Main street in their
big, glittering cars, sitting slumped down on the middle of their
spines in front of the steering wheel, their sleeves rolled up,
their hair combed a militant pompadour. One or the other of them
always took Ted along. It is fearfully easy to develop a taste for
that kind of thing. As he grew older, the taste took root and
became a habit.

Ted came out after serving his term, still handsome, spite of
all that story-writers may have taught to the contrary. But we’ll
make this concession to the old tradition. There was a difference.

His radiant blondeur was dimmed in some intangible, elusive way.
Birdie Callahan, who had worked in Ted’s mother’s kitchen for
years, and who had gone back to her old job at the Haley House
after her mistress’s death, put it sadly, thus:

“He was always th’ han’some divil. I used to look forward to
ironin’ day just for the pleasure of pressin’ his fancy shirts for
him. I’m that partial to them swell blondes. But I dinnaw, he’s
changed. Doin’ time has taken the edge off his hair an’
complexion. Not changed his color, do yuh mind, but dulled it,
like a gold ring, or the like, that has tarnished.”

Ted was seated in the smoker, with a chip on his shoulder, and
a sick horror of encountering some one he knew in his heart, when
Jo Haley, of the Haley House, got on at Westport, homeward bound.
Jo Haley is the most eligible bachelor in our town, and the
slipperiest. He has made the Haley House a gem, so that traveling
men will cut half a dozen towns to Sunday there. If he should say
“Jump through this!” to any girl in our town she’d jump.

Jo Haley strolled leisurely up the car aisle toward Ted. Ted
saw him coming and sat very still, waiting.

“Hello, Ted! How’s Ted?” said Jo Haley, casually. And
dropped into the adjoining seat without any more fuss.

Ted wet his lips slightly and tried to say something. He had
been a breezy talker. But the words would not come. Jo Haley made
no effort to cover the situation with a rush of conversation. He
did not seem to realize that there was any situation to cover. He
champed the end of his cigar and handed one to Ted.

“Well, you’ve taken your lickin’, kid. What you going to do
now?”

The rawness of it made Ted wince. “Oh, I don’t know,” he
stammered. “I’ve a job half promised in Chicago.”

“What doing?”

Ted laughed a short and ugly laugh. “Driving a brewery auto
truck.”

Jo Haley tossed his cigar dexterously to the opposite corner
of his mouth and squinted thoughtfully along its bulging sides.

“Remember that Wenzel girl that’s kept books for me for the
last six years? She’s leaving in a couple of months to marry a New
York guy that travels for ladies’ cloaks and suits. After she goes
it’s nix with the lady bookkeepers for me. Not that Minnie isn’t
a good, straight girl, and honest, but no girl can keep books with
one eye on a column of figures and the other on a traveling man in
a brown suit and a red necktie, unless she’s cross-eyed, and you
bet Minnie ain’t. The job’s yours if you want it. Eighty a month
to start on, and board.”

“I–can’t, Jo. Thanks just the same. I’m going to try to
begin all over again, somewhere else, where nobody knows me.”

“Oh yes,” said Jo. “I knew a fellow that did that. After he
came out he grew a beard, and wore eyeglasses, and changed his
name. Had a quick, crisp way of talkin’, and he cultivated a drawl
and went west and started in business. Real estate, I think.
Anyway, the second month he was there in walks a fool he used to
know and bellows: `Why if it ain’t Bill! Hello, Bill! I thought
you was doing time yet.’ That was enough. Ted, you can black your
face, and dye your hair, and squint, and some fine day, sooner or
later, somebody’ll come along and blab the whole thing. And say,
the older it gets the worse it sounds, when it does come out.
Stick around here where you grew up, Ted.”

Ted clasped and unclasped his hands uncomfortably. “I can’t
figure out why you should care how I finish.”

“No reason,” answered Jo. “Not a darned one. I wasn’t ever
in love with your ma, like the guy on the stage; and I never owed
your pa a cent. So it ain’t a guilty conscience. I guess it’s
just pure cussedness, and a hankerin’ for a new investment. I’m
curious to know how’ll you turn out. You’ve got the makin’s of
what the newspapers call a Leading Citizen, even if you did fall
down once. If I’d ever had time to get married, which I never will
have, a first-class hotel bein’ more worry and expense than a
Pittsburg steel magnate’s whole harem, I’d have wanted somebody to
do the same for my kid. That sounds slushy, but it’s straight.”

“I don’t seem to know how to thank you,” began Ted, a little
husky as to voice.

“Call around to-morrow morning,” interrupted Jo Haley.,
briskly, “and Minnie Wenzel will show you the ropes. You and her
can work together for a couple of months. After then she’s leaving
to make her underwear, and that. I should think she’d have a bale
of it by this time. Been embroidering them shimmy things and lunch
cloths back of the desk when she thought I wasn’t lookin’ for the
last six months.”

Ted came down next morning at 8 A.M. with his nerve between
his teeth and the chip still balanced lightly on his shoulder.
Five minutes later Minnie Wenzel knocked it off. When Jo Haley
introduced the two jocularly, knowing that they had originally met
in the First Reader room, Miss Wenzel acknowledged the introduction
icily by lifting her left eyebrow slightly and drawing down the
corners of her mouth. Her air of hauteur was a triumph,
considering that she was handicapped by black sateen
sleevelets.

I wonder how one could best describe Miss Wenzel? There is
one of her in every small town. Let me think (business of hand on
brow). Well, she always paid eight dollars for her corsets when
most girls in a similar position got theirs for fifty-nine cents in
the basement. Nature had been kind to her. The hair that had been
a muddy brown in Minnie’s schoolgirl days it had touched with a
magic red-gold wand. Birdie Callahan always said that Minnie was
working only to wear out her old clothes.

After the introduction Miss Wenzel followed Jo Haley into the
lobby. She took no pains to lower her voice.

“Well I must say, Mr. Haley, you’ve got a fine nerve! If my
gentleman friend was to hear of my working with an ex-con I
wouldn’t be surprised if he’d break off the engagement. I should
think you’d have some respect for the feelings of a lady with a
name to keep up, and engaged to a swell fellow like Mr. Schwartz.”

“Say, listen, m’ girl,” replied Jo Haley. “The law don’t
cover all the tricks. But if stuffing an order was a criminal
offense I’ll bet your swell traveling man would be doing a life
term.”

Ted worked that day with his teeth set so that his jaws ached
next morning. Minnie Wenzel spoke to him only when necessary and
then in terms of dollars and cents. When dinner time came she
divested herself of the black sateen sleevelets, wriggled from the
shoulders down a la Patricia O’Brien, produced a chamois skin, and
disappeared in the direction of the washroom. Ted waited until the
dining-room was almost deserted. Then he went in to dinner alone.
Some one in white wearing an absurd little pocket handkerchief of
an apron led him to a seat in a far corner of the big room. Ted
did not lift his eyes higher than the snowy square of the apron.
The Apron drew out a chair, shoved it under Ted’s knees in the way
Aprons have, and thrust a printed menu at him.

“Roast beef, medium,” said Ted, without looking up.

“Bless your heart, yuh ain’t changed a bit. I remember how
yuh used to jaw when it was too well done,” said the Apron, fondly.

Ted’s head came up with a jerk.

“So yuh will cut yer old friends, is it?” grinned Birdie
Callahan. “If this wasn’t a public dining-room maybe yuh’d shake
hands with a poor but proud workin’ girrul. Yer as good lookin’ a
divil as ever, Mister Ted.”

Ted’s hand shot out and grasped hers. “Birdie! I could weep
on your apron! I never was so glad to see any one in my life.
Just to look at you makes me homesick. What in Sam Hill are you
doing here?”

“Waitin’. After yer ma died, seemed like I didn’t care t’
work fer no other privit fam’ly, so I came back here on my old job.
I’ll bet I’m the homeliest head waitress in captivity.”

Ted’s nervous fingers were pleating the tablecloth. His voice
sank to a whisper. “Birdie, tell me the God’s truth. Did those
three years cause her death?”

“Niver!” lied Birdie. “I was with her to the end. It started
with a cold on th’ chest. Have some French fried with yer beef,
Mr. Teddy. They’re illigent to-day.”

Birdie glided off to the kitchen. Authors are fond of the
word “glide.” But you can take it literally this time. Birdie had
a face that looked like a huge mistake, but she walked like a
panther, and they’re said to be the last cry as gliders. She
walked with her chin up and her hips firm. That comes from
juggling trays. You have to walk like that to keep your nose out
of the soup. After a while the walk becomes a habit. Any seasoned
dining-room girl could give lessons in walking to the Delsarte
teacher of an Eastern finishing school.

From the day that Birdie Callahan served Ted with the roast
beef medium and the elegant French fried, she appointed herself
monitor over his food and clothes and morals. I wish I could find
words to describe his bitter loneliness. He did not seek
companionship. The men, although not directly avoiding him, seemed
somehow to have pressing business whenever they happened in his
vicinity. The women ignored him. Mrs. Dankworth, still dashing
and still widowed, passed Ted one day and looked fixedly at a point
one inch above his head. In a town like ours the Haley House is
like a big, hospitable clubhouse. The men drop in there the first
thing in the morning, and the last thing at night, to hear the
gossip and buy a cigar and jolly the girl at the cigar counter.
Ted spoke to them when they spoke to him. He began to develop a
certain grim line about the mouth. Jo Haley watched him from afar,
and the longer he watched the kinder and more speculative grew the
look in his eyes. And slowly and surely there grew in the hearts
of our townspeople a certain new respect and admiration for this
boy who was fighting his fight.

Ted got into the habit of taking his meals late, so that
Birdie Callahan could take the time to talk to him.

“Birdie,” he said one day, when she brought his soup, “do you
know that you’re the only decent woman who’ll talk to me? Do you
know what I mean when I say that I’d give the rest of my life if I
could just put my head in my mother’s lap and have her muss up my
hair and call me foolish names?”

Birdie Callahan cleared her throat and said abruptly: “I was
noticin’ yesterday your gray pants needs pressin’ bad. Bring ‘em
down tomorrow mornin’ and I’ll give ‘em th’ elegant crease in the
laundry.”

So the first weeks went by, and the two months of Miss
Wenzel’s stay came to an end. Ted thanked his God and tried hard
not to wish that she was a man so that he could punch her head.

The day before the time appointed for her departure she was
closeted with Jo Haley for a long, long time. When finally she
emerged a bellboy lounged up to Ted with a message.

“Wenzel says th’ Old Man wants t’ see you. ‘S in his office.
Say, Mr. Terrill, do yuh think they can play to-day? It’s pretty
wet.”

Jo Haley was sunk in the depths of his big leather chair. He
did not look up as Ted entered. “Sit down,” he said. Ted sat down
and waited, puzzled.

“As a wizard at figures,” mused Jo Haley at last, softly as
though to himself, “I’m a frost. A column of figures on paper
makes my head swim. But I can carry a whole regiment of ‘em in my
head. I know every time the barkeeper draws one in the dark. I’ve
been watchin’ this thing for the last two weeks hopin’ you’d quit
and come and tell me.” He turned suddenly and faced Ted. “Ted,
old kid,” he said sadly, “what’n'ell made you do it again?”

“What’s the joke?” asked Ted.

“Now, Ted,” remonstrated Jo Haley, “that way of talkin’ won’t
help matters none. As I said, I’m rotten at figures. But you’re
the first investment that ever turned out bad, and let me tell you
I’ve handled some mighty bad smelling ones. Why, kid, if you had
just come to me on the quiet and asked for the loan of a hundred or
so why—-”

“What’s the joke, Jo?” said Ted again, slowly.

“This ain’t my notion of a joke,” came the terse answer.
“We’re three hundred short.”

The last vestige of Ted Terrill’s old-time radiance seemed to
flicker and die, leaving him ashen and old.

“Short?” he repeated. Then, “My God!” in a strangely
colorless voice–”My God!” He looked down at his fingers
impersonally, as though they belonged to some one else. Then his
hand clutched Jo Haley’s arm with the grip of fear. “Jo! Jo!
That’s the thing that has haunted me day and night, till my nerves
are raw. The fear of doing it again. Don’t laugh at me, will you?
I used to lie awake nights going over that cursed business of the
bank–over and over–till the cold sweat would break out all over
me. I used to figure it all out again, step by step, until–Jo,
could a man steal and not know it? Could thinking of a thing like
that drive a man crazy? Because if it could–if it
could–then—-”

“I don’t know,” said Jo Haley, “but it sounds darned fishy.”
He had a hand on Ted’s shaking shoulder, and was looking into the
white, drawn face. “I had great plans for you, Ted. But Minnie
Wenzel’s got it all down on slips of paper. I might as well call
her, in again, and we’ll have the whole blamed thing out.”

Minnie Wenzel came. In her hand were slips of paper, and
books with figures in them, and Ted looked and saw things written
in his own hand that should not have been there. And he covered
his shamed face with his two hands and gave thanks that his mother
was dead.

There came three sharp raps at the office door. The tense
figures within jumped nervously.

“Keep out!” called Jo Haley, “whoever you are.” Whereupon the
door opened and Birdie Callahan breezed in.

“Get out, Birdie Callahan,” roared Jo. “You’re in the wrong
pew.”

Birdie closed the door behind her composedly and came farther
into the room. “Pete th’ pasthry cook just tells me that Minnie
Wenzel told th’ day clerk, who told the barkeep, who told th’
janitor, who told th’ chef, who told Pete, that Minnie had caught
Ted stealin’ some three hundred dollars.”

Ted took a quick step forward. “Birdie, for Heaven’s sake
keep out of this. You can’t make things any better. You may
believe in me, but—-”

“Where’s the money?” asked Birdie.

Ted stared at her a moment, his mouth open ludicrously.

“Why–I–don’t–know,” he articulated, painfully. “I never
thought of that.”

Birdie snorted defiantly. “I thought so. D’ye know,”
sociably, “I was visitin’ with my aunt Mis’ Mulcahy last evenin’.”

There was a quick rustle of silks from Minnie Wenzel’s
direction.

“Say, look here—-” began Jo Haley, impatiently.

“Shut up, Jo Haley!” snapped Birdie. “As I was sayin’, I was
visitin’ with my aunt Mis’ Mulcahy. She does fancy washin’ an’
ironin’ for the swells. An’ Minnie Wenzel, there bein’ none
sweller, hires her to do up her weddin’ linens. Such smears av
hand embridery an’ Irish crochet she never see th’ likes, Mis’
Mulcahy says, and she’s seen a lot. And as a special treat to the
poor owld soul, why Minnie Wenzel lets her see some av her weddin’
clo’es. There never yet was a woman who cud resist showin’ her
weddin’ things to every other woman she cud lay hands on. Well,
Mis’ Mulcahy, she see that grand trewsow and she said she never saw
th’ beat. Dresses! Well, her going away suit alone comes to
eighty dollars, for it’s bein’ made by Molkowsky, the little Polish
tailor. An’ her weddin’ dress is satin, do yuh mind! Oh, it was
a real treat for my aunt Mis’ Mulcahy.”

Birdie walked over to where Minnie Wenzel sat, very white and
still, and pointed a stubby red finger in her face. “‘Tis the
grand manager ye are, Miss Wenzel, gettin’ satins an’ tailor-mades
on yer salary. It takes a woman, Minnie Wenzel, to see through a
woman’s thricks.”

“Well I’ll be dinged!” exploded Jo Haley.

“Yuh’d better be!” retorted Birdie Callahan.

Minnie Wenzel stood up, her lip caught between her teeth.

“Am I to understand, Jo Haley, that you dare to accuse me of
taking your filthy money, instead of that miserable ex-con there
who has done time?”

“That’ll do, Minnie,” said Jo Haley, gently. “That’s
a-plenty.”

“Prove it,” went on Minnie, and then looked as though she
wished she hadn’t.

“A business college edjication is a grand foine thing,”
observed Birdie. “Miss Wenzel is a graduate av wan. They teach
you everything from drawin’ birds with tail feathers to plain and
fancy penmanship. In fact, they teach everything in the writin’
line except forgery, an’ I ain’t so sure they haven’t got a coorse
in that.”

“I don’t care,” whimpered Minnie Wenzel suddenly, sinking in
a limp heap on the floor. “I had to do it. I’m marrying a swell
fellow and a girl’s got to have some clothes that don’t look like
a Bird Center dressmaker’s work. He’s got three sisters. I saw
their pictures and they’re coming to the wedding. They’re the kind
that wear low-necked dresses in the evening, and have their hair
and nails done downtown. I haven’t got a thing but my looks.
Could I go to New York dressed like a rube? On the square, Jo, I
worked here six years and never took a sou. But things got away
from me. The tailor wouldn’t finish my suit unless I paid him fifty
dollars down. I only took fifty at first, intending to pay it
back. Honest to goodness, Jo, I did.”

“Cut it out,” said Jo Haley, “and get up. I was going to give
you a check for your wedding, though I hadn’t counted on no three
hundred. We’ll call it square. And I hope you’ll be happy, but I
don’t gamble on it. You’ll be goin’ through your man’s pants
pockets before you’re married a year. You can take your hat and
fade. I’d like to know how I’m ever going to square this thing
with Ted and Birdie.”

“An’ me standin’ here gassin’ while them fool girls in the
dinin’-room can’t set a table decent, and dinner in less than ten
minutes,” cried Birdie, rushing off. Ted mumbled something
unintelligible and was after her.

“Birdie! I want to talk to you.”

“Say it quick then,” said Birdie, over her shoulder. “The
doors open in three minnits.”

“I can’t tell you how grateful I am. This is no place to talk
to you. Will you let me walk home with you to-night after your
work’s done?”

“Will I?” said Birdie, turning to face him. “I will not. Th’
swell mob has shook you, an’ a good thing it is. You was travelin’
with a bunch of racers, when you was only built for medium speed.
Now you’re got your chance to a fresh start and don’t you ever
think I’m going to be the one to let you spoil it by beginnin’ to
walk out with a dinin’-room Lizzie like me.”

“Don’t say that, Birdie,” Ted put in.

“It’s the truth,” affirmed Birdie. “Not that I ain’t a
perfec’ly respectable girrul, and ye know it. I’m a good slob, but
folks would be tickled for the chance to say that you had nobody to
go with but the likes av me. If I was to let you walk home with me
to-night, yuh might be askin’ to call next week. Inside half a
year, if yuh was lonesome enough, yuh’d ask me to marry yuh. And
b’gorra,” she said softly, looking down at her unlovely red hands,
“I’m dead scared I’d do it. Get back to work, Ted Terrill, and
hold yer head up high, and when yuh say your prayers to-night,
thank your lucky stars I ain’t a hussy.”

Called upon to describe Aunt Sophy, you would have to coin a term
or fall back on the dictionary definition of a spinster. “An
unmarried woman,” states that worthy work, baldly, “especially
when no longer young.” That, to the world, was Sophy Decker.
Unmarried, certainly. And most certainly no longer young. In
figure, she was, at fifty, what is known in the corset ads as a
“stylish stout.” Well dressed in dark suits, with broad-toed
health shoes and a small, astute hat. The suit was practical
common sense. The health shoes were comfort. The hat was
strictly business. Sophy Decker made and sold hats, both astute
and ingenuous, to the female population of Chippewa, Wisconsin.
Chippewa’s East End set bought the knowing type of hat, and the
mill hands and hired girls bought the naive ones. But whether
lumpy or possessed of that thing known as line, Sophy Decker’s
hats were honest hats.

The world is full of Aunt Sophys, unsung. Plump, ruddy, capable
women of middle age. Unwed, and rather looked down upon by a
family of married sisters and tolerant, good-humored
brothers-in-law, and careless nieces and nephews.

“Poor Aunt Soph,” with a significant half smile. “She’s such
a good old thing. And she’s had so little in life, really.”

She was, undoubtedly, a good old thing–Aunt Soph. Forever
sending a model hat to this pert little niece in Seattle; or
taking Adele, Sister Flora’s daughter, to Chicago or New York as
a treat on one of her buying trips.

Burdening herself, on her business visits to these cities, with a
dozen foolish shopping commissions for the idle womenfolk of her
family. Hearing without partisanship her sisters’ complaints
about their husbands, and her sisters’ husbands’ complaints about
their wives. It was always the same.

“I’m telling you this, Sophy. I wouldn’t breathe it to another
living soul. But I honestly think, sometimes, that if it weren’t
for the children—-”

There is no knowing why they confided these things to Sophy
instead of to each other, these wedded sisters of hers. Perhaps
they held for each other an unuttered distrust or jealousy.
Perhaps, in making a confidante of Sophy, there was something of
the satisfaction that comes of dropping a surreptitious stone
down a deep well and hearing it plunk, safe in the knowledge that
it has struck no one and that it cannot rebound, lying there in
the soft darkness. Sometimes they would end by saying, “But you
don’t know what it is, Sophy. You can’t. I’m sure I don’t know
why I’m telling you all this.”

But when Sophy answered, sagely, “I know; I know,” they paid
little heed, once having unburdened themselves. The curious part
of it is that she did know. She knew as a woman of fifty must
know who, all her life, has given and given and in return has
received nothing. Sophy Decker had never used the word
inhibition in her life. She may not have known what it meant.
She only knew (without in the least knowing she knew) that in
giving of her goods, of her affections, of her time, of her
energy, she found a certain relief. Her own people would have
been shocked if you had told them that there was about this
old-maid aunt something rather splendidly Rabelaisian. Without
being what is known as a masculine woman, she had, somehow,
acquired the man’s viewpoint, his shrewd value sense. She ate a
good deal, and enjoyed her food. She did not care for those
queer little stories that married women sometimes tell, with
narrowed eyes, but she was strangely tolerant of what is known as
sin. So simple and direct she was that you wondered how she
prospered in a line so subtle as the millinery business.

You might have got a fairly true characterization of Sophy Decker
from one of fifty people: from a salesman in a New York or
Chicago wholesale millinery house; from Otis Cowan, cashier of
the First National Bank of Chippewa; from Julia Gold, her head
milliner and trimmer; from almost anyone, in fact, except a
member of her own family. They knew her least of all. Her three
married sisters–Grace in Seattle, Ella in Chicago, and Flora in
Chippewa–regarded her with a rather affectionate disapproval
from the snug safety of their own conjugal inglenooks.

“I don’t know. There’s something–well–common about Sophy,”
Flora confided to Ella. Flora, on shopping bent, and Sophy,
seeking hats, had made the five-hour run from Chippewa to Chicago
together. “She talks to everybody. You should have heard her
with the porter on our train. Chums! And when the conductor took
our tickets it was a social occasion. You know how packed the
seven-fifty-two is. Every seat in the parlor car taken. And
Sophy asking the colored porter about how his wife was getting
along–she called him William–and if they were going to send her
West, and all about her. I wish she wouldn’t.”

Aunt Sophy undeniably had a habit of regarding people as human
beings. You found her talking to chambermaids and delivery boys,
and elevator starters, and gas collectors, and hotel clerks–all
that aloof, unapproachable, superior crew. Under her benign
volubility they bloomed and spread and took on color as do those
tight little paper water flowers when you cast them into a bowl.
It wasn’t idle curiosity in her. She was interested. You found
yourself confiding to her your innermost longings, your secret
tribulations, under the encouragement of her sympathetic, “You
don’t say!” Perhaps it was as well that Sister Flora was in
ignorance of the fact that the millinery salesmen at Danowitz &
Danowitz, Importers, always called Miss Decker Aunt Soph, as,
with one arm flung about her plump shoulder, they revealed to her
the picture of their girl in the back flap of their billfold.

Flora, with a firm grip on Chippewa society, as represented by
the East End set, did not find her position enhanced by a sister
in the millinery business in Elm Street.

“Of course it’s wonderful that she’s self-supporting and
successful and all,” she told her husband. “But it’s not so
pleasant for Adele, now that she’s growing up, having all the
girls she knows buying their hats of her aunt. Not that I–but
you know how it is.”

H. Charnsworth Baldwin said yes, he knew.

When the Decker girls were young, the Deckers had lived in a
sagging old frame house (from which the original paint had long
ago peeled in great scrofulous patches) on an unimportant street
in Chippewa. There was a worm-eaten, russet-apple tree in the
yard, an untidy tangle of wild-cucumber vine over the front
porch, and an uncut brush of sunburned grass and weeds all about.

From May until September you never passed the Decker place
without hearing the plunkety-plink of a mandolin from somewhere
behind the vines, laughter, and the creak-creak of the hard-
worked and protesting hammock hooks.

Flora, Ella, and Grace Decker had had more beaux and fewer
clothes than any other girls in Chippewa. In a town full of
pretty young things, they were, undoubtedly, the prettiest; and
in a family of pretty sisters (Sophy always excepted) Flora was
the acknowledged beauty. She was the kind of girl whose nose
never turns red on a frosty morning. A little, white, exquisite
nose, purest example of the degree of perfection which may be
attained by that vulgarest of features. Under her great gray
eyes were faint violet shadows which gave her a look of almost
poignant wistfulness. Her slow, sweet smile give the beholder an
actual physical pang. Only her family knew she was lazy as a
behemoth, untidy about her person, and as sentimental as a hungry
shark. The strange and cruel part of it was that, in some
grotesque, exaggerated way, as a cartoon may be like a
photograph, Sophy resembled Flora. It was as though nature, in
prankish mood, had given a cabbage the color and texture of a
rose, with none of its fragile reticence and grace.

It was a manless household. Mrs. Decker, vague, garrulous,
referred to her dead husband, in frequent reminiscence, as poor
Mr. Decker. Mrs. Decker dragged one leg as she
walked–rheumatism, or a spinal affection. Small wonder, then,
that Sophy, the plain, with a gift for hatmaking, a knack at
eggless cake baking, and a genius for turning a sleeve so that
last year’s style met this year’s without a struggle, contributed
nothing to the sag in the center of the old twine hammock on the
front porch.

That the three girls should marry well, and Sophy not at all, was
as inevitable as the sequence of the seasons. Ella and Grace did
not manage badly, considering that they had only their girlish
prettiness and the twine hammock to work with. But Flora, with
her beauty, captured H. Charnsworth Baldwin. Chippewa gasped.
H. Charnsworth Baldwin drove a skittish mare to a high-wheeled
yellow runabout; had his clothes made at Proctor Brothers in
Milwaukee; and talked about a game called golf. It was he who
advocated laying out a section of land for what he called links,
and erecting a clubhouse thereon.

“The section of the bluff overlooking the river,” he explained,
“is full of natural hazards, besides having a really fine
view.”

Chippewa–or that comfortable, middle-class section of it which
got its exercise walking home to dinner from the store at noon,
and cutting the grass evenings after supper–laughed as it read
this interview in the Chippewa Eagle.

“A golf course,” they repeated to one another, grinning.
“Conklin’s cow pasture, up the river. It’s full of
natural–wait a minute–what was?–oh, yeh, here it is–hazards.
Full of natural hazards. Say, couldn’t you die!”

For H. Charnsworth Baldwin had been little Henry Baldwin before
he went East to college. Ten years later H. Charnsworth, in
knickerbockers and gay-topped stockings, was winning the cup in
the men’s tournament played on the Chippewa golf-club course,
overlooking the river. And his name, in stout gold letters,
blinked at you from the plate-glass windows of the office at the
corner of Elm and Winnebago:

NORTHERN LUMBER AND LAND COMPANY
H. Charnsworth Baldwin, Pres.

Two blocks farther down Elm Street was another sign, not so
glittering, which read:

Miss Sophy Decker
Millinery

Sophy’s hatmaking, in the beginning, had been done at home. She
had always made her sisters’ hats, and her own, of course, and an
occasional hat for a girl friend. After her sisters had married,
Sophy found herself in possession of a rather bewildering amount
of spare time. The hat trade grew so that sometimes there were
six rather botchy little bonnets all done up in yellow paper
pyramids with a pin at the top, awaiting their future wearers.
After her mother’s death Sophy still stayed on in the old house.
She took a course in millinery in Milwaukee, came home, stuck up
a homemade sign in the parlor window (the untidy cucumber vines
came down), and began her hatmaking in earnest. In five years
she had opened a shop on a side street near Elm, had painted the
old house, installed new plumbing, built a warty stucco porch,
and transformed the weedy, grass-tangled yard into an orderly
stretch of green lawn and bright flower beds. In ten years she
was in Elm Street, and the Chippewa Eagle ran a half column twice
a year describing her spring and fall openings. On these
occasions Aunt Sophy, in black satin and marcel wave and her most
relentless corsets, was, in all the superficial things, not a
pleat or fold or line or wave behind her city colleagues. She
had all the catch phrases:

“This is awfully good this year.”

“Here’s a sweet thing. A Mornet model.”

“. . . Well, but, my dear, it’s the style–the line–you’re
paying for, not the material.”

“No, that hat doesn’t do a thing for you.”

“I’ve got it. I had you in mind when I bought it. Now don’t
say you can’t wear henna. Wait till you see it on.”

When she stood behind you as you sat, uncrowned and expectant
before the mirror, she would poise the hat four inches above your
head, holding it in the tips of her fingers, a precious, fragile
thing. Your fascinated eyes were held by it, and your breath as
well. Then down it descended, slowly, slowly. A quick pressure.

Her fingers firm against your temples. A little sigh of relieved
suspense.

“That’s wonderful on you! . . . You don’t! Oh, my dear! But
that’s because you’re not used to it. You know how you said, for
years, you had to have a brim, and couldn’t possibly wear a
turban, with your nose, until I proved to you that if the head
size was only big . . . Well, perhaps this needs just a lit-tle
lift here. Ju-u-ust a nip. There! That does it.”

And that did it. Not that Sophy Decker ever tried to sell you a
hat against your judgment, taste, or will. She was too wise a
psychologist and too shrewd a businesswoman for that. She
preferred that you go out of her shop hatless rather than with an
unbecoming hat. But whether you bought or not you took with you
out of Sophy Decker’s shop something more precious than any
hatbox ever contained. Just to hear her admonishing a customer,
her good-natured face all aglow:

“My dear, always put on your hat before you get into your dress.

I do. You can get your arms above your head, and set it right.
I put on my hat and veil as soon’s I get my hair combed.”

In your mind’s eye you saw her, a stout, well-stayed figure in
tight brassiere and scant slip, bare-armed and bare-bosomed, in
smart hat and veil, attired as though for the street from the
neck up and for the bedroom from the shoulders down.

The East End set bought Sophy Decker’s hats because they were
modish and expensive hats. But she managed, miraculously, to
gain a large and lucrative following among the paper-mill girls
and factory hands as well. You would have thought that any
attempt to hold both these opposites would cause her to lose one
or the other. Aunt Sophy said, frankly, that of the two, she
would have preferred to lose her smart trade.

“The mill girls come in with their money in their hands, you
might say. They get good wages and they want to spend them. I
wouldn’t try to sell them one of those little plain model hats.
They wouldn’t understand ‘em or like them. And if I told them
the price they’d think I was trying to cheat them. They want a
hat with something good and solid on it. Their fathers wouldn’t
prefer caviar to pork roast, would they? It’s the same idea.”

Her shopwindows reflected her business acumen. One was chastely,
severely elegant, holding a single hat poised on a slender stick.

In the other were a dozen honest arrangements of velvet and satin
and plumes.

At the spring opening she always displayed one of those little
toques completely covered with violets. That violet-covered
toque was a symbol.

“I don’t expect ‘em to buy it,” Sophy Decker explained. “But
everybody feels there should be a hat like that at a spring
opening. It’s like a fruit centerpiece at a family dinner.
Nobody ever eats it, but it has to be there.”

The two Baldwin children–Adele and Eugene–found Aunt Sophy’s
shop a treasure trove. Adele, during her doll days, possessed
such boxes of satin and velvet scraps, and bits of lace and
ribbon and jet as to make her the envy of all her playmates. She
used to crawl about the floor of the shop workroom and under the
table and chairs like a little scavenger.

“What in the world do you do with all that truck, child?” asked
Aunt Sophy. “You must have barrels of it.”

Adele stuffed another wisp of tulle into the pocket of her
pinafore.

“I keep it,” she said.

When she was ten Adele had said to her mother, “Why do you
always say `Poor Sophy’?”

“Because–Aunt Sophy’s had so little in life. She never has
married, and has always worked.”

Adele considered that. “If you don’t get married do they say
you’re poor?”

“Well–yes—-”

“Then I’ll get married,” announced Adele. A small, dark, eerie
child, skinny and rather foreign-looking. The boy, Eugene, had
the beauty which should have been the girl’s. Very tall, very
blond, with the straight nose and wistful eyes of the Flora of
twenty years ago. “If only Adele could have had his looks,”
his mother used to say. “They’re wasted on a man. He doesn’t
need them, but a girl does. Adele will have to be well dressed
and interesting. And that’s such hard work.”

Flora said she worshiped her children. And she actually
sometimes still coquetted heavily with her husband. At twenty
she had been addicted to baby talk when endeavoring to coax
something out of someone. Her admirers had found it
irresistible. At forty it was awful. Her selfishness was
colossal. She affected a semi-invalidism and for fifteen years
had spent one day a week in bed. She took no exercise and a
great deal of soda bicarbonate and tried to fight her fat with
baths. Fifteen or twenty years had worked a startling change in
the two sisters, Flora the beautiful and Sophy the plain. It was
more than a mere physical change. It was a spiritual thing,
though neither knew nor marked it. Each had taken on weight, the
one, solidly, comfortably; the other, flabbily, unhealthily.
With the encroaching fat, Flora’s small, delicate features
seemed, somehow, to disappear in her face, so that you saw it as
a large white surface bearing indentations, ridges, and hollows
like one of those enlarged photographs of the moon’s surface as
seen through a telescope. A self-centered face, and misleadingly
placid. Aunt Sophy’s large, plain features, plumply padded now,
impressed you as indicating strength, courage, and a great human
understanding.

From her husband and her children, Flora exacted service that
would have chafed a galley slave into rebellion. She loved to
lie in bed, in an orchid bed jacket with ribbons, and be read to
by Adele, or Eugene, or her husband. They all hated it.

“She just wants to be waited on, and petted, and admired,”
Adele had stormed one day, in open rebellion, to her Aunt Sophy.
“She uses it as an excuse for everything and has, ever since
Gene and I were children. She’s as strong as an ox.” Not a
daughterly speech, but true.

Years before, a generous but misguided woman friend, coming in to
call, had been ushered in to where Mrs. Baldwin lay propped up in
a nest of pillows.

“Well, I don’t blame you,” the caller had gushed. “If I
looked the way you do in bed I’d stay there forever. Don’t tell
me you’re sick, with all that lovely color!”

Flora Baldwin had rolled her eyes ceilingward. “Nobody ever
gives me credit for all my suffering and ill-health. And just
because all my blood is in my cheeks.”

Flora was ambitious, socially, but too lazy to make the effort
necessary for success in that direction.

“I love my family,” she would say. “They fill my life. After
all, that’s a profession in itself–being a wife and mother.”

She showed her devotion by taking no interest whatever in her
husband’s land schemes; by forbidding Eugene to play football at
school for fear he might be injured; by impressing Adele with the
necessity for vivacity and modishness because of what she called
her unfortunate lack of beauty.

“I don’t understand it,” she used to say in the child’s
presence. “Her father’s handsome enough, goodness knows; and I
wasn’t such a fright when I was a girl. And look at her! Little
dark skinny thing.”

The boy, Eugene, grew up a very silent, handsome, shy young
fellow. The girl, dark, voluble, and rather interesting. The
husband, more and more immersed in his business, was absent from
home for long periods irritable after some of these home-comings;
boisterously high-spirited following other trips. Now growling
about household expenses and unpaid bills; now urging the
purchase of some almost prohibitive luxury. Anyone but a
nagging, self-absorbed, and vain woman such as Flora would have
marked these unmistakable signs. But Flora was a taker, not a
giver. She thought herself affectionate because she craved
affection unduly. She thought herself a fond mother because she
insisted on having her children with her, under her thumb,
marking their devotion as a prisoner marks time with his feet,
stupidly, shufflingly, advancing not a step.

Sometimes Sophy, the clear-eyed, seeing this state of affairs,
tried to stop it.

“You expect too much of your husband and children,” she said
one day, bluntly, to her sister.

“I!” Flora’s dimpled hand had flown to her breast like a
wounded thing. “I! You’re crazy! There isn’t a more devoted
wife and mother in the world. That’s the trouble. I love them
too much.”

“Well, then,” grimly, “stop it for a change. That’s half
Eugene’s nervousness–your fussing over him. He’s eighteen.
Give him a chance. You’re weakening him. And stop dinning that
society stuff into Adele’s ears. She’s got brains, that child.
Why, just yesterday, in the workroom, she got hold of some satin
and a shape and turned out a little turban that Angie
Hatton—-”

“Do you mean to tell me that Angie Hatton saw my Adele working
in your shop! Now, look here, Sophy. You’re earning your
living, and it’s to your credit. You’re my sister. But I won’t
have Adele associated in the minds of my friends with your hat
store, understand? I won’t have it. That isn’t what I sent her
away to an expensive school for. To have her come back and sit
around a millinery workshop with a lot of little, cheap, shoddy
sewing girls! Now, understand, I won’t have it! You don’t know
what it is to be a mother. You don’t know what it is to have
suffered. If you had brought two children into the world—-”

So, then, it had come about during the years between their
childhood and their youth that Aunt Sophy received the burden of
their confidences, their griefs, their perplexities. She seemed,
somehow, to understand in some miraculous way, and to make the
burden a welcome one.

“Well, now, you tell Aunt Sophy all about it. Stop crying,
Della. How can I hear when you’re crying! That’s my baby. Now,
then.”

This when they were children. But with the years the habit clung
and became fixed. There was something about Aunt Sophy’s
house–the old frame house with the warty stucco porch. For that
matter, there was something about the very shop downtown, with
its workroom in the rear, that had a cozy, homelike quality never
possessed by the big Baldwin house. H. Charnsworth Baldwin had
built a large brick mansion, in the Tudor style, on a bluff
overlooking the Fox River, in the best residential section of
Chippewa. It was expensively furnished. The hall console alone
was enough to strike a preliminary chill to your heart.

The millinery workroom, winter days, was always bright and warm
and snug. The air was a little close, perhaps, and heavy, but
with a not unpleasant smell of dyes and stuffs and velvet and
glue and steam and flatiron and a certain racy scent that Julia
Gold, the head trimmer, always used. There was a sociable cat,
white with a dark-gray patch on his throat and a swipe of it
across one flank that spoiled him for style and beauty but made
him a comfortable-looking cat to have around. Sometimes, on very
cold days, or in the rush season, the girls would not go home to
dinner, but would bring their lunches and cook coffee over a
little gas heater in the corner. Julia Gold, especially, drank
quantities of coffee. Aunt Sophy had hired her from Chicago.
She had been with her for five years. She said Julia was the
best trimmer she had ever had. Aunt Sophy often took her to New
York or Chicago on her buying trips. Julia had not much genius
for original design, or she never would have been content to be
head milliner in a small-town shop. But she could copy a
fifty-dollar model from memory down to the last detail of crown
and brim. It was a gift that made her invaluable.

The boy, Eugene, used to like to look at Julia Gold. Her hair
was very black and her face was very white, and her eyebrows met
in a thick dark line. Her face as she bent over her work was
sullen and brooding, but when she lifted her head suddenly, in
conversation, you were startled by a vivid flash of teeth and
eyes and smile. Her voice was deep and low. She made you a
little uncomfortable. Her eyes seemed always to be asking
something. Around the worktable, mornings, she used to relate
the dream she had had the night before. In these dreams she was
always being pursued by a lover. “And then I woke up,
screaming.” Neither she nor the sewing girls knew what she was
revealing in these confidences of hers. But Aunt Sophy, the
shrewd, somehow sensed it.

“You’re alone too much, evenings. That’s what comes of living
in a boardinghouse. You come over to me for a week. The change
will do you good, and it’ll be nice for me, too, having somebody
to keep me company.”

Julia often came for a week or ten days at a time. Julia, about
the house after supper, was given to those vivid splashy
negligees with big flower patterns strewn over them. They made
her hair look blacker and her skin whiter by contrast. Sometimes
Eugene or Adele or both would drop in and the four would play
bridge. Aunt Sophy played a shrewd and canny game, Adele a
rather brilliant one, Julia a wild and disastrous hand, always,
and Eugene so badly that only Julia would take him on as a
partner. Mrs. Baldwin never knew about these evenings.

It was on one of these occasions that Aunt Sophy, coming
unexpectedly into the living room from the kitchen, where she and
Adele were foraging for refreshments after the game, beheld Julia
Gold and Eugene, arms clasped about each other, cheek to cheek.
They started up as she came in and faced her, the woman
defiantly, the boy bravely. Julia Gold was thirty (with
reservations) at that time, and the boy not quite twenty-one.

“How long?” said Aunt Sophy, quietly. She had a mayonnaise
spoon and a leaf of lettuce in her hand then, and still she did
not look comic.

“I’m crazy about her,” said Eugene. “We’re crazy about each
other. We’re going to be married.”

Aunt Sophy listened for the reassuring sound of Adele’s spoons
and plates in the kitchen. She came forward. “Now,
listen—-” she began.

“I love him,” said Julia Gold, dramatically. “I love him!”

Except that it was very white and, somehow, old-looking, Aunt
Sophy’s face was as benign as always. “Now, look here, Julia,
my girl. That isn’t love, and you know it. I’m an old maid, but
I know what love is when I see it. I’m ashamed of you, Julia.
Sensible woman like you, hugging and kissing a boy like that, and
old enough to be his mother.”

“Now, look here, Aunt Sophy! If you’re going to talk that
way—- Why, she’s wonderful. She’s taught me what it means to
really—-”

“Oh, my land!” Aunt Sophy sat down, looking suddenly very ill.

And then, from the kitchen, Adele’s clear young voice: “Heh!
What’s the idea! I’m not going to do all the work. Where’s
everybody?”

Aunt Sophy started up again. She came up to them and put a
hand– a capable, firm, steadying hand–on the arm of each. The
woman drew back, but the boy did not.

“Will you promise me not to do anything for a week? Just a
week! Will you promise me? Will you?”

“Are you going to tell Father?”

“Not for a week, if you’ll promise not to see each other in that
week. No, I don’t want to send you away, Julia, I don’t want to.
. . . You’re not a bad girl. It’s just–he’s never had–at home
they never gave him a chance. Just a week, Julia. Just a week,
Eugene. We can talk things over then.”

Adele’s footsteps coming from the kitchen.

“Quick!”

“I promise,” said Eugene. Julia said nothing.

“Well, really,” said Adele, from the doorway, “you’re a nervy
lot, sitting around while I slave in the kitchen. Gene, see if
you can open the olives with this fool can opener. I tried.”

There is no knowing what she expected to do in that week, Aunt
Sophy; what miracle she meant to perform. She had no plan in her
mind. Just hope. She looked strangely shrunken and old,
suddenly. But when, three days later, the news came that America
was to go into the war she had her answer.

Flora was beside herself. “Eugene won’t have to go. He isn’t
old enough, thank God! And by the time he is it will be over.
Surely.” She was almost hysterical.

Eugene was in the room. Aunt Sophy looked at him and he looked
at Aunt Sophy. In her eyes was a question. In his was the
answer. They said nothing. The next day Eugene enlisted. In
three days he was gone. Flora took to her bed. Next day Adele, a
faint, unwonted color marking her cheeks, walked into her
mother’s bedroom and stood at the side of the recumbent figure.
Her father, his hands clasped behind him, was pacing up and down,
now and then kicking a cushion that had fallen to the floor. He
was chewing a dead cigar, one side of his face twisted curiously
over the cylinder in his mouth so that he had a sinister and
crafty look.

“Charnsworth, won’t you please stop ramping up and down like
that! My nerves are killing me. I can’t help it if the war has
done something or other to your business. I’m sure no wife could
have been more economical than I have. Nothing matters but
Eugene, anyway. How could he do such a thing! I’ve given my
whole life to my children—-”

H. Charnsworth kicked the cushion again so that it struck the
wall at the opposite side of the room. Flora drew her breath in
between her teeth as though a knife had entered her heart.

Adele still stood at the side of the bed, looking at her mother.
Her hands were clasped behind her, too. In that moment, as she
stood there, she resembled her mother and her father so
startlingly and simultaneously that the two, had they been less
absorbed in their own affairs, must have marked it.

The girl’s head came up stiffly. “Listen. I’m going to marry
Daniel Oakley.”

Daniel Oakley was fifty, and a friend of her father’s. For years
he had been coming to the house and for years she had ridiculed
him. She and Eugene had called him Sturdy Oak because he was
always talking about his strength and endurance, his walks, his
rugged health; pounding his chest meanwhile and planting his feet
far apart. He and Baldwin had had business relations as well as
friendly ones.

At this announcement Flora screamed and sat up in bed. H.
Charnsworth stopped short in his pacing and regarded his daughter
with a queer look; a concentrated look, as though what she had
said had set in motion a whole mass of mental machinery within
his brain.

“When did he ask you?”

“He’s asked me a dozen times. But it’s different now. All the
men will be going to war. There won’t be any left. Look at
England and France. I’m not going to be left.” She turned
squarely toward her father, her young face set and hard. “You
know what I mean. You know what I mean.”

Flora, sitting up in bed, was sobbing. “I think you might have
told your mother, Adele. What are children coming to! You stand
there and say, `I’m going to marry Daniel Oakley.’ Oh, I am so
faint . . . all of a sudden . . . Get the spirits of ammonia.”

Adele turned and walked out of the room. She was married six
weeks later. They had a regular prewar wedding–veil, flowers,
dinner, and all. Aunt Sophy arranged the folds of her gown and
draped her veil. The girl stood looking at herself in the
mirror, a curious half smile twisting her lips. She seemed
slighter and darker than ever.

“In all this white, and my veil, I look just like a fly in a
quart of milk,” she said, with a laugh. Then, suddenly, she
turned to her aunt, who stood behind her, and clung to her,
holding her tight, tight. “I can’t!” she gasped. “I can’t!
I can’t!”

Aunt Sophy held her off and looked at her, her eyes searching the
girl.

“What do you mean, Della? Are you just nervous or do you mean
you don’t want to marry him? Do you mean that? Then what are
you marrying for? Tell me! Tell your Aunt Sophy.”

But Adele was straightening herself and pulling out the crushed
folds of her veil. “To pay the mortgage on the old homestead,
of course. Just like the girl in the play.” She laughed a
little. But Aunt Sophy did not.

“Now look here, Della. If you’re—-”

But there was a knock at the door. Adele caught up her flowers.
“It’s all right,” she said. Aunt Sophy stood with her back
against the door. “If it’s money,” she said. “It is! It is,
isn’t it! I’ve got money saved. It was for you children. I’ve
always been afraid. I knew he was sailing pretty close, with his
speculations and all, since the war. He can have it all. It
isn’t too late yet. Adele! Della, my baby.”

“Don’t, Aunt Sophy. It wouldn’t be enough, anyway. Daniel has
been wonderful, really. Dad’s been stealing money for years.
Dan’s. Don’t look like that. I’d have hated being poor, anyway.

Never could have got used to it. It is ridiculous, though, isn’t
it? Like something in the movies. I don’t mind. I’m lucky,
really, when you come to think of it. A plain little black thing
like me.”

“But your mother—-”

“Mother doesn’t know a thing.”

Flora wept mistily all through the ceremony, but Adele was
composed enough for two.

When, scarcely a month later, Baldwin came to Sophy Decker, his
face drawn and queer, Sophy knew.

“How much?” she said.

“Thirty thousand will cover it. If you’ve got more than
that—-”

“I thought Oakley—-Adele said—-”

“He did, but he won’t any more, and this thing’s got to be met.
It’s this damned war that’s done it. I’d have been all right.
People got scared. They wanted their money. They wanted it in
cash.”

“Speculating with it, were you?”

“Oh, well, a woman doesn’t understand these business deals.”

“No, naturally,” said Aunt Sophy, “a butterfly like me.”

“Sophy, for God’s sake don’t joke now. I tell you this will
cover it, and everything will be all right. If I had anybody
else to go to for the money I wouldn’t ask you. But you’ll get
it back. You know that.”

Aunt Sophy got up, heavily, and went over to her desk. “It was
for the children, anyway. They won’t need it now.”

He looked up at that. Something in her voice. “Who won’t? Why
won’t they?”

“I don’t know what made me say that. I had a dream.”

“Eugene?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, well, we’re all nervous. Flora has dreams every night and
presentiments every fifteen minutes. Now, look here, Sophy.
About this money. You’ll never know how grateful I am. Flora
doesn’t understand these things, but I can talk to you. It’s
like this—-”

“I might as well be honest about it,” Sophy interrupted. “I’m
doing it, not for you, but for Flora, and Della–and Eugene.
Flora has lived such a sheltered life. I sometimes wonder if she
ever really knew any of you. Her husband, or her children. I
sometimes have the feeling that Della and Eugene are my
children–were my children.”

When he came home that night Baldwin told his wife that old Soph
was getting queer. “She talks about the children being hers,”
he said.

“Oh, well, she’s awfully fond of them,” Flora explained. “And
she’s lived her little, narrow life, with nothing to bother her
but her hats and her house. She doesn’t know what it means to
suffer as a mother suffers –poor Sophy.”

“Um,” Baldwin grunted.

When the official notification of Eugene’s death came from the
War Department, Aunt Sophy was so calm it might have appeared
that Flora had been right. She took to her bed now in earnest,
did Flora. Sophy neglected everything to give comfort to the
stricken two.

“How can you sit there like that!” Flora would rail. “How
can you sit there like that! Even if you weren’t his mother,
surely you must feel something.”

“It’s the way he died that comforts me,” said Aunt Sophy.

“What difference does that make!”

AMERICAN RED CROSS
(Croix Rouge Americaine)

MY DEAR MRS. BALDWIN:

I am sure you must have been officially notified by the U.S.
War Dept. of the death of your son, Lieut. Eugene H. Baldwin.
But I want to write you what I can of his last hours. I was with
him much of that time as his nurse. I’m sure it must mean much
to a mother to hear from a woman who was privileged to be with
her boy at the last.

Your son was brought to our hospital one night badly gassed
from the fighting in the Argonne Forest. Ordinarily we do not
receive gassed patients, as they are sent to a special hospital
near here. But two nights before, the Germans wrecked that
hospital, so many gassed patients have come to us.

Your son was put in the officers’ ward, where the doctors who
examined him told me there was absolutely no hope for him, as he
had inhaled so much gas that it was only a matter of a few hours.

I could scarcely believe that a man so big and strong as he was
could not pull through.

The first bad attack he had, losing his breath and nearly
choking, rather frightened him, although the doctor and I were
both with him. He held my hand tightly in his, begging me not to
leave him, and repeating, over and over, that it was good to have
a woman near. He was propped high in bed and put his head on my
shoulder while I fanned him until he breathed more easily. I
stayed with him all that night, though I was not on duty. You
see, his eyes also were badly burned. But before he died he was
able to see very well. I stayed with him every minute of that
night and have never seen a finer character than he showed during
all that fight for life.

He had several bad attacks that night and came through each one
simply because of his great will power and fighting spirit.
After each attack he would grip my hand and say, “Well, we made
it that time, didn’t we, nurse?” Toward morning he asked me if
he was going to die. I could not tell him the truth. He needed
all his strength. I told him he had one chance in a thousand.
He seemed to become very strong then, and sitting bolt upright in
bed, he said: “Then I’ll fight for it!” We kept him alive for
three days, and actually thought we had won when on the third day
. . .

But even in your sorrow you must be very proud to have been the
mother of such a son. . . .

I am a Wisconsin girl–Madison. When this is over and I come
home, will you let me see you so that I may tell you more than I
can possibly write?

MARIAN KING

It was in March, six months later, that Marian King came. They
had hoped for it, but never expected it. And she came. Four
people were waiting in the living room of the big Baldwin house
overlooking the river. Flora and her husband, Adele and Aunt
Sophy. They sat, waiting. Now and then Adele would rise,
nervously, and go to the window that faced the street. Flora was
weeping with audible sniffs. Baldwin sat in his chair, frowning
a little, a dead cigar in one corner of his mouth. Only Aunt
Sophy sat quietly, waiting.

There was little conversation. None in the last five minutes.
Flora broke the silence, dabbing at her face with her
handkerchief as she spoke.

“Sophy, how can you sit there like that? Not that I don’t envy
you. I do. I remember I used to feel sorry for you. I used to
say `Poor Sophy.’ But you unmarried ones are the happiest, after
all. It’s the married woman who drinks the cup to the last,
bitter drop. There you sit, Sophy, fifty years old, and life
hasn’t even touched you. You don’t know how cruel life can be to
a mother.”

Suddenly, “There!” said Adele. The other three in the room
stood up and faced the door. The sound of a motor stopping
outside. Daniel Oakley’s hearty voice: “Well, it only took us
five minutes from the station. Pretty good.”

Footsteps down the hall. Marian King stood in the doorway. They
faced her, the four–Baldwin and Adele and Flora and Sophy.
Marian King stood a moment, uncertainly, her eyes upon them. She
looked at the two older women with swift, appraising glances.
Then she came into the room, quickly, and put her two hands on
Aunt Soph’s shoulders and looked into her eyes straight and sure.

“You must be a very proud woman,” she said. “You ought to be
a very proud woman,”